Directors:
Fritz Lang, Pablo Larraín, David
Lean, Ang Lee, Lee Chang-dong, Spike Lee, Mike Leigh, Sergio Leone, Barry
Levinson, Val Lewton, Richard Linklater, Ken Loach, Kenneth Lonergan, Ernst
Lubitsch, Sidney Lumet, David Lynch
Labaki,
Nadine
WHERE DO WE GO NOW? (Et maintenant on va où?) C 70
France Lebanon Italy
Egypt (100 mi) 2011
‘Scope
While this is a joint cultural exchange project, a feel good
mix of East meets West, it’s largely a Lebanese version of MAMMA MIA! (2008),
but with bouncy Lebanese music instead of ABBA, much like this: Hashishit
Albe Song's Clip – YouTube (
One prevailing theme
anywhere in the Arab world is the communal funeral processions, where all
dressed in black, friends, family, and neighbors share in the burial and
mourning process. Labaki uses an opening
music video effect as all-female mourners walk in a choreographed manner set to
music, where they all move in unison, suggesting their common bond. Despite their overbearing demeanor to keep
their men in line, on their own, petty disputes between the men lead to a
neverending cycle of escalated altercations, where friends quickly turn to
foes, usually separated by their wives who have to keep the peace. In the manner of many Arabic films, Youssef
Chahine for instance, especially CAIRO STATION (1958) or DESTINY (1997), it is
not uncommon for films to break out into a musical number right in the heart of
the dramatic action, but while Chahine’s choreography rival Bollywood, often
providing the manic energy for the storyline, Labaki’s are utterly lackluster,
using songs without dance numbers, instead attempting to incorporate the music
as an element of the storyline, like the thoughts of the characters. In this manner, Labaki loses an opportunity
to enhance her films with more depth, but instead keeps it airy and
superficially lightheaded, where characters often yell hysterically at one
another in an over-the-top, melodramatic manner. Labaki herself stars as one of the central
characters, and is probably onscreen as much as anyone else, yet none of the characters
stand out or are ever really developed, which is one of the central problems of
the film. If all the characters are
forgettable, then so is the film, as this kind of film experience has no weight
or sustenance and is instantly forgettable.
Supposedly the People’s Choice winner at the
While many may love
the premise of the central scene, where the women of the town conspire to
literally drug and trick the men, concocting a secret formula in their food
while bringing in a horribly out of place group of bored Ukrainian strippers
(aka: belly dancers) to aid them in
their scheme, this is supposedly the climactic high point of the film, yet it
never materializes, as it doesn’t go far enough in the satirical exaggeration,
where the food bit barely registers, perhaps afraid to offend censors, and the
film shows little choreographic or dramatic involvement in the undeveloped
dance sequences. So the director really
mishandles her opportunity here, as she spends almost half the film setting up
this sequence with the wayward Ukrainian girls, but rather than use them as a
feature attraction, their sequence actually becomes a set-up for yet another
plot device. So it’s a bit confusing
that the most melodic musical number in the film, written and composed by none
other than the director’s husband, Khaled Mouzanar, heard when all of the women in town happily
conspire against the men, leads to a crescendo that gets undermined and lost as
a lead-in to something else. The song
itself is wonderful, but the way it’s eventually used is unfortunately
anticlimactic. Many may just be happy
with the air of blissful ignorance that is so prevalent throughout this film,
where character development or lack of dramatic tension may be the least of
their concerns. It delights in showing
empowered Muslim women, a group in real life routinely denied basic rights,
taking matters into their own hands by resorting to deception of their husbands
in an attempt to stabilize the region.
If only life were this simple—where in this film, women routinely perform fake religious
miracles. Perhaps because of the
preposterous nature of the movie itself, the entire film is framed by a
narrator as a bedtime story.
Village Voice [Alison Willmore]
If women were in charge, there'd be peace in the Middle East—or at least that's what's suggested by Where Do We Go Now?, the second film from Lebanese director and actress Nadine Labaki. Like her 2007 debut, Caramel, it's driven by a deep faith in female friendship, though here the stakes are higher, and war lurks at the edges. The film follows the women of a remote village in Lebanon as they try to keep their menfolk from joining in the sectarian violence erupting around them by burning newspapers and sabotaging the only working television. When the refuge of blissful ignorance fails, they turn to other distractions, falsifying religious miracles and hiring a group of Russian strippers. The film's flights of fancy (including a scattering of musical numbers) waver between actually charming and overly cute—and don't meld with the undercurrent of anguish that sometimes erupts, including in a wrenching monologue from Labaki herself, breaking up a fight among her café customers by howling, "You think we're here just to mourn you?" Like the hashish-laced pastries the ladies make to sedate the male population, the film feels like it has been dosed with sugar to mask its distressingly bitter taste.
Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]
Tensions are simmering in a remote Lebanese village where Muslim and Christian neighbors have struck an uneasy truce. The mosque and the church may stand side by side, but a fight is likely to erupt over the smallest thing (such as which channel to watch on the communal outdoor television). It’s mostly the men who come to near-blows; the women, who are more apt to break into song and dance, do their best to distract the alphas with everything from feigned miracles to a bused-in gaggle of Russian erotic dancers. But when an unexpected death threatens to tear the village apart, what are these headstrong, harmony-inclined ladies to do? Why, put on Sectarian Violence: The Musical!
Director-cowriter Nadine Labaki—who also stars as one of the beleaguered dames—displays an assured hand with her performers, especially saucy first-timer Yvonne Maalouf, who’s an absolute delight as the mayor’s wisecracking wife. But the filmmaker’s grasp on this inherently uneasy material is much less confident: The tone swings awkwardly between endearingly light-comic (a whimsical romantic subplot between Labaki’s character and a hunky handyman) and confrontationally mournful (the accidental killing of one character becomes an audience-hectoring ploy). And by the time the film takes a glib turn into role-switching farce—as Muslims become Christians and Christians become Muslims—the overall toothlessness of the satire becomes damningly apparent.
Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]
Where Do We Go Now? is about as feel-good a fable set in the Middle East as can be imagined. Infused with music and magic realism, a female narrator introduces it with “I’m going to tell you a little story” as a large procession of women in black sway and stomp like an active Greek chorus, reflecting the Aristophanes’ Lysistrata-like resonance in the tale. When they reach the village cemetery, they split into the Christian and Muslim sections to clean up gravestones with photographs of too many young men and boys. This locale is similar to the unspecified, yet Lebanon-like war-torn country of Denis Villeneuve’s far more grim Incendies from last year.
Back in the village, bounded by a mosque and a church, the men are hanging around the tavern. The only guy working hard there is the handsome Muslim painter, Rabih (Julien Farhat). The most beautiful Christian woman in town, the waitress Amale (director and co-writer Nadine Labaki), can’t help but notice him. Both bound by tradition, they can only be discreetly romantic in a lovely musical number dancing together, but only in their imaginations. (The terrific rhythmic music is by Labaki’s husband, Khaled Mouzanar.)
The village boys scamper around, setting up satellite TV that links the village to the outside world. They also smuggle goods along a precipitous path to avoid the hidden land mines that wandering goats occasionally set off. This limited contact is enough to bring in hints that the civil war has once again broken out, and the women spontaneously decide that the key in keeping their male population safe is to block out news of the renewed fighting. From first burning newspapers to blocking channels, their efforts humorously escalate to emphasize the men’s foibles, including hiring imported sexy Russian dancers as a distraction.
As the outside dangers are brought home by injuries to the daring boys, the dancers see that the photographs on the graves are the same ones that fill shrines in each home, and, in female solidarity, they help the women stage the ultimate strike against religious differences to prove that people really are the same. Female-centric like Labaki’s first film Caramel (2007), it’s as rich in sympathetic, individual characters, but funnier, albeit a bit over the top and satirically absurd, (there’s a fake religious miracle). Labaki demonstrates that there is hope to look beyond endless conflict, even if it is wishful thinking about an uncertain future.
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Lindis Kipp]
Nadine Labaki's new film Where Do We Go Now? explores the impact of religious warfare or at least the threat thereof on family life in Lebanon. The story follows a group of women in a small Lebanese village, who go to extreme lengths to prevent their men fighting like everybody else in the country. The village is a pretty even split of Christians and Muslims and normally everybody gets along. But with news of conflict pouring in from the outside world, the men get restless and the women have to come up with new ways to keep them occupied.
Everything from intentional arguments and Ukranian prostitutes to a hash-laced smorgasbord in the village hall are fair game when it comes to keeping the peace. The film oscillates between the hilarious and the heartbreaking, putting the audience thoroughly through the wringer and highlighting the real, day to day impact of senseless conflict. Many of the tactics employed by the women and especially their dialogue while implementing them are highly comical, which makes the drop into despair when a young man is accidentally killed that much harder.
Young Nassim is killed in a gun fight away in town and his mother Afaf decides to hide his body to avoid the conflict sparking up in their village. She tells everybody that Nassim has mumps – a ruse her friends quickly see through – and there is a heartwrenching scene where one of Nassim's friends apologises to him through the closed door of his bedroom, while Afaf stands by, not able to cry. Another poignant scene is when director Labaki's character Amale breaks down and rages at the arguing men in her café, asking them “Do you think we're only here to mourn you?”. In the final twist of the story, all the women make a tremendous sacrifice to show their men the futility of their arguments. Only after their grand gesture is there enough peace between factions to lay Nassim to rest.
The large cast are all fantastic and the audience really gets a feel for Lebanese village life. Even without knowledge of Arabic, the mannerisms and intonation make it very clear that in its original language, the film is full of regional jokes and Lebanon-specific dialogue. Thankfully, this translates rather well. The bleak, dry landscape that the remote village is set in provides a strangely beautiful backdrop for the colourful characters in the village.
One thing that particularly struck me is how palpable it was that this film had been made by a woman. Labaki manages to get across a view of life that is not predominant in cinematic stories, without making it seem like an agenda. Many of the underlying issues and tensions are portrayed through quiet actions and little gestures rather than dialogue and the fantastic, slightly disquieting opening scene is a prime example of this. The film leaves the audience feeling like they might understand the bittersweet everyday reality of armed conflict a little better and shows that no matter what, life has to go on. It's just that sometimes, sacrifices have to be made in order for that to happen.
Where Do We Go Now? | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
In the classic Greek play Lysistrata, the women of Greece, tired of losing their men in battle, decide to withhold sex from their partners until the Peloponnesian War ends. The increasingly desperate female protagonists of Where Do We Go Now?, Lebanon’s top-grossing Arabic-language film and its official 2012 Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film, would probably admire the intention of that ploy, but disapprove of its bluntness. Their attempts to wangle the men of their village away from clashes over religion are often subtler and sneakier, though no less intense. The no-sex option is never on the table, but it’s just about the only idea they don’t consider in trying to keep the peace in their small town. In spite of their efforts, though, the same conflicts keep reasserting themselves. For the men, it’s a war of sectarian pride. For the women, it’s a war of creativity against entrenched habits and knee-jerk aggression.
Director Nadine Labaki, following up her poignant but more conventional 2007 drama Caramel (another Lebanese Best Foreign Language Film contender), heads up an ensemble of colorful characters as a Christian whose café seems to be the only non-denominational gathering place in her tiny countryside village. Her hometown, surrounded by land mines and connected to the world only via a crumbling stone bridge, is so isolated that all trade with the outside world is handled by two intrepid teenagers with a motor scooter. When the local youngsters rig up a hilltop antenna capable of bringing in a few grainy stations on the town’s one working TV, it’s such a momentous event that the whole village gathers on the hill to watch a few shows together, and the mayor makes a speech about their first collective steps into the 21st century. But when the news comes on, with its inevitable grim stories of sectarian clashes, the women spring into action in a instantaneous, practiced way, picking loud, meaningless fights with each other to drown out the newscasters. It’s clear they’ve been engaging in different forms of this practice for a long time, shouting whatever lies are necessary to drown out the contentious voices of the outside world.
Their reaction to external influences is a form of provincialism, but it’s a well-intentioned one, and an increasingly necessary protection in a divided world. Before long, the village’s Christian and Muslim men are clashing over offenses both real and imagined, with the first squabbles rapidly escalating to dramatic back-room plotting and a war of attrition. The women are forced to step up their peace campaign to match. Much of Where Do We Go Now? is taken up with the struggle to keep the men’s minds off conflict. Sometimes it’s via direct, dramatic confrontation—when Labaki follows one flare-up with a furious tirade delivered to her café customers, there’s a vicious personal edge to her question “Is this what it means to be men?” as if the question is coming from the director as much as from her character. But most of the gambits are surreptitious, imaginative, and openly funny, whether the women are hiring Ukrainian strippers to invade the town, or faking a religious miracle. To Labaki’s credit, she manages to take the film between tonal extremes credibly and without dulling the impact of either the humor or the horror. It’s rare for a film to cover a child’s death and a mother’s subsequent agony, then later successfully wring giggles out of an over-the-top group song about the peace-keeping uses of hashish surreptitiously introduced into food.
The songs, composed by Labaki’s husband Khaled Mouzanar, are one of Where Do We Go’s stranger conceits. The film opens with a funeral march that becomes a beautiful, swoony dance, as the village’s black-clad women express their emotions with their bodies instead of their voices. A later romantic interlude where Labaki and Muslim contractor Julian Farhat fantasize about each other takes on the outsized emotions of a Bollywood number. In these moments, the film overtly declares the fairy-tale nature that otherwise manifests more indirectly, though the shape of the story. In spite of its serious themes and its roots in grim conflict, Where Do We Go isn’t meant to be taken at face value. It’s unabashedly a fantasy: It takes place in a generic place inspired by Lebanon, but with location and era identifiers deliberately omitted. There are no class clashes, even though there are clearly class differences. The religious strife is broad and undefined, based more on a simple, broad us-vs.-them dynamic than on any disagreement about a given belief or custom. There’s little sense of the town’s history, in terms of specific grudges or personal conflicts.
It’s also significant that while the village’s key women have detailed personalities, the men are generally more generic, distinguished largely by their social or story roles. None of them are drawn in close detail; it’s more like the women are trying to hold back a rolling wave of national intent than like they’re fighting a specific battle against individuals. Even the village’s priest and imam are fundamentally indistinguishable, good-natured men united in their desire for concord, to the degree that they’re both willing to compromise their pride and even their faith if a lie here or there will keep their followers calm. Religion isn’t an evil in Where Do We Go, and religious men aren’t inherently blinkered. Every aspect of the film is designed to isolate the religious war from other aspects of life, and to generalize it into iconic status without miring it in real issues that might divide audiences.
But what the film lacks in specificity and interest in taking sides, it makes up for in style, authentic emotion, and terrific performances, particularly from Claude Baz Moussawbaa as a mother willing to make tremendous personal sacrifices for the women’s cause, and Yvonne Maalouf as the mayor’s wife, who carries the dignity of her wealth and station, but is willing to let herself be ridiculous if necessary. Between the two of them, they accomplish a great deal of the difficulty of getting the film smoothly between its dramatic and comedic poles. For a movie about religious war, Where Do We Go is surprisingly funny; at times, it veers almost into caper territory, as its protagonists work their way through scheme after outsized scheme.
And that makes the film a much riskier proposition than a simple drama about women fighting to keep their families from fighting. Satire is a risky proposition; satire of serious subjects is even more so. In turning such a vast conflict into a comedic romp, Where Do We Go Now? sometimes feels like it’s cheating or cheapening its subject matter. Its scattered musical interludes and intermittent playfulness threaten to throw its gravity off balance, and its insistence on symbolically splitting up humanity by gender—turning all women into peacekeepers, even though it doesn’t correspondingly turn all men into warmakers—may be off-putting to some viewers in its simplicity and generalization. But Labaki’s premise goes beyond simple sexual conflict. In her allegorical world, the men stand in for all people with power, and the women for all people who can only use craft and creativity to counteract the implacability of that power. Her clever, sweet film is just another creative solution to a complicated problem.
Review: 'Where Do We Go Now' - Nadine Labaki - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek
Where Do We Go Now? - Entertainment - Time Magazine Mary Pols
Where Do We Go Now? - Filmcritic.com Movie Review Chris Barsanti
Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]
Battleship Pretension [David Bax]
Where
Do We Go Now? Fionnuala Halligan at
Cannes from Screendaily, May 16, 2011
Shared Darkness: Where Do We Go Now? Brent Simon
Fr. Dennis at the Movies [Dennis Kriz]
Movie Review - 'Where Do We Go Now?' : NPR Mark Jenkins
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
'Wish' Granted: A Jewel, About Kids - The Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
Entertainment Weekly [Owen Gleiberman]
The
Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]
at Cannes, May 16, 2011, also seen here: Where
Do We Go Now? (Et Maintenant on Va Ou?): Cannes 2011 Review
Variety Reviews - Where Do We Go Now? - Film Reviews - Cannes ... Alissa Simon
What to do when war breaks out? Bring on the ... - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen, May 25, 2012
The underdog is the people's choice. Just ask ... - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen, May 24, 2012
Village women take on sectarian strife in 'Go' - BostonHerald.com James Verniere
Review: Where Do We Go Now? - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Where Do We Go Now movie review. 2.5 stars - Chicago Tribune Mark Olsen
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Where Do We Go Now? - Movies - The New York Times Stephen Holden
Labrune,
Jeanne
SPECIAL
TREATMENT (Sans queue ni tête) C- 69
France (95 mi)
2010
This is another Isabelle Huppert vehicle, which by itself offers
promise, but there’s nothing special or remotely interesting about this film,
as it features people who are continually bored with themselves. Without exploring the origins of this ennui,
the director instead chooses a dry, lighthearted attempt to show unhappy
professionals, call girls and psychiatrists, who have outgrown all interest in
their professions, where Huppert as Alice is in a midlife crisis as an
expensive call girl with a taste for the finer things in life, but a growing
disinterest in her often ridiculous clientele.
Huppert has played prostitutes before, but brings nothing new to the
role, as initially the focus of attention is on the eccentricities of her
clients, which is mildly amusing, but also stereotypical. When one of her johns decides to play rough,
she goes into a crisis mode afterwards wondering why she’s even willing to put
up with this nonsense. In a
simultaneously told parallel story, Xavier, a bored therapist (Bouli Lanners)
sits and listens endlessly to people who have little or nothing to say, again a
stereotypical depiction where fortunately the patients shown are not seriously
disturbed, as the therapist isn’t listening anyway. And to make matters worse, his wife, Hélène
(Valérie Dréville), a fellow therapist, has lost all interest in her husband,
forcing him to find alternate accommodations. Within this set up, the director who also
co-wrote the script decides to play musical chairs with the storyline
possibilities.
Advancing the story through small vignettes, much of it shown through
repetitious set pieces where Alice and Xavier are both aloof, going through the
motions of the same routines in life, growing bored and disaffected, where they
barely know themselves anymore, each decides drastic measures need to be
taken. With Xavier’s marriage in trouble,
he decides he needs to spice up his ordinary love life, so why not a call girl,
while Alice thinks the right shrink may help her open new doors of
discovery. Their scenes together never
generate much of a spark, as each detests themselves too much, where they can’t
shake the feeling of self-loathing. The
truth of the matter is there’s not much to this movie, as it’s not really about
anything. Richard Debuisne has
co-written and also acted in each of Labrune’s last 3 films, where he plays a
hospital psychiatrist dealing regularly with the mentally ill. But even in this setting, there’s an
underlying lightness to the subject, but Debuisne is excellent, appropriately
serious and slightly offbeat in the role.
What we really see is Huppert go through a series of costume changes, as
she’s an actress who makes herself right at home in the wardrobe department,
much like Jonathan Winters or Robin Williams finding humor with any available
props. She makes any role her own, and
this one’s no different, adding an existential air of detachment and even
sadness, where besides one fellow working girl (Sabila Moussadek), she has no
close friends. There’s nothing daring or
original in this film, no great scenes, but there are excellent upscale
production values and an icy cool musical score from André Mergenthaler that
accentuates the coldness of the character’s interior worlds. While there’s always a hint that more could
be lurking under the surface, this is more a comedy of manners than a serious
drama.
Special
Treatment Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Geoff Andrew
A very fertile conceit – the film both gradually brings together and rhymes the skills and experiences of two very different disenchanted individuals whose work might be seen as therapeutic (a psychoanalyst with a troubled marriage, and a high-class prostitute who specialises in role-playing) – is given real substance by Isabelle Huppert’s predictably superb turn as the call-girl considering calling it a day. Lent strong support by Bouli Lanners as the morose shrink, she wrings each and every subtle nuance out of a character that in other hands might have slipped into caricature – though whether (pace the LFF booklet’s claims) the film also serves as a commentary on Huppert’s own career is another matter entirely.
Reel Film Reviews
[David Nusair]
The latest film from French filmmaker Jeanne Labrune, Special
Treatment follows a slick prostitute (Isabelle Huppert's Alice) and an
unhappy therapist (Bouli Lanners' Xavier) as they unknowingly help one another
solve their respective problems following a chance encounter. There's little
doubt that Special Treatment's disastrously uninvolving opening half
hour is exacerbated by Huppert's mere presence, as the actress is effectively
playing the exact same role that she's played on so many occasions before (ie
doesn't she get sick of playing cold, calculating women?) The film's episodic
structure ensures that the viewer's interest tends to run hot and cold
throughout the proceedings, with the number of compelling interludes (ie Alice
explains exactly how she works and what she charges to Xavier) almost entirely
equal to the number of less-than-enthralling segments (ie Xavier visits an
almost comically sordid sex club in which a pig makes an appearance). The
increasingly prominent emphasis on subplots of a decidedly needless nature
certainly contributes to the film's hopelessly uneven atmosphere, and it's
ultimately clear that the rambling narrative diminishes the strength of the
surprisingly conventional endings for the two central characters.
Film
in Pictures: Huppert Elicits Erotic Urges in Labrune's ... Eric Lavallee from Ion Cinema
Toasted by the Pialats, Godards, Chabrols, Hanekes and Claire
Denis, almost in her fourth decade in front of the camera, in my opinion, Isabelle
Huppert is perhaps the most versatile actress in film today. By the looks
of the first set of stills below, I'd say there is no typecasting her. Special Treatment is
being released in
Co-written by Labrune and Richard Debuisne, Sans Queue Ni
Tête centres on Alice (Huppert), an independent prostitute who is tired of
her job and plans to undergo psychoanalysis to find the strength to change her
life. Meanwhile, psychoanalyst Xavier (Lanners) has just been left by his wife
and is weary of listening to his clients’ monologues. He decides to call on a
professional to satisfy his erotic urges. The two characters thus meet, but
this is not the start of a romance, just the first stage in a difficult journey
which, through conflicts, ordeals and disappointments, leads them both to
rediscover themselves. They come across a third character (Debuisne), whom they
will lean on in order to make a fresh start.
Flickfeast
[Natasha Saifolahi]
Isabelle Huppert plays
We witness both of these characters at work- The variety of both of their
clients;
The most irritating part of this film is that it begins portraying
The film shies away from the lead female character; instead on focusing on
getting to the core of
Variety
Reviews - Special Treatment - Film Reviews - - Review by ... Boyd van Hoeij
LaBute, Neil
IN THE COMPANY OF MEN A- 94
USA
A powerful, uncompromising, hilarious and unrepentant film about men’s angry and childish underbelly, in this case cast against corporate America where it speaks the unspeakable, thinks the unthinkable, but is terrific drama and is shocking just how far the artifice is stripped, almost to the point of being a horror thriller. Chad, Aaron Eckhart, is the blond, handsome, smooth-talking, womanizing car salesman style of guy who’ll tell you anything to get you to do what he wants you to do, and lying is simply his chosen profession. Howard, Matt Malloy, is his counterpart, an insecure, easily misled nerd of repressed self-hatred. Both decide to charm a young, deaf secretary in the firm, to date her and dump her, just for the superior male thrill of it all, paying back all the personal rejection they both feel in the love game. This is a brilliant, unrelenting nightmare where love is a commodity than can be cajoled and coerced and bullied out of someone, where bold humiliation is imposed on the young interns, where every kind of human indignity is fair game in this ruthlessly competitive corporate world of job-fearing, middle-class white guys. “You can kill somebody just once. But in work, you can torture them every day of the week.”
IN THE COMPANY OF MEN Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
NURSE BETTY
USA
BFI | Sight & Sound | Nurse Betty (1999) Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, October 2000
Fair Oaks, Kansas. Waitress Betty
Sizemore, who dreams of becoming a nurse, is a fan of the television hospital
soap A Reason to Love, whose lead character is Dr David Ravell.
Unknown to her, her car-dealer husband Del is running drugs. Two hitmen,
Charlie and Wesley, pay Del a visit, during which the car salesman is killed.
Witnessing his murder, Betty is shocked into a fugue state; believing herself
the ex-fiancée of Dr Ravell she sets out for California to find him, driving a
Buick containing the drugs the hitmen are after.
While Sheriff Eldon Ballard and
reporter Roy Ostrey investigate the murder, the hitmen set off after Betty,
with Charlie increasingly fascinated by his quarry. In LA, Betty lucks into a
hospital job by saving an accident victim, and finds lodgings with his sister
Rosa. At a ball attended by the stars of A Reason to Love, Betty
meets George McCord who plays Dr Ravell and starts treating him as her lost
love. George, imagining she's improvising, gets her a part in the soap.
Confronted by cameras, Betty is shocked out of her fugue.
The hitmen track Betty down to
Rosa's house, ahead of Eldon and Roy. While Wesley holds the others at gun
point, Charlie discovers Betty knew nothing of the drugs. A gun battle erupts:
Wesley is killed and Charlie wounded. The police arrive. Betty, who has seized
Charlie's gun, returns it so he can die with dignity. Betty lands a role in the
soap.
Review
Neil LaBute has been widely accused - not without reason - of revelling in
misogyny, misanthropy and cruelty. Given this, Nurse Betty may come as a
surprise. True, some fairly unpleasant things happen, but mostly to characters
who deserve them: the repellent Del Sizemore gets scalped and shot dead for
being not only a used-car salesman, drug-dealer and abusive husband, but for
sporting a hideous mullet. It's surely no coincidence that he's played by Aaron
Eckhart, who took the role of chief predator
For although LaBute can't resist injecting the occasional acidic squirt, his latest film ends up as a fair simulacrum of a romantic comedy-thriller where the good end happily and the bad unhappily - this being, as Oscar Wilde reminded us, the definition of fiction. Which is appropriate enough, since Nurse Betty repeatedly zeroes in on the crossover point where fiction shades into fantasy, television-fed fantasy in particular. Knowingly scripted by ex-stand-up comedian John C. Richards and music editor James Flamberg, the film at once mocks and purloins the narrative conventions of daytime soap. When, in the final shoot-out, Charlie reveals that his fellow hitman Wesley is his son, it's precisely the sort of melodramatic bombshell soaps depend on; but it also makes sense dramatically, for why else would the professional Charlie put up with hot-headed Wesley?
Throughout, Nurse Betty plays this kind of juggling game. The central plot conceit of Betty's fugue - which Reneé Zellweger's waitress is shocked into when she witnesses the murder of husband Del - is a latter-day take on amnesia, that reliable old standby of soap writers; and more than once, as we're about to chortle at some especially crass line of dialogue, it's revealed to be a quote from the soap-within-the-movie, A Reason to Love. Following soapland's penchant for providing running updates for new viewers, the film's characters constantly define each other in neat encapsulations: Charlie talks of Betty as "sort of a wholesome Doris Day figure" and describes himself as "a garbage man of the human condition".
Where the film most clearly locks into LaBute's former preoccupations is that people's assumptions about each other are shown to be essentially unreliable. Betty's grasp of the supposed love of her life Dr Ravell, the character played by actor George McCord in A Reason to Love, has as much depth as the life-size cut-out of him she totes around, while George admiringly tells her "You're so real" just when she's most deeply mired in fantasy.
With more than one nod to The Wizard of Oz (Betty quits drab Kansas for West Coast Neverland, with Ravell/McCord as her phoney wizard), Nurse Betty seems to suggest that most of us end up creating our own delusional refuge from reality, and that finding it in a soap is no worse an option than most. Adopting a more fluid camera style than usual, courtesy of DP Jean Yves Escoffier (Good Will Hunting), LaBute draws nuanced performances from his cast, giving Greg Kinnear his best role yet as McCord, while Zellweger keeps a shrewd rein on the ditziness. But while Nurse Betty proves that LaBute has more than one string to his bow, you can't help thinking that he makes more memorable cinema when revelling in misanthropy. –Philip Kemp
NURSE BETTY Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
POSSESSION
USA
BFI | Sight & Sound | Possession (2002) Charlotte O’Sullivan from Sight and Sound, November 2002
Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart),
an impoverished US academic working in present-day London, discovers a letter
which sheds light on the life of Victorian writer Randolph Ash (Jeremy
Northam). Apparently happily married, Ash, it turns out, was obsessed by the
poet Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). Roland shares this insight with
feminist scholar Dr Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is Christabel's great-
great-great grandniece. They go to Christabel's family home, where they find
love letters exchanged by the writers. Meanwhile a number of rival scholars
have realised that the pair are on to something. Maud and Roland retrace Ash
and LaMotte's journey to Whitby, hoping to flnd out what became of the
relationship. In the meantime their rivals try to buy the love letters from
Christabel's family, then decide to go off to France on a new trail. Maud and
Roland beat them to it. They discover that Christabel became pregnant, but that
the baby mysteriously disappeared and that Ash believed she'd killed it.
Ash was buried with a box
containing an unopened letter from Christabel. Back in England, Maud and Roland
find out that the other academics plan to rob Ash's grave. There's a
confrontation at the cemetery. Roland and Maud open the box and realise that
Christabel's child was brought up as her niece, which makes Maud the
great-great-great granddaughter of Christabel and Ash. A blonde plait in the
box reveals that Ash met his daughter as a little girl.
Review
Neil LaBute is great at hate. In
his three previous features (In the Company of Men, Your
Friends & Neighbors and Nurse Betty), falling in love
is generally a big mistake, and the assertion of independence both safe and
thrilling. You wonder, then, what possessed him to adapt A.S. Byatt's novel,
because for all that book's deconstructive wit, what it celebrates is the
attempt to share. Love isn't easy for either of its central couples - whether
the Victorian poets Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte, or the present-day
academics obsessed with them, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey - but it's a risk
worth taking. The irony is that LaBute (revising a screenplay by Laura Jones)
has added syrup to the romances and drained out the danger. The result? A film
that's faithful neither to Byatt's vision nor to his own.
Byatt's novel, among other
things, challenges our beloved notion that the Victorians were sexually
repressed and 'we' are uninhibited. But the film restores the status quo. Take
the scenes in Whitby, where both couples end up staying in the same hotel. In
the book, Christabel prepares for sex by getting into bed in her nightie;
having made love to her, Ash realises that, despite her virginity, she was
already sexually experienced, thanks presumably to her live-in companion
Blanche. In the film, a masterful, excited Ash slowly unloosens Christabel's
corset - shorthand for her lust being unlocked for the very flrst time.
Meanwhile Maud and Roland, who in the book bond chastely over their love of
single 'virginal' beds, now share a double at the hotel because of a mix-up.
Needless to say, sexual tension ensues.
The worst betrayal, however,
concerns the character of Roland himself. Byatt's dark, British smudge of a
loser is lower class, stuck in a rut of academic mediocrity, friendless, chained
to a bitter girlfriend and oppressed by a horrible landlady. In other words, he
is everything Maud - beautiful, upper-class and critically lauded - is not. In
the movie though Roland has become an attractive, confident Yank (played by
LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart) who's determined to stay single because his
"antics" hurt someone in the past (subtext: he's a heartbreaker!).
He's also a man of action, solving the historical puzzle by stripping off, Mr
Darcy style, and diving into a lake. The character, in effect, has been bumped
up the Darwinian chain, thus undermining one of the central points of the
story, which is that in the present day it's possible for a man to feel
completely inferior to a woman: Roland is to Maud as Christabel was to Ash. Just
as importantly, this undermines the idea that a woman could be drawn to such a
'weak' flgure. Instead, the film promotes the age-old idea that what women want
is a man who knows what he wants.
On the other end of this equation
is Maud, who should be the film's trump card. Gwyneth Paltrow is just right as
a woman resigned to her perfections, but LaBute doesn't want his heroine to be
too much in control, so he's given her a heap of neurotic ticks. She frets over
the state of her relationship with Roland like a common-or-garden Bridget
Jones. One woman, though, does escape the film's dead hand. Blanche is the
painter/lover/friend Christabel leaves behind, and Lena Headey plays her to
perfection. Neither a repressed Mrs Danvers flgure nor a moppet, she has hardly
any lines, but her face says everything about what it means to be rejected.
When Blanche drowns herself, her walk into the lake is filmed in a smoky blue
light. She has given up on romance in life; all her creativity and sensuality
are being poured into death.
Meanwhile Jennifer Ehle's
Christabel, who's been merely arch and simpering up to this point, also gets a
chance to shine as a result of the tragedy. She and Ash meet at a séance where
she screams, "You have made a murderess of me!" It's a horrifying
moment (Ash thinks she's talking about their child). And maybe that's what got
LaBute excited. You believe in Christabel's desire to hurt Ash; you can even
believe that she did kill her child. This is the one point where the film and
book chime. Byatt uses up a lot of words to convey the cold madness Christabel
is plunged into when she travels to France to have her baby; Ehle's pinched
face gets you there in an instant.
The modern scenes, by comparison,
are constantly disappointing. Indeed, they get positively farcical. Maud and
Roland's declarations of love at her flat ("I want to know if there's an
us in you and me"); the gathering of the forces for good to defeat the
wicked American academic Cropper; the fist-flght in the cemetery... It's almost
impossible to believe LaBute was in the building when these scenes were shot.
But maybe there's method to this madness. Throughout Possession, the usually subtle Eckhart wears a permanent 'aren't-I-cute?' grin. We recognise the look: it's the same one he wore for In the Company of Men. Did LaBute wish to suggest that Roland's fairytale virtue was just that - too good to be true? Maybe LaBute originally planned a cemetery scene in which pushy Roland reveals he's been on Cropper's side all along. Ridiculous? At least this scenario would have had a demonic energy. The one LaBute has plumped for has no life at all.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS B 85
USA
BFI | Sight & Sound | The Shape of Things (2003) David Jays from Sight and Sound, January 2004
Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) and Adam
(Paul Rudd) are college students in California. They meet when Adam, working as
a museum security guard, tries to stop art student Evelyn from defacing a
sculpture. Chubby, gauche Adam is surprised when she agrees to go on a date.
They begin a relationship, and under Evelyn's guidance, Adam loses weight,
gains in style and confidence, and has a nose-job. The gradual transformation
startles his friends Jenny (Gretchen Mol) and Philip (Frederick Weller), who
are engaged to be married. Adam and Jenny, previously too shy to act on their
feelings, kiss; in response Evelyn kisses Philip. She also asks Adam to prove
his love by severing contact with his friends, and he reluctantly agrees.
They all meet again at the public
presentation of Evelyn's thesis project. Her project was the transformation and
manipulation of Adam, an experiment in human will. Jenny and Philip, who have
broken off their engagement, leave in disgust. Adam, humiliated, hears Evelyn
catalogue his increasingly extreme decisions, which culminated in a recent
marriage proposal. Evelyn, claiming that her project illustrates our obsession
with surface, maintains its artistic validity.
Review
"Please, just refer to me as
'It'," says Adam at the end of this film. "Or 'Untitled'." We
have seen him, a student at an unnamed US college, shuck his gawky unease, his
greasy hair, shapeless brown corduroy and hamster cheeks and become a handsome,
assured but compromised figure. What he doesn't realise is that this radical
transformation is the subject of an artwork by Evelyn, whom he thought was his
girlfriend. What he did for love, she did for art; she documents his cosmetic
and ethical choices (having cosmetic surgery, dumping his friends), and
displays his klutzy old clothes and videos of them having sex.
After flawed excursions into
comedy and costume drama (Nurse Betty, Possession),
Neil LaBute revisits his distinctive earlier territory. In the Company of
Men (1997) and Your Friends & Neighbors (1998)
inhabited a vindictive world where heterosexuality played out in corrosive
rituals. Although The Shape of Things has been described as a
gender-reversed take on Company (where two embittered men seduce
and dump a female colleague), what makes this film more interesting is the
opacity of Evelyn's motives for much of the film and her uncompromisingly
abstract vindication. We learn nothing about her past - even the scars on her
wrists, which she previously claimed as badges of experience "like rings
on a tree", were merely "another project". She admits to only
one genuine remark, whispered during an early scene - but we couldn't hear it
so it lies beyond the finished project.
Rachel Weisz's brilliantly
layered performance as Evelyn - barbed, vehement and oddly sorrowful - keeps
all options open. She retains a breathless ingenuity even when everything is
revealed - having displayed Adam's transformation, the camera homes in on
Evelyn's inscrutable expression, challenging us to prise at her artistic
integrity. The opening scene shows her infuriated by a fig leaf added to a
statue: she is a fiery despoiler of faux-innocence. At the same time, she is
monstrously indifferent to anything beyond her project - when Adam, taken aback
by her apparent jealousy when he kisses another woman, mentions Desdemona's
strawberry handkerchief, she merely turns away, saying coldly "I don't
know that reference." Although LaBute's work has often been accused of a
forensic impulse (he, like Evelyn, might be producing an exercise in Applied
Theory), he also suggests that Evelyn's work may, like her Mao badges and Che
Guevara screenprint, be mere retro radicalism on a placid smalltown campus.
LaBute's Mormon upbringing has
been much discussed, and allegorical underpinnings are clear here. He
previously traced the scorched trail of free will in his triptych Bash
(filmed in 2000), in which a character (played by Paul Rudd, who takes the role
of Adam here, justified queer-bashing as a defence of Eden. This new film's
Adam and Eve test out temptation through juicy little choices that barely
register as transgression. No wonder Evelyn's initials spell 'EAT', which Adam
has tattooed by his crotch. The Pygmalion myth also shadows the
story, and Adam recalls that he helped Evelyn find a tape of The Picture
of Dorian Gray - another cautionary tale of authenticity stifled by
self-fashioning.
The film is based on LaBute's own
2001 stage play. With its original stage cast and minimal changes - moving the
action from the midwest to rural California - the work emerges far more keenly
than it did in a London stage premiere compromised by hype. It retains a
heightened, hermetic austerity - just four characters displayed in vivid
semi-theatrical settings (Evelyn's remorseless scarlet-and-white installation;
the deceptively airy white-and-apple-green reception at the cosmetic surgery).
LaBute, borrowing video-art procedures, frequently separates his speakers - the
bifurcated dialogues resemble a split-screen installation, and reinforce the
abstracted isolation.
Elaborate prosthetic and costume
changes make Adam's transformation far more dramatic on screen - with the added
irony that as he becomes increasingly svelte and smart, he increasingly
'becomes' the appealing and familiar Paul Rudd. He also stops biting his nails
after years of his fingers looking "like raw meat", though Evelyn's
acts of remote butchery prove equally devastating. His former roommate Philip
thinks he looks like a battered wife after his nose-job, and his friendship
with Philip and perky Jenny, and the couple's engagement, are casualties of
Evelyn's artwork.
Evelyn presents her work in a
meticulously staged final episode. Adam is horribly visible in a sky-blue
shirt, cringeing as the audience follows his makeover from first vegetarian
meal to recent marriage proposal. Evelyn, backed by blood-red curtains,
describes her "human sculpture", created with "two very pliable
materials of choice - the human flesh and the human will", using "manipulation
as my palette knife". She claims that Adam's dubious moral choices reflect
our obsession with surface - with "the shape of things". Weisz looks
directly into the camera as she insists, "Only indifference is
suspect." The Shape of Things makes indifference difficult,
and suggests that LaBute's future lies not in broadening his territory, but
delving deeper. As Evelyn remarks of Adam's progress, "You've gotten cuter
and stronger and more confident - and craftier."
LAKEVIEW TERRACE B 87
USA (110 mi) 2008 ‘Scope
A nasty little film about bigoted role reversal where a snarky black cop next door becomes the worst nightmare for the interracial couple moving into the house next door who literally becomes obsessed with making their lives miserable. Not quite the horror story of DISTURBIA (2007), which featured an actual demented neighbor, this is instead a picture of relentless psychological torment inflicted upon another. Samuel L. Jackson, of course, has no peers when it comes to displaying this kind of bullying obstinacy, a man who backs down to no one, not even death while in the line of duty as one of LA’s finest, or his two children who are forced to live under a house of endless daddy’s rules, as he’s a strict single parent after his wife died three years earlier. The couple next door does not fare so well, as they repeatedly play into his hands, Patrick Wilson as the targeted white guy and Lisa Washington as his lovely black wife. Their chemistry is questionable throughout, as they behave like this is the first time their racial differences have been put to the test. Of course, that’s utter nonsense, as there’s simply no way a couple would not have faced a universe of setbacks before they were ever married, giving them a foundation upon which to draw upon in dealing with this latest nightmare. Certainly part of race baiting or taunting is knowing how to act and when, as sometimes the best thing to do with bullies is simply ignore them and refuse to give them the pleasure of a response, as otherwise they feed off your anxieties like a shark attack.
Samuel L. Jackson is a revelation in this film, a force to
be reckoned with, perhaps the most powerful performance he’s ever given, as
he’s disturbingly complex, not completely hateable, showing a profound array of
emotions not the least of which is a smart alecky attitude towards liberal
whites, as he’s able to stand them down and make them uncomfortable in an
instant simply by challenging where they come from, as they’re not the
streetfighter he is and don’t stand a chance against him in a fight, even a
verbal one. But
Without ever directly referring to it, this film takes place in the upscale
suburban neighborhood of LA where Rodney King was brutalized by the police who
were eventually exonerated by a jury of their peers, where Wilson early on
meekly utters King’s famous line “Can’t we all get along?” initially seen by
millions of TV households while his face was battered and beaten to a
pulp. My guess is that most in the
audience will not draw this connection and will instead see this exclusively as
a police thriller, a good cop turned bad, but that is where the film is most
suspect. From the outset Wilson and
Washington don’t have a chance in a bad blood game of ever intensifying
disagreements with a strong armed cop, where the most minor infractions
escalate from simple misunderstandings to gross offenses with wild and reckless
retaliation until all bets are off. Not
sure why in each instance Wilson has to go it alone to face Jackson while his
wife stays behind, as the results might have been different had she
participated, but of course, he was protecting her from the ugliness that
instantly developed each time they conversed, usually with snide remarks,
character assassination, veiled threats, and a general contempt for his mere
presence. Jackson has simply never been
better at channeling this particular type of racial bitterness, as he pulls it
off with such distinctively contemptuous sarcasm that it overshadows his
obvious charm, intelligence and wit. Up
until the final turn, Jackson
The Onion A.V.
Club review
What more does
Neil LaBute have to teach us about humanity that wasn't already apparent in his
caustic 1997 debut feature, In The Company Of Men? There's nothing wrong
with a filmmaker having a misanthropic worldview, but LaBute's is an unusually
narrow one, predicated on the notion that men are engaged in alpha-male
one-upmanship and women are, if anything, even more diabolical. Films like Your
Friends & Neighbors and The Shape Of Things intend to reveal
human needs and motives at their basest, but they're rigged for maximum shock
value, and say more about an artist with an exceedingly sour point of view than
they say about the foibles of modern man. So when LaBute pulls the grenade pin
on racism and interracial relationships in Lakeview Terrace, viewers
should know to duck and cover.
LaBute's nasty
provocations are really the only thing that separates his overheated treatise
on race and masculinity from run-of-the-mill home-invasion thrillers like Unlawful
Entry or Pacific Heights. The misconceptions start with Samuel L.
Jackson as a single police officer whose strict law-and-order mentality carries
over into how he disciplines his two children and how he patrols his own
neighborhood. His concern for morality and security, particularly as they
relate to his children, might make him sympathetic—or at least
understandable—but Jackson quickly morphs into a vicious caricature when a white
man (Patrick Wilson) and his black wife (Kerry Washington) move in next door.
Jackson makes his objections to their lifestyle and their relationship known
immediately (by way of introduction, he fake-carjacks Wilson), and the hatred
escalates from there.
Working from a
screenplay by David Loughery and Howard Korder, LaBute supplies plenty of tense
exchanges and even some insight into the difficulties interracial marriages
face from within and without. But ultimately, Lakeview Terrace isn't
about race so much as it's about being a man, which has been LaBute's fallback
theme from the start. Jackson represents black power and dominance, Wilson is
the epitome of white ineffectuality, and the situation goads Wilson into
asserting himself and protecting what's his like Dustin Hoffman in Straw
Dogs. Though LaBute picks at some intriguing contradictions in Jackson's
persona—how his hectoring moral tone doesn't keep him from, say, hosting a
stripper-filled bachelor party—but in the end, he becomes a monster along the
lines of Aaron Eckhart in In The Company Of Men or Jason Patric in Your
Friends And Neighbors. As usual, LaBute reduces when he means to reveal.
Race in America is such an inherently combustible subject that Hollywood rarely goes anywhere near it without using comedy as a skittish safety net. Which is pretty dumb, really, since we’re obviously hungry for movies that dare to acknowledge and explore the many fissures still compromising the country’s melting pot. How else could a film as blatantly awful as Crash gross $55 million and win the Oscar for Best Picture? No less incendiary, but far more incisive and controlled, Lakeview Terrace, the latest effort from noted provocateur Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things), speaks so frankly and provocatively to and about Obama Nation that it’s like a dash of cold water thrown in your face, repeatedly. Because the film ultimately takes a disastrous nosedive into standard-issue stupid-thriller nonsense, it’s likely to take a beating from critics and garner poor word-of-mouth. Don’t be dissuaded. There are certainly better movies out there right now, but good luck finding one half as trenchant.
Sporting his angriest glare but speaking in a maddeningly imperturbable tone, Samuel L. Jackson plays Abel Turner, a self-righteous LA cop who is none too happy to see interracial couple Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) move in next door. “Welcome to the neighborhood; observe all parking regulations,” reads the fake ticket Abel places on the windshield of their moving van, sticking out a few feet beyond the driveway—just the first sally in a campaign of intimidation that will gradually escalate from veiled threats to vandalism and beyond. All the while, a symbolic wildfire moves closer and closer to the hill abutting this affluent cul-de-sac—a bit heavy-handed, to be sure, but not significantly more so than, say, Spike Lee setting Do the Right Thing on the hottest day of the year.
[Something]-from-hell thrillers were commonplace in the early ’90s, and Jackson’s role here is functionally equivalent to Robert De Niro’s in Cape Fear or Michael Keaton’s in Pacific Heights ... except that Lakeview Terrace stubbornly refuses to treat Abel like a generic bogeyman. Indeed, the movie opens not as you’d expect, with sympathetic Chris and Lisa packing their belongings or arriving at their new starter home, but with a portrait of widower Abel as martinet dad. We first see the new couple on the block through his suspicious eyes, which means (by the dictates of film grammar) that they’re implicitly coded as intruders. Wilson, perhaps the WASPiest actor in Hollywood, is practically the only Caucasian in sight; the movie subtly but audaciously unfolds as if white people were the minority, complicating our responses at every turn. Abel even has legitimate reasons to dislike Chris and Lisa, who on their first night proceed to have noisy sex in the pool, witnessed by Abel’s kids.
As a writer, LaBute tends to be brutal to the point of absurdity, but here he sticks closely to the sharp screenplay, written by David Loughery and Howard Korder. Every time Lakeview Terrace heads into conventional-thriller territory, it quickly retreats to plausibility and behavioral nuance; even late in the film, a scene of Abel attacking Chris through the fence with a chain saw (not as Leatherface as it sounds) is followed by a scene in which Abel buys Chris a drink at the local bar and sincerely tries to make amends. Chris and Lisa’s relationship, too, feels thoroughly lived-in, skirting melodrama at every turn—when Chris complains that being married to a black woman makes him feel like he’s “always on the front line,” Lisa’s gently incredulous reaction shows up Crash as the hyperbolic piffle it is. Which is why it’s such a letdown when Lakeview Terrace finally succumbs to genre dictates, transforming its well-wrought characters into clockwork morons for the sake of a rousing slam-bang finale. Difficult questions become fatuous answers. It’s a real shame.
The
Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
Earlier this year, when I found myself assigned to jury duty on a drug-related trial at the Los Angeles Superior Court, our jury foreman turned out to be a blond, blue-eyed reality-TV producer from the bedroom community of Altadena. During the jury-selection process, when the judge asked if we had any particular positive or negative feelings about the police, the producer responded that he was very pleased with the work of the LAPD, who had helped to rid his neighborhood of some unsavory characters prone to "smoking marijuana and listening to hip-hop" at unconscionable hours of the day and night. This, in turn, elicited rolled eyes and an audible huff from a young African-American man also seated in the jury box. Lakeview Terrace is a movie that lives in such moments.
At first glance, it may puzzle followers of dramatist and occasional filmmaker Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things) that the American stage's crown prince of psychosexual power plays and the post-coital mindfuck has opted to follow his universally mocked 2006 remake of The Wicker Man by working as a director-for-hire on a yuppies-in-peril thriller that seems about two decades past its freshness date. But peer beneath Lakeview Terrace's lurid, exploitation-movie surface and you will find a vintage LaBute proposition: a taut three-hander that explores the space between surface appearances and realities, between what people say and what they really think.
Set in the titular suburb of Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley—the one where Rodney King was assaulted by police in 1991—the movie is about the troubles that arise when a newlywed interracial couple moves in next-door to a widowed African-American cop with three decades of service under his belt. There goes the neighborhood.
Lakeview Terrace begins with a shrewd moving-in scene, during which LAPD officer Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) glances out his window at the new arrivals over the septic tank and briefly mistakes Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson), the jocular, white husband of an alluring, well-dressed black woman (Kerry Washington), for one of the movers. A bit later, they meet-cute in the driveway—Chris smoking a covert cigarette behind the wife's back while rap music blares from his iPod, until Abel taps on his car window, flashlight in hand. "You can listen to that noise all night long, but when you wake up in the morning, you'll still be white," the cop says before uttering a forced chuckle. Things only get more Pacific Heights from there: Turner's megawatt security lights illuminate the Mattson bedroom like a football field; air-conditioner wires are not-so-mysteriously cut in the dead of summer; tires are slashed. When someone breaks into the young couple's garage in the middle of the night, Chris arms himself with his college lacrosse stick before running downstairs to investigate. Can you get any whiter than that?
Because it's being marketed as a run-of-the-mill psycho-cop romp, Lakeview Terrace will likely be evaluated solely on those terms. And as a suspense picture, it's only ho-hum, LaBute being the sort of director—much like his fellow playwright-filmmaker, David Mamet—who possesses only the most rudimentary know-how concerning the tools of cinema. (When he really wants to emphasize something, he cuts to a close-up and adds a musical sting on the soundtrack.) But like a lot of better genre fare, Lakeview Terrace uses its predictable premise to mount a stealth attack on the audience's sensibilities. Written by David Loughery and Howard Korder, this may be the perfect movie for the political moment, in that it's about people's latent prejudices—the ones they don't admit to in mixed company, and perhaps can't even acknowledge to themselves. Wilson, in particular, is very good as the Chicago native who went to Stanford on an athletic scholarship and, despite fancying himself an open-minded liberal, gives off an air of smug WASP privilege. He moves across the screen with the blissful self-confidence of someone who's never known what it means to be glared upon with innate suspicion. Watching him, we understand how an Abel Turner might take umbrage.
Lakeview Terrace never quite realizes when enough is enough, hunkering down the narrative with an overly symbolic brush fire that threatens our picture-postcard suburbia, giving Jackson's character a wholly unnecessary backstory, and culminating in an over-the-top finale full of ethereal light and crucifix poses. But along the way, it's one of those rare American movies about race in which things are shades of gray. Rather deftly, there's even a car crash or two, though that doesn't bring any of the movie's characters closer to a shared understanding. Can't we all just get along? LaBute doesn't deign to pretend like he knows the answer.
Darker Blue | Movie Review | Chicago Reader JR Jones
There goes the neighborhood | Bleader - Chicago Reader Pay Graham
WALKING A THIN BLUE LINE | Manhattan, New York, NY | News Armond White
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [3/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]
The New York Sun (Grady Hendrix) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review (Page 2)
Pajiba (Ranylt Richildis) review
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [3/5]
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [1/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [3/5]
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [1.5/5]
Screen International review Brent Simon in Los Angeles
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine) review
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [C-]
The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [2.5/4]
Austin Chronicle (Josh Rosenblatt) review [2/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times [Robert Abele]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
La Cava, Gregory
THE HALF NAKED TRUTH
USA (77 mi) 1932
Lee Tracy Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s
Diary
Lee Tracy, too little known today, is one of the all-time
great comic actors and a personal favorite of mine. He was the original Hildy
Johnson in The Front Page on Broadway and although his major films are
not numerous, each is a delight. Blessed Event with co-star Dick Powell
and Bombshell with co-star Jean Harlow are gems long beloved by
Thirties film buffs, but even they may not have seen The Half-Naked Truth,
which is a pure jolt of the Lee Tracy magic. His physical and vocal presence
are uniquely and unmistakably his: the lankily elastic body, the
whirling-dervish energy, the sarcastic tone, the long fingers that always seem
to be jabbing in someone's direction. There's not another screen actor I can
think of who has quite the manic joie de vivre of the young Tracy. In The
Half-Naked Truth, he plays a carnival barker and theatrical promoter who
will go to any insane lengths to hog headlines (a very contemporary figure for
us!). He's paired with Lupe "Mexican Spitfire" Velez, who proves to
be an extremely apt partner for him; you believe in these two together, and
that makes their final scene surprisingly emotional. (Tracy's magnetism
definitely has its romantic aspect; watching Bombshell, an audience
can be driven to heights of frustration waiting for Tracy and Harlow to realize
that they are, in fact, perfect for one another.) The wonderful ending of The
Half-Naked Truth also crystallizes the Tracy credo in a single line:
"What good is life if you don't get some fun out of it?" You can have
some of that fun by watching this film.
POSTSCRIPT: When I say that Tracy and Harlow are "perfect for each
other" in Bombshell, I mean within the context of the film, that
ends when the film is over: you can't actually imagine a future for them, but
they demand to be paired by the 90 minute mark. Oddly, you can just about
imagine a future for Tracy and Velez in The Half-Naked Truth (which is
one reason its final scene is so good).
Tracy, a talent who takes a back seat to no one, pissed away his career,
literally, in 1934. He had been cast in the film Viva Villa! (imagine
Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa!), which was filmed partly on location in Mexico
City. Bad boy Tracy pulled a prank by standing on the balcony of his hotel room
and urinating on a passing military parade. This created quite a scandal. He
was fired from the film and, although he did not stop working thereafter, he
found himself increasingly relegated to second-tier productions.
Tracy did continue to appear in theater and, later, television, and had a bit
of a comeback playing the President in Gore Vidal's The Best Man both
on Broadway (he was nominated for a lead Tony) and film (he was nominated for a
supporting Oscar). But his moment was really that 1925-1935 decade, both on
stage in New York and on film in Hollywood.
STAGE DOOR
Stage Door Dan Callahan from Slant magazine
Fuck All About Eve. The real masterpiece
about women and theater is Gregory La Cava's Stage Door, a film which
casts Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden, Lucille Ball and many other
RKO women of the era as out-of-work actresses in a theatrical boarding house
called The Footlights Club. Excitingly feminist, marked by the Depression, and
obsessed by the sound of women talking, yelping, singing and generally whooping
it up, Stage Door, though well-loved by many, has never garnered a big
reputation, probably because La Cava himself has been overlooked in studies of
major directors of the period.
Like Leo McCarey, La Cava didn't like to stick to a script, and he took his
improvisational methods radically far in Stage Door. For two weeks, he
had his actresses rehearse on the Footlights Club set, and he engaged a
stenographer to take down what they said during breaks. This loose chat was
then incorporated into the film (
Stage Door is the defining film about the 1930s working girl. However,
the women who lounge around the Footlights Club don't do all that much working,
which means that money is always tight. When snooty Linda (Gail Patrick) sweeps
into the main room in the opening scene,
As James Harvey points out in his book Romantic Comedy, it isn't what
they say that is important but the way that they sound. The sound design of Stage
Door and its overall aural chaos is enough to make your head spin, with
overlapping dialogue that might throw even Robert Altman. It's as if these
girls are terrified of silence, and if someone isn't pitching in a one-liner,
another girl will laugh, sing, or simply throw out a nonsense noise.
When Hepburn's stage-struck heiress Terry Randall enters the club, everyone
regards her suspiciously (just as flighty Hepburn herself was usually an iffy
proposition for audiences). Terry is a serious, lyrical type, and the girls
immediately think that she's a rich phony who will never fit into their world
of wised-up badinage. Jean zeroes in on her and lets off one zinger after
another, continually getting laughs from the girls. "Evidently you're a
very amusing person," says Terry, arrogant yet vulnerable.
When the owner of the club, Mrs. Orcutt (Elizabeth Dunne), shows Terry around
and tells her about her own theatrical career, she is cut off by
down-on-her-luck Grande dame Catherine Luther (Constance Collier). "Mrs.
Orcutt played with all the stars," says Miss Luther, leading Terry away.
"She supported me in lots of my shows, didn't you dear?" La Cava
gives Mrs. Orcutt a memorable close-up in response, a wounded, nearly servile
look at Miss Luther that speaks volumes about their relationship and about the
eternal relationship between stars and supporting players, a line of
demarcation that Stage Door itself erases.
"Don't you ever take anything seriously?" high-minded Hepburn asks
the girls after dinner. "After you've sat around for a year trying to get
a job, you won't take anything seriously either," says Lucille Ball's
Judy. Ball's line readings are swift and sour, but she's wet behind the ears
compared to the great Arden, who has a white cat draped over her shoulders for
most of the film. The inflections
Though Hepburn eventually emerges as the star of the movie,
Stage Door has a rather conventional tragic heroine, desperate Kaye
Hamilton (Andrea Leeds), a sweet-faced type who loses the part she needs to
Terry.
In rehearsals for Powell's show Enchanted April (based on Hepburn's 1934
Broadway flop The
In the end, there are no men to fall back on for these women (though Judy does
get married). They're tough, and they ridicule each other mercilessly, but
they're in this together. Kaye's death doesn't keep them teary-eyed for long,
but in the last scene, the girls' frivolous talk has a gravitas that it didn't
have before. La Cava shows that life goes on, and even repeats itself, as a new
girl shows up at the club. She might be a new Terry, or perhaps a new Kaye. For
these girls, the food will always be bad, the Depression will never be over,
and men are their last option. If you listen closely to Stage Door—and
some have made a religion of it—you might be surprised to find that underneath
the wisecracks and snarky camaraderie of these extraordinary women lies the
wintry humor of Samuel Beckett.
LaChapelle, Dave
RIZE
USA Great Britain (86 mi) 2005
Rize Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
How do you fuck that up? LaChapelle has successfully
turned in the worst possible documentary "feature" (it barely clocks
in) that could be generated from inherently compelling subject matter --
Lacombe, Julien and Pascal Sid
BEHIND THE WALLS (Derriere
les murs)
France 2011
Behind
the Walls (Derriere les murs): Cannes Review Jordan Mintzer at Cannes from The Hollywood Review, May 12, 2011
Billed as the first French horror movie in 3D – and definitely the only one centered around a Laudanum-addicted femme writer in the 1920s – Behind the Walls (Derriere les murs) is a bizarre attempt to insert frights into an otherwise classic, and rather depressing, tale of provincial abandon. Novelty interest should accompany film’s July local release, followed by the usual ancillary action.
Model turned actress Laetitia Casta (The Island) stars as Suzanne, a Parisian novelist who, following her daughter’s death from illness, decides to isolate herself in a country manor to work on a new book. Haunted by visions of the dead child, which are heavily abetted by her nightly cocktail of pastis and liquid opium, Suzanne’s hallucinations begin to take on frightening (at least for her) proportions, while her novel starts resembling Jack Nicholson’s opus in The Shining.
When she’s not flipping out at home, Suzanne makes acquaintance with some creepy country folk, including a perverted shopkeeper (Jacques Bonnaffee) who likes to beat his wife to show Suzanne how much he digs her. She also takes interest in a local girl, Valentine (Emma Ninucci), who’s a stand-in for her deceased daughter. When Valentine and another village girl go missing, Suzanne goes truly bonkers, and only her brawny new boyfriend (Thierry Neuvic) can perhaps save the day.
There’s practically nothing eerie about freshman duo Julien Lacombe’s and Pascal Sid’s psychologically-bent story, which provides a tad too many Renoir-esque strolls through the countryside to ever feel menacing. When the filmmakers try to play their horror hand, they resort to predictable tactics like rats scampering across the floorboards or the ghostly presence of little girls (see The Shining, again), while 3D adds zero intensity.
Despite its many drawbacks, the film is somewhat sustained by Casta’s credible performance as a grieving, tortured mother, and one ultimately wonders if Behind the Walls would have been worked better as straightforward drama, sans scares but with a few more narrative snares.
Lafosse, Joachim
PRIVATE LESSONS (Élève Libre)
Private
Lessons (Élève Libre) Lee Marshall
at Cannes
Reunited with the same co-writer, the same crew and many of the same themes he explored in his 2006 Venice competion entry Private Property (Nue Propriete), buzzy Belgian auteur Joaquim Lafosse crafts another original, disturbing work which fails however to scale the same dramatic heights as that impressively tight chamber piece.
Once again, volatile male adolescence and adult irresponsibility react together in a claustrophobic hothouse environment. But here the story of the unhealthy relationship that develops between a sixteen-year-old boy and the thirty-something family friend who agrees to tutor him through his school-leaving exams is less controlled, both visually and structurally; it also feels ethically muddy in its half-fascinated, half-condemnatory portrayal of what in most people's books would count as sexual abuse of a minor.
This said, it's not necesarilly a less commercial film; although uncomfortable to watch at times, it emerges in the end as a coming-of-age fable with an almost happy ending, and there are moments of dour comedy. The frank sex-talk and sexual activity that peppers the film will stir debate and media interest, along the lines of Ma Mere – though it should do so without censorship problems in most territories, as although the adult-adolescent couplings here are upfront enough to disturb, the camera knows its limits.
Jonas (Bloquet) is an athletic and not particularly academic sixteen-year-old schoolboy who wants to become a tennis pro. But he doesn't quite have what it takes; and in the meantime, his school reports are disastrous. With divorced parents and a mother who spends most of her time away in the south of France, Jonas is adopted by a trio of older friends whose realtionship with each other, and with Jonas, is at first left deliberately unclear. One, the affable Pierre (Zaccai), takes Jonas' education in hand, coaching him as an outside student for the all-important school-leaving exam. But the teacher-pupil relationship is complicated by a climate of growing sexual complicity, which is encouraged by another adult couple with an open rapport, Pierre's friends' Didier (Renier) and Pascale (Coesens).
Private Pupil is about various brands of immaturity. The three adults that act as Jonas' surrogate parents treat his sexual education as a kind of game, though Jonas is clearly embarrassed by their frankness. His own immaturity consists in trying to act too grown-up, thus failing tell his irresponsible elders where to get off (something that Jonas' more self-assured girlfriend, Delphine, doesn't hesitate to do). As the game becomes more disturbing, interior scenes dominate and DoP Hachame Alaouie's palette veers into darker territory.
OUR CHILDREN (A Perdre La Raison)
Belgium Luxembourg France Switzerland (112 mi) 2012
Our Children is called A Perdre La
Raison in France, and viewers can quickly make the connection when its opening
shots depict four small coffins being raised onto a plane bound for Morocco as
a mother weeps in her hospital bed. It’s immediately clear that Joachim Lafosse
is about to tackle one of cinema’s, and society’s, last taboos, the increasing
numbers of parents who murder their own small children.
Much like the old people in Michael Haneke’s Love, infanticide is a problem society can’t quite face in the eye, and many will prefer to pass on Our Children for just that reason. Those brave enough - this is without a doubt an emotional racking - will witness an intelligent and responsible treatment from Belgian director Lafosse, a deeply moving performance by Emilie Dequenne, and a devastating look at a young woman come undone. Our Children is not a film to be undertaken lightly, but it does nonetheless deserve to be seen. Re-teaming A Prophet’s Niels Arestrup with Tahar Rahim may pique interest, but ultimately the only thing that will lure audiences to Our Children is critical support. It should be forthcoming.
Inspired by a real-life case in Belgium - although there are many similar stories worldwide that Lafosse could have chosen from - Our Children isn’t simply a story of a mother with post-natal depression. It’s much more oblique, and, like any family, complicated than that. Lafosse ratchets up the domestic drama to slowly force his principals into a position where the denouement - which is thankfully never depicted onscreen - is at least approaching a point where it can be understood. That’s in no small part due to Dequenne’s (Rosetta Stone) believably tragic performance as Murielle, a carefree young woman from a relatively poor background who falls for Tahar Rahim’s charming Mounir.
Lafosse’s camera discreetly observes Murielle and Mounir as they make love and marry - the director is working at their level, making his camera complicit in what transpires throughout. Moroccan-born Mounir is devoted to Dr Pinget (Arestrup), who has housed and brought him up, and, it is later made clear, also married Mounir’s sister in order to give her residency papers. It’s an uneasy, avuncular role that Arestrup underplays, and Lafosse holds back from making Dr Pinget alone culpable for what ultimately happens - although he holds all the financial and emotional cards.
Mounir and Murielle move in with Dr Pinget, but it’s a comfortable life that comes at a price. The autocratic Pinget and Mounir are obsessed with each other, although it’s not an overtly sexual relationship. They are the “we” in “Our Children”. While they easily accommodate Murielle at the onset of the marriage, the claustrophobic set-up won’t tolerate the four children she delivers in a short space of time. She’s trapped by the incessant demands of her babies and toddlers, by Mounir’s growing indifference, by her own doubts of her abilities as a mother (reinforced by the casually-bullying Pinget) and a crushing depression which he, as her family doctor, medicates.
Music plays a strong part in Our Children, most notably in Scarlatti’s baroque operas, and Haydn’s strings pull and peck at a 26-year-old woman and mother as she goes about her increasingly-sad life, cleaning and tending and buckling under the strain until the audience wants to look away, but Lafosse has made it his mission not to let that happen - this time.
Our Children: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Jordan Mintzer, May 22, 2012
Family tragedy intermingles with gender politics in a strong showing from Belgian auteur Joachim Lafosse
Turning a gruesome real-life incident into an arresting portrait of one woman¹s gradual slide towards the unspeakable, Our Children (A perdre la raison), an Un Certain Regard film, represents another tightly wound study of domestic malaise from Belgian auteur Joachim Lafosse (Private Property).
Featuring a riveting lead turn from Emilie Dequenne as a young mother caught between two men (A Prophet stars Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup) in a claustrophobic nightmare, this gloomy and penetrating psychological drama should receive steady art house play.
Inspired by events which took place in a distant suburb of Brussels in 2007, the script – co-written with Thomas Bidegain (Rust & Bone) and Matthieu Reynaert – sticks to many of the facts in the case of Genevieve Lhermitte, who turned herself into the police after coldly and clinically murdering her five kids with a kitchen knife (the film reduces the number to four, but who’s counting?). While such an act may ultimately be inexplicable, the various reasons posited by Our Children very much fit in with the oeuvre of the 37-year-old Lafosse, whose previous films (Private Property, Private Lessons) explored the effects of perversely close-knit relationships on a handful of characters.
In this instance, the story of Belgian schoolteacher, Murielle (Dequenne), and Moroccan immigrant, Mounir (Rahim), starts off on a rather upbeat note with them falling madly in love and deciding to live together in the home of Mounir’s surrogate father, Doctor Pinget (Arestrup). But as Murielle quickly learns, the physician casts a paralyzing shadow over his young ward, whom he brought over to Belgium years earlier, while also marrying Mounir’s sister for visa purposes.
When Murielle gives birth to a first and then a second child, life for the young couple seems more or less satisfying, even if Pinget tends to micromanage the household, from which he also runs a medical practice where Mounir works as his secretary. But when a third child arrives, the burden it places on the two parents is exacerbated by the doctor’s increasingly guru-like sway over Mounir, who has no means to support his family and relies on Pinget nearly every step of the way (a sexual background between the two is suggested at one point, though never confirmed).
There’s a part of Murielle that constantly urges her husband to distance himself from the authoritarian doctor, and another that welcomes the man’s presence, at least financially speaking. Indeed, as Pinget himself cynically explains, the two lovebirds – soon with a fourth child en route – would have a hard time surviving on their own, and he quickly bats down their pipedream of moving to Mounir’s homeland with the contempt of a seasoned colonialist. (“Do you know what life is like in Morocco?” he barks at his native-born protégé.)
Beyond such underlying commentaries on immigration and class status, Lafosse constantly reveals how the doctor’s good deeds are really used to dominate the couple both economically and emotionally, bringing them to a state of social asphyxiation. And as Murielle gets further sucked into the oppressive homestead, her various escape routes – including visits with a psychiatrist (Nathalie Boutefeu) and a brief but pleasant sojourn at the home of Mounir’s mother – slowly dry up, driving her towards the final, horrific act (for which Lafosse thankfully spares us the gritty details, confining things to a chilling off-screen space).
In one of her strongest leading roles to date, Dequenne (The Girl on the Train, Rosetta) does a remarkable job depicting Murielle’s wavering psychological states as she heads for oblivion, and an extended sequence-shot where she drives home while singing a Julien Clerc song is particularly unforgettable. If her character’s motivations are never fully understandable – some may wonder why the well-educated Murielle doesn’t just grab the kids and leave – the feeling that the walls are constantly closing in around her is extremely well illustrated.
Reteaming to play a duo similar to the one in A Prophet, Rahim and Arestrup maintain the film’s tense and sinister tone – the former providing a convincing mix of fragility and machismo, and the latter looking and acting more and more like Brando in the latter half of his career.
Widescreen cinematography by Jean-Francois Hensgens (Dark Tide) constantly uses objects or characters to blur a portion of the frame, as if the truth about the events could never be completely brought into focus. Decors by regular P.D. Anne Falgueres are comprised of tidy bourgeois living quarters where the curtains are always drawn and the family seems to be on permanent house arrest.
LaGravenese, Richard
FREEDOM WRITERS B- 82
Hillary Swank reprises the Michelle Pfeiffer role in the 1995 film DANGEROUS MINDS, where a gutsy white female teacher finds a purpose in attempting to rehabilitate the emotionally damaged and forgotten lives of unwanted racially mixed freshman year high school kids who are targeted to be drop outs by the time they are juniors, so the school refuses to spend any money on resources or books, believing with these kids that’s a lost cause. What doesn’t work is the casting of goody two shoes Ms. Swank as a young twentysomething Erin Gruwell, known as Ms. G, whose artificial girl scout smile greeting them at the classroom door is just waiting for someone to wipe it off her face within minutes. What does work is the casting of previously unknown actors as the kids, who make up the four racial groups, blacks, white, Latino and Cambodian, each of which wrestle with their racial identity. Based on the experiences of a real life teacher in Long Beach, the film opens with the kid’s angry, explosive negativity to Ms. G’s white race, resentful of all the advantages her “whiteness” allows while they are forced to live inside a war zone, protective of what little turf they have, claiming she couldn’t begin to fathom what they have to go through just to get to school each day. So she decides to give them each notebooks and let them tell their own stories. Much of the film’s narrative comes from the actual writings, which lends a voice of poetic authenticity to the otherwise formulaic story of whites encountering trouble in the inner city classrooms, then having to rise to overcome insurmountable odds by identifying and then helping the kids overcome the negative stigmas standing in their path.
April Lee Hernandez is terrific as Eva, the angry Latina girl whose dad is rotting away in prison for something he didn’t do, or Jason Finn as Marcus, a boy who’s living anonymously in a hidden cubbyhole on the street, but the lives of others in the classroom are equally as compelling, including Jaclyn Ngan as a Cambodian girl who is all attitude but barely says a word, or moments with kids who are so invisible, other kids in the class couldn’t even recall seeing them before. All are given a collective voice, which tends to unify their experience, seeing through each other’s racial barriers in a somewhat utopian vision of what integration could and should be. Unfortunately, it’s a feel good, overly optimistic representation, an all or nothing process that shows a complete turnaround in the kid’s attitude and enthusiasm, instead of the struggle it must have been day by day to earn these kid’s respect, which would hardly come overnight. In this film, it was unity through the teachings of Anne Frank and the Holocaust, a teenager who faced even greater horrors in her lifetime, whose voice still speaks for all those kids who are needlessly lost at such an early age, nowadays typically to gang violence which ravages their young lives.
In an interesting twist, the film casts the daunting severity of Imelda Staunton as the head of the English department, Swank’s boss, who feels discipline, not learning, is what these kids need. Her racial bias, along with that of other white teachers, blames integration for actually ruining what was otherwise a terrific all-white school, where their test scores once soared, but now remains tarnished by the academically challenged minority, who they’d just as soon get rid of anyway, so they actually push them out sooner rather than later, as it makes their test scores overall look better. Staunton is just as persistent in her negativity as Swank is in her optimism, so there’s an interesting dynamic at play which is idealistically resolved by Swank simply going over her head, which causes continual conflict. In the real world, this teacher would probably be gone very quickly, as despite her enthusiasm, she represents a threat to the typically entrenched mindsets of the others who don’t reach into their own pockets to supply what’s needed, but have learned to live within the school’s depleted means.
The film overreaches but does not patronize, allowing the intensity of the kids to remain the focal point of the film, an interest that is sustained throughout. The film builds to an inspiring sequence, where all, including Staunton, are a bit overwhelmed at the maturity and respect these kids finally earn for themselves through their writings, but then bogs down afterwards through unnecessary relationship issues and needless bureaucratic hagglings which only takes attention away from the lives of the kids, much of which is heartbreaking. When they remain onscreen, the film bristles with energy and intensity which is immediately lost when the story veers in other directions. Even so, the film is uplifting and inspiring, but one becomes a bit sick of white saviors of the racially deprived and underprivileged in the movies, a theme that refuses to recognize the interest and imagination that is coming from within the minority community itself, whose role models continue to be overlooked in favor of movie star white heroes.
Freedom Writers JR Jones from the Reader
Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King, The
Bridges of Madison County) was inspired by a 1998 PrimeTime Live
segment to script and direct this movie about Erin Gruwell, a fledgling teacher
at
The Village
Voice [Rob Nelson]
Neither Half Nelson nor all bad, this white-
teacher-uplifts-poor-kids- of-color drama aims to favor the students' stories,
which are based on those of real-life Cali high schoolers who wrote their way
out of oppression and anonymity in the mid '90s. But those diary entries too
often take a backseat to the film's "Ms. G.," played by two-time
Oscar winner and Chad Lowe survivor Hilary Swank, who makes instantly credible
her character's preference of work over marriage to a boring
man-behind-the-woman (Patrick Dempsey). Our eager-beaver heroine suffers the
kids' sarcasm, fails to earn their respect by bringing in a Tupac tape, then
wins them over in a crucial scene that, fact-based or not, rings as false as
anything in Dangerous Minds. Reaction shots of the class's befuddled
white boy are played for cheap laughs, but writer-director Richard LaGravenese
otherwise keeps it real by recruiting cinematographer Jim Denault from
Indieville High and Imelda Staunton—here playing Bitchy Old Department Head.
FILM REVIEWS Scott Foundas from the LA Weekly
For those who found Half Nelson a bit too gritty for their
palates, here comes Hilary Swank as a first-year high-school teacher who
doesn’t look like she’s ever paid a bill late, let alone lit up a crack pipe.
As 23-year-old Erin Gruwell, she’s a prim idealist in polka dots and pearls — a
very white knight cast into the “voluntarily integrated” combat zone of Long
Beach’s
The Onion A.V.
Club [Nathan Rabin]
With her Marge Simpson pearls,
toothy grin, and unshakable belief in the essential decency of human nature,
Hilary Swank cuts a decidedly anachronistic figure in Freedom Writers, Richard
LaGravenese's fact-based inspirational-teacher drama. Set in the mid-'90s, the
film takes place in the sort of crime-ravaged Southern California war zones
immortalized in NWA's music and movies like Menace II Society. But Swank
animates her dogged positivity with an old-school combination of indefatigable '50s
optimism and '60s civil-rights activism.
Playing yet another iron-willed
true believer, Swank stars as an idealist who takes a job at a tough inner-city
school where apathy and cynicism reign, and withering contempt for humanity is
a widespread occupational hazard. Swank's Pollyanna pluck initially just earns
her insolent glares from burnt-out teachers and students alike, but her
persistence eventually wins her the loyalty and affection of shell-shocked
pupils unaccustomed to teachers driven by an almost messianic sense of purpose.
Swank ignites her pupils' imagination by getting them to write about their
lives in cathartic personal journals, and by drawing parallels between their
dangerous adolescences and the harrowing travails of Anne Frank. Patrick Dempsey
co-stars in the thankless role of Swank's long-suffering husband, who pops up
at regular intervals to complain that Swank's job is swallowing her life and
their marriage.
Like its do-gooder protagonist, Freedom Writers doesn't have a hip or knowing bone in its body. It's so doggedly square that even the faintest hint of irony or sarcasm would probably shatter it, especially once it dives headfirst into the heavy emotional terrain of the Holocaust. Yet thanks to LaGravenese's empathetic writing and direction, and Swank's titanic force of will, Freedom Writers' unabashed earnestness proves unexpectedly powerful: Its heart-on-its-sleeve humanism batters down viewers' defenses just as diligently as Swank wears down her students'. Though the film seldom strays from formula, there's something strangely moving about Swank's conviction that, in spite of everything, people are really good at heart.
'Freedom
Writers' is a work of pros – Orange County Register Teresa Budasi from the Chicago Sun-Times
Any film with an earnest message about education automatically gets moved to the head of the class, and from there can only get moved back by earning demerits for indiscretions like bad acting, implausibility and gooey sentimentality.
"Freedom Writers," which has a lot to say about education and the flaws in the American public-school system, gets high marks -- for effort and for merit. So much could have gone wrong here. It's as formulaic as any of its predecessors -- "Stand and Deliver," "Lean on Me," "Dangerous Minds" and the granddaddy of them all, 1967's "To Sir, With Love" -- where a teacher placed in a classroom of "unteachables" must use unorthodox methods to get them in line and make them want to learn. But where a couple of those stories went astray, the highly inspiring "Freedom Writers" manages to maintain the integrity of its message.
Writer/director Richard LaGravenese, best known for his screenwriting ("The Fisher King," "The Bridges of Madison County," "The Horse Whisperer," "Beloved"), can take much of the credit. "Freedom Writers" is LaGravenese's first major feature film in almost a decade. His 1998 gem, "Living Out Loud," which starred Holly Hunter, Danny DeVito and Queen Latifah, proved he could direct a multifaceted cast, and he lives up to that potential here.
Two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank leads a first-rate cast of
veterans and unknowns in her role as the young, idealistic teacher Erin
Gruwell, who on her first day at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach,
Calif., shows up sporting a crisp business suit, a string of pearls and the
enthusiasm of a dozen cheerleaders. It takes less than a day to shock her into
the reality that it's going to take a lot more than spirited determination to
get through to kids who may only be freshmen but who've experienced a lot more
of life than they should have at such a young age
Where most would be inclined to engage in petty argument and
rebellious tactics in such a situation,
Some critics may see as a flaw that the troubles the kids face outside the classroom are somewhat downplayed. We see snippets while hearing voiceover readings from their journals -- stories of domestic violence, drugs, gangs, neglect, incarceration, discrimination -- but they're a bit overshadowed by the educational aspects of the story, which is the larger point of this film. LaGravenese does well balancing it all, including the hip-hop score, which easily could have been overplayed to emphasize grittiness but instead creates an understated, poignant ambience.
A couple of supporting roles should be noted: April Lee Hernandez as the tormented Eva, who admits out loud her hatred for whites, and Jaclyn Ngan as Sindy, who barely has a speaking part but whose expression, attitude and body language convey more than any line of dialogue could.
Patrick Dempsey and Scott Glenn also turn in nice
performances as the men in
Glenn plays
World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
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New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
Laine,
Marion
A
MONKEY ON MY SHOULDER (À coeur ouvert) C- 68
aka: An Open Heart
France Argentina (87 mi)
2012
Not sure how this project ever came to light, filmed by French director
Marion Laine in her second feature, her first being an adaptation of a Flaubert
short story in A SIMPLE HEART (2008), so her area of expertise apparently is in
matters of the heart. Adapted by the
director from a Mathias Énard novel Traveling
Up the Orinoco, she took certain liberties, especially in
reconceiving the end, where the initial interest was from Argentinean actor
Édgar Ramírez, from CARLOS (2010), who asked Juliette Binoche if she’d consider
playing opposite him. They switch roles
from the book, which features a French leading man and a South American woman,
but both play successful doctors working at the same hospital. Given a narrative structure that resembles A
Star Is Born (1954), initially it’s Ramírez as Javier who receives all the
acclaim as a leading heart surgeon, with Binoche’s Mila playing a more
supportive role in the operating room.
Married for ten years, they are a somewhat sophisticated couple,
balancing career and home life, where they both work well together with the steady
hands of skilled surgeons while also having a freely uninhibited sex life at
home. But Javier ignores the hospital’s
warnings about his excessive drinking until they revoke his privileges, slowly
at first, but when he continues to flaunt his rebellious streak against their
authority, he’s basically out of a job, having a position in name only. Utterly humiliated, his pride takes a
beating, which only leads to more drinking, where his sanctimonious behavior is
pretty deplorable (much like the final episode of CARLOS), where one wonders
how Mila could survive his wildly aggressive and often violent mood swings, but
she is a believer that love cures all ills.
What changes her mood is to learn surprisingly that she is pregnant,
where in typical French behavior, she only takes birth control some of the
time, believing that’s enough.
Mila prepares to have an abortion, as both never intended to have
children, until Javier changes his mind.
Since he’s not working anyway, he thinks a baby may alter his mental
outlook, so being the devoted wife, Mila agrees to sacrifice her career and
move to South America to make him happy, hoping it might jump start his
deteriorating self-esteem. Well, lo and
behold, it doesn’t, where this turns into a wretched display of drunken
behavior, accentuated by self loathing, growing worse by the minute, where the
free-for-all of detestable mistreatment of one another, especially during
Mila’s pregnancy, is revoltingly pathetic and hard to watch, as a good portion
of the film is spent fighting and screaming at one another, where a good deal
of the set is destroyed in the process, where multiple takes must have been
fun. The melodramatic overreach is
utterly predictable, where halfway in viewers may think enough is enough, as
the miserablist tone rarely changes, making this a one-note movie. Laine does exhibit a surrealistic flair for
dream sequences by the end, however, which are actually set in the magnificent Iguazu
Falls of Argentina, but this comes way too late to rescue an already
sinking ship. There isn’t an ounce of
credibility that either Binoche or Ramírez are doctors, but the French have a
way with love scenes. In the end one of
the characters suffers an accident and falls into a coma, expected to never
revive, where in the book the character dies and the partner performs the
autopsy, labeling each body part in meticulous detail, which one must admit is
a thoroughly horrid finale. The film
leaves the ending open ended, where the picturesque dream sequences finally
scream with life.
A
coeur ouvert / Marion Laine / film
Films de France
Mila and Javier are two heart surgeons who have been married for
ten years. They have two passions in their life: their love for one
another and their work. When Mila becomes pregnant the couple’s
harmonious relationship is threatened, aggravated by Javier’s liking for
alcohol...
Cannes
Market Watch: A Monkey on My Shoulder | Film Comment ... Robert Koehler
The promise of Juliette Binoche and Edgar Ramirez paired as a passionate,
volatile couple made writer-director Marion Laine’s A Monkey on My Shoulder
about as essential viewing as any new French film premiering in the Cannes
Market. It would also surely be a reasonable example of a French film with
major stars and considerable
In this case, the absence of a Binoche-Ramirez pairing in the official selection is all too clear: Laine’s drama, based on Mathias Énard’s novel, Remonter L’Orénoque (Traveling Up the Orinoco), ends up being a royal mess, an emotional tennis match with the two actors volleying and proceeding to rip down the net.
Ramirez’ Javier is his hospital’s top heart surgeon, while Binoche’s Mila is his immediate second. (The film’s French title translates, in an unfortunate pun, as “Open Heart.”) His skills on full display in the opening sequence, Javier is at the same time on the hospital’s blacklist due to his raging alcoholism. Lusty as bunnies when they get back home, via motorcycle, Javier and Mila tend to be people who throw their entire beings at whatever task is at hand, whether it’s sex, work, or habitually breaking into the local zoo to frolic with, yes, the monkeys.
There turns out to be a whole lot of business with those monkeys, all of it increasingly laughable. But what undoes this Monkey is the movie’s obsession with pitting the two actors against each other in an endless string of domestic squabbles in which Ramirez is allowed to literally tear down the scenery. (His doctor makes Hugh Laurie’s House look positively sane.) The actors, at least, surely had a ball.
A
Monkey On My Shoulder | Review | Screen
Lisa Nesselson from Screendaily
Intense, earnest and perilously close to over-the-top, A
Monkey On My Shoulder (A Coeur Ouvert) is a frustratingly
uneven Days of Wine and Roses meets open heart surgery. Juliette Binoche and
Edgar Ramirez (Carlos) deliver feral, unbridled performances as lusty, playful
husband-and-wife heart surgeons who specialize in transplants although he’s a
hopeless alcoholic.
At first the melodrama holds together reasonably well even though the tug of Love and Death is laid on with a trowel. But as their buoyant relationship deteriorates, one does want to shout at the screen: “Physicans! Heal thyselves!”
One of at least 10 films in the French release schedule this summer that happens to have been scripted and directed by a French woman, Marion Laine’s sophomore feature is watchable but not satisfying.
“We eat too much, drink too much, screw too much and don’t get enough exercise,” says Mila (Binoche). She and Javier (Ramirez) are heart surgeons by day, renegade skinny dippers by night. When they’re not doing transplants (several docu-style close-ups are not for the squeamish), they’re cavorting like teenagers despite a decade of marriage. They’re truly, madly, deeply smitten and can’t keep their hands off each other.
Mila - who, like many a heart surgeon, has a monkey tattooed astride one ear - is unconditionally in love. No words or actions, however harsh, can dent her deep-seated complicity with Javier for long. As his alcohol habit eats away at his judgment centers, Javier is increasingly prone to jealous, possessive and irresponsible imaginings.
Although he’s as brilliant as ever - he’s the one who set up the transplant unit - and his hands are still steady, co-workers file complaints. Javier is banned from operating, which gives him more time to drink.
Like many medical specialists, Mila seems to have forgotten where babies come from. When she offhandedly complains to the staffgynecologist that she’s been plagued by nausea, the lady doc asks “Have you been taking the pills I prescribed?” “Most of the time,” says Mila.
Mila schedules an abortion. She and Javier never wanted kids to disrupt their carnal idyll. But Javier now wants the child - or thinks he does. Wearing rose-coloured blinkers, Mila is prepared to make radical sacrifices to boost her beloved’s fragile self-esteem.
Laine was keen to work with Ramirez and it was he who suggested Binoche. Are they convincing as eternal lovebirds? Yes. As heart surgeons? Not really, although both leads are conscientiously acting up a storm while endeavouring to dodge overly spelled out symbolism.
Mila’s attitude toward her accidental pregnancy is one of the more original aspects of the tale. She sees her condition as a mistake to be rectified pronto. Although she saves lives for a living, she couldn’t care less about creating a dependent life form of her own. Dream-like sequences in the final stretch have visual oomph but feel closer to a cop-out than a gutsy narrative solution.
A
Monkey on my Shoulder (A Coeur Ouvert): Film Review - The ... Bernard Besserglik from The Hollywood Reporter
Lalli,
Maarit
ALMOST
18 (Kohta 18) B 85
Finland (110 mi) 2012
There were five of us guys… I think we all had normal families. Normal problems. Normal feelings. There was nothing we couldn’t overcome. And then one year, for some reason, everything started going to shit. —Joni (Ben Thompson Coon)
A big winner at the 2013 Finland Jussi Awards, winning Best Picture,
Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, yet despite the acclaim, there are
plenty of drawbacks to this film, where the sketchy portraits often feel
isolated and lead nowhere, never really connecting the dots to an overall
dramatic theme. While it’s the
coming-of-age saga of five male friends who are about to turn 18, a major step
in one’s life as it’s symbolic of young adulthood and possibly moving away from
home, the film is divided into five twenty-minute segments highlighting each
kid, sarcastically narrated by the oldest who has already turned 18, Joni (Ben
Thompson Coon), seen in the opening segment in family therapy acknowledging
he’s never really had a single happy moment with his family. While there is plenty of humor, not the least
of which is the self-effacing Finnish take on their nation’s inept hockey team
that perpetually loses to both Sweden and Russia, the individual segments
highlight the family dysfunction which at times can get dramatically serious
and overly involved, where at times the parents troubling behavior seems
destined to drive their kids out of the house, a feeling they already
shamefully regret even though it hasn’t happened yet. Written by the director and her son, Henrik
Mäki-Tanila who plays Karri, seemingly the most well adjusted kid, seen getting
often hilarious driving lessons from his mother, Elina Knihtiä, the star of
The
Good Son (Hyvä poika) (2011), who knows her son’s habits well, ordering him
out of the car to take a breath test after he’s been out drinking all night,
but they’re the happiest together, as they continually poke fun at one another
with good-humored sarcasm. If the rest
of the film was as good as this segment the film would be highly recommended. It’s easily the most intimately personal of
the bunch, as without a father in the home, these two really care about each
other. Nonetheless, he’d much prefer
hanging out with the guys, who at one point or another celebrate each others 18th
birthday in style, seen during the summer jumping off a rock cliff into the
sea, where there’s a youthful enthusiasm usually enhanced by typical adolescent
experiences with alcohol and smoking pot.
While girls are present, they don’t really figure prominently in the
film, which is a bit surprising, as you’d think sex would be all these guys
think about. Pete (Anton Thompson Coon),
yes, real life brothers with the actor playing Joni, does have girlfriend
problems of his own, caught up in the abortion dilemma, comforting his
girlfriend after she takes an abortion pill.
His biggest surprise, however, is reserved from his parents who happily
inform him on his 18th birthday that his mother is pregnant. Pete goes into a deliriously self-centered
extended rant on the woes of being a teenager, railing against his parents,
where he literally curses them out for acting like kids who ought to be ashamed
of themselves. His parents, meanwhile,
sit there quietly holding hands just waiting for him to conclude his tirade,
glad that he’s taking it so well. Easily
the most poignant sequence is André (Karim Al-Rifai), seen picking up his
little brother at daycare when his mother, who’s rarely at home, has
forgotten. The relationship between the
two brothers beautifully expresses brotherly tenderness, even with the youngest
crying out for attention, usually inappropriately, as he’s continually left
alone, where André is the only real parent he knows, so he constantly bargains
for more time together. André struggles
with juggling his own life, including schoolwork, buying groceries, preparing
food, putting his brother to bed, calming him afterwards when he has
nightmares, and after finally getting him asleep, having to greet his loud and
heavily intoxicated mother when she arrives at the door around midnight with a
lecherous guy on her arm. His mother
(Mari Perankoski) is easily the most despicable character in the film,
suggesting a reversal of roles, where it’s the parents that act more childishly
irresponsible than their fairly well behaved children.
Perhaps the most bizarre cultural reflection of Finnish child-rearing is
the absent alcoholic father, where Akseli (Arttu Lähteenmäki) spends the
weekend with his grandparents, who politely disappear when his non-verbose
father arrives, inviting his son into the woods to go hunting, where his father
continually drinks beer and the two of them sit there in an elevated wooden
hunter’s nest without uttering a sound.
It’s only fitting they have a Finnish sauna where his father jumps into
the freezing river afterwards while Akseli grabs a beer and quickly searches
through his father’s shirt for cigarettes.
This relationship might be sad if it wasn’t so pathetic, offering plenty
of dour insight into the remote emotional isolation of Scandinavia. Joni’s segment is first and last, dressed up
in an oversized, furry wolf costume at the Linnanmäki
amusement park in Helsinki, where young girls love to run up to him and squeeze
his soft fur, where he is seen surreally riding his bike or walking next to the
sea in costume. When we meet his mother, Niina Nurminen, she appears young and
vivacious, but instead of recalling what it’s like to be a moody, self-absorbed
teenager, she becomes openly suspicious and hounds her son, pestering him with
questions once she discovers his love of pot smoking. His mother literally freaks out, showing a
giant-sized crack in the armor of her all-controlling world, where she runs her
family like a drill sergeant expecting everyone to pass inspection. Is it any wonder Joni is drawn to the mellow,
more laid-back mood of pot smoking? And
while it’s true, he’s a stone cold pothead, it doesn’t limit his prospects for
the future, as he’s intelligent, socially outgoing, probably the leader of the
group, and would likely succeed at anything he attempted. At the moment, however, he takes his furry
wolf outfit to all-girl parties, becoming something of a stripper and hired sex
object, a nighttime job that covers his drug expenses. Featuring plenty of naked backsides, a
recurring image is seeing the group of five pilfering a sofa to sit comfortably
overlooking some natural landscape, as if suspended in a state of inertia,
where the film often feels more like a collection of vignettes, where what’s
missing is a common thread holding it all together.
Almost
18 (Kohta 18) - Cineuropa
KARRI, 17, takes his last driving lesson with his own taxi-driver
mother as the teacher. She wants to discuss serious things in life. The wheel
turns into the wrong direction right on the home yard.
Nisimazine | Review:
Almost 18 Theo Prasidis
Teenage family dramas have been dominating both European and American indie scenes for the last decade. With the arrival of the digital age and filmmaking becoming increasingly accessible, they have flourished, adopted new codes, developed certain genre conventions and in some cases delivered admirable low-budget gems that have been enthusiastically welcomed by the audiences (Juno, 2007) and dearly favored by critics (Winter’s Bone, 2010). Either by conducting profound studies or simply by succumbing to passing trends, modern directors are increasingly concerned about the uncharted territory of the teenage psyche. This is the case with Maarit Lalli, who appears to have become overwhelmed by their indiscreet charm.
There were five of us guys. […] I think we all had normal families. Normal problems. Normal feelings. There was nothing we couldn’t overcome. And then one year, for some reason, everything started going to shit.
The plot is exceedingly simple. Five teenage pals are reaching 18. We follow them closely in their everyday struggle with their family, their lovers and the society. They have fun, fall in love, get drunk, fight, cry, regret. We witness them maturing through their domicile misadventures. The voice-over in the beginning of the film, which was mentioned above, sets up the viewers’ anticipations right from the go. Coupled with playful hand-held camerawork and up-beat hip-hop loops, it’s all about those raging hormones. We’re clearly off for some seriously messed up situations. Well, almost…
Almost 18 is a product of pure love. It is not an accident that in her feature debut, the 48-year-old Finnish with a television background, which did not fail to show, did not only perform directorial and screenwriting duties, but was also responsible for the production, cinematography, editing, costume design and art direction of the film. Maarit Lalli is deeply in love with her characters. One notices this every time she gently touches them with the lens, every time she pads their dreamy sequences with moody acoustic strings, every time she speaks through their lines. And this is the fundamental problem of the film. Her involvement in this has somewhat clouded her judgment and has resulted in a loss of her objectivity and clear gaze.
There are many reasons why Almost 18 is an average teenage drama. There is a dominant feeling of a constant attempt to create conflict. Each individual story is floundering to reach a climax, but all eventually fail. And the reason is simply because these kids are alright. They are all strong, handsome, cool, smart and well-dressed ladies’ men. They don’t make real mistakes. Their worse behavior is drinking beer and smoking pot. Even the one who is into gigolo stuff is very much aware of the unfulfilling sense his pursuit of the fleeting pleasures offers him. They are already fully-fledged personalities which could easily give their own parents a lesson on maturity. So it plays out like a latent maternal fantasy of a perfect son. Moreover, from the obvious focus-pulling shaky photography to the predictable musical choices, it is cinematically trite. What ultimately holds the film together and prevents the final tailspin are the performances of the actors, which are at least sincere, and which arguably serve as the main directorial focus from the very beginning.
The fact that teenage dramas can be inexpensively produced doesn’t make them an easy genre to deal with. Teenage characters do not coincide with motives of the grown-up characters. Their behavior can be highly unpredictable. This is why in a genre that tends to glut, every new offering ought to be truly original, unmistakably clear and rudely daring.
Lalli's
Almost 18 feature debut takes top awards at Finland's Jussis Cineuropa
Kohta 18 - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Laloux, René
MONKEY’S TEETH (Les Dents
du singe)
User reviews from imdb Author: eric wobma from Amsterdam
Rene Laloux was not involved in the writing of this story,
which was done by the patients of an asylum. Which immediately brings the
challenges of 'automatic writing' in mind.
What is brought to us, the viewers, is a lovely tale filled with obvious and
undercurrent symbolism, appealing like primitive painting and with a depth that
is breathtaking.
For those who want clear cut straight run of the mill storytelling with not too
much story in it ... shy away from this little gem.
For all that like everything that promises to give more than meets the eye: do
not miss this short !!
(Nor the other 2 Miracles which are given as an extra on the
LES ESCARGOTS (THE SNAILS)
An extremely
humorous short film that reveals a farmer’s troubles growing his crops, and
after a series of clever failures, he discovers an ingenious method to make
them sprout. The problem being, giant
snails appear to ravage his crops which then devour everything in sight,
including entire cities. It’s
interesting that this director routinely seems to imagine giant versions of
ordinary animals, suggesting a mutant threat where there would otherwise never
be one, as the creatures imagined presently render no harm to anyone in the
real world. Adding to the
otherworldliness, an avant-garde somewhat jazzy musical score gives this a
subterranean Beat feeling.
Fantastic
Planet / La Plenète sauvage Slarek from DVD Outsider
(excerpt)
Les Escargots
(
User reviews from imdb Author: Polaris_DiB from United States
This short film is included with the recent DVD rerelease of
Fantastic Planet, and I have to say I like it a bit better than the feature.
Laloux's earlier short is a lot less politically oriented, a lot less sensical,
but because of those aspects a lot more surreal and psychedelically wonderful.
A farmer can't get his crops to grow until he discovers that they absolutely
flourish under his tears. Utilizing a series of devices to ensure he can cry
all over the field, he raises the plants to gigantic proportions. But just like
Jack and the Beanstalk, gigantic proportions of food also equate gigantic
proportions of pests, and snails eat their way through the crops until they go
on a King Kong-like rampage of a nearby city, seducing pretty girls and
destroying entire buildings at the same time. Once recovered from the attack,
the farmer goes back and tries growing carrots this time. Which means rabbits.
The same style of animation is used here as in the later Fantastic Planet. Warm
colors and colored pencil shadings create a form of cut-out animation (think
FANTASTIC PLANET (La Planète
Sauvage)
An animated sci-fi film that resembles
the look of MONTY PYTHON or YELLOW SUBMARINE, or even the Beatles video to
“Eleanor Rigby,” complete with cardboard cut out, emotionless faces. Here humans are the prey of giant blue
creatures known as Draags, calling the humans Oms. The Oms exist in a prehistoric mindset, as
they huddle together in caves, are scantily clothed, and carry spears or other
primitive weapons. Supposedly the
filmmaker’s reaction to the Russian invasion of
This film is set on another world where
the Oms are kept as pets, but otherwise despised by the giant blueys, who find
them unintelligent and smelly, periodically cleansing the neighborhood of Oms,
using outlandish devices to exterminate their presence from the planet, from
simply stepping on them, or employing giant vacuum sucking monsters, using
poison gasses or giant balls that flatten and steamroll people. The story follows one such pet whose life was
saved only to become enslaved by the giant community, placing an electric
collar around his neck to demand immediate compliance. But over time, he learns the ways of the
Draags and attempts to use that information to save his own people. Eventually the Oms become more resistant,
using more sophisticated weaponry, and a bit of the imagery resembles
Gulliver’s capture by the Lilliputians.
By stealing the Draags technology, called their listening devices, the
Oms are able to access a means to fight back, initially hiding in exile in a
deserted part of their world, eventually travelling to another planet to
escape. But strangely, the Draags show
up there as well, which turns this into an intergalactic dispute. The jazzy electric guitar-laced musical score
by Alain Goraguer feels strangely like it’s from another era, allowing
us to recall a time in our lives when psychodelic imagery was the rage, from
comics to Pop Art. This film is an
exquisite representation of thinking completely outside the moment, using one’s
imagination to initially flee, then take up arms against an invading
nation. Thirty years later, with our own
occupation in
Are you ready for the
struggle of the Oms against their oppressive masters, the 40-foot Draags?
Something of a revelation to anyone who thinks animation extends only as far as
Fritz the Cat, Roland Topor's
graphics create a world reminiscent of two of the greatest artists of the
fantastic, Bosch and Odilon Redon. He sketches a menacing landscape full of
womb-like passages, intestinal plants, strange phallic and vaginal shapes, and
extraordinary posthistoric monsters.
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Mojo
Lorwin
In this Dali-esque animation, based on the Cold War-era novel Oms en Serie (1957) by Stefan Wul, the earth is ruled by the "Draags," a giant race of blue neutered technocrats with a passion for meditation. Domestic humans known as "Oms" are the "little animals you stroke between meditations" while wild humans/Oms are hunted like cockroaches. The surreal and perilous world of FANTASTIC PLANET (originally LA PLANETE SAUVAGE) is rendered in beautiful (very 70s) cut out stop motion. Highlights include a glow-orgy induced by an aphrodisiac communion wafer and a cackling anthropomorphized Venus flytrap. The soundtrack is a near-constant synth jam that oscillates from moody and spacey to raunchy porn funk. The film was begun in Czechoslovakia but finished in France for political reasons, and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union looms over the story. Themes of repression, rebellion, and the dangers of technocracy permeate FANTASTIC PLANET. The film seems to suggest that excessive rationality can make the ruling class blind to its cruelty, but also that solidarity can flourish in the midst of persecution and degradation.
DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze
René Laloux's mesmerising psychedelic sci-fi animated feature won the Grand
Prix at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and is a landmark of European animation.
Based on Stefan Wul's novel Oms en série [Oms by the dozen], Laloux's
breathtaking vision was released in France as La Planète sauvage [The
Savage Planet]; in the USA as Fantastic Planet; and immediately drew
comparisons to Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Planet of the Apes
(both the 1968 film and Boule's 1963 novel). Today, the film can be seen to
prefigure much of the work of Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli (Princess
Mononoke, Spirited Away) due to its palpable political and social
concerns, cultivated imagination, and memorable animation techniques.
Fantastic Planet tells the story of "Oms", human-like creatures, kept
as domesticated pets by an alien race of blue giants called "Draags".
The story takes place on the Draags' planet Ygam, where we follow our narrator,
an
Widely regarded as an allegorical statement on the Soviet occupation of
The Onion A.V.
Club [Joshua Klein]
Animation became big business
again in the late '80s, and ever since, it's become less and less likely that
there'll be another full-length animated feature quite as weird as René
Laloux's underground 1973 French classic La Planete Sauvage (Fantastic
Planet). Drawn with sharp details in warm pastel colors, the movie is just
the kind of hippie allegory—and trippy visual experience—that the '60s often
produced. Fantastic Planet, adapted from a novel by Stefan Wul, was
inspired by the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Russians in the late '60s. On
the planet Ygam lives a race of giant, alien beings called Traags. These
Traags, who are prone to hallucinatory bouts of group meditation, keep the
oddly human-like Oms as pets, often treating them with the sadism and perverse
maternalism humans frequently inflict upon their own pets. Never underestimate
the ingenuity of an Om, though: When one absconds with one of the Traags'
knowledge devices, he uses the tool to foment a wild Om uprising against his
captors. Available for the first time in years and now presented in widescreen,
Laloux's film, which won the 1973 Cannes Grand Prix Prize, is a welcome respite
from slick Disney product and countless shoddy imitators. Started in Prague but
completed, due to political pressure, in Paris, Fantastic Planet uses an
accessible medium to show the evils of propaganda and express the need for
individuality. Laloux's vision of a Dali-meets-Krazy Kat alien landscape
populated by twisted creatures is quite striking, even if the film's
psychedelic elements haven't exactly aged well. As an added bonus, the DVD
edition comes with three earlier Laloux shorts—1960's Les Dents Du Singe
(Monkey's Teeth), 1964's Les Temps Morts (Dead Times), and
1965's Les Escargots (The Snails)—that are respectively
thoughtful, haunting, and funny.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson)
Fantastic Planet (original French title: La Planete sauvage) is a
1973 animated science-fiction film directed by Rene Laloux with design by
Roland Topor, based on Stefan Wul's allegorical novel Oms en serie. The
film began production in
The story concerns the Oms, a race of Earth-origin humans living on a planet
where they are dominated and kept as pets by the Traags, giant (by comparison)
blue aliens who see the "animals" as an amusement until they observe
signs of intelligence and organization among the tribes of un-domesticated
"wild Oms." An orphaned
Fantastic Planet successfully implements the elusive sense of other-worldliness
so many live-action science-fiction films fail to pull off. The film's look is
unique even among animated features—it uses a sophisticated combination of
cut-out and cel animation, allowing for Winsor McCay-ish artwork with detailed
cross-hatching and pastel shading while avoiding the obvious "joints"
of conventional cut-out animation (a la South Park.) The background and
character designs fit together organically, without the hard lines and flat
colors that separate the two in cel animation. Character movement is sometimes
limited by this approach, but the film benefits greatly from Laloux's technical
risks—its consistent stylization lends a credible alien quality to its fantasy
world.
Laloux's film is also solid from a storytelling perspective—its gently-paced,
literary feel drives its message home without becoming preachy. The script
wisely avoids facile good-vs-evil themes, building its impact through bits and
pieces, words and images that add up to a fully-realized portrait of two
cultures in conflict. The exquisitely original look of the film is backed up
with mature philosophical substance. Forget Titan A.E., Heavy Metal
and half of the anime you've seen—Fantastic Planet is animated
science-fiction at its finest.
Twenty-five years after it won the Grand Prix at the
Cannes Film Festival, Rene Laloux's animated oddity Fantastic Planet is
humming back into theaters, a theremin-toned time capsule from the trippier
precincts of toontown and science fiction. If you've never caught it during a
cable-TV binge, it should still provide the giddy buzz of arty weirdness that
has long made it an object of cult veneration, a sci-fi starter drug that
turned many a budding fan on to Stanislaw Lem, Tarkovsky flicks, and old-school
Heavy Metal comics.
Based on a novel by Czech fantasist Stefan Wul, Planet opens on an
unselfconsciously ominous note: a ragged woman clutching a baby runs through a
thorny wilderness, sharp Yellow Submarineish squiggles and spikes
raining onto her path. The cause of her trouble is soon revealed when a giant blue
hand appears, casually flicking her about until her small body lies in a broken
heap. The hand belongs to a child of the Draag race, hundred-foot-tall,
azure-skinned, and blank-eyed beings who brought the little Oms (a play on hommes,
i.e., us) to their home planet centuries ago, alternately keeping them as pets
and decrying them as fast-breeding vermin. The Draags don't think the Oms are
very intelligent but they do learn tricks and fit into dollhouses, so a kindly
Draag girl named Tiwa takes the orphaned baby in. She names him Terr and he
grows to learn the ways of the Draags, eventually escaping to a
"wild"
French director Laloux enlisted the services of Czech animators for Planet,
and their spare but vivid images reflect period psychedelia and the globular,
hypnotically repetitive fancies of Pop Art. The film tosses off sci-fi
flourishes like rocket ships and cybernetic teaching devices, but its heart is
in the psychological and druggily inexplicable, as in the repeated Draag
meditations where their souls (or something) are transferred to spheres which
casually float to their moon. Although the visuals are worth the ticket alone, Fantastic
Planet also crackles with emotional and political resonance: Terr's status
as plaything is as viscerally humiliating as the Draag's "de-
Fantastic Planet •
Senses of Cinema Chris
Justice, April 2005
not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston)
Fantastic Planet / La Plenète sauvage Slarek from DVD Outsider
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Electric Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy
Fantastic
Planet (1973) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Nathaniel Thompson
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Twitch Ardvark
FANTASTIC PLANET Gerry Carpenter
Read the New York Times Review » Howard Thompson
TIME MASTERS (Les Maîtres du Temps)
User reviews from imdb Author: Patrick Mezard from Paris
"Les maîtres du temps" is as good as french
animation movies are rare. Designed by Moebius (Fifth Element...), inspired
from a novel of Stephan Wul (french science fiction writer) "L'orphelin de
Perdide", it remains one of the most powerful animation movie I have ever
seen.
Evidently, It is pretty old and the animation cannot be compared to today's
movies, but the rest is very impressive. Characters are mature and have
interesting personnalities, the design of ETs and plants is original and the
scenario is full of surprises. This movie is different from all others and it
is a real victory to be better than the book it has been taken of.
User reviews from imdb Author: zetes from Saint Paul, MN
Animation is the perfect medium for sci-fi. Unfortunately, few animated sci-fi films have lived up to their potential. French animation master René Laloux is definitely one who let his imagination run amok in his medium. He is best known for his 1973 film Fantastic Planet. He must have had a difficult time getting funded for other projects, because he only ever made two more features. He died just a year ago. Time Masters is his second feature (he made another in 1988, called Light Years). The animation is very primitive, and not in the inventive primitiveness of Fantastic Planet. But, what it lacks in animation, it more than makes up for with its imagination. It's simply wonderful to behold. I especially love those two little telepathic creatures, referred to as "gnomes". The story is good, if not great. The ending is quite clever. I was wishing that it had gone on for at least a half an hour longer, but I won't complain, given the limited amount of material Laloux was able to produce in his lifetime.
User reviews from imdb Author: Sturgeon54 from United States
I do not know the first thing about animation, and in fact
the only animation I have experience with is a few Disney movies and Saturday
morning cartoons. Watching this quirky piece of animated science-fiction, I
came to the realization that animation opens up an entirely new universe of
possibilities for the genre. I have read many science fiction short stories and
novels, wondering how they could possibly be translated into film, but using
animation, the portrayal of complicated conceptual ideas from sci-fi novels
seems much more possible than in traditional live-action. In fact, I'm tempted
to say that science fiction and animation naturally complement one another.
This movie is like a funhouse of outrageous otherworldly ideas, one after the
next. For a mere 80 minute running time, the filmmakers have packed an amazing
amount of material here. If anything, the movie is actually too short, and it
seems to gloss over a great deal of important plot points. It is almost like
watching a drawing board conceptualization of a longer, more ambitious film,
rather than the film itself. As such, character development is at a minimum
here, as in the work of George Lucas. But also like Lucas' films, much of that
is made up by the wealth of creativity. What is here is fantastic - a story
filled with warmth and humor that can resonate with both children and reasoning
adults. The startling elliptical ending is intriguing but abrupt. I recommend
this for more adventurous filmgoers who want to try something unique.
User reviews from imdb Author: Itamar Katz (itamarscomix@gmail.com) from Israel
Designed by the great graphic novelist Jean Giraud - AKA
Moebius – Time Masters is a fascinating piece of animated sci-fi from
Plot-wise, there's not that much to be said for it; it's an intelligent but
simplistic sci-fi story with a nice twist ending, which will, I think, appeal
mainly to younger viewers. The characters are mostly simplistic and cartoonish,
and largely unconvincing. These are the only reasons why I couldn't give Time
Masters full marks; but these flaws take very little away from the pleasure of
this film. As long as it focuses on the child character Piel, who is largely
unaware of what goes on in the larger picture and is therefore touching and
interesting, and not on the flat characters of Jaffar (good and brave for the
sake of goodness and bravery), Matton (bad and greedy for the sake of badness
and greediness) and the other adults; then it manages to be beautiful and
gripping. And when any of the alien races are on screen, be they cute and
cuddly or bizarre and frightening, you won't be able to look away. Time Masters
is essential viewing for any lover of Moebius' work, and is well recommended
for fans of science-fiction and of classic animation, and will surely become a
treasured favorite for any of these.
Time Masters
is the second Stefan Wul novel ("L'Orphelin
de Perdide") director René Laloux adapted. The first one being
"Oms En Serie" which
Laloux turned into the now classic The
Fantastic Planet (1973). It certainly feels like Laloux's cinematic
style is compatible with Wul's tales of otherworldly lifeforms, civilizations,
and struggles. Laloux breezes through the planet of Perdide with its
interesting landscapes and living curiosities, while accomodating a storyline
that invokes a gripping twist in the end; a twist that all of a sudden turns
the tale into an involving temporal puzzle.
The plot follows a troupe of space mercenaries in a race against time trying to
rescue a little boy who is left alone in the wilderness of Perdide. The boy,
who is merely kept alive by an intergalactic radio (from which he receives
information and company from the space mercenaries) he, by his youth and
innocence, thinks of as a friend called "Mike."
Time Masters feels a less serious
effort compared to The Fantastic Planet.
Unlike the latter film wherein adult themes surface from the planetary
rebellion by the little aliens against their blue-skinned humanoid masters, Time Masters is pretty much a straightforward
rescue film wherein the heroes jump in and out of problematic scenarios and try
to arrive in Perdide before the boy gets devoured by locust-like creatures.
There are scenarios wherein Laloux seems to be pushing a certain theme --- the
troupe lands in a deserted planet inhabited by faceless angel-like creatures.
These creatures would kidnap visitors and through a ceremony turn them into
"puppets" just like them. The scenario feels like a commentary
against organized religion (especially with the utilized imagery of angels, the
ceremonial baptism to a common ideology). The scenario being a mere point
within the entire film betrays the depth of the commentaries for narrative ease
and straightforwardness. It feels like Laloux is kept from truly exploring
these alien environs by his adherence to storytelling; something i never felt
while watching The Fantastic Planet.
Time Masters marks the first
collaboration between Laloux and comic book artist Jean Giraud. Giraud is most
famous for co-creating The Silver Surfer, and would later on work on as concept
artist for films like Alien (Ridley
Scott, 1979),
The animation is not smooth, which shouldn't pose a problem, especially when
one is already used to Laloux's cinema. Time
Masters seems to be confused of its classification; whether or not
it is a children's film or an adult-centered animated film. Most of the alien
designs are clumsily conceived (especially if compared to the dangerous flora
and fauna of The Fantastic Planet),
on the verge of being silly in the level of those Hanna-Barbara cartoons. Yet
at times, it's quite fantastic and the level Laloux infuses these made-up alien
landscapes with real ecosystems and cycles is just compelling.
DVD Outsider Slarek
Twitch Ardvark
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Ron Wells
A Nutshell Review Stefan S
Electric Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy
HOW WAN-FÔ WAS SAVED (Comment
Wang-Fo Fut Sauvé)
France
(15 mi) 1987
User reviews from imdb Author: matthewscott8 from United Kingdom
This animated short has been included as an extra on the R2
DVD of Laloux's Fantastic Planet, released by
In it we have Wang-Fo, a supreme master of painting in medieval
Without wishing to give away the plot too much I will say that Wang-Fo's skill
incurs the Emperor's displeasure. His work is portrayed as being tantamount to
sacrilegious because of its tendency to diminish reality. The Emperor orders
Wang-Fo's mutilation, and it is how he is saved (the title points to this being
the key to the riddle) that really makes the movie transcendent.
What makes me happiest about this movie though is the profound sense of
ambivalence engendered. One feels both sides of the argument, that great art is
at once transcendent and a perversion. Is Wang-Fo a criminal or an angel (and
there are certainly parts where his skill is portrayed as very sinister)? This
is a topic that has always fascinated me, having always buried myself in books
and images and ideas, steadfastly avoiding subsequently dimmed reality.
Henry Fuseli, a painter of Gothic fantasy commented (to misquote him from
memory) that the lover of fantasy will forever be disappointed by reality.
Laloux leaves the viewer room to make up their own mind about whether such
decadence is worth the price it demands.
This animated short based on a short story by Yourcenar, itself taken from
Lafcadio Hearne who retold a tale of more ancient origin, was apparently
considered by Laloux to be his finest work.
Oggs'
Movie Thoughts Ogg’s Movie Thoughts
Watch René Laloux's
animation now with eyes trained to detect the individual strands of fur in a
character or the realistic human-like movements of digitized children and your
bound for disappointment. Laloux's animation is not about emulation of what's
real. Animation is after all a means to release the restrictions of reality.
Laloux's most popular feature The Fantastic Planet does not
have anatomically accurate beings; it is sci-fi and its world is populated by
blue skinned aliens, little humanoid creatures, a host of bizaare fauna, and a
compelling environment that stretches the boundaries of human imagination.
Laloux has made only three feature length films in his career; most of his
other works are short films. How Wan-Fô Was Saved is his
favorite among his works. Adapted from a short story of Marguerite Yourcenar,
which is also rewritten adaptation of a Chinese parable, How Wan-Fô Was
Saved is told in a simplistic yet thought-provoking manner that is
quite absent from the mainstream animated cinema of today which seems to be
more interested in mundane details than adept storytelling.
The animation is coarse. Laloux is not interested in smooth movements. His
characters are limited in their mobility; most of the action is suggested by
the narration which supplies a level of psychology to the immobile artworks.
Yet with the little movement that is portrayed, the accuracy of human
experience is felt. The air of alcohol intoxication is portrayed with
deliberate accuracy by Laloux using the most economic of details. From the
point of view of the narrator, the apprentice of master painter Wan-Fô, the
entire tavern feels alive in a drunken man's perspective. Movement is slower;
laughter is louder; visual points of interest are more profound (a lady
roasting a pig; his master's fingerpainting spilled wine; personal musings of
the depth of art).
With less than fifteen minutes, Laloux was able to manipulate a story to serve
his philosophical interests. He details the master and his apprentice's capture
and delivery to the emperor of the Han kingdom. He emotionally paints a
background tale on the pale-skinned emperor; his character design establishes
himself as a heartless villain, but his back story tells otherwise. He plants
an indefatiguable sense of loyalty in the apprentice's character for his master
and his master's craft, to the point of lethal jealousy for his beautiful wife.
In a sense, the characters of How Wan-Fô Was Saved are as
alien as the humanoid citizens of The Fantastic Planet,
despite being grounded on an exotic yet real Chinese culture, with their warped
psychology that befits the constructs of its narrative genre.
The ending is even more brilliant. The apprentice is punished for loyally
defending his master; the palace guards behead the defensive apprentice and Laloux
does not shy away from the portrayal of violence. He nonchalantly depicts the
beheading as mere background noise --- a thud accompanying the animated fall of
the headless body. Wan-Fô is ordered to complete a painting that has been
bothering the emperor since his childhood days. Again, Laloux insists on
immobility. Bystanders and the emperor staticly watch the master complete the
painting of a vast ocean; then the painting bursts with life, a little boat
inches closer and closer to rescue the old master from his fate. Laloux, before
he did his first animated short film, worked for a psychiatric ward and has
opted to describe his cinema as schizophrenic. In a sense, Laloux achieves an
unfathomable excellence in planting imaginative unrealism in his animated
works; he allows us to lose ourselves in our imagination and join the old
master in his escape from the clutches of a tyrant who misunderstands the value
of art.
THE CAPTIVE (La Prisonnière)
User reviews from imdb Author: mcfloodhorse from Denver and Copenhagen and wherever
This short animated film from Rene Laloux opens with a distant,
almost alien narrator informing us that "we've discovered a bizarre
story...of two orphans who flee a world stricken by war and death...across an
ash desert...to reach a city whose inhabitants have become guardians of
silence" "Noise is chaos" says one of the so-called priests of
this city, and "silence is order and harmony".
The meditative, atmospheric, percussive qualities of the soundtrack complement
the mystical disappearing/reappearing figures of this city, which presages
similar elements and moods found in 'Spirited Away'.
The animation style is comparable to that of Laloux's 'Gandahar', although some
of the more psychedelic and primitive artistic qualities are more reminiscent
of his 'La Planete Sauvage'.
Laloux's trademark disjointedness or "schizophrenic" style of cinema
is still in tact, leaving things nicely open for interpretation. A few stunning
sequences also appear, as a brilliant snowfall sequence set against the ebb and
flow of some fantastic foreign ocean soon transitions into a surreal scene
involving a beached whale and the erotic mysteries dwelling therein.
With the full moon shining brightly and the tide rising quickly, the two
orphans are accompanied by the city's shadowy prime-mover/prisoner as they sail
away at dawn. "Fortunately, order and silence don't always prevail in the
end"...
GANDAHAR
aka: Light Years
This 1988 animated SF feature by
Rene Laloux (Fantastic Planet) tells the epic tale of a civilization
wiped out and reborn as a consequence of its technological experimentation. The
animation is by Philippe Caza; the dubbed English dialogue is by Isaac Asimov.
With the voices of Christopher Plummer, Glenn Close, Paul Shaffer, Jennifer
Grey, and David Johansen. PG, 83 min.
User reviews from imdb Author: arsenick from Paris, France
It is a very good anticipation movie. The part describing the lovely and environmental gandahar is wonderful. While renewing a 70's vision of sex, nature and happiness, the colors, sounds and pictures (a young girl offering her breast to a new born invented animal who looks like a tapir, born out of a grown plant). The story: mixing future and past, threatening the present by having itself created in the past, the elements that will be dangerous in the future. It is also a huge criticism of the liability of the human being regarding its evil habit to master the nature, the human body and science. In the end, scientific rubbish saves the human beings from a great scientific discovery they made years ago. Happiness is conditioned by assuming one's mistakes. A great philosophical tale. The blue skinned woman with head-wings is very impressive, as well as the very beautiful nude females.
Gandahar is
probably the closest René Laloux ever came in replicating the level of
sophistication he gave alien civilizations in The
Fantastic Planet (1973). He opens the film with an overview of a
seaside community: blue skinned humanoids living life in utter simplicity.
Laloux presents the planet of Gandahar as a utopian paradise where everything
is in joyful order; nature and civilization coincide like connecting puzzle
pieces (a plant gives birth to a pet, the pet is then taken care of by a female
Gandaharian by breastfeeding it). The supposed peace is disrupted when laser
rays start targetting the peaceful Gandaharians, turning them into stone.
Laloux cuts to the capital of Gandahar, Jasper. Beneath the carved bust of a
female Gandaharian, the council of elders is debating on who to send to uncover
the mysterious enemies of Gandahar. Sylvain is chosen; and is sent to the vast ocean
to learn more about Gandahar's attackers, an army of metal men. On the way, he
discovers an underground civilization of deformed Gandaharians (botched
experiments of Jasper who were completely forgotten), and an oversized brain
(again, another botched experiment of Jasper thrown to the sea when it was
getting too big to destroy).
It's an interesting concept, sprawling in its seemingly unlimited area of
creation; which is perfect for the highly imaginative Laloux. Laloux eats up
the concept, and populates the alien world with a civilization that becomes too
advanced (probably not industrially; but the scientific experimentations to
turn nature into a tool for advancement cannot relate Gandahar as naturally
perfect), too selfish and perfectionist (the deformed Gandaharias have turned
into a mere tall tale; and instead of turning them into a distinct class,
Gandahar has totally forgotten them (class structures cannot exist in a utopian
society)), and too complacent that it is almost powerless to any external
struggle. The plot relies on time travel for its movement; Sylvain seems to be
the chosen one to enact the prophecy but the prophecy's cyclical syntax
connotes an impetus for salvation. I suggest that the sudden appearance of the
Gandaharian dinosaur-like creature that saves Sylvain and love interest Airelle
from their egg-shaped cell as the impetus; Sylvain thought that the dinosaur as
extinct; I thought that the dinosaur is one of those Gandaharian creatures that
have escaped Gandahar's god-like machinations and is therefore the proper
turning point (it being pure from Gandahar's "sins against nature")
that could enact the cyclical prophecy and in turn save Gandahar.
Gandahar is
released in the 
.
Asimov's translation turns Laloux's film into an unexciting talkfest; Asimov
delights in several voice-over narrations, suggests a maternal relation between
the Gandaharian queen Ambisextra and Sylvain, lightens the romantic angle
between Sylvain and Airelle. Asimov's screenplay is also riddled with
hyphaluting wordplay, which somehow lessens the natural transition of Laloux's
original film --- the result is a disorienting flow, a boringly sexless
characterization, and an inevitably less enjoyable film. Harvey Weinstein does
employ several actors and actresses to provide voice talents for the characters
(Glenn Close as Ambisextra, Christopher Plummer as Metamorphis the evil
oversized brain). However, the delivery remains flat; presumably because of
Asimov's distancing semantics.
Seeing both versions, I cannot deny that Laloux's final feature film is indeed
a worthy feature; still miles away from his masterpiece The Fantastic Planet, but definitely up and
above Time
Masters (1982). Even with Weinstein's mutated Light
Years, you can still observe Laloux's undeniable artistry and
imagination in cooking up an alien civilization complete with its social and
governmental structures, and biological make-up.
DVD Outsider Slarek
Electric
Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy
Twitch Ardvark
The SF,
Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard
Scheib
Joel
Mathis Bad Movie Night
Badmovies.org
review Andrew Borntreger
Washington
Post [Richard Harrington]
Lam, Ringo
Lam, Ringo Art and Culture
You might not know it, but you've
already watched one of his movies: "Reservoir Dogs" is a note-perfect
rendition of the Chow Yun-Fat vehicle that was Ringo Lam's first big hit,
"City on Fire." The original thriller is the story of an undercover
cop who finds honor among jewel thieves. Stories of honor under fire and
brotherhood-in-arms have inspired Lam over and over again.
"City on Fire" was just
the beginning of a series of arsonist delights. "Prison on Fire,"
"School on Fire," and "Prison on Fire 2" set that same
macho story in a number of locked-down settings. Maybe that's why he's been
called "One of the darkest visionaries of Hong Kong cinema," and why
Jean-Claude Van Damme says that Lam has "the flavor of Scorsese."
While Lam clearly aims to unearth the deep conflicts at the heart of
contemporary society, it's fair to say that, even more, he's aching to stage
huge, bloody mayhem.
Lam is a product of the
"Let's do the show right here" school of Hong Kong filmmaking. In a
typical move, when he couldn't get permission to shoot a car chase on a busy
street, he shot it anyway. (The fear in the onlookers' eyes is real.) That
forceful personality tends to get him in trouble with his actors. He fell out
with Tony Leung on the set of "The Adventurers" (1995), and, on the
set of "Maximum Risk" (1996), he told Van Damme that he
"couldn't act for shit."
All of this might explain why Lam
hasn't been able to follow John Woo into the limelight of the American market
place, even though he uses the same actors and plotlines, and has the same
delight in the old ultraviolence. (Just try "Full Contact" to see the
similarity.) Instead, he's still working the Hong Kong grind and watching his
films fall into the black hole of the Chinese-cinema circuit. Still, he's used
to lulls in his fortune, and to bouncing back. Maybe that Hollywood
breakthrough is just around the corner.
Double Damme from the September 19-25, 1996 issue of Metro
CITY ON
Ringo Lam’s
hardboiled Hong Kong crime thriller was a major ‘inspiration’ for Reservoir
Dogs. In fact, with its colour-coded crims, post-heist warehouse setting and
fledgling friendship between a deep-cover undercover copper (Chow Yun-fat) and
a jewel thief, it’s pretty much a blueprint for Tarantino’s classic. Naturally,
it lacks the verbal dexterity, while the cop/robber doppelgänger theme is
better explored in John Woo’s The Killer. But Yun-fat is brilliant.
The inspiration for Reservoir
Dogs, this 1987 crime movie is a good example of the thriller HK-style
('style' being the operative word). Social and psychological nuance is out.
Designer shades are in. Hong Kong's biggest movie star, Chow Yun Fat
(The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, Hard-Boiled) is the
epitome of Esquire cool, more playful than Clint, more intense than Mel, much
better looking than Arnie or Sly. Here he's an undercover cop, Ko Chow, who
works his way into a gang of jewel thieves at the cost of his fiancée and,
perhaps, his own integrity. This is straight-cut, fashion-plate pulp. Tarantino
fans will note the familiarity of the set-up. In fact, Reservoir Dogs is
an elaboration on the the climax of Ringo Lam's
film: after the heist goes wrong, the gang hole up in a warehouse, where
bullets and recriminations start to fly. There's none of Tarantino's formal
inventiveness, none of the finesse or the wit, just a gut-wrenching dramatic
situation ready to explode.
LoveHKFilm.com (Calvin McMillin)
Chow-Yun Fat goes undercover, joining a band of hoods and befriending jewel thief Danny Lee along the way. For Chow, it all comes down to a question of honor versus justice in a movie that Quentin Tarantino liked so darn much, he remade it as Reservoir Dogs.
What's more important, loyalty or justice? That's the dilemma facing undercover cop Ko Chow (Chow Yun-Fat) in Ringo Lam's excellent crime drama City on Fire. The film is a definite must see for HK enthusiasts, if for no other reason than to witness what a Ringo Lam movie was like before he became Jean Claude Van Damme's director of choice.
Like Donnie Brasco and other films of its kind, City on Fire explores the internal ethical struggle for a policeman who get too close to his prey. The plot: after a fellow cop is knifed to death in the streets, detective Ko Chow is put on the trail of some jewel thieves by his world-weary superior, Inspector Lau (Sun Yeuh). Chow, however, has deep reservations about the assignment. "I fulfill my duties?" Chow complains, "But I betray my friends!" Despite his protests, Chow agrees to the job and attempts to befriend head crook Lee Fu (Danny Lee). After a few tense situations, Chow is eventually accepted into the Fu's confidence and asked to join in on the crew's next big score. As the two strike up a friendship, Chow's personal ethics are put to the test as he finds himself genuinely liking Fu, the very man he's supposed to arrest. Later, the climactic jewelry heist goes terribly wrong with bullets flying everywhere and bodies littering the streets. In the end, Chow is forced to make a definitive, but not surprising, decision on where his loyalties reside…with fatal results.
There have been many comparison made between this film and Tarantino's "re-imagining" (An unfortunate buzzword that emerged after Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes debacle. But I digress). Though similar in theme, City on Fire and Reservoir Dogs are dramatically different in execution. Whereas Quentin Tarantino's debut film had a sleek look and crackling dialogue, City on Fire does not—and that's not necessarily a criticism of Lam's flick. Tarantino's world is a kind of hyper-reality in which common thugs can riff on pop culture; Ringo Lam's domain seems a tad bit more realistic. The criminal element depicted in City on Fire operates in a grim, gritty underworld that's only shred of romanticism lies in the immutable loyalty between brothers. Same idea, different methods—but both pretty damn cool movies. (Sanjuro 2002)
City on Fire Michael den Boer from 10kbullets
When an undercover agent with
evidence that could lead to the arrest of a group of jewelry thieves is murder
while trying to contact his superior Ko Chow (Chow Yun-Fat), is brought in
reluctantly. Ko wants to marry his long time girlfriend Huong (Carrie Ng), but
is forced to wait because of his latest assignment which only pushes her
farther away. Ko poses as an arms dealer and he becomes friends with Fu (Danny
Lee), the group of jewel thief’s accept him and ask him join in on their next
job. After a botched jewel heist Ko starts to lose his way as he begins to
sympathize with Fu.
Ringo Lam may not be as well know
John Woo in America His films since coming to Hollywood have been varied
failing to live up to his Hong Kong films, still most of us have seen some of
his Hollywood films like Maximum Risk and In Hell. Lam like most directors from
Hong Kong their films haven’t translated to well to American as the Hollywood
system dilutes their visions until they are no longer recognizable. In City on
Fire Lam teams up once again with Chow Yun-fat who he had worked with before on
Full Contact, Prison on Fire and Prison on Fire 2. Quentin Tarentino was
heavily influenced by City on Fire using a few of the films elements in his
film Resevoir Dogs.
Chow Yun-Fat is mesmerizing in
City on Fire as he covers a wide range of emotions and he is obvious
comfortable in Ko Chow skin as he effortlessly captures the characters essence.
Danny Lee is also very good and he perfectly helps balance the relationship
between his character Fu and Chow Yun-Fats Ko Chow. They make a great team and
one of City on Fire’s strongest attributes is the interaction between their two
characters. Screenwriters Tommy Sham’s contribution to City on Fire is often
overlooked even though his script is filled with intriguing characters and plot
that is a notch above most films in this genre. It is a shame that he didn’t
write more Heroic Bloodshed scripts instead of writing primarily with in
comedies and martial arts genre’s. Ringo Lam also co-wrote the script he
direction in City on Fire excellent as scenes move along as a nice pace. Lam is
more interested in showing his audience the relationship between the
characters. There are plenty of action set pieces that are always exciting as
Ringo Lam builds tension up to a fever pitch. Teddy Robin Kwan’s unforgettable
jazzy score the features prominently a saxophone and electric piano weeps in
the background that lends itself flawlessly to Lam’s Vision. City on Fire came
at the beginning of the Heroic Bloodshed genre and Lam injects fresh ideas into
the formula without ever becoming to stale something that plagues many films
the came later near the end of this genre’s popularity.
City on Fire Winnifred Louis
DVD Monsters and Critics [Andy McKeague]
Future Movies [Matt McAllister]
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest)
A Better Tomorrow (Peter A. Martin)
Apollo Movie Guide [Ryan Cracknell]
TRIANGLE (Tit Samgok) C+ 78
Hong Kong China (100 mi) 2007 ‘Scope co-directors: Ringo Lam and Johnny To
A trilogy of Hong Kong directors (Tsui
Hark, Ringo Lam, and Johnny To) contribute to a single storyline that
unfortunately feels overly convoluted from the outset, like it’s offering more
than it can handle, and remains indifferent and nearly incomprehensible
throughout. There is no break between
the sequences, with separate writers for each director and one editor and
cinematographer throughout, but the focus of the story changes with each
passing of the baton. Tsui Hark opens
the film in an adrenaline rush where three near cartoonish characters
commiserate over their money woes and are easily lured into a get rich quick
scheme to cover their debts, where the police and the underground mafia seem to
infiltrate their every move. With this
set up, it’s always hard to distinguish who the players are or tell the good
from the bad, as it’s all a blur. While
Tsui establishes a dark, menacing mood that foreshadows a completely immoral
universe, the characters are never fleshed out and feel like a bunch of
bumbling idiots who have gotten themselves in over their heads in some
lamebrained heist that goes awry.
Ringo Lam shifts the attention to a
deeply troubled couple, where the wife Ling (Kelly Lin) suspects her introverted
and supposedly impotent husband Lee Bo Sam (Simon Yam) of foul play, of trying
to poison her after possibly killing his first wife, but she’s excessively
paranoid to the point of being delusional, claiming she’s pregnant as she
slinks under the protection of boyfriend police officer Wen (Lam Ka Tung),
forming another triangle. In keeping
with the film’s double-crossing motif, characters switch sides with the
ferocity of whiplash, as the cop nails the husband red-handed with the loot,
but as the husband is a former race car driver, he soon turns the tables and
through daredevil driving techniques quickly has the cop in handcuffs, luring
his wife to the scene, an abandoned warehouse where she immediately swears her
allegiance to her husband. In perhaps
the most peculiar moment in the movie, out in the middle of nowhere he
mysteriously plays an LP record, which turns into an exotic dance between the
husband and wife, both armed to the teeth, in what appears to be a dance of
death, as her face switches to that of his previous wife who actually died in a
horrific car crash. The question
remains: which one is going to die? But rather than turn on one another, as is
assumed, they are quickly hoodwinked by another corrupt cop, who himself is
soon the object of an underworld manhunt.
By the time Johnny To arrives on the
scene, the film starts to resemble a farce, as the entire cast is brought
together in pursuit of the loot, which is wrapped in newspaper like THE MALTESE
FALCON (1941), then carried around in a non-descript, white plastic bag. To choreographs several all-important shoot
out scenes, one at a local bar where the lights continually go on and off,
where several white plastic bags are inexplicably exchanged in the chaos, where
our thieves try to make a run for it but are trapped by a crazed amphetamine
pill-popping man (Suet Lam) who flattens all four of their getaway car tires,
luring everyone into a vacant field where all the principles meet followed
mysteriously afterwards by a traffic cop on a bicycle (Yong You) who somehow
feels its his obligation to bring order into this chaotic universe, as all hell
breaks loose in a blaze of gunfire. To
turns this anarchy into a bloodless ballet of shots in the dark and bodies
falling in the high grass one by one, all with a great deal of ironic humor,
with the original thieves outmaneuvered and left to observe empty-handed on the
sidelines like a disillusioned Greek chorus, completely indifferent to who wins
or loses, as it’s all the same to them, as they’re inevitably losers. While the sleek look of the film is always
beautifully shot by Siu-keung Cheng, from the opening scenes in the rain filled
with shadows and solitary images of emptiness and vacuousness, to a murky
atmosphere of unresolved romantic tension mixed against the impending threat of
underworld connections, to a few unusual Johnny To set pieces. But overall, it lacks depth and never rises
above a standard entertainment piece of
Time
Out London (Trevor Johnston) review
[2/6]
Okay,
In the event, aficionados will peg that Hark’s staccato rhythms make a complex
set-up even more opaque, Lam’s surprisingly restrained mid-section restores an
even keel (though there’s a bit of hairy stunt-driving too) and To’s climactic
showdown blends wry humour and poised compositions, while lagging short of his
best work. Little of it however, is genuinely striking enough to suggest a
welcome reception beyond the already converted.
NewCity
Chicago Ray Pride
A gangster film “exquisite corpse” from three leading veteran
directors of Hong Kong action movies, “Triangle” (Tie San Jiao, 2007) is
directed in a “tag team” style by Tsui Hark (”Once Upon A Time in China”),
Ringo Lam (”City on Fire”) and Johnnie To (”Election,” “Triad Election”), who
together concocted the story of three down-on-their-luck drinking buddies who
go on a get-rich quest for a lost treasure. To sets the theme of the movie
well: “What price do you pay for your desire and obsession?” Like the best of
the trio’s work, “Triangle” is a visual delight from its first fog-shrouded
images of gleaming
The Screengrab Mike D’Angelo
Not to be outdone by a
piker like myself,
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ignatius Vishnevetsky
Ringo Lam, Johnnie To and Tsui Hark decided to play
a game of exquisite corpse. It's one of those great auteurist experiments. From
a production standpoint, TRIANGLE is a "Johnnie To movie": made
through his company, Milkyway Image, starring his regular actors (Simon Yam,
Louis Koo, and Kelly Lin), shot by his cinematographer, Siu-keung Cheng, and
cut together by his regular editor, David M. Richardson (those who believe the
quality of a film's editing depends on the editor should look no further than
Richardson's resume; the man who works on the brilliant editing of To's films
is the same one who edits Uwe Boll's movies). The plan: Hark will begin a
story—a heist gone wrong—which Lam and then To will continue. Hark's episode is
full of clever conceits and twists; Lam jettisons the heist in favor of its results:
the loot and fear, both equally dangerous. So if Hark imprisons the characters
and Lam shows us how they imprison themselves, it's up to To, then, to set them
free. For To, the essence of a person, maybe their soul, is visible in what
they choose to do when compelled to do nothing, in the choice they make when
they can just run away or betray. It's no surprise that, like James Gray's WE
OWN THE NIGHT, it all ends in reeds and fog. It's the sort of emotional
wilderness that brings To closer to André Téchiné than either of his two
co-directors here. (2007, 93 min, 35mm)
Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) capsule review [3.5/5] Melbourne International Film festival
The point of interest
behind this Hong Kong heist film is that it was made in three different parts,
by three different directors and production teams, with each part continuing
from where the previous part had left of. Tsui Hark sets the story off with his
trademark frenetic and often bewildering style where the audience has to keep
up with him in order to follow what is going on. However Hark nicely sets the
scene of desperate men planning to steal a mysterious artefact, a cop who is
sleeping with the wife of one of the men and a trio of impatient Triads who are
waiting in the wings. Ringo Lam then continues the story in the most
sophisticated section of the film where he sets up a complex web of torn
loyalties, betrayals, double crosses and secret agendas. Finally Johnny To
finishes things off by stylishly bringing a degree of farce and fun absurdity
into the proceedings. The divides between the three sections are not marked but
anybody familiar with the three directors should be able to spot the divisions.
Triangle would have perhaps been more successful if either all three
parts remained consistent with each other or if they all radically differed.
Instead, Hark and Lam’s segments are very close to each other in style and tone
while To takes the film off onto a completely different tangent. What To does
would have been highly entertaining in its own right but in this case it is
slightly frustrating that To’s chose to deviate so much away from the
groundwork laid out by Hark and Lam.
User comments from imdb Author: Simon Booth from UK
A novel idea, originating in Tsui Hark
I believe, to make a film based on the old game of incremental story-telling,
passing the baton between 3 of Hong Kong's (once) top directors (they should
have swapped Johnnie To for John Woo and called it "The Victims of
Jean-Claude Van-Damme Rehabilitation Project"). The result is, sadly,
almost as incoherent as a nay-sayer might expect it to be.
The first third of the film (Tsui) is kind of scatter-shot, throwing ideas out
there for the other directors to pick up on, centred around a heist movie setup
with 3 main protagonists (Simon Yam, Louis Koo and Sun Hong-Lei) - setting up a
triangle that clearly hints where he really wants the movie to go. This section
does suffer from that amphetamine-high lack of focus that sometimes afflicts
Tsui Hark when he has too many ideas for a movie, and can't decide which ones
are really important.
Ringo Lam takes over just before 30 minutes in, and the mood shifts - he
evidently wants to create a psychological horror instead of a crime movie, and
shifts the focus more to the characters played by Kelly Lin and Gordon Lam.
This part is eerie and oblique, a little surreal at times but much more
focused.
Then Johnnie To comes in for the final act, and decides that the film should
really be... a farce! Perhaps it's his way of commenting on the baby he has
been left holding. Every character that's been introduced so far is brought
back into play, along with a couple of new ones (notably Lam Suet), and the
plot plays itself out in an elaborate comedy of errors hinged upon a series of
entirely implausible coincidences. The finale is a gun battle vaguely
reminiscent of those in THE MISSION or EXODUS, but with a more comical coating.
It's a bit Shakespearean, but falls short of The Bard's wit.
The shifting of tones, and the diverting focus of the narrative, is exactly the
sort of problem you'd expect a movie with three directors and three
script-writing teams to have. Perhaps that was the point, and each director
deliberately took the movie into their own favourite territory when they took
the reins. I guess that's how it usually happens when people play the game
amongst themselves (I forget the name of it, never really saw the appeal), but
they perhaps failed to factor in that the game is more fun for the people
playing it than for somebody who simply gets handed the end result. The
production process may be interesting to talk or think about, but probably
makes for a less enjoyable film than a more conventional collaboration would
have.
I did enjoy Ringo Lam's section though - hopefully it's a sign he's going to be
doing more work in
User comments from imdb Author: K2nsl3r from Finland
Fear not: the juicy premise of putting three masters of HK
violent cinema in one movie delivers one of the most entertaining action movies
of 2007.
The film is a palpable thrill-ride, with an air of unmistakable cool and sheer
brassiness of style. With scarcely time to slow-down, the silly and initially
confusing but heavily entertaining and ultimately straightforward plot runs
through a hundred twists and turns on its way to the seat-gripping finale that
is the last third of the film.
The three segments directed by Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnny To (apparently
in that order, although it was not indicated in the film) are distinct in style
and mannerism, but near-seamlessly integrated into a single experience. Not
only did they use three directors, they also used multiple script-writers. Do
not expect any section-markers here, though: it is not three stories, but one
story told in three consecutively more elaborate segments which represent the
vision and prowess of one director each - without, however, appearing
needlessly patched-together or unfocused. So, to compare this to that other
Asian 3-in-1 package, the excellent Three Extremes (with Takashi Miike, Fruit
Chan and Park Chan-Wook), is to miss the point. Here we are dealing with a
unitary experience, one not divisible by three.
Fans of each director will find much to comment on the stylistic differences
between each section. Best known perhaps for his kung-fu productions (at least
in the West), the multi-talented Tsui Hark delivers a cool, crafty ambiance in
his piece. Ringo Lam, a long-line police action-drama director, likewise
carries the torch with a surprisingly mellow and tactful show-of-hands. It is
really the last segment of the film, under the steady hand of the
miracle-worker Johnny To - the brilliant director of gems such as Election I
& II and Exiled - that really puts this work in the category of must-see
cinema. It would be impossible to describe just what makes the last act so good
without giving something away, but suffice to say the success lies in its mixture
of suspense, action and black humour in a dazzling tour-de-force. And yet, To's
section makes sense only in the context of the whole; it would not be possible
to appreciate the finale without going through the first and second acts. The
third act is the charm, but only because the first two acts lead to it and
suggest it with force and clarity. By its combination of three geniuses, the
impeccable thrill of the film gets multiplied by three, making the end result
something greater than the sum of its parts.
The actors are adequate and the chemistry between them works well. This is not
an especially 'deep' thinking-man's movie by any stretch -
character-development especially is among the real weaknesses of this movie -
but for what it's worth, the characters deliver their lines and express their
emotional range quite convincingly (with a few notable exceptions). The
fraternal chemistry between the main characters saves much of the hapless
script. But really, this film is about action, violence, crime, morality and
love - the stuff of entertainment. Maybe not serious or tight enough for some,
the over-the-top story proves highly entertaining as a backdrop for the stylish
visual work emanating from the three great directors.
I'm willing to forgive this movie its obvious shortcomings: its unexplained
plot-ends and side-tracks, its focus on action and shine over drama and
substance, its use of three writers in the seemingly impossible task of writing
a single storyline. Bottomline: It works! Sometimes heckling about details
seems petty when what is iffy in ideation is saved in execution. Minor script
is turned into a major movie.
Absolute entertainment, with a touch - or two, or three - of genius.
Cinematical James Rocchi
Triangle is hard to explain -- you could call it the
Hark, Lam and To have all made great
Triangle isn't about pure action, though; Sam, Fai and Mok aren't
kineticized supermen, just regular guys. As in most good heist films, Triangle
focuses more on the crew and less on the score; When the great whatsit goes
missing, Fai quizzes Mok about how well they really know Sam. Mok's
matter-of-fact: He doesn't really know Sam. "I don't know you all that
well, either; sometimes, I don't even know myself." There's a little bit
of clumsy storytelling about the resolution of the love triangle between Sam,
Ling and Wen -- apparently, getting bounced off the grill of a four-door sedan
at high speed is a cure for marital discord -- but it's nothing like the
muddled misogyny of many Hong Kong action films, where women are either set
dressing or entirely irrelevant. The leads are for the most part terrific --
Koo's Fai is a bit too broad, but Lam and Lei get to put a few shades onto
their characters. And there's more than a few laughs in Triangle, too -
from a runaway score to an ecstasy-addled tire salesman with a unique business
model. Triangle wouldn't be a good film to show an initiate to
Twitch (Todd Brown) review at Cannes
Triangle (Tsui Hark / Ringo Lam / Johnnie To, 2007) Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at Mubi, August 14, 2009
Twitch ("The Visitor") review 2-disc Hong Kong Edition DVD, also seen here: The Storyboard Guo Shao-hua
Electric Sheep Magazine Joey Leung
Critic After Dark Noel Vera
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
hoopla.nu Stuart Wilson
TRIANGLE Facets Multi Media
DVDBeaver dvd review Pat Pilon
Johnny To bio Andrew Grossman from Senses of Cinema, January 2001
Tsui Hark bio Grady Hendrix from Senses of Cinema, June 2003
Ringo Lam bio Hong Kong Film
Lambert, David
BEYOND THE WALLS (Hors Les Murs)
Belgium Canada France (98 mi) 2012
Beyond The Walls Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily
Charting the rise and fall of a love affair from giddy beginnings to
rueful afterglow, Beyond The Walls (Hors
Les Murs) marks an accomplished first feature from writer/ director David
Lambert. An intriguing storyline, confident execution and charismatic
performances from the lead actors carry the film through some unexpected plot
developments that push it towards more stereotypically anguished gay movie
romances. The first half comes closer to the tone of Andrew Haigh’s award
winning Weekend and might give the film a shot at a similar
audience. Further Festival appearances and interest from specialist gay
distributors seems guaranteed.
Beyond The Walls begins in similar fashion to Weekend with the consequences of a drunken evening where Paulo (Matila Malliarakis) has caught the twinkling eye of bartender Ilir (Guillaume Gouix) who winds up carrying him home over his shoulder and giving him a bed for the night. Ilir avoids temptation but there is an obvious spark of attraction and they see each other again. Once Paulo’s suspicious girlfriend has dumped him he boldly arrives at Ilir’s flat with all his worldly goods.
Malliarakis’s Paulo is all Bambi-eyes and puppy dog devotion as he clings to Ilir like a lifesaver in stormy seas. Initially, the character is as endearing as he is annoying. The older Ilir is more guarded and wary of turning a few lighthearted encounters into something more meaningful. Over the course of the film events conspire to reverse their early roles with Paulo emerging as the stronger of the duo and Ilir the more needy.
The first half of the film is easily the most charming. The two actors make a cute couple and there is a good deal of relaxed humour and warmth in the screenplay as the characters open up to each other and a relationship develops. Shopping for supplies in a sex shop or belligerently demanding condoms from a corner shop are amongst the funniest moments in the film.
The second half is more melodramatic and downbeat with events placing the relationship under unbearable pressure. Lambert is economical in the way he prunes back the narrative, dispensing with the need for lengthy explanations of what happens to Ilir and how this changes his life and his easygoing manner. It tells us just what we need to know to keep the focus on the ebb and flow of the ties that bind the central couple.
Lambert’s greatest talent may lie in creating characters that we care about and developing a film that brings a few fresh twists to an old familiar tale of whether love can conquer every obstacle in its path. On that basis, Beyond The Walls fulfills the promise of his previous work as a screenwriter and short filmmaker.
Domenico Laporta at Cannes from Cineuropa
When you ask David Lambert about the intention behind his first film, recently selected for the Critics' Week at the 65th Cannes Film Festival, the Belgian filmmaker simply replies that he wanted to remake The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, telling the tale of the disenchanted reunion of two lovers, who were passionately in love before a terrible event separated them. The screenplay of Beyond the Walls [trailer, film focus] follows these three phases - love, absence, reunion - in the lives of Paulo and Ilir, respectively played by Matila Malliarakis and a rising star in French cinema, the excellent Guillaume Gouix (Jimmy Rivière [trailer], Nobody Else But You [trailer]) whose phosphorescent charisma persists on screen even after the projector has been turned off.
Paulo is a young pianist who meets Ilir, an Albanian bass player. It's love at first sight for both men. From one day to the next, Paulo leaves his fiancée to move in with Ilir. On the day that they promise to love each other for the rest of their lives, Ilir leaves town and doesn't return. Beyond the Walls is, in a way, a disillusioned report from a generation who has been promised that love changes the world, but who often has to decide to give it up, simply because it's too difficult being two. The issues at stake in this story are coiled up in the intimacy of a couple, at the antipodes of hedonism, but they are still universal and have nothing to do with homosexuality, which is decidedly not the theme of the film. The film could suffer from an arbitrary categorisation by an audience with little ambition, but this would be missing a one-off meeting with characters whose story immediately feels like it is very personal and precious to its author. In fact, Beyond the Walls prolongs the emotions and wounds related in the director's short film Vivre Encore un Peu..., for which he garnered attention at several international festivals in 2010.
Here is a first film with a very intelligent understanding of mise-en-scene, complemented by the dense photography of Matthieu Poirot-Delpech (With a Friend Like Harry...) and, especially, very tight editing that gives the film, at times, a very fresh elliptic rhythm. David Lambert trusts in the spectator to understand both the more obvious (what happens inside the walls, what is boiling in Ilir's wet eyes when the story ends) and the less essential (music which, at the beginning, is the interest that the two characters have in common), and he keeps these moments few to better focus on the sequences of emotion, whether the euphoria of love (a very beautiful scene of the two lovers arm wrestling), the break-up (during the visiting room scenes), or the uninhibited humour of a situation involving an unusual object bought in a sex shop, but which symbolises so many things for Paulo (sex, alienation, the impossibility of going forward without relief). Believing in life after absence shouldn't be any less profound than believing in life after death, as both are equally traumatising events in the journey of a human being. How to survive our youth's love affairs and separations is a question that Charles Trenet already posed back in 1942, and that was then central to Jacques Demy's film in 1964. David Lambert now brings it back, and each spectator who sees his film will ask: What remains of our first loves?
Beyond the Walls is a co-production between Belgium (Frakas Productions), France, and Canada, and should be out in cinemas from June 2012.
Lamorisse, Albert
WHITE MANE
France (47 mi) 1953
THE RED BALLOON
France (34 mi)
The
Dryden Theatre -- The Red Balloon and White Mane
(LE BALON ROUGE, Albert Lamorisse, France 1956, 34
min., 35mm)
In Lamorisse’s bittersweet classic for all ages, a lonely youngster (Pascal Lamorisse, son of the director) finds his ideal playmate in a frisky and lively inflated toy. Told entirely without dialogue and thrillingly filmed on location in Paris, The Red Balloon is must-see cinema. Followed by WHITE MANE (CRIN-BLANC, Albert Lamorisse, France 1953, 47 min., 35mm) In the rugged Camargue region of Provence, French cowboys hunt for wild horses, but the one they cannot tame is their leader, White Mane. Winner of the Cannes Grand Prix for short film and “one of the most beautiful films ever made” (Pauline Kael), White Mane will be shown with a new English narration soundtrack. New 35mm prints!
Program Notes
The Red Balloon & White Mane
While Albert Lamorisse is best remembered for these two fable-like short films, he began and ended his career as a documentary filmmaker. Appropriately, influential French film theorist and critic André Bazin described White Mane (1953) and The Red Balloon (1956) as “documentaries of the imagination.” The two films tell similar stories about young boys and the possibilities of friendship. On the surface, the films are quite simple. White Mane, set in the Camargue region of southern France, is about a young fisherman, and his attempts to befriend and liberate a hunted stallion. The Red Balloon, set in the Paris neighborhood of Menilmontant, is about a boy (played by the director’s son, Pascal Lamorisse) who finds a balloon that follows him everywhere.
While inherently simple, the films are also complex allegories of the human search for comfort and affection in the face of life’s difficulties. While traditionally considered children’s films, Albert Lamorisse renders the pursuit of dreams in the world around us as something meaningful and heartbreaking, and the films have endeared filmgoers of all ages. Furthermore, the films have become traditional texts for film theorists and students, prompted by André Bazin’s celebration of the films in his famous essay, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage.”
Bazin especially championed The Red Balloon because of its minimal use of editing. Bazin claimed, “The Red Balloon is a tale told in film, a pure creation of the mind, but the important things about it is that this story owes everything to the cinema precisely because, essentially, it owes nothing.” Since Lamorisse shows the balloon’s interactions clearly in the same frames as the boy without editing tricks, Bazin claims the film is “essential cinema.” With minimal editing, the film comes closer to reality, even if it is an obviously imagined one, causing the viewer to be more actively engaged in the world of the film.
In addition to the poetic narratives, the films are respected for their beautiful cinematography. White Mane, shot in black and white, is a noticeably bright film. By emphasizing the beautiful whites within the scenery, Lamorisse appropriately blinds us with the wildness of the stallion and the vast rural landscape. Soon after the release of White Mane, Lamorisse took a job as a cinematographer on an experimental color documentary about Guatemala. This experience convinced him to use color for the The Red Balloon. The switch to color allowed Lamorisse to emphasize the vibrant balloon against the dull Paris streets.
The films were great successes around the world, finding an international audience thanks in part to their minimal dialogue. In America, they were particularly popular on the educational circuit, showing for decades in public schools and on public television. Both won the Palme d’Or for short subjects at the Cannes Film Festival. Additionally, The Red Balloon, even with its minimal dialogue, won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, making it the shortest film ever to win this distinction.
A former photographer, Lamorisse turned to directing short subjects in the late 1940s, soon acquiring an international reputation for the poetic quality of his short and medium-length films. By the 1960s, he started making complex travelogue documentaries. Frustrated with the vibrations that accompanied shooting from a helicopter, Lamorisse was instrumental in the development of “Hellavision,” a camera mount built especially for helicopter shoots. Sadly, in 1970, while shooting a commissioned piece on Iran, he died in a helicopter crash.
~John Klacsmann and Alice Moscoso, L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
Lancaster
Lancaster, Burt essay by Gerald Peary, April 2000
It would be lovely to affirm that the wonderful actor Burt Lancaster was actually the gracious artist-performer we probably imagine him to have been, someone who, because he didn't break into movies until he was 32, listened obediently to his directors and passed on to the less experienced on the sets his craft and wisdom.
Such a scenario did happen occasionally, as on the Scottish set
of Local Hero (1983), where Lancaster and filmmaker Bill Forsythe clicked, and
where the American star, available to every minion in the cast, entertained
with glorious
He bullied and disrespected even his best directors - John
Frankenheimer for The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Louis Malle for
Born in 1913 in the slums of New York, Lancaster remained as
scrappy and venomous as his powerful Irish-American mother had been, forever an
alienated, paranoid outsider in LA whose best (and only?) actor friend was the
ex-Bronx Jew, Tony Curtis, and whose most meaningful love affair in Hollywood
was with another Eastern-based Jew, Shelley Winters. His closest pal by far was
a high-school chum,
The press for decades liked to write of the off-screen friendship between Lancaster and his frequent co-star, Kirk Douglas, but Buford's book makes clear that it was Douglas alone who was desperate to make their amity real, that he was jealous of Lancaster, that he wanted to be Lancaster.
And
He'd wanted to play
Is it reasonable to say that
Not every
The photo on the back of the bio is from The Swimmer, Lancaster bare-assed about to make the plunge.
Shame on the publisher Knopf for not identifying the picture,
because it looks like a clandestine snapshot from
For an honestly gay, Knopf-published show-biz saga, there's
Arthur Laurents' spill-the-seed autobiography, Original Story - A Memoir of
Broadway and
Landesman, Peter
CONCUSSION B- 81
USA Great Britian Australia (123 mi) 2015 ‘Scope Official site
A tragic and ultimately heartbreaking story about the profound effects of football-related brain trauma, where professional athletes are reduced to inexplicable shells of themselves, literally becoming different people inhabiting their same bodies with no control over their actions, succumbed by constant headaches, psychological torment and such mind-numbing pain that they can no longer sleep or think straight, many resorting to suicide as the only way out. While this is in every sense a Hollywood movie, complete with an accompanying inner story romance, it’s tone throughout is downbeat and somber, reflective of the post 9/11 era in which it is set, basically following the life of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born pathologist and forensic neuropathologist whose specialty is the study of the human brain, who at the time was assigned to the Allegheny County coroner’s office in Pittsburgh where his job was examining the dead bodies in the morgue. However, before we meet him, there’s a fascinating introduction where David Morse plays Hall of Famer “Iron” Mike Webster in his final days, arguably the greatest center in the history of professional football, the man who anchored the offensive line in a spectacular run of winning 4 Super Bowls for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1970’s, but he’s seen homeless, psychologically damaged, unintelligible, destitute, and literally out of his mind, living in an old beat-up truck on the outskirts of a vacant lot next to a steel plant. The extent of his fall from grace is astonishing to anyone that knew him, as his anguishing pain was constant and insufferable, subjecting himself to relentless electric shock from a Taser gun, rendering himself unconscious just to fall asleep, and eventually dying of a reported heart attack at the age of 50. This brief interlude sets the tone for the film, horrifying to say the least from a Hall of Fame legend, unimaginable, and equally unforgettable.
Something of a cross between the hidden secrets of the tobacco industry in Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER (1999) and similar secrets hidden by the nuclear power industry in Mike Nichols’ SILKWOOD (1983), complete with unexplained conspiracy theories that are left dangling in the wind, Will Smith (with an African accent) stars as a forensic neuropathologist who discovers the first case of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), a football-related brain trauma, and challenges the NFL in his battle to reveal the truth, where he is fought at every step by a multi-billion dollar industry that prefers to cover up any scientific knowledge that would have a significant impact on the game. While it’s a case of dollars and cents, where the league is protecting their investment into the product of football, the filmmaker himself is an investigative journalist for the New York Times magazine, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and others, covering the conflicts in Rwanda, Kosovo, and Afghanistan/Pakistan after 9/11. The film is based on an extensive magazine piece, Game Brain - GQ.com, written by Jeanne Marie Laskas from GQ magazine, September 14, 2009, now enlarged into a book entitled Concussion, where she documents what happened to Mike Webster and several other former NFL football players, including Steelers offensive lineman Justin Strzelcyzk, who died in a head-on collision after leading police on a high speed car chase, and yet another Steelers offensive lineman Terry Long who died from drinking antifreeze, each a spiraling tragedy of epic proportions. It was Dr. Omalu who examined each of their brains after death, as the diagnosis can only be determined by an autopsy of the brain, so it’s only after the fact that the extent of this deteriorating brain condition is realized, that repeated blows to the head can have drastic effects to the brain, associated with depression, early-onset dementia, aggressive behavior and suicide. Over time, as more NFL players die, the results will be even more pervasive as other names are added to the list, such as Andre Waters, who had a reputation as one of the NFL’s hardest hitting defenders as a safety from the Philadelphia Eagles defensive backfield, but eventually took his own life with a gunshot to the head, or Dave Duerson, another heavy hitting safety from the Chicago Bears who died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the chest.
While the results are devastating, the film itself gets carried away with a Hollywood good and evil scenario, seen almost exclusively through Dr. Omalu’s point of view, with Will Smith playing a Nigerian émigré who dreamed of coming to America as a young boy, who desperately wants to be accepted in America, a tireless worker who holds eight advanced degrees and board certifications, whose hours of work are so extensive that he has little time for anything else, though he’s a dedicated Catholic, where his church priest assigns him the role of shepherding a newly arrived medical student from Kenya, Gugu Mbatha-Raw from Beyond the Lights (2014) as Prema, where his early success parallels their growing love affair, ultimately getting engaged and married, becoming his most steadfast supporter. Like Sidney Poitier in GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (1967), their moral character has to be above reproach, where Hollywood presents them as saints, where their level of decency is stupifying, though it’s clear one of the reasons his research is initially received with such skepticism is that he’s an African without American citizenship, so it’s easy to belittle his findings. In the coroner’s office, his supervisor is so offended by the invasive procedures performed on Pittsburgh Steeler greats after death that he refuses to authorize them, forcing the doctor to pay for more scientific results himself, which includes specialized tissue analysis outside the norm, as the brain shows no signs of damage during an autopsy. This thread of xenophobia and American inequality interestingly runs throughout this picture, as Omalu’s naiveté is a stark contrast to the cynicism and outright racism that greets him, where even after publishing his findings in a medical journal, he is met with a formidable amount of character assassination and utter disdain, as the NFL initially smears his medical findings. The lone ally in the room is the man that runs the coroner’s office, Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks), a noted forensic consultant in legal cases, and the mentor who trained Omalu as a forensic pathologist, and through him Omalu meets Dr. Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin), a former team doctor for the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the first NFL representatives to believe his medical findings, offering credibility from someone within the sport, becoming a major turning point in Omalu’s effort to get the NFL, and the world, to notice.
While it is portrayed as a David versus Goliath
confrontation, where a $12 billion dollar giant corporation with unlimited
monetary resources tries to suppress Omalu’s findings, where the NFL won’t even
allow him in the room to discuss the matter, turning instead to Dr. Baines “as
one of their own,” where the initial findings are met with open suspicion,
anger, and even intimidation, which leads to the most incredulous Hollywood
insinuations, easily the least effective part of the film, becoming a study of
growing paranoia as there is some suggestion that the NFL uses its influence to
call in the FBI to raid Dr. Wecht’s office, going through his files, removing
sensitive equipment, where Omalu concludes, “You are attacking him to get to
me!” The problem is the FBI did, in
fact, raid Wecht’s office, but it came three months “before” Omalu published
any of his research, so this is the kind of movie hysteria that diminishes
Hollywood’s own influence and credibility, resorting to foolishness and utter
nonsense instead of presenting what actually happened, which undermines the
effectiveness of the picture. Even
worse, there are insinuations that Omalu’s pregnant wife is being followed, as
we see her being tailed by an anonymous car, amping up the fear factor as she
attempts to get away, losing her unborn baby in the process. While there is an exaggerated portrayal of a
lurking presence of evil, suggesting the NFL is behind it all, this is
Hollywood overkill. The blatant NFL
crimes are obvious enough, as they were slow to recognize how seriously
concussions and repeated blows to the head can effect one’s brain, where
initially as an industry they lied and covered up. Despite the absurd doublespeak of NFL commissioner
Roger Goodell as he speaks under oath before an investigatory Congressional
committee studying how concussions may impact the game, nine years passed after
Omalu’s initial publishing before the NFL recognized the merit of his findings. There are still any number of football
spokespersons that continue to underestimate the impact, but it’s hard to
refute the evidence that the game of football has on the human brain, even at
the sub-concussion level, though at least the league is much more focused on
concussion protocol (Concussion
- NFL Players Association) in today’s game, as are all sports in
general, which includes an independent evaluation from doctors who are not
connected to the league. While
high-priced quarterbacks that earn big salaries can afford to voluntarily
remove themselves from the game after taking big hits, which is the ideal goal
of today’s game, many of the more borderline players can’t, as their earnings
are far more suspect, so they’re not so willing to voluntarily pull themselves
out of a game. As a result, there are
official spotters (ATC
Spotters | NFL Football Operations) on the sidelines of today’s NFL
games whose job is to observe player behavior and pull out players suspected of
taking voracious hits to the head and subjecting them to a concussion
protocol. While the system is imperfect,
where they obviously miss incidents observing from the press box, at least the
league’s rules are developing with more interest in player safety.
'Concussion,' by Jeanne Marie Laskas - SFGate Jay Jennings from The SF Gate, November 25, 2015
When a book states on the cover that it’s soon to be a major motion picture, it doesn’t usually mean this soon. The film of the book “Concussion,” by Jeanne Marie Laskas, will be in theaters on Christmas Day, with an A-list cast of Will Smith, Alec Baldwin and Albert Brooks and produced by Ridley Scott, only one month after the book’s publication date. The proximity of the release makes it almost impossible to discuss the book without mentioning the movie and its Oscar expectations, as Smith tries on a thick accent in playing Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist credited with discovering (and naming) chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Omalu, a native of Nigeria who worked in the Pittsburgh medical examiner’s office, first discerned evidence of the brain disease similar to Alzheimer’s in Mike Webster, the Steelers’ center and Pro Football Hall of Famer, and deduced that the onset was owing to the thousands of concussive hits he suffered in his pro career. The unspooling of that information (from the examination of Webster’s brain and those of other pro football players) shined intense scrutiny on the questionable science of the National Football League’s own concussion committee and led to lawsuits, congressional hearings and concussion-research rivalry and competition.
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because the subject was covered thoroughly in “League of Denial,” the excellent and award-winning investigative book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fairnaru, who also have had their book optioned for feature film treatment after already cooperating with PBS’ “Frontline” on a documentary. Laskas thanks the journalists for the “comprehensive, encyclopedic account” of their “extraordinary book” and also thanks Smith for “bringing Bennet to life on-screen with such dignity and grace.”
Fleshed out from an 8,700-word profile of Omalu in GQ magazine in 2009, “Concussion” tells the story from Omalu’s point of view — his upbringing, his medical training, his discovery of CTE, the attacks on his credibility by the league’s doctors, his engagement and marriage.
By her account, she spent years interviewing him and his family, also gathering and excerpting “long passages of introspection” that he wrote and conducting “hundreds” of other interviews with “key players” in the story. Her charge, for the magazine and the book, was to “dramatize a subject that had already been expertly covered by journalists who’d done the heavy lifting of investigative reporting before me.”
If it seems that I’m dwelling too much on the information provided in the acknowledgments at the end, which I read after the main text, it’s because the book had me frequently asking, as a journalist myself, somewhat queasily, “How did she know that?” Whole scenes where she was not present are re-created down to the pleasantries (“‘Nice to meet you, sir,’ Bennet says. ... ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Davies says”) and micro movements (“Bennet leaned forward, picked a speck of lint off his sleeve”) so that often the book reads as if it were intended to be a screenplay. The author’s headlong style, full of sentence fragments, exclamation points and italics, only contributes to that feeling.
While I don’t doubt the rigor of her own investigations and while she does a winning job of deepening the character of Omalu, the liberties taken in the narration, the hybrid nature of the book (she says the two will “divvy” up any profits, though he didn’t have any editorial control), the rehashing of an issue covered so authoritatively only two years before, and the inevitable muddling of fact and fiction to come in the “based on a true story” film have, to my mind, cast a hazy pall over the book itself.
I thought “League of Denial” was plenty dramatic already, with none of the questions I had about “Concussion” hanging over it, and for those who want both a satisfying read and a comprehensive journalistic exploration of the subject, I would recommend starting with the former. No doubt the high-profile film is going to bring to a much wider public the concussion discussion in football in general, beyond that in the NFL, in a way that may have a profound effect on both participants and spectators, from youth programs to the pros.
So what does “Concussion” give us that we don’t get from the earlier treatment? Bennet Omalu is a compelling and appealing man; naive, eccentric, and highly intelligent; aware of his own weaknesses but often in thrall to them; principled and devout; relishing the freedom in America but appreciative of his homeland’s traditions and proud of his heritage. As one man’s story, it’s easy to see what drew Will Smith to it. But it’s not the whole story.
One of the few truly incendiary revelations to come out of the Sony Pictures Entertainment hacking scandal was the series of emails that suggested the company had “softened” some of the points made by the Concussion screenplay against the National Football League. According to Ken Belson of The New York Times, this was to market “the film more as a whistle-blower story, rather than a condemnation of football or the league.” Never mind that a whistle-blower story that doesn't lean on condemnation seems inherently impossible, on the evidence of what made it to the screen, the NFL unmistakably emerges as the villain in this David-versus-Goliath story, even if the entertainment machine is indeed prodded with kid gloves.
Concussion dry-wheezes out of the gate with a show of canned pathos. Before a crowded room of fans, Mike Webster (David Morse) reminisces about his time in the NFL. The speech is practically a state of the union address, and as the maudlin strings on the soundtrack make clear, his days are numbered. Indeed, Webster is soon revealed to be living out of his car, estranged from family and friends, and coping with pains that former Steelers physician Dr. Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin) seems either unable or too frightened to diagnose. Two scenes later and Webster has tasered himself to oblivion. Or, at least, to wherever Ron Howard casting calls are conducted, which is the only possible explanation for why—spoiler alert!—he reappears at film's end in spectral form, to cloyingly flatter forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu's (Will Smith) devotion to the belief that “God did not intend for us to play football.”
For a spell, the film does seem as if it's only interested in indirectly condemning the NFL. Webster is the first of many golden boys of the sport to fall throughout the film, and given the horror-movie music that scores their physical and mental despair and the serrated edge of the film's cutting, it's as if these men are succumbing less to a neurodegenerative disease, namely chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), than to some kind of rage virus. The effect is almost perversely avant-garde: to convey the horrific effects of football on the human body as sensorial impressions.
The tacky and loose means by which the platitudinous screenplay dances around what ails the football players is just one cog in a whirligig of pat representations.
Soon, though, it becomes evident that the film isn't exactly shy about taking on the NFL, only that it's contrived in its methods. The tacky and loose means by which director Peter Landesman's platitudinous screenplay dances around what ails the story's football players is just one cog in a whirligig of pat representations. The interests of the NFL, not unfairly, are likened to those of Big Tobacco, but the consumers of the sport are laughably portrayed as ravenous masses. When Justin Strzelczyk (Matt Willig) chokes his wife in front of their children before getting into his car and driving into oncoming traffic, it's as if our own bloodlust is to blame for his demise. (In real life, Strzelczyk was divorced and living away from his wife at the time of his death.)
At the center of all this thin gruel is Omalu, the first to publish findings of CTE in American football players. The Nigerian émigré is introduced inside a court room testifying as a witness on a case and, in turn, cutely establishing his bona fides for the audience. The subsequent scene, in which he drives home while sticking his hand out the window and happily soaking in the rays of the sun with Nell-like abandon, sets up the simplistic tenor with which the man is characterized. Later, as he holds up a water-filled mason jar with fruit inside so as to illustrate to his future wife, Prema (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), the effects of blunt-force trauma on the brain, one may be excused for feeling concussed by the film's almost childish sense of instruction.
Inside the rooms where Omalu performs his autopsies, this God-fearing saint of a man speaks to the corpses that lie before him, asking them to reveal to him the truth about their death. In a way, the careful means by which these autopsies are framed come to mirror the nobly proportioned ways in which Omalu stands up to the NFL. The nefarious agents of the league remain vaporous throughout, at once within the saintly Omalu's reach and just outside of it. Bennet wins, of course, but only insofar as his voice is finally heard. Just as a better film would have given fuller shape to his convictions and disillusionments, one understands, too, that a ruder man and film are needed to truly hit the football entertainment machine as hard as it deserves.
The truth about Will Smith's Concussion and Bennet Omalu. Daniel Engber from Slate, December 21, 2015
At the climactic moment of Concussion, a docudrama out Christmas Day about the young coroner in Pittsburgh who took on the NFL, the FBI turns up. Will Smith stars as Bennet Omalu, whose discovery of what seemed to be a lethal form of illness in the brains of former football players has already turned into a long and painful fight. Doctors on the NFL payroll have done a hatchet job on his reputation, even trying to make his papers disappear from scientific journals. Strangers have targeted him with death threats, and a late-night caller has yelled at him for trying to “vaginize” the nation’s most popular sport.
Then Omalu shows up at work and finds the feds going through the files of his boss and mentor, the forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht. The charges against Wecht sound trumped up—84 counts of corruption, most for ticky-tack transgressions like sending private faxes from the office—but Omalu knows what’s really going on. He’s an immigrant, a black man, a whistleblower, and suddenly an existential threat to a $12-billion industry. “You are attacking him to get to me!” he cries at the agents.
It’s the movie’s most dramatic scene and one that, taken at face value, has some terrifying implications. According to Concussion, Omalu’s work on chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, posed such a danger to established interests that it produced a cover-up of historic proportions—one that reached not just the boardrooms of the NFL but all the way into the U.S. Department of Justice. The movie tells us that the feds were in cahoots with sportocrats, as if then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue called in favors from the President to make Omalu go away.
That’s not even half true, of course. Here are the boring real-world facts: The FBI did raid Wecht’s office, but that happened three months before Omalu published any of his research on brain injuries in football. The government did indict Omalu’s boss, but for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with the NFL or CTE, nor with the Nigerian-born pathologist whom Wecht had taken under his wing. And while the movie version of Omalu swears he’ll never testify against his mentor and then is banished from his office to a different job in the Central Valley of California, the real-life Omalu did show up in court as a witness for the prosecution and even made a bid for Wecht’s job. (He didn’t get it and eventually decamped from Pittsburgh of his own accord.)
I know that railing against the inaccuracies of a Hollywood film “based on real events” is like yelling at the sky for being blue. But the exaggeration of the plot against Omalu in Concussion feeds into a pervasive myth at the center of the national discussion over football and head injuries. It turns an ugly episode in corporate denialism—the NFL’s attempt to duck the dawning science of head trauma—into a lurid fantasy of persecution. In that way, the film echoes the media panic over football: We’ve been so eager to attack the league’s pattern of deceit that we’ve fallen victim to our own error-ridden narrative.
“The movie is emotionally and spiritually accurate all the way through,” Concussion’s writer-director Peter Landesman told the New York Times on Wednesday, in response to griping from another source—the son of former defensive back and suicide victim Dave Duerson, who appeared as a villain in the film.* But Landesman’s loosey-goosey docudrama standards are exactly the problem. When Omalu’s character says, at one point in the film, that “God did not intend for us to play football” and later warns that as long as we do, “men will continue to die,” he’s appealing not to fact-based objective truth but to an alternate reality—an emotional, spiritual one—that has come to dominate the enlightened person’s understanding of the NFL.
Are we actually watching players kill themselves before our eyes? No, not on average: A 2012 study of several thousand NFL retirees, conducted by researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, found that the former football players lived significantly longer than race- and age-matched controls. They were much less likely to die from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, accidental falls, or homicides than anybody else. That doesn’t mean that taking hits improved their health, of course; surely the opposite is true. But still this study gave the lie to a fundamental intuition about football and one that’s touted almost everywhere. There’s zero evidence that playing professional football shortens lives on average. Those are the facts. Take ’em or leave ’em.
This is the best study that we have on NFL players and mortality, yet its findings never seem to enter public consciousness. The simple truth, that former players aren’t dying—that in lots of ways they’re much healthier than you or me—smacks against the screen-ready version of history, in which a team of underdog physicians, led by heroes like Bennet Omalu, risked their livelihoods to expose a hidden slaughter.
“Look, at this point we know how dangerous football is,” said correspondent Jonathan Mahler in recent video for the Times. “Anyone who continues to believe that professional football players aren’t potentially shortening their lifespan by playing this game is living on another planet.” Even former football players have bought into the caricature of football as a deadly sport. At a recent screening of Concussion, former linebacker Keith McCants burst into sobs. “If we knew that we were killing people,” he said after the movie, “I would have never put on the jersey.”
Here’s a more sedate and honest formulation: Omalu really did discover an unusual pathology in the brains of former NFL players, and the NFL’s corrupt administration really did attempt to discredit his research and then for half a decade ignored this important line of inquiry (only caving under congressional scrutiny). But these facts have been spun out, in this film and elsewhere, into a melodrama wherein Omalu’s deadly brain pathology drives football players crazy and destroys their minds. Eventually it leads to suicide.
Perhaps. The fact that football players live longer lives, on average, doesn’t mean they aren’t also subject to an epidemic of suicide. After all, only a fraction of chronic smokers end up dying from lung cancer, but they’re still 23 times more likely than nonsmokers to get the disease. But is football really causing suicide? Again, there’s zero evidence to support the claim. According to the NIOSH study from 2012, ex-players are much less likely to kill themselves than men of the same race and age.
That hasn’t stopped the media machine, which seems inclined to tie every former athlete’s suicide to game-related damage to his brain. Omalu himself has been among the strongest proponents of this idea. And in Concussion, his character makes the link explicit: In explaining the death of another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, Omalu says, “Football gave him CTE, and CTE told his brain to drink a gallon of antifreeze.” The film also tells the stories of several other players who killed themselves in recent years: Andre Waters, who shot himself in the head in 2006; Dave Duerson, who shot himself in the chest five years after that; and Junior Seau, who did the same as Duerson in 2012. And it also strongly (and misleadingly) implies that two other players’ deaths were quasi-suicides: that of Justin Strzelczyk, who perished in a car accident as he sped away from the police in 2004; and that of Mike Webster, the patient zero for football-related CTE, who died of a heart attack in 2002.
It’s Webster’s death that serves to launch the plot of Concussion, with some embellishment. In real life, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Hall of Fame center ended up homeless, drug-addicted, confused, and so beset by chronic back pain that he could hardly sleep. At one point he grew so desperate for some rest that he bought a stun gun so he could zap his leg to knock himself unconscious. But according to the film, those self-administered shocks may have been the cause of death. Concussion shows Webster on the autopsy table right after getting zapped—a suicide by Taser.
Maybe that’s the emotional truth, as Landesman would have it: Webster may not have really killed himself, but the head-trauma–induced downward spiral of his life surely amounted to a suicide in slow motion. The real-world facts are much more complicated, however. Webster was depressed, divorced, a former steroid user, hooked on painkillers and Ritalin. And according to League of Denial, the best and most complete account of football’s concussion crisis, Webster’s risk factors for collapse were legion. A victim of ghastly child abuse with two alcoholic parents, he had mental illness running through both sides of his family. His uncle killed himself. His mother had a nervous breakdown. All four of his siblings were bipolar; one attempted suicide several times; another ended up in prison.
The same sad backstories could be told of the other football suicides shown in the film. Long had tried to kill himself before he drank the antifreeze, going back to when he was still an active player. He was also a steroid user, separated from his wife, and in the lead-up to his death he both filed for bankruptcy and came under indictment on federal charges of mail fraud and arson. Waters suffered from chronic pain in every part of his body and had been involved in a four-year battle for custody of his daughter. He was terribly depressed. Duerson had also split from his wife and lost most of his money in a horrendous business deal; not long before his suicide, he was passed over for a job. Strzelczyk was a heavy drinker and a drug user who heard voices in his head. Seau was an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler, and divorced; he’d also tried to kill himself before.
One might reasonably conclude that all these men were at a tragic, elevated risk of suicide and mental illness, brain damage notwithstanding. Or one might conclude the opposite—that these men would have been just fine if CTE hadn’t pushed them to these depths; one might speculate that the marital problems and drug addictions and other personal tragedies were a function of phosphorylated tau proteins in their brains. According to the story of Concussion, and the one promoted by Omalu and his peers, that’s exactly what occurred. If CTE doesn’t lead to suicide directly, then it causes lots of things that themselves can lead to suicide: drug abuse and gambling; violent mood swings and depression; dementia and psychosis.
Is there any truth, though, to that idea—objective as opposed to spiritual? In the fall of 2008, researchers at the University of Michigan ran a survey of about 1,000 former players from the NFL, and asked them questions about their physical and mental health. About 3 or 4 percent described themselves as being in the middle of a major depression—the same as in the normal population. When asked if they’d ever been diagnosed with depression, about 16 percent of the players said they had—again about the same as other people. (Among younger retirees, the rates of depression were slightly higher than expected.)
So former NFL athletes aren’t really more depressed than anyone else. What about violent mood swings? The researchers in Michigan asked the ex-players if they’d ever experienced “attacks of anger when all of a sudden [they] lost control” and became violent. About 30 percent said they had. The baseline rate for U.S. men is much higher—more than 50 percent.
More distressing was what the survey said about cognitive impairment. The researchers asked the former players if they’d ever been diagnosed with “dementia, Alzheimer’s disease or other memory-related diseases,” and about 1 in 20 said they had. That’s a prevalence six times greater than you’d find in the reference population. The NIOSH study corroborates this disturbing fact: Ex-NFL athletes turned out to be significantly more likely than their peers to die from neurodegenerative diseases.
A 4.6-percent rate of memory-related disease in the Michigan study is disastrously high. But let’s keep this number in perspective. Other injuries to former players—those that lead to chronic pain and arthritis—are about 10 times more common and could well be even more disabling. Many of us assume that it’s worse to have memory loss than it is to suffer chronic pain, but there really isn’t much evidence in support of that conclusion. In any case, however one might try to frame the numbers, it’s clear enough that cognitive impairments represent an urgent problem for retired players. But that’s not the same as saying that the game is turning players into vacant-eyed, suicidal psychopaths. It’s not the same as saying that God did not intend us to play football.
Concussion apes the great majority of press coverage of concussions in suggesting that players’ higher rates of cognitive impairment help explain ex-player deaths. It’s always the same account: The man who killed himself grew increasingly distracted and forgetful after his retirement; his cognitive impairments came in tandem with a sudden emotional decline. As Omalu might say: Football gave him CTE, and CTE turned his brain to mush. But these are just-so stories, concocted after the fact to fit the standard media narrative of head trauma.
Here’s another just-so story. It’s well-established that depression on its own produces cognitive impairment: Meta-analyses of the research literature suggest that people in the midst of a major depressive episode will flounder on tests of recall and recognition; they’re often unable to concentrate and have other deficits of the sort ascribed to Duerson, Seau, and the others. So perhaps these men grew depressed in the years after their retirement, as some people do. Maybe they also had bad luck—business deals gone awry, relationships that failed—and their depression metastasized into other mental problems. Maybe chronic pain from playing football left them hooked on opiates. Maybe they were prone to mental illness. Maybe they didn’t know how to go about getting help. And maybe all of these factors came together and pushed them to their deaths.
But there’s no room for wishy-washy doubts or alternative hypotheses in the docudrama version of the truth. For some of these men, a trip to a psychiatrist may well have been a lifesaver. But we forget that vital fact, and instead we blame an occult, incurable disease.
In truth, no one knows exactly how the brain pathology that Omalu first observed in Mike Webster’s brain relates to anyone’s experience in life. We don’t even know how many people might have the disease. According to Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at Boston University, more than 90 percent of the players’ brains that she’s examined show signs of the disease. (McKee would have made a fabulous character in Concussion, by the way, but alas her presence might have made Omalu seem less important. She and her colleagues were snipped out of the narrative, Bechdel test be damned.) “I think the incidence and prevalence have to be a lot higher than people realize,” she told Frontline, before suggesting that it’s anywhere from a minimum of 10 percent of all professional football players to a significant majority of them.
Think about what all this means. We know that football players are much less likely than other people to kill themselves, and that on average they live longer lives. We know they suffer from depression at about the normal rate. We know that they’re less prone than average men to violent mood swings. We know they’re disproportionately the victims of memory disorders but that the rate is still low in absolute terms, at less than 5 percent. And we believe that CTE affects up to 90 percent of all the men who ever played professional football.
If you look at all those facts together, you might conclude that 1) CTE is indeed a widespread epidemic among former contact-athletes but 2) its clinical effects are pretty modest, since most men who have it are not depressed or otherwise impaired. It could well be that this brain disease doesn’t have much bearing on the lived experience of its sufferers. Maybe someone could have all the signs of tau-protein pathology that Omalu found in Mike Webster’s brain and feel totally fine. In fact, we know from other studies that some degree of tau-protein build-up is a normal part of aging and that the presence of neurofibrillary tangles does not reliably predict cognitive impairment.
None of this is to say that CTE is fake or nonexistent. I’m only trying to point out that the science of the illness is still in an embryonic stage. We have no idea how many people really have it and what, exactly, “it” is. More importantly, we have only a blurry understanding of how CTE manifests in life. And until we get some answers to those questions—important work is now underway—we’re stuck with a spotty, shifting knowledge of the problem.
In the meantime, the bogus story of Concussion, the one so often parroted in the press, admits none of this uncertainty. It baits us into nutty, unsubstantiated claims. (Here’s one: Maybe Lou Gehrig didn’t really have Lou Gehrig’s disease but CTE instead.) It causes panic among athletes and their families, at every level of the sport. The fear of CTE infects the minds of men even in their final moments—think of Duerson and Seau, taking bullets in the chest, perhaps convinced they had no hope of escaping their disease. And, ultimately, it leaves the rest of us less informed than we were before.
Concussion
cares too much about hurting football's feelings | The Verge Bryan Bishop
'Concussion'
Takes on the NFL After All — But Offers ... - Village Voice Scott Tobias
Concussion,
about the NFL's CTE crisis, starring Will Smith ... - Slate Jack Hamilton, December 23, 2015
Concussion: Highlighting the perils of American football Alan Gilman from The World Socialist Web Site, January 14, 2016
NFL admits connection between concussions and degenerative brain ... Alan Gilman from The World Socialist Web Site, March 19, 2016
Ohio football
player, apparent suicide victim, complained of concussions Alan Gilman from The World Socialist Web Site, December 5, 2014
Brain damage
affects 3 in 10 former National Football League players ... Alan Gilman from The World Socialist Web Site, September 18, 2014
INFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski] also seen here: The Baconation [Steve Pulaski]
Will Smith's 'Concussion' Paints a Damning Portrait of the ... Jen Yamato from The Daily Beast
'Concussion' Review: Will Smith Scores Touchdown With ... Scott Mendelson from Forbes
Can movies like Concussion fudge facts in the name of art? Michael Miner from The Chicago Reader, December 28, 2015
Concussion: Can a Will Smith Movie Change the Way America Views Football? Teddy Cutler from Newsweek magazine, December 28, 2015
Next Projection [Derek Deskins]
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
ErikLundegaard.com [Erik Lundegaard]
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Review:
'Concussion' Starring Will Smith Struggles To Mai | The Playlist Charlie Schmidlin
Sony
Lawyers Cut Material From Will Smith's 'Concussion' To Avoid ... Sony Lawyers Cut Material From Will Smith's
'Concussion' To Avoid Potential Legal Hassles With The N.F.L. by Kevin Jagernauth from indieWIRE,
September 2, 2015
Will
Smith's new movie "Concussion" terrifies the NFL. Here's the ... -
Vox Joseph Stromberg, August
31, 2015
DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray [Luke Bonanno]
AVForums - Blu-ray [Simon Crust]
Daily Verdict (Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas]
DoBlu.com Blu-ray [Matt Paprocki]
Home Theater Info Blu-ray/DVD [Douglas MacLean]
'Concussion': Review - Screen International Tim Grierson from Screendaily
TheDivaReview.com [The Lady Miz Diva Vélez]
Concussion
· Film Review Will Smith's confidence goes ... Jesse Hassenger from The Onion A.V. Club
AwardsCircuit.com [Clayton Davis]
Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]
Concussion
Expert: Over 90% of NFL Players Have Brain Disea Sean Gregory interview with Dr.
Bennet Omalu from Time magazine,
December 22, 2015
'Concussion'
Doctor Hopes NFL Will React to Film "In Good Faith" Hilary Lewis interview with Dr. Bennet Omalu
from The Hollywood Reporter, November
6, 2015
Entertainment
Weekly [Leah Greenblatt]
'Concussion': AFI Fest Review - Hollywood Reporter Stephen Farber
'Concussion'
Review: Will Smith vs. the NFL | Variety Andrew Barker from Variety
Concussion
review – Will Smith battles NFL in hoary but well Nigel M.Smith from The Guardian
Concussion
review – American football drama makes ... - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Concussion,
film review: Will Smith gives a ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab
Irish Cinephile [Eamonn Rafferty]
South China Morning Post [Richard James Havis]
Toronto Film Scene [Andrew Parker]
Author of article on which film is based didn’t have to look far for drama Barbara Vincheri from The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, December 22, 2015
Pittsburgh attorney, forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht pleased with how 'Concussion' turned out Barbara Vincheri from The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, December 22, 2015
Movie review: 'Concussion' a hard-hitting drama Barbara Vincheri film review from The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, December 23, 2015
’Concussion’ takes few detours from reality, ex-Steelers physician says Adam Smeltz from The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Dec. 26, 2015
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
Austin Chronicle [Josh Kupecki]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Concussion Movie
Review & Film Summary (2015) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny
RogerEbert.com [Jana J. Monji] also seen here: Examiner.com [Jana J. Monji] and here: Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
New York Times [Manohla Dargis]
Dave
Duerson's Family Says 'Concussion' Film Smears Him The New York Times, December 16,
2015
Concussion (2015 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sony
Altered 'Concussion' Film to Prevent N.F.L. Protests ... Ken Belson of The New York Times, September 1, 2015, also seen here: The New York Times
Congress
Schedules 2nd Hearing About Brain Injuries in FootballDEC. 17, 2009
Concussion
Deal Is Challenged in Court as InsufficientAUG. 20, 2015
Judge
Asks for Revisions to Concussion SettlementFEB. 2, 2015
Game Brain - GQ.com Jeanne Marie Laskas from GQ magazine, September 14, 2009
UPDATE: Game Brain | GQ Jeanne Marie Laskas from GQ magazine, October 5, 2009
Offensive Play Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker, October 19, 2009
GQ
and The New Yorker: two takes on brain damage from ... Andrea Pitzer from Nieman Storyboard, October
26, 2009
Fred
McNeill: The People V. Football | GQ
Jeanne Marie Laskas from GQ magazine,
February 21, 2011
3 Ways the NFL
Denied Football's Concussion Crisis - Mother Jones Ian Gordon, October 2, 2013
Landis, John
THE BLUES BROTHERS
Qwipster's
Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
The Blues Brothers ranks among my favorite films of all time --
not the best, just a favorite. With inspiration that never remotely comes
close to ceasing, Landis' (The
Kentucky Fried Movie, An American Werewolf in
The film starts out with Jake Blues (John Belushi, Animal House) being
released from prison, picked up by his brother Elwood (Dan Aykroyd, Trading Places) in a used
cop car turned "Blues Mobile". They make good on a promise to
visit the orphanage they grew up in, only to find it is in danger of being shut
down due needing $5,000 in tax money owed. With only days to go before it
is too late, the Blues Brothers are inspired by a vision from God to save the
orphanage, which they plan to do by reuniting the band they played in.
This proves to be a tough task, as all of the members have moved on to other
occupations. Not only this, but along the way, they manage to piss off
the police, the Illinois Nazi Party, and just about everyone else they come
across in their bid to make enough money to deliver the money they need.
Exuding just the perfect amount of comic cool, Belushi and Aykroyd strut their
stuff with confidence, giving oodles of personality to the characters they
created during their stint on "Saturday Night Live" in the
1970s. The band is quite a talented cover band in their own right,
demonstrating their love for the music and attitude of blues and soul, and also
the artists responsible for the continued popularity of the genres.
Strong cameo appearances are a major strength, with some fantastic musical
numbers by James Brown (performing Gospel), Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, John
Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, and of course, The Blues Brothers themselves.
The comedy is so off-the-wall you can't help but laugh. The Blues
Brothers go on their comic odyssey in deadpan fashion, almost literally leaving
behind every stop destroyed, and yet, they seem almost oblivious to it
all. Just when you think the madcap nature of the film couldn't possibly
get any more silly, Landis ends the film with almost a half hour of the most
expensive, elaborate, and destructive chase sequences ever put on film.
Cars speed down the streets of
The Blues Brothers is far from a perfect comedy, and can be uneven in
spots, but these momentary lapses are very difficult to remember when it's all
over. By the time the credits roll, you'll most likely have added many
fond memories to add to your favorite movie-watching experiences. Easily
one of the most entertaining films of its era, The Blues Brothers is a
time capsule worthy collection, not only in irreverent comedy, but also in its
reverence for some of the best music of the 1960s and 70s. It's a
beautiful thing.
-- The Collector's Edition DVD features 18 minutes of additional material cut
from the theatrical release.
-- Followed in 1998 by a needless, and unfunny, sequel, Blues Brothers 2000.
There's something funny about the actual Blues Brothers,
Jake and Elwood. You don't even have to hear them say anything particularly
funny to laugh at the sheer sight of the wacky duo lined up against one
another, wearing the infamous clothing and sunglasses. And since their
appearance on "Saturday Night Live," and then later in their
milestone feature film, they have infiltrated society.
"The Blues Brothers" (1980) is, and will remain as far as I see it,
the funniest "SNL" skit adaptation to ever hit the big screen. The
problem with adapting characters from 5-minute skits on "Saturday Night
Live" is the fact that they are just that -- 5-minute skits -- and are not
substantial enough to merit any type of further focus. Backdrops are not needed
-- all we need are quirky characters with distinguishing traits or gestures
that will make us laugh.
"The Ladies Man," "The Coneheads," "A Night At the
Roxbury," and "Superstar" are all examples of material stretched
too far -- basically just skits multiplied by their original running length
some 15 or so times. In fact, there are really only two or three feature length
movies with "SNL" characters that are any good.
I love "Saturday Night Live," but even I have to admit that some
things are not meant to be turned into a movie. I'd rather see a compilation of
the character's best moments on the show hit the big screen as opposed to a
weak plot-driven film about them doing many unfunny things a quarter as funny
as anything on the television program.
"The Blues Brothers" has a great plot (considering it's an
"SNL" film) and a great pair of characters. Jake Blues (John Belushi)
has just been released from prison, greeted by his taller (and more slender)
brother Elwood (Dan Aykroyd). They visit the old Catholic home where they were
raised as children by "The Penguin," and are instantly thrust into a
mission to save the orphanage by raising a ton of money before it is due to
close.
How will they do this? Reunite their old band, of course! But it won't be easy,
because in the process they get entangled in the affairs of a Neo-Nazi and a
heavily armed woman (cameo by Carrie Fisher). They also get entwined in a bunch
of musical sequences with blues legends such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin,
and Ray Charles. (John Candy also stars in this film, and in John Hughes'
masterpiece "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," he did the "mess
around" to Ray Charles' song on the radio while driving an awful car.)
It's all in the name of fun, of course. Oh, and in the name of God. Quoting
Elwood, "We're on a mission from God." Not exactly a laugh-out-loud
line of dialogue, but the more you think about it, the funnier it becomes.
All my readers are probably aware of the fact that I absolutely love "Saturday
Night Live" and all its actors. (Well, most of them.) Especially the older
posse of actors such as Bill Murray,
When you become a fan of "Saturday Night Live," you enter a sort of
small group of friends you've never even met. You just somehow feel very close
to the actors and their friends. John Landis, the film's director, was one of
those close friends of Dan Aykroyd like Harold Ramis.
The Blues Brothers are two of the best characters to ever come out of
"Saturday Night Live." We've seen a lot of characters like Mango and
Mary Katharine Gallagher lately, but the best characters are the fondest --
Wayne and Garth, The Lounge Singer, The Coneheads, The Cheeseburger Guy, The
Blues Brothers. And just about any character Steve Martin plays.
I can't explain why I enjoy "Saturday Night Live" so much -- is it
the humor? the acting? the familiarity feel? -- but I can say that I DO love
it, and I love "The Blues Brothers."
Sequels can become nasty things or splendid things, and "The Blues
Brothers 2000," which reunited Aykroyd and Landis (the director), was a
failure. A compilation of musical sketches and a terribly recycled plot, it was
a sure sign that The Blues Brothers themselves worked not only because of
Elwood but also because of Jake, and "The Blues Brothers" the movie
worked not because of a recycled plot but because of an original one. (And
here's advice for the filmmakers: never, ever replace John Belushi with John
Goodman ever, ever again.)
I am sure that anyone who enjoyed "Ghostbusters" or any type
"SNL"-alumni film will absolutely adore "The Blues
Brothers." I mean, this is the stuff legends are made of. Jake and Elwood
Blues, two of the most familiar faces of all time. How can you not laugh at
this film? It's impossible. Yes, it's a bit long, and yes, you have to sit
through some blues music; but they're The Blues Brothers. What else would you
expect?
Blues Brothers Bad Boys Make Movie, by Doug Eisenstark from Jump Cut, October 1980
DVD Times D.J. Nock
Film Freak Central [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
filmcritic.com Pete Croatto
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell)
DVD Verdict [Dan Mancini] - 25th Anniversary Edition
DVD Town - 25th Anniversary Edition [John J. Puccio and Justin Cleveland]
Cinema Blend Margaret Williams
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
Lane, Penny
NUTS! B 89
USA (79 mi) 2016 Official Site
An irreverent film with such a preposterous opening message that one immediately assumes this is a mockumentary, a completely made-up documentary profile in order to garner laughs, told with a certain flair that distinguishes it from most documentaries, yet as it moves along, the profile of the central figure remains the same. Instead of being a con job, it’s actually a film about one of the more notorious con men in American history. Ironically the film was seen on the same night that Republican candidate Donald Trump accepted the convention nomination for President of the United States. At least to this viewer, the subject was one and the same, as this film documents one of the original snake oil salesmen that used his blatantly false advertising prowess to sell millions of dollars of worthless medical products over his own radio station during the height of the Depression, yet he was also one of his state’s most respected citizens, viewed as a pillar of the community. The film documents the rise and fall of Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, an American hero that constructed a fictional biographical account of his life as he rose to fame and fortune, similar to the character McTeague in Greed (1924), who got his start as an apprentice to a traveling dentist con artist named Dr. Painless Potter, eventually establishing a successful practice for himself, though he had no medical certificate. That wasn’t a problem for Brinkley, who simply falsified a diploma from the infamous Eclectic Medical University in Kansas City, allowing him to open up shop in the small, still undeveloped town of Milford, Kansas (the town was subsequently destroyed, as the grounds were flooded from the construction of a nearby dam) selling various medicines off the shelves in a dusty town of less than two hundred residents. According to the legend, a customer came into the office seeking a remedy for male impotence, with the customer claiming he was unable to have children after a decade of trying. The customer was persistent, refusing to accept that there was no medical cure, while at the same time looked out the window to see a Billy goat having sex with another goat, wondering if he could be implanted with the goat’s sexual glands. Intrigued at the prospect, the good doctor was willing to give it a try with such a willing patient by performing the first-of-its-kind surgery, with the patient pleased to report afterwards that his wife got pregnant and they were happily expecting their first child. With this success story, Brinkley built an empire by successfully promoting his own goat-testicle impotence cure.
One of the first things he did was build a radio tower in town, opening a high-powered radio station which was programmed with country music, also the first of its kind, speaking for hours each day, literally flooding the airwaves with advertisements selling his various medicinal products as home remedies for just about any ailment you could name, attracting patients from all over the globe, which helped him amass a fortune. In doing so, he helped install electricity in town, build a post office to handle the massive amount of mail sent to him, but also sidewalks, a town library, and a new sewage system, while also opening a hospital clinic to treat his patients, eventually expanding to clinics and hospitals in several states. In this manner he became viewed as a valuable and upstanding citizen, beloved by the people in Kansas, which protected him from federal agents looking to arrest him for obtaining a bogus medical license, as the governor of Kansas refused to extradite him since he brought so much money into the state. As a result, he was considered untouchable, where the broad reach of his radio show kept him in business. One of his most successful devices was issuing medical advice over the radio, where he would read listener’s medical complaints on the air and dispense recommended medicines to cure their reported ailments, opening a series of pharmacies that sold his products exclusively while also establishing a highly successful mail-order business. While there is a certain amount of archival footage that looks more like home movies, where there is footage of Brinkley and his wife playing with their young son, but also living a luxurious life of splendor as they travel the world on ocean cruises. Like The Great Gatsby (2013), he became known for hosting lavish parties, where among his clientele were William Jennings Bryant and Rudolph Valentino with a product that predates Viagra, becoming something of a state celebrity. But as there is insufficient material to make a movie, the director makes a clever choice, using animated sequences to fill in the narrative, with different animators drawing different sequences, where the change of pace is highly appealing, using a mix of archival footage with animated reenactments, interviews with historians, and a hilariously offbeat, and completely unreliable narrator (Gene Tognacci). The lead-up to his success is strikingly original, including a sequence mocking the famous goat gland cure in a Buster Keaton short, COPS (1922), where this constant shift in stylistic point of view is immensely entertaining, all told with an upbeat tone of affirmation and optimism, where Brinkley is seen as an innovator, where you almost wonder why we never heard of this guy before, as his influence and reach is astounding, making him the television evangelist of the radio era.
But the euphoric mood quickly shifts when the American Medical Association (AMA) starts targeting him, specifically Morris Fishbein, a physician who became editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, a man who built his reputation on exposing medical frauds, stripping Brinkley of his license to practice medicine in Kansas, calling him a charlatan and a quack in their medical journals. Undeterred, Brinkley moved to the state of Texas, building another radio tower, this one on the other side of the border in Mexico, creating a million-watt signal that was so strong it could still be heard in Kansas, broadcasting to the entire United States, along with 16 other countries, easily the most powerful radio channel anywhere in the world at that time, also building a new hospital where he and his wife lived on the upper floor. Brinkley also sued Fishbein and the AMA for slander, claiming he had dozens of patients who were happy to testify on his behalf as they were completely satisfied with the results of his medical treatment. However the judge ruled their testimony out of order, as they were not considered legitimate medical experts. Nonetheless, Brinkley had a dream team of legal advisors outnumbering the AMA that only had a single lawyer. But that lawyer was extremely effective at cross-examining Brinkley on the witness stand, challenging each and every supposed medical advancement as little more that fakery and fraud, skillfully exposing the lack of medical benefits from using his products, where the purported medicine was often little more than water and colored dye, yet he charged an outlandish fee of $100 per bottle. It became clear that Brinkley was sociopathically delusional about his own abilities, performing surgeries that had no medical effect whatsoever on one’s well-being, offering placebos for actual medicine, while amassing a fortune for offering little more than a false promise. It’s a devastating takedown, with Brinkley unwittingly cooperating in bringing about his own downfall, reluctantly acknowledging earning $1.2 million dollars for himself in just one year during the heart of the Depression. Had he been a real doctor, he would have shared his success stories with the world of science, which routinely acknowledges breakthroughs in medical advancements, but there was nothing to share, as he was never an actual doctor to begin with, but did fool the public with ingenious advertisement campaigns that were little more than personal get rich quick schemes. He built for himself a mountain of publicity, which could then be used as evidence against him. What followed afterwards was a series of lawsuits for malpractice and fraud, eventually exposing Brinkley as a quack, exactly as he had been described in the medical journals. It’s a sad end to what amounts to a mythical rags to riches American Dream story, ending in the tragic fall when Icarus flies too close to the sun. Ironically, that abandoned radio tower in Mexico became the site of disc jockey Wolfman Jack’s infamous introduction of rock ‘n’ roll music on the radio, which in the 50’s and 60’s was still the most powerful signal in North America.
Review: 'Nuts!' Reveals Doctor's Secret to Success: Goat Testicle Superlive TV
“Nuts!,” an inventive documentary directed by Penny Lane (“Our Nixon”) from Thom Stylinski’s script, tells a quintessentially American story — one that elicits both wonder and horror.
Narrated in an irrepressibly chipper tone by Gene Tognacci, “Nuts!” opens with sepia-toned black-and-white images of goats copulating, roughly drawn and crudely animated. Along with the film’s title, and the soon-to-be-revealed fact that its subject, Dr. John Romulus Brinkley (1885-1942), made his name and his fortune with an impotence cure achieved via goat testicle transplants, viewers are primed to settle in for an entertaining tale of made-in-the-U.S.A. bunco. This brisk movie is that, and more.
Dr. Brinkley is first seen as a barefoot teenager, begging for admission to Johns Hopkins University, a detail gleaned from Clement Wood’s 1934 biography, which the movie’s credits name as a primary source. “Brinkley would put goat testicles inside an impotent man, and nine months later, that man would call himself a father,” Mr. Tognacci says in a voice that suggests an affected straight face. The extent of the contrivance will set off multilevel credulity alarms in viewers paying close attention. Also curious is the movie’s seeming lack of interest in Dr. Brinkley’s inner life. These apparent defects are all part of the filmmaker’s genuinely cunning strategy.
Alternating with animated re-creations, archival footage and interviews with historians, Ms. Lane’s narrative, from Dr. Brinkley’s career roots in the once-one-horse town of Milford, Kan., grows to encompass a million-watt radio tower in Mexico, and more besides. The ever-taller-tale presented here documents Dr. Brinkley’s impact on early-20th-century pop culture. A Buster Keaton movie with a goat gland joke is cited, as is the fact that Dr. Brinkley’s radio station, besides being a showcase for his medical advice, was the first to feature all country music.
As the saga enters the 1930s, the animation and the archival footage shift to bright color, but the story grows more convoluted and bleak. The movie culminates in a cinematic coup de grâce bold enough to spin your head — one that gives the movie an entirely new dimension. No sooner does the twist sink in than “Nuts!” ends on a note of genuine tragedy.
Sundance
Dispatch #4 - Film Comment
Eugene Hernandez, February 1, 2016
The latest film from Penny Lane—her most recent feature was 2013’s Our Nixon, directed with Brian Frye—starts with an unbelievable premise and then spins off into an even more outlandish tale of a larger-than-life figure.
Leading up to Sundance, Lane was clear that Nuts! would tell the “mostly true” story of early 1900s figure Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, a man who claimed that he could cure male impotence with goat testicle implants. Later, to market his discovery, he apparently built a million-watt radio station that broadcast his ads and messages around the country. Oh, and he may have also won a governor’s race.
For Lane, Brinkley was a figure too irresistible not to put in a film. Yet by the end of the movie, it’s tough to know what is true and what isn’t—and, quite frankly, it doesn’t really matter. The story that Penny Lane weaves together—through animation, re-created artifacts, and distinctive voiceovers—is so compelling, entertaining, and engaging that whether or not it’s all true is beside the point.
Playful, alive, inventive, and fun, Nuts! is a sharp examination of a media-savvy figure with an outsized personality, who courts public attention for his own gain. Donald Trump is the latest appropriate analogue in a long series of J.R. Brinkleys who have made their name in this country over the past century.
Challenged by the fact that Brinkley lied for a living and
created his own propaganda and promotional material, Penny Lane let his
outrageousness guide her. Animated sections in the chaptered film use different
animators to visualize the stories and sometimes evoke the style of TV’s Beavis
& Butt-Head or King of the Hill. The narrated sequences
meanwhile employ the approach of a carefully crafted documentary radio program
not unlike This American Life.
Appropriately, for their expert work assembling such an array of elements to
craft the film, Lane and her team were awarded a special jury prize for
editing, on the closing weekend of the festival.
“I thought from the very beginning that the last thing I wanted to do was make
a film where you as the audience member could sit back and be like, ‘What a
bunch of dummies, how could they possibly have believed this,’” Penny Lane
elaborated during a Sundance Institute interview. “It was really important to
me that it become clear that we’re all those dummies. Any of us can fall for
anything. Brinkley was a person who knew that, and a pretty good rule of thumb
would be that the better the story is, the more critical distance you should
bring to it.”
“It’s good to be skeptical of really great stories,” Lane said.
The New Yorker [Richard Brody]
I’ve just gotten back from the Maryland Film Festival, in Baltimore, which focusses on the best of recent independent films. The discerning and ambitious programming has a valuable reflexive and analytical aspect—the films chosen help to clarify the meaning and value of the term “independent filmmaking.”
The formal definition of an “independent film” is one that is made with private financing rather than studio backing. But that covers too wide a swath of the industry, as proven by the overlap of Oscar candidates with the results of the Independent Spirit and Gotham awards. Independence isn’t a matter of financing but of urgency. An independent film is one that’s made within the arm’s reach of the filmmakers, that’s experiential—that the filmmakers make in order to see not just the world at large but also their own place in it. Independent films—and even the most stylized fictions among them—have a double documentary aspect, as much that of a mirror as of a lens, showing what goes on behind the camera and what goes on in front of it, and seemingly superimposing those two perspectives in every image. Independent films are made for the filmmaker to learn from. In effect, they’re student films—films by students of life, who aren’t professing but searching for their own place in the world and in filmmaking itself. Independent filmmakers don’t take for granted their place in the cinematic firmament and don’t even presume its existence. They see all systems as up for grabs, ripe for transformation, in a state of perpetual crisis.
That’s true of the best films I saw in Baltimore last week, in addition to festival films that I’ve previously written about, such as “Little Sister,” “collective: unconscious,” and “Kate Plays Christine.” Joining these films is Penny Lane’s documentary “Nuts!” The subject is the sort of historical curiosity that sounds all too ripe for an encyclopedia-like rundown—it’s the story of John R. Brinkley, who, in the nineteen-tens and twenties, pioneered the treatment of impotence by transplanting goat testicles into men. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on Brinkley; don’t read it. The telling of his story there is the exact antithesis of Lane’s film. She tells an extraordinary story—or, rather, she invents one, never taking for granted that the story already exists and is merely waiting to be found and told, but creating the story by the act of making the film. Lane is a story-maker, a sort of historical epistemologist, and also an artist of taste and invention. She uses animated sequences—but ones created by different animators, which keeps the film from being locked into a single style, lending each segment a different visual flavor and mood.
Lane does extraordinary archival research and comes up with newsreel footage that she allows to play at length, seemingly restoring the past to a vital immediacy. She displays a sense of reverence for the archival—and for the physicality of the archive and its circuit of connection to historical events themselves. She has a distinctively concrete and practical way with photographs, and so avoids generic documentary techniques such as the vague and slow camera-moves, and the graphic transitions and effects that dematerialize photographs. At the same time, Lane doesn’t turn Brinkley’s story into a metafiction of her own investigations. She’s a classical modernist whose good and wondrous story reflects her own astonishment at the weird ways of the world and its archival traces and trails. As Lane pores through the materials at hand, she herself watches the scope and implications of the project expand into astonishing realms of power and influence. “Nuts!” is fiercely original in its ingeniously dramatic storytelling, its vision of the place of such stories in the media-scape, and its aesthetically refined yet good-humored vigor.
Penny
Lane on 'Nuts!', Her Documentary About 'Goat Gland Doct Erin McCarthy from Mental Floss
According to his biography, the thing that made John Romulus Brinkley famous wasn’t even his idea. In The Life of a Man, Clement Wood writes that in 1917, Brinkley, a doctor running a drug store in Milford, Kansas, was talking to a farmer struggling with impotence when he jokingly referenced goats going at it nearby. “You wouldn’t have any trouble, if you had a pair of those buck glands in you,” he said.
“Well,” replied the farmer, “why don’t you put ‘em in? Why don’t you go ahead and put a pair of goat glands in me? Transplant ‘em, graft ‘em on, the way I’d graft a Pound Sweet on an apple stray.”
Brinkley balked at first, but eventually—after arguing with the farmer about it until 3 a.m.—he was persuaded to perform the surgery, for which he was paid $150. Within the next few months, he performed the operation several more times. Each time, according to The Life of a Man, the surgery worked. Impotence was cured. Babies were being conceived.
By today's standards, of course, we know that this is pure bunk—Brinkley was clearly a quack. His xenotransplantation surgery could never have worked. But in the early 20th century, this fact was not so clear, and Brinkley’s renown—and his fortune—grew. Soon, the doctor was charging $750 per surgery, performing them by the thousands, and working with celebrity clientele. He was even mocked, on film, by Buster Keaton. Brinkley and his wife, Minnie, and their son, nicknamed Johnny Boy, lived like kings, first in Milford, then in Del Rio, Texas. During the Great Depression, while much of the nation struggled, Brinkley sold other cures at a rate of $100 a treatment, raking in $1 million a year.
As unbelievable as it may sound, a goat testicle–based cure for impotence was just the beginning for Brinkley. He was an early adopter of radio, pioneered the advertorial, and conducted a write-in campaign for the governorship of Kansas. And, of course, he had his fair share of enemies, including the Federal Radio Commission and the American Medical Association. But it was his own hubris, not his enemies, that would eventually bring Brinkley down.
When she first read about Brinkley in Pope Brock’s biography of the doctor, Charlatan, documentary director Penny Lane (Our Nixon) knew she had to turn the doctor’s incredible (and ultimately tragic) story into a movie. “I just immediately was taken by the story,” Lane tells mental_floss. “It seemed ready-made for a film.” Lane’s documentary about Brinkley, Nuts!, premieres at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Once she had decided to make a documentary about Brinkley’s life, Lane dove right into archival research. Using Brock’s sources in Charlatan as a starting point, “I just started flying around the country and going to these small county historical societies,” she says. “I actually found a number of just private individuals who were interested in John Brinkley and had their own personal collections that they’d collected on eBay over the years—photographs, his advertisements, brochures, and home movies.” Trial transcripts and contemporary newspaper articles also served as important sources.
Lane spent two years traveling to collect archival materials. One key piece she found was The Life of a Man. Wood, she says, “was a hack—he would write whatever you paid him to write.” Brinkley paid Wood to write The Life of a Man, then published it at his own publishing house in the 1930s; he gave copies away as promotional items. “The book is so crazy—it’s full of the most insane purple prose you’ve ever read,” Lane says. “It’s just over the top: Comparing Brinkley to Jesus, and Galileo. I was so taken with the tone of it—it just cracked me up.”
The book provided an artistic breakthrough: Lane knew she wanted it to be the center of her documentary. “It’s kind of the inspiration, because the book cloaks itself in a kind of authority,” she says. “It’s a biography, and you’re like, ‘OK, I know what biographies are. They do a bunch of research and they tell the truth.’ But it’s not a biography. It’s full of lies. The writer had no compunction about just making stuff up. I loved that! I was amazed at how you could look at something and think you know what it is, and not realize that you’re just being duped.” Parts of The Life of a Man are used as narration throughout Nuts!.
Other important archival finds included Brinkley’s home movies and transcription discs Brinkley had recorded. “I was lucky,” says Lane, because “it wasn’t common for radio operators to do that at the time.” (The discs were actually pre-recorded radio spots that Brinkley had created to get around Federal Radio Commission laws.) Still, she couldn’t use much of those discs: Brinkley’s recordings “must’ve been considered really seductive and convincing in the 1930s,” she says, “but if you listened to him on the radio now you’d be like, ‘This is not seductive and convincing. This is actually just creepy and weird.’ So I didn’t get to use very much of his radio stuff.”
Her best find was a 1922 film Brinkley had created called Rejuvenation Through Gland Transplantation. “It looks like a science film—it’s got illustrations of the human testicle, and it shows how the procedure works, and photos of some of the people that ended up having this procedure,” Lane says. “Of course it’s not a science film, it’s an ad they made to look like a science film, which is perfect.” The film was discovered, by chance, at the Library of Congress, where it was mislabeled. “No one really knows where it came from,” Lane says. “It really gave me the kind of material that you’d want for a film like this—you want to be able to show the cross section of the testicle and how it works. It was totally a score.”
With her materials assembled, Lane began to piece her documentary together—but because of how she wanted to approach it, she found herself in somewhat unfamiliar territory. “I had this risky idea, at the beginning, that I wanted to create this film in a way where I’m creating the maximum possible chance that a viewer could fall for Brinkley’s bullshit,” she says. “I wanted to be manipulative, and then I wanted to, obviously, unravel that in the film. But I thought, ‘Well, can I do that? Is it really possible to pull that off?’”
She had plenty of archival material to work with, though not as much as she'd had in her previous documentary, Our Nixon (which mental_floss discussed with the director at SXSW in 2013). “With Nixon, I had almost 4000 hours of candid audio tape, and it really made it possible for me to construct actual characters,” she says. “With Brinkley, I had enough stuff to do a film that was chock full of awesome archival material of all kinds, but I didn't have any candid audio, so it was much harder to figure out how to make him a character.”
What she needed, Lane realized, was a script—not something a documentarian normally has to think about. “For Brinkley to be seductive and feel real, I needed to script him and create scenes from his life,” she says. So she brought in writer Thom Stylinski, who helped to craft the narration and penned reenactment scenes that were later animated. “I’m not sure I would’ve had the confidence even to do it without him,” she says. “I was like, ‘How do you write a script? I don’t even know.’ It was just really outside the realm of what I had done before.” The animation for each chapter of Brinkley's life was created by a different company and was partially funded on Kickstarter.
It took eight years for Lane to craft Nuts!, which follows Brinkley’s life from his humble beginnings in Milford to the openings of Brinkley hospitals in several states and the creation of “Formula 1020,” which Brinkley claimed was a distillation of goat glands that would cure everything from impotence to insanity. Lane says the most fascinating and outrageous thing about Brinkley was his ability to stay one step ahead of the people who wanted to bring him down. “It was this fun cat and mouse game,” she says. “Watch people try to stop him, and then watch him outsmart them, over and over again. Con men—we just love those characters. Even if you know they’re the bad guy, it’s really fun to watch the one who just keeps winning ... You can’t help it. It’s very appealing.”
The prime example was when authorities shut down Brinkley’s powerful and popular 5000-watt Kansas radio tower. “He was like, ‘Well, no problem. I’m going to go to Mexico, and I’m going to build a new radio station. It’s not going to be 5000 watts, it’s going to be a million watts, and you’re really going to regret ever having shut down my radio station in Kansas,’” Lane says. “I think that was the most amazing move of his entire career. It was brilliant.”
But it all came tumbling down when Brinkley sued the American Medical Association’s Morris Fishbein for libel in 1939. (In “Modern Medical Charlatans,” a two-part article published in Hygeia, a magazine from the American Medical Association, Fishbein had written, among other things, that “In John R. Brinkley, quackery reaches its apotheosis.”) Once Brinkley was in court and on the stand, he was exposed as a fraud—he wasn’t even a real doctor (he had received his degree from a diploma mill).
In short order, Brinkley was sued by former patients for malpractice and investigated by the IRS for tax fraud. By 1941, he had declared bankruptcy. Soon after that, he was investigated for mail fraud. He died of heart failure in 1942, leaving his wife (who supported his claims that the goat gland surgery was legit until she died) and his son penniless.
“It’s a really tragic story—ultimately, a very American tragedy: These complicated characters who are geniuses, who are born with nothing, on the outskirts of society, apply themselves and become very successful and famous, and then go down really badly, in a way because of their own hubris," Lane says. "If he hadn’t sued the AMA for libel, Brinkley probably could’ve just kept going—but he actually dragged himself into court, and that’s what destroyed his credibility and his career.”
Still, despite his misdeeds, it’s hard not to feel bad for Brinkley. “He’s not just the stock villain—I think he’s an interesting, real human being,” Lane says. “But at the end of the day, it’s just irrefutable that he was a con man. A lot of people love him because he did a lot of charity, and that's great. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that he was a con man.”
Spectrum Culture [Katherine Springer]
Nuts! :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Michael Snydel
Nuts! Movie Review: Penny Lane's Documentary on John Romulus ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
Slant Magazine [Elise Nakhnikian]
Nuts!
· Film Review Nuts! tells the semitrue story of a goat-testicle guru ... Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club
Nuts: a documentary about goat testicle transplants that's ... - The Chris Plante from The Verge
'Nuts!' Reintroduces the Quack Who Sold America Goat ... - Villag Alan Scherstuhl from The Village Voice
'Nuts!': Annecy Review | Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Wendy Ide
Nonfics [Christopher Campbell]
queerguru.com (Roger Walker-Dack)
Film-Forward.com [Hayden Jacoves]
NUTS! – Hammer to Nail Don R. Lewis
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
NUTS! Steve Erickson
Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]
Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
Georgia Straight [Martin Dunphy]
Goat testicles and great stories! An interview with film director Pe The Quack Doctor interview, September 22, 2014
'Nuts!': Sundance Review - Hollywood Reporter Duane Byrge
'Nuts!' Review | Variety Dennis Harvey
Nuts!
review – a ridiculously enjoyable ode to old, weird America Jordan Hoffman from The Guardian
Toronto Film Scene [Andrew Parker]
'Nuts!' blends fact and fiction in this tale of ... - Los Angeles Times Robert Abele
Rogerebert.com [Sheila O'Malley]
Review:
'Nuts!' Reveals Doctor's Secret to Success: Goat Testicle ... Glenn Kenny from The New York Times
John R. Brinkley
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John R. Brinkley - Kansapedia - Kansas Historical Society
John
Richard Brinkley (1885–1942) - Encyclopedia of Arkansas
Doctor John
Brinkley (Medical Quack) | Old Time Radio
The Best Darn Story Of The Whole
20th Century
The Story of John R.
Brinkley - Quackwatch April 17, 2002
John
Brinkley, the goat-gland quack - Telegraph
Mike Dash, April 18, 2008
The Strange, True Tale of the Old-Timey Goat Testicle-Implanting ... Penny Lane from The Daily Beast, September 16, 2014
Lang, Fritz
Fritz Lang Information biography from Silent Era Personalities
Fritz Lang began his career as a scriptwriter, but soon moved on to
directing. Many of his scripts were co-written with novelist Thea von Harbou,
who he married in 1924. Lang, fled
Many, if not most, of Lang's silent films are dominated by powerful visual design, and are either pure fantasy films, or include strong fantastic elements in their plotlines.
The Spiders, a two part serial produced in 1918-1919, dealt with a mysterious multinational criminal society seemingly bent on plundering the world's treasures. Inspired by the thrilling serial of Feuillade, the first episode of The Spiders offers exotic locales, a hidden treasure trove, poison gas, a heroic princess, a message in a bottle, and a secret meeting of the Spiders in their secret underground headquarters. Part Two, unfortunately, offers repetition of scenes and themes from the first story rather than develop and expand the tale's mythos. The two parts for The Spiders were released several months apart.
One of Lang's most influential silent films was Destiny (1920). Inspired by
Lang returned to the serial thrills of The Spiders for Dr. Mabuse, the
Gambler (1922). Dr. Mabuse, a criminal mastermind, employed hypnosis to expand
his power in the instable environment of post-WWI
Most of Lang's silent films were epics. The two-part adaptation of Wagener's Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, and Woman in the Moon were all big-budget voyages into fantastic worlds beyond where any previous filmmaker had ventured. The results were mixed. Metropolis cost over 5 million marks to produce, and bankrupted its studio. Some of the scenes from Metropolis, however, are among the most memorable visions in cinema history.
Lang fled
Metropolis and Fritz Lang Introduction from the
German-Hollywood Connection
The man born Friedrich
Christian Anton Lang in
Following Metropolis,
the Lang-von Harbou team went on to make another science-fiction movie for
After the Nazi rise to
power in
Although he made several respectable films in
Film
Reference Charles L.P. Silet
Fritz Lang's career can be
divided conveniently into three parts: the first German period, 1919–1933, from
Halbblut to the second Mabuse film, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse;
the American period, 1936–1956, from Fury to Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt; and the second German period, 1959–60, which includes the two films
made in India and his last film, Die tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse.
Lang's apprentice years as a scriptwriter and director were spent in the
studios in Berlin where he adopted certain elements of expressionism and was
imbued with the artistic seriousness with which the Germans went about making
their films. In Hollywood this seriousness would earn Lang a reputation for
unnecessary perfectionism, a criticism also thrown at fellow émigrés von
Stroheim and von Sternberg. Except for several films for Twentieth Century-Fox,
Lang never worked long for a single studio in the United States, and he often
preferred to work on underbudgeted projects which he could produce, and
therefore control, himself. The rather radical dissimilarities between the two
studio worlds within which Lang spent most of his creative years not
surprisingly resulted in products which look quite different from one another,
and it is the difference in look or image which has produced the critical
confusion most often associated with an assessment of Lang's films.
One critical approach to Lang's
work, most recently articulated by Gavin Lambert, argues that Lang produced
very little of artistic interest after he left Germany; the Cahiers du
Cinéma auteurists argue the opposite, namely that Lang's films made in
America are superior to his European films because the former were clogged with
self-conscious artistry and romantic didacticism which the leanness of his
American studio work eliminated. A third approach, suggested by Robin Wood and
others, examines Lang's films as a whole, avoiding the German-American division
by looking at characteristic thematic and visual motifs. Lang's films can be
discussed as exhibiting certain distinguishing features—economy, functional
precision, detachment—and as containing basic motifs such as the trap, a
suppressed underworld, the revenge motive, and the abuse of power.
Investigating the films from this perspective reveals a more consistent
development of Lang as a creative artist and helps to minimize the superficial
anomalies shaped by his career.
In spite of the narrowness of
examining only half of a filmmaker's creative output, the sheer number of
Lang's German movies which have received substantial critical attention as
"classic" films has tended to submerge the critical attempt at
breadth and comprehensiveness. Not only did these earlier films form an
important intellectual center for the German film industry during the years
between the wars, as Siegfried Kracauer later pointed out, but they had a wide
international impact as well and were extensively reviewed in the
Anglo-American press. Lang's reputation preceded him to America, and although
it had little effect ultimately on his working relationship, such as it was,
with the Hollywood moguls, it has affected Lang's subsequent treatment by film
critics.
If Lang is a "flawed
genius," as one critic has described him, it is less a wonder that he is
"flawed" than that his genius had a chance to develop at all. The
working conditions Lang survived after his defection would have daunted a less
dedicated director. Lang, however, not only survived but flourished, producing
films of undisputed quality: the four war movies, Man Hunt, Hangmen Also
Die!, Ministry of Fear, and Cloak and Dagger, and the urban crime
films of the 1950s, Clash by Night, The Blue Gardenia, The Big Heat, Human
Desire, and While the City Sleeps. These American films reflect a
more mature director, tighter mise-en-scène, and more control as a result of
Lang's American experience. The films also reveal continuity. As Robin Wood has
written, the formal symmetry of his individual films is mirrored in the
symmetry of his career, beginning and ending in Germany. All through his life,
Lang adjusted his talent to meet the changes in his environment, and in so doing
produced a body of creative work of unquestionable importance in the
development of the history of cinema.
Fritz Lang - Jeffrey Scheuer Jeffrey Scheuer's entry in the Dictionary of American Biography on Fritz Lang, also seen here: Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang (Dec. 5, 1890 - Aug. 2, 1976), Austrian-American
film director, was born in
As a youth, Lang studied architecture for a while at the
Technische Hochschule (
After the war Lang worked in
Lang's first successful effort was "Der müde Tod"
("The Tired Death," 1921, released in the
"Metropolis" (1926), a powerful expressionistic
drama about a futuristic slave society, was a stunning technical achievement;
despite its simplistic message it remains a classic. The production nearly
bankrupted the
"If Adolf Hitler had never existed," wrote the
critic Andrew Sarris, "Fritz Lang would have had to invent him on the
screen." Lang, who was not Jewish, used a madman in an asylum to espouse
Nazi doctrines in the 1932 film "Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse"
("The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse"). After it opened, he was summoned by
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister, and invited to supervise Nazi
film production. Instead, Lang fled
Although naturalized in 1935 as a
The distinctiveness of Lang's European and American periods
reflects an extraordinary adaptation: to a new country, language, and studio
environment, as well as to cinematic sound and color. Critics have never been
able to reconcile the two phases. The early German films, which gained him a
wide international following, were brilliantly innovative but self-conscious to
the point of didacticism, relying heavily on interior sets, monumental
architecture, and expressionistic devices such as painted backdrops and
stylized action. The American movies, on the other hand, reflected a more
mature style, and the resources (as well as the commercial influences) of
A tall, physically imposing figure, and a perfectionist by
nature, Lang could be a temperamental and dictatorial presence on the set. His
differences with producers ultimately prompted his departure from
A Companion to Fritz Lang — Cineaste Magazine A Companion to Fritz Lang, by Joe
McElhaney, 2015, 607 pages, reviewed by Christopher Small from Cineaste, Spring 2017
Though he has been dead for forty years, and made his last film sixteen years
before that (and in self-imposed exile from Hollywood in the Federal Republic
of Germany, no less), Fritz Lang continues to stand at the epicenter of a great
many of the cinema’s enduring debates. One widely held view defines Lang as the
apotheosis of the auteur in cinema; another, as a Brechtian subversive upending
the conventions of whatever studio system in which he was working. Whatever the
theory, it is typically predicated on the assumption that the Langian
universe—the films themselves as well as their production histories—is one of complete
domination by a single authorial figure. Part of the enduring interest in his
work, scholarly and otherwise, is the refusal of the films to entirely measure
up to these shivers of an omnipresent, authoritarian presence.
The immediate sense one gets after watching two or three Fritz Lang films is an awareness of complete sensitivity and symmetry of design, the reiteration of a handful of pet tropes and impossibly convoluted plot devices, and a powerful, allegorical vision that stands for the cinema itself. And yet, there is as much mystery and fragmentation in their design as there is clarity and contiguity; the theories break down in the face of the sheer complexity of the structures Lang places before our eyes. The initial feeling of awe at the seemingly limitless boundaries of control is undercut by the sense that the films only hint at their true subjects, that the last-minute reversals of fortune that characterize the plot devices of many of the late films betray an even greater ambiguity, a hidden ur-movie buried underneath the one we are so sure we see in all its clarity.
Lang scholarship, then, should attempt to explicate this panoramic view of Fritz Lang while providing a credible account of his films’ many unknowable qualities. Any work on Lang should refuse the invitation of the films themselves, and of the director’s proclamations, to read the work through a single lens—this or that thematic or structural focus, this or that biographical detail, this or that historical signifier. This is the mantle taken up by Joe McElhaney’s A Companion to Fritz Lang, a 607-page anthology, the first collection on Lang in decades; it is one McElhaney and his writers mostly take seriously. Where to start with Fritz Lang? Each essay dreams up an answer, and it’s their plurality (as well as quantity) that gives the book its sheer force of scholarship.
But there is an idea, touched upon by Adrian Martin in his essay on House by the River (1950), that presents some problems for the writers in A Companion to Fritz Lang. Toward the end of his essay, Carlos Losilla admits to the ultimate failure of his powers of analysis, a curious feature of Lang-watching. Martin, in the next chapter, quotes Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Bertrand Tavernier’s comments that “it is almost impossible to explain why Lang’s masterpieces are masterpieces.” The finest essays in the book deal in images, the foremost domain of Lang’s world and, it seems, the best way to penetrate their mysteries. In a provocative statement of intention that mirrors the first-frame suicide that opens The Big Heat (1953), Vinzenz Hediger’s essay on Lang’s “Art of Omission” begins with the question, “Did Fritz Lang kill his wife?” Like The Big Heat, it then takes steps to elaborate on this provocation, drawing on Proust to answer the question of the unaccountable influence of real-world knowledge on the study of films, Lang’s in particular. Later, he comments on Lang’s (also self-imposed) exile as a character in another film, Godard’s Contempt (1963), as if the director himself were a Mabuse-like figure ultimately banishing his own image to the realm of the cinema itself: “As we progress towards a stage in which Lang the man mostly survives as a character in a Godard movie, rather than as a source material for films...”
Similarly, Losilla’s essay on the five films at the end of Lang’s career conjures up Langian imagery as a way to associate his text with the particular ambiance of Lang’s films; Losilla’s sustained images of birth and growth reflect the rise of modernism and the end of Lang. He writes of being “suspended in amniotic fluid” in the womb while Lang filmed the last scene of his final film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), in which a car plummets off a bridge and sinks sinisterly into the water, a reversal of the final shot in Hitchcock’s Psycho from the same year. In what comes to represent the best writing in this volume, Losilla, thinking, like Lang, in images, links Stewart Granger’s unknown father figure perishing on a lonely rowboat at sea at the end of Moonfleet (1955) to the death of classicism in cinema that Lang’s work in this period evokes.
But while these essays are thorough, they respect a certain mystery at the heart of Lang’s films, a shifting inner film that is hard to eke out through simple formal analysis. Of course, it is indisputable that Lang encourages close reading: his style is precise in the extreme, and a shot-by-shot analysis always produces interesting results, often overlapping with intentions publicly stated elsewhere by the director. But as Tom Gunning has noted, Lang’s films almost always invite allegorical readings that cannot be entirely mapped out by tracing the contours of the mise en scène—an idea which itself, as Joe McElhaney notes in his excellent study of Clash by Night (1952), is also only one way of viewing the complex inter-text of the director’s movies. (And which Frances Guerin, also in this volume, complicates even further.) As a result, parts of the book—like the essays on Der müde Tod (Destiny, 1921) and Rancho Notorious (1952)—become mired in an analysis of stylistic minutiae. A few of the essays, such as Tom Conley’s piece on Rancho Notorious, which explores little of the film’s perspectival and political density, drily describe scenes in stultifying detail for large sections, interpreting freely and superficially as they go (“...what a Freudian allegorist might wish to call the ‘blade of castration’”), as if the mere beat-by-beat readings and tea-leaf interpretations were enough.
David Phelps’s essay on the endlessly fractured hall of mirrors that is The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse attempts to reanimate images from the movies through juxtaposition; he dazzlingly counters images from Spies (1928) with Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1928), as well as rhyming images from The Thousand Eyes. But the book, considering its price, has few illustrations; what few images it does contain are foggy black-and-white stills from the movies arranged almost ornamentally in relation to the text, and Phelps’s essay is largely the exception. I have no doubt that elsewhere images from the scenes in question would clarify a great deal more than the reams of text that try to delineate scenes and characters in these (often obscure) movies that the reader likely has not seen in some time, if at all.
McElhaney mobilizes an impressive international cadre of writers, who, as an aggregate, provide a thousand new perspectives on the director’s work. The book blends styles—historical, aesthetic, academic—with considerable ease. It is a testament to the book’s breadth that auteurist essays and studies of Lang and historicism sit side by side in McElhaney’s design. Chapters like Doug Dibbern’s study of Cloak and Dagger (1946), at the intersection of both traditions, provide an unlikely but welcome point of departure for a political reading of Lang. For Dibbern, this bitter resistance thriller, one that comes just after the overtly political period that spanned the director’s arrival in Hollywood in the mid-Thirties through the Second World War, seems to propose a vision for a future reaffirming of the wartime Popular Front between leftists and liberals. By focusing on this metaphorical level of the film, wherein two representatives of either side (Gary Cooper and Lilli Palmer) fall in love and, through their union, become radicalized in the face of a looming reactionary threat, Dibbern shows the way Lang revitalizes and even subverts conventional forms by staging them as stand-ins for the larger ideas of the films, an idea also touched upon by Chris Fujiwara in his chapter on the generic reversals of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).
Both Fujiwara and Dibbern, like the best writers in this volume, contend with Lang’s metaphorical dimension with ease; Fujiwara links the director’s exacerbation of conventional forms to a structuring device from Hölderlin, Dibbern to the material conditions behind his work in Hollywood that provide the bedrock from which Lang could experiment with metaphor. But no matter the brilliance of the image or metaphor, the core of Lang’s work will perhaps always be elusively just out of grasp. As Lang engaged every level of his films—“the dynamic, vital, and analytical movement given to the narrative as a whole,” to quote again Coursodon and Tavernier—there will always be at least a fragment of Lang’s work neglected from every study, no matter how exhaustive. But this Companion’s strength is perhaps in its acceptance of this fact, and in its pluralistic, democratic sprawl, the armory of images it draws on to mount an assault on the work of this titan of cinema.
Fritz Lang 2000 Robert E. Haller edits a compilation of articles and personal anecdotes by Martin Scorsese, Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekas and others
Lang, Fritz Art and Culture profile
Fritz Lang: Master of Darkness BFI Tribute to Fritz Lang
BFI | Features | Fritz Lang | The Permanent
Magic of Fritz Lang extensive
biography from BFI Screen Online
All-Movie Guide Joseph Ankeny
TCMDB bio from Turner Classic Movies
Lang, Fritz - Dictionary definition of Lang, Fritz | Encyclopedia.com ... biography amd profile
Brain-Juice | Biography of Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang biography from GermanFlicks.com
Fritz Lang Biography - The Free Information Society compiled by Jonathan Dunder
Fritz Lang Biography from Biography Base
Lang, Fritz at VideoArtWorld.com The Masters Series: Fritz Lang, by Christophe Le Choismier
Fritz Lang Criticism (Vol. 20) bio page from e-notes
Fritz Lang @ Filmbug brief bio
German 43: Resources: Biographies: Lang, Fritz brief bio info
Fritz Lang very brief bio from filmportal.de
Fritz Lang • Great
Director profile • Senses of Cinema Daniel
Shaw from Senses of Cinema, October
4, 2002
The Films of Fritz Lang - by Michael E.
Grost Michael E. Grost’s
extensive analysis on the Films of Fritz Lang
The German-Hollywood Connection: METROPOLIS Metropolis and Fritz Lang, Page one bio and introduction piece from German-Hollywood Connection (Undated)
introduction extensive article on Rudolf Klein-Rogge and his relationship to Thea von Harbou (2nd wife) and Fritz Lang (Undated)
Fritz Lang's Diagonal Symphony - StarWord.com Barry Salt from StarWord (Undated)
Brigitte
Helm, 88, Cool Star Of Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' Robert Mcg Thomas Jr from the New York Times, June 14, 1996
The Truth Twister Stanley Kauffman reviews Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, by Patrick McGilligan (548 pages), from the New York Times, July 20, 1997, also seen here: Fritz Lang - The New York Times
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Fritz Lang: The Illusion Of Mastery Thomas
Elsaesser from Sight and Sound,
January 2000
The
Big Heat - Bright Lights Film Journal
Jans B. Wager, January 2000
The Blue Gardenia •
Senses of Cinema Sam Ishii-Gonzalès from Senses of Cinema, June 13, 2001
Fritz Lang's M on DVD -
Bright Lights Film Journal
Gary Morris, July 1, 2000, also seen here: Fritz Lang's M -
Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture
Destiny • Senses of Cinema Michael Koller, July 13, 2001
Fritz
Lang: The Giant Who Today Goes Unseen
David Hay from the New York
The Diabolical Dr. Mabuse on DVD: The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse; The ... Scott Thill from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 1, 2002, also reviewing THE 1,000 EYES OF DR. MABUSE
Fritz Lang The Fascination of Fritz Lang, an
overview by Chris Fujiwara from the Boston
Phoenix, Jan 31 – Feb 7, 2002
Fritz
Lang: The Nature Of The Beast · Patrick McGilligan · Book Review ... Keith Phipps from The Onion A.V. Club, March 29, 2002
Kitsch, Sensation – Kultur und Film: Die Spinnen • Senses of Cinema Michael Koller from Senses of Cinema, July 19, 2002
The Woman in the Window • Senses of Cinema Girish Shambu from Senses of Cinema, July 19, 2002
Metropolis Fritz Lang 1927 Film Archive - Bibliography - Introduction ... A Compendium of Resources on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Michael Organ website from Australia, which includes translated German reviews and a scathing review in 1927 by H.G. Wells in the New York Times, posted September 24, 2002
Fury
- Bright Lights Film Journal Fritz Lang’s Assumption Factory, by Robert Castle,
November 1, 2002
Article: Crucified to the Machine:
Religious Imagery in Fritz ... Crucified
to the Machine: Religious Imagery in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, by David Michael Wharton from Strange Horizons, January 6, 2003
Woman in the Moon
• Senses of Cinema Michael Price from
Senses of Cinema, April 2004
The Testament
of Dr. Mabuse • Senses of Cinema Michael Koller
from Senses of Cinema, April 2004
The
Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse — Cineaste Magazine Chris Fujiwara (2005)
Adrian Martin Spione Machinations
of an Incoherent, Malevolent Universe, from Rouge,
2006
The Big Heat • Senses of
Cinema Daniel Shaw, February 7, 2006
16:9 16:9 in English: The
Artist and the Killer: Fritz Lang’s Cinema of the Hand, by Joe McElhaney
(June 2006)
Martin
Scorsese on Fritz Lang Fritz Lang Birthday Tribute by Martin
Scorsese, December 2006
The Big Heat • Senses of
Cinema Daniel Shaw, February 7, 2006
Kill
Hagen! - Lang's Kriemhild And Her Revenge - Bright Lights Film ... C. Jerry Kutner from Bright Lights Film Journal, June 18, 2007
Kammerspielfilm, Part 1: M by Fritz Lang Gautam Valluri from Broken Projector, July
26, 2007
Missing scenes from Fritz Lang's Metropolis turn up after 80 years ... Kate Connolly from The Guardian, July 3, 2008
“Pure Artifice”: Fritz Lang's Moonfleet • Senses of Cinema Adrian Danks, August 2008
Where Dreams Go to Die: Scarlet Street • Senses of Cinema Sarah Nichols, August 27, 2008
DVDS; Fritz Lang, Trailing Nazis Dave Kehr from The New York Times, May 15, 2009
Fritz Lang's Metropolis: Complete at Last Larry Rohter from The New York Times, May 4, 2010
A
Tale of Two Cities - Film Comment Chris Fujiwara on the
newly reconstructed version of Metropolis
from Film Comment, May/June 2010
The Woman
in the Window - Parallax View
Richard T. Jameson, November 10, 2010
Fritz
Lang at Reel Classics March
10, 2011
The Complete Fritz
Lang - Harvard Film Archive
July 25, 2014
Fritz
Lang's M: the blueprint for the serial killer movie | BFI Geoff Andrew from BFI Screen Online, December 5, 2016
Lang, Fritz They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
1967 BBC Interview by Alexander Walker also seen here: LANG, Fritz
Fritz Lang: The Lost Interview / In the summer of
1972, the ... Lloyd
Chesley and Michael Gould interview Lang
for Moviemaker magazine, February 10, 2004
Johns Hopkins
University Press | Books | Fritz Lang Fritz
Lang: Genre and Representation in His American Films, by Reynold Humphreys
(230 pages)
The religion of
director Fritz Lang from Adherents
DREAM
CHAMBER 22 (Fritz Lang) interesting Lang-based visual graphic art
Lang Movie Posters
posters
from Metropolis Edition Panorama
Berlim
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon original movie posters for Metropolis and Frau
im Mond
Fritz Lang / films / director / biography filmography and various film reviews from FilmsdeFrance
The silent and sound German expressionist films of FRITZ LANG brief reviews of early films
The Dark Worlds of Fritz Lang - Harvard Film Archive brief feature and reviews from a retrospective
The 21st Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)
Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)
Chris Fujiwara's Top 10 Directors
Photographers Gallery - Photographs by Fritz Lang nice black and white gallery
AHC Digital Fritz Lang Papers Nineteen of the twenty motion pictures Lang shot on 16mm film from 1938-1953 as he toured around the American Southwest (ranging from .14 to 10:33)
Fritz Lang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE HALF-CASTE (Halbblut)
There are no existing prints of this film.
THE SPIDERS PT 1 (Die Spinnen)
aka: The
User comments from imdb Author Snow Leopard from Ohio
This first episode of Fritz Lang's "The Spiders" is an
entertaining adventure story, and it is particularly notable for its
imaginative settings and visuals, and for the way that each sequence leads
smoothly into the next. The story is far-fetched, of course, but Lang tells it
quite well, and it makes for enjoyable viewing.
The basic setup of the sinister organization of "Spiders" involves
some of the themes that Lang used in more detailed form in his Dr. Mabuse
movies. Here, the story is strictly for entertainment purposes, and as such it
works well. Ressel Orla is suitably elegant as the leader of the
"Spiders", and she usually makes the best of her opportunities.
The opening message-in-a-bottle scene sets the tone, establishing tension and
mystery right away. From there, Lang builds up the story nicely, as the
characters learn about the hidden treasure and compete with each other and with
other adversaries to find it. His style here is similar to that in some of the
best of contemporary action movies, such as the Indiana Jones films. Most of
the scenes work well in themselves, and once it gets going, each scene also
moves the story ahead immediately to the next scene, without letting you pause
for breath.
Lil Dagover also adds a lot in her role as the priestess. Carl de Vogt is
adequate as the hero Hoog, but he does not have a lot of presence or charisma,
and most of the energy level in the characters comes from the female leads.
This episode got "The Spiders" off to a good start, and it is the
best of the two segments that Lang actually filmed. It does not have the deep
themes found in Lang's best movies, but as entertainment it works quite well.
The Onion A.V.
Club [Scott Tobias] Scott Tobias
looks at Pt’s 1 and 2
From the silent era to sound, from Germany to Hollywood, and from one genre to the next, Fritz Lang's varied and tumultuous career extended over five decades, yet his paranoid vision never wavered. No matter the period or locale, Lang always found a sinister undercurrent at work, a conspiratorial force that's far-reaching and immensely powerful, yet well-organized enough to stay out of the public eye. An auteurist's dream, his trademark themes on the nature of evil surfaced again and again in his darkly expressive films, a fact evidenced by a pair of reissues separated by 41 years: 1919's two-part serial Spiders and his final film, 1960's 1,000 Eyes Of Dr. Mabuse. Modeled too closely after Louis Feuillade's superior 10-part classic Les Vampires (1915), Spiders emphasizes exotic adventure over intrigue, but the numerous similarities between the two don't favor Lang, who hadn't yet come into his own as a director. Like the Feuillade serial, the title refers to an underground ring of black-cloaked thieves—in Spiders, the villains pointedly include top businessmen and public figures—behind a crime spree that leaves the police confounded. The first episode, "The Golden Sea," is by far the strongest, a breathlessly paced treasure hunt with one action setpiece barreling into another as unflappable hero Carl de Vogt hangs from a hot-air balloon, wrestles an asp, and saves nemesis Ressel Orla from being sacrificed to the Incan sun god. The adventure continues in "The Diamond Ship," which sticks to rote formula, again involving a ruthless quest for jewels and adding swordplay, tigers, secret compartments, collapsing walls, and a few grossly stereotyped Chinese crooks. As a formative effort, Spiders anticipates the elaborate architecture in Lang's later work (particularly 1926's Metropolis) and his preoccupation with densely organized schemes, but he wouldn't hit his stride until after the German expressionist movement broke out the same year. By the time he closed his career with 1,000 Eyes Of Dr. Mabuse, Lang had been through the harrowing experience of WWII—his wife divorced him and joined the Nazi party, and he fled Germany under cover of night—and refined his technique on low-budget American genre films. The last in a trilogy that began with 1926's Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler and 1933's The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse—the latter of which had its final reel excised by Goebbels—1,000 Eyes shrewdly updates Lang's omniscient, Hitlerian mastermind for the dawning media age. A rash of unsolved crimes leads detectives to the Luxor Hotel, where the unseen Mabuse monitors the rooms with hidden cameras and microphones and dictates orders through a vast network of nefarious thugs. The labyrinthine plot has satisfying elements of police procedural, whodunit, and old-fashioned melodrama, delivered with the no-nonsense punch of a good American B-picture, but it's the idea of Mabuse that leaves a lasting impression. For Lang to revive a character that originally echoed the Nazi movement, so long after the war had ended, serves as a potent warning that evil is ever-present among the powers-that-be, even during peacetime.
The Spiders Part I: The Golden Sea Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Kitsch, Sensation – Kultur und Film: Die Spinnen • Senses of Cinema Michael Koller from Senses of Cinema, July 19, 2002
Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell)
HARAKIRI
Germany (80 mi) 1919
User comments from imdb Author: FerdinandVonGalitzien (FerdinandVonGalitzien@gmail.com) from Galiza
At the beginning of the 20th century in
This is one of the minor films (with difference) of the German moviemaker,
Fritz Lang. Inspired by John Luther Llong and David Belasco's "Madame
Butterfly", "Harakiri" is above all, the triumph of the art
direction that shines specially in this Nippon fable in a majestic and suggestive
way. "Harakiri" it is not any big and lost Fritz Lang's masterpiece.
Thanks to its discovery our idea about the evolution of the posterior career of
the German filmmaker has been destroyed. However, this film confirms us Lang's
control of story telling, his talent for the construction of narrative and,
above all, to validate in a manner, the extraordinary themes consistent in his
work.
We encounter in this movie a more naturalist visual conception of the cinema,
rather than those works of his contemporaries. The scenery never tries to
overlap reality, but in a certain way, tries to remake it. This film was
particularly eulogized for the critics of that time for the detail of the
nature and the recreation of the
It is possible to find as well in "Harakiri" certain features very
recognizable in his later works, like the theme of love fighting against the
external circumstances that try to obstruct its success ("Der Müde
Tod" as a perfect example). In this film, love is jeopardized by the
social conventions which find their confirmation into the figure of Bonzo;
adding another aspect, the religious one, to those dangers that hunt the main
characters.
And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this
German Count must considerer putting into practice those strange and peculiar
Japanese customs, that is to say, "Harakiri" due to the remaining
days of Christmas preparations.
THE SPIDERS PT 2 (Die Spinnen)
aka: The Diamond Ship
User comments from imdb Author Snow Leopard from Ohio
This second part of Fritz Lang's "The Spiders" is a solid
follow-up to the first part. This segment is not quite up to the level of the
opening episode, but it is also entertaining, and it features some new and
interesting material. As with the first part, the story has many far-fetched
elements, and neither the plot nor the characters should be taken too
seriously.
This part opens with a somber, determined Hoog determined to bring down Lio Sha
and "The Spiders", and it then proceeds through a variety of
adventures as the adversaries continue trying to outwit each other. Some of the
settings are again imaginative and interesting, particularly the underground
Chinese city, and these are the main strength of the movie.
Ressel Orla is again good as the villainness, but this time the story does not
give her quite as many opportunities. Carl de Vogt has to carry more of the load
this time, and while he is adequate in the action scenes, he does not have
enough charisma to get the most out of the material. There was an opportunity
for some real sparks between him and Orla, but they don't materialize.
Several of the sequences are quite good in themselves, and there is again lots
of action. This story of "The Diamond Ship" does not fit together
quite as tightly as did the first story of "The Golden Sea", and
that, plus the absence of Lil Dagover, are the main things that make this one a
cut below the first episode. It's still worth seeing, though.
Die
Spinnen, 1. Teil: Der Goldene See (1919) - Home Video Reviews ... Nathaniel Thompson
The Spiders Part II: The Diamond Ship Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
FOUR AROUND A WOMAN (Vier um die Frau)
User comments fro imdb Author: FerdinandVonGalitzien (FerdinandVonGalitzien@gmail.com) from Galiza
The merchant Yquem buys his dear wife a beautiful jewel with
matching earnings in a place where the city's underworld trades in fake and
stolen jewelry. By chance, Yquem spots a man with whom his wife had an affair
in the past. Yquem follows him to a hotel where he will write him a letter
imitating his wife's hand writing. The letter invites the man to a public place
where Yquem can spy on them and try to discover whether there is still
something between them.
This early Fritz Lang film, "Vier Um Die Frau" (Four Around a Woman)
was found by chance some years ago at the "Cinemateca De Sâo Paulo",
a great present for the German aristocracy and even for the longhaired
moviegoers, because it prefigures much of "Dr. Mabuse", (corruption
in the upper class-a very habitual practice-unscrupulous upstarts, blackmail, low
class criminals, social tension.) and in the opinion of this German aristocrat,
provides one of the most outstanding titles of Lang's first period. This film
has excellent editing that gives vigour, speed and emotion to a story of an
underworld rife with treachery and betrayal as well as a complex tale of
unrequited love. The film builds to a crescendo of narrative strength that
reminds one of episodes of "Die Spinnen" made by Herr Lang a year
before.
The acting is exceptional and the performers resist the temptation to
overacting that might be expected in such melodrama. As the heroine, Carola
Toelle is especially good and admirably conveys the doubts, secret desires and
frustration that her character suffers. An excellent counterpoint is provided the
character of her friend and confidant, a perfect vamp, who provides bad advice
and is without scruples, quick to use flirting to build up her social
position... Rudolf Klein-Rogge has to be mentioned, as his performance makes
one recall the exceptional character Dr Mabuse, that he will immortalise two
years later. The excellent main actors are given equally good support in the
minor roles.
It is worth mentioning as well the great photography of Otto Kanturek and the
film production by Ernst Meiwers and Hans Jacoby. The importance of
"Decla-Bioscop"'can be seen in the first rate production values that
are so abundant in the film (great manors, hotel lobbies, the stock exchange,
etc) and on the other hand the realistic depiction of less auspicious surroundings:
ragged and wretched slums streets filled with the kind of characters you might
expect in such places. A minor point but also a real curiosity is the inclusion
of a poster for another "Decla Bioscop" production that can be
glimpsed in a theater lobby.
And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this
German Count is realizing how in tonight's soirée's there are four aristocrats
around a fat German heiress with almost the same perverse intentions of those
of this Herr Graf towards her.
DESTINY
aka: Between Worlds
Time Out Tony Rayns
Lang's first major success was inspired by the
Intolerance device of mixing parallel settings and cultures. Death gives a
young girl three chances to save her lover's life, in old
Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Renshaw]
Contemporary viewers may have
come to expect grand melodrama from silent films, but there’s a moment early in
Fritz Lang’s Destiny (Der Mude Tod) that provides a beautiful emotional
subtlety. A pair of lovers (played by Lil Dagover and Walter Janssen) is
sitting in a horse-drawn coach, sharing their ride with a goose. As the young
man prepares to kiss the woman, he ties a scarf over the goose’s eyes to
protect her modesty. It’s a sweet, playful and – perhaps most surprising –
small moment.
Those who know Lang best from the awesome visual spectacle of Metropolis
may not expect such a deft human touch, but that touch is what elevates Destiny.
The narrative actually develops into a sort of epic fantasy, as the young woman
in the aforementioned pair of lovers eventually begins a strange journey. At a
tavern in a small town, Death (Bernhard Goetzke) comes calling on the young
man, leaving the woman heartbroken and desperate. She eventually comes face to
face with Death, and pleads with him to return her fiancée to the living. The
Reaper then offers her a challenge: If she can save any one of three lives that
are about to be snuffed out, the young man will be returned to her.
That challenge sends the film to three exotic locations –
Elsewhere, however, Lang combines his remarkable visual sensibility with a hook
into his characters’ pain. Nowhere is this talent more impressively
demonstrated than a scene in which Death is shown in his garden, a tiny figure
framed against a massive wall. As Death eventually reveals himself to be a
sympathetic figure, isolated and haunted by his grim charge, Lang’s ability to
convey those emotions visually takes on tremendous resonance.
And that’s the real surprise of Destiny, particularly for those whose
experience with silent film is limited. As broad as some of the performances
may be, there’s a genuine sense of feeling and consequence behind them. The
final act of the film becomes particularly chilling, as the young woman dashes
through the town desperately seeking a soul to substitute for that of her
lover’s, even considering sacrificing an infant. Lang makes grief tangible in Destiny,
a feat even more impressive than re-creating Imperial China. Yet even in those
lesser location segments, he can manage a delicate image like two lovers
surreptitiously linking fingers while prostrate at the Emperor’s feet. Over and
over again, Lang negates the clichés of silent cinema by never forgetting to
keep his epic stories human – and small.
Cinepassion.org Fernando
F. Croce
Death is the implacable entity at
the center of Fritz Lang's deterministic traps, yet here the Grim Reaper is a
melancholy executioner, as much of an entrapped player in the cosmic design as
his victims. (The Weary Death is the original German title.) Unsmiling
Death (Bernhard Goetzke) materializes by the side of the road and hops a
stagecoach into the nearby hamlet, "some time, some place."
Sweethearts Lil Dagover and Walter Janssen share a drink at the tavern with the
dour stranger, a skeleton shadow falls across the table as a glass of beer
melts into an hourglass; when Dagover next spots her beloved, he's a phantom
marching with the other souls, disappearing behind an endless wall. The bereft
frau is desperate to join her lover, a gulp of apothecary poison does the trick
-- an overlap-dissolve transports her into Death's austere-Gothic realm, a
climb up the stairway leads her to the caped, doleful figure, to whom she begs
for the return of her beau's life in a stupefying, iris-encircled close-up, a
Dreyer image before Dreyer. Moved, Death shows her the chamber where lives are
long, skinny candles that putter out once God so decides: a flame is levitated,
which dissolves into a newborn baby, then into nothing, while a cut locates a
mother sobbing over the lifeless child. The job is a burden, Death yearns to be
conquered, so the maiden gets three chances to reclaim her man by saving a life
from being snuffed out in other parts of the world -- Orpheus, with
detours for Scheherazade, Shakespeare, and Taiping Guangji. Arabian nights,
Renaissance Venice, and folkloric
User comments Unusually compelling imdb Author marquis de cinema from Boston, MA
Der Mude Tod/Destiny(1921) was the film where Fritz Lang began sharpening
his trademarks of emotional and visual motifs. Focuses on themes Fritz Lang
obsessed over in film and life. For instance, the conflict between love and
death is faced by many protagonists(male or female) in numerous Fritz Lang pics.
From Destiny(1921) to the director's final film, 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse(1960),
Fritz Lang was occupied in his work by philosophies on death, life, love,
notion of the after life, and redemption. The visual brilliance of Lang's later
Silent films can be traced to this feature.
Figure of death is a compelling and sympathetic Lang character whose task is
not an easy one. The character of death in Destiny(1921) does what is required
of him without any subjective bias on the people he has to collect. Bernhard
Goetzke puts on screen with his performance the most fascinating portrayal of
death in a motion picture. The figure of death in Destiny(1921) is a lonely and
sad figure whose wish is to do something else. The title of the film refers to
death's inability to move outside of his destiny.
Der Mude Tod/Destiny(1921) was influential to directors of the silent and sound
eras. Luis Bunuel was impressed by its amazing visual and sad qualities(thus
the film became an influential force in most of Bunuel's work). It wouldn't be
surprising that Destiny(1921) also influenced Ingmar Bergman especially with
The Seventh Seal(1957). Other filmmakers influenced includes Enzo G.Castellari,
Mario Bava, Roger Corman, and Terry Gilliam. The film's influences can be
looked at in films as Lisa and the Devil(1972), Masque of the Red Death(1964),
Keoma(1976), and
Candleroom sequence is a moment of floating beauty and surreal grace. The
candleroom is an extraordinary visual set with a great deal of imagination put
into it. The Candleroom is symbolic of the place where the Grim reaper watches
over to see whose candle(life) will be put out. An excellent effect involves a
candle glow dissolving into a baby. The Candleroom sequence has some terrific
visual effects that blow away the CGI of today's motion pictures.
Contains a slateful of extraordinary visuals typical of a German
Expressionistic film of that time. In films such as Destiny(1921), Fritz Lang
used an aura of expressionistic imagery to display different emotions from his
main characters. Visual use of the camera reaches its climatic level during the
three tales. An example of why silent films where for the most part a great
visual experience compared to many sound pictures. Destiny(1921) matches the
astonishing imagery of Die Nibelungen(1924), Metropolis(1927), and Dr. Mabuse
Der Spieler(1922) with excellent visuals of its own.
Out of Sympathy for a woman whose beloved died, the grim reaper gives her a
chance to save one of three lives as exchange of return of beloved. Tale one
takes place in
Second tale involves a love triangle with the city of
The Imperial China tale is the third and best of the three tales. Magnificent
camera effects gives it a mythical quality that creates a feel for the
spectacle. An astonishing effect and maybe the director's most amazing effect
in his silent films involves the creation by a magician of an army of toy sized
soldiers. Deals with the Emperor of China who wants the magician's female
assistent who is loved by the male assistent. Magical feeling of the amazing
and bizarre is what makes the third tale something fantastic.
"Love is Stronger than death" is a good title for a potential
documentary of the life and film works of Fritz Lang. More than any other line
in a Fritz Lang film, "Love is Stronger than death" represents a
summary of Fritz Lang's filmography. "Love is Stronger than death"
deals with Fritz Lang's ideals about metaphysical love that goes beyond the
confines of the mortal world. Destiny(1921) deals with this notion with use of
abstract and metaphysical imagery. "Love is Stronger than death" can
also be applied to the films of Mario Bava because of his similar fatalistic
take on the topic of love.
After watching it for the first time, I consider Destiny(1921) among the
director's finest silent films. An act of courage is performed by the heroine
thus making her a tragic figure. Acting from the cast shines with moments of
expressionistic beauty. Magificently envisioned by a master of expressionistic
filmmaking. Destiny(1921) shows Fritz Lang's growth as an artist and his
capabilites to become a legendary film director.
Destiny • Senses of Cinema Michael Koller, July 13, 2001
Destiny Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Apollo
Movie Guide [Scott Renshaw]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)
DR. MABUSE: THE GAMBLER
Kim Newman from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
This two-part epic was a major commercial success in
Germany in 1922, doubtless because of its everything-including-the-kitchen-sink
approach, scrambling thrills, horrors, politics, satire, sex (including nude
scenes!), magic, psychology, art, violence, low comedy, and special effects.
Whereas the escapades of the Fantômas (and even Fu Manchu) belong to that
netherworld between the surreal and the pulpy, Dr. Mabuse was intended from the outset not merely as flamboyant
thriller but as pointed editorial, using the figure of master-of-disguise
supercriminal to embody the real evils of its era.
The subtitles of each of the film’s two parts, harping on
about “our time,” underline the point made obvious in the opening act, in which
Mabuse’s gang steals a Swiss-Dutch trade agreement—not to make use of the
secret information, but to create a momentary stock market panic which affords
Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), in disguise as a cartoon plutocrat with top hat
and fur coat, to make a fast fortune. He also employs a band of blind men as
forgers, contributing to the sense German audiences at the time felt that money
was worthless (Mabuse sees this coming and orders his men to switch over to
forging
The film’s eponymous villain shuffles photographs as if
they were a deck of cards, selecting his identity for the day from various
disguises, but it is nearly two hours before his “real” name is confirmed—which
time, we have seen Mabuse in several other disguises, from respected
psychiatrist to degenerate gambler to hotel manager. In Part 2, he appears as a
one-armed stage illusionist, and finally loses his grip on the fragile core of
his identity to become a ranting madman, tormented by the hollow-cheeked
specters of those he has killed and, in a moment which still startles, by the
creaking-to-life of vast, grotesque statues and bits of machinery in his final
lair. Director Fritz Lang, and others, would return to Mabuse, still embodying
the ills of the age—notably in the early talkie Das Testament von Dr. Mabuse and the 1961 hi-tech surveillance
melodrama The Thousand Eyes of Dr.
Mabuse.
Time Out Tony Rayns
Lang's introduction to Mabuse is typical of his
early work in being disorganised and erratically paced as a narrative, but shot
through with flashes of inspiration. The master criminal (taken from a pulp
novel by Norbert Jacques) is presented as an overlord of the contemporary
social chaos in
Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center) Thomas Elsaesser, Fritz Lang: The illusion of mastery, from Sight and Sound Jan 2000
The writer argues that Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse trilogy is a
radical critique of surveillance culture, demonstrating that the three films
are metaphors not of political power but of rebellion against power. The three
films emphasize the idea of a looking glass world, in which sight is not only
the sense most easily deceived but also the one most easily seduced. They also
investigate what such an idea implies for the political function of cinema as
an instrument of social control. In the films, it appears as if the direct look
is not a look at all, at least not in the sense that it gives access to power.
Mabuse's downfall occurs because the further he rises, the more the look he
relies on reveals its underside, namely of being a look borrowed from the
technologies of vision--technologies that are themselves blind. Lang's Mabuse
films are essays on the social symbolic represented by the new technologies of
surveillance as dissembling machines at once frightening and fascinating.
All appearances and hypnotic suggestions to the
contrary, identity is Dr. Mabuse's (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) wager of choice. It is
what allows him to move effortlessly between class-restricted social circles,
from obscenely bourgeois gambling dens to seedy proletarian establishments. One
night he is a young nouveau riche possessed of an ingratiating and fresh-faced
eagerness, the next an elderly man of the world whose Chinese spectacles
(wriggled in conjunction with a particularly memorable incantation:
"Tsi-Nan-Fu!") can mesmerize even the most stalwart state's
prosecutor (Bernhard Goetzke). Psychoanalysis is Mabuse's voodoo science:
whatever his disguise, his ultimate goal (be it power, money, or—his
undoing—love) is predicated on getting deep inside his opponent's head. As
played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge in Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou's two-part
adaptation of the Norbert Jacques novel, Mabuse is a true bogeyman, a hollow
shell of surface tics with a terrifying dead-eyed stare. Some have seen him as
myth personified (a precursor, in ways, to Adolf Hitler), though I would say
that only comes across in the hindsight of Lang's sequel The Testament of
Dr. Mabuse (a much better film, to my mind). This Mabuse has only
pretensions to myth; he's as mortal as they come and Lang's film slowly (very
slowly) leads him down a Fibonacci-spiraled path to the one true
salvation—insanity. Only there, in that post-psychological headspace, does he
become God. Until then he's just a showman and, indeed, appears most alive
while cloaked in his copious succession of highly theatrical guises. When
masquerading as the hypnotist Sandor Weltmann (whose cruel gaze makes even an
attempted suicide play as rousing populist entertainment), Mabuse seems a
precursor to the mastermind Haghi, also played by Klein-Rogge, from Lang's
Weimar-era masterpiece Spies, but when forced to act
the tortured romantic in his pathetic pursuit of the sleepy-eyed Countess Dusy
Told (Gertrude Welcker), Mabuse loses his edge and so does the film, already
bogged down by its indifferently rendered police procedural narrative (so close
to, if not actually Dada that one can see, as critic Dave Kehr has noted, why
the Surrealists held Lang's film in such high esteem). The ghosts of conscience
that torture Mabuse in the film's final scene, like most of the plot
particulars, make little sense with what's come before (the character is so
resolutely amoral that one doubts he'd ever be plagued by such easy guilt), but
the image that this confrontation precedes and heralds is one for the ages: a
stirring piece of black-and-white moving portraiture (not to mention slyly
coded satirical agitprop) entitled—for all eternity—"The Man Who Was
Mabuse."
digitallyOBSESSED!
DVD Reviews Mark Zimmer
Mah-BOO-zah. Say it
with me. Mah-BOO-zah. The name may not mean much in the
The picture opens with Dr. Mabuse playing solitaire with a deck of cards that
is most unusual: each card represents a different face and identity of the
Doctor! Selecting one at random, he proceeds with a tour de force opening
sequence in which he derails the German stock market and manipulates investors
with suggestion and false information. But where Mabuse is happiest is at the
gambling tables that plagued
Klein-Rogge (best known as Rotwang in Lang's Metropolis four years later) gives
a suitably intense portrayal to the doctor. The various disguises are often far
over the top, but he brings a presence to the role that causes us to disregard
that fact just as do his potential victims. Goetzke makes for a believable hero
as well, even though Lang cleverly sets the audience up to believe that
handsome Paul Richter, as Edgar Hull, one of the first victims of Mabuse, will
be the hero of the piece. Instead, he is swept away and dispatched by Mabuse in
a veritable afterthought that shows just how beneath notice Mabuse considers
the rest of the public. Only von Weck, who is able to resist Mabuse's mental
control with difficulty, is a suitable adversary.
The sets are mostly naturalistic when indoors. However, once outside in the
alleyways and shadowy streets of the unnamed city, German Expressionism takes
over with wild angles and sharp contrasts of light and dark. Another tactic
borrowed from Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), which Lang had originally been
scheduled to direct, is the use of animated text on screen. This is used
primarily in the hypnosis sequences to visually represent the hypnotic
suggestion echoing in the mind of the victim. It's quite effective and well done
here.
Well before Battleship Potemkin, we find Lang using montage and meaningful cuts
in Mabuse. On numerous occasions, a question will be posed at the end of a
scene, and the visual of the next succeeding scene will answer the question.
This is highly effective even today, and must have been truly startling in
1922.
As usual for a David Shepard-produced silent disc, the film is run at visually
correct speed rather than at sound speed. This makes the two parts of the film
(which were released independently, even though neither can stand on its own)
quite lengthy, but the time spent is well worth it. The intertitles
unfortunately appear to be new and digitally rendered; their digital appearance
contrasts unfavorably with the age of the film and draws away unnecessary
attention, especially when overlays are used to cover text on the screen. I
would have much preferred removable subtitles for this aspect of the
presentation.
Much as is the case in a revenge story, the fun is in seeing how Mabuse's plans
are revealed bit by bit. We as junior Mabuses get a little frisson of delight
in seeing them unspool just like clockwork, especially when the victims of
Mabuse's crimes are not terribly sympathetic. The moral ambiguities inherent in
the Mabuse and von Weck characters make this a fascinating picture that holds
up very well over the decades.
User comments Authoritative imdb comments by Author Bob Hunt (conn24h@talk21.com) from St Albans, England
In this review I refer to the Transit Film DVD edition from the F W Murnau
Foundation (or Stiftung, if you understand German!). This 2 DVD set is an
excellent restoration of this(these?) movie(s). At three and a half hours, some
may argue that it is a little daunting for the uninitiated silent film viewer,
but in my humble opinion it is so well made (by Fritz Lang) that it still
stands up today as a masterpiece of "gangster cinema". Shot between November
1921 and March 1922, the film was made only a couple of years after Lang's
directorial debut (Halblutt - 1919), and five years before Metropolis - perhaps
Lang's masterpiece. It can be argued that it represents the start of a 'series'
of gangster/crime related movies by Lang, and parallels can be drawn to Spione
(Spies) of 1927/28, and M (1931 - Lang's first talkie), and of course, The
Testament of Dr Mabuse (1932/33). There was also a final addition from 1960,
The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, but that is obviously of a different era. It is
interesting to observe that Lang/von Harbou clearly were attempting to create a
screen detective character something like Sherlock Holmes in the form of
Commissioner Lohmann, (superbly played by Otto Wernicke) for it is he who is
the detective in both M and Testament. However, I digress. Where both M and
Testament concern themselves with the work of the police in an almost
documentary fashion (especially M), Der Spieler is almost exclusively concerned
with the working of the criminal mind. Mabuse is played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge,
one of Lang's favourites - though one wonders what Klein-Rogge made of Lang -
Thea von Harbou, the screen-writer, married Lang in 1921, after divorcing
Klein-Rogge! He gives a masterful performance as Mabuse, and dominates the
film. Even when not on the screen, his omnipotence pervades the entire
proceedings. Whilst I wouldn't go so far as to describe the picture as
'gripping', it still has the power to hold the attention for most of its mighty
three and a half hours. For me, at least, this is aided in no small measure by
the magnificent new soundtrack by Aljocha Zimmermann, whose use of leitmotif
(in true Teutonic style) adds immeasurably to the overall enjoyment of the
film. I strongly recommend this picture, not only to serious students of German
Silent Cinema (they'll have seen it anyway!) but to anybody who enjoys a good
gangster/crime story. If you have a hang-up about silent movies, then in all
honesty this isn't going to change your mind - but give it a try. I think its
worth the effort in the end. Trivia: Although made in
The Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse — Cineaste Magazine Chris Fujiwara (2005) ), also seen here: Fritz Lang's Mabuse films
The Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse Boxset, including, on four DVDs, Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (270 min., 1922), Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (116 min., 1932), and Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (99 min., 1960).
What might be the central moment of Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse cycle occurs midway through Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), the second of the three films (now conveniently boxed together by Eureka! in the Masters of Cinema DVD series) in which the great director contemplates his most famous character. In a chilling scene, the ostensibly dead Mabuse criminal mastermind materializes (as a spectral superimposition) before the asylum director Professor Baum, the director of the asylum where Mabuse, having gone mad at the end of the previous film, spent his last days. The apparition places before him some pages from Mabuse’s voluminous manuscripts on the desk in front of Baum, and then (again through superimposition) merges with Baum’s body—his possession of the man reinforced on the soundtrack by a period-marking drum fall.
This scene gives image to an idea that organizes the entire series: Mabuse is a ghost, who does not inhabit his films as much as he pervades them, just as he pervades the moral and financial chaos of post-World War I Germany, through various embodiments willed by himself, more emanations than beings. Furthermore, it is not merely the form, the body of Mabuse that pervades the films, but his vision. As we watch the films, we see them through (or after) Mabuse: our sight passes through his, traces the hidden causal connections that he has establishedexploits in his complicated machinations, surveys the wreckage that he has made makes of the world he despises.
The famous beginning of the first film in the cycle, Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler)—Mabuse at his dressing table, choosing from a hand of photograph-cards the disguise he will next assume in order to further his numerous plots—also expresses this idea, except that here, Mabuse “himself” also appears, apart from his emanations, as a substantial, characterized human figure who is something more than a pod-like blank on which the individuality of the disguise is to be stamped. But in this something more, there is also something else, an alternate mode of presence from that of a human character embodied within a narrative and a narrativized social space. The man who can choose his own identity stands outside the narrative (“outside the film,” Noel Burch wrote) and literally holds the cards of the narrative, which we see therefore as a game the man plays. This gesture is not strictly personal, but also representative: “Der große Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit” (“The Great Gambler: An Image of the Time”) reads the subtitle of Part One of this two-part inauguration of the Mabuse series, drawing a connection through the image between the “gambler” (whose preferred stakes are human destinies) and the time, making the image the means by which the man becomes the representative of his time. So perhaps this opening sequence, positioning the audience on the threshold between the narrative and the act of narration, should be considered the central moment of Lang’s Mabuse cycle.
But cCan any moment be considered central, in the center of a group of films so marked by dispersion? (Dispersion is Mabuse’s way of entering the narrative, of pervading it.) A repeated gesture in the films is the scattering of papers, and there is a resonant superimposition at the end of the great sequence of Mabuse’s triumph at the stock exchange stock-exchange scene in Dr. Mabuse der Spieler, showing a huge closeup of Mabuse’s face over the trading floor the way it looks after the closing of a day of panic: depopulated, strewn with papers. The fragmented, meaningless, unread text these papers compose is a double figuration of Mabuse, who often operates through writing and whose own most visible signature is usually wreckage, the aftermath of ruin and destruction (cf. the shots of bombed offices in Der Spieler and in Lang’s third and final Mabuse film, Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse [The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse]). Not by his presence, but by his absence, does Mabuse pervade these films.
Then perhaps the central moment of Lang’s Mabuse cycle is the moment in Das Testament when the young hero and heroine, Kent and Lilli, finally penetrate the curtained space behind which, earlier in the film, the mysterious gang leader figure known as “Dr. Mabuse” has been seen issuing his orders to the gang his underlings—more precisely, seen as a motionless silhouette (projected on the translucent curtain) and heard as a voice. On opening the curtain, Kent and Lilli discover that “Mabuse” is a cardboard cutout and that the voice emanates from a loudspeaker.
What is crucial about this scene is not merely the revelation of the absence of Mabuse—a revelation that the logic of the this visionary and terrifying film makes inevitable—but Lang’s pointed disruption of the convention of the shot/reverse shot. Before they open the curtain, Kent, still believing in a flesh-and-blood enemy behind it, fires his revolver. Lang cuts from a frontal shot of Kent and Lilli, as Kent fires the gun, to a shot of the curtain. The shot of the curtain arrives at the place where, in conventional editing, the reverse shot—showing that at which Kent is firing—would come. But even an inattentive viewer probably notices quickly (because the flashes of gunfire are seen through the curtain) that this shot is not taken from the point of view of Kent and Lilli, but from the opposite point of view—from inside the curtained portion of the room. This is confirmed when, in the course of the shot, Kent and Lilli open the curtain and emerge, facing us, from behind it. Only at this point does Lang use the true reverse shot of the cardboard cutout and the loudspeaker, riddled with bullet holes.
This disruption is characteristic of Lang’s mise-en-scène, which presents, through a mastery of what has become known as classical narrative film style, an effect of seamless continuity, but does so deceptively, emphasizing absences, gaps, and contradictions. In a card-game sequence in the first part of Der Spieler, the ill-fated Hull, a wealthy young man whom Mabuse sets out to destroy, has the winning hand, as we, the audience, ascertain in an extreme close-up from Hull’s point of view. We are in fact the only ones who both see and know the strength of the hand, since Hull, under Mabuse’s hypnotic spell, tosses his cards face down, believing that he has lost. For the characters, the revelation that Hull held the winning cards occurs only after the game. As Hull and his fellow club members discuss his debacle, one of the men casually picks up the cards and carelessly drops them face-up on the table. Even now, the men do not immediately look at the cards: the moment of revelation is further delayed the length of an intertitle card.
Such an example—of information deferred, of signifiers separated from their signifieds, of a gulf opening between vision and knowledge—could be multiplied by scores of others from the three Mabuse films and hundreds more from the rest of Lang’s oeuvre. In its inscription of delay, Lang’s cinema becomes not merely an exemplary mise-en-scène of suspense, but a criticism of seeing, especially of a kind of seeing that projects onto what it sees the demand that the visible answer the logic of desire. As the extreme form of this type of seeing, Mabuse fascinates and repels Lang.
Once the universe has been struck by Mabuse’s vision, a certain unreality pervades it. Devoted to negation, Mabuse sees—and spreads to others’ vision—only hollowness, absence, delusion, and destruction. In this sense, the central moment of Lang’s Mabuse cycle could be the scene in Die 1000 Augen (a film that relocates Mabuse in the flattened context of Adenauer Germany and Cold War nuclear terror, just as Das Testament placed him at the moment just before the Nazi ascendancy) in which the millionaire Travers crashes through the two-way mirror by means of which he has been spying on his beloved, Marion. The scene is a kind of replay of the curtained-room scene from Das Testament, both in spatial terms—each scene is laid out in two contiguous spaces separated by a membrane of partial visibility—and in terms of what might be designated as the social order, or even a sacred order: the membrane is supposed to remain inviolate; an unwritten prohibition bars passing from one space to the other. Furthermore, in both scenes, the central action has a similar force: a man—not accidentally the “heroic” character (though the role and nature of the hero are subjected to merciless criticism by Lang)—violates the rule, demonstrating that the two spaces are part of a single space, subject to the same logic.
These two spaces can be assigned to two different worlds: that of the fiction film and that of the film viewer. The mirror in Die 1000 Augen is, unmistakably, a metaphor for cinema (as is the curtained room in Das Testament, as Michel Chion has shown)—one of the most fully worked-out such metaphors in all Lang’s work. When Travers is shown the mirror (part of a surveillance system that the Nazis installed in the hotel where most of the film is set) for the first time, he witnesses a trivial scene—merely a display—played by Marion and her maid. As we watch the scene along with Travers, we become aware somehow that something is missing and that we are seeing a degraded copy of life that is at the same time completely available to the gaze and not fully real. (This uncanny feeling may be compared with the realization by a character in Ministry of Fear [1944] that no one lives in the apartment to which she has been sent on an errand.) This unreality is emphasized by the hollow quality of the (seemingly direct) sound recording in Marion’s room. The visible beings go through the motions of self-directed life but give the impression of being soulless automata, an impression that the narrative later confirms and explains when it turns out that Marion has been acting all along under the hypnotic direction of the “Mabuse” of the film.
This sense of an absence of reality is closely related to the exhaustion that many commentators have sensed in numerous aspects of Die 1000 Augen: in the repetition of scenes, motifs, and lines of dialog from earlier Lang films; in the threadbare quality of the process shots; in the minimal characterizations and functional sets (already a feature of Lang’s last American films); in a sense of untimeliness that Lang acknowledged before undertaking the project (“the son of a bitch is dead,” he claimeds to have said when offered the chance to make a new Mabuse film), and that palpably enters the film itself. Two things should be pointed out about this exhaustion. First, as Joe McElhaney has shown in a detailed analysis, “the sense of cliché and exhaustion brings [Die 1000 Augen] closer to the concerns of the postwar period than one might originally believe.” Second, exhaustion is no new ingredient of the Mabuse cycle but was a key part of the very first film, Der Spieler, in which one of the central figures, the decadent Countess Told, stands for and articulates the contemporary sense of boredom that drives her on a passionate quest for ever-more exotic and refined excitements. Declaring the world empty, the Countess’s boredom has an obvious affinity with the all-negating, world-emptying gaze of Mabuse (which is why he becomes drawn to her). Both are “images of the time” that construct the world as a despised object.
Lang partly joins Mabuse and the Countess in this seeing. The filmmaker’s own gaze at the world is disabused and critical. The degree to which Lang implicates himself with Mabuse as a figure of cinema becomes quite clear in the theatrical mass-hypnosis sequence in the second part of Der Spieler (“in this sequence,” comments Tom Gunning, “Lang presents Mabuse as an embodied visual illusion apparatus”). On the other hand, it is also clear that Lang negates Mabuse. What is missing from the empty world is an animation that, the films assert, can be provided only by love. Here we arrive at another “center” of the Mabuse films. In Der Spieler, love as invoked in her jail cell by Carozza, Mabuse’s discarded mistress, causes the Paul-like conversion of Countess Told. The crucial importance of this revolution is indicated by its placement at almost the midpoint of the film, near the end of Part One. In Das Testament, love again leads to a conversion: that of Kent, whom Lilli encourages to renounce his life of crime and join in the police hunt for Mabuse. In Die 1000 Augen, the love of Travers and Marion causes a comparable conversion, this time on the part of the woman.
Lang’s interviews and published statements, no less than the films themselves, suggest that he indeed ascribes a revolutionary power to love and wants the audience to agree with his sense of it. But it is difficult not to feel that here, too—even here, where the films would seem to need all possible fullness of realization—there is, instead, an absence. Lang’s mise-en-scène of love is deliberately abstract, stripped of visual and psychological interest, and rhetorically blunt. To convey the awesome force of love, Lang relies on three things: the utterance of the word “love,” a certain visual austerity (apparent in the jail cell setting in Der Spieler and in the concentration on the faces in the love scenes of Das Testament and Die 1000 Augen), and a forthright, reduced performance style. In Die 1000 Augen, the flatness of the performances of Peter Van Eyck (Travers) and Dawn Addams (Marion) is a recognizable late-Lang performance strategy, which he developed in Hollywood through such acting styles as those of Glenn Ford and Dana Andrews. But with Van Eyck and Addams there is also the trace of a gesture back toward the purified, white-hot blankness of the Weimar-era films (as opposed to the functionalized and ambiguous blankness of the American films). In Der Spieler, Aud Egede Nissen (Carozza) and Gertrude Welker (Countess Told) use an acting style that is, perhaps, more distant from us, so it is easier to recognize, with their characters, the passage to the register of love as a stylistic effect. However, I imagine that with all three films, many viewers feel in Lang’s love motif a certain deficiency. (Tom Gunning is not alone in finding the relationship between Kent and Lilli in Das Testament a “rather saccharine and tiresome romantic subplot”; he also calls the love affair in Die 1000 Augen “soporific.”) Love must exist to counter Mabuse, says Lang, and for proof of it he has his lovers declaim their love, but they do so in a way that remains somewhat schematic.thus proved, love remains somewhat schematic.
To believe in love in the Mabuse films requires that the viewer, too, pass into a higher register of viewing: it requires an act of faith. With Lang, we have to see the world of the film as a hollowness potentially transformable and redeemable by love. This potential is something for which we must be responsible, since the films, in various ways, and for whatever reasons (inferable or merely postulable), decline to realize fully the asserted power of love. This will sound like a glib rationalization of what, more straightforwardly, should be called a flaw of these films. I put it forward, however, not to excuse the flaw but to take account of the flaw as something that the films themselves take account of. Love is the antithesis of Mabuse (a psychoanalyst, he recognizes only desire, not love) in that it cannot be predicted and preprogrammed, cannot be controlled, cannot be part of the mise-en-scène of negation. Having already aligned his own cinema with Mabuse (for the purposes of a radical critique of cinema), Lang, with passionate discretion, declines to force love to reveal itself in his mise-en-scène but merely designates the place it would have if it were to appear. (This is clearer, and perhaps subtler, at the end of The Big Heat [1953], when the hero is able to verbalize his memory of his wife only at the moment when his listener is dying.) His gesture resembles the hero’s description of painting in Scarlet Street (1945) as “put[ting] a line around what I feel when I look at things.”
With the release of the Masters of Cinema's box set of The Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse, we have a nice presentation of three films that have been available before in good editions, though only separately. There are optional English subtitles for all the films. The small booklets accompanying the DVDs include texts that have, mostly, been available elsewhere. Each film contains a commentary track by the estimable David Kalat, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse. The sparse DVD extras include an interview with the composer of the score for the restored version of Der Spieler, a short discussion on Norbert Jacques (author of the novelistic source for Der Spieler), a documentary on certain themes in Der Spieler, an interview with actor Wolfgang Preiss (who explains Lang’s bad relationship with Peter Van Eyck by saying that the director liked “actors,” not “personalities”), and the “alternate ending” of Die 1000 Augen from the French release version—really a prolongation of what remains in any case the final shot of the film. The enigma of these variant endings points again to the importance of love in Lang’s work and suggests that in this case, how love fares in the world depends on the timing of a cut.
The Diabolical Dr. Mabuse on DVD: The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse; The ... Scott Thill from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 1, 2002, also reviewing THE 1,000 EYES OF DR. MABUSE
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Ian Johnston]
DVD Journal Mark Bourne
dr mabuse from leninimports, which includes a biography and filmography here: fritz lang
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson
VideoVista Tom Matic
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
DIE NIBELUNGEN: SIEGFRIED
Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center) From Iron Age Myth To Idealized National Landscape: Human-Nature Relationships and Environmental Racism in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen, by Susan Power Bratton from Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion (November 2000)
From the Iron Age to the modern period, authors have
repeatedly restructured the ecomythology of the Siegfried saga. Fritz Lang's
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
The underrated Fritz Lang earned
belated critical recognition for his personal stamp included on his many
claustrophobic crime pictures. This DVD release of Die Nibelungen opens
an entirely new chapter in Lang's career.
By 1924, Lang had already
mastered the two-part epic, a lengthy film released in theaters in two
different sections. Following up his masterful Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler,
he turned his skills to this astonishing, five-hour fantasy.
Part One follows the adventures
of Siegfried, a hero who slays a dragon, bathes in its blood and becomes an
(almost) invincible warrior. Part Two follows Siegfried's widow Kriemhild, who
marries Attila the Hun in order to avenge her late husband's death.
Both parts feature jaw-dropping
art direction, but part two is distinctly darker and more elaborate, especially
in its fiery climactic battle sequence. Die Nibelungen as a whole is
much clearer than Dr. Mabuse and much more entertaining than Lang's more
famous Metropolis. It's an essential masterpiece.
Once again, Kino has done a
spectacular job with this 2-disc set. The picture is better than anyone could
have hoped, the score is very well done, and the extras include footage of Lang
on the set, sketches, essays and more.
About.com [Jurgen Fauth]
In 1924, years before Metropolis
and M, director Fritz Lang created a silent epic based on the
quintessential German legend: Die Nibelungen, the ancient folk tale of
heroism and revenge that also served as basis for Richard Wagner's Ring cycle
of operas. Lang's tale is broken into two movies which together clock in at
close to five hours. Conceived as a monumental spectacle at
Part one, Siegfried, begins
with the exploits of the Germanic hero. In lavishly decorated sets that recall
art nouveau rather than the expressionism fashionable at the time, Siegfried
(Paul Richter) robs a treasure, slays a dragon, and wins the hand of a queen.
But jealousy, deceit, and court intrigue lead to murder. In the second film, Kriemhild's
Revenge, Siegfried's widow marries Attila the Hun and manipulates the
knights into a tragic bloodbath.
By today's hectic standards,
individual shots in Die Nibelungen could be tightened to make for a more
streamlined movie. But there is no extraneous scene; every boiling emotion and
outrageous plot twist still resonates over eighty years later. The glittering
of the treasure on the bottom of the
The two-disc DVD edition by Kino Video comes with a handsome set of special features, including footage of Fritz Lang on the set, design sketches, a comparison of the dragon-slaying scenes in Siegfried and The Thief of Bagdad, the original 1924 score, an essay by a film scholar, photo galleries and behind-the-scene images.
Die
Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Having completed his apprenticeship to a blacksmith,
Siegfried, son of Siegmund, king of the
Arguably the artistic pinnacle of Fritz Lang’s filmmaking
career is his ambitious adaptation of Das Nibelungenlied, an epic
thirteenth Century Germanic poem of heroism, betrayal and revenge. The
poem, whose author is unknown, was first performed in
Fritz Lang’s film version of Das Nibelungenlied ran to five hours of
screen time, across two films, known together as Die Nibelungen.
The first part, entitled Siegfried , deals with the death of the hero
Siegfried; the second part, Kriemhilds Rache, tells the story of
Kriemhild's bloody revenge. It was one of the most expensive productions
made by the pre-eminent German film company UFA, requiring a seven month shoot
at a time of great economic strain (during Germany’s period of
hyper-inflation).
The screenplay was written by Thea von Harbou (Lang’s wife, a successful
author), who co-operated with Lang on many of his early films. Lang
intended the film to be a nationalistic work, promoting German culture.
Unfortunately, the film’s nationalistic subtext made it an obvious mascot for
the newly formed National Socialist German Workers Party - aka the Nazis - who
even borrowed some of the film’s design ideas.
Die Nibelungen is both a visually stunning example of German
expressionist cinema and an exciting fantasy adventure with wide
appeal. The lavish sets combine a strangely magical Gothic
romanticism with a very sinister kind of expressionism - with misty forests,
creepy underworld lairs, a forbidding island, and shadowy fairytale castles.
The first of the films features two of most iconic sequences of expressionist
cinema. The first is an animated representation of a dream in which two
stylised black eagles attack a white falcon, a portent of Siegfried’s
death. The second is where a tree in blossom gradually morphs into in to
a skull, a powerful visual metaphor for the brevity of life.
There are also some remarkable special effects, including some very effective
and ingenious use of superposition. The film’s highpoint is Siegfried’s
fight with the dragon. Even by today’s standards, the realisation of the
dragon is impressive - a huge full-size mechanical prop, so convincing that in
most of the shots it really does look like a living creature.
Strikingly different to Lang’s other films of this period, distinguished by its
sense of old world poetry, Die Nibelungen is one of the supreme triumphs
of the silent era of cinema, a beautiful, compelling and highly imaginative
reinterpretation of one of the earliest works in German literature.
Die Niebelungen Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Kill
Hagen! - Lang's Kriemhild And Her Revenge - Bright Lights Film ... C. Jerry Kutner from Bright Lights Film Journal, June 18, 2007
How did "Siegfried" get to be such a Popular German Name? THIS is How! JediKermit from Epinions
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]
DVD Talk [John Sinnott] reviewing Die Nibelungen Pt’s I and II
Die
Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com reviewing Die Nibelungen Pt’s I and II
The
Nibelungen | Theater Critic's Choice | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader reviewing Die Nibelungen Pt’s I and II (capsule)
DIE NIBELUNGEN: KRIEMHILD’S REVENGE
Levin, D.J.: Richard Wagner,
Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen:
The ... Richard Wagner, Fritz
Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal, by David J. Levin (207 pages), also seen here at Princeton University
This highly original book draws on narrative and film theory, psychoanalysis, and musicology to explore the relationship between aesthetics and anti-Semitism in two controversial landmarks in German culture. David Levin argues that Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and Fritz Lang's 1920s film Die Nibelungen creatively exploit contrasts between good and bad aesthetics to address the question of what is German and what is not. He shows that each work associates a villainous character, portrayed as non-Germanic and Jewish, with the sometimes dramatically awkward act of narration. For both Wagner and Lang, narration--or, in cinematic terms, visual presentation--possesses a typically Jewish potential for manipulation and control. Consistent with this view, Levin shows, the Germanic hero Siegfried is killed in each work by virtue of his unwitting adoption of a narrative role.
Levin begins with an explanation of the book's theoretical foundations and then applies these theories to close readings of, in turn, Wagner's cycle and Lang's film. He concludes by tracing how Germans have dealt with the Nibelungen myths in the wake of the Second World War, paying special attention to Michael Verhoeven's 1989 film The Nasty Girl. His fresh and interdisciplinary approach sheds new light not only on Wagner's Ring and Lang's Die Nibelungen, but also on the ways in which aesthetics can be put to the service of aggression and hatred. The book is an important contribution to scholarship in film and music and also to the broader study of German culture and national identity.
Die
Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (1924) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
After the death of her husband Siegfried,
Kriemhild appeals to her brother Gunther to have his killer, Hagen,
executed. When Gunther refuses, Kriemhild allows herself to be married to
Etzel, the king of the Huns. After Kriemhild provides Etzel with a son
and heir, she asks him to invite her brothers to his court. Despite
Kriemhild’s pleas, Etzel refuses to harm his guests - until
Kriemhilds Rache is the dramatic conclusion to Fritz Lang’s epic two-part
film Die Nibelungen, based on a famous Germanic poem from Medieval
times. In the first part, Siegried, we saw how Queen Kriemhild was
tricked into betraying her husband Siegfried, allowing her evil sister-in-law
Brunhild to have him killed. The second part is concerned with
Kriemhild’s revenge on her husband’s killer, the vassal Hagen Tronje - and a
bloody affair it is too.
With an enormous budget, Lang was able to realise some of the most spectacular
sequences ever seen in cinema up until this point - including some truly
ambitious battle scenes involving many hundreds of extras. This is a
triumph of German cinema in the 1920s. The sets were some of the most
extravagant ever to have been assembled in
There are two plausible interpretations of this film. The first is that
revenge is something which ennobles the human spirit; it is cowardice or folly
to let an act of evil go unpunished. The avenger is a hero, someone who
must be prepared to sacrifice everything so that retribution may be arrived
at. Kriemhild is not only morally justified in what she does, she stands
as an emblem of divine justice. This is hardly a Christian view, but it
is probably how many German people, watching the film in the 1920s, would have
felt. In the humiliating aftermath of the First World War, the
nationalistic sentiments of the film would have been readily picked up,
nourishing thoughts of revenge against those who had brought a great nation to
its knees.
The second interpretation, which is more evident today, is that revenge is a
terrible thing, something which brings only devastation and misery, and
resolves nothing. It is a conduit by which evil may enter the world and wreak
mayhem. Notice how, in the course of the film, Kriemhild becomes
increasingly fanatical in her desire to avenge the death of her husband.
She loses all trace of humanity and is transformed into a single-minded
automaton, strangely reminiscent of the Maria android in Lang’s later film Metropolis
(1927). She becomes almost oblivious to the death and destruction that
happens around her, and even sanctions the murder of her elder brother in order
to fulfil her revenge. This descent into fixated madness is horribly
prescient of what would happen to
Chicken Soup for the
Revenge-Minded Soul... MMM-MMM Good ... JediKermit from Epinions
First of all, if you haven't read my "Siegfried"
review yet, you may want to do that....just because this movie,
"Kriemhild's Revenge" is a sequel to "Siegfried." But
you'll probably figure out what's going on from this one. So there it is, right
out in the open...no one's ashamed.
There have been times in my life I've wanted revenge. A full, sweeping revenge
that carries up all I want destroyed and leaves behind only wreckage. The kind
of revenge that would make me turn from Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader at
the drop of a helmet.
There have even been times that my feelings of revenge have been
justified...times that "get over it" just isn't good enough. Justice
must be done.
For Kriemhild, the heroine of "Kriemhild's Revenge," this is one of
those times. At the end of the previous film, her husband Siegfried was killed
by her own brother and uncle to assuage her sister-in-law Brunhild's jealousy.
After having the entire court and her entire family telling her to "get over"
her husband's murder, Kriemhild decides to leave Burgundy and marry Atilla
(yes, THAT Atilla) and move east....all after Atilla's right hand man promises
to help her in her quest for revenge.
What follows are a series of traps and battles that Kriemhild sets for her own
flesh and blood; to celebrate the birth of her child with Atilla they invite
the entire Burgundian court to join their Blessed Event. No one gets out alive.
This is an amazingly chilling film for audiences like us, who are used to some
measure of a happy ending...for Kriemhild, there is no peace, there is no
happiness, there is no love...in her own words, "You killed my heart when
you killed Siegfried," and this puts us in a difficult position.
On the one hand, what was done to her was wrong...very wrong. And yet,
remembering that her own actions in fact ultimately led to Siegfried's
murder...you wonder what exactly is going in in that Braided Teutonic head of
hers. Is it displaced guilt? Is it just the completion of her revenge? And why
does she choose to take so VERY MANY with her?
Kriemhild is played by Margarete Schoen, and is played very well...although my
brief description above would lead you to think she's a one-note character, she
plays Kriemhild with a depth of emotion, and a ...fullness of hate that is
rarely seen, and certainly wasn't conveyed in many silent films. She's not just
cold and bitter...she HATES. She SEETHES. And yet, she's not evil. She just
wants vengeance.
I've come to think of this as the ultimate, iconic tale of revenge...her
patience as she waits for years to avenge Siegfried's death...her cunning
planning, involving not only her husband and his court, but the people who are
going to themselves die at her hands (all unwitting)...and then her resolve to
see this thing through to the end. Even when her own brothers beg her for
mercy, she doesn't give in.
Fritz Lang, who would later direct "Metropolis," "M," and
other early film classics, did his usual wonderful job with "Kriemhild's
Revenge," but with the exception of a few battle scenes and effects
sequences, this one isn't as visually impressive as "Siegfried" was.
The elements of magic died with Siegfried, and this is a much grittier, more
human tale.
I recommend seeing this movie to anyone, especially those interested in early
film or in German history...but everyone would be able to appreciate the pain
Kriemhild feels, and you'll be both impressed and shocked at what she'll do to
save her own soul and the memory of her husband. You should watch "Siegfried"
before watching this, it's concludes the story of the Niebelungen in a
spectacular conflagration that will leave you breathless. It's well worth your
time...check it out.
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Nibelungen (1924) from Michael Organ’s website
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
DVD Talk [John Sinnott] reviewing Die Nibelungen Pt’s I and II
Die
Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com reviewing Die Nibelungen Pt’s I and II
The
Nibelungen | Theater Critic's Choice | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader reviewing Die Nibelungen Pt’s I and II (capsule)
METROPOLIS
Kin Newman from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Originally clocking in at over
two hours, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is
the first science-fiction epic, with huge sets, thousands of extras,
then-state-of-the-art special effects, lots of sex and violence, a heavy-handed
moral, big acting, a streak of Germanic
Gothicism, and groundbreaking fantasy sequences. Bankrolled by UFA, Germany’s
giant film studio, it was controversial in its day and proved a box-office
disaster that nearly ruined the studio.
The plot is almost as simplistic
as a fairly tale, with Freder Fredersen (Gustav Frölich), pampered son of the
Master of Metropolis (Alfred Abel), learning of the wretched lives of the
multitude of workers who keep the gleaming supercity going. Freder comes to
understand the way things work by the saintly Maria (Brigitte Helm), a pacifist
who constantly preaches mediation in industrial disputes, as well as by
secretly working on a hellish ten-hour shift at one of the grinding machines.
The Master consults with mad engineer Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), who has
created a feminoid robot he reshapes to be an evil double of Maria and
unleashes on the city. The robotrix goes from dancing naked in a decadent
nightspot to inciting a destructive riot, which allows Lang to get the most
value out of the huge factory sets by blowing them up and/or flooding them, but
Freder and the real Maria save the day by rescuing the city’s children from a
flood. Society is reunited when Maria decrees that the heart (Freder) must
mediate between the brain (the Master) and the hands (the workers).
Shortly after its premiere, the
expensive film was pulled from distribution and reedited against Lang’s
wishes: this truncated, simplified form
remained best-known, even in the colorized Giorgio Moroder remix of the 1980’s,
until the 21st century, when a partial restoration—with tactful
linking titles to fill in the scenes that remain irretrievably missing—made it
much closer to Lang’s original vision. This version not only adds many scenes
that went unseen for decades, but also restores their order in the original
version and puts in the proper identities. Up to that point rated as a
spectacular but simplistic science-fiction film, this new-old version reveals
that the futuristic setting isn’t intended as prophetic but mythical, with
elements of 1920’s architecture, industry, design, and politics mingled with
the medieval and the Biblical to produce images of striking strangeness: a futuristic robot burned at the stake, a steel-handed
mad scientist who is also a 15th-century alchemist, the trudging
workers of a vast factory plodding into the jaws of a machine that is also the
ancient god Moloch. Frölich’s performance as the hero who represents the heart
is still wildly overdone, but Klein-Rogge’s engineer Rotwang, Abel’s Master of
Metropolis, and, especially, helm in the dual role of saintly savior and metal
femme fatale are astonishing. By restoring a great deal of story delving into
the mixed motivations of the characters, the wild plot now makes more sense,
and we can see it is as much a twisted family drama as an epic of repression,
revolution, and reconciliation.
Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center) Scientific Gazing and the Cinematic Body Politic: The Demonized Cyborg of Metropolis, by Jill Clark from Intertexts Fall, 1999
My article explores the images and metaphors relating to
space in Fritz Lang's 1926 film, Metropolis (remade in 1984 by Georgio
Moroder). Using a primarily Marxist interpretive framework, I analyse the
spatial layout of the filmic city of Metropolis, divided into three levels, one
above ground and two underground, as metonymic of the class divisions in the
urban society that are represented in the film. The article also examines the
architecture of Metropolis as representing social values and conflicts. It then
proceeds to investigate the film's gender dynamics as revealed in the two
figures of the robot Maria and the real Maria, and concludes that the film's
gender and class ideology is remarkably conservative.
Metropolis from Kino Film
Perhaps the most famous and influential of all silent films, Metropolis
had for 75 years been seen only in shortened or truncated versions. Now,
restored in
Metropolis takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of these two societies is realized through images that are among the most famous of the 20th century, many of which presage such sci-fi landmarks as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Lavish and spectacular, with elaborate sets and modern science fiction style, Metropolis stands today as the crowning achievement of the German silent cinema. Kino is proud to present the definitive, authorized version of this towering classic, at a length over one-third longer than any previous release, for the first time on DVD and VHS.
Fritz Lang Bibliography (via
UC Berkeley Media Resources Center) The Star on C.A.
Rotwang's Door: Turning Kracauer on its Head (an
analysis of Fritz Lang's film, the 'Metropolis') by Peter Dolgenos from the Journal
of Popular Film and Television, Summer,
1997
The half-Jewish film director Fritz Lang rejected propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbel's offer of a top position in the newly Nazified German
film industry and left the country to be one of
According to Joseph Goebbels, it was when he and Hitler went to see Metropolis in a small-town cinema that Hitler declared that Fritz Lang "will make the Nazi film." One can shed light on the ideology of Metropolis by comparing it with that of the National Socialist Party. The Nazis offered a critique of the industrial/capitalist civilization of their time, which bore roughly the same relation to a standard socialist critique as Metropolis does to a standard leftist film. Whereas the socialists spoke for those at the bottom of urban society, the Nazis, and ultimately Lang in this one film, spoke for those who were altogether outside society looking fearfully in. In the 1920s, the Nazis' support came disproportionately from rural areas, especially from people who distrusted modernization and urbanization and feared becoming proletarianized. To them, Metropolis--filled with futuristic architecture that the party rejected along with all modern art--might have seemed real as a projection of their worst fears about the city.
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ignatiy
Vishnevetsky
The now-famous story of METROPOLIS' new restoration--nearly half
an hour of footage recovered from a newly-discovered 16mm print that had been
sitting in Argentina since 1928, comprising a more or less definitive version
only a few minutes shorter than the premiere print--has eclipsed just exactly
what those restored 25 minutes do to this Introduction to Film History
juggernaut/music video reference-point, a delirious fantasy that's had the
unfortunate fate of being boiled down to its "iconic moments,"
muddled politics (courtesy of an ostensibly "socialist" script by
future Nazi Thea von Harbou) and its status as the only Fritz Lang movie to not
have any real people in it (besides, of course, villain Rotwang). If previous versions
(most notably the enthrallingly ridiculous one produced by Giorgio Moroder,
which runs half the length of this one) made METROPOLIS seem more like a von
Harbou film than a Lang one, the now "complete" version of this
sprawling future fever-dream actually resembles a movie someone as smart as
dear old Fritz would make. More nuanced because it is more excessive, the
restored METROPOLIS is a film that understands (and feels through) its
artificiality--as well as the fixations with death and female sexuality
inherent in its material--instead of presenting it as straight allegory; it's
fitting that the first piece of restored footage, arriving about seven minutes
in, is a brief sequence of a man applying make-up to a woman. Since METROPOLIS
tells its story (about a 21st century city made possible by a caste of
underground-dwelling workers) through two substitutions--the son of the city's
ruler taking the place of a worker; a vicious cyborg taking the place of a
saintly young woman--previous versions have inevitably picked the son (Gustav
Fröhlich) over the worker (Erwin Biswanger), and the cyborg over the girl (both
played by Brigitte Helm; in this case it's understandable, because she is more
interesting playing a villain). This version restores the ample screen time devoted
to 11811, the prole who trades places with heir apparent/smirking naïf Freder,
and to 11811's adventures in upper-class decadence (especially in a scene that
now seems essential--a car filling up with flyers for a local night club,
dissolving into a montage of excesses), as well as many apocalyptic
hallucinations and black-gloved intrigues (especially so in the case of
striking Lang regular Fritz Rasp; essentially an extra in previous versions,
this cut presents him as a major character in both the realities of the plot
and in Freder's nightmares).
Metropolis and Fritz Lang Page two look at METROPOLIS from German-Hollywood
Connection
The silent classic Metropolis
was created in Germany in 1925-26 by the Austrian director Fritz Lang in
collaboration with his wife, Thea von Harbou (1888-1954). This science-fiction
film, so admired today, was not even a big box-office success in its time and
the production costs almost put the Ufa film studios out
of business. But Fritz Lang's Metropolis continues to fascinate viewers
today, and for over seven decades it has influenced Hollywood and world cinema
— from music videos to films such as Blade Runner and Robocop.
Lang himself went to Hollywood in 1933, where he continued to work until 1956.
The first real science-fiction
film was based on a story written by Fritz Lang's wife, Thea von Harbou,
although some claim it actually stems from Georg Kaiser's 1920 “Gas Trilogy.”
But Metropolis is really more memorable for its fantastic imagery than
its story, which is a bit vague and confusing, at times plain silly. Lang's
cinematic vision of the city of the future has influenced the look of later
sci-fi films such as Blade Runner. Even today, there is something
fascinating about the futuristic scenes shot by the camera team of Karl Freund
and Günther Rittau — a fascination that even led Madonna and Queen to include Metropolis
clips in their music videos. Ironically, in light of the respect accorded the
film today, Metropolis nearly bankrupted the Ufa studios (the
legendary German film production company). In production for almost two years, Metropolis
required vast resources — 37,633 performers, including 1,000 men (FX-multiplied
by six) with their heads shaved for the Tower of Babel sequence alone. At 5.3
million marks, the film ended up being the most expensive ever produced in
Germany up to that time. The mounting expenses almost closed production early,
and the film failed to make money. But even the modern viewer can see where the
all the money went. Some of the scenes and special effects in Metropolis
are as impressive today as they must have been in 1927.
Erich Kettelhut's Metropolis
set designs and drawings (The very first view of the city.
- this is actually not a scene from the movie, but the original canvas) helped
director Fritz Lang create the unique imagery of this science-fiction classic.
Some critics consider the film's architecture symbolic of the power
relationships — power versus oppression, freedom versus subjugation — in the
story. Six months after a visit to New York City, Lang imbued his film with a
vision of skyscrapers of the future.
The film's reception at the time
of its release in various countries was mixed. The London Times and The
Spectator gave generally positive reviews, but in the U.S., Time
magazine's review of Metropolis ended with this unkind comment: “Ufa
might better have shut the eyes of its great cameras than permit them to
reflect nonsense in such grandeur.” In his later years Lang himself seemed to
be one of the film's biggest detractors. In 1958 he said, “I don't like Metropolis.
The ending is false. I didn't like it even when I made the film.” (This from
the director who was such a perfectionist, he required three days to shoot a
brief love scene in the film between Brigitte Helm and Gustav
Fröhlich.) One can only speculate on how much of Lang's negativity stems from
his past association with ex-wife Thea von Harbou, the film's co-writer and a
big Nazi sympathizer.
A
Tale of Two Cities - Film Comment Chris Fujiwara on the
newly reconstructed version of Metropolis
from Film Comment, May/June 2010
Metropolis splits its heroine, Brigitte Helm’s iconic Maria, into two figures. One is a preacher of love who seeks to reconcile the ruling and the working classes. The other is a wanton robot on a mission of destruction. And just as there are two Marias, so there have long been two Metropolises. One is a mummified classic, hollowed out from endless recycling in film histories and in pop culture. The other is a Fritz Lang film with all the director’s visual complexity and drive (wedded to a Thea von Harbou script that, if it’s kitsch, is kitsch that soars).
For years now the false Metropolis has been running amok, courting charges of proto-Nazism, furnishing video backdrops for nightclubs, and fueling predictable academic studies (put a cyborg in a futuristic city as seen from Weimar Germany and you have the Ph.D. motherlode). The Lang film had been mutilated in so many ways that its creator insisted that it had ceased to exist. But it turns out that Lang’s Metropolis survived after all, locked away all this time (as the true Maria is locked up for part of the film). With the new restoration that premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February and that will come out on DVD later this year after a rep-house tour, Lang’s work has finally re-emerged: in many respects a new film, neither smothered by overfamiliarity nor butchered by cutting.
Metropolis fell under re-editors’ scissors soon after its 1927 premiere, to be distributed in assorted truncations and, later, reconstructions (the longest of which, that of 2001, was still missing about a quarter of the film). In 2008, film historian Fernando Martín Peña and museum curator Paula Félix-Didier identified a nearly complete print that had languished for decades, unrecognized for what it was, in a Buenos Aires archive. (For Peña’s account of the discovery, see issue #6 of Undercurrent) This print provided material for the new restoration, which was done by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung. The restored version improves on the old abridged ones in two main ways: it increases the visual and rhythmic density of the film through the addition of content; and it clarifies the correlation of images, characters, and plotlines through the completion of form.
The new restored content appears throughout the film but mainly involves these parts:
· The misadventures of Georgy (Erwin Biswanger), a worker at the underground machines that keep the city running
· Scenes of Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), the master of Metropolis, and Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), a scientist, at a monument to a woman named Hel, whom both men loved
· The efforts of the sinister Thin Man (Fritz Rasp) to track down Fredersen’s son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich)
· Freder’s comradeship with his father’s dismissed secretary, Josaphat (Theodor Loos)
· Several action episodes, notably one in which the robot Maria incites a mob of discontented workers to attack the critical Heart Machine, and one in which Freder and Josaphat, rescuing the workers’ children from the ensuing flood, climb up an air shaft and break through a gate at the top.
Three characters who were blurry in previous editions of Metropolis—Georgy, the Thin Man, and Josaphat—now come into focus. Georgy, whom Freder replaces at the labor-cum-torture of moving the clocklike arms of a large dial, emerges as Freder’s opposite number: while love for Maria redeems Freder from a life of empty hedonism, Georgy falls easy prey to the temptations of Yoshiwara, the Metropolis sin-pit where the robot Maria will make her debut. Formerly a striking but puzzling presence, the Thin Man is now a full-fledged character, satanically enjoying the cat-and-mouse harassment he inflicts on others. Josaphat, who gets a boost in stature from the restored material (as does Freder himself, formerly the most nominal of nominal heroes), develops into an engaging co-hero.
Older versions were plotbound, so that for all its vast scale the film seemed constrained. Only with the Argentine footage does Metropolis breathe freely, encompassing the places and rhythms of everyday life. A delightful restored shot features the Thin Man standing at a newsstand, keeping baleful watch on Georgy from behind an unfolded Metropolis Courier. Bit players ride in open elevator cars that slowly ascend and descend in the background of a scene between Josaphat and the Thin Man, reminding the viewer how rare it is, in this film filled with purposeful crowds, to see people who play no part in the plot. In an interlude of respite at Josaphat’s apartment, Freder’s relaxed air of well-being discloses a native confidence that makes him a more appealing and convincing hero than he was in past versions.
Although Metropolis has long been regarded as a parable about capitalism, only with the new restoration do we actually see money—when the Thin Man tries to bribe Josaphat. The sheafs of currency he hauls out from his coat link visually to the Yoshiwara handbills that tumble down over Georgy (in another restored scene), which in turn are doubles of the mysterious maps that Fredersen’s men find in workers’ pockets.
The restoration of the Hel monument scenes (cut, supposedly, because the preparers of the American version objected to the woman’s name) adds a crucial level—the top one—to the film’s vertical hierarchy. Looming over Rotwang and Fredersen, Hel’s giant stone head embodies an abstract destiny that enfolds the entire city. (Hel herself prefigures the lost women who motivate a series of vengeful protagonists in Lang films, and Rotwang’s surrogate repossession of Hel through the robot he invents marks Metropolis as one of multiple Langian intersections of desire and dehumanization.) As Lang intercuts the mob of workers hunting for the “witch” Maria with the robot leading a band of revelers in the streets, a magisterial cutaway finds Rotwang walking alone toward the Hel head, as if the whole parallel-action cataclysm were his tribute to her.
New footage also expands and elevates the final section, putting greater emphasis on the endangered children, the heroes, and the emotional mothers (who link Metropolis to the 1931 M). At the 2,000-seat, sold-out Friedrichstadtpalast premiere in February, the final reconciliation between “Hands” (a laborer) and “Head” (Fredersen) by means of “Heart” (Freder) seemed to come off for the first time in my experience of Metropolis. It’s hard to tell, however, how much this achievement owed to the cumulative power of the restored footage and how much to the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin’s live performance of Gottfried Huppertz’s full-blooded original score.
Lang’s structure—as elaborate and ambitious as in his Mabuse films—is now clear. The same can’t, without qualification, be said of the footage from the Argentine print, a 16mm dupe defaced by a blizzard of scratches (the other materials of the restoration are in better shape: watching the whole is like reading a book with a fourth of the text printed in red). Still, for the first time since 1927, Metropolis exists. In 1985, Enno Patalas (whose archival work laid the groundwork for all reconstructions of the film) wrote, “Metropolis has been thoroughly and irreparably destroyed, as few other films have been.” Strike “irreparably.”
Metropolis Fritz Lang 1927 Film Archive - Bibliography - Introduction ... A Compendium of Resources on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, phenomenal Michael Organ website from Australia, which includes translated German reviews and a scathing review in 1927 by H.G. Wells in the New York Times, posted September 24, 2002
metropolis | movie classic, directed by fritz lang (1927) Metropolis website from leninimports, including a biography and
filmography here: fritz lang
Metropolis (1926) - German film
history by Thomas Staedeli Metropolis website featuring profiles of
each of the principal players
Fritz Lang's Metropolis another Metropolis website by Augusto Cesar B. Areal, in Brazil
Rome's Metropolis- yet another Metropolis website
Metropolis Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Metropolis and Fritz Lang Page one bio and introduction piece from German-Hollywood Connection
Fritz Lang and Metropolis Fritz Lang and Metropolis: The First Science Fiction Film, by Erika Hawkins
Maria from Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis Film
Talking Pictures Smearing the Urban:The Politics of
Metropolis, an essay by Andrew Lydon (undated)
Flickhead:
Christine Young's Metropolis Essay Reflection, by Christine Young (1999)
Fritz Lang Elizabeth Burton writes a 3-part series on Metropolis from Suite 101.com, (May/June
2000)
Technology
and the Construction of Gender in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, by Peter Ruppert
from Genders (2000)
[note – entire article is available]
Metropolis:
The Foundation of the Avant-garde, by Jason Alexander Apuzzo from Neurosurgery magazine, October 2001
(pdf)
Fritz
Lang: The Giant Who Today Goes Unseen
On a Metropolis restoration, David
Hay from the New York Times, September
30, 2001
A
Restored German Classic of Futuristic Angst
A.O. Scott from the New York
Times, July 12, 2002
Getting
It Right, F Stop and All on the Metropolis restoration, by Dave Kehr
from the New York Times, July 12,
2002
Article: Crucified to the Machine:
Religious Imagery in Fritz ... Crucified
to the Machine: Religious Imagery in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, by David Michael Wharton from Strange Horizons, January 6,
2003
About restoring
'Metropolis' feature which includes
an additional 6 articles by GREENCINE magazine
The
official site of the new restoration
village voice > film > Back to the
Future by Ed Halter Fritz Lang's
sci-fi masterpiece revisited, July 10, 2007
Metropolis: A Film Far Ahead of its Time Gautam Valluri from Broken Projector, December 7, 2007
'Metropolis' finds new life Ed Meza from Variety, December 9, 2007
DVD Times - Metropolis (Masters of Cinema Series) Kevin Gilvear
DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] (January 22, 2003) also see: Metropolis: a theatrical review of the digital restoration (September 29, 2001) again here: METROPOLIS and STAR WARS
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Unified Theory
[METROPOLIS] | Jonathan Rosenbaum August
16, 2002
Article - Ten Neglected Science Fiction Movies by Jonathan Rosenbaum follow up article from DVDBeaver
Metropolis - TCM.com Frank Miller
Metropolis - The Restoration - TCM.com Bret Wood
Metropolis (1926) - Articles - TCM.com
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Metropolis (1927) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Decent Films - faith on film [Steven D. Greydanus] One of the 15 films listed in the category "Art" on the Vatican film list
DVD Times Noel Megahey
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor)
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) Tomorrowland, an essay (2004)
The Digital Bits Bill Hunt
VideoVista review Amy Harlib
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Arthur Lazere
The Greatest Films - Revisiting the Greatest Films Ever Made Jerry Roberts from Musings of a Cinephile
Old School Reviews [John Nesbit] also seen here: John Nesbit: MovieGeek review and here: CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit)
not coming to a theater near you [Matt Bailey]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
by Jonathan L. Bowen from Orbital Reviews
by David Arnold from IMDb reviews
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
The timely return of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. - By David Edelstein ... from Slate
The New York Sun [Nicolas Rapold]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Movie Ram-blings Ram Samudrala
Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]
Metropolis Walkthrough multi-angled view of the set by Jim Pivarski
Lang Movie Posters German-Hollywood Connection
It came from "Metropolis": The legacy of a classic Matt Zoller Seitz from Salon, May 15, 2010
Time Out London
From Metropolis to Blade Runner: architecture that stole the show Jonathan Glancey from The Guardian, November 5, 2009
The view: Why Metropolis is the real summer blockbuster Danny Leigh from The Guardian, April 30, 2010
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
The Boston Phoenix Jeffrey Gantz
Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)
Fritz Lang's Metropolis: Complete at Last Larry Rohter from The New York Times, May 4, 2010
Metropolis (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fritz Lang- 1925 "Metropolis" Moloch (4:56)
YouTube - Metropolis - 10 MINUTE Promo - Fritz Lang
SPIES (Spione)
Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center) Spies, by Geoffrey O’Brien from Film Comment (July/Aug 1995)
Spies, German director Fritz Lang's first independent
production, virtually inaugurated the spy genre. Made in 1927, the film
features a number of bravura passages, including a stunning opening montage.
The writer discusses the conventions of the spy movie.
Time Out Tony Rayns
In its very idiosyncratic way, Spione
beats Lang's three Mabuse pictures as his definitive vision of a criminal
mastermind. The reason is probably that this film entirely lacks the
socio-political overtones of the Mabuse trilogy: the exploits of the evil
genius Haghi (Klein-Rogge) here represent criminality almost in the abstract,
and plunge the movie into a delirium of disguises, deaths, double-motives, and
labyrinthine tricks. The tone is somewhere between true pulp fiction and pure
expressionism, and the result remains wholly thrilling.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The colossal canvas of Metropolis was a tough act to follow, but Fritz Lang's breathtaking silent thriller manages to match and in some areas top that earlier milestone. Returning to contemporary Weimar without quite abandoning Metropolis' sense of futuristic entrapment, Lang structures Thea von Harbou's pulpy plot around another fate-orchestrating mastermind, Haghi (the casting of Dr. Mabuse himself, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, encourages thematic links), a wheelchair-bound, Lenin-whiskered banker bent on world domination. The one threat to his reign of terror is a government secret agent known as No. 326 (Willy Fritsch), whose repertoire of disguises ranges from scraggly bum to debonair swell -- Haghi aims for the hero's emotional Achilles' heel by sending comely spy Gerda Maurus to neutralize him, not counting on the two falling in love. As always with Lang, there's a geometric scheme to the narrative, manifested not only in the compositional design but also in the parallels drawn between the mutual love of Fritsch and Maurus and the disastrously one-sided romance between a dignified Japanese courier (Lupu Pick) and one of Haghi's minxy vamps (Lien Deyers). Even more audacious is Lang's use of ellipsis, particularly in the opening flurry of images setting stage for secret hideaways, bullets flying through windows, and suicide pills. (One stunner: the getaway to a break-in is summed up by a single, extremely low-angle shot of a grinning biker.) Though the movie's international skullduggery, gadgetry and malefic, shapeshifting Blofeld stand-in have often pegged it as a prototype for the James Bond thrillers, Lang's moral rigor is actually the opposite of that genre's audience-nudging mix of sadistic violence and unfeeling sex -- the emotional complexity leading up to Pick's hara-kiri is precisely what the 007 films trade in for degraded kicks. Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner. With Louis Ralph, Hertha von Walther, and Fritz Rasp. In black and white.
Spies opens in an orgy of excess, the
visceral excitement of onscreen chaos and death paralleling the anything-goes
headiness of
This
is the Fritz Lang method: pose a question, then answer it, though never in any
sort of predictable rhythm. His best narratives masterfully interweave and
overlap with a Teutonic precision that befits the oft-recalled image of the
director as a perfectly poised, monocled tyrant, cracking a horsewhip in time
with the slavish, synchronized movements of hundreds of extras. Yet Lang's is
also a messily emotional cinema, obsessed with parallel love themes for women
and for country. As Spies' conflicted operative Sonia, the luminous
Gerda Maurus (with whom Lang, then involved with scenarist Thea von Harbou, had
a passionate affair) is perhaps the most complex of the director's virginal leading
ladies, caught in this film and the subsequent Woman in the Moon at an
ineffable, metaphysical divide between younger and elder womanhood. The Madonna
and child medallion Sonia gifts to her enemy-in-trade—later lover—no. 326
(Willy Fritsch) hints at the perverse mixture of spirit-/sex-uality inherent to
Lang's female characters, mothers and whores all, but never to reductive
detriment. Indeed, the tender way in which Lang offers the villainous
spy-in-training Kitty (Lien Deyers) with a parodic past-from-hell straight out
of
Sacrifice
is a concept alien to Lang's women—they are survivalists and/or ethereal
beauties, possessing the entrancing temptations of Greek sirens. They cackle
from a burning funeral pyre or gaze down upon their wounded men like Mother
Mary frozen in a pietà close-up. The men of Spies find their salvation
and/or doom in these women: In the case of the Austrian agent Colonel Jellusic
(Fritz Rasp), the lack of a literal female counterpart seems a prompt for the
first of the film's four suicides—revealed as a traitor he is forced to kill
himself for a clearly patriarchal fatherland. Elsewhere, the Japanese doctor
Matsumoto (Lupu Pick), seduced by the aptly named Kitty into giving up an
essential peace treaty, is haunted by the memories of his deceased countrymen
and comrades. This leads to an extended hara-kiri sequence, set in a minimalist
temple before a stoic stone Buddha, which acts as a provocative companion piece
to Jellusic's quick, implicative death scene and further illustrates Lang's
facility in juxtaposing various narrative incidents for maximum profundity.
And
what of the "I"? The duplicitous master-of-disguise Haghi (Rudolf
Klein-Rogge), the puppet master of the piece? An early blackmail-in-miniature
of the opium-smoking socialite Lady Leslane (Hertha von Walther) humorously
reveals Haghi's singular loyalty ("I'm richer than Ford, Lady Leslane, and
I pay significantly less in taxes") and foreshadows his tempestuous
relations with Sonia, who slowly tears herself away from his increasingly
misguided affections. Like many a Lang mastermind, Haghi must be ruler of all
he surveys, his anxiety of influence exemplified by Spies' third suicide
wherein a lowly Haghi henchman, trapped by the police, swallows a cyanide
capsule and calmly awaits the inevitable.
Haghi
is a more streamlined (one might argue more courageous) version of that seminal
Lang/Klein-Rogge creation, Dr. Mabuse, though where the latter descends into
the survivalist comforts of madness, Haghi, quite sanely, makes a sacrificial
political statement before a theater full of less-than-discreetly charmed
bourgeoisie. Lang is thought of by some as a prognosticator of Germany's fall
into Nazism, and the confrontational ending of Spies (which ranks, in
this critic's opinion, as one of the greatest finales in cinema history)
supports such a reading, a satirical suicide sequence filled with such
audacious vigor and vitriol that—much like the film's onscreen audience—one
can't help but to laugh with and applaud, even as a sobering sense of
historical reality (in the proscenium-appropriate form of a theater curtain)
comes crashing violently down.
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Adrian Martin Spione Machinations
of an Incoherent, Malevolent Universe, from Rouge,
2006
Fritz Lang : Spione | Book Reviews |
SpikeMagazine.com Ismo
Santala on the subversive pulp fiction of Lang’s 1928 silent thriller
Spies Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
filmcritic.com Jake Euker
Spione
(1928) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall)
As
Movies Began to Talk, the Effect Was Visible Richard T. Jameson from the New York Times,
WOMAN IN THE MOON (Frau im Mond)
Fritz Lang's last silent film is nothing special, looking more
like the work of Lang's wife and screenwriter (and Nazi-to-be) Thea von Harbou.
German industrialists, convinced that there's gold on the moon, finance a space
mission; the usual conflicts arise among the crew when they find it. Nice sets,
no frisson. Lang claims to have invented the liftoff countdown for this 1928
film--too bad he couldn't get it copyrighted. 104 min.
Time Out Tony Rayns
Lang's last silent movie was planned as another
giant sci-fi film in the vein of Metropolis. It didn't work out like
that, partly because the design and trick-work are cramped and unimaginative,
partly because Thea von Harbou's script centres on the exceedingly banal
character conflicts on board the first rocket to the moon. As a result, it
looks considerably more dated than other Lang silents: it's badly acted
melodrama, and the sci-fi trimmings remain entirely secondary. One scene is
distinguished by Lang's magnificent sense of spatial drama: the actual
launching of the rocket. Otherwise, it's chiefly notable for being one of the
rare Lang movies with a deliriously happy ending.
Slant Magazine - DVD Review Keith Uhlich
After prophesying the downfall of the
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
After the fevered prophecies of Metropolis,
21st-century dystopia for Fritz Lang became ingrained into the here-and-now of
the
taoyue.com: Film Reviews - Frau im Mond / Woman in the Moon (1929)
Woman in the Moon
• Senses of Cinema Michael Price from
Senses of Cinema, April 2004
Woman in the Moon Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
DVD
Outsider
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Electric Sheep Magazine Philip Winter
Frau im Mond
(1929) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
M
A 100
As a youth, Lang studied architecture in Vienna, but at age
20 he left home and traveled throughout the world, including North Africa,
Turkey, Russia, China, Japan, and the Pacific, supporting himself by selling
drawings, painted postcards, and cartoons, eventually settling in Paris to
paint, where he had an exhibition in 1914.
At the outbreak of World War I, Lang returned to
The use of sound in M can only be described as radical, and light years ahead of its time in the use of natural street sounds, with the noisy honking of car horns, the rising volume level of an agitated crowd, the insistent tapping of a nail, the expressive sound of a cuckoo clock as it strikes noon, and perhaps most importantly the sound of an obsessionally whistled melody that eventually identifies the murderer, ironically recognized by a blind man. Lang’s subjective use of sound was highly sophisticated, where the blind balloon seller covers his ears at the mechanical noise of a hurdy-gurdy player, making the sound disappear altogether, only to be heard again when he lifts his hands, helping the viewer identify with their state of mind. Similarly, sound is identified with the killer, who is “not” able to stop the sound spinning around in his head. Visibly agitated after losing a potential victim to her embracing mother, he sits in an outdoor café and orders a cognac, where he can’t stop the sound of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, Fritz Lang's M - Hall of the Mountain King Whistling (Grieg ... YouTube (10 seconds) that he himself whistles unknowingly, where he can’t identify the source of the music he hears, where it must be subjective, imagined, or hallucinated as the whistling continues unabated, even after he covers his ears. Unlike the balloon seller, the killer can’t help what he hears, as he has no power to stop it from its merciless aggravation. Like a Wagnerian leitmotif, the whistle follows him as a sign of his subconscious identification, giving expression to his inner impulses. Of interest, it was Lang’s wife Thea von Harbou who was whistling, as actor Peter Lorre could not whistle. Giving the film another level of complexity, the tune is used in Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, which is the incidental music used to accompany Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play. Peer Gynt is a capricious and irresponsible character with no sense of self, saving his own life by allowing another man to drown, where the tune is associated with a terrifying scene in a dreamlike fantasy where the trolls attack the trespassing Peer Gynt character with hysterical screams of “Slaughter him, slaughter him, tear him up, tear him up.” Similarly, M’s frenzied mob scenes with people yelling and shrieking like the trolls evoke the same bloodthirsty passions in the public as the psychopathic killer, where the familiar musical refrain becomes a haunting prelude to unspeakable violence.
One of the major influences of the film is newspapers and
the impact they have on mass culture, which popularized serial installments of
fictionalized murders to help sell newspapers, where in this film serial
killing and serial fiction mirror one another, where the film opens with the
mother of Elsie Beckmann preparing her daughter’s meal for her return home from
school around noon. How ironic for her
to receive the latest installment of a popular serial murder story at precisely
the same time that her daughter is being murdered, where Lang is capitalizing
on the public’s strange fascination with murder, emphasizing how mass murder
was such a popular theme in Weimar Germany, where descriptive newspaper
accounts fed the public’s voracious appetite to pore over every last detail of
the crime, often blurring the lines between fiction and real life, where actual
serial crimes reinforced the concept of serial newspaper installments. Lang’s film coincides with an actual serial
killer, where the film is inspired by real-life serial killer Peter Kürten, known as the Monster of Düsseldorf, though the screenplay was
completed before Kürten was
arrested. However, Kürten blamed the press for his
killings, claiming he learned about Jack the Ripper from reading press
accounts. G.W. Pabst’s film Pandora's
Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) (1928), a fictionalized and romanticized
account of Jack the Ripper, opened near the beginning of Kürten’s killing spree, where Lang
wanted to explore the public’s fascination with crime. Public trust in government authority had
eroded after the loss of the war, which led to a devastating rise in
inflation. German culture in the 20’s
viewed violent crime as symptomatic of a failed political system, where the
assassinations of political adversaries in the early 20’s led to highly
publicized mass murders, where serial killing and serial culture blended into
one. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, written in prison and published in 1925, advocated the
overthrow of the government, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, a musical glamorizing the criminal
underworld, was the biggest hit in Berlin during the 20’s, while Alfred Döblin’s city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz,
published in 1929, followed the life of an ex-criminal through a labyrinth of
petty criminals, prostitutes, and pimps of working class Berlin. Berliner Morgenpost, Berlin’s newspaper,
published a popular column called Der Kriminalist printing accounts of
real murders side by side with serial installments of crime novels.
Germany was besieged by mass murders in the 20’s, from Georg Karl Grossman, a butcher who made a living selling human flesh, after having killed and chopped up several prostitutes, who was arrested in 1921, after which he reportedly laughed when he was given the death penalty and hanged himself in his cell, to Fritz Haarmann of Hannover, the first German serial killer who was accused or murdering twenty-seven young men within a six-year period from 1918 to 1924. It was Haarmann’s trial that introduced many of the themes raised in Lang’s film, namely the murderer’s mental capacity and his compulsion to kill, where he was in and out of prison at an early age, frequently transferred to clinics and asylums after pleading insanity, only to escape and go on another murderous spree. Both Kürten and Haarmann had served lengthy prison terms before they became serial killers, where Haarmann was executed by guillotine in 1925, the subject (the Man in Black) of the chilling child’s nursery rhyme heard in the opening of the film (“Just you wait a little while, the evil man in black will come, with his little chopper, he will chop you up”). Once Peter Kürten was arrested in May 1930, his story filtered through the mainstream press, shadowing the production of Lang’s film throughout. While researching for the film Lang spent eight days inside a mental institution in Germany and met several real child murderers, including Peter Kürten, whose psychiatric and criminal investigation lasted from October 1930 through the end of January 1931, just about the time the film was ready for release. Due to his confession, Kürten’s trial only lasted ten days in April 1931, concluding on April 22nd with a death penalty for nine murders along with seven other attempted murders. M premiered just weeks later on May 11, falling between Kürten’s conviction and his subsequent execution by guillotine in August. The press blamed Lang for capitalizing on the sensationalist aspects of the murders, especially introducing such a horrid subject matter, but Lang insisted he was not glorifying mass murder, but rather society’s obsession and problematic participation in what he called the “mass murder complex.” In 1931, Lang wrote:
The epidemic series of
mass murder of the last decade with
their manifold and dark side effects had constantly absorbed me, as unappealing
as their study may have been. It made me
think of demonstrating, within the framework of a film story, the typical
characteristics of the immense danger for the daily order and the ways of
effectively fighting them. I found the
prototype in the person of the Düsseldorf serial murder and I also saw
how here the side effects exactly repeated themselves, i.e. how they took on a
typical form. I have distilled all
typical events from the plethora of materials and combined them with the help
of my wife into a self-contained film story.
The film M should be a document and an extract of facts and in that way
an authentic representation of a mass murder complex.
Made two years before Hitler came to power, this brilliant
psychological thriller is a vivid portrait of the rapidly disintegrating
British Film Institute Film Classics Volume 1, edited by Rob White and Edward Buscombe, 2003
In M, Lang alludes to
scenes well known from war films. The
raid on the basement bar, a hangout for criminals, is staged and shot like a
military operation. From extreme high
angle, the camera observes columns of uniformed and armed police advancing in
locked step, reminiscent of infantry marching in formation. Later, one of the
gangsters surveys the scene from the same angle through binoculars, as if reconnoitering
the enemy’s position.
The war was still a
living memory in 1931. Lang singles out
Emil Dustermann from the long line of nameless beggars as the embodiment of the
classical veteran. His wooden leg signifies
that he was one of the millions of soldiers who returned from the front as
invalids. Limbs were often blown off as
grenades and shells exploded, or amputated because of a lack of surgical
facilities in front hospitals. These
cripples who dotted the streets of
Berlin in the 20’s and 30’s was filled with poverty-stricken beggars and panhandlers on the streets, comprising the underground network, as the years following World War I in Germany were, according to Lang, a period “of the deepest despair, hysteria, cynicism, (and) unbridled vice.” Chaotic elements eroded public order, so that by 1930 Nazi paramilitary groups murdered, bombed, and sabotaged the nation while the existing governmental bureaucracy sat back in helpless ineptitude. Lang’s film aptly reflects the horrors of the times, a carefully constructed cloistered madness, purposefully expressed in the formal beauty of the director’s shadowy expressionism, not only a link between silent and sound, but also German Expressionism and Film Noir, exploring the growing chaos through an effective blending of expressionist and realist styles, where M’s central character Hans Beckert embodies the struggle between a weakening moral order and an increase in malevolent forces, personally besieged by uncontrollable homicidal passions. The film opens with the blending of a gruesome nursery rhyme about a real-life serial killer in Germany with the activities of a child’s mother who prepares an afternoon meal for a daughter she presumes will be arriving soon, but the camera moves back and forth between the mother and her daughter Elsie Beckmann, the only child to walk home from school unaccompanied by an adult, bouncing her ball on the street, where a policeman unsuspectingly helps her across the street directly into the hands of the killer, initially seen only as a shadow whose lingering presence hovers ironically over a reward poster for the killer’s capture, asking “Who is the murderer?” The shadowy figure buys her a balloon while humming a distinctive melody. But as her mother futilely cries out her name, images of that bouncing ball can be seen coming to a rest in an unnamed field, with the balloon getting tangled in the telephone wires, making Elsie Beckmann the most recent victim. The newspaper reports announce another murder, leaving a city restless and uneasy, where citizens in a panic are shown accusing one another in a lynch mob hysteria, ready to incriminate just about anyone. The police are led by Inspector Karl Lohmann, Otto Wernicke, who would play the same role in Lang’s next film, THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933), Lang’s last film before leaving his wife behind in Germany and fleeing for Paris, eventually emigrating into the United States.
While the police work round the clock, they have no significant
clues, with
Abandoning the search for his next victim, Beckert becomes
frightened when he’s boxed into a corner, shown from a vantage point high above
the street, but escapes into an office building just as the employees are
streaming out the doors at closing time.
Guarding the exits, the beggars contact Schränker, informing him the killer has been trapped inside a large
building that has been locked down for the night. Schränker
leads an all-night search of the building, subduing a couple of watchmen and
searching every possible hiding place, creating an intensive level of suspense
as Beckert, who has been locked into a darkened storage room, attempts to claw
his way out. When his incessant tapping
can be heard from the outside, Beckert is quickly captured and taken away just
before the morning workers begin to arrive.
One of them was left behind, however, and is interrogated by the police,
suggesting he may have inadvertently gotten himself involved in a homicide,
which has more serious consequences, eventually tipping off the police to their
plans. But the scene of the film is the
trial sequence, where Beckert is hauled in front of a jury of his peers, namely
other killers and thieves that make up the underground criminal element of
Lang’s work was
marked by a deep streak of fatalism and paranoia, making his reputation with
quasi-mythical films about master criminals and spies, featuring Rudolf
Klein-Rogge in DR MABUSE: THE GAMBLER
(1922) and SPIES (1928), men who manipulate appearances and conspire to take
over the city, and even the world. In M,
Lang shows us gangs of real criminals and a killer who is himself a victim,
dominated by his own tyrannical urges.
In his final speech before the legions of crooks who have captured him,
Lorre agonizingly evokes the forces that stalk him, that compel him to kill,
just as he disrupts and terrifies the city as a whole. This is a film about the horror within. To show how people’s lives are dominated by
powers outside their control, Lang repeatedly emphasizes scenes of off-screen
action that mysteriously define what we see in each frame. All of Lorre’s violence is committed out of
sight, where he himself only slowly comes into view as the film
progresses. Much of his character
anticipates the evil that he intends to carry out, but it’s defined by
providing evidence of what he’s already done.
In one of the more remarkable images, he is identified at his trial
before a house of convicts by a blind beggar who recognizes his whistling, who
reaches in and grasps his shoulder from outside the frame. When the criminals close in on him, we see
him scurrying through the streets like a rat in a maze, and when he takes
refuge in a warehouse, he becomes lost in the shadows until they methodically
root him out. The entrapped killer
becomes another victim, as he has been all along, pursued from within and
without. The Mörder Unter Uns (Murderer Among Us), Lang’s original title,
is also the murderer inside us, the force of the irrational, the instinctive,
the obsessional, over which we have little influence. Combining abnormal psychology with a police
procedural drama, where Freud is combined with a crime documentary, Lang
exposes, in the last turbulent years of the
The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity, by Tom Gunning (528 pages), and M, by Anton Kaes (87 pages), book review by Dana Polan, May 12, 2001 (pdf format)
For quite some time,
Lang was not thought of as a director of modernity but as a modernist director.
That is, his films were studied not as material investigations of a historical
world (the world of contemporaneity), instead, attention was directed to the
films' supposed investigation of deep metaphysical themes -- most of all, the
existential inescapability of destiny and fate. One of the central gambits of
both Gunning and Kaes is to refuse such modernist metaphysical thematics. Kaes,
for instance, virtually gives no mention of the theme of destiny and when he
does explicitly mention the topic (on the very last page of analysis of M), he
does so to rewrite existential themes in concrete historical fashion:
This visual reference
[in a final tableau of the film] to fate and destiny dramatises a larger
tension at work in the film, a tension between the forces of modernity with
their emphasis on time, discipline, organisation, seriality, law and order, and
those recalcitrant counterforces -- trauma, passion, illness, loss and,
finally, death --that defy reason and resist integration.
Indeed, what is best
about Kaes's volume is his reconstruction of the social, political, cultural
worlds of
As a typical example of
Kaes's historical contextual reading, take his discussion of M as dramatisation
of a disciplinary culture:
The film's obsession
with surveillance also addresses the deep-seated fear of an expanding urban
population. The ease with which Beckert was able to hide . . . must have scared
the contemporary audience.
Kim Newman from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
In the early 1930’s, MGM’s production genius Irving
Thallberg assembled all his writers and directors for a screening of Fritz
Lang’s thriller M, then criticized
them en masse for not making films as innovative, exciting, profound, and
commercial as this. Of course, Thallberg admitted, if anyone had pitched the
studio a story about a serial killer of children who is ultimately a tragic
victim and accuses all strata of society of a corruption deeper than his
psychosis, they would have been kicked off the lot immediately.
Whereas
In the powerful finale, Becker is put on trial by the
underworld and pleads his case on the surprisingly moving grounds that his
accusers have only chosen to commit crimes whereas he is compelled to commit
them. Though the film establishes Inspector Karl “Fatty” Lohmann (Otto
Wernicke)—who would return to take on Lang’s eponymous archfiend (Rudolf
Klein-Rogge) in The Testament of Dr.
Mabuse (1933)—and black-gloved criminal kingpin Schranker (Gustaf
Gründgens) as traditional cop-and-crook antagonists, Lorre’s desperate,
clear-eyed, animal-like impulse murderer is the final voice of M, forcing his
persecutors (and us) to look into ourselves for the seeds of psychosis that
equals his own. Creatively emphasizing the technological developments in film
sound, Lang has the killer heard before he is seen (allegedly, the director
dubbed Lorre’s whistling) and identified by a blind witness.
M | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Tom Milne
Losey's remake of Lang's most famous film was inevitably subjected to invidious comparisons when it was first released. The main problem, as Losey admitted ('I couldn't believe myself in the idea of the whole underworld ganging up against the killer') is the weak ending. Where Lang achieved a double knockout with Lorre's great speech in which he turns the accusation against his accusers - effecting a complete turnabout in sympathies, not just because we understand that he is helpless to combat his sickness, but because he has turned into a victim of persecution - Losey manages only a sucker punch because the setting is no longer Nazi Germany. This said, the first half of the film is excellent, with the Los Angeles locations wonderfully used as a strange and terrifying concrete jungle, and a remarkable performance from David Wayne that bears comparison with Lorre.
M to Magnificent Obsession Pauline Kael
Fritz Lang's first sound film has visual excitement, pace, brilliance of surface, and feeling for detail. Above all, it has, caught in a manhunt, a small, fat man, sweating in his uncomfortable clothes-the sexual psychopath who murders little girls-interpreted by Peter Lorre with a spark of genius. It is Lorre's triumph that he makes us understand the terrified, suffering human being who murders. The film is based on the case of the Düsseldorf murderer: the police, in trying to track him down, disturbed the normal criminal activities of the city, and the underworld organized to find him, so that crime could go on as usual. Lang turns the movie into a melodramatic thriller by centering on this ironic chase-actually, on the two converging chases of the police and the underworld. The structure is so mechanical it's almost pulpy, and the film reaches for other easy effects-it's similar to THE THREEPENNY OPERA in its satirical use of beggars and criminals. But there's nothing facile about Lorre: trapped by the underworld, he screams, "I can't help myself!" Our identification with him as a psychopath is so complete it's hard to believe that while appearing before Fritz Lang's cameras in the daytime, he was, at night, acting as a comedian in a farce. With Gustaf Gründgens and Otto Wernicke; cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner; script by Thea von Harbou and others. (The tune Lorre whistles is the theme from Grieg's Peer Gynt.) In German.
Seventy years on, Lang’s legendary thriller deserves its classic status – as does the performance by Peter Lorre as the psychopathic murderer around whom the story takes shape. But Lorre occupies much less screen time than you’d expect – even more surprising is the amount of humour in what should be very downbeat material. This is, after all, both the specific, straight-from-the-headlines story of the hunt for a child-killer (Fritz Haarman’s real-life exploits also inspired Ulli Lommel’s Fassbinderish In A Year With 13 Moons [1973]) and also more wide-ranging parable illustrating the fearful atmosphere which allowed the Nazis to seize power.
The Hitler figure is Schranker (Otto Wernicke), ranting leader of the criminal fraternity, never seen without his Gestapo-style leather trenchcoat. Alongside his calculating brutality, Lorre’s unnamed killer becomes an almost sympathetic figure, especially in the remarkable, climactic kangaroo-court sequence in which the killer, captive before a vast underworld ‘jury,’ desperately pleads for his life. This isn’t a restrained performance by any means, but it’s certainly effective – and the scene is all the more powerful for the occasionally plodding nature of what’s gone before.
Knowing the strength of his finale, Lang takes his time in the early stretches – we hardly see Lorre at all, instead switching (sometimes mid-sentence) between the police and the criminal fraternity as they plot the culprit’s capture. The crooks are outraged because Lorre’s antics mean an increase in police presence and activity: “A non-member is ruining our businesses!” they moan. After a lively, documentary-style opening that sets the scene (“8 victims, 4 million inhabitants, 1,500 leads…”) the pace slows as the simultaneous manhunts swing into action. You could drive a bus between some of the ponderous pauses as the cops and criminals debate their respective strategies, often in some of the smokiest smoke-filled rooms ever committed to celluloid. It doesn’t help that, in many surviving prints, the subtitles are often patchy and, occasionally, illegibly white-on-white.
But if the dialogue drags, Lang’s technical ingenuity is enough to keep us absorbed – he’ll train his camera on an empty area, which suddenly fills with a teeming throng of people, as in one startling shot of a vacant staircase that’s rapidly overrun with policemen. M repeatedly alternates between nervy silence and hysterical tumult, dramatising one of the key aspects of the encroaching totalitarian atmosphere: crowds and their power. There’s a remarkable special effect early on involving a map, and an even more jaw-dropping one-take tracking shot through a crowded bar that would be impressive today, never mind in 1930.
Westminster Wisdom Gracchi
M is often viewed rightly as the masterpiece of German cinema and
was one of the greatest films made by its great director, Fritz Lang- an
overtly antinazi film it
reflects upon themes of guilt and individual responsibility and this blog will
no doubt turn to it again- like a great book, a great film can be reviewed as
many times as one likes and still produce new insights.
M is a uniquely fruitful film though for the political enquirer because it
doesn't have a conventional story- there is progress but the viewer makes few
friends watching the film and many acquaintances. Characters flit across the
screen to give us the impression of the terrorised city. More important than
their character is their reaction to a specific situation and the combinations
of attitudes makes the situation in which we are interested. Unlike most films
therefore, M is truly about a community of people not inidividuals. Individuals
are shown only as their actions impact upon the community.
The recent exercise in making a blog out of people's experiences of 17th
October will fail as an exercise precisely because it doesn't recognise the
entities out of which politics and history are fashioned. Like M, the
politician and historian- and by extension the ordinary person, only recognises
the individual as they intrude into the world that they perceive. Politics in
some way becomes a metaphor for life- into a moment of fame the individual
comes and then dodges out again- coming out of and going back into the dark
just as the characters in M emerge from the shadows and then vanish back into
them.
This lends the film a terrifying intensity- like politics itself the mob whirls
upon the stage as if from nowhere- terrifying and scattering individuals before
it. The civilised town turns hysterical thanks to the murders of little girls
and innocent citizens are arrested on the streets by citizen militias for
nothing more than their presence at the wrong time and wrong place. The
nightmare of liberals reflected in works as various as this film and
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (see the murder of the poet Cinna Act
3 Scene 1) is realised in the dark. Literature here merely imitates life- remember the News of the
World British campaign against paedophiles which ended in attacks on a man with
a particular kind of neck brace and a paediotrician.Peter Lorre in his great
final speech speaks of shadows following him through the streets of Berlin-
these are both the shadows of his conscience, of his victims but also the
shadows of the mob which emerges at the end to confront him but earlier has
confronted the innocent as well.
The greatness of M therefore lies in the lack of more than one great character
and in the terrors of the crowd- it lies in the ways that as the law fails to
find a responsible party, the population is unleashed and a righteous crowd
gathers to enact justice. M is a nightmare- in which every individual ceases
focusing on himself and focuses his moral judgement on the wrongs of others, where
the mob replaces the state as the organ of judgement and where a court of
criminals passes a sentence of execution.
Interesting Facts on the Movie 'M' by Fritz Lang | Let's Talk Film
1. The tune that Peter Lorre’s character whistles is
“In the Hall of the Mountain King” from the “Peer Gynt”
2. Peter Lorre was Jewish and fled Germany in fear of Nazi
persecution shortly after the movie’s release.Fritz Lang, who was half Jewish,
fled two years later.
3. Contrary to popular belief, Fritz Lang did not
change the title from “The Murderers are Among Us” to “M” due to fear of
persecution by the Nazis. He changed the title during filming, influenced by the
scene where one of the criminals writes the letter on his hand. Lang thought
“M” was a more interesting title.
4. Fritz Lang asserts that he cast real criminals for
the court scene in the end. According to biographer Paul Jensen, twenty-four
cast members were arrested during filming.
5. Fritz Lang’s cruelty to his actors was legendary here.
Peter Lorre was thrown down the stairs into the cellar over a dozen
times.When Lang wanted to hire Lorre for “Human Desire” over two decades later,
the actor refused.
6. Based on an article Fritz Lang read about the
serial killer Peter Kuerten from Duesseldorf. Details have been changed but
some things resemble reality.
7. In Germany, the Nazis banned the movie in July 1934.
Premiere voted this movie as one of “The 25 Most Dangerous
Movies”.
Chosen by the Association of German Cinémathèques as the
most important German film of all time.
8. The use of voiceover narration was a groundbreaking new
technique at the time.
The title “M” is short for Mörder, the German word meaning
Murderer.
9. MGM studio head Irving Thalberg assembled his
writers and directors for a private screening of this film, telling them that
they needed to be making films of this power and caliber. He also admitted that
if anyone had brought a story of a child killer to him, he would have rejected
it.
10. Director Fritz Lang made this film in an effort to
claw back his artistic standing after the double failure of his two previous
films, Metropolis and Frau Im Mond.
11. Peter Lorre’s whistling was dubbed by director Fritz
Lang, as Lorre was unable to whistle.
12. Two German serial killers are mentioned in the film –
Georg Karl Großman (believed to have killed up to 50 young women) and Fritz
Haarmann (known as the Butcher of Hannover; killed at least 24 young men in
Hannover).
13. The Tegel Penitentiary in Berlin is Germany’s largest
prison with about 1,700 inmates (as of 2007).
14. Alexanderplatz (the Alex) was the site of Berlin Police
Headquarters.
15. Fritz Lang’s first sound film. Before making this,
Peter Lorre had mainly been a comedic actor.
16. Peter Lorre’s character is introduced by the musical
cue ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No.
1. This was one of the very first times that a musical theme was used to signify
a character – a technique borrowed from the world of opera which is now a
staple of film-making.
17. The film has a very sour vision of contemporary life in
Germany. This is probably due to the fact that Fritz Lang – a Jew – was
alarmed at the rapid rise of Nazism and that even his wife Thea von
Harbou had become a party member.
18. Fritz Lang was convinced to make the film after reading
the last scene in the script, when a mother ominously warns “You have to watch
your children”.
19. Filmed in only six weeks.
20. The film was independently backed by an admirer of
Fritz Lang who persuaded him to make another film when the director was
thinking of giving it all up. Lang eventually agreed to make the film provided
that he had no interference and had final cut.
21. It was common practice at the time for foreign language
films to be concurrently shot in English too. Fritz Lang had nothing to do
with the English language version of his film.
22. Josef Goebbels was said to have described the film as
“fantastic, free of phony humanitarian sentiments”.
23. The film premiered in 1931 and was then banned in 1934.
It was then stuck in a vault for many years. Audiences didn’t get the chance to
see the film again until 1966. For its video release 30 years later, it underwent
a restoration which included the addition of music and sound effects that
wouldn’t have been authorized by Fritz Lang (he deliberately kept certain
passages quiet) and the cutting of certain scenes. The image had also been
altered to fit the 4:3 screen size. These injustices were amended in 2009 for
the film’s Blu-ray release.
24. According to Lang’s biographer Paul Jensen, the
director spent eight days doing field research in a mental institution.
25. Two thirds of the film was shot with sound, the
remaining third was shot silent. At the time the license fees for sound
equipment were quite prohibitive so this was a move to try to keep costs down.
However, Fritz Lang quite liked the eerie, unnerving quality that arose
from going from a sound world to one where there is no noise at all.
26. Although he was thrilled to play such a major part,
Peter Lorre came to hate it later as people tended to associate him with
being a child murderer in real life.
Big House Film (Roger Westcombe)
A Hitler doesn’t just spring up overnight, and M reveals
in a frighteningly visceral way just how prepared the ground was in 1930s
In smoke-filled rooms the various levels are skillfully intercut – the executive level of cops, crime boss racketeers and big business all become indistinguishable as do the riff-raff and their street-level customers for bootleg love and hooch in the subterranean economy.
This is beautifully poignant filmmaking. M ’s symbolism as much as its absences speak volumes, especially of an alienated (stark geometric staircases shot from above) and de-personalised (empty spaces as the first child abduction is seen) world. It’s well understood now that its sound design basically writes the book on what’s possible in this art. Music is not just the hook for the plot twist but often used dramatically as mise-en-scene.
Less remarked upon is how far ahead it was in police procedural terms. Its documentary-style representations of the emerging science of fingerprinting predate by twenty years Hollywood’s by-the-numbers discovery of forensic science in postwar thrillers like the identikit portraits in 1949’s He Walked By Night and forensic profiling in Mystery Street (1950).
Viewed strictly as a thriller, a plot weakness is that there’s no false leads in its investigation phase, M being more concerned with the techniques of detection as it hones in on its suspect. But in its obsessive focus on the pursuit of ‘one’, rather than his winnowing out from the public, M denies us the vicarious relief of seeing the blameless exonerated. No one is innocent. The film’s original title, The Murderer Among Us, in the fervid environment of the time, earned Lang death threats and bans on its production from Nazi party members in the film industry.
It’s downright spooky to see motifs of Nazism deployed years before Hitler’s election as Chancellor in 1933: the rounding up of beggars, the geometric sign ‘M’ (the murderer/der mörder) chalked on the back of Lorre’s coat as the Star of David soon would be on others.
But these pale before the haunting images of the subterranean trial by the criminal element (interestingly reminiscent of the IRA court in John Ford’s 1935 The Informer), massed silently and brooding in tiered blocks of implacable institutional ‘authority’. That the State is functioning as a criminal entity has never been better portrayed.
And even though the crims do capture the child-murderer, Lang makes it plain that we are not to sympathize with these hoods, when he holds the camera reproachfully on shots of the legit security officers bound and beaten on the way to the child-killer’s capture.
Might is right, but the trial setpiece centers on debate over their right to hold him. "We are all law experts here – from six weeks in Tegal to 15 years in Brandenburg", scoffs the head crim and tribunal ‘President’, played by Gustaf Gründgens ("Our honorable President, who is wanted for three murders"), whose shaven skull and brutal demeanour make him a great ersatz Nazi, as he rebuts the defendant’s demand for a fair trail.
This President’s summing up, after Lorre’s testimony that he blacks out and does not consciously commit acts of evil (which the President twists to an ‘admission’), makes plain there is no rule of law here and this inquisition is a throwback to the dark ages. The court’s stated goal "to render you harmless, to make you disappear" is a chilling portent of The Final Solution. When the crowd chants ‘kill the beast, kill the beast’, Lang pans across closeups of their individual faces, underlining the fact that fascism is a mass movement, reliant on complicity.
In this climactic section Lang allocates not one but two strands of dialogue to highlight the conflict between free will and passive evil, comparing the killer’s inability to stop killing with both the court’s cold-blooded pronouncement of his murder and the crims choosing their life of crime. "This evil thing inside me", Lorre calls his uncontrollable driving force, prefiguring much of the postwar pulp fiction of Jim Thompson et al.
The criminals’ response to this admission echoes both the lone justice of frontier mythology and the talkback radio demagoguery of today in its desire for swift (and permanent) retribution and a wish to overlook any mitigating circumstances which might oblige mercy.
With Hitler’s ‘election’ just around the corner, the ‘volk’ would soon get their wish.
ASNE - ‘M': Fritz Lang's Dark Masterpiece, Still
Shocking After ... One of five winning entries by Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post
that won the criticism writing category of the 1998 ASNE Distinguished Writing
Awards (American Society of Newspaper Editors)
"M" is for the many nightmares it gave to me. That is, "M," Fritz Lang's 1931 dark masterpiece, out of which sprang so much of the century's bleaker popular art and some of the earliest images of the haunting chaos that dogs us to this day.
Alas, this "restored" version may represent a heroic seven-year effort on the part of the Munich Film Archive and it may well be the best possible cut of the 66-year-old film available in years, but it still seems to be in far from pristine condition. And too many times the white subtitles are projected against a white background, their information completely lost.
So you can't see parts of it and you can't read other parts of it. My advice: Deal with it like a grown-up. The movie is somehow still necessary, and its power to disturb remains profound. On top of that, Peter Lorre's sweaty, puffy, froggy-eyed portrayal of a child murderer remains one of the most frightening images in screen history. All moist flesh and grubby, fat little fingers, infantile and pathetic yet truly monstrous at once, Lorre's character is one of the great monuments to the true squalor of evil. He is not banal in the least, but neither is he dramatic: He's a little worm with an unspeakable obsession, insane and yet a horrible reflection of the society that created him.
The film is constructed as a double manhunt. In an unnamed city (the story was based on a case in Duesseldorf, but many critics place the setting in Berlin, where "M" was filmed), a child murderer is stalking the streets. In a brilliant early montage Lang shows us the young Elsie being suavely picked up by her shadowy killer, led along streets and into the woods. There's no on-screen violence, of course, but the sense of menace is unbearably intense, particularly as Lang signifies the murderer's dementia in musical terms, having him whistle a selection from "Peer Gynt" as the demon's grip on his soul grows more fierce. Lang polishes off the sequence with two horrifying images: Elsie's ball bouncing across the grass, losing energy, and reaching stasis; and Elsie's balloon caught (as if in torment) in the suspended telephone wires.
The cops, under great pressure, mount a massive manhunt; they attack the only target they have, which is the underworld. This completely upsets the orderly nature of crime -- these guys are so well organized, they even have a stolen-sandwich ring! -- and so the crooks respond by attempting on their own to find the killer.
In allegorical terms, Lang seemed to be getting at the escalating conflict between the increasingly inept Weimar Republic and the increasingly efficient underground Nazi Party, and the underworld, being more merciless and better organized, is able to uncover the villain before police.
It goes further. The original name of the film was "The Murderers Among Us," which had resonance that annoyed those thick-necked creeps in the brown shirts. It was for that reason that Lang changed the title to "M," for murderer and for the mark of Cain that a beggar chalks on Lorre's back so that he may be identified and tracked by the beggars who are the reconnaissance unit of organized criminal interests.
And, as a narrative, the film still works brilliantly. It broke the mold before there was a mold to be broken. Lang begins by completely dispensing with the mystery elements; he reveals Lorre at about the one-third mark, so there's no whodunit. There's not even really a whydunit. Instead, it's a who's-gonna-catch-him as the two sides work frantically against each other. But even when Lang documents the final apprehension (in a brilliantly edited and timed sequence where the cops are racing to a building that the gangsters have all but commandeered as they search it), he has a surprise. That is the ironic trial of which the clammy little human mushroom, where at last he speaks for himself, declares his own insanity and the pain it's caused him and asks them who they are to judge -- interesting questions to be asked in the Germany of 1931.
But the movie is, perhaps, just as interesting as a piece of film design as it is as a piece of narrative. It was the domestic high-water mark of German expressionist filmmakers, who were about to be dispersed around the world by the rise of those same Nazis, who would gain power in 1933.
German expressionism, which may have gotten to its strangest moment in 1919's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," was essentially a visual version of a treacherous universe. It was spread by this diaspora of fleeing German genius (including Lang, who went on to have a distinguished American career) and came to light in the works of Hitchcock and Welles but perhaps most notably in that movie genre known as film noir, which dominated the American screen in the late '40s.
To look at "M" is to be in the heart of the noir universe, a shadowy zone of wet streets, dark alleyways, secret places and impenetrable mysteries. It's astonishing how modern this six-decade-old piece seems, especially if one focuses on the compositions and their meanings and can see past the Victorian wardrobes worn by the citizens of a German city in 1931.
"M," after all these years, is still a fabulous movie.
M is unrated and while it contains no gore, it does have scenes of extreme emotional intensity suggesting violence to children.
Criterion Collection FIlm Essay [Stanley Kauffmann] December 6. 2004
M (1931) - The Criterion Collection
Fascinating Rhythms - Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader, August 7, 1997
M - Film Reference Catherine Henry
Film 365 (The Masters of Cinema Series Blu-ray) David Beckett
MoC - FRITZ LANG'S M - The Definitive
Restoration? Nick Wrigley from
Masters of Cinema
Fritz
Lang's M: the blueprint for the serial killer movie | BFI Geoff Andrew from BFI Screen Online, December 5, 2016
Kammerspielfilm, Part 1: M by Fritz Lang Gautam Valluri from Broken Projector, July 26,
2007
Fritz Lang's M on DVD -
Bright Lights Film Journal
Gary Morris, July 1, 2000, also seen here: Fritz Lang's M -
Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture
m website from leninimports, which includes a
biography and filmography here: fritz lang
Power and Presence in Fritz Lang's M (1931) - Student Pulse Zachary B Munrow, 2013
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
Criterion Reflections [David Blakeslee]
M Richard Armstrong from Flickhead
Nitrate Online Eddie Cockrell
M | Peter Bogdanovich - Indiewire
M - Modernism Lab Essays Hayley Mohr
The
Peter Lorre Companion Online [Anne Sharp]
M and the Making of Peter Lorre
Fritz
Lang's M from Cyberroach
DVD Times [2003 Restored Edition] Noel Megahey
M (1931) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Review for M (1931) - IMDb Ted Prigge
CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich]
M (1931) - Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster
M (1930) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com James Steffen
notcoming.com | M - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Rumsey Taylor
Lang's M - editing sound as visuals Excerpt on M from Ken Dancynger’s book, The Technique of film and video editing, pages 45 – 47, also seen here: Lang's M - editing sound as visuals - FilmSound.org
Fritz Lang: the Cinema of Fear Dennis Toth, Film Notes from the CMA
Little White Lies [David Jenkins]
M - The Science-Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review. Richard Scheib from Moria
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
DVD Verdict Amanda DeWees, Criterion Collection
dOc DVD Review: M (1931) - digitallyOBSESSED! Jon Danziger, Criterion Collection
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection
Collector's Corner [Wes Marshall] Criterion Collection
Blu-Ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Collection
AVForums (Blu-ray) [Simon Crust] Criterion Collection
DVDTown [Blu-Ray - Christopher Long] Criterion Collection
Movie Talk [Peter Fuller] Blu-ray Criterion Collection
DVD Verdict (Blu-Ray) [Clark Douglas] Criterion Collection
DVD Talk Jason Bailey, Criterion Blu-Ray
M Tim Salmons from the Digital Bits, Criterion Blu-Ray
MyReviewer.com (Blu-ray) [David Beckett] Criterion Collection
Fritz Lang's M: The Restored Version of the Classic 1931 Film ... Mike Priner from Open Culture
Top 100 Directors: #33 - Fritz Lang (M review)
Classic-Horror Nate Yapp
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Electric Sheep Magazine [Peter Momtchiloff]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
fritz lang's m - review at videovista.net Tom Matic
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
M | Film Fortress Colin LeSeur
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
M (1931, Fritz Lang) | Facebook
Fritz Lang - Film Reference Charles L.P. Silet
MUBI [Adrian Curry] Movie posters
Exclusive Comics Excerpt: ‘M’ M, a comic adaptation by Jon J Muth, from Vulture
Script-Showcase.com complete script
BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Haflidason
M review – Fritz Lang's superb thriller fascinates | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Oklahoma Gazette [Preston Jones]
Austin Film Society [Chale Nafus]
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]
San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
M Movie Review & Film Summary (1931) | Roger Ebert August 3, 1997, also seen here: rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert]
New York Times (registration req'd) Mordaunt Hall in 1933, also seen here: Movie Review - M - The Daesseldorf Murders. - NYTimes.com
M (1931 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Internet Archive: Details: M - Eine Stadt sucht einen ... the entire film may be seen here
THE LAST WILL OF DR. MABUSE (Le
Testament du Dr. Mabuse)
Germany
Patrick McGilligan: Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. London New York
The film is studded with shoot-outs, burnings, bombings, explosions. On the purely cinematic level, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse contains some of Lang's most spellbinding work, including an eerie high-speed automobile chase at the climax, with streaks of highway and ghostly tree branches whizzing starkly by. [...]
According to Heinrich Fraenkel and Roger Manvell in their book Doctor Goebbels, His Life and Death, Goebbels explained on one occasion, 'I banned it [Das Testament] because it proves that an extremely determined group of men, whether they seriously want to or not, are perfectly capable of unhinging, no matter which State, by using violence.' But that was short of calling the 1933 film, outright, an explicit anti-NSDAP parable.
Goebbels, in private, appears to have been the film's unlikely
champion. When Lang went away to Paris, the propaganda minister saw no
contradiction in celebrating his thirty-sixth birthday, in October of 1933,
with a showing of Das Testament for privileged guests at his official
residence. Since Goebbels styled himself a cineast, no doubt this was the
'flashback-less version' denied to the German masses.
Time Out Tony Rayns
In 1922, Fritz Lang
conceived Mabuse as a cypher for Weimar Germany's corruption and decadence: the
two-part Dr Mabuse, the Gambler/Inferno shows him as a criminal
mastermind, casinos and stock exchange equally in hand, enmeshed in a web of
dope, killing, fake seances and madness. By 1932, the character had become
rather more than just king villain of the serials: Testament finds him
mouthing undisguised Nazi slogans from his asylum prison, and using hypnotism
to maintain control over his criminal empire outside; he's opposed by the same
cop who hunted Peter Lorre in Lang's M the year before. Goebbels banned
the movie but offered leadership of the German film industry to Lang, who left
the country overnight.
The Village
Voice [B. Kite]
The
stencil for a thousand crime films to follow and even after 70-some years a
sleek model of narrative excitement and paranoid construction, Fritz Lang's The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse is the story of a name that beckons the
detective/viewer toward a source for chaos, only to dissipate to a further
level of abstraction upon approach. Lang's Mabuse series (Testament
is the second, following 1922's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler; the third is
his last film, 1960's The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse) remains one of
cinema's richest pulp metaphors of the hunt for the connecting link behind
societal turmoil, the displacements of technology, and the fragmentation of
identity: Mabuse might be the warden of the panopticon society, but he never
answers his phone.
Criterion's
beautiful two-disc set features contributions from leading Mabusians Tom
Gunning and David Kalat tracing the ongoing relevance of this literal zeitgeist
to an age in which terror is color-coded. The second disc features a rough
print of the French version of the film, shot concurrently with a different
cast. Both sets of actors display the same intonations and perform the same
movements, suggesting another stencil, one for voice and gesture, in which any
particular figure is replaceable.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Calling The
Testament Of Dr. Mabuse "the Citizen Kane of super-criminal
thrillers" isn't too outrageous, though Fritz Lang's 1933 proto-noir
predates Orson Welles' rip-roaring American tableau. Both films combine style,
exuberance, and thematic complexity, with Lang's work in particular presenting
nightmarish scenarios with clever sound design and ingenious rhyming
compositions, and both films are sophisticated in their unconventional
conception of good and evil. In Testament, the title character (a genius
gang lord played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge) dies early in the film, leaving his
written thoughts behind to corrupt those who consider them seriously.
Lang claimed
that this genre piece was a comment on Nazism, but Testament speaks more
directly to how human frailty gives fascism room to grow. The film's villains
act out of raw need or reckless curiosity, following the orders of a man behind
a curtain, in a featureless room, in a part of the city where people prefer to
remain anonymous. In his frank, insightful commentary track on the Criterion
DVD, historian David Kalat debunks a lot of Lang's statements as symptomatic of
the director's penchant for self-mythologizing. Kalat is a Lang devotee, but
he's also an expert on the rich Mabuse mythology, which extends beyond Lang's
three films about the character (Testament is the second) into further
sequels and novels, all of which are to some degree about how people are
naturally inclined to follow orders.
The DVD also
includes the shorter French version of the film, which Lang shot at the same
time, as well as archival interviews with the director and his crew. The French
version is more plot-oriented, but the original provides a better document of
its era, as Lang staggers suspense sequences with a handful of relaxed
conversations. Though Testament is a single two-hour film, Kalat
compares Lang's work in general—especially the long two-parters of his
pre-Hollywood era—to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. Mabuse
parallels Tarantino in other ways, as well, from the strikingly detailed
locations to the fact that actor Otto Wernicke reprises a character in the
pulpy Testament that he first played in Lang's more horrific M.
The
Testament Of Dr. Mabuse extends off the edge of the screen to such a degree
that it even begins in the middle of a tense action scene, like, as Kalat puts
it, "the middle chapter of an ongoing serial." Its real-world
implications are transportable, as well. Kalat aggressively resists a
"Mabuse equals Hitler" reading of the film, because the morally
compromised world it depicts fits any era where men do evil in the name of
ideas.
Das Testament des Dr Mabuse (1933) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Disgraced cop Hofmeister tries to redeem himself by uncovering a
counterfeiting operation. Before he can pass his findings on to Inspector
Lohmann, he is cornered by his enemies and driven mad. Lohmann’s
investigation leads him to a lunatic asylum which is housing Dr Mabuse, a once
notorious criminal mastermind. For the past ten years, Mabuse has made no
attempt to communicate but has recently started writing copious notes calling
for a criminal reign of terror. Then he dies, suddenly. But the
spate of crimes continues unabated. It is as if Mabuse’s influence lives
on. And indeed it does, for his soul has entered the body of Professor
Baum, the respectable head of the asylum. It is Baum who now directs
Mabuse’s minions in their criminal exploits. Can nothing stop the
murderous schemes of the evil Mabuse…?
After his groundbreaking crime-thriller M
, German director Fritz Lang went on to explore the
possibilities offered by this new genre more fully in Das Testament des Dr
Mabuse . The film brings together the realism of M , with a
close interest in police methods of investigation, and the expressionist
fantasy style of Lang’s earlier films. This is an effective suspense
thriller, very reminiscent of Hitchcock’s pre-war English films, but it also
has the character of classic horror films such as Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
(1920). The film is a sequel to Lang’s 1922 silent classic Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (aka Dr.
Mabuse, the Gambler), with Rudolf Klein-Rogge once more playing the role of
the sinister master of crime, Dr Mabuse.
What is perhaps most striking about Das Testament des Dr Mabuse is its
scale and sophistication. Not only does it qualify as a masterpiece on
artistic grounds (some of its imagery is the stuff of film legend), but it is
by far and away the most ambitious dramatic thriller of its time, thanks to
some extraordinary action sequences (which includes one of cinema’s most
imaginative car chases). Lang uses sound almost as effectively as
he uses image to tell his story and create an unsettling mood of paranoia and
anticipation. This is most evident in the spine-chilling opening which
reveals what resembles a workshop in Hell, a scene that leads into a harrowing
chase sequence.
The film then suddenly switches to something far more mundane as Inspector
Lohmann (last seen in M) begins his investigation and the plot is
gradually developed. To hold our interest, Lang puts in a subplot
involving one of Mabuse’s henchmen and his girlfriend – a simple yet effective
way of bringing some humanity into what would otherwise have been a pretty
emotionally arid affair. Just when we think it’s all going to be standard
thriller, things take a darker, more sinister turn, and the supernatural
elements which were suggested in the earlier part of the film resurface.
In true expressionist fashion, Lang subverts normality and transforms a conventional
thriller into a bizarre fantasy nightmare. It’s a world where anything
can happen and the happy outcome is far from assured.
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse is significant in that it is the last
occasion when Fritz Lang would use the expressionist style so overtly.
(His subsequent black and white films are far closer to American film noir
than German expressionism, although the latter is clearly a progression of the
former.) Whilst his approach here is far less stylised than in earlier
German expressionist films, Lang's use of high contrast photography, confined
shadowy interiors and some spectacular uses of superposition is extraordinarily
effective. Not only do these emphasise the unnatural threat posed by the
film’s villain but they also highlight the vulnerability and heroism of those
who decide to take a stand against him.
This was the last film that Fritz Lang made in Germany before opting for
voluntary exile (first in France, then in the United States) to avoid having to
work as an instrument of the Nazi regime. It’s possible to read into Das
Testament des Dr. Mabuse various anti-Nazi messages – there are some very
easily parallels between Mabuse and Hitler, and Mabuse’s ambitions for a world
in which all men are robbed of individual thought has an unmistakable
Nietzschesque ring to it. It's hardly surprising that the film was
immediately banned in Germany and very nearly destroyed.
An inferior French version of the film was made by Lang at the same time as the
German version, with a cast of French actors. Another version of the film
was distributed in America in the 1950s, cut from the available German print
and titled The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse. Having existed in many years
in a shortened form, the film was restored in 2000 to almost its original
runtime by the German Film Institute, allowing us to appreciate what is easily
one of Fritz Lang’s greatest films.
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
The Testament
of Dr. Mabuse • Senses of Cinema Michael Koller
from Senses of Cinema, April 2004
The
Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse — Cineaste Magazine Chris Fujiwara (2005)
The
Diabolical Dr. Mabuse on DVD: The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse; The ... Scott Thill from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 1, 2002, also reviewing THE
1,000 EYES OF DR. MABUSE
The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey
DVD
Journal Mark Bourne
The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse - TCM.com James
Steffen
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film James Steffen on the DVD release
VideoVista Richard Bowden
DVD Savant Review: The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse - DVD Talk
Glenn Erickson
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)
DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Bill Gibron
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen
THE
TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (Fritz Lang,
1933) « Dennis Grunes Dennis Grunes
filmcritic.com Aaron
Lazenby
Eccentric
Cinema
Rod Barnett
Monsters At
Play
Christopher Hyatt
The SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review
Richard Scheib
The Digital Bits Todd Doogan
Fritz Lang: The Nature Of The Beast | The A.V. Club by Patrick McGilligan, book review by Keith
Phipps from The Onion
Spaghetti
Western (No Meatballs) on the DVD
release, by Dave Kehr from the New York
Times
Das
Testament des Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang,
Germany 1933) On the DVD restoration
from Celto Slavica, a DVDBeaver look-alike
The Testament
of Dr. Mabuse - Wikipedia
LILIOM
Lang's version of
an old Hungarian story about a carnival worker who falls in love with a girl,
gets her pregnant, stages a robbery to make some money and is killed. Then, 15
years later, he's given a chance to return to earth for just a day to see how
his wife and daughter are getting on. It's the story for the musical Carousel
but this version plays more to comedy than sentimentality. An incredibly
youthful Boyer is a sparky and lively ghost but plays the sadder scenes well
with Ozerary. Lang made this film in France while he was there trying to avoid
the Nazis.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
A stopover at
User comments from imdb Author: david melville (dwingrove@qmuc.ac.uk) from Edinburgh, Scotland
Having tried and failed to sit
through Carousel (a lumbering musical remake of the same story) I was wholly
unprepared for the delight that is Liliom. A fantasy love story set half on
Earth, half in Heaven, it's not at all the type of film you expect from Fritz
Lang. It's closer in tone to Michael Powell or Jean Cocteau - and may be a
'hidden influence' on both A Matter of Life and Death and Orphee.
Not least among his achievements...Lang pulls off the well-nigh impossible feat
of making Charles Boyer interesting! Sorry, but I'd always found this actor
deeply resistible. A suburban housewife's stereotype of a suave Continental
lover. But in this movie, Boyer plays a role that (even five years later) would
have been reserved exclusively for Jean Gabin. A tough carnival barker and
petty crook. A sexy 'bad boy' in a striped, clinging T-shirt and skin-tight
jeans.
Boyer as Liliom is a Gallic cousin of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named
Desire. I could well understand why Julie (Madeleine Ozeray) fell head over
heels for him, because I did too. He treats her appallingly, of course.
Boozing, whoring, gambling...even a (very non-PC) touch of wife-beating. For all
its fantasy elements, this love story is as warped and sadomasochistic as any
in later Lang movies, like Secret Beyond the Door or The Big Heat. (Hot coffee,
anyone?)
Eventually, two angels show up and haul Boyer off to the hereafter - where he
must atone for his sins! The term 'angels' is one I use loosely. Dark-suited,
pale-skinned and shaven-headed, these two guys look like denizens of an X-rated
Berlin nightclub. Kinkier still is Boyer's personal 'spirit guide' - a mad-eyed
knife-grinder played by Antonin Artaud, the twisted genius who invented the
Theatre of Cruelty.
Liliom is a rare treat for old-movie buffs. Lyrical and fantastic, yes. Soppy
and sentimental, never. It stands comparison with Lang's best work from
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Legend has it that Adolf Hitler approached Fritz Lang and asked him to be
the official filmmaker of the Nazi Party. Lang told the Fuhrer that he'd think
about it and promptly snuck out of the country, leaving behind his wife,
screenwriter Thea von Harbou, and his bank account. He came to
It didn't exactly happen so neatly, but Lang never did much to dissuade this
myth. Part of the story that often gets left out is that Lang originally fled
to
The film, Liliom, has rarely been shown in
Charles Boyer -- who also later came to
In heaven, Liliom is given a second chance. Sixteen years later, he goes back to earth for one day to meet his daughter and contribute something good to her life. Lang takes the opportunity to present heaven as an ironic place, with comic parallels to earth, but also with breathtakingly lovely decoration, foreshadowing Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death.
Despite its peculiar and slightly disturbing final moments, Liliom is a lovely addition to the Lang filmography. It reveals a less harsh, less paranoid filmmaker, capable of laughing and loving. The moment in which the girl says goodbye to her dying husband is arguably the most emotionally moving scene I've seen in Lang's work.
Due to its age and rarity, the DVD transfer isn't the best; it's just a bit murky and rough around the edges, though Rudolph Mate's marvelous cinematography helps a bit in this regard. Since no one has really seen it and very few materials exist, the DVD comes with virtually no extras.
Kino has also released an early film from Douglas Sirk, another German
filmmaker forced to flee to the
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review
FFWD Weekly Jaime Frederick
Mountain X Blog Review Ken Hanke
New York Times (registration req'd) H.T.S.
By Lang and Sirk, En Route on a DVD release, by Dave Kehr from the New York Times
FURY
Time
Out review
Tom Milne
Lang's first American film, with Tracy
as the man wrongly accused of a kidnapping who escapes summary justice by lynch
mob as the jail burns down, then goes into hiding, plants evidence to suggest
he died, and sits back gloatingly as his 'killers' are brought to trial.
Softened along pious lines at the end (what else from MGM, who tinkered
cravenly with the script all down the line?), so not quite the masterpiece of
reputation: Lang later made much better, much less touted films. Still
impressive, all the same, especially in the build-up to the lynching sequence.
Unjustly accused of a crime, a man (Spencer
Tracy) barely escapes a lynching and returns to wreak vengeance on the mob that
nearly killed him. Fritz Lang's first American film, made in 1936, remains one
of his most powerful and fully achieved; the pitiless overhead camera angle,
which carries such force in many of his other films, has a particular impact
here when it appears in an impromptu documentary, a film within the film, of a
near lynching that is used as courtroom evidence. Sylvia Sidney plays the
hero's fiancee, and the strong secondary cast is headed up by Walter Abel,
Bruce Cabot, Edward Ellis, Walter Brennan, and Frank Albertson. Essential
viewing, however bitter the aftertaste. 90 min.
Fritz Lang Bibliography (via
UC Berkeley Media Resources Center) White Law and the
Missing Black Body in Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) by Barbara Mennel from Quarterly Review of Film and
Video, July/August/September 2003
Fritz Lang's 1936
film Fury responded to a crisis of law created by a 1933
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Spencer Tracy makes a
more multidimensional champion of justice in Fritz Lang's 1936 Hollywood debut Fury,
playing a man wrongly imprisoned in a small town and surrounded by fired-up
locals intent on a lynching. They burn down the jail and leave Tracy for dead,
but he survives, and works behind the scenes to bring the whole town to trial
for murder. There's nothing subtle or ambiguous about the anti-mob-rule message
(though there might've been, had Lang been allowed to follow through on his
M-like intention to make Tracy guilty), but as with I Am A Fugitive From A Chain
Gang and A Face In The Crowd, Fury has an immersive quality
that excuses the bluntness. It's an astonishingly expressive film, as Lang uses
subjective tracking shots and satirical montages of clucking chickens to mock
the rioters and make the righteous look phony. Fury is heartland Americana
knocked cock-eyed, with petty gripes about taxes and lawyers escalating into
murderous rage. Lang doesn't just have people stand around talking about a
social problem. He shows them living it out, and makes the audience live it
too.
A Film Odyssey
[Robert Humanick]
Few films have ever been more appropriately titled. His first film made
in America after fleeing both the Nazi party and his homeland of Germany, Fritz
Lang's Fury is an engrossing dissertation on the barbarous impulses that
drive human nature and the need to restrain them in order to live in a decent
and civilized society. Part commentary on civic laziness in America, part look
at the flaws of a legal system that holds the power to sentence people to
death, and part reflection on the horrors of fascism, the film magnifies it's
small love story to monolithic proportions in the midst of the hard times of
the depression. Separated by financial burdens for over a year, Joe Wilson is
driving from Chicago into the country to reunite with his fiancé Katherine
Grant (Sylvia Sidney) when he's inexplicably arrested for the recent kidnapping
of a local girl. With only minor circumstantial evidence to hold against Joe,
the sheriff continues through the proper legal processes, knowing that he is
just as likely to be innocent as guilty. The townsfolk, on the other hand, take
hold of the news and twist the facts until his guilt is certain beyond any doubt;
justice must be had, and it may as well be the first man arrested. Lang's
multi-layered film uses its violent spectacle to the same effect as Spike Lee's
Do the Right Thing; the viewer acts as a horrified witness to the
inhumanity at hand, unable to alter the events unfolding. Through a series of
unexpected events, the film reverses the roles of the criminals and the victims
in a tense, illuminating legal battle that highlights, among other things, the
futility of revenge and the fallibility of human judgment. Fury is a
slap in the face to anyone who thinks that the life of any citizen should be
entrusted to a legal system so easily subjected to the whims of irrational,
bloodthirsty recklessness.
User comments from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States
If Fritz Lang had died or been
killed by the Nazis (whom he detested and opposed)in 1933 or 1934, it is
stunning to realize that his position as a great film director would have been
assured. He would have already had METROPOLIS, SPIES, DR. MABUSE, and M down to
establish his credentials as a master of cinematic art. But he left
Like many great crime films it is based on an actual incident that occurred in
A fine account of the crime, SWIFT JUSTICE by Harry Farrell, only touches
lightly on the Lang movie. The similarities with the newsreel trucks and even a
Rolph-clone (Clarence Kolb, in a small but sinister role as a powerful man
trying to convince the Sheriff - Edward Ellis - to leave the jail underprotected
from the mob)are there. But Lang allows
Fury - TCM.com Felicia Feaster
Fritz Lang's devastating indictment of mob violence, considered by many his
best American film, Fury (1936) explores the director's fascination with
the nature of justice and revenge also treated in his German masterpiece M
(1931) and later American productions The Big Heat (1953) and You
Only Live Once (1937).
Spencer Tracy stars as honest American working stiff Joe Wilson, engaged to
marry Katherine Grant (Sylvia Sidney). Jim has slaved a year to earn enough
money to marry his true love, and on the way to their union has an experience
that will change both of their lives. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Jim
is stopped in a small town roadblock and accused, on the basis of some
circumstantial evidence, of kidnapping. A domino effect of bad luck soon finds
Joe tried and convicted for the crime in the court of public opinion. A chain
of gossip in the town's barrooms, grocery stores and kitchens soon has its
citizens storming the jailhouse to bring the suspected criminal to justice. The
climactic attempt by the town's populace to burn the jailhouse to the ground is
only one of many twists and turns in Lang's superbly paced, hairpin drama which
delivers one shock after another as Lang investigates the shameful American
history of lynching in this dynamic courtroom drama.
Fury is stocked with ample evidence of Lang's cynical, biting view of
humankind seen in his often wry and disturbing visual language, like a shot of
the town's gossiping women which cuts to a shot of clucking chickens or his
close-ups of the people outside the burning courthouse, gleefully holding their
babies up for a better view of the burning man, their faces contorted by
bloodlust. With shadows distorting their appearance, rendering them instantly
ghoulish, Lang's vision of the potential evil in all human beings makes Fury
as stylistically memorable as it is for its trenchant social message.
Lang's first American film after the director fled Germany rather than become a
filmmaker for the Third Reich, Fury finally materialized after a year of
unrealized potential productions at his new studio home, MGM. And Fury
turned out to be a rather unusual film, both for its time, and for its studio,
more used to turning out family-oriented fare than a piece of socially
conscious filmmaking.
Though the film was based on the real-life case of two kidnappers, Thomas
Harold Thurmond and John Maurice Holmes, who were lynched by the populace of
After much squabbling between Lang and MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who had taken a
dislike to the director, Fury was essentially buried by the studio upon
its release. But word soon leaked out of the film's greatness, and it went on
to become a success both with art-house moviegoers, and critics like The New
York Times who called it the finest dramatic film of 1936.
Fury
- Bright Lights Film Journal Fritz Lang’s Assumption Factory, by Robert Castle,
November 1, 2002
Filmjourney Doug Cummings
Fury (1936) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Marty Mapes
Not Coming To a Theater Near You [Beth Gilligan]
Fury Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
User comments from imdb Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City
DVD Verdict (Joe Armenio) dvd review
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson) dvd review
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]
Fritz Lang's Fury sympathizes with a persecuted innocent · Watch This ... Sam Adams from The Onion A.V. Club
Being There Magazine [Nathan Williams]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent) review
YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE
Fritz Lang's 1939 film about an outlaw couple on the run
(Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney) is sometimes cited as one of the prototypes of Bonnie
and Clyde. But Lang's themes are moral and mystical whereas Penn's are
social; Lang's film, consequently, seems more genuinely timeless despite the
topicality of the story. Lang directs in a stripped-down expressionist style
that had a tremendous influence on the postwar film noir: it's always night,
usually raining, and the camera hovers over the characters like the heavy hand
of fate. 86 min.
Looking back to the boldly-stated fatalism of
his German films, and - in the on-the-run figures of Sidney and Fonda - forward
to the likes of Bonnie and Clyde and Pierrot le Fou, Lang's
superb film noir constantly breaks the boundaries of the 'social
consciousness' movie category within which it was originally pigeonholed.
Determinism is here at the crux of a social, psychological, and generic
network, as three-time-loser Fonda finds his guilt or innocence merely the
stuff of ready-set alternative newspaper headlines; and Lang constantly queries
the narrative thrust with visuals that pose their own ambiguous riddles. Even
the title is challenged by the movie's final shot: less a sentimental cop-out
than the rigorous working through of a schema that incorporates three essential
levels of perception: Fonda's own, society's, and the audience's.
Lang in the U.S.A. Juliet Clark from Pacific Film Archives
When three-time loser Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is about
to be released from prison, his lawyer assures the warden that Eddie will make
good. Eddie adds skeptically, "I will--if they let me." Like many of
Lang's films, You Only Live Once depicts a struggle between individual
will and socially determined destiny; atypically for the director, it's also a
moving and sincere love story. This has often been cited as the original
lovers-on-the-run movie. But the relationship between edgy, fragile Eddie and
sad-eyed Jo (Sylvia Sidney) feels less like amour fou à la Bonnie and
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
A released convict (Henry Fonda), in love with his defense
lawyer's secretary (Sylvia Sidney), tries to go straight, but meets with
rejection in society, and ends up being framed for murder. This movie - a
favorite of mine and one of the director's lesser-known gems - represents for
me, more than any other, the feeling of that period known as the Depression.
The bewilderment and loss of faith in authority, the fatalistic sense that no
matter what you do, society will hold you down - all reflect the darker side of
the popular mood during that era. Although Fonda's character is well-meaning,
he's no hero by any stretch. His short temper and desperation are all too
human, while the world around him is mostly brutal and uncaring. It's one of
his more remarkable performances, I think, with a hardness to it that is
missing from a lot of his good guy roles. The story was based in part on Bonnie
and
Fritz Lang once again demonstrates his mastery of the camera as an instrument for the portrayal of extreme feelings. His minimalist aesthetic, his use of shadow and expressive camera angles, are used to maximum dramatic impact. There are hokey elements too - typical of 30s crime drama - such as the kindly Catholic priest who tries to save the Fonda character from himself, or the heroine's tough, sensible sister cautioning her against her involvement with the ex-con. But the director's style manages to transcend these limitations of genre. In its doom-laden atmosphere, You Only Live Once foreshadows the post-war American style we have come to know as "film noir." As usual, Fritz Lang was ahead of his time.
You Only Live Once - TCM.com James Steffen
Joan Graham, who works for the public defender Stephen
Whitney, is in love with Eddie Taylor--a three-time convict who has just
received an early release thanks to the support of Whitney and the prison
chaplain, Father Dolan. Joan and Eddie get married, but their new life together
isn't easy; rejected by society at every turn, Eddie finds himself out of work
and begins to associate with other ex-cons. When Eddie's hat is discovered at
the scene of a fatal armed robbery, he is captured, convicted and finally
sentenced to death. Joan, however, is convinced of his innocence. He manages to
escape and Joan goes on the run with him, facing an uncertain future.
Fritz Lang's second American film, You Only Live Once (1937), is often characterized as among the very finest of
his post-German career. In it he manages to achieve a rare balance between
hard-edged social commentary, a moving love story, and expressive visual design.
From the opening shot--an imposing, vaguely menacing view of a Hall of
Justice--Fritz Lang indicates that he will question the nature of justice
itself, or at least how justice is implemented in society. This is born out by
the judgmental and callous behavior of ordinary people that Eddie and Joan meet
after his release from prison. The hotel manager and his wife, inflamed by
stories in sensationalistic "true crime" magazines, evict Eddie and
Joan from their room on their honeymoon. The trucking company owner fires Eddie
and talks casually on the phone with his wife about a card party while Eddie
pleads for his job. Greedy individuals pocket cash register tills, claiming
that the fugitives Eddie and Joan robbed them. Here Lang's cynical view of
"the crowd" displays underlying similarities to the lynch mob in Fury
(1936), his first American film, and to the panicky, quick-to-accuse populace
in M (1931). At the same time, this film is enriched by a number of
striking images, including Eddie and Joan's honeymoon conversation next to a
frog pond, the devastating scene in which a newspaper prepares three different
front-page headlines and photos of Eddie depending on the outcome of his court
trial, the fogbound prison escape scene, and smaller details such as Joan
drinking milk from a can pierced with a bullet hole.
Lang had been dissatisfied with his experience working at MGM on the film Fury
due to studio interference such as an imposed happy ending. In that respect, it
was fortuitous that he was able to make You Only Live Once with independent producer Walter Wanger. According to Lang
biographer Patrick McGilligan, it was lead actress Sylvia Sidney who
recommended to Wanger that Lang direct the project. The idea for the film came
out of a dinner conversation between Wanger, Sidney and author Theodore
Dreiser, during which Dreiser recommended that they do a story on Bonnie and
Lang's notorious drive to control every aspect of a film was extended even to
the acting; more than one person--including Henry Fonda, the film's male
lead--has remarked that Lang treated his actors like puppets. Sylvia Sidney had
worked with Lang previously on Fury and was more or less used to his
methods. "I loved working with him because I loved the fact that he was so
meticulous. He knew more about [the] camera, he knew more about cutting, and
when he said he wanted just a close-up, [it was] very much like Hitchcock, it's
what we used to call cutting in the camera." Later she would boast about
being the only actor to survive three of Lang's films, the third being You
and Me (1938). Lang's working relationship with Henry Fonda was far less
smooth.
You Only Live Once
was not a great box office success during its initial release, but it was well
received by most critics. Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times did not
feel the film was as strong as Fury, but he did praise Lang's direction:
"Mr. Lang's intuitive sense of camera angle, pace and mood raises it to
dramatic stature...." However, the reviewer for Newsweek
characterized the film as "the finest of its type since [The] Public
Enemy [1931]", adding: "Given a stirring screen play by Gene
Towne and Graham Baker, [Lang] directs it with the power and realism that
characterized his work in M and Fury." Similarly, the
reviewer for Time wrote, "You Only Live Once sets a pace which 1937 cops-&-robbers sagas may find
hard to beat."
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4+/4]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
You
Only Live Once (1937) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Brian Cady
DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [1/5]
When Movies Were Movies "Golden Age" Review Dave Smith
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
You Only Live Once - Movie - Review - The New York Times Frank S. Nugent
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
YOU AND ME B+ 90
The
big shots aren't little crooks like you. They're politicians. —Helen
Dennis (Sylvia Sidney)
Fritz Lang is something of a film revelation, where he would be renowned if he was responsible for nothing more than the first science-fiction epic, the German Expressionist silent film masterpiece METROPOLIS (1927), using a cast of thousands, building enormous futuristic sets, utilizing what were at the time state-of-the-art special effects, an arduously difficult film to shoot, lasting over a year, which nearly bankrupted the studio (financed by UFA), culminating in a blistering critique of capitalism and its effects on the future, becoming one of the most influential of all silent films. Shortly afterwards, Lang’s first sound film M (1931) is a chilling portrait of madness, murder, and vengeance, where the underworld and the police vie for a child murderer, a film way ahead of its time in its methodical, perfectly synchronized, psychological storytelling, where Peter Lorre as the compulsive murderer gives one of the great screen performances. Lang himself considered this his finest work. Shortly afterwards, the half-Jewish Lang (who was raised a Roman Catholic) was forced to leave the country once the Nazi’s rose to power, leaving immediately after rejecting propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ offer to become the new head of UFA, now a Nazi German film industry, becoming instead one of Hollywood’s most outspoken anti-Nazi filmmakers. Ironically, Lang was eventually blacklisted during the McCarthy era of the late 40’s and 50’s due to his known working relationship with German playwright Bertolt Brecht and other known communists. Throughout his career, however, Lang thrived on dark themes, including the psychological effects of lies, abuse of power, revenge, a criminal underground, and trapped characters living in a cynical world. Coming on the heels of FURY (1936), his first American film, a devastating indictment of mob violence, and YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937), a boldly fatalistic outlaw couple on the run film (which had a tremendous influence on the later development of postwar film noir, always shooting at night, featuring characters as doomed as the constant pouring of rain, where the intense scrutiny of their dark interior world couldn’t be more bleak), his third film YOU AND ME is instead something of a Brechtian romantic love story, featuring songs and musical numbers written by Brecht collaborator Kurt Weill, considered a critical flop in its day and reportedly Lang’s least favorite of his own films.
Yet somehow, YOU AND ME remains one of Lang’s most personal works, especially the way it combines disparate elements of ill-fated romance with the deviant criminal underworld and the outward extravagance of Brecht’s musical theater into a kind of melodramatic B-movie setting that actually endorses capitalism as a way out of the Depression, becoming one of the more ambitiously experimental Hollywood films of the 30’s, even if the whole never equals the sum of its parts. If it’s not one of Lang’s greatest works, it is among his most unusual efforts, where it’s a jumbled mix of something you just don’t see everyday. Set during the Depression, the opening sequence itself is a scathing indictment of capitalism set to song, Kurt Weill’s “Song of the Cash Register,” where the uncredited tenor sounds thunderously dramatic like Jan Peerce, leading to an impressive montage of cash registers, retail items and consumer goods, driving home the point that nothing in life is free, everything has a price tag, set to an abstract set of images that are deeply comical, accentuating flamboyant hairstyles of the 30’s, where customers must pay for everything from the most ridiculous and sublime to the most common ordinary needs. If one gets their hopes up that the suggested anti-capitalist theme will pervade throughout, you’d be sadly disappointed, as instead the unsung hero behind the scenes is the capitalist owner of a successful chain of department stores, Mr. Morris (Harry Carey), whose philanthropist leanings, much to his wife’s displeasure, includes the unusual habit of hiring ex-cons who have successfully served their time, where a job offering allows them a new start and a sense of moral renewal. The convicts are sales clerks scattered throughout the store, amusingly shown still exhibiting signs of their criminal expertise in making their sales pitch, where tough talking gangster George Raft as Joe tells a perspective customer “There isn’t a racket I haven’t tried.” But as the camera pulls back, he’s selling tennis rackets in the sporting good section. Instead of taking an interest in the attractive blond (Joyce Compton), the film alters course with a superbly constructed, fleeting moment, hand holding scene on escalators moving in opposite directions INSTANTES: You and Me (1938, Fritz Lang) - YouTube (28 seconds), a sexy lead-in to his sweetheart Helen (Sylvia Sidney).
Wasting no time, they quickly get married, seen
mostly through the transformative eyes of Joe, perhaps motivated by a strangely
curious date with Helen where the downbeat, melancholic torch singer Carol
Paige pays weary tribute to falling for the wrong kind of guys (another Weill
effort conjuring up Pabst’s down and out THE THREE PENNY OPERA [1931] images of
Berlin in the 20’s), never dreaming his days as a convict in jail would somehow
lead to newfound respectability, though what he doesn’t know is Helen is
herself an ex-con. In an unusual gesture
rarely seen in American films of the era that often reflect a prevailing anti-Semitic
sentiment, Lang includes sympathetic Jewish characters, Helen’s nosy yet overly
affectionate landlady and her husband (Vera Gordon and Egon Brecher). But when Joe discovers the truth about
Helen’s hidden secret, he dovetails back into the criminal underworld, where in
a priceless sequence, all the ex-cons from the store have been waiting for him
in a mob bar, where they reminisce through jail chatter in song, inventing a
kind of percussive, rhythmic chant, a numerical code that inmates use to
communicate with one another while incarcerated, imitating knocking on the
walls, a stupefyingly euphoric number called “Stick to the Mob,” where once
you’re in, you’re never out, where the boys decide to do what they do best, rob
Morris’s department store. Morris
captures them red-handed, however, alerted by inside information forwarded to
Helen, where he agrees not to send them back to jail if they can sit through
Helen’s reformative, on-the-spot, midnight chalkboard lecture (in the Toy
section, no less!) on why Crime Does Not Pay.
Using a Brechtian underworld socioeconomic critique, it becomes a cost
analysis on the detrimental effects of living a life of crime, where the hidden
costs to pay off all the crooks involved outweigh the benefits, where
capitalism is subversively expressed as a Ponzi pyramid scheme, where only the
ones at the top survive, where Number One (a bribed politician acting on
someone’s behalf) always gets their cut,
staying out of jail by paying for the best lawyers in town, while the
disposable foot soldiers taking all the risks end up fighting among themselves
over the remaining crumbs. In this oddly
charming vision of the ever elusive American Dream, Morris’s investment in
corporate ownership succeeds while the low paying, foot soldiers falter, criminal
or otherwise, where even moral redemption, paying your debt to society, comes
at a high cost, as the only choice the working stiffs of the world have is to
become slaves working for the Man. “No I
ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more.”
Bob Dylan - Maggie's Farm YouTube (
You and Me | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader, also seen here: You and Me
Fritz Lang takes a stab at a Brechtian musical, with songs by
Kurt Weill and even some stretches of recitative. George Raft plays an ex-con
who marries Sylvia Sidney without realizing that she too has done time. This
1938 feature is among Lang's most unjustly neglected Hollywood pictures—not an
unqualified success by any means but interesting, imaginative, and genuinely
strange. The story is by Norman Krasna, and Virginia Van Upp wrote the script.
In most interviews, Lang dismisses You and
Me - within
Lang in the U.S.A. Juliet Clark from Pacific Film Archives
From its dazzling, disorienting opening montage of cash registers
and consumer goods, with an offscreen singer-narrator warning in solemn
sprechstimme that "you cannot get something for nothing," it's clear
that You and Me is not your ordinary romantic fairy tale. Lang said he
intended this comedy-melodrama of love, crime, and the retail trade to be
"a picture that teaches something in an entertaining way, with
songs." That only begins to explain the film's peculiar union of Brechtian
socioeconomic critique, Expressionist stylistics, and
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Fritz Lang's view of capitalism slashes, though, having
already toiled within it, he doesn't extricate himself -- the opening montage
surveys a cosmos for sale, aimed from above at a luxurious department store and
built around a mega close-up of the "cash" button on a register, and
amid the items included in its flurry of shots is a film camera. "You Can
Not Get Something for Nothing," goes the first of Kurt Weill's
anti-musical refrains, resonating painfully with the characters carrying with
them the weight of past crimes. A clerk reveals his old identity as a
safecracker by operating a can-opener, though Harry Carey believes in second
chances and runs the store benignly; among the reformed jailbirds working the
floor are George Raft and Sylvia Sidney, co-workers and clandestine lovers who
break parole restrictions by getting married. The comedy's in the screenplay,
Norman Krasna via Virginia Van Upp, but on the screen the
User comments from imdb Author: ROCKY-19 from Arizona
What a fascinating little film, on a
variety of levels. There is an expressionism that would have made Elmer Rice
proud as well as a distinctly European approach. It feels as if it could be
either a German product or from much earlier in the '30s when
This is pure Fritz Lang, coupled perfectly with Charles Lang Jr.'s photography,
with Kurt Weill's music jumping in abruptly to make you catch your breath. The
blend of comedy and drama is smooth.
The plot line is familiar to this cast. A businessman makes a point of hiring
parolees at his department store, where some are clearly having trouble
adjusting. Joe has abided by the strict demands of his parole and his time is
at last up, freeing him to marry Helen. But she has never told him that she too
is an ex-con and still has several months of parole to serve. She has to tell
lie upon lie to cover up the secret. Meanwhile, his old gang is nipping at him
to join up again in another heist scheme.
Not for the last time, the film exposes the difficulties of staying straight,
difficulties arising both from the system itself as well as peer pressure.
Some plot points are similar to Pick-up, a George Raft-Sylvia Sidney film of a
few years earlier, but this story is much stronger. At this time Raft was in
the middle of a five-year era when he was at his best - relaxed and in
character, willingly joining in the sometimes unusual proceedings.
The rest of the cast, from wonderful Harry Carey to cynical Roscoe Karns, turns
in strong, imaginative performances. As odd as some moments might be, everyone
is clearly "in on" Lang's vision.
There is a great scene of the gang reminiscing about their prison days that
displays that vision full force. This is what the film is all about.
Fritz
Lang's only romantic comedy still displays his skepticism Ben Sachs from The Reader
Sing Me a Song of America: Fritz Lang's "You and Me" (1938) on ... Daniel Kasman from Mubi
George
Raft Sings! (Sort Of) Farran Smith
Nehme from Nomad
The Films of Fritz Lang [Michael E. Grost]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
THE RETURN OF FRANK JAMES
Time Out Capsule Review Geoff Andrew
Fox's follow-up to Jesse James
was Lang's first Western and his first film in colour; if it's more
conventional than the later Rancho Notorious, it nevertheless displays
the director's interest in the psychology (and indeed the pitfalls) of revenge.
At the start of the film, Frank (Fonda) is happy to let the law pronounce
sentence on the Ford brothers, who killed Jesse; but when they are pardoned, he
begins a deadly hunt that alienates him from society, imperils not only his own
life but those of his friends, and threatens to destroy his long-held ideas of
justice. For all its fine photography and sturdy performances, the film is
finally little more than efficient and routine, with Lang rarely probing beyond
the ironic if superficial twists of the narrative. Though it bears some slight
thematic resemblance to the earlier Fury and You Only Live Once,
he's clearly not as comfortable with dusty townships and baked landscapes as
with the noir-like ambience of his contemporary crime movies.
User comments from imdb Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
Fritz Lang directed this pallid
western filmed in muted Technicolor and starring HENRY FONDA as Frank James,
seeking to shoot down the man (JOHN CARRADINE) who shot his brother Jesse in
the back.
It's a tale of revenge, but not as dark a tale as you might expect, prettily
photographed but lacking the grittiness one would expect from this sort of
tale. Fonda makes a completely acceptable Frank James, but GENE TIERNEY is
rather wasted in her film debut, decorative but given a thinly written role which
she plays in a high-pitched, whining sort of voice. It's no wonder she got the
bad reviews she did early in her career. Nor were her looks as sharply defined
as they were later on when her acting skills improved considerably.
While she underacts, the same can't be said for any of the supporting players,
all of whom are guilty of extravagant ham acting--especially in the long,
drawn-out courtroom scene for the finale. Crotchety HENRY HULL is worst of all,
LLOYD CORRIGAN (as Tierney's father) not far behind, and J. EDWARD BROMBERG,
EDDIE COLLINS, THURSTON HALL and DONALD COOK are all guilty of cringe-worthy
overacting that just makes Fonda's performance more refreshing for its
naturalness. JACKIE COOPER too, gives a more even performance as Fonda's sidekick.
Fritz Lang makes the most of the final suspenseful shoot-out in the shadows of
a barn between Frank James and Bob Ford, but the film is hardly a distinguished
western. In fact, it's rather routine and one can only wish that someone like
Henry Hathaway or Henry King had been assigned to direct this one.
A disappointment as a western and as a film debut for Tierney.
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
In 1939, 20th Century Fox scored with their prestigious, critically approved Jesse James. And despite the fact that its hero (played by Tyrone Power) didn't make it past the ending, the studio carried on with a sequel, featuring Jesse's brother (played by Henry Fonda) and directed by the recent German transplant Fritz Lang. Most people prefer the original film, but Lang's sequel arguably has more of a personal vision. The Return of Frank James may lack the psychological darkness associated with Lang's best work, but it's still a rousing good Western.
Frank James is now hiding out under an assumed name, when he hears the news
that his brother has been shot in the back by the Ford brothers (John Carradine
and Charles Tannen). The Fords are captured, tried, and eventually released,
leading Frank on the trail for revenge. But
According to Peter Bogdanovich, Henry Fonda swore he would never work with Lang again after You Only Live Once (1937), and swore the same thing again after The Return of Frank James. Lang went on to make two more Westerns, Western Union (1941) and the superb Rancho Notorious (1952).
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Channel 4 Capsule Review Daniel Etherington
NY Times Original Review (scroll down to second review; spoilers alert) Bosley Crowther
WESTERN
UNION
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Randolph Scott and Robert Young
lay the first coast-to-coast telegraph wire in Fritz Lang's 1941 western. The
genre really doesn't suit Lang, although he had a profound respect for it: all
of those wide-open spaces seem inimical to Lang's characteristic moods of
intensity and entrapment. Still, he gives it his best, and there is one
remarkable 180-degree shot announcing the arrival of the Indians.
Time Out review Tom Milne
Perhaps the most memorable moment in this fine
and feisty Western comes with the superb 180-degree pan which starts at a cut
telegraph line, moves slowly over to a coil of wire with an arrow through it,
and then suddenly discovers a band of hostile Indians, fearsome and beautiful
in startlingly brilliant warpaint and feathered headdresses. Lang was the first
director really to exploit the possibilities of colour in the Western, and his
marvellous sense of composition lifts an otherwise conventional story - the
laying of the first trans-continental telegraph wire in 1861, with the
inevitable conflict between brothers backing opposing interests - clear out of
the rut.
User comments from imdb Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
Blazing early technicolor is an
awesome ingredient of this fast-moving Fritz Lang western featuring Robert
Young and Randolph Scott in one of their best cowboy epics. Basically the story
of their rivalry for the affections of a girl (Virginia Gilmore), as well as a
story of how the telegraph brought communication to the wilderness. Some inept
comedy is the only spoiler in an otherwise straightforward telling of an
interesting tale. Randolph Scott is excellent as the man with a past hired to
protect Western Union from Indian attacks. Robert Young is perfect as the
dapper surveyor from back East. This must have been great "Saturday
afternoon at the Bijou" sort of fare for kids and the elders who simply
wanted to enjoy a good old shoot 'em up western with cowboys and Indians. It's
still enjoyable on that level--and you'll see some of the best early
technicolor ever captured on film. Deserves more recognition as one of the best
of its kind.
The Boston Phoenix review Gerald Peary
Who would have thought it
possible? Fritz Lang Lite. In other Westerns that he made in the US — say, Rancho
Notorious, or The Return of Frank James — the cynical-to-the-core
German filmmaker (Metropolis, M) imbued his stories with paranoid,
fatalist, noir touches. Western Union, a big-budget Fox Western based
loosely on a Zane Grey novel, is gung-ho Manifest Destiny American myth,
cheering on the white guys as they foil the Indians and build the Western Union
through the Nebraska Territory. Yep, the Indians here say "How!" in
greeting, and the palefaces, perceiving an Indian attack, mutter, "Looks
like we got company!" For a time, the Sioux cause trouble, especially
after they’ve been duped by renegade whites into drinking firewater. But in the
end, convinced of the noble intentions of the Great White Father in Washington,
they let the Western Union build away.
For students of the Western,
there’s the germ of John Ford’s 1962 masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance (which will screen at the Harvard Film Archive on March 28) in the
way Eastern tenderfoot Richard (Robert Young) and grizzled, girl-shy cowpoke
Vance (Randolph Scott) vie for the same girl (Virginia Gilmore). And there’s a
fine Liberty Valance–like gunfight at the end involving a salty villain
(Barton MacLane). Although all the adventures were concocted, Lang did claim an
affection for this film. His take on the actual events? "In reality,
nothing happened during the whole building of the line except they ran out of
wood for the telephone poles."
User comments from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States
I doubt
if the real story of the development of
The film deals with how the laying of the telegraph system is endangered by
Indians, spurred on by one Jack Slade (Barton MacLane). Slade, a desperado, is
not happy with the development of a communication system that will certainly
put a crimp in his abilities to evade the police in the territories. He is
confronted by the man in charge of the laying of the telegraph wires, Edward
Creighton (Dean Jagger), Creighton's associate Richard Blake (Robert Young),
and a quasi-lawman Vance Shaw (Randolph Scott), who is Slade's brother. Blake,
an Easterner with little understanding of the West, is romancing Creighton's
sister Sue (Virginia Gilmore), but finds it hard to get used to his new
surroundings. But he does become a close friend of Shaw, especially in trying
to confront Slade.
Slade was a real Western criminal, by the way, and the subject of a section of
Mark Twain's ROUGHING IT. He was hanged in the 1870s. But he did not have any
involvement in stirring up Indians against railroads or telegraph companies.
However, MacLane makes him a memorably evil, and totally vicious type. His
killing of one of the major characters is done suddenly and from behind - and
he views the corpse as though he has just got rid of an annoyance. But Lang is
responsible for that, as well as other touches. Look at the sequence with Chill
Wills, where he is on a telegraph pole repairing it. He spits tobacco juice
several times while talking to Young, who gets a little splattered. Then there
is an Indian attack which we watch from the ground level. At the conclusion,
Young suddenly gets splattered again, but it's not brown but red that covers
him. He looks up at the pole's top, and there is Wills with an Indian arrow
through him.
It is an exciting film to watch, and well worth catching.
Western Union (1941) - Articles - TCM.com Bret Wood
Better known for his German epics
of the silent era (Metropolis [1927] and Die Nibelungen [1924])
or his American films noir (Scarlet Street [1945] and The Big Heat
[1953]), Fritz Lang was actually quite a fan of the traditional western. In
fact he spent vacations traveling throughout the West, shooting dozens of home
movies recording the landscape and people of the Old West as it faded into
history. "All my life I've loved the American West," he once said.
Lang's interest in cowboy culture was not strictly a hobby. He made several
westerns while working in Hollywood, including the Technicolor epic Western
Union (1941).
When Vance Shaw (Randolph Scott), a fugitive from justice, encounters a wounded
man in the wilderness, he tends the man's wounds and helps him to a town where
he can receive medical attention. The wounded man is Edward Creighton (Dean
Jagger), an engineer in charge of running a telegraph wire from Omaha to Salt
Lake City. While hiring men for the difficult crusade, Creighton overlooks
Shaw's criminal background and offers him a job as a scout to repay the debt.
Shaw quickly becomes interested in Creighton's sister Sue (Virginia Gilmore),
as does the tenderfoot Richard Blake (Robert Young), who joins the mission from
back east, sporting fringed, tailored western attire. Blake soon earns the
respect of his peers as they travel into the wilderness. But friendships grow
strained when the group's supply of cattle is stolen. Creighton suspects Shaw
knows something of the crime, which he does. Shaw recognizes the work of his
own brother Jack Slade (Barton MacLane), whose gang rustles cattle dressed up
as Native American warriors. Unwilling to betray his brother, Shaw searches for
a way to avenge the crimes without jeopardizing Western Union's westward
campaign.
Western Union was the final novel by Western writer Zane Grey. The book was
published three days prior to the author's death of a heart attack on October
23, 1939. Grey had discussed with actor Gary Cooper the idea of an independent
production of Western Union (to be released by either United Artists or RKO),
but it failed to materialize. At one point Paramount Pictures was also
interested in purchasing screen rights, but Fox ultimately won the property
with a $25,000 offer.
In many ways Western Union is a relatively authentic depiction of life and work
in the Old West, largely due to location shooting near Kanab, Utah and at
Arizona's House Rock Canyon. The outstanding Technicolor photography, by Edward
Cronjager and Allen M. Davey, made the most of the exotic settings, favoring
muted colors and dusky earthtones, occasionally offset by bursts of vivid
color, such as the warpaint or ceremonial feathers of the Native American
characters. American Cinematographer called it "one of the most
spectacularly beautiful examples of color cinematography we've seen in many
months."
Western Union tried to avoid the artifice of the stereotypical western, and the
scene in which Blake arrives dressed more like a stage dandy than a horseman
seems to be a jab at the colorful (but not very genuine) cowboys who populated
matinee screens of the era.
Lang discussed the film's authenticity with Peter Bogdanovich in 1965. "I
got a letter from a club of Old Timers in Flagstaff which said, 'Dear Mr. Lang,
We have seen Western Union and this picture describes the West much better than
the best pictures that have been made about the West...' For a European
director to get such a thing from Old Timers who knew about the West -- I was,
naturally, very flattered; but I suppose what these gentlemen wrote was not
quite correct. Because I don't think the picture really depicted the West as it
was; maybe it lived up to certain dreams, illusions -- what the Old
Timers wanted to remember of the old West."
One of Lang's departures from reality was in the casting of the Native
Americans. Because the local Paiute tribesmen didn't fit the stereotype of the
chiseled desert warrior, Lang (according to The New York Times),
"ordered a shipment of Hollywood Indians from Central Casting -- tall,
high cheek-boned fellows who look like aborigines are supposed to look."
This order was soon canceled, after Lang discussed the matter with John
Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Collier allowed Lang to instead
recruit 200 Navajos from a reservation, under the promise that they would be
treated with dignity.
Lang was astute enough to realize that, no matter how well constructed and
photographed, his West was just a higher grade of fantasy than the typical
Hollywood oater. He had tried to inject some period detail into Western Union,
but quickly encountered resistance at 20th Century-Fox. "I had
found...that there were cowboys in those days who wore bowler hats. But this
was already too much for the studio. Not that they didn't believe it, but they
always preferred to give an audience the same old thing -- with some new
trimming." When first offered the project, Lang thoroughly rewrote the
script, presumably to give it more of a factual feel, but his draft was
discarded by the studio. Still believing in the project, even if his ideas were
largely ignored, he agreed to continue as planned and direct the film. Besides,
maybe the true story of Western Union's westward expansion wouldn't have made
such a great movie anyway.
"In reality, nothing happened during the entire building of the line
except that they ran out of wood for the telegraph poles," Lang explained,
"and the only other thing that disturbed the laying of the line was the
ticks on the buffaloes; the buffaloes got itchy and rubbed themselves against
the poles, and the poles tumbled. And that was all that happened."
Making a film about laying the telegraph line was apparently twice as
complicated as the original task. A 1941 newspaper article reported that
"In 1861 it cost $212,000 to extend the telegraph...and the crew took four
months and eleven days, covering 1,100 miles. To reproduce their feat in 1940,
a company of 300 traveled 2,000 miles in ten months, at a cost of more than
$1,000,000."
Lang and company seem to have also doubled the amount of planning that went
into the mission. Assistant editor Gene Fowler, Jr. recalled, "On Western
Union I learned of the immense preparation that goes into a Lang picture...Models
of sets were built and camera angles and focal lengths of lenses were selected.
He believed that each shot must relate to the whole. The design of the shot
(even the lighting) must relate to the dramatic concept. Details, no matter how
good or how interesting, are only good if they fit into the overall
pattern."
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Western Union Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Classic Film Guide Capsule Review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Western Union
(film) - Wikipedia
MAN HUNT
Film Notes From the CMA Dennis Toth
Upon his arrival in
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
While far from Lang's finest, definitely a
superior thriller, set on the eve of World War II. Sadly but inevitably
jettisoning much of Geoffrey Household's superb novel (Rogue Male), it
follows Pidgeon's big game hunter from his arrest by the Gestapo (after taking
a 'practice' shot at Hitler), through his escape back to England, to his final,
brutal conflict in the Dorset Hills where he has been pursued by Sanders'
marvellously sinister Quive-Smith. The evocation of
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: theowinthrop from United States
History cannot be changed, but one
wishes it can. The crew sites the iceberg before the TITANIC reaches it. The
Ripper falls on his knife accidentally impaling himself fatally before he meets
his first victim. Booth gets into a quarrel about his theatrical reputation vs.
his father and brother Edwin, and is unable to get into Fords Theatre that
night. But none of these happened. The Titanic sank. Mary Ann Nichols met the
Ripper, and died. Booth got behind
Adolf Hitler is probably the most hated man in modern history. Even the Ripper
or Booth have more fans than Adolf (except for the extreme right). But he had a
remarkable ability to escape assassination. Most of us recall that Count
Stauffenberg tried to blow him up at a conference in 1944, supported by
military leaders in his plot. But that was the last and most deadly attack on
Hitler (two or three others were killed), and he survived it...unfortunately
for the conspirators, his political victim, and the majority of mankind. Other
plots never got that far. Nobody (that we know of) ever had a loaded rifle
aimed at Hitler's head in the
One wishes it happened that way. But it did not. Sometimes fiction makes one
really regret reality.
The Village Voice [Elliott Stein]
When Fritz Lang cleared out of Nazi Germany, he shot a film in France, then moved to Hollywood in 1934. The director of Metropolis turned out 22 films in this country—his American pictures make up more than half his work; 15 are on view at BAM's generous retro.
Lang never went into decline. Although his Hollywood films were not on the scale of his monumental German superproductions, there's no break between his European and American work. His U.S. films are as clearly marked by rigorous logic, patterns of paranoia, and obsession with the structure of the trap. The creator of the sinister Dr. Mabuse proved himself fully capable of exploiting the genres then in fashion in America: Freudian thrillers and wartime espionage flicks, but also westerns and period melodramas. And with The Big Heat (1953), he would direct the most blistering and epochal film noir of the 1950s.
His first three American films—Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), and You and Me (1938)—form a rough trilogy about victims of society's errors; all of them co-star Sylvia Sidney, the archetypal working-class heroine of the Depression era. In Fury, an indictment of mob hysteria, Spencer Tracy is an innocent man accused of a crime, transformed and dehumanized by revenge into a malevolent force. You Only Live Once, one of Lang's most bitter and moving works, corners Sidney with three-time loser Henry Fonda—the mother of all couples-on-the-run movies, it remains the finest of the genre. In the fascinating, oddball experiment You and Me, Sidney and George Raft team up as a pair of married ex-cons for a romantic comedy gangster musical. Unlike any other film by Lang, or anyone else for that matter, it features songs by Kurt Weill, including a brilliant opening number—a cautionary mini-cantata about the perils of consumerism.
Lang played an active role in anti-Nazi groups, and after two handsome Technicolor westerns, The Return of Frank James (1940) and Western Union (1941), he completed three war-inspired productions: Man Hunt (1941), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), a taut drama (co-scripted by Bertolt Brecht) about the 1942 assassination of the German "governor" of occupied Prague, and Ministry of Fear (1944), a Kafkaesque espionage yarn based on a Graham Greene novel.
The series highlight is a new print of Man Hunt, an underrated masterpiece not seen theatrically in far too long. In this visually stunning tall-tale thriller, Walter Pidgeon is an English big-game hunter arrested by the gestapo (after he takes a "practice shot" at Hitler); he escapes back to England, where he is trailed by a really nasty bunch of Nazis. Joan Bennett appears as Pidgeon's sole ally, a waifish cockney streetwalker. The Hays office threw a conniption. The studio promptly satisfied the censors' moral qualms by putting a sewing machine into Bennett's room—the lady's not a tramp, she's a seamstress!
Man Hunt Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Movie
Magazine International [Michael Marano]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4.5/5]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDS; Fritz Lang, Trailing Nazis Dave Kehr from The New York Times, May 15, 2009
CONFIRM OR DENY
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Fast-moving if fairly ordinary tribute to the
heroism of American war correspondents covering World War II. Much of the film
gets bogged down in the growing romance between agency man Ameche and Ministry
of Information switchboard girl Bennett, but it's entertaining enough when the
bombs drop; and collector-cultists may derive pleasure from a script by former
journalist and future genius Sam Fuller.
User comments from imdb Author: telegonus from brighton, ma
Made in the months before the
Japanese attack on
The New York Times review
T.M.P.
It is possible that some of the adventures Don Ameche
experiences in "Confirm or Deny" as an American correspondent in
As formula has it, they meet in a blackout, pass the night in a crowded subway shelter and spend the rest of the film wondering why they hadn't found each other before. Being so typically a Hollywoodish news hawk as to appear ridiculous against the realism of his surroundings, it is small wonder that Mr. Ameche should obtain—via carrier pigeon and other Rover Boyish means—the greatest scoop of all time, Hitler's invasion plans. And with that he is indeed faced with a problem, for if he sends out the news he would not only invite punishment from the British but risk losing Miss Bennett's love.
Circumstance has provided "Confirm or Deny" with a
dramatic intensity which obviously is not inherent in the scenario. Now that
war has hit home so forcefully scenes of devastation, the whine of bombs, the
sputtering of incendiaries and the note of personal tragedy as a secretary
finds her brother's name on the casualty list have assumed a new significance.
It is to be regretted that such tragic happenings are so often viewed by
Credit Mr. Ameche with a breezy performance and Miss Bennett with being a splendid blackout find. Little Roddy McDowall gives a sincere and touching portrait of youth in war, and Arthur Shields contributes a telling characterization of a blind telegraph operator. Archie Mayo has directed the film swiftly, which helps a lot.
HANGMEN ALSO DIE!
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Marvellous anti-Nazi propaganda film structured
as noir thriller, with Donlevy as the man who assassinates Heydrich in
Lang in the U.S.A. Juliet Clark from Pacific Film Archives
Lang collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on this fictionalized
account of the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi
Reichsprotektor of occupied
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Displaced Prussians Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht
manufactured this shrill 1943 five-course meal of Hollywood propaganda as
nearly a parody of the new form—and yet the Langian physicality is tense and
sublime, and the patriotic keening is offset by an explosion of crisscrossing
motivations and moral compromise. The story fictionalizes the 1942
assassination in Prague of Nazi bigwig Reinhard Heydrich, which happens before
the film begins; Brian Donlevy's fugitive gunman avoids capture and eventually
accepts shelter from a rebel Czech family, led by father Walter Brennan. From
there, Donlevy becomes just one figure in an expanding, complex cast, each with
their own m.o. and point of view: Brennan's reprisal prisoner, Anna Lee's
conflicted daughter, Dennis O'Keefe's jealous fiancé, Alexander Granach's beery
gestapo, Gene Lockhart's sweaty collaborator, etc. The two-and-a-quarter-hour
film has the iconic thrust of a silent; the pro-sacrifice resistance cant has
an oddly jihadist tenor today. No supps, but it's being boxed with four other
beautiful noirs, including Behind Locked Doors (1948), Budd Boetticher's
jittery forecast of Shock Corridor, and Anthony Mann's lean and mean Railroaded
(1947).
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Made during
the height of the Nazi occupation of the Czech Republic, Hangmen Also Die represents
the only collaboration between a pair of brilliant German exiles: filmmaker
Fritz Lang, who produced, directed, and co-wrote the story and screenplay
adaptation, and acclaimed leftist playwright Bertolt Brecht, who shared story
and adaptation credits with Lang. Brian Donlevy stars as a respected doctor and
member of the Czech underground who assassinates the brutal puppet ruler of the
Czech Republic. Fleeing the scene of the crime, he stays with a sympathetic
family (including patriarch Walter Brennan and daughter Anna Lee), which tries
to hide him from the manhunt that has consumed the city. While Hangmen Also
Die has been released as part of Kino's Film Noir series, it's not really a
film noir at all: It's suffused with a sense of political idealism that would
seem to be antithetical to the sort of gloomy fatalism that pervades most
noirs. It is, instead, a political thriller, albeit a political thriller that
doubles as a sort of valentine to the Czech resistance movement. In a number of
ways, the film resembles Lang's earlier classic M: It not only focuses
on a city-wide manhunt, but it illustrates the way tragedy can unite a
community behind a common goal. And while Hangmen Also Die can never
again achieve the immediacy it no doubt held for audiences in 1943, it's still
a fascinating, beautifully crafted film.
Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) capsule review
Made
by Fritz Lang (Metropolis) just prior to his landmark Hollywood picture Ministry
of Fear, Hangmen Also Die! was co-scripted by Bertolt Brecht
and left-wing American scribe John Wexley (who ended up with sole screen
credit, leading to a rift between Lang and Brecht). A dramatized account of the
1942 assassination of Nazi Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in Prague and the
subsequent search for his killers (and persecution of the citizenry), the
picture asks an audience to believe Brian Donlevy and Walter Brennan as Czechs
but overcomes the absurd casting via a persuasive blend of Brechtian themes and
Langian imagery. Thus, the movie climaxes with the courageous underground
movement fooling the evil occupiers into accepting a sympathizer to their cause
as a suspect, and the screeching Nazis found in most propagandistic Hollywood
fare of the period are tempered by sly supporting performances such as
Alexander Granach’s sordid, finger-snapping German detective. The DVD is crisp
and atmospheric, highlighting James Wong Howe’s expressionistic lighting scheme
(and, unfortunately, the stylized but less than convincing backlot sets). Along
with Anthony Mann’s Railroaded (1947) and Ida Lupino’s The
Hitch-Hiker (1953) a part of Kino Video’s new “Noir: The Dark Side of
Hollywood” series, Hangmen Also Die! is a fascinating chapter in the
history of German expatriates in Tinseltown and the uneasy but never less than
riveting intersection between social substance and commercial style.
User comments from imdb Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
Resistance
by Czech citizens during World War II against their Nazi occupiers forms the
basis for HANGMEN ALSO DIE!, based loosely on the real-life assassination of
Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi governor of
And, in fact, it might have all seemed less melodramatic and sometimes
incredible if the director had allowed his cast to avoid the pitfalls of too
much overacting. This charge cannot be leveled against BRIAN DONLEVY who seems
to be sleepwalking through his role as the actual assassin (Dr. Svoboda), but
ANNA LEE, GENE LOCKHART, JONATHAN HALE and others are guilty of wide-eyed,
over-the-top histrionics, while WALTER BRENNAN as a Czech professor is simply
miscast. DENNIS O'KEEFE is capable enough as Lee's fiancé.
Lockhart, especially, in a pivotal role as the Nazi informant who is the
subject of an intricate frameup toward the climax of the story, is given to
excessive bits of ham that seem magnified at times.
But the gripping story is mostly fascinating to watch as it unfolds a tale of
Nazi terror in an attempt to find Heydrich's assassin. Despite the overly
melodramatic treatment, it holds interest throughout a lengthy running time.
Summing up: Probably had stronger appeal for '43 audiences, which explains the
propaganda tone of the Lang/Brecht screenplay which is a fictionalized version
of a real WWII event.
User comments from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@onvol.net) from Naxxar, Malta
One of a handful of propaganda
films made by
It also features a great cast (mostly delivering excellent performances, but is
saddled with a miscast and rather stiff Brian Donlevy in the lead): Walter
Brennan and Gene Lockhart are featured in overly familiar roles but their
contribution is, as ever, reliable and entirely welcome; best of all, perhaps,
are Anna Lee and Alexander Granach; beloved character actor Dwight Frye (most
familiar to horror-film buffs) appears here in one of his last roles but, as
was generally the case, is regrettably given only a couple of lines!
Long and heavy-going, with the propagandist element coming off as fairly corny
now, but the film is held firmly together by Lang's fine direction and James
Wong Howe's superb noir-ish lighting (the Region 1 DVD by Kino was eventually
re-issued as part of a 5-Disc Noir set). It also involves a couple of scuffles
which are quite tense and energetic (Granach's death scene is especially
striking), while the last third resorts to the organized frame-up by the Czechs
of a traitor in their midst (collaborationist Lockhart) - which, in itself, is
no less frightening an act than the heinous persecution of the Nazi regime!
I'm confused, however, about the film's running-time: the print I watched ran
for 129 minutes in PAL mode (which would bring it to about 134 minutes when
converted to NTSC); even so, it contains the ending missing from the DVDs
released in Regions 1 and 2 which, being the same version i.e. cut and having
the same length (134 minutes), would indicate that the Kino edition is a PAL
conversion - which means a full running-time of 139 minutes (a minute short of
the 'official' length, as per Lotte Eisner's book on Lang)! To make matters
worse, both the Leslie Halliwell and Leonard Maltin film guides I own cite
HANGMEN ALSO DIE! as being 131 minutes long!!
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal
The
story goes that German émigrés Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht conceived of
a movie about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich,
Czechoslovakia's designated Reichsprotektor, before any details of the
operation were known. They simply read about it in the newspaper and
concocted a fantastic conspiratorial backstory around the killing, a work
of realtime historical fiction that refracted world events through Lang
and Brecht's preexisting interests in, respectively, the workings of the
demimonde and the dividends of proletariat solidarity. Their Heydrich
would be a fearsome joke, twirling his cane like a swishy burlesque
caricature, before suffering the indignity of an offscreen assassination
less than ten minutes into the film version. The feature that would
finally emerge in the spring of 1943, HANGMAN ALSO DIE! (the title was suggested
by one of the production's secretaries and inadvertently spawned a
generation of exclamatory auteurist actioners: FIXED BAYONETS!, RETREAT,
HELL!, ATTACK!, VERBOTEN!, etc.) is a decidedly unruly film, constantly
pulled between competing agendas and aims. It's simultaneously a crackling
espionage thriller, a work of decidedly nonuplifting Allied propaganda, a
congenitally anti-German diatribe, a plea for a treacly strain of
politicallyengaged art, and a romance that exudes as much passion as a
cootiesfearing fiveyearold. Much to Brecht's chagrin, the project
was marked by inevitable concessions to the system that his theorist
friends and SoCal refugee neighborhoods Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
would soon dub "the Culture Industry." The moral divisions are
clear: the Czechs, conquered in body but never in spirit, are played by
chipper American character actors (Walter Brennan, Gene Lockhart, and the
Great McGinty himself, Brian Donlevy), while the Nazis are portrayed by
the human refuse of Weimar cinema (including bit players from THE CABINET
OF DR. CALIGARI and NOSFERATU). One suspects that it was the Communist
screenwriter John Wexley, not half-heartedly Americanized "Bert
Brecht," who strove to make the Nazis' victims more relatable and resilient
by invoking the hardships of Valley Forge. As an artifact of Popular Front
patriotism, HANGMEN is unrivaled—and fanciful. (In all of Prague, there seems
but one collaborator and hundreds of loyal Czechs, always ready to form a
spontaneous mob—the good kind!—to keep the wobbly ones in line.) Like
several other war films of the era, HANGMEN ALSO DIE! was the work of
dedicated leftists whose "premature anti-fascism" had suddenly
become fashionable, albeit not in all company. Wexley, Lang, Brecht, and composer
Hans Eisler had all attracted the interest of the FBI—the latter three
labeled "Commu-Nazis" for their perceived (schizophrenic?)
loyalties. No wonder HANGMEN ALSO DIE! found its most ardent boosters in
CPUSA-affiliated rags like New Masses and The Daily Worker. (Over at the
merely liberal New Republic, Manny Farber deemed HANGMEN "good, in
spite of all the ineptitude—but it's close.") Screened for years in
prints that lopped off a crucial minute at the climax, HANGMEN ALSO DIE!
has now been restored to a reasonably coherent shape—less evasive, more
despairing, and very much worth a reckoning.
Forgotten
Classics of Yesteryear: Hangmen Also Die
Nathanael Hood
Hangmen
Also Die! (1943) - Articles - TCM.com Felicia Fester
Hangmen Also Die! Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Verdict Barrie Maxwell
That Movie Site [Heather Picker]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] reviewing Film Noir – The Dark Side of Hollywood
The New York Times review T.S.
DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]
MINISTRY OF FEAR
Time Out review Tom Milne
Forget the phony studio settings and the
script's hesitancies in adapting Graham Greene's novel about a spy hunt in
wartime
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [81.2/100]
"Ministry of Fear" is a greatly
underrated 'film noir' mystery thriller from the 1940s. Strange and confusing,
the plot is pieced together slowly and only by film's end does it make complete
sense. The film's lead, Ray Milland, is as much in the dark as is the audience.
His confusion throughout the film is only matched by his determination to
unravel the whole mystery, a Nazi spy ring that is fronted by a charitable
organization.
Stephen Neale (Milland) has spent the past two years in an English asylum after
mercy killing his wife. Released during the World War II era of German bombing
raids, Milland's attempts at establishing a normal life are thwarted when he is
mistaken for a Nazi agent. As a good patriotic citizen, Neale wants to get to
the bottom of it. It seems that the only people willing to help him are
good-natured Willi Hilfe (Carl Esmond) and his sister Carla (Marjorie
Reynolds). Eventually, Neale is accused of murder, and must clear his name in
addition to uncovering the spy ring.
What makes "Ministry of Fear" special isn't just director Fritz
Lang's ability to string along the viewer, or the screenplay adapted from the
Graham Greene novel. It isn't even the 'film noir' feel of dark lighting and
shady, mysterious characters. The best part is that the film is completely unpredictable:
the viewer knows that something is about to happen, but has no idea what it is.
In other words, the suspense.
User comments from imdb Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico
Fritz Lang was responsible for a
couple of true German originals, including the fantasy "Metropolis"
and the early talkie, "M". He was pretty popular. He claims at one point
he was invited to Goebel's office and asked to lead the film department at the
Ministry of Propaganda. "What could I say? I said, 'I'm tickled pink,
Sir.'" He and his family were on the next available transit out of
He was a prime catch for Hollywood, where he as known for strutting around in
riding breeches and boots, a monacle in his eye, shouting instructions through
a megaphone. I've never found his American movies actually gripping, although
always interesting in some way or other. They are unmistakably Langian if you
know what to look for. His thematic use of objects like clocks. Or, here, a
nicely done rainy shot of a tailor's shop in
But it's a pretty unimaginative plot, rather routine, and neither Lang nor the
performers bring much extra to it. The narrative is -- I want to say this
without seeming to ridicule it. It's "heavy handed?" Maybe that's it.
I'm doing the best I can to avoid "Teutonic." A couple of changes in
the dialogue and you wouldn't have too much trouble getting rid of Milland and
putting Rathbone and Bruce in his place. "Sherlock Holmes and the Cake of
Death." Or, with a little more effort, it could become the peg for a Bob
Hope comedy. "My Favorite Recipe."
I did like Dan Duryea though, the phony scuzzbag. He fakes being shot once,
then gets it the second time while fondling a pair of gigantic scissors. Dan
Duryea dies double deaths. Those scissors must have been Lang's idea because he
used them more than once as weapons. He seemed to like them. He seems to have
liked Duryea too because he used him twice more.
It's not his best American film but it's above average for the genre. And it's
worth seeing if only because Lang himself directed it. It's good enough that
you're not likely to be bored by it.
Ministry
of Fear - TCM.com Paul Tatara
It's hard to imagine a more convoluted plot than Ministry of Fear (1944), one of the
American thrillers that German expatriate Fritz Lang directed during World War
II. Based on a novel by Graham Greene, the script keeps you blindly guessing
from one moment to the next. Even the main character is baffled for most of the
movie. The story may or may not make complete sense, but Ministry of Fear is one of those
pictures that operates by its own twisted logic. Though you get completely lost
while you're watching, its sheer strangeness compels you to ride things out to
the end.
Ray Milland plays Stephen Neale, a man who's just served two years in an
English insane asylum for murdering his wife. Neale was wrongly convicted of
the crime, and he now wants nothing more than to get back to a normal
existence. Unfortunately, he's re-entering society at a time when
One day, Neale visits a mysterious fortune teller, then wins a large cake at a
local carnival, which leads to his being mistaken for a Nazi spy. This has got
to be the only movie that begins with intelligence agents trying to make off
with a cake, and it only gets weirder from there. Eventually, the cake will
explode (!), and Neale will attend another seance...which leads to his being
accused of another murder. Then he'll be forced to clear his name while trying
to expose the spy network. But that's just the bare bones of a wildly
Byzantine, Kafka-esque plot.
Unlike most of his
Opinions differ wildly on Ministry
of Fear. It's just that kind of movie. Some critics hail it as a
masterpiece, while others find it too overtly peculiar for classic status.
Lang, rather surprisingly, always felt the screenplay was beneath him, and he
was never happy with the finished product. In 1967, he told Peter Bogdanovich
that he had actually fallen asleep while trying to watch it on TV.
Lang's view was almost certainly tainted by the fact that screenwriter Seton I.
Miller also produced the picture. Lang always bristled under authority - Josef
Goebbels would have been a bit of a problem - so a writer/producer who could
single-handedly crush his story alterations was the kind of thing that drove
him to distraction. (He disdainfully referred to Miller as "the supposed
producer" during filming.) However, even with Miller watching over his
shoulder, Lang still managed to go $44,000 over the planned $700,000 budget. If
he really disliked this fascinating film as much as he said he did, he could
still take solace in that.
Ministry of Fear: Paranoid Style Criterion essay by Glenn Kenny, March 12,
2013
Ministry of Fear
(1944) - The Criterion Collection
Ministry of Fear Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Film Noir of the Week Steve-O
Ministry of Fear (1944) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
WOMAN IN THE WINDOW
The Woman in the Window Dave Kehr from the Reader
A masterful film noir (1944) from Fritz Lang's rich
American period, with Edward G. Robinson as a professor of psychology who
learns by doing as he becomes obsessed with the image of a woman in a painting.
I probably prefer Scarlet Street, Lang's follow-up with the same cast
(Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea), but between one masterpiece and another who's to
choose? 99 min.
Time Out Geoff Andrew
A classic noir thriller with Robinson in
top form as the likeable professor of criminal psychology who finds his most
vivid fantasies and fears fulfilled when his wife and kids take a vacation and
leave him alone to cope with the evils of the big city. Meeting up (innocently,
it seems) with the woman of his dreams - the subject of a painting in a gallery
window he passes regularly - he becomes involved first in the violent killing
of a man, then in blackmail. Meanwhile his DA pal (Massey) keeps him in touch
with the police's search for the killer. With Bennett and Duryea superb as the
eponymous heroine and the blackmailer, and atmospheric camerawork by Milton
Krasner, it's not merely a dazzling piece of suspense, but also a
characteristically stark demonstration of Lang's belief in the inevitability of
fate: Robinson, basically a good man, makes one small slip in a moment of
relaxation, and he's doomed.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
The first thing that strikes you about WOMAN
IN THE WINDOW is that you're expected to believe that Edward G. Robinson is a
fogeyish square in baggy trousers and striped socks; this movie's a parade of
physiognomies (just look at the membership of the club Robinson hangs out
in--one fat, one short, one lean...), and E.G.R.'s harsh face hints otherwise.
But maybe that's because WOMAN IN THE WINDOW is a film that intends to make us
see through the way the characters present themselves and how they rationalize
their actions. After all, if they're so erudite and educated, why are Robinson
and his friends so struck by a kitschy portrait? If they're real intellectuals,
then why does the intellectualism they practice consist of sitting around in
armchairs smoking? If Dan Duryea's supposed to be such a smooth operator, why
does he wear that ridiculous boater that makes his ears look like snowshoes? If
Joan Bennett is so universally beautiful, why does she put on so much make-up?
The truth is that in this movie, everything's a sham, especially the ending. It
is, along with CLASH BY NIGHT, one of the cruelest of Fritz Lang's American
movies, which Cine-File's Rob Christopher succinctly dubbed "majestic
downers" when writing about SCARLET STREET (made the next year with the
same cast and a similar set-up). Maybe the cruelest aspect of WOMAN IN THE
WINDOW is that the camera always moves a beat too early, as though in
anticipation of the next step. And it always guesses right.
Slant Magazine Sean Howe
As part of the original group of film
noirs identified by Cahiers du Cinéma (along with The Maltese Falcon,
Double Indemnity,
Laura, and Murder, My Sweet), Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window has enjoyed
a reputation as a genre cornerstone. It boasts many of the key noir
ingredients: a man meets a mysterious woman and soon finds himself pursued by
tough hoods, the law, and a never-ending supply of Venetian blinds. But from
the opening scene, in which Freud's name looms on a chalkboard behind the
unfortunately named criminology professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson),
it's clear that Lang is more interested in psych studies than any sort of
existential howl. After Robinson sees off his vacationing family (in an
astonishingly quick dispensing of family ties) and admires a gallery-window
portrait of a fetching Joan Bennett, he and his private-club friends lament their
middle-aged stodginess before he drifts off to sleep in one of the club's
armchairs. Strong stuff! On the walk home, Wanley meets the woman whose
portrait he's been admiring, they share a drink, and the two swing by her place
to celebrate 15 plot-free minutes with some wine and innocuous conversation.
It's the sudden entrance of a jealous beau, and a conveniently nearby pair of
scissors, that finally jumpstarts the narrative engine. After quickly disposing
of the body, Wanley nervously partakes in a privileged view of the
investigation (the D.A. is one of his club friends). The late-second-act
arrival of Dan Duryea, as the erstwhile bodyguard of the deceased, casts the
boilerplate aside. But his weaselly menace isn't enough to push The Woman in
the Window, with its unconflicted protagonist and a femme that's far from
fatal, out of melodrama to the realm of potent noir. In the same year that
Hitchcock employed Salvador Dali to act out psychology tropes in Spellbound,
Lang's familiar, ripe-for-interpretation trademarks—mirrors, clocks, and shop
windows—dovetail nicely with the dime-store psychoanalysis. Although the
much-maligned ending (a Code-satisfying change from the film's source novel)
makes more sense after repeat viewings, The Woman in the Window is
mostly notable as a dry run for the following year's Scarlet Street, a
reunion of Lang, Robinson, Bennett, and Duryea that would boast tighter
plotting, richer characters—and a pitch-black ending
When it comes to tying in the inherent social critiques of
the film noir to nail-biting tension, no one can surpass master director Fritz
Lang. His expertly controlled masterpiece The
Woman in the Window finds him in peak form. Like Lang’s other 1945 film,
Playing a psychology professor who is given a newfound freedom after sending his family away on holiday, Robinson is given an opportunity to craft a portrait of a middle-aged everyman that contains a surprising amount of ambiguity. His persona immediately inspires empathy because of its sad familiarity, but as Lang probes into his moral makeup, moments that make the audience recoil crop up more frequently. The murder and blackmail plot that entraps the Professor is a familiar one, and his reactions are typically misjudged ones. As the situation he finds himself in grows increasingly worse, and his proximity to the long arm of the law grows closer, the anxiety level that Lang induces ratchets up a few notches. Even though dozens of films tread similar ground, rare is the movie as streamlined in intent as this one. Every element of the design, from the use of shadows and rain at the most inopportune times in the plot to the proscenium arc that often frames the action, helps to heighten the viewer’s identification with the situation at hand while subtly reminding the audience that they are viewing an abstraction of reality.
The very commonplace nature of the crime is what makes its telling ring true, both as social satire and reflection of the protagonist’s values. The morbid details of genial gentleman’s club conversation filter into the plot. The crimes that crop up are perpetrated by the invisible service people and the object of the erotic fantasies that have toyed with the Professor’s subconscious. The movie presents a noir nightmare, but it’s one that might feel hilariously contrived if Lang didn’t tighten the screws that bear down on the Professor so mercilessly. Just because it seems to bemuse Lang that the Professor would find himself trapped in a scenario so pulpy, doesn’t prevent him from taking it seriously. The film presents a suspenseful situation at each turn. The resultant tone of The Woman in the Window is completely unremitting, until it hilariously does remit. The final sequence of the movie might at first glance seem to be a cop-out, but on closer inspection it reveals itself to be one of the most realized examples of the dour worldview that dominates Lang’s American films.
THE
SCREEN IN REVIEW; 'A Song to Remember' - The New York Times
Before entering this corner's one and only complaint about the new film at the Palace, let it be noted that "The Woman in the Window" is a humdinger of a mystery melodrama. Nunnally Johnson has provided a script that is literate, slightly tinged with sophistication and topped off with penetrating satirical thrusts at radio advertising and newsreel coverage of crime stories. Moreover, "The Woman in the Window" has been superlatively directed by Fritz Lang and we couldn't imagine a better set of performers than the cast this picture boasts. Each player, from Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, as the unwitting principals in a celebrated murder, to Thomas Jackson as the police homicide bureau chief, is almost letter perfect.
The ads anent "The Woman in the Window" have been making quite a to-do about the picture's ending, and rightly so. It is a climax which is going to stir up a lot of heated debate, pro and con. This spectator is decidedly in the "con" group for he believes that Mr. Johnson, the scenarist and producer, has deliberately perpetrated a most deceitful double-cross on one who was completely absorbed in, and thrilled by, all the ramifications of the film's plot.
The ending came as a "surprise," sure enough, and we only wish that the code of ethics in matters like this didn't prevent us from revealing the big secret. For this is a trick denouement and it is effected with a brashness which, it is doubtful, even that master melodramatic trickster, Alfred Hitchcock, would attempt. But if you can accept it as a huge joke, which is the only thing we can believe Mr. Johnson had in mind, then your enjoyment of "The Woman in the Window" should be complete.
The story is disarmingly simple. A professor of psychology sends his family off to the country, planning to join them after completing several summer lectures. By chance he meets the model of a fascinating painting he happens to be admiring in an art store window and she invites him to her apartment to examine other examples of the artist's work. While there, a jealous suitor storms in and viciously attacks the professor. In the struggle the professor stabs his assailant with a handy pair of scissors and kills him. Now the problem is, should the professor confess to the police and be ruined by the resulting scandal, or should be take the greater risk of attempting to completely cover up the crime.
The professor takes the last course, and his efforts to determine through his friend, the district attorney, just how he stands after the body has been found and the police have amassed a collection of clues, are developed with mounting tension. Mr. Robinson, who was so good as the insurance investigator of "Double Indemnity," gives a masterly performance as the professor, and Miss Bennett has not been seen to better advantage as an actress since she appeared in "Man Hunt" four years ago. Raymond Massey is excellent as the D. A., as is Edmond Breon as a doctor friend. And Dan Duryea is so good in the role of a blackmailer who hounds the two unfortunate victims, that you feel like actually hissing him. Fritz Lang's direction is nearly flawless, and, if it weren't for that unsporting ending, "The Woman in the Window" would rank high among the best of mystery films. Even as it is, it deserves a place of honor on your movie shopping list.
The Woman
in the Window - Parallax View
Richard T. Jameson, November 10, 2010
The
Woman in the Window - TCM.com Paul
Tatara
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
The Woman in the Window Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
The Woman in the Window • Senses of Cinema Girish Shambu from Senses of Cinema, July 19, 2002
The
Woman in the Window (1944) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeremy
Arnold
Film
Noir of the Week Spencer
Selby
Fritz
Lang's Woman in the Window: A movie about moviegoing | Bleader Ben Sachs from The Chicago Reader, December 9, 2013
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller)
Film
Notes From the CMA Dennis Toth
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel
Murray] also reviewing THEY LIVE BY
NIGHT and SIDE STREET
Edmond Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary makes reference to Lang in his review of David Mamet’s play
Movie
Review - - The Daesseldorf Murders. - NYTimes.com
Making Hollywood Films Was Brutal, Even for Fritz Lang - The New ... The New York Times, January 21, 2011
DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze
The Woman in the
Window - Wikipedia
SCARLET STREET
A
Little Trouble with Perspective: Art and Authorship in Fritz Lang's 'Scarlet Street
The writer discusses representations of art and aesthetics
in Fritz Lang's 1945 film
Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center) A Tale of Three Cities: The Banning of Scarlet Street, by Matthew Bernstein from Cinema Journal, Fall, 1995
The writer discusses the disputes between Universal
Pictures and censors in
Pacific Cinematheque (link lost):
Originally banned in the state of New York as
"immoral, indecent, corrupt, and tending to incite crime," Fritz
Lang's Scarlet Street is "a key psychological film noir, one of
Hollywood's most tortuous and bleak visions of the delusive power of the
imagination" (Paul Taylor). Edward G. Robinson stars as Christopher Cross,
a lonely man trapped in an unhappy marriage and a dreary job; his only solace
comes from his hobby, painting. When Chris accidentally meets the beautiful
Kitty March (Joan Bennett), he quickly becomes infatuated; she, for her part, believes
him to be a rich and famous artist, and leads him on. Before long, the smitten
Chris has set Kitty up in a lavish apartment, and begun embezzling funds in
order to pay her bills, completely unaware that he is being cruelly deceived --
and that Kitty's con-man boyfriend Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea) has been passing
Kitty off as the painter of his canvasses, which have started to attract
critical attention. The dramatic cinematography is by veteran Milton Krasner;
an earlier version of the same material, La Chienne, was filmed by Renoir in
1931. "Grim but brilliant noir... Robinson, Bennett, and Duryea are all in
splendid form, and the incredible visuals entrap the feckless Robinson long
before plot circumstances do" (James Monaco).
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]
This is one of the best films noirs, which is my favorite genre. They seldom get any darker than this, and there have been few dupes as colossallay duped as Edward G. Robinson.
We first meet Chris (Robinson) when he is the guest of honor at his boss' mansion. He has put in 40 years of dedicated service, and in return he gets a damned watch. He's happy, though, because he is like a big puppy, always wanting to please people. His wife, Adele (Margaret Lindsay), is a shrew who constantly reminds him that he's not as much of a man as her ex, a cop who died while trying to save a drowning woman. On the way home from his party, he sees a woman and man fighting. When the man hits her, Chris runs to rescue the woman, probably the most impulsive thing he's ever done. She turns out to be Katherine (Joan Bennett), a struggling actress. The cad was Johnny (Dan Duryea), her boyfriend/pimp. Chris and Katherine have dinner, and Chris falls in love.
Chris devotes his life to Katherine, and she uses him. He is an amateur painter, and one day Johnny, who is still very much a part of her life, steals some of his paintings to sell. An art critic sees them and tracks Johnny down. Johnny, seeing an opportunity, tells the critic that Katherine painted them, and she goes along with the lie. Instead of being upset when he finds out, Chris agrees to let her steal from him, as long as he doesn't have to be alone.
This sets up a surprising series of events which culminate in a reunion, a murder, and an execution. The ending, where echoes from the past haunt Chris to the point of madness, poignantly argues that one's conscience is a far worse punishment than anything the state can hand out.
This is among the most depressing films I have ever seen. Film noir is full of hopeless, hapless slobs who give in to their base desires and pay the ultimate price. Seldom, however, has a fall guy deserved it less. Fritz Lang is kind of a depressing guy with a bleak opinion of human nature. This film, with its haunting ending (in more ways than one), takes the cake.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
The auteur theory was
designed to recognize the covert artistry of Hollywood directors like Howard
Hawks and Nicholas Ray, whose work on programmatic studio fare was unified by
recurring themes and signature camera angles. But some studio-era auteurs were
flashier with their style and more open with their obsessions—like Fritz Lang,
whose thrillers explored human guilt and the myriad ways that overconfident
people fail to see the implications of their actions. Though he came out of
German Expressionism, Lang eventually refined his mise-en-scene to the point
where he could articulate a character's interior state with a single shot.
In Lang's 1945 noir Scarlet
Street, that shot comes early. Edward G. Robinson plays a hen-pecked
husband and go-nowhere company man who leaves a party at his boss' mansion and
walks through a trash-strewn city until he spies pimp Dan Duryea beating up one
of his girls, Joan Bennett. Robinson intervenes and knocks Duryea flat, and
Lang dwells for a moment on the look of unexpected pleasure on Robinson's face.
That look says everything about Robinson's meekness and capacity for violence,
and it explains what happens next: Bennett conning Robinson into embezzling
money, Duryea convincing hobbyist painter Robinson to sell his artwork under
Bennett's name, and, of course, the inevitable stabbing.
Scarlet Street has previously been available on DVD in
appallingly fuzzy public-domain editions, but Kino's new disc uses the restored
Library Of Congress print and adds a commentary track by Lang expert David
Kalat, who provided the immensely entertaining commentary for Criterion's The
Testament Of Dr. Mabuse. Kalat doesn't disappoint this time either. He
explains the differences between Scarlet Street and Jean Renoir's more
comic 1931 take on the same material, La Chienne, and he also offers
historical perspective, funny Lang anecdotes, lively opinions, and suggestions
for a Fritz Lang drinking game. (Take a shot when you see one of the following:
a woman in a nightgown, an angry mob, a wrongful execution, and so on.)
Scarlet
Street (1945) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Mild-mannered store cashier Chris Cross relieves his humdrum life by painting in his spare time, which is just one of the things that irks his shrewish wife. One night, after attending a dinner in his honour, Chris comes to the aid of a young woman who is apparently being attacked by a man. The woman, Kitty March, accepts Chris’s offer of a nightcap. As they talk, both lie about themselves: Kitty, a prostitute, says she is an actress; Chris admits to being a successful painter. Realising the impression she has made on Chris, Kitty decides to extort money from him. Encouraged by Johnny, her loutish boyfriend-pimp, Kitty persuades Chris to give her money to rent an apartment where they can meet. To raise the money, Chris has no choice but to steal from his employers...
Scarlet Street is the film that marked the artistic
highpoint of director Fritz Lang’s career in Hollywood during the 1940s and
’50s. It is also regarded as one of the best and bleakest examples
of American film noir, even though it clearly lacks some of the obvious film
noir motifs. Based on a novel by Georges de La Fouchardière, the film is
effectively a remake of an earlier French film, La Chienne (1931), which was directed by
Jean Renoir and starred Michel Simon.
Not only is Scarlet Street extremely well directed and shot with
consummate skill, it also boasts some of the best performances of any film
noir. The film’s three lead actors - Edward G. Robinson, Joan
Bennett and Dan Duryea - work together remarkably well, having appeared
together in an earlier Fritz Lang film, The Woman in the Window
(1944). Robinson is a perfect casting choice - he had a knack of
portraying ordinary characters truthfully and without overplaying the pathos,
but he was also just as adept at playing evil (something he originally put to
good use in his early gangster roles). Robinson’s childlike
innocence is effectively contrasted with the cruel venality of Joan Bennett’s
femme fatale. Watching the scheming Bennett manipulate Robinson is like
watching a cat toying with a mouse, just before the coup de grâce is
applied.
Fritz Lang’s origins in German expressionist cinema are apparent in the way he
develops film noir technique in his films. Whilst Lang never returned to
the true, highly stylised expressionism of his early silent films, he retained
a penchant for harsh lighting, unusual camera angles and shadow play.
This can be seen most readily in the final sequences of Scarlet Street,
where the familiar expressionistic devices allow Lang to achieve economy on
both narrative and set design whilst heightening dramatic impact. There
could hardly be a more effective way of showing the central character’s descent
into Hell than to have the shadows engulf him and drag him towards his tragic
destiny, making this an ingenious and brutal reinterpretation of the famous
Faust legend, in which a man sells his soul to possess the one thing he can
never have - love.
Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review
Edward G.Robinson in a frilly apron is not a pretty sight. Hung around his
neck in
Not that Robinson’s character Chris Cross (a clumsy allusion, even if he is a ‘marked’ man) has far to fall. Cross reveals throughout Scarlet Street that he has lived life at one remove, lamenting that he has never experienced a young woman looking lovingly at him, still less ever seen one naked! His obsessive love of painting becomes a metaphor for a life lived at arm’s length. So pitiful is he that, upon being caught embezzling funds, his boss unhesitatingly surmises the cause: "a woman".
But what a woman! In one of her greatest femme fatale roles, Joan
Bennett is louche and sexual languor personified – a breathy temptress
who comes on with a knowing wink to her own ludicrously wonderful sybaritic
lifestyle. (There’s a great moment when she acknowledges Chris’s artistry by
proffering her outstretched leg so he can paint – her toenails!)
Extending the mediated presentation of so much of the world of
Scarlet Street however doesn’t have an agenda, let alone a point to labour. Au contraire, much of it comes off as a drawing room farce, possibly reflecting its French origins (it is a remake of the 1931 Renoir talkie La Chien) with clandestine boyfriends hiding behind bedroom doors and ironic little twists of mutual or wilfull misunderstanding peppered throughout. Amplifying this is the wonderfully unctuous Dan Duryea, the charming slimeball you love to hate (or vica versa) as the stray electron in this noir triangle.
Scarlet Street’s considerable noir cred is primarily derived from its dark last quarter, a grimly Teutonic descent into Chris’s living hell that is ushered in by the soap-operatic shock of the return of Homer, the presumed-dead (back from his odyssey!) first husband to Chris’s shrewish wife which, in a darker irony, frees the artist from his matrimonial chains.
Interestingly, there’s some strong parallels to a contemporaneous noir classic from another Teutonic Hollywood refugee, Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder. In each, opportunity to cheat the company springs from the proximity to inside info of a lowly position (cashier/insurance investigator) whose dutiful nature makes them overlooked as suspects. Then there’s the incredible speech of a reporter on the way to Duryea’s execution who regales Robinson with the same riff his Barton Keys uses on Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff in Indemnity: "no one gets away with it because in here (pounding his heart) there’s a little court", a direct analogue of Keys’ "little man" in the chest cavity who can smell an insurance scam…
Scarlet Street’s stature is ensured by the unforgettable final
sequence, where irony takes on its darkest hue and underlines the pathos of
Robinson’s superbly underplayed performance. Despite the foolish braying of
Where Dreams Go to Die: Scarlet Street • Senses of Cinema Sarah Nichols, August 27, 2008
Scarlet
Street (1945) Fritz Lang « Twenty Four Frames John Greco
Scarlet Street Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Film Noir of the Week Steve-O
Scarlet
Street - TCM.com Jay Carr
A
Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Joel Cunningham) dvd review
DVD
Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]
Dragan Antulov
retrospective [8/10]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Edinburgh
U Film Society (Martin Hunt) review
New
York Film Review [Nathan Gelgud] also
reviewing SIDE STREET
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel
Murray] also reviewing HOUSE BY THE
RIVER
DVD Talk
[Jamie S. Rich] Film Noir:
Five Classics from the Studio Vaults
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[5/5]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
CLOAK AND DAGGER
Time Out review Tom Milne
Tolerably exciting, but despite some electric
moments (the shockingly casual execution of Thimig, a brutal fight in an alley
conducted in death like silence), a conventional World War II espionage
thriller and far from Lang at his best. Cooper, morosely miscast as a scientist
serving with the
DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review
With the ending of the Second
World War, there was a bit of a race in
The film stars Gary Cooper as
Alvah Jesper, a professor of physics at a midwestern university who is
persuaded to work for the O.S.S. near the end of World War II. There is concern
over the German progress in constructing an atomic bomb. Jesper is to travel to
Nazi-occupied
Unfortunately, Cloak and Dagger
is far from a success. Cooper is unconvincing as a scientist and he seldom
looks comfortable in his role. The story holds promise, but is allowed to bog
down for much of the second half by a budding romance between Alvah and Gina.
The best acting work in the film comes from some of the secondary characters
including Vladimir Sokoloff as Polda, Marc Lawrence as a fascist thug, and
Helene Thimig as Lodor. The film is the least of Fritz Lang's four wartime
films (the others were Man Hunt, Hangmen Also Die,
and Ministry of Fear), but it does manage some typically brutal
sequences including the cold-blooded shooting of a scientist lying in bed and a
violent struggle in a stairwell between Cooper's character and the Marc
Lawrence thug. SPOILER ALERT! The ending is a reversal of Casablanca, with our
hero getting on the plane while the woman stays behind, but a conventionally
happy one for all that. Lang had a much more ambitious ending in mind and one
that was actually filmed. It was a major reason for his interest in doing the
film. Lang's ending involved Jesper going back to Europe to attempt to destroy
the German atomic bomb facility and then warning about mankind's inability to
be able to control the power of atomic weapons. After a preview for WB
executives, producer Sperling decided to drop Lang's ending (perhaps at
Warners' request) and imposed the one we see now. Lang was not pleased, but
eventually tempered his criticism when Sperling complained that he was spoiling
the film's box-office chances. Lang couldn't afford to alienate too many more
Artisan delivers its usual standard of mediocrity when it comes to its classic releases on DVD. The image (full frame in accord with the original aspect ratio) is quite variable in quality. There are stretches when it's clear and sharp, others where it's too dark or too light. Speckles and some scratches are evident. The image is also subject to unsteadiness at times. The disc packaging advertises a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo surround mix, but the effect is nothing more than mono. It's clear enough to do the job, but certainly offers no surround experience as Artisan would have you believe. There are no supplements whatsoever.
Cloak and Dagger Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Cloak and Dagger (1946) bears some resemblance to the semi-documentary pictures popular in the post war years, especially to the first of all the semi-docs, The House on 92nd Street (1945), directed by Henry Hathaway. Like that picture, the hero of Cloak is an agent of a US Government Intelligence agency, in this case the O.S.S. Both films deal with atomic bomb secrets, and how they might affect World War II. Both films are based on true stories. Both films emphasize Nazi brutality and ruthlessness. Both seem determined to shock audiences by including Nazi villainesses who are at least as evil as the men around them, if not more so. I wonder if in real life whether the male chauvinist Nazis actually employed so many women agents.
I don't think Cloak and Dagger is as good as many other Lang
pictures. The early scenes in the professor's lab and in
Gary Cooper has been unjustly criticized for playing a nuclear physicist in this film. Allegedly, a cowboy star has no business playing intellectuals. Actually, Cooper does a good job. In fact, Cooper often played intellectual characters in his non-Westerns: he did a creditable job as the lead in The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938), a film of considerable charm, and he was the Frank Lloyd Wright inspired architect in King Vidor's The Fountainhead (1949). There is also the Hemingway character in Frank Borzage's A Farewell to Arms (1932), the artist in Ernst Lubistch's Design For Living (1933), the linguistics professor in Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire (1941) and the doctor-scientist in Cecil B. De Mille's The Story of Dr. Wassell (1944).
One can see a few parallels with other Lang films. When the professor is put
ashore by boat in
Oddly enough, the most personal thing about Cloak and Dagger is its
attitude towards architecture. Many of the early scenes take similar
compositional approaches used by Lang in such films as
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR
Adrian Martin from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Fritz Lang fans often divide on whether they prefer the
certified, highbrow classics like M
(1931), Metropolis (1926), and The Big Heat (1953), or the stranger ,
more cryptic and perverse films in his oeuvre that plumb less reputable areas
of pop culture, such as Rancho Notorious
(1952) and Moonfleet (1955). Secret Beyond the Door scrapes by in
some accounts as a respectable film noir, but it is the beguiling mixture of
many genres—women’s melodrama, Freudian case study, serial killer mystery, and
allegory of the artistic/creative process—that makes it such a special and
haunting oddity in the director’s career.
The film partakes of
Lang fixes the frankly sadomasochistic ambiguities of this
plot (What is the true nature of the male beast, sensitivity or aggression?
What does the woman really want from him, anyway, love or death?) into a
startlingly novel context: Redgrave is a
tormented-genius architect who has built a house of “felicitous rooms,” each
the reconstructed scene of a grisly, patently psychosexual murder.
Secret
Beyond the Door joins a special group of 1940’s films, including Jean
Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach
(1947) and the Val Newton production The
Seventh Victim (1943), whose potent, dreamlike aura is virtually guaranteed
by their B movie sparseness and free-associating plotting—as well as, here, a
voiceover narration that disorientatingly shifts from Bennet to Redgrave and
back again. Heretical it may be for a card-carrying auteurist to suggest, but
the cuts imposed by Universal on Lang’s initial edit probably enhanced his
dreamlike quality. The end result may be short on rational links and
explanations, but Secret Beyond the Door
is one of the precious occasions when Lang—aided immeasurably by Stanley
Cortez’s baroque cinematography and Miklós Rózsa’s lush score—managed to add a
richly poetic dimension to his familiar fatalism.
Time Out review Tom Milne
An example of
User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland
This has been variously called campy,
kitsch, rubbish; I think that, along with 'Rancho Notorious', it is Lang's
greatest American film (and therefore A great American film). In a decade of
male-dominated film noir, Celia Lamphere (loaded name), like the second Mrs. de
Winter and Dr. Constance Peterson, must play detective to save her relationship
and her life.
Lang uses the trappings of psychoanalysis throughout, promising enlightenment
and healing - a large narrative gap, as Mark chases Celia, puts paid to that:
this is a pessimistic anti-Freudian film.
It is also one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen - its atmosphere of
dream, its cunning use of architecture and space, its complex sexuality, its
trance-like narration, its ellipses, angles and shadows, remind me variously of
L'Herbier, Dreyer, Resnais, Antonioni, Molly's soliloquy in Strick's 'Ulysses',
Perec's 'the Man who Sleeps'. It is a rare Hollywood art-movie, and there's
nothing like it.
Secret
Beyond the Door (1948) James
Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Whilst holidaying in
Secret Beyond the Door is one of Fritz Lang’s better American films – chillingly
atmospheric and beautifully shot in the style of the classic film noir
directors of the period. It’s very nearly a return to Lang’s earlier fantasy
horror films of the 1920s and 1930s, with Freudian references, long shadows and
a lurking sense of menace. There’s even a sequence where Lang cleverly
uses his former expressionistic style to convey the mental derangement of the
film’s principal male character. Unfortunately, whilst the film is
stylistically brilliant, some stilted dialogue and slightly wooden acting
weaken its impact, and the narrative relies too heavily on tedious psychobabble
for the ending to be either convincing or satisfying. These deficiencies
aside, it’s still possible to appreciate this film for its artistic merits and
also to take some pleasure in the teasing Hitchcockian-style suspense.
User comments from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England
The
Secret Beyond the Door is Fritz Lang's melodramatic suspense tale that seems to
have taken more than it's fair share of influence from Alfred Hitchcock's
Rebecca. Before the story even starts, we're waiting to find out one thing -
what's the secret? This somewhat puts the movie on the back foot from the
start, as all that we see is build up to the big finale, which basically means
that the pay off has to be pretty good otherwise the whole film will fall
apart. The final twist, in fact, doesn't really do the build up justice; but
it's not absolutely terrible, and I would still rate this film as at least
'good', but just don't tune in expecting anything brilliant. This is certainly
no 'M', for example. The plot follows a young woman that goes on holiday and
meets a charming middle-aged man. The two later get married and she accompanies
him back to his house where she meets his son, and finds his collection of
rooms, one of which is kept locked up. What is the secret beyond the door...?
Fritz Lang's bleak cinematography and haunting use of music help to create the
atmosphere that a story of this nature needs in order to work effectively. The
focus on the door helps to create the tension as to what the secret is
throughout the movie, and Fritz Lang seems keen to capitalise on that as we see
Joan Bennett's narration change from how she feels personally to driving
herself crazy as she tries to decipher what's behind the door. The characters
in the story are interesting, and they need to be as this film is mostly
character based. We follow Celia Lamphere, and we are given her thoughts by way
of the aforementioned narration. Narration is often found in scripts that have
been written by people that don't know how to write good scripts. However, in
this case it actually helps the film to move along. In order for the story to
work, we need to know what the character is feeling, so in this case narration
is helpful to the story.
As I've mentioned, the ending isn't all that good, but the suspense builds
nicely and there's much to like about this film. If you're new to Fritz Lang,
though, I certainly recommend the classics 'M' and 'Metropolis' before this,
and also from his American films; 'Fury', 'Scarlet Street', 'Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt' and 'While the City Sleeps' get my thumbs up.
Secret Beyond the Door (1948) - Articles - TCM.com Moira Finnie
MUBI's Notebook: Adrian Martin + Cristina Álvarez López feature and video essay, September 01, 2014
Secret Beyond the Door Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Secret Beyond the Door
Colin from Riding the High Country,
January 3, 2012
Secret
Beyond the Door - The Battersea Review Geoffrey O’Brien
Secret Beyond the Door - Movie Diva
SECRET
BEYOND THE DOOR (Fritz Lang, 1947) | Dennis Grunes
The
Secret Beyond the Door (1947) - Peter Burnett
Secret
Beyond the Door | Film at The Digital Fix
Clydefro Jones
A
Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Secret
Beyond the Door | Film | The Guardian Philip French
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review also seen
here: Movie
Review - - ON THE SCREEN; 'Secret Beyond the Door,' With ...
HOUSE BY THE RIVER
One of Fritz Lang's
deathly constructs: a patently artificial period melodrama about an author
(Hayward) who strangles his wife's maid and implicates his brother (Bowman) in
the crime. It's a bleak, gloomy film, one in which the psychological undercurrents
seem to be flooding over the banks, drowning any fleeting vestige of
rationality in a perverse Teutonic romanticism.
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
This 1950 Gothic-noir by Fritz Lang, made on a shoestring for
Republic, has been a perennially hard-to-see and nearly lost spasm of Langian
mordancy—as producer Pierre Rissient relates in a DVD supp, a pioneering
Cinémathéque Française retro couldn't include it, and so Lang himself tried to
describe the film shot by shot ("So precisely!") to an enthralled
private audience, including Claude Chabrol. Precise is the word for it,
grimly so—and Chabrol may've been more influenced by Lang's recitation than by
any 10 Hitchcock films. Set in a strange Victorian-Southern suburb, the movie
recounts the depraved self-absorption of a failing novelist (Louis Hayward) who
impulsively strangles his young maid, and then sets about implicating his own
brother (Lee Bowman) in the crime. Then, of course, he writes about it. Lang's
visual expression of amorality had rarely been as intense in his American
films, and the concrete moments of anxiety are choice: the cut from the maid's
bathwater draining to Hayward grinning sleazily as he hears the trickling in
the pipe outside, the feverish search through the marsh waters for the errant
body, which, when found, inopportunely floats downriver again, its hair
billowing in the waves. A B-list leading man in the '40s,
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The final image may scatter across the floor the pages of a
manuscript titled The River, but nobody will mistake it for the Rumer
Godden novel Renoir would adapt the following year -- to Renoir the tide gives
the forward-push of life, to Fritz Lang it circles the characters' subconscious
until the insidious desires belly up. The setting is shoestring Victoriana,
with the sojourn at paltry Republic Pictures both heightening the director's
frustrations (a theme of miscegenation was summarily vetoed) and freeing his
obsessions: the budget is thrifty, but all Lang needs is a light being turned
on, bathtub water draining through a pipe, and Louis Hayward's leer for an
analysis of chaos waiting to erupt. Hayward, a frustrated novelist, sits in a
gazebo and gazes at a bovine carcass floating in the river, then at the young
maid (Dorothy Patrick) ambling down the staircase in a bathrobe; she refuses
his advances, he grabs her throat to stifle her screams, her body drops
lifelessly moments before Hayward's brother (Lee Bowman) pops up unannounced.
Bowman turns reluctant accomplice, the body's bagged up and deposited in the
waters; the woman's disappearance worries his wife (Jane Wyatt) and
incriminates his brother, yet
User comments from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England
Fritz
Lang made a lot of great films over his career, mostly in his native Germany;
but he certainly made a lot of worthwhile films in the USA, and House by the
River is definitely one of them! This thriller revels in its lush Gothic
atmosphere, and this is brilliantly complimented by the dark themes of the
story and a strong overture courtesy of George Antheil. The film takes place,
as you would expect, in a house by a river. Director Fritz Lang makes excellent
use of both of these central locations, as the house always looks dark and
foreboding; while the river is deep and dark, and provides an excellent setting
for a macabre story of murder. The plot focuses on two brothers, one of which
is an unsuccessful writer that lives with his wife and two maids. After making
advances towards the younger and more attractive maid and being turned down,
our main protagonist finds himself in a predicament when she dies in his arms.
He then recruits his brother to help him rid himself of the body in the nearby
lake, and the publicity of the disappearance gives him a welcome boost to his
writing career...
This film has been thrown in with the film noir movement that took place in the
forties and fifties; but if you ask me, it's not really a part of it. The film
does feature dashes of mystery, common of film noir - but the focus is really
on the suspense, dark plot and settings, thus making it more of a straight
thriller. The story itself is strong and works because of its well defined
characters. The ensemble cast is good overall, with Louis Hayward impressing in
the lead role and receiving good feedback from Lee Bowman and Jane Wyatt in
support. The main reason why the film works so well is clearly down to the
atmosphere, and the director always ensures that the film takes place in
absolute darkness, which helps the macabre plot no end. Lang uses props such as
dead animals and hallucination to maximum effect, and all help to make the film
what it is. The House by the River boils down to a suitable dreary climax,
which bodes well and gives credence to everything that has gone before it.
Overall, this is a lovely little movie and undoubtedly one of the best that
Lang made in America. Highly recommended!
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Alfred Hitchcock thrilled audiences with his tales of suspense for six decades. Another director, Fritz Lang, was two jumps in front of him, yet he never received quite the same measure of fame.
Perhaps this is because Lang ventured into even darker corners than Hitchcock. Hitchcock was content with wry little moments of black humor, while Lang never provided such comforts. Lang's heroes were often innocents who, for no reason at all, are trapped by fate.
Two of Lang's darkest works of film noir, have been newly released on DVD. Scarlet Street (1945) has fallen into the public domain and is already widely available on inferior, bargain-priced discs, while House by the River (1950) is an ultra-rare Lang, barely seen in any form for over fifty years. Both are now available on high-quality Kino DVDs, priced at $24.95 each. (See www.kino.com for details.)
Set at the beginning of the 20th century, House by the River plays like a kind of gothic murder romance. A struggling, but snide and hard-drinking writer Stephen Byrne (Louis Hayward) tries to seduce his pretty new maid and accidentally strangles her. He convinces his decent and physically disabled brother John (Lee Bowman) to help him get rid of the corpse. But the river has a habit of drifting its debris back and forth, and the evidence won't stay gone. To make matters worse, John is in love with Stephen's long-suffering wife Marjorie (Jane Wyatt).
Lang made the film at Republic Studios, a "B" picture palace known for cheap movies, but also for giving artists like Orson Welles (Macbeth) and John Ford (The Quiet Man) complete freedom within the boundaries of cost. He used his authority to create a quiet, gothic atmosphere between the murky river and the creepy house; he builds suspense slowly and patiently and uses unexpected elements against us. It's a subtle achievement, but a great one.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: theowinthrop from United States
A lot of movies just are not shown
frequently as they should be. I was first aware of this obscure movie by Fritz
Lang when I was at my college in the early 1970s, and was reading a book about
his films. Then I finally saw it about five years ago on channel 75 in New York
City, in a series of movies for a City College film course. It was worth
waiting for.
Louis Hayward is married to Jane Wyatt, and lives in a small town near his
brother Lee Bowman. The year is about 1890, and it is set in a rural section of
New England near a major river (as the title suggests). Hayward is supposed to
be a promising writer, but the truth is that he wrote a few small stories that
got published awhile back, and he's been pretending to be working on a novel
for nearly two years. He takes a fancy to a new servant (Dorothy Patrick) whom
he attacks and kills when she resists him. Frantic he begs his brother to
assist him, and Bowman makes the mistake of agreeing. They dispose of the body,
but the missing girl's fate becomes a subject of local interest, and
(ironically) Hayward is able to make a better impression on the locals than
Bowman does. Soon they are suspecting Bowman. Hayward, ever an opportunist, is
fully willing to let Bowman take this heat - especially as he is suspicious of
whether Wyatt and Bowman (who once dated) may be still in love. In the meantime
the body of Patrick reemerges, and (in one of the best sequences) Hayward puts
the body into a rowboat and rows in the early morning hours for miles up the
river, until he can find a spot to drop the body (which is still eventually
traced back to his home, but to Bowman)).
Lang always showed the darker side of human nature in his films, like the
mindless mob violence in FURY. Here it is the brittle, nasty small-minded New
England neighbors of Bowman, Wyatt, and Howard, who are impressed by Howard's
friendlier demeanor and don't like the stand-offishness of Bowman. The evidence
against Bowman is quite weak, but the dislike his character causes with these
boobs makes him a likely murder suspect.
Louis Hayward was a competent actor, usually a minor league swashbuckler (THE
SON OF MONTE CRISTO). Here he is given a negative role, and makes the most of
it. His Steven Byrne is not among the great villains in movies, but it is an
interesting study in arrogance and selfishness that is worthy of watching. His
claims to writer's block are patently false, as we never see him even
struggling to write anything (he is seen sitting at tables with paper and pens
near him, but no activities whatsoever). But he knows how to feed a friendly
and superior but accessible air to the townsfolk. This may be his best performance.
Bowman, usually a figure in comedies (or a supporting man for Susan Hayward in
one of her "weepies") purposely plays his role of John Byrne as a
taciturn type - stiff but not hostile. But the stiffness goes against the thin
skins of the idiot townsfolk (who prefer Hayward's false front). And Wyatt
(best known for her performance in LOST HORIZON or as Robert Young's wife on
FATHER KNOWS BEST) does well as the long suffering Marjorie.
Not SCARLET STREET, FURY, or YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, but definitely worth watching.
Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]
“I hate this
river,” says the nosy Mrs. Ambrose (Anne Shoemaker) as the tide of the water
circles "that filth" (the carcass of a dead cow it appears) around
her house for what is probably the umpteenth time, to which her next-door
neighbor, frustrated writer Stephen Byrne (Louis Hayward), replies, "It's
people who should be blamed for the filth, not the river." And with that
Fritz Lang and screenwriter Mel Dinelli neatly unpack House by the River's
theme of moral responsibility a mere three minutes into the picture. This
hand-holding is widespread in many of Lang's later work (The Blue Gardenia
and Clash by Night being the most egregious examples), but it's the sort
of thing that's easily absolved given the many fascinating ways the filmmaker
visually extended his themes.
Made in 1949 for an impoverished
Republic Pictures, House by the River not only shows its modest origins
but the frustration of its maker. Lang wanted to cast a black woman in the role
of Emily Gaunt (the part eventually went to Dorothy Patrick), the maid
Hayward's character accidentally kills mere moments after trying to seduce her,
but the suits at Republic recoiled at the idea. Ironically, the very fear of
miscegenation the director wanted to address—call it the elephant in America's
living room (or the one floating around its house)—frustrated his ambitions.
Unable to subversively work a critique of America's racial problems into the
film's fabric as he had done for Fury, Lang
had to settle for building House by the River's routine melodrama into a
snappy commentary on moral depravity and eye-for-an-eye retribution.
Stephen convinces his brother John
(Lee Bowman) to help him dump Emily's body in the river outside his home. The
man's relief that his indiscretions—adultery and murder—appear as if they'll go
unpunished considerably strokes his ego, to the point that he begins to channel
the whole affair into his latest unpublished novel. (Early in the film, Mrs.
Ambrose advises that he make his stories "racy" and, later, some
woman makes an off-the-cuff comment about writers doing their best work when they
channel the truth.) But when Emily's body floats to the surface and begins to
circle the house he shares with his wife Marjorie (Jane Wyatt), it's not just
the plot of his novel that thickens. It's here that Stephen's moral crisis
begins to take on new angles; the film's 85 minutes isn't nearly enough time to
flesh them out individually (or connect them in a truly meaningful way), but
Lang's visuals pick up some of the slack.
Lang too often tries to belie his
low budget, which usually exposes his sham (he grafts what sounds like audio
from a 100-person reception onto a nine-person party scene), and though he's
unable to give the logic by which the titular river circulates around Steven
and Mrs. Ambrose's house a truly expressive visual justification, it doesn't
matter given how splendidly he equates the river to a floating id of primitive,
unconscious fears and desires. The director's chiaroscuro imagery sinisterly
evokes Stephen's bourgeoning madness, from the parallels between Marjorie and
Emily's entrances in the film to the maddening links between Emily's hair as it
swivels in the water and the curtains inside Stephen and Marjorie's house.
Stephen gets his due, and when he does, Lang evokes it as a case of
beyond-the-grave retribution. Mrs. Ambrose might say, "What comes around,
goes around."
Felicitous
Rooms: Fritz Lang's House by the River • Senses of Cinema David Cairns, October 20, 2005
House by the River Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
DVD Times Mike Sutton
World Cinema Review: Fritz Lang | House by the River Douglas Messerli
House by the River -
William Ahearn
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [3/5]
House
by the River (1950) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Richard Steiner
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
House
by the River (1950) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
AMERICAN GUERILLA IN THE PHILIPPINES
aka: I Shall Return
USA
User comments from imdb Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico
Not a bad movie, really. Colorful,
exotic locations, educational, some interesting combat scenes. But coming from
the director of "Metropolis" and "M"?
It reminds me of an anecdote told by the psychologist who wrote "The Three
Christs of Ypsilanti." That's a psychiatric hospital in Michigan. Three
patients claimed to be Jesus Christ. The psychologist was watching a film with
the one named Louie. Adlai Stevenson, then Governor of Illinois, appeared on
the screen. "That's me," cried Louie, "I'm Adlai
Stevenson." The psychologist replied, "I thought you were Jesus
Christ." "I am," said Louie, "I'm Jesus Christ too -- but
I've got to make a living."
Fritz Lang must have had some similar motive for making this rather routine war
film. It has every cliché in the book. The romance thrown into the middle of
the muddle. The cavalry riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The
acting of the principals is at par, but some of the bits are played by people
who seem to have had no training in inducing a suspension of audience
disbelief.
The best scene in the film has Tom Ewell (in an uncommonly dramatic part)
trying to hide from the Japanese under a rotting log. His bare feet are on an
ant hill and soon his skin is crawling with stinging ants while he bites his
tongue and prays.
The best performance is given by the Japanese officer. He's great. Sinewy,
dapper, ruthless, ironic. Speaking to Michelline Presle, who has been aiding
the guerrillas -- "You rike Americans with WHITE FACES, like boiled
pork." Marvelous line. (That bleached skin, like blue eyes, is an
evolutionary anomaly confined to northwestern Europe.) The guy is fascinating
to watch physically, in the way that Jack Palance is.
Minor error. Ty Power and Tom Ewell are reporting on the position and movements
of two Japanese destroyers (actually, they look like Geary-class American
ships). Power gives the info on the ships to Ewell next to him, who relays it
by phone to a radio operator who encodes and transmits it. But the operator
isn't sending information on the location of the ships. He keeps sending the
word "news" over and over, interspersed with a couple of letter
"b"s.
It is not, as I say, a bad movie. It's just done rather by the numbers. A far
better job dealing with our defeat in the Phillipines was done by John Ford in
"They Were Expendable." This film is worth watching as a description
of the very real guerrilla movement that developed in the Islands after that
initial defeat.
American Guerrilla in the Philippines Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
RANCHO NOTORIOUS
USA
Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center) Rewriting allegory with a vengeance: textual strategies in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious, by Florianne Wild from Mosaic, Sept 2002
Fritz Lang's Western Rancho Notorious is proposed as allegory,
not in the literary-historical mode, but as an attitude or perception occurring
when one text is seen to double another. This essay pursues the idea of film as
rebus, as a narrative "other," allowing us to see beyond the
traditional or modernist view, which is antithetical to allegory.
Chicago
Reader [Dave Kehr]
A perversely stylized western by
Fritz Lang (1952, 89 min.), his last and best. The combination of unrestrained
Technicolor and painted backdrops removes any sense of reality from the
proceedings, which are set in a safe haven for gunslingers operated by Marlene
Dietrich. Arthur Kennedy arrives, looking for the man who killed his fiancee,
as an insistently repeated theme song pounds out a quintessential Lang chorus
of "hate, murder, and revenge."
Time Out review Tony Rayns
The old Lang story of Hate, Murder and Revenge...this time in the form of
his last and most unusual Western. Arthur
Kennedy, obsessed with avenging his murdered fiancée, falls in with
gunslinger Ferrer and crime queen Dietrich, and gradually, inexorably, becomes
indistinguishable from the men he was hunting. The fateful moral, the complete
avoidance of naturalism, and the integration of an ongoing ballad into the
plot, all make the movie quintessential Lang; add an overt political stance and
it would be quintessentially Brechtian too.
Lang in the U.S.A. Juliet Clark from Pacific Film Archives
"The
old story of HATE, MURDER, and REVENGE": the relentless refrain of the
theme song summarizes this brilliantly curdled western-psychodrama, a Langian
parable of paranoia and futility played out against painted Technicolor skies.
Arthur Kennedy plays Vern, a man with only one goal in life: to hunt down the
bandit who raped and killed his fiancée. The quest leads him to a remote ranch
called Chuck-a-Luck, known as a haven for wanted men; and to its proprietor,
Altar Keane--Marlene Dietrich, seen in flashback as a glamorous, daring
dance-hall girl, and in the film's present as a mature beauty in faded jeans.
Vern's investigative obsession turns everyone he meets into either suspect or
informant; his relationship with Altar is an excruciating dance of desire and
mistrust. The tale ends with an inevitable outburst of violence, but the climax
of Vern's desperate campaign brings no satisfaction, no closure, only a feeling
of exhausted disillusionment.
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Pauline Kael predicted that this 1952 effort would not be
among the films Fritz Lang would be remembered for. Fortunately, she was wrong.
At first glance it seems like a silly, stagy Western, but Lang managed to use
the film's shortcomings to his advantage. Vern (Arthur Kennedy) is bent on
finding the man who killed his beloved fiancée. He spends years searching and
following leads, and one name keeps coming up: Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich).
A former showgirl, Keane now runs a ranch called the Chuck-a-Luck that
specializes in hiding wanted outlaws. Vern helps break Altar's beau Frenchy
(Mel Ferrer) out of jail, and Frenchy leads Vern straight to the ranch. But has
Vern found the right man? Rancho Notorious is unique for its noticeable
lack of sprawling landscapes and sweeping movements. Because the small budget
kept Lang sequestered on the studio lot, he found a way to use the sets for
their claustrophobic, caged feel. The revenge-lust thread plays through the
entire film and never lets up, and the garish colors and lighting seem to
emphasize this. It's a superb achievement, and it led to two more similar
Freudian masterworks, Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954) and Samuel
Fuller's Forty
Guns (1957). According to some sources, Lang and Dietrich had an affair
during production, but were no longer speaking by the time the film wrapped.
Howard Hughes produced. Co-star George Reeves went on to play
"Superman" on TV.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
Not since JOHNNY GUITAR became a
cult classic, has there been an odder western than RANCHO NOTORIOUS with its
studio-bound outdoor sets filmed in muted Technicolor and such oddities as: 1)
MEL FERRER, who looks cast against type as a fast gunslinger; 2) FRITZ LANG of
film noir fame as the director of a mechanical western; 3) MARLENE DIETRICH
fatally attracted to ARTHUR KENNEDY, with whom she shares no chemistry
whatsoever; 4) GEORGE ("Superman") REEVES looking a bit flabby in a
thin bad guy supporting role; 5) A clichéd, banal theme song to establish the
"love, hate, revenge" motif of the story; 6) The central role of a
tough outlaw (MARLENE DIETRICH) giving rise to comparisons with another cult
favorite oddity, JOHNNY GUITAR and Miss JOAN CRAWFORD.
To Dietrich's credit, when out of her western garb and gowned in jewels and
gown, she looks stunning. But most of the time the close-ups are less than
flattering and only emphasize the modern make-up and hairstyle that doesn't
exactly smack of the Old West. It's a bit jarring, to say the least.
Most of the performances are standard for this genre, but ARTHUR KENNEDY stands
out like a sore thumb as the biggest miscasting mistake in the film, aside from
MEL FERRER. Kennedy's tough guy seems like a pose left over from so many other
of his petulant performances and this time there's absolutely nothing visible
in his chemistry with Dietrich. No sparks despite all of his tempestuous
outbreaks.
Summing up: A trifle that can easily be overlooked in the resume of Fritz Lang.
Rancho
Notorious - TCM.com Felicia Feaster
A cult Western with a distinctly kinky flair, Rancho Notorious (1952) revisits a
theme frequently explored by director Fritz Lang, as it follows a cowboy
(Arthur Kennedy) on his relentless quest for vengeance.
In a romantic opening scene Vern Haskell (Kennedy) and his fiancee Beth (Gloria
Henry) fantasize about their upcoming marriage and life together. But their
dreams soon turn to tragedy when Vern finds Beth murdered and defiled by a
thief who has fled town on horseback. For the next year Vern embarks on a
relentless mission to find the murderer, traveling from town to town. Vern
eventually hooks up with refined bandit Frenchy Fairmont (Mel Ferrer) who leads
him to the ranch where the murderer hides. A kind of sleepaway camp for
thieves, rapists and miscreants, Chuck-A-Luck (named for the vertical gambling
wheel that decides a gambler's fate) is overseen by a tough-talking, former
dance hall queen - barroom chanteuse and legendary beauty Altar Keane (Marlene
Dietrich). A sultry housemother to the assorted bad boys, Altar offers her
tenants sanctuary in exchange for a cut of their criminal profits. It is at
Chuck-A-Luck where Vern will use every resource available to him - including
his seductive power over Altar - to find Beth's killer.
From its opening act of a young, beautiful girl raped by a lawless bandit
("she wasn't spared anything," the town doctor bluntly
pronounces), Rancho Notorious
establishes an undercurrent of sexual licentiousness that may explain why this
genre picture, considered something of a disaster upon its 1952 release, has
since become a revered cult classic.
As Vern moves closer to the mystery of Altar Keane and her possible connection
to his dead fiancee, he uncovers a woman of almost otherworldly seductiveness,
but with a man's strength and grit. Altar is introduced in an outrageously racy
flashback astride one of her saloon customers as she and her fellow dance hall
entertainers engage in a "horse race" on their customers' backs. Vern
finds Altar once again in the driver's seat at Chuck-A-Luck, where the
flinty-yet-feminine mistress has beguiled her devoted lover Frenchy and holds
the other resident bandits rapt with adoration as she entertains them with her
barroom ditties. Like Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar (1954), Altar is a
memorably empowered Western heroine who manages to play with the boys without
losing her ability to arouse. As perverse as Rancho Notorious's sexual innuendo is the film's tampering with the notion
of movie heroism. A protagonist who becomes more and more like the criminals he
hunts, Vern transforms from a simple lovestruck cowpoke into a vengeance-crazed
outlaw who will do anything to avenge the murder of his fiancee.
Rancho Notorious
was the third and last of Fritz Lang's forays into the Western, a genre
Dietrich biographer Donald Spoto says Lang permanently altered as "the
father of the psychological Western." While Western Union (1941)
and The Return of Frank James (1940) enjoyed some success, the obviously
fake studio backdrops and often wooden performances of Rancho Notorious did not entice
audiences of the day. Even Lang was disappointed with the ultimately cheap look
of the film. Despite the hard work of his Man Hunt (1941) production
designer Wiard Ihnen, who "knew about backdrops and perspectives,"
Lang admitted "it was not good and it was badly lit anyway."
Though defined by outward signs of the Western: horses, two-bit towns, outlaws
and sheriffs, Rancho Notorious
is more memorable as an archetypal Fritz Lang film than a classic Western.
Concerned with the inalterability of fate and a character transformed by hatred
and marked by an often cold, aloof style, Rancho Notorious follows a tradition of Lang films where broken men
confront a corrupt society, as in Fury (1936) and The Big Heat
(1953). The bleak themes of Rancho
Notorious and Lang's apparently exacting, autocratic directing style
took a clear toll on the film's cast. Though Lang claimed that the film was
created as a vehicle for Dietrich, the star bristled at his conception of Altar
as an "an aging (but still very desirable) dance-hall girl." At age
50, but still luminously beautiful, the actress was clearly not yet able to
think of herself as past her prime, while Lang argued "Marlene resented
going gracefully into a little, tiny bit older category." Dietrich, a
reported former lover of Lang's, quarreled so energetically with Lang over her
depiction in the film that the two were no longer speaking to each other by the
time the production wrapped.
As usual, Dietrich performs several memorable songs in the picture in her
typical smoky drawl, like the sultry "Get Away Young Man," a number
she also performed at various publicity stops for Rancho Notorious, wowing audiences by
appearing in the flesh to promote the picture.
notcoming.com | Rancho
Notorious Leo Goldsmith
Images
Movie Journal Elizabeth Abele
Rancho Notorious Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Cinema
Romantico: Friday's Old Fashioned: Rancho Notorious (1952) Nick Prigge
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Plate O' Shrimp Marxo Grouch
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
CLASH BY NIGHT
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Clifford Odets' original play was a
hoary item of Broadway neo-realism in the Arthur Miller vein: a 'mature' study
of a cynical woman's adultery with an equally cynical man. Lang and his
producer Jerry Wald transposed the setting from Staten Island to a small fishing
village, and had the brilliant idea of grounding the characters in a
documentary on the community industry, giving them a substance never intrinsic
in the script. What follows is a very Langian picture of the dangerous
undercurrents in emotional relationships, excellently acted by the three
principals, interestingly counterpointed by Marilyn
Monroe (in her first major role) and Keith Andes
as uninhibited young lovers.
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Only a year after the sensation
of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), RKO probably ordered something
similar when they assigned Fritz Lang to direct this Clifford Odets play.
Though Clash by Night doesn't have Brando, Lang was twice the director
that Elia Kazan was and manages to stitch together a moving, nervously
effective film. The great Barbara Stanwyck appears at the height of her powers
as Mae, a restless, wandering soul who returns to her hometown, a fishing
village, when she runs out of places to go. Once there, she meets the simple
bear-like fisherman (Paul Douglas). He falls in love with her, and they marry.
Unfortunately, Mae also meets a hardened, world-weary movie projectionist Earl
(Robert Ryan) and begins an affair with him. The love triangle culminates in a
vicious verbal blow-out as only Odets could do it, with his punchy, highly
stylized dialogue.
Some critics grumbled that this
crackly dialogue felt out of place in a fishing village, especially when Lang
begins the film with a terrific documentary montage about fishing and canning.
Additionally, Douglas -- a former stage actor -- sometimes comes across too
large for the camera. However, Lang uses plenty of sustained shots, while
establishing a specific visual style and physical space, thereby avoiding the
trappings of the stage-bound material. The story works beautifully not as
realism, but as a representation of loss and fear. The actors, including
Stanwyck, Ryan and J. Carrol Naish, are all superb, but Marilyn Monroe is
especially astonishing in an early role as a feisty cannery worker; she's
already a star.
User comments from imdb Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
CLASH BY
NIGHT is a melodrama that betrays its stageplay origins with some artful but
sometimes arty dialogue that attempts to get us beneath the skin of its three
main characters--and occasionally does. But it's a tribute to the acting skill
of Stanwyck, Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan that their characters come alive with
all their flaws and longings exposed.
Barbara is excellent as a woman who returns to a fishing village after a long
time away, a bitter, defeated woman still trying to find a niche for herself.
Paul Douglas does a remarkably fine job as a good-hearted man, simplistic in
nature, who latches onto her only to have her betray him with the lusty Robert
Ryan. Lookers on include two very interesting performers--Keith Andes and
Marilyn Monroe (on her way up). Andes breathes life into the role of Barbara's
disgruntled brother and should have been groomed for stardom--he had the looks
and appeal of a major star.
A somewhat downbeat ending resolves the conflict--but along the way there are
some very high-strung moments from Stanwyck that she plays to perfection.
Marilyn Monroe demonstrates talent in a minor role.
A bit talky and stagebound in some scenes--but an interesting melodrama thanks
mainly to the gripping performances of Stanwyck, Douglas and Ryan. Ryan would
have made a great Stanley Kowalski in 'Streetcar' based on his drunk scene in
this one. He can play a brute about as well as anyone and here he's quite an
actor, matching Stanwyck's intense performance with a sturdy one of his own.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: theowinthrop from United States
Clifford Odets reputation as a
leading dramatist in the thirties, forties, and fifties has never recovered
from his being labeled a "fellow traveler" (at least) of the
Communists in the 1950s. Although he survived the McCarthy period, he was never
as totally popular again. His real hey day was when he wrote AWAKE AND SING,
PARADISE LOST, and WAITING FOR LEFTY. But he had gone to Hollywood and written
(and even directed) some films. Then in the early 1950s he wrote the play CLASH
BY NIGHT. It was about a love triangle between two friends and the wife of one
of them. This film was based on the drama. But there were major changes in it.
Mae Doyle is a woman seeking fulfillment. She has a reputation. She finds that
a fisherman, Jerry D'Amato, wants to marry her. In a moment of weakness she
gives into his proposal of marriage, and they do marry - even have a baby. But
she feels too straight-jacketed by the domestic scene. Then she meets Jerry's
friend Earl Pfeiffer. She starts an affair with him. Jerry is not fully aware
of this (he is a trifle blind), but that is taken care of by his
"helpful" uncle Vince, who tips him off. At the same time that this
is going on, Mae's brother Joe is pursuing an attractive young girl named
Peggy.
Unlike the best known Odets' plays (which deal with social injustice or
economic injustice), CLASH BY NIGHT was pure melodrama. As a matter of fact the
original play ended violently with a homicide - that was not in the film. Also,
keeping with Odets use of social reality, Uncle Vince (whose lousy behavior
towards Mae is due to his having to leave his comfortable room in Jerry's home
for Mae and her baby) is something of an anti-Semite and racist. That was not
used in the film either.
Still the film is not a bad example of a well-made film melodrama. Directed by
Fritz Lang, it had good performances by Barbara Stanwyck as a woman seeking
some type of excitement in her drab life, Paul Douglas as a decent man
betrayed, and Robert Ryan as a guilt - ridden betrayer of his friend. J.
Carroll Naish, even without the anti-Semitic dialog, is able to squeeze every
drop of malignancy out of his Uncle Vince (my favorite performance in the film
by the way). As Peggy, Monroe gives a performance as a young woman who is fully
aware of what Joe wants, but is determined that she'll get what she wants
(marriage), and again shows that hidden intelligence that comes through her
best work.
Recently the actor who played Joe, Keith Andes, died by suicide. His career was
never as big as it seemed headed when he played Joe (and his performance is
very good). It is interesting to see Andes and Monroe together - so young and
full of promise - and with tragedy awaiting both at the conclusion.
Clash By Night - TCM.com Rob Nixon
For all the respect and power she commanded in Hollywood, Barbara
Stanwyck had a reputation for being very generous and considerate to the young
actors who worked with her. After 65 films and 25 years in motion pictures, she
certainly had her patience and generosity tested during the making of Clash By
Night (1952) by a co-star whose on-set difficulties have become legend.
Although still a young actress and not the top star she was destined to be,
Marilyn Monroe was already sorely testing the patience of directors, co-stars,
and crew. Yet by all accounts, Stanwyck never lost her temper with the younger
woman during the making of Clash By Night or spoke harshly of her in the years
to come.
In Fritz Lang's intense study of adultery and betrayal in a northern California
fishing village (a change from the original New York location of Clifford
Odets' play), Stanwyck plays Mae Doyle, a woman disillusioned with life and men
who returns to her home town and marries a simple, decent fisherman - Jerry
D'Amato - for security. But the bitter, restless woman soon finds herself
falling for Earl, the cynical but far more sexually attractive projectionist at
the local movie theater, exactly the kind of man she was trying to get away
from. Although she has had Jerry's baby, Mae begins an affair with Earl that
almost ends in tragedy.
Monroe played the relatively small part of Peggy, the high-spirited cannery
worker who is dating Mae's brother. Playing one of her first important roles,
Monroe was nervous to the point of vomiting before every scene and breaking out
in red blotches on her hands and face. She was often late, forgetful, and
uncommunicative. Lang, not one to suffer actor idiosyncrasies lightly, was at
his wits' end with the young actress, but Stanwyck was a model of patience. The
director recounted a scene in which Stanwyck had to hang clothes on a line while
talking to Monroe, who repeatedly blew her lines. The seasoned professional had
to remove the clothes from the line and start over to accommodate the newcomer,
but Lang said, "Not once did she have a bad word for Marilyn. She
understood her perfectly."
Stanwyck admitted years later that Monroe "drove Bob Ryan, Paul Douglas,
and myself out of our minds." She told the Toronto Telegram in 1965
she found Monroe "awkward. She couldn't get out of her own way. She wasn't
disciplined, and she was often late, but she didn't do it viciously, and there
was a sort of magic about her which we all recognized at once. Her phobias, or
whatever they were, came later; she seemed just a carefree kid, and she owned
the world." Monroe ended up turning in a performance that was
enthusiastically received by critics, strengthening the resolve of her studio,
20th Century Fox, to develop her into a major star.
Not that Stanwyck didn't have her on-set difficulties, too, although the
difference in the way she and Monroe handled them illustrates why Stanwyck is
still considered one of the best-liked, most professional actresses ever to set
foot before a camera. One day during the shooting of Clash By Night, she
complained to Lang that a scene they were working on was very badly written and
that she could never play it. Lang disagreed. "Barbara, may I speak very
frankly and openly with you," he later recalled saying. "I think the
scene reminds you of a rather recent event in your private life, and that is
why you think it is badly written and you cannot play it." Lang said
Stanwyck looked at him for a second and then said slowly, "You son of a
bitch." The director didn't repeat what the private event was, although
around this time, Stanwyck was getting a divorce from her husband of 12 years,
actor Robert Taylor, who had reportedly fallen for another woman. Nevertheless,
Lang said she turned on her heels and played the scene "so wonderfully
that we had to shoot it only once." Although he said he never worked with
any artist in the U.S. or abroad more cooperative than Barbara Stanwyck, this
was the only picture the two made together.
“Somebody’s throat has to be cut.” Richard Harlan Smith from Movie Morlocks, November 6, 2009
Clash By Night Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
User comments from imdb Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland
filmcritic.com Christopher Null
Classic Film Guide capsule review
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] Film Noir Classic Connection, Volume 2
THE BLUE GARDENIA
USA
Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] - capsule
This little-seen thriller from
Fritz Lang's rich and strange late period (1953) is The Woman in the Window
with the sex roles reversed: Anne Baxter is a working girl who believes she has
murdered a masher (Raymond Burr). The film is spare in its styling and almost
glacial in its progression. As in Rancho Notorious, Lang uses an
insistently repeated theme song (sung by Nat King Cole) to give the action a
quality of ritual and doom. With Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, and George Reeves.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Relatively minor but still gripping film
noir, in which Baxter, jilted by her soldier fiancé, goes on a blind date
with Burr, gets drunk...and awakes to discover that the pushy playboy has been
murdered, quite possibly by herself. The story, which continues with
news-reporter Conte's attempts first to get the killer to come forward and then
to clear Baxter's name, is not altogether original, but Lang, his cast, and
cameraman Nic Musuraca manage to inject the proceedings with a grimly
compelling atmosphere. And the title? It's the name of the nightclub where
Baxter's fateful encounter with Burr occurs, and where Nat King Cole
contributes a welcome musical cameo.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
Just one of the disappointing
aspects of this low-budget thriller is the fact that the revelation of the
killer comes out of nowhere with a character that isn't even established during
the story. What is supposed to be an effective trick ending doesn't come across
as playing fair with the audience.
All the performances are competent--no more--including Anne Baxter as the
lonely woman who allows herself to be seduced (almost) by Raymond Burr as a
fast-talking playboy. Ann Sothern has virtually nothing of any consequence to
do and is clearly wasted here. Even Richard Conte has a role that is poorly
defined so that his scenes with Baxter lack conviction. What could have been a
good film noir, is messed up by a weak script and casual performances.
Very much of a letdown for anyone expecting something rare and wonderful from
Fritz Lang--the man who gave us "Scarlet Street" and "The Woman
in the Window", among many fine film noirs. There is no atmospheric
photography or settings for this kind of story. The whole thing comes across as
something to be watched in a one hour TV presentation from the '50s.
Goatdog's
Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review
[3/5]
Anne Baxter
plays a young woman who receives a "Dear John" letter from her
boyfriend who is off fighting in Korea. Bitterly upset, she decides to take
sleazy photographer Raymond Burr
up on his offer of a date. He gets her drunk, takes her home, and tries to rape
her. She wakes up the next morning next to his dead body, not remembering most
of the night. She heads home and tries to act innocent, but that is impossible,
because she is a seething ball of nerves whose very appearance basically
screams "I did it, whatever it was!!!"
Meanwhile, ace
reporter Richard Conte
takes up the case, dubbing her the Blue Gardenia Killer after a flower that was
left behind at the murder scene. Conte makes a front-page offer to the killer:
come and give me your story, and my paper will help with your defense. Baxter,
who is on the verge of a breakdown and close to being discovered by the police,
decides to trust him, not knowing whether he is honest or if he merely wants a
big story.
The film was
probably groundbreaking in its day, since it is among the few film noirs from
the classic period that featured a female lead. I guess, in this case, Richard
Conte is the femme fatale. However, there are a few things about it that make
it an average film at best. First of all is that it has dated badly.
Present-day viewers will have a hard time relating to the situation, most
obviously as it relates to the press. Secondly, and most importantly, the
ending is obviously something that was added against the will of director Fritz Lang.
Compare this film to his masterful Scarlet Street,
where the protagonist spends the rest of his life haunted by the ghosts of his
"victims." This film's syrupy ending, complete with a deus ex machina
confession by the real killer, is just not Lang's style. It turned what might
have been a bitter and memorable ending into something common. Rent it as an
example of a film noir that strayed from the formula, not as a really great
film.
The
Blue Gardenia - TCM.com Jay Steinberg
Beyond the profound influence that his expressionistic
efforts in Germany and America had upon the development of the film noir cycle
of the '40s and '50s, German director Fritz Lang would spend his latter years
in Hollywood actively contributing to the form. With such brooding, stylized
explorations of the underworld as Scarlet Street (1945), The Big Heat
(1953) and While the City Sleeps (1956) to his credit, the Viennese
craftsman rendered some of the most memorable suspense films of the period.
Neither Lang nor many of his champions would go on to accord such status to The
Blue Gardenia (1953), a thriller that the director took on contract for
Warner Brothers and crafted within a tidy twenty days. Regardless, the
atmospheric touches, jarring visuals and sense of paranoia with which Lang
imbued this studio quickie prevent it from warranting such simple dismissal.
Adapted from a short story by Laura author Vera Caspary, the narrative
introduces all the principals involved in a scattershot fashion before reaching
the dramatic thrust. Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter), a Los Angeles switchboard
operator sharing an apartment with two co-workers, is devastated when an
anticipated letter from her fiance in Korea turns out to be of the "Dear
Jane" variety. Intercepting a phone call meant for her roommate (Ann
Sothern), she eventually gives a why-not response to the caller's entreaties
for a date.
Arriving at the trendy nightspot of the film's title, she makes her rendezvous
with Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr), a slick-talking commercial draftsman with a
predilection for calendar girls that isn't merely vocational. After multiple
rounds of cocktails, the now-impaired Norah agrees to make a stop back at
Prebble's studio. Once Harry attempts to force himself on her, however, she
struggles, shattering a mirror as she passes out. Norah recovers enough
consciousness to stagger her way home and collapse.
The dawn, however, brings far worse consequences than a mere hangover, as the
tabloids and airwaves bear reports of Prebble's death at the hands of an
unknown assailant. Casey Mayo (Richard Conte), a high-powered newspaper
columnist and acquaintance of Prebble's, dubs the mystery woman with whom
Prebble was last seen alive "the Blue Gardenia," and begins a public
drumbeat for her to turn herself in. Wracked with guilt, and causing concern to
her friends with her increasingly paranoid behavior, Norah has a torturous
struggle over whether to put herself in Mayo's hands.
Lang may have regarded The Blue Gardenia as no more than a rushed job
for hire, but the circumstances didn't quell his hunger for innovation. Working
in conjunction with Nicholas Musuraca, the cinematographer who shot Lang's Clash
by Night (1952) and many other memorable noir efforts for RKO, the
filmmakers devised a revolutionary dolly that allowed for sustained tracking
shots, and which provides the film's narrative with an intimacy comparable to
handheld photography. "The practice of cutting in close-ups not only seems
unnatural, but oftentimes interrupts and disturbs the filmic train of thought,"
the director once told interviewer Friedrich Porges. "The photographic
apparatus becomes the constant companion of the actors; it becomes a sharp
observer of the events, capturing the drama more intensively as it draws
quickly nearer when something decisive is done or said."
Musuraca's lighting choices for The Blue Gardenia may have, on balance,
owed more to then-prevalent television standards than his prior work, but the
film still boasts many expressionistic visuals. From the vortex that envelopes
Norah at the point of her collapse to the rain-streaked window looking in at
the peak of her vulnerability, The Blue Gardenia creates a sustained
sensation of impending doom and offers much of what lent Lang his enduring
distinction in the field.
The Blue Gardenia also benefits from the game efforts of its players.
Baxter hits the right notes as the conscience-plagued heroine; Burr is
wonderfully smarmy as her would-be seducer; and Sothern engagingly delivers in
a familiar assignment as the wisecracking confidante. Worked into the plotline
with surprising frequency is Nat "King" Cole's smoky rendition of the
title tune.
The
Blue Gardenia | Fritz Lang 1953 - CeltoSlavica
The Blue Gardenia Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
The Blue Gardenia •
Senses of Cinema Sam Ishii-Gonzalès from Senses of Cinema, June 13, 2001
The Blue Gardenia (1953) | Film Noir of the Week Steve-O
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Context Alex Jacoby
Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) capsule review also reviewing BRUTE FORCE and THE NAKED CITY
DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
THE BIG HEAT
Kim Newman from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Like Fritz Lang’s 1952 Western Rancho Notorious, The Big Heat is a ballad of “hate, murder, and
revenge”: it opens with a close up of a
gun about to be used by a corrupt cop Tom Duncan to commit suicide, and
proceeds rapidly through jolting horrors that malform the characters. Cop Dave
Bannion (Glenn Ford) turns from family man to obsessive when his wife (Jocelyn
Brando) is blown up by a car bomb meant for him. Moll Debby (Gloria Grahame) is
embittered when her thug boyfriend Vince (Lee Marvin) disfigures her with a
faceful of hot coffee and takes up Bannion’s quest. In a crucial development,
the embittered hero still can’t commit cold-blooded murder, and so a double has
to step in to pull the last thread that allows justice to be done: the big heat that brings down crime boss
Lagana (Alexander Scourby) is precipitated when Debby confronts and murders her
“sister under the mink,” the crooked cop’s grasping widow.
Grounded more in political reality than most of Lang’s
noirs, thanks to the hard-hitting detail of the William P. McGivern’s novel and
Sydney Boehm’s script, The Big Heat is
one of a 1950’s cycle of syndicate-runs-the-town crime exposés—others include The Phenix City Story (1955) and The Captive City (1952). Lang’s
direction is still indepted to expressionism here, with sets that reflect the
characters’ overriding personality traits:
the cold luxury of the Duncan house, bought with dirty money; the
tasteless wealth of Lagana’s mansion, with its hideous portrait of the
mobster’s sainted mother and jiving teenage party; the penthouse moderne of
Vince and Debby, where the police commissioner plays cards with killers; the
cramped, poor-but-honest apartment of the Bannion family; and the hotel room
where Bannion ends up, his life pared down to the need for vengeance. The
finale is hardly comforting: after the
fall of the crime syndicate, the hero returns to his desk in the Homicide
Department. The welcome of workmates—expressed, of course, by an offer of
coffee—is curtailed, and the end title appears over Bannion putting on his hat
and coat to go out and deal with “a hit and run over on South Street.”
Fritz Lang Bibliography (via
UC Berkeley Media Resources Center) "Lang "contra
Vengeance: "The Big Heat,"
by Daniel C. Shaw from the Journal of Value Inquiry
The films of Fritz Lang have always been surprising in the
depth of their characterizations and social conscience. This article examines
how he treats the theme of vengeance in several of his movies, culminating in
an extensive analysis of "The Big Heat". It concludes that Lang
consistently condemned vigilanteism, by portraying the devastation it wreaks
both on the individual and on society. Nowhere is that negative depiction more
inspiring than in "The Big Heat", which reaffirms our faith in the
rule of law and the essential decency of the common man."
Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center) 'Keep the Coffee Hot, Hugo': Nuclear Trauma in Lang's 'The Big Heat,’ Walter Metz from Film Criticism, Spring 1997
The writer argues that the violence in Fritz Lang's 1953
movie "The Big Heat" emerges from a cultural anxiety over nuclear
proliferation that permeated early 1950s American culture, particularly the
film noir. He begins with a comparison of the movie with its novel version by
William P. McGivern, arguing that whereas the novel connects the nuclear to
issues of race, the movie forges the relationship between atomic energy and
gender. He explains that in the film, a crime syndicate plants a car bomb that
kills the protagonist's wife; the filming of the explosion resembles an atomic
blast and does not show the bomb's damage, thus connecting the car bombing to a
cliche common to 1950s films featuring the detonation of a nuclear device.
Moreover, he notes that the scarring of the female character Debbie by means of
hot coffee thrown at her face by her boyfriend suggests the consequences of
radiation poisoning.
Homicide Sgt Dave
Bannion (Ford), a seemingly wholesome family man, investigates a fellow
officer's suicide. Lifting the lid off the garbage can, he uncovers a world
where megalomaniac crime bosses, police commissioners and city councillors
share the same poker table, and all opposition is put on the payroll. Pulled
off the case and suspended from duty, personal tragedy and a growing contempt
for his peers lead him into a vengeful vendetta that equates his actions with those
of his enemies. Lang strips down William P McGivern's novel to essentials,
giving the story a narrative drive as efficient and powerful as a handgun. The
dialogue is functional. Every shot is composed with economy and exactitude, no
act gratuitous. The most celebrated scene, where Marvin's psychopathic gangster
mutilates his moll Grahame's face with scalding coffee, is remarkable in that
you never see him do it; the contract killings are also sex murders, but again
unseen. Bannion's redemption comes as he (and we) are moved by the courage of
others; a crippled woman gives him a lead, a band of old army chums protect his
daughter, and finally Grahame, in whose retributive act lies his purgation.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
Pretty brutal stuff is the best way
to sum up the contents of THE BIG HEAT, easily a forerunner of two biggies that
came along much later in time--L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (with its exposure of police
corruption in Los Angeles) and THE BLACK DAHLIA (the same).
GLENN FORD is out for revenge when his wife is killed by the mobsters and he
walks into some pretty scary situations when he tries to take justice into his
own hands. JOCELYN BRANDO (Marlon's sister), who plays Ford's wife, is the
unfortunate victim of a car bomb. JEANETTE NOLAN is a woman who wants to bribe
the police department when she finds out some incriminating details in a letter
her husband wrote before his suicide. LEE MARVIN is a brutal mobster with a
pretty blonde girlfriend (GLORIA GRAHAME) who is treated so viciously by him
that she decides to switch her allegiance and falls in with honest cop GLENN
FORD.
It's a tight, taut, suspenseful film (with good chemistry between Ford and
Grahame) that shows no mercy in dealing with several of its main characters for
the sake of telling a gripping story about corruption and loyalties in the
"crime does not pay" mold.
A definitive example of film noir and well worth sampling if you're a fan of
this genre.
The Big Heat
(1953) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Investigating the apparent suicide of a fellow
officer, detective Dave Bannion soon discovers he is about to lift the lid on
something that reeks of vice and corruption. The dead man’s mistress Lucy
Chapman is brutally murdered immediately after giving Bannion information that
contradicts the evidence of his wife. Realising that gangster boss
Mike Lagana is implicated, Bannion confronts him with a threat to bring him to
justice. A short while later, Bannion’s wife is killed by a car bomb that
was intended for the troublesome cop. With nothing to lose, Bannion
hands in his police badge and goes on the offensive. It’s time to bring
the curtain down on Lagana’s seedy little empire...
There’s a nice symmetry in the fact that a
great expressionist film director of the silent era should go on to make one of
the finest film noir crime thrillers. Film noir is, after all, a
cinematographic style which had its origins in German expressionist
cinema. Few filmmakers knew better than Fritz Lang how to use
lighting, set composition and camera technique to imbue a film with that aura
of hidden menace, cold brutality and paranoiac anxiety which is the very
essence of film noir.
The film stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Graham, whom Fritz Lang would cast as the
leads in his subsequent film, Human Desire (1954), an American remake of
Jean Renoir’s 1938 film, La Bête humaine. Jocelyn Brando, the
actress who plays Bannion’s ill-fated wife, was none other than the older
sister of the iconic actor Marlon Brando.
The Big Heat is one of the first examples of a sub-genre of noir
thriller in which the main protagonist is driven to step outside the law to
enact his own notion of justice. There is an unsavoury moral equivalence
of gangsters and cops - both have snouts in the same filthy trough - which the
solitary trenchcoat-wearing hero attempts to break away from in order to avenge
crimes that would otherwise go unpunished. This is quite a break with the
film noir heroes of the previous decade who, by and large, tended to operate
within the confines of the law. Another twist is that the role of the
femme fatale is reversed - here she becomes the unintended victim of the hero’s
actions, rather than an instrument of his downfall.
Whilst it is less stylised than the great noir films of the 1940s, The Big
Heat is undisputedly one of the best examples of classic American film
noir. What is particularly memorable about the film is its intense
visceral impact - a dark streak of pessimism and cruelty which borders on
sadism. The scene where Bannion’s wife is murdered is shocking because of
its unexpected suddenness (the actual killing, like most of the violence in the
film, happens out of camera shot). Likewise, Debby Marsh’s facial
disfigurement hits the spectator with the malicious brutality of a baseball
bat. It may sting and surprise, but none of this violence is
gratuitous. It is there to create a realistic impression of the lawless
world in which Bannion finds himself as he carries on his one-man crusade
against corruption. In this respect, it is much more successful than
later films, in which extreme violence is shown far more explicitly.
The
Big Heat - TCM.com Frank Miller
The revelations that crime in America had become a big
business built on corruption at almost every level of U.S. life shocked
millions and inspired Hollywood to a new type of gangster film in the fifties,
one in which the average Joe took on the mobs against fantastic odds and won.
Of all these films - which include Robert Wise's The Captive City and
Phil Karlson's Kansas City Confidential (both 1952) - the best was
German-born director Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953).
From almost the start of his career, Lang had depicted the criminal underworld
in such German classics as Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) and M
(1931). When he fled Germany to escape the Nazis, his work took on a darker
tone, with revenge as one of his primary themes. But his opposition to Hitler
would lead to trouble years later, when he was falsely branded a communist in
the early 1950s and blacklisted for two years. Once he managed to clear his
name, however, he signed a two-picture deal with Columbia Pictures that began
with this taut crime thriller.
The Big Heat
- the title is criminal slang for a police crackdown on illegal activities -
was originally a serial written for the Saturday Evening Post. It was so
popular that Columbia bought the rights even before the final chapter appeared.
They assigned former crime reporter Sydney Boehm to the script. His chief
change was to transform the main character, a police officer out for vengeance
when a mob hit on him takes out his wife instead, from a scholarly detective to
an average guy. This fit perfectly with Lang's approach to filmmaking, creating
a character with whom the audience could easily identify.
To play Lang's Everyman, Columbia assigned Glenn Ford, their most reliable
box-office star. Although rarely cast in the studio's most prestigious films,
Ford's presence insured strong interest from both audiences and the studio. At
the time, he was under contract for just one film a year, so they weren't about
to waste his commitment on just any film. His powerful presence and innate
integrity helped make the picture a hit. In addition, he inspired an in-joke
when his first meeting with vicious gangster Lee Marvin was underscored with
"Put the Blame on Mame," the hit song from one of Ford's biggest
films, Gilda (1946).
Most of the roles in The Big Heat
were filled with contract players on the Columbia lot, which proved
particularly fortunate in the casting of future Oscar-winner Lee Marvin as a
sadistic thug and Gloria Grahame as his tough-talking moll. Grahame was one of
the hottest young actresses in Hollywood at the time. As filming started, she
had just won the 1952 Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for The Bad
and the Beautiful. That may have caused some problems with Lang. He would
later claim that she tried to convince him to change her character from a
gangster's girlfriend to an heiress. He got her to accept the role as written
by threatening to "show your back all the time and get a parrot to say
your dialogue!" Grahame claimed that her only problem was the lack of good
lines for her character. She appealed to her boyfriend and future husband,
writer Cy Howard, for help. He contributed the film's two most famous lines:
her comment to a racketeering cop's widow that "We're sisters - under the
mink"; and her assessment of Ford's shabby hotel room as "early
nothing." That had actually been Howard's comment a few months earlier
when he visited her home for the first time.
Grahame was fast earning a reputation as the screen's number one hard-luck
dame, or as she called herself, "Miss Obituary." She fell victim to a
plane crash in The Bad and the Beautiful, a crazed driver in Sudden
Fear (1952), and a pot of boiling coffee in The Big Heat. Lang had carefully set up the latter scene. As Grahame
and Marvin argue, the camera picks up shots of a glass coffee pot boiling
furiously on a hot plate - hotter than any sane person would ever want it to
be. When Marvin picks up the pot and hurls it in Grahame's face, the camera
focuses on his reaction, a face of pure evil that allows the viewer to imagine
more suffering than Lang could ever have shown. But years later, he had to
laugh at the illogic of the scene. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, he
said, "I wonder how many women who have thrown hot coffee in their
husbands' faces were very disappointed with the result and said, 'Lang is a
lousy director.'"
The
Big Heat - Bright Lights Film Journal
Jans B. Wager, January 2000
The Big Heat • Senses of
Cinema Daniel Shaw, February 7, 2006
The Big Heat Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US films Tim Dirks
Images Movie Journal Grant Tracey
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review July 2000
The Big Heat (1953) – She Blogged By Night Stacia Kissick Jones
Film Noir of the Week Eddie Muller
The Big Heat - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Kim Newman from Film Reference
Westminster Wisdom Gracchi
digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Dan Heaton
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3.5/5] also seen here: Movie Vault [Goatdog]
DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review
Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]
DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [3/5]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing HUMAN DESIRE
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
HUMAN DESIRE
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Fritz Lang's 1954 American
version of the Zola novel (and Renoir film) La Bete Humaine. Gloria
Grahame, at her brassiest, pleads with Glenn Ford to do away with her slob of a
husband, Broderick Crawford. Lang mines the railroad setting for a remarkably
rich series of visual correlatives to his oppressively Catholic conception of
guilt and retribution. A gripping melodrama, marred only by Ford's inability to
register an appropriate sense of doom. 91 min.
Lang's version of Zola's La Bête
Humaine is, like all his best '50s work, as cold, hard and steely grey as
the railway tracks which here mark out the action. Glenn Ford,
the perfect embodiment of these qualities, returns from Korea, only to be
pulled into the murderously destructive marriage between Grahame and Crawford
(both superb). The bleak, dark marshalling yards are the perfect backdrop for
the playing out of adulterous relationships where 'desire' signifies only fear,
jealousy and hatred.
User comments from imdb Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
Fritz Lang was well on the way
toward losing his magic touch with grim film noir by the time he did HUMAN
DESIRE, from an Emile Zola novel and better made originally with Jean Gabin and
Simone Simon. His Hollywood phase included such disappointments as WHILE THE
CITY SLEEPS and BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, both highly flawed from a directorial
standpoint.
Here he has the screen's sauciest femme fatale, GLORIA GRAHAME, using her
sultry demeanor to lure All-American hero GLENN FORD into committing a murder
to dispose of her obnoxious, insanely jealous husband BRODERICK CRAWFORD.
The plot is driven by Crawford's brutal killing of his wife's ex-boss whom he
suspects of dallying with her. Grahame is forced to be an accessory in robbery
and murder. Crawford holds onto an incriminating letter he forced his wife to
write. Train engineer Ford gets caught up in the plot when he accidentally runs
into Grahame on the train where the murder took place.
Ford seems much too level-headed to get caught up in Grahame's plight the way
he does. The story reaches a climax after Ford finds out the truth about
Grahame's involvement in the murder. The sub-plot concerning a nice girl with a
yen for Ford is completely uninvolving and the story holds interest only as
long as the focus in the last twenty minutes is on Ford and Grahame. When
Gloria says: "If only something would happen to him in the yards,"
you know there's a plot device coming--one that assures her status as a femme
fatale.
Despite a fairly gripping story, the ending is not satisfying enough--but there
are enough noir elements in the film to make it absorbing and worthwhile.
Film
Noir of the Week Jeff Markam
Though Jean Renoir’s The Human Beast
has become the more well known and well respected film, Fritz Lang’s American
remake Human Desire is an equally provocative film of fate, passion, and
suspense. It lacks the ‘human beast’ of the protagonist of Jean Gabin,
now in the form of your average joe of Glenn Ford. Lang instead shifts
focus on the twisted relationships between Broderick Crawford and Gloria Grahame.
The story has changed to lower
working class New Jersey railroad workers. Glenn Ford plays engineer Jeff
Warren, a returning Korean war vet who looks forward to a peaceful life at
home. Meanwhile, fellow worker Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford) has been fired
due to his violent behavior. He begs his wife Vicki (Gloria Grahame) to talk
with a higher up, Owens, whom she once knew as a child to get his job back, but
when he finds about her affair with this man, it ends up in murder on a train.
It is on this night that both Jeff’s and the Buckley’s lives become bound
together as Vicki must distract Jeff in order for her husband to escape the
scene of the crime. From that point on, Jeff gets involved in a rough
passionate affair with Vicki, whose mind is set on the murder of Carl, who
holds incriminating evidence against her on the murder. Lying her way through
the seduction, Jeff finally wises up, and unknowingly leaves Vicki to her death
at the train.
Though Jeff may be the weakest character of the trio, he
takes us back to the disillusioned vets of WWII who cannot adjust to the
homefront once again. Though he at first feels optimistic to return to a
domestic life and possibly a romance with his best friend’s daughter Ellen (Kathleen
Case), the excitement he left behind Vicki brings back into
his life through their torrid affair. Ellen, introduced as a buxom brunette,
gets plainer and plainer throughout the movie as he gets deeper into the affair
with Vicki. The 50’s domestic life just can’t keep up with the excitement.
Gloria Grahame’s performance here is a hit and miss, but remains one of her
most memorable roles. Her theatrics are a little too much in certain scenes,
especially as she tries to tell Jeff of the murder and the abuse Carl has put
her through, but during the scenes with Crawford we can see a deeply sexually
frustrated woman who has found herself trapped into a marriage with a man who
keeps her as a prized trophy rather than a wife.
Completing the deadly trio is Broderick Crawford, playing a fuse that could
snap at any given moment. He brings over the uncontrollable rage of Jean Gabin
from the original and gives a menacing performance. He prostitutes his wife to
get what he wants, and yet is too stupid to realize she has a big sexual
appetite.
Lang fully explores the entire space of the train. The cramped corridors look
have become a labyrinth with no way out and compartments have become places of
entrapment that lead the characters to their own doomed fate. The loud noise of
the train makes two murders go unnoticed, and at one point leaves Jeff alone
with his thoughts of the affair, unable to speak to anyone during his daily
route.
Burnett
Guffey brings out Lang’s deep shadows and expressionistic
images on to screen, he would also lense other classic noirs such as The
Reckless Moment, My
Name is Julia Ross, and In a
Lonely Place, and would later win an Oscar for Bonnie and
Clyde. Daniele
Amfitheatrof provides a menacing score, one of noir’s best, a
harder edged version of something of Miklós
Rózsa.
It’s hard to garner up respect when Human Desire has to live up to Émile
Zola’s source
material, Jean Renoir’s original, AND the first
Lang-Ford-Grahame pairing of The
Big Heat. But this is still a Fritz Lang film, plenty of
doom, grittiness, and pure noir abound. Human Desire brings together the gritty
realism of The Big Heat and Fury
and the German
Expressionism of M and Scarlet
Street. It is certainly the master’s most underrated and undervalued
picture because of what it has to live up to.
Human Desire Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Ozus' World Movie
Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams] also
reviewing THE BIG HEAT
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
MOONFLEET
A boy and a rakish smuggler search for a legendary lost diamond in a
wonderfully stylised version of 19th century Cornwall. The characters are
linked and haunted by the memory of the boy's dead mother, and their 'romance'
is a journey through a dark world of gallows and graveyards. Lang disliked
working in CinemaScope, a ratio he described in Le Mépris as 'only good
for funerals and snakes', but uses it brilliantly. (From a novel by J Meade
Falkner).
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
This 1955 gothic thriller was
Fritz Lang's first encounter with CinemaScope; the experience would later
prompt his famous remark that the wide screen was suitable "only for
snakes and funerals." Unfortunately, the film has not circulated in 'Scope
for years, leaving Lang's difficulties to be taken on faith. What remains is a
suggestive, subjective account of an orphan boy's apprenticeship to a dashing
smuggler (Stewart Granger). The film ends, with unexpected seriousness, on a
strange mystical note. With George Sanders, Joan Greenwood, and Viveca
Lindfors. 89 min.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
Fritz Lang's only film in
CinemaScope (1955, 89 min.) is one of his most neglected features, at least in
this country. (In France there's a deluxe edition on DVD made especially for
high school students.) A kind of 18th-century fairy tale about an orphan (Jon
Whiteley) in Dorset who's adopted, after a fashion, by a smuggler (Stewart
Granger), this classy MGM production was adapted from a novel by J. Meade
Faulkner by Margaret Fitts and Jan Lustig, and its dreamlike sense of wonder is
equaled only in Lang's German pictures. John Houseman produced, and Mikos Rozsa
wrote the stirring score; the fine secondary cast includes George Sanders, Joan
Greenwood, and Viveca Lindfors.
Moonfleet
(1955) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
The setting is the windswept southwest coast of
This massively overrated period drama is barely
recognisable as the work of one of the world’s greatest directors, Fritz
Lang. The Austrian director is reputed to have hastily regretted signing
the contract to make the film for MGM, and this can be seen in the end result –
a dreary, characterless adaptation of a tired historical novel. Although
the film was shot in CinemaScope – Lang’s one and only experience of the medium
– very little opportunity is made of the artistic possibilities this
offers. Apart from a few location sequences, the bulk of the film is shot
in the studio, with unconvincing exterior sequences that make the film look
cheap and horribly dated. Stewart Granger is appropriately cast as the
ambiguous hero but appears disinterested in the role; like Lang, he appears to
be just going through the motions. Whilst MGM had been expecting a
swashbuckling adventure film along the lines of
User comments from imdb Author: gerrythree (gerrytwo@hotmail.com) from New York
I like the movie Moonfleet, but in
watching Moonfleet, you are also watching the demise of a great studio, still
trying to turn out quality pictures as the Hollywood studio system is
collapsing and movie budgets are shrinking. Moonfleet is only 87 minutes long,
there are no expensive exterior action scenes and dimly lit interior scenes are
the norm. Even though shot in Cinemascope, Moonfleet is a budget movie using
cheaper Eastmancolor, not Technicolor. Stewart Granger was still under
contract, and the other starring roles are handled by European actors, who
worked for less. MGM modified existing sets, cleaned off old costumes and
started the camera rolling. For all of that, the picture is interesting as it deals
with 18th century English smugglers and the story of young John Mohune.
MGM executives must have decided that even with Fritz Lang, Moonfleet was not
going to be a hit, which could explain the truncated story line and the always
gloomy (cheaply processed) photography. On the TCM broadcast I saw, Moonfleet
was in widescreen and had closed captioning. Looking as good as it ever will
until the movie has a full restoration, Moonfleet is just too slow paced,
without real kinetic energy. The talent is there, but probably for reduced
budget reasons, Moonfleet can't grab your attention and keep it for even 87
minutes.
Addendum: I just watched parts of Moonfleet again, from a download of a
bittorrent file made from the French Time Warner DVD of this movie (An AOL
Company was still part of the logo then, only two years ago). In a lot of ways,
this movie is a reflection of the decline of Hollywood and the importance of
movie studios in general. Director Fritz Lang worked for the UFA movie studios
in the 20s making silents, made talkies in the 30s first in Europe then in
Hollywood, and was running out the string in Hollywood when he made Moonfleet.
At the end of the movie, when young Mohune leaves open the gate of Mohune
manor, the gesture does not really change things.
The MGM logo included a gate in it, the entrance to a great movie studio. There
is a silent 1926 documentary made by MGM showing the different departments in
the dream factory, from warehouses full of period furniture to group shots of
directors and cameramen and even a garage where wind machines and power trucks
were kept. MGM was a giant movie company from the start when it combined
Goldwyn's studio with Metro. Less than 30 years after that silent, the MGM
studio was like the desolate Mohune family manor, its contract players and
staff released, its Loew's theaters sold on the cheap, its Hollywood studio
barely holding on as its New York board of directors decided to fire production
head Dore Schary and cut movie production, placing the studio's survival on big
pictures like Raintree County, Ben-Hur and How The West Was Won.
Moonfleet is still with us, but MGM is now completely gone, its name tagged
onto a film releasing company but the last of its small studio staff given
their walking papers about two years ago. The fatalistic atmosphere that
permeates many scenes in Moonfleet may be Fritz Lang's doing, but it could just
as well be that it was hard for MGM staffers to think about happy endings as
their studio was going under. And MGM's decline mirrored what was happening in
the rest of Hollywood.
Under the conditions then, it was an accomplishment for the studio to make
Moonfleet, hiring the talent not on payroll, preparing the sound stages for
production and shooting the movie using the cheap Eastmancolor film. But to me,
the picture is too much of a downer, the photography too dim and the storyline
incomplete. Moonfleet is worth watching, it has a great cast but the movie
needed a bigger budget to pay for better production values and scenes showing
what Stewart Granger's character did after leaving Mohune manor. By 1954, MGM
wasn't going to gamble on spending a lot of money on Moonfleet.
Moonfleet
(1955) - Articles - TCM.com Bret Wood
In his autobiography Sparks Fly Upward, actor
Stewart Granger described the 1955 film Moonfleet as a "dreary costume epic." As dismissive as
this phrase might at first seem, it is in fact an apt summary of the heightened
grimness of Fritz Lang's moody adventure saga.
In the mid 1700s, on the southern coast of England, orphaned John Mohune (Jon
Whiteley) seeks out Jeremy Fox (Granger), a roguish gentleman who has been
appointed the child's guardian. Unwilling to be passed along to another custodian,
young Mohune remains in Moonfleet and discovers a nest of secrets lurking
within the rocky, windswept town. Fox enjoys a camaraderie with wealthy lords,
a secretive involvement with a band of smugglers, and an association with a
series of exotic women including a gypsy dancer (ballet star Liliane
Montevecchi), a mysterious lady in a gilded coach (Joan Greenwood) and a
sinister mistress (Viveca Lindfors). John also learns he is the rightful heir
to a large diamond once belonging to Redbeard. Only through the selfless
intervention of Fox does the plucky lad stand a chance of ever receiving his
legacy, even though it means defying the heartless thieves once under his
command.
Cut from the pattern of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and Treasure
Island, the script was adapted from the 1896 novel by John Meade Falkner.
Screenwriters Jan Lustig and Margaret Fitts embellished the story with
flavorings of Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn and Charles Dickens's Great
Expectations, in an effort to boost the film's romantic intrigue quotient.
Producer John Houseman understood that the screenplay was, in his own words, a
"sparse, rather somber tale." The New York Times called the
script "a thoroughly boneless thing." The melodramatic ingredients
were contrived and the action was limited to the inns and manors of
Dorsetshire. The script simply did not have the makings of the swashbuckling
epic MGM anticipated. But, as Lang says, "Look -- you sign a contract....
Having signed a contract, you have to do your best."
Rather than exaggerating the story into something it wasn't, Lang zeroed in on
the true essence of Moonfleet:
a child's-eye view of the mysteries of adulthood and the horrors of
18th-century pirates. Moonfleet
is thus a Grimm's fairy tale in which a child's curiosity leads him into a nest
of murderous thieves, nightmarish graveyards and skeleton-filled tombs. To
Mohune, the monstrous cutthroats that crawl among the open graves of Moonfleet
are hardly distinguishable from the decaying bodies that reside therein.
Hoping for a colorful spectacular, MGM commissioned the film in Cinemascope and
Eastman color. Working with cinematographer Robert Planck and designer Hans
Peters, Lang deviated from the studio plan, rendering the film in a palette of
subtle earth tones. This allowed for bursts of highly dramatic color, as when
John stumbles through the cemetery, beneath brown-and-yellow painted skies,
watched over by a ghoulish angel statue with sickly green, luminous eyes.
Moonfleet
was shot almost completely in the controlled environment of the studio, which
allowed for the baroque compositions and stylized settings Lang was aiming for,
and which give the film its distinctively "dreary" flavor. The only
notable exception to the studio scenes are certain seaside exteriors filmed on
the stony shore of Oceanside, California.
Lang's aim was romanticism -- not the stuff of flowery love stories but the
haunted, often tragic literature of Goethe, Shelley or Poe, and the evocative
paintings of Blake, Delacroix and Goya. "If you would make a contemporary
horror story, you would use a different atmosphere," Lang explained.
"But if there are ghosts (which there are in this because they
think the smugglers are ghosts) and it plays in a churchyard and so on, you
have to make it romantic."
Granger recalled that, during production, studio head Louis B. Mayer and
producer Dore Schary visited the set with a promising actor they were trying to
recruit to MGM: James Dean. Granger was disappointed with the method actor's
sullen lack of courtesy: "I told him how much I had enjoyed his last film,
but he didn't return the compliment.... I learnt later that he'd met [Clark]
Gable and [Spencer] Tracy with the same indifference.... Hadn't Gable's
performance in Gone With the Wind moved him at all? Or, more important,
even if it hadn't, couldn't he have had the good manners to pretend that it
had? I'm afraid I was as unimpressed by him as he seemed to be by all of
us."
Moonfleet
was Lang's first and only Cinemascope film, and from the start he expressed
concern about how the process, still in its infancy, would affect screen
language. "The power of the screen always has been its intimacy....[I am]
not certain that we still will have the same power with Cinemascope [but] one
has to learn to live with changes, to make compromises." In later years,
Lang established a more firm view of Cinemascope, declaring it "only good
for funerals and snakes."
"If you think about famous paintings," Lang told interviewer Peter
Bogdanovich, "there is only one I know of that has this format, and that's
'The Last Supper.'"
“Pure Artifice”: Fritz Lang's Moonfleet • Senses of Cinema Adrian Danks, August 2008
Moonfleet Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Moonfleet (1955 film) - Wikipedia
WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS
USA (100 mi) 1956
Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
Fritz Lang's nihilistic late noir -- the
director's "most underrated film" (Time Out) -- has three ambitious
newspapermen cynically exploiting a series of sex murders, committed by a
so-called "Lipstick Killer," as they compete with one another for a
major promotion. While the City Sleeps eschews whodunit thrills and high- style
formal affectation for a simple, precise, pitiless depiction of an infected
noir universe in which there is little to choose between "normal"
society's upstanding citizens and the underworld's sickest misfits. Each of the
three competing journalists is willing to exploit, and possibly endanger, the
woman in his life in an effort to get ahead; the film's most sympathetic
character, in fact, is its serial killer, who at least has the moral sense to
plead "Catch me before I kill again." "Superbly constructed and
multilayered . . . Lang's interest is not in the killer's motivations and
methods, but in the journalists' ruthless, morally guilty minds. . . Lang's
finest film since The Big Heat and his last great success" (James Monaco).
A group of newsmen hunt for a sex murderer. Their
motive is greed; the prize is control of a newspaper. 'Noble' Dana Andrews
initially refuses to participate, but finally offers his fiancée (Forrest) as
bait for the killer (Barrymore) who, naturally, is the film's most sympathetic
character. Lang makes inspired use of glass-walled offices, where all is seen
and nothing revealed, and traces explicit parallels between Andrews and the
murderer. Lang's most underrated movie.
User comments from imdb Author: Kalaman from Ottawa
One of my favorites by Fritz Lang, "While
the City Sleeps" is also one of the neglected masterworks of 1950s
American cinema, a decade as you may know full of insight and social criticism
(e.g. "Ace in the Hole", "Bigger Than Life", "Phenix
City Story", etc.) It was Lang's penultimate American film and one of his
personal favorites.
The film, a dazzling allegory on media manipulation and modernity may not work
on single viewing and perhaps that's why it's so underrated, despite a superb
cast: Dana Andrews, George Sanders, Ida Lupino, Vincent Price, Mae Marsh,
Rhonda Fleming and John Drew Barrymore(the son of the great John Barrymore).
In discussing the picture, Lang often compared it to his German masterpiece,
"M"(1931) and the comparison is not inapt. In "M", Peter
Lorre's Hans Beckert terrorizes the whole city and creates a paranoia among its
citizens. In "While the City Sleeps", Manners's crimes mainly
function as a gimmick for the press to sell papers while the normal life in the
city seems to continue. Rather than simply conveying the necessary information
in "M", the media here in "While the City Sleeps"
(consisting of an interplay between television and newspaper) is much more
ironic and cynical: they use Manners and his victims to terrify the public to
sell more papers, something that is equally true today as it was back in 1956.
Not to be missed.
Epinions
[Stephen Murray] also seen
here: CultureCartel.com (Stephen Murray) review [4/5]
If cinema noire had a single inventor, I'd say it was Fritz
Lang, with M
being the bridge between German expressionist heightening of shadows and the
menacing night world of Hollywood black-and-gray movies. Lang fled an offer to
head film production in Nazi Germany and made a string of interesting dark
melodramas in Hollywood. Reportedly, his favorites among these were the first
one, Fury,
a movie about a lynch mob starring Spencer Tracy, and this, his penultimate
Hollywood film.
While the City
Sleeps, made in 1956 with two of the stars of Otto Preminger's Laura (Dana Andrews and
Vincent Price). Other favorites the 1950s audiences enjoyed watching sneer even
more than Price: George Sanders (All About Eve), the leprechaunish Thomas Mitchell (who appeared in Gone with the Wind and Only Angels Have Wings
the year he won an Oscar in Stagecoach),
and sultry noire vixens Ida Lupino (High Sierra, They Drive by Night)
and Rhonda Fleming (Out of the Past,
The Killer Is Loose).
Plus, as a "Mama's boy" serial killer (this is not a whodunit, and
the killer's identity is established before the opening credits begin), it has
a leather-jacketed John Drew Barrymore (whose name points back to his father
and forward to his daughter). And as the mother against whom, in 50s' dimestore
provision of Freudian motivation, is played by Mae Marsh, star of D. W.
Griffith's The Birth of a Nation
and Intolerance
and player in a dozen John Ford movies.
The movie has a lot of excellent supporting players, but bland leads. The
police detective in charge of the investigation (and anticipating the
murderer's next move as in Death and the Compass) is played by Howard Duff
(star of Jules Dassin's The Naked
City and Brute
Force and Lupino's husband) with no particular distinction. The
female romantic lead, Nancy Liggett, is played by the affectless Sally Forrest
(whom Lupino cast as the lead in two films she directed). The male romantic
lead, who is supposed to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and tv news
commentator, Edward Mobley, is played by Dana Andrews. Andrews generally
strikes me as vacuous (though he was cast in many very good films) and is
implausible as the man who will solve the case through brainpower. . . and by
dangling his fiancée (Forrest) as bait for the killer.
There is none of the anguish about placing the woman he loves in mortal danger
of The Pledge
or The Killer Is Loose
here. Mobley assumes she will bait the trap for the serial killer to advance
his career.
Identifying the killer in While the
City Sleeps has very little to do with justice and saving the lives of
future victims. Walter Kyne, who inherits a media empire early in the film,
makes breaking the case the basis for promotion to a position of de facto
control. Jon Day Griffith (Mitchell), managing editor of the flagship Kyne
newspaper; Mark Loving (Sanders), head of the Kyne wire service, and Kyne's pal
Harry Kritzer (James Craig), head of the Kyne photo service compete for the
prize. The first two try to enlist Mobley's help, with Loving sending his
sex-partner, Mildred Donner (Lupino), who is the newspaper's women's section's
head, to seduce Mobley. Kritzer is having an affair with Kyne's wife Dorothy
(Fleming) and does not exert himself on the challenge of identifying "the
lipstick killer."
After the lurid beginning of a murder, it takes a while to get all the
characters and their complex inter-relations established. The police/crime part
of the mix is subordinate to the Mobley/Liggett and Kritzer/Kyne romance
(complicated by the attempted seduction engineered by Nancy's boss, Loving) and
to the infighting within the Kyne conglomerate. (The concentration of media
headed by a thug prefigures today's Murdoch empire and the corporate logo seems
to have invented Circle-K's: it is a K in a circle.) The killer is more
violent, and clearly psychotic, but is not as amoral as the mogul. (Sanders is
oddly restrained here.)
The end of the movie is more gripping than the early goings, including a chase
through subway tunnels. There is quite a bit of humor along the way, And there
is as close to a happy ending as I can recall from any Lang film. Plus the
audience is spared the kind of annoying voice-over commentary of Dassin's The Naked City, which was a
defining police procedural movie of the 1950s. (Voiceover by the antihero was a
recurrent feature of cinema noire, but there's already too much Dana Andrews
here!)
The cast is more interesting than the plot(s). Much takes place during the day,
but in at least one sense the terror of the night spreads into daylight and the
subways tunnel is plenty dark day or night.
Cinematographer Ernest Laszlo, who had just shot Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Knife and, earlier, D.O.A.) went on to win an
Oscar for Ship of Fools
in 1965.
I don't know why Lang was so pleased with this film. I think that the two fully
noirish films he directed with Glenn Ford, The Big Heat and Human
Desire, are better, as are They Clash by Night and You Only Live Once.
While the City Sleeps (1956) - Articles - TCM.com Rob Nixon
Conventional wisdom
has it that the greatest stylistic influence on film noir was German
Expressionism, with all its dark fatalism, subjective camera angles and
movement, and sharp chiaroscuro lighting. So when an early Expressionist master
takes on a noir subject, the result is bound to be pretty much definitive.
Fritz Lang's career produced many of the best examples of the genre, including The
Woman in the Window (1945), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Big
Heat (1953). In While the City Sleeps (1956), Lang focuses on the
attempts of several newspaper people to rise to prominence by breaking the real
story behind a series of brutal murders of women. One of the hallmarks of many
noir films is the shadowy moral universe they portray, in which the lines
between "good guy" and "bad guy" are blurred. Lang goes
full out with that approach in While the City Sleeps, painting the
ambitious journalists seeking to crack the case as seedy, manipulative, and
corrupt.
Although some attempts are made at a kind of pop-Freudian analysis of the crimes,
Lang's interest here is less in exploring the mind of the murderer as he did in
M (1931), perhaps the first film about a serial killer. He does,
however, take a similar narrative approach as in the earlier movie by revealing
the killer at the very top of the story. Some critics at the time carped that
this was evidence of a poorly constructed thriller, but Lang isn't going for
conventional suspense mechanics. The killer's actions (and the concurrent death
of a newspaper tycoon) set off a chain reaction that leads the other characters
down paths that reveal their own worst sides, and that's the true focus of the
movie. There is even something of a parallel between the killer's choice of
victims and the way the ambitious men in the story all use women to achieve
their ends. Even the one character who seems to be the most upright, the
reporter played by Dana Andrews, uses his fianc¿as bait for the killer.
While the City Sleeps was Lang's last successful U.S. release, following
a 20-year career in Hollywood. Before that he was one of the most prominent
directors in Germany - Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927), The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) - until the rise of Nazism forced him out of
his native country. He made only one American film after this, a murder mystery
entitled Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956, which also starred Dana
Andrews as a writer). He then made four films in Europe before retiring from
directing in 1960. Lang was always conflicted about working in Hollywood.
Compared to the repression of Nazism, it was certainly the lesser of two evils.
But he constantly saw his work compromised by the studio system, even those
films which were independently produced, such as You Only Live Once
(1937).
"I was disgusted," he later said. "I looked back over the past -
how many pictures had been mutilated - and since I had no intention of dying of
a heart attack, I said, "I think- I'll step out of this rat race."
While the City Sleeps is notable for the number of stars in it, even if
most of them were past their prime - Andrews, Ida Lupino, Vincent Price, George
Sanders, Rhonda Fleming, Thomas Mitchell, and Howard Duff. Here again, Lang was
having to deal with the typical studio constraints, but he made it work for
him. Every part was a good one but, with the possible exception of Andrews, did
not require a huge amount of screen time. With careful scripting in
collaboration with screenwriter Casey Robinson and good planning, Lang was able
to keep each actor's production time down to four or five days, making it
financially possible to have so many names in the cast. But although it was
successful in this case, the casting proved Lang's anti-Hollywood point even
further.
"A distributor, you see, likes to have a kind of security that the money
will come back, and he believes a star is security," he explained. "I
can tell you fifty pictures with big stars that were big flops, but who can
argue with motion picture people? They never learn."
While the City Sleeps Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
While
The City Sleeps / Beyond A Reasonable Doubt - The AV Club Nathan Rabin
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » 918. While the City Sleeps ... narrated video essay from alsolikelife (5:51 )
While the City Sleeps (1956 film) - Wikipedia
BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Fritz Lang's last American film,
shot in a stripped-down, almost anonymous style that seems to befit its
bitterness and disillusion. Reporter Dana Andrews has himself framed for the
murder of a stripper in order to expose the incompetence of the police and the
fallacy of capital punishment. But after he's sentenced, the evidence that will
clear him is lost when his editor is killed in an accident. Once he's raised
the standard social issues, Lang destroys them all with a shatteringly
nihilistic conclusion. Joan Fontaine is the Lang heroine to end (literally) all
Lang heroines, at least in Hollywood (1959).
Time Out review Tom Milne
Lang's most austere film, reducing the
characters to pawns arbitrarily shifted in demonstration of a fascinating
theorem. Andrews plays a writer who plans, with the cooperation of a newspaper
publisher, to discredit the concept of capital punishment: by deliberately
implicating himself as a murderer, he will prove the ease with which
circumstantial evidence can lead to wrongful conviction. But after he is duly
convicted, the publisher (his sole confidant) is accidentally killed and
evidence of the plan destroyed. Despite the ingenious/ingenuous twist that
ensues, the film is not concerned with innocence or guilt but with
demonstrating that justice, finally, lies in the hand of fate. Not a
forthcoming film, but one which repays attention.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
With Fritz Lang in the director's
chair, this should have been a much tighter, more suspenseful film than it
actually is. Part of the problem is the script--the characters portrayed by
Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine are poorly written. Fontaine, in particular, has
little to do with the scheme of things and Andrews is so good at being an
anti-hero that he makes the character even more unpleasant than he has to be.
Barbara Nichols stands out in a good supporting role as a brassy blonde
showgirl and Sidney Blackmer as a man who concocts the scheme that lands
Andrews in prison is excellent. And by the way, contrary to what a viewer
states here, Donna Reed is nowhere in the supporting cast.
Aside from that, the outcome leaves you baffled. It's a surprise, all right,
but it all seems to be too patly contrived--a twist upon twist that stretches
credibility to the limit. A letdown feeling is the overall result of the
deceptive ending.
A tight-lipped Dana Andrews and a sophisticated Joan Fontaine (too frosty as
his loyal fiancé) have both done better work. Fontaine has one of her weakest
roles, but the film's biggest flaw is the way it toys with the viewer's
expectations and then fails to deliver that final punch.
Definitely one of Fritz Lang's lesser works.
User comments from imdb Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England
For his
final Hollywood film, Fritz Lang decided to expose the pitfalls of capital
punishment for circumstantial evidence. For this film, Lang has kept it simple;
with the entire movie focusing on the central premise and not a lot of anything
else going on. Filmmakers can sometimes saturate a film with lots of sub-plots,
and it can have a huge detrimental effect on what the film is trying to
achieve. By keeping it simple, Lang gives himself time to fully explore the
implications of his plot and the film is made more compelling because of this.
The story follows Austin Spencer; a person of stature that is continually
campaigning against circumstantial evidence being used as a means to send someone
to the electric chair. His efforts are unsuccessful, until he has the bright
idea to have a man sent to death row on circumstantial evidence, only to be
pardoned at the last minute by means of the evidence to prove his innocence
being brought to light. Enter Tom Garrett; Austin's son in law to be, and the
man that agrees to frame himself for murder...
This is perhaps Lang's best assault on the American justice system; he has
created a story that is interesting and very plausible and it works a treat in
that it gets you thinking about the fact that with this kind of law; someone
really could be killed for something they didn't do. Of course, the chances of
someone risking being put to death to expose this are unlikely, but then again;
it's only a movie, so you can expect to suspend your belief a little for a
point to be made. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt also features one of the most
finely tuned plot twists that I've seen in a movie. Lang shows us everything
about the plot; from the first ideas, to the setting up, all the way to the
trial and because of this; the final twist comes as a complete surprise. It's
been done and done a million times since this film, but despite this; Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt still has the power to shock the viewer.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is one of the highlights of Lang's illustrious
filmography. It has an unfairly low IMDb rating, and I hope that you will not
use that as a means of deciding whether or not to see this film. It is
efficient story telling at it's best and this is one of the highlights of the
film noir era.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) - Articles - TCM.com Lang Thompson
The surprise-filled thriller
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) may have been director Fritz Lang's final
American film but it's certainly not one of his lesser ones. Analytically
inclined viewers can still find Lang's familiar themes of guilt and innocence
but anybody else will delight in trying to out-guess the various twists in the
engaging story. Critic Derek Malcolm wrote, "It is a film of great economy
and precision (it lasts only 80 minutes), with the terrifying inevitability of
Greek tragedy and a pervading sense that man is his own worst enemy."
In fact, we don't want to give too much of the story away but we can let this
much slip out: Novelist Dana Andrews is dating the daughter (Joan Fontaine) of
a publisher (Sidney Blackmer) opposed to capital punishment. The publisher
hatches a scheme where he and the novelist create enough circumstantial
evidence in an unrelated case of a murdered dancer that Andrews appears to be
responsible. They plan to spring Andrews at the last minute by revealing their
deception and basking in a whirlwind of publicity about the unreliability of
capital sentences and circumstantial evidence.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt was acclaimed by many, though certainly not all,
critics. Jean-Luc Godard picked it as one of the year's ten best, snuggled
right between Chaplin's A King in New York and Bunuel's The Criminal
Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz. However, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt didn't
have a very smooth production. Director Lang felt forced into the film by
producer Bert Friedlob and, tired of fighting, he restrained much of his
legendary combativeness. It didn't help that Dana Andrews was drinking,
resulting in missed deadlines until the studio assigned a man to monitor
Andrews (which didn't work). Even the beginning and ending of the film resulted
in fights between Lang and Friedlob. A portion of the opening execution scene
was toned down by the producer (but apparently not as much as he would have
liked). As for the unusual climax, Lang finally stood his ground (even though
he told Peter Bogdanovich "I was very afraid of the ending"). At
least the script was by a one-time lawyer, Douglas Morrow, who had earlier won
an Oscar for The Stratton Story (1949).
But all these struggles capped Lang's growing dissatisfaction with Hollywood
until he finally told Friedlob, "I don't want to have anything to do with
you anymore or the American motion picture industry." After Lang's
departure, editor Gene Fowler, Jr., a personal friend of the director, put the
film together following Lang's instructions closely. (Fowler would later direct
the B-movie classic, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, 1958) Lang
directed three more films in Europe: a two-part remake of The Indian Tomb
(1959) and the surveillance-mad 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). He also
had an unforgettable acting role in Godard's Contempt (1963) as a
director trying to make a film version of The Odyssey.
Fritz
Lang: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt |
Features | guardian.co.uk Film
Derek Malcolm from the Guardian
I went to a Hollywood party in the early 1970s, held in honour of François Truffaut, one of the few French directors that Hollywood had heard of at the time. There were a lot of high-rollers there congratulating each other on their careers but I was curious about the old man with an eyepatch sitting alone in a corner.
When I asked who he was, someone said: "Oh, that's some old Hollywood director." It was, in fact, Fritz Lang who, apart from his German classics, made a number of the very best American films of the 1940s and 1950s. He had been invited largely because of Truffaut's long-held admiration for him.
He seemed surprised that I knew most of his films and asked me which I liked best. I cited M (1931) as the German example and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) as the American, although it could have been half a dozen others.
Born in Vienna in 1890, Lang had an extraordinary mastery of European expressionism that allowed him to illustrate the state of a continent that gave rise to fascism, and to make an implicit critique of the "freedom" of American capitalism. Perhaps he was a pessimist for whom life itself appeared to be some kind of trap. But he was indisputably a great director.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, in which Dana Andrews gives one of his most effective performances, illustrates that greatness perfectly. It is a film of great economy and precision (it lasts only 80 minutes), with the terrifying inevitability of Greek tragedy and a pervading sense that man is his own worst enemy.
Andrews plays a reporter who agrees to incriminate himself in a murder case because his editor (Sidney Blackmer) is pursuing a campaign against capital punishment. They plant a lighter that was given to the reporter by his fiancee (Joan Fontaine) and the reporter then poses for the photographs that will prove his innocence. Almost immediately Lang's long shot of the scene seems to suggest that things may go badly wrong.
They do. He seduces a stripper who was the murdered girl's friend, infuriating his own girlfriend although he is sure that she'll understand when all is explained. But when the only man who can exonerate him is killed in a car accident, she fights to establish his innocence - only to find that he is, in fact, guilty.
This story is so tautly directed and skilful in its manipulation of our sympathies that, several times during the film, one changes sides, for and against the man who tempted fate and the woman whose righteousness may be impeccable but is also rather irritating.
The reason the film deserves its accolades is partly that Lang makes a simple format beautifully complicated. The form is one thing, the content another in most movies. Here they are indivisible.
Lang's career is ample evidence that while most European directors who went to America were hampered by the system, not all of them were destroyed by it. Europe itself did its share of destruction.
Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933) was banned by the Nazis, after which Lang was summoned to the office of Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, and apologetically asked to supervise Nazi film production.
Fearing his Jewish background would be discovered, he fled Germany. But it is only fair to add that he also fled Hollywood in 1956, citing disputes with producers.
Nevertheless Lang made great films in two continents - in three if you agree that The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959), made in India, is a successful mixture of his German and American styles. That's an extraordinary record.
The Hand (Review of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt) by Jacques Rivette, initially published at Cahiers du Cinéma, November 1957, from Rivette’s website
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
BRD - Crimeculture Roger Westcombe, also seen here: Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review
While
The City Sleeps / Beyond A Reasonable Doubt - The AV Club Nathan Rabin
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Beyond
a Reasonable Doubt (1956 film) - Wikipedia
JOURNEY TO THE LOST CITY
aka: The Tiger of Eschnapur
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
San Francisco's Fantoma Films has
released Fritz Lang's penultimate films, a perfect bookend to Dr. Mabuse.
The Tiger of Escnapur (1959, Fantoma, $29.99) and The Indian Tomb
(1959, Fantoma, $29.99) were once the most difficult to see of Lang's films
(they were once distilled into a single 90 minute film), and now here they are
in unbelievably gorgeous digital restorations with dazzling Technicolor and
clear sound on both German and English language soundtracks.
These stories are as well known
to the German public as the Dr. Mabuse tales: an architect arrives in Escnapur
to help build schools and hospitals for a wealthy Maharaja. But unfortunately
for him he falls in love with a beautiful temple dancer that the Maharaja had
intended to marry. And now the Maharaja's brother secretly plans to take over
the throne. In between all this, we have chases, attacks, battles, escapes, a
sexy dance and a few kisses. It's a clear precursor to the Indiana Jones
series, though these older films may move just a tad slow for our modern-day
attention spans.
User comments from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@onvol.net) from Naxxar, Malta
I was wary of purchasing Fantoma's
2-Disc Set of "Fritz Lang's Indian Epic" after being somewhat let
down by the 1921 Silent original (co-scripted by Lang himself) and also its
less-than-stellar reputation. For this reason, when the second part of the saga
turned up on Italian TV a couple of years ago, I decided to check it out just
the same so as to get an inkling of what to expect! I recall thinking it pretty
kitschy and unworthy of Lang's enormous talent, but Fantoma's sale (through
their website) of their entire DVD catalog a few months back made it an
irresistible acquisition! Well, having now watched the entire saga (with
dialogue and in color, as opposed to the rather static Silent version directed
by Joe May - although hearing the Indian-garbed characters talking in German
took some getting used to), I was pleasantly surprised by how genuinely
engaging and sheerly enjoyable it all was! Though it was sold as an epic
production (to the point of concluding ESCHNAPUR with the promise that Part II
would feature greater thrills and even more spectacle) at a time when such
films were all the rage, the saga was actually a pretty modest undertaking by
eclectic (and prolific) German producer Artur Brauner. Despite the two films'
exotic, handsome look (not least in the provocative dances of Debra Paget), the
budgetary constraints were painfully obvious in the special effects department,
especially the hilarious appearance of a 'ropey' cobra which is intended to
'test' (the scantily-clad) Miss Paget's faithfulness to the Maharajah!! All in
all, even if these films hardly constitute Lang's greatest work (though he
harbored an evident affection throughout his life for this particular tale,
which was originally conceived by his former wife Thea von Harbou), they have
great - and enduring - appeal for aficionados of old-fashioned, serial-like
adventure stories tinged with romance and mysticism.
Even so, while I don't subscribe to that school of thought myself, there are
some film critics (Tom Gunning, Jean Douchet and Pierre Rissient among them)
who think very highly of Lang's Indian diptych - the first considering it one
of Lang's towering achievements and the last two numbering it among the ten
greatest films of all time!!
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review
German film director Fritz Lang's worldwide fame was sealed
when he shot the 1927 silent epic Metropolis. That science fiction classic featured a hard, cold,
future world populated by two distinct groups of people: Workers and Thinkers.
Aside from introducing one of filmdom's most memorable female robots, in the
form of Futura, Lang also stunned audiences with his stark visual imagery,
especially that of the Workers dire underground world. Lang's imaginative and
dramatic presentations continued as he directed a steady string of visually
powerful films throughout the 1930s and 1940s, including M and the Dr. Mabuse
series.
Lang's longstanding love of the classic silent serial cliffhangers was once
again brought to life in 1959, at a time when that genre had nearly vanished,
with a pair of risky films, Der Tiger
von Eschnapur (The Tiger Of Eschnapur)
and the sequel Das Indische Grabmal
(The Indian Tomb).
These two films were a part of the director's attempt to create an epic adult
fairytale/adventure set in
Luckily for Lang buffs, Fantoma Films (distributed by Image) have restored the
two original titles, and have released The Tiger Of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb as two separate discs, with both the original German audio
track, as well as a nicely dubbed English mix. At their core, these are
B-movies made by a talented director, and as a result have a disarming blend of
hokum and entertainment.
In The Tiger Of Eschnapur,
Western architect Harald Berger (Paul Hubschmid) travels to
During his travels, Berger meets the lovely Seetha (Debra Paget), a temple
dancer also bound for Eschnapur and Chandra. During a pivotal sequence, Berger
saves Seetha from a vicious tiger attack, and in doing so, finds himself
inexplicably drawn to the beautiful dancer. The predictable love triangle
between Chandra, Berger and Seetha builds quickly and eventually turns violent.
A subplot about a planned overthrow of Chandra by his devious brother only adds
to the suspense that Lang tries to create.
This is, after all, a glorified serial, so the characterizations are all rather
one-dimensional, with a clear cut distinction between villain and hero. But
that limitation does not stop a talented director like Lang. His strong suit is
shown in his visual artistry, and I found it interesting how he slowly revealed
Berger, as well as Seetha, to be in a virtual prison, as the once beautiful
surroundings become a series of inescapable doors and hallways. For all of the
simple escapism that is on the surface in The Tiger Of Eschnapur, I sense Lang's true intent was to
present a dangerous and unknown world, where nothing is as it seems. At times
he succeeds, yet at other times the film appears to be nothing more than a
simple B-movie.
One of the standout moments is an exotic temple dance by Seetha. This is not
the kind of dancing one would have found in a prudish American film of that
time, and Lang is not shy about having the camera linger on the scantily clad
dancer as she moves in the shadow of a massive stone statue.
While there are numerous impressive visual elements here, some of the "not
so special" effects really date this film. During the scene where Berger
saves Seetha from a tiger attack, a laughably matted, fur-clad arm claws
menacingly during the battle. Similarly, during a crucial man-against-tiger
fight sequence near the conclusion, it appears that a badly stuffed animal is
thrown carelessly onto Berger. Later, a decapitated human head is so
unrealistic that it borders on comical. The fakir sequence includes a couple of
truly bad dissolves that are meant to represent someone "vanishing."
Come On, Baby, Be My Tiger Inventing
India on the German Screen in Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das
indische Grabmal, by Meenakshi
Shedde and Vinzenz Hediger from Rouge
The Tiger of Eschnapur Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Der
Tiger von Eschnapur (1959) James
Travers from FilmsdeFrance
User comments Indian Epic Part I from imdb Author: kirksworks
from Marin County, California
User comments Indian Epic Part I from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
Cinescape dvd review Brian Thomas
Teleport City Cinematics review also reviewing THE INDIAN TOMB
Der
Tiger von Eschnapur (1959) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford, also reviewing THE INDIAN TOMB
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also reviewing THE INDIAN TOMB
Mondo Digital dvd
review
also reviewing
THE INDIAN TOMB
THE INDIAN TOMB
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review
From his expressionist masterpieces Dr. Mabuse The Gambler, Metropolis to M and beyond, Fritz Lang has made an
indelible mark on world cinema. When The Indian Tomb was offered up for review, I grabbed for it.
Unfortunately, The Indian Tomb
has only a slight hint of Lang's genius—all in the visuals. The quality film's
aesthetic is undefortunately mired in an atrocious story.
Beginning with a recap of The Tiger of Eschnapur, The Indian Tomb starts with Harald's
sister, Irene (Sabine Bethmann), and his brother-in-law, Walter (Claus Holm)
arriving in Eschnapur. Chandra has hired Walter to build a giant tomb for
Seetha (Debra Paget), who ran off with Harald (Paul Hubschmid) in the previous
film. Chandra's men recapture Paul and Seetha, and Chandra tries to persuade
Seetha to love him. Meanwhile, priests want Seetha dead for betraying their
temple, and Chandra's brother plots to overthrow him.
If that sounds bad, just imagine trying to watch it. Gone are the human
characters of Lang's earlier films, now replaced with one-dimensional
caricatures that are caught in utterly banal and silly situations. The vitality
that usually permeates Lang's films is conspicuously absent here, and the whole
project is worse off because of it. The only thing that makes the film
worthwhile at all is Lang's visual style, which is still in full force here.
Shots of men on elephants, wide open Indian vistas, underground caves, tiger
cages, giant temples, and more make the film a visual feast. The set pieces are
stunning, as well as is Lang's sense of framing. I wonder if watching this film
on mute might have made it better.
Perhaps the worst thing about the film is the lack of logic. For example, a man
is whipped repeatedly in the face, and neither does he flinch nor is his skin
broken. There are so many illogical events that it would take too long to list
them here, but the effect is a complete inability to suspend disbelief—even for
the causal viewer.
Also, the "special effects" are some of the worst I've seen, even for
a film of this age. There is a sequence where Seetha dances in front of a
cobra, and the cobra looks just as bad as the tiger in the first installment.
You can see the wire holding it up half the time, and the other half it shakes
so much that it's obvious that is isn't a real snake. Why did Lang even bother?
Interestingly, about
The Indian Tomb Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Das
Indische Grabmal (1959) James
Travers from FilmsdeFrance
User comments Indian Epic Part II from imdb Author: kirksworks
from Marin County, California
User comments Indian Epic Part II from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
Teleport City Cinematics review also reviewing THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR
Der
Tiger von Eschnapur (1959) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford, also reviewing THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also reviewing THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR
Mondo Digital dvd
review
also reviewing
THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR
The New York Times (Eugene Archer) review
THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE
Lang's last film. Resisting the
producer's requests for a remake, sequel or Son of... Lang instead
updated the setting to postwar Germany, and invented a new Mabuse-type
character (Preiss). Set in a large hotel where the characters' every move is
monitored by the mastermind's TV screens, 1000 Eyes is none the less distinctly
and wilfully old-fashioned in a way that is all Lang's own. Lines like 'Don't
leave town', exploding telephones, blind prophets, gadgets more quaint than
modern, and a supremely elaborate thriller plot where no one and nothing are
what they seem, give it an anti-realist ambience more reminiscent of the
Hollywood serial than of contemporary film-making. And, of course, Lang's
anti-Fascist sentiments are unmistakably as up-to-date as they were in the
'20s. Great stuff.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
With the opening death, staged between two cars during rush
hour, Fritz Lang inaugurates the Sixties as augustly as Michelangelo Antonioni
did in L'Avventura that same year. The murder is predicted by a blind,
silver-manned clairvoyant (Wolfgang Preiss), who describes it to the skeptical
inspector (Gert Fröbe) over the phone; his office is tattooed with cosmic maps
and Byzantine engravings, shades hide his blank eyes, "Does the name Dr.
Mabuse mean anything to you?" Mabuse the criminal mastermind died in 1933
but this is Lang's report on the new epoch, old images with new limpidity,
post-Hiroshima and post-Hitler, decidedly: the Luxor Hotel boasts Nazi
foundations and a "negative aura," the heroine (Dawn Addams) is seen
trembling on the ledge until Peter van Eyck (an Aryan "Henry B.
Travers," a Yankee industrialist on NATO duty) convinces her back in.
Addams says she is on the run from her abusive husband, but nobody is to be
trusted, surfaces prove unreliable and a phone explodes -- the Cold War world
of nuclear catastrophes is just as distressing as Weimar Germany, the only
certain thing is uncertainty itself ("...und tod," the seer adds).
Mabuse has more to work with now, most notably the surveillance technology
which gives him thousands of eyes -- Addams and van Eyck talk at a party when
the camera pulls back to reveal an image on a TV monitor, a one-way mirror
later on catches Addams entering her room in a slip then crumbling to the
floor, crying. A welter of influences is manifest, from Godard to James Bond to
Dario Argento (Werner Peters was cast for flavor in The Bird with the
Crystal Plumage, Suspiria's seeing-eye canine attack is anticipated),
though the main thrust of this late masterpiece is Lang's own trajectory from
past to present, summarizing both his German and American periods for complete
translucence of style. Classicism and modernism are braided by anxiety, yet
Lang to the end rejects misanthropy, leaving his characters (and cinema) in a
fragile but hopeful embrace. With Andrea Checchi, Marie-Louise Nagel, Howard
Vernon, and Reinhard Kolldehoff. In black and white.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
From the silent
era to sound, from Germany to Hollywood, and from one genre to the next, Fritz
Lang's varied and tumultuous career extended over five decades, yet his
paranoid vision never wavered. No matter the period or locale, Lang always
found a sinister undercurrent at work, a conspiratorial force that's
far-reaching and immensely powerful, yet well-organized enough to stay out of
the public eye. An auteurist's dream, his trademark themes on the nature of
evil surfaced again and again in his darkly expressive films, a fact evidenced
by a pair of reissues separated by 41 years: 1919's two-part serial Spiders
and his final film, 1960's 1,000 Eyes Of Dr. Mabuse. Modeled too closely
after Louis Feuillade's superior 10-part classic Les Vampires (1915), Spiders
emphasizes exotic adventure over intrigue, but the numerous similarities
between the two don't favor Lang, who hadn't yet come into his own as a
director. Like the Feuillade serial, the title refers to an underground ring of
black-cloaked thieves—in Spiders, the villains pointedly include top
businessmen and public figures—behind a crime spree that leaves the police
confounded. The first episode, "The Golden Sea," is by far the
strongest, a breathlessly paced treasure hunt with one action setpiece barreling
into another as unflappable hero Carl de Vogt hangs from a hot-air balloon,
wrestles an asp, and saves nemesis Ressel Orla from being sacrificed to the
Incan sun god. The adventure continues in "The Diamond Ship," which
sticks to rote formula, again involving a ruthless quest for jewels and adding
swordplay, tigers, secret compartments, collapsing walls, and a few grossly
stereotyped Chinese crooks. As a formative effort, Spiders anticipates
the elaborate architecture in Lang's later work (particularly 1926's Metropolis)
and his preoccupation with densely organized schemes, but he wouldn't hit his
stride until after the German expressionist movement broke out the same year.
By the time he closed his career with 1,000 Eyes Of Dr. Mabuse, Lang had
been through the harrowing experience of WWII—his wife divorced him and joined
the Nazi party, and he fled Germany under cover of night—and refined his
technique on low-budget American genre films. The last in a trilogy that began
with 1926's Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler and 1933's The Testament
Of Dr. Mabuse—the latter of which had its final reel excised by Goebbels—1,000
Eyes shrewdly updates Lang's omniscient, Hitlerian mastermind for the
dawning media age. A rash of unsolved crimes leads detectives to the Luxor
Hotel, where the unseen Mabuse monitors the rooms with hidden cameras and
microphones and dictates orders through a vast network of nefarious thugs. The
labyrinthine plot has satisfying elements of police procedural, whodunit, and
old-fashioned melodrama, delivered with the no-nonsense punch of a good
American B-picture, but it's the idea of Mabuse that leaves a lasting
impression. For Lang to revive a character that originally echoed the Nazi
movement, so long after the war had ended, serves as a potent warning that evil
is ever-present among the powers-that-be, even during peacetime.
User comments from imdb Author: Boba_Fett1138 from Groningen, The Netherlands
Of course this isn't the most
classic or best Fritz Lang movie but it nevertheless is a more than worthy last
one by him. It's not that he died shortly afterward (he lived till 1976) but he
lost his eye sight and by 1964 he was already nearly blind. It feels right that
he ended his directing career with a Dr. Mabuse movie. His previous 2 directed
Dr. Mabuse movies, "Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler - Ein Bild der Zeit" and
"Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse" are among his best and also best known
works. He obviously had some real passion and respect for the character of Dr.
Mabuse. Why else would he had made 3 movies involving the character, over the
course of 4 decades. The character is of course also a real intriguing ones. He
was one of the first real movie villain in the 1922 movie "Dr. Mabuse, der
Spieler - Ein Bild der Zeit". A character that manipulates, influences
peoples will, all for his own benefits, with the help of hypnotic and
supernatural powers.
Just like 7 of the 8 Dr. Mabuse movies made, this movie is shot in atmospheric
black & white. Fritz Lang made a few color movies late in his career but
for this movie he went back to his beloved black & white. No doubt he did
this on intentions to let this movie connect more and better to the previous 2
Dr. Mabuse movie, made before this one. After all, the last Dr. Mabuse made
before this one dates back from 1933.
Even though this movie is made 27 years later, it's still a direct sequel to to
"Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse". It makes lots of references to the
events which occurred in that movie. However if you haven't seen the previous 2
movies, I think you'll also still have a good time watching this movie and
understand the events in it.
The visual style and style of film-making is also mostly the same when compared
to the 1933 movie. A style Fritz Lang was of course very experienced in, being
one of the best directors of the '20's and '30's. Nevertheless the movie is
still set in its 'present' day 1960. It makes this a '60's movie in '30's
style, which also provides the movie with a few clumsiness's and at times makes
this movie feel, sound and look way more outdated. It therefor can be argued if
this was the right approach. No doubt it is also part of the reason why this
movie isn't as well known and appreciated as the previous two Dr. Mabuse movies
from 1933 and 1922.
The cinematography within this movie is especially great and helps to give the
movie its own unique atmosphere and old fashioned feeling style.
Gert Fröbe was really excellent in this movie. He proofs himself once more to
be one of the best German actors that ever lived. Ir's fun that many actor
appearing in this movie also appeared in the later Dr. Mabuse sequels, often in
completely different roles, including Gert Fröbe.
It's sort of too bad that the whole movie doesn't have the pace and excitement
of the movie its first halve. There is more talking than real thriller or
suspense moments in the second part. Still the whole mysterious atmosphere and
question; 'Who is Dr. Mabuse?', remains present throughout the entire movie.
The movie also ends with a real blast and gets surprisingly action filled
toward its ending.
Yet another real recommendable Dr. Mabuse movie!
8/10
The
Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse — Cineaste Magazine Chris Fujiwara (2005)
The
Diabolical Dr. Mabuse on DVD: The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse; The ... Scott Thill from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 1, 2002, also reviewing THE
1,000 EYES OF DR. MABUSE
The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) capsule review also reviewing THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE
Langenegger, Marcel
DECEPTION C 71
A chilly, sleek looking film with a great cast that flounts the idea that corporate success is somehow equivalent to an equal amount of sexual pleasure, so anyone not getting enough has only themselves to blame. Hugh Jackman plays Wyatt, a jet setting alpha male that works for an international law firm who accidentally stumbles upon a mousy auditor Jonathan, Ewan McGregor, who is working late one night stewing over the company’s financial records. Usually working inside a giant glass office protected from the world outside, Jonathan has no social life to speak of, not even friends. Wyatt offers him a joint and the two become fast friends. Accidentally switching cell phones, Jonathan starts receiving Wyatt’s calls where anonymous women call and ask “Are you free?” Taking the bate, he decides to meet these women for what turns out to be sexual romps in upscale hotel rooms, among which include scantily clad actresses Natasha Henstridge, Paz de la Huerta, Daisy Bates, and Charlotte Rampling, whose face is subsequently seen on the cover of The Economist the next day under the byline Wall Street Heiress. Success breeds success, and Jonathan has somehow been elevated into an exclusive sex club where the members ask no questions, are forbidden to give their real names or discuss business, but simply meet for discretionary sex. It’s an intriguing idea where powerful people are too busy in their working lives to develop personal relationships, preferring instead to schedule sex like business appointments. Meanwhile Wyatt is supposedly off on a business trip to London so has no way of retrieving his phone, but urges Jonathan to enjoy the pleasures of his phone while he has it.
Everything for Jonathan is going swimmingly when suddenly it
gets even better when he meets Michelle Williams, known only as S, an
attractive girl he’d had the occasion to meet briefly on the subway, a girl
he’d obviously been thinking about, so he’s hesitant to pursue his regular
impersonalized routine, wanting instead to know everything about her, so he
invites her to dinner. When they meet in
Chinatown, they wander to a nearby hotel afterwards where just as things are
heating up, S is discovered missing, blood is seen on the bed, and Jonathan is
bushwacked, waking up in a state of confusion, calling the cops, where his
attempts to explain are even more confusing, especially since the scene of the
crime has been completely cleaned up by the time he awoke. Even more surprising, Wyatt steals his way
inside his apartment, obviously he’s not who he said he was and starts slapping
Jonathan around, making threats, claiming he’s got the girl, but what he wants
is for Jonathan to transfer money to secret bank account during his next
scheduled audit or the girl dies.
Jonathan discovers Wyatt assumes the identity of persons who died under
mysterious circumstances and has been working this scam for awhile, embezzling
corporate funds and then killing the person to avoid any trace. Rather than go to the police, this spirals
into a thriller that eventually leads to
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The title Deception has been used many times for movies. It was bestowed upon an Ernst Lubitsch import in 1921, and it graced a popular Bette Davis vehicle in 1946. It has also been used for everything from straight-to-video fodder to porn. The new Deception, written by Mark Bomback (Live Free or Die Hard) and directed by rookie Marcel Langenegger, falls somewhere in the middle of these. It's a twisty, sexy thriller, using recycled, familiar twists. A shy, reserved accountant, Jonathan McQuarry meets a dashing, outgoing lawyer Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman) and they become friends; Wyatt takes steps to coax Jonathan out of his shell. But when their cell phones get switched, Jonathan begins receiving calls from women asking him to meet them in hotel rooms. On one rendezvous, he meets a beautiful blonde (Michelle Williams), with whom he feels a connection (he spoke with her on the subway once). Of course, it's all too good to be true, and anyone who's ever seen any kind of twisty thriller will know who's in on it, how and why. Even Dante Spinotti's chilly cinematography, which emphasizes glass and reflections and nighttime (with blues and grays), is nothing surprising.
But the reason Deception rises slightly above the usual level of junk is McGregor. Hollywood loves these repressed types of characters (see Smart People or Starting Out in the Evening), but actors rarely know how to play them; usually they use external acting tricks to emphasize their internal torment and they end up lagging a few steps behind the audience. But McGregor finds a canny balance between his shyness and his desire to overcome it. He doesn't have a strong personality; rather than keeping the same tempo throughout, Jonathan reacts to other characters as he believes they would like to be reacted to. As a result, Jackman and McGregor share an easy, appealing chemistry during the film's setup. Williams, too, lends intelligence to her beauty and effectively sells her scenes with McGregor. It's too bad that Jackman, who co-produced the film, couldn't likewise find something to suit his own talents.
Deception, a new film starring Ewan McGregor and Hugh
Jackman, is being billed as a steamy thriller, but most of the mist dissipates
in the first half hour. McGregor plays Jonathan McQuarry, a junior accountant
who's auditing a law firm. He works well into the night, doesn’t have a family,
and doesn't have much of a social life, but Wyatt Bose (Jackman) can help.
Wyatt's been around the block, plays tennis, enjoys the company of the ladies,
and—lucky for McQuarry—works at the firm being audited, or so it seems. The
occasional cutaways to people who don't seem to know Wyatt are none too subtle.
And that's the theme of the film.
Each twist is preceded by a couple of fairly obvious clues, but the film
lingers on the plot turns as if they're unexpected then explains them to us,
nice and slow. What it doesn't explain is why McQuarry turns away from the
police and becomes an amateur sleuth when he needs to solve the mystery of the
missing girl, the unknown assailant, and the anonymous sex ring (that's the
steamy part). Granted, thrillers usually explain their aversion to cops with a
simple threat ("If you go to the police, she's dead. I'm watching
you."), so omitting it might seem economical in the right film.
But this film isn't economical.
It’s sluggish when it should be nimble, explanatory when things are clear, and
loose with logic when rigor would be more apt.
It does have a few neat ideas,
though, and it occasionally seems capable of rising above its basic plot. For
example, the visuals of Manhattan’s glass and grids harmonize nicely with the
idea of overworked, highly paid workers who turn to their cell phones for
anonymous sex. The work of the accountant is a column of numbers, and so are
the entries in his address book. When the great British actress Charlotte
Rampling (Swimming Pool, Heading South) turned up, I was suddenly
optimistic. With heavy eyes and an icy smile, she has a knack for elevating
unconvincing movies, but her appearance in Deception is too brief for
her magic to extend beyond a few incidental scenes.
In a larger role than Rampling,
Michelle Williams is also a welcome presence, but the movie's failing isn't in
the production. It’s in the persistent attempt to be clever without quite
delivering the goods.
Bracing neo-noir is what you get with "Deception," a new film with three very hot actors: Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams.
Up front, let me say that I went in feeling a bit dubious about "Deception." I've never really been an avid champion of Mr. McGregor's or Mr. Jackman's. Some films of theirs are less than spectacular. And until "Brokeback Mountain," Ms. Williams hadn't really caught my eye either. But it's fun to be a little bit surprised by getting entertained with a movie that could've very easily been a real turkey.
"Deception" marks the debut of Swiss-born director, Marcel
Langenegger, who has had success doing videos and television commercials. He
was an art student in
With a little suspended disbelief (what noir film doesn't require that?),
"Deception" deceives the person watching the film to some extent and
Jonathan McQuarry (McGregor) to beat hell. As Wyatt Bose (Jackman) says to
McQuarry, "You don't get much, do you?" So we can see here Ewan
McGregor is playing against type as a low-key, somewhat anti-social bean
counter who audits the books of various big businesses around
But he scores big time after he hooks up with Jackman's Bose, who appears to be a hip, socially-connected attorney that takes a liking to the slightly squirrelly McQuarry. Bose is a member of a covert sex club of high dollar business people whose lives are so filled with making big bucks, they have no time to bother with intricacies when it comes to intimacies. The club is made up of a phone network that requires members (when his or her cell phone rings) to respond 'yes' to the other member's telephonic query, "Are you free tonight?" No names. No history. No getting to know one another.
McGregor's character then spends many un-free nights in posh hotel rooms
with attractive, upwardly-mobile women while Bose is away on business in
But wouldn't you know it: our ardent auditor soon meets up with a wistful-looking lady whose beauty doesn't mask the baggage she carries. You can see it in her face. We only know her as S. Ms. Williams is S, and to say McQuarry falls for her hard would be putting it lightly.
Mr. Bose, however, has his own reasons for seducing Jonathan into the steamy evenings a lonely bean counter can have in a big city sex club. You need to find out exactly why that is on your own, and I should be thanked for that as "Deception" is much more deceptive that way.
A sort of metamorphosis occurs in the later frames of the film: McGregor becoming more Bose-like, and Jackman is more like McQuarry. Not to the ridiculous extent of John Woo's 1997 film "Face/Off" with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, but slightly reminiscent of it. Both McGregor and Jackman convince us how much McQuarry is smitten with S and just what a schmuck Bose is. Ms. Williams takes no prisoners as the vulnerable young woman who says with her face that she hates her life and would really like to "get out of this place" if she just could.
But taking the Oscar as the forever most 'take-no-prisoners' actress in film is the striking, mature Charlotte Rampling (in cameo) as one of young McQuarry's one-night-hotel-stands.
Ms. Rampling is old enough to be McGregor's mother and she's proud of it. She's been well cast for her brief appearance as an older Wall Street tycooness (is that right?) who's quite fond of younger men. Rampling was particularly noticeable in the 2003 French film, "Swimming Pool."
On the other hand, "Deception" (rated R) is really not much of a visual debauchery. Its theme is seductive, though, and so is its tone, accompanied by memorable but non-intrusive music composed by Ramin Djawadi.
One more thing: to allay your wondering why I would suggest that Charlotte Rampling should get an Oscar for the best all time 'take-no-prisoners' film personality, I simply say: it's because she starred with Sean Connery in John Boorman's "Zardoz" (1974)---the coolest freakin' movie ever made.
ReelViews (James Berardinelli)
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress)
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
Screen International Allan Hunter
FilmJerk.com Review [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: DVD Talk
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune Colin Covert
Los Angeles Times [Mark Olsen]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)
New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
Langseth,
Lisa
PURE
(Till det som är vackert) B 88
aka: Beloved
Sweden (97 mi) 2009
This first time feature film by Swedish writer/director
Lisa Langseth seems to have gone through several permutations, including at
least 3 or 4 different titles, initially released in
From this emotional abyss, Katarina has learned
to elevate her spirit through the use of classical music and an MP3 player with
earplugs, where the musical soundtrack is filled wall-to-wall with
breathtakingly beautiful music, especially from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven,
where she takes her somewhat common and unimaginative boyfriend to a concert of
Mozart’s Requiem, played to perfection
by the Gothenburg Symphony in their hometown concert hall. While she is utterly enthralled, his reaction
is more or less one of open hostility due to the obvious class difference,
where his life bears no resemblance to that music. Katarina’s curiosity, on the other hand,
takes her into the concert hall afterwards where she listens to a rehearsal in
progress, temporarily transported from the graphic violence of her
neighborhood. When a woman approaches
her, mistaking her for a temporary job applicant as a front desk receptionist,
she creates a sympathetic lie that sounds heart renderingly appealing and is
miraculously given the position straightaway.
Apparently, the maternal instincts of her boss, Isabella Alveborg, kick
in when Katarina indicates a preference for Mozart to Snoop Dogg, drawing a
distinction between her own daughter, suddenly becoming the daughter she never
had. This position gives her access to
the continuous stream of music and even some of the principle players,
including the conductor, Samuel Fröler, who introduces her to a book of poetry
and the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, where the quote “Courage is life's
only measure” literally enraptures her, where she is quickly swept off her feet
by the surge of untapped emotions from this elegant smorgasbord of cultural
enlightenment. The conductor obviously
takes liberties with this intern, which turns into an ill-advised Clintonian
Monica Lewinsky affair, which she misreads, severing all attachments to her
former life, which leaves her flying freefall on a trapeze with no safety
net.
Vikander’s emotional
upheaval is beautifully portrayed, much of it wordless, where she moves between
an enraptured schoolgirl’s crush to a demoralized and humiliated woman who’s
been betrayed, where she’s cruelly removed from her position, taking her feet
out from under her, initiating a spiraling descent into a crushing void of
hopelessness and despair. Having
literally nowhere to go, as her boyfriend has disowned her, throwing her out as
well, all she has is the street to comfort her, finding each day a stark
nightmarish rejection, feeling ever more helpless and scorned. At this point, the film’s turn to misery and
gloom has a Hungarian feel of bleak depression, something that country
specializes in above all other nations, where suicide idealizations frequent
the screen, led by Vikander’s no holds barred approach in allowing her soul to
rise to the surface and literally be exposed and debased, leaving her with an
irreparable psychological wound that is internally ruptured, where she can’t
stop the bleeding. Based on the
eloquence and ferocity of Vikander’s performance, offering a fiercely unique
perspective, this could have been one of the best films of the year, as again,
Beethoven is never far away in the musical expression of human pain and agony,
where he contemplated suicide at the impending loss of his hearing. After all the effort to get to this point,
building a believable character within such a painfully realist framework, it’s
the director that is her own undoing, adding an epilogue style finale that
feels like a betrayal of everything that came before, offering a compromising,
uplifting air of hope through art and cultural awareness that simply isn’t
there. She reaches a point for which there
are no further options, but then one is pulled out of a hat, which feels more
like trickery and the artificial wonders of rewrites, offering a studio style
ending that is more in line with focus groups than real life, as this otherwise
tragically uncompromising film is not designed and triggered for happy endings,
but needs the blistering shock of her own hellish emptiness and inadequacy,
which the director achieves for one startling moment, which wordlessly offers a
painterly Madonna and child rendering of transcendence from human
suffering. Unfortunately the director
then adds a completely unnecessary tacked-on ending, which derails the
previously established dour mood, stealing much of the emotional power away
from that original moment of utter devastation, allowing the audience a release
point to feel good about, as if she has finally achieved Kierkegaard’s message.
User reviews from imdb Author: WilliamCKH from Northern
California
I caught this movie at our local film festival and found the film
fascinating. It tells the story of a young girl Katarina, beautifully played by
Alicia Vikander, coming into her own maturity after being exposed to timeless
music and poetry. Through abit of courage, she lands a job as a receptionist in
city's music center, gradually giving her the skills and independence she needs
to succeed in life on her own terms. Her reality is ugly at times, with a
mother who is messed up and suicidal. She depends on the men in her life to
give her the necessities in life. But soon we see her stronger side, longing
for this new reality of beauty and poetry missing from her old life...but it's
not that easy, and she does things that are wrong, terribly wrong...A
conscience, though, is not a luxury she can all afford. I think the director
wants us to take pity on Katarina. Katarina, I think, doesn't want that.
Alicia Vikander is wonderful in the role. She reminds me of a young Sandrine
Bonnaire. This is a star-making film for her and I'm looking forward to what
she's going to do next.
User reviews from imdb Author: gradyharp from United
States
PURE ('Till det som är vackert') is a stunning little film from
Katarina (Alicia Vikander, a brilliant, young, fresh 22 year old Swedish
actress) lives in poverty with her boyfriend Mattias (Martin Wallström, a
handsome, sensitive blue-eyed actor) in an unkempt apartment where Mattias
spends his days watching television while Katarina seeks meaning to her grungy
life on the streets as a prostitute. Her family is in disarray - her mother
Birgitta (Josephine Bauer) is an alcoholic and a mentally ill wasted person -
and Katarina is discontent. By chance she hears some Mozart played on the
YouTube and has an epiphany moment. She has been a driven, hurt and hopeful
soul, but Hearing Mozart somehow changes that. The music draws her to the
Gothenburg Symphony Concert Hall where because of some free tickets she and
Mattias hear a performance of the Mozart Requiem as conducted by Adam (Samuel
Fröler): the experience bores Mattias but transforms Katarina. The concert hall
becomes a magnet for Katarina and as she sneaks into the hall for a rehearsal
of the Beethoven 3rd she is mistakenly identified by receptionist Nya (Isabella
Bauer) as a potential candidate for job in the hall. Katarina's apparent love
for music and her openness gain her the position of Concert Hall receptionist:
she has escaped her dreary life and is surrounded by classical music. Gradually
Katarina meets and becomes friends with Adam who finds her refreshing and in
addition to talking about music he introduces her to great literature and
philosophy. The bond grows and Katarina and Adam have an affair, a relationship
that is transient because Adam is married. When Adam shares with Katarina that
the affair must not go on, Katarina is crushed, and because of the fear Adam
holds about her omnipresence in the concert hall, he has her fired. The manner
in which this abrupt change in Katarina's transformed new life progresses
echoes one of the phrases of Kierkegaard the Adam taught her - "Courage is
life's only measure' - and the story takes surprising turns and an even more
surprising end.
Much of the success of the film is due to the extraordinary acting by Alicia
Vikander, a young talent who seems wise beyond her years as far as intuitive
acting skills. The musical score is attributed to Per-Erik Winberg, though the
music throughout the film is Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Massenet. In addition
to the story being well written and directed and performed, there is a
secondary message for the audience: the introduction to classical music and to
cultural concepts can change lives of young people if they gain exposure. It is
a challenge we should attempt of provide.
A high-school dropout determines to transcend her troubled past,
no matter the cost, in intense drama "Pure." Although destined to be
remembered as the film that made riveting 22-year-old thesp Alicia Vikander a
star in her bigscreen debut, the strong writing, clever use of music and
confidently nuanced visuals mark Swedish helmer-scribe Lisa Langseth as a
talent to watch. Pic won
Adapting her own play (which starred Noomi Rapace when it premiered at Stockholm's Dramatic Theater in 2004), Langseth explores issues of class and culture in contempo Sweden. Her protagonist is 20-year-old Katarina (Vikander, in a visceral performance), the tightly wound daughter of a suicidal alcoholic.
Katarina's savage soul finds solace in classical music, so she's practically in heaven when she bluffs her way into a receptionist job at the Gothenburg Symphony. And she flowers under the attentions of the orchestra's charismatic, married conductor Adam (Samuel Froler, casually cruel), who tries to cultivate her taste with recommended readings and recordings. But their brief affair leaves her more vulnerable than ever.
There are many pleasures in Langseth's complex, multilayered screenplay, not least the irony of Katarina's deadly serious interpretation of Adam's favorite Kierkegaard quotation, "Courage is life's only measure." While a climactic plot twist may seem over-the-top given the story's realism to that point, it makes deliciously wicked sense in terms of character development.
In a film full of contrasts, copious classical pieces (from Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Massenet) counterpoint loud hip-hop sounds, just as sophisticated city-living opposes the limited offerings of the rough suburbs.
The sleek, realist production package poignantly underlines Katarina's emotional ups and downs. At first, the stellar lensing by Simon Pramsten ("Sebbe") frames her isolation outside the community she wants to join, but ultimately makes her a part of it. Meanwhile, the convincing wardrobe, hair and makeup designs also chart her metamorphosis from self-hatred to self-confident.
Camera (color), Simon Pramsten; editor, Malin Lindstrom; music, Per-Erik Winberg; production designer, Lena Selander; sound (Dolby Digital), Henrik Ohlin; associate producers, Jessica Ask, Gunnar Carllson, Mikael Frisell, Helena Sandermark, Christian Holm. Reviewed on DVD, Chicago, Feb. 28, 2011. (In Berlin Film Festival -- market; Santa Barbara Film Festival -- competing; 2010 Pusan Film Festival -- Flash Forward.) Running time: 101 MIN.
Søren
Kierkegaard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Danish philosopher
Gothenburg
Symphony Orchestra official website
Lanners, Bouli
Michelle Zaladonis, Facets Multi Media:
Philippe “Bouli” Lanners born in
ELDORADO B 89
A grim, tautly constructed film about two dysfunctional guys on a road trip, a sure fire bet to cinema nirvana for some who just live for pictures like this. However, with this film, the minimalist genre is being pushed to the limits of miserablism, as after awhile, there’s nothing remotely humorous about these guys, as what made them dregs of the earth rises to the surface leaving the audience underwhelmed by the enveloping bleakness on this road to oblivion. Typically in road movies, the dysfunction leads to the biggest laughs—my personal favorite, Aki Kaurismäki’s TAKE CARE OF YOUR SCARF, TATIANA (1994), as two Finnish dweebs drive through the Lapland swigging boatloads of coffee and vodka while picking up Russian chicks and listening to plenty of rock ‘n’ roll. That’s pretty much the standard formula. In this film, however, breaking from the norm becomes the formula, such as how these guys meet, as it’s certainly under inauspicious circumstances. Following the religious ramblings from some homeless looking character who claims to be Jesus Christ, a man who never again appears in the film, who may as well be an omen of doom, Elie (Fabrice Adde) is found hiding under the bed in the apartment of Yvan (the director himself), apparently caught in the act of theft, where initially he claims to have a weapon and refuses to come out until after Yvan falls asleep and he unsuccessfully makes a break for it. The two remain stuck together like glue, like it or not, where their attempts at conversation are meager to non-existent, where they talk in circles endlessly about subjects that never get discussed. Eventually after getting duly pissed off, Yvan feels for the guy as he has nowhere to go and he doesn’t want him breaking into his place again, so he tries to help him out by actually driving him to his parent’s house somewhere near the French border in French-speaking Belgium, though the film was actually shot on location in Liège.
As it turns out, Elie claims he is a junkie who’s been straight for two weeks and was scrounging for busfare home, or so his story goes. What happens next is a series of misadventures, all set under a menacing sky that pours buckets of rain on these dour souls when they’re least prepared for it. There isn’t an ounce of sunlight anywhere in this picture, as looking out the ’79 Chevy station wagon car windows the flat landscape reveals factory smokestacks leaving clouds of black smoke in the air, usually blending in with the near darkened sky, the depiction of a veritable wasteland. In momentary lulls, loud industrial music plays, as if we didn’t get the point, to slightly amusing effect. The people they encounter make the two of them seem like the two sanest people on the planet, reinforcing an absurdist element of comic misunderstanding that is already present. First, Philippe Nahon makes his presence, the creepy butcher from Gaspar Noe’s I STAND ALONE (1998) and also IRRÉVERSIBLE (2002), offering his nearby garage for needed maintenance repairs, but not really offering, more like ordering. And when they get there, all he cares about is getting them drunk, pointing out his vast collection of cars, each one with the impression of hitting a person still imprinted into the frame. When they make their escape in the dead of night, the car ends up in worse shape than before, both pelted by a punishing storm. In the aftermath, they need still more road assistance, this time by a nudist who calls himself Alain Delon who asks no questions. Back on the road again, they make it to Elie’s home, where his mother, Françoise Chichéry, gives a great performance, especially when his unidentified father, who is never seen, only heard, gets in a shouting match while kicking his son out, while the camera remains fixed on the mother, who is perhaps the only one in the entire film who truly comprehends the extent of her loss. The humor disappears altogether and the tone of the film shifts as truth hurts.
While zany characters continue to inhabit the film, what’s
interesting is the effect afterwards on this undynamic duo, where Yvan in his
cut off shorts and khaki shirt and mangy hair is an outsider, but he still
gives a damn, while Elie on the other hand has nothing to care about,
beautifully expressed earlier at a gas stop where the clerk refused to even
wait on them, so after attempting to get her attention to no avail, they simply
walked out of the store with whatever merchandise they felt like taking. Whatever brief attempts at friendship that
were made earlier in the film seem more and more futile, as over time they have
less and less to say. What’s interesting
is how the wasteland outside creeps into the characters inside, where the
emptiness of the moment looms larger every second. Again, the brilliant music by Renaud Mayeur
never sounds easy or impressionable, but always feels troubled, as if
expressing the turbulence outside. As
the secondary characters grow even more dour, such as a couple of charming
bikers who offer their own nihilist views where nothing matters, Yvan and Elie,
like the two knuckleheads in Beckett’s existential play Waiting for Godot are challenged to make any sense out of the
situation. Beautifully shot by cinematographer
Jean-Paul De Zaeytijd, much of this takes place in the final moments of light
as darkness is about to devour the day.
It’s not often that films allow all modes of communication to simply
fade away into nothingness, where all attempts at finding meaning are refuted,
where literally nothing matters any more.
Zero point, the point at which nothing else exists, is finally
reached.
NewCity
Chicago Ray Pride
Belgian writer-director-actor Bouli Lanners turns the
backroads of his native land into a widescreen setting for a melancholy road
movie-cum-buddy movie that strikes all the right absurdist notes in an
admirably concise running time. When used car dealer Yvan (Lanenrs) discovers
heroin addict Elie (Fabrice Adde) robbing his apartment he takes an unlikely
shine to the younger man and they hit the road in Yvan’s vintage Chevrolet.
Lanners has said he wanted Wallonia to resemble Montana, and he and
cinematographer Jean-Paul De Zaeytijd pull it off: they’re poets of abrupt
weather. With Philippe Nahon, Didier Toupy, Franise Chichy. Renaud Mayeur’s
score offers ironic grandeur. 80m. 35mm.
Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall
Belgian writer-director Bouli Lanners puts a fresh spin on the
buddy road movie with this offbeat 2008 comedy, starring as an auto importer of
questionable integrity. One night he finds a young junkie (Fabrice Adde) has
broken into his house, but the burglar is so inept that the older man takes
pity and drives him home to the French border. Traveling side roads, they
develop a tentative friendship as they encounter a scary psychic and car
enthusiast (Philippe Nahon of I Stand Alone), a nudist camper, and an
abandoned Doberman--bizarre situations that Lanners invests with a tinge of
sadness and benevolence. To his credit, he avoids a formulaic ending,
reflecting instead on the impermanence of human connections and the inescapable
baggage of the self. In French with subtitles. 81 min.
ELDORADO Facets Multi Media
Yvan, writer-director
(and sometimes actor) Bouli Lanners, Ultranova), casts himself as a
quick-tempered, 40-year-old vintage car dealer, who arrives home one night only
to discover young Elie, an inept young burglar, trying to rob him. But rather
than beating him up for the intrusion, he develops a strange affection for him,
which includes taking him home to his parents in his old Chevrolet. Thus begins
the start of an odd journey across Belgium, with wide-screen images that
suggest the American West. Wacky rural humor and a yearning for country roads
run smack into urban decay. Eldorado strikes a just-so balance between sadness
and absurdist humor, while the score by Renaud Mayeur evokes the road-movie
mood, with just a hint of ironic parody. The instinctive mix of stylistic savvy
and beautifully nuanced content makes Eldorado a droll and idiosyncratic
addition to the Belgian Noir pantheon and distinguishes Bouli Lanners as a
film-maker deserving of wider acclaim.
Village Voice (Melissa Anderson) review
The title of Bouli Lanners's modest, yet surprisingly affecting, road-trip/buddy movie, which refers to an imaginary place of great wealth and opportunity, isn't necessarily ironic: The writer-director-actor has a profound love for the flat expanses of the film's southern Belgium and its gas stations, snack shops, and RV parks. Eldorado is a tale of two guys, fat and thin: Stroppy vintage-car dealer Yvan (Lanners, dressed like a Walloon Kevin Smith) comes home one night to find smack-scrawny Elie (Fabrice Adde) robbing him. Instead of calling the cops, Yvan becomes oddly protective of the pathetic felon and offers to drive him to his parents' house near the French border. The voyage provides both lovely shots of low-country landscapes—which suggest not the starker palette of Dardenne Brothers' territory, but magic-hour prairie heartland—and genuinely funny encounters with weirdos (a car-accident fetishist, a nudist named Alain Delon). When the traveling companions reveal their backstories, the monologues avoid mawkishness, further upending all low expectations of this frequently trite genre. In its final act, Lanners's film is smart and confident enough to acknowledge that certain lives are dead ends, while others get tired of just spinning their wheels.
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [3/6]
Road movies are
custom-made for America’s landscape—all those lost highways and easy riders
(see page 73)—but the genre has proved to be surprisingly flexible in terms of
nationality. Writer-director Bouli
Lanners’s tale of two Belgian deadbeats—a car salesman (Lanners) and a
junkie (Adde) caught robbing the former’s home—cruising around their home
country in a ’79 Chevy has all the hallmarks of our own homegrown odes to two-lane
blacktops. The freeways and backstreets might be mistaken for some route below
the Mason-Dixon line; even the gnarly garage-rock soundtrack is in English. But
the quirky folks they meet along the way, from the naked RV driver named “Alain
Delon” to the way-too-intense Good Samaritan (Nahon, channeling his psycho from
I Stand Alone), have a distinctly
Euro-weird vibe about them. Besides, you don’t have to be from the US of A to
search for your own personal lost city of gold.
Lanners’s
preference for po-faced Continental quirk eventually wears out its welcome, but
Eldorado does have one last trick
up its sleeve; just when you think you have this deadpan buddy comedy figured
out, the film swerves into unexpectedly pessimistic territory. Fatalistic
endings are nothing new, but the way it recasts the movie’s long, strange trip
suggests that down is the only direction left.
FIPRESCI Dana Linssen
The Eldorado of Bouli Lanners lies not hidden in the lush greenery of a South-American jungle. It is to be found under the wide horizons of the Wallonian skies in Belgium. But still, hidden it is, only to emerge under the golden sunsets and sunrises of the characteristic glow of the Northern hemisphere.
In his second feature film (following 2005's equally impressive Ultranova) director and actor (after a minor part in the kindred-spirited art house hit Aaltra he now takes the male lead) Bouli Lanners hits the road again in the strangely graceful desolation of the Wallonian landscape.
Originally self-taught as a painter, Lanners and his director of photography Jean-Paul De Zaetijd literally tint the celluloid in every possible shade of worn-out gold. Thus the filmmakers push their portrayal of Belgium — though similarly sad-absurd as in the grayish blue of Ultranova, in which they give you an idea about the slow and poisonous Americanization of the European landscape — a little further.
The genesis of Eldorado stems from a true story. Upon coming home one night the director caught two thieves in the act. One of them was hiding under his bed, the other one under his desk. And all three of them were scared shitless. Just like his character in the film he could not get them out of his house, nor could he get to his phone to call the police. From that bizarre status quo a night of talking arose. The events in the film that develop from there are pure invention, underlined the director in Cannes.
Protagonists Yvan (Lanners) and Elie (Fabrice Adde) belong to the contingent of beautiful anti-heroical losers that, to the great delight of audiences, inhabit European cinema. For whatever feeling of remorse, the goodness of his heart, the inability to act (all of this to be subtly revealed during the course of the events) Yvan decides to give burglar Elie a swing on the road and bring him home.
Anyone who thought the road movie to be an exclusively American genre, tied to the American dream and the final frontier, should see Eldorado to realize how, crammed between borders of old European countries, the Belgian road movie is essentially a voyage within. The journey of Ivan and Elie leads from nowhere to nowhere, through the claustrophobic woods of the Ardennes, along deserted camp sites (where only a nude Alain Delon is to be found) and across the B-routes, the old smugglers trails, the short cuts to no cuts at all.
Two men and the road — it is as simple as that. All the absurdities that give the film its melancholic light-heartedness arise from that. As does the sincere humane portrayal of these down and out guys. And for Bouli Lanners who tries to live his life as if he were in his own road movie, thinking, writing, scouting locations while driving along, the car is a time capsule to another world. Not a world so far away, but the one that unrolling beside the car window, this little fake film frame to the world. "I could make no films without at least one sideways tracking shot", he assured in an interview on the occasion of Ultranova. It reveals the world less seen. Thus his filmmaking goes back to the explorers that discover the world through their lens as well.
Lanners himself describes the palette of Eldorado as a faded 'Western'. But the gold that shimmers is as much the gold of the "Belge Noire", named after the pure and dark Belgian chocolate that lends its name to a new wave of Belgian and Wallonian filmmakers.
Besides Lanners, the informal movement includes the casual company of Aaltra-directors Gustave De Kervern and Benoît Delépine; of actor/director Benoît Poelvoorde (Man Bites Dog, C'est arrivé près de chez vous, 1992); of Fabrice Du Welz (The Ordeal, Calvaire, 2004) and Olivier Smolders (Black Night, Nuit noire, 2005). Whether it is tragic-comedy with an Aki Kaurismäkian-touch, such as Aaltra, the full-blooded Ardennes-horror of The Ordeal or the used future magic realism of Black Night, each and every one of these filmmakers engages himself with the notion of loss and decay, with the economic deforestation that has eroded their sense of cultural pride and identity. Thus the affinity with the far more severe style of filmmaking of the Dardennes is never far away: they all share the same concern about the European waste land, whether it is social realism or the burlesque defining their tone.
Slant Magazine review Joseph Jon Lanthier
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Screen International review Lee Marshall
The NYC Movie Guru [Avi Offer]
Film-Forward.com Kevin Filipski
Eye for Film (Darren Amner) review [2.5/5]
Director interview Interview by Paul O’Callaghan from the British Film Institute, October 28, 2008
The Hollywood Reporter review Ray Bennett
Variety Leslie Felperin
Chicago Sun-Times Bill Stamets
New York Times Stephen Holden
THE GIANTS (Les Géants)
Belgium France Luxembourg (84 mi) 2011
The Giants Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily, May 20, 2011
Life is an awfully big adventure for two adolescent boys and their newfound friend in The Giants (Les Geants), a joyous heartwarmer with an endearing Mark Twain meets Ken Loach vibe. Bouli Lanners third feature deftly negotiates between heartbreak and hilarity in a picaresque story notable for its boisterous good spirits, economical storytelling and engaging central performances. A refreshing take on some classical story elements, the film should appeal to Lanners growing following and delight audiences across the age spectrum.
Cinematographer Jean-Paul De Zaeytjid does an expert job of capturing the lush green countryside, rivers and fields where the story unfolds. There is an immediate connection to the world of Huckleberry Finn and the beauty of wind whispering through blades of grass that would not seem out of place in a Terrence Malick film. The rustic idyll is where we meet 15 year-old Seth (Martin Nissen) and 13 year-old Zak (Zacahrie Chasseriaud), two close-knit brothers living in the country home of their late grandfather.
Their mother appears to have abandoned them to their own devices for the Summer. They are broke, bored but endlessly resourceful as they steal food from the basement of a neighbour’s house and make their own entertainment. When they meet Dany (Paul Bartel), the duo becomes a trio and the dynamic changes as they dare to become a little more adventurous.
One of the reasons that The Giants casts such a spell is the refreshing depiction of the adolescents as affectionate and good-natured. Even when their behaviour grows reckless or reprehensible ( selling grandpa’s house to a local drug dealer, breaking into a family’s summer house etc) we see it as a question of survival rather than malice.
The trio are lovable scamps rather than the sullen angry young men or menacing hoodies that have come to dominate the depiction of a younger generation in modern mainstream cinema. Set aside the dope smoking, wank jokes and fascination with farting and they could step from the pages of Enid Blyton.
The lightness of touch that Lanners displays with casting and story allows him to confront some serious issues of parental abandoment, isolation and how the growing bonds of friendship offer a brighter hope for the future. Dany suffers at the hands of his violent, psychotic big brother Angel ( a scary Karim Leklou), shady drug-dealer Boeuf (a twitchy, hilarious Didier Toupy) takes them for a ride but they also experience the kindness of strangers when Rosa (Marthe Keller) saves them from the pouring rain and takes them home for tea.
The performances of the three boys are very impressive; unselfconscious, endearing and completely believable as three musketeers against the world. They make you care immensely about the fate of the characters and ensure that Bouli Lanners film will widely engage with hearts and minds.
The
Giants (Les Géants): Cannes 2011 Review
David Rooney at Cannes from The
Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2011
The teenage cast members could hardly be better in Bouli Lanners' coming of age tale centered on two Belgian brothers.
CANNES -- Belgian director Bouli Lanners was a painter before he turned to acting and filmmaking, and there’s ample evidence of that background in the sumptuous visuals of The Giants, with lush landscapes and a wooded river setting that show the majestic beauty of nature at its most seductive. Three appealing young actors bring unforced charm, buoyancy and vulnerability to this coming of age story, but the film is held back by lack of meat on its narrative bones.
Written by Lanners and Elise Ancion, The Giants is a European take on modern Hollywood films about the exhilarating freedoms and jarring dangers of adolescent experience, such as The Outsiders or Stand By Me. The film is more focused on mood and on suggesting the inner lives of its characters than on their adventures and adversities, and its unvarnished depiction of the harsh betrayals and disappointments of the world provides glimmers of a grittier brand of social realism. It’s also slickly packaged, with the kind of high-sheen production values seldom applied to intimately observational storytelling of this type.
Two brothers in their mid-teens, Zak (Zacharie Chasseriaud) and Seth (Martin Nissen), are left to their own devices and dwindling funds by an absentee mother working abroad. Shacked up for the summer at the rural cottage of their late grandfather, they strike up a warm friendship with another unsupervised local teenager, Dany (Paul Bartel).
Zak, the youngest, feels the sting of abandonment, constantly checking for cell phone messages from his mother. But the three of them basically are just looking to score some weed, go joyriding in grandpa’s beat-up car and stave off boredom by any means available. Seth also is eager to stay out of the way of his violent older brother Angel (Karim Leklou), a psychotic thug who acts as henchman to drug-dealer Beef (Didier Toupy). While the emotional aspects are understated and the three young actors convey their feelings less in words than in brief unguarded moments, the loose-limbed action shows a nice grasp of the raw tenderness of youth, as well as the rebellion. The excitement that comes with their sudden independence lends plausibility to the brothers’ dicey scheme to rent out their grandfather’s house to Beef as a base to harvest and distribute his cannabis crop. The movie’s central section becomes somewhat flaccid as the kids goof off, stealing food from a neighbor’s cellar, breaking into a vacation home to drink the owners’ booze stash, and then obtaining temporary shelter from a kind stranger (Marthe Keller). But Lanners and Ancion bring humor, delicacy and poignant insight to the bonds among boys whose cultivated bravado barely masks their insecurities and their need to be loved. The gullible trio gets ripped off by Beef and his pitiless cronies, and despite the teens’ perception of themselves as tough and resilient, they are ill-equipped to defend themselves against the cruelties of the adult world. But while this steers the film toward a melancholy conclusion, there’s also bittersweet satisfaction in their gentle steps toward maturity and self-reliance.
Toupy, Leklou and Gwen Berrou as Beef’s amusingly dour cokehead girlfriend provide the villainy in what’s basically a modern twist on a classic dark fairy tale about children lost in the woods. The teenage cast members could hardly be better, particularly the quietly touching Chasseriaud.
Neo-folksy English-language vocals and score by the Bony King of Nowhere (a musical project headed by Belgian composer Bram Vanparys) provides a lovely melodic complement to the action. And Jean-Paul De Zaeytijd’s gorgeous widescreen cinematography (the film was shot on Luxembourg locations, mostly using crisp natural light) helps summon elegiac thoughts of youthful summer idylls.
Cannes
2011. Directors' Fortnight Awards. "Breathing" and "Giants" David Hudson at Cannes from Mubi, May 20,
2011
Lanthimos, Yorgos
DOGTOOTH B 83
Greece (96 mi) 2009
A quirky family values from hell comedy about miscommunication and
dysfunction that veers into the disturbingly absurd, like incest, family abuse,
and self-inflicted mutilation, all of which are misguided attempts to make
sense out of this world, one that is grounded in utter fabrication. Meet a perfectly comfortable middle class
family with a car in the carport that Dad drives to work each day at a nearby
factory, with a swimming pool in a back yard that seems to go on for the length
of a soccer field. Instead of a riff on
the modernized world in Jacques Tati’s MON ONCLE (1958), what’s truly unique
here is that the parents have completely misinformed their kids about the world
outside and decided instead to raise them in a completely imaginary world where
they are trained never to leave the boundaries of their home, where if they
stay inside they’ll always be safe, and where lurking in the garden can lead to
deadly trouble from wild cats if they’re not careful. Now all in their teens, there are two girls
known as older and younger, and a son.
Interestingly, Dad, the only one to ever leave the home, brings a woman
(the company security guard) home every now and then for his son and pays her
like a prostitute to have sex with him, but it’s her intercourse with the
sisters that has the most devastating consequences, bringing in videos from the
outside world which stirs things up a bit.
No one bats an eye or ever disobeys, as they are ruled by their parent’s
fear tactics. So what we watch take
place over the course of the film is bored children attempting to amuse
themselves, occasionally getting on each other’s nerves, inexplicably resorting
to violence or sexual curiosity from time to time, where their otherworldly
robot-like oddness is enough to make anyone think they may be inhabited by
extraterrestrials.
While the sight gags are amusing, as the kids invent games with
anesthetics, giving each a dose, and the first one to wake up wins, or they
stumble around playing blind man’s hide and seek, while also occasionally using
incorrect language, as they were intentionally taught the incorrect meaning of
certain words, which has its moments, but after awhile, one wonders where all
this is leading. It’s clear the parents
have stacked the deck in an attempt to control their own kids by inventing an
imaginary world, and with no TV, newspapers, or telephone, the kids have no
conception of any outside world, so like the grown children they are, they
continually reach the wrong conclusions when they’re perplexed about something. Little by little, things start to go wrong,
where the kids seem to have their own ideas about how to exist in this world,
but what their own parents have in store for them is equally mind
boggling. When the influence of several
older videos suddenly breaks through the cracks of this hermetically sealed
world, we see the influence of ROCKY (1976), JAWS (1975), or FLASHDANCE (1983)
and recognize how easily this corrupts their world, where the parents actually
prefer the safety of incest after that, thinking they have more control than more
visits from an outsider. Featuring
deadpan, emotional listlessness and cruelly bizarre setups, one eventually
grows tired of the silliness of it all, as it’s hard to bring thoughts about
this film anywhere into context outside the theater, as it seems to have little
or no application, so this is simply a case of experience it for yourself and
see what you get out of it. Obviously
many found it uproariously funny, while others found it mildly amusing, growing
tired of the same, monotonous tone that exists throughout. There are moments of mind-numbing violence,
also plenty of uninhibited sex scenes, many of which are comical, yet overall,
despite the attempt to be something different, oddness by itself is not enough
to make this a good film, as it suffers from the new director syndrome of not
knowing how to resolve the family conflict.
This one ends without really taking us anywhere.
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams] at Toronto
For true terror, one had to look away from the midnight
screenings and toward Dogtooth,
Giorgos Lanthimos' shut-in fable of three grown children whose parents have
cooked up an elaborate fantasy to prevent them from venturing beyond the
boundaries of their compound. Lanthimos works through the logic of their
confinement with methodical inspiration: the invented vocabulary that attaches
words referencing the outside world ("telephone" for salt shaker);
the preposterous stories of wild beasts prowling the roads, internalized before
the children learned how to question. The movie's nondescript visual style and
its slope-shouldered performances only increase the sense of reality and
unease.
Time Out Online (David Jenkins) review [5/5]
Greek provocateur Lanthimos plays psychological
conditioning for twisted laughs in this ingeniuous and shockingly blunt satire
on the nuclear family which inhabits a world that’s suggestive of a latter-day
Buñuel film peopled by mini Kaspar Hausers. A happily married factory worker
takes his duties as a father (of two twentysomething daughters and one son) to
extreme measures by forbidding them to leave their sprawling homestead and
strictly monitoring any interaction they have with the outside world. The
geometric framing and odd, almost robotic performances place this in the realms
of science fiction more than human drama, but its insights into the anomalies
of power, influence and manipulation are penetrating to say the least. Highly
recommended.
Our
critics choose their favourite films #2 by James Christopher and Wendy Ide from The London Times Online, May 25, 2009
(excerpt)
This magnificent
Greek film by Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the creepiest stories ever painted on
screen. It's like being at home with Rose and Fred West. A perfectly
respectable middle-class couple, for reasons titillatingly beyond our ken, have
raised three grown-up children in total isolation of the outside world. The
youngsters dare not set foot outside their gated family home, complete with
large garden and swimming pool, for fear of being eaten alive by stray domestic
cats. The film has just won top prize in Un Certain Regard because it redefines
the meaning of sadistic repression. The two "girls", simply called
Elder and Younger, and their over-sexed brother, dream about escaping to other
lives. The ghastly tragedy is that they have no real idea what another way of
life entails beyond picture books and whatever they're deranged parents tell
them about life beyond the fence. It's a salutary tale about familial
responsibility that will shock you to the bone.
Dogtooth JR Jones from The Reader
I’ve seen movies this weird before, but never from
blog Gabe Klinger
from CINE-FILE
Mention of the words “Greek” and “cinema” in the same sentence often
provokes shudders from veteran filmgoers. The fact is, one is used to seeing
the same touristic views of the southeastern European country in film after
film; the same easygoing, slightly quirky story of an extended family (usually
staring Irene Pappas) set against a Mediterranean paradise. Either that, or the
latest chef d’oeuvre by Theo Angelopoulos, who is to
Dogtooth
(Kynodontas) Dan Fainaru at Cannes
from Screendaily, also here: Screen International (Dan Fainaru) review
A family living in
a secluded property outside town is cut off from the rest of world by a high
fence and, with the exception of the father, forbidden to ever leave in Dogtooth,
an enforced metaphor which repeats its socio-political messages over and over
again.
Winner of the Prix
Un Certain Regard at Cannes, it will be branded by some as a highly significant
statement and by others as a laborious, long-winded cerebral allegory wrapped
in a highly stylised package. Fixed camera shots, meticulous framing and
several intentionally passionless but quite explicit sex scenes could carry
Yorgos Lanthimos’ second feature through to film festivals and select art house
exposure, but its deliberately slow, monotonous pace, and far-fetched premise
could make it a tough sale elsewhere.
The father of this
family (Stergioglou) is convinced that the best way for his children to remain
uncontaminated by the world is to completely cut them off from it. He has
created, in his mansion, a fake, pristine universe for his boy and two girls to
grow up in. Now all in their late teens and uniformly docile, they learn
everything they know from recorded tapes, but perversely, these are supposed to
protect the brood from the dangers of the outside world by changing the sense
of any word they are not supposed to know. Thus the sea is a leather chair and
a zombie is a yellow flower. Every once in a while, the father brings home a
female security guard from his factory, Christine (Kalaitzidou) to service his
son, for sex is considered to be another necessary bodily function.
The parents keep
their children in this state of induced infantilism on the grounds that what
they don’t know can’t harm them. An imaginary sinful brother is created and
banished to the other side of the fence, as a warning for the others to behave.
However, even in such a hermetically closed, sterile environment, echoes of the
world outside are bound to penetrate. When Christine, the only character in the
film to have a name, leaves behind a video of Rocky, thereby
“infecting” one daughter, the father ultimately decides that incest is
preferable to having strangers trespass into their world.
Borrowing from
many sources, the script makes its intentions clear at a very early stage. The
dangers of segregating oneself from the world, whether at a personal or
national level, are underlined by the immobile camera, the deadpan dialogue,
the expressionless acting, the lack of any evident emotion. At the same
time, for a metaphor to make sense, it has to be firmly rooted in the
environment it comments on, which isn’t the case here. The wealthy may be distancing
themselves from the “vulgar crowds”, but the disciplinary methods of education
they use here would make their kids break out in laughter. It’s also difficult
not to wonder about the kind of future these parents have in mind for their
children, or about simple, practical things, like the condition of the house
and the grounds around which look so well groomed despite the absence of any
staff. Details, indeed, but what is a world – imaginary or otherwise -
made of, if not details?
Review for Kynodontas (2009) - IMDb Tristan H.E. White, also seen here: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Trist=E1n_White?= review
Cinematical [Scott Weinberg] at Toronto
Sound On Sight Madeleine Koestner
Quiet Earth The Crystal Ferret
Sound On Sight Ricky D
The Lumière Reader Tim Wong
hoopla.nu review Stuart Wilson
MontrealGazette.com [Al Kratina]
Screen Fanatic [David O'Connell](Australia)
User reviews from imdb Author: kidf from Wellington, New Zealand
13th Annual European Union Film Festival | Gene Siskel Film Center Barbara Scharres
Cannes '09: Day 11 Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club, May 24, 2009
How (Not) to Cook at Cannes Controversy. Cannes Diary 05/21/09 Karina Longworth from SpoutBlog
Joseph Proimakis at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 21, 2009
Dogtooth David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 21, 2009
Little White Lies Matt Bochenski at Cannes, May 19, 2009
Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes from Variety, May 19, 2009, also here: Variety (Boyd van Hoeij) review
“Dogtooth” Wins Top Cannes Un Certain Regard Prize Eugene Hernandez at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 23, 2009
Top Un Certain Regard prize goes to Dogtooth Nancy Tartaglione from Screendaily, May 25, 2009
What Dogtooth's parents learned from Footloose Steve Rose from The Guardian, April 24, 2010
ALPS (Alpeis)
Greece France
Canada USA (93 mi)
2011 ‘Scope Official
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With ALPS, Greek provocateur Giorgos Lanthimos has once
again crafted an unsettling work of allegory, much like controversial 2009
totalitarian incest comedy Dogtooth. It similarly pivots on an
unsustainable, insular ideology, or experiment, flawed from inception, not unlike
the Greek economy prior to its inevitable implosion.
The distinction here is that rather than focusing on a family compound where a
father shelters and deludes his children, hiding them from the world into
adulthood, ALPS approaches the grieving process. It thrusts a group of
lost souls (each deliberately devoid of complex characterization) into the
world of clumsy re-enactments (a theme also present in Lanthimos' 2005 drama, Kinetta),
where they pretend to be the recently deceased for loved ones unable to cope
with their loss.
Led by a paramedic known only as Mont Blanc (Aris Servetalis), the notion of
dictatorship as a regulating force in an inherently disastrous environment
dominates, given his rigid enforcement of rules and structure regarding engaging
the bereaved. In such, the actual re-enactments, shown mostly with the
eventually dissident Monte Rosa (Aggeliki Papoulia), play out awkwardly,
lacking any real emotion, exacerbating the banality of life's significant
moments when taken out of context.
As significant as the story is, Lanthimos' method of storytelling jumps in and
out of re-enactment scenarios, giving only brief glimpses at the lives of each
character, which may, or may not, be real or performed. The perceived reality
within the framed text or performance has the unspecified potential to be yet
another re-enactment, only defined by deliberate ambiguity, leaving the
audience conscious of their role adjacent to those hiring these loosely defined
actors to play the dead.
Noting the superficial presence of actors in film, these empty vessels are
defined only by the characters they portray to those watching, be it us, the
viewer, or those grieving within the text of the movie. The conflict here stems
from a performer unwilling to remain within the limitations of her character
despite clear direction from her leader.
The question examined amidst the economic and mortal allegory is that of a
passive role made aggressive should an actor refuse to break character or let
you escape your tenuous, voyeuristic indulgence.
There’s a case to be made for the idea that Greece has more
ghosts than the average country. This argument would involve space – having
relatively little, especially for their dead, Greeks rent out cemetery plots
for three years maximum before the body is exhumed to make room – but also the
fact that Greece’s is one of the more fully recorded histories we have. And
what ghosts exist that are not remembered?
Alps, the latest from Athens-born director Yorgos Lanthimos, tells a
certain kind of ghost story. Lanthimos is most famously the director of 2009’s Dogtooth,
the creepy, Oscar-nominated fable of clannish perversion that made the film
world sit up and wonder, “What the fuck is up with Greece?” Alps carries
over several of that film’s themes and intensifies its aesthetic mood of
earthly limbo: Several of its scenes are set in a hospital, the rest are
infused with a similarly antiseptic starkness. The tone is one of deadpan
discombobulation, a world turned 45 degrees to the left but presented with a
clear, dry perspective.
Whether you are willing or able to match that perspective will determine the better part of your response to Alps, which opens with a puzzling sequence and only gets weirder from there. A young woman (Ariane Labed) performs a rhythmic gymnastics routine to a swollen orchestral recording, protests to her coach (Johnny Vekris) that she wants to perform to pop music, and is promptly threatened with a grisly death. Next we meet a paramedic (Aris Servetalis) with an odd way of comforting accident victims: “You may be about to die,” he says to a critically injured teenage girl in the back of his ambulance. “Who’s your favorite actor?”
As is revealed at the director’s mischievous leisure, that question is more purposeful than it first appears. As the nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia) who receives the ailing teen girl – an accomplished tennis player – tells the girl’s parents, “Death is not the end.” In fact, she offers, after reminding them of how important it is to remember the deceased, it could be the beginning a beautiful relationship, one that involves her stopping by a few times a week and “substituting” for their daughter, equipped with a costume and a few salient preferences, including the fact that her favorite actor is Jude Law.
Papoulia (who played the elder sister in Dogtooth) knows she is not the intuitive choice for this particular gig. That would be Labed (none of the characters are named), the other female in their four-person troupe (including Vekris and Servetalis) of substitutes. They meet in the gym to debrief, try out celebrity impressions, and agree on their group name, Alps, chosen because no other mountain could stand in for an Alp but the Alps could stand in for any other mountain. Resemblance and age-appropriateness are less important than you’d think, as is acting facility: The Alps know their lines (usually) and hit their marks, but that’s about it. The customers don’t require total fidelity — just bring them a body.
The troubled, empathetic nurse emerges as the central character, and through her Lanthimos explores the lonely succor of standing in for what’s been lost. He keeps the focus on the substitutes, the customers are only seen in fragments, blurred, or from behind; only their need is felt. There is no talk of money, though we know the first three visits are free. Client requests are highly specific, and usually involve repeating the same lines over and over again; fights and confrontations are reenacted with mordantly wooden timing. The script (which Lanthimos co-wrote with Efthimis Filippou) feels at once tightly controlled and improvisational — each moment is deeply, almost mechanically constructed, and yet they play out in a sequence that is too lax for too long. The layering at work is so subtle as to seem incidental; Lanthimos resists easy signposts or even a clear demarcation of the lanes, never letting us settle on what to make of this misfit, distinctly patriarchal crew.
When a ghost gets ghosted, Alps cracks open and one character’s desperation drives the final third of the film. The climax errs on the side of the overwrought and overdetermined, like an earnest adolescent’s first attempt at a short story. And yet Papoulia’s extraordinary performance lingers, as does the film’s provocative existential fog. Slowly but with terrible surety, Alps reveals the fracture lines within its subjects, their families and the group itself, so that by the end it’s no longer clear who is substituting for whom. Only that the dead are surely better loved than the living.
Film
Comment Selects Q&A: Yorgos Lanthimos - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold interview, February 22,
2012
Film Comment Selects comes to a close on Thursday night with the new film from the director of 2009’s twisted, er, “family” film Dogtooth. Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos continues his exploration of strange, synthetic private worlds with Alps, about four people who attempt to help the recently bereaved by impersonating their deceased loved ones. Film Comment interviewed Lanthimos about the new film, inhabiting other people’s lives, directing theater, and the state of funding in Greece.
Where did the idea for Alps come from?
Alps came from conversations I had with Efthymis Filippou, the co-writer of both Dogtooth and Alps, while trying to find an idea about our next film. He mentioned an idea about people asking other people to write letters to them, pretending to be someone who has died. Then I came up with this rough story about a nurse, who actually offers to stand in for deceased people, to help family and friends cope with their grief. It seemed complex, funny, and sad. So we liked it and started working on a script.
Your films sometimes feel like they could arise out of acting
games. Do they? Dogtooth (about a family whose adult children have grown
up in total isolation) could have come out of the request to “pretend that you
are an adult with only a child’s experience.”
No, but we do play a lot of games while rehearsing. At least, in Kinetta [05] and Dogtooth, because in Alps we didn’t rehearse that much. The games are more a way of working with the actors, or nonprofessional actors. They don’t always have to do much with the story, or the idea of the film. Scenes might be invented through games, but not the whole concept.
The characters in Alps can resemble well-intentioned
robots. That’s funny, but isn’t it also a little scary?
I think the whole situation is scary and funny at the same time. No matter how you see these people, they are definitely troubled. Some of them are trying to find something new, and others to find something they lost. Maybe all of them are trying to find both. The fact that you can laugh with them makes you realize things in a more profound way. When you stop laughing, you might even feel guilty. It is funny that the stand-ins are even more troubled than the people they’re actually trying to help, the ones that experienced a death in their circle. That’s why we decided to focus more on them, instead of the grieving families, friends, and lovers. There’s something more tragic and scarier trying to break into a relationship, or situation, or condition, than trying to break out.
The idea of reenactment is a part of Kinetta and Alps.
Are you interested in performance art or literature along those lines? For some
reason I thought of the humor in stories by George Saunders (CivilWarLand in
Bad Decline, Pastoralia).
Alps is much more than reenactment. The characters try to inhabit other people’s lives and personalities. They forge relationships with others and affect their lives and their own. I recently read a couple of stories from Pastoralia, by George Saunders, and it is true, I find them very interesting, funny, and devastating at the same time.
There seems to be a theater contingent in your filmmaking
community. Could you talk a bit about your experience with theater, and theater
in Athens?
I was lucky to have directed one play in the theater, before making my first feature. It was a play by one of the most important contemporary Greek writers, Dimitris Dimitriadis. It gave me the chance to figure out how I could work with actors and experiment. I never studied theater and never intended to do any, until I was offered to direct my first play. I hate theater every time I stage a play. But a couple of years pass by, and then I want to get involved again. It’s different with cinema. No matter how terrible the experience is while making a film, before I even finish it, I want to start the next one.
There are an extraordinary number of plays being staged in Greece every season. And a huge number of all kind of venues, from classical theaters to bar basements. Hosting classical and contemporary plays, but also experimental theater, dance, etc. It must be a record compared to the size of the population. They’re not all successful of course. The last play I directed was Chekhov’s Platonov at the National Theatre in Greece. Many of the actors that were in it have also been in my films, like Aris Servetalis, Aggeliki Papoulia, Ariane Labed.
How dire is the funding situation in Greece?
The funding situation in Greece just got worse, because of the crisis and the fear of default. We had to shoot Alps under worse financial conditions than Dogtooth, which was already a very low-budget film. But we decided to go ahead and do it, and in the process not try to hide the situation, our lack of means, but somehow try and make it work to our advantage.
Alps: The Full Range | Village Voice Nick Pinkerton, July 11, 2012
Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]
The Playlist [Oliver Lyttelton]
Film-Forward.com [Christopher Bourne]
Flickfeast [Patrick Gamble] also seen here: Neon Klaws [Patrick Gamble]
The A.V. Club [Alison Willmore]
Extreme Long Shot [Hamed Karkan]
World Socialist Web Site [Richard Phillips]
Yorgos Lanthimos on Alps, Greece, and the Travails of ... - Village Voice Simon Abrams, July 11, 2012
Slant Magazine DVD [John Semley]
DVD Talk [Christopher McQuain]
The House Next Door [Phil Coldiron]
The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]
Flickering Myth [Sushan Mansley]
The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Time Out New York [Keith Ulhich]
The New York Times [A.O. Scott]
THE LOBSTER A- 93
Greece Netherlands Ireland Great Britain France (118 mi) 2015
From Greece, the
same country that gave us Costa-Gavras’s brilliant political exposé Z (1969), showing the demise of a military
junta during absurdly repressive times, the country again is in deep economic
turmoil over its national debt, where the abruptly changing insecurity of life
in that society simply does not resemble anywhere else in the rest of the
world, causing this Greek filmmaker at least to take a completely unique
worldview. Evoking the depths of Greek
tragedy with a true artistic realization, Yorgos Lanthimos invents an absurdly
bleak universe that is such an extreme form of dark comedy that it appears to
exist in its own universe, where it’s often hard to equate how it mirrors our
own world. Unsettling, to say the least,
demonstrating a kind of scathing sarcasm that hasn’t really been seen since
Terry Gilliam’s nightmarish BRAZIL (1985), the film has a power to enthrall but
also confuse, as it lends itself to no easy answers. Like the best David Lynch films, the director
would be hard pressed to find any critic that actually understands specifically
what the director was trying to achieve, though from an audience standpoint,
it’s not like anything else you’ll see all year. Weirdly reminiscent of LORD OF THE FLIES
(1990) for adults, the starkness of the situation calls upon a completely new
societal order, where nothing is as it seems, but exists in the bizarre logic
of the moment, told exclusively through deadpan humor, surrealistic flourish,
and completely absurd events. At the
center is a subversive rebellion against conformity, where characters are
forced to accept the most peculiar set of rules as the norm, and then carry out
their daily routines within the appalling restrictions of those imposed
standards, each weirder than the next, where the outer shell capitulates
willingly, showing no sign of aversion, while the inner being is profoundly
disturbed, but can’t show it, as the entire film evolves around the core idea
of pretending to fit in. David, Colin
Farrell in his most unglamorous role, plays a pot-bellied, middle aged,
ordinary man with no outstanding attributes, whose wife of eleven years has
just dumped him, where in this society it’s a crime to be single, so he’s sent
to a “home” for recovery, a rehabilitation hotel with strict rules and the most
ominous consequences. Here he has 45
days to find an acceptable mate or he will be transformed into an animal of his
choice, while accompanying him on his journey is Bob, his brother turned into a
dog, transformed years ago from a previous visit to this same recovery
home.
Described as an
“unconventional love story,” the film is set in the near future where being single
is considered a crime, so people’s lives depend on finding a partner. While the hotel establishment resembles a
health spa, it’s more appropriately a cruel and sadistic prison with draconian
regulations that are strictly enforced, where the rules are accepted without
question, as if this has been a longstanding tradition, including morning
visits from a maid, Ariane Labed (the director’s wife), who nakedly straddles
David’s lap until he gets an erection before abruptly departing, leaving him in
a state of permanent dissatisfaction, where there isn’t the slightest hint of
love or happiness anywhere to be found, instead residents cower in fear at the
inevitable, willing to accept the slightest hint of compatibility as a sign of
true love. Couples are drawn together by
an exaggerated notion of having something in common, using physical attributes
as “defining characteristics,” where both are left-handed, walk with a limp,
have a speech impediment, or are subject to nose bleeds, etc, a seemingly
random or arbitrary trait, where people are so desperate to be accepted that
they attribute maximum importance to seemingly insignificant details. For David, it’s his nearsightedness, for his
friend Robert (John C. Reilly), it’s his lisp, while John (Ben Whishaw) walks
with a limp, as they seek to find a partner who matches their own personal
characteristic. Part of the intrigue of
the film is the novel use of originality, where they have literally created a
futuristic Brave New World that
exists in its own peculiar mathematical certainty, but makes little sense. Being stuck in the absolutism of this
Kafkaesque totalitarian world is the fate of each character, where no
background information explains how society arrived at this point, yet the
lifeless and banal quality of their lives is matched by a musical soundtrack
that is wrenchingly emotional, including Beethoven String Quartet No
1 in F major, Op 18, No 1 Adagio ... YouTube (8:34), which recurs throughout
like a musical motif, becoming a parody of what’s missing. Also featured is the equally rare and
obscure, yet extremely stylized romanticism provided by Sophia Loren and Tonis
Maroudas singing “What Is This Thing They Call Love,” Sophia Loren, Tonis Maroudas
- Ti 'ne afto pou to lene agapi (1957 ... YouTube (2:26) from BOY ON A
DOLPHIN (1957). The film is narrated by
the voice of Rachel Weisz, an unseen character that doesn’t appear until well
into the second half of the film, who speaks in a halting voice, with no voice
inflection, never sure of herself, as no one, not even the narrator, is capable
of actually expressing themselves clearly, instead everything is communicated
in strict robotic deadpan without ever showing an ounce of emotion. While this conveys an amateurish feel, as if
actors never really rehearsed their lines, it’s part of Lanthimos establishing
a totally “new” world that is both haunting and ridiculous, provoking outright
laughter at times, adding bizarre twists that are weird and increasingly
uncomfortable, tapping into an extreme degree of pain and anguish.
With the arrival of
new guests, the coolly efficient hotel manager (Olivia Colman) speaks with
uncanny ease, “The fact that you will be transformed into an animal should not
alarm you,” as she and her partner (Garry Mountaine) provide pop songs and
inane skits for the identically dressed hotel guests advocating the advantages
of couples, Something`s
Gotten Hold Of My Heart - The Lobster - YouTube (4:08), while the throbbing
electrical sounds resembling a fire alarm signals it’s time for The Hunt,
extraordinary scenes when the residents are bussed into a nearby forest to hunt
down escapees and other individuals called Loners with tranquilizer darts,
gaining an extra day for every captive delivered, dramatically elevated to a
slow motion operatic montage shot by cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, Apo Mesa Pethamenos - Danai
(The Lobster OST - HD Video ... YouTube (3:06). One of the guests, a ruthless misanthrope who
is easily the hotel’s most unpleasant resident known as the Heartless Woman
(Angeliki Papoulia), takes sadistic relish in bagging record numbers of hunt
victims, each targeted for animal transformation and returned back to the
forest. The sinister nature underlying
each and every scene only grows more chilling, where there’s a lot going on under
the surface, most of it indescribably dark and cruel, like being stuck in a
Grimm fairy tale. When David finally
escapes to the forest, he discovers yet another rebellious society of wandering
outcasts run by the tyrannical rule of Loner Leader Léa Seydoux (couldn’t help but wonder how she
became the leader), a terrifying force of evil who inflicts her own ridiculous
set of rules, where touching, kissing, and falling in love is forbidden,
punishable by mutilation, so they survive like hidden guerilla fighters. It’s here that David meets his soul mate, the
Short Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz), but they are unable to express affection,
so they develop a coded sign language designed to hide their true feelings from
others. “When we turn our heads to the left,
it means I love you more than anything in the world, and when we turn
our heads to the right, it means Watch out, we’re in danger. We had to be very careful in the beginning
not to mix up I love you more than anything in the world with Watch
out, we’re in danger.” Inexplicably,
the Loner Leader and a randomly chosen partner lead David and his chosen
partner on covert visits to the City, ostensibly to visit her parents (both
play classical guitar), where she invents a life and a career, as the City is
run by an equally arcane set of rules, with police on the lookout for
non-married individuals who are subject to arrest. Shrewdly written by Lanthimos and his
frequent co-writer Efthymis Filippou, exhibiting a more accomplished sense of
overall direction, where one can’t help but be a bit wonderstruck by all the
perplexing, unanswered questions, the film draws heavily upon existentialism
and the theater of the absurd, where the specter of liberation or conformity
shadows every scene, creating a thought provoking and oddly moving experience
where romance remains undefined and continually under construction, even by the
end, which couldn’t be more disturbingly ambiguous.
TIFF 2015 | The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland ... - Cinema Scope Angelo Muredda
You’d be hard-pressed to think of a more singular contemporary filmmaker than Yorgos Lanthimos, whose off-kilter satires are perfectly attuned to humanity’s endless capacity for self-delusion. It’s a shame, then, that to this critic Lanthimos’ English-language debut The Lobster recalls nothing so much as My Blueberry Nights (2007), in which Wong Kar-wai sang all his old auteurist songs to an off beat with a wasted cast of high-profile international stars (including Lobster narrator and star Rachel Weisz) at his disposal. As does Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster begins with the establishment of a hermetic system founded on maddeningly arbitrary principles: in this instance, a dystopian society where single people, like sad-sack hero David (Colin Farrell), are rounded up at a hotel resort and given 45 days to find a mate, lest they be transformed into an animal of their choosing. And as in ALPS (2011), where a team of actors cum unlicensed social workers less than persuasively substitute for their clients’ lost loves, the most intimate of relationships are intentionally flattened via stilted performances, with the resort’s guests feigning nosebleeds and sociopathic tendencies to satisfy their overseers’ insistence on finding a match who shares the same “defining characteristic.”
The Lobster is certainly no less ambitious than its high-concept predecessors, even mining the absurdist potential of its premise to arrive at some fresh insights on impairment—e.g., seeing apparent deficits like limps as signature features that bring one closer to, not farther from, one’s self. The trouble lies in the film’s noncommittal tone, which too often deviates from Lanthimos’ reliable deadpan. Set against the earlier films’ prickliness, The Lobster seems oddly ingratiating, keeping the dashed-off non-sequiturs but often anchoring them in tired bromides. Olivia Colman’s officious resort manager gets the worst of it, at one point assuring a new couple that if they encounter any problems they’ll be assigned children: “That usually helps.” Whether Lanthimos’ broadening of his style to such common-sense punch lines is the by-product of a deliberate shift from his abrasive aesthetic or just a transitional hiccup (into English, into modestly higher budgets), it still makes for a mild but still disconcerting bump in an otherwise unerringly smooth career.
Review: The Lobster | Yorgos Lanthimos - Film Comment Yonca Talu, March/April 2016
There is a decidedly Kafka-esque edge to The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos’s dystopian meditation on romance and estrangement in the modern world. Narrated in voiceover with the clinical detachment typical of Lanthimos’s cinema, this disquieting parable draws striking parallels with the Czech master’s seminal The Trial. The Greek filmmaker borrows from his literary predecessor the harrowing atmosphere of life under oppressive rule, and revives the premise of a distraught hero’s ruthless persecution by the powers that be.
The film opens with thirtysomething David (Colin Farrell)—Joseph K.’s screen double—being left by his wife for another man and subsequently taken to a fancy seaside resort. As David is subjected to peculiar check-in rituals (registration of his sexual orientation and confiscation of his personal belongings), it becomes clear that this is no ordinary Holiday Inn but a severely administered open prison. The hotel management compels its single guests to find mates during their short stay, or else be transformed into animals. David chooses to become a lobster if he doesn’t succeed: “Lobsters live over a hundred years and stay fertile all their lives,” he explains. For Lanthimos, this is not a random choice of beast: his lethargic protagonist is like a crustacean struggling to survive in rough waters.
The hotel epitomizes the modern disciplinary institution, operating simultaneously as school, asylum, and hospital. Daily theatrical demonstrations in a ballroom extol the benefits of marital life to the guests, while physical experiments hinder sexual fulfillment. Navigating this dreadful routine, David encounters law and punishment, and even public torture: a lisping man (John C. Reilly) is burnt with a toaster in the middle of the cafeteria because he has repeatedly engaged in masturbation in his room. Some guests resort to lying and hide behind make-believe relationships to save their skins. David briefly adopts this strategy but, after a traumatic experience, flees into the woods where he begins to live among the Loners, a group of anarchic fugitives opposed to sex and love.
Survival instincts catapult David from a community that forcibly injects emotion to another that banishes it and numbs the individual. Though their principles are at odds with each other—one is a capitalist institution that marginalizes loneliness while the other is a civic society that promotes it—their tactics are similarly despotic and both inflict atrocious punishments upon disobedient members. In each case, the only thing that’s permissible is conversation. And it is by striking up a few conversations with David that one elegant Loner (Rachel Weisz, who also delivers the film’s voiceover) steals his heart away.
In this half-mythical, half-surrealistic portrait of an innocent Everyman’s confrontation with a cold-blooded system, Lanthimos achieves a level of audience identification that his previous films had failed to bring about. Alternating between melancholic and aggressive string compositions by Beethoven and Shostakovich respectively, he conveys David’s turbulent inner life and his growing sense of helplessness against power structures that want to strip him of his humanity. Lanthimos’s mise en scène is vibrant, meticulous, unsentimental, and effective.
That unsentimental quality can also alienate the viewer; in the end, David remains as much a stranger to us as he does to himself and his lover. Crushed by the violently tragic predicament in which his would-be companion finds herself, he retreats to his existential bubble and becomes ghostly, un-readable, and almost devoid of emotion. Lanthimos leaves us with a feeling of cosmic loneliness, and the idea that, even between lovers, there are insurmountable rifts—a void that can never be filled.
Spectrum Culture [Dominic Griffin]
In Yorgos Lanthimos’ English language debut, The Lobster, he presents to audiences a fully realized world, cut from whole cloth. There are science fiction elements on display, but it feels more like a twisted fairy tale, a dark fable spiritually close to our own world. Using his unique voice, Lanthimos skewers the very real preoccupation with loneliness and connection by exploring them in an absurdist alternate reality painted with broad, caustic humor.
In the film, Colin Farrell plays David, a sullen, newly single male. Here, in The City, uncoupled individuals are sent to a resort of sorts called The Hotel. There, they have forty five days to find a mate. If they fail in their quest for love everlasting, they’re turned into the animal of their choice, to have a second chance at romance in a new form. The Hotel is set up like a dating show from reality TV hell, with daily dances, odd rituals, and hilariously dry seminars on coupling. Early in your stay, tenants are forced to have one hand tied behind their back, so they can understand the value of things that come in pairs. At one point, another single, played by John C. Reilly, has his hand held inside a burning toaster for being caught masturbating.
The beauty of The Lobster is that it’s quite funny, so long as you don’t think about the psychological underpinnings for more than a few passing moments. Underneath the high concept gags and curiously structured bits of hilarity, there’s a sullen darkness, its weight equal to the distance between what the film exaggerates and how our actual world truly functions. Sure, here the societal pressures are dialed up to a near homicidal level, but that extrapolation just becomes a coping mechanism. It’s that much easier to find satisfaction in the film’s sterling observations when there’s a fluffy cushion of artistic quirkiness keeping the aesthetic distance at bay.
The film’s first half is briskly paced and establishes this status quo with startling economy. You never question any of this society’s intricacies because the relevant details are fleshed out with such certainty. It’s an efficient, effective approach to world building that’s as impressive as it is refreshing. The core concept driving this reality seeps into everything, especially the interactions singles have with one another. The dialogue takes on a shockingly straightforward tone when hooking up becomes a life or death situation.
There’s a set piece early on introducing the concept of “The Hunt.” One of the ways singles can extend their stay at The Hotel is to venture out into the woods to hunt “Loners,” singles who’ve escaped into the wild. The sequence is both thrilling and comical, but it also opens the world up even further. The film’s second half picks up this narrative strand, following David into the flip side of the coin as he lives with The Loners. There, he falls in love with a Short Sighted Woman (played by Rachel Weisz), only in this particular tribe, coupling is forbidden.
It’s in this second half that the film begins to falter, as the ins and outs of Loner culture don’t lend themselves to the sharp jokes of the first act. There’s a slight tonal shift, as watching Farrell and Weisz try to hide their palpable chemistry is a more painful cinematic experience than, say, watching Ben Whishaw repeatedly slam his head on a table to find kinship with a perpetually nosebleeding woman. The story begins to veer far more into tragic territory, though it doesn’t lose its perspective or insight.
While it’s a real blast to watch Lanthimos cleave the head from the romcom genre and roast it on a spit, the more The Lobster dwells on the harsh truths behind the struggle for companionship, the harder it becomes to watch. It lulls you in with pretty easy, if esoteric, laughter before forcing you to confront some truly queasy realizations about the human condition. It’s an ambitious, challenging film that showcases one of the more original voices working in modern film.
Slant
Magazine [Kenji Fujishima]
Yorgos Lanthimos's The Lobster may be the filmmaker's English-language debut, but no matter the tongue, his obsession with deconstructing and reconstructing codes of physical and verbal communication remains the same—as does his penchant for high-concept premises, hermetically sealed environments, and deadpan humor. In Dogtooth, Lanthimos's formal precision followed function as it focused on a family that was itself living in a carefully constructed, hermetically sealed world, complete with its own customs and idioms; much of the film's perverse thrill lay in seeing Lanthimos try to top himself, sick joke atop brilliantly executed sick joke.
Alps suggested the limitations of his approach as he applied the same icily detached style to material—about people impersonating the dead so as to help loved ones through the grieving process—that demanded a broader emotional palette than he allowed. Now, in The Lobster, he takes on what may be his most emotionally fraught dramatic material yet: romantic relationships and the societal pressures of the dating game. The result leaves one wondering if the filmmaker, perhaps, needs a vacation from his own vision.
As Lanthimos's high concepts usually are, this one is as sui generis as they come. The title derives from main character David's (Colin Farrell) choice of animal when asked what he'd like to turn into if, after 45 days at a particular hotel, he fails to find a mate. From that nutty premise, Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou, for a while at least, hit upon some genuinely provocative truths. These characters take the need for human companionship as a given, and some of them go to desperate lengths to find their match—like a limping man (Ben Whishaw) who fakes a nosebleed problem simply to make it with a particular woman with a similar “defining characteristic.” This focus on merely superficial similarities to try to force a romantic connection especially resonates in our digital age, with the increased emphasis on creating online personas and making instant impressions.
Even more than that, The Lobster fundamentally questions the need for nuclear coupledom in the first place—a challenging notion that's brought into sharper focus in the film's second half, after David escapes from the hotel and joins a group of “loners” in a nearby forest, all of whom are made targets of hotel residents in periodic hunts. The group's ice-cold leader (Léa Seydoux), however, militantly frowns upon romantic connections of any sort—which is bad news for David, as he meets an unnamed woman (Rachel Weisz) who immediately takes a liking to him.
Essentially, The Lobster becomes a more conventional tale of forbidden love, but one given the demented Lanthimos touch—evident not only in the extremely deadpan manner in which these people address each other, but in the whole new system of gestures the two lovers are forced to create in order to communicate with each other (at least until the Loner Leader tries to have her way with them). In its own skewed way, this also feels accurate to human nature, with the courtship process often dependent as much on reading subtextual clues as on making outright public declarations.
And yet, as intelligent, often hilarious, and occasionally insightful as it is, The Lobster also shows a filmmaker's style—the unnervingly distanced compositions, the deliberately flattened line deliveries, the shocking bursts of violence—hardening into shtick. The near-surgical precision with which Lanthimos approaches the most surreal of conceits turns out to be a double-edged sword, toeing the line between examining closed systems and being itself too much of a closed system. As entertaining as it can be to watch Lanthimos spin countless gags out of his high concepts, his films also exude the predetermined feel of a filmmaker who has already reached conclusions about human nature before allegorizing them on the screen.
The Lobster may be about characters yearning to move beyond ideological extremes into uncharted emotional and physical terrain, but beyond a few unexpected sparks of life thrown out by the actors, the film itself remains remarkably pinched, both emotionally and intellectually. Any correspondence to the real world is strictly of the viewer's own inference, because the ultra-controlling Lanthimos isn't about to lay his cards on the table in at least even a sliver of an attempt to directly confront his audience with his supposedly oracular human insights. Perhaps, in the end, it isn't only the characters in The Lobster who refuse to look beyond their own preconceived notions.
The
Petty Laments of Yorgos Lanthimos's “The Lobster” - The New ... Richard Brody from The New Yorker
'The
Lobster': A Dystopian Tour de Force - The Atlantic Christopher Orr
NYFF: The Lobster
- Reviews - Reverse Shot Nick
Pinkerton
In
The Lobster, if you're single
you might be transformed into an animal
Leah Pickett from The Chicago
Reader
Yorgos Lanthimos' absurdist dystopia is the best of Cannes so far Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club
'The Lobster: Cannes's WTF Sci-Fi Sex Odyssey - The Daily Beast Richard Porton, also seen here: Richard Porton
The Lobster draws out an illogical world to its most logical ends | The ... Tasha Robinson from The Verge
Cannes Review: Yorgos Lanthimos' Outstanding 'The Lobster' Oliver Lyttelton from The Playlist
The Lobster (2015 Cannes review) :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Tim Grierson from Paste magazine
The Lobster Cannes Review | Vanity Fair Richard Lawson, also seen here: Vanity Fair [Richard Lawson]
Cannes Review: Yorgos Lanthimos' 'The Lobster ... - Indiewire Eric Kohn
'The Lobster' Review: Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz's Dark ... Caspar Salmon from Pajiba
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]
Cannes 2015. Day 3 on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman
Stephanie
Zacharek - Village Voice
The Lobster is like a reality dating show reimagined as art house cinema Chris Plante from The Verge
The Lobster | Film Review |
Tiny Mix Tapes David Feinberg
The Lobster - Little White Lies Trevor Johnston
Cannes 2015: “The Lobster”: comedy of the absurd, short on laughs ... Zornitsa Staneva from Pop Optiq
Little White Lies [Adam Woodward]
The House Next Door [James Lattimer]
Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Hannah McHaffie [Reel Insights]
Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
'The Lobster': Review - Screen International Lee Marshall
AwardsCircuit.com
[Clayton Davis]
NYFF
Review: Yorgos Lanthimos' Insanely Brilliant Film 'The Lobster ... Alex Billington from First Showing
Cannes 2015 Critics’ Notebook #1: Standing Tall, Tale of Tales, The Lobster Aaron Hillis from Filmmaker magazine
Day 2 - The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo
Cannes 2015 Review: THE LOBSTER Starts Strong ... - Twitch Jason Gorber
The
Lobster Movie Review: Farrell Shines in Absurd Comedy | Collider Phil Brown
FilmFracture
[James Jay Edwards]
Review: Yorgos Lanthimos'
'The Lobster' - Film Angie
Han from Slash Film
Film review: 'The Lobster' ridicules society's date-or-die mentality ... Benjamin Dodman from France 24
Talking
Pictures [Howard Schumann]
PlumeNoire.com [Moland Fengkov]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]
Love
Hurts in Lanthimos's Daring 'The Lobster,' but It ... - Village Voice Michael Nordine
Cannes
Dispatch #3: The Lobster - Film Comment Eugene Hernandez, May 22, 2015
Yorgos Lanthimos on the Absurd Logic of Satirizing Modern | Indiewire Emily Buder interview from indieWIRE, October 8, 2015
Colin Farrell Isn't Quite Sure What His Cannes Movie The Lobster Is ... Julie Miller interview with actor Colin Farrell from Vanity Fair, May 15, 2015
Cannes:
'The Lobster' Director Yorgos Lanthimos Explains Why Name ... Eric Kohn interview from idieWIRE, May 2015
Daily | Cannes 2015 | Yorgos Lanthimos's THE LOBSTER ... David Hudson from Fandor
'The Lobster': Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Leslie Felperin
Cannes Film Review: 'The Lobster' - Variety Guy Lodge, also seen here: Variety [Guy Lodge]
Dave Calhoun Time Out London
The Lobster review - dark satire on relationships gets fishy near the tail ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, also seen here: The Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]
The
Lobster review – surreal satire and black-humour laughs | Film ... Mark Kermode from The Observer
The
Lobster, film review: a new Farrell for a love story like no other ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent
The
Lobster review: 'like nothing you've seen before' - The Telegraph Robbie Collin
The Lobster: a spookily beautiful, treacle-black absurdist ... Donald Clarke from The Irish Times
South China Morning Post [James Mottram]
Toronto Film Scene [Andrew Parker]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
New Jersey Stage [Eric Hillis]
Movie review: 'The Lobster' Michael Smith from The Tulsa World
Austin Chronicle [Josh Kupecki]
'The
Lobster' offers a rich, surreal take on modern love - LA Times Justin
Chang
The Lobster Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Sheila O’Malley
Barbara Scharres the Ebert site
Review: In 'The Lobster,' Colin Farrell Plays a Divorced Man in a Loner-Hating Society A.O. Scott from The New York Times
The Lobster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lanzmann, Claude
SHOAH
Lanzmann's nine-hour documentary meditation on the Holocaust is a distillation of 350 hours of interviews with living 'witnesses' to what happened at the extermination camps of Treblinka, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Chelmno and Belzec. Feeling that the familiar newsreel images have lost their power to shock, Lanzmann concentrates instead on the testimony of those survivors who are 'not reliving' but 'still living' what happened, and on 'the bureaucracy of death'. One of the two Jews to survive the murder of 400,000 men, women and children at the Chelmno death camp describes his feelings on revisiting Poland for the first time. A train driver who ferried victims to the concentration camps is seen making that same journey to 'the end of the line' again and again; a retired Polish barber who cut the hair of those about to enter the gas chambers describes his former work; an SS officer talks about the 'processing' of those on their way to the concentration camps; a railway official discusses the difficulties associated with transporting so many Jews to their deaths. The same questions are repeated like an insistent refrain, the effect is relentless and cumulative. One word of caution as you watch the witnesses giving testimony; bear in mind Schiller's observation that 'individual testimony has a specific place in history but doesn't, alone, add up to it'.
Shoah Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
Though Claude Lanzmann's seminal Shoah catalogs one of the most horrifying events in the history of the world, it remains one of the most life-affirming works of art ever produced for the cinema. "The film is structured in a circular, concentric manner," Lanzmann has said about this towering masterwork. Over the course of nine-and-a-half hours, dozens of Holocaust survivors share their stories of perseverance, their memories doubling back on each other in a way that's never tiring, though Lanzmann explicitly uses repetition to point to a shared human consciousness. Every interview in the film is powerful enough to make its own documentary. (Indeed, Lanzmann's conversation with Sobibor camp survivor Yehuda Lerner was so impossible to condense that he would release the entire film as a 95-minute standalone, the beautiful Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 P.M.) Lanzmann doesn't use stock footage to evoke the horrors of the Holocaust. Instead, he builds the past using tools that exist only in the present, summoning an unfathomable catastrophe with the voices and memories of survivors (not to mention their tears and pained expressions) and endless panoramic shots of bucolic countrysides. When one interviewee recalls how the screams of victims used to linger in the air outside a concentration camp, this memory haunts Lanzmann's pastoral exteriors for the rest of the film. There's an overwhelming sense here that nature itself has yet to recover from Hitler's slaughter. Rather than use photographs of concentration camps, Lanzmann contends himself with elegiac shots of what remains of these houses of death (mostly skeletal foundations) in the modern world. Every anecdote in the film speaks for itself as a melancholic celebration of Jewish perseverance and an affront to any number of Nazi pathologies and rituals of denial. Nature in Shoah (and in Sobibor) is a living, breathing monument to the dead, and a beautiful reminder of what it feels like to roam free.
Time Magazine [Richard Corliss]
Why is this holocaust different from all other holocausts? In raw nightmare numbers, the Nazi extermination of 6 million European Jews ranks below the Soviet Union's systematic starvation of the rebellious Ukraine in 1932-33 (10 million by Stalin's count) and Mao's catastrophic Great Leap Forward into prolonged famine in 1957-62 (at least 27 million). Uganda and Kampuchea have produced more recent evidence that Hitler's policy of mass murder as an instrument of statecraft was not unique. Yet the Final Solution remains the archetype of man's bestiality to man, and there are compelling reasons for this to be so. The villain: Hitler still seems the embodiment of melodramatic evil, a spellbinder sent from hell or central casting. The perpetrators: a civilized Western nation conceived the outrage of genocide and executed the plan with technological precision; if the Germans could do it, anyone could. The victims: the Jews, eternal outsiders, were traditionally treated by Christians with an uneasy mixture of respect and enmity. Here was the seed of ordinary anti-Semitism brought to rancid fruition.
But what makes this Holocaust film, Shoah, different from all others? For 40 years the event has been analyzed and dramatized. So the prospect of a 9-hr. 23-min. documentary, comprising no archival footage, only interviews with death-camp survivors and chillingly bucolic vistas of the camp sites today, is likely to raise apprehensions and even yawns. We have seen all that too many times before; next atrocity, please. And in fact the testimony in Shoah (a Hebrew word for cataclysm) does not justify either the film's extraordinary length or French Director Claude Lanzmann's relentless badgering of some of the victims. Still and all, it is salutary to be confronted, hour after hour after hour, with memories horrifying enough to fill a dozen movies. Subjecting oneself to Shoah is like being strapped down for an extended session with the exorcist.
In December 1941, within a few days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazis began gassing Jews and Gypsies at a camp in Chelmno, Poland. More than 150,000 died there; two survived, and both offer their soul-scarred witness in Shoah. One of them, Simon Srebnik, was a boy of 13 at the time. Returning to Chelmno, he visits townspeople who were once enchanted by his beautiful singing voice. They also remember the screams of Jews locked in the local church before being taken away. At Treblinka, site of the Nazis' most efficient gas chambers, villagers recall standing by the railbed watching Jews inside the trains. With a smile, the villagers would draw their fingers quickly across their necks: a warning and a wicked taunt to those about to die.
Like Historian Raul Hilberg, who bears eloquent witness in Shoah, Lanzmann did not begin his mammoth project by "asking the big questions." Instead he amassed thousands of details--the exact size of the gas chambers, the regimen of the SS killer-bureaucrats--and arranged them in a vast mosaic that exposes but does not explain the mystery of extermination. Many of the details are riveting. Former SS Officer Franz Suchomel (whom Lanzmann filmed with a camera concealed in his shoulder bag) sings the Treblinka marching song--"No Jew knows that today"--and describes a pit that consumed discarded bodies: "There was always a fire in the pit. With rubbish, paper and gasoline, people burn very well." Auschwitz Survivor Rudolf Vrba manages a smile of roguish irony as he recalls the Germans' insistence that Jewish corpse carriers must always be "running . . . They are a sporty nation, you see." Itzhak Zuckermann, a member of the Jewish wartime resistance, has resources not of humor but of despair. "If you could lick my heart," he tells Lanzmann, "it would poison you."
Obsessed by his subject, Lanzmann wants to lick every Holocaust heart, and no matter if it bleeds on contact. Mordechaï Podchlebnik, the second Jewish survivor of Chelmno, "thanks God for what remains, and that he can forget." But Lanzmann will not let him forget; he even questions the man's fixed smile. Finally, Podchlebnik surrenders to the director's ghoulishness and quietly sobs. Abraham Bomba was once a barber at Treblinka, charged with cutting the hair of women and children in the gas chambers immediately before their execution. Today he cuts hair in Israel, and in a bizarre "photo op," Lanzmann asks Bomba to display his Holocaust tonsorial technique on the customer who now sits in his barber chair. Later, overwhelmed by the memory of a fellow-barber's wife and sister entering the gas chamber, Bomba begs, "Don't make me go on please." Lanzmann continues to insist. For a minute or two the barber silently snips at the hair in front of him. Then he dries his face with a towel and tells the rest of the story Lanzmann would break a man to hear. No scoop is that important.
"I didn't do this for the pleasure of having him crack," Lanzmann told L'Express. His mission, as he saw it, was to lead each subject "toward the moment of truth." Whatever his journalistic ethics, Lanzmann proved himself an indefatigable guide on that journey. By the end of Shoah, the viewer is grateful to have made the forced march with him, for the film's achievement is to show there are stories worth hearing, and ravaged, resilient faces that reward our scrutiny. The horror, the gallows humor, the shame and the heroism, the lessons of this holocaust--and all others--have not been exhausted. We still have much to learn about the poison in our hearts.
Motion Picture [Fred Camper] Shoah’s Absence, by Fred Camper from Motion Picture magazine, Winter/Spring 1987
Annual
3 Chapter 10 - Simon Wiesenthal Center Multimedia ... Lanzmann's
Shoah and Its Audience, by Ruth K.
Angress from The Simon Wisenthal Center, 1985
Richard Brody “Shoah” at Twenty-Five, by Richard Brody from The New Yorker, December 7, 2010
willfully obtuse review Pauline Kael from The New Yorker, December 30, 1985 (pdf format)
Pauline Kael Reviews: The Ones She Got Wrong David Haglund from Slate, October 28, 2011
Critic Is Off Target Pauline Kael's Review Of 'Shoah' Superficial ... Jack McKinney from The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13, 1986
In this week's issue Look Again, by David Denby from The New Yorker, January 10, 2011
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Matt Bailey]
Jonathan Rosenbaum Tragic Proportions, by Jonathan Rosenbaum from ArtForum, December 8, 2010
What Is Shoah? - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Eric Hynes, December 8, 2010
Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
DVD Verdict Joel Pearce
Fulvue Drive-in [Nicholas Sheffo]
MichaelDVD Region4 DVD review [Steve Crawford]
Shoah: movie review - CSMonitor.com - Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
MovieMartyr.com
[Jeremy Heilman]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Empire's Shoah Movie Review - Empire Online David Parkinson
"Shoah," Spalding Gray, "You Wont Miss Me," More on Notebook ... David Hudson from Mubi
David
Fear Time Out New York, also seen here, by listed as #1: 50 best documentaries
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Chip Karpus]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] November 24, 1985
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] December 29, 2010
Ebert Presents: At the Movies (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky) (Video)
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- Review [Gary W. Tooze]
SOBIBOR, OCTOBER 14, 1943 , 4 P.M. C 72
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
On October 14, 1943, a plan was set into motion
whose success was predicated on the presumption of German punctuality.
Greischutz, a Nazi soldier, steps into a concentration camp's tailor room to
pick up a fur-lined coat. Standing by Greischutz, Yehuda Lerner drives an ax
into the German man's skull; the man's blood is mopped from the floor as he is
placed beneath a stack of fur coats. Lerner's face pales as he recalls the fear
and joy that overwhelmed him that day. Had Greischutz not kept his 4:00
appointment, Lerner and his men would surely have perished. Comforted by the deaths
of so many Jews, the Nazis became oblivious to the possibility of a Jewish
revolt. In Claude Lanzmann's Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 P.M., this
naïveté reveals itself as a life-affirming weapon. Omitted from the classic Shoah, this 1979 interview between director
Claude Lanzmann and Lerner is an unsentimental celebration of Jewish
perseverance at the Sobibor concentration camp. Lanzmann's slow-crawling camera
stresses how Poland is still haunted by Hitler's slaughter: the moans of the
dead seem embedded in blades of grass and pieces of stone. Lanzmann focuses on
a field of geese as Lerner recalls the twisted poetry of Nazi pathology;
spectators claimed that the Jews "cried like geese" when they were
slaughtered (the animals were reared at some camps, provoked into quacking
during exterminations). These are minor yet tragic asides to Lanzmann's
stringent gaze, which hardly moves from the stoic face of Lerner, whose story
of survival is an affront to the shameful notion that Jews accepted their fates
without struggle.
THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (Le dernier des injustes)
France Austria (220 mi) 2013
Violence, War, Death: Cannes Report, May 19 | Cannes | Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres
Eighty-seven-year-old director Claude Lanzmann of “Shoah” fame was welcomed to the stage of the Salle Debussy tonight by Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux, to a standing ovation. Lanzmann profusely thanked his crew and all who helped make his new film “The Last of the Unjust” possible, and the two joked about previous discussions regarding whether the film was to be presented in or out of competition, before the genial director planted a huge kiss on Frémaux’s cheek.
Lanzmann’s place in film history is assured by his landmark “Shoah,” and "The Last of the Unjust” grew out of the hours of unused interview footage that he shot of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council of Elders in the Theresienstadt ghetto in what was then Czechoslovakia. In the lengthy rolling text that begins the film, Lanzmann makes it clear that his film will exonerate Murmelstein, who has long been a controversial figure whom some had accused of collaboration with the Nazis.
In characteristic fashion, Lanzmann is meticulous and thorough in establishing the time, the places, and the progression of events in Murmelstein’s seven-year relationship, from 1938 to 1944, with Adolf Eichmann, who in every way his overlord and the arbiter of the fate of the community that the Jewish Council administered. The film intercuts lengthy sequences of the interviews with Murmelstein, which were conducted in Rome in 1975, with Lanzmann’s present day visits to relevant locations in Vienna and the Czech Republic.
Although at Eichmann’s war crimes trial it was claimed that his participation in Kristallnacht could not be established, Murmelstein provides his direct eye-witness account of Eichmann personally smashing sacred objects with a crowbar as he directed SS men in the ravaging of a Vienna synagogue. Murmelstein refutes Hannah Arendt’s famous statement about the banality of evil, saying in reference to the trial, “The corrupt Eichmann was never shown.”
I felt no aura of the day’s specters of evil in the streets of Cannes as I walked back to my hotel. A new bistro has opened along the narrow pedestrian passageway I take up to the rue d’Antibes from the Palais, and revelers with drinks in their hands were mixing with the people who just gotten ice cream from the gelato shop a few steps away. A rock band was playing on a temporary stage in front of the nearby church, Notre Dame de Bon Voyage. It’s Sunday night and it’s not raining.
The Last of the Unjust: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young at Cannes
Claude Lanzmann’s previously unseen 1975 interview with the last Jewish Council Elder, Benjamin Murmelstein, is a unique historical document, screening out of competition at the fest.
In almost four hours of relentless interviews and reflection, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann returns to the ghostly lands of Shoah, his 9½ hour documentary which has been a watershed for human knowledge about the Holocaust since it appeared in 1985. The Last of the Unjust refers to Benjamin Murmelstein, the third and last “Jewish Elder” appointed by the Nazis to run the Theresienstadt ghetto camp in Czechoslovakia, interviewed by Lanzmann in Rome in 1975. Accused by some of having been a collaborator, including historian Gershom Scholem, who called for him to be hanged, he is fully vindicated in the film as a courageous man who uses his prodigious memory and dazzling intelligence to reconstruct the terror he lived through and in some way influenced. The forcefulness of Murmelstein’s personality carries the audience through some longeurs in a powerful, often painful revisitation that is bound to unleash new debate on the role of Jews who worked for the Nazis. Its historical interest and importance should guarantee limited release in Europe, the U.S. and festivals around the world.
The doc takes its place beside three other films Lanzmann made containing interviews and material that didn’t find a place in the epic Shoah: A Visitor from the Living (1997), Sobibor, 14 October 1943 (2001), and The Karsky Report (2010).
When Lanzmann and his late cameraman William Lubtchansky meet Murmelstein on a terrace high above Rome 30 years after the war, the elderly man with thick glasses describes himself candidly as “an exile” and “the last of the unjust.” As the interview proceeds, it becomes impossible to doubt his sincerity as he describes in excruciating detail his role as administrator of the Nazis’ so-called “model ghetto” constructed in the Czech town of Theresienstadt. As one of the chief rabbis in Vienna at the start of the war, Murmelstein had already run across Adolf Eichmann, who ordered him to write reports to the Nazi authorities. In one of the film’s key scenes, he vehemently denies that Eichmann embodied, in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “the banality of evil”. On the contrary, he describes him as a corrupt,violent demon who personally participated in destroying synagogues on Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) on November 10, 1938. It is Eichmann who orders, and richly profits from, forced Jewish “emigration” and who controls Theresienstadt, where he appoints Murmelstein as president of the Jewish Council following the murder of his predecessor, Paul Eppstein. “I’ll make you King of the Jews,” Eichmann taunts.
How, Lanzmann asks, did he manage to not be shot or hanged? Comparing himself to Sheherazade in 1001 Nights, he comments, “I survived because I had a story to tell.” He sees his role as the third and last president of the Jewish Council as “a comic marionette” under the heel of the Nazi overlords, and yet he is able to refuse some of their demands, such as himself making up a list of prisoners to be sent on convoys to the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka in the East.
Most importantly, he uses what power he has -- and Murmelstein leaves no doubt that he was a strong-willed, forceful administrator -- to save 120,000 lives by arranging their emigration to Palestine and other places. He recounts with gusto how he was able to get 2,000 inmates out of the Dachau concentration camp and send them to Portugal and Spain via occupied France. Though he could easily have emigrated to London himself, he stayed behind in Vienna because he felt he “had something to accomplish -- a mission,” even feeling “a thirst for adventure” as a bureaucrat who could make a difference. So much blunt directness and unflinching honesty goes beyond a self-portrait to reflect on all the supposed Nazi collaborators.
Theresienstadt was a showcase for a visit by the Red Cross, even the site of a propaganda film showing happy Jews at work and play, but in reality it was a concentration camp where disease and starvation killed nearly 100,000 Jews due to horrible overcrowding and appalling sanitary conditions. Murmelstein launched a campaign for better living conditions, slyly using a town “embellishment” program to get his hands on building materials. He was particularly concerned about the elderly.
Once during the interview, Lanzmann interrupts his torrent of words to ask how he can talk about such things without emotion. The rabbi, a great fan of metaphor, simply says, “If a surgeon starts crying over his patient on the operating table, he kills him.”
Another time he compares himself to “a dinosaur on a highway … but time will take care of the dinosaur, and the highway will be free again.” It is a stark summation of one of the most practical men in history.
Though acquitted on the charge of collaborating with the Nazis by a tough Czech court, he never set foot in Israel to avoid facing a second trial.
Lanzmann’s great strength as a filmmaker is the clarity of his moral stance, which comes through in every question he asks, in every chilling image shot by master French cinematographer Caroline Champetier of the empty, staring streets, the carefully repainted buildings, the innocent-looking train stations that the viewer is demanded to envision otherwise. Sketches flash on the screen, as shocking as they are moving, of hearses and bent figures, drawn by Jewish artists who buried their work deep in the ground of the camp.
This is another film that forces you to stare at the horror, however painful it is to do so. And it does require some patience to watch.
The second hour in particular tends to bog down with quotes from books and people who will be obscure to many viewers, but the momentum picks up again and the fine ending is impossible not to watch.
Dialogue is in French and German.
Cannes 2013. The Past, Present Tense: Claude Lanzmann's "The Last of the Unjust" Daniel Kasman from Mubi
Cannes 2013: Dark mirrors | British Film Institute Geoff Andrew from BFI Sight and Sound, May 20, 2013
Cannes Roundtable One: Amy Taubin, Gavin Smith, Kent Jones ... Film Comment, May 21, 2013
Alexander Horwath from Roundtable discussion Number 2 from Film Comment
Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE
Cannes Diary, Days 3-5: Coen Bros. Films and Real-Life Jewel Heists Wesley Morris from Grantland
Daily |
Cannes 2013 | Claude Lanzmann’s THE LAST OF THE UNJUST David Hudson from Fandor
Rob Nelson at Cannes from Variety
Claude Lanzmann returns to the Holocaust | Film | The Guardian Agnès Poirier portrait of Claude Lanzmann from The Guardian, May 14, 2013, also seen here: Agnès Poirier
Lapeyre, Jason and Robert Wilson
I DECLARE WAR D+ 65
Canada (91 mi) 2012 ‘Scope Official site
This is a children’s film that’s inappropriate for children, as physical and psychological torture porn have now crept into children’s films, while it’s also inappropriate for adults, as this is really just a children’s film that has little to do with actual children. So who is the audience for a film like this? That’s likely only part of the problem, as it’s a bit too preposterous to be taken seriously, while what’s worse is nonchalantly juxtaposing such deeply disturbing adult immorality into the actions of children. The kids could easily be cast for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012), as they’re young and innocent, some probably not even in their teens yet, with some with those high pitched children’s voices where boys can still sing soprano in the church choir. The entire film takes place in the woods where all boys, and one tomboyish older girl, are playing a two-team war game that is little more than capture the flag, with strange rules about how to actually register a kill, as otherwise kids can get shot, but if not killed within ten seconds, they can spring back to life and stay in the game. Once killed, you are instructed to go home. In this manner, certain characters that are around in the beginning of the film have long since left by the end. The two teams have leaders, where the most realistic aspect of the film is kids getting an attitude about having to take instructions from somebody else instead of just doing what you want, as any adult could be interchangeable with the leader, and many kids would be just as upset being told what to do. Of course, boys are thrown off their game with a girl playing, as they don’t exactly know what to make of a girl in the game, where one suggests she use her exotic powers as a girl to get another boy’s attention before killing him.
But that’s not the way this game plays out, as early on kids want to ignore the rules and get a quick advantage by cheating, thinking it would be so much simpler that way. Enter PK (Gage Munroe), a short kid with a Napoleonic complex—no not because of his diminutive size, but because he’s read books and actually studied Napoleon’s battle tactics, so in over a dozen games this kid is undefeated in this particular war game. He doesn’t wish to blemish his record by cheating, so he orders his soldiers to play fair, despite their disgruntled anger, but we soon discover the other team isn’t remotely playing fair at all, so there’s an unseen psychological struggle going on in the woods that effects each and every one of the kids. What appears to be innocent fun isn’t that at all, as some kids are getting beat up, another is continually tortured, where some only exhibit weird personalities with toilet humor obsessions, the kind of things that suggests many of these kids have little to no social skills and are likely friendless. While the film pushes the limits of what people are willing to endure for the sake of friendship, one has to ask why would they allow themselves to get beat up and not go home? Why would they stick around for more abuse? And that’s exactly what these directors have in store for us, as one of the team leaders, Skinner (Michael Friend) develops psychotic tendencies, where he enjoys hurting other kids, always threatening to make matters even worse, which suggests he’s mentally unstable. What kid wants to play war games in the woods with mentally unstable characters? When it reaches this stage, it stops being fun, as kids are getting hurt, and at some point, escalating the brutality, something horrific could really happen. Watching Napoleon and Mussolini wannabe’s try to psychologically mix it up with ever more unpleasant dirty tactics is just not much fun to watch.
While one could easily take this as an allegory for the absurdly moronic behavior of adult warfare, where all rules are off, winning by any means is the real goal, but these kids aren’t even old enough to be in high school, where they couldn’t possibly understand the degree of human savagery involved. And let’s face it, who would ever want to play this game again? But here kids just suck it up and endure endless torture of a psychotically disturbed kid, only to escape, and rather than go home, they willingly walk right back into the same trap all over again. The other galling aspect of the movie is the pure idiocy of kids supposedly remaining hidden from view, but instead they’re walking right out in the open, talking loudly as can be, making themselves the easiest targets to spot, yet this behavior continues throughout the film. There are plenty of moments where enemy targets are standing right in front of them and are simply ignored, no explanations offered, where it’s as if the game stops while kids verbally threaten and intimidate one another, and no one has the wherewithal to just end it right there. The directors do add a few visual twists, where the stick rifles in their hands become sophisticated guns firing real bullets, whether automatic guns and rifles, or bazookas. One kid seems to be practicing his use of X-Ray vision, where if he concentrates hard enough he can make his target explode. Afterwards, of course, we realize this is all just his imagination. But the psychotic behavior and brutal torture tactics are never imaginary, becoming all too real, where it’s literally uncomfortable watching kids engage in such disturbingly sick behavior, never having the good sense to just stop and go home. When all is said and done, this film offers very little human insight, where the war game itself never materializes, as most aren’t even playing the game half the time. There’s not a single kid who’s actually having any fun, as the kids taunt and abuse one another throughout, where the film is instead an expression of a bullying psychotic weirdo taking over the game while other kids timidly let him. Stay home already, anything’s better than being subject to more of this phony baloney, a candidate for one of the worst films seen this year.
Chicago Reader Ben Sachs
This Canadian feature cleverly mixes archetypes from war films and coming-of-age movies, defamiliarizing both genres in the process. It takes place over the course of an afternoon as a group of preteens play an elaborate war game in the woods, drawing on their surprisingly rich knowledge of military history to determine their strategies. Since the movie doesn’t show us anything beyond the woods, the game comes to seem increasingly real, with some of the scenes of bullying assuming the force of actual violence. Jason Lapeyre’s script is compellingly ambiguous—the preadolescent behavior is too sharply drawn for the story to register as allegory, yet the kids’ actions carry such strong emotional consequences that the game never seems trivial. The movie follows its own creepy, opaque logic and leaves a strong aftertaste. Lapeyre and Robert Wilson directed.
I DECLARE WAR Facets Multi Media
Almost every afternoon, a group of 13-year-old friends gather for
a game of Capture the Flag in the woods. Using sticks and old toys as weapons,
these would-be warriors form allegiances, stage rebellions, and discover
treacheries that blur fantasy and reality. P.K. Sullivan, a brilliant military
tactician—his favorite film is Patton—leads a crack team to frequent
victory. The commander is Quinn, whose attitude is less serious because he is
enamored with the game's sole female player. One afternoon, loose cannon
Skinner decides to challenge the rules and stage a mutiny. He is hell-bent on
destroying P.K. by any means necessary, starting by taking his best friend as a
prisoner of war.
Directors Robert Wilson and Jason Lapeyre clearly remember how in childhood, everyday
emotions can feel incredibly intense, as youthful innocence of the game
gradually takes on a different tone as the quest for victory pushes the
boundaries of friendship. I Declare War could be described as Lord
of the Flies meets Roald Dahl in this fascinating and unsettling take on
the games that children play. Incisively charting the boundaries between
innocence and experience and recalling Lindsay Anderson's If... in its
disturbing shifts between reality and fantasy, I Declare War is one of
the most accomplished and intriguing films that is as much about adolescence as
warfare in recent memory.
Exclaim!
[Robert Bell]
The rules in war are simple: two teams set up camp with a
respective flag that the opposing team needs to capture to win. If anyone is
shot, that person has to count to ten before they can play again. If they're
hit with a grenade (a balloon filled with red liquid), they have to go home.
Each side has an established leader familiar with the strategies of the
opposing side. There's PK (Gage Monroe), the confident perpetual winner and
ersatz social nucleus of the schoolyard, and Quinn (Aiden Gouveia), his scrappy
competition, hopeful to win this outing with the unlikely addition of Jess
(Mackenzie Munro), a cunning girl with secret tactics that's more interested in
gaining Quinn's affections than playing a game of war.
But what no on could have predicted was that repressed emotions and personal
vendettas would turn the war into something unprecedented. When effeminate
outcast Skinner (Michael Friend) throws a grenade at Quinn, his leader, he
takes charge of his team and eventually captures a prisoner (Siam Yu), using
excess force and verbiage outside of the lexicon of youthful larks.
Tonally, this overt metaphor plays as comedy, for the most part, with the kids
referencing a variety of popular war movies and arguing about trivialities and
friendships. While serious about the game they're playing, discussions about
whether it would be worse to put your penis in a dog's mouth or go the rest of
your life without a computer contextualize the age bracket and maturity level
of what's on display.
What's impressive about I Declare War is its ability to reiterate the
tropes of the genre, similarly building up tension and establishing complex
motivations amidst the varying players, despite being little more than a
weekend game amongst kids.
The implications about conflict resolution and popular socialization in today's
youth are obvious, but not milked in a pedagogical capacity, leaving this
modern criticism of sorts to entertain through sheer innovation and an astute
ear for pre-teen conversation.
Village Voice Alan
Scherstuhl
The most revealing film ever made about kids and the appeal of violent fantasy isn't Battle Royale or an adaptation of Lord of the Flies. It's the shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark that a couple of Mississippi buddies put together over the course of their adolescence. Every punch thrown by this wee Indiana Jones is scored with the fully Foleyed crack of the original film. Between shots, the hero and the villains age from junior high to high school and back. It's as if the pretend ass-kicking they've devoted themselves to is the very agent of their maturation into American men—which would be only a slight exaggeration of the way millions of MMA- and blockbuster-minded boys today get shaped into grown-ups.
I Declare War is almost as true. Its heroes are kids; its villains are kids; its fantasies are kids'. But its truths are adult. Concerned with nothing more than one afternoon's capture the flag-type game of forts and toy guns, and nothing less than the way armed conflicts so often become self-perpetuating gameplay ruled by the most childish of feelings, the movie, directed by Jason Lapeyre and Robert Wilson, features 90 minutes of kids plotting to kill kids. It's play-violence, of course. The warriors here pop their pretend artillery off at each other, but we see what they feel: movie-style muzzle fire, explosions from paint-balloon grenades, a crossbow bolt thunking into a tree when the shooter actually only aimed a slingshot.
One team is led by cocksure preteen PK Sullivan (Gage Munroe, a born screen presence), a sort of neighborhood Napoleon who has Patton slumber parties. To capture his enemies' flag, Sullivan plots feints and ambushes; on the other team, Sullivan's rival, Skinner (Michael Friend), schemes against his own troops and bets the game on the taking of a prisoner, schweeny Kwon (Siam Yu), who is to Sullivan what Milhouse is to Bart Simpson—a best friend and a liability. Skinner's plan: to force Sullivan into a foolhardy assault to free Kwon.
The movie illustrates like few others the peculiar intensity of kids' adventure fantasies. Not housebroken entertainments like Harry Potter or The Goonies, the ones sold to kids with parental approval, but the foul-mouthed and curiously cruel fantasies of actual, unsupervised kids with too much unstructured time. There are some laughs here, especially when the soldiers briefly break character and admit to less bloodthirsty concerns—"Want to come to my house after war?" But mostly the kids and the film play this as serious as any men-with-guns thriller, with death (administered by the squib-like paint balloons) permanent and shocking.
One execution, involving a splatter-grenade to the head, plays out just as it would in a vintage Schwarzenegger shoot-'em-up: We watch the grim face of the killer but are spared a shot of the gory victim. Skinner, a troubled kid pickling in his unpopularity, sees the captured Kwon as a chance to revenge himself upon his social betters—even if doing so involves real torture with a real pocket knife. We can tell that knife is not a figment of his imagination the way the guns are because he has to WD-40 it to open the blade. The occasional kick to a fallen soldier's gut isn't make-believe, either. As the war grows more intense, the play violence and real bullying become indistinguishable.
All that makes this much more than The Bad News Bears' First Blood. As the film surges to its tense conclusion, that game takes on some real dramatic stakes, because Skinner keeps making the pretend stuff too real, and because the kids all will it into mattering. That's infectious, even though the movie never pretends the flags or the forts stand for anything more than the idea of "winning" itself. War here is a time-killing abstraction, a way to demonstrate to the world that war is a thing you are good at. Sullivan, who has won enemy flags in all previous war games, prides himself deeply on his knowledge of ancient battles; he wants nothing more than to go up against someone else who understands strategy. Lapeyre's script is smart about the boundless self-regard of kind-of-smart kids surrounded by less-gifted ones. Sullivan mistakes his ambitious competence for greatness, and he's blind—until his bleak showdown with Skinner—to just how much of his decency he's willing to sacrifice to win.
Exciting and thoughtful, scraped free of the empty provocations of the wicked-pixie Hit-Girl scenes in Kick-Ass, I Declare War offers movie thrills—smartly plotted betrayals and escapes—as well as its share of disappointments. The firefights grow wearying, some of the bullying verges upon the fantastic, and in at least two scenes the chatter loses its naturalistic flatness. "Ever been buggered?" a kid nicknamed Altar Boy is asked. "No," he says, "it's an Anglican church."
The performances are strong, especially Friend as the sweaty, insecure bad guy, an eruption of dork rage who keeps ruining the war by making it personal. Mackenzie Munro is excellent as a young woman—maturing faster than the boys—who learns she can sweet-talk her way through confrontations with the enemy. She can shoot, too. The smart, funny, terrifying thing: Like all these characters, hers seems to learn something fundamental about how to be a grown-up from pretending to be a killer.
Tiny Mix Tapes [Daniel
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Lapid, Nadav
POLICEMAN (Ha-shoter) B 88
Israel (100 mi) 2011
While analysts may view the Arab-Israeli dispute and conflicts between Muslim and non-Muslim communities through political grievances, the roots of such conflicts lie as much in culture and Arab tribalism. Seventh-century Arab tribal culture influenced Islam and its believers’ attitudes toward non-Muslims, where today, the embodiment of Arab culture and tribalism within Islam impacts everything from family relations, to governance, to conflict. According to Philip Carl Salzman from The Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2008, The Middle East's Tribal DNA :: Middle East Quarterly - Middle, for Arab Muslims confronting Jews, the opposition is between the dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, and the dar al-harb, the land of the infidels, where the Muslim is obliged to advance God’s true way, Islam, in the face of the ignominy of the Jew’s false religion. Islamic doctrine holds that all non-Muslims, whether Christian or Jewish dhimmi or infidel pagans, must be subordinate to Muslims. Jews under Qur’anic doctrine are inferior by virtue of their false religion and must not be allowed to be equal to Muslims. For Muslim Arabs, the conceit of Jews establishing their own state, Israel, and on territory conquered by Muslims and, since Muhammad, under Muslim control is outrageous and intolerable. In a 2006 interview, Pierre Heumann, a journalist with the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, asked Al-Jazeera editor-in-chief Ahmed Sheikh whether enmity toward Israel is motivated by self-esteem. Sheikh explained, "Exactly. It’s because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants. can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million.” The Arab situation, compared to Israel’s, is bleak. In all spheres of life except for religion, Arab society and culture has declined in importance and influence. Muslim Middle Eastern countries, from Morocco to Iran, are dictatorships, where the propensity of Arab states and Iran to dictatorship also has roots in tribal culture. There is an inherent conflict between peasants and nomads. Peasants are sedentary, tied to their land, water, and crops while tribesmen are nomadic, moving around remote regions. Peasants tend to be densely concentrated in water-rich areas around rivers or irrigation systems while pastoral tribesmen, in contrast, are spread thinly across plains, deserts, and mountains. In global competition with other societies and cultures, Arabs have for centuries been losers. Israel, on the other hand, is a parliamentary democracy with established civil liberties. It is perhaps the most multiracial and multicultural state in the world, gathering as it has Jews from all corners of the world. It has also accepted and, albeit imperfectly, incorporated a substantial population of Arab Bedouin and Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian. Throughout the span of Middle East history, tribes have often posed a credible threat to central governments, and have played an important role in the making and dismantling of ruling dynasties.
Tribes and Tribalism in the Arab Spring - Center for Middle ... Khaled Fattah, October 26, 2011
The Romans, the
Persians, the Ottomans, the French, the British, the Italians, Arab kings,
Imams, Sultans and the post independence Arab military officers, have all
attempted, with various degrees of success and failure, to destroy, co-opt,
subordinate and manipulate tribes. The Romans, for instance, allocated payments
to tribes in the region to guard the frontiers against external intrusion. The
Persians, on the other hand, used tribes as buffers against emerging powerful
neighbouring dynasties, while western colonial forces promoted tribalism as a
counterbalance to the rising urban sentiments of nationalism. Tribes, however,
posed the most serious challenge to the political elites of the post-colonial
independent Arab states. At the heart of this threat lies the obsessive
preoccupation of the 20th century political regimes in the region with the
total confiscation of the political arena, and the forcible submission of all social
actors to the will of political leadership.
By looking through the wrong end of the telescope, many in the Western world
think of tribal people as nomads, riding camels and living in harsh and remote
desert areas. This is not the reality in the Arab Middle East, where the
distinction between tribal and non-tribal does not correspond in any
significant way between nomadic and settled populations. The majority of Middle
Eastern tribes do not move. Tribal populations, for instance, in Iraq and Yemen
are settled farmers, who plant fruits and vegetables beside their sorghum and
millet. Remarkably, tribal identity in the region is still alive in the
socio-political consciousness of millions of Arabs residing in modern
globalising cities. This unique phenomenon is one of the excellent mirrors to
reflect how tribalism in the Arab world is not a way of life. Rather, it
is an identity, which is grounded in cultural psychology and politics. In other
words, tribalism in the Middle East is culturally rooted and politically
shaped. It’s uneven development and strength in the region is the outcome of
the divergent and changing types of state formation, colonial penetration,
economic growth and societal changes.
One does not normally associate tribalism when speaking of Israel except as the traditional divisions of the ancient Jewish people as depicted in The Old Testament. Yet what’s interesting about this film is how it depicts modern Israeli society through a tribal context, where layered within the fabric of ordinary life are various subset groups, each containing their own shared rituals and beliefs with other members that seem to express their unique identity. What’s perhaps most surprising is how these rival groups vie for power and are often at odds with one another, becoming part of the continuing struggle to define what it means to be an Israeli. It’s not often one sees this degree of self-analysis and criticism coming from within Israel itself, where it would be hard to imagine a similar film attacking the inner fabric of American society, particularly one winning awards at the Jerusalem Film Festival before being exported around the world. The key is the understated tone, where this is not some exaggerated farce or overblown melodrama making claims on a particular point of view in order to pacify the ardent believers, instead it is the meticulous attention to detail that likely raises eyebrows here, and the changing shift of the story. From the outset, the viewer is taken inside the ritualistic mindset of an elite anti-terrorism police unit of the Israeli government, something akin to the American Navy Seals, as these are the guys that specialize in only the most difficult operations, normally against Arab terrorists. Through the eyes of Yaron (Yiftach Klein), perhaps the Alpha-male of the all-male group, these are highly trained experts whose close-knit camaraderie is essential, as they lay their lives on the line for each other on a daily basis, seeing themselves as true patriots, looking out over the vast emptiness of the desert to exclaim, “This is the most beautiful country in the world,” where they greet one another with hugs and loud pats on the back, always expressing a physicality in their interactions that borders on the homoerotic, though not as exaggerated as Claire Denis’s sublime imagery in Beau Travail (1999). They maintain this same bond of affection during their down time, extended to each other’s wives and children, where love of country, family, and each other are the building blocks for an impregnable nation, all believing they live in the greatest nation on earth. Alone with his pregnant wife, Yaron has a fairly bland personality, where his ambitions of building a safe home for his family are no different than anyone elses. What’s interesting is how the individual is sublimated for a group mentality of cohesiveness and seeming invincibility, where these men are used to succeeding when working as a collective group.
After spending nearly an hour with this Israeli commando unit when they’re not on duty, where the camera simply observes their behavior, the scene inexplicably shifts to a group of neo-Nazi’s roaming the streets, aggressively kicking in cars they pass along the way, finally smashing one car to bits, purely at random, where we see the car owner staring in disbelief, helpless to do anything about it. Shira (Yaara Pelzig) is then seen as part of another group of college age kids walking along the outskirts of the desert when simultaneously they pull guns out of their knapsacks and fire at a lone tree on the road ahead, unleashing their rage as they use it for target practice. We see them again meeting in the plush upscale confines of Shira’s parent’s home rehearsing some revolutionary message they intend to deliver, trying to reduce their manifesto to its bare essence, “It is time for the poor to get rich, and the rich to start dying…” While their leader Nathanael (Michael Aloni) approves or disapproves various recommendations, they are a band of Jewish radicals who naively plot class warfare through violent means, part of the Israeli bourgeois, raised in middle or upper class homes, from good schools and universities. In a momentary diversion, Shira is seen visiting a lesbian nightclub spouting plenty of musical rage, but when someone actually tries to talk to her, she instantly despises them and all that they stand for. These fanatics infiltrate the Jerusalem wedding of a billionaire’s daughter, taking three Israeli billionaires as hostages, using the moment to air their anti-capitalist grievances through the national media, allowing a film crew to take pictures of each of them pointing guns to the heads of the hostages, like some sort of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) outlaw group. Yaron’s anti-terrorist group is called in to restore order, as these capitalists are near heads of state in their own industries, Israeli success stories, and are to be protected at all costs, where in a preliminary review, each terrorist is targeted in a planned raid. In the first hour of the film, one would never have anticipated this kind of outcome, but what grabs one’s attention is how none of these radicals would be pulling off this kind of gun-toting violence on their own, but are acting as a group collective, seemingly with one voice and one purpose. Likewise, so is the police unit, who perform their duties flawlessly. In reviewing the ensuing carnage, Yaron stares in disbelief at what he sees, young Jewish terrorists who are little more than kids themselves, children of privilege raised to be the future of the nation, both groups fighting for the “collective soul” of Israel. It’s an interesting comment on the power of tribal collectives, where people can become lost in the dream-like utopia of a better world, falling in love with the idea, even dying for it, even as reality proves far more complicated.
Village Voice Michael Nordine
Arriving in theaters more than two years after being named the best undistributed film of 2011 by the Village Voice, Nadav Lapid's Policeman deftly examines the physical and spiritual fallout of ideology turning into action.
Yaron (Yiftach Klein) is the leader of an elite counter-terrorist squad in Israel, as well as husband to a wife whose pregnancy he doesn't want to jinx by discussing too openly; as they're often wont to, these two aspects of his life prove impossible to compartmentalize.
To say that the ensuing drama moves at a snail's pace runs the risk of offending any slugs who might be reading, but the incremental changes Yaron and his cohorts undergo are something of a slow-burning marvel to behold. Lapid is so unconcerned with crafting a conventional crime drama that merely titling his film Policeman reads as a minor subversion, a way of defining the narrative in relation to a genre it hardly fits into.
This distinct approach also makes the propulsive incidents, when they do arise, all the more gripping. Near the end, a mundane wedding photo shoot abruptly turns into a hostage situation; the scene feels dire as soon as it's begun.
Lapid avoids bluster even here, framing the climactic raid as something more elegiac than triumphant — a no-other-choice response to be met with misty eyes rather than shouts of victory.
Slant Magazine Nick Schager
Israel's fractured psyche is plumbed via narrative splintering in Policeman, Nadav Lapid's compelling drama about his homeland's burgeoning social unrest. Lapid's story begins with Yaron (Yiftach Klein), a member of an elite counter-terrorism unit and a borderline caricature of national masculine pride, proclaiming high atop a mountain after a bike ride with his equally macho mates, "This is the most beautiful country in the world," dancing with hip-thrusting suggestiveness for his pregnant wife, and greeting his comrades with back-slaps so powerful that their sounds overwhelm the soundtrack. Yaron is the epitome of he-man Israeli military might, and the first (and longest) sequence of Lapid's debut focuses on his day-to-day activities, which involve attending a barbeque where men playfully wrestle and he checks himself out in the mirror while holding a baby (to see how impending fatherhood will suit him), and trying to pick up a 15-year-old waitress at a café by showing her (and asking if she wants to stroke) his gun. Virility and power define him, as does a steadfast belief in the unassailable virtue of his country, which must be protected at all costs in a manner similar to the health of his unit, which—under fire for a prior shooting that claimed some Palestinian lives—he plans to protect from prosecution by having fatally brain tumor-stricken squad member Ariel take the fall for the incident.
Ariel is a cancer that must be excised for the survival of the team, just as combat casualties must be accepted for the good of the nation, a body-politic undercurrent that Lapid introduces deftly. That internal-disease metaphor extends to the material's second half, in which the story—after a scene in which a gang of nihilistic punks trashes a car for no reason—shifts its gaze to another tight-knit group of true believers. Violent reactionaries, this clan is nominally led by handsome Nathanel (Michael Aloni), but truly run by stone-faced Shira (Yaara Pelzig), a wannabe-poet revolutionary who plans to read her kill-the-rich manifesto decrying Israeli socio-economic disparities on television after carrying out a kidnapping of wealthy billionaires at a wedding. It's a scheme whose particulars remain shrouded in mystery for long stretches, as Lapid depicts the inner workings of the group, which also includes follower Oded and, soon thereafter, Oded's father, who tags along in order to protect his son. Here as with the counter-terrorism team, violence intermingles freely with sexuality, as Oded pines for Shira and she for Nathanel, though more than their carnal urges, it's their clichéd rage and hypocrisy that permeates these segments, a sense of semi-justified anger channeled by spoiled-brat kids desperately trying to play Che Guevara.
Lapid presents these two storylines as representing increasingly at-war factions of the current Israeli consciousness, and as such, they're destined to come to a head during Policeman's finale. Lapid's stewardship in the lead-up to that confrontation is remarkably assured, capturing an ever-present atmosphere of clique-ish camaraderie and pent-up fury and fanaticism through intense close-ups and vivid compositions of dynamic tension. As with a shot in which Oded and his dad travel back and forth between kitchen and dining room, the two always in separate spaces that are visually divided by a wall, the film's aesthetics convey class, gender and age schisms with subtle urgency. When the powder-keg fuse is finally lit, suspense mounts not so much with regards to the eventual outcome, as the circumstances can only lead to one real resolution, but to the way in which the various characters will reconcile their convictions and choices with the realities they face. As such, Policeman's apex proves to be its final shot, a shared look between Shira and Yaron—she perhaps seeing the humanity in him, he trying to process that this terrorist is not an Arab but a Jew—that beautifully embodies the film's formal and thematic fissures.
Cineaste Richard Porton
In addition to screening distinguished films, it’s also important for film festivals to formulate a consistent esthetic stance that justifies the inclusion of a disparate group of titles, which critics and audiences can then either dismiss or embrace. During Olivier Père’s second year as festival director, it became clear that the one-time head of Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight had successfully pulled off a subtle balancing act. Although Père is clearly enamored of the sort of auteur cinema that distinguishes the Fortnight from the more bloated entries at the Cannes Competition, he’s nevertheless obliged to regale the public with a certain number of crowd pleasers that can attract locals to the huge open-air screenings at Locarno’s Piazza Grande. Despite Père and his team’s efforts to complement the Concorso Internazionale’s auteur emphasis with honest populist choices for the al fresco screenings, there were some obvious cracks in this policy’s veneer. While some of the films screened at the Piazza Grande, namely Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block and Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar, successfully merged artistry and accessibility, it was more difficult to defend extremely pedestrian fare such as Jon Favreau’s Cowboys and Aliens (presumably invited as an excuse to invite Harrison Ford to receive a career award), Will Gluck’s Friends With Benefits, and Emmanuel Mouret’s L’Art d’aimer
Fortunately, adventurous filmgoers are certainly not obliged to partake of any of the Piazza Grande’s weaker offerings and, unlike a megafestival such as Toronto, the nominal glitz which apparently rationalized the presence of a few weak Hollywood or French commercial movies never threatens to smother the allure of Locarno’s smaller, more esthetically daring films. It’s also greatly to the festival’s credit that retrospectives are not relegated to the margins but are in fact a vital component of the entire mix. 2011’s Vincente Minnelli retrospective (which was subsequently exported to the Brooklyn Academy of Music) offered a valuable opportunity to reexamine this surprisingly complex director’s legacy. Scheduled to coincide with the publication of Emmanuel Burdeau’s comprehensive Minnelli monograph, the films unspooled at the Ex-Rex cinema, a pleasantly musty film palace in the city center. The Minnelli retrospective, like last year’s Lubitsch tribute, fused Hollywood nostalgia with the ambiance of a university seminar; stars such as Leslie Caron (who shone in Minnelli’s An American in Paris) rubbed shoulders with archivists, critics, and academics such as Jacques Rancière, Freddy Buache, and Jean Douchet. Viewing the pristine 35mm prints at the Ex-Rex could only confirm previous memories of Minnelli’s gloriously neurotic sensibility. Ostensibly a comedy, Father of the Bride (1950; one of the films I reacquainted myself with at Locarno) emerged as a quasinoirish suburban nightmare—the labyrinth of wedding planners, decorators, and caterers that Stanley and Ellie Banks (Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett) encounter while preparing for their beautiful daughter’s (Elizabeth Taylor) wedding exemplified an early phase of the consumer society that still bedevils us. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) is a more curious artifact from the end of Minnelli’s career. An adaptation of an Alan Jay Lerner/Burton Lane Broadway musical, On a Clear Day contains bleak echoes of My Fair Lady. Instead of the irascibly charming Henry Higgins trading bons mots with Eliza Dolittle, Dr. Mark Chabot (Yves Montand), a deceptively suave Svengali, subtly terrorizes Daisy Gamble (Barbra Streisand), a daffy Brooklynite with psychic powers. Shamelessly manipulated by Chabot, who imperiously conducts sessions in what is now labeled “past lives regression,” the temperature is much too chilly for true romance. Daisy can only find refuge in fleeting memories of a happier existence as a fiery “free spirit” in nineteenth-century England.
Père’s glowing review of Nadav Lapid’s Policeman (winner of this year’s Jury Prize at Locarno) in the Fall 2011 issue of Cinema Scope provided compelling evidence that he is willing to eloquently defend the festival’s programming choices. Lapid’s debut feature is one of the most provocative films to come out of Israel in recent years; Waltz with Bashir and Lebanon are, by comparison, tame and equivocating. Lauding Policeman’s political vision and audacious style, Père maintains that “it is also one of the most stimulating cinematic propositions of recent years, resolving the form and content problem thanks to a stunning feat of dramaturgy while its powerful mise-en-scène expresses ideas that are just as radical.”
Père, moreover, argues that Policeman belongs to an influential group of films (the lineage extends from L’avventura and Psycho to Mulholland Drive) that disrupt “patterns of classical narration” through a rupture in the film’s midsection that sets up a dialectical tension—thereby promoting a salutary disorientation designed to undermine both cinematic conventions and hidebound social and political attitudes. In Lapid’s film, an opening section explores the daily regimen of Yaron, a macho policeman and expectant father in an elite commando unit predisposed to admiring his perfectly sculpted body in the mirror while boasting about his prowess as a warrior. This extended sequence eventually segues into the film’s primary narrative strand, a dispassionate examination of a group of well-heeled Israeli leftists, whose rhetoric and good looks recalls the young zealots of Godard’s La Chinoise—and whose fondness for terrorist adventurism is reminiscent of the Weather Underground and Baader-Meinhof gang. Refusing to capitulate to liberal sentimentality, these intrepid—and occasionally klutzy—ideologues are far from the antidote to Yaron’s nationalist bluster; in many respects they are merely a bizarre fun-house mirror reflection of the Israeli state’s political hubris. To a certain extent, the militants’ rage against income inequality, which inspires them to launch an inept kidnapping of a wealthy industrialist, represents a hyperbolic version of the tent encampments that recently surfaced in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. From another perspective, their intransigence and fanaticism suggests what might ensue in Israel if the currently peaceful protestors’ demands are ignored by a complacent state.
Cinema-Scope Olivier Père
It’s been a long time since a first feature has displayed such masterly direction as Nadav Lapid’s Policeman (Hashoter), such a sense of connection to the films of Godard, Bresson, Fassbinder, Kubrick, and Haneke, and giving those more perceptive viewers such a conviction of witnessing the arrival of an outstanding filmmaker while also discovering a major film as brilliant in formal terms as in its ideas. At a time when all the best new directors (Serra, Gomes, Alonso) are implicitly demonstrating a political dimension to their work through the very act fact of producing and filming in a different way—usually steering clear of the big issues and rejecting a frontal approach to historical, ideological, and social concerns—Lapid dares to make explicitly political films. One might say that as an Israeli, he has no choice in the matter. The impressive thing about Policeman, which won the Special Jury Prize in Locarno, is that it is both the best political film in ages (including and especially in Israel) and also one of the most stimulating cinematic propositions of recent years, resolving the form and content problem thanks to a stunning feat of dramaturgy while its powerful mise en scène expresses ideas that are just as radical.
Policeman did not simply emerge out of nowhere. Those who saw Lapid’s mid-length film Emile’s Girlfriend at Cannes Critics Week in 2006 knew they had discovered a filmmaker with a gift for brilliant writing, able to construct within a mere 48 minutes a sophisticated narrative combining humour, romance, and reflections on the Jewish question under the tripartite influence of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen (e.g., the memorable sequence of the Shoah museum tour). Policeman has the same qualities of Emile’s Girlfriend, but in a much more serious register and with a tenfold growth in assurance that matches the gravity of the new project. If Policeman is the precocious outcome of Lapid’s artistic trajectory—he previously made short films and also wrote the novel on which the film is based—it is also part of the genealogy of modern cinema, a disparate yet coherent family that would include Mulholland Drive (2001), Tropical Malady (2004), and Certified Copy (2010), amongst others: all major works of contemporary cinema, drawing upon Psycho and L’avventura (two films at the matrix of modern cinema, both made in 1960), that make abrupt changes in the middle or record the mutation, dislocation, and crisis of classical narration. Policeman uses this syndrome of the “film cut in two” to dialectical effect, through its highly rigorous organization of a kind of folding that occurs shortly before the midpoint of the narrative and offers a second start, initially unpredictable and unexpected, but which in fact constitutes a symmetrical repetition of the first part in a new form.
The first 40 minutes of Policeman chart the life of a policeman and his colleagues who are members of an elite anti-terrorist squad, observing, with a touch of irony, these over-trained men devoted body and soul to the state of Israel, who function like a well-oiled human machine in their risk-free existence where everything is organized according to manly rituals. Lapid focuses on Yaron (Yiftach Klein, also the lead in Emile`s Girlfriend), a kind of prototype of the Jewish superman whose intense narcissism, total moral and physical investment in Israel and passionate devotion to his mother make him a fascinating film character. His wife is pregnant, and he performs a semi-naked courtship dance to express his strength and pride to her. Later, at a barbecue with his colleagues, he admires himself in the mirror as he holds a child in his arms, as if in aesthetic preparation for impending fatherhood, before going on to joust with his friends, the men’s grappling observed by their wives with loving, aroused attention (a realistic parody of Zionist machismo that recalls another film about the Jewish superman, the wonderful You Don’t Mess With the Zohan [2008]). The cult of mental and physical strength and good health is expressed in this first section’s central narrative episode. One of the commandos, weak an emaciated after developing a brain tumour, slows down the group’s operations and compromises its goals of perfection and optimal performance. Since it is clear he will very soon be dead, his immediate superiors, and Yaron, ask him to take responsibility for the death of Palestinian civilians during an operation, to save his comrades from prosecution. The unhealthy body, like the foreign body (the Arab), must be neutralized, and if necessary eliminated, in order to preserve Israel’s unfailing power.
While this first section observes the daily existence of those who are the armed wing of state violence, a transitional sequence of a group of punks silently destroying a car shows anarchic violence in all its awful banality on the way to the film’s second part, which dramatizes a hypothesis of revolutionary violence in Israel. (In each case, the filmmaker only ever envisages his country in terms of violence.) Completely disconnected from the first part (until the final dénouement), this second movement has, however, a quite symmetrical relationship to it. The group of patriotic proletarian policemen is replaced by a group of hate-filled bourgeois youth, disgusted by Israeli society, who intend to denounce social injustice via a grand terrorist gesture. In the desert, after a bike ride, the policemen proclaim their unconditional love for Israel (“It’s the most beautiful country in the world!”), while the wannabe terrorists practice their marksmanship by shooting at an olive tree, discharging their weapons and their hatred onto a symbol of peace and justice. A young woman in the group, Shira (Yaara Pelzig), secretly in love with their leader Nathanael, stands out for her purity and fanaticism. Young, good-looking, rich, rebellious, they are like relatives of the characters in Le diable probablement (1977) and La chinoise (1967). But the symmetry is soon broken by the perturbation of fiction. State violence functions at full throttle, while revolutionary violence, which does not (yet?) exist in Israel, spirals downwards to end in failure and death. In the film’s final shot, Yaron silently observes the face of the dying Shira, shot down by his bullets. What is he thinking? For the first time, the enemy to be defeated is not an Arab but a Jew. Something has just broken down. Confused thoughts, complicated and contradictory, go through his mind. What if this beautiful woman lying on the ground was his own daughter, like the one his wife is just about to bring into the world?
In the end, what separates the two parts of the film is their relation to reality. What Lapid describes in his account of the policemen’s lives is of the order of documentary. What he invents in the second part is of the order of fantasy, a cry of anger against the government: science fiction that is in the process of becoming fiction. In the weeks following its first screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival (where it won three awards), the film took on a troublingly prophetic dimension in light of the wave of protests and demonstrations by young Israelis, who poured into the streets shouting the same slogans Shira uses at the end of the film: “Police, you are not our enemies. You too are the oppressed.” In Israel, this outstanding political film has thus become a standard-bearer for youth who are angry with a government they loathe. Elsewhere in the world, Policeman may well also impress for more than the chilling perfection of its mise en scène.
Review: 'Policeman' A Strong, Haneke-Inspired Rumination ... Christopher Bell from The Playlist
Policeman / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo
Policeman | Review - Ioncinema Ryan Brown
Indiewire Eric Kohn
Political Film Review Michael Haas
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
The Film Emporium [Andy Buckle]
Sound On Sight Zornitsa
Facets : Cinémathèque: Policeman
AV Club Ben Kenigsberg
Tribes and Tribalism in the Arab Spring - Center for Middle ... Khaled Fattah, October 26, 2011
The Middle East's Tribal DNA :: Middle East Quarterly - Middle Philip Carl Salzman from The Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2008
Keyframe: the Fandor Blog [Anna Bak-Kvapil] Interview with the director, December 19, 2011
Director interview Neta Alexander interview from Film Comment, June 5, 2014
Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Policeman - Time Out David Jenkins
Toronto Film Scene [William Brownridge]
SFIFF capsule: 'Policeman' - San Francisco Chronicle Leba Hertz
Israel's austere 'Policeman' makes no compromises - Los ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
Policeman - Roger Ebert Godfrey Cheshire
New York Times
Manohla Dargis
Lapine, James
INTO THE WOODS – made for
TV, PBS American Playhouse B 85
USA (153 mi) 1991
I
was raised to be charming, not sincere. —The Prince (Robert Westerberg)
One of the most endearing of all Stephen Sondheim musicals, a magical experience largely because of its universal accessibility, one that pokes fun of children’s fairy tales, imagining them with different outcomes than ending happily ever after, premiering on Broadway on November 5, 1987. Divided into two halves, separated by an Intermission, the first half fits the audiences expectations by ingeniously combining several classic fairy tales, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Jack and the Beanstalk, with a sarcastic narrator (Tom Aldredge) dressed in a suit visibly seen standing off to the side of the stage advancing the stories with a polished relish, while in the second half, when the familiar suddenly turns unrecognizable, elements of death and stark realism are added, where the story grows darker with a chilling despair that haunts the surviving characters, suddenly cut off from their families and homes, left to fend for themselves in a changing world. Music and lyrics by Sondheim, with a clever story written by James Lapine, the production won three Tony Awards, Best Score, Best Book (Story), and Best Actress in a Musical (Joanna Gleason as the Baker’s wife, whose deadpan timing is a joy to behold) in a year dominated by The Phantom of the Opera, winner of seven Tony awards, becoming the longest running Broadway show in history. Collaborating with Lapine, the writer has a taste for visually oriented theater, where their first musical together about pointillist painter Georges Seurat was Sunday in the Park with George, in 1984, winning two Tony awards for design, while Sondheim and Lapine won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Lapine also directs the film, attempting to recreate the Broadway experience by simply filming a performance in front of a live audience, but the suffocatingly narrow and confined limitations of a fixed camera with a zoom lens moving in and out, but not panning from side to side (where interestingly the stage moves instead of the camera), prevents an overall view of depth and breadth of the entire stage, losing much of the three dimensional aspects of movement, as there are plenty of scene changes within a scene, often losing connection with characters, where the visual effect throughout is everything feels flattened out. This is the same problem with filming operas (appearing regularly in movie theaters nowadays), where these specific theatrical performances were meant to be experienced live in theaters where the sound reverberates throughout the music hall.
Ostensibly a story about a childless Baker (Chip Zien) and his
wife (Gleason) and their magical quest to begin a family, fighting off a curse
placed upon them years ago by an ugly Witch (Bernadette Peters, a delight in
one of her best roles), who has herself been cursed, collecting several items
the Witch demands to reverse the curse while interacting with other storybook
characters throughout the journey. With
music tying all these elements together, the opening sequence of heading “Into
the Woods” draws in many of the featured characters, including Little Red Riding
Hood (Danielle Ferland, who ultimately becomes knife-wielding and cynical)
snatching as many cookies as she can grab in the bakery before she’s off to her
grandmother’s house, a somewhat dimwitted neighbor Jack (Ben Wright) who
through impoverished circumstances is forced by his mother to take his best
friend, a cow named Milky White (an inanimate object), to the market for money,
while Cinderella (Kim Crosby) is seen fleeing through the woods wearing
slippers of gold while escaping from the Prince (Robert Westerberg, who doubles
as the wolf, and after meeting on the set ironically goes on to marry
Cinderella/Kim Crosby in real life afterwards) after the luxurious ball, a
recurring event that happens on each of three consecutive nights. The First Act plays out like a delightful
run-on sentence, continually getting carried away with one idea, which overlaps
into another, and another, creating waves of interconnecting sequences that are
humorously developed through complicated musical lyrics that are given the
Sondheim touch, where he is a master of cleverly crafting music and lyrics
specifically tailored to the characters and situations within his
musicals. Perhaps setting the absurdly
ridiculous tone for the story is one of the more memorable musical numbers, a
duet of dueling princes in “Agony,” Into the Woods - "Agony" - YouTube (2:39), one
(Chuck Wagner) who can’t fathom how to steal away Rapunzel locked in her tall
tower with no doors and the other whose fair maiden keeps eluding his grasp at
the ball, something he finds unthinkable, where he attributes it to “madness,”
each an exaggerated caricature of what a Prince Charming is supposed to be, yet
each bemoaning the opposition they encounter as if it were a fate worse than
death. But that’s only a prelude for
worse catastrophes yet to come. When the
Witch discovers the Prince has romantic inclinations with Rapunzel, she begs
her daughter not to leave her, as the world outside is filled with trouble and
heartache, "Stay with Me" - Into The Woods
(1991 ... - YouTube (2:46), becoming one of the best songs ever written about parental loss. When Rapunzel refuses, however, the
Witch angrily blinds the Prince, cuts off Rapunzel's hair and banishes her to
the desert.
Part of the beauty of the play is how well the audience is initially
comforted by the opening act, where everyone finds what they’re looking for, as
the Bakers have a child, the Witch has regained her beauty, Cinderella has
married the Prince and lives in a castle, Little Red Riding Hood has defeated
the Wolf, and Jack and his mother are no longer poor, as the magic beans
received for the cow have brought them riches, where “once upon a time” has led
to “happily ever after” and all is seemingly right with the world. At the Intermission, audiences are likely to
be smiling. But the second act literally
transforms the play, as something devilishly clever aspires to something even
greater, where simply following one’s customary storybook destiny without
having to make difficult choices is not in the cards, as that is not how life
works. Despite achieving what they set
out to, everyone seems happy on the outside, but underneath they all still
yearn for something more, where the Bakers fret about not having enough room
for a new family, while Cinderella may actually be growing bored with the
Prince, and Rapunzel, despite being freed from the tower, wanders aimlessly in
the desert, where her blind Prince somehow finds her there, regaining his sight
from her tears and marries her on the spot, but she’s grown hysterical. Both Prince Charmings continue to romance
other women, betraying their wives in the process, but this is all they know. While Jack initially chopped down the
beanstalk, leaving a Giant dead in their backyard, a new Giant is detected from
another beanstalk, a Lady Giant who’s fuming over the loss of her husband and
wants the child responsible handed over to her.
In her wrath, she destroys the castle, steps on Grandmother’s house, and
causes the death of the Baker’s wife. In
regaining her beauty, the Witch has lost her powers to defend against such a
formidable creature, singing the “Last Midnight” in their darkest hour, leaving
them seemingly at the mercy of the Lady Giant, many having lost their homes and
their loved ones. This heartache and
tragedy is reflected in one of Sondheim’s greatest songs, “No One Is Alone,”
where Cinderella comforts Little Red Riding Hood while the Baker consoles Jack
after he’s lost his mother, trying to keep his anger from swelling up into
vengeance. In the end only a few
survive, but they are visited by the spirits of the ones they lost, where the
Witch, of all people, delivers the moral of the story, singing one of the most
beautifully heartfelt songs, “Children Will Listen,” before they all
collectively return to the introductory main theme song, “Into the Woods.” These complex characterizations are the heart
of the story, as Sondheim brings the unfamiliar into the familiar, where this
is one of his more audience pleasing and ingeniously created works. By the end, we feel intimately connected to
the characters, mixing comic wit, savage satire, and pure tragedy into their
otherwise fortuitous lives, bringing them to the edge of the apocalypse where
their world, as they and we in the audience know it, is completely destroyed
and they must find a new way to survive outside the safely protected confines
of fairy tales and illusion.
DVD Savant Review: Into the Woods - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson
A delightful cluster of fractured fairy tales, the Broadway musical Into the Woods has great music, comedy, and heart. It examines the universal concerns behind the magic and humor: Our desires, our problems and our fears in the real world. And in a daring midpoint twist, it becomes a parable that ranges way beyond the realm of children's stories.
To remove the curse of a Witch (Bernadette Peters) preventing them from having children, the Baker (Chip Zien) and his wife (Joanna Gleason) go into the woods to gather several magical items. There they meet Red Riding Hood (Danielle Ferland), who's just escaped the clutches of the Wolf (Robert Westenberg) and enlist the aid of a number of characters from other stories (Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Rapunzel). The search becomes entangled with a half-dozen familiar storylines, yet all is straightened out by the time intermission rolls around ... after which the show does a complete reversal on our expectations, pitting the characters this time against the often insoluble problems of the real world.
A new big-scale stage production of Into the Woods in Los Angeles prompted Savant to ask Image Entertainment for this older catalog title, a full-on video version of the stage show recorded in 1990. It's a marvel, plain and simple, from Sondheim's melodic songs to his great characterizations. A generally spoofy tone does no harm whatsoever to the story, in which familiar storybook characters take on human dimensions. Little Red Riding Hood, for example, is a selfish glutton and her Wolf comes off as a rapist-murderer. The Witch's curses are meted out for very real reasons. There's a definite class difference between a baker's wife and the princesses who flee into the woods to avoid their worthless, vain princes. The dialogues given these characters are often hilarious ("Dwarfs are very upsetting!") and the songs pierce straight to their heart's desires - Children Will Listen, Giants in the Sky.
Lapine and Sondheim are known for their radical dramatic structures, but Into the Woods is audience-friendly. The various intrigues seem to have sorted themselves out at the mid-point, but then the playwrights push their characters into a life beyond 'happily ever after', where princesses find out their perfect mates aren't so perfect, and even the most powerful characters have painful lessons to learn. Worse yet, instead of simple dangers to overcome, they must face a terrible force that invades the fairyland to destroy them all. The set storybook characters have to grow into real people, accepting responsibility and loss. Only by having courage against an unknown fate and by forming new 'families' is there any hope of survival.
The show thus becomes serious, while staying firmly in make-believe land: We can interpret the monstrous force that's killing everyone any way we wish. Unlike The Birds, the threat can be traced to definite human crimes. Most of fairyland tries to run away, and the responsible characters that fight to survive are forced to forget about placing the blame. Into the Woods is about responsibilities that fairy tale people don't have to face, but we do: Parenthood, commitment, even terrible crimes against society that secretly originate with our own misdeeds.
Into the Woods is a full course of theatrical excitement, an entertaining, accessible and intelligent musical show. The cast is composed mostly of NYC stage stars of the kind who show up only as minor characters in Woody Allen films. Danielle Ferland sings a song in Radio Days, and the great Joanna Gleason is familiar from Hannah and her Sisters, Boogie Nights and various TV series. But another fine talent, Chip Zien, works in soap operas and has accomplishments on his resumé such as providing the voice for the ill-fated Howard the Duck. Bernadette Peters of course gets the most attention for her impressive Witch, acting and singing up a storm through a gnarled mask.
Image's DVD of Into the Woods is from a videotaped television show (shown first on PBS, I believe) that is excellently directed and covered. It doesn't try to escape artificial stage trappings - Jack's Cow is still made of plastic, as it should remain - but the settings and costumes are more than enough to inspire the suspension of disbelief. A literal film version with 'real' settings and splashy special effects would dissipate the impact of this great show.
Into the Woods - Home Theater Info Doug McLaren
As kids most of us were entertained by fairy tales. The gentle stories that begin with ‘Once Upon a time’ concluding with ‘and they lived happily ever after’ have been read by parents to sleepily children everywhere is pretty much a universal phenomenon. Because of this many pieces of literature including movies and stage plays how examined these traditional children’s stories frequently through a more mature vantage point. This is a legitimate slant to place on fairy tales especially considering the original incarnations of most of these stories are gruesomely violent including such family unfriendly topics as cannibalism, child abuse and serial murder. The name often associated with fairy tales is not just appropriate as a family name but also for the mood set; Grimm’. Since a couple of DVDs I’ve reviewed lately have been alternate incarnation of famous fairy tales so I felt it was an appropriate time to revisit one of the best treatments of these stories; Steven Sondheim’s ‘Into the Woods’. Typical of a master playwright and musician Sondheim’s ability to take what the expectations of the audience completely and delightfully twisting them to a frequently dark vantage point. I have seen many of his plays but there is a certain magical feel to this one even apart from what is required for the plot. It successfully brings the innocence of our childhood recollections of these stories placing them against the backdrop of adult sensibilities and more sinister themes. This play is as close to the common, modern versions of these stories as ‘Sweeney Todd’; has with a cable cooking show. One of the greatest things about DVDs is how some filmmakers go right into the Broadway Theater, set up thing camera up front in the best seats in the house and record a performance. While admittedly no as exciting as the live production it does transmit the presentation to the viewer in a better way than a migrated to the movies production could. If you set up your home theater properly you can emulate the acoustics of a majestic Broadway theater. I you have already seen this show in such a venue I this DVD is certain to spark some great memories. The play depicts the enchanted forest inhabited by such familiar characters as Little Red Riding Hood (Danielle Ferland), Jack and the Beanstalk (Ben Wright), Rapunzel (Pamela Winslow), and Cinderella (Kim Crosby) plus a story to weave them all together, ‘The Baker (Chip Zien) and his Wife (Joanna Gleason)’. The tales are told and connected together by The Narrator (Tom Aldredge) who stands off to the side directly addressing the audience. For most of the first act the stage is divided into three equal sections that meld together as the stories become more entwined. The opening introduces us to the characters through a song that has them express their inner desires; what they wish for. Cinderella wants to go to the King’s festival, Jack wants to save his cow and best friend, Milky White, from Market by giving milk and the baker and his life want desperately to have a child. They are under an infertility spell cast by their neighbor, the Witch (Bernadette Peters), over a late night covert incursion to her prize garden. The witch also took their newborn daughter back then renaming her Rapunzel and locking her in a remote tower. The witch offers them relief from the curse if they can find four items by the toll of the forth midnight; "the "cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold". This sets up the next segment of the play along the lines of a tried and true methodology, the plot coupon; collect then all and redeem them for a denouement. It also sets us up for the darker twists occur for the second act. It may seem like everyone received their wishes but that is when every after turns out to be less than happy. The prince (Robert Westenberg) cheats on Cinderella and his brother (Chuck Wagner) on Rapunzel with Snow White and Sleeping Beauty but there is no happiness there as the men have distaste for tickets of thorns and groups of little people. Red now has a wolf lining to her cloak and a sizable knife as she returns to the woods and Jack misses the kingdom in the sky. It seems the Giant’s widow has climbed down looking for her husband’s murderer. At one point the group decides they have to give someone up to the giantess to appease her and offer up the narrator since he isn’t one of them after all. The problem is he is the only one who knows how the story ends and the tale descends into chaos.
Recently, fairytales have been reimagines both movies and television series. Movies such as ‘Jack the Giant Slayer’ and ‘Maleficent’ representing the big screen and television series, including ‘Once upon a Time,’ and ‘Grimm’, fairytales have reached an unprecedented level of popularity. The original Broadway play became an award-winning hit in 1987, the time before some of the stars of the upcoming film version of the play about to be released were even born. Besides being exceptionally entertaining, this demonstrates what a visionary Stephen Sondheim has been. Trademark of the sound time musical stylistically includes is the chance for internal rhyme schemes and syncopated rhythms. One of the most outstanding and memorable aspects of virtually every sound find play is that just underneath the entertaining song and dance numbers deeply poignant story of humanity. While the numerous twists and turns of the interwoven stories are designed to keep the audience off-balance, the foundation is built on the didactic theme that wishes when they come true not always make for a happy ending. The underlying moral to the story, since all fairytales need a moral, is presented in the ballad, ‘Children will listen’. Like ‘South Pacific’s ‘Carefully Taught’ it warns parents about what they tell their children, they are listening. This is typical of Sondheim; expertly able to juggle dark comedy with more serious themes never losing sight of the play’s main purpose; to entertain. No matter how many times I watch this play it never ceases to bring a smile to my face. This disc may be older but it is well worth while.
As alluded to above, a big-budget mainstream Hollywood film is about to be released. Undoubtedly, this telling of "s Into the Woods’ will be retrofitted to better suit the change in media from stage the film. While I am reason to be certain that this variation will be very entertaining, there’s something about the charm of a stage production and having a disc recorded from the vantage point of the orchestra seat. The original DVD captured much of the experience of the play, bringing back many pleasant memories of watching this in the theater with my late wife. In anticipation of the new movie Image Entertainment has released a newly remastered high definition version of the play. According to the press notes, the play was originally filmed in 35mm so his conversion to the Blu-ray format should yield a stunning 1080p video, and indeed it does. After watching the DVD many times over the years, I have to admit that the greatly enhanced details, especially when combined with the newly remastered DTS-HD MA Stereo bass audio track. You can still configure your receiver to emulate the acoustics of a large were very theater, now, there’s a significantly greater amount of audio information to process an even better experience. From the moment I put this Blu-ray in my player. I felt I was returned back to that Broadway theaters so long ago. For those of you with 3-D equipment, I did set my LG Smart TV to convert it to 3-D. While obviously not as good as material native to the format it did provide a very interesting experience. Meta-how you choose to watch and listen to this play, this release is a must-have and will provide enjoyment for a long time to come.
A Critical Movie Critic [Danielle Behrendt]
epinions DVD [Stephen O. Murray]
DVD Verdict Bryan Pope
DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray [Luke Bonanno]
Larraín, Pablo
Pablo Larraín and His Unintentional Trilogy - NYTimes.com January 8, 2013
From Lynch and Godard to Larraín: How Film Directors Have Handled the Transition to Digital Steve Greene from indieWIRE, March 1, 2013
FILM INTERVIEW: Pablo Larraín « Bring the Noise UK Mikey Serpico interview from Bring the Noise, October 2012
THE PROBLEMS OF FICTION PABLO LARRAÍN with José Miguel ... José Miguel Palacios interview from The Brooklyn Rail, November 2012
10 Questions for Director Pablo Larraín | Film reviews, news ... Demetrios Matheou interview from the arts desk, February 4, 2013
"All Of It Is True" An Interview with Pablo Larrain Sofia Serbin de Skalon interview from Sounds and Colors, February 8, 2013
Interview: Director Pablo Larrain On The Unique Aesthetic Of 'No ... Oliver Lytellton interview with the director and lead actor from the indieWIRE Playlist, February 12, 2013
Gael Garcia Bernal and Director Pablo Larrain Talk NO and the Lo ... Sheila Roberts interview with the director and lead actor from Collider, February 15, 2013
The Art of Filmmaking: Pablo Larrain – Keyframe - Explore the world ... Jonathan Marlow interview from Fandor, February 15, 2013
Pablo Larraín - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FUGA
Chile Argentina (110 mi) 2006 Official site [cl]
User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York
"Fuga", an Argentine-Chilean co-production was shown recently in a
cable channel. Not having a clue as to what it was about, the premise looked
interesting. This is the first full length feature directed by Pablo Larrain.
The plot centers around a composer, Eliseo Montalban, who might be a genius,
but who can't deliver his masterpiece because not only is his composition
difficult to execute, but it represents for its creator the sum of the trauma
he experienced as a young man when he watched in horror the raping and murder
of his own sister in mysterious circumstances. We watch how Montalban, who is
going to conduct the premiere of his own creation at the Municipal theater in
Santiago, witnesses from the podium the death of his beloved Georgina from what
appears a massive coronary with blood exploding from her head.
Eliseo Montalban goes crazy after his loss. The man ends up in a mental
institution where he adorns the walls of the room he is confined to, with the
Danza Macabra musical score. Eliseo has gone mad after the failure of his debut
by attacking, and destroying six pianos in a conservatory, which clearly
indicates he is quite disturbed. In a way, he is fighting his own demons in the
only way he knows how.
Enter Ricardo Coppa, a man who is interested in finding the legendary
composition. Everything leads him to the room in the now crumbling building
that housed the hospital in which Eliseo Montalban was a patient. To his
amazement, he discovers under the wall paper what had eluded him from the
start. Coppa, an untalented pianist wants to make the composition his own.
"Fuga" has some visual elements that are at first appealing, but
unfortunately, the narrative, as conceived by Mateo Iribarren, Hernan Rodriguez
Matte, and the director, becomes too weird for its own good. The casting of
Benjamin Vicuna as the mad composer, doesn't add up anything to the plot
because this role demanded a much more experienced actor. Gaston Pauls, a good
Argentine film star does what he can, but he is not helped by a screen play
that becomes tiresome as it goes along. The music of Juan Cristobal Meza is
interesting, as is the cinematography of Miguel Joan Littin.
Watch "Fuga" as a curiosity.
User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California
Larrain shows considerable dash in this first feature about a traumatized
young composer, Eliseo Montalbán (Benjamín Vicuña), whose memory of seeing his
sister raped and murdered (over a piano) when he was a child is reawakened when
the mysterious death of his female piano soloist during the premiere of his
symphony leads him into madness. He disappears into an institution, till a
mediocre musician, Ricardo Coppa(Gastón Pauls),trying to reconstruct his lost
composition from writing on the sanatorium walls hidden under wallpaper, finds
him, now working as a fisherman.
"Everything in this co-production between Argentina and Chile is
preposterous and unbelievable," a Latin American reviewer wrote. Yet in
spite of the far fetched and melodramatic elements of the screenplay Larrain
directs with conviction. The adult Eliseo (lovely name) appears crazy from the
start, and Vicuña has presence though he alternates between poetical suffering
and merely vacuousness. One believes in Eliseo because everybody else does but
when he has his breakdown and massacres six grand pianos with an ax things
become a little too bizarre. (Flashbacks to his childhood are well done; the
boy actor too has a strong presence.)
In spite of the far fetched and melodramatic elements of the screenplay Larrain
directs with conviction. The adult Eliseo (lovely name) appears crazy from the
start, and Vicuña has presence though he alternates between poetical suffering
and merely vacuousness. One believes in Eliseo because everybody else does but
when he has his breakdown and massacres six grand pianos with an ax things
become a little too bizarre. (Flashbacks to his childhood are well done; the
boy actor too has a strong presence.) Larrain doesn't have as good material to
work with here as he was to have in 'Tony Manero,' either in terms of a central
character or in the way of a socio-historical world with rich and disturbing
overtones. This seems a little like something Francis Ford Coppola might have
recently done -- but the doomed Italian family in Buenos Aires of Coppola's
'Tetro' is a much richer mix than Eliseo and his privileged parents, and the
intermingling of Chilean and Argentinian elements and characters seems
unconvincing to South American viewers and confusing to North American ones.
The title plays with the double meaning of the word "fuga" as both
the musical form of the fugue, and "flight", since Eliseo goes into a
flight from his traumas and his madness. But I guess that isn't any more
profound than any other aspects of the screenplay.
Still, the element already there that was to flower in 'Tony Manero' is the
ability Larrain has to delve into an utterly doomed, deranged world with
unswerving focus and conviction. It just means so much more in the second film
than in this polished but relatively empty debut.
TONY MANERO
Tony Manero | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Wally Hammond
This tough, impassive, marvellous second feature from young
Chilean Pablo Larraín exhibits a candour and keen eye for its ‘lower depths’
milieu worthy of Pasolini at his most austere and non-judgmental. Set in, and
partly intended as an allegory of, the dictatorial reign of Pinochet in 1978,
it’s a sympathetic portrait of an unsympathetic, even unredeemable character,
Raúl (Alfredo
Castro). This 52 year old is a calm but psychopathically violent thief
who’s obsessed with the disco hero Tony Manero played by John Travolta in
‘Saturday Night Fever’. Shot entirely hand-held, sometimes jump-cut and out of
focus, and constructed as an informational jigsaw, Larraín’s movie follows his
evasive quarry through the wasteground, scrapyards, apartment blocks and
run-down cinemas and cafés of Santiago as he prepares for his appearance on a
daytime TV audition show aiming to find Chile’s own Tony Manero.
This is a film where, if anything, the execution exceeds the idea. In as far as
the script proposes interesting parallels between the distorting excesses and
temporary impunity of the murderous Pinochet regime and the actions and amoral
behaviour of its main protagonist, such ambitions also threaten to rigidify and
overwhelm the impressive character study and abandon the movie’s intriguing
dramatic centre. Thankfully, not least through impressive, company-wide low-key
performances – including a standout central one – and dextrous and discreet
direction, the film’s original, tragic and bleakly humorous vision shines out,
definitely marking out Larraín as a talent to watch.
Andrew
O'Hehir at
Nothing I've seen in
Here's how Raúl (Alfredo Castro), the corpse-gray, 52-year-old antihero of Larraín's film, endures the Pinochet dictatorship: By not giving a shit about anything or anybody other than his quest to become the leading Tony Manero impersonator on a third-rate Chilean variety show. (Unfortunately for him, the first time he shows up it isn't Tony Manero night, but rather Chuck Norris night.)
Raúl's detached, perfectionist demeanor conceals a pit of boiling
rage and sociopathic desire. He becomes an incidental serial killer, piling up
bodies as he tries to build a disco floor (out of chipped glass tiles and
fluorescent strip lighting) in a scummy
Tony Manero | Review | Screen Jonathan Romney from Screendaily, also seen here: Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney]
A gritty but sometimes elusively narrated drama, Tony Manero will become a fixture on the festival circuit, but commercial chances will be selective outside the Spanish-language art-house market. Niche distributors should warm to it, although they may have to stress either the disco-fever element or the dark crime content to make the film a plausible sell to audiences.
Tony Manero is set in
The unprepossessing, ungainly-seeming Raul models himself on Tony, and leads a small troupe that performs disco routines in a run-down café. Other members are are his girlfriend, faded belle Cony (Noguera), her teenage daughter Paul i (Lattus), and a younger man, Goyo (Morales), with apparent left-wing leanings and some sleek dance moves.
While striving to perfect his routines, Raul pursues his latest fixation, the purchase of a large quantity of glass to recreate the famous dancefloors of the Travolta film. But unknown to his dance mates, the usually placid Raul is even more disturbed than his rages in rehearsal suggest. Early on, he helps an old lady in distress, then without warning turns violent. Going to the cinema to see Saturday Night Fever yet again, he finds Grease playing instead and vents his fury to shocking effect. Just as troubling is the rather more petty way in which he decides to settle a score with a competitor.
Tony Manero confidently persuades us to accept certain wilful contradictions in its central character sketch. Raul is a wildly unprepossessing figure, sallow and rat-like, yet he seems to have a strange sexual appeal. Both Cony and elderly cafe owner Wilma (Poblete) find him irresistible, though he offers little in return, while even Paul i seems susceptible to him, as shown in a sequence that lowers Raul a few more steps on the ladder of humanity.
Meanwhile, the political background is introduced discreetly and gradually, with army forces glimpsed menacingly in the background. An early hint of an extreme-right status quo is Wilma's complaint that Goyo's plea for unity in the troupe sounds downright communistic.
Blind to the reality around him, Raul fixedly pursues his dream - which is eventually shown to be one of surpassing futility. Without making their political point explicit, Larrain and his co-writers offer a suggestive commentary on the way that societies retreat into fantasy and denial in times of repression. Faded colour and loose docu-flavoured camerawork heighten our sense of the drabness that Raul hopes to escape from. What's more, Larrain pulls off the rare achievement of evoking the disco era without a shred of the customary kitsch.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Tony Manero (2008) Jonathan Romney from Sight and Sound, May 2009
James Quandt ArtForum, May 31, 2010
Hammer to Nail (Michael Tully)
DVD Times Noel Megahey
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Michael Atkinson IFC Fix
World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
Electric Sheep Magazine Pamela Jahn
Neil Young [Jigsaw Lounge] for Tribune
Subtitledonline.com [Darrell Williams]
TIFF Review: TONY MANERO | Twitch Todd Brown
New York Film Festival 2008: The Headless Woman and Tony ... Vadim Rizov from The House Next Door
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jeff Robson]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
TalkTalk Johnny Dawson
Tony Manero (Pablo Larraín, 2008) - Tony Manero on MUBI Mubi Forum discussion
Tony Manero | The House Next Door Elise
They Shoot Actors, Don't They? Aaron
DVDs. "Tony Manero," "The Sun," Leone and More David Hudson at Mubi
Time Out New York [Kevin B. Lee]
San Francisco Chronicle [Justin Berton]
New York Times (registration req'd)
POST MORTEM
Chile Germany Mexico (98 mi) 2010 ‘Scope Official site [cl]
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
No one who appreciated Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero will be disappointed by its follow-up. Unforgettable as the blank-faced Saturday Night Fever–obsessed serial killer in the earlier film, Alfredo Castro returns in Larraín’s more overtly political and even more disturbing Post Mortem, playing a blank-faced, purposefully enigmatic Chilean morgue employee obsessed with the nightclub dancer who lives next door even as a coup unfolds against the nation’s socialist government. Post Mortem shares Tony Manero’s shabby atmospherics and viscerally awkward mise-en-scène; it builds in intensity as Chile moves toward martial law and the protagonist is drafted to help perform the autopsy on deposed president Salvador Allende.
The House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima]
Impassivity also characterizes the latest provocation from Larraín. As with his last film, Tony Manero, Post Mortem stars Alfredo Castro, this time playing Mario, an autopsy transcriber at a morgue in Santiago who's once again so afflicted with tunnel vision that, as the Chilean military brutally clamps down on revolutionaries and threatens to bring the country down to its knees, all he can focus on is banging a cabaret dancer who lives next door. Larraín shoots this story with the same lengthy takes, deadpan sense of black-comic perversity, and grungy 16mm aesthetic of Tony Manero; once again, we are in the company of an inscrutable weirdo, one that Larraín isn't so much interested in understanding as simply observing with a coldly detached eye. Unlike in his previous film, however, he presents more of the horrors of Augusto Pinochet's military rule, providing a sobering counterpoint to the awkwardness of the central romance. His political commentary may not have matured all that much since Tony Manero (he once again spins a rather facile genre-bound metaphor to act in concert with the real-life terrors around it), but I have to admit, I found Post Mortem more grimly amusing, strangely affecting, and certainly unsettling than its overpraised predecessor. And its seemingly endless, unexpectedly devastating eight-minute concluding punchline is quite possibly some kind of classic.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the month: Post Mortem (2010) Jonathan Romney, October 2011
A neurotic Chilean mortuary assistant in the year of Pinochet’s coup is the focus of Post Mortem, a character study that’s every bit as distinctive and chilling as Pablo Larraín’s last film Tony Manero.
At the end of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, we discovered together with Bruce Willis’s supposedly living character that he had really been dead all along. It sometimes happens in non-genre films too that we sense we are watching characters who, although ostensibly operating as living beings in real environments, are to all intents and purposes dead already – figuratively, that is, rather than in a supernatural sense. This is the case with many films by certain directors – Béla Tarr, Lisandro Alonso, Raúl Ruiz, Jim Jarmusch come to mind – whose characters often seem akin to phantoms re-enacting actions they might have performed when alive.
Detecting such wraiths in the skin of supposedly living characters is often purely a matter of the viewer’s perception, but the effect presents itself in a more heightened form in the case of Mario Cornejo (Alfredo Castro), the anti-hero of Pablo Larraín’s Post Mortem. The title gives the game away, suggesting that Mario not only literally assists in autopsies, but that he himself is somehow eking out a post-death existence on earth. The implication too is that Chile – in 1973, the year of the Pinochet coup – is already in a post-mortem state: a country of ghosts, with the murderous military regime seemingly intent on turning the nation into a republic of the dead.
Post Mortem is a follow-up to Larraín’s extraordinary second film Tony Manero (2008), about one man’s pathological state of denial during the Pinochet regime. The new film takes Tony Manero’s sardonically macabre humour even further. On one level, Post Mortem can be read as a realistic drama about an ordinary man – albeit a highly disturbed one – who goes about his daily business before being caught up in the traumatic events of September 1973. But several things militate against the film being read too literally. One is a disconcerting scene out of sequence – an apparent flash-forward in which Mario’s neighbour and sometime lover Nancy (Antonia Zegers) appears inexplicably as a corpse under examination. Another factor is the treatment of the relationship between Nancy and Mario, whose glaring eccentricity is distinctly at odds with conventional psychological drama. Nancy is self-regarding, flamboyantly neurotic – and seemingly a perfect mate for Mario; when she inexplicably starts crying in an extraordinary extended scene, Mario suddenly, hysterically starts weeping too, tears and snot dripping off his face. Mario is played by Alfredo Castro, who was so peerlessly creepy in Tony Manero as the sociopathic disco king Raúl; and if anything, he’s stranger still here, thin to the point of resembling a newly exhumed corpse or a morbidly floppy marionette, with lank hair falling over his usually expressionless face.
Then there is the film’s stylisation; it may be in part a brilliant response to budget limitations, but it works to extraordinary effect, the action seeming to take place in an uncannily still dream world. The explosive drama of the coup d’état figures as a conspicuous absence, prefigured in the opening image, shot from beneath the undercarriage of a military vehicle passing over an empty street littered with debris. The coup’s eruption is heard off screen, missed by Mario, who happens to be taking a shower as it happens. We hear planes passing overheard, glass smashing, the noise of crowds – and then silence, as Mario steps out into a deserted street.
But the city of Santiago seems just as ghostly before the coup as it does after. From the start of the film, Mario’s world echoes with hollow, distant sounds as if we’re in an aquarium (the buzz of electric lights, a phantom cancan echoing in the corridors of the variety theatre), while Sergio Armstrong’s photography (in 16mm, blown up to 35mm) is a nauseous palette of pale greens, browns, purples and pinks that evoke the discolouration of a cadaver. The widescreen framing is unsettlingly eccentric too, suggesting bodies trapped in frames, windows and boxes, or on stage-like performance spaces.
The film falls into two distinct chapters. One depicts the relationship between two lonely and disturbed people – the man an ineffectual, solitary masturbator and the woman a deranged narcissist – who share only their desperation and their intense denial of what’s going on around them. Driving in his car, Mario and Nancy are in a hurry to get away from the political reality of the socialist demonstration they’ve wandered into (manifestly a communing of the already dead, or at least the marked-for-death). Nancy later lets out a cri de coeur of blind denial after her house has been destroyed, and her younger brother and union-activist father have disappeared: “We don’t have anything to do with this. We’re peaceful people. Call the police.”
The second chapter, recounting the coup’s aftermath, is more overtly nightmarish. In a distressing scenario – clearly drawn from reality, but echoing the visual metaphors of absurdist theatre – corpses pile up in corridors and on stairwells, like so much backlogged material to be processed by the bureaucracy of death, of which Mario is now a part. Once the military is in power, the coroners’ job is no longer to investigate the causes of death, simply to record and quantify – literally, to count the bullet holes.
Larraín seems to offer two overt elements of political commentary. One is the sequence in which, with massed top brass in attendance, Mario’s boss Dr Castillo performs an autopsy on a mutilated corpse, which we learn is that of Salvador Allende; Castillo concludes that the deposed president could have shot himself – the suggestion being that the coroner is colluding in the official cover-up of his presumed assassination. (Though in fact a new autopsy performed this July confirmed that Allende did indeed take his own life.) Another key element is the change in Castillo, who is heard at one point voicing leftist sentiments about following the example of Ho Chi Minh; despite such rhetoric, he quickly becomes a meek servant of the new order (not that, under military surveillance, he has much choice).
It is not clear precisely what Larraín is saying about 1973 Chile. The suggestion perhaps is that the nation was already in a state of somnambulistic denial – of the kind depicted in Tony Manero – even before the coup. Indeed the entertainment at the theatre visited by Mario – a cancan line, a weary stand-up and, judging from the manager’s comments, some raunchier fodder – is a horribly archaic, deadened form of bread and circuses. The implication is that – unlike the morts vivants Mario, Nancy and Castillo – only those who resisted and were slaughtered had a true claim to be alive.
Not that this is a world entirely without hope or compassion – Mario’s colleague Sandra protests bitterly at the horrors that the morgue workers are made to participate in, though her cries are silenced by a soldier’s warning gunshots, signifying that her card too is marked. There’s a certain compassionate gentleness in Mario’s comportment, too: dragging a corpse-laden trolley down the morgue’s basement corridor, his actions suggest respectful duty, as if he’s become Charon, ferrying the dead to the underworld. Notably, he and Sandra try and save a lone survivor from the hecatomb; but it’s typical of the film’s subtlety that the wounded man – and the hospital nurse who takes him in – are simply glimpsed later, without commentary, as bodies on the pile.
Despite his capacity for quiet resistance, however, Mario finally embraces the new order’s death drive. The difficulty of the film stems from the way it presents the cataclysm from the perspective of a disturbed protagonist, the horror of 1973 conflated with the turbulence of Mario’s psyche in a harrowing final image in which he finally becomes not just death’s attendant but its executor. This grim tableau, observed with chill matter-of-factness, puts the final stamp on an enigmatic but utterly distinctive and troubling film.
Review: Director Pablo Larrain's Continues His Dark, Comedic ... Christopher Bell from the indieWIRE Playlist
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Glenn Heath Jr.]
DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Bill Gibron]
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Christopher McQuain]
REVIEW: Pablo Larraín's Post Mortem Feels Around for ... - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek
Post Mortem | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Noel Murray
A Dazed Witness to History in Post Mortem - - Movies ... - Village Voice Melissa Anderson
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Electric Sheep Magazine [Frances Morgan]
theartsdesk.com [Demetrios Matheou]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
World Socialist Web Site [Richard Phillips]
Little White Lies Magazine [Laurence Boyce]
Film-Forward.com Kent Turner
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Subtitledonline.com [Rob Ward]
The Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Matt Finley]
NO B- 80
Chile France USA (116 mi) 2011
This is another heavily awarded film that seems a curious choice at best, the only Chilean film to have been nominated for an Academy Award in the Foreign Film category, also winning the Art Cinema top prize in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes where it received a “rousing standing ovation” when it screened. While few South American films receive this kind of recognition, the award may be more for the director’s dogged persistence in completing his Trilogy using a background of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet’s 15-year military dictatorship, also including TONY MANERO (2008), an extremely provocative take on the Fascist mindset of the era, turning a disco dancer into a psychopathic serial killer with an ever accumulating body count, where the military presence looms ominously in the background, and POST MORTEM (2010), where a similar sociopathic character (played by the same actor Alfredo Castro) is a mortuary assistant who remains obsessed with a nightclub dancer even as the bodies pile up, remaining blind to the accumulating horrors of Pinochet's military regime. Both films were shot in a grainy 16 mm blown up to 35 mm, where the director obviously feels comfortable with this grungy aesthetic, choosing a primitive U.S.-bought, 1983 U-matic video camera in the final installment that helps the film achieve the gritty authenticity of archival news footage from the era. While some may accept the pale, washed out colors and the persistent blurriness throughout, resembling standard television shows from the 50’s or 60’s as opposed to the late 80’s, this easily qualifies as one of the ugliest looking films seen in decades. While it was obviously the director’s choice, one would think it would only look worse on a small television screen, as it only seems to alienate or further isolate the viewer from the subject matter, especially since so little archival footage is actually used other than television broadcasts. But what footage there is does blend seamlessly into the rest of the movie, but it begs the question, is that really necessary? Do we not already understand the ugliness of the situation? What’s different about NO from the other two films is rather than delve into the Fascist mindset, this one shows a Chilean population finally doing something about it, expressed in often darkly satiric images that show a fundamental understanding of how creatively developed media advertising, through originality alone, can overcome the apparent political stranglehold in government controlled mass media.
While the film provides no background information
whatsoever, Pinochet was installed in a U.S. backed military coup d’état in
1973 when democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende allegedly
took his own life while under siege, surrounded by an armed opposition. Pinochet’s Fascist military dictatorship
ended democratic rule and targeted all political opponents, where thousands of
leftists were killed, 30,000 tortured, and 80,000 arrested indefinitely, often
disappearing without a trace, most all of which happened immediately after
assuming power in 1973. Nearly a quarter
of a million left the country in exile, claiming political persecution from a
Fascist police state that allowed no political dissent, and more followed when
the nation’s economy continued to fail throughout the decade, where Pinochet
was believed to have embezzled as much as $28 million dollars. Nonetheless, at the behest of the
What the film does
especially well is establish a shadowy, noirish atmosphere of lurking menace,
where René’s car and property are vandalized while police vehicles
remain parked outside, or he receives threatening phone calls that harm may
come to his young son, and his boss makes still more threats about what could
happen to him, so it’s a bit ironic that while others insist upon gloomy reminders of the horrors of living under a military
dictatorship in their approach, René sticks to the positive, targeting
youth culture with rainbow images of happiness and joy, young people dancing in
the streets and singing a familiar “We Are the World” style theme song Michael Jackson - WE ARE THE
WORLD - HD STEREO ... - YouTube (7:05) turning into something like this, Exclusive
clip from Pablo Larraín's new film No, starring Gael García Bernal YouTube
(1:53). Within this murky existence, the film fails
to address the sins of the Pinochet regime other than by insinuation, where
facts and archival footage are surprisingly absent. When Guzmán is assigned by the
Fascists to head the Yes campaign, where in the Pinochet military vernacular
they’re running against “faggots and commies,” pitting a subordinate against
his boss, he threatens to use strong-armed tactics that are never
employed. For instance, what’s stopping
a boss from demanding excessive work hours from René so he has no time left to spend on the campaign, or, as Guzmán has armed militants at his
disposal, a police state from destroying the No television studio and all their
equipment, making it impossible to produce nightly segments? Hell, this kind of stuff was shown in Sam
Fuller’s PARK ROW (1952) during rival newspaper wars, one side’s dirty tactics
pitted against the other, until one is bombed out of business. Instead, the audience continually sees short
30 to 60 second TV spots, without a clue how they’re filling 15 minutes every
night, or how well their spots are doing with the public. It’s likely there were other forces at work
besides the TV campaign, but they’re not a part of this film, suggesting it was
the work of this group alone that finally toppled a dictatorship, winning 56%
of the vote, where 97% of the electorate voted, eventually leading to democratic
elections for the Presidency and Parliament.
Television is a powerful medium, combined with the savvy political
effectiveness of well calculated advertising, like candidate Obama’s very effective
2008 slogans promising “Change we can believe in,” or “Yes we can,”
where this victory in Chile after 15 years of living under the thumb of a
police state must have felt like the elation of electing the first black
President in the United States. There’s
very little build up, however, or a rush of excitement, as the workers were led
to believe they had little chance, where Gael García Bernal’s acting performance is
emotionally subdued throughout, rarely showing any emotion except his outbursts
against downbeat leftist rhetoric. Even
when victory is declared, he can’t even crack a smile, still living under the
constant fear of reprisals.
In Pablo Larraín’s follow-up to Post Mortem, Gael García Bernal plays an ambitious, young Chilean advertising man who is asked to help create a persuasive campaign for the anti-Pinochet ‘No’ vote in the 1988 national plebiscite, which ultimately ended the military dictatorship that had ruled the country for 16 years. Not as dark, and much less surreal and distinctive in style than Larraín’s previous work revolving around the repressive Pinochet regime, No is an extremely watchable lesson in historically and politically charged filmmaking.
A fascinating exercise in historical fill-in-the-blanks, Pablo Larrain’s No is built around the real television advertising campaigns conducted by both sides (“Yes” and “No”) of Chile’s historic 1988 referendum on Pinochet. Though the film is sometimes frustratingly out-of-context (we get little sense of whether any of the ads are working until late in the film), its examination of the invidious way style subsumes substance in political campaigns is riveting — and totally undermines any notion of this being a hagiographic history lesson. Often hilarious (the recurring gag involving mimes nearly made me keel over) and featuring a lovely, subtle performance by Gael Garcia Bernal, No also functions as a sly character study of a man — estranged from his wife and in the shadow of his father — who earns back some measure of self-respect by working up the guts to apply his craft to something meaningful.
Completing his trilogy on the 17-year presidential regime of
Augusto Pinochet, Chilean director Pablo Larrain's No explores the 1988
plebiscite that ultimately led to his downfall and overall democratic rule.
But rather than present a mere biopic of events surrounding the referendum,
Larrain shot this entire film in analog with a 4:3 aspect ratio, creating an
authentic, albeit ugly, aesthetic, and told the story from the perspective of
an advertising guru trying to motivate citizens to vote.
Since the governmental conceit – considered a crock after the controversy
surrounding the 1980 referendum – would force a democratic election should the
majority Chilean vote be the titular "No," political dissidents hire
suave ad exec René Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal) to create content for the 15
minutes a day they're allowed for television campaigning.
On the opposing side is Saavedra's boss, Lucho (Alfredo Castro), whose tendency
towards dirty tactics and attack campaigning enlivens the debate, much to the
delight of onlookers previously uninvolved in (read: resigned to) politics.
Rather than bog down his daily 15 minutes with dreary reiterations of the many
woes stemming from the protracted dictatorship, Saavedra adopts a
"happiness" slogan involving a rainbow, catchy jingles and an
abundance of enthusiastic montages to manipulate, or motivate, voters into
action. Glibly, he reduces broad political change to a Coca-Cola commercial,
inserting images from "We are the World" and American fast-food ads.
There are even TV spots that feature a husband trying to convince his wife to
say, "Yes" in the bedroom.
This borderline satire of mass media control and puppetry is ultimately what
makes this stylized biopic of sorts into entertaining comedy. Just as protests
go out of control and Saavedra's family is harassed and threatened by political
leaders, the amusing commercials and dramatic pleas from the likes of Jane
Fonda and Christopher Reeve keep everything saucy and irreverent enough to
inspire chuckles.
It's this ability to make dark comedy out of the horrific that makes No
stand out from a sea of similar pedagogical biographical films. Think of this
as Wag the Dog or In the Loop, only based on actual events and
with subtitles.
At least we can laugh while being told how easy it is to control and guide the
majority of any given population.
No | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Ryan Patrick Mooney
Set in 1988, fifteen years after Augusto Pinochet rose to power in a military coup aided by the U.S. government, Pablo Larraín’s No focuses on the Chilean national plebiscite, a referendum to determine whether the dictator would serve another uncontested eight-year term in office or be replaced by a democratically elected president. Under Pinochet’s tyranny, tens of thousands of Chileans were killed, disappeared, or exiled for social or political resistance. Under this genocidal police state, the government maintained strict control over the airwaves. Leading up to the referendum, the campaigns for and against Pinochet were given a half hour of air time to appeal to the public. In this fictionalization, the minority “No” coalition hires René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), a silver-tongued television advertising executive, to be the creative director of their campaign. Though wary and conflicted at first, Saavedra crafts a cheeky and persuasive series of commercials and commentaries that subvert the ruling party and results in proletariat victory.
As the final episode of a trilogy centering on the dictatorship, No is the culmination of Larraín’s efforts and his most affecting and passionate articulation of the Chilean struggle. In the previous installment, Post Mortem, Larraín focused on a civil servant (portrayed by his steadfast collaborator Alfredo Castro) who finds himself enmeshed in the coup, surrounded by corpses, and on the verge of mental collapse. Castro returns here as Lucho Guzmán, Saavedra’s supervisor at the advertising firm and the producer of the incumbent’s propaganda platform. They still have to see each other at their day jobs, and as the campaigns progress the dissension escalates until it morphs into a threatening display of power. Guzmán has armed militants at his disposal; Saavedra isn’t even safe at home. Their ideologies ignite their contention as much as they undergird the individual campaigns. Though he’s thoroughly pragmatic, Saavedra assumes the populist role of an idealist, using youth culture and American imagery to sway the voters. On the other hand, Guzmán emphatically believes in his position as the protector of the old guard, to the point that it obscures his professional vision.
While the historical relevance of the story is obvious, No is not a mere historical reenactment. It has a racing pulse, a survivalist instinct. Larraín relies heavily on close-ups and an active handheld camera to emphasize immediacy and place emotional reactions in the foreground. His aesthetic choices are provocative and decidedly retro, as No was filmed on magnetic tape widely used for Chilean television in the eighties. As such, outdoor scenes are marked by blinding streams of light and hazy overtones that are as harsh as they are necessary. Matched with news clips from that period, the story’s action blends and coheres with its archival source material. Aesthetically, ugliness and kinetic energy are here the underlying drivers of change.
No is a wholly engrossing and riveting piece of work. Scenes with effusive discourse are spliced together without the contingency of exposition or the buffer of lengthy transitions. It may be dense and exhausting, but the film’s visceral impact serves as physical evidence of sorts. Weeks after viewing, the marks are still there, but any pain is assuaged by the current of black comedy that streams through the carnage. Advertising, as we know, is a funny business. Larraín wisely exploits this, and the motif becomes a through-line of the trilogy. Starting at the end of this masterful triptych isn’t a problem: it will just give you a reason to seek out Larraín’s previous works.
Sight & Sound [Demetrios Matheou] March 2013
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Enrique Nunez Mussa]
Sound On Sight Tope Ogundare
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]
Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]
Paste Magazine [Gabrielle Lipton]
NO Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Eric Kohn at Cannes
from indieWIRE, May 18, 2012
ScreenDaily
[Lee Marshall] at Cannes, also seen
here: No
Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]
Garcia Bernal and Larrain Just Say 'No' EXCLUSIVE VIDEO ... Anne Thompson from indieWIRE, December 21, 2012
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
James Rocchi at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 18, 2012
Guy Lodge at Cannes from HitFix, May 18, 2012
Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]
FilmSchoolRejects [Daniel Walber]
Sound On Sight Laura Holtebrinck
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Screen Comment [Saideh Pakravan]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Critical Movie Critics [Howard Schumann]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
CultureCatch.com [Brandon Judell]
Bonjour Tristesse (English) photos
Mighty Movie Podcast: Pablo Larrain on No Dan Persons from The Huffington Post
DAILY |
Cannes 2012 | Pablo Larraín’s NO David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 18,
2012
David Rooney at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May, 19, 2012
Leslie Felperin at Cannes from Variety, May 18, 2012, also seen here: Variety [Leslie Felperin]
Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2012
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
'No'
an appealing take on Chilean politics - San Francisco Examiner Anita Katz
One Prism on the Undoing of Pinochet - The New York Times Larry Rohter from The New York Times, February 8, 2013
Chilean national plebiscite, 1988
Chilean transition to democracy
THE CLUB (El Club) B 84
Chile (97 mi) 2015 ‘Scope
God
said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he
separated the light from the darkness.
—Genesis 1:4
In a similar manner as Lars von Trier, Larraín is a full-blown provocateur, whose goal is largely to stir up as much trouble as possible, which this feels designed to do, even if it borders on the ridiculous. What’s missing in this allegory of a church tainted by scandals is the outrageous wit and humor of Luis Buñuel in films like VIRIDIANA (1961) and Simon of the Desert (Simón del Desierto) (1965), while Larraín’s attacks feel more mean spirited and self-motivated, as if he relishes the act of condemnation. Born to an upper class family linked to the Pinochet dictatorship, where his father was a right wing politician, Larraín has veered to the left, intimately familiar with his country’s past crimes, but he falls well short of an arena that offers any solutions, where his films feel more like finger pointing than well thought out journalistic exposé’s. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize (2nd Place) at Berlin, this film will not win the director any friends in his home country, which is over 70% Catholic, as the director’s goal in this film is to take aim at the Catholic Church in Chile, who’ve been there as an institution since the nation was originally formed, often included in the upper echelons of politics, including the reign of dictators, holding the conservative to hard right positions. Not for the faint of heart, this is a deeply troubling film set in a small, somewhat dilapidated coastal town of La Boca in Chile that is known for attracting surfers. To the sacred sounds of Arvo Pärt, the same music used so effectively in Tom Tykwer’s WINTER SLEEPERS (1997), the story concerns an unassuming yellow house, where concealed from the world (and to the viewers initially) is the fact it is owned and operated by the Catholic Church as a kind of repository for disgraced priests who have committed serious crimes, where they are expected to use this time to repent. Unfortunately, none of the current residents spend any time reflecting on the past. Instead we see images of them on the beach training a greyhound dog named Rayo, making him chase a simulated rabbit strung to a pole, racing him relentlessly, timing short bursts of speed, and even entering him into a race, where a small group of men stare through binoculars from a distant field overlooking a racetrack while a lone woman accompanies the dog to the racing chute. When Rayo wins, they contemplate making bundles of money by taking him to Santiago, the nation’s capitol.
Meet Father Vidal (Alfredo Castro), a lifelong pedophile; Father Silva (Jaime Vadell), an army chaplin for 30 years that aided the military in torturing prisoners; Father Ortega (Alejandro Goic), whose solution for unwanted babies was to take them from the mothers that didn’t want them and redistribute them to those that did, otherwise known as baby trading; Father Ramírez (Alejandro Sieveking), who is too senile to remember his sins; and Sister Mónica (Antonia Zegers), the overseer who runs the house, who is not really a nun, but was accused of beating her adopted daughter. This motley crew spends the majority of their lives tucked away from the world outside, as they’re not allowed to interact with the public. While they really spend the majority of their days plotting and scheming, they are joined one day by another fallen priest, Father Lazcano (José Soza), who we quickly learn is another known pedophile, as no sooner does he arrive, but a homeless man on the street named Sandokan (Roberto Farías) begins shouting at Lazcano, describing in raw detail the filthy things that were done to him as a child by that priest, where his rant grows increasingly loud and disturbing, where the cowering priests don’t know what to do. Handing Lazcano a pistol hidden away for self-defense, they encourage him to scare the rascal away, like a scurrying rat. But instead, Lazcano shoots himself in front of Sandokan, taking his own life. While an investigation from the police produces conflicting statements about the incident, everyone is cleared of any wrongdoing. The Church, however, sends their own investigator, a morally righteous Father García (Marcelo Alonso) who intends to right a sinking ship, reminding these men why they’re there, as it’s not some country club running greyhounds, where the men have turned into lazy ingrates without an ounce of repentance.
Like the arrival of Clint Eastwood to clean up the place, Father García is one serious hombre, interrogating each of them Stalinist style as if he’s conducting his own Inquisition, already appraised of their crimes, demanding a full accounting before God of their actions. As all of their crimes are revealed, each of them instead offers an excuse that minimizes guilt or personal responsibility, leaving the Father in a quandary about their continued self-deception, resorting to threats, taking away the greyhound, shutting down the facility, where he’d just as soon see them all behind bars. This kind of talk will not win him any friends on the premises, as this band of brothers refuses to wilt under pressure, as they’re not yet ready to face their Judgment Day. Wary of this new priest, “He wants to change the Church. The Church is 2000 years old, I like it the way it is.” They go through the motions of pretending to lead better lives, but who are they kidding? They’re running a feast-laden racket with booze galore hidden away from the world, living on hush money from the Church, as they’re considered too dangerous to mix with society. Meanwhile, Sandoken is still around, choosing a vacant location alongside the yellow house, shouting more vile content into their ears at all hours of the day and night, only this time he’s visited by Father García, who wants to hear what it’s all about. Fearing for what might happen to them, the tiny collective must act quickly, plotting an insidious plan that resembles FRANKENSTEIN (1931), instigating an angry mob scene, lighting the fuse, steering them towards the homeless outcast, as he’s the one to blame for what these waywards priests have done behind their backs, covering up their own crimes by blaming the innocent. The choice to use a metaphor for crimes this historically egregious doesn’t really work, as the full impact of the Church’s very real actions to send these wayward priests to surreptitious locations in Africa and South America isn’t really felt, as these “criminals” are still being hidden and protected by the Church and not handed over to police authorities. So ultimately what’s changed? Rather than assess the damage of actual crimes throughout history, Larraín resorts to a savagely black satire, showing the extent a corrupt Catholic Church will go to protect its own, inventing an inflammatory new mythology of the absurd while lambasting the moral hypocrisy of past sins. Shot in a dreary, often out of focus style, this low budget look is an improvement over the grainy images of his previous work No (2011), but the depravity of the subject matter seems intentionally bathed in a kind of moral blur, as if suggesting the Church has not yet come to terms with this issue.
The Lumière Reader
[Jacob Powell]
A prickly affair, Pablo Larraín’s The Club starts off looking like a somewhat less funny version of Father Ted, with its ensemble cast in a Parochial House and a housekeeper who keeps things running smoothly. I remember having seen at least a couple of films involving dicey priests—Primal Fear springs to mind offhand—but this is the first film I’ve seen that looks at the rumoured practice the church has had of shifting on ‘priests with problems’ to remote locales to avoid embarrassing legal and media situations. Larraín and co. produce a kind of heightened vérité (not unlike John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary) which runs towards themes of culpability and restorative justice, but overall the film has a purgatorial sense aimed more at the church at large rather than the specific characters drawn in the film. Moments of unexpected mirth and fleeting joy are quickly subsumed by The Club’s pervasive difficult and dark tone, and leave the film feeling somewhat disjointed as it struggles to integrate these various elements. No doubt Pablo Larraín is the man for wryly incisive Chilean socio-political commentary, and The Club makes for reasonable discomfort food, but for me the film just doesn’t work quite as well as the director’s previous efforts.
Lost Horizons -
Film Comment Olaf Möller, May/June 4, 2015
Unlike the same-named sidebars at Cannes and Venice, which are effectively dumping grounds for debuts the main sections have rejected, Berlin’s Critics’ Week consisted of a series of discussions preceded by screenings. The Berlinale, of course, showed no interest in this. It regards critics as good for one thing only: writing about the Berlinale, preferably in a laudatory tone, and certainly not raising questions about the festival––at least none Kosslick and his lieutenants might feel the need to address officially. As long as the festival achieves the expected attendance figures, voices the appropriate political sentiments, and seems to do right by Germany’s film production structures, everything is fine.
But who defines these aims and directives? That’s a question some asked when the extension of Kosslick’s contract was announced last year. The general feeling was one of tired resignation, and those who voiced dissent were met in time-honored fashion with smears––someone who criticizes Kosslick must simply want his job, right? Wrong. He or she might just want to see someone else in his place who hopefully can do a better job. But what exactly would doing a better job mean? The response offered by the Critics’ Week in terms of aesthetics and vision had little to offer by way of an alternative: quite a few of their choices could just as well have been part of the festival proper (Christoph Hochhäusler and Johnnie To are Berlinale alumni). And so the Critics’ Week was more about civic behavior than films: a reminder of the importance of public discourse. So when did that discourse cease to matter?
The House Next
Door [Kenji Fujishima] also seen
here: Berlinale Review:
The Club - Slant Magazine
If Chilean director Pablo Larraín's latest feature, The Club, is any indication, the relatively straightforward nature of his last film, No, was only temporary. The gleeful perversity of his previous two features, 2008's Tony Manero and 2010's Post Mortem, is back in his new film, and so is a welcome maturity to his misanthropy that lends an unexpected moral weight to the coal-black comedy.
The film's titular “club,” we soon discover, is a group of banished Catholic priests living in a yellow house in a small Chilean coastal town. Actually, their existence is more akin to imprisonment than anything else: Looked over by a nun named Monica (Antonia Zegers), none of these priests are allowed to make any contact with the outside world beyond the occasional dog race featuring Father Vidal's (Larraín regular Alfredo Castro) precious greyhound (and even then, they have to observe the races from afar, with binoculars). Their imposed-from-above purgatorial bubble, however, is burst when Sandokan (Roberto Farías), the self-proclaimed victim of a new entrant into their ranks, Father Lazcano (José Soza), hassles the group outside their window, to the point that a guilt-ridden, panicky Lazcano commits suicide in front of his victim. Further complications ensue when well-meaning Father Garcia (Marcelo Alonso) enters the scene, intent not only getting to the bottom of the incident, but also exorcising these priests' demons and thus shutting down this group for good.
This setup suggests a topical takedown of both corruption in the priesthood and the ruthless ways Catholic churches have tried, over the course of decades in some cases, to cover up their immoral behavior. As ever with Larraín, however, his targets are much broader. For one thing, Sandokan, it turns out, is hardly a simple victim himself: He has been so corrupted by his sexual abuse as a child that, as a troubled adult, he now believes he can only find true love with a priest. And then there's Father Garcia, who, the longer he investigates these priests and gets to know them, gradually finds his own sense of good and evil challenged.
Larraín can usually be counted on to find a fairly novel visual style to tell his story, and while Sergio Armstrong's 2:35:1 cinematography in The Club doesn't quite draw attention the same ways, say, Post Mortem's super-wide 2.66:1 cinematography and No's 1.33:1 videotape photography did, Armstrong's dim lighting of interiors and general use of soft focus throughout are worth noting, especially in contrast to the occasional bold colors in wide landscape shots of the sky—as if visually indicating a higher intelligence just beyond these characters' individual and collective reach. The most striking thing about The Club in the end, though, is the way Larraín's anger toward the self-interested corruption of the Catholic church is, to some extent, enriched by its clear-eyed, if occasionally grimly amusing, grasp of the complexities of human nature. Thankfully, we're far from the jokey facile metaphors of Tony Manero and Post Mortem; there's a twisted empathy underneath the misanthropic black humor of The Club that cannot be so easily dismissed.
Cinema Scope 64
Preview | The Club (Pablo Larraín, Chile)
Quintin from Cinema Scope,
Fall 2015
The Club, the fourth feature by Pablo Larraín, is set in a small town in coastal Chile. There’s an unassuming house in this town that the Catholic Church runs as an open prison for priests who have committed serious crimes, sheltering them from the prying eyes of society. One priest (Father Vidal) is a proud pedophile; a second (Father Silva) takes satisfaction that he used to aid the military in torturing prisoners; a third (Father Ortega) traded babies; and a fourth (Father Ramírez) is too senile to remember his sins. There is also a nun (Sister Mónica) who is not really a nun, and who used to beat her adopted daughter. In their spare time, the priests train Rayo, a greyhound that competes at the local racetrack. In other word, except for the dog, the house gathers together the scum of the earth.
One day, another pedophile (Father Lazcano) joins the club, but he’s being tailed by Sandokan, a homeless wreck whom he abused years prior. Confronted by his past, Father Lazcano shoots himself; then a new character, Father García, arrives. His mission, on its surface, is to find out what happened to Father Lazcano, but more than an investigator, Father García is an inquisitor, Soviet-style. He knows exactly what everyone has done, but he wants to hear them confess. Not like the way people confess in church, but the way they do it in the police station. Father García is there to humiliate and to punish. Which is precisely what Pablo Larraín has always done to his characters.
Born in Chile in 1976 to an upper-class family linked to the Pinochet regime (his father is a right-wing politician), Larraín prefers to deal in his films with the low and middle classes, whom he strongly despises. If there’s a common thread running through his cinematographic output, it’s that the problem of contemporary Chilean society is not, as usually assumed, that it suffered a dictatorship for almost 20 years, during which time thousands of citizens were murdered, tortured, and disappeared, all kinds of censorship and repression was exerted, and people couldn’t leave their homes at night because of the curfew. No, for Larraín the true problem is that Chileans deserve their fate because they secretly liked to be humiliated and destroyed by the barbarians, as they thought that they were not strong enough to rebel against them.
Larraín attacks the poor from the left and from the right. His films are made to condemn, but not to condemn injustice, abuse, or crime, rather people, as if Judgment Day has come. Tony Manero, the main character of his celebrated first feature, is a pure Larraín creation. A thief, an assassin, but also a pathetic John Travolta impersonator, he abuses his dancers, who are willing to be martyred by Manero, like Manero himself is humiliated by his own ideology: being, like Pinochet, an imitator of the Empire, he acts exactly like him. In that sense it’s hard to draw a line between the oppressor and the oppressed: they ooze from the same mud. Maybe the oppressed are even worse, because they act against their true interests.
If Tony Manero (2008) isn’t enough to show Larraín’s point of view, Post Mortem (2010) underlines it. Sordid to the point of absurdity, the film deals with a civil servant who works at the state morgue and takes advantage of the coup d’état to murder his cheating lover. Chock-full of corpses and autopsy scenes—even one of Allende, which in no way serves the story, but only makes the film even uglier—Post Mortem shows that even if the employees in the morgue were fervent supporters of Allende, and also demanded arms for the people before the coup, afterwards they acted like sheep in service of the regime. Again, Chileans deserved Pinochet and liked him, says Larraín: after all, the protagonist is a killer like him, exactly like Tony Manero. There is not one likeable character in Post Mortem, no scene to be enjoyed, no single moment of relief. The filmmaker-inquisitor never shows a hint of tolerance or forgiveness. On the contrary, his creatures are constantly to blame, and the film serves as the purgatory to their faults. And purgatory is what Father García wants the residence to be in The Club.
Larraín’s third feature, No (2012), is lighter, maybe because it’s set in the advertising milieu, where the protagonist René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal) is a key figure in fashioning the anti-Pinochet campaign for the 1988 referendum. This time, Larraín rewrites his thesis in a more abstract and general way: the outcome of the referendum was not due to the majority being fed up by Pinochet, his government, and his atrocities, but because the voters were persuaded to vote “No” by the cleverness and modernity of a campaign that could be used to sell any kind of goods. This time, humiliation is not shown through people genuflecting before the powerful, but by revealing that citizens didn’t have the true will to get rid of the dictator, and could be easily manipulated in one way or the other. For Larraín, Chile has no History, only small-time anecdotes, souvenirs like the stock material of the 1988 campaign that makes up the core of No. In the end, the 17 years of dictatorship and the 25 of democracy that succeeded them were more or less the same thing, because Chile lives in sin.
The Club seems a logical development of Larraín’s religious approach to filmmaking, finally addressing his key subject in a milieu where sin and repentance are discussed on a daily basis. Nothing better suits this purpose than taking the issue to an extreme: a bunch of sinners who are at the same time priests serves as a perfect example of the abomination of mankind. These monsters are even more of an excuse for exposing ideas than in Larraín’s previous films, acting as theatrical abstractions used to utter sermons. Like all of Larraín’s oeuvre, The Club is strongly dependent on art direction, to the point of being distracting in almost every scene. Like Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker to whom Larraín resembles in his taste for ostentatious cruelty and sordidness, the film proceeds as a series of arbitrary events that, after the death of the movie’s sole nice character (Rayo, the dog), results in a compromise between Father García and the rest of the troupe.
There is no apparent surrogate for Larraín in Tony Manero or Post Mortem, although he is close to the manipulating publicist in No. But it’s striking how much of the filmmaker can be read into Father García. As the inmates point out, Father García hails from a different social milieu: he wears good clothes, has an American Express card, and is never confronted with the destiny of ordinary people nor the true needs of the poor. As a Vatican bureaucrat, he deals with with rules made by others. He comes and goes, without really solving anything, leaving things unchanged. He is as impotent to modify reality as films are, but he will continue with his life and his function when he closes the case. Father García and his righteousness are not to be identified with: he is an obsessed moralist, a persecutor, and, finally, a coward who cannot complete his mission, which is to suppress evil. He’s like Larraín, who makes one film after another devoted to showing that the world is doomed and that souls are rotten, without any real change possible, only a petty compromise. That’s why The Club has all the traces of that old device used by inquisitors and Stalinists alike: the autocritique.
The Film Stage
[Giovanni Marchini Camia]
Berlinale 2015:
Pablo Larrain's 'The Club' | Canvas by Grolsch Michael Pattison
Film
of the week: The Club Tony Rayns
from BFI Sight and Sound, November
16, 2016
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Amber Wilkinson]
Berlin Review:
Pablo Larraín's 'The Club' is a Bracing Cr ... Neil Young from indieWIRE
The Club | Reviews
| Screen Dan Fainaru from Screendaily
The Club | 2015
TIFF Review - Ioncinema Nicholas
Bell
An Online Universe
[Andrew Buckle]
The Upcoming
[Benedict McKenna]
Dog And Wolf
Berlinale 2015 [Mark Wilshin]
One Room With A
View [Danielle Davenport]
Concrete
Playground [Sarah Ward]
'The Club' ('El
Club'): Berlin Review - The Hollywood Reporter Jordan Mintzer
Berlin Film
Review: 'The Club' - Variety Scott
Foundas
The Club (2015),
directed by Pablo Larraín | Film review Dave
Calhoun from Time Out
Movie review: The
Club (El club) - PRAGUE POST | The ...
André Crous
Berlin 2015
review: The Club - think Calvary, not Father Ted ... Ryan Gilbey from The Guardian
Berlin 2015:
“Every Thing Will Be Fine,” “Under Electric ... Michael Pattison from The Ebert site
Chile's Pablo
Larraín Presents Film on Catholic Priests at ... The New
York Time’s Art Beat
The Club (2015 film)
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
NERUDA B- 81
Chile Argentina France Spain USA (107 mi) 2016 ‘Scope
On
our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented,
poetry flourished. That is why we know
that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by
peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
—Pablo Neruda
One might think this is a wildly imaginative and somewhat
chaotic way of revealing the interior thoughts of one of the world’s greatest
poets, Pablo Neruda, yet instead, like Larraín’s other works, it remains coolly
ineffectual, revealing next to nothing about the man or his poetry, becoming a
kind of man-on-the-run political spoof, as the director’s mocking style simply
deludes reality. What we do know about
Neruda cannot be found in this film, as it makes no attempts to be
biographically informative, but instead persists on examining just one of the
post-World War II years in Chile when Gabriel González Videla was President
from 1946 to 1952. After receiving
support from communists to get elected, which at that time were split with the
socialists, at the urging of the United States the nation banned the Communist
Party, first expelling them from the cabinet before outlawing them as a
political party in 1948, a ban that remained in effect until 1958. With a crackdown on communists who were
subjected to mass arrests, stripped of their right to vote, poet and Communist Senator
Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) offered a seething rebuke to the President, first at
an outrageously surreal political gathering set inside a lavish public urinal
the size of a department store with all the distinguished guests present before
criticizing the President for “selling out to the United States” in a speech
before the National Congress. Shortly
afterwards he was forced underground where he remained in hiding for the next
thirteen months before spending the next three years in exile after escaping
over the Andes Mountains to Argentina on horseback, a story dramatically
recalled during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1971. From the champagne parties with naked
revelers to his bohemian relationship with fellow artist Delia del Carril
(Mercedes Morán), it’s clear Neruda was no ordinary communist, where the rules
of the game made exceptions for his presence.
Delia joined the French Communist Party after the First World War, as
she was studying painting in Paris at the time, where they initially met in the
mid 1930’s when she was 50 years old and he was only 30, but their age difference was
offset by her intelligence, vitality, and beauty, as their home became a
meeting place for the great intellectuals, artists and writers of the time.
Unfortunately Larraín’s unsettling and overly confusing film won’t make
a dent in Neruda’s popularity, which was buoyed immensely by the massive
popularity of the film Il
Postino (The Postman) (1994), a fictional film based on a novel inspired by
an incident in Neruda’s life, the only foreign-language film to be nominated
for a Best Picture Award in more than 20 years, where the theatrical run was so
long (almost two years), it was still in theaters after the video release and
its initial cable run. Gabriel García
Márquez called Neruda “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language,”
while New York Times book review
critic Selden Rodman observed after the poet’s death, “No writer of world
renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans,” yet surprisingly this
film contains little poetry, doling it out almost exclusively through narrative
passages, as instead the film invents a plot device in the questionable
character of Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal), a fascist police
inspector that hounds him through his various escape routes, always one step
behind, taunted along the way with notes placed in books of poetry left behind
by Neruda. This fascination with an alter-ego
is along the lines of Sherlock Holmes and his infamous Moriarty, while the cat
and mouse game alters the entire mood of the film, offering a playful,
illusionary tone that has the effect of keeping the viewers off-guard as well,
as Peluchonneau is something of a delusional fool, “half moron, half idiot,” as
he’s described near the end, yet the film is narrated throughout by his less
than trustworthy character, where the entire film exists in a kind of bogus
stream-of-conscious netherworld. It’s a choice
made the director that has a way of preventing identification with any of the
characters, remaining elusive and overly detached. If interior passages of Neruda’s poetry had
played a more significant part, adding emotional resonance to the communist
struggle, for instance, this might have been an ingeniously inventive film, but
as is, it feels strangely convoluted, where the artist himself remains
distanced from those workers and peasants that he claims to maintain solidarity
with throughout his journey. Instead,
while he escapes, we see them rounded up, arrested, and simply thrown into
prison while he continually remains protected.
The chaotic nature of the film may reflect the extent of his alienation,
but it offers little contact with the struggle, and no evidence of hope, where
instead he remains bogged down by his own existential struggles.
Perhaps the most damning part of the film is its refusal to embrace the artistry of the poet, where we rarely, if ever, actually see him write or spend any time in reflection, where instead he’s shown as aloof and indifferent, having little regard for others. While this is a landmark moment in Chilean history, onscreen we find Neruda partying in brothels with the bourgeoisie, showing a fondness for his sensual vices, where we never see that side of him that millions embrace through his writings. While there is a reference that 10,000 union workers were moved to a stunned silence when he brought a piece of paper out of his pocket to read, or that he read his poetry before 100,000 citizens in Brazil, it is the power of his words to embrace human equality and to discover a common worldwide humanity, where his message of communism and worker’s rights is what made him dangerous to the government. Yet we don’t get a hint of that, instead we’re bogged down by this idiot game with a delusional police inspector that doesn’t even exist, where the best he can do is drive around in circles in front of the Presidential Palace blowing the car horn to ensure the President doesn’t get a good night’s sleep, adding the comical element of farce to the psychological deficiencies of his tracker, continually moving from place to place, becoming a road movie simply by the changing locations. While new poems are presumably mailed to the masses to keep the underground movement thriving, all we see are trips to the mailbox, as we don’t hear the poems, or see anyone other than the inspector reading them. This disconnect prevents the viewers from learning more about the significance of this artist, as what lines of poetry we hear are mentioned right alongside the mysterious inner thoughts of the psychologically challenged police inspector, who yearns to catch his man, gather fame and adulation, while learning to be a bit of a poet himself. Of course, none of that ever happens, so the messenger actually dilutes the message. There is no transcending force that unites the artist with the struggle, instead the film seems more concerned about showcasing the police inspector’s ultimate failure, as if fascism would be overthrown or undermined by a lack of conscious, all of which feels strangely disconnected from the real cause.
Postscript (not in the film)
The ultimate irony is that Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, the year after the Chilean Communist Party nominated him for President. He withdrew his nomination to make way for Socialist nominee Salvador Allende, who in 1970 became the first Marxist candidate to be a democratically elected President in any South American country, appointing Neruda to be the ambassador to France, returning to Chile in 1973 due to poor health, just in time for America’s intervention in a CIA sponsored coup d'état, surrounding the capital with troops, removing Allende from power by force (he allegedly committed suicide the next day), replacing him with a fascist military dictatorship lead by General Augusto Pinochet that remained in power until 1990. Pinochet’s dictatorship dissolved Congress, suspended the Constitution, and began a persecution of alleged dissidents in which thousands of Allende supporters were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. Among them may have included Pablo Neruda, who was hospitalized with cancer, where he died under mysterious circumstances, with a doctor injecting an unknown substance into his stomach, with Neruda’s driver, Manuel Araya, claiming he was poisoned, perhaps under the orders of Pinochet, as he died six hours later. What ultimately happened remains a mystery. In contrast to JFK’s historic funeral procession, as shown in Larraín’s film Jackie (2016), where over 100 foreign dignitaries showed up and the entire nation watched on public television, Pinochet refused to allow Neruda’s funeral to become a public event, where it took place under a massive police presence, with Neruda’s house broken into, his papers and books taken or destroyed, while thousands of Chileans disobeyed the curfew and demonstrated on the streets.
Neruda - Film Society of Lincoln
Center
Pablo Larraín’s exciting, surprising, and colorful new film is not a biopic but, as the director himself puts it, a “Nerudean” portrait of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s years of flight and exile after his 1948 denunciation of his government’s leadership. Larraín’s heady blend of fact and fancy (the latter embodied in an invented character, straight out of detective fiction, played by Gael García Bernal) is many things at once: a loving, kaleidoscopic recreation of a particular historical moment; a comical cat-and-mouse game; and a pocket epic. Featuring Luis Gnecco, a dead ringer for the poet and a formidable actor, alongside a terrific cast.
Cinema Scope: Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria September 07, 2016
It is not easy to face a national (and even international) myth and emerge unscathed. Pablo Larraín, who has spent years confronting the ghosts of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in his homeland of Chile, speaks in one of his two new films this year about one of the quintessential Chilean poets: Pablo Neruda, an aristocrat, communist, and bourgeois, a womanizer, lover and husband, a man both self-aware and self-centred. Neruda is set in 1948, in the days when the Chilean government of González Videla banned the Communist Party. Neruda (Luis Gnecco), in his role as senator, decided to confront the government publicly and thereby condemned himself to exile, first in his own country and later abroad.
Although the film draws a portrait of the poet (or the myth of the poet, his public and monumental figure) as a man obsessed with his public relevance and his fame, a man both contradictory and somewhat treacherous, debauched and somewhat cartoonish, Neruda is in no way a biopic or a historical reconstruction. If anything, it’s another chapter of Larraín’s series in which he pinpoints the supposed dark soul of his native country, painting a spooky portrait on the boundaries between history and representation, memory and fiction. The main plot of Neruda is not about the poet escaping from justice while he is at the same time playing with it and trying to increase his fame, but the love story between the poet himself and the police officer chasing him (Gael García Bernal). A sort of crime thriller, Neruda is an austral western about two characters eventually revealed as fictional, as liars: two characters, or a character in search of an author. But is there something more? Larraín’s previous films worked around this idea of national guilt, positing Chile as a sick, inherently fascist society where everybody is responsible for the ascension of the Pinochet dictatorship. This sort of bourgeois point of view is not so obvious in Neruda: rewriting the myth of a national figure as Neruda is, no doubt, a risky project—and the marketing of the film for its national premiere emphasizes more the thriller aspectt of the film than the biographical one—but below the game and the metacinematic reflection, there’s still an intellectual disdain. The film plays with the myth, creates a darker version of the poet, in order to do…what?
Film
Comment: Jonathan Romney December
15, 2016
After watching Pablo Larraín’s Neruda, I’m not sure that I know much more about the film’s subject than I did before—and I knew next to nothing. I was aware that Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet, a Nobel laureate, and an icon of the left. I now know that he was a Communist senator who was driven into hiding when his party was outlawed; that he had to flee Chile by crossing the Andes; that he was famous, and much adored, for the exaggeratedly romantic manner in which he recited his poems in public; and that he had a penchant for fancy dress parties and cavorting naked with female admirers.
At least, I assume much of this to be true, but Neruda makes it hard to tell how much of it and to what degree, since this factually based fiction isn’t what you’d call a biopic in any conventional sense; it’s not even entirely clear to what extent it’s really about Pablo Neruda himself. Let’s say the film is about an idea of Neruda, and about the way that ideas about poets and political figures take root in people’s minds—not just in the minds of their admirers, but of their enemies too.
Larraín’s films have until recently been about Chile and its modern history, sometimes in stylized nightmare mode (Tony Manero, Post Mortem), sometimes in more familiar realist registers (The Club, docudrama No). This year, however, the director has pitched camp in the field of what you might call the anti-biopic, making two films about modern icons in which he doesn’t so much recount a life as contemplate a myth, and to some extent, the biographical subject’s own awareness of that myth. Jackie—Larraín’s first English-language film, premiered in Venice—is about Jackie Kennedy’s experience in the wake of Dealey Plaza, and about the moment when she realizes she is about to move off the center stage of history and into the wings.
Neruda, unveiled in Cannes back in May, is a rather grander undertaking than the somewhat claustrophobic Jackie; you could even call it grandiose, as befits its central figure. The film covers a brief period in Neruda’s life—from the moment in 1948 when Communism is proscribed in Chile and he is forced into hiding, to his escape into exile the following year. The action begins in what might seem the conventional mode for a film about a man of weight and moment. Neruda (a wonderfully droll, blustering Luis Gnecco) sweeps into a senatorial corridor of power, flashbulbs popping round him, and into a spacious room filled with august statesmen; his right-wing opponents fling sour comments at him, which he counters with peppery, defiant quips. There’s a definite touch of Citizen Kane about this flamboyant start, and it’s only after a moment that you wonder how much Larraín is indulging his penchant for borderline surrealism, as the room is at once a sort of stately council chamber and a men’s toilet, with urinals along the wall. Who knows, maybe such a room exists in the Chilean parliament, but it begins the film on a casually bizarre note that makes you wonder about the veracity of what follows.
For example, did Neruda and his wife Delia del Carril really throw such orgiastic parties? The well-heeled bourgeois bohemians of their circle let their hair down in wild nights of salsa, semi-nudity, and fancy dress, at which Neruda charms the crowd by performing—clearly his standard party routine—his greatest hit, the love poem “Tonight I can write the saddest lines.” He’s a ludicrous apparition, a portly middle-aged man with kohl-lined eyes, dressed in the white robes of Lawrence of Arabia, and laying on his famous quavering “poet’s voice,” the one that never fails to make hearts pound. “Many women,” comments the voiceover narrator, “must think he makes love with a rose between his teeth.”
It’s this voiceover that makes us so uncertain whether we’re seeing a real Pablo Neruda, or an observer’s half-besotted, half-vengeful distortion of him. The narrator, who eventually reveals himself a few episodes in, is Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal), a policeman ordered by his superiors to apprehend and humiliate the poet, following the ban on Communism—a ban directly ordered, Peluchonneau states, by the U.S. government. It may be that the opening scenes of Communist debauchery are actually in the mind of Peluchonneau, a man employed to discredit Neruda, and perhaps already working on making him look absurd in our eyes.
Take Peluchonneau out of the equation, and this episodic drama—scripted by Guillermo Calderón, Larraín’s co-writer on The Club—offers a fairly linear account of Neruda’s career as outlaw. It shows him and Delia attempting to cross into Argentina, but being turned back because of confusion over the poet’s nom de plume and the birth name on his passport, Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. Then we see the couple moving from their luxurious home into a cramped apartment where Delia, an Argentinian aristocrat, finds proletarian domesticity not to her taste (when she complains about cleaning the place, a follower offers her a pair of rubber gloves; she grandly sniffs, “Hygiene is a bourgeois value”). Neruda sometimes emerges from hiding, at one point dressing as a priest to sneak out to a brothel, and in a later visit, donning drag, Falstaff-style, to escape a police search. In the background, Chilean history takes its course; we see brutal round-ups of leftists and a prison camp commanded by a young military officer, one Augusto Pinochet.
Throughout it all, the Nerudas cut a swagger. Despite Pablo’s philandering narcissism, Delia (played as a stately, tender survivor by Mercedes Morán, from The Holy Girl) is clearly in love with him. The prospect of being on the run with him, as if in a romantic novel, visibly excites her, although the reality becomes somewhat different: “You suffocate me all day,” he moans, “I used to be a prince.” Meanwhile, Pablo continues to twit his enemies; no longer able to defy the reigning powers face to face, he drives past the presidential palace at night beeping his horn to spoil the sleep of President González Videla (played with snakelike sourness by Larraín’s acteur-fétiche Alfredo Castro). There’s also an extraordinary sequence in which Neruda dresses in a white suit and broad-brimmed hat, to pass as a Central American visitor; walking in the street, he hugs an impoverished street kid. The scene seems to offer a sentimentalized image of the great man’s compassion, but there’s a bleak twist; the next scene shows the waif wearing Neruda’s white jacket, but interrogated by police.
While the film never makes us doubt that Neruda is a great poet and a politician of true conviction, nevertheless he also emerges as a self-serving, self-mythologizing, perpetually randy buffoon. The film plays poignantly on the disconnection between the demon-lover persona that he creates in his verse, and the physical reality of a dumpy middle-aged man with an ill-advised comb-over. It’s not that Neruda’s looks discredit the persona, but it is suggested that they made him all the more narcissistically attached to it, and to an act that worked rather well both for Delia and for Pablo’s many admirers, public and private.
So much for the portrait of the artist—but beyond that, the film is a portrait of the policeman on Neruda’s trail, his arch-enemy and perhaps arch-fan. Neruda depicts a parodic Holmes-Moriarty relationship between the detective and his quarry: the poet taunts Peluchonneau by leaving him a trail of paperback thrillers to puzzle over. But Peluchonneau is himself a dime-novel detective, in that he doesn’t really exist. Here’s the film’s boldest touch: the fact that Peluchonneau is manifestly a fictional figure. Not only is the character a pure invention, but he’s aware of himself as an invented character, and ultimately has to accept that he is Neruda’s creation. Every fugitive needs a pursuer; the poet has created his own imaginary nemesis, the figure who will make Neruda’s escape look truly heroic by dogging his trail till the very last.
Peluchonneau is as preposterous a figure as his prey—a self-described “trained monkey” constantly humiliated by his superiors, and agonized by the thought that his prostitute mother may not, after all, have been impregnated by the legendary police chief from whom he takes his fancy surname. Played by Bernal, the fedoraed, pencil-mustached cop is certainly dashing, and sees himself as no less a love god than Neruda; he even gets into a clinch with the poet’s first wife, or thinks he does, for this scene may be entirely in his imagination. He pursues Neruda on a bike that runs out of fuel, wearing a cartoonishly penile cycle helmet; and yet the film finally grants him a moment of self-conscious nobility, a redeeming apotheosis in which he more or less becomes real at last.
It’s a premise straight out of Jorge Luis Borges, the idea that the detective creates his own prey and vice versa. “I dream of him, he dreams of me,” Neruda comments, and it is suggested that the relationship is altogether homoerotic (Peluchonneau absurdly denounces Neruda on live radio as “a public menace and an unforgettable lover”). Delia unequivocally tells Peluchonneau as much in an extraordinary sequence in which a single continuous conversation keeps cutting between two different setups and styles of lighting—characteristic of a highly fragmented, episodic film in which Larraín and regular DP Sergio Armstrong use back projection and other devices of stylization to defuse expectations of a reliable historical drama.
Larraín arguably overplays his card in the final section; the snowbound pursuit is overstretched, and the film’s self-reflexive dimension overstated by Peluchonneau’s too-prolix commentary. But despite the mocking tone, the film’s melancholic grandeur is maintained throughout, not least through a hauntingly austere soundtrack that mixes Federico Jusid’s score with passages of Charles Ives, Edvard Grieg, Gavin Bryars, Penderecki, and the latter’s dedicated hommagiste Jonny Greenwood. It’s a film of unsettling looseness and dreamlike fluidity that, at moments, recalls another Chilean master of cinematic uncertainty, Raúl Ruiz. And, while its tricksiness may set some viewers’ teeth on edge, it’s a film that’s very congruent with a tradition of self-reflexiveness in Latin American literary fiction. Think of it not as a movie about Pablo Neruda, but as an experimental novel masquerading as a movie about Neruda, and this film begins to make a bold, perverse kind of sense.
Interview:
Pablo Larraín on Jackie and Neruda - Film Comment José
Teodoro interview, November/December 2016
The back-to-back December releases of Pablo Larraín’s Neruda and Jackie constitute a juncture, a pivot-point that renders the director’s purposes both more defined and more elusive. The first film concerns the mythos of his native Chile, the subject of repeated, cataclysmic interference by the United States; the second concerns the mythos of the United States and a cataclysm on its own soil. The following conversation (conducted during the Toronto Film Festival) contains some debate about the nature of what binds these films and Larraín’s work generally. We can at least agree that, unlike nearly every contemporary Latin American auteur, Larraín’s directorial signature isn’t a matter of consistent visual style. Spanning the baroque, the austere, and the oneiric, the aesthetics of his films are case by case, precisely drawn from the disparate dictates of the material; rather, Larraín’s signature is rooted in a regard for history and culture that is arduously invested in re-examination and devoid of sentimentality. The grotesque is never far off in Larraín. Even the Oscar-nominated No, his most overtly celebratory narrative, is as tainted with sober cynicism as it is tinted with a sickly pinkish hue.
Larraín’s prior films include Tony Manero (2008), about an impoverished, sociopathic disco savant (played by the brilliant Alfredo Castro) angling for minor celebrity during the darkest years of the dictatorship; Post Mortem (2010), in which a mortician (Castro) perilously in love with a burlesque dancer is tasked with performing an autopsy on Chilean President Salvador Allende; No (2012), which dramatizes the 1988 plebiscite that brought an end to the Pinochet era from the perspective of the marketing wizards (again, Castro, and Mexican superstar Gael García Bernal) on each side of the campaign; and The Club (15), a caliginous inquisition drama about disgraced priests residing in a remote seaside retirement home.
Neruda is just as irreverent as its predecessors, and Jackie just as morbid. The former is less an homage to Chile’s most beloved poet than it is a postmodern policier about the politics of personality and the communist purge that sent Pablo Neruda into hiding. Neruda’s protagonist isn’t even Neruda; instead, the film hews close to one Óscar Peluchonneau (Bernal, at his most transfixed and waxen), the detective leading the hunt for Neruda and impelled by his own delusions of grandeur. Not unlike the bounty-seeking antihero of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Óscar senses destiny drawing him toward his prey, whose mythic allure he will absorb by virtue of their inevitable contact. Meanwhile, coming just in time for an especially despairing election year, Jackie revisits the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination through the eyes of America’s most iconic widow, played by Natalie Portman with an addlepated blend of trauma and tenacious poise. Jackie is an eerie, and in some ways surprisingly earnest, portrait of a queen forced to fuse personal and public grief as Camelot vanishes from under her feet.
At one end of your filmography we find Fuga, your 2006
debut, which still feels like an outlier. At the other lies Jackie, your
first non-Chilean, English-language film. In between you have made five
features that seem organized around a critical investigation of Chilean history
and culture. Were those films intended to be part of a larger project?
Look, man, I never planned anything. Okay, I planned the first one. I called my two brothers, both of whom are lawyers, not filmmakers, but I wanted them to produce it. They agreed and were excited. Fuga was an expensive movie for our circumstances in Chile back then. It did well at the box office. It got awful reviews. I wasn’t sure how to deal with it.
How do you feel about it now?
I haven’t seen it since we made it. Probably I should. My older brother moved on. He now does political analysis. He’s on the liberal right, but that’s another story. My little brother said he wanted to do more. Since then we’ve produced 20 movies together, films by Sebastían Lelio, Sebastián Silva, Marialy Rivas. But, to go back, sometime after Fuga I’m in Spain, at the Museo Reina Sofía. I find there this big Taschen book of photography. I’m leafing through it, kind of bored. I see this picture of this super-skinny guy in his fifties, sitting on a sofa, smoking, staring out the window. I start thinking, “Who is this man?” He could be a dancer. And a serial killer. I’m thinking about Saturday Night Fever, which was released in Chile in 1978. I’m wondering if this could have a political dimension, and: Tony Manero. We shot it very quietly. We went to Cannes and had some success there.
Then I’m at the Turin Film Festival. Someone from the press asks me about Allende. They think Pinochet killed Allende. I explain that this isn’t true. Allende shot himself with a weapon that Fidel Castro gave him. Even Allende’s family has admitted this publicly. It’s not like I’m making it up. But there, in Turin, I find myself back at the hotel, Googling away, making sure I’m right to say this in public, and the autopsy report comes up. I read it. It is a very technical thing, like any autopsy report, but I’m finding it to be, in its medical language, a sort of poetic description of my country. Out of that came Post Mortem.
Then Antonio Skármeta writes this play about the plebiscite. He says why not make a movie. So we make No. While we’re making it, it occurs to me that we have some kind of trilogy. I never planned it.
Neruda was a parallel project that we were developing a long time. I didn’t want to make it. I thought it was impossible to make a film about Pablo Neruda. Eventually we found a way to dig in and produce what we like to call an anti-biopic.
I was going to say, Neruda really isn’t about Neruda.
It’s about the Nerudian. Neruda was a lover of food, a great cook, an expert on wine. He travelled the world collecting things. He was a lover of women, a communist, a politician, a senator, and the most amazing writer of our language. How do you depict such a man? We found out about this period when he escaped from the cops. Yes! So we bring the cop into the story and develop the script around him. But this was going to be a big movie for the Latin American reality. Big budget. It was delayed because we had to wait for Gael. It was also a five-country coproduction, so it took some time. At a certain point I realize it’s going to be another eight months before we can get started and I’m unemployed. What am I going to do? I can’t just go home and cut flowers, though I love to do that. So I do a theatre play, and I get this idea. My brother says, “When do you want to shoot it? After Neruda?” I say, “No. I want to shoot it now. I want to write it and go into pre-production in three weeks.” So we write the movie, me and Guillermo Calderón, who wrote Neruda, and Daniel Villalobos, a film critic and novelist, in three weeks, then shoot it in two and a half weeks. In a month and a half we have material for a movie. That was The Club.
That just leaves Jackie.
We go to Berlin with The Club. We get an award. At the after-party I meet Darren Aronofsky, who was head of the jury. He asks me to read something. He sends it to me and it turns out to be a script I read five years ago. And I liked it. I read it again and I come to Darren’s office and I ask him, “Man, why do you want a Chilean to do this? You’re crazy.” He laughs and says that he thought I could bring a good take on this. I was intrigued, but I said I would only do this with Natalie Portman. He laughs again. He tells me he’ll set up the meeting and then it’s my problem. We meet and I tell her, “If you don’t do this movie I’m not doing it either. No pressure, but that’s how it is.” Natalie asks to see my movies. We set up screenings. I was scared. Here’s Natalie alone in a cinema watching The Club! We meet again. We have another draft in which I had [screenwriter] Noah [Oppenheim] remove all the scenes without Jackie. Natalie accepts. I honestly didn’t expect someone like her to work with someone who made the movies I made. But this says a lot about her, that she’s willing to take risks with people. Darren, meanwhile, allowed me to make the film with total artistic control, which is very hard to get today on a movie like that. So we were setting up Jackie while I continued to shoot Neruda. Then we were in Paris where I was editing Neruda while shooting the interiors for Jackie. We finished Neruda for Cannes, and then after Cannes I finished Jackie, and now I’m talking to you.
Why did it have to be Portman?
It was her mystery. You sit her in front of the camera, dress her however you need to dress her, get her to look however she has to, ask her to describe everything she feels and everything she’s thinking, and you will still wonder what’s going on. That’s her mystery. That’s a resource in cinema. You never get all the answers. If you do, the game is over.
From the beginning of Jackie, something that struck me
was how you frame the reverse-shots between her and the journalist not over the
shoulder but, rather, head-on, confrontational.
Stéphane [Fontaine, the cinematographer] and I photographed that sequence with two cameras. We put them together, almost touching, facing in opposite directions, an operator on each side, the actors looking right into the lens. It had to be super-frontal. You can’t hide. I thought it would be more interesting to expose the characters as much as possible right away, put it all on the line. We shot those sequences at the end of production, so Natalie had fully absorbed Jackie. She was in full control.
The feeling is very different, of course, by the time we
arrive at Jackie’s coda. Which is pretty hypnotic. I couldn’t tell you
if this sequence runs five minutes or ten—
It’s seven minutes and 40 seconds, man.
In those seven minutes and 40 seconds it feels like your
heroine reaches some sort of state of grace in her mourning. You achieve a kind
of pure portraiture. Which inevitably made me think of Warhol.
You know what Warhol was working on when he died? If I remember it right, he was working on Jackie Kennedy with the veil. But that’s not what I was thinking of. I felt I wanted to arrive at an illumination moment. Not a moment where we all hold hands and sing, no. I just felt that the movie went into this absolute darkness and needed to reach a very bright moment. It’s not even hope. It’s about a woman who recognizes the moment she’s living through, the terror, and is able to fully inhabit it.
Perhaps what I’m feeling is a conflict between Jackie’s
personal, internal grief and the very public grief she’s duty-bound to perform.
This moment of grace is the moment when personal grief and public grief find a
way to coexist.
Yes. The public self and private self come to a point where they are no longer two selves. It’s maybe also a matter of realizing you’re in danger and arriving at the place where you learn to live with it.
Jackie is intimate and isolating. Neruda, on the
other hand, feels very open and inclusive. The party scene, the brothel scene:
your Neruda is poised among his admirers like a religious figure in a
Renaissance painting. Though not a static one. In my memory the camera is
almost always moving.
I never moved the camera like this in my life. For the first time, we had access to all the grips we needed. We had cranes, Steadicam, dollies, and track. The camera has an energy that’s like reading. Neruda’s poetry is about rhythm. After reading you still feel the motion. While shooting, his poetry was all over the place. You’d be sitting on an apple box and you’d spy a poem under the tripod. You’d be on a cigarette break and someone would pick up a book of Neruda’s work.
There is indeed a lyricism, as well as a swaying, or sense of
intoxication.
I have to tell you something incredibly sad. Two weeks ago our Steadicam operator, Darío Triviño, who shot 90 percent of Neruda, went to bed and never woke up. He was 45. Usually a Steadicam operator can sustain a shot for, say, four to seven minutes. Some can go up to nine minutes. This guy could do 10, 11. He was a master. To make these shots in that aspect ratio with these old lenses is very hard. It’s like you’re on a ship. Very hard to sustain the right horizon. Darío had never read Neruda in his life, but by the end of production he had memorized several poems. He was infected by the Neruda virus.
It’s interesting to learn how much Neruda and Jackie
overlapped. I’m sure it’s not lost on you that your first non-Chilean film
is being made by the country—is about the country—that looms in the
periphery of your previous films, the same country that backed the communist
purge from which Neruda runs, that backed the coup that ushered in the Pinochet
era depicted in Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No.
It’s the country that keeps sticking its nose in my country, man.
In Neruda, the titular character is portrayed quite
irreverently…
We don’t build monuments, man.
…while Jackie strikes me as quite reverent toward its
titular character and the singular situation she finds herself in.
Ah. I see. This is interesting, what you’re saying. But it’s different for me. If you look at my previous movies, you’ll notice that all of them are focused on male characters. With this one I have to contend with, not just a woman, but Jackie Kennedy! A former First Lady! I had to find a different path. I needed to find a new way to look at her. I’m not American. I would never have American patriotism. I only have patriotism for my country, my people. I regard the American flag the same way I regard the flag from China of France.
Does this make you less inclined to dissect the image of
Jackie?
I don’t intend to divorce myself from politics because I don’t believe this is possible. I would simply say that I looked at her through a lens of love and compassion. I had this idea of Jackie Kennedy as an American queen. I was a novice. Then I went to YouTube looking for material and found the White House tour Jackie did in 1961. I couldn’t believe what I was watching. When she came to the White House she did a restoration for which she was heavily criticized. People said she did it with public money, which wasn’t true. People said she did it just to match her own taste, which was partly true. She hired a team who went all over the United States and brought back furniture that had originally been in the White House. She wanted to protect the legacy of that building. JFK suggested she put together this TV show to show the people what she did and why. I had this idea about this superficial woman who was mainly concerned with fabrics and fashion, but in this show I found the woman who captured my imagination. I was so moved by the way she would express herself, try to smile. I found out that she wrote the script, that everything she said was her own words. I saw the notes from her interview with Arthur Schlesinger and began to sense how political she was. Believe me, man, if I’ve done anything in my life it’s study political people, and there are very few with such a powerful sense of politics.
This idea of trying to control a legacy connects Jackie to
Neruda and No, where we find the Pinochet regime struggling to
portray itself as benevolent.
This legacy thing interests me. Maybe it always will. But if there’s a bridge that could connect all my movies it’s the idea of people that are victims of historical circumstance, people forced to behave in ways they don’t fully understand, who don’t know exactly what it is that they’re doing or why.
In Tony Manero it seems like the historical
circumstances are facilitating or permitting sociopathic behavior in your
protagonist that might otherwise have never manifested. It made me think of
certain Pinochet-era narratives from Roberto Bolaño, such as his novels Distant
Star or By Night in Chile.
Absolutely. It is a kind of license. The same is true with Post Mortem. These are people whose lives might have been unremarkable if it weren’t for history tapping them on the shoulder and offering another path. But with Jackie and Neruda we shift the focus away from individuals on the periphery of history and onto people who are right at the center.
Watching Neruda reminds us that there was a time when
writers and artists actually held a profound influence. At least enough
influence to be considered a threat to the establishment.
I know. It’s strange to think of it. Neruda’s particular power came from how he was able to describe our country, our society, our people in a way that no historian or journalist has ever done. If you want to understand who we really are, read Neruda. Neruda is in our water. He’s everywhere. That’s why instead of dealing with his poetry we chose to absorb the poetry and see what comes out after. Neruda is what transpires after drinking that Neruda water.
Yet I don’t think the literary precedents for the film’s story
lie in Neruda but, rather, in the work of other Latin American authors.
You know Jorge Luis Borges?
You took the words out of my mouth. The detective’s journey
feels Borgesian.
Borges had an idea of overlapping fictions. Neruda is a Nerudean story overlapping with a Borgesian process. Well-known people throughout history at some point become concerned with managing their own legacy or iconography. I guess this is what you were getting at before, right? People want to project a certain idea of themselves, to twist history so that it regards them in a specific way. I’m trying to see how such people go about their business. Let’s go into the kitchen. Let’s watch the chef at work. Everything that happens in those five days for Jackie or those two years for Neruda is recorded. We know where they were at such and such time. But once they close the door, that’s where the fiction starts, the imagination starts. We make a little hole in the door, we slip a camera through that hole, we find out what we can see. I’m a storyteller. I don’t want to relay facts. I want to play. And to create a problem.
Put this way, Óscar is the problem. He’s unexpectedly cast in
Neruda’s immense shadow and realizes that there might be a place for him in the
mythology.
We all want to be in the story. “Say my name!” This is where Borges comes in. Óscar is a character written by Neruda. Neruda was very smart because he didn’t write only nice things about himself. He understood that if you can see the worst in yourself and use it, if you can make fun of and be cruel to yourself and find at some point that the nice character and the worst character are a single character, then you have something.
Do you see your films as being personal in that sense, as a
way to explore darker parts of yourself?
You wouldn’t believe how fast it happens. You’re telling a story that has nothing to do with you, and then suddenly it gets down into something extremely personal.
I ask because there’s a deep perversity at the heart of your films.
If there’s no perversion, there’s no beauty. Forget it. The word perversion comes from Latin. It means to see the reverse. Per-version: a different version of the story. It doesn’t necessarily refer to the actions of what we typically call a perverted, evil person. A bad priest, say. Or Donald Trump. It’s an oblique way to understand reality. And it becomes personal. Cinema is personal, man. The filmmakers that you or I admire were very personal.
Though it’s often most interesting when what’s personal in the
work isn’t obvious.
That’s true. It’s almost always about desire. It’s your desire that can’t help but find its way to the screen. I deal with some very mean characters doing mean things, but I look at them with compassion. I love them. I love the meanest person I’ve dealt with. That’s the reason why I would never be able to make a movie about Pinochet: there’s just no way that I could find anything there to love. So I wonder how [Paolo] Sorrentino is going to do the Berlusconi movie. I’m dying to see that. How do you do that? I don’t know. But it’s cinema. Let’s all of us keep letting cinema find its way. Can you imagine this planet without cinema? I can imagine it without phones. Without Internet also. But without cinema? I don’t know. I would probably be a lawyer.
Making of 'Neruda': How a Biopic of a Chilean Communist Poet ... Making of ‘Neruda’: How a Biopic of a Chilean Communist Poet “Completely Turned the Genre on Its Head,” by Tatiana Siegel from The Hollywood Reporter, November 14, 2016
Pablo Larrain's 'Neruda' Starring Gael Garcia Bernal Is A Thrilling ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
Ferdy
on Films [Roderick Heath] on NERUDA
and JACKIE
Fandor: Kenji Fujishima Pablo
Larraín and the Political Biopic, on NERUDA and JACKIE, October 03, 2016
Neruda | Film Review | Slant Magazine Oleg Ivanov
Review:
A poet on the run in startlingly great 'Neruda' - Salon.com Lindsey Bahr, December 6, 2016, also seen
here: Larrain's
'Neruda' a playful, thrilling story of Chilean poet - Daily Herald
We Got This Covered [Lauren Humphries-Brooks]
Little
White Lies: Sophie Monks Kaufman
Neruda :: Movies :: Reviews :: Neruda :: Paste - Paste Magazine Andy Crump
Review:
NERUDA, Playful, Poetic Filmmaking
Dustin Chang from Screen Anarchy
The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson
Movie Mezzanine: Mallory Andrews
Film Journal International [Chris Barsanti]
“Paterson” and “Neruda” Anhony Lane from The New Yorker
Jordan Riefe: 'Neruda' Makes Poetry of a Cat-and-Mouse ... - Truthdig Jordan Riefe
The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]
Brooklyn Magazine: Benjamin Mercer
Filmmaker: Vadim Rizov September 08, 2016
Observations on Film Art: Kristin Thompson October 13, 2016
n+1: A. S. Hamrah December 12, 2016
Filmmaker: Howard Feinstein September 29, 2016
In
Review Online: Lawrence Garcia
The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]
Film-Forward.com
[Rania Richardson]
Battleship Pretension [David Bax]
'Neruda' Review: Poet vs. Police - WSJ Joe Morgenstern
Sight & Sound [Wendy Ide] November 4, 2016
NoSpoilerReviewz.com [Jason Singer]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Sight & Sound: Kieron Corless October 06, 2016
Neruda
Movie Review : Shockya.com Chiara
Spagnoli Gabardi
Celebrating
Pablo Neruda » Abandon All Despair Ye Who Enter Here July 12, 2013
From 'Jackie' to 'Neruda': How Pablo Larrain Is Reinventing the Biopic David Fear interview with the director and actress Natalie Portman from Rolling Stone, December 17, 2016
What Do 'Jackie' And 'Neruda' Have In Common? Chilean Filmmaker
Pablo Larraín Robert Siegal
interview from NPR, December 17, 2016
Gael
Garcia Bernal in 'Neruda': Cannes Review | Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
'Neruda'
Film Review – Cannes Film Festival 2016 | Variety Jay Weissberg
Neruda review - unconventional drama constructs rather than retells ... Benjamin Lee from The Guardian
Irish Film Critic [Alex Saveliev]
The Los Angeles Times: Justin Chang also seen here: Pablo
Larraín's 'Neruda' is a richly imagined biographical fantasia - LA ...
Neruda Movie Review &
Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert
Glenn Kenny
Review:
'Neruda' Pursues the Poet as Fugitive - The New York Times A.O. Scott
Pablo
Larraín on His Latest Films, 'Jackie' and 'Neruda' - The New ... The
New York Times, December 15, 2016
Why
the Movie 'Neruda' Is an 'Anti-Bio' - The New York Times May 18, 2016
Pablo Neruda - Poet |
Academy of American Poets - Poets.org
The Song of Despair - Poems | Academy of American Poets - Poets.org
Pablo Neruda - Pablo Neruda
Poems - Poem Hunter
Pablo
Neruda | Poetry Foundation
JACKIE B+ 92
USA Chile France (99 mi) 2016 Official site
Don’t let it be forgot,
That once there was a spot,
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot.
—Camelot, sung by Richard Burton, words and music by Alan Jay Lerner
and Frederik Loewe, 1960, "Camelot"
w/ Richard Burton - YouTube (2:31)
While Pablo
Larraín has been a lauded and perhaps overrated filmmaker, where his two recent
films No (2011) and The
Club (El Club) (2015) have been controversial and provocative, yet they
have failed to deliver on the artistic promise expected from critically
acclaimed filmmaking, where one questioned whether greatness lies within
him. Surprisingly, and perhaps uniquely,
this ruminating biopic on Jackie Kennedy in the four days following the
assassination of her husband in November 1963 is a superb piece of filmmaking,
among the better films seen all year, the director’s first venture in the
English language, where perhaps this is the first time all the pieces fit
together, starting with a towering performance from Natalie Portman, arguably
the best in her career, following brilliant work with Terrence Malick in Knight
of Cups (2015) where her brief but elevated performance was among
the film’s high points, a creatively
insightful script written by Noah Oppenheim, told in a fragmented manner,
highlighting all the interior moments kept away from the cameras and never seen
or imagined before, beautifully edited by Sebastián Sepúlveda in what is
arguably the best edited film of the year, all held together by a bombastic
musical score written by Mica Levi that superbly adds a somber, funereal
flourish, yet also expansive symphonic reach that adds an experimental, avant
garde element to the film. On top of
that, the cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine is exquisite, beautifully
combining the external and interior moods that were haunting the First Lady,
where the film reaches into the depths of the moment, perhaps only as film can
examine, retracing one of the most historic moments in American history. The film is framed by a Life magazine interview taking place a week afterwards by Theodore
H. White (Billy Crudup) at the vast but empty Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port,
where Mrs. Kennedy makes it clear she’ll be controlling what gets printed,
scrutinizing the reporter’s notes, amusingly offering stories that she later
indicates is not for public record, resulting in a surprisingly poignant essay
("For
President Kennedy: An Epilogue," by Theodore H. White, Life, 6 ...)
that continues to resonate to this day based on its historic impact, as the
First Lady was the first to elegantly frame President John F. Kennedy’s legacy,
beautifully reaching a chord desperately needed by a country reeling at the
time, establishing the myth that will forever be associated with her husband,
often referred to as the Camelot era.
Previously the best
characterization of Jackie Kennedy came from actress Parker Posey in the
outrageously delightful The House
of Yes (1997), a film that superimposes her own fictitious images over
Jackie Kennedy’s infamous tour of the White House, A Tour of the White House
with Mrs. John F. Kennedy - YouTube (57:37) before delving into one of the
sickest bits of satire ever conceived on film.
Now we have Natalie Portman showing a different side of the First Lady,
brushing up on history, asking for historical expertise on Abraham Lincoln’s
funeral, then designing her own husband’s funeral in a similar fashion,
insisting upon the same specifics.
During a period when women’s rights and opinions were largely ignored,
it’s amazing to think that Jackie Kennedy’s elaborately historic funeral plans
for JFK were implemented right down to the last detail, while at the same time
her profound dignity on display during a moment of national trauma remains one
of the treasured moments in American history, where she personified grace under
pressure. Legendary Greek actress Irene
Papas noticeably channeled her behavior in the Costa-Gavras political suspense
thriller Z (1969), winner of the Best Foreign Film, when right-wing generals
along with a police chief staged an assassination of her husband to gain
political power in Greece. This film is
a look behind the scenes at the private moments where her mood vacillated
between unspeakable strength and a crippling anguish, becoming a powerful, yet intimate
portrait of a very public grief. Portman
is outstanding in the role, literally owning the picture from start to finish,
capturing a wounded soul rising to the occasion with a tempered intelligence,
displaying a previously unseen confidence and depth of character, elevating to
new heights in her career as she literally treads new ground, imagining how the
First Lady might have handled tricky situations, relying upon the help of the
President’s brother Robert Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) and her personal assistant
Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig).
Additionally the film is an undeniable technical achievement, from the
brilliant cinematography to the mournful musical score that is completely in
sync with the changing moods, yet the art direction by Jean Rabasse couldn’t
feel more precisely accurate, taking us inside the White House, including the
upstairs bedrooms where the public has always been excluded.
The delicacy of the
situation occurs after a new President is sworn in, looking forward to running
the country, but continually forced to look backwards as well for the last
vestiges remaining of old business. It’s
here that Portman literally provides new territory, as we’ve never had a look
at the First Lady behind the scenes, where she’s not seen as some meek,
grieving widow, but an authoritative figure barking out instructions for people
to follow, where she is an undeniable Lady Macbethian force to be reckoned
with. At the same time, she is the one
who must tell the news to their two small children, Caroline and John Jr., that
their father won’t be coming home anymore, where she goes to great lengths to
include them openly in the family affairs while at the same time protecting
them. Moving back and forth in
fragmented storytelling, the film offers a highly personalized window into
something we’ve never seen before, and does so with an extraordinary
complexity, where we hear her question herself in voiceover whether her
decision for such a public funeral was for her husband or more for
herself. As we relive the traumatic moments of the assassination, a few rare
moments stand out, like wiping the blood from her face aboard Air Force One
after it happened, or tearfully cleaning herself up afterwards before crawling
into bed, and later wandering in a sedated daze, going from room to room in the
White House while listening to the title song from the musical Camelot, exposing her privacy in a place she so
proudly helped restore, recalling her elegant tour of the White House that
doubled as a history lesson, but now she would be forced to leave, where there
is pressure by the new administration to move into their new quarters. While she is emotionally shattered by the
experience, agonizing over decisions to be made, she is ever mindful of her
husband’s legacy, taking great care to help frame it in a positive light, where
we get a glimpse of her dignity, intelligence, and heartbreak all at
once. One of the more intriguing devices
is the use of an Irish Catholic priest, Father Richard McSorley (John Hurt) as
the First Lady’s personal confidante, literally walking her through the funeral
in anguished reflection before his burial, discussing her rage and
philosophical doubts, including a startling revelation of her husband’s
infidelities, often viewed in close-ups, where their long walks together add a
previously unexplored spiritual dimension that hovers over the occasion, adding
unique personal insight to the event.
Perhaps the most remarkable quality, however, is the emotional vividness
of the film, where we’re able to see the piercing vulnerability of the First
Lady during a time of great emotional sorrow, yet also her steely resolve as
she strives to find a way out of the emotional labyrinth she finds herself
stuck behind, where it’s a surprise to find a Chilean director explore what is
quintessentially an American story with such relevance and artistic
insight.
JACKIE Ken
Rudolph Movie Site
The familiar events of November 22, 1963 and the immediate aftermath are recounted entirely from witness and participant Jackie Kennedy's point of view in this brilliant script by Noah Oppenheim. The key to understanding the power of this film starts with the premise of its script, which bookends faithful re-creations of familiar events with an extended interview of Mrs. Kennedy by a journalist (Billy Crudup) in the immediate aftermath of those fateful days. Extraneous and speculative material have been jettisoned in favor of a lean, even surprising psychological portrait of an historical person whose legend has eclipsed her reality. Thanks to the script, and Chilean auteur Pablo Larrain's austere and exacting direction we've been given a biopic that really does break ground.
But let's face it, without a performance of such depth of feeling and convincing verisimilitude as Natalie Portman delivers in the role of Jackie, the film would not have worked. Others in the cast gave fine performances, particularly Greta Gerwig, who is remarkably self-effacing playing Nancy, Jackie's close confidante and assistant in the White House. However, some of the other familiar presences, including Peter Sarsgaard's Bobby, strayed a bit from the physical and vocal reality in favor of nuanced acting...not necessarily a bad thing; but considering how faithful to the real person that Portman's characterization was, these departures stuck out.
One additional note: Mica Levi has written the most effective score for a movie in ages...from the very first painfully atonal descending scream from the strings to represent the horror of the the actual assassination, to the haunting melodies accompanying Jackie's inner turmoil. This is one musician who was in total sync with his director and the script. Kudos all around.
Cinema Scope: Tommaso Tocci September 09, 2016
In his first English-language production, second unconventional biopic of the year (after Neruda), and third impressive film since February 2015, Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín keeps racking up successes. He hits the ground running in Jackie by prefacing the opening shot with the strange, self-collapsing flute-and-violin notes that will accompany his portrayal of the First Lady in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination. Mica Levi’s theme—like Natalie Portman’s compellingly affected accent, and like Jackie’s entire structure—is discordant, alienating, and absolutely irresistible.
Scenes of Jacqueline’s horrifying endeavour cover anything from the President’s death in Dallas (this one less extensively than you’d perhaps think; Larraín needs only a terrific tracking shot of the limousine speeding away and a glimpse of the fatal hit) to the funeral and subsequent move from the White House, but they’re scattered across the film and framed by two conversations: one with The Journalist (Billy Crudup), the other with The Priest (John Hurt), in a sort of rational and spiritual assessment of her past and future.
Portman’s most complex character since Black Swan is as concerned about her own future as she is about her husband’s legacy. Linking the two is a motif that subtly turns Jackie into a film about places: places in history, places to rest, places you’ve created and must now leave, places you’ll move to, even though “nothing’s ever mine.” In the First Lady’s words, things and artifacts last far longer than people, which is why we see her discussing furniture purchases in a faux-archival footage reproduction of her “Tour of the White House” TV special. The relics of American history she brought in will end up in boxes, perhaps sold to ensure the future of her children. Her fascination with Lincoln betrays a desire to make legendary figures descend on reality, while at the same time setting the stage for her real husband to join the ranks of legends.
It’s powerful stuff, woven carefully into the fabric of Noah Oppenheim’s excellent, measured screenplay. And yet Jackie lives and dies by Larraín’s extreme close-ups of his protagonist, especially in the handheld, agitated shots aboard Air Force One following the assassination. Grief blends with a fierce survival instinct in her search for legitimization. She wants everything out in the open, from her bloodstained dress to her children’s confused looks. By contrast, she’s calm and collected during the interview—as is Larraín’s composition—playing cat and mouse with Crudup and tiptoeing across the line of what’s true and what’s public. In this respect, it’s easy to recognize some of the shared elements between Jackie and Neruda. But it’s still striking to see Larraín tackle such quintessentially American material (and with a largely different crew) and managing to hit the mark so cleanly once again.
The audacious biopic Jackie opens on the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts in 1963, merely a week after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Though she welcomes a journalist into one of the Kennedy residences along Cape Cod, the now-former First Lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, has no permanent home. History has shredded her lease at The White House, which she had controversially renovated during her husband's time in office, and her belongings had been hastily shuffled to storage, like a college kid taking a break between semesters. "It's been just one week and already they're treating him like some dusty old artifact, to be shelved away," Jackie laments. She understands the country needs to move forward, but she barely had time to pack, much less grieve, before getting whisked away.
During the recent Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was assailed for a speech to Wall Street in which she expressed the need to have "public and private positions," referring to Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and the political horse-trading necessary to pass the 13th Amendment. Jackie is about the heartbreaking necessity of having to reconcile private shock and anguish with the stage-management of political theater, which requires a swift and peaceful transfer of power. It honors the unfathomable courage and defiance of a First Lady devoted to public service, even in those instances when she was decried as vain and superficial. The film asserts that her husband wasn't the only one sacrificed for his country on November 22nd, 1963.
Shot in rigorous, semi-experimental close-up, Jackie frames a national tragedy through an intimate perspective, relying on Natalie Portman's expressive face to tell much of the story. Director Pablo Larraín, a Chilean director making his English-language debut, carries a fascination with politics and media into a film that examines Jackie's legacy through different filters. The framing device has Jackie getting interviewed by a reporter (Billy Crudup) in Hyannis Port, often pointedly questioning his questions and battling for control over her own story. It also intersperses footage of Jackie filming the hour-long TV special A Tour of the White House, which granted CBS viewers a chance to see the work she'd done to enhance "the People's House."
The bulk of Jackie, however, is given over to the events of Nov. 11, 1963, when Jackie found herself at the center of a personal and national tragedy. With breathtaking speed, she goes from cradling her dead husband's head in her lap to witnessing Lyndon Johnson's swearing-in on Air Force One, all while wearing a pink Chanel dress still caked with blood. In the first of many assertions of will, she refuses to change her outfit because she wants to shame the extremists who threatened her husband during his tour through Texas. Operating from both a strong sense of history and a refusal to succumb to fear, she argues for a large, open funeral procession down the streets of Washington D.C., modeled after Abraham Lincoln after he was assassinated. At the same time, she has to consider her children, who are too young to comprehend the news fully, and her own thorny emotions about a husband who'd grown distant from her.
There's a mesmeric intensity to Jackie that's unlike any biopic of its kind, marked by a deliberate effort to narrow the scope to one woman's actions and reactions over the course of a few fraught days. Much like her extraordinary score for the science fiction film Under The Skin, composer Mica Levi sets a tone for Jackie that's simultaneously discordant and beautiful, with lilting strings punctuated by sharp, ringing woodwinds. There's an enveloping somberness to the music that complements Portman's performance, which in quieter moments suggests Jackie as a ghostly figure who's haunting the wreckage of her own life. "I used to make [men] smile," she tells the journalist. Now she makes everyone uncomfortable.
More than merely offering a backstage pass to history, Larraín draws us into the utter uniqueness of a situation where personal loss and national duty collided so violently. No reasonable person could be expected to absorb a tragedy of that magnitude, but Jackie makes shrewd political decisions and stands firmly behind them when others plea for caution. Shock and lucidity would seem to be contradictory responses, but Jackie makes that duality seem possible and astonishingly heroic. Her abiding sense of patriotism could not be suppressed by an assassin's bullet.
The
House Next Door [[Kenji Fujishima]
In Jackie, it doesn't take long for Pablo Larraín to pull his first subversion of the biopic genre. Those familiar with Natalie Portman's previous work as an actress will be startled to hear her vocal approximation of Jackie Kennedy's distinctive speech patterns in the film's opening moments. But when Jackie makes it clear to a visiting journalist (Billy Crudup, playing a version Theodore H. White, who profiled her in Life magazine a week after John F. Kennedy's assassination) that she'll be controlling this interview as much as possible, one quickly realizes that Larraín wants us to be aware of Portman's performance as an act. The spectacle of a famous actress like Portman taking on one of the most iconic figures in American history becomes, under Larraín's direction, just another level of performance, in a film concerned with elucidating levels of performance in public and private spheres.
Such a self-aware vision of one of the most famous first ladies in U.S. history is very much of a piece with Larraín's prior films—especially No, his chronicle of an ad executive's creation of a campaign to help bring down Augusto Pinochet's regime in Chile. If that film was all about the selling of a political position, Jackie is about the selling of a presidential legacy. That, according to Larraín, was one of Jackie's main obsessions in the aftermath of her husband's assassination in 1963. But then, that PR-like role was one of her most prominent functions as first lady when John F. Kennedy was president of the United States, perhaps illustrated most directly by the 1962 television special in which she offered CBS News reporter Charles Collingwood a tour through a newly restored White House, a project she spearheaded.
Pablo Larraín's Jackie is concerned with elucidating levels of performance in public and private spheres.
For the most part, though, Jackie focuses its attention on Jackie Kennedy the week or so after the assassination. Thus, another major thread of the film centers on her concerns over how to approach her husband's funeral arrangements, with much drama revolving around how private or public the ceremony should be. Though her advisers would prefer a low-key affair, Jackie sees this funeral as a way to potentially solidify her husband's legacy; as a result, she eventually decides on a more public procession.
Even as Jackie agonizes over such matters, though, we see and hear her reflecting on the decision, wondering to an Irish Catholic priest (John Hurt) whether she marched in public more for herself than for her late husband. It's that level of anguished reflection that suggests one of Jackie's other noteworthy achievements: as a fascinatingly multilayered character study. As much as it's an inquiry into the ways the political bleeds into the personal, Larraín's film also aims to find the real Jackie underneath the fashionable surface and cunning calculation. To that end, cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine's extreme close-ups, which occasionally push into Jackie's face, become instruments of prodding, capturing Portman as she shifts between presenting Jackie's real emotions and the way she reverts back to a carefully cultivated public persona seemingly on a dime.
All of this suggests a biopic with more of an academic bent than most. But perhaps Jackie's most remarkable quality is its emotional vividness, with Larraín maintaining a hold on Jackie's grief in the wake of her husband's death. Two especially memorable sequences stand out in that regard: a scene right after the assassination in which we see Jackie tearfully clean herself up and crawl into bed, and another in which she wanders through the halls of the White House, the title number from the musical Camelot spinning on a record player and the camera tracking her as if she were hanging out inside the Overlook Hotel of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
But Jackie as a whole is marked by Jackie's trauma, with Mica Levi's lushly mournful strings infusing the proceedings with a melancholy quality, and Sebastián Sepúlveda's non-chronological editing weaving in and out of past and present in ways that suggest a mind dealing with trauma. Above all, though, there's Portman bringing piercing vulnerability, steely resolve, and emotional mystery to an iconic figure, in a film that refuses to encase her in hagiographic amber even as it is recognizes her profoundly human sorrow.
Natalie
Portman Is Jackie Kennedy -- Vulture
Boris Kachka
Ferdy
on Films [Roderick Heath] on NERUDA
and JACKIE
Fandor: Kenji Fujishima Pablo
Larraín and the Political Biopic, on NERUDA and JACKIE, October 03, 2016
Sight
& Sound [Tom Charity] November
29, 2016
The
House Next Door [Sam C. Mac]
The Film Stage [Rory O'Connor]
Movie Review: Jackie - Reason.com Kurt Loder from Reason
The Nightmare of History: Jackie Nicolas Rapold from Brooklyn magazine, November 29, 2016
AwardsCircuit.com [Clayton Davis]
Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]
n+1: A. S. Hamrah December 12, 2016
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Cineuropa.org [Camillo De Marco]
Movies with Mae [Mae Abdulbaki]
The Cinemaholic John H. Foote
Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
Brooklyn Magazine: Paul Dallas September 22, 2016
From 'Jackie' to 'Neruda': How Pablo Larrain Is Reinventing the Biopic David Fear interview with the director and actress Natalie Portman from Rolling Stone, December 17, 2016
What Do 'Jackie' And 'Neruda' Have In Common? Chilean Filmmaker
Pablo Larraín Robert Siegal
interview from NPR, December 17, 2016
Interview:
Pablo Larraín on Jackie and Neruda - Film Comment José
Teodoro interview, November/December 2016
Natalie Portman in
'Jackie': Review | Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
'Jackie'
Review: Natalie Portman Is A Fine First Lady In Daring Biopic ... Guy Lodge from Variety
At 'Jackie' screening, star Natalie Portman hopes for a future 'first spouse' The Washington Post, December 2, 2016
'Jackie' movie review: Natalie Portman delivers award-worthy
turn as former first lady Mike Scott
from The New Orleans Times-Picayune
The Los Angeles Times: Justin Chang
Jackie
Kennedy: The First Instagram First Lady - The New York Times The New
York Times, November 30, 2016
'Jackie': Under the Widow's Weeds, a Myth Marketer - The New York ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, December 1, 2016
Pablo Larraín Narrates a Scene From 'Jackie' Mekado Murphy from The New York Times, December 2, 2016
Jackie (2016 film)
- Wikipedia
Larrieu, Arnaud and Jean-Marie
TO PAINT OR MAKE LOVE
(Peindre Ou Faire L’amour) B- 82
Sort of a beautiful
people, nouveau riche film fantasia, founded on the principle that you have
unlimited resources and can live anywhere in the world. Given that, little in this film feels
believable, yet it’s sumptuously beautiful to look at, shot by Christophe
Beaucarne, set in a gorgeous valley overlooking the Rhône-Alps mountains off in
the distance. Supposedly based on an
alluring idea of what to do once you reach retirement age, this is a
star-driven vehicle that would be highly preposterous if played by ordinary
looking people. Sabine
Azéma and Daniel Auteuil star as the sophisticated retiring couple Madeleine
and William, who already have a stunning view of the mountains from their
upscale urban apartment. This is a successful pair that is used to the
finer things in life, like fine cognacs and wine, regularly hosting dinner
parties, and high end automobiles. Their
daughter is off to college, having recently won a scholarship to study in
William falls into
doldrums, feeling bored and inadequate that he doesn’t know how to fill his
time. Madeleine on
the other hand, welcomes an opportunity to greet the great outdoors, and with
paint and easel in hand, finds an open field with a spectacular view of the
mountains rising just above a layer of trees.
No sooner does she start, but she spots a man who appears headed in her
direction. Claiming to smell the paint
from the roadside 50 meters away, Sergi López introduces himself as Adam, the region’s
blind mayor, and asks if she wouldn’t like to visit a nearby home for
sale. Bringing her husband the next day,
they instantly agree to buy on the spot, and with the magic of cinema, the
house is completely furbished within seconds.
Out of gratitude, they decide to invite the mayor to dinner, where we
meet his ravishingly beautiful wife Eva (Amira
Casar). They tell tales of how they each
met, eat gourmet food with lavish drinks afterwards, all on an outdoor porch
overlooking a perfect landscape. We
never see anyone cook or clean in this film, yet the lavish lifestyle seems to
appear as if by apparition. The invite
is returned, as their respective homes are within walking distance past a
stream and across a field, interestingly expressed one night in total screen
darkness, as the blind mayor leads them back home afterwards. Shortly thereafter, the mayor’s house burns
down, everything is lost, and the couple moves in with our retirees, and before
you know it, the mayor is taking Madeleine upstairs, leaving William on the
sofa with Eva.
Rising early the next morning, Madeleine and
William are outraged, feeling they were duped and manipulated by this swinging
couple who must have tricked them.
Vowing to get rid of them, they instead leave on their own volition,
which leaves William exasperated, as it takes the wind out of his sails,
thinking he must have misunderstood, especially when he learns the couple is
moving in to be near friends on a remote Pacific island with no plans on coming
back. On a lark, William claims he’ll
have to invite them to his daughter’s wedding, which is instantly agreed
to. No sooner are the words spoken, but
his daughter visits and announces her marriage plans, which is a gala affair at
their house in the country. Adam and Eva
visit for the wedding, but end up crashing on the sofa due to fatigue from jet
lag, joining Madeleine and William for a late night dinner after everyone else
has gone to a local night club. Rising
early the next morning, all four end up in a group hug making plans to sell the
house so they can all move to the islands.
The storyline only grows more ludicrous, accentuated by Jacques Brel and Demis Roussos songs,
including several renditions of “Nature Boy” that leave us scratching our heads
as to why anyone would leave this idyllic paradise to head for the Pacific
islands of Gauguin. However, with this
couple, in a rather odd glimpse of idyllic perfection in the lives of the rich
and famous, paradise is all in their minds.
To Paint Or Make Love (Peindre Ou Faire L’amour) Jonathan Romney in Cannes from Screendaily
The second film by France’s
talented, and as yet little-known, team the Larrieu brothers promised to be a
wild card in the Cannes competition. Given their inventive, hugely oddball
debut feature A Real Man (2003), their follow-up could well have turned
out as much a mood-lightening charmer as Agnes Jaoui’s Comme Une Image
was in last year’s festival.
Unfortunately, the Larrieus’
undoubtedly poised and intelligent comedy nevertheless retains little of the
spikiness and genuinely surprising invention of their first film, which was a
sort of arty rom-com with hints of Godard and Jacques Demy and a bizarre
birdwatching climax.
Any comparable edginess, however,
vanishes in the decidedly softer To Paint Or Make Love, a middle-brow,
middle-class confection set amid beautiful mountain scenery, and best described
as an erotic comedy for the A Year In Provence set.
Strong performances, handsome
visuals, sexy content and a slightly spurious, over-elaborated air of literate
sophistication could make this a very saleable film, with a ready-made audience
of traditionally-minded Francophiles, but its slightly smug cosiness will turn
off edgier-minded festivals.
Daniel Auteuil – in a
considerably less challenging role than his lead in Michael Haneke’s
competition film Hidden – plays William, a meteorologist having doubts
about his early retirement. However, his wife Madeleine (Azema) – who runs her
own business and does a spot of Sunday painting on the side – is out with her
easel in the mountainous Vercors region. There she meets charming, nature-aware
Adam (Lopez), a blind mayor who shows her a dilapidated house just waiting for
renovation to become a bucolic dream home.
In a flash, William and Madeleine
move in, and having fallen in love with the region, also yield to the
easy-going charms of Adam and his beautiful wife Eva (Casar) who, on persuading
Madeleine to paint her portrait, promptly strips down to her socks.
When Adam and Eva’s house burns
to the ground, William and Madeleine invite them to stay, but the visitors turn
out to be interested in more than the basic hospitality, at once shocking their
hosts and reigniting their conjugal passions.
With bizarre abruptness – a
dramatic device the Larrieus deploy cannily – Adam and Eva phone to announce
that they have high-tailed it to a Pacific island and, before long, William and
Madeleine have decided to join them there. A steamy, but somewhat farcical coda
shows the couple discovering the unexpected advantages of entertaining
house-hunters.
For the first 45 minutes or so
the film is gently droll but also somewhat arch – not least because of Sabine
Azema who, while looking glamorous and slyly sexy, cannot stop herself from
unleashing all the mannered, knowing tics and moves that made her so profoundly
irritating in Alain Resnais’s Pas Sur La Bouche.
Auteuil and a somewhat
pleased-with-himself Lopez provide amiable, relaxed presences; only Casar looks
ill at ease in a role which never becomes much more than an alluring
free-spirited sexpot.
Thoroughly awkward as well is the
play on Adam’s blindness, which manages to reinforce all the cliches about
blind people’s sensuality and hyper-sensitive powers of perception – even
though the film is clearly making ironic play of those commonplaces and of the
urban couple’s fantasies about the romantically earthy Adam. To underline the
latter point, the Nat King Cole standard Nature Boy is played twice on
the soundtrack, once – unforgiveably – in a version by Demis Roussos.
Things liven up considerably once
the Larrieus start deploying their twisty approach to narrative construction,
throwing in some unexpected temporal jumps and using the theme of blindness to
motivate a clever formal device, in a longish, craftily sound-designed sequence
in which Adam guides his friends through the countryside at night, with the
screen remaining in pitch darkness.
Much of the film, however, comes
across as a shallow, sumptuously-mounted lifestyle product, with Christophe
Beaucarne’s elegant photography and designer Brigitte Brassart’s hotly coloured
interiors adding to the overall sense of highly marketable chic.
Even the cultural references,
however – notably Stephane Grappelli jazz and an effectively deployed Jacques
Brel song – come across slightly like as prestige elements, placed to enhance
the film’s cultural value just as William and Madeleine’s renovations boost the
value of their house.
Overall tweeness is exacerbated
by the impressionistic score, plus a somewhat enigmatic song, contributed by
singer Philippe Katerine, who contributes an eleventh-hour cameo as a
well-heeled swinger.
A certain brittle wit remains
intact from the Larrieus’ debut, but the brothers seem to have set their cap
here at a slightly older, middle-class and middle-brow audience. For all its
ironic moral-comedy intentions, To Paint Or Make Love is a film that
will soothe and flatter its audience, but – unlike its
ornithologically-inclined predecessor – will ruffle no feathers.
Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
When a comedy's strongest scene
takes place when the screen is entirely blacked out despite being shot in a
luscious valley near the Alps, it's a sign that the film contains glaring
weaknesses. Even more when Demis Roussos' rendition of “Nature Boy” suddenly
blares out “The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved
in return,” and causes the audience to titter uncomfortably (I was shaking my
head in disbelief thinking “What the Hell is THIS for?”).
Attending a morning press screening of Peindre
Ou Faire L'Amour (To Paint or Make Love) in the Grand Theatre
Lumiére, I began wondering just what criteria the Cannes Film Festival uses to
select competition films. This lightweight French pastry can now forever tout
itself as a Palm d'Or nominee when far more worthy candidates never see the red
carpeted entrance of the Palais des Festival. Judging from director Jean-Marie
Larrieu's pretentious press conference comments, there's a good chance that the
selection committee relied on the Larrieu brothers' track record and
promotional statements, thinking that the silly film contained more substance:
To Paint or Make Love is an
ironic proposal for the future, reflecting the choices that face our two main
characters. The idea was to ask: what's left, once your professional career is
over? We also wanted to show that amazing things can happen to ordinary people.
These characters, who are confronting great questions like Love, Desire, Sex,
or Art, are not hero types. They're from the French provincial petty
bourgeoisie. But they experience powerful and thrilling moments.
Not that the film doesn't possess
some charm; its locations and cinematography are often as sensual as the
dialog's frequent poetic musings. France may even want to consider using
excerpts to promote tourism to its southeastern region. Unable to shoot in the
Pyrénees, the filmmakers began shooting in the beautiful Rhône-Alps region and
located a perfect house that will fill all viewers with longing; it really is
an ideal sanctuary for the retired—a virtual “Garden of Eden.”As Jean-Marie
explains, the “landscapes are bodies. The intimacy of a landscape is related to
the nude.”
The major problem lies with the overall
vision of the project, and the directors' heavy handed manner of clobbering the
audience with their message, along the lines of American hack directors Oliver
Stone and Ron Howard. Afraid that their audience wouldn't understand the
feelings of their major characters, they disrupt the narrative with overly loud
Jacques Brel and Demis Roussos songs with overt lyrical messages, and
deliberately force elementary symbolism by naming their supporting cast Adam
(Sergi Lopez) and Eva (Amira Casar).
After directing unknown actors in two previous projects (Fin d'Eté and Un
Homme, un Vrai), brothers Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu teamed two of
France's most prominent acting talents in the leading roles, casting Daniel
Auteuil (known to American audiences primarily through The Closet) as
William and Sabine Azéma as Madeleine. The actors hit their marks fine, and
even subtle poignancy surfaces when Auteuil ponders his future in the face of
early retirement—there has to be more meaning to Life than meeting longtime
friends for rounds of golf.
William has led a routine life in the French weather service while his wife
Madeleine refurbishes homes, and their grown daughter prepares to leave for
Rome, leaving them to themselves. To relax, Madeleine paints landscapes as a
hobby, but this is primarily an excuse to get out in the countryside and
breathe the fresh air. One morning a blind man named Adam smells her oils from
afar and introduces himself as the village mayor, offering to show her a nearby
house. It's for sale, and Madeleine falls in love at first sight, soon
convincing her husband to purchase the villa and begin anew with fresh vistas,
aromas, and outlooks.
Before long, William and Madeleine become inseparable from their new friends
(Adam and Eva), and begin a new lifestyle radically different from their former
staid urban ways.
There's a few “surprises” along the way, so I'll avoid spoiling those. The
narrative unfolds in straightforward fashion and isn't the most unpleasant film
you'll run across, but Peindre Ou Faire L'Amour plays less well
afterwards when realizing that the acting talent and sensual cinematography
really promised a bigger punch, and that the directors have treated you like an
elementary school pupil, assuming that you have virtually no visual literacy.
VOYAGE TO THE PYRÉNÉES
Voyage
To The Pyranees (Le Voyage aux Pyrénées)
Jonathan Romney at Cannes
A marital farce about misunderstandings, the great blue
yonder and (apparently supernatural) gender-swapping, Journey To The
Pyrenees is brisk, witty and often daft. This love letter to the
film-makers' native region is a gift for its two leads, Sabine Azéma and
Jean-Pierre Darroussin, and its humour will have some viewers in raptures,
although more may head for the hills. At the very least, the film offers
something like a return to form for the Larrieu brothers after the stuffy
disappointment of their 2005
The film should perform well when it opens in
Azéma and Darroussin play Aurore and Alexandre, a couple of
well-known screen actors on holiday on the
However the local rugged male talent has quite the opposite effect. Another problem is that neurotic Aurore is terrified of bears, which thrive in the locality. Tenzing (Gurgon), the Tibetan husband of hotelière Aline (Jover) explains that it's only by looking directly into a bear's eyes that Aurore will be cured.
It's when the bear turns up - manifestly a man in a furry suit, played by Cyril Casmèze - that things get very bizarre indeed. Aurore has a closer encounter with the beast than expected, then runs amok as a wild woman. Three skinny-dipping folk-singing monks turn up, Alexandre finds he can speak Tibetan thanks to magic mushrooms, and Aurore and Alexandre finally resolve their marital problems in a freak body swap.
This very uneven romp veers between sophisticated, knowing humour, and something closer to comic-strip surrealism - and it's usually in the former register that it works best. Increasingly episodic, the film ends up coming alive only intermittently, and when the couple pack their bags and leave, you can't help feeling that they and the film have slightly outstayed their welcome.
Still, there are ample touches of the very distinctive humour
that marked the Larrieu brothers' formally inventive debut feature A Real
Man (2003). Azéma, thankfully, is kept on a a rather tighter leash than she
was in To Paint or Make Love, although she's still prone to be a little
flighty under her bizarre scarecrow hairstyle. But she's well matched with
Darroussin, one of the most dependably likeable of French actors, whose
unflappable, self-effacing sang froid pretty much sustains the film's
comic coherence. As for the
Sunday
18 Emmanuel Burdeau at Cannes from Cahiers
du Cinéma
"The
The above quote was made by one of the Larrieu brothers on stage, just before they screened Le Voyage aux Pyrénées (trans: Trip Through the Pyrenees), for a theatre that was as packed as it was good-humored. The quote is lovely and amusing and we’ll try to use it in the next few days.
It’s the story of a couple of famous actors who go to the mountains to try to appease the Missus’ rampant nymphomania. Nearby, a Bulgarian bear is doing somersaults in the grass before taking them on. For one who has remained skeptical regarding the Larrieu brothers work, just as well for A Real Man, as for To Paint Or Make Love, this fantasy that turns too easily to nonsense and slapstick has the advantage of making things clearer. All you see are landscapes and all they talk about is sex. What matters to the Larrieu brothers seems to be this: is it possible to make a film in the mountains without it becoming at the same time an erotic film? Can we escape the all-powerful metaphor? No. Or rather: it would seem that, for the first time, the Larrieu brothers understand that while they are certainly good at filming, and they certainly love valleys, peaks and clouds, they are not good enough for their shots not to turn into postcards from time to time. And it would seem preferable to film nature as a call to pleasure than as a panorama to be hung on a wall. The metaphor, then, is no longer what needs to be refused or handled with care. It must be, on the contrary, exaggerated and stretched in all directions. Only vulgarity perhaps will allow one to retrieve the bit of natural wildness that a camera that is too gentle and too stylized cannot possibly depict.
That’s just one take on the film. But it will give you an appreciation of a film that is fearful of nothing, least of all its own facile aspects. And also to go back and see, with a more generous eye, the preceding features made by the Larrieu brothers.
Lartigau, Eric
A TICKET TO SPACE B 85
A film that never takes itself too seriously, a light-hearted romp into the future, where in the year 2030 as we zoom across the countryside flying just barely above the trees, things seem a little different. When a journalist requests an interview with a young astronaut, a flashback tells the story. It all started with a government lottery, an idea to save an otherwise bankrupt space program, where they devised a scheme to involve the public, where only two winning ticket holders would be allowed to fly into space, reminiscent of CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. But before we get ahead of ourselves, we have to start by taking a closer look at a failed marriage, where the husband (co-writer Kad Merad) is so used to failure that he fabricates stories to tell his family that all have delusions of grandeur, such as leaving call back messages from Claude Lelouche on his home answering machine, which his wife easily figures out is their own phone number. Eventually his wife and kid take a hike, but this sad affair turns into a hilarious moment simply by the way the scene is set up. And this sets the tone for the entire picture, most of which is just drop dead funny, a spoof of STAR WARS, 2001, ALIENS, GALAXY QUEST, and anything that features the dramatic buildup of superheroes, including the momentous music soundtrack.
Marina Foïs is
superb as the female co-pilot from Breton, a perfect Madeline Kahn character
who ruminates about her mother’s recipes and all things that remind her of
home, but swoons over any man that practices flattery. Along the way we meet the mistake proof
mission control expert (André Dussolier) who dreams of retiring after one last
successful mission, the mission commander who is already a national hero
(co-writer Olivier Barroux) from commandeering previous successful
missions, and Guillaume Canet as the head of the class, the all too perfect other
civilian passenger who passes all physical exams with flying colors, leaving
the poor abandoned husband, who makes this his attempt to impress his wife, in
his dust. Once they get into space, however, the action
heats up, as the space station destination is so enormous, they hardly notice
that one of the passengers is missing, until he takes control of the ship’s
computer, leaving the mission commander helpless with no operating back up
system, something right out of a STAR TREK episode, but when they send the
co-pilot to open a hatch door and scream for help, we realize we’re in for a
bumpy ride.
Despite wanting to dislike this vehemently as being silly,
insipid and stupid, like a Mel Brooks SPACEBALLS sequel, against one’s better
judgment this film actually wills you to like it and is actually a mile a
minute laugh with tons of fun. It’s a
terrific looking film, extremely well written by Olivier Barroux, Kad Merad,
and Julien Rappeneau from the outset
where the opening credits announce awards from the farthest regions on earth,
including Film Least Resembling
Jean-Jacques Annaud's “The Bear,” meant for all age groups, young and old, one
is surprised that the comic level of interest is sustained throughout, and that
the manic energy never wanes. It’s simply
an enjoyable film experience.
Lassiter, John
TOY STORY 2
USA
BFI | Sight & Sound | Toy Story 2 (1999) Kim Newman from Sight and Sound, March 2000
The Tri-County Area, the US, the
present. When his shoulder is injured, the cowboy toy Woody is left behind when
his young owner Andy goes off to cowboy camp. While rescuing Wheezy the Penguin
from a yard sale, Woody is spotted and stolen by Al, a toy-store manager. Woody
is actually a merchandising tie-in for Woody's Roundup, a
television puppet show from the 50s. He will complete a set along with Jessie
the cowgirl, Bullseye the horse and the still-boxed Stinky Pete the Prospector,
all of whom Al wants to sell for a fortune to a Japanese toy museum.
Buzz Lightyear, another of Andy's
toys, organises a rescue party which tracks Al to his store. There Buzz is
boxed up and replaced by a new Buzz Lightyear model. Woody is persuaded by
Jessie, who was donated to charity when her owner hit puberty, to stay with the
collection. But when the first Buzz and rescuers find him, they convince Woody
to return to Andy. Stinky Pete, however, is determined to go to the museum and
sabotages the rescue. The second Buzz stays behind to forge a relationship with
his father. The toys follow Al to the airport and spring the others during
baggage handling. Stinky Pete is tucked into the rucksack of a little girl,
while Woody saves Jessie from the plane's cargo hold with Buzz and Bullseye's
help. Andy returns and Jessie and Bullseye are adopted into his toy family.
Review
Although a triumph of cutting-edge technology, demonstrating fully the possibilities of computer animation, Toy Story has become such a much-loved film because of its profound, almost old-fashioned humanity. Woody, Buzz and the toy gang, down to the merest walk-on sight gag, are alive in the way all great cartoon creatures are alive (in no small part thanks to canny voice casting that exactly matches the character design). Like this sequel, the first film has an extremely sophisticated, surprisingly melancholy understanding of the importance, resonance and tragically brief shelf-life of the average plaything.
The follow-up may be inevitably less fresh and misses the freakish presence of Sid's mutant toys (the three-eyed grab-machine aliens from the first film, however, have a nice cameo), but it makes a few minor, effective upgrades. Randy Newman's musical numbers, for example, are integrated so as to serve the plot points. Toy Story 2 focuses even more tightly than the first film on the plight of creatures who are only 'alive' so long as they can retain the attention of their quixotic owners. Their in-built obsolescence is ultimately as poignant as the tiny lifespans of the Blade Runner replicants.
So while the plot sets up Woody's rescue from the loathsome Al, affording the opportunity for all manner of extravagant action scenes - a road-crossing set-piece, with the toys hiding under traffic cones and achieving their end while causing human-level chaos they don't notice, and a splendid, protracted peril ride through the airport at the finale - the script takes care to show the downside of toy life. Jessie, for instance, sings about the loss of her owner's love, signified by the junking of cowgirl ephemera in favour of make-up and pop records. The toy villain, one of those sad but valuable items who remains pristine in his original 50s box, yearns for a life in a museum, but Woody and the film finally recognise that toys have no real value, no life, unless they are played with.
Of course, any film with this message that comes (albeit at one remove) from Walt Disney and with an attendant merchandising blitz, has to cope with an ironic bite. Those in the know, especially exasperated parents, will love the cynical gags about the toy business: Rex the dinosaur discovers a Buzz Lightyear video game can't be won without the purchase of a tie-in manual; in the store Tour Guide Barbie explains an aisle-load of Buzz figures by noting that "in 1995, short-sighted retailers understocked." Barbie's licensees refused to allow her to appear in the original, which means she comes in for some hilarious joshing here and generally comes off as an airhead next to the spunkier Bo Peep and Jessie.
Al, the discount-toy entrepreneur, comes in for a lot of criticism, but the film takes advantage of his obsessions to fill in the backgrounds of its own inventions. Video games and the Star Wars franchise are parodied as the film delves into the relationship between Buzz and Zurg, while it also perfectly evokes the ramshackle charm - represented by Howdy Doody in the US and Muffin the Mule here - of vintage 50s puppet television, with an attendant panoply of lunch-boxes, toy gramophones, cereal promotions ("Cowboy Crunchies") and snake-in-the-boot jack-in-the-boxes. Like The Iron Giant, the film revisits the 50s for much of its inspiration, rediscovering in the era the dawn of marketing. But a full measure of Toy Story 2's success can be gauged by its undeniable appeal for children who have never seen a Western television show or played with a cowboy toy.
Soundtrack:
"Woody's Roundup" Theme Song by Randy Newman, performed by Riders in the Sky; "When She Loved Me" by Randy Newman, performed by Sarah McLachlan; "You've Got a Friend in Me" by Randy Newman, performed by (1 - 'Wheezy's Version') Robert Goulet, (2 - instrumental version) Tom Scott
Lathan, Stan
BEAT STREET
While Charlie
Ahearn's 1982 independent feature Wild Style worked frontline reportage
of New York's nascent rap and breakdance scene into an otherwise anodyne
teenage romance, this rather glossier affair sprinkles the latest happening
sounds over a selection of familiar narrative moves. So we get troubled
cross-ethnic relationships, the drama of a young dj's first night on the decks
at a big club, the dangers of spraying graffiti on subway trains - all of it
unfolding against the streetwise setting of the Bronx, but with a strictly
PG-rated filter on sex and bad language. Pretty bland, but you have to admit
co-producer Belafonte had an eye for talent, spotlighting HipHop
legends-in-the-making Afrika Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force, the Rock Steady
Crew, and Grand Master Melle Mel and The Furious Five.
I've written about a couple of the key early hip-hop movies (Wild Style, which was the first and the rawest, and Krush Groove which was one of the glitziest, most
star-studded) so it was inevitable that I'd eventually get around to some of
the other early hip-hop flicks. Once
None of the movies that still get mentioned are worthless and
all are charming, but the sheer volume took some of the novelty out of seeing
this street culture legitimized on the big screen. Beat Street is yet another
story of kids in the
There isn't much unique about the story but film gets a lot
of details right. The opening credits immediately feature some excellent break
dancing and graffiti-inspired design while the burned-out buildings and
house-parties vibe of the South Bronx youth culture is legit. (One of the film's
most memorable lines: "This ain't
User reviews from imdb Author: charlessmith702210 from United States
I guess when "
The break-dance scenes in "
Like "The Warriors", "
Most of the gang stuff in the flick was graffiti related to the hip-hop
culture, and rap music. A lot of rap music appeared in the flick, because
hip-hop members used rap music as a diversion to the negative aspects of gang
life. Even the theme song of the movie, which closed the curtain to the flick,
was not just an homage to hip-hop culture--it also was an homage to the death
of Ramon.
By the way, during the dance scene called 'Tango, Tango', I guess the female
drummer in the pit orchestra conducted by actress Rae Dawn Chong was Sheila E.
making a cameo appearance.
Film Freak
Central Review [Alex Jackson]
New
York Times [Vincent Canby] (registration req'd)
Latina, Frankie
MODUS OPERANDI F 10
USA (90 mi) 2009 Official site
Perhaps the worst film to ever grace the screen at Facets, this would most likely be categorized as a midnight feature, yet it was the feature film playing for an entire week, featuring plenty of gore and nudity, where the dialogue and nearly every shot is an intentional ripoff of the 1970’s exploitation films. Unlike Tarantino, however, who uses plenty of homages to his predecessors, can write dialogue, utilize music, and hire decent actors, this film relies entirely on the cheesy factor, expecting the audience to be in on the joke, but the complete abandonment of any kind of direction whatsoever leaves this film embarrassingly flat onscreen. Unlike even the Kuchar brothers who can make films on the spot of the moment for next to nothing, this film hasn’t got an ounce of personality or any flair for humor, so it’s simply bad filmmaking. The dialogue is read, not spoken, so there’s no connection to even a single character throughout the entire movie, making this an endless exercise of futility.
The narrative does not bear repeating, as it hardly matters at all, especially when it’s just a bunch of shots thrown together so haphazardly, where what happens doesn’t make an ounce of difference in this meandering kind of film that attempts to pay tribute to the film noir spy thriller, but isn’t at all bashful to employ a series of torture porn techniques, even including what amounts to a snuff film. While the intentions may have been commendable here, trying to have some fun making a film in Milwaukee of all places, featuring the city’s magnificent skyline, even including an appearance by Mark Borchardt, who directed the hilarious making of a movie documentary AMERICAN MOVIE (1999), tapping all his relatives for cash, but here the execution is beyond horrible, it’s horrendous, and not recommended even for those who revel in this sort of thing. Russ Meyer got it right, where his wicked sense of humor made bad acting not only trashy but memorably trashy, while this guy just never gets it right, making a film that’s pretty close to worthless.
Time Out New York review [3/5] Aaron Hillis
A rogue CIA agent
(Russell) seeks revenge for his wife’s murder while searching for two
mysterious briefcases. Like the creepy little brother to Machete (hello, Mr.
Trejo!), this stilted but oddly compelling Milwaukee-based throwback to Me
Decade cheapies pays homage to the entire spectrum of ’70s exploitation cinema,
from the mucky Super-8 to the copious nudity. It isn’t winky like Black
Dynamite nor as formally in control as Grindhouse; given director Latina’s
sincerity with his material, this may be the bloodiest, perviest espionage
thriller Ed Wood never made.
MODUS
OPERANDI Facets Multi Media
After the mysterious "Cowboy" double-crosses the
CIA, two important briefcases go missing. Black Ops special agent Stanley
Cashay is dragged out of retirement to track them down. His reward? The name of
the man who killed his wife, but Cashay needs to clean up quickly if he wants
to get back into the game. Frankie Latina proudly sets his debut film in his
hometown of Milwaukee, populating it with local legends: Randy Russell,
co-author of the great American Job, plays Cashay, and Mark Borchardt,
hero of American Movie, plays art deco superagent Dallas Deacon. He and
the delicious but deadly Black Licorice (Nicole Johnson) are hot for the
briefcases! Along the way, Cashav consorts with "a rainbow assortment of
mute American Apparel-clad vixens unburdening their breasts with medium
cool" in this lovingly assembled oddity, made over the course of four
years.
Modus Operandi invokes a checklist of low-budget styles, including:
blaxploitation, French New Wave, Nikkatsu gangster flicks, William Castle, Russ
Meyer, Seijun Suzuki, and early George A. Romero. Frankie Latina burnishes his
genre bona fides by casting as his primary villain the veteran heavy Danny
Trejo, currently starring in Robert Rodriguez's Machete. Once you add a
soundtrack with piano keys and fuzz pedals as ammo and you have a fun,
titillating low-rent James Bond!
eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum) review [5/5]
SCREENED AT THE 2009 CINEVEGAS FILM FESTIVAL: This film is cheesy, grainy, bloody, ethically questionable, badly constructed, poorly acted, and contains enough nudity to fill a weekend of Cinemax After Dark...I couldn't have had a better time!
Former CIA agent Stanley Cashay (Randy Russell) is a drunk
bum who passes out on bar bathroom floors and takes a raw egg in his whiskey
for breakfast. His wife was murdered a while back, and he drifts around
Milwaukee. As he is about to shoot himself, his old spy agency comes a-calling.
It seems two briefcases have been stolen from presidential candidate Squire
Parks (Michael Sottile), and Cashay is the only who can retrieve them.
What follows is a convoluted plot in which the balding middle aged Cashay gets
sober, then calls on his old cronies from the agency (with names like Black
Licorice and Casey Thunderbird) to assist him. Cashay does not really get the
cases back himself, per se, but soon double crosses pile upon double crosses,
and the bodies begin to pile up as well.
As some of you may know, I am a huge fan of grindhouse flicks. Something Weird
Video is my favorite video company, and I find a hard "R" flick from
thirty years ago more entertaining than internet porn. Writer/director Frankie
Latina has taken the exploitation genre and done an incredible job with his own
film. The picture has a wonderful grainy quality to it, and often switches from
color to black and white stock. Characters are introduced, then hurt or killed
off; they seem to have no purpose other than to serve the needs of a gore
loving audience. The tortures that Borchardt's character, Dallas Deacon, must
endure border on the morbidly hilarious. Danny Trejo has just a few scenes as
CIA director Holiday, but he seems to be in on the joke, and it is fun to watch
him.
The wonderfully appropriate musical score is credited to six different people,
and even features a wailing theme song that sounds like a reject from a 007
spoof. The sound design is excellent, especially for a film of such a, ahem,
limited budget. I wasn't sure what was going on once in a while, but Latina
keeps building the violence and nudity until a hilariously explosive finale.
Also, we get to find out what is actually IN the briefcases, thank you, sir,
for not going Tarantino or "Ronin" on us.
"Modus Operandi" is short enough to not wear out its welcome, and it is gory dirty fun. I watched it on a lark, it seems to have been filmed on a lark, and it's fricking great stuff. Like "Grindhouse"? You'll love this!
ReelTalk (Donald Levit) review
Modus Operandi proves in spades how seldom spoofs of spoofs are successful. Even David Niven was embarrassed in big-money star-stuffed Casino Royale; Mike Myers’ star-cameo Austin Powers threesome grossed big at the box office but mainly grossed out at the lowest common denominator; S*P*Y*S trashed Trapper John-Hawkeye Pierce chemistry; and Britain’s The Spy with a Cold Nose chilled Laurence Harvey. And so on.
“Presented” by ex-adult film star Sasha Grey, consciously devoid of dialogue real or otherwise, done on Super 8 and meaninglessly running back and forth between the grainiest of black-and-white and even clumsier color, Modus Operandi screams DVD shelves and camp midnight movie culture. Shoestring homage to shoestring action espionage-and-sex adventure fare of forty years ago, it shoots in too many directions to plumb any of them, let alone develop character or story.
With relatively little speech, wooden at that, the would-be humor is left to depend on what meets the eye, but by the fifth or sixth paunchy male basking among bare-bosomed babes, the parody joke grows stale. And one full-frontal female chained and knifed in gratuitous Dan Brown secret sect ceremony, is laughable but not comic.
The other full-frontal, male, is merely unappetizing, as two Swinging Sixties-booted and –skirted CIA women rouse and cold-shower balding former Black Ops ace operative Stanley Cashay (Randy Russell). In naked drunken stupefaction on a floor mattress, he mourns the wife killed by assassins because he was not around. In offices and playboy pads and on Deep Throat park benches, the identity of that murderer is carroted to him in exchange for the recovery of two attaché cases.
Pilfered from subsequently victorious presidential candidate Squire Parks (Michael Sottile), one contains an incriminating videotape, the other for no reason at all a full spool of film. Also on the assignment is red-appareled Black Licorice (Nicole Johnson), a less than statuesque Pam Grier-copy telephoned in from lounging in panties on her Tokyo balcony.
First-time feature director and co-writer Frankie Latina is a Milwaukee product, and this is pretty much a Wisconsin affair, cast, crew, musicians. Location, too, which -- not to slight the city that Schlitz made famous -- makes for quite a comedown from the international tourist spots of the spy genre, as in a small boat against an unimpressive lakeside skyline or the zombie-like hero’s extended walk along drab grated storefronts.
With a dishrag of a hero-agent and double-crossing characters with sophomoric snappy names but difficult to differentiate or care about in staccato scenes, the adventure ends with an eyeful of a revenge bang. This may or may not save someone’s honor but is ninety minutes too late to rescue the film.
Slant Magazine (Diego Costa) review
Village Voice Eric
Hynes
Screencrave
[Tom von Logue Newth]
Director interview (IndieWire) Interview June 10, 2009
Director interview (Onion AV Club) Interview by Adam Lovinus, August 25, 2009
Director site
Frankie Latina site
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
New York Times
(registration req'd) Mike Hale
Lau, Andrew and Alan Mak, also
known as Wai-keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak
INTERNAL AFFAIRS (Mou gaan dou)
Hong Kong (101 mi) 2002 ‘Scope
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Undercover cops posing as triad
gangsters have been staple figures in HK cinema since Alex Cheung's Man on
the Brink (1980, sort-of remade by Andrew Lau
in 1994 as To Live and Die in Tsimshatsui), but this huge domestic hit
goes one better by twinning its fake triad cop (Leung) with a triad mole in the
police force (Lau). Each mole is answerable to the other's nominal boss (Wong
and Tsang respectively), leading to tactical complications and a lot of genuine
suspense as each side tries to outwit the other over a shipment of dope from
Thailand. There's no hint of an auteur sensibility at play, but the careful
plotting, rich characterisations and sleek mise-en-scène give this an
impact rarely seen in HK films these days. Leung is outstanding as a man close
to mental and physical breakdown, and Lau's cocky narcissism is exploited more
cunningly than usual. The Chinese title invokes the lowest circle of Buddhist
hell, a fair indication of how noir things get.
Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost)
The film that revitalized the Hong Kong film industry presents a
brilliant “why didn’t I think of that?” premise, realistic and earnest
character development set forth by perfect performances in a star studded cast,
stirring visuals and simply the flawless execution to thrill the viewer until
the very end. For those unaware, Infernal Affairs tells the story of two moles,
Ming (Andy Lau) and Yan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai). Ming, a highly honored officer
is truly a mole placed by his triad boss, Sam (Eric Tsang), years ago to
infiltrate the police. Yan in turn is a tough and skilled cop chosen to
infiltrate Sam’s gang with a trustworthy position after years on the job. Both
walk the thin line of good and evil offering mind and character bending
substance while delivering non-stop entertainment in a fast-paced dual cat and
mouse game. There’s no one person responsible for the quality of the slick
crime thriller, as Andrew Lau’s encompassing direction takes glimpses at the
well-written parallelism in the main character’s lives and respective organizations.
It could be Leung winning our compassion by putting up with one hazardous
situation after another to win back his life. Or Lau with a debatable mix of
good and evil, leading everyone on with his cleverness. Every interconnected
element stands as blueprints for success in any type of film, not simply
limited to
Infernal Affairs Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
[MINOR
SPOILERS] Easily one of the most accomplished police-actioners of the last few
years, Infernal
Affairs
treads a thin purple line between pomposity and grace. Its dramatic camera
angles, thunderous faux-Wagner score, and icon-vs.-icon face-off all incur
ample potential for self-parody, but the film's humor, narrative fleetness, and
above all its heavy / light tone serve to keep it all together. It's hard to
explain -- and maybe this is why HK fanboys see this trilogy as a return to
form for the floundering industry -- but Infernal Affairs maintains an awareness
of the showy gimcrackery of its premise, the surface-skimming of its Taoist
tropes, and yet it clearly believes it its world, refusing the knowing wink of irony. In fact, the
determinist overtones of the film's religious pensées lend an unusual dignity to the mandates of
genre. When only two men hold a vital secret and one of them dies, this event
hits us with the force of tragedy rather than narrative contrivance, turning
our hero into a lone-wolf Cassandra rather than a prop for further sequels. The
cast is uniformly excellent, with Tony Leung and Andy Lau perfectly matched as
yin (hangdog gravitas that must find its inner bad-ass) and yang (pretty-boy
insouciance gradually locating its ethical center). But Eric Tsang gives a
particularly inspired performance as Sam, the crime boss whose every violent
outburst barely conceals the pleasure he takes in his own power. [A minute ago,
I had written that Tsang "is fantastic as Sam," an unconscious
blunder that carried unwanted associations.]
Village
Voice (Dennis Lim) review
Two undercover scenarios fused into one tense, tail-chasing whole, the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs recharged a slumping movie industry at home (where it spawned a pair of sequels within a year of its 2002 release) and is soon scheduled for Hollywood reconstructive surgery at the hands of Martin Scorsese. Working from an irresistibly neat axial symmetry—Tony Leung plays a cop playing a gangster, Andy Lau plays a gangster playing a cop—Infernal Affairs spins in place with aplomb, generating exponentially more vertiginous doublings with each sweaty-palmed set piece.
Leung's Yan, who as a young cadet was dispatched by Superintendent Wong (Anthony Wong) to infiltrate the triads, now serves as trusted aide to crime boss Sam (Eric Tsang). Sam's apprentice Ming (Lau), likewise secretly embedded with the enemy many years ago, is now a high-ranking police officer who reports to Wong. The diagram of cross-purposes is so snarled that the characters are at all times floundering in a quicksand of imperfect knowledge. Implausibly convoluted, the hall-of-mirrors plot allows for much moral bewilderment and sexy existential brooding. The two heroes share a pair of father figures, and both have inhabited their covert personas for so long they no longer know who they are. The identity crises reach bipolar pitch when a botched drug bust alerts cops and gangsters alike to the existence of a mole in their ranks. Yan and Ming are entrusted—by both sides—to unmask the culprit, i.e., to ferret out each other and themselves. As in Michael Mann's Heat, which Infernal Affairs often evokes (not least because the women are marginal to the point of extinction), the antagonists function as repellent magnetic poles. They meet only three times, and the sensationally matched Lau and Leung, lupine and doe-eyed respectively, spark fireworks that make Heat's De Niro–Pacino summit look like an awkward blind date.
Hong Kong crime films are renowned for pyrotechnic splatter, but Infernal Affairs, directed by Andrew Lau (not the actor) and Alan Mak, owes less to the perverse flamboyance of Hollywood transplant John Woo than the comparatively terse flashiness of Milkyway honcho Johnnie To (The Mission). By design, it's the opposite of an action film. Tension arises from a congealing mood of queasy inertia. Almost every scene sinks into a miasmic panic of confusion and suspicion. The pulse-quickening sequences, though densely edited, have a helpless, frozen quality. Indeed, the strongest adrenaline jolt is an almost motionless concerto of flickering GPS markers, jammed cell phone signals, and an index finger discreetly tapping out Morse code.
Glamorous and gritty, the look of the film is post–Wong Kar-wai cosmopolitan luxe—all glass reflections, neon smudges, and sets so soothingly green-filtered they resemble aquariums. An absurd amount of the action takes place on rooftops that emphasize the panoramic Hong Kong harbor and skyline.
Introductory titles evoke the Buddhist concept of "continuous hell," conferring a philosophical tint on the movie's infinite circularity. Back in the real world, a story with no end simply means continuous profits—two follow-ups were rushed into production. (The trilogy screens at the New York Film Festival and is available on DVD in Chinatown.) Sidestepping the first film's inconvenient deaths, Part II, a madly cross-cutting prequel, contrives a pretzel of a backstory, cribbing from Godfather II and handing the baton to the superb veterans Tsang and Wong. In Part III, which hopscotches through the months before and after Part I's compact time frame, the karmic-wheel metaphor gains unwanted resonance; the film runs in circles before finally collapsing from exhaustion.
Infernal
Affairs: High Concept in Hong Kong • Senses of Cinema Charles Leary, May 22, 2003
Reverse Shot review James Crawford
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Kinocite K.H. Brown
AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [B+]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web comparing INTERNAL AFFAIRS to Scorsese’s THE DEPARTED
Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
Infernal Affairs Kevin O’Reilly from DVD Times
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [4/5]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10] March 7, 2003
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [3/5]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
Kamera.co.uk review Bob Carroll
DVD Town [John J. Puccio and Yunda Eddie Feng]
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C-]
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
VideoVista review Debbie Moon
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
DVD In My Pants - Special Collector's Edition - DVD Review The Trilogy
DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) dvd review [5/5] The Trilogy
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez, reviewing The Trilogy
The Boston Phoenix review Brett Michel
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
DVDBeaver.com - DVD Review [Leonard Norwitz]
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
INFERNAL AFFAIRS II B- 81
Hong Kong China
Singapore (109 mi) 2003
‘Scope
Sergio Leone meets THE GODFATHER in a fast, violent, over the top, high
gloss, super melodramatic action flick about the intricate behind the scenes
workings of corrupt cops and corrupt mobsters, in a MACBETH-like scenario where
everyone betrays one another and nearly everyone dies. There’s little time for love and romance
here, as the entire film is watching different characters create these
elaborate schemes to set somebody else up, including mob family members turning
cop informers. Time-wise, this is a
prequel to INTERNAL AFFAIRS, backtracking ten years to 1991, leading to the Hong Kong unification in 1997. Having not seen the original, I’d say the
storytelling was a little suspect, as the frantic pace left plenty of confusion
surrounding the accumulating body count, which just added to the general
feeling of hysteria. What I did like was
the few bits of dialogue that mixed Zen sayings with mob mentality – that was
funny – interesting as well that there’s as much reliance on cell phones here
as in the recently released CELLULAR.
While this is well made and highly entertaining, there are only brief
hints of character development and little staying power past the rolling of the
credits, unless of course, you’re planning on going out and whacking
somebody.
Time Out review Tony Rayns
This unbelievably complicated prequel
(a second viewing helps) opens in 1991 and follows police mole Yan (the Tony
Leung character, here played by Shawn Yue)
and triad mole Ming (the Andy Lau character, here Edison Chen)
through a major power struggle in the HK underworld. The first of many
'revelations' is that Yan is actually the illegitimate son of a recently
murdered triad boss; his rise in the criminal ranks owes everything to the
patronage of his half-brother Hau (Ng), a 'family man' who methodically
slaughters his way to power. The huge success of the first film has given the
film-makers delusions of Coppola-esque grandeur: a one-off has swollen into a
trilogy (Parts II and III were shot back-to-back and released three months
apart), complete with a Michael Corleone figure. The designer 'look' of the
original has gone, but there's an unmistakeable air of self-importance
undercutting the dramatic impact. Performances are credible and in the case of
mainland star Hu
Jun (guesting as a senior cop, badly dubbed into Cantonese) actively
likeable.
Asian Cinema Drifter Tuna (link lost)
The strong turn Infernal Affairs makes to resemble the Godfather trilogy
is a successful one in structure and content. The film is essentially a
prequel, going back to 1991, at a time when Sam was a lower boss fighting for
power, and Inspector Wong had more important triad troubles on his hand. Their
close relationship dominates the film, while along the side, Shawn Yue
and Edison Chen
reprise their roles as a younger Yan and Ming just starting out their jobs as
moles and working their way up in the background. The film works perfectly like
the Godfather 2 did to separate it from most sequels through intent. Rather
than aim for a stronger recreation of the previous film ( a task of which is
impossible and unappealing), it decides to fill in the background and add to
the experience of the first. The film content itself seems to mimic the Godfather,
with its parallel assassination scenes, the main focus of triad wars, the
succession from father to son, and even the essential huge family portrait.
Moreover, it works very well as an interesting update on the Godfather, without
sinking to the depths of becoming a full-blown remake. Most of the elements are
in fact, unique to the Infernal Affairs series, from the grim undertones, to
the massive web of a plot, or the catchy and slick rockish soundtrack. On the
other side of the coin, because the film sets out to fill in the gaps of the
series, it doesn’t nearly have the fantastic turns or intensity as the first.
This becomes ever apparent with a rather mellow climax that can leave you a bit
unsatisfied at the end. Still, for the entertainment it gives as one of the
best crime series’ out of
Infernal Affairs was the biggest film in 2002 and very highly
rated by me, I was very excited about this prequel and like many others didn’t
want to be disappointed, the early reviews coming out of
The story is set within the period of 1991 – 1997, aka “The forgotten Years.” The start is just before the start of the first film and crosses that mark and then goes on to fill the gap skipped in the original.
The film starts with a long scene of dialogue from Superintendent Wong (Anthony Wong) about how he first became a cop, he is talking to Sam (Eric Tsang) who at this point is just a boss of a small gang under the head triad family the “Ngai’s.” and in fact at this time, quite a good friend. The eldest of the Ngai family is murdered by a young triad member, Ming (played in this movie by Edison Chen). Ming is working for Mary (Carina Lau) wife of Sam before he is put into the police force.
With the eldest Ngai dead, his son Hau (Francis Ng) has to take charge of the gang, Hau informs all his fathers offspring of his death, this includes promising young police cadet Yan (played in this movie by Shawn Yue) Yan had lied on his police application so when they find out about his family background he is thrown out the police force but given the chance to “be a righteous person” by SP Wong looking for a undercover to go into the triad society. I won’t give anymore of the story away as I don’t want to spoil it!
Most of the cast of the original film return, with Eric Tsang, Anthony Wong, Chapman To reprising their roles, many new characters are introduced as well. Hu Jun plays Inspector Luk a straight forward, righteous cop and the highly under rated actor Roy Cheung as his mole in the triads. Francis Ng play Hau, a laid back yet evil triad leader, Francis Ng is without doubt one of the best actors Hong Kong has to offer at the minute and instead of giving one of his overacting performances that he does so well, he plays his part very subtle and quite but delivers a great performance to match any other. Carina Lau plays Mary, a strong female character who shows no weakness to anyone but will do anything for her husband Sam.
The majority of the aforementioned actors are experienced,
proven actors, so the roles that were going to come under most scrutiny were
the roles of Yan and Ming. Everyone knows Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Andy Lau
played these roles in the original with such style and charisma, the question
is could the young and inexperienced Shawn Yue and Edison Chen recapture the
characters. Firstly Edison Chen does a great job although many critics seem
like they wont compliment
So my final opinion on Infernal Affairs 2 is that it is a worthy prequel to the original that manages to look and feel different with out being a totally different movie, its much darker and grittier the first, but keeps its style and charisma. Worthy viewing for anyone!!
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Deep Cover Tony Rayns from Sight and Sound, January 2004
What
Goes Around, Comes Around: Infernal Affairs II and III and ... Charles
Leary from Senses of Cinema, February
12, 2004
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Infernal Affairs 2 Michael Sunda from DVD Times
Monsters and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]
LoveAsianFilm.com Martin Cleary
Kung Fu Cult Cinema Brandon Fincher
Shuqi.org - Asian Cinema David Bjerre
City on Fire Owlman
VideoVista review Rob Marshhall
Derek Elley Variety
DVDBeaver.com [Yunda Eddie Feng]
DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray DVD Review [Leonard Norwitz]
INTERNAL AFFAIRS III: THE FINAL CHAPTER
Hong Kong China
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Made as a co-production to facilitate
distribution in the mainland, Part III disarms China's censors with a lengthy
subplot starring Chen Daoming
(the emperor in Hero) as a supposed arms dealer/triad kingpin from the
mainland who turns out to be good guy after all. His storyline, involving the
colourless Leon
Lai as yet another senior cop who may or may not be a triad mole, is dull
and unconvincing. It's also poorly integrated with the rest of the movie, which
laboriously plugs every gap in the lean original and shows Ming (Lau) slowly
cracking under the weight of his guilt. The best bits are the snazzy credit
sequence, which reconfigures the climactic elevator ride from Part I as a
descent into Buddhist hell, and the amusing flashbacks to Yan's sessions with
his psychiatrist, charmingly played by both Leung and Kelly Chen.
This 'Directors' Cut' has superseded the version first released in HK (107
min); its multiple endings generally provoke derision, but the last one (which
rewinds to the start of Part I) is neat.
Asian Cinema Drifter Tuna (link lost)
So we think we know what happened to Ming after Infernal Affairs, unless
of course you were a mainlander that is now completely baffled with the
good-guy friendly ending of the first film. But now it’s decided, that Ming is
still out there, a year after investigation, finally free to make his
transition into a true to heart good guy. However, with insanely complex script
writing, the film manages to squeeze even more material into the cracks of the
first two films, find a way to give Tony Leung more than ample screen time,
while creating a sensible resolution to Ming. All while squeezing in the
biggest damn list of HK stars to round out the trilogy. And so, the film winds
up with an ambitious premise, some interesting directorial style and pacing,
but a rather confusing script that can leave the average viewer baffled with
the timeline. Lau and Mak do as good a job as they can, given the situation; by
fitting in a whole new conflict regarding a suspicious cop played by Leon Lai,
and an even more suspicious mainland criminal played by Chen Daoming, and tying
it to both Yan’s and Ming’s story as we constantly shift back and forth in time
to uncover the mystery.
So in the end, it is so hard to go wrong with the Infernal Affairs trilogy. The
script is remarkable given the circumstances, (cliché star-studded blockbuster)
and with these stars, we get remarkable performances all-around, as usual. Andy Lau
is as tense and cool as he can be, filling out the changes in his role rather
nicely. Leung gets a nice chance to shift out of self-pitying “I’m suffocating
in the depths of symbolic Infernal Affairs hell” and move to smooth calm easier
days, working with Sam and charming Kelly Chen a whole lot more. Infernal
Affairs fans should and probably have seen this already, but frankly, I’m more
interested in recommending this to someone who hasn’t seen the other two. I bet
there’s nothing hopelessly funnier than that.
Talking Pictures (UK) review Sheri Last
Infernal Affairs has been a mind-defying trilogy. Hats off to anyone that’s been able to keep up with who’s who, who’s spying on whom, who’s alive and who’s dead and what happens when. There’s a definite Infernal Affairs universe, where good-looking people are sneaky, brave, double-crossing and oh so cool. They also seem to pop up alive when you’re sure they’re not – and no, this isn’t some Hong Kong version of Schrodinger’s cat or a metaphysical exploration of the deepest mysteries of physics, it’s just a deliciously non-linear monster of a saga.
In case you have been keeping up, Infernal Affairs III fluctuates between the temporality of I and II (and in case you haven’t been keeping up – tut tut – II was the prequel to I). Complicated stuff but at the end, the feeling of genius you get from having understood the saga (well, almost) is unparalleled!
So why do we put ourselves through the cog-turning thinkfest that is Infernal Affairs when we could just watch Jackie Chan? I’ll tell you… it’s because the Infernal Affairs movies are, in a word, brilliant. Number III is no exception. Being thoughtful enough to have included a catch-up booklet with the DVD, which means you won’t even be as lost as you thought you would be.
III focuses on the stories of Yan (Tony Leung) and Ming (Andy Lau); Yan – a cop working for Mafia boss Sam and Ming – who used to be Sam’s mole on the police force. Except Ming goes by a different name in III and Yan was killed at the end of I. When the police realise that one of Sam’s moles is killing off the others, they begin an Internal Affairs investigation. Meanwhile, we take a look back at Yan and his problems faced as a mole. In short, it’s a great story, full of betrayals and lies and more lies. It fits nicely in with the two preceding movies, and far from feeling like filler, III has enough revelations to do justice to everything we’ve all been through.
Cinematographically, this movie is wonderful. It’s choc-full of visually-astounding shots, unusual angles and moody use of colour. The score completes the filmic atmosphere. Haunting and suspenseful notes are the perfect accompaniment to scenes which we know are pivotal, fatal or tragic. Infernal Affairs III utilises the zigzagging time-warp of the trilogy to great effect by creating a huge amount of tension because most of the time we know what’s going to happen, have braced ourselves for it and are then shocked by something else along the way.
This movie is so polished, so marvellously engineered and so immaculately scripted that the flawless result fits together perfectly with the tone, style and atmosphere of the two previous movies. It’s like watching a dream (a rather serious and thrilling dream – not one of those woozy, flowy ones) and not ever wanting to wake up.
What
Goes Around, Comes Around: Infernal Affairs II and III and ... Charles
Leary from Senses of Cinema, February
12, 2004
DVD Times Anthony Nield
KFC Cinema JoE Shieh
Shuqi.org - Asian Cinema David Bjerre
VideoVista review Jeff Young
Movieman's Guide to the Movies (Brian Oliver) dvd review [3.25/5] [Special Collector's Edition] with references to THE DEPARTED
Insidepulse.com [Robert Sutton]
Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [3.5/5]
DVDBeaver.com [Yunda Eddie Feng]
DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray DVD Review [Leonard Norwitz]
Lauby, Chantal
LEAVE YOUR HANDS ON MY HIPS B- 81
France
A charming, amusing film that is largely a showcase for veteran actors who
might feel right at home in an Almodovar comedy or LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, as there
is always an interesting mix of gay and straight as well as some cultural
diversity interspersed within the narrative.
The film opens to the sounds of Dick Dale and surf music, as a middle
age actress played by the director seems to be having a mid-life crisis, as her
young daughter is moving in with her boyfriend, leaving an emotional void in
her life. The story then circumnavigates
its way around various family and friends and people in the theater world,
people who constantly discuss one another’s lives, where no one ever keeps a
secret, no one ever spends any time alone, but where stories may be embellished
and where life always seems to include going out to loud, pulsating,
electrically lit, multi-colored dance clubs, or going to elaborate parties,
especially birthday celebrations, including gala costume affairs. While there’s nothing particularly serious
going on, the actress ultimately finds a strong silent type, a close to the
vest, biker carnie worker who runs the ride called “Pulpo” or Octopus at the
Carnival, and seems to have a Gypsy streak in his family of friends. The best scene of the film is a Gypsy
birthday party for a 70-year old man, which is actually their first date
together, complete with festive food and great music. Tribute was paid in the credits to Tony
Gatlif, as I gather this was his contribution to the film. Much of the rest was fairly typical and
heartwarming, featuring the unusual face and features of Rossy de Palma, who
just as easily plays a woman or a man, according to Kirk, with a face like
Picasso, according to Charles, and from my view, resembles a comic book version
of Rubber Woman, as her face is so odd-shaped and her entire body appears so
elastic. But much of this film is
designed for pure entertainment, with a thread of romance running through it
all, much of it shot in the spectacular setting of the rides and flashing
lights of the Carnival
Amusement Park
Laughton, Charles
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER A 98
USA
Beware
of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are
ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.
—Matthew 7:15-16
A
good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth
good fruit. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
—Matthew 7:18, 20, The Reverend Harry Powell (Robert
Mitchum’s) ominous introduction
But
there are things you hate, Lord, perfume-smellin' things, lacy things, things
with curly hair.
—The Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)
This is another film that when released in 1955, it was maligned as hopelessly out of synch with American postwar sensibilities and was yet another film that failed at the box office, which so disappointed the director he never made another film, yet remains one of the greatest American films ever made. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Davis Grubb, adapted for the screen by James Agee, who had a severe drinking problem and died the year the film was released, so the director finished the script, though it largely coincides with Agee’s first draft. Unlike the uproar with the publishing of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927), which took satirical swipes at attitudes within evangelical circles in the 1920’s, denounced from pulpits across the country, where the city of Boston banned the book, this novel was based on the true story of Harry Powers, who was hanged in 1932 for the murders of two widows and three children in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Using a hybrid of different styles, the film is something of an oddity, using a German Expressionist lighting design, gorgeously filmed by Stanley Cortez, honored for his deep focus cinematography in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), but also the manner of a Brothers Grimm children’s story, using elaborate artificialized visual fantasy with a seething undercurrent of social malaise hovering underneath. Despite the fairy tale element, this veers into film noir territory, expressing cynical attitudes and deeply repressed sexual motivations, where God (who is spoken to directly) is literally seen as a tolerant accomplice to murder: “Not that you mind the killings! There's plenty of killings in your book, Lord.” Easily the most outstanding aspect is a brilliantly evil performance by Robert Mitchum as the Reverend Harry Powell (who as it turns out, directed the children scenes, as Laughton had little affection for them), a psychopathic preacher (needing no make-up) that kills unsuspecting widows for their money, who spends the film on a relentless search for hidden money that he knows is in the hands of two children, ten-year old John (Billy Chapin) and his younger sister Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce).
So while this is a murder mystery about a serial killer on the loose, it’s simultaneously a nightmarish child horror story seen through the eyes of the children, given a strange Biblical context, including repeating refrains from a familiar hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” first heard here The Night of the Hunter: The Showalter Hymn, when it is first YouTube (1:26). Mitchum’s baritone voice was never used to better effect, and while the hymn is a song of reassurance and faith, here it is continually used to announce his menacing presence. Set in the rural Bible belt during the Depression, Ben Harper (Peter Graves) robs a bank stealing $10,000, quickly giving it to his two young children to hide before he is arrested and hauled off to jail, but not before forcing them both to swear not to tell anyone, not even their mother. Sharing the same prison cell, the Preacher (arrested on car theft) overhears him talk in his sleep about hidden money, which may as well be the voice of God speaking. After Harper is executed, the Preacher, with his fire and brimstone drawl, dressed in a cleric’s black cloth and a wide brim puritan hat, pays a visit to the grieving widow Willa, Shelley Winters, who is surrounded by her overly pious community, especially Mrs. Spoon (Evelyn Varden), who keeps her nose in everybody’s business. While the entire community is smitten with the young Preacher, it’s Mrs. Spoon (an anonymous presence of Evil hidden within the flock of Christian sheep, who can later be seen leading a lynch mob against him!) who gushes over his presence and all but throws Wilma at his feet in marriage, though John keeps a healthy distance and has his suspicions, as all this Preacher keeps asking him about is the money. No one believes John, however, as the Preacher has everyone convinced the money was thrown in a river, especially his mother, though he keeps tightening the screws on John, especially when he terrorizes him with the thought of becoming his new father through marriage, a man with the words “love” and hate” tattooed on the knuckles of each hand, seen here: Love - Hate: Night of the Hunter - YouTube (57 seconds), turned into a freakish circus performance told in the form of a Biblical parable.
Wilma’s wedding night is a thing for the ages, as Powell is not interested in sex, only wallowing in all the as yet undiscovered money, where the naively eager expectant bride is belittled and humiliated to discover the puritanical wrath of God coming down upon her in the form of her new tyrannical husband who lays down the law that sex is only for procreation. As if under the spell of his personal magnetism, we see her next sweating profusely, framed by burning torches at a revival meeting, confessing her wedding night sinful expectations as a means to arouse the crowd into a virtuous frenzy. But when she overhears the Preacher’s sinister threats to her son, this leads to a maniacally crazed ritual where her soft narration of receiving God’s salvation results in a baptism of the barbaric and the grotesque The Night Of The Hunter - Wife Killer YouTube (2:11), leaving her at the bottom of the river. With no one left to protect them, the children are finally at the Preacher’s mercy. Realizing his murderous intentions, they slip away into the night and escape in a raft down the river, producing some of the most extraordinary images of the film, abandoning all pretense at realism and embracing the children’s point of view, almost like turning the pages of a child’s picture book. The artificiality of these river sequences is dazzling, often resembling a Huckleberry Finn wonderland, where Mitchum’s foreboding presence follows them everywhere, seen on the distant horizon riding a horse. But the real surprise is yet to come, where Laughton picks silent film goddess Lillian Gish from the D.W. Griffith era to sweep the kids up in her arms and take them into her protective custody, as she has several other abandoned young children as well, which changes the entire tone of the film. Rooted in a strong faith in The Bible, often telling them stories, Gish as the counter opposite to Mitchum couldn’t be more intriguing, a hard-nosed woman who practices tough love. When the inevitable occurs and the Preacher comes for the children, she knows a fraud when she sees one, leading to a delicious Good/Evil co-mingling refrain of the hymn, where Gish, rifle in hand, joins along, but includes what the Preacher leaves out, the lyric reference to “Jesus” Robert Mitchum - The Night of the Hunter - "Leaning" - YouTube (2:12). All set in a weird, exquisitely beautiful and eerie atmosphere that feels timeless, not at all reminiscent of the 50’s, where the subversive nature of the film recalls Douglas Sirk, this is a truly exquisite allegory of innocence, evil, and hypocrisy, selected to the Library of Congress National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” certainly influencing later directors like Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, and the Coen Brothers.
Kim Newman from
1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Based on a slim, stark novel by Davis Grubb, Charles
Laughton’s sole film as a director is a Depression-set fable of psychosis and
faith, strikingly sinister and yet deeply humane. Told mostly from the point of
view of children, the story is like a fairy-tale in its simplicity, and yet
seethes with adult complications. The trigger is a stash of money stolen by
hard-up bandit Ben harper (Peter Graves) and entrusted to his children John
(Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), which makes Ben’s desperate widow
Willa (Shelley Winters) an object of attraction for one of the screen’s most
unforgettable villains. “Reverand” Harry Powell (Robert Mictum), in
black-and-white clerical garb with a puritan flat hat that curls into a set of
demonic-looking horns, is associated with the Bible and a switchblade; with the
words “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles, illustrated as he arm
wrestles with himself. Powell’s wooing of Willa is high-pressure, fooling the
woman (who ends up serenely drowned) but not the children, who flee after the
murder, the money stashed in the little girl’s doll.
Mitchum, usually associated with cynical heroes, her plays
a sincerely committed villain, moonlighting as a serial killer of loose women
but sexually obsessed with the money he feels he needs to fund his bloody
crusade. The nocturnal escape down river, shot in expressionist monochrome, is
a magical sequence, with close-ups of strange-looking swampland flora and
fauna. With Evil/Hate so powerfully conveyed, The Night of the Hunter needs an equally strong force to represent
Good/Love. Laughton managed to get silent star Lillian Gish to come out of
retirement to play Rachel, a kindly woman whose farm is open to many underage
runaways who come down the path. Like the snake in Eden, Powell threatens
Rachell’s idyll, working his seamy charm on one of the older girls to find a
way onto the farm. In a remarkable siege finale, Mitchum’s menacing drone of an
edited hymn (“Leanin’”) is joined and completed by Gish, who knows the full
lyric (“Lean on Jesus”) and adds her voice to his, banishing his darkness
aurally before he is actually defeated.
from Jude Law in
the March 2006 Empire Magazine:
“I saw this film when I was 12 years old, videoed it, and being the pretentious little sod that I was, when I had a group of friends over next, I asked them if they wanted to see a black-and-white classic rather than an Eddie Murphy film or something. Robert Mitchum’s at his best, playing the ultimate anti-hero. You don’t know whether to love him or hate him, but you certainly can’t take your eyes off him. Shelley Winters gives her best performance, in my opinion. I think one of the most important aspects of this is Stanley Cortez’s cinematography. There’s a shot towards the end of the film where the children journey towards their freedom, and it’s the most extraordinary modern use of fairy-tale imaginative cinema I’ve ever seen; with just music, no dialogue.”
Laughton's only stab at directing, with Mitchum as the psychopathic preacher with 'love' and 'hate' tattooed on his knuckles, turned out to be a genuine weirdie. Set in '30s rural America, the film polarises into a struggle between good and evil for the souls of innocent children. Everyone's contribution is equally important. Laughton's deliberately old-fashioned direction throws up a startling array of images: an amalgam of Mark Twain-like exteriors (idyllic riverside life) and expressionist interiors, full of moody nighttime shadows. The style reaches its pitch in the extraordinary moonlight flight of the two children downriver, gliding silently in the distance, watched over by animals seen in huge close-up, filling up the foreground of the screen. James Agee's script (faithfully translating Davis Grubb's novel) treads a tight path between humour (it's a surprisingly light film in many ways) and straight suspense, a combination best realised when Gish sits the night out on the porch waiting for Mitchum to attack, and they both sing 'Leaning on the Everlasting Arms' to themselves. Finally, there's the absolute authority of Mitchum's performance - easy, charming, infinitely sinister.
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Night of the Hunter remains one of the most twisted evocations of godliness gone awry. Charles Laughton's shadowy compositions and omniscient perspective (see the film's transfixing point-of-view shots) suggest that the film's characters are in the presence of God himself. Rev. Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) forgot his master's will somewhere along the way to the local strip joint. A master of manipulation, he feeds on human naïvete, rewriting God's grand designs to suit his own selfish needs. Before Ben Harper (Peter Graves) was arrested and sentenced to death, he stashed his stolen booty inside his little girl's dolly, and as his father is pushed to the ground and hand-shackled by the law, little John (Billy Chapin) swears to never tell a soul. Sharing a prison cell with Powell, Harper spills his secret in his sleep and the dirty Reverend goes hunting for Harper's widow (Shelly Winters), whom he subsequently destroys. Her little lambs, though, prove more difficult to dispose of. Guarded by Lillian Gish's Mother Goose, the children survive Rev. Powell. Laughton's delirious compositions evoke a Grimm landscape where love is constantly and erratically at war with the forces of hate. Perverse yet remarkably life-affirming, Night of the Hunter may be the best film ever made about spiritual perseverance.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
It isn’t enough to say that Charles Laughton’s first and only feature as a director, The Night Of The Hunter, is the greatest directorial one-off in cinema history—while that apparently wasn’t clear in 1955, when it opened to ambivalent reviews and poor box office, it should be self-evident by now. In his liner-notes essay for the essential new Criterion DVD, critic Terrance Rafferty calls the film “the most irreducibly American in spirit,” and that’s much truer to its legacy. Though the film is informed by the bold shadow-play of German Expressionism and directed by a British actor, its elemental power comes from its grasp of the conflicts and obsessions that give America its character: the Puritanical consideration of sex and sin (and attendant hypocrisies), the persistent threat of guns and violence, and the Old Testament showdown between good and evil that suggests a land split into the spiritually yearning and the charlatans eager to exploit them. In that context, it makes sense that Laughton considered Lillian Gish the most important of his many extraordinary collaborators: Gish was his direct line to D.W. Griffith, whose eternally provocative silent classic The Birth Of A Nation epitomized the country’s sharp divisions and set its cinema on course.
Working with the great cinematographer Stanley Cortez, whose list of credits extend from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons to the Sam Fuller dramas The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor, Laughton creates an atmosphere of enveloping menace, Southern Gothic by way of a Grimm fairy tale. At its center is Robert Mitchum, radiating dark charisma as a false prophet who uses his preacher act to ingratiate himself to a community, specifically lonely widows he can exploit (or just kill) for their money. After getting information from a cellmate sentenced to hang for his role in an armed robbery gone wrong, Mitchum seduces one such widow (Shelley Winters) and terrorizes her young children (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce) in an effort to find the thief’s stolen loot. Ultimately, the kids head downriver to escape him, finding refuge with a stern old Mother Goose (Gish) who takes in lost children.
Though Laughton didn’t intend it to be a horror film, the first response to The Night Of The Hunter is terror: Mitchum plays evil with a silky, imposing charm that occasionally crosses into shocking fits of rage, and Cortez’s looming shadows evoke Gish’s line about it being “a hard world for small things.” Yet as much as the darkness epitomized by Mitchum blankets the film, Hunter also has an overwhelming allure: The enchanting sequence where the children drift downriver on a boat, as various creatures look on from the banks, is like proto-Terrence Malick, a moving, unexpectedly poetic assertion of the natural world at the bleakest possible moment. Hunter is the stuff of nightmares, but it’s the stuff of dreams, too, and it beckons you to follow it downstream.
The
Night of the Hunter Gerald Peary
Here's prime movie trivia: what's the greatest film ever from a director who only made one film in a lifetime? Perhaps I'm forgetting something obvious (e-mail me an alternative choice), but my vote goes to The Night of the Hunter (1955), playing at the Brattle January 18-20 in a newly restored 35mm print. This wondrous cinematic tour-de-force (Martin Scorsese is among its vocal fans) represents the total behind-the-camera oeuvre of actor Charles Laughton (1892-1962), the pudgy, versatile star of such abiding screen classics as Les Miserables, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
In fact, Laughton did more than brilliantly direct.
The gorgeous, fanciful screenplay, credited to novelist-critic James Agee, was, according to Agee biographer, Lawrence Bergman, almost completely a Laughton rewrite, after the neophyte director became impatient with Agee's unshaped adaptation of the Davis Grubb novel.
Why only one picture? I actually have a tentative answer to one of the great mysteries of American cinema. I once interviewed Norman Mailer, and asked about the Raoul Walsh-directed movie of his The Naked and the Dead, which Mailer loathed. He told me, "Charles Laughton was to do it, and we spent a week together in New York at Laughton's St. Moritz Hotel penthouse. He had a great dedication to the novel, and he was coming off. . . The Night of the Hunter, which he thought would do extraordinarily. It didn't. Laughton was not a young man, and it took everything out of him. He never directed again."
It's easy to see how the movie bombed the first time: here in the cherry-pie Eisenhower years comes this decadent, ghoulish story of a fruitcake villain, a serial-killer of his newlywed wives, who, between murders, has --blasphemy!-- intimate on-screen talks with God. He thoroughly believes the Lord walks at his side, this bogey-man, bogus pastor, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), who shivers in disgust about women's carnality before he cuts female throats. We get to see one tragic courtship from beginning to a quick end, when he goes after Willa (Shelley Winters), a vulnerable young widow with two kids and some hidden money, marries her and then quickly sends her to the bottom of a river. A poor, gone Ophelia, there she floats among the flotsam.
Can a masterly film be campy in places? You'd expect from Mitchum a laid-back, sleepy-eyed satan, not the double-barreled, over-the-top, grand guignol performance which dominates the film: there are moments when his eye-rolling lunatic act feels like a male audition for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
But Mitchum's acting is consistent with Laughton's stylized conception: from Hollywood in the 1950s comes the most totally expressionistic film since the 1920s and German Expressionism. Mitchum's juicy, exaggerated way is the showy, demonstrative, expressionist style. Several of the angular, paranoia-enducing sets hit with triangular splotches of harsh light (the honeymoon-murder locale, for example) could come out of the original The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari.
Laughton collaborated here with one the finest of cinematographers: Stanley Cortez, honored for his deep-focus photography for The Magnificent Ambersons. Some of most famous, adult fairy-tale shots in Night of the Hunter also are deep-focus: for instance, the poetically pantheist sequence in which cobwebs, frogs, shivery rabbits dominate the front of the frames, while far off in the background (but in sharp focus) two diminutive orphaned children (Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce) sail down the river to escape the demented preacher man.
This scene feels likes Disney's Snow White, when the heroine flees into the forest from the evil queen, before she meets her protectors, the Seven Dwarfs. In The Night of the Hunter, the protector is a godmother elderly lady, Miss Cooper (Lillian Gish), who takes in lost children and they become part of her "coop";they strut through the streets in a row like little peppers. Miss Cooper is played by the one-time D.W. Griffith silent star (The Birth of a Nation, Orphans of the Storm, etc.), and her appearance in The Night of the Hunter is total enchantment. Posited as the antidote to Powell's devilish religiosity, Miss Cooper is pure Christian charity, and the scene in which she and that minister of hate clash with dueling hymns to God is a thrilling manichean battle of wills.
The Night of the Hunter opens with Miss Cooper suspended in the heavens among stars warning of "False Prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing." Lillian in the sky with diamonds! Awesome!
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter'' (1955) is one of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many ``great movies'' are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but ``Night of the Hunter'' is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don't know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists.
Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it
has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones,
seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world
outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes, the movie
takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks as
artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family's house with its strange
angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes a set so
obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely stylized studio
film like "Kwaidan" (1964).
Everybody knows the Mitchum character, the sinister "Reverend'' Harry
Powell. Even those who haven't seen the movie have heard about the knuckles of
his two hands, and how one has the letters H-A-T-E tattooed on them, and the
other the letters L-O-V-E. Bruce
Springsteen drew on those images in his song "Cautious Man'':
"On his right hand Billy'd tattooed the word "love'' and on
his left hand was the word "fear'' And in which hand he held his fate was
never clear''
Many movie lovers know by heart the Reverend's famous explanation to the
wide-eyed boy ("Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you
like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?'') And the scene
where the Reverend stands at the top of the stairs and calls down to the boy
and his sister has become the model for a hundred other horror scenes.
But does this familiarity give "The Night of the Hunter'' the recognition
it deserves? I don't think so because those famous trademarks distract from its
real accomplishment. It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of
the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores it holds up as
well after four decades as I expect "The
Silence of the Lambs" to do many years from now.
The story, somewhat rearranged: In a prison cell, Harry Powell discovers the
secret of a condemned man (Peter
Graves), who has hidden $10,000 somewhere around his house. After being
released from prison, Powell seeks out the man's widow, Willa Harper (Shelley
Winters), and two children, John (Billy Chapin) and the owl-faced Pearl
(Sally Jane Bruce). They know where the money is, but don't trust the
``preacher.'' But their mother buys his con game and marries him, leading to a
tortured wedding night inside a high-gabled bedroom that looks a cross between
a chapel and a crypt.
Soon Willa Harper is dead, seen in an incredible shot at the wheel of a car at the bottom of the river, her hair drifting with the seaweed. And soon the children are fleeing down the dream-river in a small boat, while the Preacher follows them implacably on the shore; this beautifully stylized sequence uses the logic of nightmares, in which no matter how fast one runs, the slow step of the pursuer keeps the pace. The children are finally taken in by a Bible-fearing old lady (Lillian Gish), who would seem to be helpless to defend them against the single-minded murderer, but is as unyielding as her faith.
The shot of Winters at the bottom of the river is one of several remarkable images in the movie, which was photographed in black and white by Stanley Cortez, who shot Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons," and once observed he was "always chosen to shoot weird things.'' He shot few weirder than here, where one frightening composition shows a street lamp casting Mitchum's terrifying shadow on the walls of the children's bedroom. The basement sequence combines terror and humor, as when the Preacher tries to chase the children up the stairs, only to trip, fall, recover, lunge and catch his fingers in the door. And the masterful nighttime river sequence uses giant foregrounds of natural details, like frogs and spider webs, to underline a kind of biblical progression as the children drift to eventual safety.
The screenplay, based on a novel by Davis Grubb, is credited to James Agee, one of the icons of American film writing and criticism, then in the final throes of alcoholism. Laughton's widow, Elsa Lanchester, is adamant in her autobiography: ``Charles finally had very little respect for Agee. And he hated the script, but he was inspired by his hatred.'' She quotes the film's producer, Paul Gregory: ``. . . the script that was produced on the screen is no more James Agee's . . . than I'm Marlene Dietrich.''
Who wrote the final draft? Perhaps Laughton had a hand. Lanchester and Laughton both remembered that Mitchum was invaluable as a help in working with the two children, whom Laughton could not stand. But the final film is all Laughton's, especially the dreamy, Bible-evoking final sequence, with Lillian Gish presiding over events like an avenging elderly angel.
Robert Mitchum is one of the great icons of the second half-century of cinema. Despite his sometimes scandalous off-screen reputation, despite his genial willingness to sign on to half-baked projects, he made a group of films that led David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, to ask, ``How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?'' And answer: ``Since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods.'' ``The Night of the Hunter,'' he observes, represents ``the only time in his career that Mitchum acted outside himself,'' by which he means there is little of the Mitchum persona in the Preacher.
Mitchum is uncannily right for the role, with his long face, his gravel voice, and the silky tones of a snake-oil salesman. And Shelly Winters, all jitters and repressed sexual hysteria, is somehow convincing as she falls so prematurely into, and out of, his arms. The supporting actors are like a chattering gallery of Norman Rockwell archetypes, their lives centered on bake sales, soda fountains and gossip. The children, especially the little girl, look more odd than lovable, which helps the film move away from realism and into stylized nightmare. And Lillian Gish and Stanley Cortez quite deliberately, I think, composed that great shot of her which looks like nothing so much as Whistler's mother holding a shotgun.
Charles Laughton showed here that he had an original eye, and a taste for material that stretched the conventions of the movies. It is risky to combine horror and humor, and foolhardy to approach them through expressionism. For his first film, Laughton made a film like no other before or since, and with such confidence it seemed to draw on a lifetime of work. Critics were baffled by it, the public rejected it, and the studio had a much more expensive Mitchum picture (``Not as a Stranger'') it wanted to promote instead. But nobody who has seen "The Night of the Hunter'' has forgotten it, or Mitchum's voice coiling down those basement stairs: "Chillll . . . dren?''
Criterion Collection film essay [Michael Sragow] November 18, 2010
Criterion Collection film essay [Terrence Rafferty] November 16, 2010
Criterion Collection film essay [David Ehrenstein] February 1, 1988
The Night of the Hunter (1955) - The Criterion Collection
The Crop Duster [Robert Horton]
CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] Blu-Ray, 2-discs
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Eric Henderson] 2-discs
Film Noir of the Week Bruce Crowther in 2-postings offers chapter excerpts from his book, Mitchum: The Film Career of Robert Mitchum, May 16, 2010
The Night of the Hunter - Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford, also seen here: Read TCM's article on The Night of the Hunter
The Night of the Hunter (1955) - Articles - TCM.com Why the film is essential, and more
Armchair Oscars [Jerry Dean Roberts]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
filmcritic.com shrieks through the Night Pete Croatto, also seen here: Pete Croatto
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Nitrate Online (Capsule) Eddie Cockrell
The
worst best films ever made Tim Lott
from The Guardian, July 24, 2009
My favourite film: The Night of the Hunter Peter Kimpton from The Guardian, December 8, 2011
San Diego Reader [Duncan Shepherd]
San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
New York Times [Bosley Crowther] (registration req'd) also seen here: NY Times Original Review
DVDBeaver.com - Full Review [Gary W. Tooze]
Laur,
Katrin
THE
GRAVEYARD KEEPER’S DAUGHTER (Surnuaiavahi tütar) D+ 65
Estonia (100 mi) 2011
Another wretched portrait of miserablist life in the post-Communist
aftermath of Estonia, where without socialism to moderate the economic free
fall of most poverty stricken families, especially in the rural areas, all
that’s left are pathetic humans drenched in alcohol, where drinking is pretty
much all they do. Making matters worse
are the conditions of the children, who are largely on their own raising
themselves, making do as best they can while their parents are on all night
benders, sleeping it off until midday.
Lucia (Kerttu-Killu Grenman) is a rambunctious hellraiser of a daughter
who answers to no one, particularly not her teachers, through she voluntarily
cares for Jats (Esther Koiv), a neighbor's Down-syndrome child who continually
follows her around wherever she goes.
This picture of parental absenteeism is at the heart of the film, with a
mother Maria (Maria Avdjushko) who’s blindly drunk most of the time and a
father Kaido (Rain Simmul) who simply doesn’t wish to get involved. While the picture is continually sympathetic
to Lucia, allowing her to run free whenever she wants, answering to no rules of
authority, basically eating candy bars for dinner, as she spends her entire life
in a playful mode, never able to concentrate or get serious in school, where
her grades are a disaster. All the
teachers look the other way, knowing the kind of trailer trash parents she has,
until one orderly teacher (Eva Klemets) comes to the realization that it’s not
in the child’s best interest to simply pass to the next grade without learning
anything. Complications ensue.
While the story is written by the director, what’s really a pretentious
narrative device is the attempt to heighten the melodrama by continually
showing what slobs and worthless creatures the parents are, who may as well be
rolling around on the ground mired in mud, as if they live in a pig sty, as
every single glimpse of them shows them to be horribly crude, backward, and
drunken caricatures who are worse than pathetic. So while the story may hold some social
interest, what to do with the children of alcoholics in the post-Communist
world of Eastern Europe, where there are few jobs to be had, where if it were a
realist Romanian film they’d be selling the children on the adoption black
market, Laur’s storytelling borders on the pretentious, overdoing the
downtrodden factor, making Lucia’s situation downright pathetic, then eliciting
sympathy for her neglected and undernourished world through an almost fairy
tale effect. While it’s plainly spelled
out that none of this is Lucia’s fault, little is revealed about her parents,
making it impossible to understand how they arrived at such a wretched state. Of course the audience is going to feel
sympathy for a parentless child, but the larger family questions about how they
remain so isolated and cut off from the rest of their own family and the
community fabric remain unaddressed, making little effort to paint a more
complete social dynamic, choosing instead to highlight the sorrowful nature of
a poor child’s limitations. Despite the
interest by the teacher and the social welfare authorities, no intervention is
indicated as no one has reportedly been hurt, but the family is under a continuing
investigation.
In an out of the blue plot contrivance, Kaido is offered a week in
Finland based on his gravedigger connections, something that is never explained
or elaborated upon, making little sense to the uninitiated, but it offers the
family a chance to overreact to the opportunity, where from her parent’s
reaction Lucia assumes they’re moving permanently to Finland. Once there, they discover fewer job
opportunities than in Estonia, but also an ultra liberal female pastor (Ulla
Reinikainen) who allows them to spend the week with her, giving Lucia a chance
to see the world and broaden her horizons while her parents remain exactly the
same, the one-dimensional horrible parents who would rather drink than spend
time with their own daughter. When it’s
time to return home, the parents feel even worse than before, fatalistically
seeing no way out, putting Lucia in rather desperate straights, especially when
the welfare authorities start nosing around again. Everyone here becomes the picture of societal
blame, the parents, the neighbors, the teachers, the town welfare authorities,
all somehow abandoning the best interests of the future generation, as if all
are complicit in somehow denying this child a future. But since there is little attempt to paint
even the slightest picture of society’s presence other than as an authoritarian
state, this is highly inaccurate conjecture and blatantly unfair, instead
blurring the lines, as really what it comes down to is a resilient child who
still has a future balanced against the hapless and defeatist parents who don’t
really care. Perhaps there’s a whole
generation out there who have succumbed to alcohol addiction, a leftover
Russian habit where currently 20% of male deaths are attributed to alcoholism,
but this film fails to properly frame this as a societal issue or offer much
insight into a progressively worsening social dilemma.
Jigsaw
Lounge [Sheila Seacroft] Kaunas film festival report
Small town Estonian life is grim for
eight-year-old Lucia, with her perpetually drunk young mother and easy-going
gravedigger father who’s almost given up trying. She’s seriously behind at
school, and often hungry at home, yet she has a kind of blissful freedom,
running wild with the other kids and particularly with her Down’s Syndrome
friend Jats, daughter of an apparently similarly hapless artist who lives
in the village. A chance to spend a week away in the city staying with lively
pastor Sirpa shows them all what a better life could be like, and Lucia warms
to her new motherly friend who likens her to Pippi-Longstocking. But back
at the graveyard life soon gets as bad, if not worse, than it was before when
her father goes away in despair to find work, and tragedy ensues. There
are very good things in this film: Maria Avdjushko is excellent as the
weak-willed and self-hating mother, and as a child’s eye view of a
deprived life it’s often very well done. But certain elements – chief of which
are the melodramatic and at times contrived-looking plot and a
surreal/spiritual note that’s verging on the mawkish – keep one from totally
engaging with this slice of bleak Estonian life.
A child's unwavering gaze, neither blindly accepting nor especially judgmental, anchors Estonian helmer Katrin Laur's "The Graveyard Keeper's Daughter," a pastoral tale of alcoholism and neglect. By all civilized standards, 8-year-old Lucia qualifies as a child at risk, with a largely absent father and chronically drunken mother. Yet, blithely frolicking around the titular burying grounds, accompanied by her angel, a younger girl with Down syndrome, Lucia fashions a satisfying existence from the cards dealt her, protecting her autonomy from well-meaning adults. The stylistic fluidity of the pic's evocative fairy-tale tropes trumps any sociological overlay, increasing "Graveyard's" arthouse appeal.
Little Lucia (Kerttu-Killu Grenman) voluntarily cares for Jats (Esther Koiv), a neighbor's Down-syndrome child whose resemblance to the statue of an angel at the center of the cemetery makes her puppy-dog devotion seem even more special. Lucia also uncomplainingly looks after her mother Maria (Maria Avdjushko) in the aftermath of her nocturnal drunken card games at their stone house nestled deep in the woods. Her father though happy to teach her to drive (she takes the controls of the graveyard pickup truck, gleefully perched on his lap), otherwise foists all parental obligation onto his alcoholic wife, denying any knowledge of how to care for a girl child. Yet Lucia seems none the worse for her precocious self-sufficiency, particularly leavened as it is by an elemental openness to the vibrant nature around her.
Helmer Laur and lenser Annsi Leino transform Lucia's graveyard into a secret garden, a magical place of nocturnal mystery and daylight communion whose blood-deep natural cycles render the inevitable process of socialization quietly tragic.
But when Kaido and his family are invited to spend a week in Finland, staying with a friendly female pastor (Ulla Reinikainen), the vacation first seems as a potential game-changer. Maria and the pastor share drinks, confidences in Russian (apparently Maria's native tongue) and kick up their heels, falling over each other in tipsy communion. This reminder of the girl she once was inspires Maria to resolve to stop drinking, while Kaido dreams of a decently paying permanent job. Indeed the visit opens each parent's eyes to the possibility of other options, none of which outlast the trip back to Estonia.
Meanwhile, the arrival of a young, by-the-book teacher (apparently the only person in Estonia not hitting the bottle), concerned over Lucia's low grades, threatens to topple the girl's carefully balanced house of cards, when a disaster of epic proportions (and impressive f/x) renders all options moot.
Camera (color), Anssi Leino; editor, Kersti Miilen; music, Part Uusberg; art director, Eugen Tamberg; costume designer, Tamberg; sound (Dolby), Ants Andreas; sound designers, Tiina Andreas, Matis Rei. Reviewed at Montreal World Film Festival (Focus on World Cinema), Aug. 28, 2011. Running time: 102 MIN.
Alcoholism
Is Killing Off Russian Men - Global - The Atlantic Wire February 15, 2011
Laurent,
Emmanuel
TWO
IN THE WAVE B- 82
France (91 mi)
2010
This is a delightful romp through the archives of the late 50’s and
early 60’s French New Wave films, specifically referencing François Truffaut,
whose landmark film 400 BLOWS starring a young 14-year old Jean-Pierre Léaud
was a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959. Simultaneously, a fellow writer from the
Parisian film magazine Cahiers
du cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, was busy
readying his first film BREATHLESS, which opened nearly a year later also to
resounding success, elevating both young novices to becoming spokespersons for
the nouvelle
vague.
Since both were erudite and educated, used to expressing their thoughts
on paper, they did not shy away from the cameras which followed them
everywhere, plastering them on magazine covers, making them an international
sensation. Breaking all the rules about
rigid narrative filmmaking, much of it just copying traditional formulas guided
more by economics than genuine inspiration, this brash group of young guns
broke away from film studios and invented a new art, preferring to shoot on
location where their editing and visual style expressed a new sense of urgency
and personal expression, inventing new rules as they went along. The trip down memory lane guided by clips of
their early films is a real treat, as they play out like personal photo albums
or favorite songs, as so many audience members will recollect seeing these
films and recalling what a vital part they played in transforming their own
attitudes about art and cinema.
Both Truffaut and Godard are seen in clips as documentary interviewers
as well, where Truffaut wrote a legendary book from his Hitchcock interviews,
while Godard wrote a film CONTEMPT (1963) that was largely inspired by his
interviews with Fritz Lang. The young
novices idealized directors who exhibited a flair for cinematic art and
imagination, like Renoir, Hawks or Hitchcock, or who could express emotions
through an unabashed realism, like Nicholas Ray. Unfortunately, many of their compatriots were
left out of this venture, as there is no mention of Chabrol’s LE BEAU SERGE
(1958), oftentimes cited as the first New Wave film, or Eric Rohmer who built a
career around character observations and dialogue, or the brilliant
contributions of Jacques Rivette, who they all admired as perhaps the most
radical artist among them, while including clips from Agnès Varda’s shorts,
where we see a playful side of Godard in front of the camera, and Jacques
Demy’s LOLA (1961). This oversight
streamlines the density of the subject matter, which is not so much a
historical account of the New Wave, something the public appears clamoring for,
but focuses instead on just two contributors, and barely makes a dent on their
films, really only exploring their early years where each suffered box office
casualties along with their successes.
Interestingly, despite noting their radical artistic achievements, the
film doesn’t weigh in with any historical analysis or perspective on either
man’s career. In fact, there is no one
onscreen who disputes the film’s findings or who offers a dissenting view. In an interesting foreshadowing of events to
come, both men are seen rallying the troops in 1968 and consolidating their
combined voices against the French ministry’s firing of legendary film
archivist Henri Langois from the Cinémathèque Française, even halting the
Cannes Film Festival that year, which led to the turbulent street
demonstrations that reinstated not only his position but the needed funding.
Activism and artistic differences eventually leads to a permanent
artistic rift between the two men in 1973, where Godard embraces radical
politics as an essential ingredient to any socially relevant art, while
Truffaut believes art transcends politics.
Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT (1973), absent any politics, provokes an
excoriating public denunciation from Godard, calling it irrelevant and nothing
more than a bourgeois trifle, while Truffaut countered with the publishing of a
twenty-three page personal critique of Godard, calling him a sham, an
illegitimate spokesperson for the working class as he lives a typically
bourgeois lifestyle surrounded by wealth and riches. The two men never spoke again for the rest of
their lives, like something out of CITIZEN KANE (1941) when Orson Welles
stopped speaking to Joseph Cotton.
Earlier in the film, Godard relished a Welles quote: “Art as a moral stance against tyranny.” Under the circumstances, however, considering
the contributions both have made to cinema, their public spat seems petty and
childish, even if their respective views both happen to be true and offer the
best analytic film criticism this movie has to offer. What is especially sad is seeing both men competitively
vie for the personal allegiance of Jean-Pierre Léaud, the poster child of the
New Wave, who feels compelled to continue to work for both directors while
being pushed and pulled from both ends, like a child in a divorce custody
case. While this documentary only skims
the surface, using ridiculous images of actress Isild Le Besco paging through
old copies of Cahiers, the real interest lies in reviewing clips from the early films which
come alive onscreen, beautifully capturing the vibrant energy of youth, a
timeless moment in cinema history when the world stopped to watch and listen as
the medium playfully spit out the past while rejuvenating itself.
Two
in the Wave Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun
Two hearts! Believing in just one mind!
The story is well told of two teenage cinephiles, François Truffaut and
Jean-Luc Godard, whose eyes met across a Parisian cinema and whose passion for
Hitchcock and Hawks led them to become critics and filmmakers of the nouvelle
vague. But this detailed new doc, drawing on archive interviews and clips, with
shots of paraphernalia and odd inserts of a young actress wandering around
Paris (did they see Isaac Julien’s ‘Derek’, in which Tilda Swinton does the
same?), still feels fresh and makes you want to spend all day doing nothing but
hop from cinema to cinema. The film pays attention to the pair’s lesser-known
works, such as their 1950s shorts, as well as signature films, ‘A Bout de
Souffle’, ‘400 Blows’ and the rest. Mostly, the film celebrates cinephilia and
solidarity, although it also tries to get to the root of why Truffaut and
Godard fell out in 1973, with the latter accusing the former of selling out and
Truffaut labelling Godard ‘a shit’ in return.
Two in
the Wave – review | Film | The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
The bitter division between François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard is one
of the great stories of cinema history. To tell it, documentary-maker Emmanuel
Laurent uses voiceover and clips from the movies, though evidently he is unsure
how to open the subject out. In 1960, the sensational success of The 400 Blows
had given Truffaut the power to promote the career of his contemporary Godard,
offering him his own script to direct: Breathless. They became passionate
allies, if not precisely friends, until 1968, when Godard became increasingly
radical, difficult and didactic. They were the new wave's Lennon and McCartney
– or perhaps more Castro and Guevara: while Truffaut consolidated his success
on the industry podium, Godard absented himself from this spectacle and took
the revolution deep into the Bolivian jungle. The break came with Godard's
ferocious denunciation of Truffaut's Day for Night, though Laurent's film does
not quote Truffaut's own denunciation of Godard's diva tendencies: "the
Ursula Andress of militancy". Tellingly, Laurent suggests that young
Jean-Pierre Léaud, who starred in films by them both, was like a child in a
divorce case. The early shots of young Léaud's open, beaming face are
desperately sad.
The
Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]
An anniversary present for the new wave—tied to the upcoming 50th-birthday screenings of Breathless—Two in the Wave gives the gift of received wisdom as it recounts the erstwhile friendship of film-critics-cum-directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. The chronology jumping about a bit, we go through their first meeting as teenagers attending Parisian cine-clubs, their back-to-back debut successes, then the later divergence of Godard's global-political radicalism and Truffaut's more personal vision, ending abruptly with their acrimonious letter exchange of 1973, the "Takeover"/"Ether" of cinephilia (Truffaut's classic kiss-off to J-LG: ". . . you're the Ursula Andress of militancy"). We hear from the subjects and their shared star, Jean-Pierre Léaud, as seen in archival footage and interviews—catnip enough for those susceptible to the romance of the period, though these figures have hardly been neglected up to now. Almost all the rest of the commentary comes from critic and Truffaut biographer Antoine de Baecque, writer and narrator here. Director Emmanuel Laurent extends de Baecque's essay with clips from Truffaut-Godard films (diminished in HD) and, rather than new interviews with contemporaries, footage of an attractive actress (Isild Le Besco) flipping through old photos and looking pensively at the entrance of the old Cinémathèque Française.
Time
Out New York [Keith Uhlich]
Emmanuel Laurent’s documentary on the tumultuous friendship between critic-filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut hardly rates as a DVD special feature. A dry collection of archival interviews and other materials traces these two leading lights of the French New Wave from their first meeting to their poisonous breakup-par-lettre. Laurent mimics some of the duo’s stylistic affects: An ongoing voice-over, spoken by film critic Antoine de Baecque, is very Godardian in its erudite discursiveness. And several modern-day scenes of actress Isild Le Besco—reading back issues of Cahiers du cinema and wandering wistfully past the Paris Cinémathèque—are an embodiment of Truffaut’s principle that, to make a successful movie, one need only film the face of a pretty woman.
Not in this case, though. Laurent knows the facts of his subject, but he loses the emotional thread amid all the flimsy homage. Only a quick-cut montage of the directors’ frequently shared performer Jean-Pierre Léaud (best known as Truffaut’s onscreen alter ego Antoine Doinel) truly resonates, as a collection of film clips show him aging from a scrappy teenage boy to a haunted older man and back again. Otherwise the film blows up a minor aspect of the New Wave to foolishly apocalyptic proportions, substituting gossip for gospel
User reviews from imdb Author: Chris_Docker from
For Godard fans, and probably Truffaut fans as well, a documentary about
their friendship, generously illustrated with clips from their movies, sounds
like manna from heaven. Godard famously said, "All you need for a movie is
a gun and a girl." A gun was definitely needed – preferably to shoot the
director before he made this.
Not that the history of these two seminal filmmakers, their initial close
friendship, and later parting over fierce artistic differences shouldn't be
told. Perhaps it should. To examine those differences or even analysing the
individual greatness of Godard and Truffaut. To show how they were originally
so close, rather than a chummy accident. Such would be a service to those who
love their work, to those approaching it for the first time, as a suitable
section of a sixth-form media studies, or even a pleasant half hour TV
documentary. That the present offering would look out of place even as a DVD
extra is not only a condemnation of its artistic integrity, but singularly odd
as some will take it almost as a besmirchment of the great traditions that
Godard and Truffaut spearheaded.
Of the many expositions of the two key movies many would identify as
kick-starting the French New Wave, Breathless (Godard) and The 400 Blows
(Truffaut), this documentary competes for the prize of leaving the viewer with
even less information than they probably came in with. An uninspired commentary
gives little mention of the innovative styles and techniques, clips seem to be
used at random (and often poorly at that). At best it offers the sort of
history you could get in five minutes from Wikipedia. We hear much about their
love of movies but with only the most superficial of clues as to why, the
particular intellectual passions and insights that might distinguish them from
the most moribund of cinema-goers. We have, in short, no analysis. No
descriptive observation. Merely occasional waffle. Emmanuel Laurent's Two in
the Wave had its
Of the things I couldn't help but enjoy though, were the scenes from the
movies. I managed to identify most of them, and playing 'spot the clip' gave me
something to do while tuning out commentary that narcissistically imagines it
is doing me a great service - even with its room temperature IQ. But what of
other viewers? For an introduction to the men and their work, shouldn't the
films have been identified? Or at least the relevant techniques highlighted by
commentary? As an example, the back of my mind recalls a tracking shot in a
clip being shown that has a jump cut. Some moments after (not before or during)
the jump-cut, but immediately before switching to another film clip, the
commentator says how . . . 'they were setting out to destroy the notion that
you can't jump-cut while tracking.' The clip that then begins, immediately
after this apparently sensible remark, is from À bout de soufflé: a film
particularly famous for its use of jump-cuts. Let's watch and see which
sequence they use! Mmmm . . . not a tracking shot for a start . . . and the
cuts in this particular piece of film (in a moving car) are of the traditional
kind. I feel one has to be particularly careful if ever making damning
criticism, but this is just shoddy film technique from Laurent. I search for
the section using a digital copy of the film at the festival press centre, just
to be sure I made no mistake. I hadn't. The commentary refers to something you
would easily miss, simply because the footage is on screen before the
voice-over, and the choice and positioning of screen clips would lead any
normal viewer to believe they were about to see the point made in the following
section – which turned out to be either a bad example or irrelevant.
Fortunately a film about Godard would struggle to be all bad. Two in the Wave
comes alive in the clips of interviews with Godard himself. Apart from seeing his
movies, it is one of the best ways of getting insights into them. Additionally,
Godard speaks as passionately in word and deed as he does at 24 frames per
second. He can probably tell us more about film-making in five minutes than all
the pompous drivel that is wasted by many of the writers filling books (or in
this case film) on his works. (There are many notable exceptions, though some
of my favourites include writers, WW Dixon and David Sterritt – and to be fair,
I also suspect Laurent is capable of much better than this if he just leaves
the camera at home).
Another morsel of worth was the inclusion of student riot footage, which was
better than average. And helps to illustrate the rebellions against what was
seen as Gaullist repression of the arts (among other things) and artistic
freedom of expression generally.
A bigger shortcoming is the lightweight manner in which Godard and Truffaut's
disagreement is handled, since their friendship is the film's primary stated
remit. The best one can gather is that Godard was somehow interested in using
film for political ends, whereas Truffaut was concerned with film as fine art,
or art for art's sake. While this is correct as far as I understand it, it
would have been a great opportunity to examine the arguments over which they
found such passionate disagreement.
Sadly Two in the Wave is little more than a pretentious fanzine-style offering,
couched in deceptively cultured tones.
The
complicated friendship of Truffaut and Godard exposed in the ... Armond White from The NY Press
LET'S SAY YOU don’t know what the French New Wave was, that you only know Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-wai or mumblecore. You still owe a debt to Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard’s influence. The new documentary Two in the Wave makes a good place to start learning about the New Wave’s significance. It looks at Truffaut and Godard as the most emblematic directors of that mid-20th century movement. Their respective debuts The 400 Blows (1959) and Breathless (1960) brought fresh attitude to film culture’s conventions. Their collaboration and inevitable falling apart reflected the rise and fade of all revolutions and—like their greatest films—offers a lesson in the poignancy, brilliance and fatalism that can occur in human relations. The “complicities of a friendship” is the film’s moving subtext.
Director Emmanuel Laurent keeps a human touch in retelling this eventful
history through a whimsical motif: Nubile researcher Isild Le Besco combs
yellowed newspaper documents and magazine clippings and visits
Laurent and de Baecque’s allegiance pays off in the way Two in the Wave effectively transmits Truffaut and Godard’s personalities primarily through their work: gorgeously vivid clips from many seminal films. These prove, without argument, the great aesthetic contribution the New Wave made to our movie heritage. Nothing by Tarantino, Wong or mumblecore compares with the vision and humor of Jules and Jim, Masculine- Feminine or the precisely chosen moment from Jacques Demy’s magnificent Lola that both Truffaut and Godard recognized as an essential expression of the New Wave’s heart and genius.
After the silent era, the French New Wave (the term La Nouvelle Vague was coined by L’Express in 1957 to describe a generation of emerging French filmmakers) is the most important development in
movie history. Given today’s journalistic corruption, it’s almost unimaginable that the revitalization of film as art and political movement began with critics. Yet Truffaut and Godard (along with Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol) were a rare breed of principled, dedicated film critics. They took movies seriously, which is to say passionately. Working at Cahiers du Cinema magazine and following the Catholic example set by its legendary editor André Bazin, they wrote about films as if they mattered spiritually, not commercially. This doc cites Godard’s reviews as being “furiously at war with bourgeois criticism.” Inspired by silent movie innovation, they learned: All art derives from the urgency— and the practice—of personal expression.
Two in the Wave makes for a richly detailed footnote to a golden
age and stillgolden principles. But it’s also a winning and necessary
corrective to our current barbarous culture. Focusing on Truffaut and Godard
brings back the idea of film as the creation of artists (auteurs) rather than
the product of corporate, demographic study and/or celebrity vehicles or
adolescent wet dreams. There’s thrilling footage of Godard quoting Orson
Welles: “Art as a moral stance against tyranny;” a humbling meeting of
old/young giants when Godard interviews Fritz Lang. By first articulating their
enthusiasm for the great auteurs of European cinema (particularly Jean Renoir),
the New Wave critics next extolled the genius of American directors—particularly
Griffith, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Preminger—and then, trading
pens for cameras, walked in their paths with innovative determination.
Truffaut, Godard and the gang’s
The New Wavers’ common faith was to destroy cinema’s false myths. They introduced the self-conscious approach to movie history and the awareness of genre and form (aka modernism). That approach prevails in the enjoyment of film as pop culture—even though it has been distorted into either pompous elitism or politically unconscious and morally vacuous escapism. Re-seeing so many classic clips in Two in the Wave raises high irony about contemporary film culture’s indifference to the classical virtues that New Wave radicals nonetheless preserved. (Their apparent taste for literature and the fine arts bolstered their critique of contemporary mores and politics.) There’s an eternal war between art and commerce; even the New Wave has its objectors—and the struggle continues. For that reason, Two in the Wave isn’t a geek fest. It’s an affecting reading of film history as passion and personal politics, not business.
TWO
IN THE WAVE (Emmanuel Laurent 2009)
Chris Knipp from Filmleaf
DVD Talk Jason Bailey, also seen here: Jason
Bailey
Hammer
to Nail [Michael Tully]
The Lumière
Reader [Steve Garden]
Slant
Magazine [Joseph Jon Lanthier]
DVD Savant
Review: Two in the Wave Glenn
Erickson
Onward
and Upward with the Arts: Auteur Wars :
The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker (abstract only), also seen here: 4.7
issue of The New Yorker (JPEG enlarged image of the newsprint)
"The
Auteur Wars": Why Godard and Truffaut Couldn't Live Together ... Nerve, April 2, 2008
Rocchi's
Retro Rental: New Wave, Old Crime : SFGate: Culture Blog! James Rocchi from The SF Chronicle, April 15, 2008
SBS
Films - Two in the Wave Tim Irons
Documentary
Review: 'Two in the Wave' | Arts Entertainment | Epoch ... Joe Bendel
Film-Forward.com Jack Gattanella
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Andrew Robertson]
The
NYC Movie Guru [Avi Offer]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Two
in the Wave — Inside Movies Since 1920
Wade Major from Box Office
magazine
Visit our Blog for
reviews of individual films Anne Orchier from Cine-File, March 11, 2011
Phil
on Film [Philip Concannon]
Two
in the Wave – review Philip French
from The Observer
Two
in the Wave movie review -- Two in the Wave showtimes - The ... Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
New
York Times (registration req'd) A.O.
Scott, May 19, 2010
French New Wave -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Law, Clara
Clara Law - China-related
Topics CI-CL - China-Related Topics
Clara Law
(born May 29, 1957 in Macau) is a Hong Kong film director, now having relocated
to Australia before the Transfer of the sovereignty of Hong Kong|1997 Hong Kong
handover.
She has produced several films focusing on the themes of migration and the
identity crisis of Hong Kong people. Her most remarkable works include Farewell
China (1990) and Autumn Moon (1992).
After she moved to Australia, she continued her film career and made several
films including Floating Life (1996) and The Goddess of 1967
(2001), both have won numerous awards in Australia and film festivals around
the world. Her latest film is Letters to Ali (2004), which deals with
Austalia's refugee situation.
She often collaborates with her husband, Eddie Fong|Eddie Fong Ling-Ching, who
usually is her screenwriter.
Hong Kong HONG KONG NEW WAVE: 1979–1984 Film Reference
The Hong Kong New Wave burst onto
the international film scene in 1979. During the late 1970s the film industry
in Hong Kong suffered a serious decline in audience numbers, largely due to the
popularization of television. Most studios were desperate to find solutions and
therefore were willing to innovate. In addition, a new class of nouveau riche
formed during the economic take-off of the 1970s were interested in investing
in the film industry. Thus, between 1979 and 1980 about thirty to forty new
directors made their debuts. All of their films used Cantonese, and many were
technically superior to earlier films made by the established studios, and more
contemporary in style and theme. Important examples include Feng jie (The
Secret, Ann Hui, 1979), Liang zhu (Butterfly Murders, Tsui
Hark, 1979), Ming jian (The Sword, Patrick Tam, 1980), and Fu
zi qing (Father and Son, Allen Fong, 1981). Although these films are
generically and stylistically heterogenous, one common characteristic of these New
Wave films was that they shared a "Hong Kong–centered" sensibility,
unlike the films of their refugee predecessors, who had taken Hong Kong as a
temporary residence before their final return to China. This generation that
grew up in Hong Kong fundamentally changed the look and the nature of its
cinema.
Many New Wave productions were
creative explorations of social issues and cinematic traditions, but not all
were commercially successful. For instance, after several commercial failures
Tsui Hark (b. 1950), one of the leading directors of the New Wave, found
himself working for a newly formed commercial studio, Cinema City Company,
which specialized in combining action with comedy. Its style combined glamorous
visuals, fast editing, and modern urban settings. By using big budgets, big
casts, and extensive packaging and publicity, it quickly rose to the top in the
1980s. Among its most successful hits were Zuijia Paidang (Aces Go
Places, 1982) and its four sequels. New successful production houses such
as Cinema City began to replace the old studio system of Shaw Brothers, which
officially closed down production in 1986. Since then the financing of films
usually have come from one of the three companies—Golden Harvest, Golden
Princess (financier of Cinema City), and D&B Company—which control both
production and distribution.
Because industry financing came
from a small number of companies, it is not surprising that the New Wave's
freedom from strict commercial demands would be short-lived. By the mid-1980s a
"Second Wave" was taking shape, working more within the confines of
the commercial system while continuing the technological advances and the
social sensibility of the First Wave. The Second Wave was composed of some of
the New Wave directors such as Tsui Hark, Yim Ho (b. 1952), and Ann Hui (b.
1947), as well as younger directors such as Mabel Cheung (b. 1950), Clara Law
(b. 1957), and Wong Kar Wei (b. 1958). Second Wave films dealt with
contemporary issues, particularly those related to the 1997 reunification of
Hong Kong with China. Like their First Wave predecessors, many of the Second
Wave's works were shown on the international festival circuit, at the Cannes
Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and Tokyo International Film Festival.
Some major works of this period include Center Stage (Ruan Linguy,
1992), by Stanley Kwan (b. 1957) and Floating Life (Fu Sheung,
1996), by Clara Law. Many of its popular productions, such as the Aces Goes
Places series, beat Hollywood films at the domestic box office. During this
time, Hong Kong films dominated the markets of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and
mainland China.
Hong Kong Film Directors'
Guild - Directors - Clara LAW
biography and filmography
Hong Kong Cinemagic -
Clara Law Cheuk Yu biography
Clara Law - WikiVisually profile
Law,
Cheuk-yiu Clara | Hong Kong Women Filmmakers extensive profile
Local and Global Identity: Whither Hong Kong Cinema? • Senses of ... Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, June 7, 2000
Autumn Moon
• Senses of Cinema Stephen
Teo from Senses of Cinema, February
13, 2001
Temptation of a
Monk • Senses of Cinema Stephen Teo
from Senses of Cinema, February 13,
2001
Floating Life: The Heaviness of Moving • Senses of Cinema Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, February 13, 2001
Materialism and
Spiritualism in The Goddess of 1967 • Senses of ... Fiona A. Villella from Senses of Cinema, April 10, 2001
Clara Law • Great
Director profile • Senses of Cinema Dian
Li for Senses of Cinema, October 5,
2003
2007 Taiwan Film & TV Project Promotion ::: Media Center Taiwan Film and TV project, December 6, 2007
50 Essential Feminist Films – Flavorwire Farewell China (1990) listed at #40, by Alison Nastasi, July 18, 2014
Letters
to Ali film analysis • Clara Law • Senses of Cinema Roger
Dawkins, December 2014
10 great dystopian Australian road movies | SciFi Film Festival The Goddess of 1967 (2000) listed at #9, May 19, 2015
The
10 Best Films From Hong Kong's 90s Golden Age Of Cinema Autumn
Moon (1992) listed as #7, by Sally Gao from The Culture Trip, December 2, 2016
SCREEN GRAB: Clara Law brief interview (Undated)
An Interview with Clara Law • Senses of Cinema Katherine Millard interview from Senses of Cinema, April, 2001
RealTime Arts -
Magazine - issue 43 - Clara Law: an impression of ... Elsie McCredie interview June/July 2001
Clara Law speaks with WSWS “Australia’s inhuman treatment of ... Richard Phillips interview with Clara Law from the World Socialist Web Site, October 11, 2004
Hong Kong female directors speak out | CNN Travel Tiffany Lam interviews Ivy Ho, Clara Law, and Heiward Mak, April 13, 2010
Being Clara Law |
Macau Closer magazine Hélder
Beja and Joao Pedro Lau interview, December 2016
Clara Law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FAREWELL CHINA (Ai zai bie xiang de ji jie)
Hong Kong (115 mi) 1990
Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
Farewell
User comments from imdb Author: eric wobma from amsterdam
Any film with Maggie Cheung, the
superb actress who has a depth and scope comparable with the incomparable Anna
Magnani & Romy Schneider, is very well worth watching.
This film, although viewed on a terrible Full Screen DVD edition with an awful
haze over the picture, is worth every minute of your time !!
The film kicks of with a feverish scene in China, and ends in Heaven, which has
all the elements of the deepest pits of Hell... All this we can see all too
clearly on the face of Li Hung. Portrayed of course by Miss Cheung.
Not that Tony Leung isn't worth mentioning here; far from it ! Starting out as
a naive Orpheus searching high and low for his Euridice, he is afflicted by the
filth of down town Big Apple. He portrays the searching husband beautifully.
Also the horrible teen with a heart, Hayley Man, delivers a fine performance.
And even the baby boy has some glorious acting moments caught on film !
A thrilling and sometimes very chilling drama; watching this film is a
magnetizing experience ! Thank you Clara Law; that you'd wish and find ways to
give us many more of your wonderful films !!
User comments from imdb Author: ehre (ehre@xtcnewyork.com) from NYC
It's a good film, and I think it captures a certain angle of
the present-day Chinese imigrant story, much more so than the almost
"faery tale" "An Autumn's Tale." Set mainly in NYC's
Chinatown, "Farewell China" is a real tear-jerker. If you don't like
or aren't in the mood for movies which can be as frustrating, agonizing, and
heartbreaking as real life often is, particularly when it comes to imigrants,
this isn't for you.
The plot involves a married couple who leave their son behind in the care of
grandparents while they emigrate to the U.S. from China separately, first the
wife, then the husband (rather atypical, I believe). For every imigrant success
story lauded in the media, there are almost certainly scores more who never
"make it." Indeed, this film subtly questions the price of
"success." Also touched upon, though handled perhaps a bit
ham-fistedly, I think, are issues of identity.
As usual, Maggie Cheung is absolutely wonderful, and as sweet as she plays her
character, I think most people will be shocked by how changed the wife becomes
at the end. It's really scary (at the risk of appearing tangential with such a
comparison, I must note that I don't think I've felt as chilled to my very soul
by a plot twist since "Rosemary's Baby" -- then again, I'm not the
most alert moviegoer). Tony Leung also turns in the expected great performance
as the innocent, then disillusioned, then tragic father. Though sometimes
flawed, this film really arouses one's horror and pity.
Please see this movie, especially if you're a Chinese-American kid with an
identity crisis! (See it, and I'm sure you'll know what I mean!)
One more note: the depiction of inner-city non-Chinese minority crime is
handled much more sympathetically here than in movies like the aforementioned
"Autumn's Tale" and "Comrades, Almost a Love Story" (both
also deserving of a screening, especially the great and sure-to-be-classic
"Comrades") -- not that I think those portrayals were inaccurate;
I've lived in NYC 20+ years, I should know.... Unfortunately, said
"sympathetic" (and, more accurately, empathetic) depiction is, in
keeping with some other "issues" raised if not exactly explored in
this movie, done a bit ham-fistedly or heavy-handedly, almost in that
"Schindler's List"/"Saving Private Ryan" or Steven
Spielberg way of being "preachy." Thankfully, IMHO, this scene lasts
just a couple or so minutes.
Anyway, Clara Law is an interesting HK filmmaker and this is one of her best
ones. I hope it comes to DVD soon. This film, like "Comrades," is a
very Chinese film. If you're interested in Chinese culture, you can get a good
sense of it in these films.
50 Essential Feminist Films – Flavorwire Farewell China (1990) listed at #40, by Alison Nastasi, July 18, 2014
AUTUMN MOON (Qiu yue)
Hong Kong Japan (108 mi) 1992
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Clara Law's
limpid, understated movie justifies its own poetic title by minimising plot and
avoiding melodramatics; it's the flip-side of the slam-bang heroics that
dominate Hong Kong cinema. An aimless Japanese private eye (Nagase, the Elvis
fan from Mystery Train) catches the current autumnal mood of Hong Kong
when he runs into a schoolgirl in the grip of her first crush and her dying
grandmother; he has a brief sexual fling with an old flame from Japan, but
nothing much else happens. The movie sees Hong Kong as a technopolis on a par
with Tokyo, but regrets the waning of Chinese social and cultural traditions,
and ponders the city's future in the run-up to 1997. The Brits, chasteningly,
have no part to play in the film's equation.
Autumn Moon (1992) Kozo from Love HK Films
An unusual drama from Clara Law that could be tough going for some. However, it can prove rewarding for those who take the time to appreciate its subtle narrative.
This languid drama from celebrated international director Clara Law is anything but uninteresting. Li Pui-Wai stars as Pui-Wai, a fifteen year-old Chinese girl on the cusp of adulthood - and soon to lose her past via immigration to Canada. In her final year in HK, she befriends Tokio (Masatoshi Nagase), a wandering Japanese traveler who’s retreated to HK to eat and sleep, fish and fornicate.
Pui-Wai struggles with experiencing her first love, all the while consciously aware that she’s about to lose him to her impending immigration. Meanwhile, Tokio runs into his first love’s sister (Maki Kiuchi), and can’t even remember who she is. This parallel reveals Tokio’s narrative relation to Pui-Wai. He’s her future made real: once wide-eyed and keenly aware of his memories, he’s now jaded and without recall of the little things that compose his life.
There is a gentle give-and-take to the relationship between these two disparate, yet kindred souls. Both share the same appreciation for life: one has merely forgotten while the other struggles with the bittersweet aftertaste of her memories. Pui-Wai rejects Tokio’s hard-hearted shell - it’s only through his exposure to her that he begins to remember and recognize the beauty and joy in his past.
While this sounds like a supremely cheesy setup, Clara Law and Eddie Fong manage to tell their tale both subtly and simply. Using single camera set-ups, seemingly unrelated subplots, and generous long takes, they bring their message across both verbally and metaphorically. This is a film about silent revelation and quiet introspection, and not bombastic ephiphany.
Wong Kar-Wai can be seen in this film, but credit for the similar paths both Autumn Moon and Wong Kar-Wai travel should be given to another source: Japanese author Haruki Murakami. In Murakami novels like Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and A Wild Sheep Chase, the subject is society and how it affects the individual. His novels are meditations on urban alienation, as people struggle to reconcile themselves with the times they live in. The same can be said for the characters in Autumn Moon, who form a rare friendship that illuminates the value and fragility of memory. Ultimately, the film reveals life as a cyclical process - everything repeats itself elsewhere, both an unavoidable and a precious process. This film isn’t explicit about what it says, but more is conveyed than whole pages of text could possible say.
User comments from imdb : x_x_DrStrangeposter_x_x
This is my favorite Asian film and
perhaps my favorite film amongst a select group of others. It only recently
{Late 07} became available on DVD and I have only just now got round to
watching it-- for the first time in over 10 years since I first viewed it on
late night TV. The first viewing was some sleep addled night when it seared
itself onto my cerebellum with striking resonance and jutted out as a film that
I immediately took to. I'm pleased to report it's lost none of its power for me
and in fact I am even more moved and touched by it now. It's often hard to describe
how such small, little known pictures can strike such a cord.
I suppose the most resonant element is that simply it is a minute, spare, human
picture and while it espouses larger universal themes of migration, identity,
nationality and generations, it remains true to a core individual spirit of the
characters and their displacement and cultural mesh as they wrestle with their
place in a world in constant flux. But not only that, they wrestle with their
own discord and disharmony amidst personal situations which they ultimately
wish to not define who they are. The Hong Kong backdrop lends the film power by
echoing the sparsity and hollowness that one feels in weightlessness and
rootlessness, a perpetual upheaval that sadly strips away our identities.
Further irony can even be attached with the story of Hong Kong itself, it's own
history. Hong Kong appears alone, isolated and empty to match the feelings of
the characters, simple, elegant, spare and affecting, it's a sharply alienating
vision.
There's a pervasive sense of the individual adrift and astray from an anchor
that states who we are, where we come from and who we should be. The central
characters here are still exploring this and redefining and searching for an
identity that doesn't limit or confine their spirit, no matter what their
situation dictates must be their next move-- they struggle for an assertion of
their true selves. I suppose, to cut short here, this gels with me not only
because I have my own sort of mesh in background and displacement growing up in
different countries and constantly being uprooted but moreover because like
these characters I have that constant ache, that search and that parallel of
still being over just has been.
But for all this thematic talk Autumn Moon never forgets to be a simple,
singular film about two souls who touch each others lives in an inexorable
manner that neither will soon forget. Upon end with the celebrations of the
August Moon we are left with a subtle reminder of this. It's funny how sometimes
the smallest of pictures can come along and touch you and seem to say the kinds
of things you've felt and do so so poignantly and concisely that it just marks
some kind of definition of who you are and what moves you. Often with these
very touching personal films it becomes hard to elaborate just what so deeply
touches you, moving into the realm of emotion without words, thoughts just a
transcendent, unspoken purity in appreciation, more physical and spiritual.
I think there is a shared sensibility in this picture with such films as Lost
in Translation for example and to a lesser extent American Beauty. They both
share a sensibility that suggests identity within a world in constant flux and
characters that wrestle with the confines of their own personal and national
identity within the boundaries set out in the film. Both films offer up
characters that are dislocated not so much physically but more importantly
emotionally-- this dissatisfaction and cultural limbo and ennui is offset
against their immediate geographical position. This in a sense determines their
immediate decision making process but there's always that overall, all
encompassing humanistic base level thought process that drives them to the
conclusion that these destinies we arrive at through geographical standing,
while not determining who we are, are boundaries we adhere to not out of
familiarity but out of a sense of cultural and sociological unrest. Meaning
that while we are dissatisfied with notions of migration and upheaval they are
a necessary evil of an ever changing world which always seeks to confine,
compartmentalize and define us before we have a chance to find out who we
really are.
Autumn Moon
• Senses of Cinema Stephen
Teo from Senses of Cinema, February
13, 2001
Migration-as-Transition: Pre-Post-1997 Hong Kong Culture in Clara Law's Autumn Moon Audrey Yue from Intersections 4 (Sept. 2000)
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
The
10 Best Films From Hong Kong's 90s Golden Age Of Cinema Autumn
Moon (1992) listed as #7, by Sally Gao from The Culture Trip, December 2, 2016
Movie Review - Autumn Moon - Review/Film ... - The New York Times Stephen Holden
TEMPTATION OF A MONK (You Seng)
User comments from imdb Author: anonymous from Australia
Temptation of a Monk is a treat for
those viewers who value character development and self discovery. The movie is
the story of a army general who strives to transcend the trappings of his
position, social expectation and his current state of existence. He enters a
monastery which shakes his social foundations (an elder brother monk, 10 years
old ordering an ex-general around), but the teachings are ineffective because of
his hidden motivations in joining the monastery. After a traumatic event, he
moves on to another monastery, where his life begins to change. His newfound
learnings and knowledge are again tested to determine whether he perseveres.
The subtlety of the plot and the gradual development of the character is
wonderful, much like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar. This is the strength
of the film, enticing viewers to watch on to find out whether the protagonist
perseveres. The contemporary style of the costumes is another feature of this
film adding to the beauty of the landscape. Overall, Temptation of a Monk is an
oriental treat -- displaying both the beauty of the land and of the human soul.
User comments from imdb Author: lyone-fein from Iowa
This excellent film gives viewers
an entry into some of China's religious cultural traditions--from the point of
view of a very irreligious man. Beginning in a traditional Confucian setting,
the film follows a successful military man as he finds himself at the mercy of
the fickle politics that dominate the court of the T'ang Dynasty. Inadvertently
manipulated into betraying some of the most fundamental values of Confucian
virtue and filial piety, the main character is forced to go into hiding, taking
refuge in a Buddhist monastary. Of course, "taking refuge" is a
pun--for that is what it is called when a person converts to Buddhism--but for
the central character it is quite literal.
As he continues to live in his new environment, the former general finds
himself struggling with profound inner questions about the kind of life he has
lead up until now. Throughout the course of the film, even as he continuously
tries to flee his former life, he is forced to confront and deal with the
consequences of his many past actions. He learns the truth of the Buddhist
teachings as, one by one, all the things that he held dear--his family, his
lover, his pride--are taken from him.
This is truly a sublime film that can speak to audiences on many levels: as
beautiful cinema, as great art, as engrossing entertainment, and as an
opportunity to reflect on some substantial questions.
(P.S. This film also contains the most visually stunning sex scene I have ever
seen.)
Tempation Of A Monk - Korean Movie DVD, Japanese Movie, Chinese ... DVD Asian
With its grand, colorful pageantry and
cast of characters unable to provoke an emotional response from the audience,
TEMPTATION OF A MONK is a curious mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Containing ample portions of sex and graphic violence, this picture serves up
exploitation fare for an upscale, art-house audience.
The plot, which is occasionally difficult to follow
(undoubtedly due to East/West cultural differences), tells a story from the
early years of China's Tang dynasty (circa 626 AD). General Shi (Wu Hsin-kuo)
is a fiercely-loyal, greatly-feared battle commander whose prince, one of three
sons vying for the Emperor's throne, is incompetent. When an offer comes from
rival general Huo Da (Zhang Fengyi, from FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE) for a bloodless
coup if Shi will command his troops to offer no resistance, the stage is set
for betrayal. The takeover turns out to be bloody and Shi's troops (not to
mention his prince) are slaughtered. Distraught, the general abandons his
chance for glory in the new regime, turns his back on a princess who loves him
(Joan Chen), and flees to an out-of-the-way monastery, where he shaves his head
and accepts the 10 Buddhist prohibitions.
There are three exceptionally energetic battle scenes
in TEMPTATION OF A MONK, but the sequences linking them are by turns slow,
confusing, and disjointed. The chief problem seems to be that actor Wu Hsin-kuo
plays the main character in such a detached fashion that it's difficult to see
beneath the mask of self-pity. There's nothing in Shi for the audience to
connect with, and he comes across as exceptionally shallow. The same is true of
the villain, Huo Da, and the love interest, Princess Scarlet. The only
character with a real personality is the 100-year old Abbot of the monastery
where Shi seeks refuge. Played with good cheer and a wry wit by Michael Lee,
this man has words for the moment and wisdom for the centuries.
Like many recent Chinese exports, TEMPTATION OF A
MONK attempts to weave an individual story into a larger, historical backdrop.
However, unlike FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE and TO LIVE, Clara Law's feature doesn't
get the personal story right. The director does a good job with the epic
portion, but when it comes to developing Shi's tale, things don't always work.
This is supposed to be an examination of how battle can convert a warrior into
a seeker of peace and truth, but the violent climax nullifies much of what
TEMPTATION is trying to say. In the end, the film offers evidence that
ambitious stories of this sort need a strong, identifiable protagonist -- something
TEMPTATION OF A MONK too obviously lacks.
Temptation of a
Monk • Senses of Cinema Stephen Teo
from Senses of Cinema, February 13, 2001
FLOATING LIFE (Fu Sheng)
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A fascinating if flawed tale of a Hong
Kong family who emigrate to Australia, where the bossy, largely Westernised
second daughter's warnings about pit-bulls, killer wasps and skin cancer only
add to the difficulties of adjustment; meanwhile, the eldest sister tries to
persuade her husband that they should leave Germany, and the womanising eldest
son wonders whether he too should see in 1997 or join his family. Shifting
steadily from gentle comedy to something more poignant, the film never quite
adds up to anything very compelling or cohesive. Watchable, none the less.
User comments from imdb Author: Old Joe from Hamilton, Australia
Spoilers Warning: This piece was
written for school!
The task of shifting house can be overwhelming. Moving to a new town or city
can be scary. Have you ever considered what it would be like to immigrate to a
new country, where you did not know anyone or spoke that countries language?
You may have immigrated before, if you have not, the film Floating Life, gives
a good insight into what it is like to immigrate and to go through the
experience of dislocation.
The films focus is on the Chan family, Ma and Pa Chan with their two youngest
sons, who are moving to Australia to avoid the communist take over of Hong
Kong, and to be with their ‘Second' daughter, Bing, who has lived and worked in
Australia for three years.
The title, Floating Life, is very clever and is referring to the immigration
experience. When a family lives in a certain place all their life they are said
to have put down ‘roots', but anyone who shifts from country to country loses
all sense of who they are and where they belong, thus they are ‘floating'. This
is exactly what Floating life is trying to portray to the audience, that the
displacement of the whole Chan family, leaves them unsure of who and where they
are meant to be.
The use of the landscape in Floating Life, shows how the Chan's experience
Australia. The contrast coming from the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong, to the
blue skies, bright sun and suburban way of life in Australia, is effectively
done. The scenes when the Chan's first arrive in Australia, are very comical,
because it shows how the family is dumbfounded by their new surroundings, the
wildlife and the freedom that they now have.
The film's focus is very much on immigration and how the Chan's try to
assimilate to their new country, this is exemplified in the character of Bing.
Her character on the surface seems very confident and successful, yet
underneath she is very cynical and paranoid with life, causing much unrest for
her family. The first days the Chan's live with Bing in Australia are tough.
She tells her family the terrors of living in Australia: the cancerous sun,
killer wasps, poisonous red-back spiders, pitbull terriers and that the burning
of incense in a wooden house is not on.
Bing also points out that her two younger brothers are now to speak English,
not Chinese, since they are living in an English speaking country. She almost
acts like a mother to the boys, afraid that they will become ‘louts'. This
creates a wedge in the families relationship with Bing, to the extent, that
they flee to a new home. They feel that Bing is trying to change their culture
and for the worse.
Yet, many of the characters in this film are at a loss, because they are losing
their identity. The Chan's oldest daughter, Yen, who is happily living in
Germany, is at odds because she cannot work out whether she is Chinese or
German. This is after her husband tells their daughter, that because she speaks
Cantonese and not Mandarin, that her mother does not speak ‘real' Chinese. This
provokes Yen to ask, `Who am I?'. Ma and Pa Chan also feel that because they
are in a new country that the tradition of burning incense is no longer worth
it. Furthermore, Pa gives up his passion of Chinese tea, claiming `My heart's
not in it'.
Bing seems on the surface to be the most adjusted to the way of life in
Australia. However after her family leaves her, Bing falls into a great
depression, realising how much she really has given up. This forces her family
to go back to their roots, to help save their daughter. The most poignant scene
in the film, is at the end, when the mother is burning incense, crying a prayer
that her ancestral gods will once again bring back an important member of their
family. Bing's illness helps the Chan's to recapture their culture, and what
made them who they are.
This film is a great look at what a daunting experience immigration must be,
and the effects of the Chinese diaspora. It allows us to go further than just
be an observer, but to experience what the movies character's are feeling,
which is confusion, isolation and alienation. Thus, Floating Life is the search
for a place, to which an individual feels comfortable, in calling ‘home'.
Floating Life - Chinese
Cinema Site, by Shelly Kraicer
Clara Law's new film "Floating Life" has been on the film festival
circuit for only a couple of months, and already it has won widespread acclaim,
including a Silver Leopard prize at the 1996 Locarno Film Festival. It's easy
to see why: FL is a nearly irresistible mix of hilarious Immigrants Disoriented
in a
Narrated by each of the children in turn, "Floating Life" is the
story of the Chan family's emigration from
Played broadly and comically by at first by Annie Yip, Bing attempts to enforce on her parents and brothers her iron regimen of total, cold-turkey assimilation to Western ways. Bing is not only a family fascist: she's terrified to the point of paranoia of the dangers of Australian life (the hole in the ozone layer, vicious neighbourhood dogs, poisonous spiders, houses ready to burst into flame ...). The tension accumulates to hilarious effect until it snaps, the family threatens to shatter, and the story deepens and becomes more serious. Gar Ming drifts into nightmare in HK (after having to confront his dead grandfather's exhumation and his girlfriend's abortion), and he flees to join his parents. The most affecting section of the film explores the root of Bing's behaviour (in a flashback), and celebrates her mother's traditionally mediated response. Mrs. Chan sets up an altar to her family gods just outside the threshold of her new home, and appeals for their intercesion to save her daughter from breakdown.
Thus far, the elements of a standard Chinese diaspora movie. But several aspects of FL allow it to soar above this conventional, slightly predictable premise. Its structure is set out in chapters with a series of titles that define the sequence of houses the action passes through. Clara Law and cinematographer Dion Beebe have taken great care precisely to vary the look of the film. Various film stocks, filters and levels of exposure set off 1) the highly overexposed, bleached, almost colourless Australian scenes (to exaggerate how that foreign space must strike a new arrival from Asia); 2) a rich green pastel-hued Germany; and 3) a neon-bright, detail-packed and full colour spectrum HK (the look, through the distorting mirror of anguished memory, of all the life left behind).
When Clara Law and Eddie Fong's script aims to be funny, it is truly
hilarious: the lost-in-Oz Chan family looks cute, silly, absurd and pitiable
all at once in their timorous treks into the wilds of
In "Farewell
Local and Global
Identity: Whither Hong Kong Cinema? • Senses of ... Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, June 7, 2000
Floating Life: The Heaviness of Moving • Senses of Cinema Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, February 13, 2001
Floating Life Michael Stein from Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, October 2002
Scope | Archive: Film Reviews, Portals Special Issue an20 by Hsiao-Pin Chang, The University of Nottingham, UK
Asian Cinema Studies Society Fifth Biennial Conference Synopsis and brief bio of director
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
The Z Review
Eden Law
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey
San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review
THE GODDESS OF 1967 A 96
Australia
Did you see Melville’s LE SAMOURAI? “The closest thing to a perfect movie I’ve
ever seen.” —John Woo
(Apparently the killer was driving around in a Citroen DS 19, known as the deesse, French for Goddess. )
A young Japanese embezzler, with a passion for snakes, buys a Goddess on the Internet. But when he arrives with $35,000 in cash in a case at the front door, he discovers the owners have just blown themselves away. A blind girl freely shows them the bits of brains on the ceiling before letting him take her for a ride through the Australian outback. This then turns into a completely original road movie that travels through the inner recesses of the blind girl’s memory and imagination, filled with murder, incest, and other horrors and pains. She’s my sister; she’s my daughter; she’s my granddaughter. The best scene is when he plays the jukebox in an old bar and he teaches her to dance. This is filled with dazzling, unforgettable photography and is easily one of the most hauntingly beautiful, yet strangest and most unpredictable films I’ve seen, with a gorgeous performance by the girl, Rose Byrne. Winner of Best Director of the Fest.
Clara Law Dian Li from Senses of Cinema (excerpt)
The Goddess of 1967 may be the most philosophical of all Law films. In
terms of structure and characterisation, it bears a remarkable similarity to Autumn
Moon: the chance encounter of a Japanese tourist with a local girl and
their joint journey in search of self-discovery and self-salvation. These two
films are probably the best examples of Law's cinematic aesthetics: poetic
films that emphasise tonality and atmospherics over cause–effect narratives.
All rhetorical devices such as framing, colour, image, texture and composition
serve to extend the film's penetrating power to the inner world of its
characters. Poetry, as the Russian Formalist aesthetics would put it,
“defamiliarises the familiar” to produce sparks of the sublime. The visual
world of The Goddess of 1967 – the characters, the landscape of the
Australian outback and the steel and glass mammoths of
Film: The Goddess of 1967 Peter Thompson from Sunday ninemsn
The Goddess of 1967, directed by Clara Law, opens this
week in Sydney and Melbourne. Already widely seen on the international festival
circuit, it won the prize for best director at the most recent Chicago Film
Festival and Rose Byrne was chosen as best actress at Venice for her leading
role in the film.
Over the last few years, we've got used to exporting our most promising talent.
Actors and directors, cinematographers and designers all head overseas for
wider horizons and richer rewards. But Clara Law, born in Macao and educated in
Hong Kong and London, has come the other way. Already an established film-maker
with an international reputation when she arrived seven years ago, she lives
here with husband Eddie Fong, who collaborates with her as screenwriter and
producer. The Goddess of 1967 is their second Australian film.
In this film Clara Law has embraced perhaps the most compelling Australian
symbol — the vast dry interior — with a mixture of fear and wonder. Her choice
of images, realised by cinematographer Dion Beebe, is unusually inventive.
"The first time we went to the outback, in '97, two or three years after
we [arrived] here, I was kind of ...it really opened my eyes. I'd never known
it or never imagined it to be like that. And I was scared, but I was also
really inspired, because there's something so very ancient and primeval here
and I felt it was speaking to some ancient memory in me," Law says.
In one sense, the sparsely inhabited expanses with their towering skies and
featureless plains are a clean slate on which the central characters reinvent
themselves. JM comes here from Japan, from the alien, high-tech wilderness of
Tokyo, where his existence is totally isolated from the natural world.
"I think he's the product of excessive materialism and the taking over of
our life by science and technology and big corporate [organisations] and
everything. He's this guy who's very angry inside, who's very disconnected, who
cannot find his connection with the world and people. He spent his life trying
to be connected to something, he connects himself to a snake and he's tried to
connect himself with this car," Law says.
JM's dream is to purchase a car but not just any car. He has searched the
Internet for a Citroen Goddess, the legendary machine first built in 1955 which
has been eulogised as a perfect symbol of modernism. Clara Law sees JM as a
postmodern man, clinging to an obsolete dream of technological perfection.
"But for me the postmodern existence is cold and inhuman and incomplete,
because we are probably very fulfilled in our material need but we are very cut
off from the spiritual side and the emotional side in us," she says.
JM finds his car but it comes with strings attached. His contact is a strangely
carefree blind girl (BG) who has her own reasons for accompanying him on his
journey. As well as her physical disability, BG is burdened with a tragic past,
which for Clara Law is simply a necessary part of being human.
"I think we spend at least half of our life trying to resolve the knots
that we tied when we were young, that we were aware or unaware of. So there are
a lot of knots that we have to untie as we grow older.
"The film is about redemption and love. And I think if you can find that
in yourself — and I mean to really, really find it in yourself and not be
intellectual about it or it being a concept or something — is to be able to
feel that you're ready to forgive at a certain stage in your life, before you
can move on."
If the broader framework of The Goddess of 1967 is relatively familiar,
Clara Law nevertheless uses it to carry some extraordinarily vivid sequences,
which add up to something greater than their apparent sum. JM is the debut
screen appearance of Japanese fashion model Rikiya Kurokawa and a great deal
seems to be going on behind that arresting face. Rose Byrne transcends the
technical problems of rendering blindness to give BG a touchingly vulnerable
vitality.
Striking as the physical locations are in themselves, the visual treatment
deliberately steers away from naturalism. Much of it is consciously artificial,
reflecting the hopes and illusions of the characters as much as anything else.
Although The Goddess of 1967displays the same affection for the
absurdity of human behaviour that Clara Law revealed in her previous film A
Floating Life, it doesn't offer easy laughs or cheap thrills. That said, it
will touch you in unexpected ways. And it's intriguing to contemplate its
perceptions of Australia as an imaginary place, perceptions which may find more
sympathy internationally than they do here. As the old saying goes, a fish
doesn't see the water it swims in.
Materialism and
Spiritualism in The Goddess of 1967 • Senses of ... Fiona A. Villella from Senses of Cinema, April 10, 2001
The Goddess of 1967 An Examination of Clara Law’s The Goddess of 1967 as a Representation of Australian Cultural Identities, by John Grech, October 2002 (read the pdf formatted version)
DVD Savant Review: The Goddess of 1967 Glenn Erickson, also seen here: Turner Classic Movies dvd review
Confused and
cold-hearted The Goddess of 1967 directed by Clara
Law Richard Phillips
from the World Socialist Web Site
eFilmCritic.com (Andrew Howe) review [3/5]
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Dust for Eyes
DVD
Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review
[2/5]
IndependentCritics.com [TC Candler]
10 great dystopian Australian road movies | SciFi Film Festival The Goddess of 1967 (2000) listed at #9, May 19, 2015
An Interview with
Clara Law • Senses of Cinema Katherine
Millard interview from Senses of Cinema, April, 2001
RealTime Arts -
Magazine - issue 43 - Clara Law: an impression of ... Elsie McCredie interview June/July 2001
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen
LETTERS
TO ALI
Australia (106 mi) 2004
Australia is the only ‘Western’ nation that imposes mandatory detention on all asylum seekers, adults and children alike. Letters To Ali is the story of an ordinary Australian woman who decided to find out more about this abhorrent practice. Trish began writing to a number that belonged to Ali, an orphaned 15 year old Afghan boy who was being detained at Port Hedland. The family opened their hearts to Ali, sent him letters, CD’s and made phone calls. Then they travelled 12,000kms round trip to visit their new ‘son’. When they decided to go again the following year, filmmaker Clara Law went along for the ride. Law, a native of Macau, has a reflective approach to life in her adopted homeland. This informs the content and style of Letters To Ali and why an ordinary family would make such an extraordinary effort. She avoids policy to concentrate on the humanity of people like Trish who stand up to the fear that surrounds refugees, despite the paradox that keeps Ali as faceless as the government wants him, and hundreds like him, to remain. It’s a heartfelt film that is touching and enlightening despite Law’s protracted and meandering style. An early promise of intimacy is unfulfilled and handheld camerawork has a high queasy quotient – breathtaking landscapes are reduced to a nauseous digital blur that add nothing to her story. Another trip through the edit suite would have vastly improved the impact of this film and its galling subject. “Children must not be put in jail without just cause,” said Malcolm Fraser. Hopefully Law’s film will bring this message closer to those who need to hear it.
Urban Cinefile (Australia) Richard Kuipers
Teenage refugee Ali (not his real name) has been held in Baxter Detention Centre in Port Hedland since fleeing the Taliban in 2001. Responding to a community appeal to help refugees and asylum seekers, Doctor Trish Kerbi and her family have been corresponding with Ali for 18 months. Determined to meet the boy, the family embarks on an 8,600 km journey to Baxter. Documentary maker Clara Law accompanies the family and reflects on her own migration from Hong Kong to Australia as the journey progresses.
Letters To Ali opens with elegantly composed images of Melbourne
suburbia, where Clara Law and partner Eddie L.C. Fong now live after migrating
from cramped quarters in Hong Kong almost a decade ago. Simple text on screen
informs us of her history and happiness living in a house that has "more
rooms than people".
In this quietly and intelligently composed overture, Law imparts just the right
mix of hard information and personal commentary to establish her legitimacy as
author and participant in this exploration of a migrant much less fortunate
than herself. 15 year-old Ali is one of more than 100 minors currently held in
mandatory detention in Australia. His story, and that of the family reaching
out to help him, has been fashioned by Law into a deeply moving account of
injustice and how ordinary people can indeed make a big difference.
The key to this documentary's appeal is the absolutely pure motives of Dr Trish
Kerbi and her family. From the moment they arrive on screen, they epitomise the
ordinary, fair-minded Aussie people next door whose concern for the welfare of
a child prompts an extraordinary demonstration of compassion. The high-spirited
family's trek through the outback is a visually and emotionally exhilarating
one. The mutual trust and commonness of cause between subjects and filmmakers
is plain to see and by the time we reach Baxter they're like old friends. So
warm is their presence (and so brutally honest are the children's descriptions
of the barbed wire fences at Baxter) that the legally enforced non-appearance
of Ali himself in no way diminishes the impact.
The analysis of bigger political issues surrounding Ali's case is wisely
non-expert driven for the overwhelming majority of the running time, though Law
does permit a couple of well-timed detours. Commentaries by former PM Malcolm
Fraser (whose reputation as a statesman of vision and compassion grows daily)
and Immigration Minister Ian Macphee (79-82) draw sharp distinctions between
current policies and the bi-partisan approach to refugees and asylum seekers in
Australia's recent past.
Specifically, they refer to the welcoming of boat people in the wake of the war
in Vietnam and how neither side of politics used this influx of refugees to
create fear or mistrust. Their testimony is nothing short of a devastating
attack on the current government's mandatory detention of refugees - a policy,
it must be remembered, that was established by a federal Labor government. Law
tells us in her commentary she "dropped everything" to make this film
and her passion is evident in every frame. She cannot tell Ali's story without
also telling her own and the results are deeply affecting. No matter where you
stand politically or in relation to refugee policy, Letters To Ali is a
stirring achievement that only the hardest heart will not be moved by.
Letters
to Ali film analysis • Clara Law • Senses of Cinema Roger
Dawkins, December 2014
World
Socialist Web Site Richard Phillips
Lawrence, Elizabeth
ROLL OUT, COWBOY B 84
USA (75 mi) 2010 Official site
The question this film asks is whether the world is a better place with singing cowboys in it? Popularized in the early B-movie westerns of the 1930’s and 40’s, cinema introduced Gene Autry to the world, and later Roy Rogers who also appeared on television with Dale Evans along with the Sons of the Pioneers. While the initial novelty may have worn off through the years, this film documents a revival of sorts, showcasing the special talents of Chris “Sandman” Sand, a rapping cowboy influenced by the rap craze of the 80’s, a young man from Dunn Center, North Dakota, population 120, where he purchased his old broken down house for a cool $1000, as that’s all he had in his pocket at the time, stuck in the middle of the vast emptiness of the Great Plains where there are considerably more livestock animals than there are people. Sandman acknowledges suffering from occasional bouts of depression, also that the previous two tenants of his home were musicians that committed suicide. This seems to motivate him, however, serving notice to the world that he’s a force to be reckoned with. A good natured, self effacing and completely unpretentious individual, Sandman often takes his talent on the road where he sings a combination of home grown personal ballads that he writes, which are more typically cowboy songs alongside rap and rhyme adventures that he learned to appreciate while living on an Indian Reservation as a teen in Western Montana in the 80’s.
Sandman’s personal hero is Will Rogers who he claims was a
Cherokee Indian born in
What feels unique in this small, upbeat, and more often than not delightful film is authentic showcasing of people living on the fringe, both rural and in the cities, who aren’t that far removed from homeless people, as they are just barely scraping by. It’s reminiscent of the remaining elements of the post 60’s counter culture, where Sandman has a much more evolved tolerance for racial and sexual diversity than people that normally live in the wide open spaces of the West, who tend to be more elderly and hard core conservative. Sandman’s following includes an idealistic youth movement that sees a brighter day ahead, who see him on the vanguard of a coming social change, as his songs advocate a different kind of world than the one we live in, a kinder, gentler place where despite obvious differences, people have fewer insurmountable obstacles and almost no one uses confrontational tactics. Messages tend to be artistically expressed in songs or poetry instead of political demonstrations which they have little use for. Sandman spends a good deal of his time holed up in the remote isolation of his rural home, where there are few neighbors nearby, but instead hills and vast plateaus that extend to the far reaching horizons, where a sunset may pass for his weekly social communion. Living with this degree of loneliness built into his life, it comes as no surprise that his songs are so intensely personal, reflecting the spare reveries of another passing day living alone, where friends and his connection to the world seem to have more nobler, far reaching ramifications. Skillfully directed by a Columbia College graduate who accentuates distances and a notable emotional sparseness, unfortunately few will ever see or hear Sandman, but he’s the genuine article.
Chicago Reader Michael Wilmington
The bizarre act of Chris "Sandman" Sand—original cowboy ballads interspersed with rapping—doesn't seem like the best strategy for pop-music stardom, nor does the fact that he still lives in his tiny hometown of Dunn Center, North Dakota, whose elderly residents probably prefer Roy Rogers to LL Cool J. But there's something charming about Sandman's oddball quest and the indomitable spirit that shines through his hapless road tour, his hexed day job as a truck driver, and the free concert of sometimes raunchy material that he performs for his polite neighbors. Director-cinematographer Elizabeth Lawrence treats her likable, talented subject with the bemused affection he deserves.
NewCity Chicago Ray Pride
Elizabeth Lawrence’s “Roll Out, Cowboy” follows Chris Sand, the “Rappin’ Cowboy” of Dunn Center, North Dakota, Population 120, an itinerant 39-year-old troubadour touring the West with his unlikely specialty. The loneliness and decline of small-town America is the understated undercurrent of “Roll Out,” as memorable s the genial fumbling of the likable, so-sincere Sand. What life is there for him on the road? What life is there for anyone in these towns? Sand makes a fine figurehead for the disappearing working class that’s followed the disappearing “Middle Class.” Fans of docs like “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” may well be tickled. Lawrence, a Chicago native, worked with a largely Chicago-based crew, several of whom are alumni of the Columbia College Film/Video production program. The cinematography, taking in landscape and rustic small-town interiors, as well as the sound design, are top-notch. 75m
ROLL OUT, COWBOY Facets Multi Media
His tour bus is broken, he bought his house for a thousand bucks,
and his hometown's population is 120 and shrinking. Chris "Sandman"
Sand is the face of the nostalgic American West, except for one thing: He looks
like a Woody Guthrie protégé but raps like LL Cool J. Roll Out, Cowboy
follows this country/hip-hop musician as he tours the country during the during
the last U.S. presidential election. When hip hop music hit the airwaves of the
North Dakota badlands, where Sand grew up, he learned to rap and rhyme to the
pulse of baling machines and irrigation pumps. From indie rock groupies in city
clubs to flirty grannies grinding against him in rural community dance halls,
no one can resist Sandman's winsome charms or the genre-blending and endearing
style that's uniquely his own. Chris Sand's story is about one man's daily
effort to make his voice heard.
Roll Out, Cowboy is a one of a kind documentary, that not only showcases
the musical fusion of country/hip hop/folk/rap/ styles, but also presents a
part of America that remains immune to marketing campaigns, record labels, and
consumerist politicking, as if it were the truth. Director Elizabeth Lawrence
in her outstanding debut film, allows us to follow Sandman the Rappin' Cowboy
as he travels from red state to blue and back again, blending discordant music
genres into a style uniquely his own. This is not the romanticized, Roy Rogers
version of the American frontier. This is Sandman. The cowboy who raps.
Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Chris Sand, a resident of Dunn Center, N.D., northwest of Bismarck, where he lives in a house he bought for $1,000, goes by the handle "Sandman, the Rappin' Cowboy." This sweet, side-winding little documentary from director Elizabeth Lawrence follows Sand on a no-budget U.S. tour of some incredibly small bars and events with fellow musicians Jonah Carpenter (who doesn't last long) and Shawn Parke (who does).
Sand's talents lie in various, half-formed directions, judging from the man we get to know here. He's a passable cowboy rapper, albeit the only one in his field. He's effective at lining up interested one-night stands with song lyrics about "goin' downtown." He's lucky to be alive, based on his experiences as a long-haul trucker in training. And he's a political activist of medium wattage ("Barack Obama/Will rock your mama").
Somehow you add it up, and Sand becomes more than enough for his own documentary. Lawrence shot "Roll Out, Cowboy" in 2008 and early 2009, and the images of small-town North Dakota, Iowa, Montana, Washington and Missouri just before and after the launch of the Obama era, as the recession sinks in for a good long stay, reveal a surprising amount about the way we live a couple of years later. My favorite voice in the picture belongs to a real cowboy, Jonathan Lind, who makes a fleeting appearance (he's also from North Dakota), and in two or three sentences talks about the good money he makes working on an oil rig, and the time that takes away from what he loves, which is "calving heifers in the spring and shipping cattle in the fall" and watching the sun rise on the prairie.
Onion AV Club Cory Casciato
ChiIL Mama: Sandman The Rappin' Cowboy LIVE at Bonnie Kenaz-Mara from Chill Mama, July 23, 2011
WBEZ Jonathan Miller
User reviews from imdb Author: from United States
Interview with filmmakers Sara Burrows interviews the filmmaker and producer from The Lake Forester, July 19, 2011
The Official Site of Will Rogers
Lawrence, Francis
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS C+ 78
USA (122 mi) 2011 ‘Scope
An interesting box office combination, pairing the ever appealing Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon with teen idol sensation, Twilight boy Robert Pattinson, both extremely attractive and gorgeous to look at with People magazine important Hollywood faces, where, expectedly, the producers should make a killing. And placed in between these two, keeping them apart, why not implement another Academy Award winner, that sadistic Nazi from INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009), Christoph Waltz playing another sadistically evil man audiences love to hate? Let’s see, add up the Witherspoon crowd, the Twilight crowd, and the Tarantino crowd - - surely this is a match made in box office heaven. It very well may be, and it’s pleasantly enjoyable enough, but typical genre material, safe and playing by the book, with little razzle dazzle or excitement except the look of the film which appears terrific in the trailer, but uses the tried and true TITANIC (1997) formula of an old geezer (Hal Holbrook) recalling the entire film in a flashback sequence. Based on a best selling novel by Sara Gruen, the present recalls the Depression days, where Holbrook, an escapee on the loose from a nearby nursing home misses his connection of meeting his son at the circus, as he’s there in the evening while the performance took place in the afternoon. That leaves him plenty of time to have a drink with the young circus owner (Paul Schneider) and pour out his memories of the world’s worst circus disaster way back in 1931. Beautifully photographed by Rodrigo Prieto, especially the sensuous lighting scheme, which makes the intimate scenes in the cramped, lamp lit train cars seem even more delicate while also capturing the spectacular colors under the big top of the circus.
Pattinson, who will forever be associated with the Twilight series, doesn’t really stake out new territory. He’d have to be a deliciously evil guy for that to happen, or disfigured or handicapped in some kind of way, where he has an altogether different perception than being just another pretty face, as he is again here. Overly naïve and always idealistically good, he is the same character simply transplanted into a different story, an aspiring young veterinarian whose final exams are interrupted by the death of his Polish immigrant parents, leaving him to fend for himself, broke, alone, and homeless, as the bank took the house. Hitching the rails, as so many did during the Depression, he just happens to hop the train of the Great Benzini Brothers traveling circus, where he quickly makes a name for himself as the animal vet. But what really attracts his eyes is the star of the show, the scantily clad bareback rider, Witherspoon, blond and in curls, wearing backless, form fitting silk dresses, looking sensational. She’s married, however, to the boss of the show, the ringmaster Christoph Waltz who tyrannically rules with an iron fist, surrounded by guys with muscle who protect his every move. Immediately seen as a penny pincher and a guy who will do anything for a buck, like kick guys off a moving train if he can’t or is unwilling to pay them, his questionable ethics and ruthless tactics are betrayed by his perfectly charming and civilized manner, where his mood see saws back and forth, becoming uncontrollably jealous and wildly paranoid when he’s had too much to drink. In other words, he’s the fun character to watch, while the other two are running around behind the scenes trying to ignite sparks that never come.
But since this is a circus story, the real star of the show is Rosie the elephant, an animal with a soft spot for alcohol, but instantly becomes their sensational new act, the one designed to fill seats and make them rich, even though the initial performance goes haywire and nearly gets the star rider killed. But not to worry, elephants are smart and notice the difference in mood and temperament in terms of how they’re treated. Pattinson prefers not poking the poor animal with the hook, while Waltz gores the thing repeatedly until it bleeds. Pattinson’s good guy routine catches the twinkle in Reese’s eye, as both are animal lovers, and of course, Rosie is delighted by a friendlier handler. Perhaps the most absurd moment in the movie occurs when Pattinson discovers the animal speaks Polish, as it responds to commands in Polish and suddenly does circus tricks. Well this certainly saves the audience from having to endure the painfully repetitious acts of learning how to train an animal. Like magic, the animal saves the show. Waltz, on the other hand, continues to mistreat the animals, but none more than Reese, his own personal pet, that he likes to train his own way. If Pattinson objects, there are the muscle guys who will beat him bloody, forcing him to witness her mistreatment in silence. As he’s about to leave the circus for good, admitting he’s been whipped, there’s a commotion under the big top, where someone has released all the wild cats, where the lions and tigers are charging the audience and causing mayhem, screams everywhere as some people are trampled. In the middle of it all, of course, true love finds a way, sending the audience home with a Hallmark picture postcard finale, using a system of painting by numbers, supposedly pressing all the right buttons, but ultimately lacking in every respect except how to shoot the animals and the star performers and make them appear superficially glorious. The movie is easy on the eyes, but by the end, one is reminded of the infamous P.T. Barnum expression: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Based on the book by Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants follows Depression-era veterinarian Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson) as he impulsively decides to join a traveling circus - with problems ensuing as Jacob begins to fall for the wife (Reese Witherspoon's Marlena) of owner/animal trainer August Rosenbluth (Christoph Waltz). There's little doubt that Water for Elephants gets off to an exceedingly promising start, as filmmaker Francis Lawrence, working from Richard LaGravenese's screennplay, opens the proceedings with a modern-day sequence revolving around an older Jacob's (Hal Holbrook) arrival at a contemporary circus. It's a stirring sequence that's heightened by Holbrook's engaging, downright poignant performance, with the film's compulsively watchable atmosphere perpetuated by the initial scenes set within the past - as Lawrence does a nice job of infusing such moments with a melodramatic and suitably old-fashioned feel that proves impossible to resist. It's only as the novelty of the movie's off-kilter locale wears off that its deficiencies start to become clear, with the three leads' ill-fated efforts at stepping into the shoes of their respective characters certainly standing as the most obvious example of this. (Waltz fares especially poorly, as the actor delivers an unreasonably broad turn that sucks the energy out of the movie on an all-too-frequent basis.) The episodic nature of LaGravenese's screenplay ensures that Water for Elephants is subsequently only enthralling in spurts, with the number of talky, pointless sequences generally (and increasingly) outweighing moments of an organic and wholeheartedly gripping variety (eg August takes out his considerable rage on an elephant). The absence of chemistry between Jacob and Marlena cements Water for Elephants' place as a fairly misbegotten adaptation, which is a shame, really, given the strength of the source material and the talent both in front of and behind the camera.
Water For Elephants | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
The screen adaptation of Sara Gruen’s bestselling historical novel Water For Elephants has this in its favor: It’s the perfect release for an Easter weekend, when families nationwide will be looking for inoffensive, moderately engaging entertainment to distract them for a few hours without unduly upsetting anyone. There’s nothing challenging about this polished Depression-era romance, but while it comes wrapped in a hearty dose of sentimentality and uplift, it rarely tugs at the heartstrings hard enough to become cloying. It isn’t a film the whole family can love, but it’s a film the whole family can stomach.
Twilight mainstay Robert Pattinson stars as a would-be veterinarian who stumbles into a job at a small traveling circus after a family disaster derails his college career at the very moment his final exam begins. (His professors couldn’t have waited a mere two hours to tell him the bad news, thus allowing him to graduate? Not in a story this devoted to broad strokes and contrived barriers.) At the circus, he falls for pretty star attraction Reese Witherspoon, the wife of mercurial, abusive ringmaster Christoph Waltz. The circus is on the brink of financial ruin, and Pattinson’s new livelihood is periodically in danger, until Waltz acquires an elephant named Rosie from a defunct competing circus. Then Witherspoon and Pattinson bond over their affection for the animal, as Waltz becomes progressively more suspicious and violent, which puts Pattinson’s life in danger as well.
Gruen’s novel was constructed around a single narrative surprise, but there are no such shocks in the film version, helmed by former music-video director Francis Lawrence (who also directed Constantine and I Am Legend). It’s a tastefully managed, passionless melodrama, full of brooding looks and reasonably sweet moments, but typified by a scantly characterized central couple who bring no sense of engagement to their relationship. Witherspoon comes across as sad and wary at best, while Pattinson’s terrible summation of his hopes for their future—“You’re a beautiful woman, you deserve a beautiful life”—veers beyond callow into laughable. Only Waltz (the deserving Best Supporting Actor winner for 2009’s Inglourious Basterds) brings some verve to his performance, and even he winds up limited by the plodding story, which mechanically brings two pretty people together, traumatizes them, then holds them apart. Water For Elephants respects its source material to the point of lacking its own identity or any sense of commitment, but at least its mild, innocuous charms assure it won’t spoil the holiday weekend by being divisive or difficult.
Water for Elephants | Film Review | Slant Magazine Glenn Heath Jr.
Beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, and Water for Elephants finds immense pleasure in juxtaposing extreme dimensionality with budding emotion. Director Francis Lawrence stages this aesthetic motif within the colorful microcosm of a traveling circus fighting off bankruptcy during the Great Depression. Shot by the great cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, the film relishes levels of light and texture, often pulling back in wide angle to let the sheer size of an elephant or the grace of a woman on horseback dangle before our eyes. Economic collapse hovers on the periphery, like a wolf waiting for its prey to fall lame. This pressure, represented by the countless "dead circuses" seen throughout the story, inevitably weighs heavily against the film's more fantastical and hopeful elements. Wonder seems to be the only glue keeping Water for Elephant's big top from collapsing.
Told in standard flashback/voiceover narration by an old man (Hal Holbrook) musing to a fellow circus aficionado, Water for Elephants feels like a sweet fable adrift in a sea of darker realities. Poverty, isolation, and destitution are apparent, but often relegated to the background. Wild Boys of the Road this is not. While most of the United States is drifting aimlessly into a black hole, you'd never know it from visiting the house of Cornel veterinary student Jacob Jankowsky (Robert Pattinson), whose Polish emigrant parents sacrificed everything to make his life structured and supportive. That all changes when Jacob's mother and father are killed in a car wreck, forcing the young man to give up school and hit the road. One train hitch later and he's landed a temporary gig with a low-tier circus named the Benzini Brothers, a wondrously seedy outfit headed by the masochistic ringleader August (Christoph Waltz) and his graceful wife Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), the star performer for the show.
Illusion defines each of these characters and their motivations. August invites Jacob into his close circle of thugs and performers only because the young man has knowledge of veterinary medicine, and could potentially help the circus compete with the dreaded Ringling Brothers. Marlena is immediately attracted to Jacob, but her flirtations only rise to uncomfortable levels after drinking too much champagne. Caught between a psychotic businessman and a luminary lost woman, Jacob is more observer than hero. The film is most interesting when his perspective is limited to glimpses and flashes, whether it's watching Marlena train her horses from a distance, or gazing at August orate to the crowd overwhelmed by a harsh spot light.
In the first hour of Water for Elephants, the core triangle of characters seamlessly merges with the legions of other performers and workers. The circus becomes a living, breathing organism with hierarchies that are at first deeply fascinating. Waltz complicates the grandeur and poetry of the institution by calling it "a sovereign nation," an independent and fluid community run by the iron fist of its leader. The ways in which each character subverts this fascist code makes the film substantive even while delving into familiar territory. Jacob disobeys a direct order from August and chooses to shoot an injured horse instead of watching it suffer, while Marlena slyly acts on her affections for Jacob through subtle glances and fleeting dances. This pattern culminates when August purchases an elephant named Rosie as the show's new main attraction, and Jacob grows increasingly attached to the beast's kindness and power, treating her as a friend instead of an animal. For a while, these sublime moments allow the film to survive the many cracks of sentimentality ripping at the façade.
When the dam of secrets finally breaks, Water for Elephants hastily veers into conventional territory. The illusion, the magic, the wonder disappear, replaced by tepid romance, obvious revenge, and pandering melodrama. At this point, the characters seem preordained to follow a specific linear track riddled with exposition and sentimentality. The climax, supposedly one of the worst circus disasters according to our narrator, is neither epic nor convincing, and merely an excuse for the script to wrap up fitting endings for both its villains and heroes. Lawrence completely abandons Jacob's lucid memory track, possibly because he's no longer an observer, but now an active participant. Still, Pattinson's uneven performance isn't up to the challenges created by Waltz's sadistic dynamism, and he often falls prey to reacting to situations rather than acting within them.
By the end of Water for Elephants, I found myself thinking back to the prophetic words Holbrook's older Jacob says in the opening scene: "I had a good life, a big life." For a while, Jacob's memory latches onto the vivid levels of size and affection interconnecting with a mesmerizing vision of the past. The depth to his hazy dreams goes deep. It's too bad Water for Elephants sells out, rendering its many magical acts moot in point and purpose.
Water for Elephants Review: Almost Everything is an Illusion ... Agent Bedhead from Pajiba
Water for Elephants Erik Childress from e-Filmcritic
Water For Elephants — Inside Movies Since 1920 Pam Grady from Box Office magazine
Filmcritic.com Bill Gibron
Water for Elephants review Rebecca Murray from About.com
Water for Elephants - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Water for Elephants (8/10) Tony Medley
Water for Elephants Peter Sobczynski from e-Filmcritic
'Water for Elephants' Movie Review | RopeofSilicon Brad Brevet
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Water for Elephants : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Brian Orndorf from DVD Talk, also from e-Filmcritic: Water for Elephants
FILM REVIEW: Water for Elephants Eli Glasner from CBC News
Exciting and Romantic Circus Tale - ReelTalk Movie Reviews Betty Jo Tucker
Review: Water for Elephants Harvey Karten
The MovieHamlet [Stefan Hedmark]
Water for Elephants: Movie Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Variety Reviews - Water for Elephants - Film Reviews - New U.S. ... Peter Debruge
Water for Elephants: Tough times, with a rose tint - The Globe and ... Rick Groen from The Globe and the Mail
'Water for Elephants' (PG-13) Connie Ogle from The Miami Herald
'Water for Elephants' review: High-wire circus act Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle
'Water for Elephants': Movie review - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Water for Elephants :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews
Reese Witherspoon in 'Water for Elephants' - Review - NYTimes.com film review, April 21, 2011
Water for Elephants - By Sara Gruen - NYTimes.com book review, June 4, 2006
Book Review: 'Water for Elephants' - The New York Times book review, July 12, 2007
Lawrence, Ray
BLISS
Australia
Urban Cinefile (Australia) Andrew
L. Urban
Harry Joy (Barry Otto) is a
successful advertising executive but a less successful husband. When he has a
heart attack and dies for a few minutes, his life (and his view of life)
changes. His wife Bettina (Lynette Curran) is having a sordid affair and his
teenage son David (Miles Buchanan) is exchanging sexual favours from his sister
Lucy (Gia Carides) with drugs. Life seems somewhat more problematic - more
hellish. His discomfort is further propelled when he meets the beautiful nature
child (and ex-hooker), Honey Barbara (Helen Jones), but it leads him to
discover a new kind of bliss.
Before its time as a film, Bliss
confronted the mid 80s audiences with its audacity. As a novel, the themes and
symbols are only slightly less striking, but that's because the images are
secretly played out in our own mind. Not so with black comedy in the cinema.
It got a dreadful reception at Cannes
Barry Otto is unique, too, an actor whose peculiar voice characteristics lend
themselves to the slightly surreal world of Bliss.
This DVD release is a major milestone for Australian cinema, providing both the
theatrical release version and the director's cut, together with the all
important commentary track from the filmmakers. This, in part, puts on record
one memorable letter (out of many) from a viewer after the film's screening on
ABC TV, referring to 'that disgusting, filthy, depraved film you showed the
other night... when are you showing it again?'
Of course it's a fascinating experience to see Bliss now, 20 years after its
debut. None of its bizarre twists and turns seem to have dated and the film's
caustic flavour still bites through its comic delirium. The commentary,
beautifully droll and laconic by both director Ray Lawrence and producer
Anthony Buckley, has a nostalgia-tinged tone, peppered with anecdotes and
memories, to make it as much a personal reflection as a filmic notation.
eFilmCritic Reviews John Rice
Most movie fans have a handful of
virtually unknown titles they cherish as personal favorites. Little gems they
can think of as their own since virtually nobody else has seen, or even heard
of them. The 1985 Australian film Bliss, from director Ray Lawrence (Lantana),
falls into that category for me. While it caused something of a spectacle on
its original release and won several major Australian Film Institute awards, in
the 20 years since, it has fallen off into virtual obscurity. Until late 2005
it had never been released on DVD anywhere in the world, until Roadshow
Entertainment finally released a 2 disc Special Edition in Australia in
September. Finally, not only is this wonderfully quirky film available for home
viewing, the original 129 minute version, essentially unseen outside the Cannes
film festival, is available for the first time.
Harry Joy (Barry Otto) is an
amiable and fairly successful advertising executive who possesses a particular
skill for telling engrossing stories. He has a happy marriage to wife Bettina
(Lynette Curran), his daughter Lucy (Gia Carides) is studying to be a social
worker and his son David (Miles Buchanan) is going to be a doctor. The only
problem is, Harry is about to die. During the four minutes of Harry's death he
gets an understanding of life he had never imagined and once revived, he begins
to believe he has not actually survived, but has died and gone to Hell. Bettina
is now having a brazen affair with his business partner, David is a drug dealer
and Lucy is exchanging sexual favors for cocaine. Harry decides it is time to
make some changes and face reality and the "flower child" Honey
Barbara (Helen Jones) he meets while on a weekend bender seems to be just the
person to help get him there.
Bliss is adapted for the screen by Lawrence and the
source book's author Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda) in what is one of the
better novel to screen adaptations. The quirky, Vonnegut style sense of humor
in the source carries through quite well, while being a bit tempered, which in
this case is a good thing. Where the novel borders on being childish at times,
the film is more successful at maintaining its sense of humor without taking it
quite as far.
Despite it's silly exterior, this is a meaningful and rather profound story
about finding purpose and satisfaction in life and how difficult they are to
achieve. Like the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, they are simply coated with a layer
of acerbic wit and dark, brutal honesty. Harry finds it fairly easy to
determine the course he should follow, but significantly more difficult to actually
continue on that course as long as it takes. As with real life, he is
constantly challenged by flashy, immediate, and more socially demanded actions.
The road is more than a bit bumpy and he is forced to negotiate some rather
outrageous obstacles in his quest for happiness. His repeated mistakes are not
fixed with simple, quick solutions as so many movies prefer, but often take
years to rectify. Along the way, it is easy to become surprisingly attached to
this oddball and subconsciously cheer for him to succeed. It is a surprisingly
powerful film, the full impact of which doesn't completely hit until the final
scene, with a wonderfully poetic monologue.
Easily the greatest pleasure of the Australian 2 disc Special Edition is the
inclusion of the original 129 minute version. Previous to this, most if not all
versions released anywhere on video were an edited 108 minute version, which
was considerably choppier in narrative and didn't fully expand on some of the
more subtle elements. While the longer version still has its flaws, it is a
significant improvement over the edited one and essentially renders the 108
minute version unnecessary and undesirable, except as an example of how
important editing is to effective filmmaking. Thie review originally appeared
on Slacker-Reviews.com.
This is one of those special
movies whose reach exceeds its grasp and is well worth the extra effort
required to be seen.
DVD Times Gary Couzens
The New York Times (Richard F. Shepard)
LANTANA A- 93
The Village Voice [Dennis Lim]
In Lantana, Ray Lawrence's
fastidious diagram of inert lives and impacted relationships, Sydney is for all
intents and purposes an outer circle of hell. Adapted by Andrew Bovell from his
play Speaking in Tongues (currently at the Gramercy Theatre), the film
creates a world so hermetic its every interaction is practically incestuous.
Middle-aged cop Leon (Anthony LaPaglia) is ambivalently involved with
just-separated Jane (Rachael Blake), whom he met at the salsa classes that his
wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), enjoys markedly more than he does. Sonja has an
inkling of Leon's infidelity, and confides in her somewhat glazed therapist
(Barbara Hershey)—whose own marriage, to a stoic academic (Geoffrey Rush), is a
sickbed of paranoia and heartache, battered beyond repair by the still-raw
death of a pre-teen daughter.
The chance-impelled multi-strand
narrative is an intrinsically expansive form, premised on the possibility of
(and yearning for) connection, even if the sensibility tends toward the
depressive (see, most obviously, Magnolia). But Lantana is a
perverse model of circumscription—its closest analogue may be a Neil LaBute
contraption like Your Friends and Neighbors. Notions of serendipity or
happenstance are too benign to apply to the underlying machinations in this
purgatory, where synchronicity is a grim twist of fate and there is no such
thing as a happy accident. In the most disquieting scene, Leon rounds a bend
while out jogging, smashing into a stranger, who first staggers away bloodied
then falls weeping into Leon's arms. (Bovell's script is never more fatuous
than when this character is resurrected, along with other minor players, for
what Magnolia devotees will recognize as a sub-Aimee Mann congregation.)
Lantana divides its bottomless reserve of misery among four
couples (Jane's estranged, hapless husband and her young, working-class,
ostensibly contented neighbors are also roped in), and cedes to a
missing-person investigation midway. Lawrence, a director of commercials whose
only previous feature credit is 1985's Bliss (based on the Peter Carey
novel), gives the film an aptly enervated look, and he gets nuanced
performances from LaPaglia, Blake, and especially Armstrong, though the
psychology is skimpy to the point of abstraction. The scenario eventually
becomes so coincidence-choked that the filmmakers have no choice but to play it
for mild snickers. Indeed, the oppressively hesitant, reticent tone often seems
like mere counterballast to the mounting implausibilities. The characters keep
bumping into each other, like molecules in a collision chamber, and the oxygen
begins to deplete as the degrees of separation dwindle to zero.
Sixteen years ago, director Ray Lawrence
wowed the movie-going world with his debut feature Bliss, a black comedy that
garnered a nomination for the Palme d'Or at
Forty-something
When Dr. Somers goes missing, the intersection of these lives and others
crystallizes into a web that may lead to murder, and
Lantana's
Where Lantana truly excels is in its deft evocation of this disparate
group's lives and its rich characterizations, given flesh and blood by the
power of its ensemble. Particularly effective are Rush, whose face is a mask
that can't quite contain John's escalating grief, and LaPaglia, whose
performance anchors the film. His
Watching Lantana, it is hard not to regret that Ray Lawrence took so long between films. The good news is that he's finally back.
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
Monogamy isn't cutting it for the middle-aged marrieds in Australia's "Lantana," a perceptive, powerfully acted psychodrama about a quartet of couples in crisis and the resulting crimes of the heart: betrayal, neglect and, as the film's eerie prologue suggests, even murder.
The victim – one of four female protagonists – is still among the living when the suspenseful, multilayered story opens. The mystery asks not only whodunit but also who was done, if indeed she was done at all.
Though it comes complete with clues, motives and all the trappings of a mystery, the movie is driven by its characters – 10 lost souls who are just going through the motions.
Some, like psychiatrist Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey) and her husband, John Knox (Geoffrey Rush), have suffered grievous losses; others, like policeman Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) and his wife (Kerry Armstrong), are struggling with a stale marriage. But all are in the throes of over-40 existentialism, asking themselves as chanteuse Peggy Lee once did, "Is that all there is?"
Like the dense, entangling shrub that gives the movie its name, all of the characters are connected – some by sheer coincidence. The film grew out of playwright Andrew Bovell's "Speaking in Tongues." And although Bovell's script retains the intimacy of the play, it's not stagy; as the title suggests, it sites many a critical scene in thickets buzzing with insects and down dark, lonely roads.
Detective Zat takes center stage even before he is assigned to the case. And as it is gradually revealed, Zat is both crime-solver and suspect. Whether guilty of murder or not, he is no innocent. The headboard-banging sex scene that serves as his introduction says it all. He's cheating on his alienated wife, Sonja, with Jane (Rachael Blake), a gutsy dame recently separated from her clingy husband (Glenn Robbins).
Sonja is a patient of Valerie, who is struggling unsuccessfully with the death of her 11-year-old daughter. She and her husband are of no help to each other, but float past one another like ghosts. In her fragile state, Valerie begins to believe that one of her patients, a combative gay man (Peter Phelps), is sleeping with John.
Add to the mix Jane's neighbors (Vince Colosimo and Daniella Farinacci), a mysterious jogger, a Latin lover and a dance teacher, and you have what could have been a bewildering maze. Director Ray Lawrence hasn't made a feature film since 1986's award-winning "Bliss," yet he never loses the audience, just as the actors never lose sight of their distinctively drawn, empathetic characters.
"Lantana" is a lot like a Robert Altman film, without the sarcasm or the contempt for mankind's folly. The movie's writer and director are compassionate, if somewhat fatalistic, when it comes to the staying power of relationships. Bad things happen to good marriages. And, the filmmakers suggest, betrayal is worst of all.
Caught in the Web: Ray Lawrence's Lantana • Senses of Cinema Mark Freeman, September 18, 2001
“It's tangled”: Lantana (Ray Lawrence, 2001) • Senses of Cinema Christie Long, March 13, 2011
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
PopMatters Nikki Tranter
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet)
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
indieWIRE Peter Brunette
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
JINDABYNE B+ 90
Australia
An interesting, yet extremely uncomfortable movie, that from the outset grabs the audience by the throat, then settles into a comfortable portrait of life in the small town of Jindabyne, an entranceway to Australia’s Snowy Mountains region, before eventually becoming a slow burn of seething under the surface outrage, with hands pointing in every which direction except to whoever is really responsible for a hideous unsolved crime. When the opening credits warn the viewers that there may be uncomfortable scenes ahead portraying dead spirits, naming the tribal regions which may take offense, well that is another eye opener. Utilizing the immense expanse of a solitary road winding through the desolate outback leading up to the mountains, beautifully shot on ‘Scope by David Williamson, we may as well be entering TWIN PEAKS, as we become instantly familiarized with some of the town’s notables, who all cast a friendly eye to one another while harboring deeply unresolved secrets from the past which come bubbling up to the surface from time to time. We are introduced to two troubled children, one with a morbid yet uncontrollable fascination with death. Troubled children usually indicate troubled families, and when the two kids kill what was a classroom pet, the adults all head for differing emotional cover, yet something unsettling is in the air, reflected as well by the troubled marriage of Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne, who are attempting to recover from even more serious events from their past.
Of course, when there’s trouble, what do men do but go on a fishing trip, heading for a remote location by their favorite river, walking exhausting miles to get there, settling down to camp by the river’s edge. Of interest, this pristine mountainous region has been invaded by a stream of electric wires strung high above the trees, with an accompanying soundtrack of anguished cries and moans, suggesting some mystery lies underneath, like they must have desecrated sacred territory. And in his first series of casts, Byrne sights a young naked girl floating lifeless in the water, which casts a pall on their fishing trip, everyone turning instantly downbeat, confused as to what to do, as they are outside any cell phone reception. So rather than allow the body to float away from them downstream, they tie one foot to a shoreline tree. Come first light, Byrne joins his buddies with the first catch of their trip, releasing some of the tension, and before long, they’re all fly fishing the river with highly productive results. After a few days, when they head back to civilization, the looks on their faces tell all when they return within cell phone range, as the police want them to remain where they are until they can arrive on the scene, not returning home into well into the night. The police continue their investigation the next day, scolding the men for not calling off their weekend plans when they actually discovered the body, and when they are released from questioning, the news media is waiting for them with flashbulbs popping, making TV and newspaper headlines the next day where they are publicly ridiculed for their behavior, turning them into miscreants, social outcasts in this small, close-knit community.
What they hadn’t counted on was stirring up racial resentment as well, as the victim was a young Aboriginal girl, whose family is outraged that the men kept on fishing even after finding her body, all but ignoring her presence all weekend long while fishing around her naked corpse which was left in the water. The town is in an uproar as the men’s wives join in this public inquisition by becoming first indignant, and then horrified, embarrassed that the whole town is suddenly staring at them like unwelcome outsiders. Internally, the psychological tension takes its toll, placing marriages and friendships on the brink, as every little thing suddenly becomes enlarged and exaggerated, blown way out of proportion, and people start pointing their fingers, hunkered down into defensive posturing, wiping their own hands clean while continually placing the blame elsewhere. Some of this delves into the emotional cringe factor, as the men are alienated and shunned from their families and the community, and Linney’s attempts to revive a sense of community spirit to bring everyone back together again are met with appalling results, yet she perseveres anyway, which really gets uncomfortable, especially when she attempts to make peace with the Aboriginal family of the victim, at the point of insisting, even though she is not welcome.
Sort of an update on the McCarthyist era Red scare mentality depicted in The Crucible, this isn’t a story of right or wrong, but shows the kind of societal exasperation involved from distorted perceptions, highlighting society’s irrational reaction to fear, how our need for easy answers and instant resolution creates a quick-to-judge groupthink, leading to a complex kind of mass hysteria bordering on a witch hunt or lynch mob mentality. In this film, through a series of small personal revelations we come to know characters that are portrayed as our own neighbors and are asked to see ourselves in them. The spirit of reconciliation is called into question here, where the motives of everyone involved are so out of alignment with one another, where the well-meaning offering of friendship or peace is seen as a provocative insult, a completely unnecessary and highly indignant confrontation, depicted here as racial arrogance, actually making matters worse, suggesting that at the end of the day there are no easy answers. Based on a Raymond Carver short story “So Much Water, So Close to Home,” which provided some of the source material for Altman’s SHORT CUTS (1993), there’s a wonderful mix of built up familiarity and intimacy with the characters, established by excellent performances throughout, and the slow realization that a hollow moral compass guides many of us, clueless through the end of our own culpability.
On the ball Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian
Jindabyne is a stunning Australian film in the Director's Fortnight
section from Ray Lawrence, a psychological drama based on a short story by
Raymond Carver (which Robert Altman also used in Short Cuts). Laura Linney and
Gabriel Byrne give superb performances as an unhappy couple in the Australian
town of
Helen Gramates (Day 8) for Time Out
Jindabyne directed by Ray Lawrence also screened in the Director’s
Fortnight. It is based on the Raymond Carver short story “So Much Water, So
Close to Home,” in which a group of men on a fishing trip finds a dead woman’s
body floating in the stream and decides to continue on, only to report the
incident days later. What’s special about Jindayne is how the
filmmakers adapt the story to involve Aboriginal people and how the film ends
up exploring not only moral responsibility but also racial tensions occurring
in a small Australian community. And as in
Jindabyne Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily
In a time of
uncertainty or crisis, the only things you can cling on to are personal
integrity and a sense of community. That is the hard lesson learnt by the
residents of Jindabyne in director Ray Lawrence's haunting companion piece to
his award-winning comeback feature Lantana (2001).
Like Lantana there is a dead body, a killer and a mystery that could easily be
the basis of a Wolf Creek-style chiller.
Aimed at grown-up audiences, the film’s accomplished ensemble cast and
thoughtful approach should readily engage the same sophisticated crowd as
Lantana.
Based on a Raymond Carver story that formed part of Short Cuts (1993),
Jindabyne depicts a place where everyone is haunted by the past. The old town
of that name now lies under water and the new town has been built on higher
ground. The natural light creates piercing blue skies and the vastness of the
area lends it some of the eerie, enigmatic qualities that made Picnic At
Hanging Rock (1975) such a landmark of Australian cinema.
One weekend, Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) and three friends head to the high country
for their annual fishing trip. Stewart discovers the body of a young girl
floating in the water. Rather than immediately reporting the discovery, the men
decide to carry on fishing and enjoy their weekend. The decision ultimately
provokes outrage in the local community and prompts Stewart's wife Claire
(Laura Linney) to question the entire basis of their marriage. Her instinctive
reaction to the situation is compassion. Stewart's reaction is a gruff
indifference: he simply cannot understand why there is such a fuss.
Part of the pleasure of Jindabyne is the way that Beatrix Christian's
screenplay brings each of the characters into sharp focus. It would be easy to
condemn Stewart's callousness or the pig-headed denials of his fishing buddy
Carl (John Howard). We may not admire what they do but we understand who they
are.
Claire is heroic in her efforts to heal the community and make everyone accept
their personal responsibility for the situation that develops. We know that her
concern may also result from a lingering sense of guilt that she abandoned her
own son when he was born and failed to do the right thing. Everyone has their
reasons in Jindabyne and everyone has a past to overcome.
Elegant in its precision and fluidity, Jindbayne has some stunning performances
from a flawless cast. Once again Gabriel Byrne's innate charm is used to work
against the grain of a character and create sympathy for a flawed figure. Sean
Rees-Wemyss is a wonderfully natural, unspoilt child actor who brings an aching
truth to Stewart and Claire's son Tom. We almost take it for granted that Laura
Linney will give a fine performance but every thought and feeling her character
has seems to be revealed with unmistakable clarity through the raging in her
eyes, the tension in her body or the cold fury in her voice. It is a great
performance in a film that could well earn
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
The town of
Jindabyne in Australia's New South Wales isn't what it used to be, literally.
Relocated as part of a water-diversion scheme in the '60s, the old town now
rests at the bottom of a lake around which the current town resides. When
Gabriel Byrne, playing a retired Irish racing star now running a garage in
Jindabyne, takes his son fishing, they return with one small fish and one
considerable alarm clock pulled up from the ruins. It's a seemingly normal occurrence
in a place where everybody knows that there's something waiting beneath the
placid surface, even if no one knows exactly what.
Byrne has a
more ambitious fishing trip in mind, however, and with three buddies he sets
off to a remote river location where they make an unexpected discovery: The
nude body of a young Aboriginal woman floating in the water. Instead of
notifying the police immediately, they tie the body to shore and finish out
their weekend trip. Upon their return, they find a community appalled at their
decision, particularly Byrne's wife (Laura Linney) and the woman's family, who
see it as just another case of whites treating the Aboriginal community with
disdain.
If the plot
sounds familiar, you've probably read Raymond Carver's short story "So
Much Water, So Close To Home" or seen the Robert Altman film Short Cuts,
which weaves it into a tapestry of L.A. That film's detractors point out,
somewhat undeservedly, that Altman emphasizes his own characteristic pessimism
over the gritty, unexpected epiphanies that are Carver's trademark. They'll be
even more frustrated with Jindabyne, which uses the framework of
Carver's story as an opportunity to open up a community's old wounds and ends
with no sign that anything will close them.
Director Ray
Lawrence and screenwriter Beatrix Christian don't seem to have much interest in
tidy stories with definable beginnings and ends. We never learn how an Irish
driver and his American wife ended up in such a place. Characters talk about
things being different "this time" without referencing any other
time. It's obtuse and overstuffed by design, filled with characters recovering
from traumas of which we never learn the source, like an orphan girl whose
obsession with death keeps growing more intense by the scene. In the end, it's
all a bit too self-consciously mysterious and Lawrence leans a bit too much on
the atmosphere to do the work for him as he builds to a frustrating ending. But
his vision of a place haunted by a restlessness it can't define proves unsettlingly
infectious.
Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]
Aussie filmmaker Ray Lawrence's debt to Robert Altman in his previous Lantana is made explicit in his new film Jindabyne,
which counts as its source the Raymond Carver short story that gave Short
Cuts some of its most offhandedly scabrous moments. Where Altman used
Carver's So Much Water So Close to Home as one of the many strands that
lent his teeming
Carver's story trenchantly depicts the effects of an all-male group's refusal
to let a woman's dead body get in the way of their weekend fishing trip, though
in the film's eponymous New South Wales town the elements appear polluted even
before the corpse turns up in its waters. The very air breathed by mechanic
Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) and his traumatized wife Claire (Laura Linney) is so
weighty with numbed portent that the scream heard when the dead girl is found
dumped in the river suggests a hundred repressed tensions released at once.
Rather than catharsis, however, casual callousness follows: Stewart and his
buddies tether the victim to a tree and go about their fly-fishing rituals, a
decision which precipitates a spiraling scandal once it is revealed.
Like Lantana, Jindabyne ponders the ways
people connect or drift apart in fits of wounded emotion that break through its
thriller format. Also like the earlier film, it shatters its own best effects
with a lecturing tidiness that undercuts the ambiguity
Though its literary basis is American, the film belongs to a specifically Australian
line of fastidiously disquieting, vaguely return-of-the-oppressed-styled
parables (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave), where unspoken
colonialist crimes of the past are evocatively reflected in the secrets
submerged in the local river. Like Peter Weir and Fred Schepisi,
Zoom In Online (Annie Frisbie)
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Film Journal International (Rex Roberts)
Urban Cinefile (Australia) Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Le Guay, Philippe
NIGHTSHIFT (Trois Huit) B+ 92
France (95 mi) 2001
A creepy and disturbing film about the psycho-terrorist who happens to work on your shift down at the local bottle factory. On an all-male working class shift, Pierre is a nice family guy trying to get ahead, and the film opens when he is shown his locker as the new foreman on the night shift. Immediately he is the object of practical jokes and an intense personal scorn from Fred, Marc Barbe in the most startling performance of the festival, a guy who believes he was wrongfully passed over for the job. Fred is an intense, brooding, psycho-thug, whose bi-polar mood swings range from buying Pierre drinks as his best friend, to acts of criminal violence against Pierre, then swinging back again to a good man sympathizing with his aging father. This is a film where anything could happen as Pierre so wants to be liked that he’s willing to endure almost any personal torture in his misguided attempt to befriend a psycho-terrorist, and his own son is so anguished and torn by his father’s inability to stand up for himself, continually allowing himself to be publicly humiliated, that unbelievably, his son turns to Fred for companionship. Despite the improbability of anyone allowing such an extreme degree of criminal aggression to go unreported to the authorities, the film’s strength lies in it’s stark realism, in the rhythms, sights and sounds of the bottle factory, the social gatherings of the men both on and off the job, carrying this silent code where men aren’t supposed to be weak, so of course, they constantly attack one another, and the victims are too ashamed to say anything. Barbe is brilliant, as his character is so skillfully honed, nothing phases this guy, but his power and presence dominate this film.
THOSE WHO REMAIN (Ceux Qui Restent) B 87
An interesting
variation on IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (perhaps closer to IN THE MOOD FOR DEATH), as
two people meet purely by chance at the hospital cancer ward, each visiting
their respective partners, eventually drawing comfort from each another in
surprising ways they don’t really understand themselves. Vincent Lindon is Bertrand, a German
professor whose wife is dying of breast cancer, while his teenage stepdaughter
(Yeelem Jappain) at home blames him for her mother’s
illness. Emmanuelle Devos (Lorraine) has
a boyfriend with colon cancer who must learn to survive without a colon, with a
waste bag strapped to his stomach, and discovers that rather than rising to his
support, she’s actually losing interest in him, becoming much more fascinated
with seeing Bertrand every day, who becomes the only reason she comes to the
hospital every day, usually ending the daily visits by offering him a ride to
the train station in her car. Bertrand,
especially, holds his emotions tight to the vest, never raising his voice,
going through his daily rounds with a somber purpose, while Lorraine is wildly
conflicted about why she’s there, and is bluntly honest about not wanting to
spend the rest of her life with a seriously disabled man she doesn’t love.
Despite the severity
of the subject matter, the film feels effortless, as we simply fall into the
rhythms and patterns of the film as if it’s happening before our eyes, where
each day brings a new encounter, and where we never once see the actual patients
themselves except in photos. They turn
out to be each other’s sole support group, and quickly realize their problems
are secondary and relatively insignificant when compared to their partners, so
even when they start to approach one another physically, which happens with the
utmost of care, they’re extremely sensitive to each other’s concerns, but are
afraid to think of it as more, as their love is needed elsewhere. It’s a tricky situation which is handled beautifully
by seasoned performers and by a director who does not interfere with her own
script, but lets her actors feel their way through it, as it never feels
anything but natural, with all the accompanying complications.
Devos provides most
of the humor, and it’s amazing how often she breathes life into her onscreen
characters, remaining approachable, always vulnerable, a sexy, beguiling woman
who makes it easy with her nervous affection for others, as she seems to be
able to tell perfect strangers her life story as if it was the very first time,
where it always feels like it matters.
She is a living, breathing woman that anyone would love to meet, and her
companionship onscreen is a lurid reminder of how smart and unassuming mature
women can be. The mood of careful
restraint is maintained throughout, with occasional bursts of typical sounding
movie music, with a visit by the filmmaker herself playing Bertand’s
sympathetic sister who shows how difficult it can be to offer love to someone
whose world has been ripped away from them, who have become exhausted by their
own pain. It is in this environment that
this offbeat hospital corridor friendship actually works, because it makes
little sense, yet its heightened significance elevates its unique importance in
their lives.
Festival
of New French Cinema Reece
Pendleton from the Reader
In this Gallic variation on Brief
Encounter, a hospital oncology wing serves as the meeting place for two
distraught people: a somber professor (Vincent Lindon) whose wife is dying of
breast cancer and a flighty graphic designer (Emmanuelle Devos) whose boyfriend
is being treated for colon cancer. Their new friendship provides each of them
with much-needed emotional support until romantic feelings creep in and
complicate their lives. Writer-director Anne Le Ny avoids cheap sentiment,
infusing her story with quiet grace, but the film’s real strength is the
chemistry between Lindon and Devos, whose nuanced performances make the chance
relationship absorbing and wholly believable.
Festival of New French Cinema Diane Eberhardt from Facets
Bertrand,
whose wife is dying of cancer, and
Character actress Anne
Le Ny makes a haunting scripting-helming debut with "Those Who
Remain." A German teacher spends afternoons at the suburban Paris hospital
where his wife is a patient on the breast cancer ward. His innocent
conversations with a younger and far flightier graphic artist, whose b.f. is
also being treated for cancer, gradually evolve: Their voices say
"vous," but their bodies yearn for less formal avenues of expression.
A sort of Gallic "Brief Encounter"
intelligently updated to reflect modern mores, fest-ready pic was released
locally in late August to glowing reviews.
The teacher, Bertrand
(Vincent Lindon), and the artist, Lorraine (Emmanuelle Devos), endeavor to
remain cordial and civilized while struggling with panic and guilt. Neither
protag's significant other is ever seen, yet the offscreen mates' presumed
suffering infuses the proceedings. Bertrand deeply loves his wife; Lorraine has
only been in her relationship for a year.
Thoughtful blend of
delicacy and pragmatism, selfishness and sacrifice makes the most of a handful
of locations and rituals: a few cups of coffee, the hospital's newsstand,
Lorraine's car, the bus on which Bertrand commutes.
Bertrand's 16-year-old
stepdaughter Valentine (Yeelem Jappain) is having trouble coping with her mom's
protracted illness. Helmer casts herself as Bertrand's meddling and outgoing
sis.
Down-to-earth, utterly
believable venture explores commitment, fortitude and the eternal scramble to
be true to one's feelings without being unfair to others.
Lindon and Devos, last
seen together in "The
Moustache," play off each other with the right measure of sincerity
and subterfuge.
Unfussy widescreen
lensing anchors narrative with admirable simplicity.
Leacock, Philip
TAKE A GIANT STEP
USA (100 mi) 1959
While the filmmakers' intentions were well placed, the
handling of this story doesn't hold up. The film, with a screenplay by Louis S.
Peterson and Julius J. Epstein, studies the difficulties a black teenager faces
growing up in a white world. Nash, as the boy, is ostracized by his white
friends' parents. His own parents are unresponsive to his needs, so he turns to
the maid, Dee. In the stage version the relationship between the boy and the
maid had heavy sexual overtones, but the film downplays that aspect of the
story. Scenes depicting Nash's relationship with his white friends seem staged
and awkward. However, strong performances by Nash and supporting players make
the film worth viewing.
User comments from imdb Author: moonspinner55 from redlands, ca
Restless African-American kid in a
mostly-white small town wrestles with the values he's been taught by his
working parents, whose kowtowing to the whites has left their son combative and
surly; add to this a normal siege of hormones for a seventeen-year old boy, and
it's nearly a black variation of "Rebel Without a Cause"! Handsome,
clean-cut Johnny Nash is very good as the troubled youngster (who, in a silent
pantomine, stands up to his teacher over lessons involving the Civil War), but
the dialouge alternates between frank and plain-spoken (appealingly so) and
occasionally very awkward. Playwright Louis S. Peterson collaborated with
Julius J. Epstein on the screenplay, getting the action off to a false start
with an argument between the kid and his dying grandmother (nothing substantial
gets said because the characters keep answering each other's questions with
more questions). After Nash chats up some call girls (referred to, bashfully,
as prostitutes) and returns home with beer on his breath, the film takes on the
shape of any number of teens-in-trouble second-features. The fact that race is
the central issue doesn't exactly make the film more relevant or even an
anomaly--it's more of a novelty. ** from ****
Take
A Giant Step - TCM.com Andrea Passafiume
Seventeen-year-old Spence (Johnny Nash) is an
African-American teenager who has been raised in a white middle-class
neighborhood his whole life. When one of his high school classes starts talking
about racial issues, Spence is confronted with some harsh realities and begins
to question what it means to live as a person of color in a white world.
Spence’s confusion is nurtured by the family’s sensible African-American
housekeeper, Christine (Ruby Dee), whose warmth and wisdom help Spence come to
an understanding of who he really is.
Take a Giant Step
(1959) is a well-intentioned coming-of-age drama that was a product of its
socially conscious period in American history, right on the cusp of the
turbulent sixties. Originally a successful off-Broadway play, the film version
was financed through actor Burt Lancaster’s production company,
Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions, which had scored an earlier box office hit
with the Oscar®-winning Marty in 1955. Take a Giant Step playwright Louis S. Peterson adapted his work into the
film’s screenplay at a time when African-American screenwriters were a rarity
in Hollywood.
Ruby Dee shines in her pivotal role of Christine, leading a supporting cast of
fine actors, many of whom came from the original stage version. Estelle Hemsley
and Frederick O’Neal make memorable impressions reprising their Broadway roles
as Spence’s grandmother and father.
Take a Giant Step
marked the screen acting debut for pop singer Johnny Nash in the leading role
of Spence. Best known for his 1972 hit “I Can See Clearly Now,” Nash also sings
the film’s title song.
Though critical response was lukewarm upon its initial release, Take a Giant Step is worth a look for
its unique and poignant perspective on changing attitudes in American culture
during a pivotal period of change.
"Take
a Giant Step" and "A Raisin in the Sun" by Mark A. Reid Mark A. Reid from Jump Cut,
May 1991
User comments from imdb Author: (masai39@yahoo.com)
from Queens, New York
User comments from imdb Author: C.
Sean Currie (hypestyle) from detroit, MI
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Lean, David
Film Reference Charles Affron
There is a trajectory that
emerges from the shape of David Lean's career, and it is a misleading one. Lean
first achieved fame as a director of seemingly intimate films, closely based on
plays of Noel Coward. His first directorial credit was shared with Coward, for In
Which We Serve. In the 1960s he was responsible for extraordinarily
ambitious projects, for an epic cinema of grandiose effects, difficult location
shooting, and high cultural, even literary, pretention. But, in fact, Lean's
essential approach to the movies never changed. All of his films, no matter how
small or large their dimensions, demonstrate an obsessive cultivation of craft,
a fastidious concern with production detail that defines the "quality"
postwar British cinema. That craft and concern are as hyperbolic in their
devices as is the medium itself. Viewers surprised at the attention to detail
and composition in Ryan's Daughter, a work whose scope would appear to
call for a more modest approach, had really not paid attention to the truly
enormous dimensions of Brief Encounter, a film that defines, for many,
intimist cinema.
Lean learned about the movies
during long years of apprenticeship, gaining particularly important experience
as an editor. It is clear, even in the first films he directed with (and then
for) Coward, that his vision was not bound to the playwright's West End
proscenium. This Happy Breed, a lower class version of Cavalcade,
makes full use of the modest terraced house that is the film's prime locus. The
nearly palpable patterns of the mise-en-scène are animated by the highly
professional acting characteristic of Lean's early films. Watching the working
out of those patterns created by the relationship between camera, decor, and
actor is like watching choreography at the ballet, where the audience is made
aware of the abstract forms of placement on the stage even as that placement is
vitalized by the individual quality of the dancer. The grief of Celia Johnson
and Robert Newton is first expressed by the empty room that they are about to
enter, then by the way the camera's oblique backward movement respects their
silence.
It is in Brief Encounter
that the fullness of the director's talent becomes clear. This story of chance
meeting, love, and renunciation is as apparently mediocre, conventional, and
echoless as Flaubert's Madame Bovary. What could be more boringly
middle-class than the romantic longing of a nineteenth-century French
provincial housewife or the oh-so-tasteful near adultery of two
"decent" Britishers? In both cases, the authorial interventions are
massive. Lean conveys the film's passion through the juxtaposition of the trite
situation against the expressionistic violence of passing express trains and
the wrenching departure of locals, against the decadent romanticism of the
Rachmaninoff score, and most emphatically against one of the most grandiose and
hyperbolic exposures of an actress in the history of film. The size of Celia
Johnson's eyes finally becomes the measure of Brief Encounter, eyes
whose scope is no less expansive than Lawrence's desert or Zhivago's tundra.
Lean's next two successes were
his adaptations (with Ronald Neame) of Charles Dickens novels, Great
Expectations and Oliver Twist. Again, intimacy on the screen becomes
the moment of gigantic display. The greatness of Pip's expectations are set by
the magnitude of his frightful encounter with an escaped convict who, when he
emerges into the frame, reminds us all what it is like to be a small child in a
world of oversized, menacing adults. A variation of this scale is also seen in
Pip's meeting with mad Miss Havisham, in all her gothic splendor.
Lean's next few films seem to
have more modest ambitions, but they continue to demonstrate the director's
concern with expressive placement. Of his three films with his then-wife Ann
Todd, Madeleine most fully exploits her cool blond beauty.
A significant change then took
place in the development of his career. Lean's reputation as a
"location" director with a taste for the picturesque was made by Summertime,
an adaptation of the play The Time of the Cuckoo, in which the city of
Venice vies with Katharine Hepburn for the viewer's attention. It is from this
point that Lean must be identified as an international rather than an English
director. The subsequent international packages that resulted perhaps explain
the widespread (and unjust) opinion that Lean is more of an executive than a
creator with a personal vision.
The personality of Lean is in his
compulsive drive to the perfectly composed shot, whatever the cost in time,
energy, and money. In this there is some affinity between the director and his
heroes. The Colonel (Alec Guinness) in The Bridge on the River Kwai must
drive his men to build a good bridge, even if it is for the enemy. Lawrence
(Peter O'Toole) crosses desert after desert in his quest for a self purified
through physical ordeal, and viewers must wonder about the ordeals suffered by
the filmmakers to photograph those deserts. The same wonder is elicited by the
snowy trek of Dr. Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and the representation of life in early
twentieth-century Russia.
That perfectly composed shot is
emblemized by the principal advertising image used for Ryan's Daughter—an
umbrella floating in air, suspended over an oceanside cliff. This is a
celebration of composition per se, composition that holds unlikely elements in
likely array. Composition is an expressive tension, accessible to viewers as it
simultaneously captures the familiar and the unfamiliar. It is the combination
that makes so many viewers sensitive to Brief Encounter, where
middle-class lives (the lives of filmgoers) are filled with overwhelming
passion and overwhelming style. Laura and Alex fall in love when they go to the
movies.
David Lean Director website
Sir David Lean | British
director and cinematographer | Britannica.com biography
Overview for
David Lean - TCM.com
including biography
screenonline: Lean, Sir David (1908-1991) Biography Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors, Sarah Cardwell from BFI Screen Online, also seen here: Screenonline biography of David Lean
David Lean Website BFI Screen Online Director site
David Lean » historyonfilm.com extensive profile
David Lean • Great
Director profile • Senses of Cinema Alain
Silver from Senses of Cinema,
February 12, 2004
All-Movie Guide bio from Bruce Eder
Britmovie Biography and Filmography
David Lean: An Internet Resource
David Lean, Film Director, Dies at 83 - NYTimes.com April 17, 1991
Sir David Lean - Telegraph Obituary, April 17, 1991
THE LOST ART OF DAVID LEAN - The Washington Post Obituary, April 17, 1991
Politics
& Prose - 97.02.04 - The Atlantic
Jack Beatty book review of David Lean: A Biography, by Kevin
Brownlow from The Atlantic, February
4, 1997
Great Expectations • Senses of Cinema Boris Trbic, November 5, 2000
David
Lean's Problem Child: Gorgeous but Flawed Ryan's Daughter ... Matthew
Kennedy from Bright Lights Film Journal,
May 1, 2006
David
Lean (1908 – 1991), 30/03/08, Kinoeye - Warwick Blogs Kinoeye,
March 30, 2008
Master
and Commander | The New Yorker Anthony
Lane from The New Yorker, March 31,
2008
The epic legacy of David Lean | Film | The Guardian Andrew Collins, May 4, 2008
David Thomson on
the work of David Lean | Books | The Guardian David Thomson, May 10, 2008
Forgotten Lean: The Ann Todd Trilogy • Senses of Cinema John Orr, May 19, 2008
How
Sir David Lean had an epic falling out with Steven Spielberg over ... Chris Evans from The Independent, June 12, 2008
Brief
encounters: How David Lean's sex life shaped his films | The ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent, June 28, 2008
BFI | Sight &
Sound | David Lean Restoration: ‘This Happy Breed,’ by Sonia
Genaitay, July 2008
Michael Wood reviews David Lean · LRB 3 July 2008 Michael Wood on Lean from The London Review of Books, July 3, 2008
Comrades, Comes the
Revolution: David Lean's Doctor Zhivago and ... Comrades,
Comes the Revolution: David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago and Warren Beatty’s Reds, by Daniel
Garrett from Offscreen, July 2013
The Passion of David Lean: What It Means to Be a 'Dedicated Maniac ... V. Renée from No Film School, November 2, 2013
10 Essential David Lean Films You Need To Watch « Taste of Cinema ... Cai Ross, August 26, 2014
<em>Beyond
the Epic: The Life & Films of David ... - Screening the Past Brian McFarlane book review of Beyond
the Epic: The Life & Films of David Lean, by Gene D. Phillips, from Screening the Past, January 2015
TSPDT - David Lean They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
New York Film Academy's 20 Great Movie Directors
Telegraph's Top 21 British Directors of All Time
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Sir David Lean (1908 - 1991) - Find A Grave Memorial
IN WHICH WE SERVE
In Which We Serve
(1942) Janet Moat from BFI Screen Online
Already acclaimed in the theatre, Noël Coward was approached by film producers Anthony Havelock-Allan and Filippo del Giudice to make a film, on any subject he wanted. Coward had been enthralled to hear Lord Mountbatten speak about the sinking of his ship, HMS Kelly, and thought it would make an effective film story. Coward needed a good technician to help him and David Lean was recommended as being the best in the business.
In Which We Serve (1942) was Lean's first directorial credit, after more than a decade as a highly respected editor. He had already declined several offers to direct 'quota quickies', fearing that becoming associated with inferior films could damage his career.
Coward's first script was much too long, but he eventually came up with the idea of the Carley float as a device to flashback to some of the best scenes he had written, focusing on just three of the survivors. Mountbatten himself advised Lean on the sequence where the ship is dive-bombed. The documentary-style opening, showing the building of the ship, was filmed by Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan, with a voice-over supplied by Leslie Howard.
Although Lean insisted on sharing the direction credit with Coward, his name is barely mentioned in the publicity material for the film, which does not even carry a photograph of him. The Monthly Film Bulletin review praises "the quite outstanding direction of Noël Coward" and fails to mention David Lean at all, although Coward left Lean to more or less shoot the film on his own, while he concentrated on playing the lead role.
For John Mills, playing Shorty Blake, it was to be the first of five films he would make with Lean. A 17 year-old Richard Attenborough made a strong impression in his first film role as the cowardly young stoker. Coward himself gives a rather humourless performance as the Captain, hampering the characterisation with his clipped and affected speech delivery. He also takes care to script for himself several fatherly speeches addressed to the crew, throughout the film. Despite such shortcomings, and Coward's condescending view of the lower classes, the film is very moving, and Lean achieves some stunning sequences.
THIS HAPPY BREED
This Happy Breed
(1944) Janet Moat from BFI Screen Online
This Happy Breed was David Lean's first official credit as
solo director, and the most successful film of 1944. It was adapted from Noël
Coward's hit stage play (the title comes from Shakespeare's Richard II),
which had opened at
The film celebrates the stoicism, humour and resilience of ordinary British people. Laurence Olivier spoke the narration, which is heard over the breathtaking opening sequence, a stunning aerial view of London, from the Thames and across the rooftops, down to the back door of one particular house and right through it to the front door.
Landmark events in the lives of the Gibbons family, such as the General Strike, are sketched in effectively but economically in the screenplay. Lean was already employing one of his trademark devices of 'leaking' one scene into another - a new scene begins before the previous one has quite faded away. He especially uses sound to anticipate the next scene, keeping the audience in a constant state of expectation.
One sequence in particular uses sound quite brilliantly. When Reg and his wife are killed in a car crash, Vi goes out into the garden to find Frank and Ethel and tell them the awful news. The camera stays in the living room while the radio plays a loud dance tune, and the happy sound of children playing outside is heard. Eventually Frank and Ethel come into the frame, from the garden, the soundtrack making a poignant counterpoint to their silent grief.
The film also gave Lean his first real experience of directing actors. In her second film role for him, Celia Johnson is unflatteringly made up, lit and photographed, and attempts an unconvincing south London accent, but she is very moving in all her scenes. The other performances are, on the whole, creditable. John Mills plays another sailor, again in love with Kay Walsh. Alison Leggatt and Amy Veness are both splendid as the older women in the family, and wear some astonishing hats.
BFI | Sight &
Sound | David Lean Restoration: ‘This Happy Breed,’ by Sonia
Genaitay, July 2008
Studies in Cinema: Jeremy Carr also reviewing BRIEF ENCOUNTER, July 2013
BLITHE SPIRIT
Great Britian (96 mi) 1945
Blithe Spirit
(1945) Janet Moat from BFI Screen Online
Blithe Spirit (d. David Lean, 1945) was the second of three Noël Coward adaptations produced by Lean's new company Cineguild. Ronald Neame, co-founder of the company alongside producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, was again the director of photography, and the film was another Technicolor production. Coward himself performed the witty introductory voice-over. With its cast of distinguished comedy actors, the film did well with post-war audiences, but Coward professed himself disappointed with the result, although Lean had warned him that 'high comedy' was not really his forte.
The film is stylish. The action is set at the Condomines' comfortable upper middle-class home in Kent, and great care was taken to ensure the right look for the set. An actor like Rex Harrison was quite at ease in the world of the play, but Lean himself reportedly found it not to his own taste. The special effects are convincing and Lean's lighting and framing give it visual interest. The action is stagey, so all depends on the cast and they play wonderfully, even though Harrison was considered by some to look too young for the role of the middle-aged Charles. Kay Hammond and Margaret Rutherford had created their roles on the stage; the play premiered at London's Piccadilly Theatre on 1941 and was still running when Coward invited Lean to make a film version.
Hammond, in her floaty green chiffon gown, green hair and pale make-up, is a sexy and mischievous Elvira, employing her throaty, theatrical drawl to good comic effect. The American actress Constance Cummings' Ruth, by contrast, is brisk and sensible. Margaret Rutherford's performance of Madame Arcati has passed into theatre legend and she recreates the role of the eccentric and rather incompetent medium effectively for film. Her joy at the realisation that she has actually managed to summon up a spirit is beautifully judged.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER
Brief Encounter | Chicago Reader Don Druker
This is the film that established David Lean's reputation, before he went on to such bombastic exercises as Lawrence of Arabia and Ryan's Daughter and shifted from being—in Lindsay Anderson's view—England's white hope to England's white elephant. Though based on a short play (and screenplay) by Noel Coward that rarely rises above the level of the old women's magazines, this 1945 tale of the chance meeting and almost affair of a bored suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) and a married doctor (Trevor Howard) in a provincial railway buffet does manage to zero in on some of the more depressing aspects of English middle-class life, and thus survives more as a social document than a genuinely compelling drama. With Cyril Raymond and Stanley Holloway. 85 min.
Cinema Scope: Jonathan Rosenbaum's DVD column June 25, 2014
A day later, I watch an even greater weepie from a decade earlier, Brief Encounter (in Criterion’s four-DVD box set David Lean Directs Noël Coward), and it immediately becomes apparent to me why Robert Bresson once cited this 1945 heartbreaker as one of his ten favourite films. I’m thinking not only of what might be described as the brute delicacy of its emotional thrust (with roaring trains and Rachmaninoff vying with the repressed and unfulfilled longings of souls in hiding), but also for the contrapuntal boldness of Celia Johnson’s off-screen narration, addressed to herself yet couched in the form of a confession to her husband. The film is quite radical in other respects as well, employing expressionistic lighting changes and tilted angles at key moments, and even takes the risk of departing from its own point-of-view narration to include an edgy conversation between Trevor Howard and a male friend after Johnson has fled from the scene.
A bit sheepishly, I’m forced to confront the possibility that it may have been the huge popularity of this film when it came out that has kept me from revisiting it any sooner—the suspicion that a film so universally loved and respected must have something wrong with it. But then again, I don’t feel the same way about William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a film that for me grows in impact and stature every time I revisit it. This is clearly another case of the audience having been right—leading Billy Wilder (or George Axelrod, or some combination thereof) to appropriate the same Rachmaninoff piano concerto in The Seven Year Itch (1955) as a way of parodying both Brief Encounter and the public’s susceptibility to its power.
Brief Encounter (2015), directed by David Lean | Film review - Time Out Tom Huddleston
David Lean's wondrous romance, adapted from Noel Coward's story, is one of the most emotionally devastating movies of all time
In this enlightened age of quickie divorces and Ashley Madison,
it would be all too easy to sniff at ‘Brief Encounter’, director David Lean and
author Noël Coward’s prim, oh-so-English tale of romance, respectability and
repression. But those willing to give themselves over to the film’s mounting
mood of swooning, tight-lipped desperation will be rewarded with one of the
most vivid, impassioned and painfully believable love stories ever committed to
celluloid.
She is Laura (Celia Johnson): the good little housewife to a drab, inattentive
middle-class worker bee, trudging through a repetitive, stultifying existence
somewhere in suburbia. He is Alec (Trevor Howard): a doctor whose equally
loveless union has driven him to find solace in work. Their chance meeting in a
station café develops first into a casual friendship, then gradually, guiltily
into something neither of them can fully understand or admit.
Drenched in Lancashire drizzle and overshadowed both by the receding clamour of
war and the spectre of impending social change – it was released in 1945 –
‘Brief Encounter’ is so much more than just a tale of two lovers. It’s also an
affectionate but firm nudge-in-the ribs for the British bourgeoisie: are we
really going to let our lives run on rails, never grabbing happiness where we
find it? Have we learned nothing in these cruel years? As it turned out, Lean
and Coward were on to something: just a few decades later, the selfless,
stifled attitudes of ‘Brief Encounter’ would, for better or worse, be a distant
memory.
Brief Encounter
(1945) Janet Moat from BFI Screen Online
David Lean's third Noël Coward adaptation for Cineguild has become one of the most popular romantic British films of all time, regularly appearing on lists of 'best films'. The story of unconsummated middle-class adultery began life as a one-act play, Still Life, in the compilation Tonight at 8.30.
The film is a small masterpiece of construction. According to Kevin Brownlow's biography of Lean, it was the director's idea to start the film at the end of the story, and then recount earlier events in flashback before revisiting the first scene, now expanded and made all the more poignant by what the audience knows. Laura herself tells the story, as though to her dull but kindly husband Fred, although he never actually hears her voice-over confessions.
It is with this film that Lean announces himself as a poet of the cinema, using the imagery of shadowy subway passages and platforms lit by sudden bursts of harsh light from passing trains to convey the atmosphere of Alec and Laura's illicit liaison. The small town locations (actually Beaconsfield, near to Denham where most of the film was shot) are beautifully used, both to suggest Laura's real world and how her love for Alec makes her see familiar surroundings in a new light.
The acting of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard (in his first starring role) is impeccable and very moving, even if their much-parodied refined RADA pronunciation can sound amusing to modern ears. The characters' moral attitudes may also seem light years away from modern sensibilities. (The story is actually set just before the Second World War and the sociological changes which that brought). This does not detract from the performances, helped enormously by the use of the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto (a composer rejected by Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit as "too florid"). The film begins with the opening bars of the concerto's first movement, and ends with the closing bars of the third and final movement.
Coward's customary condescension towards his working-class characters - Stanley Holloway's decent stationmaster and Joyce Cary's genteel buffet manageress - grates, but their teasing flirtation across the rock cakes is an effective and necessary comic counterpoint to the romantic intensity of Alec and Laura's growing infatuation.
Brief Encounter - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Liam O’Leary from Film Reference
In 1929 Leon Moussinac could, in his Panoramique du cinéma , declare "L'Angleterre n'a jamais produit un vrai film anglais." The remarkable renaissance of the British film at the end of World War II requires a very different judgement. In 1944, David Lean made Brief Encounter , the most characteristic and perfect British film of all time. Its debt to Noël Coward must not be underestimated, but it is Lean's film. Lean, having worked as an editor on films by Michael Powell and Anthony Asquith, began his career as a director in association with Coward on In Which We Serve , This Happy Breed , and Blithe Spirit. He then directed Brief Encounter , about the infatuation between a housewife and a married man, with such uncanny human awareness and real creative skill that it stands out against his later more ambitious and elaborate films.
Brief Encounter is on a small scale, intimate, and probing. Everything is obvious and yet nothing is. Laura Jesson, its suburban heroine, may not reach the dramatic solution of an Anna Karenina but what she does experience is no less poignant. We share her joys and sorrows of the moment until they carry her to the edge of tragedy. It cannot be seen entirely, however, as tragedy for there is an element of values and choice. Life is not simple and the greatness of the film lies in its awareness of this complexity. An insensitive critic once described the film as, "Two characters in search of a bed." French critics failed to see that there was a problem. But for characters like Laura and Alex, there were values that they honoured, even at the expense of pain. It is, in a way, a triumph for their common humanity. Very simply the end did not justify the means.
The happy unification of this tale of star-crossed lovers, the intense reality of their attraction and the universal nature of the experience is played against a background that is deeply and truly British. If being British is the spirit of the "stiff upper lip," then it is belied by the passionate note that runs through the film. The small joys of love, the impetus towards realization and fulfillment, the sense of threatened pleasures haunts the viewer from beginning to end. The perfect performances of that most subtle of all actresses, Celia Johnson, and of Trevor Howard contribute greatly to the success of the film. It is, though, the happy fusion of all the elements that give it a perspective and unity rare in the cinema.
The setting of the suburban railway station and its vicinity sees a great human drama take place. Everything about it is authentic down to the familiars who haunt it, the funny little people with their airs and graces and their trivial jokes and quarrels. Other dramatic incidents which occur in the film include the visit to the restuarant and the cinema; the humiliation and shame when reality shatters the dream; and the unexpected friend who turns up to interrupt their one possible night together. The film thus opens with the climax which is not fully understood until the gentle pain-filled voice of Laura relives the happy but poignant days of a moment of life she will never forget.
There is one element that enhances the film in a most felicitous way. When Rachmaninoff wrote his 2nd Piano Concerto he could little have guessed that he was providing the theme music for a very beautiful and inspiring British film. Though it was not a commercial success in America, it was successful for the British cinema in terms of prestige.
Brief
Encounter Criterion essay by Adrian
Turner, June 26, 2000
When
Noël Met David . . . Criterion
essay by Ian Christie, March 27, 2012
“Riskiest
Thing I Ever Did”: Notes on Brief
Encounter Criterion essay by
Kevin Brownlow, March 27, 2012
Brief Encounter |
Criterion Collection | British Film | Movie Review | 1945 Matthew from Classic Art Films
Brief Encounter
(1945) - The Criterion Collection
Criticwire
Classic of the Week: David Lean's 'Brief Encounter' | IndieWire Vikram Murthi
Romance With
a Stiff Upper Lip in 'Brief Encounter' | PopMatters Stephen Mayne
Studies in Cinema: Jeremy Carr also reviewing THIS HAPPY BREED, July 2013
Little
White Lies: Sophie Monks Kaufman
The L Magazine: Vadim Rizov October 10, 2012
Ferdy on Films: Roderick Heath
Brief
Encounter · Film Review More than 70 years later, Brief ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club
Brief
Encounter Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com
Svet Atanasov
Brief
Encounter Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest
David Krauss
Brief Encounter:
Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of ... Randy Miller III
Brief Encounter
| Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine
Clayton Dillard
Blu-ray
Review: David Lean's BRIEF ENCOUNTER Is A Sparkling Affair Matt Brown from Screen Anarchy
REVIEW:
DAVID LEAN'S "BRIEF ENCOUNTER" (1946) STARRING ... Raymond Benson from Cinemaretro
Brooklyn Magazine: Elina Alter
Time Out
New York: Keith Uhlich
Brief Encounter: the best romantic film of all time | Film | The Guardian David Thomson from The Guardian, October 16, 2010
Brief
Encounter review – 70th anniversary rerelease of David Lean ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, November 5,
2015
"Brief Encounter": A matter of the heart | Far Flungers | Roger Ebert
Movie Review - - THE SCREEN IN REVIEW - NYTimes.com Bosley Crowther
Brief
Encounter Blu-ray Trevor Howard - DVD Beaver
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Great Britian (118 mi) 1946
Great Expectations
(1946) David Parker from BFI Screen Online
Great Expectations (1946) was the first of David Lean's two adaptations of Dickens classics (Oliver Twist followed in 1948). Lean realised the cinematic potential of the novel more skilfully than his predecessors and most of those that followed him. The result is one of the finest British literary adaptations, and one of the most acclaimed of all British films.
Lean brings Dickens' words to life in a series of memorable set-pieces: Pip's encounter with the convict Magwitch in the churchyard, beautifully foreshadowed by the grim and desolate establishing shots of the Kentish marshes; Pip's first meeting with the eccentric Miss Havisham, and the macabre atmosphere in the offices of Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer whose walls are decorated with the death masks of clients he has lost to the gallows.
John Mills, at 38 surprisingly old for the role, is excellent as Pip, although Martita Hunt steals the early scenes, playing Miss Havisham as an imposing if shabby figure, bedecked in crumbling lace and linen. Francis L. Sullivan as Jaggers gives a similarly powerful performance: his voice rolls and booms, and physically he towers over his servile assistant Wemmick (Ivor Barnard).
Talking of the adaptation process, Lean said, "choose what you want to do in the novel and do it proud. If necessary cut characters. Don't keep every character, just take a sniff of each one." This somewhat cavalier attitude to classic literature is perhaps a wiser one than that of filmmakers who lack the courage to cut out marginal material. In Lean's case it certainly didn't detract from the audience's enjoyment of what has come to be seen as quintessential 'Dickensian' cinema.
Typical of Lean's careful choices is the retention of Wemmick's Aged Parent: the character serves no real narrative purpose, but the very visual humour of the repeated nodding to the elderly, increasingly deaf 'Aged P' provides an amusing distraction, and preserves a piece of very Dickensian characterisation.
Lean successfully distils a long and complex novel, written in the first person, into a compelling visual narrative covering no more than two hours. In this film, perhaps more than in any other, he makes us care about the characters, and casts the kind of cinematic spell very few directors are capable of, bringing into play a powerful visual narrative that hints at big themes and elemental forces. Great Expectations offers a near perfect balance of human sentiment and visual grandeur.
Great Expectations • Senses
of Cinema Boris Trbic,
November 5, 2000
OLIVER TWIST
Oliver Twist (1948) David Parker from BFI Screen Online
David Lean's second attempt to bring Dickens to the screen is no less detailed in terms of sheer cinematic craft than its predecessor, Great Expectations (1946). Oliver Twist (1948) is a visually lavish spectacle which demonstrates a meticulous sense of planning and foresight. Occasionally, however, Lean's attention to clear visual storytelling, and his skilful composition of each shot, is at the expense of the kind of pictorial characterisation which Dickens revelled in.
However, other strengths make the film a classic of British cinema. Chief among these is Alec Guinness's performance as Fagin. Guinness balances a powerfully theatrical performance of looks and gestures with the pathos of his carefully pitched dialogue. He is almost alone in the cast in capturing the spirit of irony that began to be such a feature of Dickens' work with the publication of Oliver Twist. This was an irony that was evidently lost on many overseas spectators: in the US the film was initially banned on the grounds of 'anti-semitism'.
Oliver Twist was only Dickens' second novel - less monumental than much of his later prose, like Bleak House or Little Dorrit. Consequently, there is less of a risk for Lean in bypassing any mention of the Maylie family, for example, or cutting out disturbing scenes of the condemned Fagin in his cell. These are significant omissions if we are interested in judging the film solely by its faithfulness to the book. But they are entirely justifiable to maintain the force of the central narrative in a medium that requires more economy than did a lengthy Victorian novel.
John Howard Davies is still perhaps the most memorable and affective Oliver yet seen on screen; the delicacy of his speech, and his muted, often awkward movements perfectly capture the sense of confinement that define the character. Robert Newton's Bill Sikes is another highlight; the most relaxed performance Lean ever let slip through his directorial net.
The depiction of London is also a key factor in this film's success. The stark lighting is somewhat softened by the sooty feel of London, and this makes for a perilous atmosphere whenever the story takes us onto the streets. It is the first of Lean's films to attempt an epic scale with real confidence and assurance. When set against some of the overblown visuality of the later work, Oliver Twist may be the very best of Lean's 'big' films.
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
Passionate Friends,
The (1948) Janet Moat from BFI Screen Online
Lean's sixth Cineguild film was adapted from a 1913 story by H.G.Wells, which had been filmed before (d. Maurice Elvey, 1922). Wells' heroine was clearly intended to be one of the new breed of emancipated and intellectual young women who flourished at the turn of the 20th century, but most of this is lost in Eric Ambler's screenplay. Mary seems to modern eyes to be merely selfish and mercenary, preferring a comfortable, if loveless, life with her rich banker husband to romantic passion with old flame Steven.
The film is technically assured and inventive, but its structure, comprising a flashback within a flashback, is confusing and alienating. With its use of a female voice-over narration, its emphasis on an unfulfilled affair and the presence of Trevor Howard as one of the lovers, the film has some similarities with Brief Encounter (1945). However, the characters are more glamorous and sophisticated than Brief Encounter's provincial Alec and Laura. Fashionably dressed, they inhabit a privileged London world of large houses, society balls, dining out, theatre-going and foreign holidays. The film has a hard, glossy look. Only Claude Rains' jealous husband shows any real emotion, while Ann Todd (later to become Lean's third wife) is glacial and remote, eliciting little audience sympathy.
There are some terrific technical moments, notably the whole sequence around the theatre tickets, and the device of the binoculars, which enables Rains, as he thinks, to discover Mary's affair - a perfect mesh of camera movements and editing.
Following the lifting of wartime travel restrictions, the film revels in its Swiss locations, as Lean lovingly films Lake Annecy and its surrounding mountains. Mary's joy and excitement on her first flight, even extending to the airline food, would have struck a chord with many people experiencing foreign travel for the first time. It is a foretaste of things to come, when Lean will film completely on location.
MADELEINE
Madeleine (1949) Janet Moat from BFI Screen Online
David Lean's accomplished treatment of the famous Scottish Madeleine Smith case was not favourably received, and indeed is often considered to be his least typical film. The too objective script leaves audiences not knowing whether Madeleine was a murderess or not, and this fact contributed to the film's failure on release.
Ann Todd had played the role of Madeleine in a West End theatre version of the story, and she persuaded Lean to make a film of the subject, which she found fascinating. Some sequences remind one of later Lean films, notably Ryan's Daughter (1970), as when Emile (Ivan Desny) and Madeleine dance on the hilltop while the village dance below them grows more and more frenzied, underlying the sexual intensity of the scene. The jeering spectators who follow Madeleine to court reappear to torment Adela Quested, when she gives evidence in A Passage to India (1984).
Lean introduced some Freudian imagery into the film - the rain-soaked street where the lovers embrace, the shot of Madeleine on the floor with only Emile's cane in the frame. There are many impressive sequences, including the trial scene itself - Madeleine looks up the tall flight of stairs which lead to the courtroom, the trapdoor opens and the spectators peer down at her. It is a nightmare scene worthy of Hogarth.
Of the supporting players, only Leslie Banks as the authoritarian father registers strongly. Ultimately, the remoteness of Ann Todd's performance and appearance, coupled with the objective script, results in a film which is cold and uninvolving, despite the authenticity of its settings, the beauty of its photography and its technical mastery.
THE SOUND BARRIER
Sound Barrier, The
(1952) Janet Moat from BFI Screen Online
David Lean's third and final film with his wife Ann Todd was also his first for Alexander Korda's London Films, following the break-up of Cineguild. Prompted by a newspaper story, the film was fundamentally a tale of male courage in exploring the unknown, and the women who wait at home. With its exciting, if repetitive, flying sequences, the film marked a departure from the domestic or literary concerns which had characterised Lean's choice of subject matter to date. Its heroics look forward to Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
Lean devised some effective sequences, especially Tony and Susan's flight from London to Cairo, when the Alps and Greek and Egyptian antiquities are seen to the accompaniment of the jet's vapour trail in the sky, and the roar of its engine on the soundtrack. Also memorable is the prologue to Tony's fatal test flight, when he observes a bird climbing high into the sky before dropping like a stone towards the earth.
Distinguished playwright Terence Rattigan's script is strong when charting the difficult relationships of John Ridgefield with his daughter and his chief designer, but the domestic scenes between Tony and Susan, Phil and Jess, are weak. The mix of 'human stories' with supersonic thrills is an uneasy one. Renowned stage actor Ralph Richardson, who had appeared in several films for Korda, is a powerful presence as the ruthless tycoon and his two big scenes with Ann Todd are very effective.
The Sound Barrier was a great box-office success, but it is now rarely seen and has become one of the least-known of David Lean's films.
HOBSON’S CHOICE
Hobson's Choice
(1953) Janet Moat from BFI Screen Online
It was Alexander Korda who suggested Harold Brighouse's 1915 stage comedy Hobson's Choice to David Lean as a possible film project. It had been filmed twice before, by Percy Nash in 1920 and Thomas Bentley in 1931. The title is a pun - 'Hobson's Choice' is no choice at all, precisely the situation Henry Hobson finds himself in by the end of the play.
Charles Laughton had already made several successful films for Korda before he was offered Hobson, a role he had actually played on stage as a teenager in his native Scarborough. He was the first real international star that David Lean had worked with up to that time. John Mills, replacing first choice Robert Donat as Willie Mossop, reveals a lovely gift for comedy, especially in the gentle pantomime of the preparations for his wedding night. (By the end of the film, not only has Willie gained in confidence, his very unattractive pudding bowl haircut has begun to grow out, too.) Brenda de Banzie is excellent as the determined Maggie, not afraid to show the character's tender side and the warmth of her affection for Mossop, beneath all her bullying and bluster. A very young Prunella Scales can be glimpsed in one of her first film roles.
In its overall look, the film marked a temporary return to the late Victorian setting of Lean's adaptations of Dickens. The director's touch is as technically assured as ever, as evident in the famous sequence of Hobson's fall into the cellar after his drunken pursuit of the moon's reflection in the rain puddles outside the Moonrakers pub. The ominous opening scene, in which the camera pans anxiously along the street on a stormy night, reveals nothing more sinister than Hobson's shop and his own figure lurching drunkenly through the doorway. Although the play was dated even by the time of filming, it is beautifully constructed and its characters painted with such affection - and performed so well - that it remains a pleasure to watch.
SUMMER MADNESS
aka: Summertime
Great Britian USA (100 mi) 1955
Summer Madness
(1955) Janet Moat from BFI Screen Online
The credits for Summer Madness (1955) proudly proclaim
that it was photographed entirely in
It was Lean's third film in colour, ravishingly shot by Jack Hildyard, and an Anglo-American co-production. In its theme of an adulterous love affair (the Italian is married), it echoes both Brief Encounter (1945) and The Passionate Friends (1948). Like Brief Encounter it begins with a steam train thundering into the frame. Like The Passionate Friends it includes a motorboat ride for the lovers.
Lean is not afraid to show all the tourist sites, and he marshals his crowd scenes with great aplomb. In Katharine Hepburn he had a huge star, and the truthfulness of her playing of an ageing American spinster achingly alone in a city of lovers saves the film from being what, suggested critic Dilys Powell, might otherwise have been a novelette within a documentary. Hepburn and Lean became life-long friends, but were never to make another film together.
Some of the symbolism - there is a shoe motif, and the lovers finally come together to the accompaniment of a firework display over the city - may seem too obvious to modern audiences, and the whole film is shamelessly romantic and glamorous, but, like Venice herself, it is hard to resist.
Introduction Sight and Sound
A subtle,
poignant piece, with a lovely performance from Hepburn at its centre" —Time Out, London
David Lean's
Summer Madness (aka Summertime) shows 1950s Venice at its most
colourful and romantic. Based on Arthur Laurents' popular play, The Time of
the Cuckoo and scripted by H E Bates, the film tells the story of Jane, a
lonely middle-aged spinster - a 'fancy kind of a secretary' - who splashes out
on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Venice. Thrown in with a variety of couples at
the Pensione Fiorini (the artist and the ingénue, the old married American
couple, the hotel owner and her long time lover) her loneliness and unhappiness
are palpable.
This was the
first opportunity that Lean had been given to film abroad. He makes the most of
his colourful locations, painting a magical picture of a glorious city from
dawn to dusk, as seen through the fresh, but hopelessly romantic eyes of Jane,
who is searching for a 'miracle' and finds it in the form of the charismatic
Venetian antique dealer Renato de Rossi, played by Rossano Brazzi.
The city's
renowned facility for heightening all the senses defeats Jane's attempts to
mask her emotions. Hepburn movingly conveys the complex feelings of a woman
both open to experience and disappointed with life, floundering as she must
decide whether to surrender to the Italian's sophisticated ideas on love and
romance, or to follow her head and resist. At no point in the film do you fear
that the studio will impose a happy ending. This is a David Lean film after
all.
Hepburn's
trademark feisty vulnerability comes into its own in her touching portrayal of
a lively yet ultimately lonely woman surrounded by the sensuality and romance
that has hitherto been denied her. She brilliantly conveys the complex feelings
of a woman both open to experience and disappointed with life, shocked by the
Italians' sophisticated sexual relationships, yet full of passion.
Lean's
startling, hyper-colourful portrait of Venice has been restored by the
collaborative efforts of the bfi National Archive and the Academy Film Archive.
Although the original Eastmancolor negative had seriously faded, the colour has
been fully restored and the soundtrack digitally remastered to return this
feature to its full glory.
The perfect
post-summer pick-me-up for festival-goers, Summer Madness is a must-see
for all Hepburn fans, Lean enthusiasts and romantics alike.
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI
Do not speak to me of rules. This is war. This is not a game of cricket.
—Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa)
The
Bridge on the River Kwai, directed by David Lean | Film review
A classic example of a film that fudges the issues it raises: Guinness restores the morale of British PoWs by building a bridge which it transpires is of military value to the Japanese, and then attempts to thwart Hawkins and Holden's destruction of it - or does he? etc. The film's success also marked the end of Lean as a director and the beginnings of American-financed 'British' films.
Bridge on the River
Kwai, The (1957) Janet Moat
from BFI Screen Online
David Lean's plans to film Richard Mason's novel, The Wind Cannot Read, for Alexander Korda had come to nothing. However, his new project was also to have a jungle setting, and also brought his first collaboration with legendary producer Sam Spiegel, who approached Lean with The Bridge on the River Kwai while he was still shooting Summer Madness (US/UK, 1955). Significantly, Lean was attracted by the story's epic quality, and saw a drama of Shakespearean dimensions in the tragic relationship between Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) and Nicholson (Alec Guinness). He wrote the script with Michael Wilson, although the screen credit went to the book's author, Pierre Boulle.
It is a film of two halves. The first concerns Nicholson's stubbornness, wrong-headedness and courage, and his relationship with the Japanese Colonel Saito, while the second is the story of the British commandos attack on the bridge. The link between the two stories is the character of the American sailor Shears (William Holden), who escapes from the prisoner of war camp, only to return to it as one of the commando team.
The first story is replete with ironies. Nicholson, having endured terrible punishment for refusing to allow his officers to perform manual labour, actively encourages them to do so once he has decided that the bridge must be as well built as possible, to demonstrate British superiority. He himself sees no irony in this, nor realises that he, the great upholder of the Geneva Convention, is collaborating with the enemy by becoming obsessed with the building of the bridge. He has more in common with Saito than he realises: both men are governed by their own codes of 'honour'.
The second story comes as something of a shock. We seem to be watching a completely different film, when the theme of the commando raid on the bridge is introduced. This segment is much more straightforwardly told, with plenty of action sequences and conventional heroics. Lean achieves some memorable images, especially the opening, a wonderful aerial shot of the jungle. A marvellous cut shows Shears' head filling the screen and appearing to come out of the sun. When the Japanese open fire on the commandos in the jungle, hundreds of birds rise up from the trees and fill the sky.
TNR
Film Classic: 'The Bridge on the River Kwai' (1958) | New Republic Philip Roth, April 21, 2011, originally
printed January 27, 1958
For about half the picture, the hero of The Bridge on the River Kwai is a British Colonel (Alec Guiness) whose depth of courage and sense of duty is at once touching, magnificent, and comic. Part of the success of The Bridge is that its courageous hero is shown from all angles, in all kinds of mirrors. He is strong, stubborn, fallible, maniacal, silly, and wise; and in the end he is pathetic, noble, and foolish.
It is as the picture progresses that you become increasingly aware of the complexity—the pathos, the foolishness, the nobility—of the Colonel’s actions. At the beginning, when he and his men have been captured in Thailand by the Japanese he seems merely conscientious. But when he docs not submit to the brutality and degradation heaped upon him by the Japanese commander (Sessue Hayakawa), when finally he wins and forces the commander to accept the British officers as officers, then the force and depth of his character begin to appear. He takes over the building of the bridge and the direction of his men; the bridge becomes his Moby Dick.
That the bridge will finally be a strategic link in the Japanese railroad system from Bangkok to Rangoon does not, cannot, concern him. He is obsessed, first, with constructing a monument to British ingenuity and determination; then with keeping his men well-disciplined and spirited; and finally with remaining a model officer.
From the first stirring scene in which the British troops are led into the Japanese camp whistling an old marching song, until the scenes where the Colonel has the bridge halfway across the Kwai, the film moves swiftly. When another line of action is introduced and we are removed from the drama of the prison camp, the picture begins to lose pace. The second line of action has to do with the adventures of an American (William Holden) who, after escaping from the prison camp on the Kwai, winds up at a lush R&R camp on Ceylon.
In recounting his stay on Ceylon a bucketful of simple-minded pleasantries and heavy-handed ironies gets sloshed around; as you may know, sloshed irony is particularly unsavory. When, eventually, the American is shanghaied into returning to the prison camp with a commando unit whose mission is to blow up the bridge, he howls and balks. Now had he not balked he would hardly have been credible; and yet the style of his balking seems finally false to me, as though at bottom it were a kind of comic posture to make him seem a regular guy. He remains for me only the idea of a person.
When, in the end, the bridge is wired to be blown up, the British Colonel discovers the wire, and, maniacally, attempts to prevent the explosion. The result ofhis intervention is death for almost everyone involved; the bridge is destroyed only when the Colonel’s wounded body falls across the dynamite switch. The Colonel, then, does not appear to have actually chosen to blow up his bridge, nor does he live to see it destroyed. And thus he is robbed of that final agony and awakening that might have made of him a tragic figure. He does, of course, have an awakening: “What have I done?” he finally asks. But what kind of question is that? What must I do now?—that is what the tragic hero asks, that is the painful question. He must do something. To have the hero fall across a dynamite switch because he is wounded permits the final destruction to arise not out of the agony of choice but out of mere physical circumstance. What had begun as a drama of character ends unsatisfactorily with some misty melodramatic statement about Chance and the Ironies of Life.
And yet despite the thinness of the final gesture, The Bridge remains an engrossing and stirring movie. Amazingly, it allows an American to feel patriotic about the British, and that is because it is not, thank God, patriotic about patriotism. Rather it represents the limitations of moral and national passion is well as its glories, and consequently makes patriotism, courage, and pride human possibilities.
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
- Filmsite.org Tim Dirks
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) – Deep Focus Review – Movie ... Brian Eggert
Nick's Flick Picks Nick Davis)
Salon Michael Sragow, January 25, 2001
The House Next Door Chris Gisonny
rec.arts.movies.reviews Dragan Antulov
The
Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - Articles - TCM.com Rob Nixon
'The
Bridge on the River Kwai' on TCM - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares
Combustible Celluloid
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Skrzyniarz
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The
Bridge on the River Kwai | Film Review | Slant Magazine Christian Blauvelt
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Edinburgh U Film Society Stephen Townsend
Review: 'The Bridge on the River Kwai' - Variety Mike Kaplan
BBC Films Almar
Haflidason
The Bridge on the River Kwai Movie Review (1957) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - Screen: 'The Bride on the River Kwai' Opens ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times
The Bridge on
the River Kwai - Wikipedia
LAWRENCE ARABIA
Time Out Dave Calhoun
‘Epic’ is an over-used word in cinema, but David Lean’s 1962, near four-hour journey with TE Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) into the Arabian desert is surely the gold standard for films grand in scale, design and delivery. It’s 50 years since Lean chronicled the exploits of Lawrence, an unconventional British officer who struck out alone during World War I with the aid of Bedouins (including Omar Sharif in his most famous role) to fight the Turks in parts of modern Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria.
This digital restoration marks its anniversary. Most striking, still, are the desert scenes: battles yes, but also the film’s harnessing of the searing, inhuman heat of the sandy wilds, first introduced by Lean’s famous cut from a striking match to a rising sun. O’Toole, too, remains compelling, as he swings between arrogance and humility, confidence and doubt. You’ll need to dedicate half a day to it – but this deserves to be seen again on the big screen.
Lawrence of Arabia
(1962) Janet Moat from BFI Screen Online
Over the years, several attempts to film the story of the
extraordinary life of T. E. Lawrence, most notably by Rex Ingram in the 1920s
and Alexander Korda in the 1930s, had come to nothing. After the huge success
of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which fused adventure story,
spectacle and flawed heroics, the potential of
Lean's mastery of composition, of fashioning exactly the right images from the immensity of the desert, its rocks and shadows and hillocks of sand, surpassed anything even he had attempted before. Sometimes he is content for the desert vastness itself to be the point of the scene, as evident in the breathtaking long shot of camels strung out on it like ships on the sea, or the famous sequence of Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) slowly emerging from the mirage on the far horizon.
Audacious cuts, like the legendary one from an extinguished match to the rising sun, or sequences like the one where the sun grows larger and larger until it fills the screen during Gasim's desperate desert walk, have lost none of their power after forty years.
There is hardly a frame which is not visually stunning, but Lawrence of Arabia also boasts an exceptional script by Robert Bolt, in his first collaboration with Lean. In the opening credit sequence we know nothing of the man, yet Bolt economically conveys that this is someone who takes risks and finds danger exhilarating. The film promotes the Romantic view of Lawrence which informs his own account of the Arab Revolt in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. There are startling symmetries, like Lawrence checking his reflection in the golden dagger that goes with his immaculate new white Arab robes, and later seeing his blood-soaked face and clothes in the same dagger, following the massacre of the Turkish column.
Lawrence's identity is questioned throughout the film. Costume designer Phyllis Dalton devised a marvellous way to indicate Lawrence's failing grip on who and what he was. The robes worn by Peter O'Toole become thinner and thinner, until, at the Arab Council in Damascus, they are practically transparent. By the time Lawrence takes his farewell of Arabia, he is reduced first to a reflection in a table top, then a shadow on a curtain, and then to a blurred image behind a car's dirty windscreen.
Lawrence
of Arabia - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications John McCarty from Film Reference
Lawrence of Arabia has been described as a "thinking man's epic." The film has all the ingredients of a classic adventure yarn. Typically in epics, these ingredients are showcased to the detriment of character and plot in order to keep the action rolling. But in David Lean's epic, the title character and the political machinations surrounding his exploits take center stage; what's more, he remains an enigma even as the final credits fade to black.
Like the vast, arid landscape that, in the words of Alec Guinness's Prince Feisel, proves such a mystical allure for this latest in a line of "desert-loving Englishmen," the mystery of Lawrence's character is never quite fathomed. There is no Rosebud here. Even his rape at the hands of the Turks, which Lawrence described in his memoirs as the key assault on "the citadel of my integrity" and which may or may not have revealed to him a latent homosexuality, explains nothing.
The film overwhelms with its images of the desert and men at war, but the uncompromising genius of Lean's direction, Robert Bolt's screenplay and Peter O'Toole's starmaking performance as the obscure British map maker who becomes a national hero only to flee back to obscurity is that the focus always remains on the quest for Lawrence himself. You never stop thinking about and trying to understand him even though the quest ultimately proves unsuccessful, for the filmmakers and for us, just as it did for Lawrence himself. Our final image of the man as he is driven from the scene of his wartime triumphs to a yearned-for life of invisibility is through the windshield of a jeep, the dust-streaked glass obscuring his face. Even the film's initial advertising art (subsequently changed) showing Lawrence in arab head gear, his face in shadow, cued audiences to the puzzle without a solution they were in for. One can't even imagine a film—certainly not an epic one—like this being made today, where it is insisted upon that whatever we know or need to know about a given film's main character(s) is spelled out fully, usually in the first ten minutes.
Lawrence of Arabia appeared at a time when the British cinema that produced it and Lean were taking a decidedly different turn. Lean began his career as an editor then director of small, mostly black and white, dramas about English life drawn from the works of Charles Dickens and Noel Coward. He established himself a master of the epic with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), the superlative World War II adventure film that won a slew of Oscars, including one for him as Best Director.
He began preparing Lawrence in 1960 when the foundering British film industry was being reshaped by a younger generation of filmmakers who scorned Lean's classically trained approach to narrative moviemaking and fondness for large scale canvases and subjects. They preferred to train their cameras not on vast landscapes and enigmatic heroes but on working class anti-heroes and the dreariness of British lower class life. Their small, black and white "kitchen sink" dramas, not Lean's behemoth tales of romantic characters swept up in the turbulence of historical events, were the future of British films, they maintained.
After the success of Lawrence , which took longer to make than it took the events the film chronicled to take place, Lean continued to invite scorn by making epics. When Lawrence was restored for re-release in 1989, he explained why. He'd envisioned a future when the astronomical costs of making such movies would eventually become prohibitive, so he made them while he had the chance. But there was more to it. As the curtains opened on the giant 70mm screen at the London premiere of the restored Lawrence , the ailing director, speaking on audio tape, invited the audience to sit back and experience "what the movies used to be"—i.e. something that could not be experienced the same way except at the movies.
His younger colleagues' "kitchen sink" dramas and even his own earlier films in a similar vein could be shown on television with no loss in emotional effect. But not the epic, and certainly not Lawrence . For him a film like Lawrence of Arabia was what cinema in the post-TV era was all about: a grand opportunity for larger than life adventure, in both the making of it and the seeing of it, that should be seized upon if for no other reason than the unlikelihood of it ever coming our way again.
Blue-eyes
Is Back | Movie Review | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 23, 1989
Thanks to a meticulous restoration carried out by Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten, working with a team of specialists that ultimately included director David Lean himself, Lawrence of Arabia has been rereleased in all its original glory in a version that includes some footage that wasn't even seen by most of the film's earliest audiences (the original road-show version, released in late 1962, was cut by about 20 minutes before it went into general release). I won't dwell upon the complex detective work carried out by the restorers, except to note that in order to make the version currently playing as complete as possible, the original actors even redubbed some of their lines, which were then electronically altered so that their present voices would sound like their voices 27 years ago. Lean was also permitted to make a few minor modifications in the editing, so that the definitive version of this epic about the enigmatic T.E. Lawrence and his unorthodox military career is actually a "final cut" that incorporates practically all of the material that was in the original version.
Having seen the film only twice--once around the time that it first came out, and again recently--I find my feelings about it even more strongly divided than they were in the early 60s. To put things in perspective, 1962 was a year in which other prominent English-language releases in the U.S. included John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Howard Hawks's Hatari!, Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, and Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey Into Night.
All of these movies seemed superior to Lawrence in one way or another back in 1962, and even today, I would still probably rank them all higher. Looking back at the spring 1963 issue of Film Culture--the same issue, incidentally, where the first version of Andrew Sarris's highly influential auteurist manifesto, The American Cinema, appeared--I see in a chart of critics' ratings of current releases that Sarris gave the lowest possible rating to Lawrence ("poor"), Peter Bogdanovich ranked it only a notch higher ("fair"), two other critics deemed it "very good," and only William Everson and Dwight Macdonald considered it "excellent"; no one at all gave it the highest rating, which was "exceptional."
This was of course during a period when the French New Wave was nearing the height of its glory, when Antonioni and Fellini were first acquiring mass appeal in the U.S., and when the New American Cinema was just beginning to make a pronounced impact--to cite only some of the excitement that made Lean's achievement look relatively staid and conventional. Certain critics of this period like Macdonald, Stanley Kauffmann, and John Simon clearly thought otherwise, but because these same critics tended to disparage the majority of the movies that I cared most about (ranging from Ford and Welles to Godard and Resnais), it wasn't difficult to take sides against Lean as the epitome of academicism, literary cinema, and "good taste" in the worst sense--all the signs of old-fashioned squareness that the best new movies were fighting against.
I find it hard to disavow the essential tenets of that position today. But something vital about the state of creativity in the cinema has changed since then, and compared with most recent releases, Lawrence of Arabia can only properly be regarded as a towering achievement (with certain reservations, which I will get to shortly). If its spectacular, formal use of 70-millimeter has none of the sense of the new to be found in such superior big-screen blockbusters as Tati's Playtime and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (both of which surfaced only five or six years later), it still marks a major step forward for the ambitious personal epic compared to such preceding examples of the period as Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments, Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, Otto Preminger's Exodus, Nicholas Ray's King of Kings, and Lean's own The Bridge on the River Kwai. In addition, Lawrence of Arabia has proved to be an enormous influence on subsequent epics. The ambiguous positioning of its central character clearly paved the way for Patton, the use of a naive reporter as an expositional device was later adopted (albeit clumsily) in The Green Berets, and still other aspects of Lawrence of Arabia have found their way into subsequent epics ranging from Star Wars to Apocalypse Now to Dune.
Part of the unusual achievement of Lawrence of Arabia in its time, later emulated by such would-be successors as A Man for All Seasons and Becket, was to combine the purely sensual virtues of a scenic and pictorial costume epic like one of De Mille's with the more literary and "classy" cultural values of the English theater. (When Lawrence compares himself at one point to Moses crossing Sinai, the reference to The Ten Commandments becomes explicit; a little later, the film parodies this notion when Lawrence mistakes a dust storm for a "pillar of fire.")
Ironically, although detractors such as Sarris called the film "impersonal" in the 60s, it can be seen today as one of the prototypes of the contemporary "personal" blockbuster in which the director's own will to power is reflected in the ambiguous megalomania of the central character. This is a tradition that actually goes all the way back to such silent classics as Stroheim's Foolish Wives as well as to The Ten Commandments and Hawks's underrated Land of the Pharaohs. But Lean gave an increased intellectual respectability to this position that countless later directors have cashed in on, including, among many others, Werner Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God), Francis Coppola (Apocalypse Now), Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and more recently Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ), John Milius (Farewell to the King), and Terry Gilliam (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). Thanks in part to Lean's example, these films are about more than their ostensible subjects--they are also about the positions of their respective directors in leading hordes of people, dreaming big dreams, and reflecting on the metaphysical ambiguities of their power, all of which has tended to make most of these blockbusters bear an annoyingly monotonous and narcissistic resemblance to one another.
It is to the credit of Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt, however, that Lawrence of Arabia has a historical density and political and psychological nuances that go beyond those of its numerous successors. This is all the more surprising when one considers that, apart from Lawrence's death in 1935 from a motorcycle accident, which opens the film, the time span covered in 216 minutes is only about two years--from the end of Lawrence's stint as a lieutenant and mapmaker in Cairo in 1916, when he was dispatched to meet with Prince Faisal, until his return to England in 1918. Apart from the occasional allusion to Lawrence's background, this leaves about 45 years in his life unaccounted for.
From the outset, Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) is perceived as a grand enigma: well-educated, self-assured, remote, oddly masochistic, and passionate about Arabia. Before very long, he emerges as a visionary leader of Arab independence against the Turks--winning the confidence of both Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) and Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness)--and so impresses the bedouin army with his courage and endurance during a long trek across the desert to capture Aqaba that they garb him in Ali's white burnoose, which henceforth becomes his identifying costume. He even wins over the wily and primitive Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn), drawing him and his men away from their loyalty to the Turks and into the bedouin army.
My knowledge of the real-life counterparts of these characters and events is spotty at best, but it seems to me that the film's mythic dimension in relation to the third world is very closely allied to that of Apocalypse Now--the white man lording it over noble (or ignoble) savages, who look to him for guidance. This is certainly reflected in the characteristic decision to have two of the three leading Arab characters played by whites (Guinness and Quinn), and my reservations were recently seconded in an interesting and not entirely unsympathetic article about the film by Edward W. Said--literature professor at Columbia, author of Orientalism, and a member of the Palestine National Council--in the February 21 issue of the Wall Street Journal entitled "'Lawrence' Doesn't Do Arabs Any Favors."
Describing Guinness's Faisal as "a cross between his rendition of Fagin and T.S. Eliot's Confidential Clerk, with an annoying admixture of oiliness thrown in for good measure," and Quinn's Auda as "a semi-moronic thug out of West Side Story," Said also argues that, contrary to the film's depiction of its hero, "Lawrence was a British imperial agent, not an innocent enthusiast for Arab independence," and a Zionist to boot. Focusing on the scene of the Arab National Council Meeting in Damascus, occurring near the end of the film, which Said rightly calls "the film's political payoff, its climactic argument about the Arab revolt," he persuasively concludes that Lean's "unmistakably imperialistic" vision is that "serious rule was never meant for such lesser species, only for the white man."
None of this should imply that Lawrence of Arabia is necessarily any more imperialistic or racist in its implications than other big-budget war epics; on the contrary, I would argue that it more or less goes with the territory. (In fact, one can find a pretty close equivalent to Lean's depiction of the Arab National Council Meeting in Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! made ten years earlier, when the "nonwhites" who are shown as unfit to rule themselves--including the same uncouth Anthony Quinn--are Mexican peasants.)
Having acknowledged this serious limitation about Lawrence of Arabia, which may have contributed as much to its success as its more defensible virtues, I should mention what makes the film a major work in spite of these nagging problems. Freddie Young's Super Panavision, 70-millimeter cinematography, for starters, is conceivably the greatest desert photography that we have in movies, and some of the film's greatest moments are elongated meditations on mountains, camels, and mirages--moments that give us a sense of space, history, and even psychology that goes beyond any of the particulars found in Bolt's extremely literate dialogue. (Another central visual reference point is the blueness of O'Toole's eyes, which becomes all the more striking in relatively monochromatic desert settings.)
Excepting the minstrel-show casting of Faisal and Auda, the performances are virtually flawless: O'Toole has certainly never been better, and arguably Sharif and Jose Ferrer are at their best as well. (On the other hand, whether or not Ferrer's depiction of a Turk is as objectionable as Guinness and Quinn's Arabs--an issue that Said seems content to overlook--is a question worth raising.) At the same time, the performances are enhanced by the broader context created as the film alternates between actorly dialogue scenes and large-scale spectacle without giving the impression that either of these is padding. Even if some of this film's strength comes from the acting and dialogue of the English theater, it can never be accused of looking stagy.
Returning to the question of Lawrence's character, the film manages to suggest his ambiguous sexuality without ever committing itself to a specific reading of it. Some of this is no doubt due to actual or anticipated censorship restraints circa 1962. While little is known conclusively about Lawrence's sexual orientation, most accounts agree that he was obsessed and traumatized by what happened to him after he was captured by the Turks in Deraa, which apparently included torture and homosexual rape. The film manages to be unusually explicit about the sexual interest of the head Turk (Ferrer) in Lawrence, but then it goes to great lengths to suggest that all that Lawrence suffered at the hands of the Turk and his henchmen was beatings. Much earlier, there's a fairly strong suggestion of an amorous relationship between Lawrence and a young Arab servant, but this too is allowed to go nowhere.
The latter portion of the film charts a steady deterioration in Lawrence's stability and self-confidence after the episode in Deraa, but both the nature of this change and the reasons behind it are left ambiguous, apart from Lawrence's dawning recognition that he is more a pawn of British interests than an autonomous leader of the Arabs. This multilayered portrait suggests that Lean and Bolt are trying to at least partially demystify Lawrence as a hero, but the fact remains that the ideological baggage carried by the White Man's Burden theme is a lot stronger than any amount of irony that the filmmakers can bring to it.
Indeed, some of the film's irony has a sense of self-protection about it. Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), the American journalist modeled on war correspondent Lowell Thomas, is sufficiently disingenuous and cynical to imply a certain amount of anti-American satire in the portrait. But as Said points out, Bentley's role in publicizing Lawrence isn't all that different from the role of Lean and Bolt (are American newspapers any more "commercial" than big-screen blockbusters?) and Bentley seems to be used as a scapegoat to distract us from the comparable simplification being perpetrated by the filmmakers.
"They hope to gain their freedom," Lawrence says to Bentley about the Arabs. "They're going to get it, Mr. Bentley. I'm going to give it to them." The irony here may be rebounding on Lawrence, and it's worth noting here and elsewhere that the question often arises as to who is simplifying what and whom. (Bentley's interview with Prince Faisal, by the way, which occurs shortly after the intermission, is one of the longer scenes not previously seen in its entirety in all the shorter versions of the film; it is also one of the few moments in the restoration when the sound seems slightly off.)
Magisterial, intelligent, handsome, mysterious, proud, brilliant, imperialist, bombastic, narcissistic: the film, like its hero, is all these things. Paradoxically, it is not really a film that admits hidden depths--the ironies and ambiguities are all there on the surface, which is one of the reasons I doubt that this is a masterpiece that can be combed indefinitely for buried treasures.
Lawrence prancing about on top of a captured train makes for some fine images, but not ones that tell us anything new or different about him; Lawrence half-crazed and soaked in blood may make us think of Shakespeare, but it's the Classics Illustrated version. When we last see him riding off in a jeep toward his trip back to England and a motorcyclist passes him, reminding us of his eventual death, the effect is anything but complex; it suggests, rather, the kind of Profundity 101 that some English professors love to foist on helpless undergraduates.
On the other hand, it is pointless to complain that the charge of the bedouins on horses and camels into Aqaba is ahistorical (apparently the port fell to the Arabs without a single shot being fired) because a more accurate depiction would have deprived us of a stunning extended pan across the city to the sea during the battle, with a cannon grandly appearing in the center foreground as the camera comes to rest. I haven't the foggiest notion of whether Lawrence's grand entrance at the officer's bar in Cairo wearing his white burnoose with his young Arab servant in tow is historically accurate, but it makes for a terrific scene, and Lean manages to stretch it out for maximum effectiveness. There are many such showstoppers all the way through, which prompts me to concede that as a grand, old-fashioned entertainment, Lawrence of Arabia qualifies, warts and all, as the best new movie around.
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The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia: review - Telegraph Nicholas Shakespeare, April 14, 2011
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rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert] September 2, 2001
rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert] March 17, 1989
Movie Review - - Screen: A Desert Warfare Spectacle:'Lawrence of ... Bosley Crowther from The New York Times
The New York Times A.O. Scott
Lawrence
of Arabia Blu-ray Peter O'Toole - DVD Beaver
Lawrence of
Arabia (film) - Wikipedia
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
Doctor Zhivago (2015), directed by David Lean | Film review - Time Out Cath Clarke
One of the classic screen
romances, as Omar Sharif and Julie Christie meet, love and lose each other
during the Russian revolution
With a running time of
three hours and 17 minutes, breathtakingly beautiful landscapes and wolves
howling in the woods, ‘Doctor Zhivago’ does it bigger and better than anything
else. Based on Boris Pasternak’s 1958 novel, the story sweeps through World War
I, the Russian revolution, famine and civil war.
But what’s history next to the epic love story of poet and doctor Yuri Zhivago
(Omar Sharif, brooding) and shopkeeper’s daughter Lara (Julie Christie, glowing
like she’s swallowed a lightbulb)? Even better than the lead performances is Rod
Steiger as the rotter who seduces Lara as a 17-year-old schoolgirl after
sleeping with her mum, and Tom Courtenay as her fanatical husband. ‘Doctor
Zhivago’ has the most irritating soundtrack in the history of cinema and yes,
it’s old-fashioned and sappy. But it’s impossible not to swoon. This is a love
story to sink your teeth into.
Doctor Zhivago
(1965) Sergio Angelini from BFI Screen Online
First published in
After a series of financial failures, MGM was desperately looking for a hit, and so gave Lean carte blanche. He turned to many of the cast and crew from his previous film, the hugely successful Lawrence of Arabia (1962), including: actors Omar Sharif and Alec Guinness, composer Maurice Jarre, Production Designer John Box, Costume Designer Phyllis Dalton, screenwriter Robert Bolt and, belatedly, cinematographer Freddie Young. Initially Lean had hired Nicolas Roeg, who had shot second unit on Lawrence, but they didn't get along and after a few weeks he was let go.
Lean even begins the film as he did Lawrence, with a long prologue leading into the main bulk of the narrative, which is told in flashback. He had previously used such a structure for In Which We Serve (1942) and Brief Encounter (1945); unlike Lawrence however, the flashback bookends the narrative to provide some sense of closure, providing a more upbeat end to the film. Initially, it also serves to make it clear that Zhivago and Lara will eventually become lovers - they don't actually speak to each other until 80 minutes into the film.
As Komarovsky, Rod Steiger (a late replacement for James Mason) steals every scene that he is in, clearly revelling in playing such a morally varied and ambiguous character, one that perhaps even achieves a kind of nobility by the end. Just as good is Tom Courtenay who, as his change from the idealistic young Pasha to the weary and embittered Strelnikov indicates, is given a substantial character arc. In this respect, Sharif, Christie and Geraldine Chaplin in the main roles are saddled with rather static and passive characters giving them less scope to shine. Visually stunning, the film is replete with memorable images: the frozen dacha, the cavalry charge against the Moscow demonstrators, a battle seen through a pair of spectacles, a cornflower that seems to weep. In 2002 the novel was turned into a mini-series by ITV.
Doctor
Zhivago - TCM.com Frank Miller
Promising young surgeon Yuri Zhivago is happily married to a wife
from a good family when a world war, the Russian Revolution and his growing
passion for the beautiful Lara disrupt their lives. Though Lara inspires his
greatest poetry, they are kept apart by the forces of history until Zhivago
defies the Soviet government to flee with his love to the snowbound countryside
of his youth. There, they snatch a few moments of happiness until she vanishes
with their infant daughter, leaving Zhivago to spend the rest of his life
searching for her. Years later, his half-brother, Yevgraf, tracks down a young
factory worker who knows little of her past except for her passion for music
and poetry which she inherited from her father, Yuri.
Doctor Zhivago (1965) was the first major western film to capture the turmoil
of the Russian Revolution, leading the way for such later epics as Nicholas
and Alexandra (1971) and Reds (1981).
Winning out over several other producers, Carlo Ponti bought the film rights to
Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel Doctor Zhivago from its
Italian publisher in 1963. At the time, David Lean was the only director who
seemed capable of pulling off such a large-scale production. On the strength of
his international success with Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Ponti hired
him and gave him complete artistic control.
Lean's first choice for the title role was Peter O'Toole, who had risen to
stardom with his performance in Lawrence of Arabia. Having suffered
through two years of shooting in the desert, however, O'Toole was loath to
commit to a similarly grueling film shoot in what promised to be dauntingly
cold climates, so he turned the film down.
Then, Lean turned to the other actor who had risen to stardom in Lawrence,
Egyptian actor Omar Sharif. The casting was a surprise to everybody, including
Sharif. He had asked his agent to propose him for the role of Pasha, the
student revolutionary who becomes Zhivago's nemesis. Tom Courtenay would win an
Oscar& nomination for his performance in that role.
After considering several other actresses for the lead, Lean chose British
newcomer Julie Christie, over the studio's objections. He based his choice on
one scene in Billy Liar (1963), in which she played opposite Courtenay
and a few clips from Darling (1965), which was currently in production
and would go on to win her international acclaim and an Oscar®.
Lean also had to fight to cast Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of the legendary
Charlie Chaplin, as Zhivago's wife, Tonya. With the exception of an uncredited
bit in her father's Limelight (1952), it was her first appearance in an
English-language film.
It took two years to film Doctor Zhivago. Over 800 craftsmen in three countries
worked on the film. The final production budget was $14 million, twice what the
film's backers had agreed to.
The film's principal location in Spain was the C.E.A. Studios, near Madrid's
international airport. Production designer John Box and his crew spent six
months turning the ten-acre studio into a reproduction of Moscow between 1905
and 1920. Included in the set were a half-mile long paved street, trolley
lines, an authentic replica of the Kremlin, a viaduct with real train engines,
a church and more than 50 businesses. Publicists touted the set as the largest
ever built for a film.
For Zhivago's trip through the Russian Steppes, Box constructed sets in the
mountains north of Madrid. This required diverting the course of a river to fit
Lean's vision and building miles of fresh railroad tracks.
Lean originally wanted to shoot each of the film's scenes in the appropriate
season, so he scheduled a ten-month shoot. Unfortunately, he arrived in Spain
during one of the country's mildest winters ever. After repeated delays that
added $2.5 million to the budget as he waited for snow, he finally had to shoot
during the warmer months.
Many winter scenes were shot in the summer, when actors had to withstand
temperatures climbing to 116 degrees while muffled in Russian furs. Costume
designer Phyllis Dalton had to keep strict watch over the extras to make sure
none of them were shedding layers of clothing to cool off. Sharif would later
note, "We had an army of make-up assistants who every two minutes came and
dabbed you because we were sweating profusely."
Doctor Zhivago was the second of three films teaming David Lean with playwright
Robert Bolt. Bolt had previously saved the Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
script. Their third collaboration would be Ryan's Daughter (1970),
starring Bolt's wife, Sarah Miles.
Along with the reissue of Gone With the Wind (1939), Doctor Zhivago
saved MGM from bankruptcy in the mid-'60s. It also marked a new path for the
historical epic. Previous films had simply focused on the scope of
world-shaping events. With Zhivago director David Lean and scriptwriter Robert
Bolt brought a new romantic sensibility to the epic. That Victorian ideal would
inform such later blockbusters as Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), Lady
Gray(1986) andTitanic (1997).
Doctor Zhivago was nominated for ten Academy Awards®, including Best Picture,
Best Director and Best Supporting Actor (Tom Courtenay). It won for Best
Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Freddie Young), Best Art Direction
(John Box), Best Costumes (Phyllis Dalton) and Best Score (Maurice Jarre).
Comrades, Comes the
Revolution: David Lean's Doctor Zhivago and ... Comrades,
Comes the Revolution: David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago and Warren Beatty’s Reds, by
Daniel Garrett from Offscreen, July
2013
History Hasn't Killed It: The Story Behind 'Doctor Zhivago' - Biography ... Joe McGasko, December 27, 2015
Doctor Zhivago |
film by Lean [1965] | Britannica.com
Illumined
Illusions-Seeing Cinema in a New Light [Ian C. Bloom] 5-page essay (pdf)
Doctor Zhivago | Larsen On
Film Josh Larsen
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
The
History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1965 [Erik Beck]
Doctor
Zhivago (1965) | Journeys in Classic Film
Kristen Kopez
Doctor Zhivago -
Pajiba John Williams
Doctor
Zhivago (1965) - Articles - TCM.com
MUBI's Notebook: Glenn Kenny Special Blu-ray Preservation/Restoration
Edition, April 30, 2010
The true story of Dr Zhivago's Lara | The Spectator Sofka Zinovieff book review, August 27, 2016
Doctor Zhivago (1965) - Little
White Lies David Jenkins
Doctor Zhivago - New
York TV Review - NYMag John Leonard
Doctor
Zhivago | Film at The Digital Fix
Raphael Pour-Hashemi
DVD
Journal D.K. Holm
Essential
Classics - Romances | PopMatters
Erik Hinton
KQEK
DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]
DVD Savant Blu-ray
Review: Doctor Zhivago Glenn
Erickson
High-Def
Digest [David Krauss] Blu-Ray
Blu-rayDefinition.com
- Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
DVDizzy.com
- 45th Anniversary Edition DVD with Pictures and Comparison Luke Bonanno, Blu-Ray
Doctor
Zhivago (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Stuart Galbraith IV
Film
Intuition: 45th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray [Jen Johans]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
CineScene.com Richard Doyle
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jeff Robson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The New Yorker: Pauline Kael's review December 1965
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
'Doctor
Zhivago': 1965 Review | Hollywood Reporter James Powers
Doctor
Zhivago | Variety A.D. Murphy
Doctor
Zhivago review – vehement storytelling still conjures great ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
Doctor Zhivago, film review: David Lean's epic romance celebrates ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent
Doctoring
Zhivago - The Irish Times
November 23, 2002
Omar
Sharif's Doctor Zhivago: Why I love this film - Telegraph Film director Richard De Aragues
San Francisco Examiner [Scott Rosenberg]
Doctor Zhivago Movie Review & Film Summary (1965) | Roger Ebert
Movie Review - - DOCTOR ZHIVAGO - NYTimes.com Bosley Crowther, also seen here: New York Times [Bosley Crowther]
Dr.
Zhivago Blu-ray - Julie Christie - DVD Beaver
Doctor Zhivago (film) - Wikipedia
The CIA's
'Zhivago' | by Michael Scammell | The New York Review of ... Michael Scammell from The New York Review of Books, July 10, 2014
RYAN’S DAUGHTER
Great Britain (195 mi) 1970 ‘Scope DVD Cut (206 mi)
Ryan's Daughter | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
David Lean finally got some madness going in his images with this 1970 production. In 1916 Ireland, Sarah Miles marries tweedy schoolteacher Robert Mitchum (his charisma hidden behind steel-rimmed spectacles), but soon begins an affair with Christopher Jones, a soldier of the occupying British army. It's insanely overproduced in Lean's standard epic style, yet somehow the crazy mismatches in scale contribute to the film's sense of romantic delirium. With John Mills, Trevor Howard, and Leo McKern; photographed by Freddie Young.
Ryan's Daughter | Film Society
of Lincoln Center
That undisputed master of the epic form, David Lean followed his 1965 Doctor Zhivago with another stab at sweeping tragic romance, loosely adapted by frequent Lean screenwriter Robert Bolt from Madame Bovary. In an Oscar-nominated performance, Sarah Miles (the then Mrs. Bolt) stars as a young lass in a coastal Irish town circa WWI, trapped in a loveless marriage (to schoolteacher Robert Mitchum, who reportedly grew his own marijuana on the set) and drawn into an affair with a shellshocked Major (Christopher Jones) from the occupying British army. Ravishingly photographed by the great Freddie Young (who won an Oscar for his work), Ryan’s Daughter proved a popular hit but a critical failure, and Lean wouldn’t direct again until A Passage to India 14 years later.
Ryan's
Daughter | The Cinematheque
David Lean was on the epic run that included Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago when he directed this Madame Bovary-inspired drama set in a small Irish village during the 1916 Troubles. Sarah Miles is the married woman who has a scandalous affair with a shell-shocked British officer (Christopher Jones); Robert Mitchum is her much-older husband, the local schoolteacher. John Mills won an Oscar for his supporting role as a developmentally-challenged villager. Freddie Young’s sumptuous cinematography also won an Oscar — Young’s third, after his statuettes for Lawrence and Zhivago. A hit with audiences but not critics, “Ryan’s Daughter is arguably the most visually-impressive film ever made in Ireland ... The production was long and drawn out while Lean waited for perfect weather conditions for his many and spectacular outdoor scenes ... the breadth of which can only be fully appreciated on the big screen” (Alice Butler, Irish Film Institute).
Ryan's
Daughter (1970) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Fred Hunter
Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles) is the daughter of local pub owner
Thomas Ryan (Leo McKern), living in a small village on the coast of
Rosy sets her sites on the handsome young school master Charles Schaughnessy
(Robert Mitchum), a quiet, mild-mannered man who becomes taken with the young
woman. They get married in one of the more memorable movie weddings, that
starts in a quite ceremony and degenerates into a sort of Bacchanalian orgy,
that ends with the couple going up to their room to consummate their marriage,
while the louts outside pelt the windows with dried corn. But it's when things
calm down that the real surprise comes to Rosy. Charles makes love to her
tenderly and gently rather than passionately, and when done rolls over and goes
to sleep. It is clear that the experience has been anything but inspiring to
Rosy.
And the day to day rhythm of married life offers no excitement, either. She
discovers that Charles is dull rather than just quiet, and the contemplative
life is simply intolerable to her. She spends a lot of time talking to local
priest Father Collins about her predicament, complaining that what she has just
isn't enough. Collins cautions her to be careful what she wishes for, because
she'll sure as hell get it.
The excitement Rosy's been looking for finally arrives. She discovers him
sitting in her father's pub: a British soldier named Randolph Doryan, who is
both handsome and semi-tragic, having been permanently wounded in the war. It
isn't long before they have started a torrid affair in which Rosy achieves the
passion that has been missing in her marriage and her life. But this is a
particularly dangerous liaison, since the hatred of the British (and the IRA
activity going on underground in the village) make the prospect of an Irish
girl carrying on with a British soldier tantamount to treason.
The locals' tongues are set to wagging very early on, but it takes her husband
Charles a little longer to catch on. He suspects that something is going on,
and even asks her at one point if there is anything between her and the
soldier, which she denies. In one fascinating, prolonged scene, Charles takes
his class down to the beach to collect specific types of shells. While on the
beach he sees two sets of footprints walking side by side, one belonging to a
female and the other obviously belonging to the soldier Doryan, with his slight
drag on one foot. He follows the footprints to a grotto inside which he
believes his wife and the soldier to be, and tries to wait them out
(ironically, unknown to Charles, the only person in the cave is Michael, the
village idiot).
The anti-British sentiment in the village sharpens when IRA hero Tim O'Leary (Barry
Foster) arrives in town to transport guns and munitions. But they are stopped
by the British (led by Doryan). When Tim O'Leary tries to escape, and Doryan
shoots him down in front of the whole village. After this, the animosity toward
Rosy swings out of control: the villagers storm the Shaughnessy's home and take
Rosy, stripping her and cutting her hair off, not leaving until Father Collins
arrives to stop them. Rosy and Charles are left together in their humiliation.
Charles tells her that he always knew that they were having an affair, but he
had always hoped it was something that would burn itself out. Now it looks like
that affair is all over, and Charles, who has remained faithful to Rosy despite
her unfaithfulness. Unable to stay in the village any longer, the pair decide
to leave for
Coming after the enormous success of Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of
Arabia, critics and audiences alike were anxiously anticipating the next
epic from director David Lean. What they weren't expecting was what they got
with Ryan's Daughter:
a paper-thin story stretched to epic proportions. In Dr. Zhivago Lean
demonstrated that he could tell an intimate love story against the backdrop of
the Russian Revolution. But in Ryan's
Daughter the triangle is played out against a revolution that never
happens. It's as if Lean is trying to test the patience of the audience.
The performances can't be faulted. Robert Mitchum is amazing as the quiet
husband. Never before had he been allowed to convey so much through his body
language and facial expressions; he is alternately strong, loving, and tragic.
Sarah Miles gives a strong performance as the woman who is literally torn
between two lovers and can't seem to help herself, even when her actions start
to get dangerous. Christopher Stone is something of a cypher as the suffering
soldier, but Trevor Howard is a powerhouse and Father Collins, and John Mills,
of course, is wonderful. The film itself is gorgeous: Freddie Francis' sumptuous
cinematography which perfectly captures the Irish coast (and is particularly
impressive in the storm sequence) justifiably won the film's second Academy
Award.
For their new Special Edition, Warner Bros. has struck the transfer from newly
restored 65mm source elements. The result is a splendid transfer with
incredible rich colors and pure flesh tones. The audio feature strong tone
quality, but tends to be a little light on bass. The two disc set includes a
35th Anniversary "making of" documentary in three parts, 2 vintage
documentaries, and a full length commentary by Lade Sandra Lean, Sarah Miles,
Petrine Day Mitchum (daughter), and a host of others.
David
Lean's Problem Child: Gorgeous but Flawed Ryan's Daughter ... Matthew
Kennedy from Bright Lights Film Journal,
May 1, 2006
Ryan's Daughter (1970) |
Movie Review - Lenin Imports
'Ryan's Daughter' review by Jonathan White • Letterboxd
Ryan's
Daughter (1970) - Ferdy on Films
Rederick Heath
Rio
Rancho Film Reviews: Ryan's Daughter
also seen here: Rio
Rancho Films Reviews *potentially offensive*
Ryan's
Daughter — So Misunderstood - The Rake Magazine Cristina Córdova
Movie
House Commentary Johnny Web
Nick's
Flick Picks: The Best Actress Project [Nick Davis]
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
Coffee
Bean Cinema: Ryan's Daughter (1970)
Stafford Christensen
Ryan's Daughter - TCM.com David Sterritt
Ryan's Daughter (1970) Review | notesonafilm
30.
British filmmaker David Lean's "Ryan's daughter" (1970) Jugu Abraham
DVD Savant Review: Ryan's Daughter - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson
The
Onion A.V. Club [Donna Bowman]
The DVD Journal | Quick Reviews: Ryan's Daughter Dawn Taylor
Film
Freak Central - Ryan's Daughter (1970) [Two-Disc Special Edition ... Bill Chambers
Junta Juleil's Culture Shock [Sean Gill]
Review:
'Ryan's Daughter' - Variety
Return of Ryan's daughter | The Independent Andrew Johnson
Cleveland
Press [Tony Mastroianni]
Ryan's Daughter Movie Review & Film Summary (1970) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - The New York Times Vincent
Canby, also seen here: New
York Times [Vincent Canby]
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Ryan's
Daughter / Trivia - TV Tropes
LeBeau, Zach
THE SCIENTIST B 86
USA (88 mi) 2010 Official site
A somewhat mild sci-fi flavored drama on the concept of
being reborn, examining our place in the universe, where one wonders what
happens to the spirit after one dies, which is asked by a married couple early
in the film without realizing how it would consume their thoughts for years to
come. At the center of the story is
physicist Dr. Marcus Ryan (Bill Sage), one of the more advanced scholars in the
quantum physics department in some unnamed Midwestern town, where much of the
film was actually shot in
Occasionally, there are brief comments made directly to the camera, as Ryan is keeping a video diary of each passing day after the accident which he hopes will keep him connected to his lost family, which he then dutifully places in a cabinet afterwards, a catalogue of mournful recollections, while in the background, we hear him listening to Verdi’s “Requiem” playing softly. Other than that, he exists in a perpetual stupor, though years have passed, still unable to comprehend the mystery behind it all. Eventually, based on something he’s seen in his head, he constructs some kind of scientific apparatus with unknown designs, but something that requires a leap of faith to believe in its effectiveness. It sits inertly connected to a computer system asking him the question, do you wish to reboot? When he clicks yes, it slowly powers up to a white light energy stream that defies everything that is known, extending beyond human knowledge, actually entering a mysterious new realm. Miraculously, the nagging injury to his leg is gone, as is a recent cut on his face, where he has become the recipient of an unquantifiable energy stream, raising his level of awareness as he can seemingly hear people’s thoughts as they go spinning around the room near the power source. In particular, he hears the anguish in the voice of a next door neighbor (Brittany Benjamin) who is contemplating having an abortion, as she’s discovered what a self-centered twit her husband is, and she doesn’t wish to bear him a child, sensing him unfit. The scene of the movie is how he chooses to respond to this otherworldly sensory information, balancing the needs of the mother with deserved respect and a sense of believability, as information so out of the ordinary might seem crazed and an invasion of her personal privacy, like perhaps he’s an eavesdropper. But he handles it perfectly and it leads to a transcendent moment in the film, one that raises the level of consciousness of those around him.
Ryan is constantly besieged by flashbacks of his child, who playfully comes and visits him often, as does his charming wife, the lovely Daniela Lavendar, Ben Kingsley’s gorgeous wife, always cast in a pastoral scene of bucolic calm where everything seems at peace before she flutters away out of sight, awakening to a conscious rush of memories which are more intense than life itself. Dr. Reed keeps pecking at Ryan to get out into the world more, as the other scientists don’t hold a candle to him, and he’s sorely missed. After his white light experience, he assumes a new persona, one that is highly confident with infinitely more wisdom, but he remains low key with others, preferring to listen to the voices revolving around the room, catching various phrases of both the living and the dead. It’s as if a fissure from an alternate universe has opened and only he has the ability to comprehend. The use of music by Steve Horner reminds us of Kubrick in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) when man comes close to the monolith, not in a similar sound, but the way a whoosh of energy suddenly fills the room consuming the audience with a heightened sense of dramatic intensity. While the storyline is somewhat predictable, it’s nonetheless told in a manner unlike most other films, offering a unique perspective that sets this film apart from others. It’s slow in developing, but the director has an excellent sense of presentation, not overdoing it, always keeping it within the realm of what’s believable, where by the end it’s as if the audience has been implicated into the next storyline.
Zach LeBeau’s very modest yet philosophically ambitious “The
Scientist” stars Hal Hartley stalwart Bill Sage as the titular physicist, who’s
grieving over lost loved ones and constructing some sort of generation to
channel psychic energy. It’s a swell vehicle for Sage’s brand of conflicted
charm, but the film is neither “2001″ or “Solaris,” which the filmmaker
has said he admires, nor “Pi” nor “Primer,” intellectually ambitious films made
on a half-a-hand-me-down-shoestring. The other performances are erratic. A
scene with the wind rustling crisply in trees made me long for summer to come.
In a director’s statement, LeBeau talks an admirable game: “We can draw from so
many cultures, so much history, so much pain and anguish and beauty and
wonderment and put all of that cumulative experience and knowledge together to
do something great together, as a people, to take our consciousness en masse to
a higher level.” With Brittany Benjamin.
THE
SCIENTIST Facets Multi Media
Dr. Marcus Ryan (Bill Sage)
anguishing over the tragic death of his wife and daughter secretly constructs a
mysterious energy generator in his basement. He is a physicist whose specialty
is quantum mechanics, but despite his expertise, this device unleashes energies
that triggers a series of multi-dimensional events that propels Ryan towards
the realization of higher level of consciousness. The Scientist provocatively
explores the balance between acts of faith (religious "truth") and
scientific "fact", as he tries to understand his tragic loss from the
perspective of science. Can we really attempt to integrate our empirical
experience through philosophical meanings while being informed by balanced
spiritual values? Can his training as a physicist help him grapple with grief
and find solace? The Scientist is ultimately about a man's struggle to
resolve the disparity between the science of the present and the world of the
past, which will require both faith and experimental investigation.
Nonpareil Online John Sullivan
“The Scientist,” while classified as a sci-fi movie, is
really more of a journey past the known and into the unknown. In other words,
you won’t find Jedi Knights or Klingons running around in this picture. What
you will find is a great story about the potential of mankind, as we evolve
into a higher state of consciousness.
The movie’s main character, Dr. Marcus Ryan, portrayed by Bill Sage, is a
physicist whose specialty is quantum mechanics, which is a set of scientific
principles describing the known behavior of energy and matter that predominate
at the atomic and subatomic scales. In other words, he’s the perfect candidate
for what is shown to him later on in the film.
Unfortunately, Ryan’s family is killed in a horrific accident that leaves him
broken and spiraling into a maelstrom of booze and depression. He eventually
decides life is not worth living and throws himself off a building.
Here’s where the story gets interesting – he actually survives the fall. In
addition to this miracle, somewhere between him going splat on the pavement and
his time in the hospital, he sees blueprints and technical plans of some sort
of bizarre machine. As a physicist, this fascinates him. It is then when he
decides that he was pre-destined to build the machine he saw in his head. He
has no idea what it is or what it might be used for, but decides to build it
anyway. Now, as a life long sci-fi geek, this is a very cool, very bold move on
the character’s part, but the realist in me says, “What if it’s a bomb, dummy?”
Anyway, as in most sci-fi movies, you have to suspend disbelief.
What really got me about this movie is that he endeavors to use this machine to
benefit humanity. I’m not going to spoil it, but I will say that the “machine”
turns out to be something very different, and in my opinion very cool. Fans of
Phillips K. Dick’s novels should really enjoy this movie, as it owes quite a
bit to his body of work. It’s what some call “hard sci-fi,” a term I happen to
loathe, but am still forced begrudgingly to use from time to time. In truth,
this film merely uses sci-fi elements to enable the main character to
selflessly uplift and have an effect on those around him in a positive manner.
I know that I sure left the theater feeling better than I did when I walked in.
* Editor’s note: Scenes from this film were shot in Council Bluffs in October
2008.
The Southern Illinoisan [Adam Testa]
Kitsap Sun Michael C. Moore
North Kitsap Herald [Jennifer Morris]
Omaha World Herald [Bob Fischbach]
Lechki, Marek
ERRATUM B+ 91
This film was
recognized at the Chicago Film Festival in the best new director category, and
it’s another Polish indie film that features a uniquely original narrative
structure, one that is not easily recognized at first but grows more naturally
appealing as time goes on. Tomasz Kot is unspectacular as
Michal, an ordinary everyman kind of guy, an accountant in a fairly
non-descript job who is asked to pick up his boss’s imported car in Michal’s
home town, which is just a few days before his son’s first communion. After some obvious hesitation, Michal is seen
signing the necessary paperwork with the dealership and driving away something
along the lines of a Ram truck. While
Michal was obviously upset when his wife asked him to invite his father to the
communion, he does pay his elderly father a visit and honors his wife’s
request, but his father (Ryszard Kotys) is non-communicative and barely
acknowledges Michal’s presence, refusing the invitation, however, claiming he
has a more pressing engagement feeding a sick neighbor’s rabbits. Clearly mad and disgusted, Michal storms out
and decides to drive home at night, growing irritated that his cell phone is
losing its signal, so he’s visibly distracted when he hits a man on the
highway, leaving him in a quandry, and in a Crime
and Punishment moment, drives away from the accident and seeks immediate
help with the car repair, asking an old family friend for help. When he realizes he’s lost his cell phone and
that there may be evidence connecting him to the crime, he confesses to the
police, who report the man on the highway died and that he was a vagrant
drunkard who likely walked into his path, calling it an unfortunate accident,
making no charges.
Like
opening a Pandora’s Box, this event forces him to stay in town waiting for the
car to be repaired, a chain reaction that sets other actions into motion, as
Michal was trying desperately to avoid seeing anyone there. Instead he starts making inquiries about the
man who died, trying to find people that knew him. In uncovering the life of a total stranger,
the layers surrounding his own life become unraveled, as he revisits his father
again several times trying to repair their damaged relationship where years of
resentment have driven them apart, also his one-time best friend Zbyszek
(Tomasz Radawiec) who still lives in town and plays in a band, inviting Michal
to a performance. Dividing his time
between his father, making inquiries about the dead stranger, and hanging out
at a local lake with Zbyszek, the site of many childhood adventures, where a
grumpy old man with a shotgun appears comically trying to stop them from
climbing a rickety wooden tower, seen as sort of an Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny
contentious relationship, where a tone of loss and regret, sometimes turning
comical, pervades every experience.
Through
a series of brief encounters, Michal slowly opens up, where the director finds
a poignancy in small moments, and a kind of relief with Zbyszek that their
friendship is still vibrantly alive, where he has a chance to re-evaluate his
thoughts of home. The underlying music
by Bartek Straburzynski is simply outstanding, providing a wall-to-wall musical
score of mood and subtle elegance that provides atmospheric undertones, but
never intrudes. The film resembles the
poetic imagery of early David Gordon Green, especially the music, with such
purposeful use of small vignettes, and a running theme with a stray dog, as
Polish indie films, see also ALL THAT I LOVE (2009), seem to have recaptured a
cinematic vitality that America’s indie films have lost, as Green doesn’t make
films like that any more. Certainly one
of the major surprises at this film festival is the quality of the Polish films
and their ability to rejuvenate what used to be the exclusive terrain of the
American indie movement.
Chicago International Film Festival: Week Two Andrea Gronvall from The Reader
In this
nuanced and atmospheric Polish drama, an accountant (Tomasz Kot, excellent)
returns to his hometown to pick up his boss's imported car and on the way back
accidentally kills a drunken vagrant. Stuck in the small village while he
cooperates with the police and waits for the vehicle to be repaired, the hero
resumes contact with his estranged father (Ryszard Kotys) and tries to uncover
the dead man's identity. Encounters that seem sinister at first take on
different hues as he gets closer to the truth about both men. Director Marek
Lechki achieves a subtle elegance through still moments and small gestures,
drawing grace and hope from the least likely situations. In Polish with
subtitles. 95 min.
Gold Plaque to ERRATUM (
Lecomte, Ounie
A BRAND NEW LIFE
France South Korea
(92 mi) 2009
Matt Bochenski at Cannes from Little White Lies
I lost a bet this
afternoon. Before I came out here, somebody told me about the whole clapping
thing at Cannes. I sort of nodded and ‘yeah yeah’d’, but my god, it goes on all
the time. Before the film starts, they get the directors, producers and
actors. up on stage and everyone claps. Then they say a few words and everyone
claps. Then the film starts and the festival logo appears and everyone claps.
Then the film ends and everyone claps. Then the directors, producers and actors
stand up again and… you get the idea. A woman next to me started clapping
yesterday evening because the film was late starting. I wanted to point out
that she was doing it wrong, but then again she’s French, so you never know.
My attitude
towards clapping is that it’s a bit much. It’s like tipping hairdressers – they
should do a good job for the price you pay, anything on top of that is just
being greedy. But I wasn’t that surprised, I suppose. After all, not everybody
is fortunate enough to share the precious English trait of propriety. So I told
this guy, ‘There’s no way I’ll ever clap at Cannes.’ And he told me, ‘You will,
I’m telling you. I bet you.’ So I’ve sat here not clapping. Until today.
When another layer of my pre-Cannes scepticism was stripped sadly away.
At least I wasn’t
clapping a film, not really. I was clapping for Sae Ron Kim, the nine-year-old
star of Ounie Lecomte’s A Brand New
Life. And I was joining the rest of the theatre, on my feet to
acknowledge the most pure, truthful and inexpressibly moving performance by a
child – by anybody – I have ever seen, in one of the saddest films you’ll ever
see.
This was the story
of Jinhee (Kim), a little girl who loves her dad but is put up for adoption at
the whim of her step-mother. She is betrayed by the only people in her life she
has ever counted on, bereft and abandoned to carve out a new life in a
confusing and treacherous world. Before that new life can begin comes the
agonising limbo of the orphanage and the painful acceptance that ‘fate’ and
‘destiny’ are cruel charades that grown ups use to abuse little girls.
I really can’t
begin to express how emotionally devastating this film is. I left the
auditorium 30 minutes or so ago, and I’m not close to absorbing it, or
recovering. To say that Sae Ron Kim is mesmeric isn’t the half of it – so
small, so fragile, so beautiful she will rip you apart before the film is done,
and then – at the very end – she’ll put you back together. It’s an absolutely
staggering performance, and the festival jury should give her the acting prize
right now instead of wasting their time on the rest of the films here. So I
clapped, and I cried, and it took an effort of will to stop doing both.
As an aside,
though: it’s extremely weird to be riveted to your seat with tears running down
your face, only to see the actress who’s put you in that state wandering past
on her way to a loo break. Only in Cannes, I suppose…
A
Brand New Life (Une Vie Toute Neuve)
Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily
A heart-tugger
rather than a full-on tearjerker, A Brand New Life is a sure-footed
story of a childhood abandoned, and a striking debut by Korean-born French
director Ounie Lecomte. Loosely autobiographical, Lecomte’s film is produced by
director – and Cannes competition juror – Lee Chang-dong, and while it lacks
the harder edge of Lee’s own films, Lecomte’s restrained and intimate drama is
an assured and highly appealing debut that seems highly likely to achieve
international art-house sales.
Festivals in
general will embrace A Brand New Life, but it could also play especially
well in events angled to younger audiences, who are likely to connect with the
winning lead performance by pre-teen discovery Kim Saeron.
Set in South Korea
in 1975, the film begins with nine-year-old Jin-hee (Kim Saeron) spending time
with her father and clearly loving every moment of it. The scene soon shifts to
an austere stretch of countryside near Seoul, and it’s only then that it dawns
on Jinhee that she and Dad are about to part company. For reasons never made
clear – not least because Jinhee herself never learns them – her father is
leaving her in a Catholic orphanage, while he heads back, we later discover, to
his new family.
Stunned by her
unceremonious abandonment, Jin-hee finds it hard to adjust to her new life,
refusing to let go of the belief that Dad will soon come and fetch her.
Gradually she settles in, largely as a result of being befriended by another
girl, the older Sook-hee (Park Doyeon). Eventually, both are candidates for
adoption by one of the Western couples that visit the home; the orphans’
departures for new lives are periodically and poignantly signalled by group
farewell choruses of Auld Lang Syne.
The film is very
much focused on Jin-hee’s immediate experience and perceptions of the new world
around her, without bringing any extra narratives to bear, except for a slim
subplot about the home’s oldest inmate, lame 17-year-old Yeshin (Ko) and her
unrequited love for a local boy.
Cynical viewers
might say that the film offers an implausibly benign picture of Jinhee’s new
world. The orphanage is run by sympathetic nuns and an approachable director
(Oh), with only a business-like nurse (Park Myung-shin) showing a rougher edge.
She gives Jinhee a slap for misbehaving, but otherwise the girl suffers no
mistreatment – apart from the obvious one of being wrenched away from her home
life. Equally, Jinhee suffers no tensions with any of her co-internees, of whom
only Yeshin and Sook-hee are given delineated characters, and none of whom none
seem in any way troubled or embittered by their own situation.
Economic
camerawork establishes a keynote of ascetic realism. In a low-key, somewhat
impressionistic narrative, Lecomte’s most significant failing is that she
overplays her symbolic hand in a number of touches. One, likely to induce
winces, is a priest reading a sermon about Jesus’s complaint, “Oh Father, why
hast thou forsaken me?” Another is an over-extended thread about Jin-hee and
Sook-hee’s attempts to rescue a fallen fledgling bird.
The lead child
performances are excellent, Park Doyeon making a very energetic impression,
especially in the scene where Sook-hee tries desperately to please prospective
Western parents in her ‘audition’ for them. And young Kim Saeron, the centre of
attention throughout, proves a natural, managing to switch with versatile
effect through Jinhee’s moods, from shy incomprehension through rage to
ordinary childish petulance.
A Brand New Life David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 21, 2009
Rob Nelson at Cannes from Variety,
May 20, 2009
Leconte, Daniel
IT’S HARD BEING LOVED BY
JERKS (C’est dur d’etre aime par des cons)
Mary Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine
That's the caption for a cartoon of an exasperated Mohammed that ran on the cover of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly. It was the winner of a contest the magazine held in support of the Danish magazine that was threatened by Islamic fundamentalists after publishing an illustration of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban. Inside that issue of Charlie Hebdo were 12 other cartoons, including one in which four terrorist whose bodies are still smoking from a bomb blast are arriving in heaven, and Mohammed says "Wait, we've run out of virgins."
Muslims in
It's a serious issue, gods know, but Leconte keeps the film
racing along like a Preston Sturges comedy. Aside from being a tribute to the
liberality of the French judicial system (at least on free-speech matters), It's
Hard Being Loved by Jerks is the briskest, most hilarious and, in its
subversive way, most inspiring film so far at
It's
Hard Being Loved By Jerks (C'est dur d'etre aime par des cons) Lisa Nesselson at Cannes from Screendaily
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press versus religious
grievances are explored to edifying effect in It's Hard Being Loved By Jerks.
This lively, intelligently-structured documentary chronicles the suit brought
by Muslim organisations against French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo
after the irreverent paper, famed for its own stable of political cartoonists,
published 12 allegedly-insulting Danish cartoon interpretations of the Prophet
Muhammad. Two of the original cartoons plus the French paper's cover design
were singled out as being allegedly racist by the plaintiffs.
This dense, Daniel Leconte-directed
documentary boasts eloquent protagonists, high stakes and a certain measure of
suspense: will the values of a secular democracy whose law on free speech dates
back to 1789 trump broader fears of upsetting Islamic fundamentalists?
Leconte filmed key
players in the drama before, during and after the trial (although not actually
inside the courtroom) and the result is sure to enjoy a prolonged theatrical
life in
First published by the
Danish paper Jyllands-Posten in late September of 2005 as The Faces of
Muhammad, the cartoons sparked no immediate protests. The collection was
subsequently "embellished" by persons unknown who tacked on insulting
images designed to antagonise fundamentalist Muslims - a tactic that worked.
Danish flags were burned, products boycotted, embassies and consulates
assaulted.
European Union
officials disassociated the EU from the debacle, putting the blame squarely on
the Danes. To illuminate the fuss, French daily France-Soir ran the 12
cartoons on
In his documentary,
Leconte records the spirited newsroom process of picking the cover of the issue
that eventually sold some 400,000 copies -- over twice the customary print run.
Although France-Soir
and L'Express also published the cartoons, only Charlie Hebdo and its
editor Philippe Val ended up on trial.
Several interviewees
strongly imply that the suit originated at the highest government levels to
send a conciliatory signal to the Arab world, thus protecting French
investments and French citizens abroad. Val deplores creeping media
self-censorship and luminaries such as Shoah director Claude Lanzmann
warn that if the plaintiffs prevail,
The French love of
debate is on permanent display here as participants on both sides of the story
hold forth. lnterviewees are clearly identified each time they speak, but
non-French audiences may, understandably, be unaware of how much cultural
weight certain individuals carry in the public arena.
By bringing charges
against Charlie Hebdo, the plaintiffs brought into the open a crucial
debate from which French society emerged stronger. Unless you're an active
member of the Taliban, that's a happy ending.
Leconte, Patrice
Read
the full interview Making Friends the Hard
Way: An Interview with Patrice Leconte, by Cynthia Lucia
from Cineaste
THE GIRL ON THE BRIDGE
BFI | Sight & Sound |
The Girl on the Bridge (1998) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound,
June 2000
France, the present. Young Adèle
is interrogated by a psychologist, seemingly while in jail. She confesses to a
string of sexual encounters and continuing bad luck. She is next found on a
bridge in Paris, about to jump. Knife-thrower Gabor rescues her and offers her
a job as a human target. In Monte Carlo, he changes her hairstyle and wardrobe.
Their dangerous act (he throws knives blindfolded at Adèle) is popular and
their relationship grows affectionate, although Adèle keeps having sex with
other men. Gabor declares they are in luck as long as they stay together.
They win money in the casino and
go to San Remo where they win a car in a lottery. They drive at night without
lights and crash in a field. On a cruise ship, where Gabor throws knives while
Adèle spins on the wheel of death, they meet newly married Takis and his bride.
Adèle runs away with Takis. Gabor uses the bride as target but wounds her and
loses his job. Meanwhile Takis' boat breaks down. He abandons Adèle, who ends
up broke in Athens. Gabor turns up in Istanbul equally destitute. She finds him
as he is about to jump into the Bosporus. They walk away together.
Review
Popular French cinema usually
comes to the UK in two guises: action thrillers, such as Luc Besson's, or
heritage films, of which director Patrice Leconte's Ridicule is a
good example. La Fille sur le pont is another kind of movie
altogether, what one might call a 'popular auteur' French film. Made by a
prominent director (Leconte) to a high standard of craftsmanship, featuring an
ambitious contemporary script, it's nonetheless aimed at a mainstream audience.
Leconte (who last November lead a controversial battle against French film
critics for their alleged bias against French cinema) is now in the same class
of renown as Bertrand Blier, Bertrand Tavernier and Coline Serreau, among
others. However, La Fille sur le pont fizzled at the box office in
France, despite its three-star - Leconte, Daniel Auteuil, Vanessa Paradis -
status, humour and upbeat happy ending.
There's much to savour here: shot
beautifully in black and white, the film features marvellous widescreen
camerawork and excellent turns from Paradis and Auteuil. But these
achievements, together with flamboyant dialogue à la Blier and
pointed New Wave references (the Les Quatre Cent Coups-like
interview with protagonist Adèle at the beginning, the La Baie des anges-style
picture of the Côte d'Azur) cannot compensate for the script's flimsiness.
Granted, as the film keeps telling us, we are watching a fairy tale: "I'm
[her] good fairy," says knife-thrower Gabor of Adèle to a young man on the
train; Adèle and Gabor act as good-luck charms to each other; significant objects
mysteriously appear at key moments. But this tale of mutual salvation is
strangely old-fashioned, despite Adèle's slangy lines and casual promiscuity.
The view of the circus follows age-old cinematic clichés: circus people are
basically sad, their acts disasters waiting to happen.
La Fille sur le pont lacks novelty in another, more
interesting way: it uncannily fits the recurrent French father-daughter theme,
now starting to look a little dog-eared. As in some of Brigitte Bardot's 50s
films or those in the 80s and 90s with Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marie Gillain and
indeed Vanessa Paradis, a world-weary middle-aged male enacts the fantasy of
saving/loving a delinquent daughter-figure, an erotic rescue fantasy mixed with
the Pygmalion myth. "I want to turn you into Cinderella," says Gabor
before giving Adèle a make-over in Monte Carlo. Typically, the young woman is
motherless while her father is played by a big star - here it's Auteuil, while
Gérard Depardieu played Paradis' father in Elisa. Even more strikingly,
in Leconte's Une chance sur deux she had two fathers, played by
Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Equally characteristic of this father-daughter sub-genre is the way the younger men are ineffectual and quickly marginalised despite their sexual usefulness, while the relationship between ageing male and young woman is sexually sublimated. In this case though, the knife-throwing metaphor turns both farcical and nasty, as Paradis passively waits to be wounded. Just in case we hadn't figured it out, the sexual metaphor is underlined by Paradis noting that it invokes "fear and pleasure at the same time" in her. As in other examples of this genre, misogyny is cleverly occluded by the beauty of the images and the male lead's accomplished acting. We even end up feeling sorry for Gabor when he can't throw his knives any more. Auteuil's ability to evoke winsome vulnerability almost makes us forget the symmetry of his and Adèle's fate is illusory: in their particular game, he risks losing his job but she risks losing her life.
THE WIDOW OF ST PIERRE
France Canada
BFI | Sight & Sound | La Veuve de Saint-Pierre (2000) Michael Witt from Sight and Sound, September 2000
The island of Saint-Pierre, a
small French settlement off the Canadian coast, 1849. After a night of heavy
drinking, fisherman Neel murders the elderly Coupard. The island authorities
sentence Neel to death and request the loan of a guillotine from another French
colony. While waiting for the guillotine, the authorities appoint Jean, captain
of the troops in Saint-Pierre, as Neel's custodian. The captain's wife, Madame
La, teaches Neel to read and lets him perform odd jobs around the island, much
to the disapproval of the governing élite.
As Neel becomes integrated into
the community, the residents grow reluctant to assist in his execution.
Initially, the local men refuse to tow the ship carrying the guillotine into
the harbour, and do so only when Neel himself volunteers to help. The island's
governor successfully pressurises an aspiring immigrant to take on the job of
executioner; when questioned by the governor, the captain refuses to shoot on
the crowds in the event of a riot over Neel's execution. Madame La encourages
Neel to flee to Newfoundland, but he voluntarily returns to his cell. Having
married a local woman who bore him a baby, Neel is executed. The captain is
deported to France and shot by firing squad.
Review
Director Patrice Leconte has always delighted in gliding unpredictably between genres. In addition to his work in advertising, he has continued to turn out on average a new feature each year in a variety of registers. As if to confound expectations, his new film La Veuve de Saint-Pierre bears little resemblance to his earlier foray into the costume drama genre, Ridicule. Where Ridicule playfully combined period comedy and political satire, the politics of La Veuve de Saint-Pierre - in which the murderer Neel becomes a reformed man thanks to the attentions of the kindly Madame La - can be reduced to bland slogans along the lines of 'Abolish capital punishment' and 'Beware the wrath of petit-bourgeois functionaries scorned'.
More interestingly La Veuve de Saint-Pierre is about surfaces, with the
characters' attention to dress codes and behavioural rule books echoed in the
film's sumptuous visuals. Working with a comparatively large budget, Leconte
goes to great length to evoke the glacial blue-greys and rough textures (slate,
granite, ice) of the
As is often observed in relation to his previous work, Leconte's five-year apprenticeship as a comic-strip artist seems to have influenced the film's crisp editing style and often refreshingly insolent mise en scène. But on this occasion the film's strident imagery ends up swamping emotional nuance. Rather than carrying a humorous or dynamic charge, forthright insertions such as the cutaways to the ship carrying the guillotine charging through the ocean come across as clumsy distractions from the fragility of the relationships at the film's heart. Similarly, the injection of gratuitous bursts of melodrama through expertly executed set pieces (the pelting of the prisoners' cart with rocks, for instance) disrupt the film's wider mood.
Leconte has claimed that it was the quality of Claude Faraldo's script and the chance to work with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil that convinced him to step into Alain Corneau's shoes (Corneau, the director of Tous les matins du monde, walked away from the project four months before shooting was due to start). But it's possible he also perceived here the opportunity for a further variation on the fine portraits of sexual desire which feature in his earlier Monsieur Hire, Le Mari de la coiffeuse and Le Parfum d'Yvonne. The principal focus of this sombre and self-consciously lyrical film is on the three-way relationship between Neel, his captor, the captain, and the captain's wife, Madame La. (The "veuve" of the title means widow, appropriately enough since La's concern for Neel ultimately leads to her husband's execution, but it's also the nickname for the guillotine). Above all, La Veuve de Saint-Pierre is constructed around three fantastic faces: Auteuil brings subtlety and intense energy to his role as the captain, Binoche embodies the statuesque La with cool precision and Emir Kusturica appears wholly at ease inside the wild but gentle Neel.
But it is in their interrelation that the film fails to convince: while the narrative ricochets suggestively from one lingering close-up to the next, it seldom delivers on the promise of emotional depth. Despite its aspiration to represent something of the transcendental power of love, La Veuve de Saint-Pierre ultimately fails to convey a genuine sense of emotional intensity or fragility.
MY BEST FRIEND
France (94 mi) 2006 ‘Scope
The
Village Voice [Ella Taylor]
Light, airy, and sweet, Patrice Leconte's latest comedy swings his favorite premise—fruitful encounters between opposites—away from romance and into the wistful hunger for friendship in a careerist world. Daniel Auteuil slyly tweaks his easy geniality into a subtle form of heedlessness as François, an ambiguously successful antiques dealer who treats everyone around him with the same chilly dispassion he brings to his pursuit of beautiful objets d'art. When his business partner (Julie Gayet) challenges him to a pricey bet that he can't come up with a true friend in 10 days, he finds himself stumped for buddies until he meets his opposite, Bruno (the adorable Dany Boon), a sociable cab driver and collector of Panini stickers who gives François free tuition in how to be loyal and sympathique. The lesson backfires, and their rocky friendship is tested in an uproarious and tender climax on the set of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, where Bruno captures France's heart just by being a nervous wreck. Leconte embraces sentimentality with the wisdom of a seasoned man and the goofy, light heart of a teenager, but he's never glib or condescending, and his mastery of tone makes this delightful farce a nutty feel-gooder about the difference between a friend and a contact.
The Onion A.V.
Club review
Nathan Rabin
It's common for people
to have at least one friend they don't particularly like, yet hold onto out of
sentiment, shared interests, or sheer inertia. In Patrice Leconte's My Best
Friend, wealthy businessman Daniel Auteuil wakes up to the
disquieting fact that none of his supposed friends particularly like him. He
has plenty of co-workers, acquaintances, and contacts, but nothing more. In a
bid to stave off a profound existential crisis, he agrees to one of those
gimmicky bets that fuel high-concept comedies: If he can produce a best friend
by the end of the month, he'll get to keep an expensive vase. If he loses, his
partner gets it.
Friend initially mines its promising premise for
bracing, uncomfortable laughter, as an overconfident and increasingly mortified
Auteuil discovers just how tenuous and calculated his bonds are with the people
he considers friends. It's too bad the film devolves into a fairly standard
mismatched-buddy comedy once Auteuil hires know-it-all cab driver Dany Boon to
teach him how to make friends. In an obvious turn, he finds that the answer to
his problems might just be his affable, salt-of-the-earth tutor, an inveterate
quiz-show fan too riddled with anxiety to achieve his dream of cleaning up
on-air.
Boon's surface
gregariousness masks the fact that he isn't much better at forming meaningful
alliances than Auteuil. He's got plenty of friendly acquaintances, but few
genuine soulmates. Auteuil and Boon are separated by class but united in their
loneliness and hunger for meaningful connections. Friend follows a
predictable arc as their relationship progresses from wariness to unlikely
friendship to inevitable betrayal. And any film that feels the need to borrow
the fake, strained drama of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire for an
extended climax suffers from a dearth of creativity. Affable and slight,
Friend is too intent on being likeable to delve into the uncomfortable
truths just beneath its surface. Auteuil and Boon's appealing performances keep
the film engaging throughout, but it's easy to pine for a dark, challenging
film with this premise, pitched more toward a harrowing emotional reckoning
than this film's ambiguous but inevitable happy ending. Is it at all surprising
that an American remake is already in the works?
Manhattan
Movie Magazine Marlow
Stern
French director Patrice Leconte (“Ridicule”) has garnered
worldwide acclaim over the years for his intimate films concerning humanity; or
rather, the ties that separate us, and bind us together. His latest offering,
the tragicomedy “My Best Friend” displays a much lighter side of Leconte than
his previous work, the critically-hailed “Intimate Strangers”; the film also
marks the third time that Leconte has collaborated with the inimitable Daniel
Auteuil.
François Coste (Daniel Auteuil) owns an antique art dealership, specializing in
1930s art deco, with his business partner Catherine (the fetching Julie Gayet).
It’s all business all the time with François, as he is first seen attending a
client’s funeral with the ulterior motive of acquiring an antique bureau from
the recently deceased. François is widely perceived as a snooty, self-absorbed
individual who only cares about material possessions. During the funeral
proceedings, François observes that the deceased had very few friends in
attendance. François is noticeably affected by this predicament, and later that
day, splurges on a 200,000 EUR Greek vase signifying friendship, even though
it’s well outside of both the company’s budget, and area of expertise.
That evening, during a birthday dinner with various associates François, to his
own amazement, is chided for not having any friends as the associates point
out, in true “Death of a Salesman” fashion, that when François dies, no one
will attend his funeral. Catherine challenges him to produce his best friend in
the next 10 days, or else he must surrender the vase he just purchased. In his
quest for friends, François meets garrulous taxi driver Bruno (Dany Boon) who,
instead of possessing close friends, is preoccupied with his quest for
knowledge (coming in the form of game-show facts, which make up the bulk of his
conversational repertoire). Despite his factual dexterity, Bruno fails numerous
game-show interviews due to his nerves. Bruno however is exceedingly affable
and as such, is recruited by the naïve François to help him in the lost art of
making friends. François must learn the 3 S’s: sociable, smiling, and sincere.
The “coaching” scenes, where the clueless François is thrown headfirst into the
fray to try and make friends, provide some great laughs.
It’s fairly obvious where all this is heading, but Leconte has crafted an at
once thoughtful, engaging, lighthearted, and melancholic entertainment about
loneliness and friendship; it’s an effortlessly appealing mélange, due in no
small part to the effectiveness of the two leads. The typically smarmy
“My Best Friend (Mon meilleur ami)” is an airy, heartwarming little film that
will encourage you to re-examine your own life and the connections you’ve made,
and just might make you a better person for it. Oh, and lest I forget - the
“big payoff” is priceless.
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
MY BEST FRIEND Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) review
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris
Austin Chronicle (Josh Rosenblatt) review [1.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
THE SUICIDE SHOP (Le Magasin des Suicides)
France Canada
Belgium (79 mi) 2012
The Suicide Shop Lisa Nesselson at Cannes from Screendaily
Prolific director Patrice Leconte takes his first stab at feature
animation with The Suicide
Shop (Le Magasin
des Suicides), a mordantly macabre musical about what happens when an upbeat
youngster is born into a family whose stock in trade is selling the
accoutrements for doing oneself in. It is a darkly amusing adaptation of Jean
Teulé’s 2007 novel - which would have been far less palatable as live action –
and works very nicely as hand-designed 3-D animation. This playful
momento mori should find takers wherever distributors are willing to take a
chance on a politically incorrect quality animation.
Slated for a September 26 release in France, the sardonic but jovial confection had its world premiere in Cannes at a lone screening for several hundred French schoolkids, who seemed appreciative. While certainly suitable for older children, the film’s sensibility is also geared to adults. It’s an artfully extended one-joke movie - in which the joke, it must be said, is a pretty good one.
The title shop, founded in 1854 and in the Tuvache family ever since, is a sort of reverse pharmacy that cures whatever’s ailing you - permanently. You can literally name your poison: They carry over 200 of them, and Madame Tuvache thinks of the deadly elixirs as perfumes with a killer fragrance.
The Tuvaches pride themselves on selling rope and nooses, poisonous insects, Japanese ritual swords, razor blades both rusty and pristine, you name it. When a homeless man wanders in, they take his budget into consideration by offering a plastic bag and the tape to seal it over his head.
Business is good in the dreary metropolis where dour expressions and suicidal thoughts are the norm.
But when Madame Tuvache gives birth to congenitally happy Alan, the family is thrown into upheaval and near-disgrace.
Monsieur Tuvache - a consummate aesthete-cum-shopkeeper whose first name, improbably, is “Mishima” - and his wife already have a mopey teen son and daughter. Daughter Marilyn whines that it’s so totally unfair that she’s not allowed to kill herself like the other kids. Alan’s joie de vivre jeopardises everything the Tuvaches have built up.
The film’s mater-of-fact tone is close to that of The Addams Family, where Morticia would give her kid a bigger and sharper knife to run around with. Here dad gives Alan his first cigarette, encourages him to inhale and promises to get him a whole carton to practice with. Anyone who dug The Corpse Bride should enjoy this.
Before he became the director of a series of hit comedies that are French cultural touchstones, followed by a number of mostly melancholy international art house successes including Monsieur Hire, The Hairdresser’s Husband, and Ridicule, Leconte, a lifelong comics fan, worked for five years as an illustrator for pioneering French comics. The main cast and supporting characters are drawn with expressive panache. The depth added by the 3-D version, while not really necessary, is pleasantly unobtrusive.
Etienne Perruchon’s catchy melodies are a peppy fit with Leconte’s deadpan lyrics.
Leduc, Paul
REED: INSURGENT MEXICO
User reviews from imdb Author: Edgar Soberón Torchia (estorchia@gmail.com) from Panama
In the early 1960s there was a strong film movement in most
Latin American countries that originated the so-called New Latin American
Cinema. Pioneer countries were
Reed:
Insurgent Mexico Between history and homage, by Judith
Hess and John Hess from Jump Cut,
1974
FRIDA, NATURALEZA VIVA
aka: FRIDA
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
Paul Leduc (Reed: Insurgent
Mexico) gives us fragments from the life of painter and left-wing activist
Frida Kahlo, presented in achronological flashbacks from her deathbed that
eventually become more orderly. As with most biopics about artists, this 1985
film treats Kahlo's life and work as almost interchangeable; it's meditative,
mainly visual (dialogue is kept to a minimum, and the striking, rich colors do
full justice to Kahlo's palette), and only intermittently dramatized. The
overall effect is rather static, and Leduc supplies too little information for
a comprehensive reading of Kahlo's life and work, though her husband Diego
Rivera and her association with Leon Trotsky are treated in some detail. Ofelia
Medina is impressive and persuasive in the title role, and Juan Jose Gurrola
and Max Kerlow offer believable versions of Rivera and Trotsky. In Spanish with
subtitles. 108 min.
We learn a great number of things
about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo from Paul Leduc's film "Frida."
We learn that she suffered horribly from polio that, later in life, forced the
amputation of a leg and confined her completely to bed; that she was married to
the muralist Diego Rivera, who shared her enthusiasm for communist politics,
and who together with her played host to Trotsky during his Mexican sojourn;
that her father often entertained her and her sister with puppet shows and pillow
fights; that she had lovers, male and female, and was fond of wearing elaborate
costumes and headdresses; that she was a supporter of Zapata and occasionally
wore a pistol strapped to the leg braces under her skirt; that she was
infatuated with her own image and stared almost incessantly at herself in the
mirror; that when she lay in state, the Soviet flag was draped over her coffin.
These details are laid out in a
fragmented manner, like pieces of a puzzle scattered onto a carpet. The film is
conceived as a deathbed reverie, in which the events of the artist's life slip
into her mind (or out of it) in no particular order. We see Kahlo (Ofelia
Medina) lounging in her bath, smoking pot and drawing decorations in red
lipstick on the body cast from her spinal operation; marching with Rivera (Juan
Jose Gurrola) for the Spanish Loyalists; drunk on cognac and swinging in a
hammock.
The life that Leduc has chosen to
chronicle is rich and eventful, and the filmmaker, who is Mexican-born, has
certainly benefited from that. And yet the movie never makes sense out of these
fragments or gives us a sense of the woman's spirit that would draw them into a
coherent or satisfying whole. The partial portrait we're able to construct is
of a dark, charismatic beauty with severe black eyebrows and a flair for the
outrageous who led a fashionably bohemian life at the vital center of the
Mexican art world of the '30s. All the incidents in her life are set forth
without discrimination, as if they were all of equal weight and importance --
as if the biographer's task were only to report and not interpret or give
order.
The film's structure -- which
must have been born out of the misguided notion that since Kahlo was a modern
artist she required a modernist biography -- isn't the only problem. The tone
of the film is worshipful, and yet the parlor radicalism of this early art
couple comes through. If you didn't know their work, you would be tempted to
dismiss them as infuriatingly self-indulgent dilettantes. But nothing could be
less dilettantish than the record Kahlo painted of her pain or the stern,
searching gaze that bores out from her canvases. Kahlo's art didn't have a wide
range -- it was too ingrown for that -- but it had an unsettling, almost
demonic urgency. The art has a formidable presence onscreen, and we learn more
about Kahlo -- about her sickness, her relationships and her passions -- from
the canvases displayed in the film than from anything the director contributes.
These pictures, an enormous percentage of which were self-portraits, render
biography almost unnecessary.
Leduc, who also cowrote the
script, cannot reconcile the contrast between Kahlo's robustness and her
affliction, and so he depicts her suffering as merely an aspect of artistic
chic. In fact, Leduc spends so much of his time examining the collection of
handsome objects surrounding her that you think the film is about them. But the
objects are mute, or else Leduc fails to create enough of a context for them to
speak to us. Kahlo collected dolls, and in one of her late drawings (done after
her leg was removed) saw herself as a broken doll, but nothing of this
perception of herself as damaged goods -- or her intense desire to have a child
by Rivera -- is expressed in the film. Nor is her extensive dependency on drugs
hinted at, nor the possibility that her death was, in fact, a suicide.
Medina is perhaps the greatest
casualty of Leduc's approach. Her performance as Kahlo is an extraordinary
incarnation, both powerful and deft, and she brings this strikingly
contradictory artist close to us -- only to have her director push her away
again.
DVDBeaver.com
[Axel Mishael Muñoz Barba]
Lee, Ang
Ang Lee NNDB Biography (excerpt)
Ang Lee's grandparents were executed after the Chinese Civil War in 1949 for the crime of being landowners. Lee's parents escaped to Taiwan, where he was born. He studied acting there, then came to American and studied theater and filmmaking. While he was a student at New York University, Lee served as assistant cameraman as Spike Lee (no relation) put together his thesis film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. Ang Lee's own thesis film, Fine Line, won both Best Film and Best Director at NYU's film festival.
After graduation, though, Lee found himself in "development hell" for six years, unable to find funding to make a movie until, remarkably, his scripts for Tui Shou and The Wedding Banquet won first and second prize in a Taiwanese screenwriting competition. Tui Shou, is a comedy with serious undertones about an aging Taiwanese Tai Chi master who comes to America to live with his son and American daughter-in-law. Barely released in America (as Pushing Hands), it was well-received in Taiwan. His second film, The Wedding Banquet, is a hilarious comedy about a gay Asian-American who feigns straightness when his Taiwanese parents visit. A hit on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, it was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film, as was Lee's third film: Eat Drink Man Woman, a comedy-drama about a master chef losing his sense of taste and his three daughters letting him know they have grown up.
To the surprise of many, Lee's next film had nothing to do with either his native Taiwan or his adopted America. Instead he filmed Jane Austen's very English period romance Sense and Sensibility, starring and scripted by Emma Thompson, and it won rave reviews and an Oscar for Thompson's script. After that Lee made the heartbreaking '70s suburban wife-swapping drama The Ice Storm with Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver, the Civil War western Ride with the Devil starring Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich, and the big-budget medieval martial arts masterpiece Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon with Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh. The top grossing foreign-language film ever released in America, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was nominated for ten Oscars and won four, including Best Foreign Language Film.
Adapting Hulk from the comics by Stan Lee (also no relation), Lee cast Eric Bana as the mild-mannered man who becomes a green brute when he loses his temper, and Nick Nolte as his father. Hulk was well-made, but it was a commercial flop. The audience that would have appreciated the movie's subtle depth had no interest in a giant green monster, while many fans of The Incredible Hulk comic books were bored when Lee spent screen time exploring the character's tortured internal traumas, instead of simply reveling in his monstrous temper tantrums.
Lee's next film was Brokeback Mountain, the first major studio film to offer a gay romance as its central story. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal starred, audiences left in tears, and Lee became not just the first Asian but the first non-white person to win the Oscar as Best Director. In communist China, the state newspaper China Daily published an editorial proclaiming, "Ang Lee is the pride of Chinese people all over the world, and he is the glory of Chinese cinematic talent". But Brokeback Mountain was banned in China, and the parts of Lee's acceptance speech where he alluded to the movie's plot were edited out of the Chinese broadcast.
All-Movie Guide bio from Rebecca Flint Marx
Having garnered international acclaim for his work, Taiwanese director Ang Lee was one of the first Chinese-born directors to find critical and commercial success on both sides of the Pacific. Born in 1954 in Taipei, he graduated from the National Taiwan College of Arts in 1975 and then went to the United States, where he studied theater directing at the University of Illinois and film production at New York University.
After winning awards in 1985 for his student work (while at N.Y.U., he also worked on Spike Lee's acclaimed student film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads), Lee spent the next six years working on screenplays, eventually making his directorial debut in 1992 with Pushing Hands. A comedy about the generational and cultural gaps in a Taiwanese family in New York, it won awards in Lee's native country. His next film, The Wedding Banquet (1993), further explored cultural and generational differences through a gay New Yorker who stages a marriage of convenience to please his visiting Taiwanese parents. The film met with widespread acclaim, winning a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and a Best Director prize at the Seattle Film Festival, as well as Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.
With his international reputation growing, Lee went on to make Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), his third film to focus on the theme of generational differences — and also his third film to feature stately actor Sihung Lung. Eat Drink Man Woman proved Lee's most critically and commercially successful film to date, winning a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination, as well as Independent Spirit Award and BAFTA nominations. Following this success, Lee ventured into the world of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking with Sense and Sensibility in 1995. A fairly faithful adaptation of Jane Austen's novel, with a screenplay written by its star, Emma Thompson, the film proved another success for the director, earning honors including a Best Picture Oscar nomination (it went on to win Best Adapted Screenplay for Thompson), a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and a number of British Academy Awards. Lee was voted the year's Best Director by the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle.
In 1997, the director next turned to adapting Rick Moody's novel The Ice Storm. The story of familial dysfunction in Watergate-era Connecticut, the film featured an impressive cast including Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Allen, and Christina Ricci. Lee brought a sober, painterly touch to the material, and his approach won him international critical acclaim. The film won a number of international awards, including a 1997 Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival for James Schamus. Having secured a place on Hollywood's roster of A-list directors, Lee next tried his hand at Civil War drama with Ride With the Devil, which featured a cast of some of Hollywood's more prominent up-and-comers, including Tobey Maguire (who had worked with Lee on The Ice Storm), Jonathan Rhys Myers, Jewel Kilcher, and Jeffrey Wright.
Lee's next effort, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), was a lavish and exciting fantasy that would eventually become the highest grossing foreign-language film ever released in the U.S. A spectacular romantic adventure that became a phenominal international success, Crouching Tiger earned award nominations across the board, including 14 Oscar Nominations, and 16 British Academy Award Nominations. When the smoke cleared and the winners were finally announced, Crouching Tiger earned, among others, four Oscars including Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director at the Golden Globes, and four British Academy Awards including Best Director. Aside from simply being a breathtaking and visually extravagant adventure, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a rare example of a subtitled film that achieved widespread stateside success.
After serving as screenwriter for the film Tortilla Soup
(a Mexican-American take on Lee's
own comedy Eat Drink Man
Woman), Lee
raised eyebrows worldwide when he announced that he would take the helm for the
long awaited live-action comic book adaptation Hulk.
The resulting film was without question one of the most brooding comic book
films ever adapted to the big screen. A melancholy study in father/child
relationships that largely eschewed comic book action in favor of character
driven melodramatics, the beautifully shot film would also prove one of the
closest visual representations of an actual comic book ever committed to
celluliod. Despite its smart use of frames and inspired use of color and
transitions, the film simply failed to live up to audience expectations on the
heels of Sam Raimi's
character-driven but still action-packed Spider-Man;
leaving a large collection of movie-related merchandise to gather dust on toy
store shelves nationwide.
Any fears about Lee's
impact as a director were laid to rest, however, in 2005 when he directed the
monumentally acclaimed Brokeback
Mountain, staring Jake Gyllenhaal
and Heath Ledger.
The film's sensitive and epic portrayal of a thriving romance that survives
between two Wyoming cowboys in the 1960's was praised as both elegiac and
grounded. Lee's
deft handling of material that simultaneously drew on the established themes of
classic cinema and pioneered completely unexplored territory in mass media
could not have been more exalted and Lee
won a Golden Globe for Best Director of a Motion Picture, as well as an Academy
Award for Best Direction. The film also picked up Golden Globe awards for Best
Motion Picture Drama, Best Screenplay, and Best Original Song in a Motion
Picture, and another Oscar for Best Original Score.
TCMDB biography from Turner Classic Movies
Film Reference profile by Kevin Hillstrom, updated by Robyn
Karney
Ang Lee Great
Director profile • Senses of Cinema David
Minnihan from Senses of Cinema,
August 27, 2008
Ang Lee @ Filmbug biography
Ang Lee - Mahalo profile page
filmfodder.com: movies: specials: director profiles: ang lee profile by Mac Slocum from Filmfodder
Lee, Ang brief bio from Montgomery Fellows
Pinyin news » Ang Lee an examination of his name in Mandarin
Chinese Directors - Ang Lee brief synopsis of his films
Ang Lee Pictures, Ang Lee Photo Gallery and Biography - Celebrity ...
Mongtomery Fellow Ang Lee to receive Dartmouth film award The Dartmouth News, October 13, 2000
BFI | Sight & Sound | Stealth And Duty Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, December 2000
Love and
Swords: The Dialectics of Martial Arts Romance: A Review of ... Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, December 28, 2000
Ang Lee's Martial Arts Film Sweeps Taiwan Awards China People’s Daily, December 4, 2000
CNN/TIME - America's Best America’s Best Artists and Entertainers (2001), which includes Richard Corliss on Ang Lee
Bright Lights Film Journal | Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Beautiful Beast, Gary Morris, January 1, 2001
Philosophical analysis of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Michael Chung, February 22, 2001
Watching Movies With Ang Lee Rick Lyman watches the 1963 Hong Kong film "Love Eternal" with Lee from The New York Times, March 9, 2001
Crouching China, Hidden Agenda Richard Corliss from Time magazine (March 14, 2001)
Reviews of The Hong Kong Filmography Crouching Tiger's roar alerts West to world of Asian film, by John Beifuss from Pop Culture, Spring 2001
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Art Film Hidden Inside the Chop-Socky Flick Matthew Levie from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2001
Ang Lee wins Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival - International ... International Herald Tribune, September 11, 2005
Rick
Moody on Brokeback Mountain | Books | The Guardian Rick Moody from The Guardian,
BFI | Sight & Sound | Western Special: Lonesome Cowboys Roger Clarke from Sight and Sound, January 2006
Western Special: Lonesome Cowboys Edward Buscombe from Sight and Sound, January 2006
BFI | Sight & Sound | Climb Every Mountain #1 on Top Ten Films of the year, by Nick James, January 2006
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Ang Lee's bold cinematic vision Ang Lee profile from the BBC News, January 17, 2006
Catherine Gander: A short story is not a quick fix. It demands interpretation, as Ang Lee's western has shown Lost Art of the Narrative, Catherine Gander from The Guardian, January 18, 2006
Ang Lee: Asian audiences more accepting of gay subject China Daily, January 21, 2006
Bright Lights Film Journal review Men in Love, Matthew Kennedy, February 2006
Bright Lights Film Journal (Alan Vanneman) review Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in the Grand Tetons Anymore, February 2006
Family and friends praise Ang Lee's quiet dedication by Ho Yi from The Tapei Times, March 7, 2006
Truthdig - Ear to the Ground - China Censors Ang Lee’s Speech March 7, 2006
Lee Disappointed Over 'Brokeback' Loss CBS News Hong Kong, March 8, 2006
Ang Lee: Blending East and West China.org, March 14, 2006
Ang Lee - TIME brief profile, April 30, 2006
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; The Cinema of Boy Meets Boy and Girl Meets Girl Ginia Bellafante from The New York Times, July 15, 2006
Beijing's bid for cool: Ang Lee's Olympic rapprochement - Asia ... Clifford Coonan from The Independent, October 18, 2006
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Making Women Warriors--A Transnational Reading of Asian Women Action Heroes L.S. Kim from Jump Cut, Winter 2006
Ang Lee: Things I’ve Learned As A Moviemaker Ang Lee from Moviemaker magazine, February 3, 2007
Offscreen :: Ang Lee’s Cowboys Irini Stamatopoulos essay from Offscreen, February 28, 2007
Analysis of Brokeback Mountain in Jump Cut Justin Vicari from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
A Leap Forward, Or a Great Sellout? David Barboza from The New York Times, July 1, 2007
In Ang Lee's 'Lust, Caution,' love is beautiful to see, impossible ... Dennis Lim from The International Herald Tribune, August 27, 2007
Ang Lee's Lust, Caution could buck the NC-17 trend | Film ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Guardian, August 31, 2007
indieWIRE: Ang Lee Wins Again in Venice, "Lust, Caution" Takes ... September 8, 2007
Who's Afraid Of Ang Lee? - September 21, 2007 - The New York Sun S. James Snyder
Ang Lee's 'Lust,' built on trust - The Envelope - LA Times Paul Lieberman, September 23, 2007
Ang Lee 'very satisfied' new film shown in entirety - The China Post September 25, 2007
Ang Lee director profile - Times Online October 12, 2007
A Chicken Coop, but No Tigers - New York Times Jennifer Frey from The New York Times, November 25, 2007
Love
as an Illusion: Beautiful to See, Impossible to Hold Dennis Lim from The New York Times,
The Observer profile: Ang Lee Happily Dogged by Controversy, James Robinson profiles Lee from The Observer, December 30, 2007
Wild, Weird and Wonderful: Appreciating Ang Lee's <i>Hulk</i ... Rob Humanick from The Projection Booth, June 13, 2008
What if Ang Lee's Hulk movie isn't as bad as everyone said it was ... In Defense of Hulk, Erik Sofge from Slate, June 17, 2008
You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Ang Lee | UGO.com a website that asks the question: “What If Louis Leterrier Remade Ang Lee's Other Films?” (Summer 2008)
"Ang Lee's movie has a backstory of pure serendipity" by Dan Bloom, Taipei Times October 11, 2008
Retrospective: The Films Of Ang Lee | IndieWire November 19, 2012
Ang
Lee: The Man Who Encapsulates The Essence of Global Chinese ... Khairah Film Reviews, October 31, 2016
Lee, Ang They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Ang Lee (The
Ice Storm) - IndustryCentral Ang Lee on Directing the Ice Storm,
Interview by Mary Hardesty from DGA magazine
(1997)
Ang Lee Jennie Yabroff interview from Salon, October 17, 1997
Interview
with Ang Lee | Film | The Guardian
Andrew Pulver interview, November 3, 2000
Guardian Unlimited Interview Ang Lee and James Schamus interview from The Guardian, November 7, 2000
Ang Lee - Interview | Interview | Find Articles at BNET Graham Fuller interview from Interview magazine, December 2000
Gerald Peary - interviews - Ang Lee December 2000
Film Monthly Interview Ang Lee Tackles The Hulk, Paul Fischer interview, June 14, 2003
Interview with Lee in The New York Times Elvis Mitchell interview from The New York Times, June 22, 2003
Ang
Lee: Not just the quiet man The Long and the Shirt of It, Andrew Anthony
interview from The Observer, July 6, 2003
AfterElton.com - Interview with Brokeback Mountain Director Ang Lee Interview by Gregg Shapiro, December 9, 2005
People's Daily Online -- Interview: Ang Lee deserves Oscar award ... Interview with actor Winston Chao, March 7, 2006
Ang Lee is Changing the Rules Interview by A.G. Basoli from Moviemaker magazine, February 3, 2007
indieWIRE INTERVIEW | “Lust, Caution” Director Ang Lee | IndieWire Erica Abeel interview, September 26, 2007
Q&A with Ang Lee - TIME Rebecca Winters Keegan interview, October 2, 2007
Twitch - 2007 MVFF30: LUST, CAUTION—Interview With Ang Lee & Tang Wei Interview by Michael Guillen, October 7, 2007, also seen here (click to enlarge photos): Cross-published on The Evening Class.
The Ang Lee Session: Some notes on the making of Lust, Caution – A ... N.P. Thompson interview from Northwest Asian Weekly, October 13, 2007
New Statesman - Interview: Ang Lee Rebecca Davies interview from The New Statesman, January 3, 2008
BFI | Sight & Sound | Cruel Intentions: Ang Lee Nick James interview from Sight and Sound, January 2008
Asia Pacific Arts: The Missing Link Brian Hu reviews Whitney Crothers Dilley’s book, The Cinema of Ang Lee, October 5, 2007
Melancholic nostalgia pervades life in front of Ang Lee's lens Bradley Winterton reviews Whitney Crothers Dilley’s new book, The Cinema of Ang Lee from The Tapei Times, December 16, 2007
Ranked 27th on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best Directors
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Ang Lee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) - David Lamble/ClaudesPlace . Interview by David Lamble on YouTube (23:42)
PUSHING HANDS (Tui Shou)
Taiwan (105 mi) 1992
Time Out review Tony Rayns
This first feature by a Taiwanese
graduate from the NYU Film School has a crippling central flaw. The film is
about an elderly tai chi master from Beijing who clashes with his all-American
daughter-in-law when he retires to his son's home in up-state New York. The
culture gap is so extreme (and on her side, so vehemently expressed) that you
wonder why on earth she married a Chinese guy in the first place - a question
the script blithely ignores. That said, this is a reasonably amiable
comedy-drama with a strong streak of sentimentality. It falls a long way short
of Wayne Wang's Chinatown movies.
User comments from imdb: Matador from NYC, New York
Pushing Hands is Ang Lee's
beautiful film about an elderly Chinese man transplanted into his son's
American home. While most films about this subject, which for some reason
critics like to call "East meets West", hyperbolize the struggles
that immigrant Chinese must face, Pushing Hands tends to focus on minutia
instead. For example, the elderly grandfather does not know that tin foil
cannot be put into the microwave, which leads to a scolding by his caucasian
daughter-in-law. All the conflict in the film is grounded in the real world, as
opposed to some very abstract 'generational conflict'. Because of this I found
this film to be much more rewarding than most other films about
Asian-Americans. A must-see for Chinese-Americans and Caucasians alike.
Personally, I'd like to watch it with my Chinese grandparents.
Listen for James Schamus's cameo as the voice on the answering machine at the
beginning of the film.
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
The wise, gentle patriarchs in Ang Lee's films have nothing on the director himself, who has shaped all three installments in his so-called Father Knows Best trilogy in such warmly knowing fashion. "Pushing Hands," which was made before "The Wedding Banquet" and "Eat Drink Man Woman," is a smaller film than its successors, but it has much the same emphasis on everyday kindness and respect, along with discreetly traditional values.
It will be no great leap for Mr. Lee when he moves on to direct a version of Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," since gentle comedy of manners is so clearly his forte. Even in this occasionally stilted early film, the director's bemused intelligence comes through. Once again, the story describes a profound culture clash, this time involving a retired tai chi master, Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung, who also starred in "The Wedding Banquet"), who moves from Beijing to America to live with his son. The film first finds him in a sterile New York suburb, coexisting with a daughter-in-law who is not of Asian extraction and has absolutely no use for this lovely old man.
While Martha (Deb Syder) works so hard at establishing herself as "a bold new voice in women's fiction" that she gives herself stress-related stomach aches, Mr. Chu does his best to remain on a peaceful plane. The film concentrates on wry observations of why such tranquillity is not possible in contemporary America, and in seeing this new world through old Mr. Chu's point of view. The title, a tai chi reference, is described as "a way of keeping your balance while unbalancing your opponent." As such, it aptly describes this teacher's new life.
Mr. Lee doesn't get far making the marriage between Martha and Alex Chu (Bo Z. Wang) look convincing. And his younger characters remain sounding boards for the film's ideas about filial duty and the pressures of the modern world. Still, "Pushing Hands" displays many of the charms of Mr. Lee's later work, from attention to cooking (there's a funny and appetizing scene involving the making of dumplings) to sweetly autumnal romance. There's a lovely performance from Lai Wang as one of the few soul mates Mr. Chu finds during travels that take him from Westchester to Chinatown.
The 1992 "Pushing Hands" has the crisp good looks of Mr. Lee's other films in this trilogy (all were shot by Jong Lin) and shows the same care with its courtly father figure. Mr. Lung makes palpable the Old World virtues Mr. Lee celebrates and the assurance that however rude life becomes, those virtues won't be washed away.
User comments from imdb: Author: Bobby Bob from Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Sihung
Lung, the actor who played Master Chu, the aging tai chi master, gave a very
convincing and sincere performance in this film. It was no wonder that he won
the Golden Horse (Taiwan's equivalent for the Oscars) for Best Actor in this
film. His performance was extremely touching, as tears jerked into my eyes as I
see an aging and traditional Chinese father trying to get along with his
westernized family while also trying to adjust to life in a new place and
culture. The film encourages people, especially new immigrants, to emphasize
and put themselves in their parents' shoes. Try to understand how difficult it
is for them to come and settle in a new place and try not to push them away. Be
patient with them, take a step back and everything may be better.
The movie title, "Pushing Hands", is very appropriate, as this is the
term for an exercise in tai chi in which a person achieves balance by giving up
balance. In this non-aggressive exercise between 2 people, a person offers no
resistance at all to the pressure or push that the other person is exerting and
keeps borrowing this strength until they feel they have fused into one and thus
have achieved harmony. This was what Master Chu did. Although his
daughter-in-law kept misunderstanding him, causing much discontent and
eventually got his son to try to sent him away, he offered no resentment or a
temper tantrum. He simply walked away gracefully. This action caused his son to
appreciate him and remember why he got his father to live together in the first
place in a tear jerking scene and finally they worked out a solution. They
decided to give each other space by living separately instead of pushing each
other away. In the end everyone was much happier, as even the daughter-in-law
learned to accept the father, symbolized by her decorating the guest room for
him and asking the question if he would ever visit. The father achieved the
balance that he seek in Tai-Chi.
Ang Li is simply amazing and sensational. He did what he could with the limited
budget and created a very warm and tear jerking film. Although this film was not
the highest quality (the version I saw was very unclear and skips sometimes)
and it could feel slow at times, especially the beginning sequence, the film
was a great work in directing. The film picked up its pace after the slow
beginning without any big fighting scenes or explosions and never felt boring
afterwards. Also, from the beginning sequence, where he was able to show the
dissension and gap between the daughter-in-law and the father by using just
different scenes and visuals, to scenes throughout the film where he used
lighting and different camera angles to show the internal pain and sadness that
the father experience, it was, simply put, a great piece of art considering the
budget. It showcased the talent of Li and gave the audience a glimpse of the
man who would bring us the memorable Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
THE WEDDING BANQUET (Xi Yan)
Taiwan USA (106 mi) 1993
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Wai-Tung's life seems near perfect: a
Taiwanese in New York, he's a natural at real estate, and shares an apartment
with his long-time lover Simon (Lichtenstein). There's just one problem: he
hasn't come out to his folks who still write from Taiwan of their desire for
grandchildren. To forestall an arranged marriage, Wai-Tung persuades his tenant
Wei-Wei (May
Chin), a Shanghai woman in need of a Green Card, to join in a marriage of
mutual convenience. His parents then announce they're coming for the wedding.
Never patronising his characters, Ang Lee
combines comedy, both subtle and raucous, with acute social asides. There's
genuine pain and confusion amid the jokes, so that the bitter-sweet,
tentatively positive coda packs real punch. Winston Chow's Wai-Tung is
initially rather stilted, but the rest of the cast performs excellently, and
the script is admirably matter-of-fact in its treatment of the threatened gay
relationship.
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
The favorite on this year's festival circuit is Ang Lee's The
Wedding Banquet, which shared the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival.
Timing had something to do with it. At a moment when many young Chinese
filmmakers are coming to prominence, this Taiwanese-American film confirms the
vitality of the new Asian cinema. And it is also one of the most accessible of
the new gay-themed movies. Focusing on a gay man who marries a woman in order
to help her get a green card and then tries to keep the charade going when his
Taiwanese parents come to visit, The Wedding Banquet does justice to all
its characters. Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), a ruthless real estate entrepreneur,
his lover Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), and Wei-Wei (May Chin), a selfish
artist who will do anything necessary to survive, all have very real foibles
but seem decent at the core. Similarly, Wai-Tung's parents, who appear at first
to be benighted, prove to have more wisdom and tolerance than their son
imagines.
Ang Lee finds a lot of rich humor in the collision of these characters, but in
the end the film is deeply poignant. The parents return to Taiwan with their illusions
shattered but with a deeper sense of acceptance of their son. Although their
rapprochement is touching, it doesn't erase a bittersweet sense of regret over
what might have been. Militant gay activists might have preferred a more
ebullient ending, but The Wedding Banquet pays close attention to the
hopes and dreams of its straight and gay characters, without trivializing the
emotional lives of any of them. Now one only hopes that Ang Lee retains a bit
of skepticism toward all the hype that has made him this year's darling.
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
A darling of the past year's festival circuit, The Wedding Banquet wins fans with its sunny disposition as it turns a contemporary story about a marriage of convenience into a deft bedroom farce and humanist drama. Wai Tung (Chao), a naturalized American citizen from Taiwan, is a young real estate entrepreneur in New York City. He lives with his lover Simon (Lichtenstein) in a Manhattan brownstone enchanced with all the trappings of upwardly mobile and gay-identified lifestyles. Mom and Dad back in Taiwan know nothing of Wai Tung's homosexuality and vociferously long for news of their son's marriage and impending grandparenthood. Additionally, living illegally in the loft of a building owned by Wai Tung is Wei Wei (May Chin), a young artist from Mainland China who's in need of a green card. Both Simon and Wai Tung are fond of Wei Wei, so when Simon proposes an arranged marriage between Wai Tung and Wei Wei, they all think their problems have been solved. But the problems are only beginning, as they come to discover when Wai Tung's parents, Mr. and Mrs Gao (Sihung Lung and Ah-Leh Gua), insist that they are flying in from Taiwan for the wedding. The charade swells as they makeover the apartment, taking down muscle posters and hanging Chinese calligraphy in their place and passing Simon off as the friendly and ever-present landlord. Simon's gourmet cooking is surreptitiously substituted for Wei Wei's inept food preparation attempts. The sham continues through the wedding ceremony, through the long farcical banquet sequence attended by 300 guests who pull out all the stops, including following the couple into their honeymoon suite, and through the extended visit of Mr. and Mrs Gao, who are residing in the apartment with the disarranged threesome. In many ways, The Wedding Banquet is a conventional comedic set-up with familiar plot complications and charade. What distinguishes The Wedding Banquet is its generosity toward its characters, who are all given their due. Wai Tung is forced to reconcile his own internal culture clash, Wei Wei's self-serving survival instinct becomes tempered by a new concern for the welfare of others, Simon's accommodating tolerance is stretched unpleasantly toward its breaking point, and Mr. and Mrs. Gao turn out to be much more understanding than anyone knew. Considering its tiny budget and mix of professional and non-professional actors, The Wedding Banquet looks very polished and assured. A great compassion for its characters and some truly original narrative material (at least for American audiences) offset some of the generic conventionality inherent in the storyline. Score yourself an invitation to The Wedding Banquet; it's an affair to remember.
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]
Love is never easy, especially when you’re a closeted
homosexual and your parents travel 8,000 miles to attend your sham wedding
while your lover nervously assumes the role of bogus best man. That may sound
like a setup for a screwball farce, but The Wedding Banquet turns out to
be a thoughtful and ultimately deeply moving story about family ties,
tradition, and acceptance. As the film that put writer/director Ang Lee on the
map, it’s a must-see for anyone who’s enjoyed his subsequent work, especially Eat
Drink Man Woman and The
Ice Storm, both equally powerful meditations on damaged families
with serious communication issues.
Though much of the dialogue in The Wedding Banquet is in Chinese, the
action takes place in New York. Taiwanese expatriate Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) is
living a fast-paced Manhattan life as a budding real estate wheeler-dealer. He
lives in a lovely Greenwich Village townhouse with his affable doctor boyfriend
Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). Wai-Tung’s biggest problem: The constant
long-distance phone calls from his parents (Ah Lei Gua and Sihung Lung)
wondering when their beloved only son is finally going to get married.
When the parental pressure becomes too much, Simon suggests that Wai-Tung marry
Wei-Wei (May Chin), another expat who lives in one of Wai-Tung’s buildings. She
needs a break on the rent and a green card. He needs a wife to silence his
parents. Everyone will win. A City Hall ceremony is scheduled.
Things start to go wrong when Wai-Tung’s parents suddenly show up for the
wedding. Simon and Wai-Tung race around the house taking down all the male
nudes and replacing them with Chinese calligraphy scrolls just in the nick of
time. Mom and Dad settle in for an extended stay, and they like Wei-Wei
immediately, but they’re horrified by the civil ceremony and by the perfunctory
restaurant dinner that follows. An old friend of the family who’s a big
Chinatown restaurant tycoon offers a solution: He’ll throw the happy couple a
huge traditional wedding banquet.
But sometimes traditions are bad ideas. As a result of the traditional
excessive drinking and the traditional goading of their friends, Wei-Wei ends
up pregnant, and Wai-Tung has no good explanation for the furious Simon. Now
that all five are living in the townhouse, the tension is thick. Wei-Wei
doesn’t want a baby, Wai-Tung feels totally trapped, Simon is the affronted odd
man out, but Mom and Dad couldn’t be happier.
The important decisions that each of the five faces are played out in an
intricate series of small scenes that feel totally true despite the slightly
forced nature of the plot. Most touching are the moments when Wai-Tung’s mother
speaks to Wei-Wei about her dreams for her son, dreams she slowly begins to
realize may never come true. Simon wonders how such a tangled situation, one he
created after all, can ever resolve itself happily. And Wai-Tung is crushed by
guilt over his many deceptions and is fearful of losing Simon forever.
Lee orchestrates most of the action within the confines of the house, only
adding to the tension and the claustrophobia as the family’s secrets begin to
emerge. What started out funny becomes intensely dramatic, and you’ll find
yourself fervently hoping that all five, each of whom has only the best
intentions at heart, can find paths to acceptance and forgiveness.
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
Modamag.com - DVD Review [Kage Alan]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Cox) review
Washington Post (Megan Rosenfeld) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (Yin shi nan nu)
Taiwan USA (123 mi) 1994
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
Ang Lee's new family comedy, Eat Drink Man Woman,
serves up a rich gallery of sharply defined characters--a master chef, his
three daughters and their lovers. It's a comedy of manners, a celebration of
Chinese food, and a poignant chronicle of change and dissolution, as the family
breaks apart in unexpected ways. While the milieu is very different from that
of Lee's last film, The Wedding Banquet, the bittersweet mood is very
much the same, confirming Lee as an artist with a distinctive melancholy
vision.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Comedy drama about a widower and his
three unmarried daughters. Mr Chu, a retired Taipei chef, would like his girls
to leave home, but is too repressed and stubborn to communicate frankly with
them, relying instead on the ritual Sunday dinners he serves up to preserve a
sense of family. They, however, feel guilty about their own needs: Jia-Jen, a
Christian teacher, nursing a broken heart and covert desire for the sports
coach; Jia-Chien, a career woman into casual sex with her ex; and the youngest,
Jia-Ning who works in a burger-joint and gets on uncomfortably well with a
friend's boyfriend. Which daughter, if any, will stay with Dad? Or will he
succumb to predatory widow Mrs Liang - if his health holds out? Tasty
ingredients (Sihung Lung's
Mr Chu and Chien-Lien
Wu's Jia-Chien are especially good), but the food metaphor never carries
weight, and the characterisations are too shallow to lend the film emotional
punch.
Eat
Drink Man Woman - TCM.com Sean Axmaker
"Eat, drink, man, woman. Basic human desires. You
can't avoid them." – Old Chu
Ang Lee opens Eat Drink Man Woman
(1994) on brief shots of Taipei, a bustling modern city of skyscrapers and busy
streets crammed with cars, mopeds and pedestrians, before he sweeps us out of
the city and into the rural home of Old Chu, a semi-retired master chef in one
of Taipei's most respected restaurants. Here there is no rush, only the loving
attention lavished on an elaborate Sunday meal for his three daughters. Chu, an
aging widower, is most at home in the kitchen, preparing and cooking and
readying for presentation. He's less sure of himself presiding over the social
ritual of the family dinner, which plays out with strained politeness. The
muted tension reflects no animosity, merely a disconnection as the grown women
follow their paths and keep their personal feelings and struggles hidden from
one another.
Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang), the youngest daughter, is a student who works part time
as a fast food clerk (it's not a statement of rebellion, merely a reflection of
the changing urban culture) and falls for her best friend's neglected and
frustrated boyfriend. The eldest, high school math teacher Jia-Jen (Kuei-Mei
Yang), took over the maternal responsibilities since the death of their mother,
at the cost of her romantic life. She still mourns a lost love from years before
and her frustration and resentment simmers under her brittle façade of
authority both at home and at school. Middle sister Jia-Chien (Chien-lien Wu)
is a rising executive at a national airline company engaged in a casual affair
with a younger man and determined to finally leave the rural family home. At
the dinner that opens the film, she announces that she has bought an apartment
in the city and will be moving out of the family home. It's not the last major
event that will be announced at dinner. All four family members will face
romantic trials that will change their lives dramatically and, true to form,
they will hide their emotional lives until the ritualistic announcement at
their weekly dinner.
Taiwan-born director Ang Lee trained first as an actor and then as a director
in the United States. His first two features, Pushing Hands (1992) and The
Wedding Banquet (1993), are wrapped up in the same collision of cultures
that Lee experienced living in the U.S., reconciling the Chinese expectations
of family responsibility and tradition with the far more open culture of
American life. Both were shot in the U.S. with producer James Schamus (who
became Lee's longtime writing and producing partner) and financed with
Taiwanese backing. Both were enormously successful in Taiwan, and the latter
became an independent hit in American that established his international
reputation.
Eat Drink Man Woman,
Lee's third feature, was his first to be shot and set in his homeland.
Determined to establish himself as a Chinese filmmaker, Lee returned to the
city of Taipei, where he grew up, and he drew from his own experiences. As a
struggling filmmaker just out of college, Lee kept the family home and cooked
the meals while his wife worked full time and he wrote scripts and pitched
projects, trying to get his first feature produced. The idea of food as
something to be shared is very Chinese, according to Lee. It became a natural
focus for his story: food as a way of communication, as a social and familial
experience. "The food and the banquet in the movie has really become a
ritual," explained Lee in an interview. In this film, it often replaces
communication.
Food is also central to Chu's identity. Unbeknownst to all except his closest
friend and fellow chef Wen (affectionately known as Uncle Wen by Chu's
daughters), he is losing his sense of taste. He has a lifetime of recipes and a
passion for cooking, but like a painter going blind or a musician losing his
hearing, he's an artist losing command of the sense that defines him. It's an
obvious metaphor for aging and losing control, but in the hands of Lee it's
more than just a symbol. Called from his family by Wen to save a culinary
disaster at the restaurant, Chu arrives intent and confident and completely in
his element, like a surgeon coming in to perform an emergency operation. As he
steps in to the restaurant and snakes through the kitchen counters with
laser-like focus, he's dressed in the chef's answer to surgical scrubs by one
man and handed his glasses by another as all gather round to hear his
assessment of the crisis and await his solution and instructions. This is the
one area of life in which he still has control, yet he must rely on Wen to
gauge his success when he whips up a last-minute entrée to replace a shark fin
fiasco. All the cooking theory in the world is just that when faced with the
results of real food on the human tongue.
The stories and emotional crises are familiar, the stuff of melodrama and
romantic comedies. It's the perspective Lee gives this portrait of repressed
desires and hidden lives played out in the rituals of meals and family
gatherings that makes the film so engaging and appealing. According to producer
and co-writer James Schamus, "Eat Drink Man Woman takes place really as the third of our "Father Knows
Best" trilogy. We're really seeing the Confucian fatherly role model
slowly turn into something else, something more modern." The American
Schamus confesses that he found it difficult when he attempted to write from a
Chinese perspective. "The more research I did, the worse the script
got," he explains, so he transformed the characters (at least in his own
mind) into a Jewish family and wrote from his own cultural experience. When Ang
Lee read it, he responded: "It looks very Chinese." Yet, while social
and cultural details are unique, the emotional lives and hard decisions are
universally human.
The study of social manners and suppressed feelings became Lee's specialty. His
next film was an adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility
(1995) starring Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. The
setting is half a world and two centuries removed from Eat Drink Man Woman but the (if
you'll pardon the expression) sensibility is almost the same. Similarly, films
as otherwise different as The Ice Storm (1997), Hulk (2003) and Brokeback
Mountain (2005) ultimately concerned themselves with longing, emotional
repression and a fear of unleashing the tumult of feelings kept under control.
Eat Drink Man Woman
was a 1995 Oscar® nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and was remade as Tortilla
Soup in 2001, which shifts the story, almost completely intact, to a
Mexican-American family.
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B-]
KFC Cinema JoE Sheih
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review
DVD Town (Sam Vicchrilli) dvd review
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
The DVD Journal Betsy Bozdech
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
DVD Verdict Dezhda Mountz
Needcoffee.com - DVD Review HTQ4
Edinburgh U Film Society (Katia Saint-Peron) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY A- 94
Let
me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
─William Shakespeare, Sonnett 116, Sonnet 116 -
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Ang Lee, a Taiwanese director who acknowledged in interviews to having never read the Jane Austen novel upon which this is based, may seem like an odd choice to direct a British comedy of manners that is so thoroughly ensconced in early 19th century literature, as it’s his first film shot completely in English, as his first three efforts were shot in Mandarin Chinese, yet he proves to be a worthy choice, an ardent admirer of casting sweeping romance dramas in natural outdoor settings while retaining the poetic intimacy of complex personal relationships, so superbly rendered both here and a decade later in Brokeback Mountain (2005), while remaining an advocate of self-restraint, a character trait of the social period that is at the heart of the novel and film. Lee visited museums and art galleries for visual ideas, turning to the British Romanticist landscape paintings of John Constable and J.M.W Turner, where cinematographer Michael Coulter matched the sweeping majesty of painterly compositions. But like most British dramas, acting is the key ingredient, toned down here to match the atmospheric mood of strict social constraint. Adapted by actress Emma Thompson, who spent five years writing and revising a screenplay, which eventually won her an Academy Award, she reshapes the novel by eliminating the narrator’s voice, which is largely that of Austen herself, while incorporating the author’s keen insights into the character of the elder sister, played, perhaps unsurprisingly, by Emma Thompson. The film, as the title indicates mirrors the interior lives of the two oldest Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, who are ages 19 and 16 in the book, altered somewhat here to accommodate Thompson’s actual age of 36, while Winslet was 19. Elinor’s elder status reflects a sensible and more reserved personality, perhaps past her marrying years, where she’s like a second mother looking after the interests of others, demonstrating a sense of duty, as she’s already assuming much of the responsibility when it comes to the behavior of the three sisters, also including a precocious young 13-year old Margaret (Emilie François), while the more indulgent and self-centered Marianne is allowed free expression of her feelings, completely at odds with her elder sister, both showing a strong intelligence, but Marianne accentuates her sensuous inclinations, singing songs at the piano, reading poetry, while openly expressing her opinions and exhibiting her love interests for all the world to see. While they are decidedly different personalities, they couldn’t be closer, often confessing their secrets to one another or seen sleeping in the same bed. It’s an open question whether one represents sense and the other sensibilities, or whether one triumphs over the other by the end, as the narrative pits the interest of both women’s lives happening simultaneously, each with their own romantic affairs, interweaving the interior drama through a series of unfolding events, much of which is expressed through letters. While the book was published in 1811, the period in question is the last decade of the 18th century, where the girls had a sizeable means of support until the sudden death of the wealthy Henry Dashwood (Tom Wilkinson) near the beginning of the story, where he makes his oldest son John (James Fleet), from his first marriage, promise to look after the financial interests of his second wife, Lady Dashwood (Gemma Jones) and her three daughters. While he most assuredly makes a deathbed promise, his odious wife Fanny (Harriet Walter) ultimately persuades him otherwise, offering them an annual stipend, undermining their position socially and financially, as they are forced to live below the means they have been accustomed to living. Suddenly unwelcome in her own home at Norland Park, uprooted even from their bedrooms, Lady Dashwood is soon looking elsewhere for a new place of residence. The Austen novel highlights the precarious position women found themselves in the 19th century, where a sudden shift in financial circumstances could lead to dire straits, completely altering one’s destiny. Accordingly, women had no status except through marriage, where pressure was placed upon single women to marry into society. Quickly moving into the household is Fanny’s brother Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), a quietly sensitive, overly shy and unassuming man (with almost no lines, so always appears ill at ease) who has received the best education, but in keeping with the times has no designs of immediate employment. This idea that wealth is not earned but inherited through the firstborn male heir is discussed at some length, even in conversation between Elinor and Edward, where the options and restrictions are even more suffocating for women.
Elinor Dashwood: You
talk of feeling idle and useless. Imagine how that is compounded when one has
no hope and no choice of any occupation whatsoever.
Edward Ferrars: Our circumstances are therefore precisely the same.
Elinor Dashwood: Except that you will inherit your fortune. We cannot even earn
ours.
Lady Dashwood delays her plans, as Elinor quickly develops an attachment to Edward, where the two seem happy and well-suited, which Fanny soon notices and voices her disapproval, interrupting any time they spend together, eventually sending him away to London to prevent anything further from developing, an act that literally crushes Elinor’s spirit, but she refuses to show any emotion, especially to the spiteful Fanny, who naturally assumes the interest is motivated only by money rather than love. This is a perfect example of Fanny’s narrow-minded crudeness, which stands in stark contrast to the more free-spirited lives of the Dashwood sisters, who were largely moved by Edward’s affection shown to young Margaret, winning her heart in the process as well, where she has a hard time dealing with his absence. This generates a pattern of mysteriously absent men and the more accessible women, where the men are viewed almost as fantasy figures, gallant, elegant, and dashing, like the handsome prince in the fairy tales, where they remain somewhat sketchy and out of the action, often figuring into the humor of the occasion, while the women are more fully realized characters. Unlike men, social standing is attained only through marriage, where there’s an unwritten, underlying desire to marry these women off to the best possible suitor, where prospective men are often judged like livestock at a county fair. In this manner, the bloom of their youth is easily the most impressive aspect of the film, where they are expected to lose themselves to the wonders of nature, where their intelligence and charm couldn’t be more appealing. However, the film doesn’t really get going until Marianne comes of age. Her introduction, however, is on the amusing side, as we see her playing a depressing song on the piano soon after the death of her father, where Elinor asks her to kindly play something a little less depressing, so she breaks into an even more depressing dirge, a wonderful way to establish character without uttering a single word. At the urging of a distant cousin, Lady Dashwood moves her family to Barton Cottage in Devonshire, where the quaint home lacks many of the conveniences, much fewer servants, but they are welcomed by Sir John Middleton (Robert Hardy), almost always seen accompanied by a brood of hounds, and introduced into society by his loquacious mother-in-law Mrs. Jennings (Elizabeth Spriggs), a women abounding in rumor and local gossip, whose social currency is hearsay, having the privilege of spreading it often and with great pleasure, as if this is her greatest joy, constantly making public innuendos about the available Dashwood women, which is seen as much as an act of friendship as a constant irritant throughout. Into their lives walks Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), a friend and comrade of Sir John during the British military escapade into India, arriving by horseback as Marianne can be heard singing at the piano, where he’s immediately smitten by her. Marianne, however, is not at all pleased, despite the matchmaking intervention by Mrs. Jennings, as he’s more than twice her age, an honorable man of wealth and reputation where the formality of his noble conduct appears overly rigid. It doesn’t stop him from bringing flowers, however, where his perfect diction and pronunciation is legendary, initially used as comic relief, appearing and disappearing from the frame, often at full gallop, always excusing himself from her presence, as it’s clear he hasn’t her full attention. When Marianne and Margaret go running through the hillside in one of the more wondrous outdoor scenes, they get caught in a downpour of rain where Marianne slips and turns her ankle. Who should arrive, cutting a dashing figure on his white horse, like some kind of apparition, but the debonair John Willoughby (Greg Wise, who was having an affair with Thompson during the shooting and eventually married), a neighbor who sees the accident and carries her in his arms back to the safety of her home. Marianne’s rush of elation can’t be contained, where despite Colonel Brandon’s best efforts, they are all for naught, as she only has eyes for Willoughby.
The ensuing romance takes place in public view, where neither hides their enthusiasm at seeing one another, where they laugh and giggle with delight in each other’s company, distraught during temporary absences, literally pining away the lost moments until the exuberance returns when they can be together again, sharing common interests in poetry, music, art, and love. Austen highlights the erotic aspect of Marianne and Willoughby’s relationship, which contrasts strongly with Elinor and Edward’s reserved relationship, where Elinor warns her sister about flaunting their affair so openly. Marianne, however, insists that’s the beauty of love, surrendering to it in all its glory, continually feeling overwhelmed by the indescribable joy and passion it brings. Her euphoria reaches a peak at the moment she believes a proposal is coming, but instead Willoughby’s family is sending him off to London on business, expected to be gone indefinitely. Unprepared for the about face, Marianne is completely distraught, retreating to her room in tears where she remains inconsolable and the entire household may as well be in a state of mourning. Even Edward pays a visit, but appears nervously standoffish, uncomfortably ill at ease, exiting almost as soon as he arrives, leaving Elinor to surmise the visit was one of pity and sense of duty rather than any genuine interest, where she’s forced to submerge her feelings once again. Making matters worse, two of the Middleton relatives arrive on the scene, Charlotte Palmer (Imelda Staunton), an uneducated blabbermouth whose enthusiasm for gossip rivals that of her mother Mrs. Jennings, while her ever dour husband (Hugh Laurie) detests every lame thought coming out of her head, where their picture of marriage is one of utter disaster, and also a cousin Lucy Steele (Imogen Stubbs), who inadvertently reveals to Elinor in strict confidence that she’s been having a secret four-year engagement to Edward Ferrars, dishing out the lurid details every moment they’re together, talking her ear off revealing personal secrets, where Elinor begins to understand Edward’s reticence during the last visit, but is overwhelmed by the disastrous consequences of a possible future literally pulled out from under her. With both Dashwood sisters down on their luck, leave it to Mrs. Jennings to revive some of the lost magic, inviting Elinor and Marianne to London where she’ll stir the pot of fate once again. As Marianne unleashes her hopes at seeing Willoughby once again, Elinor couldn’t be more guarded and reserved, lost in a resigned acceptance of what has transpired. Despite a flurry of letters from Marianne that go unanswered, the parties meet at an extravagant social ball where Marianne’s unbridled enthusiasm is met with a cold dismissal, leaving her devastated to find Willoughby with another woman. While the sisters console one another about their lost loves, Elinor finally has someone to share her sense of outright exasperation, though Marianne is shocked to learn that her seemingly levelheaded sister has been as emotionally blindsided and traumatized as she has, but never showed even a hint of despair, impressing her immensely. Colonel Brandon fills in the salacious details about Willoughby’s fall from grace, forced to marry for money instead of love, while Edward is disinherited after his refusal to break off his engagement with Lucy, believing it is the only honorable thing to do. Out of gentlemanly respect, Brandon offers Edward a living under the protection of a church parsonage. Still wallowing in her emotional despair, Marianne is once again caught wandering out in the rain, where it is the older Colonel Brandon who must harrowingly carry her for miles back to safety, falling gravely ill with pneumonia, where she’s literally at death’s door, nursed back to health by a patient and obliging Colonel Brandon, finally gaining his due. Edward visits as well, revealing Lucy left him for his brother Robert (Richard Lumsden) and his ample inheritance, leaving his heart free to pursue Elinor, who is so taken aback she falls into a state of complete shock, unleashing her long pent-up emotions in a gusher of tears. Once again, the two sisters are cared for, united in love and marriage, with Willoughby on his white steed looking on enviously from the nearby hillside wondering what could have been.
Tucson
Weekly [Stacey Richter]
Is this ever a costume drama! Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant and practically every other British actor you can think of romp thorough the country in funny clothes in this clever adaptation of Jane Austen's novel about impoverished girls hunting for husbands. Of the recent crop of movies about Britons in by-gone eras falling in love out-of-doors, this is by far the best. The script (by Emma Thompson) is witty and well-paced; the crisp, brisk direction by Ang Lee (who made, most recently, Eat Drink Man Woman) keeps the slow-paced lives of the 19th century from ever becoming boring. This movie deals with Love and Romance like they made it in the old days--big, sweeping and stormy.
The Films of Ang Lee [Michael E. Grost]
Sense and Sensibility (1995) shares several features with the later Brokeback Mountain. The world of both films is similar. Both take place in a natural landscape, green, wet, hilly, geographically spread out, one in which people use horses for transport, and raise sheep. Both are worlds in which people create their own entertainment: music is provided by live singers, there are elaborate dances in large halls, lots of intimate two person conversations, exchanges of life history, festivities with sky imagery (coins in Sense and Sensibility, fireworks in Brokeback Mountain), and ordinary people doubling as their society's entertainers (poetry reciters and musicians in Sense and Sensibility, rodeo performers in Brokeback Mountain). Living within extended families, much concern over money and getting family financial support, and the endless passing around of the deeply kept secrets of one's personal life are key lifestyles in both films. Both worlds seem "pre-modern": relics of an era before modern times, urban living, and mass communication.
The two Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility seem oddly similar to Jack and Ennis in the latter film. Both have an intimate closeness, beyond anything they share with their heterosexual partners. There are several scenes in which the sisters sleep together in the same bed, cuddling close for warmth, like Jack and Ennis sharing a blanket together early on the mountain. The personalities are related, too. Eleanor is like Ennis: repressed, bottled-up, with intense feelings locked inside, constantly giving up her natural emotions to live according to society's ideas of duty. This is regarded as "sense" in the earlier film, but nightmarishly tragic in the latter. It has its dark side in Sense and Sensibility, too, however, with its heroine much too ready to settle for less. Her overwhelming tears at the end, where she finally lets out her repressed feelings, are like Ennis' tears that he sheds at ultimate moments. By contrast, Marianne and Jack pursue their romantic interests, and frequently get rebuffed, hurt, and finally approach death.
Deep Focus
(Bryant Frazer) review [A-] also seen here: DEEP FOCUS: Sense and
Sensibility
None of my friends will go see Sense and Sensibility, no matter how I talk it up to them. They all hate Emma Thompson. Jane Austen is just excruciating. Hugh Grant is passe. It's a shame that Kate Winslet picked this for a follow-up, since she was so good/cute in Heavenly Creatures. Alan Rickman is terrific; too bad he's resorted to appearing in a stodgy old costume drama. Howards End put them into a coma, and they're still way too drowsy to go see another 'literary' picture. Ang who? And anyway, it's probably going to win the Oscar for Best Picture, so how good could it be?
Well, pretty damn good, actually. If you won't listen to Siskel, the Academy or the National Society of Film Critics, listen to me -- the guy who gave Peter Jackson's gorefest Braindead (aka Dead Alive) four stars and refuses on principle ever to see another Merchant Ivory film. Enjoying Sense and Sensibility is like giving yourself over to the sensual perks of a terrific piece of cheesecake, a long hot bath, or a good foot massage. You just have to sit back, relax, let go of any mental blocks you might have built up, and let the performers do their thing for you.
They're hired in the service of an old-style soap opera. Sense and Sensibility details what happens to the women of the Dashwood family -- the mother (Gemma Jones) and daughters Elinor (Thompson), Marianne (Winslet), and Margaret (Emilie Francois) -- when Mr. Dashwood dies and leaves his estate to his son, John (by law, houses go from father to son, not father to daughter). John's wife, Fanny, won't permit him to care for the women as his father requested, and they are forced to accept the charity of a cousin, Sir John Middleton, into whose house they move. In the course of the story, the women encounter gallantry and romance aplenty, for better or for worse (naturally, they learn their lessons from the worse and learn to embrace the better by film's end).
Don't let me pretend the film hasn't any flaws. The double happy ending is welcome, but seems to come too easily after all the struggle that precedes it. As gorgeous as the cinematography is, it's a little too lush, too precise in its colors and motion for my taste. Director Ang Lee (Eat Drink Man Woman, The Wedding Banquet) is a fine storyteller, but he falls back on a few too many mannered compositions. As the most ebullient of the Dashwood, Winslet enthuses so much, so consistently (except when bedridden), that her character actually seems a little stiff over the course of the whole movie. Playing Edward Ferrars, the already-spoken-for object of Elinor's affections, Hugh Grant remains unmistakably, well, Hugh Grant, and you get the distinct feeling that he's given up even trying to get a handle on individual characters, opting instead to portray the ever-stammering archetype of himself over and over again. Francois makes a distractingly precious little girl in the mode of Kirsten Dunst from Interview With the Vampire (and the far-too-severe Oscar winner Anna Paquin from The Piano). And etcetera.
But permit me my gushing: Thompson is amazing in her mostly quiet way (a relief from her serious script-chewing in Much Ado About Nothing). When she burst into sobs in a key scene, I swear half the house behind me was choking in sympathy, making their own private noises. To a great extent, Sense and Sensibility really is Thompson's movie -- she wrote the screenplay, of course -- and it's quite a piece of work. I don't mean to belittle the contribution of the director or a fine ensemble cast, but I wouldn't be surprised if Thompson next takes it upon herself to direct a picture (would this be a worse idea than letting Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner take the reins of a Hollywood film?). It remains to be seen exactly how good she'd be, but if her next film has the high spirits and stubborn contentedness of this one, I'm sure it will be, above all, quite a pleasure.
Nora
Stovel - The Jane Austen Society of North America
Boston Review: Alan Stone
on Sense and Sensibility (film ...
Alan Stone from the Boston Review,
February/March
1996
Oscar Vault Monday – Sense and Sensibility, 1995 (dir. Ang ... Cinema Fanatic
Austen
Film Locations: Barton Cottage – Sense and ...
Sense and Sensibility - Turner Classic Movies Frank Miller
Nitrate Online Carrie Gorringe
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1995 [Erik Beck]
Sense and Sensibility - Philadelphia City Paper Cynthia Fuchs, also seen here: Cynthia Fuchs
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
Sense And
Sensibility | Georgia Straight Vancouver's News ... Ken Eisner
m3review - SENSE
AND SENSIBILITY - mdoyle.com Michael
J. Doyle
Sense &
Sensibility | PopMatters Lara
Killian DVD Review
DVD
Review Guido Henkel
DVD
Verdict Margo Reasner
Blu-ray.com
[Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Movie
Rewind [Mrs. Norman Maine]
SENSE
AND SENSIBILITY — Cinema In Focus Denny
Wayman and Hal Conkln
Edinburgh
U Film Society [Melanie J. Baker]
Review for Sense
and Sensibility (1995) - IMDb Dragan
Antulov
Sense
and Sensibility | Variety Todd
McCarthy
Sense and
Sensibility (2015), directed by Ang ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew
My
favourite film: Sense and Sensibility | Film | The Guardian Paul Laity
Washington Post Rita Kempley
Sense and Sensibility - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Sense and Sensibility (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE ICE STORM B 85
USA
Beautiful images and terrific use of gamelan bells in the soundtrack, also an excellent performance by Christina Ricci playing a disturbed, sexually precocious 14-year old, but a truly uninspiring and obnoxiously empty film filled with empty people having little or nothing of significance to say, another one of those adults behaving badly films. Despite all the praise heaped upon this film, I found it sadly disappointing.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
With its meticulous script by James
Schamus, strong performances and elegant direction, this tragi-comic look
at the lives of a couple of comfortably-off small town Connecticut families in
the winter of 1973 is a gem of witty, perceptive observation. Unbeknown to
Allen his wife, Kline is carrying on with neighbour Weaver, an affair
discovered when he comes across his teenage daughter Ricci playing her own
sexually explorative games with Weaver's sons. Cue marital discord, adolescent
disenchantment and family crises in a thoroughly enjoyable blend of comedy and
melodrama which is spot-on both in its evocative re-creation of the fads,
habits and attitudes of the early '70s, and in its sense of an America at a
particular point in its socio-political history.
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]
The emotional deep freeze experienced by a group of
characters in New Canaan, Connecticut over the 1973 Thanksgiving holiday
weekend is the subject of The Ice Storm. The aptly named film, adapted
by producer-turned-screenwriter James Schamus from the novel by Rick Moody,
gets so many of the outward trappings and small period details so wondrously
right that the sheer accumulation of “correct touches” threatens to obscure the
thinness of the story and the off-putting empathetic void which these
characters inhabit. The WASPy sterility of their upper-middle-class lives is,
in part, what the movie posits as the problem, but in so doing The Ice Storm
never much allows the audience to warm up to its characters. The absence of
heat is this drama's fatal flaw. The performances are terrific, nevertheless,
as the movie goes about the task of paralleling the stunted emotional lives of
the adults and children of two neighboring families while Watergate,
wife-swapping, and drug experimentation dominate their social arena 10 years
following the demise of Camelot. Trodding through this familiar Updike/Cheever
suburban turf is Kevin Klein as family man Ben Hood, who is having an
unsatisfactory adulterous affair with his neighbor Janey Carver (Weaver).
Janey's husband Jim (Sheridan) is frequently away on business but Ben's wife
Elena (Allen) has grown increasingly suspicious. Ben and Elena's daughter Wendy
(Ricci) is sexually experimenting with both the Carver boys (Wood and
Hann-Byrd), while her brother Paul (Maguire) is enamored with a rich girl from
his prep school. All these micro-dramas coalesce and come to a head during the
course of one long evening that also plays host to the area's worst ice storm
in 30 years. Sometimes, as in the case of the ice storm, the movie's intentions
are overly literal and obvious; yet most of the time we are left to infer
meaning from slight triggers and cues. This is because, by and large, these are
characters who are too genteel and over-pedigreed to say (or always even know)
exactly what they mean. For example, Ben's way of discussing the facts of life
with Paul is to advise him not to masturbate in the shower because it wastes
water and electricity. Or when Janey catches Wendy playing “show me yours, I'll
show you mine” with her youngest son, her alarmed impulse is to lecture Wendy
about Margaret Mead and the Samoans. By following his award-winning Sense
and Sensibility (which was produced and co-written by longtime collaborator
James Schamus) with this American period piece, director Ang Lee (Eat Drink
Man Woman) is fast proving himself a cultural chameleon. But with The
Ice Storm, Lee seems to have emphasized the details of cultural accuracy
over the rudiments of telling a gripping drama.
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The Ice Storm'' takes place as an early winter storm descends
on Connecticut, casting over Thanksgiving a shroud of impending doom. In a
wooded suburb, affluent adults stir restlessly in their split-level homes,
depressed not only by their lives but by their entertainments, and even by
their sins. Their teenage children have started experimenting with the same
forms of escape: booze, pot and sex.
The Hood family is held together by quiet desperation. Ben (Kevin
Kline) is having an affair with a neighbor (Sigourney
Weaver). His wife Elena (Joan
Allen) is a shoplifter who is being hit on by a long-haired minister. The
children sip wine in the kitchen. Young Wendy Hood's grace before Thanksgiving
dinner is to the point: ``Thanks for letting us white people kill all the
Indians and steal all their stuff.'' Ben and Elena observe later, ``The only
big fight we've had in years is about whether to go back into couples
therapy.'' The film, based on a novel by Rick Moody, has been directed by Ang
Lee, whose previous credit was an adaptation of Jane Austen's ``Sense and
Sensibility.'' Both films are about families observing protocol and exchanging
visits. Only the rules have changed. When Ben Hood visits Janey Carver (Weaver)
for an adulterous liaison, he wanders into Janey's rec room to find his own
daughter, Wendy (Christina
Ricci), experimenting with Janey's son Mikey (Elijah
Wood). Wendy, who is 14, has also conducted an exploratory session with
Mikey's kid brother, Sandy. The father asks his daughter what she's doing
there. She could as easily have asked him. The early 1970s were a time when the
social revolution of the 1960s had seeped down, or up, into the yuppie classes,
who wanted to be ``with it'' and supplemented their martinis with reefer. The
sexual revolution is in full swing for the characters in this movie, leading to
Ben Hood's lecture to his son on the facts of life: ``Masturbating in the
shower wastes water and electricity.'' When Janey Carver finds her son and the
Hood girl playing ``I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours,'' her response
is a bizarre speech on Margaret Mead's book about coming of age in Samoa.
The literate, subtle screenplay by James Schamus cuts between the children and
their parents, finding parallels. Paul takes the train into the city to visit
the apartment of the girl he likes; he puts sleeping pills into her drink to
make her perhaps more agreeable, and she passes out. Meanwhile in New Canaan,
the adults are attending a ``key party'' that turns into a sort of race: Can
they swap their wives before they pass out? Elena Hood even finds Philip, the
long-haired minister (Michael Cumpsty) there. ``Sometimes the shepherd needs
the comfort of the sheep,'' he explains tolerantly. She answers: ``I'm going to
try hard not to understand the implications of that.'' There is a sense of
gathering tragedy, symbolized in one scene where a child balances on an icy
diving board over an empty pool. When disaster does strike, it releases
helpless tears for one of the characters; we reflect on how very many things he
has to cry about. Despite its mordant undertones, the film is often satirical
and frequently very funny, and quietly observant in its performances, as when
the Weaver character takes all she can of Kline's musings about his dislike of
golf, and finally tells her lover: ``You're boring me. I have a husband. I
don't feel the need for another.'' They all feel the need for something. What
we sense after the film is that the natural sources of pleasure have been
replaced with higher-octane substitutes, which have burnt out the ability to
feel joy. Going through the motions of what once gave them escape, they feel
curiously trapped.
Salon | "The Ice Storm" Baby It’s Cold Inside, Charles Taylor from Salon, October 17, 1997
Suburban
Hell: An Examination of Suburban Life as Portrayed in The Ice Storm, Mr. &
Mrs. Bridge, and Welcome to the Dollhouse
David Ng from Images
The Yale Herald review Ice Storm proves that decadence can be chilling, by Josh Westlund, October 10, 1997
CNN - Review: Passion served cold in 'The Ice Storm' - Oct. 14, 1997 Paul Tatara from CNN news
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
also seen here: Ice
Storm, The (1997) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
The
House Next Door - The Criterion Collection #426 [Andrew Chan] March 18, 2008, also seen here: The
Criterion Collection Database (Andrew Chan)
Nitrate Online
(Carrie Gorringe) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd
review [Criterion Collection]
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd
review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion
Confessions
PopMatters
(Matt Mazur) review
Harvey's Movie
Review (Harvey O'Brien) review
The Onion A.V.
Club dvd review
Scott Tobias
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[4/5]
The Digital Bits dvd review Dan Kelly
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
The IFC Blog [Michael Atkinson]
DVD Journal Betsy Bozdech
DVD Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
The Ice Storm Jeffrey Overstreet from Looking Closer
Film Scouts (Cari Beauchamp) capsule review
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
Edward Johnson-Ott review [4/5]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]
PopcornQ review Jenni Olsen
Ang Lee (The
Ice Storm) - IndustryCentral Ang Lee on Directing the Ice Storm,
Interview by Mary Hardesty from DGA magazine
(1997)
Ang Lee Jennie Yabroff interview from Salon, October 17, 1997
The Globe and Mail review [4/4] Rick Groen
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver.com Full Graphic Review by Gary W. Tooze
RIDE WITH THE DEVIL
USA
NItrate Online (capsule) Carrie Gorringe
Ride With the Devil
is Ang Lee’s interpretation of the
American Civil War and it is a subtly spellbinding exploration of how the
conflicting forces tore apart life in the state of Missouri; the conflicts depicted here, both emotional
and martial, also serve to represent, via synecdoche, warfare nation-wide. Devil also provides an explanation for
the rise of the post-Civil-War lawlessness as the frontier and opportunities
for advancement began to narrow and finally close (the guerilla tactics of the
Missouri “Irregulars” (those who fought for secession) would prove useful
training for outlaws like Jesse James and the Younger Brothers). Lee takes this
volatile material and renders it without hysteria or sentiment, but with a
great deal of compassion, and is one of the few directors capable of achieving
such a goal (perhaps the Taiwanese-born Lee had the advantage of emotional
distance on his side, but his story-telling skill is also painstakingly
exquisite).
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Building on the qualities of Wedding
Banquet, Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, director
Lee here tackles a far grander subject - the American Civil War. About a unit
of young 'Bushwhackers' - Southern guerillas tackling Yankee platoons - it
focuses on the experiences of two friends: plantation owner's son Jack Bull
(Ulrich) and Jake (Maguire), both basically liberal on the issue of slavery but
driven by vengeance and proud loyalty to bear arms for the Confederacy.
Steadily, however, as altercations with volatile colleague Pitt (Rhys Meyers),
Jack's encounter with the widow Sue Lee (Jewel), and Jake's deepening
friendship with ex-slave Daniel (Wright) take effect, the pair find themselves
rebels without a cause. Truly epic in scale yet full of beautifully observed
details, the film benefits hugely from sturdy yet exquisite performances, Frederick
Elmes' typically meaty camerawork and yet another intelligent and incisive James
Schamus script. The social and ethical issues are treated with depth, but
there's no sermonising; the light touch extends to a gentle humour interspersed
amid the carnage. Like The Outlaw Josey Wales and Once Upon a Time in
America, it's a tale of hatred transformed by disillusionment into a
redemptive desire to abandon bloodlust and look to the future.
filmcritic.com (Athan Bezaitis) review [4/5]
Hands down, this is the best Civil War movie since Glory.
Ride with the Devil is captivating from the opening scene and its
eclectic cast is shockingly powerful. Don't worry about Jewel ruining anything;
she convincingly makes the transition from pop star to actress, and Jeffrey
Wright's (Basquiat,
Celebrity)
performance of a former slave fighting for the Confederacy is unprecedented and
chillingly realistic. I have no clue what they were thinking with such a
misleading title -- Ride with the Devil isn't some supernatural, special
effects-laden, cheesy line-filled, end-of-the-millennium dud; it's a movie
about a perspective of American history rarely talked about in classrooms
across the country. The plot sympathizes with the ideals of the Confederate
bushwhackers fighting a guerilla-style war against the Union Jay Hawks- and to
its credit; it almost makes you believe in their cause.
Our protagonist is Jake Roedel, (Tobey Maguire -- The
Ice Storm) a young Missouri-raised son of a poor Dutch
immigrant, and he along with his child hood buddy Jack Bull Chiles, the son of
a Missouri plantation owner, (Skeet Ulrich -- As
Good As It Gets, Chill
Factor) join up as bushwhackers when their homes and families
are seized by Union soldiers. They both become skilled gunmen and execute
daring raids on Union soldiers and sympathizers. By 1862, their unit, headed by
Black John (James Caviezel), includes George Clyde (Simon Baker) and Clyde's
loyal former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright). With a harsh winter looming,
the Bushwhackers must disperse and find shelter. Several members hole up in a
hidden hillside dugout. While in hiding, their food and supplies are provided
by the young widow Sue Lee (Jewel). When casualties are taken from a Jay Hawk
surprise attack the group is splintered and Jake and Holt are united as
soldiers in solidarity. As the war rages on, most of their remaining
Bushwhacker compatriots are either dead or lost on the Southern cause, so Jake
and Holt must decide whether to keep the fight alive or flee west.
The production of the film is outstanding; the settings, costumes, imagery, and
soundtrack add a strong dose of reality to the characters. The gunfights are as
exciting as any war movie I've seen, and the dialogue is also vintage mid-1800s
Southern jargon, which Ulrich pulls off surprisingly well. The real gold nugget
of the film however is Jeffrey Wright's character: Daniel Holt is a Southern
black man fighting against Northerners. In principle, he's killing those who
are fighting for the freedom of his people. This role has rarely been touched,
if ever, in modern filmmaking, however the reality of the situation is that
there actually were a number of black Southerners who fought for the
Confederacy, many of whom thought that it would lead to better treatment after
the war. Throughout the film Holt's emotions are expectedly hidden but when he
reveals some inner demons the film is at its peak.
Believe me, I can understand why you wouldn't want to see it. Jewel, Skeet
Ulrich, and nobody else you've ever heard of. It's sounds hard to take
seriously, right? Every once in a while a good one comes along against the odds
and that's the case here. Director Ang Lee (Sense
and Sensibility) has done a fantastic job and this film is
really worth watching, even at two hours and ten minutes. I still haven't
figured out what Ride with the Devil means exactly, but it would be a
travesty if a lame title kept this one from being a real success.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Ride with the Devil (1999) Peter Matthews from Sight and Sound, December 1999
Ride with the Devil, Ang Lee's follow-up to The Ice Storm, may be painted with broader strokes than his earlier work, but it still confirms that he's a masterly and most mysterious talent
Unless one is charitable enough to include a piece of mega-shlock like Titanic
in the reckoning,
In this dual context of popular ignorance and corporate greed, Universal Studios is to be congratulated for having the altruism, the courage or maybe just the plumb foolhardiness to underwrite director Ang Lee's Civil War drama Ride with the Devil. While the movie intermittently revs up for some showy combat scenes, its real métier is a texture of fine-grained observation that brings history to life on the molecular level. Lee's famed attention to detail isn't necessarily the most lucrative quality in box-office terms, however, and there are bound to be many viewers who find his meditative rhythms a tax on their patience.
I wouldn't entirely disagree, but I think the movie is to be honoured more for its risk-taking longueurs than for the conspicuous ruckus of its action sequences. The Taiwanese-born Lee is almost invariably described as a consummate miniaturist and it's understandable that he should wish to knock that orientalist assumption on its head. In Ride with the Devil he exhibits a gift for raw brutality which couldn't have been guessed at from such sunnier entertainments as The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Sense and Sensibility (1995) – or even from the psychological violence of his sombre masterpiece The Ice Storm (1997). The current film can boast one hideous amputation plus an assortment of gaping war wounds, and it culminates in a civic massacre that seems a deliberate nod to the opening bloodbath of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969). Maybe Lee needed to beat his chest a little for the benefit of those studio powerbrokers who would forever typecast him as a purveyor of dainty chinoiserie. But he also knows this virile posturing is basically kids' stuff – just like the heroic swagger of the young guns whose story he tells.
It's no great mystery what attracted Lee and screenwriter-producer James
Schamus to the source material, Daniel Woodrell's acclaimed 1987 novel Woe
to Live On. Set along the border of
Much has already been made of the fact that the movie adopts the perspective of the American South – identifying not with its racism, certainly, but with the core of aggrieved humanity lying behind that culture. Actually, most Civil War pictures are from the Confederate point of view, for the obvious reason that gallant, gracious and vanquished Dixieland offers better opportunities for pictorial elegy than the victorious North. If Lee feels a twinge of closet sympathy for the Southerners, it's doubtless because they embody a vital connection to tradition which the secular and forward-looking Yankees have lost.
Lee's earlier, family-based dramas were scrupulously poised between celebrating and chastising our modernity for its loosening of the ties that bind. The Ice Storm appeared to tip the scale towards conservatism, but even there the suburban wife-swappers were made human and comprehensible in their fumbling attempts at self-emancipation. Ride with the Devil simply extends this principled ambiguity to a broader canvas.
In one sense, the movie is about throwing off the bad old customs and acquiring the virtues of liberal democracy. Desperate to prove his mettle, second-generation foreigner Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) joins in the slaughter of Union troops by the marauding Confederate guerrillas, the Bushwhackers, until enlightenment dawns in the guise of former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), whom he learns to accept on an equal footing with himself. Holt, meanwhile (who has sided against his own interests out of misguided loyalty to his quondam master), discovers the sweet taste of freedom. A third object lesson is supplied in the person of Sue Lee Shelley (Jewel), feisty frontierswoman and standard-bearer of the proto-feminist cause. However, the rise of egalitarian values also means the defeat of a whole way of life founded on their denial. That's the lacerating irony at the heart of both book and film. The flower of liberty is gained through an act of conquest, thus setting in train primordial resentments that continue to fester today (the 'woe to live on' of Woodrell's punning title).
D. W.
There is sure to be some clever queer critic who argues that our hero's eventual repudiation of the masculine bond and pacification by marriage express a rearguard political agenda. But that's just a fancy way of saying this is a classical Western, plumping itself at the crossroads between phallic lawlessness and feminised order almost by definition. Ride with the Devil wants the precise sensibility of Lee's best work (the logistics of mounting a super-production having thickened his brushstrokes somewhat). Still, there remain countless ineffable grace notes – the primeval greenness of woods in the midst of carnage or a fidelity to the autumnal crispness of a particular day – that amply confirm this director as the most mysterious talent at large in American cinema.
Ride with the
Devil • Senses of Cinema Susan
King, April 2004
BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD review: Ride with the Devil (0) Graham Fuller, June 2010
AboutFilm.com
(Jeff Vorndam) review [B-]
Village
Voice (J. Hoberman) review insipid film that has the feel of an undergraduate costume
drama
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Gary Mairs
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Nitrate
Online (Cynthia Fuchs) review
DVD
Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review
eFilmCritic Reviews Johnny Clay from iF magazine
Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet) review [A]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Murali Krishnan
review [2.0/4.0] The historical
component is involving, but the poorly developed story is a detriment to any
issues examined
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[3/5]
The UK
Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review
[1/4] grim and
depressing film with characters that are
odious even as concepts
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Xiibaro
Productions (David Perry) review
[2/4]
Political
Film Society review Michael Haas
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Rick Groen
Austin Chronicle (Russell Smith) review [3/5]
Philadelphia
City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Stack]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (Wo hu cang long) B+ 92
Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon Anthony Lane
from The New Yorker
The new Ang Lee film is scripted in Cantonese and Mandarin and set in the
A rich, romantic take on the wuxia,
China's heroic swordsman genre, from the eclectic Ang Lee. The
first ten minutes or so offer dense exposition, introducing the legendary and
righteous swordsman Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat),
his esteemed partner Yu Shu Lien (Michelle
Yeoh) and the wilful young aristocrat Jen (Zhang Ziyi),
who enjoys a double life as a thief under the malign tutelage of her governess
(Cheng
Pei-Pei). They clash over the Green Destiny, a priceless sword which Jen
steals as a mark of defiance. Yu gives chase in a brilliantly modulated set-piece
across the roof-tops, the women defying gravity in exhilarating leaps and
bounds. Once it takes flight the movie never touches the ground, spinning
myriad duels of the body and spirit. Ang Lee has
always been a director of finesse and fine feeling, but his touch is just as
deft even as he extends his grasp to reveal the breathtaking vistas of mythic
China, then relaxes enough to stage the demolition of a tavern with slapstick
aplomb. Inventively choreographed by Yeun Wo-Ping - of The Matrix fame -
the film imbues every look, every gesture with resonance and grace. Sexy and
sublime, it's a feast for the senses and 100 per cent sheer cinema.
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Love and violence, and a great title. The incredibly fluid, poetic ballet-ridden fight scenes got most of the ink, but the simple love lines are also great. Exotic and spectacular locations, fearless guidance by Ang Lee (who doesn't flinch as he sways into a 30 minute flashback in the middle of the film), and the Chinese are forever put on the roll call of great cinematic romances by Chen Chang and Ziyi Zhang. Chang is an incredible mix of gentleness and suppressed violence as Dark Cloud, ruling the desert with Arabesque music and a youthful Zapatista beard and spirit. Michelle Yeoh is also incredibly soulful, the tragedienne for whom love only knocks but never enters, or is the problem that she always allows herself to become distracted on the way to answering the door? Full of pathos, kindness, and dormant violence near the surface in any case. It's rare enough to see anything new in film these days, and the sped-up, choreographed martial arts scenes must be seen to be explained, and to be seen is to be appreciated. The only place where the two strands of plot meet, the violent mating ritual between Chang and Zhang, is at once heart-warming, amusing, and impressive. China is the aesthetically hidden continent, and at this point we're willing to believe damn near anything.
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Ang Lee, who's brought us such
varied fare as The Wedding Banquet, Sense and Sensibility, The
Ice Storm and Ride with the Devil, shifts direction again with Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a martial-arts film that, in more ways than one,
stabs us in the heart. Filled with fight scenes that should leave audiences
gasping for air, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is also a touching love
story starring international superstars Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh. If ever
a Chinese movie (with subtitles) had a chance of seducing America's mainstream
movie audience, this would appear to be it.
The plot is pure pulp. Chow and
Yeoh are the ancient-Chinese equivalent of white knights, too busy serving
others to find any time for romance. Now, Chow plans to retire, which involves
first handing over a 400-year-old sword known as the Green Destiny. But in a
scene that sweeps both the actors and us off our feet, the sword is stolen,
perhaps by the witch-like Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei), perhaps by a rebellious
young beauty named Jen (Zhang Ziyi). All four characters are masters in wu
xia, which is how Fred Astaire would have fought if he'd been born in China
during the Qing dynasty--bouncing off walls, leaping across rooftops, hovering
in air. But Jen, despite her prowess, still has a few things to learn.
Think Luke Skywalker. Or Princess
Leia. Either way, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon hinges on whether Jen,
whose talents are growing by the minute, goes over to the dark side. That Lee
and his co-scriptwriters have chosen to build the movie around a Chinese lass
rather than a Chinese lad seems reason, all on its own, to stand up and cheer.
But the filmmakers don't stop there. The movie is about what it means to
be a woman, whether in ancient China, modern-day China or, for that matter,
modern-day America. Not only do Yeoh and Zhang kick royal butt (often each
other's), they struggle against the roles that have been assigned to women.
Those death-defying swoops across the tiled roofs of Beijing are literally
flights to freedom.
Hence the movie's title, which
refers to the pent-up power that could one day transform the world, if it's not
doing so already. I found it interesting that the women in Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon are usually working against, rather than with, one another;
sisters are powerful, but sisterhood isn't, apparently. Still, that's a minor
problem in a movie that has women busting through life's glass ceiling like it
was made of spun sugar. Lee sometimes has trouble meshing tones; Yeoh's
dignified performance is left stranded a couple of times when the movie
suddenly veers into comedy. But I guess that's the price you pay when you try
to cross so many borders--East-West, male-female, youth-age, fantasy-reality,
Bruce Lee and Ang Lee.
One wonders what the latter will
come up with next.
The Boston Phoenix review Gary Susman
You've never seen anything quite
like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon before. If you're a lover of
art-house and foreign films, you've never seen a film of such delicacy and
decorousness that also offers such heart-stopping action sequences. And if
you're a Hong Kong-movie cultist, even one accustomed to female-driven action
movies, you've never seen these conventions wedded to such lofty-minded artistry.
Even if you're a fan of Hollywood action spectacles, you've still never seen
sequences like the ones here, which literally take flight above even such
envelope-pushing fare as The Matrix. The combination of Hong Kong-style
storytelling, state-of-the-art action, and director Ang Lee's own art-film
preoccupations doesn't always mesh, much less soar. But when it does, you'll be
stunned and overwhelmed.
Lee, who's made a career of
hopping among languages, cultures, and historical periods (contemporary New
York and Taipei in The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman,
Jane Austen's England in Sense and Sensibility; '70s suburbia in The
Ice Storm), has maintained some constant themes in his work; generational
conflict, moral education, and especially the social and sexual strictures
against which his strong-willed female characters chafe. In last year's awkward
Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, he spent as much time in the
drawing room as on the battlefield. Crouching Tiger represents a much
more successful fusion of comedy of manners and action drama;
co-writer/co-producer James Schamus's much-repeated description of the film as
"Sense and Sensibility with martial arts" doesn't really begin
to describe the achievement.
Lee has inspired some career-best
work in his team of Asian legends, including charismatic superstars Chow Yun
Fat and Michelle Yeoh, pioneering 1960s Hong Kong martial-arts star Cheng Pei
Pei, cinematographer Peter Pau, and fight choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping (finally
recognized in America for his work on The Matrix). Yuen sends the
characters, most of them sword-wielding, Jedi-like warriors, leaping up the
sides of buildings, hopping across rooftops, skipping like pebbles across
lakes, vaulting to the tops of trees, and casually defying gravity like some
combination of Peter Pan, Gene Kelly, and Spider-Man. But it's all done in the
service of character and plot. Each fight is the characters' way of expressing
what they dare not talk about -- revenge, arrogance, bitterness, yearning, even
love. The sequences are both thrilling and lovely, and they're likely to make
any audience break out into spontaneous applause.
Unfortunately, when the
characters aren't soaring, the movie often remains earthbound as well. The
story, based on one part of a five-part novel by 1930s writer Wang Du Lu, is a
labyrinthine tale of intrigue in a mythical 19th-century China. The ostensible
main characters -- Giang Hu warrior-knights Li Mu Bai (Chow) and Yu Shu Lien
(Yeoh), take a back seat to the story of Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), a governor's
daughter who longs to be a Giang Hu warrior but is engaged to marry another
aristocrat. She also longs to be reunited with her secret lover, a
swashbuckling desert bandit called Dark Cloud (Chang Chen). The MacGuffin is Mu
Bai's sword, a magnificent 400-year-old weapon called "Green
Destiny"; when it's stolen, Mu Bai comes out of retirement to join his
friend Shu Lien in recovering it from the likely thief, Mu Bai's old nemesis
Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei). Much is made of the warrior code, the struggle
between teachers and their resentful disciples, and the battle between the good
and evil sides of the Giang Hu Force over Jen Yu's soul.
All this is enacted in an archaic
Mandarin dialect that is foreign to Lee and his mostly Cantonese-speaking cast,
so it's no wonder that his stars, especially Chow and Yeoh, seem to be holding
something back. Granted, the plot demands it; Mu Bai and Shu Lien have never
acted upon their feelings for each other out of respect for her fiancé, who
died saving Mu Bai's life. Still, the adherence to protocol isn't all that
stifles these characters. Chow, Yeoh, and especially the stunning ingénue Zhang
smolder intensely but to limited effect. They can't wait until they're leaping
and clashing again, and neither can you.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Stealth And Duty Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, December 2000
Love and
Swords: The Dialectics of Martial Arts Romance: A Review of ... Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, December 28, 2000
Ang Lee's Martial Arts Film Sweeps Taiwan Awards China People’s Daily, December 4, 2000
The Village Voice [Amy Taubin] Fear of Flying, Amy Taubin from The Village Voice, December 5, 2000
Slate [David Edelstein] All the Indies Were Kung Fu Fighting, December 8, 2000
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, December 8, 2000
Bright Lights Film Journal | Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Beautiful Beast, Gary Morris, January 1, 2001
The New York Times (Dave Kehr) essay ["The Asian Alternative"] January 14, 2001
Philosophical analysis of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Michael Chung, February 22, 2001
Crouching China, Hidden Agenda Richard Corliss from Time magazine, March 14, 2001
Reviews of The Hong Kong Filmography Crouching Tiger's roar alerts West to world of Asian film, by John Beifuss from Pop Culture, Spring 2001
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Art Film Hidden Inside the Chop-Socky Flick Matthew Levie from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2001
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Making Women Warriors--A Transnational Reading of Asian Women Action Heroes L.S. Kim from Jump Cut, Winter 2006
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A]
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [A-]
Kung Fu Cinema review [5/5] Mark Pollard
LoveHKFilm.com (Calvin McMillin; Ross Chen) review
Harvey's Movie Review (Harvey O'Brien) review
DVD Journal Alexandra DuPont
CNN Showbiz (Paul Tatara) review
Nitrate Online (Dan Lybarger) review
World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh, the astonishing thing about this film, set in feudal China, is the complete absence of social commentary or protest
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]
PopMatters Oliver Wang
another review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Lucas Hilderbrand Pop Matters
here Simon Wyndham from DVD Times
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3.5/4]
Movieline Magazine (Michael Atkinson) review
DVD Movie Central Michael Jacobson
The Providence Journal review Michael Janusonis
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
filmcritic.com (Norm Schrager) review [4/5]
DVD Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review
Kamera.co.uk review John Atkinson
Flipside Movie Emporium (Jeremiah Kipp) review [A]
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Movies 101 (Robert Glatzer) review
Movieline Magazine (Stephen Farber) review
The Trades (Kenneth Leung) review
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review
Political Film Society review Michael Haas
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [5/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson) dvd review [Superbit Edition]
DVD Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review [Superbit Edition]
DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review
Film Scouts (Cari Beauchamp) capsule review
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
KFC Cinema Peter Zsurka
Edward Johnson-Ott review [4/5]
H.K. DVD Heaven (Chris Gilbert) dvd review
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
The Reel McCoy (Patrick McCoy) review [5/5]
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/5]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [4/4]
indieWIRE review Ray Pride
Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet) review [A]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [5/5]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4+/4]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon - Hybrid Magazine Mitch Persons
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3.5/4]
Film Journal International (Peter Henn) review
Film Scouts (Jonathan Robert Muirhead) capsule review
Movieline Magazine dvd review Joshua Mooney
Edinburgh U Film Society (Isabel Curie) review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
The Globe and Mail review [3.5/4] Rick Groen
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review also seen here: Seattle Post-Intelligencer review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Time.com: Interview with Crouching Tiger director Ang Lee July 25,
2000 I Thought I Was Going
to Have a Stroke,
interview by Stephen Short
Guardian Unlimited Interview Ang Lee and James Schamus interview from The Guardian, November 7, 2000
Ang Lee - Interview | Interview | Find Articles at BNET Graham Fuller interview from Interview magazine, December 2000
Gerald Peary - interviews - Ang Lee December 2000
We Kicked Jackie Chan's Ass: An Interview
with James Schamus Stephen
Teo interviews the film’s co-writer and producer from Senses of Cinema, March/April 2001
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Making Women Warriors--A Transnational Reading of Asian Women Action Heroes L.S. Kim from Jump Cut 48 (Winter 2006)
HULK
USA (138 mi) 2003
Film Comment
Magazine review
Geoffrey O’Brien
The Incredible Hulk, as a comic book, was
a model of narrative clarity. It had the bracing simplicity of garage rock
modified by a note of piercing melancholy that evoked Smokey Robinson's
"I've Got to Dance to Keep from Crying." The Hulk himself, barreling
through all snares and obstacles while uttering a few characteristic
monosyllables ("Hulk trust no one!"), was the embodied spirit of
comic books. But the flavor was in the sadness: when the Hulk wasn't throwing his
weight around against the likes of the Rhino or the Behemoth, he was lost in
contemplation of a solitude beyond redemption. . . The beautiful monster, the
wounded monster, the sad monster: this other hidden Hulk is subliminally
present if not always perceptible in the giant green simulacrum of Ang Lee's
Hulk--although there is unquestionably a forlorn quality in those pogo-stick
leaps across the arid wastelands.
Village
Voice (Michael Atkinson) review
It's not so easy being green—that much we know. Striving with science-nerd earnestness to be more than merely a summer box-office blast-surge, Ang Lee's The Hulk regards its megalithic mutant icon with a kind of apocalyptic sensitivity. Gone are the caveman one-liners, desperate puns, and sitcom irony of the original '60s Marvel comics (I remember a bygone issue of The Incredible Hulk in which the Great Green One wore an apron and did dishes). Instead, Hulk-itude is a solemn tribulation, and poor old Bruce Banner is the Job of post-nuclear bad science, military subjugation, and patriarchal abuse.
Which was the elemental thrust of the collective Marvel revelation: Sustaining a secret identity was often the least of a neurotic, self-hating superhero's problems. The Hulk was, from the first, the most simplistic and most angst-ridden scenario, a Jekyll-Hyde struggle wrought quantum whose manifested id was pure, rampaging youth-fury (however desexualized), and the more society strenuously tried to control it, the more destructive it would become. It was an irresistible if one-note paradigm, and as drawn by Jack Kirby, it seemed to bust out of its panels by virtue of uncontrollable muscle bulk and pubertal spite.
For director Lee and writer-producer collaborator James Schamus, Banner's stations of the cross begin and end with repressed memories—handily surfacing, or forced to surface by evil military researchers, as triggers for mega-transformation. Banner (Eric Bana, selected here less for Chopper-affect than for an almost airbrushed blandness) is so buttoned-down that luscious lab-mate Betty (Jennifer Connelly) has already dumped him, the two maintaining an affectionate, almost-was bond despite his inability to share emotionally. Even the cause of his Monster from the Id—no mere gamma bomb, but a combination of a lab accident, new "nanomeds," and a genetic miswiring inherited from his self-experimenting father—is haunted with Oedipal angst. When the green scat hits the fan, there is no shortage of Herculean fury and demolished hardware on display, but most of the movie's action scenes take place inside Banner's beleaguered skull.
The upshot is sweetly melodramatic—at least, you inevitably note, there are nominal humans aboard. (Oscar winner Connelly has talking like a real person down.) For all of Hulk's attempted compassion, Lee devotes a great deal of energy to approximating comic-book layouts with flexible multi-paneled screens, jazzy wipes, and digital dissolves, and the effect, however smooth, makes you hanker for the oblique hysteria of Sam Raimi's Darkman. The Hulk himself is all-digi as well, and he's no Gollum—in terms of expressiveness and physical style, he evokes a seething Harryhausen gargantua, or Kong himself, with the vague semblance of Bana's worried eyes. (Rest assured, his swath of obliteration claims very few lives, but a giant mutant poodle gets whumped.)
By far the most outrageous visual factor is Nick Nolte as Banner's long-lost father. The writers have conjoined the comic's original prick-Dad with Hulk villain the Absorbing Man, and epically disheveled in the manner of his notorious 2002 mug shot, Nolte raises the roof even before his irradiated flesh starts melding with the lab furniture. In the climactic hollering match and face-off, before the ending splooges out into an Akira-style abstraction, Nolte's exploding patriarch jacks up the story's antisocial wish fulfillment into a Nietzschean-anarchist's wet dream, but one can only vainly hope that the preordained sequel will head in that dastardly direction.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the Month: Hulk (2003) Rob
White from Sight and Sound, August
2003
A sophisticated fairytale
with an Oedipal twist, Hulk
is unmistakably an Ang Lee film and the best Marvel adaptation to date.
At first glance Ang Lee's mature
career (together with his long-time producer and screenwriter James Schamus)
divides neatly into two halves. First there are bittersweet family dramas with
a growing air of tragedy and disappointment: The Wedding Banquet
(1993), Sense and Sensibility (1995) and The Ice Storm
(1997). Then there are large-scale, action-packed epics which apparently tail
off more and more from tragedy: Ride with the Devil (1999), Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and now Hulk, his version of
Marvel Comics' long-running serial. It would be easy to emphasise the shift in
scale from chamber pieces to big-budget blockbusters, and Lee's extraordinary
ability seemingly to master any genre, but what's more fascinating is the
extent to which the same themes and motifs recur in these films irrespective of
their tone or genre.
So if Hulk and The
Ice Storm seem in some senses poles apart one a youth-oriented
comic-book adaptation, the other a drama drawn from a serious novel it's worth
remembering that in the latter the teenage narrator Paul (Tobey Maguire) is an
avid Fantastic Four fan. He uses the comic's sci-fi metaphysics ('anti-matter',
portals to other dimensions) to try to fathom the tangled intricacies of family
life. And it's this experience the adolescent or young adult's often mute
search for meaning in the face of a chaotic or malevolent environment that runs
through all Lee's films, lending them the coherence of an oeuvre.
This quiet and troubled
perplexity is everywhere in Hulk, notably in two extraordinary
shots in which characters witness a nuclear explosion and another in which the
Hulk, hanging on to a plane in the outer reaches of the atmosphere, gazes into
space. What's at stake could be termed the epistemology of innocence, but it's
explored without naivety: Lee's films are centrally about innocence, but rather
like David Lynch's and much more so than Tim Burton's, they know how fragile a
state this is.
The figure of the Hulk, as
created in 1962 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in strip form and then adapted for
US television in 1978 as The Incredible Hulk (with Bill Bixby as
the tormented Dr Jekyll figure of Bruce Banner, and the body-builder Lou
Ferrigno as his monstrous green-skinned other self), is one of the jokers in
the Marvel pack. He (or it) isn't a superhero as such but a rampaging
incarnation of the id the embodiment of Bruce's inner beast. Not so in Lee's
film. The Hulk's face here fills with curiosity or yearning as often as it
contorts with rage. Lee underscores the childlike quality with unmistakable
references both to 1933's King Kong (when the Hulk cradles Betty,
Bruce's co-worker and ex-girlfriend played by Jennifer Connelly) and to James
Whale's 1931 Frankenstein (when he's entranced by a desert
landscape). This computer-generated creature is impulsive and vulnerable in a
quasi-autistic manner; in this respect he's very like Mikey (Elijah Wood) in The
Ice Storm, perilously alone, seeing the world as no one else does.
Whereas Bill Bixby's Bruce was crushed and melancholy, doomed always to have to
break any emotional tie, he was recognisably a mature man. But the Bruce of
Lee's film, played with very little speech or expression by Eric Bana, is a
grown-up haunted by the past, still in thrall to childhood traumas. He's
chronically introspective, like Elinor (Emma Thompson) in Sense and
Sensibility or Jake (Maguire again) in Ride with the Devil.
Hulk brings to the fore the pervasively
non-naturalistic, fairytale quality of Lee's work a quality more akin to
Dickens or the Brothers Grimm (or indeed Marvel) than any but the darkest
Disney productions. Even when, as in The Ice Storm, Lee has worked
in a naturalistic mode, there's still that sense of entrapment, particularly
domestic entrapment, that underpins so many fairytales. The mise en scne of Hulk
makes this palpable: many scenes take place at night or in sealed laboratories
and military installations. (When the Hulk escapes captivity and leaps in great
bounds across the south-western desert it's accordingly exhilarating.)
The film also foregrounds the
fable-like element of Oedipal conflict. Weak, hostile or absent fathers abound
in Lee's work, counterpointing the damaged, preoccupied young protagonists. So
in Hulk there are two fathers, both authoritarian and more or less
mad: Bruce's psychopathic parent David, played with relish by Nick Nolte
(looking for all the world like the Unabomber), and Betty's father General
'Thunderbolt' Ross (Sam Elliott), who tells her, "You can trust me to do
what I think is right not what you think you want." In one scene the two
men glare at each other across a huge hanger like two vicious, mangy lions in a
stand-off. In Lee's films nuclear families are combustible and destructive,
like those bombs that are numbly witnessed in Hulk. There's a
mythical wickedness at large.
Hulk is also pointedly
non-naturalistic in its use of CGI, split-screen, inserted graphics shots and
computer-designed dissolves. Despite the now-conventional use of ear-splitting
sound effects to disguise the 'weightlessness' of CG monsters, this Hulk is
never meant to seem anything other than an animated creation, a digital
Pinocchio. So tottering are his movements, on occasions it's impossible not to
recall Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion work. The artifice is taken to an extreme
in the film's culminating battle, when the Hulk takes on a monster able to
absorb elemental power who becomes so engorged it's as if he'll grow beyond the
Earth's perimeters. This is CGI in the service of surrealism, recalling the
expanding animals in Tex Avery's King-Size Canary (1947). Taken
together, the various visual devices make up a rattle-bag aesthetic that adds
to the overall impression of stylisation.
The paradox of the stylised,
fairytale nature of Lee and Schamus' work here and elsewhere is that it's not
by any means juvenile. Hulk is richly mythopoeic and
sophisticated. For all their considerable entertainment value, the two X-Men
outings and Spider-Man (2002) are essentially high-school capers.
Hulk is no less enjoyable, but it's in another league of complexity and for
this reason is the best Marvel adaptation so far. Lee's career is fast becoming
the most interesting in Hollywood.
Insightful analysis of Hulk as Œdipal drama in Film Interntational
Hulk and the Hero’s journey
Cody Yarbrough from the CG Jung Page,
Wild,
Weird and Wonderful: Appreciating Ang Lee's <i>Hulk</i ... Rob Humanick from The Projection Booth,
What if Ang Lee's
Hulk movie isn't as bad as everyone said it was ... In
Defense of Hulk, Erik Sofge from Slate,
You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Ang Lee | UGO.com a website that asks the question: “What If Louis Leterrier Remade Ang Lee's Other Films?” (Summer 2008)
The Film Journal (Daniel James Wood) review ["Elements of Classical Mythology in Ang Lee's ___"] (2002)
Slate (David Edelstein) review
The Hulk | Neil
Young's Film Lounge - Jigsaw Lounge
World Socialist Web
Site review How “Entertaining” Is the American Entertainment Industry? David
Walsh,
Slant Magazine Nick Schager
DVD Times Noel Megahey
VideoVista review Tony Lee
The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review
DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
CultureCartel.com (Tony Pellum) review [3.5/5]
PopMatters (Todd R. Ramlow) review
Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review
Kamera.co.uk review Ian Haydn Smith
sneersnipe (David Perilli) review
Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]
The Providence Journal (Michael Janusonis) review [4/5]
Kamera.co.uk dvd review John Atkinson
The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review
Movie-Vault.com (Joseph Kastner) review
filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [3.5/5]
DVD Times Review [Raphael Pour-Hashemi]
Village Voice review Robert Wilonsky
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib
CultureCartel.com (Chris Madsen) review [4/5]
Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Gary Mairs
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
hybridmagazine.com review Woodrow Bogucki
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2.5/5]
Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Shroom
Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet) review [B-]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
CNN Showbiz (Paul Clinton) review
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [1.5/4]
Box Office Mojo (Scott Holleran) review
Exclaim! review Noel Dix
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [HD DVD Version]
DVD Talk (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2.5/4]
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen
Boston Globe review [2/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Los Angeles Times (Manohla Dargis) review
DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray DVD Review by Gary Tooze
Hulk (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Film
Monthly Interview Ang Lee Tackles The Hulk, Paul Fischer
interview,
Interview with Lee in The New York Times Elvis Mitchell interview from The New York Times,
Ang Lee: Not
just the quiet man The Long and the Shirt of It, Andrew Anthony
interview from The Observer,
Every once in a while a film comes along that
changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange
itself around it. Think of Thelma and
Louise or
—B. Ruby Rich from The
Guardian,
If you can’t fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it.
—Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger)
Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapt a 1997 E. Annie Proulx short story
from Close Range, Wyoming
In a tale of anguished souls living in the shadows of similar lore, perhaps Ang Lee’s most heartbreakingly tender film, shot largely in the pristine mountainous wilderness of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto capturing its raw beauty, this is a touchingly understated film with few words, using silence and natural sounds, with exquisite pacing where the situation onscreen explains itself. From the opening shots of a desolate town in Signal, Wyoming back in the summer of 1963, we’re immediately immersed in a dusty shithole of a town that looks totally run down, where the space is larger than the people who inhabit it. Two guys are waiting for a job without speaking. Local rancher Dennis Quaid tersely issues them their instructions in a cowboy vernacular that is barely understood by the uninformed. One guy tends to the sheep high up on Brokeback Mountain, sleeping without a fire out under the stars, supposedly protecting them from intruders or outside elements like coyotes, protecting the rancher from losses to his herd, while the other picks up weekly food and supplies, and tends to the camp, where both meet only at breakfast and dinner. Jake Gyllenhaal is Jack Twist, a down on his luck rodeo rider, while Heath Ledger is Ennis Del Mar, a tightlipped, dirt poor ranch hand, both high school drop outs with few prospects, neither yet twenty. Interestingly, few words are spoken between them, as the wonder of the outdoors literally fills the screen with extraordinary natural beauty, where the sheep roam in perfect harmony through the lush, pastoral landscape. Before they know it, with the help of several bottles of whisky, words are flowing, surprising themselves, as they naturally feel an ease with one another, which leads to hard-fought-against romantic inclinations. They spend a summer together, which haunts them for the rest of their lives, as despite the hardships it’s easily the most intensely personal experience they will ever know.
Through the passing of time, they each get on with their lives, as Jack rides the rodeo circuit in Texas and marries Lureen, Anne Hathaway, a cowgirl who catches his eye, whose father has earned a fortune selling farm equipment, while Ennis marries a local sweetheart Alma, Michelle Williams, a revelation in the film who happens to be Ledger’s real-life wife, adding warmth and personal intimacy, where their scenes together feel naturally lived-in and real. Neither man is particularly good at fatherhood or family affairs, as each comes from scarred, emotionally deprived backgrounds. Four years later Jack sends notice of a visit and arrives on Ennis’s doorstep one day, where his wife catches them kissing in an intense embrace, but says nothing. When they leave together on a supposed fishing trip, pain is etched all over her face, which has a ripple effect to the whole family. This film expresses the inexpressible. Ennis knows the times and knows that in this country, neighbors wouldn’t stand for two guys running a ranch together, “This thing grabs on to us again in the wrong place, we’ll be dead,” so their relationship is haunted by a perpetually unfulfilled longing, like a lost Eden, split between the freedom of the wilderness and the restrictions placed on them by a sexually repressed society. Up until now, the film has a kind of Douglas Sirk, wrenchingly melodramatic feel to it, where the men’s lives unravel and become unhinged in ways that on the surface resembles anyone else’s disappointments, yet their secret visits remain under wraps, something no one can talk about.
Once the years take their toll on the men’s lives, their children grown, their home life in ruins, their visits together a painful reminder of all that they’re missing, only then does the film elevate itself and reach for more, in a stunning confessional scene where they can’t seem to leave each other, where Jack blurts out “I wish I knew how to quit you,” surrounded by the majesty of spectacular scenery, where men are reduced to tears, tiny creatures dwarfed by the immensity of it all, yet what matters most about these individuals suddenly surges to the forefront, demanding our attention and our respect. It’s a startling moment that takes us a bit by surprise, stunned to realize the complexity of their lives and what they mean to each other only at that moment. It’s achingly real, and it continues on that brilliantly developed high plain until the end. While the film is beautifully understated, where the marketing scheme downplays the gay aspect and suggests a “universal” love story, it is unquestionably a gay sexual attraction and love affair, with explicit sex scenes that are both brutally rough and surprisingly tender, where Ennis mumbles “This is a one-shot thing we got goin’ on here,” though both are filled with the Western cowboy ethic that forbids even the thought of such things, where in their minds it’s associated with sordid stories of violence and murder. Therefore it’s a love kept under wraps, continually closeted and under denial, disguised as a fishing trip, yet it’s a lingering and haunting presence in their lives, where each ends up in a loveless marriage, where loneliness defines their every aching moment, especially Ennis, who only grows more isolated and alone after leaving his wife, eking out a barebones existence working seasonal cattle roundups. When he receives occasional visits from his older teenage daughter who’s nearly grown up, Alma Jr. (Kate Mara), seen at about the same age as he was in the opening, the film comes full circle, where she’s going her own way and making her own choices.
A story of thwarted love, eloquent in its mute despair, where gay love has never been so sacred, yet what’s most alluring is the magnificent natural beauty of the Edenesque world that surrounds them, where the luxurious color of 35mm film never looked better, making the digital look of what passes for film today look antiquated and ugly, where the entire industry lost its soul by selling out the opulence and grandeur of real film. Despite their distance, Jack in Texas and Ennis in Wyoming, they come together again and again, year after year in the most remote locations, knowing that if caught they could be hog-tied and murdered by fellow cowboys (a reminder, as B. Ruby Rich explains in discussing the tragedy of Matthew Shepard, of exactly how provisional and geographically specific contemporary tolerance remains), before heading back out into the “real” world of emptiness, alcoholism and disappointment. There is a plot twist near the end where Ennis’s post card to Jack is returned marked “deceased,” a dumfounding moment that sends him into a tailspin, reflected in the marvelous use of a flashback style moment where he imagines what actually happened as he’s listening to Lureen dispassionately describe what happened to Jack over the phone. For Lureen it’s a moment over and done with, while for Ennis, the loss is indescribable. Heath Ledger is astonishing, especially at the end, as he perfectly captures the essence of the poetry that wordlessly expresses love and longing. The visit to Jack’s parents house, so quiet and spare, is near perfect, elevating the spirit of the man who isn’t there to the forefront, reminding us of the unfathomable depths of the still unexplored regions of love. It’s a devastating moment and one of the most powerful scenes in all of cinema, tragically haunting the viewer for years to come with weighted emotions and images permanently etched into the core of our very souls.
Fiction:
Brokeback Mountain: The New Yorker
Abstract of the E. Annie Proulx short story initially published in The New Yorker,
Jack Twist and Ennis
del Mar, herding sheep together on Brokeback Mountain in 1963, develop a close
friendship that quickly turns into a sexual relationship. Their foreman, Joe
Aguirre, sees them one day through his binoculars. After the summer ends, Ennis
marries Alma, settles in Riverton, and has two daughters. Jack moves to Texas,
rides rodeo, marries Lureen, and has a son. Four years later, Jack writes to
Ennis to tell him he will be in town. Jack goes to Ennis's house, and they
embrace violently. They go out to a motel, where they have sex and discuss
their powerful attraction and bond. Jack wants them to be together, but Ennis
knows that people like them get killed: when he was a boy, his father took him
to see the corpse of a man who had been beaten with a tire iron and castrated
for that reason. Jack gets Ennis to take a few days off and go away with him.
They begin taking occasional fishing trips together. Ennis's marriage begins to
disintegrate; his wife is suspicious and resentful, and she divorces him and
marries the grocer. At Thanksgiving, she tells him her suspicions; he twists
her wrist and slams out the door. Ennis and Jack get older. On a trip in 1983,
they talk about their affairs with women and their children. Ennis tells Jack
he will not be able to see him again until November (it is May) and Jack is
furious, frustrated by the impossibility of their situation. He feels that they
could have had a good life together; now all they have is Brokeback Mountain.
He is sick of the scarcity of their time together. Things unsaid and now
unsayable rise around them, but nothing is resolved. The moment Jack remembers
and craves is when, at Brokeback Mountain, Ennis came up and embraced him from
behind: the only artless and charmed moment in their difficult lives. Months
later, Ennis's postcard to Jack saying that November still looks like the first
chance comes back stamped "DECEASED." Jack's wife Lureen tells him
that Jack was pumping up a flat on his truck on a back road when the tire blew
up. The force of the explosion slammed the rim into his face; he was knocked
unconscious and drowned in his own blood. Ennis can't decide if it was really
an accident, or if it was the tire iron. Jack had wanted his ashes scattered on
Brokeback Mountain. Ennis travels to meet Jack's parents, who have the ashes,
and decides that it was the tire iron, after all. Jack's father is scornful of
his son. Ennis remembers Jack's story: when Jack was three or four, he had
trouble getting to the toilet on time and used to wet the bathroom. His old man
blew up one day, beat him, and urinated on him to show him "what it's like
with piss all over the place." Jack saw that, unlike himself, his father
wasn't circumcised, and realized things between them could never be right.
Ennis goes up to Jack's room. In the back of the closet, on a nail, he finds
Jack's shirt stained with Ennis's blood, from when Jack had accidentally
slammed Ennis's nose when they were grappling. Placed inside it is another
shirt, Ennis's own, which he thought was missing. Jack's father refuses to let
his ashes go. Ennis orders a postcard of Brokeback Mountain. In his trailer, he
pins it up and, beneath it, the two shirts on a hanger suspended from a nail.
He begins to dream of Jack as he was; he wakes sometimes in grief, sometimes in
joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, and sometimes the sheets. There is a
gap between what he knows and what he tries to believe, but "if you can't
fix it you've got to stand it."
Recommended
Reading: E. Annie Proulx Interview : Alternative Film ... Excerpt of Matthew Testa interview of E.
Annie Proulx,
“Excuse me, but it is NOT a story about ‘two cowboys.’ It
is a story about two inarticulate, confused
Brokeback
Mountain Anthony Lane from The New Yorker
In
the summer of 1963, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake
Gyllenhaal) herd the sheep on Brokeback Mountain, in Wyoming, and fall in love.
Ang Lee's movie traces the ups and downs of that love over many years, making
it clear that the downs are fated to outnumber the ups. The film has a curious
motion at the beginning, managing to seem at once hectic and sluggish; once the
heroes start to grow up, however, and thus to strug-gle against their feelings,
the story comes painfully alive, and the per-formances stretch toward the
tragic. There is fine support from Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams as the
baffled wives of the two men and from Kate Mara as Ennis's teen-age daughter,
but the picture belongs to Ledger, whose downcast gaze and chewed-up words bear
almost unbearable testimony to a heart under siege. Any attempt to promote this
as an issue movie, gripped by an agenda, feels badly misplaced; the only issue
here is the oldest and most sorrowful one of all.
Ang Lee’s
adaptation of an Annie Proulx short story arrives amid much chatter from
awards-season soothsayers and pundits who have slapped the easy tag of ‘gay
cowboy movie’ on this sensitive, intelligent and pleasingly traditional film.
Certainly its two male protagonists, Jack Twist (Jake
Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger),
two free-and-easy 19-year-olds, tend sheep together in rural Wyoming. They
favour denim, live close to the land and enjoy – briefly – a loving, sexual
relationship. But there’s little in this film to excite either John Wayne fans
or devotees of Warhol’s ‘Lonesome Cowboys’. Instead, the film’s themes of
forbidden love, lost opportunity, marital deception and romantic honesty are
quite accessible, mainstream even. The revolution is all off-screen: what
ultimately makes ‘Brokeback Mountain’ a radical project is that it’s set to
become the first bona fide, well-made and commercially successful gay weepie to
emerge from Hollywood.
Jack and Ennis meet on a Wyoming mountainside one summer when both are employed
to watch over the flock of a local farm baron (Randy Quaid).
Lee indulges wide shots of flowing rivers, travelling sheep, wispy clouds and
mountain vistas to canonise the pair’s experience on Brokeback Mountain. He
threatens to over-sweeten us with the shallow beauty of a Marlboro commercial
or Wrangler advert until, one night on the mountain, a drunken Ennis spits on
his hand, turns Jack over and lights the fuse on an on-off love affair that
will stretch painfully over two decades but never escape the macho strictures
of the rural worlds to which they belong. Both marry; both have kids; both meet
occasionally over 20 years for the odd tryst disguised as a fishing trip. For
Jack and Ennis, Brokeback Mountain is more than a place; it’s a symbol of what
could have been, a state of mind, an unattainable nirvana.
‘Brokeback got us good,’ sighs Jack to Ennis as their strained friendship
floats through the years, forever secret, barely defined, hardly spoken. Always
taking his cue from Proulx’s original story (a marvel of epic economy), Lee and
his screenwriters Larry McMurty (‘The Last Picture Show’) and Diana Ossana
present just enough of the pair’s married, post-Brokeback lives to remind us of
the conservative and traditional nature of their domestic lives.
But what makes ‘Brokeback Mountain’ more interesting than a well-meaning time
capsule of period values are the subtle differences in character that Lee
carves between Jack and Ennis. Jack is more exuberant, more romantic, a dreamer
who rides the rodeo and hatches impossible plans for him and Ennis to live together.
Ennis is a puritan, unadventurous and afraid of himself; he takes solace in
violence, holds back emotionally and creates excuses for the stagnation that
defines his life. The film is Ennis’s tragedy; it becomes painfully obvious
that he left his soul on Brokeback Mountain. It’s a tough act to witness and
one that Heath
Ledger handles superbly, delivering an increasingly sad, mumbling and
desperate performance that smacks of loneliness and alienation. And all because
the boy loves the boy but barely knows what such love means, let alone
possesses the tools with which to act on it.
What we have here is acutely calibrated storytelling. Nothing is wasted. The
pacing is calm, the mood sombre, and the adaptation is both respectful and
imaginative. Lee retains the taut ease of Proulx’s prose, allowing him to cover
a long period of time (about 20 years) without lessening the tragedy at the
heart of the tale or offering episodic biographies. Very little is added to
Proulx’s story; the film’s screenwriters take smart inspiration from a line
here or a comment there, spinning them into well-placed new scenes.
‘Brokeback Mountain’ deserves all the awards and acclaim that it’s bound to gather
in the next couple of months. It’s painful stuff, moving and intelligent. Lee
has taken a story of gay love and placed it where it should be – in the
mainstream. He’s delivered a beautifully crafted film to boot.
Proulx,
McMurtry and Ossana Discuss Adapting “Brokeback Mountain ... Jenny Shank from New West Books & Writers,
Proulx wrote the story about
eight years ago, and said it was “generated by years and years of subliminal
observation. But the incident that actually made me start writing it was one
night when I was in a bar in
Proulx said that when she was first approached about turning “
Diana Ossana, who has partnered with Larry McMurtry in writing screenplays for
many years, first read Proulx’s story in The New Yorker when she was
staying up late with a case of insomnia. “My first impression was that the
story was about these very macho guys, working class fellas, who were doing
this ranching job, and then all of the sudden they’re in a relationship.”
Ossana was moved by the landscape and “the picture [Proulx] painted with the
words. They were spare, precise, evocative, and unsentimental.”
Ossana was staying in McMurtry’s home in
McMurtry said he thought the story was “perfection. A genius-level story.” And
so when they wrote the first draft of the screenplay, “we used every single
line and sentence and stuck to Annie’s language like a tick.” This resulted in
a 60-page screenplay, and then Ossana and McMurtry “amplified it on lines
Proulx had suggested, mostly adding in the characters’ domestic lives.”
- - "When we first scripted only
what was contained in the short story, those pages only comprised about
one-third of the final script for Brokeback--about 35 pages of script. The
shooting script was 110 pages long; the other 75 pages were added by us."
Correction from McMurtry and Ossana
B Ruby Rich on Brokeback
Mountain | Film | The Guardian B.
Ruby Rich from The Guardian,
September 23, 2005
Ang Lee's
award-winning gay western is the most important film to come out of
Every once in a while a film
comes along that changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter
has to arrange itself around it. Think of Thelma and Louise or Chungking
Express, Blow-Up or
A fortnight ago, Ang Lee flew to
The vast majority of New Queer Cinema works were gritty urban dramas, set in
Now,
Peering down through the years at the power of that
In the end,
As Brokeback Mountain moves the men's story forward through the decades, as
they escape from their wives and pursue each other through fishing trips (nope,
those will never be innocent again) in an effort at recapturing the rural bliss
of their primal scene, the isolation of setting and frozen emotional boundaries
of the love preclude any intrusion of more modern accepting attitudes. If that
seems an artificial excision concocted to heighten drama, consider that
Proulx's story originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, the year before
Now, however, the first wave of critics to see the film have already begun
to build on the obvious, informing readers that westerns were already gay;
there has already been a rush of wanton nomination as genre favourites are
reconsidered. It's irresistible, I suppose, but it's all wrong. Ever since the
dawn of feminist film criticism and theory in the 1970s, film scholars have
analysed the homoerotic subtexts in the homosocial world of the classic
western. But
But
Andy Warhol certainly had noticed the appeal of hunky cowboys for the gay
imagination - and the dangers they courted. He had his early feature film,
Lonesome Cowboys, shot in 1968 in Oracle,
Lonesome Cowboys won the best-film award at the
In 1969, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight would rocket to superstardom with
Midnight Cowboy, an urban vision that explicitly followed Warhol's lead in
ascribing queerness to cowboy's duds and physique and enduring male
friendships. Through Voight's education regarding what fantasies he's come to
Lonesome Cowboys and Midnight Cowboy cemented the cowboy-hustler motif in
the popular imagination and lifted a subculture to the surface, writing the
cowpoke into the book of gay desire for decades to come. But Lee also knows
something else, from his years of making films that tread with exquisite
delicacy on the suffering of the human heart. He knows that great love and
suffering are sometimes packaged together. He knows that self-denial is as
finely tuned a punishment as the damage any posse could inflict. He knows that
the death of the heart, to add Elizabeth Bowen to these citations, knows no
bounds of gender, nationality, or era.
It is fascinating indeed that after his green mis-step in The Hulk, Lee has
returned to the subject matter of his first triumph, The Wedding Banquet,
released more than a decade earlier to great critical praise. And it's
noteworthy that Lee's longtime producer and scenarist James Schamus
(co-president of Focus Features, the company that produced and will release
Times have changed, and unlike the sunny upbeat Wedding Banquet, this new
film carries the burden of a crushing societal threat that will not be solved
by a turnabout of forgiving parents.
An
Affair to Remember - The New York Review of Books Daniel Mendelsohn from The New York February
23, 2006
Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the
distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie-in commercial
advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews-has been that the story told in
Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic
with "universal" appeal. The lengths to which reviewers from all over
the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone
in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random
sampling of the reviews collected on the film's official Web site makes clear.
The Wall Street Journal's critic asserted that "love stories come and go,
but this one stays with you-not because both lovers are men, but because their
story is so full of life and longing, and true romance." The Los Angeles
Times declared the film to be
<a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted,
mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before
it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.>
Indeed, a month after the movie's release most of the reviews were resisting,
indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as "the gay cowboy
movie." "It is much more than that glib description implies,"
the critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. "This is a human
story." This particular rhetorical emphasis figures prominently in the
advertising for the film, which in quoting such passages reflects the producer's
understandable desire that
The reluctance to be explicit about the film's themes and content was evident
at the Golden Globes, where the film took the major awards-for best movie
drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from
the film was screened, it was described as "a story of monumental
conflict"; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor
in a movie drama described Heath Ledger's character as "a cowboy caught up
in a complicated love." After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as
saying, "This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film's many
excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the
way the film is being promoted and received. For to see
Both narratively and visually,
After that-because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives
they think they must lead-misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and
everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you
associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families
have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl
disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his
two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew,
her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker
of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an
appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation
(an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made
miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he
is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but
because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.
As for Jack and Ennis themselves, the brief and infrequent vacations that they
are able to take together as the years pass-"fishing trips" on which,
as Ennis's wife points out, still choking on her bitterness years after their
marriage fails, no fish were ever caught- are haunted, increasingly, by the
specter of the happier life they might have had, had they been able to live
together. Their final vacation together (before Jack is beaten to death in what
is clearly represented, in a flashback, as a roadside gay-bashing incident) is
poisoned by mutual recriminations. "I wish I knew how to quit you,"
the now nearly middle-aged Jack tearfully cries out, humiliated by years of
having to seek sexual solace in the arms of Mexican hustlers. "It's
because of you that I'm like this-nothing, nobody," the dirt-poor Ennis
sobs as he collapses in the dust. What Ennis means, of course, is that he's
"nothing" because loving Jack has forced him to be aware of real
passion that has no outlet, aware of a sexual nature that he cannot ignore but
which neither his background nor his circumstances have equipped him to make
part of his life. Again and again over the years, he rebuffs Jack's offers to try
living together and running "a little cow and calf operation"
somewhere, hobbled by his inability even to imagine what a life of happiness
might look like.
One reason he can't bring himself to envision such a life with his lover is a
grisly childhood memory, presented in flashback, of being taken at the age of
eight by his father to see the body of a gay rancher who'd been tortured and
beaten to death-a scene that prefigures the scene of Jack's death. This
explicit reference to childhood trauma suggests another, quite powerful, reason
why Brokeback must be seen as a specifically gay tragedy. In another review
that decried the use of the term "gay cowboy movie" ("a cruel
simplification"), the Chicago Sun-Times's critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with
ostensible compassion about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that
"their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from
different religious or ethnic groups-any 'forbidden' love." This is
well-meaning but seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from
different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we
watch it
unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures
that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers
themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.
But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves. As Brokeback
makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is
only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the
lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches
scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world
around them-beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families, as
Ennis's grim flashback is meant to remind us-represents as unhealthy, hateful,
and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets
and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so
early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up
hating themselves: they believe that there's something wrong with themselves
long before they can understand that there's something wrong with society. This
is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands-"Fear
was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted
him," the actor has said-and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his
deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis's self-repression and
self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled
quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens
his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply
by being in his own body-by being himself.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
So much, at any rate, for the movie being a love story like any other, even a
tragic one. To their great credit, the makers of Brokeback Mountain-the writers
Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, the director Ang Lee-seem, despite the
official rhetoric, to have been aware that they were making a movie
specifically about the closet. The themes of repression, containment, the
emptiness of unrealized lives-all ending in the "nothingness" to
which Ennis achingly refers-are consistently expressed in the film,
appropriately enough, by the use of space; given the film's homoerotic themes,
this device is particularly meaningful. The two lovers are only happy in the
wide, unfenced outdoors, where exuberant shots of enormous skies and vast
landscapes suggest, tellingly, that what the men feel for each other is
"natural." By contrast, whenever we see Jack and Ennis indoors, in
the scenes that show the failure of their domestic and social lives, they look
cramped and claustrophobic. (Ennis in particular is often seen in reflection,
in various mirrors: a figure confined in a tiny frame.) There's a sequence in
which we see Ennis in Wyoming, and then Jack in Texas, anxiously preparing for
one of their "fishing trips," and both men, as they pack for their
trip-Ennis nearly leaves behind his fishing tackle, the unused and increasingly
unpersuasive prop for the fiction he tells his wife each time he goes away with
Jack- pace back and forth in their respective houses like caged animals.
The climax of these visual contrasts is also the emotional climax of the film,
which takes place in two consecutive scenes, both of which prominently feature
closets-literal closets. In the first, a grief-stricken Ennis, now in his late
thirties, visits Jack's childhood home, where in the tiny closet of Jack's
almost bare room he discovers two shirts-his and Jack's, the clothes they'd
worn during their summer on Brokeback Mountain-one of which Jack has sentimentally
encased in the other. (At the end of that summer, Ennis had thought he'd lost
the shirt; only now do we realize that Jack had stolen it for this purpose.)
The image -which is taken directly from Proulx's story-of the two shirts hidden
in the closet, preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them could never
fully enjoy, stands as the poignant visual symbol of the story's tragedy. Made
aware too late of how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his loss, Ennis
stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing the shirts and weeping
wordlessly.
In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of clothing leads to a
similar scene of tragic realization. Now middle-aged and living alone in a
battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with which Proulx's story
begins, the tale itself unfolding as a long flashback), Ennis receives a visit
from his grown daughter, who announces that she's engaged to be married.
"Does he love you?" the blighted father protectively demands, as if
realizing too late that this is all that matters. After the girl leaves, Ennis
realizes she's left her sweater behind, and when he opens his little closet
door to store it there, we see that he's hung the two shirts from their first
summer, one still wearing the other, on the inside of the closet door, below a
tattered postcard of Brokeback Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls
back to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a little window next to
the closet, a rectangular frame that affords a glimpse of a field of yellow
flowers and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the two spaces-the
cramped and airless closet, the window with its unlimited vistas
beyond-efficiently but wrenchingly suggests the man's tragedy: the life he has
lived, the life that might have been. His eyes filling with tears, Ennis looks
at his closet and says, "Jack, I swear..."; but he never completes
his sentence, as he never completed his life.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the most tortured, but by no means untypical, attempts to suggest that
the tragic heroes of Brokeback Mountain aren't "really" gay appeared
in, of all places, the San Francisco Chronicle, where the critic Mick LaSalle
argued that the film is
<about two men who are in love, and it makes no sense. It makes no sense in
terms of who they are, where they are, how they live and how they see
themselves. It makes no sense in terms of what they do for a living or how they
would probably vote in a national election....The situation carries a lot of
emotional power, largely because it's so specific and yet undefined. The two
guys-cowboys-are in love with each other, but we don't ever quite know if
they're in love with each other because they're gay, or if they're gay because
they're in love with each other. It's possible that if these fellows had never
met, one or both would have gone through life straight.>
The statement suggests what's wrong with so much of the criticism of the film,
however well-meaning it is. It seems clear by now that Brokeback has received
the attention it's been getting, from critics and audiences alike, partly
because it seems on its surface to make normal what many people think of as gay
experience- bringing it into the familiar "heart of
Indeed, the point that gay people have been trying to make for years-a point
that Brokeback could be making now, if so many of its vocal admirers would
listen to what it's saying-is that there's no such thing as a typi-cal gay
person, a strangely different-seeming person with whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del
Mar have nothing in common-thankfully, you can't help feeling, in the eyes of
many commentators. (It is surely significant that the film's only major
departure from Proulx's story are two scenes clearly meant to underscore Jack's
and Ennis's bona fides as macho American men: one in which Jack successfully
challenges his boorish father-in-law at a Thanksgiving celebration, and another
in which Ennis punches a couple of biker goons at a July Fourth picnic-a scene
that culminates with the image of Ennis standing tall against a skyscape of
exploding fireworks.)
The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal
love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a
distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person
can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and
Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really
homosexual-that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay
people"-you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and
suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and
harrowingly exposed.
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman] Blazing Saddles,
indieWire
[Michael Koresky] Don’t Fence Me In,
Slate (David
Edelstein) review Lasso Me Tender, And Lee’s
Slate (David
Leavitt) essay ["Is ___ a gay film?"] Men in
Love, Is Brokeback Mountain a Gay Film?
New York
Observer (Andrew Sarris) review In the Minority on Mountain,
Rick
Moody on Brokeback Mountain | Books | The Guardian Rick Moody from The Guardian,
BFI | Sight & Sound | Western Special: Lonesome Cowboys Roger Clarke from Sight and Sound, January 2006
Western Special: Lonesome Cowboys Edward Buscombe from Sight and Sound, January 2006
BFI | Sight & Sound | Climb Every Mountain #1 on Top Ten Films of the year, by Nick James, January 2006
Catherine
Gander: A short story is not a quick fix. It demands interpretation, as Ang
Lee's western has shown Lost Art of the Narrative, Catherine
Gander from The Guardian,
Bright Lights Film Journal review Men in Love, Matthew Kennedy, February 2006
Bright Lights Film Journal (Alan Vanneman) review Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in the Grand Tetons Anymore, February 2006
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; The Cinema of Boy Meets Boy and Girl Meets Girl Ginia Bellafante from The New York Times, July 15, 2006
Analysis of Brokeback Mountain in Jump Cut Justin Vicari from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
Offscreen
:: Ang Lee’s Cowboys Irini
Stamatopoulos essay from Offscreen,
Love
as an Illusion: Beautiful to See, Impossible to Hold Dennis Lim from The New York Times,
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN by Ang Lee : Alternative Film Guide Andre Soares
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A-]
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Twitch review Jim Tudor
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4.5/5]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
The New York Sun (Benjamin Lytal) review
Kamera.co.uk review Edward Lamberti
The Films of Ang Lee Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review Page 2
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review
CineScene.com (Chris Knipp) review
Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [A]
Brokeback Mountain Kevin O’Reilly from DVD Times
Brokeback Mountain Kevin Mackenzie from DVD Times
Brokeback Mountain - New York Magazine Movie Review Ken Tucker
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
stylusmagazine.com (Alfred Soto) review
Reverse Shot [Chris Wisniewski]
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Collector's Edition] 2 Disc
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
filmcritic.com (David Thomas) review [5/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann and Patrick Bliss
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]
Movies 101 (Robert Glatzer) review
The Providence Journal (Michael Janusonis) review [4/5]
CNN Showbiz (Paul Clinton) review
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4.5/5]
3 Black Chicks (1053) review Chris Utley
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
Reel.com review [4/4] Pam Grady
CultureCartel.com (Lee Chase IV) review [3.5/5]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]
CBC.ca Arts (Alec Scott) review
hybridmagazine.com
review Tiffany Crouch
Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [A-]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
World Socialist Web Site review Joanne Laurier
Martin Tsai's Blog The Bitter Critic feels bitter
Cinepassion.org Queer Oppression for the Straight Eye, by Fernando F. Croce
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Political Film Society review Michael Haas
eFilmCritic.com (Paul Bryant) review [5/5]
Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Tim Knight
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [A]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3/4]
sneersnipe (David Perilli) review
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Exclaim! review Peter Knegt
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Eye for Film (Kevin Stanley) review [4/5]
Reviews of Brokeback Mountain - Dave Cullen
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review [Collector's Edition] 2 Disc
Monsters and Critics - DVD Review - 2 Disc CE [Jeff Swindoll]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Collector's Edition] Colin Jacobson, 2 Disc
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [HD DVD Version]
DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]
Facts &
Fiction - 97.11.12 Imagination Is Everything, A
Conversation with E. Annie Proulx from The
Atlantic Monthly,
At close range
with Annie Proulx Matthew Testa
interview with E. Annie Proulx from Planet
Jackson Hole,
AfterElton.com -
Interview with Brokeback Mountain Director Ang Lee Interview by Gregg Shapiro,
Annie
Proulx tells the story behind "Brokeback Mountain ... Interview with the novelist by The Advocate,
Blood on the red carpet Annie Proulx on how her Brokeback Oscar hopes were dashed by Crash, from The Guardian, March 11, 2006
Entertainment
Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman,
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3.5/4]
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [4/5]
The Observer (Philip French) review
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] also seen here: Brokeback Mountain Movie Review (2005) | Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
Masculinity and Its Discontents in Marlboro Country - New York Times Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, December 18, 2005, also seen here: 'Brokeback' and the gay frontier - International Herald Tribune
Brokeback Mountain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Great site for Brokeback Mountain reviews, news and cultural impact The Ultimate Brokeback Guide, Dave Cullen
Ang Lee wins Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival - International ... International Herald Tribune, September 11, 2005
Ang
Lee: Asian audiences more accepting of gay subject China
Daily,
Family
and friends praise Ang Lee's quiet dedication by Ho Yi from The Tapei Times,
Truthdig - Ear to the Ground - China Censors Ang Lee’s Speech March 7, 2006
Lee
Disappointed Over 'Brokeback' Loss CBS News
Ang Lee: Blending
East and West China.org,
'Good
mournin' to ya to cowboy' Chris Moran from The Guardian,
Don't
Fence Me In: Richard Eder reviews
E. Annie Proulx’s collection of short stories, Close Range,
A Reader's Manifesto An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose, by R.R. Myers from The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2001 [Among the writers attacked are Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, E. Annie Proulx and David Guterson]
Critic
savages 'pretentious' US literati
Duncan Campbell from The Guardian,
The Scripting
News Jessica Winter from The Village Voice,
'Brokeback
Mountain': Rape of the Marlboro Man
David Kupelian from from WND
Commentary,
Annie Proulx infuriated over
‘Brokeback’ loss MSNBC News,
Annie Proulx - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brokeback Mountain (short story) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
LUST, CAUTION (Se, jie) B+ 92
The mood is stifling, yet like the best Asian films,
everything is revealed in subtle glances, with Lee's acute sense for details,
in the smallest of all possible movements, which tell all. Lee’s first
Chinese language feature since CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000), this is
an old-fashioned, sprawling love story gone wrong set in Japanese-occupied Hong
Kong in 1938 and Shanghai in 1942, adapted from an Eileen Chang 54-page novella
drenched with murky details and political intrigue. Told nearly entirely through flashback, where
attention to the look and the customs of the period are favored over detailed
historical facts, which are largely assumed in this film, designed to appeal to
Asian audiences, as one would think all Chinese are familiar with pre-WWII
Japanese atrocities from a foreign invader, while American viewers may need
more historical prodding. To its credit,
the film foregoes any backdrop and instead immerses the viewer instantly into a
realm in Hong Kong that resembles an invisible bubble, a highly protected world
within a world revealing a small segment of ultra rich Chinese who are
continuing to live as they are accustomed, buying what is unavailable in stores
on the black market, but maintaining their Chinese identity while the Japanese
declare martial law on the streets. To
these women, there is no reference to a war going on, a total block out of
what’s happening on the streets where citizens are routinely clubbed and
arrested and where there are long lines of Chinese attempting to obtain their
miniscule rations in order to survive.
Instead the women sit in a room and play mahjong all day while sipping
tea, gossiping about each other’s lives, discussing the
In this women’s social circle the mahjong game is hosted by
Mrs. Yee, the irrepressible Joan Chen, whose dapperly dressed husband Mr. Yee
(Tony Leung), occasionally drops in to pay his respects. Newcomer Tang Wei plays a younger woman Wong
Chia-chi, alias Mrs. Mai, pretending to be the wife of a rich merchant, but is
actually a member of the Chinese resistance whose goal is to assassinate Mr.
Yee, a woman whose irresistible manner and beguiling allure catches Mr. Yee’s
eyes. The way this plays out is in a
series of table glances, all carefully guarded under his wife’s eyes, yet
messages are mysteriously sent and received.
A secret affair ensues. Mr. Yee
is suspected of collaborating with the enemy (the Japanese), eventually
becoming head of a heavily guarded secret police division that rounds up,
interrogates and tortures Chinese sympathizers, eventually authorizing their
disappearance. But mostly his life is
layered in secrecy and his motives throughout remain shrouded in mystery, where
until the end little is even known about his actual profession. Wong Chia-chi’s life, on the other hand, is
revealed through flashback sequences to be a young college student in Hong Kong
who is recruited to perform a melodramatic propagandistic theater piece
designed to arouse the sympathies of a Chinese audience (“China will not fail!”), hoping to raise money for their cause,
as Hong Kong has not yet fallen to the Japanese. Motivated by deaths and betrayals to his own
family, the leader of the theater troupe Kuang Yu Min (Chinese pop star Wang
Leehom) decides to join the Chinese underground and train them for secret
missions to assassinate enemy collaborators, targeting Mr. Yee. Wong Chia-chi, whose beauty and acting skills
are unsurpassed, is lured into this idealistically naïve group and used as bait
in the role of a seductress, having never even kissed a man, tempted perhaps by
an unexpressed longing to please this director, searching for approval after
being abandoned by her own father who has been exiled to England. As soon as she gets surprisingly close,
however, Mr. Yee and his wife move to
An interesting twist on this tale is Tang Wei’s brilliance with illusion, how she skillfully plays her part moving so seamlessly between real and make believe. She and Leung are so secretive in every respect with each other, much like Bertolucci’s LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972), except for their sexually explicit scenes in bed, the only moments of “trust” they ever have, a cat and mouse game of dominance, cruelty and surprise, where she is actually manhandled and raped, though with consent, where the psychological allure is as transfixing as the sex, as the two delve into an Ôshima IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976) mindset, where the tables are turned by her apparent inexhaustible ability to outlast him, becoming completely captivated by one another. The attraction feels so real that we sense she’s not really going ahead with her mission, but time and again she surprises us, revealing the full extent of her mental anguish only in a moment where she pleads with the resistance leaders to quickly kill him and put an end to her prolonged agony. Along the way we get a series of hints from movie posters and clips, as she identifies with Joan Fontaine’s fear of Cary Grant’s suspected dark motives in Suspicion (1941) or post WWII heroine Ingrid Bergman kidnapped and drugged by Nazi agents in NOTORIOUS (1946), two films with women at the mercy of bad men. This film draws a much more vivid portrait of Leung than any of the other men in her life, so at all times the audience feels their irresistible desire may alter her original plans.
The excruciating period detail and lurid Douglas Sirkian melodrama resembles Stanley Kwan, whose historical pieces set in Shanghai are legendary, ACTRESS (1991), RED ROSE, WHITE ROSE (1994, based on another Eileen Chang novella), or EVERLASTING REGRET (2005), where the roving eye of the camera becomes an unseen character, luminously shot here by Rodrigo Prieto, featuring exquisite costumes and beautifully designed sets, with exceptional music by Alexandre Desplat. What’s missing in this film is Kwan’s ability to elevate the city’s historical context into his films, where the streets, the back alleys, the food vendors, the bars, or the musical set pieces all come to life within the telling of the story, so the audience literally gets a “feel” for this place in time. Instead Lee excludes much of this built up historical detail in order to enhance the dark complexities of the developing psychological interior world, much like Ôshima’s IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, which was also set during war time which is all but unseen. So despite the paper thin plot where the minor characters all but disappear, the real story of this film is a character exposé of how pretensions of love go painfully awry during the wretched times of war, featuring two Chinese characters ensnared in a web of deceit under the psychological mindset of a Japanese occupier, reflected in their sexual deviation and their own deeply disturbed moral delusion.
Of interest is how Wong Chia-chi’s background is also shrouded in a gulf of mystery, offering no clues why she was driven to this destiny, as she appears to have little political motivation, or how she can be so much smarter than the rest, more self-assured and sophisticated, offering an unusual sense of calm, so completely at ease mixing with the social customs of the upper class. The audience is completely at a loss to understand how she could be an accomplice to murder. The length of the film accentuates the kind of patience that is needed from an audience in order to understand what kind of patience and commitment Tang Wei’s character must have had, continually molding and developing her make believe persona, becoming thoroughly entrenched in her role as a seductress, but always balancing her sensuality with the mental strength needed to outmaneuver a man of this caliber. She is an indomitable spirit caught up in the horrors of the times, all but abandoned by her family, used by the political powers that thought only of their own gains, and easily discarded as yesterday’s news once the mission is over. The point of this film is that the mission is never really over, as it’s a pointed reminder of how shameless and cowardly men hide behind the bold actions of women in order to accomplish their so-called political and humanitarian aims, taking all the credit for their accomplishments, discarding them completely when they are no longer useful. By creating such an alluring perspective of female torment, much like the fierce dramas of Almodóvar, Lee is attempting to express a sense of gratitude to great heroines of the past.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
You can't talk about Ang Lee's tastefully erotic espionage thriller "Lust, Caution" without observing that there is far more caution than lust in the film's equation. But then what would you expect from a director whose career is defined by characters who either repress their true feelings out of cultural expectation or social shame, or mask their emotions with manners and rituals?
Set largely in Japanese-occupied
Lee lingers on grace notes of unspoken signals and unfulfilled desire, from stolen glances to fleeting brushes of the skin to the lipstick traces of Jiazhi's tea cups and wine glasses. Of course, you could just say Lee lingers, and leave it at that. There are more than 90 minutes of passion and suspicion and fear hidden under the surface of manners and poses before the affair hits NC-17 territory. The explicit coital scenes of bodies pumping away in brutal, animalistic sex is a carefully engineered shock to the elegant stillness that Lee has created.
The perfectly dressed surfaces couldn't be more lovely, but the long fashion show to the finale smothers the emotions under the length and the look, and Lee's insights into the messy feelings that simmer and stew in the hothouse of sex are, frankly, fairly mundane.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Venice 2007: War, Lust, Spies And Quaint Conceits Nick James from Sight and Sound, November 2007 (excerpt)
Written by
producer and screenwriter James Schamus and produced by Focus Features, Ang
Lee's Lust, Caution could have been regarded as another American
triumph. But since it stars Chinese actors and is set in the Shanghai and Hong
Kong of the late 1930s and early 1940s after China's invasion by the Japanese,
it counts as Chinese. Based on a favourite Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) story, Lust,
Caution follows the career of a fledgling Hong Kong actress (Tang Wei) who
is recruited by a young ideologue to star in anti-Japanese propaganda plays.
Soon, however, her recruiter-director (Wang Leehom) asks her to infiltrate the
family of a notorious collaborator (Tony Leung) and become his lover. To do so
she must sacrifice her virginity with one of the group - and it's not her
handsome recruiter who volunteers but a boorish user of prostitutes. This sets
in train a spy saga that spans mistakes, murder and a couple of years and ends
up with our heroine entangled in a passionate tryst with her enemy.
For the Italian press Lust, Caution was a shock
Golden Lion winner, a film of locked-down emotions not even thought to be in
contention. Many of them preferred Kenneth Branagh's flashily theatrical
reworking of Anthony Shaffer's play Sleuth, which boasts a fine
performance from Michael Caine as the cuckolded husband, if not from Jude Law
as the hairdresser/lover come to negotiate. But where Sleuth is a
shouted chess game of silly sexual menace, Lee's film has a wonderful light
tension of suspense, of everything being held just beneath the surface of
society's values, with sex scenes that have the intensity and sense of reality
of Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses. Give Ang Lee a fresh genre and a
short story to expand and once again he hands us something handsome and
compelling.
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
Blessed with an achingly beautiful score by Alexandre Desplat, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is a more tasteful Blackbook, which is odd considering how much more graphic it is in its depiction of not just sexuality but, thanks to a darkly-comic homage to Torn Curtain, violence as well. Where Blackbook director Paul Verhoeven is a vulgarian, though, Lee projects civility and cultivation. That's how he so often manages to shank you. The affair between secret service man Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, never viler) and a young freedom fighter masquerading as a Mahjong-playing housewife (the incandescent Tang Wei) in pre-revolutionary Shanghai plays out in an interminable series of rape scenarios from which Lee never flinches, fostering an impression of artistic integrity that Lee has been only too happy to perpetuate by blithely accepting the MPAA's ruling of an NC-17 rating for the film. Alas, post-Brokeback Mountain, the intensity of the In the Realm of the Senses-style sex scenes is too conspicuous for its own good, prompting extratextual questions about Lee's motives. Friend and colleague Norman Wilner said something in passing that really got me thinking: that he would feel like Lee is rhetorically asking us, "Is this what you wanted from Brokeback?" had he more faith in Lee's intellect. At any rate, in light of the sheepishness of Brokeback Mountain's same-sex encounters, the gratuitousness of Lust, Caution's hetero liaisons does strike a note of methinks the lady doth protest too much. Yet the picture gets around to honouring its pretensions towards truthfulness in a climax that exposes the sham of Blackbook's romantic sacrifices and narrow escapes (Mata Hari will always face down a firing squad), even if it's only later, at home in the dark, that the full weight of Lust, Caution's misanthropy comes crashing down on you. If Lee is ultimately too prosaic to ever be anything but a great middlebrow filmmaker, consider what an oxymoron that is; we're lucky to have him
She felt a kind of
chilling premonition of failure, like a long snag in a silk stocking, silently
creeping up her body.
—Zhang Ailing, “Lust, Caution”
The primary question
in Lust, Caution (Se, jie) is: “What is real?” The answers,
nebulous and harsh, are suffused with cigarette smoke and punctuated by
clacking mahjong tiles. A WWII melodrama set mostly in Japanese-occupied
These lovers could
not be more different on their surfaces. Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), the brutally
efficient head of
Yee’s stoicism is his
refuge, though he seethes with rage and resentment (indicated by the slightest
glances and gestures in Leung’s devastating performance, revealed in Rodrigo
Prieto’s splendid cinematography). What he can’t know, though you do, is that
Mak Tai Tai is not who she seems, but is instead Wong Chia Chi, a Chinese
patriot determinedly insinuating herself into his life precisely to set him up
for assassination. And what Wong doesn’t articulate, though you observe it, is
that she is increasingly confused by the roles she plays, from student and
actress to spy and lover.
Wong begins her
adventure as a girl, literally in school uniform. She’s motivated to join an
actors’ troupe partly by her attraction to its earnest leader Kuang (Wong
Lee-Hom). They decide against Ibsen in favor of a patriotic play, and Wong’s
first night hooks her forever: when her convincing performance and seemingly
real tears inspire the audience to join in her character’s rousing last cry
("
Her initial
encounters with Yee are promising: it’s clear that he’s moved by her,
accompanying her to the tailors so she can oversee the modifications to a new
suit ("The close-fitting collar,” she notes, “is the latest look").
As they discuss their interests and yearnings over a secret dinner, Wong’s
performance ironically allows her to voice assorted truths, to seek out her own
feelings. “Men,” she observes, “have many distractions. We ladies have only
shopping and mahjong.” She is bored with playing the wife, but she is also
excited by the lies. The possibility that she will seduce this powerful man
suggests she is herself powerful, not just shopping, but affecting her nation’s
history and future.
And then the plan is
over—or so it seems. Yee is relocated, the acting troupe disbanded, and Wong
left standing on breadlines, like thousands of other Chinese citizens. She
misses the scary thrills of their amateurish scheming, and, no small thing, has
lost her virginity in at least two ways. Not only has she slept with one of her
fellows in order to prepare for the encounter with Yee, but she has also
witnessed a horrific stabbing, committed by the actors to protect their secret
identities (this scene is extraordinary, a genuinely awful murder, not at all
competent or climactic).
When the chance to
resume the assassination plot comes up, this time supervised by “official”
resistance leaders, Wong again goes along. Some three years after the first
failed effort, she is outfitted in expensive dresses, gossips with Mrs. Yee,
and glances furtively at Mr. Yee from across the mahjong table. Again, she can
dab expensive perfume behind her ears and ride in hired cars. She can imagine herself
someone else, she can even imagine herself in love with Yee. For they share not
only a mutual, crucial deceit, but they also share a disturbing intimacy, based
on lies but also on real emotions—fear, desire, and lust. “If you pay
attention,” he tells her, “nothing is trivial.” Indeed, the smallest
dishonesties are also the most profound.
Wong’s dedication to
her cause is, the movie proposes, shaped by self-delusion as much as a pursuit
of truth. Not only do she and her fellow actors believe in the absolute good of
their self-appointed mission, but they also believe in the absolute evil of
their prey. And yet, as Wong crosses emotional and moral borders during her
performance, you see the problems with making such black-and-white
distinctions. It’s not that Yee can be forgiven for his crimes, but that her
own identity and work are also fraught with grey. Her deceptions make her feel
like a prostitute, a role with which Yee can identify. Tragically and
tellingly, Kuang can’t comprehend her feelings. He does, however, come to feel
a mix of guilt, jealousy, and vague judgment, as he begins to fall in love with
Wong, though of course, he never tells her (his manipulations are perhaps more
unsettling than Yee’s, because he thinks himself honorable).
As the men work their
angles and Wong seeks a measure of self-control, Lust, Caution has
garnered attention for its explicit sex scenes. Several are not only graphic,
but also violent, illustrating Yee’s cruelty and confusion (he’s desperate to
feel powerful, much like Wong) as well as Wong’s need to feel intimate with
him, even at the cost of her well-being. But these scenes also serve a thematic
purpose, in the questions they raise about what’s “real” in sex performed for
films that are not designated “pornography.” At the same time, the sex scenes
provide moments of sincere connection for Wong and Yee: they see one another as
“real” when they engage in sweaty, acrobatic acts, taking emotional risks they
don’t take at any other time. Vulnerable and aggressive, their closeness in
these moments is unsafe but also, for them, the most safe they feel.
("What if I told you I hated you?” she asks as they begin one assignation.
“I believe you,” he says.)
In these scenes, the
sex is plot, not just a break for lush scoring and pretty bodies on display, as
it is in most movies. This plot, so urgent and pained, dooms both partners.
When Wong at last articulates her suffering for Kuang and their resistance cell
leader, Old Wu (Chung Hua Tou), they can’t begin to absorb what she’s telling
them. “For an agent,” insists Old Wu, “there’s only one thing: loyalty.” Unlike
Yee, who forces his way “into [her] heart,” her so-called compatriots are
visibly flummoxed by her description of the sex and her own violent fantasies
(she imagines shooting Yee herself, “his blood and brains all over me").
Old Wu asserts, “Keep him hooked and keep me informed.”
And so Wong is lost,
even as she thinks herself found. While thematic points are both weighty and
obvious (patriotism produces prostitutes, war is motivated by money, betrayal
leads to revelation), Wong’s anguish and sudden understanding provide this
sometimes lugubrious, often fascinating thriller’s most chilling moment.
Asia Pacific Arts: Lust, Caution, and Tony Leung's Eyes Brian Hu from Asian Pacific Arts, a film better received in Asia than in the West, October 5, 2007
At the
More than that, they felt compelled to explain the bad reviews. The film's
inherent "Chinese-ness" was a typical answer, especially when
speaking to the Chinese press. For instance, Lee argued that the film came
natural to Chinese audiences and then resigned to the fact that "crossing-over"
to the West would be a major challenge. Or as actor Wang Leehom puts it:
"The nerves that it hits on are poignant to the Chinese audiences all
around the world."
But there are several problems with this explanation. First, the film's
inscrutable Chinese-ness seems a strange, belated excuse given that so many
"Chinese" films have already crossed over in the
Lust, Caution is no exception. Part of what makes it
so interesting is that it shows Chinese people at the crossroads of the rest of
the world: between Japanese aggression, Euro-American cultural goods, and the
"global city" of
So is there a better explanation for why the film has gotten
bad press in the States? One is that mainstream American critics didn't have
the patience for a 158 minute art film. The most obvious example came from Hollywood Reporter critic Ray
Bennett who began his review: "Ang Lee's lugubrious spy epic Lust, Caution brings to mind what soldiers
say about war: that it's long periods of boredom relieved by moments of
extremely heightened excitement." Mr. Bennett: have you never seen a
Taiwanese art film? Hell, have you never seen the similar Notorious, one of Hitchcock's understated
thrillers?
At the premiere, Schamus vindictively (and with much reason) singled out such
critics for their laziness: "If you don't like our movie, that's perfectly
fine, that's your job. Sometimes, however, I have to object against a certain
amount of ignorance, that, when accompanied by smugness and an unwillingness to
see what you're trying to do, I have to object to….When somebody is too lazy to
even go back and see who Eileen Chang was and what was really going on in
Shanghai and how the politics and sexuality of it figure into Chinese culture,
then I feel like, ‘Well, maybe you should get another job.'"
On that, I wholesomely agree. It's disconcerting that even the positive reviews
of the film tend to single out the film's "visual beauty" as its
primary asset, and not the film's remarkable treatment of 20th century Chinese
history.
So there are in some ways barriers to entry. But for me, the
primary barrier is not history, but something altogether more important: more
cinematic, more integral to unlocking the film's visual and narrative
pleasures. That is, of course, Tony Leung's eyes.
Leung has been in the Chinese film industry for decades now. He was a staple of
1990s
For me, what made the second half of Lust, Caution so mesmerizing was
the interplay of glances between Leung and co-star Tang Wei. And much of
appreciating that choreography of looks has to do with understanding the
history of Leung's "electric eyes," as Tang puts it in an interview.
There's a specific moment when the battle of the stares begins. It's at a
mahjong table hosted by a Mrs. Yee (Joan Chen). Amongst her guests is Wong Chia
Chi (aka. Mrs. Mok) (Tang Wei), a spy whose mission it is to seduce the
double-crossing husband Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) so that her collaborators can
catch, then assassinate him. The characters communicate on two levels. Through
speech, they trade pleasantries, politely discussing mahjong and gossip. But
their true intentions are spoken with their eyes. Mrs. Mok gives Mr .Yee some
fashion advice and invites him to call her to set up a tailoring appointment.
She begins to write down her telephone number, and in a sudden frenzy of gazes,
Mrs. Yee sees what she's doing and blurts with a smile, "I have your
number already." Almost simultaneously, Mrs. Mok averts the gaze of both
Yees, then sneakily places her telephone number within view of Mr. Yee, who
predictably, steals a glance.
From that point on, seduction and war intermix in a crossfire
of gazes. And the bedroom is the primary battleground. In the first of the
much-publicized sex scenes, watch how Mrs. Mok aims her eyes, however
amateurly, at Mr. Yee's heart, trying to gain the upper hand. And watch how Mr.
Yee stares back; those eyes are so impregnable they're hostile. They contain
his many contradictions. He lusts for her, maybe even loves her, yet he's
cautious and ready to pounce if the need arises. For all that's been said about
the corporeal geometries of the sex scenes, I found myself focusing mostly on
their facial expressions: how Mr. Yee's eyes slowly begin to reveal his lowered
defenses with each subsequent bedroom encounter. And in Mrs. Mok's eyes, we
sense fatigue, resignation, and deep sadness about being in the arms of her
enemy. So much of the film's tension is contained in their dampened eyes,
enveloped in a dizzying array of glistening limbs and torsos.
So much of the tension is built on seeing Tang, the first-film actress, take on
Leung, the veteran with the magical peepers. The actors' bios fit the
characters well: Mrs. Mok is the young warrior, taking on an enemy that has
already thwarted many a two-faced floozy. What makes Leung's gaze so powerful
in that first sex scene is our appreciation of Leung's mastery of his ocular
instruments. This isn't Leung lazily doing his usual puppy-dog stare; it's not
the glimmer of decency his eyes shot at the end of Infernal
Affairs, as if to remind audiences that he's the good guy. It's
Leung doing what he does best in a completely new way. Here, those eyes display
pure evil's window of vulnerability. According to Tang Wei, Ang Lee had to put
a leash on Leung's usual trickery. "The director had Tony Leung repress
the urge to use those ‘electric eyes' we often see from him. So what he
depicted was completely from the character. It's all a performance." It's
that appreciation for Tony Leung's performance that makes Mr. Yee's gaze ever
more shocking and venomous.
And knowing that Tang, formerly a TV soaps star in
Of course, even those with an appreciation for Leung and his trademark stare
still might not like the film. In a mostly negative review, Manohla Dargis
of the New York Times celebrated Leung's performance, but took issue
with the fact that his freshman co-star simply couldn't keep up. Stephanie
Zacharek, who once wrote a fantastic article called "In
the Mood For Leung," was enamored by the second half and the
Tang-Leung seduction, but felt the exposition was limp. I don't take issue with
either critic, because they understand what Lee was working with and gave the
film a fair shot. But those critics who simply complained that the film is
overlong and that the second half lacked intensity need to rethink why they're
even reviewing this movie.
Michael Wood
reviews 'Lust, Caution' · LRB 24 January 2008 Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, January 24,
2008
EastSouthWestNorth: Lung Ying-tai on "Lust, Caution" Lung Ying-tai
The Ang
Lee Session: Some notes on the making of Lust, Caution – A ... N.P. Thompson feature and interview from Northwest Asian Weekly, October 13, 2007
Lust, Caution - The Darjeeling
Limited - The Kingdom -- New ... - NYMag
David Edelstein
The Movie Review: 'Lust, Caution' - The Atlantic Christopher Orr
Ang
Lee's 'Lust, Caution' has sense and sensuality | PopMatters Lewis Beale
Lust, Caution
(Film) - Lust, Caution - Aesthetic and Interpretive ...
Pajiba (Constance Howes) review
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Twitch review Jim Tudor
Passion stifled Mike D’Angelo from Las Vegas Weekly
Screen International Dan Fainaru in Venice
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Nick's Flick Picks Nick Davis
KFC Cinema Martin Cleary
World Socialist Web Site review Richard Phillips
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
not coming to a theater near you (Jason Woloski) review
Between Productions [Robert Cashill]
Electric Sheep Magazine Tom Huddleston
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [3/5]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Political Film Review Michael Haas
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Sura Wood
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
Movies 101 (Robert Glatzer) review
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
How Ang Lee Earned His NC-17 for
'Lust, Caution' -- New York ...
Logan Hill from NY magazine
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Film Journal International (Erica Abeel) review
The Village Voice [Robert Wilonsky]
Ang Lee is Changing the Rules Interview by A.G. Basoli from Moviemaker magazine, February 3, 2007
indieWIRE INTERVIEW | “Lust, Caution” Director Ang Lee | IndieWire Erica Abeel interview, September 26, 2007
Q&A with Ang Lee - TIME Rebecca Winters Keegan interview, October 2, 2007
Twitch - 2007 MVFF30: LUST, CAUTION—Interview With Ang Lee & Tang Wei Interview by Michael Guillen, October 7, 2007, also seen here (click to enlarge photos): Cross-published on The Evening Class.
New Statesman - Interview: Ang Lee Rebecca Davies interview from The New Statesman, January 3, 2008
BFI | Sight & Sound | Cruel Intentions: Ang Lee Nick James interview from Sight and Sound, January 2008
Time Out London (Wally Hammond) review [4/6]
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Ang Lee's Lust, Caution could buck the NC-17 trend | Film ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Guardian, August 31, 2007
Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review
Boston Globe review [2/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
In Ang Lee's 'Lust, Caution,' love is beautiful to see, impossible ... Dennis Lim from The International Herald Tribune, August 27, 2007
indieWIRE: Ang Lee Wins Again in Venice, "Lust, Caution" Takes ... September 8, 2007
Who's Afraid Of Ang Lee? - September 21, 2007 - The New York Sun S. James Snyder
Ang Lee's 'Lust,' built on trust - The Envelope - LA Times Paul Lieberman, September 23, 2007
Ang Lee
'very satisfied' new film shown in entirety - The China Post September 25, 2007
TAKING WOODSTOCK B 86
USA (120 mi) 2009
Despite
it’s critical acclaim, I was never an admirer of Ang Lee’s ICE STORM (1997),
his caption of the underbelly of suburban life from an earlier era, namely the
free-wheeling, wife swapping times of the early 70’s, the liberal residue left
over from the peace and love generation of the 60’s, which despite its gorgeous
look, was surprisingly shallow and superficial, dwelling on shortcomings
through stereotypes, turning into an adults-behaving-badly movie that at least
in my view, never really captured the significance of the times. I’m not sure his appreciation for the 1960’s
is any more insightful. Whatever efforts
were made to advance a radical social agenda in the 60’s, so much of which
became mainstreamed a decade later, is ignored in Ang Lee’s film. The 70’s was
an era where the dreams of the 60’s died, largely due to a bad end to the
Vietnam war and Watergate impeachment proceedings that led to the fallout of
the Nixon presidency and a new cynical undertanding of government filled with
lies and cover ups that ultimately birthed a new law and order conservative
reality. The Baby Boomers refused to
pass an ERA amendment, but advances in civil rights, heightened concern for the
environment, increased space exploration, and much of the feminist sentiment
gained a broader acceptance into everyday life.
One never gets even the slightest hint that major social issues were
percolating in the 60’s, even in the life of Elliot Tiber, whose memoir is used
as the basis of the film, who just a few weeks before the Woodstock festival
was involved in the Stonewall Riots where he joined a rising rebellion of gays
and lesbians overturning police cars in their wrath against police
harrassment. Here that event is reduced
to a single offscreen phone call when one of his friends gets out of jail and
heads for the west coast. In both films,
they suffer greatly by Lee’s decision to abandon social context and instead
accentuate the personal, resulting in the creation of utterly superficial
stereotypes instead of real life, flesh and blood characters who bear some semblance
to the people of the times. To that end,
both films are pleasantly entertaining satiric caricatures instead of the real
deal.
What’s
most surprising about this film is the ongoing humor, as from the get go,
Imelda Staunton as Elliot’s mother offers a supremely gifted expression of
rigid Russian old school thinking, a pessimistic Jewish mother who’s life
experience has taken her through so many variations of political repression
that she expresses her miserablism with profound comic timing, such as relating
how she escaped the wrath of the Czar’s soldiers by walking alone through the
snows in Minsk before playing the Holocaust card, claiming others around her
were all gassed. We hear this more as an
admonishment to shame a local bank officer while requesting a payment extension
on their dilapidated property in rural White Lake, population several hundred
in an unincorporated corner of nearby Bethel.
For all practical purposes, this little hamlet is the center of the
universe and the place where the Woodstock rock concert was born. While other nearby communities refused to
issue permits for an outdoor rock concert that would attract hippies and other
alleged derelicts, Elliot, as the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, grants
himself a permit before entrusting it to the Woodstock ventures. With a little help from the grazing land of a
neighboring dairy farmer, Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), a legal site was
approved. When promoter Michael Lang
arrives in a helicopter on their front lawn, almost exactly rendered by Jonathan Groff, with his girl friend in tow, played by none
other than Mamie Gummer, Meryl Streep's daughter, along with a bag of cash and
a host of limousined lawyers, Elliot has created quite a stir. There’s a great deal of re-creation of original scenes
used in the 1970 WOODSTOCK documentary, so when we see them again they are
instantly recognizable, such as the helicopter scenes, the skinnydipping, the
nuns flashing the peace sign, the mudslides, Michael Lang on a motorcycle or
riding a horse, the masses of humanity in various states of dress or undress
getting stoned, the split screens, the traffic pileups and the veritable filth
that was left behind, an emblematic image of the aftermath of the 60’s.
What’s
unique to this film is Lee’s perspective on this massive event, which is to
reduce it to a coming of age story from one of the participants, Elliot
(Demetri Martin), a straightlaced young kid fresh out of college who’s confused
about his sexual identity, his role with his parents, and his place in society,
as he’s a sweet kid that means well, but seems more comfortable as one of the
nebbish personalities from a Woody Allen movie, as his very identity wreaks
with neurotic sexual anxiety. When all
the other kids are walking around naked or in colorful hippie attire, this kid
is wearing polyester pants held up by a belt, with a plain polo shirt, all in
drab Sears catelogue colors. The blank,
continuously perplexed expression on his face matches that of Dustin Hoffman in THE GRADUATE (1967),
another smart kid who feels it hard to find his place in the world. The suddenness and unexpected arrival of
literally hundreds of thousands of peaceloving kids on their front lawn was at
the time and remains today simply mindboggling.
The closest the film gets to actually being at Woodstock is Elliot’s
MEDIUM COOL (1969) style trip to the concert, initially escorted on the back of
a police motorcycle as they swerve through hordes of clogged roads teeming with
flower children in what resembles a religious pilgrimmage to Mecca or some
other holy land. Without ever getting
near the stage itself, he is befriended by a couple in a VW van, Paul Dano and
Kelli Garner, who offer him his first acid experience, eventually retreating
inside their elaborately designed, kaleidescope colored interior while
listening to a tape of Love’s Arthur Lee sing “Red Telephone.” With mild subtlety, Lee accentuates colors as
mind images bend and change shape in an exquisite phantasmagorical rendition of
an acid hallucination, expressed with a great deal of tenderness and sympathy
for the characters.
While this “trip” gets to the
heart of the experience, a vision of peace and love, it never really connects with
anyone else, as by the end everyone goes their own way. This is as much of a social comment as Lee is
willing to make, that it was a brief moment in time, like youth itself, and in
a flash it was gone. There is no
suggestion that people were moved or altered by this experience, or even that
it matters anymore, but the fact that they’re making a movie about it forty
years later is evidence of its significance in the landscape of the 60’s,
alongside Vietnam, the Black Panthers and police brutality, the unification of
the war and Civil Rights demonstrations, and a series of heartbreaking
political assassinations that literally kept the nation in mourning for nearly
the entire decade. Woodstock was an eye
opening vision that became mythical almost instantly, a supposed happy end to
all the ills that dominated the news, or so we were lead to believe. Later we learned of all the electrical
problems onstage and that most of the musicians were so stoned very few offered
even decent stage performances, such as Ten Years After’s Alvin Lee in his
electrifying version of “Going Home.”
The Grateful Dead, acknowledged masters of playing even while on acid,
could barely play at all. So within this
experience is an underlying dysfunction which perhaps never gained expression
any better than the 50’s jazz musicians and Beat poets, many of whom grew
isolated and disillusioned. Lee never
touches on this dissent or disillusionment, but instead paints a portrait of
innocence and confusion, which feels much too simple, as anyone who lived through
the 60’s was hardly innocent. There are
a myriad of interesting secondary characters, from the Living Theater-style
theatrical group that can’t stop the urge to rip their clothes off while
onstage performing Chekhov, or Liev Schreiber as the wonderfully Almodóvarian
character Vilma, a gun carrying cross dresser who’s also a former marine, hired
on the spot for his own version of special forces security, who mostly keeps an
eye of Elliot’s father, Henry Goodman, who finally offers a poignant moment
alone with his son near the end when concert goers are literally “coming down”
from the hills and making their slow trek back home. Lee makes subtle use of the music with some
excellent choices, much of which was never played at Woodstock, but it
underlines what we see onscreen. Not
nearly as original or as inventive as Julie Taymor’s magical ACROSS THE
UNIVERSE (2007), but it still resonates in its low key, uniquely personal
way.
“Taking Woodstock" full soundtrack credits:
How Could We Know- Lori Mark
Stoned On The Range- Don Pugilisi
Wispy Paisley Skies- Fraternity of Men
No Love, No Nothin’- Judy Garland (can’t find a clip of this, but your
consolation prize for playing is this Marlene Dietrich version)
Maggie M’Gill- The Doors
No
Escape- The Seeds
Motherless Child- Sweetwater Group
One More Mile- The Paul Butterfield Blues Band
Do Wah Diddy Diddy- Hairy Pretzel (Manfred Mann version, come on,
doesn't everyone know this song?)
Wooden
Ships- Crosby, Stills & Nash
Flutes, Bongos & Limbos- El Monaco Bar Band
The Flute and Bongo Sizzle- El Monaco Bar Band
Hare Krishna Maha Mantra-
International Society for Krishna Consciousness Boston Devotees
Handsome Johnny- Richie
Havens
China Cat Sunflower- The
Grateful Dead
High Flyin’ Bird- Richie
Havens
Beautiful
People- Melanie
Coming into Los Angeles-
Arlo Guthrie
America- written by Paul Simon, performed by Ken Strange, Jeff Paris,
Bob Hackl
If
I Were a Carpenter- Tim Hardin
Red Telephone- Love Arthur Lee
Mind Flowers- Ultimate
Spinach
Sweet Sir Galahad- Joan
Baez
Raga Manj Khamaj- Ravi
Shankar
I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To
Die Rag- Country Joe and The Fish
I Shall Be Released-
written by Bob Dylan, performed by The Band
Going Up the Country-
Canned Heat
Try
(Just a Little Bit Harder)- Janis Joplin
Essen- written by Lee Tully and S. Demay
Can’t Find My Way Home-
Steve Winwood
Volunteers- Jefferson
Airplane
Freedom (2009)- Richie Havens (1969 version)
Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [2/6]
As Ang Lee
films go, Taking Woodstock is
relatively painless. When he isn’t reaching for lofty, awards-baiting heights (Brokeback Mountain) or being deathly,
soul-sappingly dull (The Ice Storm),
the infrequent pleasures in the director’s work tend to rise to the surface.
This adaptation of a memoir by Elliot Tiber, who was instrumental in organizing
the 1969 “peace and love” concert, is most rewarding when it abandons narrative
altogether. The centerpiece sequence, in which protagonist Elliot Teichberg
(Martin) takes an acid trip with two VW-van hippies (Paul Dano
and Kelli
Garner), is as beautifully constructed as the delirious murder scene in Lust, Caution and the windswept skip through
the desert in Hulk. It also
resonates with a profound sense of possibility and regret—one of the few times
when it doesn’t feel like Lee and his screenwriter, James
Schamus, are looking back at these events from a mock-enlightened
perspective.
The movie’s worst
passages condescendingly play on our modern-day awareness: A peripheral
character reveals that people are charging for bottled water; concert organizer
Michael Lang (Groff) makes a closing-line mention of this awesome Rolling
Stones concert that’s in the works. Such willy-nilly referencing negates the
film’s effectiveness as a period piece and calls attention to some of the more
questionable omissions. Seems it’s okay to have a sassy, gun-toting transsexual
(Schreiber) dispense self-actualizing bons mots to the closeted movie Elliot
while conveniently ignoring the real-world Elliot’s prominent role in the
Stonewall Riots. Lee and Schamus make history blandly palatable; in the
process, they rob the times and the people they’re portraying of their
complications.
Taking
Woodstock - Book Review by Bob Blaisdell - Forward Magazine - September/October
2007
When in 1969 the promoters of the Woodstock Festival in Upstate New York lost their preferred site for a concert, Elliot Tiber helped them relocate to Max Yasgur’s cow pasture. The festival totally changed his life. Born in 1935 to immigrant Jews, Tiber was an artist commuting between New York City and the depressed town of Bethel in the Catskills where his parents owned a rundown motel.
Much of the first half of this gleefully candid and often hilarious memoir chronicles Tiber’s unhappy ’50s boyhood and the discovery of his gay sexuality. Despite the cameo appearances of famous writers, artists, actors, and musicians—Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Richie Havens, and his impossible maddening mother, who never tires of relating how she escaped the Czar’s soldiers through the snows of Minsk—Tiber is clearly the star of the book.
When the narrative closes in on the event itself, the miracle of the promoters’ money and influence transforms (and twists) the lives of the Tiber family in unimaginable ways: “Woodstock was like some kind of UFO that had landed and released armies of the sexually liberated in the very uptight town of Bethel. I had been suffocating in the closet for fourteen years. Now, Mike Lang had thrown open the closet door and let me loose in a wild party of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.”
Taking Woodstock is the story of a middle-aged gay man challenging bigotry, intolerance and the rural peace of Upstate New York residents for the legal rights to sing, dance, and make love not war. Tiber’s success created a kind of bonfire on which the excesses of the era would burn for years, but the music and the lyrics sparked a universal brotherhood of youth that occasionally still flairs up today, often in unlikely places, like the Velvet Revolution in Prague. Meanwhile, the remote Catskill region economically and spiritually revived, and Tiber found himself at one with himself, his father, the world. His mother, bless her soul, holds out against the sentimentality: “‘I hope you don’t mention my name in your book,’ she said. ‘… I hated all those kids with their dirty sex and drugs—kids who should be home with their mothers. … I am ashamed of you and Woodstock.’”
Plume Noire review Moland Fengkov
Ang Lee has an impassioned and at times aggravating way of
moving from one genre to another. From Brokeback Mountain to The Hulk, along
with The Ice Storm, his films never cease to amaze-though it's difficult to
recognize his own style. With Taking Woodstock, he takes advantage of the
audience and takes them on a small acid trip, giving them a good puff of a
cigarette that makes them giggle, without descent or danger and without
consequence or after effects. Because in this film, the audience laughs a lot
and has a good time as if among friends, but once the psychotropic effects wear
off, it's over. Without being a Fear in Loathing in Woodstock, the film manages
all the same to revive the spirit of goodwill generated by an event which broke
through all musical barriers.
As for the famous festival, you won't see anything. As for the music the
mythical groups produced there-you won't hear anything either. Though the film
attempts to retranscribe the spirit of the time, the energetic freedom in which
a whole generation threw itself in a time of trouble marked by conflicts in
Israel and Vietnam, it above all tells the story of a family, under the angle
of the — almost screwball-like — comedy. That of Elliot, young New Yorker with
the look of delayed teenager, a failed artist who returns home to try to save
his parents' motel. Upon learning that a neighboring smalltown refused to
accomodate a large festival, he contacts the producers to propose they move the
event to his godforsaken place. In a few days, thousands of hippies invade the
region. Elliot takes advantage to emancipate himself from the yoke of his
parents through a journey in which he will finally be able to be himself.
Caricature is drawn to the extreme, notably in the case of the Jewish mother
(Imelda Staunton) whose dialogues sound like movie quotes, the characters,
inspired by true protagonists, deteriorate with equal goodwill : from the
Vietnam vet traumatized by the horrors of war to the débonnaire transvestite
(campily played by Liev Schreiber, completely at ease in his colorful dress and
under a blond wig), to the crazy theatre troupe. This gallery of portraits
functions as a psychedelic kaleidoscope of the various components of hippy
spirit.
Alternating traditional filming with formal quasi-documentary formal treatment,
and mixing in certain sequences with gimmicks from 70's films with the help of
split screens and moving shots, the mise en scene tries to be rock'n'roll and
dynamic. In the end, this psychadelic family comedy is smoked quietly with the
sound of a
Christian
Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review
[B-]
It was inevitable that a dramatic feature about Woodstock
would debut on the fabled festival's 40th anniversary but, coupled with all the
other tributes and DVD packages and interviews and look-backs and think pieces,
I'm tempted to call for a moratorium on the whole shebang. I am a proud, if
somewhat jaded, member of that tie-dyed generation but there's only so much
hippie nostalgia I can endure.
The drama in question, Ang Lee's "Taking Woodstock," is a bit like the festival itself – a happy mess. It was scripted by James Schamus and based on an eponymous memoir by Elliot Tiber subtitled "A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life." Elliot had been working as an interior designer in Greenwich Village, N.Y., but moved to the Catskills to bail out his parents' ramshackle motel. When a permit for what was originally billed as a small-scale neighboring music and arts festival is rescinded, Elliot helps strike a deal to keep the show alive at a 600-acre dairy farm down the road. (The location was actually Bethel, not Woodstock, but Woodstock sounds better.) The rest is history and herstory.
As played by Demetri Martin, not a very galvanizing actor, Elliot is both the center of the action and a witness to the maelstrom. His personal odyssey during the "3 Days of Peace & Music," as the festival was billed, is intended to symbolize a generational passage. Living as a semicloseted homosexual, the strait-laced Elliot locates a companionable vibe in Woodstock. He liberates himself, along with 500,000 other shaggy attendees. Although Lee reveals little of the festivities and concerts, except from faraway, he provides a marvelous extended sequence in which Elliot, hitching a ride on a policeman's motorcycle, is ushered into the scene. The hippie (or would-be) hippie procession is like a fantasia. In only a few minutes we are treated to an inexhaustible gallery of painted faces and fads.
This is perhaps the most authentic scene in a movie that otherwise, despite its careful, almost fetishistic attention to the look and feel of the experience, seems counterfeit. It's inevitable that the hippie movement now seems as fixed in time as the Paleozoic Era, but Lee encourages his actors to behave as if they were in a roadshow production of "Hair." In the case of Imelda Staunton, who plays Elliot's horribly overbearing Russian-Jewish immigrant mother, she's such a stock caricature that the bottom drops out of the movie every time she waddles into view, and, as Elliot's father, Henry Goodman is only slightly less stock.
The film comes across as rather dim-witted because Lee's take on Woodstock is almost entirely self-contained and un-ironic. (An exception: One of Woodstock's producers, played by Jonathan Groff, alludes to an upcoming bliss-out at Altamont featuring the Rolling Stones.) I'm not arguing that Lee should have front-loaded his film with posthippie hindsight. But it's one thing to present Woodstock as if nothing came after it, quite another to dramatize it as simply, well, "3 Days of Peace & Music."
Even apart from its soundtrack, the Michael Wadleigh documentary "Woodstock" was such a comprehensive take on the event that Lee's movie was bound to suffer by comparison. But the documentary points up what is flagrantly wrongheaded about "Taking Woodstock," where the machinations of the producers and promoters lack any real bite or guile; the cavorters descending on the scene are without exception sweet-souled; and the acid trips, including Elliot's, are fun-house frolics. The only really bad guys are the Mafia soldiers trying to muscle in on the scene, and they are driven off as if they were country bumpkins. (Heading up security is a burly, golden-tressed ex-Marine transvestite played by Liev Schrieber in what can best be described as a career stretch.)
Lee may want to portray Woodstock as a shining moment in time, but, in doing so, he barely gives lip service to what was roiling the country. Emile Hirsch, playing a shellshocked Vietnam vet, seems like just another giddily stoned soul mate. Lee works in occasional documentary footage of the Vietnam War, or the Apollo moonwalk, but these clips seem like bulletins from Neverland.
Lee has always had an affinity for innocence and an abiding affection for outcasts, and both traits serve him well in "Taking Woodstock" – but only up to a point. Beyond that point, where sanctification meets reality, the film floats up, up, and away. It's as if he decided to photoshop the Age of Aquarius and retain only the airhead naiveté.
DVD Talk - Theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Slant Magazine review [2/4] Ryan Stewart
filmcritic.com (Jason McKiernan) review [2.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [2/5]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Village Voice (Melissa Anderson) review
Moving Pictures magazine [Ron Holloway] at Cannes
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B-]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Black Sheep Reviews by Joseph Belanger
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
No Sense or Sensibility: Lee’s “Woodstock” Undercooked Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 15, 2009
James Rocchi Redblog at Cannes, while James Rocchi also interviews Lee and others from AMC Blog, May 17, 2009
Screen International review Allan Hunter at Cannes
Jeffrey Wells Hollywood Elsewhere at Cannes
Ang Lee's Woodstock Aberration Mary and Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 2009
Howard Feinstein at Cannes from Filmmaker magazine, May 17, 2009
Cannes '09: Day Three Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 15, 2009
Cannes '09 Day 3: Up with people Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe blog, May 15, 2009
Cannes 2009 Review: Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock Alex Billingham at Cannes from First Showing, May 15, 2009
‘Taking Woodstock’ rocks Charles Ealy at Cannes from 360 Austin Movie Blog, May 15, 2009
Alison Willmore at Cannes from the IFC Independent Eye, May 15, 2009
Tim Hayes Critics Notebook at Cannes
Cannes. "Taking Woodstock" David Hudson at Cannes from IFC Blog, May 15, 2009
Hollywood Reporter Gregg Kilday interviews Lee, May 14, 2009
Ang Lee: “I hate to be characterized” Eugene Hernandez at Cannes from indiWIRE, May 16, 2009
FilmInFocus Editor's Blog | Demetri Martin on becoming Elliot ... Nick Dawson and Todd Gilchrist interview Elliot Tiber, August 27, 2009
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
Film Review: Taking Woodstock Kirk Honeycutt at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 16, 2009
Todd McCarthy at Cannes from Variety, May 16, 2009
Time Out Online (Geoff Andrew) review [4/6] at Cannes
Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [2/6]
The Independent (Kaleem Aftab) review [3/5] First Night: Taking Woodstock, from The Independent, May 16, 2009
The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Taking Woodstock at Cannes 2009, review, by Sukhdev Sandhu, May 17, 2009
Sean O'Hagan The year of living dangerously, essay an Woodstock and Altamont from The Observer, May 17, 2009
Peter Bradshaw Hippies, bullies and mobsters, from The Guardian, May 18, 2009
Wendy Ide Taking Woodstock at the Cannes Film Festival, from The London Times Online, May 18, 2009
The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [2/4]
The Boston Phoenix (Chris Faraone) review
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris, August 28, 2009
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Woodstock. Roger Ebert’s review of the 1970 documentary, May 22, 2005
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4] August 26, 2009
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review August 26, 2009
Lens: Woodstock Memories James Estrin from The New York Times, July 31, 2009
Woodstock: A Moment of Muddy Grace Jon Pareles from The New York Times, August 5, 2009, also including: More Photos >
Turn On, Tune In, Turn Back the Clock Karen Schoemer from The New York Times, August 20, 2009
Woodstock Festival - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Woodstock Festivals and All Live Music. Share and Discover ...
Woodstock 1969 | Woodstock.com the Official Woodstock Site
Woodstock 1969 Lineup and Songlist
"Woodstock: A New Nation", Book excerpt from "Aquarius Rising" by Robert Santelli
1969 Woodstock Festival & Concert
Tired Rock Fans Begin Exodus Bernard L. Collier from The New York Times, August 18, 1969
1969 Woodstock Festival & Concert - How Woodstock Happened Part 1 by Elliot Tiber, reprinted from The Times-Herald Record, Woodstock Commemorative Edition, 1994
"How Woodstock Happened... Part 2, Part 2 by Elliot Tiber, reprinted from The Times-Herald Record, Woodstock Commemorative Edition, 1994
Statement on the Historical and Cultural Significance of the 1969 Woodstock Festival Site September 25, 2001
Woodstock in 1969 : Rolling Stone June 24, 2004
Pot, Skinny-Dipping, and Freedom Rock: Woodstock and the Year of the Outdoor Music Festival (Part 1) (Feature) Part 1, Rob Kirkpatrick, excerpt from his recent book, 1969: The Year Everything Changed, at Pop Matters, August 3, 2009
Excerpt from “Pot, Skinny-Dipping, and Freedom Rock: Woodstock and the Year of the Outdoor Music Festival (P.2)” by Rob Kirkpatrick Part 2, Pop Matters, August 5, 2009
"Sex, Drugs, Rock 'N Roll in Redneck Country" Ethel Grodzins Romm from The Huffington Post, August 15, 2009
The Woodstock Consensus Rex Weiner from The Huffington Post, September 5, 2009
Woodstock (1970) Michael Wadleigh film
Woodstock photos:woodstock 69 photos:Woodstock Festival photos ...
Woodstock: previously unseen images | Music | guardian.co.uk
Taking Woodstock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elliot Tiber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1969 Woodstock Festival & Concert...Woodstock Hero
LIFE OF PI – 3D B- 80
USA (127 mi) 2012
Much like Cloud Atlas (2012), this is another example of Hollywood excess, as these guys love to throw their money around, this time somewhere in the neighborhood of $70 million dollars, which is considered a bargain for a hi-tech, special effects film. To give you an example of the unstable nature of the business, not the least of which is financial, initially the production team targeted director M. Night Shyamalan in 2003, who shares Indian roots with the film, but he chose another film, LADY IN THE WATER (2006), leading to the choice in 2005 of Alfonso Cuarón who also chose another project, CHILDREN OF MEN (2006), then later in 2005 the pick was Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who began writing and adapting the screenplay, and even started shooting in India before abandoning the project. So Ang Lee, hired shortly afterwards, is actually the 4th director chosen to make this film. In other major changes, Tobey Maguire was originally hired to play the reporter, but Ang Lee chose not to use a recognizable face and deleted all his scenes, reshooting with a different actor. Such is the nature of show business. The film is largely a child’s fantasy adventure tale written for the screen by David Magee, the screenwriter of FINDING NEVERLAND (2004), an overly dour look at J.M. Barrie, the writer of Peter Pan, this time adapting the 2001 Booker Prize-winning bestselling novel by Yann Martel, an interesting literary prize awarded for the best full-length work of fiction from the former British Commonwealth, in this case India. Shot in 3D, and while many are raving about its use here, including Roger Ebert Ang Lee: Of water and Pi - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times calling it “the best use of 3D I've ever seen,” there are really only a few scenes where the use is significant, with one being the opening credit sequence, which is a montage of various animals joyously frolicking in the lush foliage of an Indian zoo, which has a playful ease about it, and is certainly a nice way to introduce animals living in harmony with both people and the natural world around them. A good hour goes by after that where the 3D use is sporadic and not altogether significant.
Set in 3 different time periods, beginning in the present, Irrfan Khan as a middle-aged man named Pi relates a personal story to a visiting journalist, Rafe Spall, which becomes the novel the film is based upon, explaining not only where he got his name, but also how he came to have faith in God. Except for the finale, and other brief moments, the story is told entirely in flashback, one period at 12 and another at 16. The youngest addresses Pi’s family, as his father owns and operates a zoo, but more significantly explores his spiritual interest in pursuing Hinduism, Islam, and Catholicism, eventually becoming a Hindu Catholic, which may as well be part of the Bahai faith, as he tends to accept a universality of religions. While this spiritual initiation is supposed to come full circle by the end of the film, that’s not really how it plays out, as instead this is seen almost exclusively as a fantasy adventure story, where the religious affiliation is negated by the existentialist aspect of the journey. For those inclined to see proof of God in the storytelling, as Pi apparently does, this is certainly not forced upon the viewer, as the overall drama is adventure based. When the adventure is over, the story peters out. Pi’s family decides to move to Canada, bringing with them all the zoo animals which they intend to sell, but they are shipwrecked en route and Pi is separated from his family, the only eventual human survivor of the accident. Inexplicably, Pi escapes with a zebra, an oranguatang, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger on a rescue raft, but by the end of the journey, it’s only a young boy and a tiger that survive. Along the way, they encounter many adventures, most of which includes addressing the overriding fear of one another, as Pi literally has to construct an alternate life raft tied to the main raft that separates him from co-existing with a near starving carnivore. The mad and ferocious rush of the shipwrecking storm eventually subsides to a tranquil calm, where the monotony of living through days after days on end slows the pace to a crawl, and each to their separate corners, so to speak.
Some of the film’s most beautiful and transcendent moments occur during this peaceful interim, where the ocean turns translucent turquoise and the mind’e eye sees the entire cosmos reflected within, not only giant whales and exotic fish glowing in the dark, but also the faces of his family, the planets and the galaxy, where at least for one spectacular moment, 3D perfectly captures a poetic recreation of Buddhist enlightenment, a realization of nirvana. While this is a moment when starvation alters the perception of reality, blurring the realms of existence, these are easily the most abstractly unique and unforgettable images of the film. But mostly this is a Biblical Job endurance test for both human and animal alike, perhaps one and the same, where by the time the near-death experience envelops them, they are both reduced to skin and bones, the beast inside finally tamed, the savage fierceness of each literally sapped out of them, where all that’s left is praying for a miracle. Ang Lee has always been a visually complex filmmaker, known for having a unique, chameleon-like quality of artistic metamorphosis, as the diversity and range of his work is literally stunning, and while he may have been searching for a novel use of 3D as a new cinematic language (as they all claim), where the experience of the film is as transforming as the book, unfortunately, except for a few priceless moments, much of this experience is a bit of a slow slog, especially the over-emphasis on verbal narration that can grow endless, actually undermining any visual effect, growing most tedious when the overly frustrated and crazed character starts calling out God, acting defiantly as if he’s ready to die. While he may have been the sole human survivor, much of this is due to his reckless behavior at the time of the shipwreck, as he was already separated from the others by stupidly roaming the outer shipdecks in the middle of a storm, lucky he wasn’t blown away or washed overboard. Despite creating an impressive CGI tiger, the Hollywood glossed, computer generated, artificial look of the screen tends to monopolize the viewer experience after awhile, where the ocean bears no resemblance to an ocean, and where a lack of dramatic engagement defines this adventure story, as it’s the human element that never rises above the material, especially a weak finale that undercuts everything that happened before.
Consistently dazzling, even when his bold vision falters in
execution, Ang Lee (The Ice Storm, Hulk) is the perfect director
to translate Yann Martel's hugely popular parable into the language of cinema.
As told to Martel's unnamed on-screen avatar (Rafe Spall), Pi Patel's
astounding story of survival benefits from Lee's heavy stylistic hand. If
you're not familiar with the source material, rest assured, there is a reason
very specific to the narrative to justify all the visual flights of fancy.
At its core, Life of Pi is a tale about the purpose of storytelling and
the ambitious Taiwanese director relishes the opportunity to bath the entire
production in ornate symbolism. From the humble beginnings of the multitheistic
son of a zookeeper's story, which teems with beautifully composed 3D shots of
exotic creatures, to the stunning, bombastic chaos of the storm that sinks the
ship taking Pi, his family and their animals from India to Canada, through the
young man's epic journey across the ocean in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger,
Lee uses the myth-like tale of finding your inner animal to face a beast to
test the boundaries of contemporary filmmaking.
Whether you choose to take every word of Pi's story literally or interpret it
as deeply symbolical, it's a fantastic scenario, so that's the way it's filmed.
Both Suraj Sharma and Irrfan Khan give assured performances as the younger and
older versions of our plucky protagonist, but the special effects and art
design are sure to get the most notice from audiences and Oscar voters alike.
It's barely within the realm of comprehension that Richard Parker (the tiger)
isn't a flesh and blood, giant killer cat when he's in that tiny lifeboat. On
the opposite end of the photorealistic CGI used to create Sharma's primary
co-star, Lee paints nearly every scene with a surreal dreamlike grandeur and
finds the middle ground with a lush application of 3D that accentuates the
visceral imagery, but falls short of noticeably engaging with the subtext
screaming from every other pore of the film.
It's a beautifully made movie and sure to be crowd-pleasing, but as a
remarkably faithful adaptation, the story's lasting impact will depend on your
receptiveness to its guarded positivism.
Life Of Pi | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
A central plot point in Life Of Pi—the film adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestselling book—centers on the philosophical question of whether animals have souls. The title character, a self-possessed Indian boy, believes they do, and that people can tell by looking deep into their eyes. His zookeeper father feels differently; in his opinion, any depth in an animal’s eyes is just human emotion reflected back at the viewer. This conundrum—essentially, the question of whether to interpret the world spiritually or cynically—becomes the backbone of the plot. But it also works into a choice that the characters present directly to the viewers, about whether they want to take that plot literally or metaphorically, whether to focus on the film’s body, or accept its soul.
The choice is harder than it was in Martel’s book, because here, the body is more compelling by far. Pi grows up in his father’s zoo, until his father decides to sell the animals and move his family abroad. When their transport ship sinks, Pi (played as a teenager by Suraj Sharma) ends up adrift at sea on a lifeboat populated by an assortment of animals, including a full-grown Bengal tiger. Director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Brokeback Mountain) executes all this with dizzying, overwhelming verve: The shipwreck in particular is a dazzling sequence, particularly traumatic in 3-D, and Lee stylizes a great deal of the more mundane storytelling as well. As with so much about Pi, it’s strikingly beautiful, but consciously artificial.
And so is the meat of the story, which has Sharma repeatedly, desperately trying to come to terms with his lifeboat companion in some way that doesn’t kill either of them. For much of the film, the metaphors at work are largely submerged in the immediacy of Sharma’s breathless, intense fight for survival, spaced out by moments of overwhelming visual richness provided by the changing environment around him. But the larger messages about spirituality often seem forced, and it’s more compelling to focus on Lee’s visceral cinematic experience than on the larger, fuzzier messages Martel’s story conveys about humanity’s connection with God. The tiger’s soul might make for a deeper, more compelling bit of fiction, but Lee renders its body so lavishly and lovingly that it’s hard to get past that surface.
The House Next Door [Gerard Raymond]
Ang Lee's latest, Life of Pi, signals its visual strengths from its very first frame. Using state-of-art 3D technology, the credit sequence is a delightful montage of the flora and fauna surrounding Piscine "Pi" Patel, the young Indian hero of the story, which is based on the prize-winning novel by Yann Martel. The setting is Pondicherry, a former French colony in South India, where Pi's father manages a zoo in the city's botanical garden. Even when you feel sometimes that the visuals are a little too self-consciously framed, Life of Pi has a memorable shimmering beauty. However, when it comes to the framing narrative, in which the adult Pi (Hindi movie star Irfan Khan) relates his incredible story to the stand-in for Martel, the movie stumbles. But for the most part the sheer sweep of the spectacle carries the day.
The young Pi's idyllic life in the zoo is rudely disrupted when his father decides to emigrate. The family, with all their zoo animals in tow, are bound for Canada when a storm hits and the ship is wrecked. Pi is the only human survivor—along with a zebra, an ape, a hyena, and a magnificent Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Eventually it's just Pi and the tiger out at sea in a lifeboat. Lee's command of the visuals and the technology help meet the inherent challenge of adapting Martel's novel, in which the protagonist spends most of this tale of survival stuck in the middle of the ocean. Credit goes to newcomer 17-year-old Suraj Sharma for holding his own alongside the splendid, digitally created Richard Parker, and the dazzling scenic effects. While not much actually happens during Pi's nearly 19-month ordeal at sea, the tense relationship between boy and beast is vividly portrayed. As Pi narrates, "You can't tell daydreams from reality," we're treated to an array of dazzling visuals: schools of flying fish, the ravages of a stormy sea, a mysterious and deadly floating island.
The tale, we're told at the start of the movie, is going to be "a story that will make you believe in God." Whether this is true or not will be the viewer's choice. The spiritual inspiration to be drawn from Martel's tale, which is set up as a test of faith, is rather inelegantly delivered to the audience in the concluding portion of the movie which follows the novel much too literally. It would have been nice if Lee and scriptwriter David Magee had found a more imaginative and cinematic way to end their movie. Faithful to the book’s epilogue, Lee has Pi relate the alternate explanation for the engrossing yarn we have just witnessed in a static scene, delivered from a hospital bed. It’s a chunk of exposition and comes with the moral of fable spelled out. After nearly two hours of visual creativity it’s a wordy let down.
Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]
Water is the key element in Ang Lee's Life of Pi, employed by the director to flaunt a grand aesthetic and express grand existential themes. Gloriously rendered, the film best engages the 3D format when stepping into liquid, whether observing a swimmer from below or surging through an astonishing nighttime typhoon. In visualizing this spiritual survival story, which novelist Yann Martel cooked up to great acclaim in 2001, Lee often depicts the lost-at-sea protagonist, Pi (newcomer Suraj Sharma), as a mere minnow in an unforgiving eternity of water, the lifeboat he shares with a Bengal tiger a vessel of insignificance. Following the awesome foundering of an animal-filled freighter, whose submerged decks and flooding hull are scanned as if from the bow of a rollercoaster, Lee's camera (entrusted to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button DP Claudio Miranda) hangs back to see Pi suspended underwater, watching helplessly as the massive ship, which also held his family, sinks before him. The frightening enormity of the image is later matched by the cool serenity of calm waters, which, through Lee's lens, meet the sky to create a seamless, dreamlike canvas, where Pi's dinghy floats like it's stranded in picturesque oblivion. There's a glut of big ideas beneath Life of Pi's surface, namely one's relationship with God, but its strongest impression, communicated in pure terms with cutting-edge means, involves the humbling vastness of life, a universal notion that, here, transcends questions of belief.
Played with poise and poignancy by Irrfan Khan, Pi is first introduced as a middle-aged man, who, naturally, tells his epic story to an eager listener. In an odd twist of adaptation, his audience is Martel himself (Rafe Spall), arriving at Pi's door at the urging of one of the survivor's relatives, and whose inquiries prompt the film's inevitable flashbacks. So begins a first act that is by turns handsome, fanciful, curious, and agonizing, charting the seeds of young Pi's spiritual growth in 1977 Pondicherry, India while shoddily leapfrogging to and from that horrid framing device (Khan provides excessive, if eloquent, narration).
After a cute bit about the origins of his name helps to establish his personality traits (like his comfort around water and his abilities with mathematics and people-pleasing), Pi is seen diving into an obsession with religion, taking an all-inclusive approach by embracing Christianity, Islam, and his family's Hinduism. At his home, which sits amid a stunning zoo his father (Adil Hussain) founded as a business, Pi makes declarations like wanting to be baptized, his family's reactions half-supporting and half-deriding his newfound pastime. "Believing in everything is the same as believing in nothing," says Pi's father, offering warm wisdom but practically begging the movie to prove him wrong. Though delectably shot in a manner that feels both native and otherworldly, like it's set in an Oz as envisioned by Mira Nair, the film's long opening is remarkably twee and unambitious, playing like a family flick that might be called My First Deity Tour. Its critters and colors wow the eyes, but its theological groundwork, which features three actors playing Pi as he grows into his faith(s), is far more flat than solid.
And then the rains come. Pi may not receive the ritualistic baptism he desires, but he and the film get a doozy of a cleansing during Lee's virtuosically staged shipwreck, the unmistakable turning point for Life of Pi's merit and watchability. Like Noah robbed of his ark, Pi becomes the sole survivor of the inclement incident at sea, which cuts short his family's plans to move the entire zoo to Canada. He's eventually left in his small boat with a few four-legged stowaways: an injured zebra, an orangutan, a nasty hyena, and the tiger, Richard Parker, whose offbeat name hardly reflects the seriousness of his ferocity. Before long, after the hyena gets hungry and then becomes a meal itself, only Pi and Richard remain, forced to maintain a king-of-the-mountain-style duel over who dominates their small, shared home (Pi fashions his own floating sidecar with the lifeboat's generous wealth of supplies, but continuously climbs back aboard, striving to establish an alpha-creature stance).
The second act shifts the film from a lazy and comfy litany of introductions to a riveting fantasia of pure cinema, wherein Lee paints an oft-wordless picture of nature's harshness and grace, the perfect arena for Pi to have a Christ-like coming of age. In visual terms, what Lee simply does with marine life is staggering, pinning Pi and Richard in the path of a massive, migrating school of fish, and lighting up the evening sea with scads of bioluminescent jellyfish, whose peace is interrupted by the surface leap of a colossal blue whale. There's also a kaleidoscopic, Kubrickian dream sequence, with fauna and cosmos morphing into maternal visions. So far, no other 2012 film has so strongly outweighed its shortcomings with breathtaking spectacle, and as for Richard himself, the tiger may just be the most convincing CG animal ever animated for movie screens.
Martel's book has famously resonated with those at their own existential crossroads, as Richard can serve as a stand-in for any malady one must live with. This facet of the story comes across beautifully on screen, a manifestation of a young man's larger struggle to fight his own demons, and peacefully maintain his place in a treacherous, surrounding world where sharks roam. He's ultimately stripped of all belongings, and his and Richard's enchanted respite, a vine-laden, meerkat-filled island, proves a fatal temptation, as crutches in the race of life can so often be. With inherently spiritual components, Pi's journey strikes a humanistic chord, and just as Pi doesn't answer to a single god, it invites folks of all types to walk away with it as their own parable.
It isn't until act three that things become especially religious, as the elder Pi recounts an alternate story his younger self told investigators concerned with the sunken ship. The possible revelations of the new tale may not be shocking, but they do introduce some hefty questions about preceding events and the nature of religious fables, only to be hastily explained away so the film can rush to the credits. Such is a prime example of something that surely registered better in the book, its thin treatment confirming that writer David Magee was more ready to script action than squeeze in smart chatter about God. The result is an extraordinary quest of survival hampered by condescendingly tacked-on bookends. The film's own saving grace is its feast of magnificent imagery, which, in Lee's hands, rights wrongs by being something close to holy.
David
Edelstein on 'Life of Pi' -- New York Magazine Movie Review
Life
of Pi, directed by Ang Lee, reviewed. - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens
'Life of Pi' Review — Ang Lee - Movieline Alison Willmore
Review: Ang Lee's ambitious 'Life Of Pi' dazzles and ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
(A Nutshell) Review [Stefan S]
'Life of Pi': You Are Where - Entertainment - The Atlantic Wire Richard Lawson
Life Of Pi (2012) Movie Review from Eye for Film Anne-Katrin Titze
Life of Pi - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Ang Lee's Life of Pi: The Next Avatar - Entertainment - Time Richard Corliss
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
DVDizzy.com Luke Bonanno
Life Of Pi Review: Don't Fill Up On Turkey, Save Room For ... - Pajiba Joanna Robinson
Life of Pi : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jeff Nelson
A Visionary Director's Sumptuous 'Pi' - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Boxoffice Magazine [Vadim Rizov]
BeyondHollywood.com [Brent McKnight]
Cinema Confessions [Gautam Anand]
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
MonstersandCritics [Ron Wilkinson]
Life of Pi (2012) Movie Review | Film School Rejects Jack Giroux
Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]
Sound On Sight Kenneth Broadway
Combustible Celluloid Review - Life of Pi (2012), Ang Lee, Irrfan ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Life of Pi Review - CinemaBlend.com Kristy Puchko
The Reel Critic.com [Lisa Minzey]
thesubstream.com [Mike Cameron]
Movie Cynics [The Vocabulariast]
Georgia Straight [Patty Jones]
David Denby: Life of Pi - The New Yorker (capsule review)
Life Of Pi | Film | Spoiler Space | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
'Life of Pi' rated No. 3 film of 2012 by Time magazine
Ang Lee: Of water and Pi - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times Ebert interviews the director, November 17, 2012
The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
The triumph of Life of Pi - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen
Critic Review for Life of Pi on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday
'Life of Pi' review: Being wowed by special effects ... - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Examiner.com
[Chris Sawin] Houston Examiner
Oregon Herald
[Oktay Ege Kozak]
Examiner.com [Jana J. Monji] Los Angeles Examiner, also seen here: Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
Review: 'Life of Pi' is a masterpiece by Ang Lee - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey
Life of Pi :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews
The New York Times [A.O. Scott] also seen here: Life of Pi - Movies - The New York Times
Creating a Tiger for 'Life of Pi' - NYTimes.com - The New York Times
BILLY
LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK C 74
USA Great Britain China (113 mi) 2016 Official Facebook
A
colossal failure of a movie, one that falls off the rails and then only
continues to get worse, yet in spite of the jumbled mess of this rather
ambitious series of mixed messages, most all of which go awry, there is a hint
of something intriguing underneath all of this, even if filmmaker Ang Lee
himself, director of such masterful works as Sense
and Sensibility (1995) and Brokeback
Mountain (2005), fails to find it. While the
Taiwanese filmmaker has always been an outsider looking in at American culture,
the voice underneath the film actually belongs to novelist Ben Fountain, whose
2012 novel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in
2013, is a Kurt Vonnegut
style comic satire on American military adventurism in 2004, set on a single
day just when the U.S. is losing confidence in the Iraq war. On Thanksgiving Day, at the home of the
Dallas Cowboy football team in Texas Stadium, a young platoon of eight war Iraq
war heroes from Bravo Squad are returned temporarily from their combat zone
after an intense firefight is captured on a video that goes viral, sent on a
well-publicized victory tour in an 8-day swing back home, given the celebrity
treatment, culminating with an invite to the football festivities to honor and
celebrate their service in a halftime spectacle. Contrasting the realities of the war with America's
perceptions back home, the film refreshingly paints a completely different
mindset in the minds of the battle-hardened soldiers than that of civilians,
who are baffled throughout and continue to have this wide-eyed mythological
view of heroism traced back to John Wayne in cowboy movies. While the story itself is remarkable for its
near surreal depiction of war as an intetense, hyper-reality whose traumatized
imprint is left on soldiers and their families, where its depiction of bravery
in action is balanced by the modest and humble views of the combatants, who are
still just 19-year old economically deprived kids who are often driven to join
the armed forces based on a paucity of opportunities in their own lives, where
they are seen as young guys who are desperate enough to try just about
anything. Told through flashbacks in a
psychologically existential manner, almost exclusively through the perspective
of Specialist Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn), whose individual thoughts often seem to
freeze on the frame, yet the uneven filmmaking techniques are the film’s real
undoing, never really capturing the spirit of the bond between the Bravo unit,
who have their own unique humor, or the feeling of just how distanced and
disaffected they are from civilian life, creating instead an odd mix of
plodding, awkward moments that are only accentuated onscreen, creating an
uneven tone of humor and pathos, authenticity and surrealism, dream and
reality, becoming one of the more uncomfortable viewing experiences of the
year.
Perhaps the biggest problem is the director’s decision to use a super high 4K resolution (twice the pixels as an ordinary film), actually shooting the film in high-tech 3D, relying upon two cameras running at five times the normal speed, 120 frames per second instead of the normal 24, creating unprecedented clarity of image, even when seen in typical 2K digital projections, yet instead of heightening the film’s reality it only serves to accentuate the wildly exaggerated artificiality on display. It’s impossible to watch this film without being aware every second that the visual style feels forced, becoming more of a distraction where viewers are treated to an artificially constructed alternate reality. With that in mind, the dream sequences, flashbacks, characters lost in thought or caught up in a spiritual moment, feel eerily undermined mechanically, as if the technique itself is draining the life force out of the film, where the sterile, impersonal world of a football stadium could just as easily be Las Vegas or an ocean cruise, where it simply feels like another world outside our own. Thrust in the middle of this circus-like, Colosseum atmosphere, Billy seems to resemble Billy Pilgrim’s alienated, mind-wandering journey from Kurt Vonnegut’s epic 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, using flashbacks instead of time traveling, where the effect is the same, as he struggles to come to grips with the huge disconnect between the realities of war at home and abroad. Coming from a small town in Texas, we get a glimpse of Billy’s family life, where his physically disfigured sister Kathryn (Kristen Stewart) fiercely opposes the war and actively works to help Billy from being redeployed back to Iraq immediately following the game. Since he nearly pulverized the jerk that dumped her after a car accident left her with multiple scars, he joined the military as a way of atoning for his past sins. Eerily undermining the victory party, but easily overlooked by citizens at home, is the death of Shroom (Vin Diesel), the philosophical platoon sergeant whose life Billy tried to save, awarded the Silver Star for his heroic efforts, but nonetheless missing from all the hollow celebratory festivities that were meant to inspire support for the war effort, where Billy’s left to consider the ultimate irony, “It is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life.” And therein lies the problem with the film, as it attempts to lambaste the shallowness of the “Victory Tour” while at the same time honor the troops, whose thankless, life-threatening work rarely gets the support it deserves. In a film that tries to have it both ways, it fails instead of succeeds, becoming an ugly spectacle where the clarity of image only accentuates how embarrassingly off-the-mark this film really is.
Attempting to hold his men together is Sergeant David Dime, Garrett Hedlund, a straight, non-nonsense kind of Bravo Company leader in the Ollie North mold, who barks out instructions that instantly bring the men into formation in seemingly chaotic moments, like when the ferocity of the fireworks display takes the men back to their battleground stations, wreaking havoc with their mental psyches, reliving the traumas of war while supposedly standing at attention during a jingoistic half-time show behind Beyoncé fronting Destiny’s Child and a host of scantily-clad dancers, yet at the same time the guy has a “Fuck you” attitude with phoniness and insincerity of any kind. Unfortunately, in a football stadium, the place is crawling with American citizens that appear to be well-wishers and supporters who have seen nothing of war and haven’t a clue what a soldier’s life is really about, such as a brief appearance from Tim Blake Nelson as a crude Texas oilman who associates his creed of “drill baby drill” as a sign of patriotism, as if getting rich and fighting in a foreign country are part of the same mindset, yet one is an oil-rich fat cat while the others come from economically disadvantaged communities, where the hypocrisy is so blatant that Sgt. Dime’s dismissive response to the man simply blows his mind, as he’s not in lockstep with the same exaggerated patriotic mentality on display. The film is not so much about Iraq as it is a sharp critique of the phony patriotism and corporate greed in George W. Bush’s Texas. None personify that more than Norm Oglesby (Steve Martin) as Jerry Jones, the self-made, oil-rich, billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, who is willing to put these men in motion pictures to cement their heroic legacy, but after promising six figures each, lowballs what he’s willing to pay them, where the defiant soldiers simply walk away from the deal. “Your story,” he pompously tells Billy, “no longer belongs to you. It’s America’s story now.” While the man may be a wheeler-dealer, he’s also a first-class cheapskate. Yet just like Bush, Cheney, and Rove, wealthy men of status who went to law school to obtain a student deferment in order to avoid serving in Vietnam, what do they know about a grunt who’s barely making $14,800 a year? “Vietnam, excuse me? Why would I wanna go get my ass shot off in some stinking rice paddy just so Nixon can have his four more years? Screw that.” Billy starts wondering, “Maybe the game is just an ad for the ads.” Out of this clouded hallucination comes a typical soldier’s dream, described in the book as “the sort of delusion a desperate soldier would dream up,” which comes in the form of Faison Zorn (Makenzie Leigh), one of the attractive Dallas Cheerleaders that makes flirtatious eye contact with Billy before making out behind the curtains. She heaps effusive praise in Billy’s direction along with kisses, as if maybe she’s finally one of the few who’s capable of understanding him, yet she only sees him in a patriotic light, as a soldier doing his duty, not as a regular guy who’s contemplating not returning to combat. That kind of guy she would drop in a second, as he’s not her idea of the American Dream. As it turns out, the Bravo squad is not even their actual name, but a name given to them by a Fox News team that was embedded with them during the war, a signature designed to beef them up and sound more patriotic. Somehow, whatever the intended message, it all gets lost in the jumbled mish mosh of American spectacle, missing the expertise of someone like Robert Altman, for instance, a director whose genius was creating order out of chaos in sprawling films like Brewster McCloud (1970), shot in the Houston Astrodome, but also MASH (1970) and Nashville (1975).
Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Film Society of Lincoln Center
Ang Lee’s stunning adaptation of Ben Fountain’s novel is the story of an Iraq war hero (newcomer Joe Alwyn) who comes home with his fellow members of Bravo Company for a victory tour. This culminates in a halftime show at a Thanksgiving Day football game—a high-intensity media extravaganza summoning memories of the trauma of losing his beloved sergeant in a firefight. Lee’s brave, heartbreaking film goes right to the heart of a great division that haunts this country: between the ideal image of things as they should be and the ongoing reality of things as they are. Billy Lynn is also a giant step forward in the art of cinema, made with a cinematographic process years ahead of its time. With a brilliant supporting cast, including Kristen Stewart, Chris Tucker, and Garrett Hedlund, with Vin Diesel and Steve Martin.
The Chicago Reader: Andrea Gronvall
Ang Lee (Life of Pi) directed this adaptation of Ben Fountain's acclaimed satirical novel, about a bewildered teen soldier on leave from the Iraq war. The young man's valor in a firefight have made him a media hero, so now everyone wants a piece of him—from the Bush administration selling the war to TV sports broadcasters chasing Nielsen numbers to a cheerleader seducing him in order to promote her homespun Christian values. With that setup, screenwriter Jean-Christophe Castelli should have been able to come up with some sharper barbs, which might have mitigated the uneven tone, inelegant editing, and scattered narrative. British newcomer Joe Alwyn stars as the emotionally scarred private, alongside Kristen Stewart, Vin Diesel, Garrett Hedlund as a sergeant with some great lines about Americans' misunderstanding of the troops, and Steve Martin as a smooth football magnate whose patriotism ends at his bottom line.
The New Yorker: Richard Brody November 04, 2016
Ang Lee’s new film is as much about the techniques he uses as it is about the story he tells. On Thanksgiving, 2004, Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn), a young Texan hero of the Iraq War, is fêted along with his platoon at the Dallas Cowboys’ football game. At the stadium, Billy and a cheerleader named Faison (Makenzie Leigh) fall in love at first sight, making his impending redeployment to Iraq all the more wrenching. Meanwhile, Billy’s sister Kathryn (Kristen Stewart), who opposes the war, exhorts Billy to find a way out of the service. The tale is a flat and tame dilution of “American Sniper,” about the crime of squandering martial virtue in dubious battle. Though Lee’s brief battlefield flashbacks (starring Vin Diesel, as a philosophical sergeant) are affecting, the rest of the movie offers emotion by numbers. The plot’s mechanical quality is reinforced by the high-tech 3-D cinematography, which, by means of an ultra-high frame rate, exceptional brightness, and unprecedented resolution, is meant to heighten the film’s reality but instead displays its artifice; the action seems staged inside a light box. Co-starring Chris Tucker, as the soldiers’ agent, and Steve Martin, as a fatuous tycoon.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk | Ang Lee Review - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold, November/December 2016
Across the U.K. this November, Abel Gance’s Napoleon is showing in a freshly scored five-and-a-half-hour digital restoration reviving the triple-screen climax that first blew minds in 1927. Gance’s bravura techniques, which encompassed an array of adventurous camerawork, reportedly helped inspire the anamorphic lens that would be crucial to the creation of Cinema-Scope. And so one spectacle begot a fresh lineage of others, till the pursuit of bolder-stronger-truer cinema led us through the years—by way of 3-D, high-def, high frame rates, sheer studio muscle—to the latest larger-than-life experiment: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. “Have an open mind,” director Ang Lee implored at the New York Film Festival, where his film had its world premiere, “and give it a chance.”
It’s not often that one sees a director as nakedly anxious as Lee appeared at the screening I attended, in a custom-equipped AMC Lincoln Square theater a couple of blocks from the festival’s home base. Drawing out his introduction, the Academy Award–winning filmmaker seemed reluctant to leave the stage and let the movie begin, and if you’ve read some of the finicky insta-reviews of his homecoming drama that followed, you might understand why. Lee’s envelope-pushing gambit—shooting in 3-D at 120 frames per second, at unsparingly lucid 4K resolution—has been treated by many as some kind of obstacle rather than the integrated artistic technique it is. The price of filmmaking has always been that the most intimate of artistic risks occur on such a big, big screen; at a press talk the morning of the screening, Lee compared the postproduction for different versions of the film to making love over and over again.
No doubt, Lee’s frank adaptation of Ben Fountain’s 2012 best-seller wears its heart on its sleeve—but the pangs of emotional exposure and abandonment are the film’s very lifeblood. Its jarhead protagonist Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn) returns to Texas from his Iraq tour as a conquering hero in 2004—the man in the Bravo Squad who lugged their mortally wounded Krishna-loving sergeant (Vin Diesel) off the battlefield during a firefight. Instead of a simple homecoming, Billy and his fellow Bravos, including surviving sergeant Dime (Garrett Hedlund), are to be trotted out as patriotic mascots at a football game. A Hollywood agent (Chris Tucker) shadows them, glued to a cell phone pleading for some Bravo Squad biopic that sounds unlikely. And so, although present, flesh-and-blood, and safe, Billy and his buddies exist as useful symbols of America: the basic plot consists of their uniformed selves being transported from one place to another, from party Hummer to press conference to stadium center stage.
The first thing that strikes you about Alwyn as Billy is how pink he looks. Here it’s high time to marvel at the candidness allowed by the use of high-definition by Lee and cinematographer John Toll: observing these actors’ faces, even at rest, is like watching the surface of a lake, noticing it ripple with a breeze. Put another way: you see, physiologically, when a character has been crying in this film, for a few seconds after. And Alwyn inhabits his role so vulnerably that he can work at the subtle register required, remarkable for such a newcomer—as a sensitive instrument posed in front of another sensitive instrument, his eyes like a feature-length inheritor to those close-ups of John Garfield in The Pride of the Marines. The same goes for Kristen Stewart, slipping into a small but crucial role as Billy’s protective sister Kathryn, who tries to convince Billy to obtain an honorable discharge rather than ship out again.
Lee’s switchback narrative structure runs along three time frames: the Bravos’ long march to the stage, where Destiny’s Child will dance before them, alternates with Billy’s flashbacks to fighting and camaraderie in Iraq, and with time spent with his family, who are averse to political controversy at their dinner table (except for Kathryn). The reliance on Billy and Kathryn’s sibling attachment might get clunkier as the screenplay grinds on—as does a sprouting plot centering on a puffy Steve Martin as the moneybags behind the curtain who offers to bankroll the Bravo movie but would pay the soldiers a pittance. But Lee recognizes the traumatic logic that binds his story. Each associative edit to the past indicates some psychic mark—from the quiet tumult of Billy’s young but overflowing mind, or the normal adolescent libido that sends him fantasizing about a cheerleader (Makenzie Leigh) during the anthem at the football game. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk actually courses with strange countervailing forces—between the temporal dislocation of the multinarrative cuts, the rawness of faces shown often in head-on shots that don’t let us look away, the satirical swirl in and around the action, and the perpetual existential sense of Billy being onstage and backstage, somebody and no one.
And whatever else might be said about the sometimes stolid interior scenes—possibly a reflection of the rigor required for shooting at these whisker-sensitive resolutions—the halftime show with its band and dancers is nightmarishly good, a feat of deep staging in which Billy disappears in plain sight. The film’s gloves also come off with that showtime, when aggressive stage hands show zero respect for the Bravos, behavior that is the perennial flip side to a veteran’s welcome. But even before then, Hedlund’s wisecracks as Dime let loose a steady stream of self-protective sarcasm beneath all the backslapping profanity that knits together the squad. The Life of Pi Lee of Hollywood-magic pageantry is never too far from the Ice Storm Lee.
Some may be unable to see past the Avatar-grade visual intensity of scenes that can hum with a stage-like sense of presence. But where the high-frame-rate TV-news pellucidity of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit clashed with the fantastical subject, it’s a prime fit here for Alwyn’s tenderness and the close-to-the-bone tenor of tough but wounded soldiers. Where then do we go from here? For young men like Billy, that’s an open question, but for cinema, wherever it leads, Lee has blazed a trail and taken a risk, which is more than one can say for so very many.
Deep
Focus: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Film Comment Michael Sragow, November 11, 2016
The title character of Ang Lee’s frontline/home-front Iraq War movie, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a U.S. Army specialist (played pallidly by British newcomer Joe Alwyn), gets lionized for springing to the defense of a wounded sergeant on a video replayed endlessly on cable news, then gets flown back to America for a two-week victory tour. The movie aims to dramatize how America’s marketing of sentimental patriotism can render undeniable heroism inauthentic, not just to citizens who don’t really want to think about the war but also to the hero himself.
Ben Fountain’s source book of the same name was misleadingly hailed as “the Catch-22 of the Iraq War.” Lynn is less like a Yossarian than he is like a down-home Candide. He’s an inchoate every-lad—19 and still a virgin. When the Army’s P.R. arm turns Billy and his squad-mates, “the Bravos,” into poster boys for post-9/11 valor, they become a moving part of Destiny’s Child’s 2004 Turkey Day halftime show at Texas Stadium. (It comes in the middle of one of the worst NFL games ever played, the Cowboys’ 21-7 loss to the Chicago Bears.) Billy may be a native of fictional Stovall, Texas, but he feels no kinship to the Dallas high-rollers, expensive gladiators, and entitled fans he encounters in the luxury boxes and high-priced seats of “America’s Team.” By the end of the film, he and his buddies engage in pitched combat not just with Iraqi insurgents but also with pissed-off rock-star roadies and stage managers.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk has been trumpeted as a technological great leap forward. Lee shot the film at a rate of 120 frames per second (instead of 24), with 4K resolution and in 3D. It’s too bad Lee has applied what Tri-Star Pictures calls “New Cinema” to an “Old Cinema” screenplay: a heavy-handed spectacle that both exploits and condemns American excess. I saw the film without 3D or super-speedy projection—the way it will play in most theaters. In a conventional format, the film’s luminosity and exactness are still impressive. But they’re not expressive. How could they be? Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is essentially a one-character movie with just two fully dramatized sequences.
Fountain’s novel thrives on the way it stitches together a confused, heroic soldier’s wayward streams of consciousness with his comrades’ gifts of gab. It cries out for aural, not visual, virtuosity. To pull it off as a movie, Ang Lee would have had to create a latter-day soundtrack as layered, playful, and suggestive as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. Of course, to do that, he might have needed to cast a lead actor able to improvise in the American vernacular instead of a male Brit ingénue who makes you wonder, “What’s the masculine phrase equivalent of ‘an English rose?’ ’” Lee and screenwriter Jean-Christophe Castelli reduce Fountain’s best bits of dialogue to preachments or punch lines.
The movie takes place during a single day (Thanksgiving), but Billy’s ruminations and flashbacks create a kaleidoscopic narrative. Unfortunately, each past- or present-tense vignette is purposeful to a fault, whether it’s depicting flesh-and-blood combat in Iraq, psychological warfare in the hero’s dysfunctional home, or a brotherhood sending off a fallen mate with a rough-and-ready service at a military cemetery. Lee strives to achieve a free-association kind of looseness and to scale lunatic highs. But here he’s far too cautious a filmmaker. He wants to use his cutting-edge technology to make us to feel as if we’re dropping through a psychic trapdoor into Billy’s hyper-sensitized consciousness. Yet the movie is cripplingly steady even when it’s being hyperbolic. Every piece of show biz and NFL glitz or Iraq War grit is too contained.
When the book came out in 2012, Fountain told Teddy Wayne in the Huffington Post that his creative impulse came from watching the actual Cowboys half-time show on TV, on Nov 25, 2004:
The show was very much like the one I describe in the book, this surreal and patently insane — to me, anyway — mash-up of militarism, pop culture, American triumphalism and soft-core porn. At one point during the show the camera flashed on a group of soldiers who were marching along with everyone else down on the field, and they looked like actual combat soldiers. They were in desert camo, and looked lean and tan; my sense was that they’d been over there fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. And I wondered what it would do to your head, to have been over there immersed in daily life-or-death situations, then you return to the U.S. and get plunked down in the middle of this very artificial situation. How, in other words, would you keep from going crazy?
Watching that halftime show seemed to crystallize a lot of things I’d been feeling and thinking up to that point. I was confused; I didn’t have a clue about why America is the way it is, this place where I was born and had spent my entire life. I didn’t understand my own country. In some ways, writing Billy Lynn was an attempt to make some kind of sense of the place, or at least to put a frame around my fundamental confusion.
The central metaphor on the page and screen is the same: Texas Stadium during a turkey bowl as “the sheltering womb of all things American—football, Thanksgiving, television, about 800 kinds of police and security personnel, plus 300 million well-wishing fellow citizens.” Fountain filters his description of the extravaganza, which includes the United States Army Drill Team and the Prairie View A&M Marching Storm band, more successfully through the eyes of a super-observant, ultra-sensitive Billy, who will redeploy to Iraq in two days.
Lee does a decent job of putting the audience in Billy’s boots as he and his fellow Bravos parade down the field and react to the sensory overload of snare drums and majorettes and cheerleaders. But Lee rarely succeeds at opening up the issues within Billy’s head. In the book, Billy muses, “If there ever was a prime-time trigger for PTSD, you couldn’t do much better than this.” When he checks his own racing pulse and adrenaline, it’s as if he’s testing his own sanity: “Pupils dilated, pulse and blood pressure through the roof, limbs trembling with stress-reflex cortisol rush, but it’s cool, it’s good, their shit’s down tight, no Vietnam-vet crackups for Bravo squad!” Unfortunately, the way Lee and Castelli have pruned the story and its verbal onslaughts, mistakenly resisting and clarifying narration, the movie really does come off as a portrait of a soldier who’s in denial about having full-blown PTSD. So the ending comes as an abrupt about-face.
As the back story emerges both in scenes set at his Texas home and another on his base in his Iraq, we learn that Billy’s rebellious sister Kathryn (a generically intense Kristen Stewart), at odds with the rest of the family partly because she opposes the Iraq War, feels responsible for his enlistment. A couple of years before, her fiancé dumped her after she survived a scarring car accident; Billy took revenge by reducing the moral weakling’s Saab to a heap of metal, then using a tire iron to threaten the creep himself. Billy’s willingness to join the Army was his get-out-of-jail free card. During his P.R. visit stateside, Kathryn becomes convinced that Billy has been psychologically scarred. Between his tremulous responses to his sister’s repeated, texted pleas for him to leave the Army, and his own recurring flashbacks to the death of his sergeant and mentor, the instinctive and unconventional “Shroom” (Vin Diesel), the film seems to characterize Billy, deceptively, as a warrior about to fall apart. The filmmakers miss their mark, whether they mean to toy with our expectations or to draw the finest line between normality and madness.
As far as physical re-creation goes, Lee pulls out all the stops on the half-time show, as drum lines and flag girls criss-cross the field and Destiny’s Child (solid impersonators for Beyoncé, Kelly, and Michelle) command the audience with their hip-swinging swagger. Lee captures some terrific shots of drum majors and dancers jolting Billy as they invade his marching space. But after he’s directed to stand in place on a stage, Billy tunes out of the pageant, which quickly faded from my memory. Afterward, I located the real event on YouTube and found it infinitely more fascinating and touching, even (or especially) without Billy’s fictional histrionics: the sight of soldiers stumbling into each other and the drill team accentuates the poignancy and absurdity of America’s desperate urge to honor its heroes in the gaudiest ways. In the movie, everything simply funnels into Billy’s most prolonged flashback to Iraq and his biggest tribute to his mentor, Sergeant “Shroom” (Diesel overdoes his macho-guru vibe). Shroom’s studies in Eastern wisdom include the lesson that if a soldier is meant to die, the bullet that kills him has already been shot. Shroom also teaches Billy, in what may be this movie’s ultimate message, that Americans are children who must go to other countries to grow up.
It’s difficult to know how to respond to Billy’s experience of first love—or at least a high-flown form of lust—with a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader named Faison (Makenzie Leigh), who is a true believer in Billy’s valor and in Christianity. Lee has a gift for unexpected romantic assignations, and Leigh and Alwyn generate both a touching romantic aura and some erotic heat. But this coupling is too clipped and hazy. Her disbelief that he’d want to go AWOL and run away with her carries too much weight in his ultimate decision of whether to flee or fight.
The movie eventually comes into focus as a bleak, mirthless service comedy combined with a coming-of-age-story. Will Billy accept his newfound identity as a soldier no matter what he thinks of this particular war? The stronger questions come from a show-biz subplot about a producer/agent (Chris Tucker) who tries to put the Bravos’ story up for sale. Will Billy protect his saga from Hollywoodization, when he learns that Hilary Swank may want to play his role? Will he refuse to compromise on a partnership with the Cowboys’ fictional owner, Norm Oglesby, who peddles a cheapskate jingoism? (Steve Martin, as Norm, disappointingly mistakes a put-on for a performance.)
The Bravos learn that to get a major star, you need a major budget, but to get a major budget, you need a major star. That’s the only time this movie brings to mind a Catch-22. Lee’s visuals are eye-popping in Billy Lynn’s Long Half-time Walk. What the movie lacks is a clear vision.
World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk looks fantastic. It's also unwatchable. Daniel Engber from Slate, October 20, 2016
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri
Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk :: Movies :: Reviews ... - Paste Magazine Kenji Fujishima
Ang
Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, reviewed. - Slate Dana Stevens
Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Is an Overstuffed Satire, But ... - Vulture David Edelstein
Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is all technology, no movie - Vox Todd VanDerWerff
Ang
Lee Makes A Major Miscalculation With High Frame Rates In 'Billy ... Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist
Every
Movie Has a Lesson [Don Shanahan]
Slant Magazine [Christopher Gray]
Time: Stephanie Zacharek November 11, 2016
The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski] also seen here: iNFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ang Lee, 2016) Daniel Nava from Chicago Cinema Circuit
In
Case You Were Curious, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk ... - Vulture In Case You Were Curious, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Features a Fake Beyoncé, by Jackson
McHenry
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The Cinemaholic Matthew Passantino
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Freakin' Awesome Network [Justin Oberholtzer]
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'Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' Review | NYFF 2016 | Hollywood ... David Rooney from The Hollywood Reporter
'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' Review at the New York Film Festival ... Owen Gleiberman from Variety
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Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (film) - Wikipedia
Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Wikipedia
'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk,' by Ben Fountain - The New York Times book review, May 18, 2012
Ben
Fountain's “Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk” - The Washington Post book review, April 30, 2012
Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain – review | Books ... Theo Tait book review from The Guardian, July 6, 2012
Passive
Aggression: Recent War Novels - Los Angeles Review of Books Michael Lokkeson, October 1, 2013
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain | Vietnam Veterans of ... Marc Leepson from The Vietnam Veterans of America
Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain – extract | Books ... Ben Fountain from The Guardian, February 6, 2012
Lee, Benson
PLANET B-BOY B+ 90
There’s something awfully appealing about the energy of
being young, showcased here in the lead up to an international break dance
competition, where b-boys, short for beat boys, compete in national teams, one
per country, along with a free pass to the previous year’s champion. Combining a near supernatural dance athleticism
that integrates choreographed and improvised showmanship, power gymnastics,
kung fu, group precision, and the fancy footwork of James Brown, these kids
spend their lives practicing just to compete in the main event where 18
international teams perform a group number for 6 minutes, with an award for the
best show performance, followed by a dance off against the 3rd and 4th
place teams, and the 1st and 2nd place teams, awarding
winners only for 1st and 3rd. Without much background on the origin of the
sport other than acknowledging its popularity from brief clips in an early
1980’s movie FLASHDANCE (1983), or without familiarization with any rules, where
the audience hasn’t a clue what contestants are being judged on, one can’t help
but be mesmerized by the energy and youthful enthusiasm that every team
displays. With a wall-to-wall music soundtrack,
carefully editing the onscreen choreography with the movie music, similar to
the film
Much like the documentary SPELLBOUND (2002), which follows
selected participants ahead of time in a national spelling bee, where the
filmmakers hope they’ve chosen a few who make it to the finals, this film
targets specific countries, especially Korea and France, the two teams that
fought for the championship the previous year, singling out a few of their
better dancers, believing our knowledge of a bit of their shared personal
circumstances, no matter what country they’ve come from, will contribute to our
appreciation of the break dance culture.
Shooting
in Seoul, Paris, Osaka, and Las Vegas, teams from Korea, “Gamblerz,” the
previous winner, also their new national team, “Last for One,” France “Phase
T,” Japan “Ichigeki,” and the US “Knucklehead Zoo” are singled out, where a few
are shown in personally revealing scenes with their families intermixed with grueling
nonstop footage of practice and rehearsals.
Gamblerz practices 7 days a week from
One would never think that the break dancing championships
would take place in the otherwise unheard of town of Braunschweig, Germany,
which has held the event since 1990 (when the sport was supposedly dead) in a
Volkswagen Convention Center and houses the teams in a nearby elementary
school, throwing mattresses and pillows into empty classrooms with kids all
piled on top of one another – no luxury there, and almost no prize money to
speak of, especially when divided up among 9 dancers and a coach – perhaps a
few hundred dollars each. Instead, it’s
all about recognition and the love of the sport, as winners will likely later
get endorsement deals. But all the teams
come together in a communal cafeteria and practice gymnasium, where the Korean
kids found the food inedible and couldn’t wait to get back in their rooms to
steam some rice and kimchi. Despite the
language difficulty of kids coming from so many different countries, the common
denominator was eyes, as they could see what the other groups were doing, and
all eyes focused on Gamblerz, the defending champions from Korea, which feature
a stunning Olympian caliber athleticism.
Leading up to the 2005 championship, no team has ever won two years in a
row and the
Time Out New York (David Fear)
Most people
think of break dancing as a long-gone fad, one of those pop-cultural novelties
that went out with Rubik’s Cubes and frankie say shirts. For Thomas
Hergenröther, however, it was an art form worth preserving, which is why he
founded the Battle of the Year in 1990. The annual event is single-handedly
credited with keeping the dance genre alive; every year, crews from all around
the globe train like Olympic hopefuls for a chance to show off their skillz and
gain the respect of their intercontinental peers.
No one would
claim that big-picture context is the strong point of Benson
Lee’s documentary, which starts off with only the barest of B-boy history
lessons. Old-school legends like Ken Swift are trotted out for rote
talking-head interviews, archival clips make cameos, and graying European
hipsters reminisce about their collective road-to-Damascus moment (the breaking
sequence in… Flashdance?). It’s only when Planet B-Boy
settles into the stories of the 2005 tournament’s hopefuls and turns into the Spellbound
of bodyrockin’ that the film finds its proper ambassadorial groove. Stylistic
flourishes drop as the movie simply lets the dancers do their fleet-footed,
hyperathletic thing; by the time the world champions are revealed, the outcome
almost doesn’t matter. Hip-hop culture has been declared the winner.
Film Journal International (David Noh)
Although the vogue for breakdancing may have waned in these
parts, it appears to be bigger than ever internationally, as proved by Planet
B-Boy. Indeed, when one travels the world one can usually espy a group of kids
in town squares from
Director Benson Lee obviously has a deep affection for his subject and his film
is a lively, engaging terpsichorean travelogue which takes us to
The film is palpably full of youthful ethnic male beauty and memorable
characters, like a Korean boy who sits abashedly by as his father, whose job is
installing the South Korean flag in people’s homes, expounds on his
non-comprehension of his son’s ambitions, or the more outwardly rebellious
12-year-old French dancer who greets his mother’s confession of racial fears
with a contemptuously muttered, “Whatever.” There is “Crazy Monkey,” also from
France, who does endless head spins and one Japanese breaker who works his tail
off in his family’s tea shop and repeats his country’s well-known adage of
conformity, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."
Filmed at an agreeable breakneck pace, it all culminates in the competition
itself, where those Korean boys do indeed really shine. But underlying
everything is a certain pathos, which exists in every dance field, from ballet
to b-boying: the knowledge of it being essentially a pursuit for the young and
healthy. No matter how big the trophy or cash prize, the essential tenuousness
of this art—especially for the impoverished South Korean crew, who’ve hocked
everything just to get to
Reel.com
[Chris Barsanti] also seen here: filmcritic.com
Just as the film world is gearing up for yet another cinematic event wherein Jamie Kennedy tries to get laughs out of being a white guy who likes rap, comes a documentary that, by going abroad, goes a good distance toward restoring some actual credibility to domestic hip-hop style. Planet B-Boy, Benson Lee's study of international break-dancing has all the hallmarks of an overly earnest production, with its over-the-top talking heads proclaiming the glory of true b-boy style (while giving the uninitiated zero specifics) but overcomes that shortcoming through sheer passion. These are kids who really want to break-dance, and how long has it been since somebody could say that and mean it?
Wisely, Lee doesn't go into an examination of how hip-hop,
DJ'ing, and break-dancing all came about in
In a stranger-than-fiction development, while American
hip-hop and mainstream culture moved steadily in a different direction,
hardcore groups of dedicated break-dancers (or "b-boys" in their
strictly old-school parlance) in
But Planet B-Boy is really more interested in
cheerleading than in sociological study, and so it's for the best that the bulk
of it follows a number of international b-boy teams as they gear up for the
annual "
Along the way, though, Lee somehow actually does find something authentic amidst all these young men of varied backgrounds who show up in a grey little German burg to do dance combat before a screaming audience, whether it's the South Korean boys desperate for familial approval or the multi-racial team from a poor Parisian suburb who don't seem to have anything to lose. Last but not least, it's the long-shot Americans, having to work almost harder than any of the other 17 teams to try and beat them at an art form invented, and almost forgotten, decades ago in their own country.
Mary Houlihan's Chicago Sun-Times review...
With his new documentary film, "Planet B-Boy," director Benson Lee takes what many may see as an '80s dance fad -- break dancing -- and shows how it has become a vibrant art form. While it's still relegated to the underground, he makes a case for moving it to higher ground and mainstream status.
"It's as legitimate a dance as any other dance that has existed," argues one performer.
Break dancing grew out of the
Lee does a thorough job of outlining break-dancing history,
using interviews of performers and film footage. He quickly moves on to what's
happening today by focusing on the 2005 competition at the
By the late '80s, after it was exploited as a fad, break
dancing lost much of its appeal and respect. Thomas Hergenrother, a longtime
devotee, started
Break dancing's biggest misconception? That the dancers are not dancing, that they don't know what they're doing, that it just happens in the moment. But that last complaint is exactly what makes this form unique, interesting, dynamic and, in a way, universally acceptable.
Part of its charm is that it still mostly exists in the urban streets where it sprang up. Unlike most other dance forms that are static, break dancing's rules are being made on the spot. Some influences are kung fu movies, gymnastics and singer James Brown's fancy steps.
Lee focuses on crews from
It's a world filled with compelling characters, obsessed young men devoted to the form, even though they haven't figured out how to make a living at it. And these men with the street attitude and spectacular moves have the same dream as any ballet, jazz or modern dancer. As one competitor says: "To make a living with what we love is the dream of all dancers."
Lee slyly allows the suspense to build during scenes of the
The personal stories of several performers are laced throughout the documentary, adding another level of enjoyment.
A young white dancer is adopted by the black dancers in his neighborhood; his mother admits that the experience has quelled her racist feelings. A Korean dancer is torn between doing what he loves and building a solid relationship with his widowed father. A Japanese dancer also works in the family tea shop and comes to realize his mother is proud of him.
One young man, who quit his job to practice for the competition, admits he's on the verge of "being the worst father."
His pretty wife gives a resigned smile, knowing there is nothing short of competition that will vanquish his desire to perform.
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
The House Next Door [Steven Boone]
KPBS Movie Blog [Beth Accomando]
The Village Voice [Ed Gonzalez]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Scott Macdonald
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg)
Variety Dennis Harvey
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
New York Times (registration req'd) Matt Zoller Seitz
YouTube
- PLANET B-BOY: Landmark shots from around the globe. (
Planet B-Boy Battle for
Tribeca at Webster Hall (
Battle of
the Year_Greatest Hits_Episode 1 (
Planet B-boy: Korea (
Drifterz Performance (
PLANET B-BOY: TFF outdoor
screening. DRIFTERZ (
PLANET B-BOY: TFF
Outdoor Screening. LAST FOR ONE (
last for one peformance (
Last for One (
Last4One @ Planet
BBoy Opening Tribeca Film Festival (
Last4One @
Planet BBoy Opening Tribeca Film Festival (Part 2 (
North Korea vs South
Korea from 'PLANET B-BOY' (
Planet B-boy: France (
Planet B-Boy -
Knucklehead Zoo & Last for One (
Last for One (KOR) +
Knucklehead Zoo (USA) (
Planet B-Boy : Knucklehead Zoo (
Knucklehead Zoo Team website
YouTube
- Planet B-Boy-Battle of the Year- Knucklehead Zoo (
Knucklehead
Zoo Professional Break Dancers - AOL Video
(
Lee, Bruce – martial arts action star
FISTS OF FURY (Tang shan da xiong)
aka: The Big Boss
Hong Kong
(100 mi) 1971 ‘Scope
co-directors: Lo Wei and Wu
Jiaxiang
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Lee had been a child star in Hong Kong
movies of the 1950s; this crudely made but highly enjoyable revenge drama
marked his return to Hong Kong (after his failure to escape stereotyped
bit-parts in the US) and launched a worldwide fashion for 'kung fu' movies.
Cheng (Lee) arrives in Thailand to join relatives working in an ice-packing
plant. When he learns that the place is a front for heroin smuggling, he
reveals his martial prowess and takes on the villainous boss (Han Yingjie,
also the film's martial arts choreographer) in a frighteningly intense duel to
the death. The mix of authentic martial arts skills, cartoon-like violence,
righteous anger and filial piety (Cheng never forgets his promises to dear old
mum, back in Hong Kong) struck a chord with audiences everywhere in a way rarely
seen since the heyday of the James Dean cult, making Lee a global star
overnight.
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
In a crudely ingenious tease-opening, Bruce Lee finds a
brawl waiting as soon as he reaches town yet a promise of nonviolence makes him
pass on it. Until he at last snaps into action midway through, ass-kicking
duties fall to his cousin (James Tien), who works at an ice factory with the
rest of the family. Gelid blocks reveal bags of contraband, then body parts
from the workers who tried to intervene. The boss (Han Ying-Chieh) holds
martial-arts practices in his garden, he emerges from a bevy of masseuses to
show his henchmen how it’s done. (The dubbing has just the right deflating
hint: "Speed and keen senses. Nothing comes easy in life, my boy."
"Great. Hey dad, could you let me have 2,000 yen?") "Industrial
unrest" yields to brawls, Lee is made foreman to quell blue-collar
turmoil; the hero promises to uncover the truth about the disappearances, but
finds himself susceptible to booze and gals. Lo Wei keeps the action in
medium-shot, although the camera will become an opponent’s face receiving the
hero’s flying feet if the occasion calls for it, plus there’s the occasional
ACME effect (one villain is punched through a wall, leaving his
arms-outstretched outline on it). The Donen of Seven Brides for Seven
Brothers is the key stylistic influence, Petri's The Working Class Goes
to Heaven comes in for the cogent Marxist joke, the prole’s ultimate
nightmare of going into the boss’s office and not coming out alive. With Maria
Yi, Tony Liu, Li Kun, and Nora Miao.
eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Slyder
After disappointing stints in the United States, mostly due
to racism even though he was born the United States, Bruce Lee, a native of
China born in San Francisco, went back to Hong Kong (where he had lived at an
early age until 18) to try and establish himself as a martial arts star. He
landed a contract with Golden Harvest studios, and Raymond Chow, the studio
head, would go on and produce his first film (he would eventually produce all
of Lee’s films) called The Big Boss. It was released in the US as Fists Of
Fury. The result was a commercial blockbuster in China that generated a buzz in
the US. Lee’s first film is really a stepping stone in his later films to come,
and despite the somewhat weak plot and wooden acting, the martial arts
sequences are first rate, and really makes this film worth a look.
The film is the story of Chen Chao-An (Lee), a Chinese city
boy that moves to Thailand with his cousins to work in an ice factory. He has
sworn to his uncle (Chia Ching Tu) not to get into any violent fights, a trace
that probably he has had a violent past in he city. During Chen’s first stint
at the factory, an accident occurs as one of the ice cubes falls and breaks.
Two of Chen’s cousins discover the bag amongst the ice shreds, and thanks to
it, later they would disappear. Another one of Chen’s cousins, Hsiu Chen (James
Tien), whose a dear friend of Chen, goes with another relative to the boss’s
house, but never returns. As the mysteries turn even more and more darker, Chen
must find out the reasons why his cousins have disappeared without the trace, a
mystery that the boss (Yin-Chieh Han) and his associates in the factory would
kill for.
The plot is basically formulaic; the film contains several plotholes that
hamper the film in many aspects, since the film tries a bit too much to hold
the weak storyline between good guys and bad guys. The storyline is weak since
the film makes the disappearance case look dumb. One would go to the Chinese
Consulate in Thailand and present a demand, but the film never does that so
that the actual plot doesn’t derail from where it’s originally intending to go.
Thanks to this, the suspense never really fills up well, and sometimes ends up
with a few groaners, especially in the very end.
Thanks to those flaws, the film gets hampered substantially but keeps itself
alive thanks to two factors, the cinematography and the martial arts sequences.
The cinematography of the film, which was shot on Thailand helps a lot and
gives the film credibility, in fact, it was one of the first films to be shot
on a real-life scenario and not a studio set, and some shots were breathtaking.
Lee’s trademark of a man stepping foot on a strange land was shot perfectly,
and gives the film a warm feeling, along with a few comedic antics. But the
movie’s true kicker is the martial arts scenes choreographed by Lee himself.
Though this is not the first time we see Lee in action (The Green Hornet was
the first), it certainly is the first of really riveting fight scenes that
would later on define the martial arts genre. Whereas in the Green Hornet,
Lee’s style wasn’t as well appreciated, here we see him in his full splendor.
The sequences are riveting all the way until the last punch; the fights in the
factory and the face off between Lee and The Boss (Han is a real-life martial
artist) are classics. What gives the last fight a big boost is the trademark of
all of Lee’s films, which is that he always liked to fight with real-life
martial artists. Thanks to this the fights are even more interesting to watch and
you feel the true awe of the fight seeing a master fighting another master.
That was fucking great.
The performances were all right. Lee’s acting is at times wooden but the fight
scenes really make up for it. The rest of the supporting cast is also up to the
standards. Lo Wei’s direction sometimes stiffs up at certain times, but manages
to keep the film under control despite his shaky script.
In the end, Fists of Fury is not one of Lee’s greatest, but
it damn sure is one of his most important, since we see here The Dragon finally
starting to establish his reign in the martial arts scene, a reign that may
have not lasted long, but that left a deep and profound impact in the movie
industry and in the martial arts genre. This film still remains a minor classic,
but Lee would outdo himself with his next film.
Kung Fu Cinema review [8/10] Mark Pollard
LoveHKFilm.com
(Calvin McMillin) review
DVD Outsider Slarek
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [3/5]
CultureCartel.com
(Travis Lowell) review [2.5/5]
VideoVista
review Jeff
Young
Big
Boss: Comparison (Spectrum vs. Ultimate Edition) Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Todd Doogan reviews Bruce Lee: The Master Collection
DVD Times Michael Sunda, Bruce Lee: The Ultimate Collection
DVD Clinic [Scott Weinberg] Bruce Lee:
The Ultimate Collection
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
FIST OF FURY (Jing wu men)
aka: Chinese Connection
Hong Kong (108 mi) 1972 d: Lo
Wei
One of the best of the Chinese chop
sock dramas. It has a basically serious story: the inmates of one kung-fu
school have poisoned the teacher of a rival school, and our devoted hero sets
out on a course of revenge. But a potential revenge tragedy turns into a film
of comic strip outrageousness as Bruce Lee
tries, but fails, to reconcile his natural thirst for revenge with his desire
to keep the name of his school clean. The result is a patently absurd and funny
movie, involving a series of spectacular fight routines, often filmed in slow
motion, which are highly acrobatic and exciting.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The death of legendary martial-artist Huo Yuanjia is still
shrouded in mystery, Lo Wei's film offers itself as a "popular
interpretation" keyed to nationalist pride and Bruce Lee at his fiercest.
The barely suppressed hysteria is unveiled in an extravagant précis: Lee as the
prodigal disciple comes back to the academy to find his master dead, the
funeral is held under forlorn stage snow and disrupted by the bereft hero, who
hugs the coffin, sobbing. Pneumonia is the official diagnosis, Lee smells foul
play but muzzles his rage in honor of the teacher's peaceful lessons. Such
restraint can't last long in Japanese-ruled Shanghai, however, and his proud
fury finally erupts against taunting plaques, a gag repeated twice -- Lee
dismantles a sign reading "Sick Man of Asia" and force-feeds it to
the Bushido students he's just quelled, then splinters a "No Dogs and Chinese
Allowed" sign in iconic slow-motion. The main conflict is between Chinese
fists and samurai swords, the villains are a Mifune stand-in with painted-on
Snidely Whiplash mustache (Riki Hashimoto) and a thick Russian warrior (Robert
Baker) "on holiday." The action sequences are appreciatively filmed
with a quick, alert eye (a melee early on has the hero grabbing two foes and
spinning the mannequins like a dervish, Lo cuts to a higher angle to catch the
absurd sight), and then there's Lee. One moment achingly tender with Nora Miao,
the next shattering the ankles of a horde of opponents with a pair of nunchaku,
the superstar is already poised as a mythical figure -- he picks up the
rickshaw containing a traitorous ferret (Wei Ping-Ao) and smashes it against a
nearby wall like Paul Bunyan, his doomed-rebel capper is freeze-framed right
out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. With James Tien, Chen Fu
Ching, Chin San, and Han Ying-Chieh.
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
After generating a huge buzz with his major film debut
“Fists of Fury,” Bruce Lee wasted no time in following up his commercial
success, and he did it with style. Thanks to a tighter script, great acting,
and last but far from least, ass kicking fight scenes, the Chinese Connection
(original title: Fist Of Fury) stands out as one of Bruce Lee’s finest films to
date, and an undisputed martial arts classic. I was just blown away even more
with this film when I saw it; it’s really a riveting ride. Ok, Fists Of Fury
started the ball rolling, but it was this film that catapulted Lee into
superstardom.
Lee is superb as Chen Zhen, a former student that returns
to his once martial arts school in Shanghai in the 1930s, back then an international
compound for Japan, only to find out that his beloved teacher and master Ho-Jun
Chia has died under mysterious circumstances. Then in the honorary services, a
Japanese School committee shows up and blatantly discriminates the Chinese
challenging them to a fight and even gives them a banner as a present that
reads “Sick Asian People.” The rest of the school members back down, but Chen
doesn’t, and infuriated by the insult he secretly takes the gift back to the
Japanese school and beats the shit out of them. The Japanese head Suzuki (Riki
Hoshimoto) decides to sweep revenge and try to use his power to pressure the
school to turn over Chen if not, they’ll close the school and arrest them
instead. Chen goes into hiding as he investigates and tries to find out who
were the ones responsible for his master’s death.
The script, based on actual events, is tighter, and very well developed, and
hits on the touchy subject of racism. The film isn’t pro-Chinese or
anti-Japanese; it’s more of an outcry against the racism that at many times is
present in those countries (climaxing with Chen smashing a sign that read: No
dogs or Chinese allowed), and also reflects pretty much on Lee’s own
discrimination problems he had back in the States.
The martial arts sequences have never been more riveting and more powerful. Lee
uses the power of revenge with his kung fu skills, and the resulting
combination is deadly and all around brutal. Every kick and every punch is so
powerful that you can even feel the anger hit your nerves. It’s that powerful.
Lee also manages to put his acting skills to the test, and pulls it off with
style, coming up with interesting espionage tactics as showing himself like an
old newspaperman, or a geek telephone repairman. In theses cases, especially in
the last one, it kind of forces the issue, and the graveyard scene where Chen
is with his girlfriend Yuan (Nora Mia) borders on the childish. But other than
that, his vengeful performance is top notch. Again the cinematography is well
used, every fight scene is well coordinated, and the camera shots are perfect.
The rest of the cast was great, hell, what else is there to talk about? The
film is fucking great.
In the end, Lee’s second film shows even more improvement
over the first, and manages to pull out a genre-defining film. This film is a
martial arts classic, fucking hell, just go out and rent it.
Kung Fu Cinema review [10/10] Mark Pollard
LoveHKFilm.com
(Calvin McMillin) review
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]
Fist
Of Fury: Comparison (Spectrum vs. Ultimate Edition) Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
DVD Talk
(John Wallis) dvd review [2/5]
VideoVista
review
Christopher Geary
And You Thought It Was Safe [David DeMoss]
Needcoffee.com - "Bruce Lee and the
Masters" DVD Review Doc Ezra
Love and Bullets
dvd review [Goodtimes Release]
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Todd Doogan reviews Bruce Lee: The Master Collection
DVD Clinic [Scott Weinberg] Bruce Lee:
The Ultimate Collection
The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review
DVDBeaver
dvd review
Henrik Sylow
THE WAY OF THE DRAGON (Meng long guo jiang)
aka: Return of the Dragon
Hong Kong (100 mi) 1972 d: Bruce Lee
The only film written, produced, and
directed by Bruce
Lee was to have been the first of a series in which he cast himself as Tan
Lung, out-of-town strong-arm, here hired by the Chinese owner of a restaurant
in Rome to sort out their problems with the local syndicate. The film has the
roughness you might expect in a first directorial effort, and also a perhaps
unexpected leaning towards comedy. Lee makes great play on his character as the
country boy without weapons confronting the denizens of the
technologically-powerful West and winning hands down. Fight fest addicts will
relish confrontations with Chuck Norris,
Robert
Wall and Wang Ing Sik,
professionals all.
Kung Fu Cinema review [8/10] Mark Pollard
Bruce Lee's third feature film has noticeably aged over the
years but Lee's peerless charisma and abilities remain well intact.
This film and the unfinished Game of Death were the only
films Lee directed and wrote himself. Unlike his first feature, The Big Boss
and Fist of Fury, Lee made an obviously attempt to incorporate humor into the
story. The opening of the film sets the tone for Lee as a foreigner out of his
element in Rome. He gets looks in the airport and upon entering a restaurant,
inadvertently ordering four bowls of soup since he is unable to read the menu.
This is a refreshing change for Bruce's onscreen character although much of his
comical mugging is generally overacted and lacks maturity.
Lee's plot comfortably remains similar to his previous
films. In place of a factory or martial arts school is a Chinese restaurant in
Rome run by Chen Ching Hua, played by Nora Miao who had appeared opposite Lee
twice before. Once again, a group of thugs are out to give the innocent
proprietors trouble. In this case, they want Chen to sell her business but she
refuses. Lee's character is unable to speak English which allows him to focus
on his substantial body language to get his point across to the baddies. It
also just happens that most of the restaurant's young cooks are aspiring karate
practitioners. Their initial skepticism turns to idol worship once they see Lee
kick the tar out of some thugs. Set in the modern day and in an environment
where guns are available could have presented Lee with a problem. He overcomes
this obvious disadvantage by crafting wooden darts which he throws at his
victims to disarm them. Sure, its a stretch but then one of the things that
made Lee a great entertainer was the fact that he knew when to embellish or
stretch reality in order to heighten a film's entertainment value. In an
interview conducted for a documentary on Bruce Lee, co-star Chuck Norris once
mentioned how Lee began using kicks a lot more after his onscreen fight with
Norris at the film's climatic end, something Norris apparently encouraged.
While this may or may not be true, Lee's own belief's concluded that high kicks
were not practical in a street fight because it took too long to connect and
left the attacker vulnerable, something which Sammo Hung once proved to great
effect in a training routine with Yuen Biao in The Prodigal Son. Yet, one of
Lee's most memorable scenes came in "Enter the Dragon" as he flies
through the air to kick the villain in spectacular fashion. Its worth noting
that in Way of the Dragon, Lee replicated on screen the move that wowed casting
agents for the television series, "The Green Hornet." Lee leaps up in
an amazing show of dexterity and power to kick out a light bulb from a socket
hanging directly above him.
Champion martial artist, Robert Wall appears as Norris'
student. He would appear again as Mr. Han's body guard in Enter the Dragon.
Norris himself a karate champion had yet to make a name for himself in
Hollywood and some might argue that he never did considering that he has never
had much charisma or great acting ability. In truth, he proves to be a terrific
opponent for Lee. Although not present throughout the bulk of the film, Norris'
only fight with Lee at the end of the film is considered by many to be classic
and one of the best onscreen match ups ever. In a stroke of genius, Lee got
permission to shoot the fight at the Roman coliseum, a fitting location where gladiators
once fought to the death for their Emperor. In reference to those ancient days,
Norris turns his thumb down at Lee as they first lay eyes on each other, once
the Emperor's signal to have a gladiator killed. After a short game of cat and
mouse, the two final stand face to face and begin preparing for their epic
fight with a series of stretches. The distinction between the two could not
have been greater, excepting Lee's match up with former student, Kareem Abul
Jabbar in Game of Death. While Lee is dark and bare skinned and moves with the
reflexes of a cat, Norris is stocky with pale skin and a full chest of hair.
His moves are sure but more like those of a heavyweight boxer. The only witness
to this fight is a mangy kitten who is shown in cuts throughout the fight. The
whole fight is well done, although if one were to place the encounter within
the context of the story, the question of Norris' motivation must be asked.
He's obviously been paid to take out Lee, but no mention is given to whether Norris
is a professional killer for hire or just a guy who likes a good fight.
Purely as a story, Way of the Dragon is a very sophomoric
effort that lacks depth. When not in his trademark menacing mode, Lee loses his
potency. Yet, the film features Lee once again at his best when he's fighting
and his expert use of nunchakus is featured here even better than in Enter the
Dragon. The final battle with Chuck Norris is rightly legendary and certainly
provides more than enough reason to see this film. Budding students of Jeet Kun
Do will also note that Lee's philosophy of effect over form is voiced in the
film as the merits of Chinese boxing are challenged.
LoveHKFilm.com
(Calvin McMillin) review
Way of The Dragon: Comparison (Spectrum vs. Ultimate Edition) Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
Jerry Saravia
retrospective [2/4]
Harvey's
Movie Review (Harvey O'Brien) review
VideoVista
review Mike
Philbin
DVDActive (Malcolm Campbell) dvd
review [8/10]
DVD Times Michael Sunda reviews Bruce Lee Ultimate DVD Collection
BBCi - Films (DVD review) Almar Haflidason
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
ENTER THE DRAGON
Hong Kong USA (98 mi) 1973 ‘Scope d: Robert Clouse 25th Anniversary Edition (110 mi)
The first of a burgeoning series of
American film industry attempts to colonise the kung-fu market, this manages to
be inferior to even the weakest of Bruce Lee's
echt-Chinese movies. A sorry mixture of James Bond and Fu Manchu, it
tacks together the exploits of a multi-national crew of martial artists
converging on Hong Kong for a tournament, infiltrated by Lee - fresh from his
Shaolin temple - on an assignment to bust an opium racket. Worth seeing for
Lee, but still unforgivably wasteful of his talents.
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
After the mixed success of his third effort, The Return Of
The Dragon, Lee started to work in his next project, The Game Of Death.
Shooting was taking place for four months in India when all of a sudden Lee was
offered an American offer to appear in the lead role in a new film called Enter
The Dragon. Lee wasted no time and decided to interrupt the Game Of Death
shooting and work 100% in what was to be his breakthrough film in the US, and
what a breakthrough it was. Enter The Dragon cemented the final block for Bruce
Lee to be proclaimed as the greatest martial artist of his era, if not, of all
time. The film is nearly perfect, with a pretty tight but predictable script,
superb performances, and ass-kicking fighting scenes. The film remains a
classic in the martial arts genre; sadly, Lee didn’t live to see it shine.
Han (Shih Kien) is an evil drug lord and murderer of young
girls but has never been directly proven for it. So Lee (Bruce Lee), who’s a
Shaloin monk, is hired by the Interpol to infiltrate Han’s island through a
martial arts tournament that he stages every three years, in which he invites
martial artists around the world to participate, to find out and uncover hard
evidence so they can arrest him. And he doesn’t go alone, two American martial
artists, Roper (John Saxon) and Williams (Jim Kelly) are also invited. Roper is
a hard-hitting gambler that owes money and needs to find cash to pay back,
while Williams is a wanted man in the US. Lee also goes for personal reasons,
since it was Han’s bodyguard O’Hara (Robert Wall) who killed his sister. You
know what happens next.
The plot is somewhat of a cross between James Bond and lots of 70’s cheese, and
it’s pretty much predictable. It kind of leaves some pretty loose ends when it
comes to Han’s “daughters” since they’re never mentioned again in the film. And
the storyline is practically pure formula, and yes, Han is character wise, a
carbon copy of Dr. No. Still, the script scores high at character development.
The flaws take some shine off the film, but it keeps it’s momentum thanks again
to Lee’s martial arts sequences.
The fight sequences are choreographed to perfection, and never miss a beat, and
the cinematography is superb, catching every kick and every punch with
accuracy. Hell, they even make John Saxon look like he’s fighting even though
he doesn’t know jackshit about martial arts, still, it’s pretty much fun to
watch him act. Jim Kelly, even though he’s not an actor, still manage to put on
some cool hard knocks, but of course, the man who steals the show is no one
else but Lee, who again gives out some of the best fighting throughout his
career. His re-match with Robert Wall (he fought him in Return Of The Dragon)
is a must, along with his classic fight with martial artist Shih Kien (Han) in
the room of mirrors. Again, that’s cinematography and acting at it’s best.
Robert Clouse’s direction manages to keep the film under control, despite the
scripts predictability; he injects the suspense in the precise moments and the
rest is history.
In the end, the film isn’t a masterpiece, but it damn well
delivers, thanks to the three leads. The film remains though, a classic, due to
the great fight sequences that has. It’s arguably the best martial arts film
ever made if not, one of the best. Unfortunately, Lee would die of a brain
edema a month before the film was released, his status of a hero would soon
pass into legend due to the great influence he had on the martial arts genre.
He’ll be sorely missed.
Enter
the Dragon - TCM.com Lang Thompson
Rather than being just a weak imitation of the
crowd-pleasing films Bruce Lee made in China, Enter the Dragon (1973) - his first mainstream American film - captures all
the excitement of his previous Hong Kong hits. In fact, it's often called one
of the greatest martial arts films ever made and one reason is because people
who aren't martial arts fans also enjoy it. By Hollywood standards, the film
was a B-movie, yet every aspect of it from the acting to the direction was way
above average for an action thriller. And, of course, the fight scenes are
mesmerizing and unlike anything previously seen in American films. Enter the Dragon was a huge hit but
sadly Lee didn't live to see this, dying just a few weeks before the premiere.
Putting an espionage twist on the familiar revenge theme, Enter the Dragon features Lee as a
martial arts expert whose sister was killed by drug smugglers. The smugglers'
island is heavily guarded which prevents Lee from easily gaining access until a
police agency recruits him for a secret mission there. It turns out that the
smugglers' boss is hosting a martial arts contest which allows Lee and two
partners to visit the island as contenders in the championship.
The genesis of Enter the Dragon
began with producer Fred Weintraub who thought Hollywood could make a good
martial arts film. He convinced Warner Brothers to back the project and then
hooked up with Bruce Lee's own production company, Concord. Michael Allin was
hired as the scenarist (he would later write Truck Turner (1974) and the
1980 Flash Gordon as well as Zarafa, an acclaimed book about the
first giraffe brought to Paris). The director was Robert Clouse, a two-time
Oscar nominee for Best Live Action Short Subject (The Cadillac (1962), The
Legend of Jimmy Blue Eyes, 1964). Supposedly Clouse was the only director
who wanted the job. For added box office appeal, the producers signed up
perennial B-movie actor John Saxon and karate champion Jim Kelly.
Because it was his first starring role in an American film, Lee felt tremendous
pressure to succeed. In fact, he was so nervous that he didn't appear for the
first three weeks of shooting. Producer Weintraub told writer Rick Meyers at
the time that Lee was feuding with his old boss Raymond Chow and giving him a
hard time as well. The first day Lee appeared, his nerves manifested themselves
in a facial tic that required 27 takes to get a good shot.
Most of the extras were actual martial arts fighters and some of them couldn't
resist the urge to take on the famous Bruce Lee, scuffles that invariably ended
in Lee's favor. But Lee knew what he was doing. He staged all the martial arts
sequences that made the film so memorable. One of his kicks was actually so
fast that it was filmed in slow motion so that viewers could see it wasn't a
camera trick; other shots were sped up. After principal photography was
completed Lee added the Shaolin Temple scene that places Enter the Dragon in a cultural context,
linking it more closely to Chinese traditions. Weintraub recognized Lee's
immense talent and was planning to sign him for a second American film at the
pay rate of one million dollars.
But Lee died July 20, 1973 of a brain edema. Enter the Dragon was released in the U.S. barely a month later and became a
huge hit. Many of Lee's earlier Hong Kong films were then dubbed and released
in the U.S. Other Hong Kong martial arts films starring Jimmy Wang Yu, Ti Lung
and other Chinese stars began appearing in U.S. theatres, often presented in
poorly dubbed and crudely re-edited versions. The Bruce Lee clones appeared as
well, featuring names like Bruce Li, Bruce Le and the quite improbable Bronson
Lee (sporting a Charles Bronson mustache; he was actually Japanese). It would
be years before martial arts films would overcome the negative image created by
this flood of third-rate product.
Today, kung fu fans and martial arts film buffs will find plenty of familiar
faces in Enter the Dragon.
The most famous have two of the smallest parts. At the start of the film Lee
spars with Sammo Hung and at the end one of the men in the crowd fighting Lee
is Jackie Chan (Lee breaks his neck). Yuen Biao, another friend of Hung and
Chan's, also has a small part. You can also spot Chuck Norris, Lam Ching-Ying,
the vampire-buster from numerous ghost films, and Yuen Wah, a perennial action
star. But even the larger roles feature martial arts stars. Mr. Han was played
by Shih Kien, who appeared in numerous films as the legendary Wong Fei-Hong
(the same quasi-historical character that Jackie Chan plays in the Drunken
Master films, Jet Li in the Once Upon a Time in America series and
Donnie Yen in the Iron Monkey films). Angela Mao (as Su Lin) was one of
the best-known of the many female martial arts stars and Bolo Yeung (as Bolo)
has enjoyed a long career in this genre though the quality of his films can't
compare with Bruce Lee's work.
Mutant
Reviewers from Hell review
Dragan Antulov
retrospective [8/10]
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
VideoVista
review Richard
Bowden
Cinescape dvd review Brian Thomas
CultureCartel.com
(John Nesbit) review [3/5]
Salon (David Lazarus) dvd
review
Action
in motion: kinesthesia in martial arts
Aaron Anderson from Jump Cut,
December 1998
DVD
Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]
DVD
Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review
The
Digital Bits dvd review [Special
Edition] Todd Doogan, 25th
Anniversary 2-disc Special Edition
KFC Cinema Matthew Abshire, 25th Anniversary 2-disc Special Edition
DVD
Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review 25th Anniversary 2-disc Special
Edition
DVD
Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel and Lieu Pham, 25th
Anniversary 2-disc Special Edition
CHUD.com (Dave Davis) dvd
review [Special Edition]
DVD MovieGuide
dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD
Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [3/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd
review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD
Verdict (Dennis Prince) dvd review
[HD-DVD Version]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [HD-DVD
Version] Nicholas Sheffo
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd
review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD
Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review
[4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
Enter the Dragon (BluRay) Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
Cold Fusion Video Reviews (Nathan Shumate) review
And You Thought It Was Safe [David DeMoss]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Edinburgh
U Film Society (Keith H. Brown) review
DVD Times Michael Sunda, Bruce Lee Ultimate DVD
Collection
San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review
The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray
Version] Leonard Norwitz
Lee Chang-dong
"Secret
Sunshine"at Palm Springs International Film Festival Bijan Tehrani from Cinema Without Borders,
which includes an interview with the director
Lee Chang Dong, director of Secret Sunshine, graduated in 1980 with a degree in Korean
Literature from
Lee did not study filmmaking before starting out. He penned two screenplays,
Park Kwang-su's To the Starry Island in 1993 and A Single Spark in 1995. After
being encouraged by his contemporaries to finally step behind the director’s
chair, Lee made Green Fish, a "critique of Korean society told through the
eyes of a young man who becomes enmeshed in the criminal underworld" in
1997.
In 2000, Lee made Peppermint Candy, a story following a single man in reverse
chronology through 20 years of South Korean history. He served as the minister
of Culture and Tourism in the South Korean Government from 2003 to 2004.
Lee Chang-dong > Overview - AllMovie Bio from Tom Vick
A successful novelist and screenwriter before becoming a
director, Lee Chang-dong came late to filmmaking, but quickly
established himself as one of
The Films of Lee
Chang-dong - Harvard Film Archive
May/June 2008
Korean cinema has recently seen a renaissance at all levels of filmmaking, from the popular to the experimental. While gonzo filmmakers like Kim Ki-duk (The Island, Samaritan Girl) and Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Lady Vengeance) have gotten a lot of attention with their violent thrillers, and Hong Sang-soo wins converts by making sophisticated examinations of relations between the sexes that owe a certain amount to French cinema, Lee Chang-dong (b. 1954) continues in a direction pioneered by such celebrated directors as Im Kwon-taek and Park Kwang-su, that of a thoughtful cinema devoted to examining social and historical problems as they intersect with the lives of particular individuals, realistically presented. At the same time, Lee ups the ante from his predecessors by focusing on ambiguous protagonists caught in dire situations.
Lee began his career as a novelist. His first filmmaking experience came when he worked on two acclaimed films directed by Park Kwang-su: as a co-writer on To the Starry Island (1993) and as sole screenwriter on A Single Spark (1995). Lee set aside his filmmaking career in 2003 and 2004 to accept the post of Minister of Culture under President Roh Moo-hyun. Although the films he’s directed remain little-seen in this country, Lee is recognized internationally as one of the leading East Asian filmmakers of his generation. Secret Sunshine and Oasis are Lee’s best-known films and are justly celebrated as moving portraits of the fragility of human relationships and faith today. However, Lee’s first two films are just as remarkable with their emphasis on the human costs in South Korea‘s struggle from authoritarianism towards unbridled capitalism.
What is remarkable about Lee Chang-dong’s films is their ability to be both intelligent and emotionally affecting while only skirting the kind of melodrama so prevalent in Korean cinema. Much has been made of Lee as a sort of latter-day Bresson, but for all that his films take up questions of suffering and redemption, they remain rooted in the here-and-now of contemporary Korea.
Lee Chang-dong Mubi
Lee Chang-dong (이창동, Korean producer, director, scriptwriter ... bio from Han Cinema
LEE
Chang-dong - Festival de Cannes - From 11 to 22 may 2011
Lee Chang-dong • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Joseph Pomp, December 4, 2014
Translator's Note: on the Narratography of Lee Chang-dong On the Narratography of Lee Chang-dong: A Long Translator’s Note, by Heinz Insu Fenkl, reprinted from Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, 2007
MILYANG/ SECRET SUNSHINE (Lee Chang-Dong, 2007) Marc Raymond from Foreigner’s Guide to Film Culture in Korea, February 6, 2008
The
Unseen and the Unspoken: The Films of Lee Chang Dong | The ... David Wilentz from The Brookly Rail, May 6, 2008
Spotlight | Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea) - Cinema Scope Robert Koehler from Cinema Scope, 2010
Realism
and melodrama in Lee Chang-Dong's "Secret Sunshine" by ... Marc Raymond from Jump Cut, 2010
Poetic justice for Lee Chang-dong - INSIDE JoongAng Daily Sung So-young, May 25, 2010
Secret
Sunshine: A Cinema of Lucidity - From the Current - The ... Dennis Lim from Criterion, August 24, 2011
Oasis • Senses of Cinema Marc Raymond, June 17, 2012
Between
Innocence and Experience: Lee Chang Dong's Secret ... Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, June 17, 2012
Peppermint Candy •
Senses of Cinema Rahul Amid,
June 18, 2012
Green Fish • Senses of Cinema John Fidler, June 21, 2012
Masters
of Modern World Cinema: Lee Chang-dong – CineScope February 14, 2015
Yes, Minister: Lee Chang-dong Interviewed Firecracker 10 magazine, also including an interview September 10, 2005
Lee Chang-Dong Lets the Sunshine In Scott Foundas interviews the director from the LA Weekly blog, October 31, 2007
"Secret
Sunshine"at Palm Springs International Film Festival Bijan Tehrani from Cinema Without Borders,
which includes an interview with the director
The
Evening Class: PSIFF08: <i>SECRET SUNSHINE</i>—Lee Chang-dong On… Michael Guillen interviews the director from
The Evening Class, January 8,
2008 , also seen here: Twitch
Veterans Lee, Yun Team Up in 'Poetry' Lee Hyo-won interviews Lee Chang-dong from The Korean Times,
Q&A:
Lee Chang-dong - The Hollywood Reporter
Park Soo-mee interviews the director from The Hollywood Reporter,
Interview: Lee Chang-dong Talks 'Poetry,' How 'Avatar' Affected Him ... Christopher Bell interview from the indieWIRE Playlist, February 8, 2011
Poetry:
Interview with Director Lee Chang-Dong | Emanuel Levy February 18, 2011
IFFR
2011: An interview with LEE CHANG-DONG - ScreenAnarchy Ard Vijn interview, August 22, 2011
Lee Chang-dong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia also here: Lee Chang-Dong - AsianMediaWiki
GREEN FISH
Time Out Tony Rayns
Screenwriter Lee's debut feature
offers a wry, regretful chunk of recent social history in the guise of a
gangster drama. Makdong (Han) comes home from military service to find his
family fragmented and their village razed to make way for a vast new housing
development. He drifts back to the outer suburbs of Seoul and into the employ
of a seemingly sympathetic gang boss (Moon), whose much-put-upon mistress
(Shim) seems in need of a friend. But Makdong is hopelessly out of his depth,
not realising that he's barging into a sado-masochistic relationship and
misunderstanding the politics of inter-gang rivalry. Lee's sense of his
characters as unwitting victims of the moral/economic/architectural climate
they live in is anchored in brilliantly judged imagery and in an acute
sensitivity to ambiguities of mood and feeling.
Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost)
Green Fish
disappointingly shouts out mediocrity from the get-go as it unexplainably
presents hints of qualities to make an excellent film, but never fully delivers
and captures our attention. The film appears to pride itself on being a
realistic and touching character drama, but rather we get a lackluster and
predictable film without any true pull.
Mak-dong (Suk-kyu Han), a discharged soldier in the army returns home to find
things have changed, his family has issues, and work is difficult to find. He
meets a woman who takes a liking to him and plays a part in him receiving a job
as part of a small gang, so he can earn money for his family to live happily.
The premise is the first hint at what’s to come, as it’s not too particularly a
special one that leaves us eager to watch. Nevertheless, the execution is
what’s important and can make you forget how bland the premise is, if there’s a
fresh take on the idea handled with emotion and interest. The problem is, we
get fragments of these, mainly with melodramatic plot twists that give us a
false sense of character attachment. Throughout most of the film though, solely
from the way the scenes are presented, we are rarely sympathetic to the
characters and simply don’t care at times. Character depth and motivation are
also somewhat explored but not with any interesting gimmicks or appealing
traits. Nothing truly stands out in the film other than the occasional bursts
of emotion from some of the actors, that tells us much of the problem simply
lies in the writing.
The entire experience remains a plain one despite an interesting narrative (in
terms of pacing and entertainment). The camera work isn’t too stand-out,
whether it be dreary scenery or disorienting action, but along with the Taxi
Driver-esque soundtrack, it does effectively capture the correct atmosphere.
Overall though, the film doesn’t come recommended, as there are plenty of
simple stories, even in
Darcy's Korean Film Page Darcy Paquet
The year 1997 saw the debut of a major filmmaking
talent in Lee Chang-dong, a novelist who first became involved in the
film industry as co-writer of two films by Park Kwang-su, To the Starry
Island (1993) and A Single Spark (1996). These works deal with various
aspects of 20th-century Korean history, but Lee's debut film Green Fish
is a very contemporary story set in the rapidly-developing outskirts of
The film's hero Makdong (meaning "youngest
sibling") returns to his hometown after completing his compulsory two-year
military service. He tries to find work to help support his family, which seems
on the edge of disintegration, but with the area overrun by new apartments,
little is available. Ultimately he takes a trip into
Green Fish features an all-star cast and
crew, although many of them were not well-known at the time. The actors include
Han Suk-kyu,
Moon
Sung-keun, Shim Hye-jin, Song Kang-ho,
Jung Jin-young (Hi, Dharma), Oh Ji-hye (Waikiki Brothers), Myung
Kay-nam (My Beautiful Days), and even Han Suk-gyu's brother, Han
Sun-gyu. It was produced by what is now
Most striking about Green Fish, as with Lee's subsequent features, is its emotional force, which is expressed while abstaining from conventional melodramatic techniques. He paints a gloomy view of Korean society and the turbulent nature of its development. This can be seen perhaps most clearly in the inner conflicts and problems faced by Makdong's family. A scene towards the end of the film, in which a family picnic disintegrates into chaos, shows how unstability has kept the family from growing close, or providing each other with any emotional support.
Lee has become a stronger and more refined
filmmaker over time, and his later features Peppermint Candy (2000) and Oasis
(2002) carry more of his personal style than Green Fish. Nonetheless Green
Fish stands well on its own, and it offers an impassioned if pessimistic
view of
Green Fish • Senses of Cinema John Fidler, June 21, 2012
KFC Cinema Peter Zsurka
Review of "Green Fish" David Walsh from The World Socialist Web Site
PEPPERMINT CANDY
Time Out Tony Rayns
As in Green Fish, Lee uses his
protagonist's life as a sounding-board for Korea's modern history - here, the
20 years from the eve of the Kwangju Massacre to the film's present. Twenty
years which see Young-Ho (newcomer Sol, electric) turn from a fresh-faced innocent
into a self-hating, suicidal jerk via traumatic experiences during his military
service and a thoroughly dehumanising stint in the police force. Well aware
that his pessimistic analysis of Korea's trajectory could be a pill too bitter
for most audiences to swallow, Lee has had the smart idea of telling the story
backwards: the film opens in the present and ends 20 years earlier with
Young-Ho looking forward hopefully to his future. Thanks to fine writing and
performances and subtle use of recurring imagery, the film is dramatically
powerful and highly emotive.
Asia Cinema Drifter Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost):
Peppermint Candy opens up with a severely disturbed Yong-ho wandering
around a riverbank where a number of friends appear to be having a 20-year
reunion picnic. Much to their surprise, they see Yong-ho, who had been friends
with them in the past, but his insanity proves to be a real party pooper when
he climbs up on some train tracks and gets hit by a train with a determined
claim that he is “going back.”
And so the story moves in reverse chronological order, as we visit various
points in his life over the twenty years that precede his suicide. These
include relationship ups and downs with his wife, his life as a police officer
in the 80s, a traumatic experience as a soldier early in his life, and his
first love. While the reversed order does create some mystery regarding the
cause of his insane outburst, it doesn’t resemble Memento because it focuses on
using this order more for emotional value than twists and turns. Yong-ho
represents the everyday South-Korean citizen, and it’s in this that Lee
Chang-dong finds his most effective drama. The subject matter
however, won’t alienate foreign viewers either as the film’s enjoyment doesn’t
hinge on its ties with modern Korean history and society. It’s all simply
handled so realistically that this one average man’s life, seems like a true
story, and one with which the viewer can easily identify his or herself. Sol
Kyung-gu seems to quite easily evocate the incredibly wide range of emotions in
his character from a tortured soul to an ambitious youth with dreams that we
can all understand. In addition, Moon So-ri
gives a subtlety touching performance as Yong-ho’s first love.
Chang-dong avoids the pitfalls of his last film, Green Fish through the most
important aspect in a character drama: its…characters. Young-ho is far more
accessible than the lead of Green Fish despite Chang-dong’s far more
chronologically spread-out story here. Both films are simple tales of ordinary
men, but Green Fish is handled in a low-key subtle style while Peppermint Candy
seems epic. Green Fish’s subtlety doesn’t get across to the audience as well as
Peppermint Candy’s events, even though the latter’s plot can’t help but feel like
it has holes when it skips around time so much. And while epic most usually
also means melodrama, you’ll hardly notice it here. In the end, Peppermint
Candy is more than a pleasant surprise when Chang-dong’s follow-up at first,
seemed to be shaping up for more than 2 hours of another lackluster story.
However, he corrects his errors, while remaining in the same genre as his last
film and just plain succeeds, minor contrivances aside.
Koreanfilm.org Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
As one of the most anticipated films of the year, Peppermint Candy, the second feature from acclaimed director Lee Chang-dong, was chosen to be the opening film of the 1999 Pusan International Film Festival. Some people viewed this as a coming of age: both for Lee, the novelist-turned-director whose debut feature Green Fish (1997) took home the top prize from the Vancouver International Film Festival; and for Korean cinema in general, since this was the first time in PIFF's four-year history that a domestic film was chosen for this honor.
The festival opened with fireworks, speeches, and a bit of rain, and when the film began to roll it clashed somewhat with the festive atmosphere. Peppermint Candy is the personal history of a man whose troubled experiences leave him greatly disturbed. The film asks of its viewers a fair amount of concentration and emotional energy; some scenes are upsetting, while others give us mere hints of beauty: the undeveloped potential that lies dormant within our hero.
The narrative structure of Peppermint Candy shares much in common with an early Jane Campion film, Two Friends, in that we first witness a tragedy, and then progress backwards in time to learn the events which led up to it. The film contains seven episodes from our hero's life, each of which reveal him in a different stage of development. These segments are linked by a series of shots taken from the back of a train, as if to suggest that the train itself leads us back into his past.
Many of the episodes in our hero's life echo the
contemporary history of
Ultimately the main character remains out of our grasp. Lee denies us any easy explanations for our hero's character, or excuses for his behavior. The film frustrated me as I was watching it for the first time; I wanted greater access to the hero's feelings. Nonetheless, I felt shattered upon reaching the end of the film, and it has beckoned me back for a second viewing.
Peppermint Candy Derek Lam from Camera Stylo
Peppermint Candy, director Lee Chang-Dong's second
feature and an ambitious charting of recent Korean history via the perspective
of an individual who lost out in the nation's development, opens in the present
with its protagonist's suicidal leap in front of a speeding train. Ending
some twenty years earlier, amidst the brief period of optimism following the
assassination of virtual dictator Park Chung-Hee in October 1979, it traces in
between antihero Yong-Ho's fall in reverse chronology, with episodes in time
that coincide with watershed events in South Korea's convulsive transformation
from near-fascist industrial state to one of Asia's booming "mini-dragon"
economies.
Despite the central narrative stunt, those seeking formal or
structural pleasures may be disappointed. Less a rigorous filmmaker than
an intuitive, populist storyteller, Lee is least comfortable when the film is
most stylized: the use of reverse-motion footage to bookend each narrative
episode doesn't just appear bland but oddly noncommittal, accompanied as it
were by music even more curiously faceless than the images. Yet it's with
considerable panache that Lee fashions the perennial loser myth out of
historical material: confidently schematic, un-self-consciously
sentimentalized, Peppermint Candy is old-fashioned melodrama that
doesn't shy away from representing its protagonist's hopes and regrets via a
long-lost love.
Given the film's penchant for archetypes, actor Sol
Kyung-Gu's neatly impressive turn comes across as less performance than
illustration. Revealed at film's end to be a gentle, flower-picking soul
content in life merely to take landscape photos and relax in the sun, the remarkably
vacant Yong-Ho exists less as a character with individual quirks than as a
passive everyman on which Lee projects the anxieties and frustrations of his
generation. There are no surprising idiosyncrasies to the character, nor
does Sol invest him with any personal mannerisms. Whether when reeling
from having shot a student as part of the military forces suppressing the
Kwangju uprising, or as a neophyte police interrogator compelled to torture a
dissident, he reacts more than he acts, and generally as one would expect him
to, following the overall trajectory of the corruption of an innocent.
The effect might be too generalized for some, but it's in keeping with the
film's aspirations for the mythic.
Not that the film's laid-back aesthetic doesn't have its
drawbacks. Decidedly non-severe, it emasculates, or at least makes appear
softer than it actually is, Lee's criticism of the oppressive regimes his
character suffers under. The thesis is sound: pinning down the
And yet, in the absence of rigor, the effect is less trenchant than it might have been. Still, one has to give Lee credit for the almost cruel wit with which he renders bittersweet the film's eponymous, near corny fetish-object. When offered one at the picnic finale of the film, Yong-Ho asks Sunim, lifelong love and the film's idealized object of desire, if she enjoys peppermint candies. "I try to," she answers. "At the factory, I wrap a thousand of them a day."
Heroic Cinema James Brown
Young-ho has lost everything: his youth, dreams, hopes and love. Seven segments that progress backwards in time and span twenty years of personal and national history reveal a series of desperate incidents and self-destructive trends that mark his life.
Backwards narration has become a rather fashionable way to
present a story on screen. Memento and Irréversible are two
recent examples of films utilising reverse-narrative structures. Some of the
dominant characteristics of this technique are its systematic engagements with
notions of temporal linearity, the past, of memory and the state of remembering
(or, in Memento’s case, the inability to remember). If the act of
observing and listening to a story told backwards is fascinating, it is perhaps
due to a resemblance in the way we as individuals recall our own experiences
and narrate our personal histories. Peppermint Candy takes this relationship
a step further by entangling the subjective history of its central character
with crucial socio-political moments in the history of the
In March 2003, director Lee Chang-dong was appointed
For some this is an extremely meaningful and significant film, but in order to better appreciate Peppermint Candy it is probably necessary to have some awareness of Korean culture and history — especially the Kwangju massacre and the concept of han.
Peppermint Candy • Senses of Cinema Rahul Amid, June 18, 2012
Critic
After Dark: Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang Dong, 1999) Noel Vera
The Film Journal Jose Alejandro Perez Eyzell
Review: Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong / 1999) Martin Cleary from New Korean Cinema
Love HK Film Sanjuro
KFC Cinema Brandon Fincher
MediaCircus.net Anthony Leong
Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]
Indie Cult Eric K
Peppermint Candy Acquarello from Strictly Film School
Asian Film Foundation Cheryl Cain
Film Threat Review Jason Ankeny
KPBS Movie Blog [Beth Accomando]
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
OASIS A- 94
This is a wild adventure, bold and
brutally raw, yet also unusually innovative and psychologically intriguing, a wretchedly
close-up look at societal prejudice through one of the most improbable and disturbing
love affairs ever captured on film, which is also heartbreaking, as there are
small, intimate moments that will simply take your breath away. Assuredly directed, evenly paced, using a
whole arsenal of camera techiniques, the film features two outstanding lead
performances that couldn’t be more difficult for the audience to watch, each
exposed through different opening segments.
Hong Jong-du, in a simply dazzling performance by Sol Kyung-qu, makes
the impossisble become possible, as his completely unlikable manner later later
becomes endearing to the audience. He roams
the streets in a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt while everyone else is wearing
winter clothes, smiling, affable, completely at ease with himself, though his
body is a neverending series of nervous energy where he can’t stop himself from
constantly wiping his nose throughout the film.
Others find him so repulsive that they think of calling the cops the
moment they see him. In American films,
the seedy character of Ratso Rizzo from
Out of the blue and apparently without any thought to what would happen, Jong-du decides to pay his respects by bringing a fruit basket to the family whose father he was convicted of killing in the hit and run accident that led to his incarceration. Outraged at the thought of seeing him again, they find his presence disgusting, but no more disgusting than what we soon discover they are planning to do, which is leave their seriously disabled daughter with an advanced stage of cerebral palsy, Han Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), alone to fend for herself in a rathole of an apartment while the rest of the family moves into a brand new spacious residence that was built to accommodate the needs of the disabled. Gong-ju in a wheelchair is a sorry sight from the moment we see her, as her physical contortions are profoundly disturbing and awkwardly off-putting, her eyes moving around her unsteady head which itself has no muscle control, with stunted growth on her hands and feet, unable to walk and barely able on occasion to blurt out a few nearly unrecognizable words. Adding to the wretchedness of this situation, Jong-du returns later to find Gong-ju alone and sexually assaults her to her hysterical cries and shrieks, only deterred when she faints, where he then actually takes the time to make sure she recovers. With this brief moment of concern, our revulsion turns to amazement as an oddball friendship ensues.
In what could only be described as remarkable, the audience is immediately intrigued by Gong-ju’s use of a hand mirror, continually glaring it in Jong-du’s face, where the light reflections break up into surrealistic images of little butterflies. Earlier, to the sounds of her singing a soft melody, we saw light rays in her room turn into a slow motion rendering of a white dove fluttering around her apartment. These visions are sparingly used, but quite effective, as on occasion Gong-ju actually becomes the woman she envisions, completely healthy without any physical deformities, but still glaringly in tune with her partner. When they meet, Jong-du tells her that her name in Korean means “princess,” which he affectionately calls her after that, claiming he was named after a famous general, the nickname she uses for him, but only after pointing out that the famous general he was referring to was actually a notorious traitor. Meanwhile, Jong-du becomes her only friend, seemingly the only one who talks to her, even calling her on the phone, sharing noodles together, doing her laundry, washing her hair, and is certainly the only one who ever takes her outdoors from her imprisoned environment. In the real world, however, no one sees her as a person, instead she is simply a deformed creature that people have learned to stay away from. When Jong-du brings her to his mother’s family birthday party at an upscale local restaurant, the family is immediately repulsed at the sight of her and no one except Jong-du ever offers to help her. After both being roundly rejected at the restaurant, Jong-du doesn’t want to go home but wants to make a special night of it, taking her to a karaoke lounge where he holds nothing back, screeching at the top of his lungs while singing her a beautiful love song.
From the long opening shot which focuses on an Indian tapestry hanging on the wall, like an exotic magic carpet showing a beautiful princess along with a young servant and an elephant at a water hole next to a giant palm tree, this film does an excellent job creating the fragile interior world of the lead characters, using music and eloquent fantasy sequences as brilliant contrasts from the blunt trauma of an uncaring exterior world that is a near documentary depiction of lower class deprivation. As the film progresses, we learn how the families have turned their backs on both of these individuals in such a morally reprehensible manner that it’s as if society is tilted upside down, where the outside world is nothing but arrogance and self-serving class interests that blames or pushes aside anyone that stands in their way, making both of these hapless individuals easy family scapegoats. Without ever mentioning it, both understand the degree of their social ostracization where there has never been anyone else who actually took the time for either one of them. Over time, as the views of society prevail, this couple is but a faint glitch on a radar screen, thoroughly bulldozed by the larger societal interests and savagely misunderstood, where the realist world continues to have their own way of seeing things. One can’t help but be utterly flabbergasted at what is achieved by the end of the film, where despite their wrenchingly sad predicament, there is something profoundly upbeat and emotionally cathartic about what we’ve experienced here, using vibrant exit music that has a Latin jazz tinge of what we might hear from Wong Kar-wai, leading to a tremendous climax that only dissolves afterwards over the end credits. The exquisite music is attributed to Jae-jin Lee. Moon So-ri’s painstaking detail in expressing her physical deformity was nothing less than phenomenal, apparently realized by living in a house of cerebral palsy residents for several months prior to the shoot, which certainly adds a spectacular layer of realism to the sheer look of this film, never for a moment overshadowing the equally stunning physical mannerisms of Sol Kyung-qu.
Oasis Block Cinema
After serving several years in prison for involuntary
manslaughter, Jong-Du, a mentally ill young man, calls on the family of his
victim. They send him away, but not before he falls for their daughter, a young
woman severely disabled by cerebral palsy. Lee Chang-Dong, a Korean New Wave
filmmaker who recently served as South Korea’s minister of culture and tourism,
crafts an edgy, heartbreaking depiction of an unlikely romance between two
people ostracized from family and society. Featuring a stunning performance by
Moon So-Ri, who won the Marcello Mastroianni award for best actress at the
Venice Film Festival.
Oasis Martin Rubin from the Reader
Skating fearlessly on the edge of tastelessness and
sentimentality, this 2002 South Korean feature is another strong, provocative
film by Lee Chang-dong (Peppermint Candy), an edgy tale about a dense
jailbird and a woman with cerebral palsy who grimace, grunt, and thrash their
way toward an awkward but affecting last tango in a dingy Seoul apartment. As
it ranges through harrowing melodrama, discomfiting comedy, bitter jabs at
bourgeois hypocrisy, and sweet, fleeting fantasies, it demonstrates the tonal elasticity
and moral elusiveness that characterize much of the new South Korean cinema.
Lee is a director of dogged force rather than finesse, and here much of that
force comes from the fierce lead performances of Sol Kyung-gu (the blighted
antihero of Peppermint Candy) and the remarkable Moon So-ri,
establishing herself as one of the most intriguing talents around. In Korean
with subtitles. 132 min.
The 21st Vancouver International Film
Festival - A Report Lisa
Roosen-Runge from Senses of Cinema
Oasis is
likely to be quite controversial and prominently discussed, and for good
reason. At least it is a damning condemnation of the invisible status of people
with disabilities in modern
Posts from the Internet
Film Discussion Group, a_film_by
From: Kevin Lee
Date: Thu Dec 16, 2004 3:58pm
Subject: Re: acting '04
Yes, there is definitley something distinctive about Lee Changdong's handling
of actors. I've only seen PEPPERMINT CANDY and OASIS but in both cases he makes
a study of bad behavior in his leads. The signature Lee Changdong scene
involves a party where friends and family gather together to eat, drink, sing,
reinforce their bonds and forget about their worries -- a communal psychic
purging that allows them to continue believing in their happiness -- and in the
midst of it, Sol Kyung-gu or Moon So-ri act up and disrupt everything, because
this collective act of "acting happy" only exacerbates the misery
lurking inside them and unleashes it like a demon under the bed. This happens
twice in PEPPERMINT CANDY and once in OASIS.
But Sol and Moon's bull-in-the-china-shop pyrotechnics wouldn't be half as
compelling if Lee wasn't able to get his ensemble to function so effectively as
straight people. The people who play the family members and friends are so good
at acting like normal, well-meaning people who just want to be happy. Because
of their effectiveness I empathize with their discomfort and confusion when the
lead characters go haywire, even as I share the emotional torment of the leads
(because, unlike the other characters, the viewer is given information about
the sociological and historical causes for the lead characters' dysfunction).
It's Ozu's etiquette on a collision course with Fassbinder's rage, and the
result is gutwrenching but also makes the best use of the sociological aspects
of drama: it confronts the viewer with his or her own process of understanding
and empathizing with others.
If only Jia Zhangke could be as inspired with his treatment of actors (instead
of offering them as neorealist objects of pity) he wouldn't be content with
pitching softballs to festival audiences.
Kevin
Bright
Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]
Has any film introduced its heroine with more beautiful
imagery than
Oasis Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
For better or for worse, the historical development
of Korean cinema has been linked to the genre of melodrama, in much the same
way that people think of martial-arts films in relation to
For his third film Oasis, Lee seemingly
changed course and decided to make a love story: a melodrama rooted in the
relationship between a social misfit just released from prison and a woman with
cerebral palsy. What seems on the surface to be a depressing tale of squalor is
actually one of the most amazing films
Oasis begins in mid-winter when a man named Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu) is released from prison wearing summer clothes. He served time for a drunk driving accident in which another man is killed, but his decreased mental capacities seem to leave him unable to understand how the incident has impacted others. After a half-hearted reunion with his family, he takes a visit to the home of the man he killed.
There he meets a woman named Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), whose name means "princess" in Korean. Afflicted with a severe case of cerebral palsy, Gong-ju is more or less confined to her room, talked at occasionally but otherwise ignored. Jong-du takes an interest in her immediately, and despite being thrown out, resolves to return later when he knows she will be alone...
It's hard to write about this film without commenting on the acting by the two leads, reunited after their turn in Peppermint Candy. Many will be struck by the challenge met by Moon So-ri in portraying a severely handicapped woman, but Sol Kyung-gu has also given tremendous life to his character, and the two of them together are brilliant. Much of the film's appeal comes in watching the two of them interact.
But more than anything else this film comes across
as an anguished appeal by director and writer Lee Chang-dong, who has made such
tremendous strides in his first three films that he has to be considered one of
eFilmCritic.com (Elaine Perrone)
FIRST SCREENED AT
In a stunning demonstration of the insensitivity and lack of
common sense that have plagued him his entire life, Jong-du attempts to make a
social connection with the family of the man killed in the hit-and-run accident
– who, it turns out, was the father of Gong-ju and her brother. Then, in an
unnerving scene that is as far from meeting-cute as is imaginable, Jong-du
tries to express his attraction to Gong-ju by raping her.
Still, the neglected Gong-ju, whose mind is sharp in spite of her ruined body,
recognizes that Jong-du's behavior is not motivated by malice but by his
inability to comprehend boundaries. She invites him back into her life, and, to
the horror of both their families, the two misfits form a deep attachment,
complementing and completing each other. He becomes her limbs; she opens his
heart so that he is finally able to perform a perfect, selfless act of love for
her.
Challenging and often brutal to watch, Oasis is still essential viewing for
filmgoers who regard movies not just as entertainment but also as an art form.
Moon So-ri is astonishing, turning in what amounts to two separate performances
– one as the painfully contorted, grimacing Gong-ju whose perfectly normal
emotions and desires are not dampened by her crippling affliction, the other as
the gracefully lovely, lighthearted, and able-bodied young woman who inhabits
her fantasies. Likewise, Sol Kyung-gu (Peppermint Candy, Public Enemy) is a
remarkable actor, almost unrecognizable from one film to the next as he
transforms himself completely into whatever character he is portraying. Here he
seems not to be acting at all, as he "becomes" the simple-minded,
aimless, and socially inept Jong-du.
Oasis was the second collaboration of Mr. Sol and Ms. Moon
with each other and their director/screenwriter Lee Chang-dong, a
novelist-turned-filmmaker who is now
The Village Voice
[Michael Atkinson]
Lee Chang-dong's Oasis is, at first blush, one of those occasional miracles that approach leapingly scandalous material with a superhuman charity and somehow dodge charges of tastelessness. In the end, it's a daring heartbreaker. Pedestrian-realist romances with stringently tragic spinouts have emerged as one of the most original and affecting new genres of the tentatively U.S.-distributed Korean new wave, and Lee's movie, released by a fledgling boutique company but loaded with five Venice Film Festival awards, trumps the competition with little more than shadows on a wall.
Employing a loose, grainy, post-Godardian vision of cramped urban coexistence, Oasis begins with Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu), himself a rarely observed breed of movie varmint: Adenoidal, impulsive, fresh from a prison stint for drunk-driving manslaughter, he seems at first to be either retarded or sociopathic—in one of several cataclysmic restaurant visits, the hapless parolee tries to convince the waitstaff to let him leave his shoes in lieu of a giant meal tab. Soon, it's apparent that Jong-du is simply one of those people: He stands too close to strangers, never says the right thing, and can't help defiling social norms—he even goes to visit the family of the old man he was convicted of killing, expecting to amiably apologize.
He's cast out, of course—even his own family avoids him—but not before he sets his sights on the victim's daughter, Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), a girl with severe cerebral palsy. We're introduced to her in a swoony indication of the movie's contrapuntal nature: The perfectly real white dove we see fluttering around Gong-ju's apartment turns out to be, in a blithe cut, the sunlight she's shakily reflecting from a handheld mirror. Throughout, Lee's light-footed realism gives way to moments of matter-of-fact lyrical sorcery, most often when, as a wickedly unlikely romance blooms between these two misfits, Moon suddenly relaxes her character's harshly twisted deformity, springs out of her wheelchair, and dances. Somehow, the subjective abandonment of Gong-ju's confining physicality—in effect, allowing us to see the distance between Moon's lovely, vibrant self and her damn-the-torpedoes imitation of disablement—only brings us in closer, refocusing our gaze on the woman rather than the deformity. You begin to look forward to those moments, as when Jong-du is carrying her on a subway platform and you see her hands relax, abruptly able to hold him in return.
Oasis displays astonishing confidence: Jong-du's first reaction to Gong-ju is to try to rape her, a taboo-lacerating scene that meets its comeuppance later when the couple's first consensual encounter, itself a tearjerking marvel, is found out and confronted by their outraged (but covertly amoral) families. Just as ballsy, Moon's CP portrait seems to err on the side of extremity, but quickly she's a reality that demands to be accepted. Lee effortlessly creates a dense social context for his star-crossed lovers, from the bookending sojourns to the unforgiving police station to one of the great, discomfiting extended-family dinner scenes of all time. But Oasis is utterly beguiling because Lee, like many other percipient Asian filmmakers, is simply more attentive to his characters' emotional tumult than the audience's. No movie in recent memory has translated so clearly the secret language of lovers normally lost on the rest of the world.
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Director Lee Chang-dong is rapidly emerging as one of the
most important directors in
Hong Jong-du has just been released from prison where he has
just done time for a hit and run driving incident where a man was killed. It is
the middle of winter, but all he has to wear is the summer shirt he went in
with. He finds that his family has moved and immediately gets himself into
trouble with the police again when he eats at a restaurant without being able
to pay. He visits the family of the man killed in the car accident, bringing a
basket of fruit with him. Understandably, the man’s son and wife are less than
happy to see him. While he is there, he meets the man’s daughter, Gong-ju, who
suffers from cerebral palsy. He strikes up an unlikely friendship with the
girl, much to the horror of his own and the girl’s family. Jong-du recognises
instinctively (he is too dumb to rationalise it), that Gong-ju is someone as
isolated from the world as he is himself – an outsider with no ability or means
to interact with the real-world. Together they both create their own way of
getting on, but it is a relationship that cannot be understood or tolerated by
their respective families. With a previous conviction for attempted rape, Hong
Jong-du’s motives are suspect.
What makes Oasis so remarkable and raises it above other similar “issue” films
is the unsentimental manner in which it is handled. The director, who also
wrote the script, doesn’t side-step any potentially controversial issues –
political correctness, moral judgements, social attitudes to the disabled,
disabled sexuality – all these topics are not only taken-on, but deftly handled
in an intelligent, thought provoking and realistic way. The hazard of such an approach
is that it is all to easy to preach and paint issues in a simplified black and
white manner, lapsing, the way so many films on a similar subject do, into
heavy-handed melodrama. Lee Chang-dong not only avoids these pit-falls, he
deliberately raises and skilfully navigates through them, blurring the morality
of the actions that are traditional in such roles.
It would be all to easy, for
example, to depict Gong-ju as a special case, but in Oasis she is not a
gifted savant – she is a disabled woman with an ordinary woman’s needs and
desires that she unable to satisfy both through her disability and also through
the attitudes of family and society towards her. She wants to dress-up, wear
make-up, fall in love, dine out - the everyday things everyone else takes for
granted. The film successfully puts us into her mind, showing us without any
sentimentality how she sees herself, how she copes and how her mind processes a
world that she is unable to be fully a part of. Moon So-Ri’s performance is
remarkable - a sensitive, brave and nuanced performance.
No less nuanced is the character and the performance of Sol Kyung-gu as Hong
Jong-du. How much easier it would be for Gong-ju to be looked after by a
sensitive, understanding person, able to see the real person behind her
disability. Hong Jong-du defies every preconception you would have about such a
character. His intentions are well-meaning, but he is uneducated and
ill-mannered and expresses himself badly. He doesn’t make a good impression on
anyone. His first encounter with the girl alone is really quite disturbing.
Yet, he displays far more compassion and understanding than anyone else close
to the girl. Once again however, the director doesn’t make things easy for the
viewer. Deliberately blurring the issues, not only does he make his lead
character something of an anti-hero, but the families cannot be easily
dismissed as the traditional bad-guys. How sympathetic would you be if you had
a disabled relative being courted by a man who not only killed her father
through drunken driving, but also has a conviction for attempted rape?
With such challenging characters and situations, the aim of the film is not, as
is so often the case, to give the audience a chance to feel superior and good
about themselves, nor is it a cynically manipulative tear-jerker. Lee
Chang-dong asks the viewer to examine their own prejudices and preconceptions
and along the way he offers some truly astonishing insights as well as some
little moments of pure cinematic magic and Dancer
In The Dark-style flights from reality.
Oasis • Senses of Cinema Marc Raymond, June 17, 2012
Korean Cinema in 2002 Peter Rist from Offscreen
KFC Cinema review Brandon Fincher
Oasis Lee Marshall in Venice from Screendaily
Milk Plus review Shroom, providing the Cliff notes version of the entire film
filmcritic.com Don Willmott
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Film Journal International (Maria Garcia)
Strictly Film School Acquarello
DVD Verdict Joel Pearce
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
59th Venice Film Festival 2002, September 6, 2002 Robin and Laura Clifford
LEE Chang-Dong SOL Kyung-gu, MOON So-ri, AHN Nae-sang, RYOO Seung-wan Press Release and Film Credits (pdf format)
The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
DVDBeaver.com - Full Review [Kin Ho]
Oasis (2002 Chang dong-Lee) Karaoke sequence from YouTube (4:43)
SECRET SUNSHINE A- 94
Premiering at Cannes in 2007, nominated for a Foreign
Language Academy Award in 2008, it took nearly 4 years before the film opened
in a major U.S. city, distributed by IFC, and when it did, it was shown on HD
Video on a small screen, similar to watching it at home, as the size is reduced
even further for the ‘Scope aspect ratio, so the top and bottom of the screen
were empty. As to why it took so long
for the film to arrive, one remains clueless, as it’s clear this is a formidable
talent with unique filmmaking credentials.
According to his bio at IMDb See full bio, Lee
Chang-dong was born in Daegu, considered the most right wing city in
Lee never makes it easy for us, nor does he spell things out for us, as he instead takes us on Jeon Do-yeon’s novelesque journey (winner of Best Actress at Cannes), a widow who is moving with her young son to the small town of her recently deceased husband, the subject of poisonous family rumors which has caused her to leave her family behind, which begins with her car breaking down just outside of Milyang, which in Chinese means “Secret Sunshine,” where a hotshot mechanic Song Kang-ho cheerfully welcomes her to the city. Slowly she acclimates herself to life in a small town, where school busses have flowers and optimistic slogans painted on them and where everyone has soon heard about her arrival. She immediately joins a women’s social circle, even as she has little in common with these other women who oftentimes make unflattering comments about her behind her back, but this is what’s done as she assumes a social standing as a piano instructor. It’s interesting to see women drink too much in public as they have a vicious sense of humor and seem to enjoy leaving their husbands behind. Their frivolity recalls the surreal final scene of dancing housewives in Bong Joon-ho’s audacious psychological thriller MOTHER (2009). Somewhat shockingly, this film turns into a heartbreaking missing child saga, where the terrifying jolt of losing her child becomes a stark everyday reality, where her inconsolable anguish leads her to seek comfort in the refuge of Christianity, where her physical expression of grief in the church is unforgettable, expertly shot by the way where in a distant shot that lasts for nearly a minute we only hear the sounds of wailing in the congregation before a close up reveals the source, where smiles just a few minutes ago have led to a flood of tears. Song Kang-ho accompanies her in her religious quest, always a bit late and usually appearing just outside the frame, but he always seems to be there, standing up for her when no one else will, especially when her dysfunctional family comes to her son’s funeral and tries to label her damaged goods. When Jeon was initially blackmailed and had no one else to turn to, there’s a hauntingly empty scene where she pays him a visit at his garage at night where she stands outside gazing in at him where he’s alone, drinking heavily, and singing karaoke at the top of his lungs.
Jeon’s Christian transformation is one for the ages, as she
soon becomes the poster child for a born again Christian, assimilating the
message and the speech, becoming one of God’s ambassadors on earth spreading
the message. She goes to meetings,
speaks with the Reverend, joins new social circles, and sings joyous religious
songs outside the commuter train stations as bystanders walk by. The film paints an excellent portrait of
Korean Christianity, which is always led by that everpresent cheerful smile,
and where they have a ready answer for all of the nation’s social ills. This leads to that transcending moment when
she’s ready to go to prison to forgive the man who murdered her child. There have been other similar determinant
prison sequences, Bresson’s PICKPOCKET (1959) and Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW
(1963) come to mind, which feature moments of transcendence. But this is something different altogether
and is eerie and creepy at the same time, as the prisoner has also found
comfort in the salvation of Jesus Christ, so her forgiveness is not really
necessary, as he’s already squared it with a higher power. Where does this leave her? - - devastated and
crushed, where this turns into a psychologically tormenting grief and anguish
of Dostoevskian proportion. Her ultimate
clash with religion reaches
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Buried in the year-end rush but one of the year’s best films, Lee Chang-dong’s rending, hyperventilating follow-up to 2002’s Oasis focuses on Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon), a willowy, not-too-pretty young mother relocating to the obscure burg her dead husband came from, for obscure reasons. Reserved and cagey, Shin-ae herself remains a mystery, as she resists the gang-press of gossipy neighbors and over-friendly men (including congenial mechanic Song Kang-ho), plays with her headstrong grade-school son, and sets up a storefront piano school. Her unsettled life, and the mellow rhythms of the film, get scorched when her boy is kidnapped and then found dead, launching Shin-ae into a cascade of walking death, beatific Christian born-again-ness, leveling disillusionment (she decides to “forgive” the imprisoned killer in person, never a good idea), and self-destruction. Like a twisted sister to Rabbit Hole, Secret Sunshine doesn’t just posit grief but probes the hidden biology of it, like a parasite slowly chewing up its host from the inside. Lee makes lengthy, expansive, unpredictable movies always gripped by emotional tribulation, and the red-eyed Jeon, landing a Best Actress at Cannes in 2007 and unforgettable as well in The Housemaid, goes to hell and back.
Glenn Kenny from Premiere
Not a frame is wasted in this 142-minute Korean drama from director Lee Chang-Dong, which begins with a mother and son stranded on the road to Miryang, the Korean town whose Chinese characters translate as the film's title. The mother and son are rescued by The Host's Kang-Ho Song, here with another bad haircut, playing a friendly auto mechanic who falls hard for the woman, a piano teacher settling in the town of her late husband's birth.
The first 40 minutes or so comprise fish-out-of-water comedy/drama of the sort that might have Hollywood pursuing remake rights, but an awful tragedy sends the movie and its heroine into another direction altogether—a direction I think is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, hence my skimpy plot description from here. The story's component involving religion evokes Bunuel without adopting his barbed irony; the theme of a woman losing control of her life recalls Cassavettes, but Chang-Dong doesn't go for the burn-rubber emotionalism of the American director. What makes this movie so hard to pin down critically, especially in blog-time, is how little Chang-Dong's style recalls other directors'. I admit that I haven't seen his three prior films. But I'm very much looking forward to catching up.
Secret Sunshine | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Noel Murray
According to the heroine of Lee Chang-dong’s brittle drama Secret Sunshine, the film’s title refers to the Chinese translation of the name of the provincial Korean village Miryang. Jeon Do-ywon moves to Miryang with her son after her husband’s death, and sets up shop as a piano teacher in what used to be his hometown. There, she finds the “sunshine” constantly at odds with the “secret.” Many of her new neighbors are devout Christians, who smile at her and want her to know “the world is really filled with happiness,” even if she doesn’t realize it. But they also speak ill of Jeon behind her back, spread harmful rumors, and don’t accept her as one of their own until she joins their church. Once she’s in the fold, Jeon discovers that much of the congregation has ulterior motives for their purported piety, and the more Jeon pursues her own faith, the more the contradictions and hypocrisies drive her mad.
Secret Sunshine’s plot hinges on a shocking first-act twist that would be more effective if Lee didn’t spend the first 40 minutes foreshadowing it, and the movie as a whole runs a little long, belaboring its point. But from start to finish, Lee crafts scenes that show how people lie to themselves, in ways both subtle and deeply disturbing. Jeon gives a powerful performance as a woman who refuses to see the flaws in her late husband, yet can’t stop seeing the flaws in everyone around her, or in herself. And the split in her psyche is exacerbated by Song Kanh-ho, a socially awkward local mechanic who tries to help Jeon’s business by lying about her credentials, and who undergoes his own conversion to Christianity so he can have more excuses to get close to her. Secret Sunshine is a frequently beautiful film with a cold, dark heart, and Song establishes what’s most unnerving about it in the opening minutes, when Jeon asks what life is like in Miryang, and Song replies, “There’s nothing strange about it… it’s like anywhere else.”
Let
the Sunshine In Scott Foundas from The LA Weekly Blog, April 23, 2007
(excerpt)
Of course, most of those movies will remain tightly under wraps
until the
Lee’s most ambitious and fully realized film yet, Secret Sunshine is that rare movie that possesses that fullness and complexity of a great novel — one that keeps revealing new layers to us the deeper we move into it, and where it is as difficult to predict what will happen ten minutes in as it is two hours later. When the movie begins, it suggests an Asiatic Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, with a recent widow (Jeon Do-yeon) and her young son moving from Seoul to the small town of Milyang (the film’s Korean title), where the woman hopes to establish herself as a private piano tutor. En route, her car breaks down and when the local Milyang mechanic (The Host star Song Kang-ho) comes to her aid, we see the first sparks of a hesitant romance between two shy, lonely people. And so Secret Sunshine proceeds for a while, as the widow adjusts to her new surroundings and takes stock — prompted by the evangelical proselytizing of a born-again pharmacist — of her faith (or lack thereof) in some higher power. Then, abruptly and without warning, the film becomes something of a thriller, and some time after that a nearly Bressonian study in human suffering. If it is hard to imagine how one movie could possibly be all of those things (and quite a few others too), it may be even harder to conceive of the agility with which Lee guides Secret Sunshine through these switchblade reversals of comedy and despair, darkness and light. For in the end, the movie is all of a piece and impossible to imagine any other way — a secular hymn to the small triumphs and cavernous tragedies of the everyday, and to our awesome ability to cope.
To say much more would be to compromise the surprises of Lee’s film, and surprises at the movies these days are an endangered natural resource. But a few words are owed to the film’s remarkable actors, without whom Secret Sunshine might still have remained so many disparate pieces in search of a whole. Song, who is one of the biggest male stars in Korea at the moment, seems to relish playing the sort of taciturn, anti-heroic supporting role that big stars aren’t supposed to play at the peak of their careers. (Think George Clooney in Good Night and Good Luck). Jeon, meanwhile, is a revelation — to me, at least, since I haven’t seen any of her previous films (although she is said to have been excellent playing an AIDS-stricken waitress in Park Jin-pyo’s 2005 drama You Are My Sunshine). On screen in nearly every scene, she is fearless in her navigation of the movie’s turbulent emotional currents and gives the kind of un-stylized performance that hardly seems like “acting,” slowly revealing to us the extraordinary inner strength and grace of this seemingly fragile, uncertain woman, until it is as if we are beholding a saintly figure cast out of the heavens. This is the kind of performance that great directors inspire in great actors, and it sets a high standard by which all others at Cannes 2007 shall be judged.
User reviews from imdb Author: Harry T. Yung
(harry_tk_yung@yahoo.com) from
"Miryang" (literally translated "secret sunshine") is
the name of a small town in the less densely populated part of
All the above happens in the first hour of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour
movie. The remainder of the movie is devoted to probing Lee's mental state
after suffering from this horrible, devastating double bereavement.
In its skillful story-telling, under an easy direction style, this movie is one
of those (my apologies for saying so) designed with the aim of fetching the
lead actress awards. With resounding success, it became instrumental to Jeon
Do-yeon earning the highly esteemed
Watching this movie is sometimes like watching Jeon taking a series of tests,
each one harder than the one before, towards winning the highest honour. This
starts with a sequence of establishing scenes to show the bonding between the
little boy and mother, Lee, who is sometimes childlike herself in the
simplicity of her affection. Then comes the kidnapper's phone call, a scene
Jeon handles with pitch perfection precision. The scene of victim body
identification at the riverside is shot with a combination of distance shot and
close ups, where Jeon, through both facial expression and body language,
conveys the mother's agonizing journey through shock, disbelief and clinging to
one last hope.
The range of emotions now gets even more complex. There in the painful,
tearless silence facing her wailing, screaming mother-in-law (the murdered
boy's grandmother) and the eerie feeling that her son is still around in the
house. Then comes the most difficult part. Quite naturally, Lee seeks religious
solace, through an Evangelist-ish group. Smile begins to come back to her face,
as well as a serene, peaceful glow, until she decides to visit her son's murderer
in jail to personally give him her forgiveness.
This is probably the award-winning scene. She holds the flowers she brings to
show the prisoner that it signifies her forgiveness. With an even more serene
and loving expression, the prisoner thanks her and reassured her that since he
started serving his jail term, he has sought, and been granted God's
forgiveness. The audience will observe the subtle change in the expression on
Lee's face, so superbly portrayed by Jeon. Back at the parking lot, while her companions
on the visit are chatting merrily about how wonderful the transformation of the
prisoner has been, Jeon remains ominously taciturn. Finally, she drops the
flowers and murmurs "If God has already forgiven him, what is there for me
to forgive?" and sinks on the ground, fainting right beside the car.
In the remainder of the movie Jeon portrays Lee's heart-wrenching struggle
between a desire to forgive and an instinct to hate – a performance that earns
her a place among the best of the very best.
Secret Sunshine: A Cinema of Lucidity - From the Current - The ... Criterion essay by Dennis Lim, August 24, 2011
Secret Sunshine
(2007) - The Criterion Collection
Between
Innocence and Experience: Lee Chang Dong's Secret ... Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, June 17, 2012
Realism
and melodrama in Lee Chang-Dong's "Secret Sunshine" by ... Marc Raymond from Jump Cut, 2010
MILYANG/ SECRET SUNSHINE (Lee Chang-Dong, 2007) Marc Raymond from Foreigner’s Guide to Film Culture in Korea, February 6, 2008
Bullet to the Head, Silver Linings Playbook, Secret Sunshine, Journey to Italy Noel Vera from Critic After Dark
Secret
Sunshine, 2007, Chang-dong Lee | Criterion Close-Up Aaron West
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]
The Lumière Reader Tim Wong
Secret Sunshine Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Secret Sunshine Rufus
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
TrustMovies: Lee Chang-dong's SECRET SUNSHINE taps into a mother's ... James van Maanen from Trust Movies, December 22, 2010
Lee Chang-Dong Lets the Sunshine In Scott Foundas interviews the director from the LA Weekly blog, October 31, 2007
"Secret
Sunshine"at Palm Springs International Film Festival Bijan Tehrani from Cinema Without Borders,
which includes an interview with the director
The
Evening Class: PSIFF08: <i>SECRET SUNSHINE</i>—Lee Chang-dong On… Michael Guillen interviews the director from The
Evening Class, January 8,
2008 , also seen here: Twitch
Lee Chang-dong: Secret Sunshine (2007)—NYFF Chris Knipp
Reverse Shot [Michael Koresky] Fall 2007
The House Next Door [Steven Boone]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]
Secret Sunshine (Miryang) | Review | Screen Lee Marshall from Screendaily
Living in Cinema [Craig Kennedy]
luna6 from Lunapark6, also seen here: Lunapark6
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
OhmyNews [Howard Schumann] and a shorter review here: CineScene [Howard Schumann]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Secret Sunshine — Inside Movies Since 1920 Ed Scheid from Box Office magazine
Secret Sunshine - Film - Time Out New York Keith Uhlrich
Secret Sunshine Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun
Movie Review - 'Secret Sunshine' - 'Secret Sunshine' Makes U.S. ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times, December 21, 2010
Festival Distinguished by Its Strong Actresses A.O. Scott at Cannes from the New York Times, May 26, 2007
Secret Sunshine Chang-dong Lee - DVDBeaver Luiz R.
POETRY (Shi) A 95
South Korea (139 mi) 2010
When was the last time an American film was written
specifically for a sixty-something grandmother in mind for the lead? Everything seems driven towards the youth
market, yet this film makes a mockery of any culture that idealizes youth and
in the same breath excuses the violent consequences of reckless immaturity,
where parents are constantly seen covering up and protecting the criminal
behavior of their children, who are not nearly so innocent anymore. Written by the director with this specific
actress in mind, Mija (Yun Jung-hee, who has acted in over 300 films in her
career, coming out of retirement after sixteen years of living in Paris)
is in nearly every scene, and while there are secondary players, the entire
film revolves around her character. Not
since Edward Yang’s YI YI (2000) have we seen a film like this, and much of
this resembles Yang’s novelesque filmmaking style, shooting small, personalized
moments of astonishing intimacy, where his attention to detail is immensely
significant, capturing the wordless rhythm of ordinary life so perfectly,
offering few close ups, similarly shooting here in long, medium range shots
with Mija repeatedly seen cutting vegetables or preparing food for her grandson
in the kitchen, staring out a bus window looking across a city river at the
mountains off in the distance, sitting, waiting alone at a rural bus stop,
arriving home to the quiet emptiness of her kitchen, or stopping to observe a
flower or record what nature sounds like in her diary. Like his last film, the river offers a
foreboding message, while as children are playing, one of them notices a young
girl’s dead body floating downstream, a classmate of Mija’s aloof teenage
grandson Wook (David Lee). Within
moments, her grandson and five other boys are implicated in an egregious crime
at school that ended in the girl’s suicide.
The fathers of the boys meet with Mija to decide how best to handle the
situation, deciding that their son’s futures and the reputation of the school
would be better served if they kept the news quiet about what happened, and to
make amends, offer a generous monetary package to the bereaved mother. Mija, obviously shaken, walks out and tries
to focus on something else, anything else.
What makes this movie so special is not the story itself, which is announced in the opening minutes, but watching the way the consequences unfold, where the suspense isn’t necessarily what happens, but the way it happens, as much of it plays out like a silent film. Mija barely utters a word to Wook, who hasn’t an ounce of remorse, instead he’s an aimless, self-centered kid who’s used to being waited on hand and foot and acts like he hasn’t a care in the world, yet as his mother lives and works out of town, Mija looks after him while also working as an in-home care giver to an elderly man left partially paralyzed from a stroke, where it appears her life is spent cleaning up after the messes left behind by others. Almost on a whim, she decides to register in a poetry class, where her instructor suggests everyone has poetry in them, but that they need to find a way to liberate their awareness. Mija finds it especially difficult, constantly working, never feeling inspired, yet she jots down various notes in her diary when she finds an idle moment. She also attends poetry readings, where locals read their works in a coffee house atmosphere. While the poetry itself is not all that exceptional, the use of highly distinctive language in an otherwise near wordless movie is quite a contrast, as the director himself is accentuating a different level of thought throughout his own picture. There are several remarkable scenes that stand out, like Mija attending the Christian church service for the deceased girl, where the use of refracted images give the appearance of entering an alternate universe, yet the mirror images also offer a psychological impression that she’s seeing herself in the death of the young girl, as if her own future was destroyed in the process. This blending of the souls is a unique component of death, where the living identify with their own mortality. Mija is also diagnosed with early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, though she doesn’t exhibit any signs of forgetfulness yet. All the more reason why she is so shaken by this experience, as it feels like something she doesn’t ever want to forget.
Exhibiting cowardice to the core, the other fathers suggest Mija have a woman-to-woman talk with the bereaved mother in hopes she will accept their offer. What’s even more disturbing is the way they casually sit around and consume alcohol while they assign responsibility to someone else. It’s easy to see their son’s contemptible behavior in their own adult lives, as not once in this entire film do any of them ever speak to their sons or hold them accountable, a scathing indictment of male behavior in Korean society, not to mention the brazen cover up, and this from a writer/director who once served as the nation’s Minister of Culture. Mija’s visit takes on its own spiritual transcendence, but not as one would imagine, as this is another remarkable sequence, one filled with a quiet and mesmerizing poetry all its own, all the more captivating by revealing only the sparest essence of the moment, where the unseen, untapped power is the quiet dignity of the two women. How this matter evolves is almost entirely offscreen, alluded to, never for a moment seen, which is the director’s aesthetic. The film is unique in that words are never used to address the actual criminal acts, which are the story of the film, instead it silently makes references, offers signs, clues, glances, gestures, poetic reveries, and insightful silences, where a consummate actress like Yun Jung-hee gracefully carries this film on her shoulders. By the end the audience is immersed in a moving and powerful drama, where the poetry professor candidly reveals that poetry is a dying art, that few people read it or find it much use anymore, that the culture certainly doesn’t embrace it, making it nearly archaic in a morally bankrupt society that prefers to cover up and forget its heinous acts, sweeping them under the rug. But the director finds a way to poetically rhapsodize the unspoken truths in a YI YI-like remembrance, where this heartbreaking story finally finds release.
Film Fest Journal: Poetry, 2010 Acquarello
While Lee Chang-dong's Poetry has invited comparison to Bong Joon-ho's Mother in its tale of morality, filial devotion, and culpability in the absence of memory, its theme of capturing the ephemeral beauty in the quotidian and transforming it into something eternal suggests a closer association with Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life. And like After Life, the film is stitched together by mundane interactions and memories both real and constructed (in this case, as told by students in Mija's (Yun Janghee) class struggling to find a source of inspiration for their poetry writing assignment). By interweaving fractured moments of grace and (implied) brutality, youth and old age, innocence and death (the opening image is of children playing in the river who subsequently discover a body floating in the river), Lee creates an understated metaphor, not only for the idea of preserving the poetry in everyday life, but also for the indomitable heroine's struggle to find beauty - and legacy - in the face of brutal reality.
Poetry | 54th BFI London Film Festival Tony Rayns
Lee Changdong follows Secret Sunshine with another powerful and moving story of a woman finding inner strengths - perhaps even an identity - she never knew she had. Yang Mija (the great veteran star Yun Junghee returning to the screen after 16 years) lives in a dormitory town outside Seoul, looks after her teenaged grandson Wook on behalf of his divorced mother, and has a part-time job caring for an elderly disabled man. One day, on impulse, she joins a poetry-writing class and starts trying to follow the tutor's advice to see more intensely what's around her. But she soon discovers that Wook is implicated in the suicide of a girl classmate, and pressure from parents of other boys in Wook's class starts to force her to contemplate doing things that were previously unthinkable. In a film rich in visual and verbal poetry, not to mention flawless performances from the entire cast, Lee succeeds in broaching moral, sociological and sexual questions without deviating an inch from his larger project to map the fault-lines in Korean society. Poetry and cinema may be dying arts, but Lee is on the battle-lines to save them.
The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]
As in his equally exceptional last film, Secret Sunshine (2007), Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry is a perfectly paced and performed character study of a woman raising a child on her own who must contend with a heinous act of violence. In her 60s, Mija (the marvelous Korean screen vet Yun Jung-hee) lives with her sullen adolescent grandson, Wook (Lee David), whose mother is looking for work in Busan. Poetry’s first third gently observes the quotidian activities of its heroine, who has just been diagnosed with dementia, and her endless caretaking—not only of her obnoxious grandson but the infirm patriarch who employs her as a home aide. Though most of her hours are spent cleaning up after others, Mija, prone to nattering, is not without pride or curiosity; impeccably attired in floral prints, she enrolls in a poetry class. As she desperately awaits inspiration from the muses, Mija learns of Wook’s role in a despicable act committed against one of his female classmates; the words flow after she decides her charge must suffer the consequences of his actions. Poetry, rightfully awarded Best Screenplay at Cannes last year, stands out as both a quietly scathing condemnation of male violence (and the craven attempts to cover it up) and an ode to the strength of a senescent woman all too frequently dismissed.
New York Film Festival 2010: Poetry Elise Nakhnikian from Slant magazine, September 21, 2009, also seen here: The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
Mija (Yun Jung-hee) is the antithesis of the title character in Bong Joon-ho's Mother. Where the mother in that film insisted that her son was being framed for the murder of a young woman, doggedly tracking down leads until she unearthed the truth, Mija knows as soon as she hears it that Wook (Lee David), the impassive grandson she's raising, was partly responsible for the suicide of a girl in his high school class. For Mija, the question is not how to prove Wook's innocence, but how to do something much harder: She must figure out what justice looks like in a case like this and how to make sure it is done, without betraying her beloved grandson.
Mija learns the truth from the fathers of the other boys, who see it as an unfortunate but easily solved problem: They just need to hush up the school officials and the press and pay off the girl's mother. Mija can't bear to listen to their talk; she keeps drifting out of the room and they barely register her absence, patronizing her as she has no doubt been patronized her whole life. (The girlishly lovely Mija's default mode is smiles and self-deprecating chitchat, and the other characters keep commenting on her beauty and her ultra-feminine clothes.) But writer-director Lee Chang-dong tunes us so precisely into Mija's wavelength that her searching silences speak much louder than the men's false, self-justifying words. Mija knows they owe the girl and her family more than just cash, and she knows she how important it is for the boys to acknowledge and atone for their crime.
Poetry nudges us a bit too hard every now and then, mostly when a kindly poetry teacher lectures his class about learning to truly see. Those unnecessarily expository moments stick out like a fly in a bowl of bisque, but they're too rare and too minor to ruin this elegantly told morality tale, whose screenplay won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes. Making Mija's thoughts and feelings clear without ever spelling them out, Lee follows several strands of resolutely everyday encounters to a deeply moving conclusion (while deciding what to do about the crime, Mija tends to a stroke victim, learns that she has early-stage Alzheimer's, and joins that talky teacher's poetry class). Cinematographer Kim Hyung-seok's compositions pack in as much information as the screenplay, often framing the most important part of a shot in the background. Time and again, we watch Mija as she watches somebody else. The people she looks at generally overlook or ignore her, but she never misses a trick.
Near the start of Lee Chang-dong’s ravishing new film Poetry (Shi), students in a community center poetry class set out to describe the most beautiful moments in their lives. The scenes they choose are modest and poignant. One man remembers the triumphant feeling of spreading out on the floor of his first apartment. A young woman recounts the day she taught her beloved and now-late grandmother the words to a favorite song. Mija (Yung Jun-hee) cries as she recalls an afternoon when her sister wanted to play with her. Then just three years old and dressed in her finest outfit, Mija felt “so good… so pretty” to be recognized by her sister, older by seven years. Mija will be noticed again in the film, this time by a spiritual sister of sorts.
Disarmingly girlish, Mija is making her way through an indifferent city with a lacquered pink smile and a self-deprecating laugh. Surviving on a public subsidy and her wages as a maid, she lives in a crowded apartment with her moody teenage grandson, Wook (Lee David). As she scrapes by, her efforts go largely unappreciated, both by Wook and his divorced mother, who lives in another city. Still, Mija maintains a lively curiosity about the world and a yearning to create. After enrolling in the poetry class, she attempts to “really see.” This, her instructor (Kim Yong-taek) explains, is the key to artistic inspiration.
Soon she sees two deeply disturbing facts. The first concerns her own failing health, which she chooses to keep secret. The second is Wook’s participation in a crime on school grounds that resulted in the suicide of a young girl named Hee-jin (Han Su-young). Along with the school’s administrators, the fathers of the other delinquent boys have banded together to cover up the crime, and they want Mija’s share of the hush money. While Mija’s encroaching dementia will eventually rob her of her memory and ability to communicate (“The nouns are the first to go,” a doctor tells her, “then the verbs”), the people around her commit to a willful forgetting, attempting to sweep the truth from sight.
While Mija’s efforts to see begin as a creative act, she soon takes up the cause as a moral imperative. The film quietly observes her odyssey, as she attends Hee-jin’s sparsely attended memorial, then visits a series of locations: the secluded room where the boys attacked their victim and the site of Hee-jin’s suicide. Director Lee Chang-dong favors suggestion over explanation: his camera “sees” instead of tells, letting viewers draw their own conclusions. In so doing, he demonstrates a rare trust in the audience, as well as in his story and his actors. Yung Jun-hee, who is in almost every scene, delivers an astonishing performance as Mija, awakening to all the good and destruction in the world just as it’s slipping away from her.
The film underlines that slipping away in the metaphor provided by poetry. Mija’s teacher worries explicitly that it’s a dying art form: no one reads it anymore, he says, much less writes it. The loss is a symptom of a more widespread problem, Poetry suggests, the inability of individuals to “really see” each other. Had Wook and the other boys recognized Hee-jin as a person, acknowledged her pain, could they have continued to perpetrate their crimes? Mija will eventually barge into Wook’s bedroom, trying to shake a confession out of him. He pulls the covers over his head, refusing to look at her. Maybe it’s then, when she realizes she cannot force her grandson to atone within his own heart, that her mission becomes clear.
In one of Mija’s classes, a fellow student describes a doomed love affair: “Even the suffering,” she claims, “is beautiful.” Mija’s suffering—or, her realization of it—is made beautiful here. As Mija sits by the river where Hee-jin took her life, the camera zooms in on her notebook, so that it fills the frame. Droplets begin to fall and soon saturate the paper. At first, the viewer assumes the splashes are Mija’s tears, then realizes they are raindrops from a passing storm. As Mija’s story attains another, almost metaphysical dimension, one can’t help wondering if the droplets are indeed tears after all, those of Hee-jin, the girl whose tragedy haunts the film from the first unsettling scene to the last.
»
In Review: POETRY (Lee Chang-dong, 2010) at The One One Four ... Marc Raymond from One One Four,
Currently in competition at the 2010 Cannes film festival, the great Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s fifth feature POETRY is opening domestically here in Seoul and is available with English subtitles at the Yongsan CGV. I can confidently say that this film will be among my ten favorites when I put together my best films list of 2010, and it would not surprise me if it is number one. Quite simply, no other director today makes films like Lee, with a style that mixes convention with realism, understated simplicity with dramatic flourishes, combined with a great feel for the space of his characters. Moreover, Lee is one of the few directors today, and perhaps the only Korean director, dealing with social and moral issues in a fairly direct manner. In some ways he is hopelessly out of touch and old-fashioned. As Lee himself has mockingly said: “I take everything seriously. But who likes a stiff who only talks about serious stuff?” (Kim, 63) It is this very dated quality, however, that I most value in his films. In today’s film world, it is surprisingly refreshing to encounter a director who is as serious as Lee, and even more rare to find one with his mixture of stylistic skill and humanistic realism. (WARNING: some spoilers ahead)
POETRY revolves around the main character of Mija, an elderly woman who is raising her 16 year-old grandson, Wook. She has to work as a maid and personal assistant to an elderly man who has had a stroke in order to get by, and she stands out within the small suburban community for her eccentric style. After an opening sequence when we see a dead body floating in the river, we follow Mija as she learns she may be contracting Alzheimer’s disease. Searching for meaning in her life (a recurrent theme of Lee’s, especially prominent in his last film, SECRET SUNSHINE), she decides to take a poetry class, spurred on by a childhood memory of being told she had potential as a poet. However, the main plot quickly reveals itself: the dead girl who we see in the opening sequence has committed suicide because she had been repeatedly gang-raped by Mija’s grandson and his five friends. The fathers of the other boys have a meeting and decide each will pay 5 million won to the girl’s mother (a farmer) in the hopes of keeping the police from becoming involved. The rest of the film deals with Mija trying to come to terms with her grandson’s crime as well as her own quest to finally write a poem.
Those familiar with Lee’s films will not find this plot summary surprising. Lee consistently represents middle-class Korean society as being morally bankrupt and guilty of covering up the crimes of the past, not unlike European auteur Michael Haneke. But he differs from Haneke in not focusing on these characters; instead, he is interested in the more complex characters who feel like outsiders to this society. This has been especially true in Lee’s more recent films. After starting his career by focusing on male characters in a crisis of masculinity (GREEN FISH and PEPPERMINT CANDY), Lee has moved towards the romantic couple in OASIS, the single mother in SECRET SUNSHINE, and now another invisible character within this society, the elderly grandmother. It is also as if Lee is responding to critics of his earlier work, such as Kim Kyung Hyun and Kim So Young, who argued that Lee, despite wanting to make films from a critical perspective, basically left masculinity unquestioned and femininity unexamined in GREEN FISH and PEPPERMINT CANDY. This is certainly not the case with his latest works. In fact, one could even argue that POETRY acts as a kind of feminist response to Bong Joon-ho’s MOTHER, released last year. Both films feature eccentric elderly protagonists, but instead of viewing the character as crazy and destructive, Lee views her as the one of the few ethical characters in this highly compromised world.
The difference in these characters is perhaps related to their respective relationship to genre. MOTHER is very much a genre deconstruction of the maternal melodrama, and thus needs its character to behave as she does in order to carry out this plot. POETRY, on the other hand, is probably the first film in which Lee abandons genre and moves closer to an art cinema narration. One of the most remarkable things about Lee’s previous films is that they were popular successes domestically, despite their challenging style and subject matter. This is primarily because of their generic appeal and use of star power. POETRY is much more a character study, and unfortunately is unlikely to attract much of an audience. This is intriguing because part of the reason why Lee abandoned with career as a writer and became a filmmaker at the age of 40 was that he felt literature no longer held a great deal of social relevance. It now seems that Lee feels the same way about cinema. Making a film that centers, in part, around poetry is a way of commenting on this fact. As Mija’s teacher/poet explicitly states, poetry is a dying form. So, Lee seems to believe, is a certain view of the world that an increasingly coarse culture now ignores. This is what makes Lee so old-fashioned, like a cranky old man who dislikes where the world is heading. And while I would agree that Lee is perhaps overly didactic in his condemnation of postmodern culture, it is still a view worth expressing, especially when it is articulated with Lee’s degree of cinematic skill and intelligence.
Maybe because he has abandoned genre, Lee’s style n POETRY includes more innovation than usual, although it is still told mostly through realist conventions. Exceptions to this are two sequences in which, as part of their poetry class, the students directly address the camera and try to tell about “the most beautiful moment of their life.” These scenes are quite theatrical in quality, and are among the more memorable and wonderful in the movie, despite their lack of direct relation to the plot. The other major stylistic breaks occurs at the end of the film, in which Mija’s poetry teacher reads her poem while the camera revisits spaces shown earlier, but now empty of Mija’s presence. There is clear debt here to both Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU (1952) as well as Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernist classic L’ECLISSE (1962), but the effect works perfectly with Lee’s thematic and stylistic purpose and is not simply an empty homage. Like Kurosawa’s protagonist, Mija has accomplished something before she fades away (in this case mentally rather than physically), although this ethical act may not have any positive real world value. For Lee, by this point, that may not be possible anyways. All one can do is live with their own actions: this is the only heroic action remaining in the postmodern world.
I’ll conclude with this final quote from Lee. Although he is commenting about the differences between the 80s and 90s, the remarks are if anything more true today:
“In the 90s, being serious kills the party because you make a fool out of yourself by talking about things people already know but choose not to talk about. In the 80s, there was some merit in telling the truth. But by the 90s, truth was not appreciated. Here I am, still taking things seriously and trying to tell the truth. How irritating! (laughs)” (Kim, 63)
Quotes taken from:
Kim Young-jin, LEE CHANG-DONG (Seoul: Korean Film Archive, 2007)
Spotlight | Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea) - Cinema Scope Robert Koehler from Cinema Scope, 2010
Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry
asks no less remarkable a question than this: Can the onset of a person’s loss
of language also be the beginning of a new state of consciousness? If poetry
can be termed as the elimination of all but the most essential words to convey
the most perceptive thoughts, then Lee’s film can’t be exactly termed “poetic,”
one of the many potential pitfalls that this extremely tricky title contains.
Nor is it trying to be. Poetry is the culmination of a quintet of films
about Korean men and women that Lee began with Green Fish (1996), his
only foray into genre about a poor family’s son who becomes enmeshed in Seoul’s
criminal underworld. By the end of Peppermint Candy (1999), in which the
key passages in a brutish cop-turned-salesman’s adult life are examined in
reverse chronology, Lee had so thoroughly laid bare and dissected the male ego
and id that only women seemed possible as subjects. For the
novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-filmmaker, it didn’t mean some recycling of
the musty and despicable Bergman line—women as the mainline to the “soul,” as a
substitute for “a silent God”—but a thematic touched by human limitations yet
heroic: women as stumbling but dogged explorers, wounded animals capable of
creative leaps beyond the ugly world surrounding them. They lack essential
functions, refuse to accept societal norms, or are in the process of losing
portions of their mind, but are nevertheless able to gather new perceptive
abilities and inner fortitude in the midst of a quagmire of decadent machismo.
This inclination began,
in Oasis (2002), with a desire to take the camera off the tripod. Green
Fish and Peppermint Candy haven’t lost an ounce of their original
drive, ambition, and narrative propulsion. (Lee is, among other things, as
strong a storyteller as there is in the cinema.) However, they look a bit too
clean by this point, because Lee’s subsequent films have been made by a
director more confident in his abilities to visually convey the world’s
contradictions, the equal interest in the garbage piles in the corner of the
frame and characters that simply refuse to play along with expectations. If Green
Fish is openly beholden to the yakuza film, Poetry is beholden to no
precedents expect those suggested by Oasis and emphatically declared in Secret
Sunshine (2007), where a grieving mother’s choices to fill her emotional
loss take her to the border between madness and sanity. Mija (Yun Junghee), a
66-year-old grandmother prone to wearing flowery dresses and flamboyant hats,
is just as burned by a tragedy brought on by a younger generation as Secret
Sunshine’s Shin-ae, but the moral weighting has shifted. While random
hazard hits Shin-ae, Mija—while her daughter is working in Pusan—is raising a
grandson accused of participating in a gang-rape of a schoolgirl who reacted by
jumping off a bridge to her death.
Normally, this would be
the heart of the matter, the useful moral dilemma as a catalyst for dramatic
ideas. But Mija’s response is decentred, shifted to the side by her impulse,
inspired by nothing in particular, to start writing Korean lyric poetry (“shi,”
the film’s Korean title). Lee is fascinated by inhibited characters who act
without motivation and beyond psychological definitions, since this allows them
to map out their own behaviour by means of their subconscious. In Oasis,
Gong-ju, enduring severe cerebral palsy, falls in love as a jump into uncharted
territory, almost as a test of her own capacity for living. (When she imagines
herself as physically whole, and able to speak normally, she launches into
verse.) Shin-ae losing her child is a prelude for her real story, which begins
with bumbling attempts to reach some kind of ecstatic state through Pentecostal
Christianity. While Mija’s journey is similarly open-ended, more mysterious,
more laden with potential—Lee’s men die or find some finality, while most of
his women continue on indefinitely—the shroud of death hangs in the distance.
She is seen early on as a
patient, learning that she may be experiencing the first effects of
Alzheimer’s; characteristically for Lee, this is no impediment, and certainly
not as a prop for melodrama. Lee’s storytelling is non-diagrammatic, never
insistent: There is no simple cause and effect between the initially cautious
diagnosis and her decision to sign up for a poetry class at a community centre
in her smallish city on the banks of the Han River. That doesn’t mean, however,
that the viewer is denied such a cause-and-effect reading if they choose one,
and Lee isn’t a filmmaker to either encourage or discourage it. This is perhaps
the most notable aspect of the evolution of Lee’s screenwriting—rewarded at
Cannes with the screenplay prize—starting from the unmistakable determinism of Green
Fish and the elegant but closed geometrics of Peppermint Candy. Like
his camera, which allows viewers to make their own compositions and choices
within the larger frame, his narrative approach trusts in granting characters
their own lives, so much so that one gets the sense that they frequently
surprise Lee himself with the choices they make.
When Mija isn’t attempting
to follow her poetry teacher’s instructions to observe things for their
potential beauty—even in her kitchen sink—she is putting up with her surly,
non-verbal grandson or the ornery ways of an elderly male stroke victim she
tends to daily. This follows a pattern seen in the early reels of Oasis
and Secret Sunshine, when pure routine defines characters’ lives, with
the vital wrinkle here that Mija has encountered an outlet for her better
impulses. Her unexpected decisions stemming from a series of awkward meetings
with the fathers of the boys being investigated in the gang-rape (involving how
much they should compensate the dead girl’s family, as if cash can put a period
on grief) are diametrically opposed to such routine, and may even be the fruit
of a mind opening to poetry’s imaginative associations even as its capacity for
memory and vocabulary is beginning to close down. It would be fascinating to
know what Lee’s early drafts may have first intended for Mija to say to the
dead girl’s mother when she treks to meet her, since what actually transpires
on film can’t be anticipated, and seems to be thoroughly the result of an
author allowing his fictional character a loose rein.
This narrative freedom is
more interesting than the film’s lauded conclusion, which perhaps drew more
appreciation than usual since Poetry was one of the Cannes Competition’s
only films with an emotionally heartfelt ending. But the more effective
emotions derive from the face and eyes of veteran actor Yun Junghee, whom Lee
cajoled out of a 16-year retirement. Lee has consistently drawn great
performances from his actors, and only partly because he writes huge roles for
them. He gives his actors space to move and breathe, and grants them the
opportunity to fail—absolute catnip for actors with an instinct for risk. Each
of his leads could easily have taken disastrous turns onscreen: Sol Kyung-gu’s
doomed Yongho in Peppermint Candy could have been hopelessly
anti-climactic after his life-ending opening sequence, just as his immature
Jong-du in Oasis could have become an absurd cavalcade of tics and
misfit mannerisms, just as Jeon Do-yeon’s Shin-ae could have collapsed in a
torrent of hysterics; and let’s not even consider what a lesser actor might
have done with Gong-ju in Oasis, whom Moon So-ri understands as a woman
with desires, not as a vehicle to display physical contortions. Risk is in fact
endemic to Lee’s filmmaking, which may appear to be plowing the traditional
turf of psychodrama, but is most attuned to a fascination with the capacities
of otherwise regular women to uncover their concealed selves and, by doing so,
rebel against societal norms even stricter than the most precise and demanding
arrangements in Korean lyric poetry, which everyone in Mija’s class—save Mija
herself—agrees is “too hard.”
Poetry
(Lee Chang Dong, 2010) Noel
Vera from Critic After Dark
Armond White reviews Poetry, directed by Lee Chang-dong -- NYPress
POETRY Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
New York Magazine [David Edelstein]
BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge
The
House Next Door [Sean Axmaker]
Unexamined/Essentials:
Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010) Jaime
Christley,
ReelTalk
[Donald Levit] The Birth and Death
of a Poetess
CANNES
REVIEW | Solace in Verse: Lee Chang-dong’s “Poetry” Eric Kohn at
The Lumière Reader [Steve Garden]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Lee
Chang-dong: Poetry (shi, 2010) Chris
Knipp
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
In
the Korean drama Poetry, a woman confronted with evil turns from bad to verse Michael Sicinski from The Nashville Scene
Poetry Lee Marshall at Cannes
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Box Office Magazine [Ed Scheid]
Bina007 Movies [Caterina Benincasa]
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Flick Pick Monster [Nick Duval]
Cannes '10:
Day Eight Mike D’Angelo at Cannes May 20, 2010
Cannes
Film Festival 2010: Day Eight – Carlos, Poetry, and Our Life Matt Noller at
Lee
Chang-dong's “Poetry” wins best screenplay at Cannes : The ... Ko Kyoung-seok kave from Pop Nation,
Cannes
2010. Lee Chang-dong's "Poetry"
David Hudson at Cannes May 20,
2010
Veterans Lee, Yun Team Up in 'Poetry' Lee Hyo-won interviews Lee Chang-dong from The Korean Times,
Hollywood Reporter
The Hollywood Reporter [Maggie Lee] at Cannes
Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London, May 20, 2010, also seen here: Poetry Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London
Poetry –
review | Film | The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
Poetry,
Lee Chang-dong, 139 mins (12A) | The Independent Jonathan Romney
Lee Plays With Fire, Ice in `Poetry' Lee Hyo-won from The Korean Times,
Cannes
'10 Day 8: Terrorized Wesley Morris
at Cannes Boston May 20, 2010
World Events
Rumble at Cannes Manohla Dargis at Cannes May 21, 2010
New York Times
(registration req'd) Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, February 10, 2011
A Fine Balance: The Quiet Life of a Star Actress Franz Lidz from The New York Times, February 6, 2011
Lee, Hélène and Christophe Farnarier
THE FIRST RASTA (Le Premier
Rasta) C 71
France Mauritius (86 mi) 2010
What this attempts to be is a documentary exploring the
roots of the Rastafari movement in Jamaica, focusing on one individual who
allegedly founded the movement in the 1930’s, Leonard Percival Howell, who was
one of the 25,000 Jamaicans working on the Panama Canal as exploitive labor,
where they were treated like a slave class by the dominating colonial powers,
developing a socialist worldview, where footage from Eisenstein’s POTEMKIN
(1925) is utilized to express his internationalist “workers of the world” sentiment. When the Canal was completed just prior to
World War I, and the subsequent Russian Revolution, the Jamaicans were quickly
expelled from
One particular difficulty with this film is the state of confusion running throughout, as the filmmakers use the African style of talking history, where friends and family of Howell describe what they remember about their experience, where for some of the elders this is more than 50 or 60 years ago, where what is immediately evident is that none of the “witnesses” have any formal education, so their descriptions of life at the Pinnacle are vague and incomplete, never really mentioning why they came together as a group in the first place, what spiritual kinship they shared, or what initial hardships they must have endured attempting to be completely self-reliant for such a large group of nearly 3000 people. Viewers may be scratching their heads trying to figure out what was really happening and why, as one envisions something like a back to nature utopia, but Howell himself expressed interest in multiple wives, which was not addressed, and no one describes any food arrangement, work requirements, or communal rules, yet this went on for some twenty years, but the director certainly offers little help in pulling this Pinnacle material together with pictures or stories or any sort of historical reference. Instead the film is a series of fragmented recollections, tainted memories, really, as much of it is filled with the bitterness of disillusion, as shortly after a visit to the island by the British Queen in 1959, prior to achieving independence in 1962, the Pinnacle was subject to a major police raid that destroyed the living compounds, burning much of it to the ground while also making several arrests, basically shutting down the operation and sending people fleeing in all directions. No one mentions any legal basis or justification for the raid, even in the most general terms other than to suggest they were defying colonial mentality by attempting to be free and liberated. However there is some reason to believe there may have been an ongoing series of raids before the community was destroyed, where the perceived negative social repercussions from the out of control ganga drug enterprise within Jamaica may have become the tipping point.
It begs the question, now that they are an
independent country, what’s stopping them from building another self-reliant
Rastafarian community? Instead the
painted portrait is of a scattered presence on the island, with many living
instead in urban ghettos, largely responsible for creating bass heavy ska music
in the 50’s before evolving into Reggae music in the 60’s, which became
internationally accepted due to the influence of the acclaimed Bob Marley, who
accentuated many Rastafarian themes in his music, like Bob Marley & The
Wailers 'Rastaman Chant' (2:24), but you won’t find them here in this
film. Instead, the filmmaker likes to
gather a group of guys, young and old, on the street playing drums and chanting
Rastafarian songs, where a singer calls out, like a church preacher, which is
followed by a choir response, creating a hypnotic rhythm, much like the Cuban
Guaguancó style music seen here: Guaguancó - YouTube
(1:41). We see this stylized arrangement
4 or 5 times in the film, each seemingly on-the-spot, where it’s apparent music
has endured even as much of the Black Nationalist sentiment has become
marginalized. Instead the music suggests
one love, one heart, and a kind of universal interracial community living in
harmony, much like predominate Mardi Gras themes, which also mix French,
African, and Indian cultures into a rhythmic and highly percussive beat. What’s missing from the discussion is any
mention of education or cultural rights, as a prevailing theme throughout the
film is a portrait of dispossessed people who remain poor and uneducated inside
Jamaica today, whose collective political voice remains silent, perhaps
representing only about 1 % of Jamaican society, yet their desire to remain
opposed to the typical societal dictates of greed and consumerism and instead
advocate a healthier back to the land lifestyle of self reliance remains
admirable. But this documentary is
spotty at best, leaving out a more historical perspective for personal talking
points that simply don’t reveal the whole story of what remains an elusively
intriguing subject.
The First Rasta | Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall
Reggae musician Bob Marley is probably most Americans' link to Rastafarianism; Leonard Percival Howell, founder of the Jamaican nationalist movement, remains largely unknown, yet this documentary by Hélène Lee, author of a French biography, and codirector Christophe Farnarier seems designed to enshroud Howell in myth. As a teen in the early 20th century, he went to sea, meeting other penniless adventurers and absorbing influences from Marxism to Harlem jazz; returning to Jamaica in the early 1930s, he spread an anticolonialist, messianic populism based on his veneration of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, while advocating ganja for spiritual elevation. Scarcity of archival records may be partly to blame for the sketchy portrait, which draws heavily on contemporary interviews with stoned elderly followers.
TimeOut Chicago Emily Torem
French filmmaker Christophe Farnarier and Jamaican culture expert Hélène Lee’s documentary focuses on the three essentials of the Rastafari movement. No, not weed, dreads and crocheted hats; God, community and music. And okay, yes, ganja. Based on Lee’s eponymous book, The First Rasta traces the political, ideological and spiritual movement to its founder: Leonard Percival Howell, a.k.a. “The Gong.” In the early 1900s, Howell was one of 25,000 Jamaicans forced out of Panama after being exploited in the building of the Panama Canal. Realizing blacks were being subject to colonial whims, Howell began preaching about the African diaspora. In Pinnacle, Jamaica, he created what might today be called an eco-village, where some 2,500 Rastas eventually lived. One woman describes the community’s philosophy as “love flow like a river if we move together,” angrily adding, “but they took everything.” Perceived as a political threat, Pinnacle was burned down in 1959 by the police.
Accounts from aging Rastas accompany montages of black-and-white photos, all of it set to intoxicating music. The first Rasta is no longer with us, but this beautifully paced doc demonstrates that the Rastafari movement is far from irrelevant. The movie’s last section focuses on the present, with Rastas discussing the dangers of Western factory farming and genetically modified organisms. Independence from a globalizing economy, adherents suggest, is their greatest strength.
Review of “Le Premier Rasta” « Repeating Islands Liz Ferguson (Montreal Gazette), also seen here: Catch music-heavy documentary Le Premier Rasta, Saturday ...
Le Premier Rasta could be Rastafarianism 101 for people whose knowledge of it doesn’t go much beyond dreadlocks, ganja and Bob Marley.
The first Rasta of the title is Jamaican Leonard Percival Howell (1898-1981). Howell was the first to say that Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I was the Messiah who was predicted in the Bible. The movie describes Howell’s life and activities through anecdotes, memories and explanations from historians, his contemporaries, his children and other relatives. Howell worked on the construction of the Panama Canal, visited many countries of the world as a seaman, and spent time in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. He knew fellow Jamaican Marcus Garvey, a proponent of black-reliance and leader of a back-to-Africa movement.
Howell returned to Jamaica in 1932 and in 1939, he established a commune called Pinnacle. It had between 2,600 and 3,000 residents, according to his son. One former (female) resident said that Pinnacle was the biggest food company in the country and goes on to recite a long list of delicious fruits that were grown there. Another former resident, a male one slyly says that all the women at Pinnacle were Howell’s wives… but this statement is not further explored or explained.
At this point Jamaica was still a British colony. Howell told people they were bowing down to the wrong king and should not their taxes, ideas that did not go down well with the authorities at all, not then and not even after Jamaican independence. Pinnacle was often raided and in 1958 it was destroyed by the government. But the people who had lived there took their ideas all over the country. I was surprised to learn that the wearing of dreadlocks and use of marijuana as a sacrament developed out of interaction with Jamaica’s Indian community. (Between 1845 and 1970, Jamaica received 36,000 immigrants from India.)
Music plays a big part in the film, with some people bursting into song seemingly spontaneously, and with casual performances on the streets, in homes and around a campfire. There are some drummers who could teach Montreal’s Sunday afternoon tam tam folks a thing or two. Archival film footage is used to great effect. The eagle-eyed might recognize some scenes from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.
Editor Nini Ranaivoarivony deserves praise (maybe a prize) for a masterful montage that mixes those scenes with construction of the Panama Canal, railroads, factory machinery, billowing smokestacks, etc., with a loping soundtrack.
The First Rasta Diego Costa from Slant magazine
Fr.
Dennis at the Movies [Dennis Kriz]
THE FIRST RASTA (Le premier rasta) Facets Multi Media
New
York Times [Paul Brunick]
Rastafari movement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rastafari, Rasta, Rastafarianism - ReligionFacts
Marcus Garvey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ska - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
List of ska musicians - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Reggae - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ReggaeTrain.com...your portal to Reggae music...(Home Page)
Guaguancó - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lee Je-Yong
aka: E J-yong
E J-yong Page
Director’s page by Lee Eunhye and Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
E J-yong Info Sheet Lee Eunhye from the Korean Film Page
An Interview with E J-yong Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
THE AFFAIR
An Affair Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
This film, the debut feature by director Lee
Jae-Yong, is a muted, introspective view of the feelings surrounding an
affair. It features Lee Mi-Sook and Lee Jung-Jae as two people who find in each
other's presence a sense of meaning and consolation. In early 1999, An
Affair won an award for best Asian film at the Newport Beach International
Film Festival in
Seo-Hyun, who lives in
Lee Jae-Yong creates a rather distinctive mood in this film, through his use of plastered, gallery-like interiors and a careful selection of music. In addition, he draws forth a remarkable performance from lead actress Lee Mi-Sook, who expresses beautifully the complexities of her character.
For me the film captures most vividly the silent anguish of the wife before the affair. In witnessing the clumsy, unthinking attitude of her husband, and the extent to which her own feelings have become lost inside her, we realize that the affair is Seo-Hyun's only means of regaining her self. As we watch the relationship develop, we are struck more by the desperation with which the two are pulled together, rather than any feelings of intimacy they share.
Nonetheless, as the two lovers begin to find solace
in each other, their old loneliness gradually transforms into feelings of
desperation and guilt. The director skillfully augments the level of tension as
the sister returns from
Probably the darkest, loneliest feature of the year, An Affair draws us into the pain of another's life and challenges us to imagine ourselves in the same situation.
ASAKO IN RUBY SHOES
South Korea (117 mi) 2000 (Trailer: 300k)
Asako in Ruby Shoes Adam Hartzel from the Korean Film Page
Between his financially successful 1998 film, The Affair, and his immensely successful Untold Scandal in 2003, E J-yong directed a film that did not perform well financially, Asako in Ruby Shoes. Lee Jung-jae, who was also featured in E's debut, plays E U-in, a Korean civil servant bored and unfulfilled in his job and life. Void of a circle of friends, U-in spends his nights cruising internet porn sites. His voyeurism does not stop with his nighttime activities, however, for he also engages in stalking a woman unavailable to him, a young, punkish woman (Kim Min-heui) whose hair is dyed a fire-y Run Lola Run-ish red. One day U-in receives a spam email that he proceeds to reinforce by clicking on the provided link. He is asked to type in his perfect woman and he proceeds to type in the demographics of Mia, the object of his daytime gaze. From here, the titular character is created from U-in's gaze, Asako in Ruby Shoes.
The women behind the gaze that is Asako is a young Japanese named Aya (Tachibana Misato) who has found her life to be similarly soulless. Having decided on a unique form of suicide, she plans to hold her breath across the International Date Line so as to confuse whether she died today or yesterday, she decides to forgo her future and stop attending her pre-college classes. Getting a job at a health club, she befriends a co-worker, Rie (Awata Urara), a slightly manic-depressive loner who is attracted to Middle Eastern men. After eventually being fired from the health club, Aya decides to pursue a "modeling" gig in order to afford her trip to the International Date Line and to fully pay for the object of her gaze, the Dorothy-esque Ruby Shoes.
A Korean/Japanese production, E appears to be
presenting a play within a play. That is, the global nature of this production,
jumping back and forth from
Lee Jung-jae is perfect casting for this role. Lee possesses the kind of face that allows for the effortless conveyance of innocence and humility. I've only seen Lee in four of his films and have always felt as if I was eating Papa Bear's or Mama Bear's porridge, that is, a little too much and a little too little in his portrayals. However, E U-in is Baby Bear's porridge for Lee. Just right. Tachibana Misato presents a nice subtle range in her role, with a wonderful scene where she must playfully lie when caught hopping the fence into her late grandmother's home. The supporting cast of Kim Min-huei and Awata Urara provide excellent caricatures with the appropriate depth to not appear as if emerging from a vacuum.
Asako in Ruby Shoes has a slow pace, the
type of film I prefer, and the camera angles and mise-en-scenes allow for some
beautiful images, such as an above view of U-in lying naked and eating
watermelon between his legs while submerged in an icy bathtub on a hot day.
Although the film is not about the complicated issues surrounding internet
porn, (Aya's foray into that world is quite tame and U-in is presented to us as
not someone who visits the more extreme sites out there), the ending still
poses some problems, appearing too clean and easy. However, although not
successful financially, E was quite successful in presenting to us his artistic
gifts. Where Asako in Ruby Shoes also succeeds is in providing yet
another challenge to views of a homogeneous
UNTOLD SCANDAL
South Korea (124 mi) 2003 (Trailer: 300k)
Untold Scandal Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
Eighteenth-century epistolary novels don't
generally form the basis for record-breaking opening weekends at the
box-office. This rule is no less true in
First: if you've seen Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons or read the original novel, then don't go into Untold Scandal expecting major departures in the plot. The basic narrative and characterization are more or less the same, with only small adjustments made to broker a neat fit with 18th-century Korean society. Instead, approach the film as you would a new, contemporary staging of your favorite classic play. You've already memorized your favorite lines, but you'd like to experience it again and see what the new setting will do for the overall effect.
The new setting in Untold Scandal is
striking. The vibrant, gently clashing colors of the costumes and sets give a
visual counterpoint to the sensuality of the story. Sex scenes -- far more
explicit than in previous film adaptations -- collide with our preconceived
images of old
A recent internet poll posed the question of why the film was so commercially successful (over 3 million admissions nationwide), and respondents gave primary credit to the cast. The movie's women are proven acting talents: Lee Mi-sook, a star of the 1980s (in such films as Bae Chang-ho's Whale Hunting) who resurrected her career with director E's first film An Affair (1998), has already earned a Best Actress citation from the Korean Critics Awards for her portrayal of Lady Cho (the "Glenn Close character"). She has more than enough poise, presence and sensuality to excel in the role. Chameleon Jeon Do-yeon, reknowned for choosing widely diverse roles and playing them all equally well, takes the film's most serious part, and gives it great depth. Most attention was focused on male lead Bae Yong-joon, however. Having reached the pinnacle of fame in the TV drama sector with his clean-cut, nice boy image, he surprised many people by landing such a risque part for his cinematic debut. Some predicted disaster; he actually pulled off the part better than expected, though in many ways he is overshadowed by the women in the film. Memories of John Malkovich also set a high standard to live up to.
If Scandal is primarily about execution, however, then director E J-yong must be given the most credit (an interview with the director is also available on this site). He keeps a familiar story interesting by virtue of unexpected juxtapositions (for example in the soundtrack, a mix of classical European and Korean music), visual elegence, and efficient storytelling. He stays true to the spirit of the original novel while giving it an entirely new aesthetic. More than anything else, it is entertaining. Not intended as an art film, Scandal is a notable example of fashioning a modern-day blockbuster from a completely unexpected set of ingredients.
DASEPO NAUGHTY GIRLS
South Korea (103 mi) 2006
Dasepo Naughty Girls Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
In early 2005, a dark, controversial internet comic called Dasepo Girls appeared and won over a large following among young Koreans. Set in a high school named Musseulmo (literally, "Useless High School"), the comic portrayed a place where the students were sex addicts, where the teachers were perverts, and where virtually nothing was forbidden. With a diverse cast of characters filling the large number of episodes (76 to date), Dasepo Girls followed multiple storylines and created a rich, twisted, narrative world.
Film companies were quick to notice the comic's success, and by the end of 2005 director E J-yong, well-known for Untold Scandal (2003) and An Affair (1998), announced that he would adapt it into a movie. The initial reaction from fans was one of anticipation but also disbelief: how could such scandalous material be re-worked for a mainstream audience? Even aside from the comic's strong sexual content, Dasepo Girls was a wide-ranging collection of disjointed stories that would be hard to unify into a coherent whole.
Nonetheless, E J-yong seemed the perfect choice for such a project, given his demonstrated flair for scandalous topics and his new-generation attitude towards moral issues. A young cast was quickly assembled, headed by actress Kim Ok-bin (from the 2005 horror film Voice). Meanwhile, production company Ahnsworld also commissioned a series of 40 short films based on the comic (which, though uneven, are worth tracking down in their own right).
Commercially the film, titled Dasepo Naughty Girls in English, tripped out of the gate. Viewers familiar with the comic were clearly expecting something far more racy -- to be honest, the film is a bit of a tease (it ended up being given only a mild 15+ rating). It also opened just as monster movie The Host was on its way to becoming the best-selling Korean film in history. Dasepo ultimately grossed $3.8 million, which for Korean films of average budget is considered a disappointing performance.
Dasepo Naughty Girls may not have been what teenage
fans were expecting, but Director E has nonetheless given us a highly original
and satisfying film, assuming you go in with the right expectations. Basically,
he has taken the original comic's spirit of transgression and transformed it
into a film that defies the mainstream in other, quieter ways. If Korean
society often portrays itself as being homogenous, Dasepo Naughty Girls
explodes that notion in favor of diversity. Hierarchical social structures, too
familiar in real-life
The film also treats narrative in the same relaxed way it engages moral issues. Largely episodic in nature, it will linger on one character's concerns and actions for a certain period of time before dropping it and moving on to another character. Although most screen time is spent on Kim Ok-bin's "girl who carries poverty on her back", attention is also paid to other characters who have little or no relation to her. Even in the latter part of the film, there are few signs of the plot coalescing into a decisive conclusion; instead, the film takes its time exploring the corners of its world and the characters that inhabit it. The director even throws in a few catchy song-and-dance numbers.
Ultimately Dasepo becomes an odd and fascinating sort of utopian vision of modern Korea, though not the utopia that most Koreans would imagine for themselves. The film's candy-colored palette and playful horsing around may suggest that the director is simply having fun, but a closer look reveals that he has a clear social agenda -- one that may well be worth examining seriously
Lee Jun-ik
KING AND THE CLOWN
Safe Haven For
Cinephilia - Gay City News Steve
Erickson
South Korean director Lee Jung-ik’s “King and the Clown” was a “Titanic”-sized hit at home; it’s now the second highest-grossing Korean film ever made. It’s also the kind of Asian film that usually appeals to Americans: full of period flavor, pageantry and bright colors. I can already picture a trailer hailing its exoticism and comparing it to Neil Jordan’s “The Crying Game” and Chen Kaige’s “Farewell My Concubine.”
A gay love triangle between two jesters and a king, it tugs the heartstrings
shamelessly but effectively. Jang-seng (Karm Woo-sung) and Gong-gil (Lee
Joon-gi) are part of a band of traveling minstrels whose raunchy performances
mock royalty. Expecting a negative reaction, the troupe is astonished that the
king (Jung Jin-young) enjoys their performance, but the real attraction for him
is Gong-gil, who becomes his lover. For much of its length, the sexual
frankness of “King and the Clown” only goes so far. Just when its homoeroticism
seems in danger of remaining subtext—albeit one that nobody could possibly
miss—a few lines of dialogue bring it to the light of day. However, Gong-gil’s
as close to being a transvestite as he is to being a modern gay man, although
neither category truly fits him. He doesn’t live as a woman, but his
personification of female roles and femininity—particularly his silky skin—are
his main appeal to the king. Jung’s performance suggests a medieval Michael
Jackson with a murderous streak—less flamboyant but equally childlike. “King
and the Clown” has been likened to “
King and the Clown Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
The closing days of 2005 saw the debut of a rather different sort of Korean blockbuster. King and the Clown, with its lack of star casting, its period setting, its focus on the traditional arts, and an obvious gay subtext, did not seem to fit the mold of an event film like Tae Guk Gi or JSA. Yet despite screening at the same time as big budget films Typhoon, Blue Swallow and King Kong, this was the movie that got young viewers excited and talking during the winter vacation. It seems there are two stories to tell about King and the Clown: the story of the film itself, which though not a masterpiece represents an interesting and engaging take on a creative subject; and the account of how and why this film turned into a popular phenomenon -- a story that can tell us interesting things about the Korean audience.
The film, by director Lee Jun-ik (Once
Upon a Time in a Battlefield) focuses on a pair of clowns who perform comic
plays, songs, and acrobatic tricks for aristocrats or commoners during the
Chosun Dynasty. Jangsaeng, played by Gam Woo-sung (
After the two arrive in the capital
Like Welcome to Dongmakgol and Memories of Murder before it, King and the Clown is based on a local play (titled Yi), and the film makes good use of its source's rich narrative material. Although the second half, centered in the palace, lacks the energy of the first, the slower pace is not inappropriate given the film's darkening tone. Jeong Jin-young (Hi, Dharma) is quite interesting as King Yonsan, one of Korea's most famous and notorious monarchs who possessed concentrated power but lacked the sanity to use it effectively. Apart from a well-formed plot, however, the film's real highlight is the play-acting by the two clowns. Both actors are mesmerising in their verbal sparring and their enthusiasm for performing, and one wishes there were even more of these scenes to enjoy.
If King and the Clown had possessed a visual and cinematic sophistication to match the skills of its actors, then it may have emerged as a breakout international hit, like an earthy version of Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (a film with clear plot parallels, that King seems to reference in a parody of Chinese opera in the second half). Alas, Lee's direction is capable but rather plain in a visual sense, despite the colorful costumes and set.
The original Korean title of this film is "The King's Man", which references much more directly the erotic current underlying this film. And indeed it is Lee Joon-ki as the King's man who is credited with enabling this film to sell 10 million tickets. Virtually unknown before the film's debut -- although his simultaneous appearance in the TV drama My Girl gave his popularity a twofold boost -- Lee has become an instant sensation, a perfect example of a film creating its own star power. (Supposedly Jang Hyuk was originally cast in this role, until he was shipped off to the army after being found to have illegally dodged his military duty) Amidst Lee's burgeoning popularity, news stories have proliferated about how teenage Korean girls are supposedly less interested in muscular, alpha male types compared to adrogynous or outright feminine-looking boys such as Lee or Kang Dong-won (Duelist).
Yet it's also notable that a society which is
commonly believed to be strongly homophobic has so embraced a film that --
let's face it -- contains a highly charged if largely implied homoerotic tone.
This is not because attitudes and prejudices have changed overnight, rather it
seems that the filmmakers have been extremely skillful in their portrayal of
Konggil. Like many other instances of discrimination in modern-day
King and the Clown Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Lee Kang-shen
THE MISSING (Bu Jian)
Taiwan (82 mi) 2005
Rotterdam Mike D’Angelo at Rotterdam 2004
[So similar to a Tsai film in many ways that the differences
(roving camera, overt melodrama) stand out in bas-relief. It's a richer, more
vital work than Good Bye Dragon Inn, with which it was originally intended to
be paired in an omnibus project; Lee's use of duration -- particularly that
heartbreaking, endless shot of Grandma running frantically around the park --
has an admirable clarity of purpose, and the movie as a whole is elegiac
without becoming simply maudlin. Weird to hear Lee rambling on and on in his
introduction -- I'm pretty sure that was more than I've heard him speak in all
of his movies combined.]
Mar Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Not a lot to add to Mike D'Angelo's capsule from Rotterdam (scroll down to
"Tue 27"), since he hits it on the head. (But I'll ramble some
anyway.) Lee's directorial debut bears the same relationship to Tsai
Ming-liang's films as Liv Ullmann's do to Bergman's. Same basic m.o., but with
slight deviations from the master's efforts that take on a significance utterly lost on total newcomers. But this
isn't to say the films are unfriendly to beginners. Like Ullmann's Faithless,
Lee's film is less severe than Tsai's films not because of any slackening of
rigor, but because he's less afraid of conventional displays of emotion. The
result comes to stunning fruition near the end of the first half-hour, when we
see a frantic grandmother running all over a
The
Missing: An Interview with Lee Kang-sheng
Volker Hummel from Senses of Cinema
Lee Myung-se
NOWHERE TO HIDE
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Taiwan director Edward Yang recently
speculated that part of the unexpected critical success of his new film,
"Yi Yi," is likely due to its conscious lack of a pretentious visual
style. "There's so much visual showing off in movies these days," he
said, "that it's getting in the way of telling stories."
He might have been specifically
referring to "Nowhere to Hide," the latest flashy South Korean action
movie by cult-favorite director-writer Lee Myung-Se ("Bitter &
Sweet"), in which every scene seems to be shot in some exaggerated visual
style -- experimenting wildly with texture, color saturation, film speed and
even animated effects.
Lee's story is your basic "French
Connection" setup about two mismatched buddy police detectives obsessed
with bringing down a crafty drug lord.
More particularly, it follows Seoul
police detective Woo (Park Joong-Hoon), who looks like the Korean John Belushi
and is such an enthusiastic expert in the art of police brutality that he makes
Popeye Doyle look like Father Flanagan.
The movie is essentially one long chase
sequence, shot in an array of styles, all counterpointed by blaring rock music.
Some of it is quite arresting, especially Lee's opening
assassination-by-butcher-knife scene, shot on a long flight of steps in the
rain (to the Bee Gees' song "Holiday") and obviously influenced by
the similar scene in Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent."
But it's altogether about as
dramatically compelling as the Spike and Mike Festival of Animation. The
characters are uniformly repulsive, the cliche-ridden script builds no real
tension or psychological interest, and the bottom line is that Lee's innovative
but ultimately tedious and even ludicrous MTV-style visuals add absolutely
nothing to the story dynamics.
Nowhere to Hide Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
By mid-July or so I was becoming frustrated. There had been a number of interesting releases in the first half of the year, but (short of "The Picnic") there was no film that really demanded attention, that one could consider calling a masterpiece. I didn't realize what lay just around the corner.
Nowhere to Hide is an action/art film that simply dazzles. Its style, humor, cinematography, and endless invention combine to make watching it an exhilarating experience.
Lee Myung-se has made some fascinating films in the past, many of which, such as My Love, My Bride and First Love, have tackled issues of love and marriage. This, his sixth film, draws its inspiration from a more abstract source. "In a Monet painting," Lee says, "the theme is not the water lily. The water lily is just the object to paint light upon. As it floats, we see its reflection on the water, and that is what we call painterly. My intention is the same. In this film, I wanted to show the filmic. The story and the characters are not the main focus of my film. Movement is. Movement enters the other elements in this film to create kinetic action." [quoted from the film's pressbook]
There are several types of movement which propel this film: the physical movement of the actors (Lee reportedly spent time analyzing the movement in dance and World Cup soccer); the visual movement created by lines of composition within the frame; movement through time (the time for each major scene is faithfully printed for the viewer); movement towards resolution of the plot (a cat-and-mouse chase between a group of cops and a killer); and the movement inherent in Lee's editing, which removes small chunks of the original footage to create a muted, staccato-like propulsion (he makes frequent use of what I guess you would call a "jump-dissolve"). But in contrast to the scattered movement you see in a film such as Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express, the movement in this film is directed inward, as it guides us relentlessly to the final confrontation between the pursuer and the pursued.
But to focus on the movement in Nowhere to Hide is to ignore its many other remarkable traits. (1) The humor. I watched this in a packed theater, and the crowd was in uproar; unfortunately much of the humor does not translate well, but the physical humor alone is a delight. (2) The acting. Many of the bruises and cuts you see on the actors' faces are real. Lee insisted on authenticity for this film, and drew forth amazing performances from a very talented group of actors, including Park Joong-hoon, a legendary actor who returns to the spotlight here after an absence of several years; Ahn Sung-ki, adding the role of a ruthless criminal to his long resume; and Jang Dong-gun, a younger actor playing an extremely sympathetic role. Park Joong-hoon's performance draws special note, however, for creating an onscreen image sure to produce teenage imitation in the manner of a Humphrey Bogart or James Dean. (3) The set. This is a gorgeous-looking film, set within steam-filled alleys, gingko-sided streets, and rooftops. The weather shifts without warning between late-afternoon sun, snow, and heavy downpour. Lee also utilizes such cinematically-charged locales as an outdoor stairway and a passenger train.
The only blemish on this film is its remarkably boring English title. A one-word title such as "Ruthless" or "Impulsive" would have better expressed the meaning of the (complex) original title, while perhaps evoking memories of Alfred Hitchcock, who Lee cites as a major influence on his work. Nonetheless, this should in no way detract from what is clearly Lee's best work.
Arrested Motion:
Leaps and Bounds in the Korean ... - Senses of Cinema Anne Rutherford, June 2000
Chicago Reader (Steve Erickson)
Kamera.co.uk Colin Odell
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
filmcritic.com hides from Nowhere Jeremiah Kipp
kfc cinema Peter Zsurka
The Boston Phoenix Gerald Peary
New York Times (registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell
DUELIST
South Korea 2005
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Duelist (2005) Tony Rayns from Sight and Sound, April 2007
Once upon a time in Korea, soon
after a young prince has taken the throne, the country is plunged into
hyperinflation by a flood of counterfeit coinage. Trying to find how the fakes
are brought into circulation, veteran policeman Ahn and his unruly young woman
partner Namsoon spot and challenge a masked man who seems to be guarding a
wagonload of fakes through a bustling market. The man disappears near the home
of Minister of Defence Song Pil-Joon, and police intelligence suggests that he
might be Minister Song's longtime protégé Gu Jang-gon.
Ahn and Namsoon start following
Gu, who proves adept at giving them the slip. Namsoon finds herself confronted
and challenged to a duel by the masked man in a dark alley at night; her
adversary suddenly disappears. The police discover that the coins are being
forged on boats and distributed via the country's canals; Namsoon is sure that
Minister Song is behind the plot. Disguised as a servant, she infiltrates the
minister's birthday party and overhears him tell Gu Jang-gon that his aim is to
provoke social chaos and then seize power by marrying his daughter to the royal
heir. After an inconclusive duel with Gu, the lovelorn Namsoon lapses into
drinking and insubordination. She and Ahn are suspended from duty.
Ahn and Namsoon search Minister
Song's house for incriminating evidence just as Gu turns on his mentor,
suspecting that he's acting in his own (rather than the country's) interests.
Ahn later leads a raid on the mansion and arrests the minister. He tells
Namsoon that Gu was killed in the fray, but she is by now lost in romantic
fantasies of erotic duels with the masked man.
Review
At first glance Duelist seems
a Korean simulacrum of the films that have won Zhang Yimou a mass audience in
the west, Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004):
an over-designed, over-coloured and generally over-egged pastiche of a
martial-arts movie, aimed at an audience easily impressed by CGO
(computer-generated orientalism). Lee Myung-se certainly has no more commitment
to the martial-arts genre than Zhang Yimou does, but he has a more credible
history than Zhang of playing with genre for his own ends - and nobody has ever
accused him of being opportunistic or insincere in his work. Duelist
is not his finest hour, but it develops an erotics of swordplay which is
original, distinctive and finally rather touching.
It's hard to say whether it's a
weakness or a strength that the film has virtually no plot. It does have one
large macguffin in the form of boatloads of counterfeit money (they turn out to
be part of an offscreen conspiracy to unseat the monarch), but the film is
preoccupied with a tomboy's moonstruck pursuit of an unattainable lover and the
'mystery' fades away long before it reaches closure. Namsoon (relative newcomer
Ha Ji-won) is the young female sidekick of veteran cop Ahn (the great Ahn
Sung-ki in his fourth Lee Myung-se film), working to crack the counterfeiting
case, sidetracked and then derailed by her infatuation with the eyes of a
masked villain. Not content with placing the star-crossed couple on opposite
sides of the law, Lee also suggests that there are major sexual complications: Namsoon
is a distinctly boyish girl who fights, drinks and swears like a trooper, while
the villain's mask hides the androgynous Gu Jang-gon (former model Gang
Dong-won), the 'kept boy' of the louche minister of defence.
The film plays more like a
rhapsody than either an action movie or the detective thriller suggested by the
police-procedural aspects. With this goes a rhapsodic disdain for historical
fact (there were no young women constables, feisty or otherwise, in the Chosun
Dynasty) and a rhapsodic delight in the aesthetics of colour, movement and
texture. You could say much the same about Hero, of course, but
Lee doesn't embalm his visuals in a formaldehyde of kitsch. The dazzling
opening scene in a crowded market, for example, is one of the most purposively
confusing sequences ever mounted: a sustained montage of incidents, characters
and acrobatics that's impossible to read as narrative on first viewing but that
leaves vivid impressions of both Namsoon's 'virility' and the masked villain's
allure and underlying melancholy. Virtually any shot in any Zhang Yimou movie
could be frozen to produce a 'pretty' still, but that wouldn't work here: the
sequence is built purely on motion and quicksilver cutting.
Duelist is a comeback film for Lee, who spent the
six years after his international hit Nowhere to Hide (1999) based
in New York, failing to set up an American film. Whatever he thought about Hero
and Flying Daggers during this long hiatus, Duelist
is in many ways entirely consistent with his other films. His central theme
from the start has been erotic/romantic desire, and nearly all his films have
explored obstacles to desire. His brilliant debut Gagman (made in
1988, eight years after the Gwangju massacre and five before the advent of
civilian governments) implied that its eccentric characters' dreams were
thwarted by the appalling state of the nation, but Lee subsequently left
politics aside and began to focus on psychological and sexual blockages. The
other constant has been his hostility to conventional 'realism'.
And so Duelist
rethinks swordplay as a dance of courtship, with thrusts and parries
representing the desires and fears of the untamed heart until death - the only
possible climax to a duel - is transcended in a never-ending fantasy of airborne
combat, kept aloft by passion alone. This is a powerful, almost metaphysical
image for desires that are impossible in the real world, matched in Lee's
cinema only by the climax of First Love (1993), in which the
intensity of a schoolgirl's hopeless crush on her Baudelairean drama teacher
animates the entire contents of her home. Duelist is let down by
too-broad elements of slapstick comedy, but its visuals are spiffy and the
single-minded redirection of the martial-arts genre is admirable.
Lee Seong-gang
MY BEAUTIFUL GIRL, MARI
The
Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
The fest's loveliest and most affecting film, Lee Seong-Gang's My Beautiful Girl, Mari, is a 100 percent animated fairy tale about a lonely, fatherless boy living in a seaside village who gains access to a parallel paradise (and its attendant sprite-goddess) through an abandoned lighthouse. Owing a good deal to the best Japanime, Lee's dreamy ode to ocean sounds, cumulus clouds, blooming jungles, late-afternoon light, and (again) fading memories hums with an observant poetry that should make most American animators red with shame.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Most of the recent animated features emerging from South Korea's re-energized film industry take their cue from the popular anime style of Japan, with its angular body types, big eyes, zippy visual effects and science fiction story lines. Lee Sung-gang's exquisite tale of childhood remembrance and imagination is different, a patient fantasy painted in swaths of color without the traditional pen and ink lines. Two childhood friends recall their last days together in their small coastal village, where an abandoned lighthouse full of the ghosts of flying fish is their playground and a marble with a magic spark is their ticket to a fantasy dimension. Behind the magic are the very real, roiling emotions of loss, betrayal and adolescent attraction. There's a delicacy and a poignancy in both story and style that is rare in animation today.
User comments from imdb Author hektorthillet from United States
"My Beautiful Girl Mari" tells the story, or requiem if you will,
of young Nam-woo's fast approaching adulthood, and the growing fear we all
experienced growing up of ending up alone if we ever left that fantasy world
that is our childhood were imagination is always company in the most bitter of
days. We are softly submerged into a memory-like setting as the movie opens with
what I would describe as one of the most haunting and calming intro montages I
have ever seen in an animated film of this nature. You fly away on the path of
a seagull, and for a moment you're thinking of your own life and memories with
no motive; as Lee Byeong-Woo's opening score paints familiar images and summons
warm thoughts of a beautiful memory that's past.
You are introduced to Nam-woo, a young boy living a simple life in the
beautiful coast of
This is probably something most of us still deal with … things and people in
our lives we refuse to let go. The character Nam-woo embodies that notion in a
most realistic and gripping way. His loneliness and refusal of closeness with
others by fear of abandonment is something many kids his age experience and
later endure as grown ups. And I like very much the approach of this movie to
these issues, in where there is not necessarily a happy compromise or an
absolution; instead a world of options and question marks we might or might not
figure out for the sake of the rest of our lives.
Exquisite animation, haunting score, reflective subjects, and a calming escape
for the mind are all part of what this work of art has to offer to those
seeking something more meaningful in animation. Reminiscent of other great
works such as "Whisper of The Heart", and as refreshing and inspiring
as a Ghibli film; this beautiful story from Korea shows that everyone out there
has visions of animation just as pure and resonant as the big boys.
My Beautiful Girl, Mari Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
It's been a long time since Korean animation has occupied a major position within the industry. In the 1970s, local animated films (mostly broadcast on TV) attracted viewers with creative images and stories, but in the decades since, Korea has produced little animation outside of outsourcing work for foreign studios (much of The Simpsons was drawn in Korea, for example).
In recent years, several new production companies have made an effort to revive the industry and utilize local drawing talent for homegrown films. Although several high-profile works are on the way, My Beautiful Girl, Mari is the first major animated film in years to try to forge a new image for the industry.
Mari tells the story of a boy named Namoo
who lives in a seaside village. Several years after the death of his father,
Namoo finds himself faced with further struggles: his grandmother is ill, his
mother has a new boyfriend, and his best friend will move to
This film's director, Lee Sung-gang, is a rising talent who had drawn notice previously for his animated shorts, which played at many overseas festivals. The images he creates for My Beautiful Girl, Mari were made on the computer with fairly simple tools, such as Flash and Illustrator. Nonetheless the end result is dazzling: a multi-textured, vibrant world that is poetic in its simplicity. The voices for the film were recorded by real children (a refreshing change from the practice of having adults speak in high pitch), as well as some famous actors: both Lee Byung-heon and Ahn Sung-ki contribute their talents.
Although this film was not a success at the box-office, it represents both a major step forward for Korean animation and the birth of a wondrous film that deserves not to be overlooked. Apart from its remarkable imagery, the film also proves to be a touching portrait of how children deal with loss. With luck, someday we may look back upon this film as a first step in the rebirth of Korean animation.
DVD Times Noel Megahey
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
DVD Talk Don Houston
Lee, Spike
Spike Lee - Biography/Complete works (1996) - In Motion Magazine July 13, 1996
Spike Lee has established himself as one of Hollywood's most important
and influential filmmakers in the past decade. Spike has now completed his
ninth film Girl 6 released in Spring of 1996. The Jackie Robinson
Saga is to come in 1997. These movies follow his critically-acclaimed films
Malcolm X and Clockers.
In 1986, his debut film, the independently produced comedy, She's Gotta Have
It, earned him the Prix de Jeunesse Award at the Cannes Film festival and
set him at the forefront of the Black Wave in American Cinema.
School Daze, his second feature, not only proved highly profitable, but
also launched the careers of several young Black actors. Spike's timely 1989
film, Do The Right Thing, garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best
Original Screenplay and Best Film & Director awards from the Los Angeles
Film Critics Association. Lee's Jungle Fever and Mo' Better Blues
were also critically well received.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Spike returned South from Brooklyn to attended
Morehouse College. Spike coontinued his education at New York University's
Tisch School of the Arts, where he received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in
film production. Lee then founded 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks and Musicworks.
In addition. he has created two retail companies, Spike's Joint, based in the
Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, where he has resided since childhood, and
Spike's Joint West in Los Angeles.
In addition to his achievements in feature films, Lee has produced had directed
numerous music videos for such diverse artists as Miles Davis, Tracy Chapman,
Anita Baker, Public Enemy and Bruce Hornsby. His other music videos include
work for Phyliss Hyman, Naughty by Nature, and Arrested Development.
Lee's commercial work began in 1988 with his Nike Air Jordan campaign.
Collaborating with basketball great Michael Jordan on seven commercials, Lee
resurrected his popular character, Mars Blackmon from She's Gotta Have It.
Lee is also well-known for his Levi's Button-Fly 501, AT&T, and ESPN
television commercials. His latest venture is a Ben & Jerry commercial
which features commercials. Spike has also directed several Art Spot Shorts for
MTV and a short film featuring Branford Marsalis and Diahane Abbott for Saturday
Night Live. Additionally, Spike has authored six books on the making of his
films; the fifth book, Five For Five, served as a pictorial reflection
of his first five features.
Spike Lee -
Director - Films as Director, Scriptwriter ... - Film Reference profile by Charles Derry
Spike Lee is the most famous African American to have
succeeded in breaking through industry obstacles to create a notable career for
himself as a major director. What makes this all the more notable is that he is
not a comedian—the one role in which Hollywood has usually allowed blacks to
excel—but a prodigious, creative, multifaceted talent who writes, directs,
edits, and acts, a filmmaker who invites comparisons with American titans like
Woody Allen, John Cassavetes, and Orson Welles.
His films, which deal with different facets of the black
experience, are innovative and controversial even within the black community.
Spike Lee refuses to be content with presenting blacks in their
"acceptable" stereotypes: noble Poitiers demonstrating simple moral
righteousness are nowhere to be found. Lee's characters are three-dimensional
and often vulnerable to moral criticism. His first feature film, She's Gotta
Have It , dealt with black sexuality, unapologetically supporting the heroine's
promiscuity. His second film, School Daze , drawing heavily upon Lee's own
experiences at Morehouse College, examined the black university experience and
dealt with discrimination within the black community based on relative skin
colors. His third film, Do the Right Thing , dealt with urban racial tensions
and violence. His fourth film, Mo' Better Blues , dealt with black jazz and its
milieu. His fifth film, Jungle Fever , dealt with interracial sexual
relationships and their political implications, by no means taking the
traditional, white liberal position that love should be color blind. His sixth
film, Malcolm X , attempted no less than a panoramic portrait of the entire
racial struggle in the United States, as seen through the life story of the
controversial activist. Not until his seventh film, Crooklyn , primarily an autobiographical
family remembrance of growing up in Brooklyn, did Spike Lee take a breath to
deal with a simpler subject and theme.
Lee's breakthrough feature was She's Gotta Have It , an
independent film budgeted at $175,000 and a striking box-office success: a film
made by blacks for blacks which also attracted white audiences. She's Gotta
Have It reflects the sensibilities of an already sophisticated filmmaker and
harkens back to the early French New Wave in its exuberant embracing of bravura
technique—intertitles, black-and-white cinematography, a sense of
improvisation, characters directly addressing the camera—all wedded
nevertheless to serious philosophical/sociological examination. The
considerable comedy in She's Gotta Have It caused many critics to call Spike
Lee the "black Woody Allen," a label which would increasingly reveal
itself as a rather simplistic, muddle-headed approbation, particularly as Lee's
career developed. (Indeed, in his work's energy, style, eclecticism, and social
commitment, he more resembles Martin Scorsese, a Lee mentor at the NYU film
school.) Even to categorize Spike Lee as a black filmmaker is to denigrate his
talent, since there are today virtually no American filmmakers (except Allen)
with the ambitiousness and talent to write, direct, and perform in their own
films. And Lee edits as well.
Do the Right Thing , Lee's third full-length feature, is one
of the director's most daring and controversial achievements, presenting one
sweltering day which culminates in a riot in the Bedford Stuyvesant
section of Brooklyn. From its first images—assailing jump cuts of a woman
dancing frenetically to the rap "Fight the Power" while colored
lights stylistically flash on a location ghetto block upon which Lee has
constructed his set—we know we are about to witness something deeply
disturbing. The film's sound design is incredibly dense and complex, and the
volume alarmingly high, as the film continues to assail us with tight
close-ups, extreme angles, moving camera, colored lights, distorting lenses,
and individual scenes directed like high operatic arias.
Impressive, too, is the well-constructed screenplay,
particularly the perceptively drawn Italian family at the center of the film
who feel so besieged by the changing, predominantly black neighborhood around
them. A variety of ethnic characters are drawn sympathetically, if
unsentimentally; perhaps never in American cinema has a director so accurately
presented the relationships among the American urban underclasses. Particularly
shocking and honest is a scene in which catalogs of racial and ethnic epithets
are shouted directly into the camera. The key scene in Do the Right Thing has
the character of Mookie, played by Spike Lee, throwing a garbage can through a
pizzeria window as a moral gesture which works to make the riot inevitable. The
film ends with two quotations: one from Martin Luther King Jr., eschewing
violence; the other from Malcolm X, rationalizing violence in certain
circumstances.
Do the Right Thing was one of the most controversial films of
the last twenty years. Politically conservative commentators denounced the
film, fearful it would incite inner-city violence. Despite widespread acclaim
the film was snubbed at the Cannes Film Festival, outraging certain Cannes
judges; despite the accolades of many critics' groups, the film was also
largely snubbed by the Motion Picture Academy, receiving a nomination only for
Spike Lee's screenplay and Danny Aiello's performance
as the pizzeria owner.
Both Mo' Better Blues and the much underrated Crooklyn owe a
lot to Spike Lee's appreciation of music, particularly as handed down to him by
his father, the musician Bill Lee. Crooklyn is by far the gentler film,
presenting Lee and his siblings' memories of growing up with Bill Lee and his
mother. Typical of Spike Lee, the vision in Crooklyn is by no means a
sentimental one, and the father comes across as a proud, if weak, man;
talented, if failing in his musical career; loving his children, if not always
strong enough to do the right thing for them. The mother, played masterfully by
Alfre Woodard, is the stronger of the two personalities; and the film—ending as
it does with grief—seems Spike Lee's version of Fellini's Amarcord. For a
white audience, Crooklyn came as a revelation: the sight of black children
watching cartoons, eating Trix cereal, playing hopscotch, and singing along
with the Partridge family, seemed strange—because the American cinema had so
rarely (if ever?) shown a struggling black family so rooted in the
popular-culture iconography to which all Americans could relate. Scene after
scene is filled with humanity, such as the little girl stealing groceries
rather than be embarrassed by using her mother's food stamps. Crooklyn 's
soundtrack, like so many other Spike Lee films, is unusually cacophonous, with
everyone talking at once, and its improvisational style suggests Cassavetes or
Scorsese. Lee's 1995 film, Clockers , which deals with drug dealing,
disadvantage, and the young "gangsta," was actually produced in
conjunction with Scorsese, whose own work, particularly the seminal Meanstreets
, Lee's work often recalls.
Another underrated film from Lee is Jungle Fever (1991).
Taken for granted is how well the film communicates the African-American experience;
more surprising is how persuasively and perceptively the film communicates the
Italian-American experience, particularly working-class attitudes. Indeed, one
looks in vain in the Hollywood cinema for an American director with a European
background who presents blacks with as many insights as Lee presents his
Italians. And certainly unforgettable, filmed expressively with nightmarish
imagery, is the film's set-piece in which we enter a crack house and come to
understand profoundly and horrifically the tremendous damage being done to a
component of the African-American community by this plague. Jungle Fever , like
Do the Right Thing , basically culminates in images of Ruby Dee screaming in
horror and pain, a metaphor for black martyrdom and suffering.
Nevertheless, the most important film in the Spike Lee oeuvre
(if not his best) is probably Malcolm X —important because Lee himself campaigned
for the film when it seemed it would be given to a white director, creating
then an epic with the sweep and majesty of a David Lean and a clear political
message of black empowerment. If the film on the whole seems less interesting
than many of Lee's films (because there is less Lee there), the most typical
Lee touches (such as the triumphant coda which enlists South African President
Nelson Mandela to play himself and teach young blacks about racism and their
future) seem among the film's most inspired and creative scenes. If more
cautious and conservative, in some ways the film is also Lee's most ambitious:
with dozens of characters, historical reconstructions, and the biggest budget
in his entire career. Malcolm X proved definitively to fiscally conservative
Hollywood studio executives that an African-American director could be trusted
to direct a high-budget "A film." The success of Malcolm X , coupled
with the publicity machine supporting Spike Lee, helped a variety of young
black directors—like John Singleton, the Wayans brothers, and Mario Van
Peebles—all break through into mainstream Hollywood features.
And indeed, Lee seems often to be virtually everywhere. On
television interview shows he is called upon to comment on every issue relevant
to black America: from the O. J. Simpson verdict to
Louis Farrakhan and the Million Man March. In bookstores, his name can be found
on a variety of published books on the making of his films, books created by
his own public relations arm particularly so that others can read about the
process, become empowered, find their own voices, and follow in Lee's filmic
footsteps. On the basketball court, Lee can be found very publicly attending
the New York Knicks' games. On MTV, he can be found in notable commercials for
Nike basketball shoes. On college campuses, he can be found making highly
publicized speeches on the issues of the day. And on the street, his influence
can be seen even in fashion trends—such as the ubiquitous "X" on a
variety of clothing the year of Malcolm X 's release. There may be no other
American filmmaker working today who is so willing to take on all comers, so
politically committed to make films which are consistently and unapologetically
in-your-face. Striking, too, is that instead of taking his inspiration from
other movies, as do the gaggle of Spielberg imitators, Lee takes his
inspiration from real life—whether the Howard Beach or Yusuf Hawkins incidents,
in which white racists killed blacks, or his own autobiographical memories of
growing up black in Brooklyn.
As Spike Lee has become a leading commentator on the cultural
scene, there has been an explosion of Lee scholarship, not all of it laudatory:
increasing voices attack Lee and his films for either homophobia, sexism, or
anti-Semitism. Lee defends both his films and himself, pointing out that
because characters espouse some of these values does not imply that he himself
does, only that realistic portrayal of the world as it is has no place for
political correctness. Still, some of the accusers point to examples which give
pause: Lee's insistence on talking only to black journalists for stories about
Malcolm X , but refusing to meet with a black journalist who was gay; the
totally cartoonish portrait of the homosexual neighbor in Crooklyn , one of the
few characters in that film who is given no positive traits to leaven the harsh
criticism implied by Lee's treatment or to make him seem three-dimensional.
Similar points have been made regarding Lee's attitudes toward Jews
(particularly in Mo' Better Blues ) and women. At one point, Lee even felt the
need to defend himself in the New York Times in a letter to the editor titled,
"Why I Am Not an Anti-Semite."
If Malcolm X brought Lee more attention than ever before, the
films he has made since brought critical and/or financial disappointment.
Clockers starts powerfully enough with a close-up of a bullet hole and a
montage of horrifically graphic images of violence victims. Although Clockers
realistically evokes the world of adolescent cocaine dealers within the limited
world of a Brooklyn housing project, Clockers ultimately reveals Lee to be
either not particularly skillful at or not particularly interested in telling a
traditional story. Girl 6 and Get on the Bus reveal similar attitudes toward
dramatic narrative. A visually pyrotechnical examination of a fetching
contradiction, Girl 6 presents a young black woman circumspect in her private
life who nevertheless works as a phone-sex operator. Although not written by
Spike Lee, this experimental work's flaccid narrative is pumped up by its
stunning cinematography. The weirdest scene undoubtedly is a postmodern parody
of the television show The Jeffersons ; in certain regards Lee's multiple
diegeses in Girl 6 suggest an imitation of Oliver Stone's controversial Natural
Born Killers. Although startlingly inventive in the manner of Jean-Luc Godard,
Girl 6 was destined, despite its florid subject, to frustrate a popular
audience searching for simple coherence.
Get on the Bus , like many of Lee's films, takes a real
historical event as its inspiration: the Million Man March organized by Louis
Farrakhan. A beautifully evocative credit sequence of a black man in chains
cuts to a cross on a church in South Central Los Angeles—certainly an ambiguous
juxtaposition. In Get on the Bus , a variety of black men—each representative
of a different strain of the black experience—must share a long, cross-country
bus ride on their way to the Washington, D.C. march, a conception which recalls
the classic American film à thèse of the fifties (for instance, the Sidney Lumet/Reginald Rose
Twelve Angry Men ), where each metaphorical character is respectively given the
spotlight, often through a moving monologue or dramatic scene, thus allowing
the narrative to accrue a variety of psychological/sociological insights.
Notably for the Lee oeuvre, Get on the Bus includes black gay lovers who are
treated three-dimensionally (tellingly, only the black Republican is treated
with total derision, thrown off the bus in a scene of comic relief). Like much
of Lee's work, this film has a continuous impulse for music. And there is one
stunning montage of beautiful ebony faces. Nevertheless, the ending of the film
seems anti-climactic, because the characters never quite make it to the Million
Man March—a disappointing narrative choice perhaps dictated by Lee's low
budget.
He Got Game , like many Lee films, seems meandering and a bit
undisciplined, if with important themes: here, of father/son reconciliation,
and the meaning of basketball within black culture. Indeed, never have
basketball images been photographed so expressively; and apposite, parallel
scenes of one-on-one father/son competition highlight the film. Like Accatone ,
where Pasolini used Bach on his soundtrack to ennoble his lower-class youth,
Lee brilliantly uses the most American composer of all, the lyrical Aaron
Copland. Summer of Sam likewise has some extraordinary elements, particularly
Lee's perceptive anatomizing of the complicated sex lives of his Italian and
African-American characters. Rarely, too, has a film so expressively evoked
such a precise sense of place and time—that chaotic summer when New York City
was obsessed and terrified by the Son of Sam serial killer. Unfortunately,
audiences were largely indifferent to Lee's interest in character and texture,
disappointed that Summer of Sam did not offer a more traditional narrative
focused on the killer and his sadism, in the typical Hollywood style.
Curiously, one notes that Lee's documentary for HBO, 4 Little
Girls , reveals some of the same problems as Lee's recent fiction career. A
documentary on a powerfully compelling subject—the four little girls killed in
a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963— 4 Little Girls , though
politically fascinating, is curiously slack, with its narrative as its weakest
link, Lee failing to clearly differentiate his characters and not building
suspensefully to a clear climax. Stronger are the film's individual parts: such
as the killer's attorney characterizing Birmingham as "a wonderful place
to live and raise a family," while Lee shows us an image of a little child
in full Klan regalia, hand-in-hand with a parent; or one parent's the memory of
Martin Luther King Jr.'s memorable oration at the funeral—"Life is as hard
as steel!"
As Lee's career progresses, it becomes increasingly clear
that his interest in political insight and the veracity of historical details
is what impedes his ability to tell a story in the way the popular audience
expects. Whereas Lee once seemed the most likely minority filmmaker to
transform the Hollywood establishment, he now seems the filmmaker (like,
perhaps Woody Allen) most perpetually in danger of losing his core audience. Do
the Right Thing and Malcolm X were successful precisely because Lee was able to
fuse popular forms and audience-pleasing entertainment with significant
cultural commentary. Lee seems now to be making films which—despite their
ambitious subjects and sophisticated points-of-view—disappear almost entirely
off the cultural radar screen.
Interesting, almost as an aside, is Lee's canny ability, particularly in his earlier films, to use certain catch phrases which helped both to attract and delight audiences. In She's Gotta Have It , there was the constant refrain uttered by Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon, "Please baby, please baby, please baby, baby, baby, please. . . "; in Do the Right Thing , the disc jockey's "And that's the truth, Ruth." Notable also is the director's assembly—in the style of Bergman and Chabrol and Woody Allen in their prime—of a consistent stable of very talented collaborators, including his father, Bill Lee, as musical composer, production designer Wynn Thomas, producer Monty Ross, and cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, among others. Lee has also used many of the same actors from one film to another, including his sister Joie Lee, Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, John Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee, helping to create a climate which propelled several to stardom and inspired a new wave of high-level attention to a variety of breakout African-American performers.
Spike
Lee The Invisible Man, by Kent Jones from Film Comment, January/February 1997
The proof of Spike Lee’s insight is the clamor of opposing rash positions around his films—how difficult is it to imagine a scene from a Lee movie in which a gaggle of film critics scream their opinions about the relative worth of a young African-American filmmaker’s oeuvre in each other’s faces, shot in contrasting off-angles and perfectly sculpted light? His less sophisticated admirers, in other words those who are unwilling to apply the same sort of hardworking analysis to his work that he applies to American society, have never done him any favors by pushing him as an “innovator.” (Some innovator: his actor-on-the-dolly move, cribbed from Mean Streets and monotonously reprised in every film from Mo’ Better Blues through Girl 6, is numbingly off-key and gives the impression to the unsuspecting viewer that certain sidewalks in the New York area are equipped with conveyor belts.) Then there are those who claim that he is basically reheating old-fashioned social consciousness in a rock video microwave. But the classic social consciousness of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird begins with an abstraction—Racism, and How It Can Be Overcome—and structures its narrative accordingly: a racist malefactor and a good and righteous man square off against the backdrop of an amorphously indifferent populace that could be swayed either way and finally listens to reason. Lee, on the other hand, always starts from the specifics that make up the fractured consciousness of African-American males. “Hey daddy, I’ll suck your big black dick for two dollars!” drawls the teenaged whore to Wesley Snipes’s Flipper Purify before he screams with indignation and takes her in his arms at the end of Jungle Fever. It’s one of the few sweepingly rhetorical moments in modern cinema that earns its weight and self-importance because it’s the culmination at a whole battery of anxieties, horrors, disappointments, and subterfuges that have all been laid out by Lee with his typical block-by-block, hard plastic clarity.
There is also the overgrown-film-student charge, somewhat easier to fathom but essentially wrong and recklessly dismissive. What I understand people to mean by this is that Lee is a showoff, which is true enough. His camera never gets comfortable, and no stroll down the block is complete without at least six changes of angle. He is also constantly throwing aesthetic blankets over large chunks of his movies: changes of film stock for different locales in Clockers and Get On the Bus, high-def video for the images of the phantom callers in Girl 6, the infamous (and truly maddening) squeezed anamorphic image for the Southern section of Crooklyn. That’s not to mention the liberal application of pop songs ladled over large portions of his films. There are few filmmakers whose work seems less organic and more the sum of their aesthetic choices.
Moreover, there are few filmmakers who are less interested in (or less adept at?) giving us the rhythms of quotidian existence. The world of Spike Lee is almost completely devoid of the everyday tasks and actions that make up the backbone of most films. When he does have a go at everyday life, it is often editorialized to a level beyond absurdity. Annabella Sciorra’s family in Jungle Fever is so heavily singularized and lacking in nuance that “Italian Family” seems to be a new flavor of salad dressing. The opening scenes of Malcolm X are the most embarrassing, a fifth-hand evocation of zoot-suit culture. Lee’s relentless, never-ending control leaves you with the feeling that when his good actors (Snipes, Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Alfre Woodard, Giancarlo Esposito) score a few points, they’re getting one over on their director.
The fact is that legibility and visibility are more important to Spike Lee than anything else. Every film has its own eye-catching design and every moment is held only as long as it takes to register as a sign; everything beyond that feels like a holding action. Lee is a completely arrhythmic filmmaker in this sense: tempo and nuance are always sacrificed for clarity. It’s fascinating to watch one of his attempts to render abandon because of his complete unwillingness to surrender his lock on the visuals. (Image and sound often seem like two separate categories with their own energies: while the visuals feel uptight, cramped, and fixated on the center, the soundtrack is always a mighty river of words and music.) When Denzel Washington’s Bleek is composing a tune in Mo’ Better Blues, Lee puts his poor actor on the dolly and spins the room around him. It’s very similar to Troy’s dream of a glue-induced flight over the block in Crooklyn because of the way that both actors are all but stapled to the camera. What is supposed to play as a sense of flight, artistic in the first instance and psychosexual in the second, is instead tidy and tight as a drum. On close inspection, though (and close inspection of Lee’s cinema is always rewarding), there’s something conceptually right about the Mo’ Better scene, since the story deals with the way that artistic expression can be the unhealthy result of a transferral of guarded aggression from mother to son, a mask of mastery to wear in a racist world.
Which is pretty close to a self-portrait, at least based on the evidence of Lee’s films (and his acting: in all of Lee’s performances his voice and his body seem to be going in two different directions, which plays like a bizarre and quite intriguing evasion technique). His detractors make an enormous leap when they lazily insist that there’s nothing but a vacuum behind all that “style.” How ridiculous: what other filmmaker has been more adept at delineating the process of American racism and treating it as a living organism rather than a frozen entity? It’s no small achievement, even when the film is as artistically pallid and mushy as School Daze or Mo’ Better Blues. The insistence on leaving nothing to chance, which often flattens out his representations of jazz clubs, city blocks, and middle-class homes to the point that they feel like computer art, has a painful, extracinematic edge. You can feel Lee’s desire to loosen up, but it’s always checked by his fear of making a move without the protection of his agile mind. His films are personal in the strangest sense: the artist is revealed by the many ways with which he chooses to constantly camouflage his personality.
The film school complaint is the other side of the coin from the more absurd charges of “reverse racism,” divisiveness, and separatism, all of which are hogwash, and all of which start from the wrongheaded assumption that Lee is some kind of “special interest” filmmaker. Aside from the fact that people are constantly attributing sentiments voiced by Lee’s warring characters to Lee himself, what’s so striking about the frequent criticisms and judgments of his work is their eagerness to reduce it to a lowest “cinematic” denominator and sweep it under the rug. The idea that Lee is a propagandist grows out of what can only be understood as fear of encroachment on the sacred territory of American cinema and its myths. It’s the same kind of fear that once prompted a friend of mine to make the following remark to an acquaintance on the neighboring barstool who said he was afraid to go to Harlem: “Let me get this straight—you’re afraid to be a white man in America?”
Lee goes against the grain of the model well-rounded filmmaker, balanced between the thematic and the organic, between action and emotion. As an artist, he has firmly positioned himself midway between didacticism and dialectics. The didactic side is his tireless effort to keep the desires, frustrations, looming terrors, and class diversity among African-American men visible and viable within mainstream, i.e. white, i.e. racist American culture. (He is less interested in women but willing to keep his films democratically open to their viewpoints, as in the interminable but informative improvised discussion in Jungle Fever.) The dialectical side is the rigorous manner in which he breaks down and presents the warring components of American society, a pot in which nothing melts and everything congeals (he has never been interested in the currently fashionable Hollywood idea of “positive images of black people,” in which Wesley Snipes or Samuel L. Jackson is afforded the same golden opportunity as Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford to play the lead in idiotic action movies). The ensuing tension, which catches characters in a grid between the personal and the societal, is palpable in every one of his films, from the throwaway Girl 6 to the hymnlike Get On the Bus, from the synthetically delicate She’s Gotta Have It to the grandiose Malcolm X, from the awful yet shaggily lovable School Daze to the magnificent Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever. And that tension makes something odd but undeniably beautiful out of Crooklyn, an autobiographical reminiscence filtered through his sister Joie (he co-authored the script with her and brother Cinqué) that all but denies the possibility of Proustian reverie in favor of a systematic and seemingly exhaustive survey of the focal points, obsessions, and imagery of an early-Seventies African-American childhood. It’s a haunting film in which the action is interestingly dispersed across a more delicate visual palette than the burnished tones of Ernest Dickerson would have allowed (courtesy of Daughters of the Dust cinematographer Arthur Jafa), suggestive of public-school mural art.
Placing Lee as a filmmaker rather than as a public figure or a provocateur has been somewhat set aside over the years. An instructive comparison would be Claire Denis, another essentially cold and precise filmmaker intent on rendering the multicultural makeup of modern life, who also strategically casts her films in warm, convivial tones and atmospheres. Denis is also a filmmaker of choices: a handheld camera for S’en fout la mort, interlocking narratives in J’ai pas sommeil, extreme closeup sensuality spread dolloped all over Nénette et Boni. But there are moments of comfort and reflection for her characters, and none whatsoever for Lee’s—the people in his films are just as guarded and wary as their creator, who may never be relaxed enough to make a spontaneously generated autobiographical work like U.S. Go Home. A better precedent for Lee in world cinema is Nagisa Oshima, in whose films the patient accumulation of dry detail and opposing forces bursts open with an emblematic action at the film’s climax. The ending of Jungle Fever or Mookie’s garbage can in the window at the end of Do the Right Thing are kissing cousins to culminating moments like the eating of the apple in Cruel Story of Youth or the moment in Dear Summer Sister when the girl says, “They should never have given Okinawa back to the Japanese.” Oshima is a more naturally elegant and economical filmmaker than Lee—more than he would probably have cared to admit in his angrier days—but they are both children of Brecht with a shared obsession with clarity, specificity, and the abandonment of personal concerns in favor of political directness. An interesting cultural divide: where one might say that Lee “likes” all of his characters, one might in turn say that Oshima “hates” all of his, at least in early films like The Sun’s Burial (perhaps it’s more correct to say that he equalizes them to a uniform unpleasantness). In any case, the net effect is virtually identical.
Lee may be even bleaker than his relentlessly tough Japanese cousin. There is always a lot of high spirits, Fifties-style sentimentality, and verbal jazz in Lee’s work. But they hide what is in the end a despairing vision of existence, in which the backdrop of divisiveness and polarization not only never gives way to transcendent action and understanding (the way it does with the kiss at the end of Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) but shadows his characters mercilessly. When it’s not felt in the restless visuals or through the neurotically inert characters—Lee’s people, like Fassbinder’s, are forever making small, tightly circumscribed movements across a limited selection of folkways that make them look like rats in a maze—it’s there in the oppressively heavy atmosphere, a side effect of turning every field of action (Morehouse College, a movieish jazz club located in some unimaginably bland netherworld, the life of Malcolm X, a project courtyard, a Brooklyn block) into a metaphorically charged space. There’s an uncharacteristic moment in Jungle Fever when Lee suddenly cuts to Flipper standing on a bad corner of Harlem a split second before he consorts with some unsavory characters in search of his crackhead brother (Samuel L. Jackson). You can feel his tension, distaste, and angry confusion in the way he mills around, his body tight. It’s an unusual moment because it hands over the reigns to an actor, no matter how short the duration. The entire Harlem-swanky-architectural-firm-Bensonhurst social grid that Lee has set up seems to be pressing down on Flipper.
There are appalling things in Jungle Fever, but it remains his most devastating film, perhaps for the crazy reason that it’s the one most packed with interlocking thematic material. That’s the paradox of Lee as an artist: the more linear and streamlined his films are, the duller they get and the more they flounder. The Tim Robbins-Brad Dourif yuppie tag team, the Italian family scenes (Anthony Quinn’s performance as a supposedly prototypical Italian father—“Your mother was a real woman!”—is like an industrial disaster in an olive oil factory), the floating conversations between Lee and Snipes all just sit there, but their place in the grid that Lee sets up, the way they counterpoint, amplify, and bruise one another, give the film a remarkable fullness and social three-dimensionality. As in Do the Right Thing (which has some similarly awful moments that are nonetheless vital cogs in the machinery, like Lee and Turturro’s conversation about niggers), Lee achieves something rare in American cinema, which is an illustration of the degree to which people are products of their environment, a far cry from the bogus individualism of so much American cinema. Flipper and Angie (Sciorra) are ciphers at the center of Jungle Fever, surrounded by a range of far more vivid characters: Ossie Davis’s terrifyingly stern, separatist, Old Testament father and Ruby Dee’s pathologically genteel mother, John Turturro’s haloed candy store proprietor, and Samuel L. Jackson’s horrifying crackhead. And on reflection what seems like an artistic miscalculation turns out to be a dialectical strategy. Lee is speaking to middle-class people like Flipper (and himself, presumably) who keep things status quo by avoiding the cacophony of warring voices in their ears, just as in Do the Right Thing he is speaking to layabouts like Mookie who try to float through the world and eventually act out of sheer psychic exhaustion. When Mookie throws that garbage can through the window, he is egged on by his neighborhood friends, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has correctly pointed out, but he is also making a fruitless and mindless gesture that is the result of so much heat, aggravation, and sloganeering. It seems appropriate that the characters are diminished by the confusion that makes up their world (was this the reason Wim Wenders made his insane and now legendary comment that Mookie was not enough of a hero?) and that they have no time or room to analyze calmly.
In his less successful work, the striking moments come unmoored in a sea of heady aesthetic choices. Since Lee films every moment with equal weight and at an unvarying rhythm, his hyperbolic clarity can backfire on him when the focal points are reduced in number. Clockers is an unsatisfying film because the sheer immersion technique of Richard Price’s novel is antithetical to Lee’s aesthetic strengths. If any of his films does actually follow the old social-consciousness model it’s this one, in which every character represents not a societal force but a different symbolic aspect of The Drug Problem In The Ghetto. (Lee is about as good a candidate for an in-depth study of life in the projects as Richard Attenborough.) But there are impassioned moments, particularly the montage in which a slow track away from Strike (Mekhi Phifer) playing with his trains is intercut with terrifyingly immediate shots of real crackheads scoring and getting high. There’s nothing terribly wrong with Malcolm X beyond the fact that it drains a lot of the flashfire anger and drama out of the autobiography to give us a good, sturdy, dignified tour through the subject’s life (the most striking passages of the film move with the slow and stately rhythm of Washington and Angela Bassett’s immaculately acted mutual respect). Girl 6, which seems to enter a more playful mode, devolves into nothing much by the end (although it does have one of Lee’s most physically frank moments: Isaiah Washington’s shoplifter sweet-talks ex-wife Theresa Randle into an alley and shoves her hand down his pants).
Get On the Bus marks a turning point for Lee, a move towards a valid, tempered feeling of uplift and more faith in his actors and away from so much fanatical control. Lee finds myriad ways of exploring the faces of his uniformly magnificent actors in worried contemplation, to the point where his film takes on a singing beauty and a simple closeup of the great Charles Dutton carries real weight. There have been some ridiculous things written about this buoyant, defiantly old-fashioned movie, far from a song of praise to Louis Farrakhan. The Million Man March does not take on ideological but symbolic import: the simple and joyous fact of one million African-American men congregating in one place is what motivates everyone to get on the Spotted Owl to Washington, and the feeling is echoed by the actors as they bite into their meaty roles. The makeup is standard WWII bomber crew stuff: an old failure, a young upstart actor, a gentle cop, a reformed gangbanger, a homosexual couple, a silent Muslim, a Republican businessman, an estranged father reunited with his gangbanger son and chained to him by court order, a Jewish relief driver, an aspiring filmmaker/witness (“Spike Lee Jr.,” as one of the characters calls him), and the bus driver-spokesman hash out what seems like every conflict that currently besets the African-American community in a more musical version of vintage Rod Serling or Reginald Rose. But as always, Lee short-circuits any answers beyond a lonely self-respect. There is a painfully beautiful moment midfilm when the cop, whose father has been killed by gang members and whose beat is the ghetto, listens to the murder confession of the former gangbanger-turned-counselor, a moment made possible by the fellowship of the bus ride. And the cop suddenly turns the tables and tells him he’ll have to arrest him when they get back to L.A. Lee cuts away from the standoff to a shot of the moon seen from the front window. This is presumably one of the moments in the film that’s been called a cop-out, but is it a cop-out to illustrate a hopelessly divisive issue and refuse to put a Band-Aid on it? Lee isn’t turning away from the conflict but turning towards the sad flow of time.
Get On the Bus may be his most heartfelt movie, but it still has the protective coating of every other Lee film—its materials are just more human. As he slowly loses his audience in the increasingly foul atmosphere of corporate culture (Bus disappeared from theaters with ruthless speed), it’s puzzling to imagine how Lee will evolve. As a filmmaker he is caught between a rock and a hard place: he is too resolutely anti-American for the self-satisfaction of the current political climate, and he is too tightly coiled an artist to generate new enthusiasms now that the first flush has been over for some time. As much as I admire his abilities as a dialectician, the most penetrating moments in his enormously complex cinema are the small, instinctive ones. There is a moment at the end of Crooklyn when three of the children are walking up a public staircase, two of them holding hands and the other straggling behind, and they are lackadaisically singing a song that is gently echoed by a harmonica in Terence Blanchard’s score. When they stop they wonder what they’ll be wearing to their mother’s funeral. The heartbreak—and the moment is heartbreaking like few moments in recent cinema—is in the high oblique angle that places the kids in a vast expanse of concrete, a detail that feels as if it comes straight from the filmmaker’s memory. And it’s in the stoic trudge up the steps, the sense of a burden that must be shouldered with dignity at all costs.
And then there are two moments in Jungle Fever and Get On the Bus, almost identical. In Jungle Fever, during the crushing scene where Snipes and Sciorra are fooling around on the hood of a car, Lee makes a brief cut to a shot from the point of view of an apartment window looking down on them. We never see the inhabitant and the shot is over quickly, but once Lee cuts back to his interracial couple we just wait for the sirens to start blaring. And in Get On the Bus, amidst the guarded but real camaraderie of a Memphis bar (exemplified by a lovely moment in which Davis and the proprietor bridge their racial divide with a shared passion for rodeo, reminiscent of the scene in Powell’s A Canterbury Tale in which the Oregonian G.I. and the Kentish carpenter talk woodworking), Lee makes an almost subliminal cut to a shot of a random white face staring. We don’t see what he’s staring at, but we don’t have to. In both instances, a whole range of anger and fear is shot right into the heart of the film. It’s during moments like these that I feel another, more vulnerable Spike Lee lurking beneath the quicksilver intelligence and stoic demeanor of the one we know. The question is: does he really want to reveal himself to those staring faces and open windows, positioned throughout American culture, even in the supposedly generous world of cinephilia?
The Official Spike Lee Virtual Joint
All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Ankeny
Spike Lee - Actor, Director, Editor - Variety Profiles biography from Variety magazine
Spike Lee Biography - Yahoo! Movies
JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Spike Lee Sees It All June 30, 1989
Your Sneakers or Your Life Rick Talendar from Sports Illustrated (1990)
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum August 2, 1990, also seen here: Disjointed
[MO' BETTER BLUES] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
Hollywood Radical [MALCOLM X] | Jonathan Rosenbaum December 11, 1992, also seen here: December | 1992 | Jonathan Rosenbaum
Rundles, Jim; "Black Marines Were Fighting on Iwo Jima" at Montford Point Marines Jim Rundles from The Jackson Advocate, February 23 – March 1, 1995
Fitzgerald, Sharon; "Spike Lee: fast
forward"; findarticles.com; Oct-Nov, 1995 Sharon Fitzgerald from American Visions, October/November 1995
Spike Lee Independent Filmmaker [1996] Lee’s speech at the Imagination Conference in San Francisco from In Motion magazine, June 8, 1996
Kindred, Dave; "Mars points NBA to next Milky Way - advertising character Mars Blackmon"; findarticles.com July 21, 1997
"Living foot to mouth"; salon.com Heston on Spike Lee: "If he wants to come and take a shot at me, go let him try it,” May 28, 1999
The film that made a serial killer weep Blaine Harden from The Guardian, June 25, 1999
Doing the wrong thing? Stefano Hatfield on Spike Lee directing ads
for K-Mart, from The Guardian, March
5, 2002
BFI | Sight & Sound | Fear Of A Black Cinema Amy Taubin from Sight and Sound, August 2002
Feeling the Unthinkable | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 16, 2003, also seen here: The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Ubben Lecture at DePauw
University April 3, 2003
Double Standards Daniel Sterman from The Columbia Spectator, April 13, 2004
Scotsman Article (2005) Lover and a Fighter, by Jackie McGlone, June 12, 2005
Spike Lee: The Angriest Auteur -- New York Magazine Ariel Levy, August 13, 2006
The Lumière Reader » Film » Spike Lee’s Territory Brannavan Gnanalingam, October 11, 2007
"Spike Lee to Receive the Wexner Prize"; Wexner Center for the Arts (2008)
Lee calls out Eastwood, Coens over casting Eric J. Lyman from The Hollywood Reporter, May 21, 2008
BBC News: Eastwood hits back at Lee claims June 6, 2008
Marikar, Sheila; "Spike Strikes Back: Clint's 'an Angry Old Man'"; abcnews; Sheila Marikar from ABC News, June 6, 2008
Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee Go to War! E-Online, June 8, 2008
FOXNews.com - Spike Lee Ignites War of Words with Clint Eastwood ... Hannity & Colmes transcript June 10, 2008
Lee blasts Hollywood war mythology as Miracle at St. Anna debuts CBS News, September 7, 2008
Spike Lee: “George Bush Took Out Wall Street” claiming American President George Bush “has succeeded in doing what Osama Bin Laden could not: Destroying Wall Street,” Huliq News, September 15, 2008
Outside Man - The New Yorker John Calapinto, September 22, 2008
Spike
Lee Goes to War With 'St. Anna' Sheri Jennings Washington September 28, 2008
Spike Lee in
the line of fire Ben Child, from The Guardian, September 30, 2008
Spike Lee's "Uniquely American [Di]vision": Race and Class ... Ivan Cañadas from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2009
When
Spike Lee Became Scary - The Atlantic Jason Bailey, August 22, 2012
Spike
Lee Shares His List of “Essential Films”
Aisha Harris from Slate, July
26, 2013
Review: Todd McGowan's Spike Lee - Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard book review of Todd McGowan's Spike Lee, from Slant, February 26, 2014
Scene by Scene: A Breakdown of Essential Spike Lee scenes Dylan Moses Griffin from Movie Mezzanine, February 3, 2015
Do The Right Thing Spike Lee film analysis • Senses of Cinema Jennie Lightweis-Goff, April 2, 2015
On
Joie Lee in Do the Right Thing (and More) - Film Comment Cassie da Costa, February 19, 2016
Lee, Spike They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Interview: Four Little Girls Gary Susman (1997)
Guardian Unlimited Interview November 18, 1999
eFilmCritic - The Spike Lee Interview Bill Baxter, December 4, 1999
DGA Interview Interview by Darryl L. Hope from DGA, November 2000
Cinema Gotham: 25th Hour Spike Lee Interview DVD Talk, January 16, 2003
Ghosts of New York | Culture | The Guardian Danny Leigh interviews Lee from The Guardian, April 11, 2003
Film Monthly Article Paul Fischer in Spike Lee/She Hate Me Interview, July 26, 2004
BBC: Calling the Shots Interview by Stella Papamichael from the BBC, September 2004, including a continued discussion about Lee’s film SHE HATE ME: Read Spike's views on the movie
Lesley O'Toole talks to Spike Lee about his current projects The Guardian, March 25, 2006
NPR Audio Interview (2006) April 1, 2006
"Q&A with Spike Lee on Making 'Do the Right Thing"; New York Magazine How I Made It: Spike Lee on 'Do the Right Thing,' Interview by Logan Hill, April 7, 2008
SUGAR & SPIKE - New York Post Sandra Guzman talks to the director, September 21, 2008
Spike Lee film depicts soldiers he wanted on big screen: Black ... Interview by Sonia Murray from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 24, 2008
Spike Lee discusses 'Miracle at St. Anna' (and Obama) - Los ... Tom Roston from The LA Times, September 25, 2008
The miracle of Spike Lee | Salon Arts & Entertainment Interview by James Hannaham from Salon, September 25, 2008
Continue reading Interview: 'Miracle at St. Anna' Director Spike Lee Interview by James Rocchi from Cinematical, September 26, 2008
Spike Lee: 'Anyone who thinks we move in a post-racial society is someone who's been smoking crack' Video interview with Jason Solomons, Andy Gallagher, and Henry Barnes from The Observer, October 6, 2009 (10:51)
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Spike Lee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spike Lee In Line for iPhone@Apple Store-SOHO YouTube (27 sec)
Air Jordan IV Commercial (30 sec)
Michael Jordan Spike Lee Nike (31 sec)
Spike Lee tells AFI his favorite movie (34 sec)
2005 Spike Lee Michael Jordan Commercial (1:00)
YouTube - Orange advert - Spike Lee YouTube (1:06)
Spike Lee Gives His Thought On the Obama/Clinton Race (2:02)
Spike Lee on Zidane (2:41)
Spike Lee on Bill Maher: Someone blew up the Levees (3:01)
Spike Lee's Ode to New York City: Fuck You, from "25th Hour ... YouTube (5:06)
Clip of Lee expressing his views of the Hurricane Katrina and Tuskegee matters on Real Time with Bill Maher YouTube, Spike Lee Smells a Conspiracy (5:37)
The History Channel's The Life and Time:Spike Lee (6:22)
Nike Air Jordan Evolution (6:38)
Charlie Rose - Spike Lee / Norman Francis (56:45)
JOE’S BED-STUY BARBERSHOP: WE CUT HEADS
User comments from imdb Author: ebone84 from middlesex, nj
Joes Bed-Stuy Barbershop is Spike
Lee's thesis film for NYU graduate school. With this film it is clear that
Spike Lee would go on and make better and greater films. Spike Lee's film about
a barber shop centers around the main character Zack. Zack takes over the
barbershop after Joe is mysteriously murdered. But it becomes apparent that
Zack will follow in Joe's footsteps down the wrong path. The movie is a glimpse
into the world of an urban jungle where it's survival of the fittest whether
you like it or not.
Harvard Crimson Mark D. Payson
Spike Lee's first feature film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop:
We Cut Heads and a documentary of the making of Do The Right Thing,
both running at the Brattle Theater this weekend, provide a close look at the
development and practice of one of America's most talented modern filmmakers.
The hour-long documentary focuses on more than the technical details of
filmmaking; it is concerned with the making of a provocative film in the
context of its set (filmed on location in
Making Do the Right Thing and Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop
The first half-hour of Making 'Do The Right Thing' centers on the nine
weeks of preparation for shooting: the refurbishing of old buildings, the
construction of the pizzeria and the Korean grocery across the street (both
built exclusively for the film), and interviews with local residents and cast
members.
A sense of real-life drama that mirrors the film's content is revealed, almost
by accident. An ambulance streaks down the street during an interview and our
attention is directed to medics rushing into the neighboring apartments. In a
later section, a woman speaks of sleeping on a doorstep all night to be first
in line for the extras casting and how she constantly woke up in fear.
One of the more extraordinary subplots that develops is that of a teenage girl
who gets a job cleaning trash off the streets after the day's filming. One day,
after getting paid, she disappears and an older woman who kept an eye on her
says she has left to do crack with the money she earned. The teenager returns
several days later to resume her work, but the subject is never brought up
again.
The reaction of the local residents to the filming is not always positive.
There is a good deal of ambivalence toward the "rich
The second half of the film deals with the actual filming and alternates clips
of Do The Right Thing with interviews of cast members, highlighting
their attitudes about their characters' message and the messages of the film.
This fascinating array of opinion is concluded best by Spike Lee's statement,
"We just tried to go out for the truth without being concerned whether it
was positive or negative."
The documentary provides an intriguing further look at Do The Right Thing
and leaves one wishing the director, St. Clair Bourne, had not remained so
objective in filming its making. Although Bourne's work lacks a strong opinion,
the film adds an extra dimension from which to discuss Lee's 1989 release.
Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop, on the other hand, leaves us grateful it is
only an hour long. It is no match for Spike Lee's later work. This is not to
say it should be entirely dismissed, for it does allow some insight into his
origins as a director.
The story is of a barbershop which doubles as a headquarters for playing the
"numbers," an illegal lottery. Centering around the life of a barber,
his wife--a social service worker, and a boy he takes on to help him in the
shop, the film involves dealings with gangsters involved in the numbers game
and a failed attempt to steal money from them and flee to Georgia.
Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop never becomes very gripping, perhaps because
the dialogue and acting is excessively forced. The editing at times is also
unnaturally jarring, for no apparent reason. However, there are moments of pure
Spike Lee: when the barber awakens to a pair of gangsters looming over him in
an unnerving point of view or when a young boy is taught by his older friend how
to swear with the correct hand gestures.
The pair of films provide an informative look at Spike Lee's work, especially
the documentary, which serves as a well-made epigraph to an exceptional film.
SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT
Lee's first
feature focuses around the attempts of Nola Darling (Johns), aware but not
ashamed of her reputation as a good-time girl, to sort out the three steady men
in her life with a view (maybe) to marriage: the sincere and caring Jamie
(Hicks), the self-obsessed model Greer (Terrell), and the outrageous bicycle
messenger Mars (Lee). Each lover, convinced that he is the solution to Nola's
problem, makes his prospective pitch (to the girl and audience alike) in a
series of painfully funny character vignettes. The action centres on Nola's
spacious Brooklyn studio, where the men take it in turns to assassinate each
other's characters, before gathering round Nola's Thanksgiving table to do it
face-to-face. Structurally, it could be compared to Kurosawa's Rashomon
for its subjective cross-examination of Nola's loves; but this delightful
low-budget comedy, with its all black cast and black humour, is 100 per cent
Lee.
Spike Lee takes the minimalist blackout style of fellow NYU film school grad Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and jazzes it into the funniest comedy of summer '86. Nola Darling (Tracy Camila Johns), an earthily charismatic young woman, refuses to be dominated by any man. After a series of "dogs" (hilariously lampooned in a montage of fatuous opening lines), Nola selects three paramours: Greer, Mars (Lee), and Jamie--a narcissist, a space shot, and a grim believer in true love. Her independence and their clashing styles combine in comic situations that build into giddy fugues; in one example, a plaintive soliloquy by Jamie morphs into an argument with Mars about basketball and the ugliness of Larry Bird. Made for less than $30,000, Lee's first feature posed him as a rival to Woody Allen, nearly equaling him in psychological authenticity, perhaps bettering him in virtuosity and sheer creative glee. R, 84 min.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
In the first three
minutes of She's Gotta Have It, writer-director-star Spike Lee offers up
a Zora Neale Hurston quote, a plaintive jazz score by his father Bill, artful
photos of New York street life by his brother David, and sumptuous
black-and-white footage of bridges and brownstones, shot by cinematographer
Ernest Dickerson. In 1986, few American independent films looked and sounded as
distinctive as She's Gotta Have It, and Lee upped the ante further by
seeming to promote a theretofore-unrecognized new Harlem Renaissance. From the
jump, She's Gotta Have It announced that it wasn't going to define black
life in terms of crime and poverty, just as it wasn't going to bind independent
filmmaking to moribund realism.
Nevertheless, a
lot about She's Gotta Have It was iffy then and is iffy now, starting
with the premise. Tracy Camilla Johns plays a promiscuous young commercial
artist juggling three boyfriends: genteel professional Tommy Redmond Hicks,
preening model John Canada Terrell, and Lee, a livewire bike messenger. (Johns
also has a predatory lesbian friend… best forgotten.) The movie tries to
compensate for its lack of story by promising a frank look at female sexuality,
but the title tells the tale: When it comes to its central idea, She's Gotta
Have It is more leering than revelatory.
Luckily, Lee has
more on his mind than just making some nebulous points about gender relations. She's
Gotta Have It is a calling-card film in the best sense of the term, in that
it doesn't just show what Lee can do, but what anyone can do. In spite of his
small budget, Lee shoots a musical number in vivid color, and works in a poetry
reading, a comic montage of lame male pickup lines, and even a sex scene that
looks like something out of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. The movie aches
with possibility, and the real shame isn't that the film's plot isn't as good
as its style, but that independent filmmakers—and black filmmakers in
particular—have largely failed to follow Lee's lead.
blackfilm.com dvd review Kam Williams
After 22 years, Spike Lee’s feature film debut still more than
holds up for a bare bones production made on a shoestring budget in a dozen
days. Shot on locations scattered around the Brooklyn native’s neighborhood,
this inner city romantic comedy chronicles the amorous misadventures of Nola
Darling (Tracy Camila Johns), a sex-starved sister who, well, who has just
gotta have it.
So, over the course of the romantic romp we find Nola juggling three different
dudes at once: jealous, marriage-minded Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks),
vain fashion model Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell) and lowly bike messenger
Mars Blackman (Spike Lee). However, the unapologetic feminist steadfastly
refuses to commit to any of her beaus who bicker amongst each other while also
fending off the overtures of a solicitous lesbian, Opal Gilstrap (Raye Dowell).
Considered somewhat controversial at the time of its release due to a sexist
double standard which deemed its heroine’s sexual habits slutty, She's Gotta
Have It worked, in part, precisely because of the novelty of her defiance. But
the movie’s most memorable moments belonged to Spike himself in a
scene-stealing performance which he would soon parlay into a big payday as a
pitchman for Nike Air Jordans in a string of TV commercials.
The film is also noteworthy because it launched not only Lee’s historic career
but that of numerous other African-American thespians like S. Epatha Merkerson
and actors-turned-directors Eric Dickerson (Juice) and Reggie Hudlin (House
Party). Finally, it features some of what would become Spike’s trademark
cinematic stylings, such as his having folks address the camera directly.
New York Negro neurosis as source material for mirth, amusement and
introspection, like a Woody Allen classic, only in blackface.
Slant Magazine
[Eric Henderson]
Spike Lee's first feature-length film was one of the
lynchpins of the burgeoning American indie movement of the 1980s, but don't
hold that against it. Unlike the seemingly endless torrent of films tailor-made
to cater to specialty divisions, Lee's early work spoke on behalf of the black
experience without just speaking to blacks alone. (Or to the filmmaker alone.
Contrast this with She Hate Me, if you dare.) Stylistically,
Lee's work was as cheekily dialectical from the get go as would later be
celebrated in his Bed-Stuy/Brecht passion play Do the Right Thing. As in
that particular masterpiece, She's Gotta Have It's characters talk into
the camera, but they do so in service of a Rashomon-tinged postmortem on
how an artistic young woman couldn't make polyamory work in her favor. Nola
Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns, in sort of an unlovable, self-absorbed
performance) is the independent woman in question, and the entire movie is a
multi-P.O.V. flashback to when she spent Thanksgiving time-sharing her vagina
between Jaime (Redmond Hicks), a sweet-natured but oppressively
traditional-minded monogamist, Greer (John Canada Terrell), a hard-bodied,
soft-headed male model on the cusp of taking his bikini briefs onto the cover
of GQ, and Mars (the director himself), a runty bicyclist deliveryman
who hasn't delivered a package in two years but knows how to make Nola laugh.
Nola acts as though none of the three—to say nothing of her slithering,
predatory lesbian friend—are good enough for her exclusivity, but Lee the
director certainly stacks the decks in favor of Jaime (at least until a rude
character development in the third act puts his gallant image in doubt). The
answer seems so clear to everyone but Nola, and just as her suitors' insistence
that she make a choice capitulates to her strident independence, the film's
raucous free form scene sketches and improvisations (and one stylized full-color
interlude amid the surrounding black-and-white cinematography) put conventional
narrative execution secondary to the characters' shared sensation. Even if
Nola's urban enclave ends up too close for comfort, Lee's first film statement
conveys the communal experience that would elevate even some of his sketchier
efforts like Get On the Bus and 25th Hour.
DVD Talk (David Walker) dvd review [4/5]
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review
PopMatters (Stuart Henderson) review
DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson
DVD Verdict (Gordon Sullivan) dvd review
Philosophical Films (Dr. Jorn K. Bramann) essay examining the concept of freedom, as explored in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant
The New York Times (D. J. R. Bruckner) review
SCHOOL DAZE B 88
Only Spike Lee makes movies like this, which targets its own black audience through the provocative and at times reprehensible behavior of its black leads. This is a unique style of satire, as almost every character in the film is bogus. The problem, obviously, is that it’s a highly entertaining film that embellishes what not to do, as opposed to offering any solutions to rectify matters. The film targets black stereotypes, and goes to meticulous ends to shine the light on the need for status and social acceptability, as seen through black college fraternities and sororities, where people are willing to degrade themselves in any number of ways in order to gain social acceptance. Understand, this was written even before BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991), so it predates almost any films at all on the subject of modern black consciousness. What I found enjoyable is the way Lee plays with the various film styles, reverting to old Hollywood song and dance musical numbers with knock out costumes and set designs, but the songs themselves were relatively lame, to the sports genre where the coach (Ossie Davis) gives a sermonizing pep talk right out of the Blaxploitation era, to a town confrontation genre right out of BILLY JACK (1971), where the local boys, led by Samuel L. Jackson, take on the college wannabe’s in what was really one of the better written scenes in the film. But the problem here is that for every good idea, there’s no finishing touch. Instead entire sequences are hung out to dry with no resolution, but they’re no less provocative.
Lee is still developing his voice here, and while the
subject matter is ambitious as hell, his execution leaves something to be
desired, as in the end, everything that has come before is simply dropped. It’s an extremely unfortunate end to what has
been a rollicking ride, exposing the various points of view of both educated
and working class blacks, pitting them all against one another in a highly
confrontational style, but when nothing is resolved, it leaves the audience
feeling cheated. That’s unfortunate, as
otherwise this is a unique way of exploring social accountability, where Lee
himself plays one of the characters that regrettably chooses the wrong
path. But that is ultimately the message
of the film, that blacks are in a daze about where they need to be, posturing
one view or another with a sanctimonious fervor, all of which leads
nowhere. There’s a brilliant opening
montage of black leaders, the icons and spokespersons of their generations,
which is followed by a film that exposes the current generation as a bunch of
players who are amateurishly out of their league when it comes to having any
vision or lasting impact on others.
Instead they’re a neverending sea of fools barely able to tread water,
as they’re filled with lame, meaningless rhetoric that appeals to no one
else. This is as narrow-minded a
portrayal of blacks in
Swiftian satires on popular taste can
backfire badly, and Spike Lee's
attempt at black consciousness-raising through the armature of Animal House
movies almost dies of the contusion it is trying to lance. One glance at Julian
(Esposito) leading the Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity, who crawl along barking in
unison in gladiatorial togas, is enough to topple satire into farce. Half-Pint
(Lee) finally passes his initiation test and loses his virginity in the frat
Bone Room. The football coach (Davis) delivers a locker-room pep talk straight
out of Sanctified Church, and the Dean is in bed with the college's white
benefactress. The musical numbers are uniformly uninventive. Here and there the
sociology is clear, but much of the film may seem incomprehensible to English
audiences. On the evidence of She's Gotta Have It, Lee has a small,
intimate talent; here he goes for the big podium and blows it.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: ceebeegee from New York, NY
School Daze is billed as a musical
comedy but is better described as a comedy-drama with musical numbers as
commentary--the only non-diegetic number is "Good and Bad Hair," Lee's
all-girl fantasy homage to West Side Story that addresses colorism between the
"paper bag-light" sorority Gamma Rays and the darker activist girls.
Ebert wrote that this was the first movie he'd seen in a while where the black
characters relate to each other instead of a hypothetical white audience--it is
this that gives the movie its engrossing authenticity. (If it matters, I'm
white.)
As funny as the movie can be, it's also incredibly hard-hitting--there's a
sequence in the last 20 minutes where Julian, "Big Brother
Al-migh-tee," insists his girlfriend "prove" her love, that's
almost unwatchable and yet brutally honest. Lee has been called sexist for his
underwritten female characters--there may be some truth to that but School Daze
is far more critical of the men than the women. Rachel, Dap's girlfriend, is
perhaps the most levelheaded, likable character in the movie, and is strong and
supportive of Dap while still maintaining her independence. Even the Gamma
Rays, who come off as shallow and colorist in the beginning, are sympathetic as
they stand up for and try to aid the pledges during hazing. The characters who
come off the worst are the GPG brothers who are, almost to a man, brutish,
sadistic and crude. Julian in particular is unredeemable--clever, manipulative
and almost sociopathic in his treatment of Jane. Lee supposedly based the movie
on his observations at Morehouse and the movie stands as a scathing indictment
against the black fraternity system and its abuse of the women's auxiliaries (aka
"Little Sisters").
The movie has structural weaknesses (the ending is problematic and seems to
come out of nowhere although it fits thematically) but its biggest problem is
Lee's flat performance as Half-Pint (and, frankly, he looks a little too old for
it). I love Lee's movies but his early tendency to cast himself in major roles
was a real weakness--he's just not a good enough actor and his performance
always jerks me out of the story. The rest of the cast is fantastic, though,
especially Tisha Campbell as Jane and Giancarlo Esposito as Julian. Notice must
also be given to Bill Lee's wonderful score. Ultimately it's a movie whose
heart and imagination overcome its flaws.
Slant
Magazine review
Eric Henderson
Widely criticized as one of the more egregious
examples of Spike Lee's spin-painting approach to telling stories, School
Daze is, if nothing else, a compelling time capsule of racial politics in
the late '80s, ethnographically sealed-off in a hothouse micro-environment (an
all-black college campus) that's as constrictive as Lee's varying plot threads
and stylistic whims are profuse. At the heart of the film's tension are the
simmering social divisions between the school's "Wannabes" and
"Jigaboos," or, in other words, the light-skinned,
integration-aspiring, economically well-off students versus the dark-skinned,
militant, socially and politically conscious students. (I'll give you one guess
as to which side of the division Lee seems to be endorsing in the film's
Brechtian, extremely divisive finale.)
Laurence Fishburne plays Dap, the fatigue-wearing, burgeoning campus radical
who stages demonstrations to protest the fact that Mission College (more or
less a stand-in for Lee's own alma mater Morehouse University) has not made it
a policy to divest from Apartheid-stricken South Africa (as many
whiter-than-white Ivy League universities had already done). On the opposing
side of the spectrum is Julian (Giancarlo Esposito), the "Big Brother
Almigh-tee" of the Gamma Phi Gamma frat chapter, who exemplify the
sort of navel-gazing, hermetic self-involvement that is exactly what Dap is
standing up against. (The same complacency that Spike Lee as a director means
to denounce as well, though it must be admitted that the bulk of his film is
devoted to youthful nostalgia in full blush, and not the political commitment
that would characterize his next batch of films, especially Jungle Fever
and Malcolm X.) On the distaff side of the
social spectrum are the meowing Gamma Rays, with their chemically straightened
hair and blue contact lenses, and the sorority-rejecting, proudly Nubian
women—one of whom, Dap's girlfriend Rachel, is afraid to admit she wants to
pledge Gamma Ray next semester.
The film's central argument is that black matriculation is undercut by internal
divisions—and in some cases external, as exemplified by the scene at a KFC
where a gang of jobless blacks led by Samuel L. Jackson chastise Dap and his
sense of "consciousness" by reminding him that, college or not, he's
still "always going to be a nigger" as far as white society is
concerned. (It's worth comparing Lee's take on higher education with Bill Cosby's,
especially considering that the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World—which
portrayed black college as the epitome of middle-class, apolitical
existence—featured School Daze cast members Jasmine Guy, Kadeem
Hardison, and Darryl M. Bell.) But breaking that momentum and scattering its
dialectic power to the wind is a whole batch of Lee's trademark
musical-not-musical sequences.
To clarify, Lee has always been an extraordinarily musical-influenced
filmmaker, and many of his most famous set pieces have been as much edited and
propelled by their musical thrust as by their narrative or thematic impact. Big
Daddy Love's roll call in Do the Right Thing, Flipper's visit to the
crack house in Jungle Fever, and even the cadences of Monty's litany
against every social subsection at the center of 25th Hour all ebb and flow like verse and
chorus of a showstopping musical centerpiece. School Daze one-ups them
all with a cornucopia of different musical montages (Motown girl group, go-go
proto-hip-hop, frathouse step shows), including one ("Straight and
Nappy") that sends up the Broadway-influenced tenet of having musical
numbers act as an extension of the characters' subconscious thoughts. But the
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
The
Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan
DVD MovieGuide
dvd review [Special Edition]
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
"School
DaZE" BY Spike Lee on YouTube (4:18)
DO THE RIGHT THING A 97
Motivated by a
series of high-profile police cases involving the senseless deaths of black
suspects, Spike Lee honed in on various stories that were repeatedly making the
headlines, the first of which was on the night of June 22, 1982, when six white men were charged in the fatal
beating of Willie Turks, a black subway car maintenance worker
who, along with two other black transit workers, were literally pulled out of a
car and beaten by a white mob that had grown to 15 to 20 youths in the
Gravesend section of Brooklyn, where at the sentencing hearing Judge Sybil Hart
Kooper said, “There was a lynch mob on Avenue X that night. The only thing missing was a rope and a
tree.” A succession of other incidents
followed, such as the strangulation death of graffiti artist Michael Stewart while in police custody in
lower Manhattan in September of 1983, the fatal 1984 Bronx shooting of elderly
and mentally unstable Eleanor Bumpurs by the New York Police Department
while enforcing a court-ordered eviction, shot twice by a 12-gauge shotgun, or
the 1986 mobbing of three black men in the largely Italian community of Howard
Beach, Queens, which resulted in the death of Michael Griffith when he was struck by a car after
he was chased onto a highway attempting to evade a mob of white
teenagers who had already beaten him and his friends. All of these incidents occurred during the administration
of Mayor Ed Koch, fueling racial tensions in the city. It was this climate that led Lee to write his
own script, where due to the volatile subject matter in which an Italian-owned
pizzeria is burned to the ground in retribution for the unjustified killing of
a black man, he was forced to scale back his budget from $10 million dollars to
$6.5 million, but this gave him control of the final cut.
A powerful, incendiary work that draws the lines of demarcation in misunderstood race relations, that beautifully follows the lives of ordinary people on a congested Brooklyn Bedford-Stuyvesant city block one hot summer day in New York City. Lee, himself, plays an everyman, a guy defined by his lack of heroics or even ambition, but he’s completely likeable in this memorable performance as Mookie the pizza deliveryman. He works at Sal’s Pizzeria under the domineering thumb of paternalistic Italian owner Sal, Danny Aiello and his two grown sons, one overtly racist, the older John Turturro, and his more impressionable younger sibling Richard Edson. What becomes immediately noticeable is that the owners are all white while the customers are all black. Turturro makes despicable remarks about the clientele all day long, a hothead who freely throws out the “N” word, without a clue as to the consequences. Sal acts as an intermediary peacemaker, usually throwing out a few bucks to make the problems created by his son go away, but he also carries a baseball bat behind the counter threatening anyone who doesn’t follow his rules. Mookie, meanwhile, has a tendency to prolong his delivery time, getting lost interacting with nearly everyone he meets, everyone that is except his girl, Rosie Perez, and his newborn son Hector that she complains he never sees. Perez opens the film in a wonderful montage of nonstop Flygirl dance moves over the opening credits to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” that generates a fiery spirit of individualism and fierce determination, Do The Right Thing Intro - YouTube (3:40).
Into this picture walks three men on the edge, Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito), a black
hothead who espouses black nationalism to a chorus of one, shown in fine form
stirring up trouble here, DO THE RIGHT THING - YouTube
(2:23), Smiley (Roger Guenveur
Smith), a mentally challenged guy who carries around a picture of Martin Luther
King and Malcolm X, but stutters to the point of incomprehensibility, so is
shunned by everyone, and Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), the proud owner of the
largest and loudest boom box in the territory, that constantly plays the
thundering Public Enemy hip hop anthem “Fight the Power.” These three young guns form an odd collective
of Greek chorus outsiders who are defined by the fact no one listens to them,
balanced by an equally ostracized older set of three characters who sit and
sarcastically comment on the world around them.
Add to this mix the wonderful casting of Ossie Davis, a stumbling drunk
known as Da Mayor who occasionally lapses into moments of pure eloquence, and
his harshest critic, Rubie Dee, known as Mother-Sister, who sits in a
windowsill and oversees all. What
quickly becomes evident are the racial undercurrents that run beneath
this neighborhood community, simmering
just under the surface, waiting for an opportune moment to ignite, where the
temperature rising eventually reaches a boil.
Perhaps the most important voice of the entire collective belongs to Samuel
L. Jackson as Mister Señor Love Daddy, the local deejay whose voice of black
dignity is heard throughout the day, a reminder of all things black and
beautiful, with themes of love connecting everything he plays.
In an inexplicable moment when a
black kid gets senselessly shot by the white police, a spark of indignation
sets off a free for all race riot in the middle of the night that leaves
everybody in the middle of a melee.
What’s interesting is no one person is to blame, there are no heroes, no
villains, though it gets confusing in the moment when all hell breaks loose and
rage sets the neighborhood against Sal, who may be perceived as the villain and
the victim. All have something to do
with the outcome, yet little is gained from this outburst, as it’s a fury seemingly
without any real political context. The
film is notable for a theatrical staginess that includes a dream-like reverie
of hatred pitting one race against another Do The Right Thing (Race Rant
Scene) - YouTube (3:33), a race
rant that reoccurs again in 25th HOUR (2002), also for the
orchestral music written by the director’s father, Bill Lee, that occasionally
sounds like the Aaron Copland Americana of OUR TOWN (1940), for accurately
reflecting a natural sense of dialogue that isn’t heard in other films, that
boldly dissects a small turf of a New York City neighborhood, filled with
humor, charm, wit, and and a sly intelligence, as it refuses to be pigeonholed
into something it isn’t, as it certainly doesn’t advocate violence, nor does it
pinpoint blame. What it does do is
stimulate a multitude of points of view, taking the issues of race and police
brutality head on, combining the ideas of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X instead
of picking one over the other, where one preaches non-violence, the other that
violence is needed in self defense, leaving the viewers to sort it all out
after the fact. When this film won no
awards at Cannes, the Festival President that year, Wim Wenders, explained his
view that the character of Mookie did not act heroically, believing he did NOT
do the right thing, so the film did not deserve to be recognized. As incredible as that sounds, this diversion
of opinion is the beauty of the film.
Do
the Right Thing Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader
With the possible
exception of his cable miniseries When the Levees Broke, this 1989
feature is still Spike Lee's best work, chronicling a very hot day on a single
block of
here Odienator
on memorable film critic reviews from The House Next Door (excerpt)
3. Joe Klein's review of 1989's Do The Right Thing infuriated me like Bosley Crowther at a screening of Pulp Fiction. Klein called Spike Lee's film "reckless" and indicated that only White people would be able to have a civil, detailed discussion on the film's message. "Black teenagers won't find [the film's message] so hard," Klein wrote, "white people are your enemy." In 1989, I was one of those people Klein painted with his monolithic brush, a Black 19-year old computer science major entering his final year at college. Despite dreams of being a critic, I had become a computer science major because there were no Black film critics (or so I thought), and I didn't think I'd be able to get a job. Klein's erroneous predictions of race riots at every screening made me wish I had done the right thing and gotten that degree in journalism or film, if only so I could publicly let him know what an asshole I thought he was. As a result, I started writing reviews for anyone who would read them. I owe 1,542 movie reviews to Joe Klein's comments.
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Released during one of
New York's most hotly contested mayoral elections, as well as one of the
hottest summers on record, 1989's Do The Right Thing prompted a
controversy that threatened to overshadow its artistic worth. The mindless,
reactionary criticism the film generated—largely centered on the idea that
Lee's smart, evenhanded, honest drama would provoke racial violence—seems to
have had a huge effect on the filmmaker, whose subsequent work has often been
strident and simplistic. But neither those initial criticisms nor the muddled
politics of many of Lee's later films lessen the impact or importance of his
brilliantly constructed breakthrough. Following the
day-in-the-life-of-a-community paradigm popularized by American Graffiti
and Car Wash, Do The Right Thing focuses on one exceedingly hot
day in the life of Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood, a primarily black
community enduring an uncomfortable codependence with its primarily non-black
shop owners. Danny Aiello and Spike Lee lead a large, excellent cast as an
Italian-American pizza-store owner and his delivery boy, respectively. Both
characters uneasily navigate between idealism and pragmatism, between the white
world behind the counter of the pizza shop and the black world that supports
it, however bitterly. At the time of its release, Do The Right Thing was
attacked for allegedly painting a hopelessly bleak view of American race
relations. But the film's supposed nihilism isn't as striking as its warm,
empathetic depiction of a community wracked with poverty, aimlessness, and
misdirected anger, yet still bursting with vitality and solidarity. Rather than
peddling false uplift, the trademark of Hollywood dramas about racism, Lee's
film depicts a universe where the social strictures designed to maintain order
are forever endangered by an underclass no longer willing to work within a
system that has failed them. As America enters a second Bush administration,
Lee's incendiary masterpiece remains as provocative and timely as ever.
Criterion's terrific double-disc DVD helps place the film in a broader social
context through numerous extras, chief among them extensive behind-the-scenes
footage and an audio commentary featuring Lee, cinematographer Ernest
Dickerson, Joie Lee, and production designer Wynn Thomas. (Their appearances on
the track are announced, for little discernable reason, by the unmistakable
Chuck D.) The DVD also includes an hour-long making-of documentary and an
enormously revealing press conference from the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, featuring
a testy Lee and his largely silent cast facing the international press,
answering questions that run the gamut from fawning to insulting to borderline
incomprehensible.
“Do the Right Thing,” Spike Lee's ambitious, funny, infuriating
and mostly brilliant film about a hot hot day in a Bedford-Stuyvesant
neighborhood, begins with a sexy, militant funk and grind that immediately
plugs you into the movie's headset. The message is right there, flat out, in
Public Enemy's title song: "You got to fight the power, fight the power,
fight the powers that be." And it reverberates through the movie -- at
times quite literally -- rocking the
It rocks the theater audience, too, but this is a complex, multilayered movie, and the in-your-face attitude supplies only the movie's powerful, thumping bass line. The story as a whole -- the melody -- is sweeter, mellower, and Lee orchestrates the mixture of elements masterfully, first letting one dominate, then the other.
Lee comes from a musical family -- his father, Bill Lee, wrote the film's score -- and he's built the film on a musical model. It's his "Rainbow Coalition" Symphony. Counterpoint is the dominating principle, and in laying out this complicated narrative, Lee is attempting to explore the polarities of the inner city. He does this by setting up a system of opposites -- black and white, love and hate, conciliation and violence, man and woman -- then sets them against each other.
The catalyst for the action is the heat, which rises off the asphalt in quivering waves. With temperatures nearing 100, the chill in even the street's coolest customer is under siege. On a normal day, tempers might be held in check, the harsh word left unsaid, but today, the hottest day of the year, it's meltdown time and all the emotional hydrants are opened wide.
Lee and his cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, turn this anger into a palpable force. But the filmmaker also uses it as a source of comedy, especially early on, when the characters are being introduced. The real glory of the movie is the feel Lee has for the picked details of life on the streets. It's at its best when it's listening in on the three older men in their lawn chairs on the corner or the back-and-forth front-stoop jiving of the younger kids. These exchanges, which cover everything from bad breath to fatherless children, have a right-from-life vibrancy -- they hum with energy.
The film's home base is Sal's Pizzeria, a corner joint operated by Sal (Danny Aiello) and his two sons, Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson), since the time when the neighborhood was mostly Italian. Unlike most of the area's white businessmen, Sal remained in the neighborhood as its ethnic balance shifted, and not just out of stubbornness or a lack of alternatives. He stayed out of pride and a love for the neighborhood, and over the years he has built a tradition of good relations with his black customers.
Vito, on the other hand, despises what his father has created. Filled with hatred for the business, his brother, the blacks and the neighborhood, he sets out to make misery for everyone, especially Sal's delivery man, Mookie (Spike Lee).
Lee puts a lot of stories, and a lot of characters, in motion here, and they ricochet off one another like billiard balls. There's Mookie's sister Jade (Lee's real sister, Joie Lee), who's tired of having his butt in her apartment; Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), a comradely drunk; Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), who stutters something not quite comprehensible about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; and Mookie's girlfriend, Tina (Rosie Perez), who wants him to take responsibility for their baby boy. Linking them all together is Mister Senor Love Daddy (Sam Jackson), the deejay for WE-LOVE radio, who provides commentary and musical accompaniment to the events of the day from the window of his broadcast booth.
Lee is careful not to take the easy way out in presenting his characters -- mostly they're complicated, both black and white, sometimes easy to like, sometimes not -- and, with the exception of Ruby Dee in the pointless role of Mother Sister, he gets loose, jazzy work out of his ensemble. Extra special attention is given to the relationship between Mookie and his white employer, who cuts him slack when he takes his time on deliveries. With Vito -- and the white cops, whom the blacks in the neighborhood see as a kind of hostile, occupying army -- he is less successful.
But Lee doesn't single out Vito's racist anger. In a surrealistically close-to-the-bone sequence in which the characters spew their ugliest ethnic slurs, he shows how the same barely suppressed rage festers inside everyone. Lee's point in including this orgy of racist spleen-venting is to show how easy it would be to spark a full conflagration, and it's out of this observation that the rest of the movie springs.
The match is provided a raggedy-headed provocateur in hospital-white Air Jordans named Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito), who demands that Sal give some picture space on his all-Italian wall of fame to blacks. As might be expected, Sal prefers Sinatra to Aretha and invites Buggin Out to make his exit, baseball bat in hand. In return, Buggin attempts to organize a boycott of Sal's, mostly without sympathy, until he approaches Radio Raheem, a hulking intimidator with a super-jumbo boom box. Raheen had loped into Sal's earlier that day, "Fight the Power" jacked full up, only to have his power shut down. A movement of two, they announce their boycott at closing time, where, again, the boom box becomes the issue and the rage overflows into savage violence.
The movie runs on emotion, a highly questionable, highly flammable power source. Lee isn't a politician, and he doesn't censor himself or make sure that he has all his ideas worked out in his head first. He just tosses them out. As a result, the film is a moral workout. At once a plea for tolerance and a rationale for violent opposition, the film embraces both its patron saints, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, then invites us to hassle out the contradictions.
Despite the moral wobbliness, especially at the end, the film is not, as some of the advance press has suggested, an irresponsible, hysterical rant. Lee does, at times, paint with a very broad brush. Also, his eagerness to be balanced causes him to be overdeliberate in drawing his characters, and in places the actors can't rise above the script's "Playhouse 90"-style social consciousness. But "Do the Right Thing" is a movie made by filmmaker working in sync with his times -- an exciting, disturbing, provocative film.
Do the Right Thing Criterion essay by Roger Ebert, October 12, 2001, also seen here: Criterion Collection FIlm Essay [Roger Ebert]
Do the Right Thing (1989) - The Criterion Collection
Do
The Right Thing Spike Lee film analysis • Senses of Cinema Jennie Lightweis-Goff, April 2, 2015
BFI | Sight & Sound | Fear Of A Black Cinema Amy Taubin from Sight and Sound, August 2002
JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Spike Lee Sees It All June 30, 1989
Faber and Faber Library The Inside Story of Do the Right Thing, excerpt from the book, Spike Lee: That's My Story And I'm Sticking To It, by Kaleem Aftab, from Focus features, June 27, 2008
Spike Lee's “Do the Right Thing”: An Exploration – Kirsty McGowan D. Newman from The University of Calgary Film Society, May 4, 2012
Spike Lee wrote his second film, Do the Right Thing, over the ... Matt Granger Academic Essay (pdf)
When Spike Lee Became Scary - The Atlantic Jason Bailey, August 22, 2012
On
Joie Lee in Do the Right Thing (and More) - Film Comment Cassie da Costa, February 19, 2016
Do the Right Thing - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference Robert C. Sickels
Do the Right Thing - Turner Classic Movies Richard Harland Smith
Do the Right Thing | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Eric Henderson
eFilmCritic Reviews Slyder
Jeeem's Cinepad [Jim Emerson] also seen here: Do the Right Thing
Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
Do The Right Thing Review | We've Got To Fight The Powers That Be TK from Pajiba
Do The Right Thing | DVD Video Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Gary Couzens from The Digital Fix
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Do the Right Thing (1989) - CultureVulture.net Paul de Angelis
PopMatters Jonathan Beebe
Spike Lee: Do the Right Thing Eric Henderson from Slant magazine
Film Notes -Do the Right Thing - University at Albany Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University
Do the Right Thing - Movie Lists - AMC Bill Gibron
Edward Copeland on Film October 25, 2007
Edward Copeland on Film 2nd look, October 26, 2007
Edward Copeland (20th anniv.) [Jonathan Pacheco] June 30, 2009
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
Movie analysis: Spike Lees point in Do The Right Thing (1989) - by ... Ed Z. Ved, November 10, 2010
FilmHead.com (Matt Heffernan) review [4/4]
Long Che Chan Andrew Chan
Welcome to Emanuel Levy » Do the Right Thing
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky, Criterion Collection, 2-disc
digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Dan Heaton, Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD Journal Alexandra DuPont, Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review Criterion Collection, 2-disc
Do the Right Thing - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the ... Gil Jawetz, Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD Review - Do the Right Thing (Criterion) - The Digital Bits Todd Doogan, Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD REVIEW: Do The Right Thing (Criterion Collection) Current Film, Criterion Collection, 2-disc
About.com Home Video/DVD Review Ivana Redwine, Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVDTalk DVD Review (20th Anniversary Edition) [Tyler Foster[ 2-disc
DVD Verdict- 20th Anniversary Edition [Victor Valdivia] 2-disc
DVD Talk Jason Bailey, Blu-Ray, also seen here: Jason Bailey Fourth Row Center
HighDefDiscNews [Justin Sluss] Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict (Blu-Ray) [Adam Arseneau]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
FilmHead.com Matt Heffernan
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Cox]
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [5/5]
yave begnet: urban riots - a thing of the past? June 19, 2008
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Do the Right Thing an overview of the film and its legacy from Absolute Astronomy
Do the Right Thing 1989: Movie and film review from Answers.com Another overview
• View topic - 97 Do the Right Thing - CriterionForum.org June 19, 2009
Script-O-Rama.com The screenplay
Do the Right Thing (1989) - The 25 Most Important Films on Race - TIME
Next: Q&A With Spike Lee on Making 'Do the Right Thing' Logan Hill from New York magazine, April 7, 2008
Spike Lee: 'Anyone who thinks we move in a post-racial society is someone who's been smoking crack' Video interview with Jason Solomons from The Guardian, October 6, 2009 (10:50)
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
The view | 20 years on, you can still Do the Right Thing Danny Leigh from The Guardian, July 10, 2009
Danny Leigh | The view: In praise of inconsistent directors Danny Leigh from The Guardian, September 25, 2009
The film that changed my life Ryan Fleck from The Guardian, April 18, 2010
rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] in 1989
rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert] in 2001
New York Times [Vincent Canby]
'Do the Right Thing': Issues and Images - New York Times excerpts from the conversation, from The New York Times, July 9, 1989
A group discussion about the film where the participants were Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell, New York City's Commissioner of Cultural Affairs; Henry Louis Gates Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois professor of education and sociology at Cornell University; Nathan Glazer, professor of education and sociology at Harvard University; Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, associate professor of psychiatry and associate dean for student affairs, Harvard Medical School; Burton B. Roberts, administrative judge of the State Supreme Court in the Bronx; Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplays for ''Taxi Driver'' and ''The Last Temptation of Christ'' and directed ''Patty Hearst''; Dr. Betty Shabazz, an administrator at the Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York and the widow of Malcolm X, and editors of the Arts and Leisure section
Youth Gets 5 to 15 Years For Howard Beach Attack - New York Times February 12, 1988
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Do the Right Thing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Why
Did the North Charleston Cop Handcuff Walter Scott Leon Neyfakh from Slate, April 8, 2015
NYPD Investigates Alleged Howard Beach Hate Crime Gotham City Insider
Howard Beach Incident (1986) | The Black Past: Remembered and ...
Do The Right Thing (20 D Energizers) on YouTube (1:16)
Clip - Do the Right Thing. (1:23)
DO THE RIGHT THING (2:23)
DO THE RIGHT THING (2:26)
Do The Right Thing (Race Rant
Scene) (3:33)
Do the Right Thing / Sesame Street (4:29)
MO’ BETTER BLUES
USA (129 mi) 1990
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
It's clear from the opening that the
way Lee sees jazz is as Art, sanitised and consequently a mite gutless. Indeed,
as obsessive trumpeter Bleek (Washington) advances on his inevitable
comeuppance - you know he's gotta get it - Lee's earnest parable
proceeds to hit whole clusters of bad notes. First, the music is wrong: ghosted
by Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard et al, Bleek's gigs range through an
anachronistic array of styles, while Lee's underlining of mood with a handful
of classics (Coltrane, Ornette, Miles) comes over as a showy hip parade of his
own cultural credibility. But more damagingly, plot and characterisation are
trite, perhaps even reactionary. If Bleek's errant attitude to his two lovers (Joie Lee, Cynda
Williams) is symptomatic of an arrogant devotion to his art, the women
rarely rise above schematic stereotypes (the Jewish club-owners fare even
worse). Moreover, Lee's coda advocates submissive motherhood for a neglected
lover and patriarchal domesticity for all concerned. Ideology apart (no drugs
here), a messy, meandering script ensures that, despite stylish camerawork and
sturdy acting, this lengthy indulgence succeeds neither as jazz movie nor as
cautionary tale.
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
Spike Lee falls victim to aestheticism in Mo' Better
Blues. Lee may have hoped to explore the difficulties facing a black
musician and the suffering he inflicts on the women in his life. But what we
see is a bloodless riff on old movies like Young Man With a Horn, in
which Kirk Douglas played the driven, tormented trumpet player torn between two
women. There are also echoes of New York, New York and The Hustler,
and Lee has said he wanted to challenge the images of jazz presented in Bird
and 'Round Midnight. Too many old movies are swimming around in his
head; his characters disappear into a nostalgic vapor.
Some of Lee's stylized compositions are impressive; the smoky jazz clubs are
seductively evoked. But there's little urgency in this film. Spike Lee is an
NYU film school graduate, and he's shown an insular, movie-bred sensibility
before, particularly in School Daze, when he did his own variation on
the hokey old college musicals like Good News. But his earlier movies
also had some of the raw electricity of the streets. Mo' Better Blues,
in thrall to the cliches of the star-is-born musicals of the past, is a
stillborn academic exercise.
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Few will accuse Spike Lee's "Mo' Better Blues" of being a masterpiece. But it's still full of the things that make Spike Lee films, well, Spike Lee films. Full of the fun, full of the spirit.
And full of the people -- the Spike Lee people. Perhaps the best thing about this jazzy love story is the combined presence of everyone, the sense that Lee's cast and crew is alive and well.
There's little in the first two-thirds of "Blues" that isn't highly watchable. Ernest Dickerson, Lee's regular director of photography, reprises his memorably colorful, playfully gymnastic images. A soundtrack featuring John Coltrane, Branford Marsalis and Bill Lee (Spike's father) suffuses the film with heady spirit. And mega-likable Denzel Washington graces his central role with tasty licks.
He's Bleek Gilliam, a dedicated musician who doesn't understand why girlfriends Joie Lee and (newcomer) Cynda Williams want to come between him and his trumpet. Therein lies the central story of "Blues." Yet also therein lies its central shortcoming.
In apparent counterpoint to the movie's bouncy, musical spirit, Spike Lee wants to make a film about relationships: Washington and his women, his rivalry with band saxophonist Wesley Snipes, his obstinate fidelity to his friend, manager and compulsive gambler Giant (played by Spike Lee), his dressing room antics with band members Bill Nunn and Giancarlo Esposito. Yet, though those relationships are ticklish, they're never deeply engaging.
The movie loses momentum in its final third. The script's twists and turns, including alarmingly violent reprisals against two characters, seem narratively inorganic, arranged in the wrong key. Lee also tacks on the kind of unimaginatively scripted, happily-ever-after finale you'd think he'd despise.
The things to savor in "Blues" come in no particular order. Sometimes it's the music or comic retorts -- from Lee, Esposito or the late, amusingly blue-tongued Robin Harris, to whom this film is dedicated. But perhaps the most delicious example is a comic surrealistic scene in which Washington makes love to Joie Lee, only to find her turn into Williams, then back again. He starts calling each one by the wrong name. Now they both scream at him. He looks from one to the other, back to the first one, then the other. Finally, in complete hapless exasperation, he looks directly at us. It'll bring the house down every time.
User comments from imdb Author: JawsOfJosh
from Chicago
After the commercial and critical
success of "Do The Right Thing," in which Lee announced his arrival as
a major player, he choose to follow up his breakthrough with a more personal
film. If you examine history, it seems all iconoclasts choose to do so after
their first big success ("The Conversation," "Close Encounters
Of The Third Kind," "Talk Radio"), and Lee decided to pay homage
to what he's always referred to simply as "the music." Set in
then-present day 1990, "Mo' Better Blues" tells the tale of Denzel
Washington as Bleek Gilliam, a selfish trumpeter who fronts his own jazz quintet
in an upscale Brooklyn club. The strength of the film deals with Bleek juggling
his loyalties. On the love side, Bleek is caught between two women; Clarke is a
sexy bombshell in constant need of Bleek's attention who's too busy centering
in on his music. She's also an aspiring singer hoping Bleek will give her a
chance to shine. Bleek, obviously, does not want to share the spotlight. Indigo
is a thoughtful schoolteacher who is not fragile with Bleek's tremendous ego
but is careful with his somewhat callous heart. At work, Bleek is wrestling
with a hungry band demanding pay raises given the success they're achieving at
the "Beneath The Underdog" club. Clumsily working towards the band's
raise is Giant, Bleek's lifelong friend and incompetent manager, who also has a
considerable gambling problem. Bleek must decide whether to trust Giant or risk
losing his band, while deciding how long he can keep up the game between Indigo
and Clarke.
This, simply, is one of my favorite Lee films. Thank God someone finally made a
jazz film for the late 20th century, jazz had not received a proper modern
makeover since 1961's "Paris Blues." Lee creates a wonderful,
intimate world set off by moody lighting in shades of red, yellow and blue. His
camera and editing - which was spontaneous and lively in "Do The Right
Thing" - is slow and deliberate here, carefully punctuated in all the
right places. This film marked the debut of some of Lee's trademark camera
moves, including the 'gliding sidewalk' dolly and his slow-spin-upward pans.
Like his previous films, Lee is adept and balancing out scenes between comedy
and drama. A lot of the 'band' scenes are engagingly funny, mostly guy talk
with a spin of that "cool daddy jazz vibe" added. Lee is also
skillful at making Bleek the antagonist of the film without rendering him
completely unlikable. The "Love Supreme" montage ending seemed to
stretch the film for longer than some would have liked, but I feel it was
justified in order to illustrate the beauty and necessity of Bleek's
redemption. Lee was also smart to reduce screen time given to the film's true
protagonist, saxophonist Shadow Henderson (rendered with cool, suave
sophistication by Wesley Snipes), in order to keep the audience focused on
Bleek. You will also get a delicious sampling of great jazz in this film if
you're a novice to such. Aside from the concert numbers written and performed
by Branford Marsalis and the dreamy jazz score by Lee's father, Bill, there are
great pieces by John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, among others. A
cool, sexy film.
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum August 2, 1990, also seen here: Disjointed
[MO' BETTER BLUES] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
Spike
Lee: Mo' Better Blues | Oeuvre - Spectrum Culture Stacia Kissick Jones, April
12, 2012
DVD Times Gary Couzens
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna, with photos
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
DVD
Talk (Chuck Arrington) dvd review
[3/5]
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Caryn James) review
JUNGLE FEVER
USA (132 mi) 1991
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
When happily married black architect
Flipper Purify (Snipes) begins an affair with his Italian-American secretary
Angie (Sciorra), all hell breaks loose: his wife (McKee) throws him out, Angie
leaves home after being beaten by her father, and families, friends and
neighbours chip in with horrified reactions... Lee's 'joint' looks good,
features a chorus of garrulous characters (most of them heavily into racial
hatred), makes stirring use of music (by Stevie
Wonder and others), and never allows the forgiving women a fair share of
the deal. But instead of showing how prejudice seeps into the private
intimacies of daily life, the film turns its attention to the other characters,
including Flipper's junkie brother Gator (Jackson), who fuels a subplot evoking
the destructive effects of crack on black society. Sadly, this aspect, which
allows Lee his most unsettling and impressive scene, seems loosely tacked on to
the main thrust of the film.
User comments from imdb Author: msjpacke
from United States
This movie is more about sex than
race. Lee was quoted in the NYT as follows: "I hate this whole Hollywood
process of breaking down a movie to one sentence," he said. "My films
don't deal with one theme. They interweave many different things. You have to
think. I'm not saying interracial relationships are impossible. Flipper and
Angie are not meant to represent every interracial couple in the world. They
are meant to represent two people who got together because of sexual mythology
instead of love. Then they stay together because they're pushed together.
They're outcasts. And since their relationship isn't based on love, when things
get tough, they can't weather the storm." Thus at its core this film is a
feminist critique of the nature of sexual attraction in contemporary America.
These folks are wrong for each other but they both are stereotypically
"attractive." There is "chemistry" between them, but no
shared values that are the bedrock of a serious relationship. The "black
stud"/ "sexy white girl" is just one way this could be
instantiated.
In one sense, this is a serious issue and it is worth exploring. My own
misgivings about this film is that Lee's moral seems to be: values = good, chemistry
= bad, and this strikes me as somewhat simplistic.
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
Spike Lee's Jungle Fever is a panoramic look at the
multi-racial American metropolis. Lee brings off some bravura scenes involving
the subsidiary characters. A rap session among several black women when they
learn the hero has taken up with a white woman is hilarious, and the riffs
among the bigoted white men who congregate at a candy store in Bensonhurst are
equally flavorful. Lee doesn't stereotype all the white characters. The superb
John Turturro demonstrates his versatility in a poignant portrayal of the
heroine's awkward neighborhood suitor, and Annabella Sciorra is equally touching
as the woman dominated by an abusive family and drifting into an interracial
affair that represents a reprieve from her stunted home life.
Yet in depicting this interracial affair, Lee stumbles. We never get any idea
of the feeling between the two lovers, and if Lee's point is that there is no
real feeling, then why make this the central story of the movie? One suspects
that Lee needed the interracial love story as a hook to get the movie made, but
he turns out to have little understanding of the sexual and romantic dynamics.
In addition, the architect played by Wesley Snipes is a cipher; we never
comprehend the profound personal dissatisfactions that might drive him into a
dangerous love affair. Lee's mosaic has some masterful background details but a
gaping hole at the center.
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
Lee uses a love affair between a black architect (Wesley
Snipes) and his Italian temp secretary (Anabella Sciorra) to examine race,
ethnicity, economics, education, culture, proximity, religion, addiction,
essentially anything he can think of that keeps people apart. The basic
forbidden love plot has been around since the dawn of time, but in many ways
this is Lee's most ambitious film. The sheer number of characters he employs in
an attempt to capture the entire heartbeat of the Harlem negro community and
Bensonhurst Italian community is staggering, though it predictably results in
too much caricature with many of the secondary blacks being druggies and
Italians being uneducated hotheaded loafers. Both Snipes & Sciorra have
loving and intelligent partners who are at least their equals, but generally
it's a portrait of ignorance trumping passion and curiosity. That said, John
Turturro decides it's still worth pursuing the black girl he's had a crush on
even after he sees all Sciorra has gone through since dumping him. Samuel L.
Jackson is hilarious as an admitted crack head, going as far as doing a song
and dance where he threatens to rob an elderly person as a way of extorting
money for his next score from younger brother Snipes. The drug subplot is a bit
of a mess, but the theme of escaping the grip of familial control is very well
handled because it's a problem of all the key households. Despite several
strong performances from a cast that also contains Tim Robbins, Anthony Quinn,
Ossie Davis, and Halle Berry (doing the phony showoff stuff that later netted
her a bogus award), Terrence Blanchard considers himself the real star
delivering a score so obnoxious it would not only drown out Radio Raheem's
boombox, but actually makes some of the dialogue indiscernible.
User comments from imdb (Page 3)
Author: Shari (AfricanVenus84@aol.com) from United
States
I love Spike Lee, I really do. He
forces people to take a look at social situations as more than culture and
things people do. He's more along the lines of why do we do what we do? His
films have a distinct black voice, but provides angles from other ethnicities
as well, I love that about him. He's not particularly one-sided about anything.
I've always heard about this movie growing up, but never have I seen it. Well,
BET decided it was time I should and showed it last Friday. I liked the way it
was directed, but something about the film puzzles me. They went through all
that without ever really having a yen for each other? He destroyed his marriage
over a curiosity? I guess that's life, but it still unnerves me and doesn't
flow with the film. Added to that, Flipper is/was staunchly pro-black, but I
guess that's to show that even someone like him could dip to the other side. It
was obviously a social issue of the early 90's and why successful black men
decide it's time to trade up when they've made it. Apparently they think it's
ok if they have enough money and that the world has changed enough that people
will allow it. Personally, nothing has changed in some 40 odd years for a black
men to think America's ok with him dating a white woman. Kobe's case has proved
that and so did the scene where they were playing around and wrestling and
someone called the cops on him cuz they thought he was raping her. Black men
need to understand that the history of romantic race relations is this: White
women were put on a pedestal as the epitome of beauty, desire, and purity.
Black people were always the antithesis of that, but white men could jump back
and forth as they pleased with no detriment to their character. Even in 2004,
that mentality has a hard time going away. I liked that Flipper's father in the
movie expounded upon that. Things haven't changed that much and Spike took that
and ran with it to show it visually. The acting was very good for this film,
because they didn't necessarily have to be, but they were great. The movie was
clear, the music was cleverly applied in the right places. The scene with the
women arguing about what it does to them to see black men with white women was
brilliant. It seems quasi-feminist at the same time. It just has every approach
and I love it. Great movie!
The House Next Door: Odie Henderson June 23, 2016
Artforum: Nick
Pinkerton March 31, 2017
DVD Times Gary Couzens
The Film Palace [Edward L. Terkelsen]
Brooklyn
Magazine: Justin Stewart March 28,
2017
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [3/5]
Austin Chronicle (Kathleen Maher) review [3.5/5]
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
Jungle Fever: Black/ White Relations on YouTube (4:56)
MALCOLM X
USA (202 mi) 1992
Time
Out review
Geoff Andrew
Lee's labour of love is arguably his
most anonymous film to date, with fewer in-your-face stylistic flourishes or
confrontational ideological statements than his earlier works. True, the scenes
of young Malcolm (Washington) and his pal Shorty (Lee) at a Boston dance hall
exhibit a fizzy choreographic flair; true, too, that the opening credits
footage of the Rodney King beating hints at an anger none too shy of courting
controversy. But mostly, while the film glides from Malcolm's early years as a
hustler and petty criminal to his emergence in the Nation of Islam, it plays
surprisingly safe as a solidly crafted trawl through the didactic/hagiographic
conventions of the mainstream biopic. In short, it's a familiar tale of a man up
against prejudice coming to see the light. If the first hour contains most of
the drama, it's the later scenes that constitute the lesson: how to achieve
black pride, power and dignity in the face of white oppression. Were it not for
Washington's charismatic performance and the abiding fire of Malcolm's oratory,
this didacticism might be tedious; but Lee's skill at playing to his strengths
ensures that only the whitewashing of NOI's attitude to women, and odd scenes
such as Malcolm's prison visit by an apparition of Elijah Muhammad, come over
as major flaws.
Exclaim! dvd review James Keast
Just slightly more than a decade ago, Spike Lee was at the top of his game, and he harnessed all his skills, vision and influence into what may be his greatest filmic accomplishment (after Do the Right Thing). Malcolm X is the film of a lifetime, not just for the story it tells of the revolutionary black Muslim but for the filmmaker who probably still hopes it’s not the last great film he’ll ever make. And make no mistake, Malcolm X is a great film: “some David Lean shit,” as Spike declares over the long opening tracking shot. Its ambitions won’t be tamed — it follows young Malcolm “Red” Little from Harlem ne’er-do-well through career criminal to incarcerated black man to violent revolutionary to international man of diplomacy, all before his assassination at the age of 39. Lee pulls out all the stops in creating his tableaux, including following Malcolm to Egypt and filming at Mecca — he’s the only Western filmmaker to ever receive such permission. But Malcolm X, for all Spike Lee’s vision, is embodied heart and soul by Denzel Washington, who does remarkable, career-defining work in the title role. Malcolm X is a film that should never have been made by a Hollywood studio; in fact, it’s only because it was initially developed by Norman Jewison that it even got off the ground. When Lee took over, the film was modestly budgeted, something that Lee knew was a mistake, so he took a calculated risk: he went ahead and started shooting the film he wanted to make, knowing that he would run out of money well before postproduction could be completed. But by that point the studio would be in too deep to back out and would have to allow him to finish. It almost worked, but Lee had a backup plan: when the studio balked at the costs, Spike picked up his rolodex and started calling some prominent — and rich! — black friends. Oprah and Cosby were on the list, but the funniest play is when Lee admits to leaving Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan to last, so he could play off their competitive natures with each other and get bigger donations. But what shouldn’t be lost in the behind-the-scenes foofaraw is the telling of this life, its challenges and its accomplishments. Included on this two-disc “special edition” is a feature-length documentary, Malcolm X, which was nominated for an Oscar in 1972. In it, one gets to know the real Malcolm — his political life was ridiculously well-documented by cameras — and discovers that it’s very familiar, due to the eerily spot-on performance by Denzel Washington. In terms of delving deeper, Malcolm is a subject that could sustain explorations for years; this film could be just the tip of the iceberg for a curious history buff. But for film fans, Spike Lee fans, Denzel Washington fans and history buffs, Malcolm X is a rare and treasured accomplishment. Plus: 1992 commentary by Lee, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, editor and costume designer, deleted scenes.
Talking Pictures (UK) review Nigel Watson
Malcolm X is an angry film. It firmly declares war on the
white man who is responsible for all the ills of the black Afro-American man.
As Malcolm X says "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed
on us." America is not his home, it is his psychological and spiritual
prison.
Malcolm's anger largely derives
from the exploits of the Klu Klux Klan who fire bombed his home when he was a
child, and their subsequent murder of his father (which is regarded as suicide
by the white insurance man/company). Though even the evil of the Klan is rather
undermined by a beautiful shot of them riding into the rays of a huge moon
hanging on the horizon.
As a young man Malcolm is a vain
hustler who gets involved with gangs, drugs, rackets, burglary and white women.
It is when he is in prison that he has a religious vision and converts to the
Islamic faith.
As soon as he is released from
jail he rises to power within Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam. In this role
he lectures that the white man is the devil, a black nation should be
established, and it should be segregated from the malevolent whites. When
President Kennedy is shot dead he declares that "his chickens had come
home to roost" and that he has no sympathy for him. Most of his ideas are
misogynistic, racist, right-wing and inflammatory. This part of the film seems
like a long-winded slice of hectoring worthy of the worst excesses of
evangelical television or a visit from power mad Jehovah Witnesses. It is only
at the closing stages of the film that he realises, after a pilgrimage to
Mecca, that black and white can co-exist.
Malcolm's own chickens come home
to roost when the Muslim group, which he has now left, assassinates him and
establishes him as yet another icon of martyrdom worthy of veneration by future
generations. The fact that he is aware that his time is coming to an end, and that
he had psychic visions previously, implies that he was a chosen individual who
was more than just a common-man.
Spike Lee confidently tackles
this high-powered Hollywood biopic with the kind of bravado that I suspect even
Malcolm X would have found difficult to match. His film is justified as a
corrective to the errors and ignorance of the white man's version of religious
and American history. Unfortunately, there are many areas where Lee's crusading
becomes silly or plain ludicrous. For example, there is an argument that God is
black not white, which indicates a rather naive view of religious ideology. At
the end of the film we have no less a person than Nelson Mandela talking to a
classroom of children who, one by one, declare they are "Malcolm X" which
makes it look like an out-take from a rejected Benneton advert. At other
moments there are dancing sequences that look like the kind of stereotypical
images of black people, white people would be ashamed to portray. Though as the
scene where the white girl gushingly asks how she can help Malcolm X's cause,
and is summarily dismissed, the white person/audience has no right to say or do
anything, he/she is condemned by history and Spike Lee as the devil
incarnate.
Malcolm X can be seen as a cry
for ethnic purity and cleansing, and we know where that can lead to...Spike Lee
gives us the writing on the wall that we should all read and consider.
I say 'can be seen' in the
paragraph above because the film can be read in lots of different ways. Lee can
argue that Malcolm X becomes more moderate and rational at the close of the
film and that he wasn't so anti-white before his death. This tones down the
worries of a white audience but the same closing scenes then start showing the
rifts between black groups.
Lee admits that Malcolm X was a
complex man, and his film tries to deal with this complexity. This leads us to
wonder what parts of Malcolm X's philosophy we should merit and which we should
discard. What we are left with is the empty slogan "By any means
necessary". As Carl Rowan, an ex-director of the U.S. information service
has commented, this,
"is a glaring instance of
movie-makers revising history and making a man who had a dubious impact in life
appear to be a towering social and political figure long after his
death."
During production Lee was aware
that his film would spark controversy, and he conceded that,
"There's just no way for one
film to satisfy everyone's perception of who Malcolm was. He meant a lot of
different things to a lot of different people."
You can see Malcolm X
simply as a story of a person who rises from poverty and petty crime and,
through spiritual and educational enlightenment, becomes a voice for his
people. Indeed, many film reviews have regarded it in this manner, but this
completely misses the point that this is a 'message' movie that at least tells
you much about the state of racial relationships in the U.S.A. and at best
challenges the Hollywood representation (or lack of representation) of such
issues.
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
The much-hyped "Malcolm X" happens to be a spiritually enriching testament to the human capacity for change -- and surely Spike Lee's most universally appealing film. An engrossing mosaic of history, myth and sheer conjecture, this ambitious epic manages to sustain itself for 3 hours 21 minutes, and also overcomes an early frivolity of tone and Lee's intrusiveness to achieve a stature befitting its subject.
Lee, whose enormous affection for his hero suffuses his work, nevertheless resists the temptation to sanitize Malcolm as Richard Attenborough did Gandhi. The civil rights leader, as eloquently portrayed by Denzel Washington, emerges as an immensely likable human being -- a onetime black separatist who overcame his own prejudices. Still, this biopic will ruffle a few white feathers -- and probably a few black ones too; that's a given -- but "Malcolm X" addresses itself to all Americans, reminding us none too gently with its opening footage of the Rodney King beating that the work is never done.
Though the film covers 40 of the most turbulent years in our society, it seems oddly isolated from its time and place, almost as if the characters were trapped in a snow globe. This segregation may be purposeful, even astute, on Lee's part, but it denies Malcolm his historical underpinnings. And there's a theatricality to the crowd and street scenes that give the film the look of a Broadway play.
Lee, who directs the way other people order Chinese food, brings all manner of styles and moods to the film's four chapters -- Malcolm's troubled youth, his conversion to Islam, his ministry and his pilgrimage to Mecca. It's Washington's formidable task to pull all of them all together, to reconcile the disparate Malcolms, which he does with uncanny ease. To make sense of the internal struggle, it's essential to know the tragedies of Malcolm's childhood, as recounted here in the Lee screenplay based on Alex Haley's "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."
The hero is already a hunky teenager when the film opens. His wavy red hair thick with pomade, his features bathed in halo lighting, Washington seems to have walked off an art-deco playbill and into the movie. A Midwesterner newly arrived in Boston, Malcolm falls under the influence of a zoot-suiter, Shorty, played with camera-mugging gusto by Lee. Shorty outfits his new friend in flashy duds, teaches him to walk the walk, and in general makes the country boy cool in a musical sequence that plays like "Mo' Better Malcolm," complete with a big-band dance number.
Then Lee finds his way again as the story takes a darker turn. Malcolm, now living with a sluttish white moll and calling himself Detroit Red, falls in with a crime lord, West Indian Archie -- Delroy Lindo milking poison charm from the role as though from the fangs of a cobra. The first of a series of father figures who would guide Malcolm toward his destiny, Archie introduces the young man to a life of cocaine, numbers-running and robbery, which leads to Malcolm's incarceration and his subsequent redemption.
Washington, who has allowed his character to grow jaded and mean, still hasn't quite prepared anybody for the man who earned the nickname "Satan" in prison. He draws a portrait of a man who has regressed to his childhood, expressing his rage through temper tantrums that repeatedly land him in solitary. When he emerges from the dark, finally broken, he is drawn to the light of Islam by Baines (Albert Hall), an inmate who introduces him to the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman). As the fez-wearing and wizened Nation of Islam leader, Freeman seems to float above his chair like a Shriner on helium.
Elijah Muhammad takes the once-profligate Malcolm under his wing after his release from prison, whereupon Malcolm quickly becomes the holy man's chief spokesman, brilliantly articulating the rage and despair of his people to electrify blacks as he terrified white Americans. (As part of his transformation, Malcolm forsook white women, who may not appreciate being lumped in with pork and drugs in the Muslims' grocery list of poisons proffered by the blue-eyed devils.) Though he marries a suitably devout follower (Angela Bassett) and has a family, Malcolm seems more alone than ever as he becomes disillusioned with Elijah Muhammad and splits with the Nation of Islam.
Near the end of his 39 years, Malcolm abandoned separatist teachings after his pilgrimage to Mecca brought him into contact with devout Moslems of all races. And just as Malcolm opens his mind to the possibilities of global harmony, the film finally finds its epic scope. Lee delivers a surprisingly more accessible Malcolm than most remember. The passage of time and Washington's innate sweetness take some of the sting out of his words, their bitter vitriol evident in the newsreels that Lee weaves into the narrative.
Malcolm gets his deification when he faces the final fusillade of inevitable martyrdom. But Lee in the end cannot resist an opportunity to play the pamphleteer. "Malcolm X" closes first with Ossie Davis reciting Malcolm's eulogy, followed by Nelson Mandela's reading of one of Malcolm's more celebrated speeches, and finally with a belabored attempt to tie it all together with cute schoolchildren. It's a little much, but then so was "Gandhi."
Hollywood Radical [MALCOLM X] | Jonathan Rosenbaum December 11, 1992, also seen here: December | 1992 | Jonathan Rosenbaum
DVD Times Nat Tunbridge
DVD Savant Blu-ray
Review: Malcolm X Glenn
Erickson, also seen here: Malcolm
X (1992) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
Newsweek (David Ansen) review From
Sinner to Martyr: A Man of Many Faces,
November 16, 1992
Movieline Magazine dvd review Michael Atkinson
The Onion A.V.
Club dvd review
Scott Tobias
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [5/5] [Special Edition] also included: Read Chris Tribbey's interview with Spike Lee
DVD Town
(John J. Puccio & Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd
review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Kevin Clemons) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD
Verdict (Patrick Bromley) dvd review
[Special Edition]
Joe Bob's Drive-In Movie Review an amusing take on the film
Reel.com dvd review [4/4] Tim Knight
Montreal
Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
filmcritic.com (Eric Meyerson) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Py Thomas
DVD Verdict
(Dean Roddey) dvd review
DVD Talk
(Chris Hughes) dvd review [4/5]
Brilliant
Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
The
Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review
[4/5] Brad Cook
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4/5]
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
CROOKLYN
USA (115 mi) 1994
Time
Out review
Geoff Andrew
This semi-comic look at middle-class
family life in Brooklyn, New York, in the mid-'70s was written by Spike Lee
and his siblings Joie and Cinqué. As well as hanging out on the stoop and
battling with four idle brothers, ten-year-old Troy (Harris) - from whose point
of view the story is told - witnesses the tensions between her mother (Woodard)
and father (Lindo). While Lee's customary visual style and sense of street
vitality are much in evidence, it's easy to see why this fond,
semi-autobiographical evocation of a largely vanished lifestyle bombed in the US.
It's not just the misjudgment of depicting Troy's lengthy visit to an aunt in
Virginia through the squeezed perspective of an anamorphic lens, nor even the
final scenes in which the story lurches from comedy to half-hearted melodrama:
the key problem is that the film is simply a ragged series of anecdotal
sketches.
Black Flix
(Laurence Washington) review
In the past, director Spike Lee has held black politics,
black on black racism and interracial sex under a microscope -- don't look for
that in his latest offering. In fact, don't even look for plot. That's not to
say Crooklyn is a bad movie. Fact is, Crooklyn is a wonderful little gem that
doesn't need a plot because it's a pictorial of real life. If there is some
semblance of a plot, it's the films 10-year-old heroine, Troy ( Zelda Harris)
and her experiences growing up in Brooklyn during the early '70s with four
brothers.
Lee captures the essence of '70's with R&B music
featuring The Stylistics, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder. It's the time of the
afro and platform shoes. If you're between the ages of 30 and 45, you'll get an
emotional rush as Lee shows '70s memorabilia.
One thing I've mentioned in past reviews of Lee's work is
that he's always stretching with his photography. Spike Lee's flims, like
Steven Spielberg's have their own unmistakable signature. Crooklyn is no
exception as Lee experiments with great looking camera angles. The
only time things get ugly is when Troy visits her middle class aunt and uncle.
Lee slightly distorted the picture in an attempt to show the difference between
southern middle class blacks and their northern cousins -- it didn't work.
Movieline Magazine review Michael Atkinson
On those scarcer-than-hen's-teeth occasions when producers
and directors need someone to play an intelligent, independent, grown-up woman
who also happens to be black, they tend to call Alfre Woodard. Commanding,
intuitive and blazing with conviction, Woodard never coasts, and never fails to
push her characters out into four dimensions, whether or not they were written
that way. Her characters in Passion Fish, Blue Chips, Cross
Creek and Grand Canyon all embody reservoirs of experience the
scripts don't hint at. The magic trick begins with Woodard's very appearance:
at the same time ravishingly Cleopatran and chillingly primal, she looks like
no one else. One quick movement of those huge eyes can throw your back out.
Woodard's best performance so far is in Spike Lee's Crooklyn. Her role
as the beleaguered mother of five rowdy city kids wasn't really that big, but
she made it seem so powerful that her presence loomed large over scenes even
after her character had died.
Fearless, thorny and intolerant of bullshit in any quantity, Woodard's Carolyn
Carmichael is traffic cop, breadwinner, judge, jury and executioner for her
contentious clan ("Put the salt down, Wendell, before I pull your head
off"), which includes an irresponsible but caring musician husband played
sensitively by Delroy Lindo. Carolyn's an overworked teacher as well as an
overworked mom, and Woodard gives her the quick, wary reflexes and locked-in
survival gaze of a war zone short-timer. Woodard's never afraid of coming
across as too strident, and she never makes a bid for our sympathy by trying to
soften her characters' combative edges. Her Carolyn is shellacked-bat tough,
and so put upon that when she does sit in awe of a child's kindness, or purrs
"Hey, ladybug..." to her young daughter, it feels to us like the sun
has come out.
Woodard's work digs deeper than that, though. Nothing in
the script explicitly addresses Carolyn's inner struggles, but Woodard provides
them free of charge. Carolyn is an emotional ping-pong ball, and though she is
much too strong to crack under pressure, Woodard makes the bad stitching in the
woman's psyche as plain as day. At her core, this is a woman torn between her
unrealized dreams and the infrequent but white-hot pleasures of motherhood.
She's disgusted with the petty chaos of her life, and wouldn't have it any
other way. In each of Woodard's rages, you can feel the sad bitterness of lost
chances in her voice. Without ever doing "vulnerability," Woodard
projects a sense of Carolyn's secret weaknesses. She lets us into Carolyn's
head but never waits patiently for us to catch up to what her character is
thinking. The secret may lie in the subtle suggestion of fear Woodard gives
Carolyn--fear of being wrong, fear of poverty, fear of finally losing control
of her family.
Throughout the exhausting harangues and marital crises, we emphathize with
Carolyn without ever knowing exactly why. Only later, when she is suddenly
stricken with cancer, and Woodard makes the light disappear from her eyes, do
we fully realize how much passion had boiled underneath her fierce surface. The
movie aches for more of her, just as the film's family aches for their mother
after she's gone.
DVD Times Gary Couzens
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
'Crooklyn'
- Washington Post Desson Howe
Crooklyn Movie Review
& Film Summary (1994) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - Review/Film; A Tender Domestic Drama From, No ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times, also seen here:
The
New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
CLOCKERS
Clockers Anthony Lane from The New Yorker
The new Spike Lee picture is adapted from the 1992 thriller by Richard
Price (the two collaborated on the screenplay), but thrills are low on the
agenda of this nervy, knowing tale, which bristles with jokes and social
problems where you would expect the plot to be. The clockers of the
title—low-grade crack dealers who work the
Strike (Phifer) deals crack from the
benches in front of the Brooklyn tenement where he grew up. Rodney (Lindo) has
his protégé earmarked for big things, but he has to be blooded first: murder is
Rodney's only insurance. Strike listens, but when his intended victim turns up
dead, it's Strike's straight-arrow brother Victor (Washington) who confesses to
the crime. Rodney isn't happy. That goes double for detective Klein (Keitel)
who, unlike his partner Mazilli (Turturro), refuses to accept they've put away
the real killer. Spike Lee's
adaptation of Richard
Price's novel cuts back on the cops' perspective but retains the essential
overview of a society trapped in a cycle of despair. In an apparent reaction
against the plethora of flashy 'hood' movies his success helped spawn, Lee has
toned down the snap of his montage, muted his saturated mise en scène in
favour of streetlight chiaroscuro, and co-opted jerky, handheld zooms from cinéma
vérité. Scored largely to plaintive soul tracks (Seal, Marc Dorsey), the
result is a more sober, mournful and meditative expressionism than you'd
expect. That's not to say the film isn't suspenseful, but the director's
distaste for the inner city's gun culture is clear to see. Superbly acted.
Black Flix
(Laurence Washington) review
Spike Lee has a distinct way of opening his movies. He
grabs you by the shirt coller and smacks you upside the face. Remember Malcom
X? Clockers is no exception. Lee shows actual crime scene photographs of
drug-related murder victims behind superimposed opening credits. Beware: Lee
doesn't make the slightest attempt to soften the photos.
Clockers isn't your typical Spike Lee movie, and it
isn't Lee's best work either -- so don't look for Malcom X. But that's not to
say Clockers isn't an excellent film. It is. Fact of the matter is, if it were
up to me, "and it is," every crime drama with a mind blowing plot
twist will get an excellent review from me every time. Clockers is such a
movie. Hopefully as a crime drama, Clockers will receive the accolades it
deserves, and not be over shadowed by similar genre films, i.e. Pulp Fiction
and The Usual Suspects.
Based on Richard Price's novel, Clockers is about a harden
Brooklyn homicide detective (Harvey Keitel) investigating the murder of a drug
dealer. The crime was apparently committed by one of two brothers,
who couldn't be more different (or could they both be involved?). One brother
is a hard working family man (Victor Washington), and the other is a small time
drug dealer (Mekhi Phifer).
At first, Keitel is convinced that Phifer's older brother
is protecting him by taking the rap for the murder. Washington has a clean
record, and he's claiming self-defense. But as Keitel digs deeper, he becomes
unsure as to which brother actually commited the murder. Keitel's investigation
eventually leads him to the big drug dealer (Delroy Lindo) who ordered the hit.
There are great, believable performances here, especially
by Lindo and Phifer. But crime drama aside, like all Spike Lee movies, Clockers
delivers a heavy message. It's about humanity in a Brooklyn housing project,
where the residents try to fight back but are held in fear by drug dealers.
Lee's complex murder mystery will have you guessing who
done it right up to its sensational ending.
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
The dilemma of
"Clockers," Spike Lee's punishing, confused adaptation of Richard
Price's novel about the urban drug trade, is summed up early on, during an
impromptu debate between Strike (Mekhi Phifer) and his crew. Some of the young
"clockers"—drug runners—working the project park benches think that
the only "real" rappers are the hard ones, that rap should be tough
and in-your-face because "that's what it's like out here." Others
argue that rappers should stop glorifying crime and drugs, and start putting
out the "positive" word on constructive change.
The exchange is short but
revealing, cutting immediately to a crucial question: How does a contemporary
artist deal with the inner city? How, after so many crack movies and cop shows
and gangsta videos, can Lee—or anyone else—take on this material without
running into a cliche around every corner?
Lee doesn't come up with the
answer in "Clockers." Still, to his credit, you can feel him
grappling with it, searching for a solution.
The problem is one of saturation:
Rap and its surrounding universe are a multimillion-dollar industry. That's a
lot of imagery. Still, in his powerful opening sequence, Lee effectively
constructs a traumatizing collage of death: close-up shots of bloody corpses,
slit throats, entrance and exit wounds, dark pavement slick with brain tissue.
It's a devastating sequence—one
of a generous sampling of extraordinary moments in this erratic, troublesome
film. And perhaps nowhere else does Lee articulate such a strong, personal
sense of feeling; nowhere else does the equation between crack and death come
across more vividly. Unfortunately, once Lee begins telling Price's story, his
focus becomes less acute.
The central story itself is not
distinctive, and though Lee certainly churns up a lot of dust, he never
captures the mythic quality that made Price's original seem so much bigger than
its almost generic cast of players.
Strike and his crew run crack for
Brooklyn operator Rodney (Delroy Lindo), who conducts his illicit business
without much fanfare out of his neighborhood candy store. Strike is Rodney's
man—or at least that's what Rodney keeps telling him. And if Strike would just
deal with this one problem for Rodney, this one little hit on a kid working at
a fast-food joint, then Rodney would hook him up.
Almost immediately, the kid is
found dead. But it is Strike's brother, Victor (Isaiah Washington), who turns
himself in for the crime. Because Victor is married, with two kids, and works
two jobs, Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel), the investigating detective, smells a
rat. He knows that Strike is the bad apple. And instead of accepting Victor's
explanation of self-defense, Rocco latches onto Strike, putting pressure on him
to confess.
Eventually, Strike's boss gets
upset over his increasingly frequent conversations with Rocco. Between a rock
and a hard place, Strike feels the walls begin to close in—or at least that's
the feeling we're supposed to get, especially since Strike is also afflicted
with a bleeding ulcer. Still, despite Lee's usual stylistic tricks and visual
hyperbole, huge hunks of "Clockers" are strangely unaffecting. You
can feel the director behind these scenes, pumping them up, pitching them—in
much the same way he pitches his products in his television commercials.
Nonetheless, the actors do a
credible job. As Rocco, Keitel finds new wrinkles in this tired character,
mainly by remaining oblivious to everything except what's right in front of his
formidable nose. Phifer makes a confident debut as Strike, but Lindo makes a
more prominent impression, even though his amoral Rodney compares unfavorably
with others in the genre, most notably Morgan Freeman's character in
"Streetwise."
There are potent observations about
an important subject here, and what comes through most distinctly is the
everyday quality of the lives on screen. The world of "Clockers" is
not a world of chaos. It's extremely orderly, a place for business and
businessmen. Death is a byproduct, but if you do the job right, that all takes
place downstream.
Lee is grappling with real issues
here, and the real world resonates through his work. The Mark Fuhrman tapes,
for example, make Price and Lee—who have juiced up the dialogue to give it an
even greater immediacy—look like geniuses. The film nails the sort of callused,
practical-minded police force that casually accepts street violence: Let the
"yos," as the cops call them, kill themselves off. Who cares?
What Lee doesn't give us is the
full, hellish context of the system in which Rocco and his sidekick (John
Turturro, in a small role) work. Price's book, it seems, is about the system,
but Lee's "Clockers" lacks both the novel's expansiveness and its
sense of psychological intimacy. What we get mostly in the film is a sense of
Lee flailing, struggling to get a handle on his material.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe) review
Second
Glance: Spike Lee's Powerful, Underrated Crime Drama ... Jason Bailey from Flavorwire
Clockers (1995) | Truer Than Truth Jason Panella
Spike
Lee enters the inner-city crime genre with Clockers · Watch This ... Jesse Hassenger from The Onion A.V. Club
DVD Times Gary Couzens
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Dragan Antulov retrospective [6/10]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
The Tech (MIT) (David V. Rodriguez) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]
CNN Showbiz Carol Buckland
Todd McCarthy Variety
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
Tucson Weekly [Zachary Woodruff]
'Clockers'
- Washington Post Kevin
McManus
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review calls it bombastic oversimplification and shallowness
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Clockers Movie Review
& Film Summary (1995) | Roger Ebert
GIRL 6 C+ 79
USA (108 mi) 1996
That’s
the business, honey bunch. —Susan
Batson, Acting instructor
It’s sex in the city, Spike Lee style, with a Prince soundtrack wailing
in the background, and with Lee offering us a primer on just how you make it in
show business, emphasis on the word business.
This is not some misogynistic fantasy about the way it could or should
be, but simply a rather comic take on just how absurdly sexist the business
already is, where nearly all the big name stars do nude scenes at some point in
their careers, especially women of color.
Again, this is not hypocrisy, this is the business, and from Lee’s point
of view, the starting point of the story, the entry point. Theresa Randle has an Alice in Wonderland journey as she naively attempts to break into
the movie business “without” demeaning herself by stripping for the prospective
director, but runs into a wall of indifference, as talent is measured through
sexuality. When she does an audition for
a typically arrogant white director, played here by Quintin Tarantino,
supposedly the rage of the industry, he requires that she remove her clothing,
which causes her a great amount of stress, as she needs the part but doesn’t
want to go down that same broken road of having to resort to racial stereotypes
of black women once again being manipulated by an industry controlled by white
men. She wishes to be judged on her talent,
which isn’t getting her the time of day.
Sex is what moves the talent meter.
Written by feminist playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, a MacArthur
award “genius grant” recipient in 2001, and Pulitzer Prize winner in 2002, this
is a rather subversive attempt to comment on the brick wall that black women
hit when faced with breaking into show business, as they are rarely, if ever,
accepted on talent alone, where they have to be the sexiest and most sizzlingly
hot creature on the screen, perfectly exemplified by Dorothy Dandridge in
CARMEN JONES (1954), the tragic sex symbol in an all-black cast ironically
filmed by white director Otto Preminger.
Randle starts out with the beauty of a model, but no pizzazz, nothing to
light up the screen, where easily one of the best scenes in the movie is working
with her way-over-the-top acting coach who continually berates her for being an
emotional dud, seen here: GIRL 6 - ULTIMATE READING! -
YouTube (
The film itself is very erratic and one of Lee’s least understood films, never really making the case to reframe the inappropriate stereotypes, where once Randle quickly rises to the top of her field, which she does easily and naturally, becoming comfortable with herself as a sexual presence, it apparently stutters and hesitates about where to go next, as she instead has a kind of mental breakdown, where she starts imagining herself in black roles throughout history, where the movie seamlessly intermixes fantasy with reality. Men are purely secondary roles in this film, which prefers the female perspective, as Lee plays the Mookie role a few years down the road as the good-natured neighbor in the building, while Isaiah Washington plays multiple roles, including a clever street thief, her former boyfriend, and the Harry Belafonte role as the soldier in the CARMEN JONES sequence, where the fragmented approach to his role may interestingly be a telling comment on men, as women tend to like part of who they are, but dislike other parts, never seeming to be able to find a complete man. Randle’s imagination also takes her through a roller coaster journey of various destinations, which include some major songs, Prince - How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore? on YouTube (3:51) or [1982] Vanity 6 - Nasty Girl on Vimeo (4:15), but also rather hilarious tributes to black TV sitcom staples like Good Times (1974 – 79) and The Jeffersons (1975 – 85), playing Thelma with Spike Lee dressed up as George Jefferson, doing his strut, even dancing the Funky Chicken, while also taking a stab as Pam Grier in a FOXY BROWN (1974) meets SHAFT (1971) flashback, where she takes care of business before he can arrive on the scene, all but eliminating the need for a male role except to add extraneous violence, which she rightly points out is completely unnecessary, as all the dirty work has already been done. Randle is exquisite throughout, perhaps breaking the all time record for most hairstyle changes in a film, where it’s a shame her career never blossomed, but the movie squanders a good idea and breaks down into a myriad of different directions, mixing fantasy, satire, and social commentary with parody, none of which are made clear except for the fact that its easy to lose yourself in this industry, which wants you to be all things to all people.
1 She Spoke 2 Me Prince 4:19
2 Pink Cashmere Prince 6:15
3 Count the Days New Power Generation 3:26
4 Girls & Boys Prince, Revolution 5:31
5 The Screams of Passion Family 5:27
6 Nasty Girl Vanity Six 5:14
7 Erotic City Prince, Revolution 3:55
8 Hot Thing Prince 5:41
9 Adore Prince 5:31
10 The Cross Prince 4:46
11 How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore Prince 3:53
12 Don't Talk 2 Strangers Prince 3:11
13 Girl 6 New Power Generation 4:04
Girl 6 Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader
Spike Lee directed (and reportedly did an uncredited rewrite on)
this mainly comic script by playwright Suzin-Lori Parks, about an aspiring
actress (Theresa Randle) who becomes a phone sex worker to pay the rent.
Perhaps because Lee seems less ambitious here than in previous features I found
myself enjoying this film more; for all its hit-or-miss quality it offers a
dreamy playfulness and stylistic inventiveness as well as a satirical edge that
kept me interested. (Lee is particularly provocative when he cuts between film
and video in highlighting some of the ideological preconceptions we have about
both media.) Lee himself and Isaiah Washington costar; among those in smaller
roles are John Turturro, Jennifer Lewis, Debi Mazar, Ron Silver, Peter Berg,
Richard Belzer, and, in cameo parts, Naomi Campbell, Halle Berry, Madonna, and
Quentin Tarantino.
Lee's follow-up to She's
Gotta Have It has been a long time coming, but this freewheeling comic
celebration of an independent New York City gal fits the bill: it even starts
with Judy (Randle) auditioning with a monologue from the earlier film. When the
director (Tarantino) insists she strip, she quits, and her acting career
appears to be over until she lands a job as a phone-sex operator. Although her
friend Jimmy (Lee) is appalled, in many ways 'Girl 6' is a liberating,
therapeutic role: sexually she's always in control, she's well paid, and
there's no colour barrier. But is Judy hung-up on Girl 6? If this synopsis
suggests a plot, Lee must have had other things on his mind. Instead, the
film's eclectic, New Wave-ish pick'n'mix of fantasy, parody and pastiche sets the
stage for star cameos à go-go. Randle changes her look with every scene, throws
in faultless impersonations of Dorothy Dandridge and Pam Grier, and almost
holds it all together. After this role, she should never have to audition
again. There's something refreshing about the film's reckless proximity to
anarchy, the stylishly imaginative cinematography and lusciously exorbitant Prince
soundtrack, even if it does ring hollow when Lee tries to get serious on us.
User reviews from imdb Author:
dahemo from USA
I can't help but to be amused by the
other comments/reviews on this movie. They (even the positive ones) completely
enforce exactly what this movie is actively trying to point out about our
society.
Several people noted that the narrative was weak or nonexistent, that the film
didn't "go" anywhere, and/or that there was too much extra
"stuff" that distracted the story from the "real" plot
line. I'm here to tell you that this is the whole point of Spike Lee's
brilliant Girl 6. It's not a flaw in the movie, it is part of it's very
construction.
Every time an extradiegetic scene was placed within the overall plot (such as
the Dorothy Dandridge, Foxy Brown, Jeffersons scenes as well as the recurring
image of the elevator shaft) the audience is pulled away from the narrative of
the film and forced to see it as such: a movie! And fictional movies have no
basis in reality; the people and actions depicted are not real. This disrupts
our normal expectations about what we expect to see in a film.
The movie is also scattered with touches of reflexivity. For example, Naomi
Campbell, wearing a shirt that says "Models Suck" and Quentin
Tarantino, acting very ironically in a way he has been accused of. At the end,
the movie theater in L.A. is showing a movie entitled "Girl 6" and a
billboard proclaims that it's "The End." Absolutely all of this is
purposeful and calculated. It does exactly what so many people were
disappointed not to see, by subverting our expectations and implicitely
pointing out that this is NOT a movie you can just "fall into" and
become a passive spectator, that it actively engages the audience and breaks
down our concepts of the master narrative by giving us an ending we did not
expect.
Girl 6 is not a movie about phone sex, as so many of you seem to believe. It is
a feminist (if you know anything about Suzan-Lori Parks, you know she would
never condone something sexist, let alone write it) film that deliberately
references itself in order to subvert our expectations about films, society,
and women.
It's really a shame that so many people are, in fact, so hooked on
"traditional" forms of narrative (taught by a sexist society) that
they fail to see the value of this film.
Slant
Magazine review
Eric Henderson
So Spike Lee puts his on-screen sex toy Rosie
Perez's nude, supine coconuts in glittering, ice-dripping close-up in Do the
Right Thing, his own voice growling from behind the camera, "Thank God
for the right nipple, thank God for the left," and no one blinks. In Girl
6, he makes Quentin Tarantino play himself auditioning girls for his big
black epic (apparently not Jackie Brown) by forcing them to take off
their tops and pointing to his watch if they hesitate. But because Lee actually
shows ingénue Theresa Randle's pop rocks, the critics roundly lumped him in
with Q.T. and the rest of the auteur boys' club, branding him a closet
misogynist whose transgression is all the more disappointing for its patina of
masculine sensitivity.
Girl 6, the story of a girl and her stint in the phone sex biz, is a
sloppy and problematic film, no diggity. But the opening audition scene and its
thematic reprise at the film's end are not among its mistakes. Actually, they
are among the film's only signs of cognitively dissonant, Godardian life. Girl's
screenplay was written by a female, Pulitzer-winner Suzan-Lori Parks, and
Randle's disrobe-under-duress is, in actuality, Parks's own built-in reminder
to everyone who's actually telling the tale. Tarantino and Lee are not so
stylistically exclusive that most wouldn't recognize Tarantino's obvious
function as a stand-in. (Only the racial difference between them confuses the
metaphor.) So what Parks demonstrates by forcing Lee to force Randle into the dressing-down
room is exactly what Tarantino says: "It's what the role requires."
Or rather, it's what every current role for young black women requires.
Randle's unnamed protagonist (her kleptomaniac ex-husband calls her Judy, but
in a tone that suggests a reference to Cary Grant) frequently fantasizes about
her dream roles, and none from the relatively short list (Carmen Jones, Foxy
Brown, and George Jefferson's nondescript daughter) show their tits. There is a
fourth role that "Judy" dreams of playing, if only metaphorically.
That's the role of the young girl who she sees on the news who fell six stories
down an elevator shaft and whose hospital struggles run parallel to Girl 6's
career as a phone call-girl. The hospitalized girl doesn't show her tits, either,
as the four "roles" all come to represent an overblown ideal of both
sensual power and chaste innocence. Spike Lee is plain out of his element here,
and it's no wonder he falls back on stunt casting (a post-Erotica Madonna as the boss of an illicit
"no rules" phone sex ring who tells "Judy" to "come
back when you get some cojones") and a ceaseless handpicked playlist of
his favorite Prince songs.
Philadelphia
City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
Spike Lee's newest movie is nothing if not self-conscious. It opens with Girl 6 (Theresa Randle) on video. She faces the camera and says, "The only reason I've consented to doing this is to clear my name." It's soon clear that she's auditioning for a part, and her chosen monologue is Nola Darling's introductory speech from She's Gotta Have It. The director who's checking her out is none other than the ubiquitous Quentin Tarantino (here called "QT, the hottest director in Hollywood"), a definitive sleazeball who says he's looking for "the total package," the "beauty of Halle Berry" and the "range of Angela Bassett." Within minutes he tells Girl 6 to take off her shirt so he can see her "tits." She does but then thinks better of it and leaves, the camera trailing behind her as she walks by scores of other young women, leaning against the walls of a narrow hallway.
While this set up makes it look like Girl 6 will deliver a fairly standard condemnation of show business sexism (interesting in itself, given repeated complaints about Lee's own work), it actually gets more complicated than that, in some confused and often engaging ways (the engaging part has everything to do with Randle, who's pretty full-on electric). It's not that this is an especially insightful, compelling or even clever movie. But its look at the phone sex industry through Girl 6's eyes is erratic, at times predictable as hell and at other times unruly and inventive.
Written by Suzan-Lori Parks, Girl 6 is less effective as a portrait of a particular individual than as a self-deconstructive consideration of the mechanisms that represent women as stereotypes and consumable objects. That is, the surface story charts no new ground. Girl 6, the artist-with-a-soul, can't get "legitimate" acting jobs, so she makes money as a phone sex operator (egged on by super-entrepreneurial "madame" Madonna, with lap dog as prop), confronts her lack of self-worth through her head-tripping encounters with johns and co-workers, and comes out more or less intact at the other end.
This as-if-it-were-sincere story breaks down and resurrects itself repeatedly, a formal funkiness enhanced by a sensational Prince soundtrack (and I mean Prince, not Symbolman; it's mainly old material). After Girl 6's run-in with QT, we see her endure a gamut of nonjobs—handing out flyers on a busy New York street, suffering the indignities of a movie extra (literally standing on line), practicing with her acting coach (who wails that she must "Drop into the pain!"). Portrayed through a series of camera tricks — jumpcuts, that gimmicky wrong-lens skinny shot that Lee used in Crooklyn, his signature couple's-stroll-down-the-sidewalk-without-moving shot — Girl 6's going-nowhere career looks almost cartoony, which is, I think, the point.
Even in her supposed "real life," she's trapped, in a dingy apartment in a noisy building, in a series of nonrelationships. Her loneliness is framed by two stock-character men: her neighbor-down-the-hall and best friend Jimmy (Spike Lee playing yet another version of himself, a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and baseball card collector), and her refusing-to-get-it ex, named only "The Shoplifter" (Isaiah Washington), who keeps coming around wanting to get back with her.
Looking for other options, Girl 6 finds herself caught between still more cliches and hard places. In all her incarnations, she's wearing different wigs and outfits, a device providing a visual corollary to her phone sex job, where she poses as a series of dream girls, renaming herself "April," "Esmerelda," and the supremely anonymous, ever-available "Lovely." In this position, she thinks that she has the freedom to be anyone, but, of course, the blinking computer that initiates every call cues her performance according to the caller's prefab desire (high school girls, big "teats," etc.). And, as boss Lil (Jenifer Lewis) reminds her assembled multi-raced girls-as-numbers staff (including Debi Mazar as #39 and Naomi Campbell as #75), unless specified, they're all and always "W-H-I-T-E." No "ethnics."
As this perpetually recreated but basically same-old persona, Girl 6 exists only between and as familiar media-image possibilities. Even when she does reimagine herself as black, it's within specific, mass market terms: she dreams herself variously as Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones (Whitney and Janet, currently battling over who gets the bio-pic, should take note of Randle's terrific performance here) or Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (with "Power to the People" fro, kicking out a line-up of leather-jacketed thugs)."
Throughout Girl 6's descent into seedy sex talk and the "dark" side of her "self," the local news is covering a story of an eight-year-old black girl who falls down an elevator shaft. All these images, which move Girl 6 to tears, are strictly tab-TV banalities — shots of the concerned aunt holding a photo of her niece, the little girl's bandaged head against a white hospital pillow.
When Girl 6 imagines the kid's plunge down the shaft, it's crazy, too-obvious and cheesy, a fall into oblivion — all right already. But it's so cheesy that it comes back round the other way; it starts to seem almost smart, an ingenious gesture of resistance, within and against mainstream constraints.
At the same time, the movie is a jumble of self-referencing. After a while it starts to feel like all the Spike Lee Joints have been run through a grindomatic.
Certainly the fragmented narrative, repeatedly turned inside-out, would suggest that there's no single way to read what's going on here. (The final sequence literally includes a shot where telephones rain down from the sky onto the street where she's standing — an image so completely ludicrous that it dislocates any implied resolution.) But here's the upshot-beauty of it: while I know that I'm probably being optimistic by reading all this entangling and detangling into Girl 6, and even if this interpretation makes it into a more intriguing movie than it might actually "be," there's still a way that it's all fair and all possible. And that, thin as it may seem, may be the most astute and vital illusion this movie has going for it.
Tucson
Weekly (Stacey Richter) review
The SALON Features: Spike Just Ought to Have Fun Laura Miller from Salon
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4] also seen here: James Berardinelli
Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe) review also seen here: Nitrate Online
"Girl 6" Rob Blackwelder of SPLICEDWire
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Beatdown Magazine (Kevin Ryan) review
The Tech
(MIT) (David Rodriguez) review
Scott Marcus review also seen here: Scott Marcus
DVD Talk
(Preston Jones) dvd review [2/5]
Straight.com Ken Eisner from Georgia Straight
Film Scouts Reviews: Girl 6 Leslie Rigoulot
Rita
Kempley The Washington Post
Desson Howe The
Washington Post
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4] also seen here: Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
GET ON THE BUS
USA (120 mi) 1996
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Lee assembles a crew of
African-Americans travelling from South Central LA to attend Louis Farrakhan's
Million Man March in Washington, DC, not only to celebrate an historic event,
but to depict a microcosm of black (male) America - and to highlight the
experiences and attitudes that divide, define and unite men bent on achieving a
sense of brotherhood. Despite evident good intentions and the sterling
performances, this ambitious road movie, set over three days in October 1995,
never gets very far. Ironically (given some of Lee's earlier efforts), that's
partly down to the director's determination to create a sense of balance: as
scripted by Reggie
Rock Bythewood, the passengers are more ciphers than fully rounded
characters, while the conflict-driven narrative, which embraces issues of
colour, class, criminality, age, religion and sexual politics, is schematic.
Whether Farrakhan himself is simply pro-black, or sexist, anti-white and
anti-Semitic is never really confronted, but the problem is less one of
ideology than drama: though Lee's deft expertise keeps things pacy and (mostly)
plausible, the material can't avoid a certain predictability and, in the end, a
preachy sentimentality.
User comments from imdb Author: JawsOfJosh from Chicago
Armed with 16mm cameras, a
miniscule budget financed independently by 15 different black businessmen, and
a wonderful script, Spike shot "Get On The Bus" and released it to
commemorate the one-year anniversary of the 1995 Million Man March. Set on a
bus bound for Washington D.C., this film examines the problems and opinions of
various of black men on racial issues in the 90's.
Family, misogyny, homosexuality, religion, violence, education, and economics
are all addressed here as well as other issues. Spike does not only shed light
on issues that pertain to black peoples involvement in White America, but the
film also attacks color-consciousness among light-skinned and dark-skinned
blacks (as he did in "School Daze"). Like "School Daze,"
this may be the only other Spike Lee film that seems to be aimed directly at Black
America, and Spike shows the varying degrees of complexity with his cast of
characters. There is a rage-filled actor, a homosexual couple in the midst of
separating (one out-and-proud, the other closeted), a sensitive cop, a
level-headed family man, a gangbanger turned Sunni Muslim, a naive filmmaker,
and a tired, defeated elderly man. There is also an estranged father who sees
the March as an opportunity to re-connect with his resentful, bound-for-crime
teenage son. His son has been recently convicted of burglary and has been
ordered to remain "chained" to his father for 48 hours, the irony of
which does not escape the other members on the bus.
Given the film is almost set entirely on a bus, Spike restrains himself in
dispensing out his evolving camera and editing styles, using only a brief
sequence set in a desert to bleach the screen with a heavy yellow tint. Many
Spike Lee regulars are in the film, like Ossie Davis and Isaiah Washington who
give sound performances (Davis' "I lost everything" monologue is
especially moving). The real notable acting is provided by Andre Braugher as an
angry, egocentric actor whose rage is fortunately balanced for him with a
healthy dose of articulated intelligence and Roger Guenever Smith as a
sensitive, bi-racial cop who works in South Central Los Angeles. Those two
really are the stand-outs in this film.
The dialogue is so flowing and casual in this film despite its topic matter,
that you could listen to this film instead of watch it! I can't recommend this
film enough for fans of Spike Lee or fans of great dialogue. As a Spike Lee
worshipper, I rank this film in his top 5. Potent.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
In the days after the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., it was interesting to see it through the wary lens of the white media. We heard about Louis Farrakhan (what's he up to this time?). We heard about the whiff of sexism in the men-only gathering. We heard about the hopes and doubts that African-American men (seen, as always, as a monolith) would find peace in unity, especially in the tense days after the O.J. verdict.
What we didn't hear about, except in sidebars and snippets,
was the human element. What did the March mean to the men of wildly different
backgrounds, generations, and beliefs? Spike Lee's Get On the Bus throws
us in with fifteen men who seem to have been selected for maximum friction. The
movie, which rarely leaves the bus, is almost African-American Buffalo.
It's a feat of metaphor and rhetoric -- a lot of talk before the
"real" story happens (the March is seen only in fuzzy video clips
near the end).
One can almost imagine Lee and scripter Reggie Rock Bythewood checking off
their list of types. There's the gang-banger turned Muslim (Gabriel Cassus),
the biracial cop (Roger Guenveur Smith), the downsized old-timer (Ossie Davis),
the gay couple (Isaiah Washington and Harry Lennix), the camcorder-toting Spike
wannabe (Hill Harper), the absentee dad (Thomas Jefferson Byrd) and his wayward
son (De'aundre Bonds), the arrogant actor (Andre Braugher), and a trio of
drivers (Charles S. Dutton, Albert Hall, and Richard Belzer).
That these men are types, not stereotypes, is due mainly to the performances.
Bythewood's script isn't bad -- it's sometimes very good -- but it's full of
speeches and actor's moments. In this brand of drama, everyone must stand and
unfold himself while Lee zeroes in. Get On the Bus is Spike Lee's first
feature in which he doesn't appear onscreen, though the kid with the camera is
his obvious surrogate (at one point, Charles Dutton waves the kid away
dismissively and says something like "Okay, Spike Lee, get the camera
outta my face"), and Lee's camera itself becomes a character. The movie is
grainy and jump-cutty, like Lee's other recent films, making visual jazz out of
talking heads.
Lee knows he has a potent metaphor in the bus itself, which resonates with
memories of Rosa Parks and school busing. The vehicle of past oppression becomes
a symbol of forward movement toward empowerment. You're either on the bus or
you're not. Some of the men have doubts, and Richard Belzer, as the Jewish
driver, elects to get off. He misses the point, but then so do a few of the
passengers.
Of the actors along for the ride, veterans Dutton and Davis offer their usual
impeccable gravity (though a tragic plot twist mars Davis's characterization).
Washington, of Lee's Clockers and Girl 6, is fine as the bitter
Gulf War vet who found himself doubly ostracized as a gay black Marine.
Braugher, of TV's Homicide, is bitingly funny as the egotistical,
womanizing actor.
'Get On the Bus,' in the end, is a film in the form of a question: Are you on the bus or not? Are you going to stand still or help move things forward? The black men in the movie answer in different ways. But we don't have to be black or male to find the question relevant, or to seek our own answer.
Get
on the Bus - TCM.com Rob Nixon
Released one year to the day after the Million Man March of
1995, Spike Lee's film Get on the Bus
(1996) commemorates the historical moment when, following the call of Nation of
Islam leader Louis Farrakahn, African-American men all across the U.S. traveled
to Washington, D.C., for what Farrakahn called a day of "atonement."
It was a chance to speak out against racism, to promote unity among the black
community and to correct the image of African-American men as, in Farrakahn's
words, "a bestial, maniacal and savage group of persons." The goal of
the march was widely hailed, even while its chief organizer continued to foment
controversy and criticism of what many saw as his own brand of racism,
separatism, and sexism. The controversy swirling around the Nation of Islam
leader is frequently argued over in Get on the Bus, and the ultimate goal of the march forms the basis for
most of the film's lively discussions. But rather than focus on the event at
the highest organizing levels (though frequently alluded to, Farrakahn is seen
only briefly, during TV coverage), Lee chose to center the film around a group
of ordinary men on a single bus on its way to the capital. To get a broad cross
section of the community's issues, challenges and concerns, the script
appropriates a convention used in Hollywood war movies in which a group from a
widely diverse range of backgrounds and viewpoints are thrown together and we
watch as those differences clash and ultimately coalesce. The story also
includes a white man, the Jewish bus driver who strongly objects to Farrakahn's
characterization of his people, offering the opportunity for discussions of the
march leader's statements about the Jewish community and comparisons of the
Holocaust and slavery.
Lee knew that the mostly single-set script would prove to be thorny in terms of
visual interest, and after the film's release, he admitted that the piece was
"a little too talky." So he relied on a cast of distinguished
veterans, such as Ossie Davis and Charles S. Dutton, as well as talented
newcomers and lesser-known performers, to make the confined setting as lively
and compelling as possible. Davis, who had acted in Lee's School Daze
(1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), and Malcolm
X (1992), had reservations about participating, largely due to ideological
differences with Farrakahn and the general direction of the Nation of Islam.
Nevertheless, Davis and his wife, actress Ruby Dee, had contributed to the
March by financing a bus and supported the overall goal of it. And he was eager
to work with Lee again, especially given the character of Jeremiah, an older
man who has been through a lot personally and witnessed a great deal of his
people's history and who is a mouthpiece for some of the film's most stirring
words about pride and responsibility.
The limits imposed on him by the script weren't Lee's only challenge in getting
Get on the Bus
made. The budget was not huge, the schedule short (18 days, necessitated not
only by the logistics of shooting on a traveling bus but by the need to have a
finished piece in time for the one-year anniversary of the march), and the
production difficulties potentially daunting. Sound mixer Tom Fleischman,
noting the run-and-gun nature of the shoot, said the finished result was more
like a documentary, grabbing sound and image on the fly and having to accept
whatever was captured. But it's that very quality that gives the movie its
appeal, and it opened to some of the best reviews of any of Spike Lee's films.
The downside is that it has often been overlooked, in no small part, perhaps,
because many people perceive it to be a documentary and not a reality-based but
completely crafted work of fiction.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Get on the Bus, however, is the way it was initiated and financed. Lee
had no thought of making a film about the march until he was contacted by
producer Reuben Cannon, who had a writer, Reggie Rock Bythewood (a former actor
who had written only for TV series up to this point) and the idea for the
story. Lee agreed, but only if it could be financed solely with
African-American funding. "When you think about the principles of the
Million Man March, that was right," Lee said. "Black seed investment
for a black business. I didn't want to approach the same people who had given
money to Malcolm X, so we made a new list." In addition to himself
and Bythewood, Lee got production investment funds from famed attorney Johnnie
Cochran; actors Wesley Snipes, Danny Glover, and Will Smith; and several other
black businessmen and financiers. In all, he raised $2.5 million, all of which,
thanks to pre-selling the finished product, was returned to investors right
before the picture opened.
Mike's Midnight Movie Reviews review
Harvey's Movie Review (Harvey O'Brien) review
Alex Christensen, The Magic of the Movies
Tucson Weekly (Stacey Richter) review
Get On the Bus - Vern's
Reviews on the Films of Cinema Vern's ...
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
'Get
on the Bus': How a Spike Lee Joint Captured the Spirit of the ... Elishia Peterson from Soul Train
The Z Review Michael Brendan McLarney
UTK Daily Beacon [James Palmer]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]
Movie Hell (Michael J. Legeros) review [B+]
Philadelphia City Paper (A.D. Amorosi) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Get on the Bus Movie
Review & Film Summary (1996) | Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
4 LITTLE GIRLS A 96
USA
A well-woven historical portrait of 4 girls blown up in a Birmingham,
Alabama church in 1963, showing her friends and family with their current
reflections interspliced with archival footage of what is believed to be a
turning point in Civil Rights history, causing the whole world to watch. Raw, very real, and profound, including a
haunting rendition of Joan Baez singing a Richard Farina song, “Birmingham
The dynamiting in September 1963 of a
Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama was a specially horrible addition to the
litany of racist horrors of the time, since it took place during Sunday school
and the victims were children. The big part of Lee's film commemorates the
lives of the '4 little girls' who died, through the memories of parents,
siblings and friends. A number of public figures, including a gaga George
Wallace, recall the wider civil rights struggle. A final section describes
the conviction, years later, of one of the killers, a merry-looking mannikin,
clearly out of his mind. Lee's tough decision to include photos of the victims'
smashed-up bodies was probably correct, but adding 'soulful' music to some of
the interviews was more questionable.
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith
Phipps]
4 Little
Girls, Spike
Lee's documentary about the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in
Birmingham, Alabama, opens with Joan Baez's recording of "Birmingham
Sunday" and the gravesites bearing the names of the four girls killed in
that bombing. That's all a lot of people know of the event, other than that it
served as a turning point in the civil-rights movement, and Lee's film attempts
to correct that oversight. 4 Little Girls tells the story in full, with
emphasis on the volatile environment leading up to the bombing. Martin Luther
King called Birmingham "the most thoroughly segregated city in the United
States," and within it, the 16th Street Baptist Church played a key role
in the mounting protests of the early '60s. Bombing it was meant to strike a
critical blow to the protesters, and part of the reason it didn't can be found
in the resilience evident in interviews with the victims' families and other
survivors. As emotional as most of them get, they also find a way to convey
their still-strong dedication to the principles for which the four girls served
as unfortunate martyrs. 4 Little Girls is an important act of historical
preservation, a focused and effective film that brings back a dark, important
moment in history with startling clarity.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Perhaps the strangest thing in Spike Lee's Oscar-nominated documentary '4 Little Girls' is the recent footage of George Wallace, the old segregationist himself, so enfeebled by age and his assassination-related frailty that Lee has to provide subtitles for his slurred speech.
Lee has shown us the famous footage of Wallace blocking the
school entrance (it's the same clip that appears in Forrest Gump), and
now Lee shows us an old man eager to seem misunderstood. Sitting at a desk with
a can of Diet Pepsi prominently displayed (what a product placement!), Wallace
keeps repeating that his best friend is black. "Ed," he beckons,
"c'mere. Been all over the world with him." Ed the black best friend
obediently stands next to Wallace, his expression faintly embarrassed. Spike
Lee stays off camera throughout 4 Little Girls (we hear him asking a few
questions), but I would pay good money to have seen his face when he was
interviewing Wallace.
The Wallace segment is part of Lee's condensed history lesson in the middle of 4
Little Girls, which begins with tragedy and then establishes the historical
context for it. As Joan Baez's cover of "Birmingham Sunday" plays on
the soundtrack, Lee pans across the graves of Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins,
Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley -- the girls who died in the bombing of
the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Denise was 11; the
others were 14. Four broken columns in a memorial represent four lives cut
short.
Aside from some Oliver Stone-ish touches -- abrupt fades to white; jittery
zooms into file photos -- Lee's style here is unflashy and uncluttered. He sets
a camera in front of his subjects -- survivors, friends and relatives of the
girls, activists and journalists -- and lets them talk, intercutting a generous
amount of newsreels and pictures. Some may debate Lee's judgment in keeping the
camera on a weeping relative for a few beats too long, or slashing us with
shock-cut morgue photos of the mutilated girls. But even these moments play
less as lapses of taste than as necessary, visceral reminders of the horror of
the events of September 15, 1963.
I don't really know why Lee interviewed Bill Cosby (he doesn't say much that
any of us couldn't have said), but the rest of his choices (including Wallace)
are impeccable. We listen to the deep sadness of Chris McNair (father of Denise)
remembering Denise's first encounter with racism, or the resigned grace of
Alpha Robertson (mother of Carole) renouncing any hatred of the man who killed
her daughter, and we may wonder if we would have the strength to endure what
they did. And such activists as Andrew Young and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth are
living history texts illuminating the fear and loathing (and hope) of the era.
If there were any justice, Lee would've taken home a statuette on Oscar night. His filmmaking here may be simple, but it has the beauty of simplicity and the shadings of compassion (an aspect that has brightened the often-overlooked recent work of this once-angry director). Aided by rich photography by Ellen Kuras (who shot, brilliantly, Tom Kalin's 1992 'Swoon') and a subtly moving score by Terence Blanchard, Lee has crafted a lovely piece of work about one of the ugliest chapters in American history.
4 Little Girls Movie Review & Film Summary (1997) | Roger Ebert
Spike
Lee's ``4 Little Girls'' tells the story of the infamous Birmingham, Ala.,
church bombing of Sept. 15, 1963, when the lives of an 11-year-old and three
14-year-olds, members of the choir, were ended by an explosion. More than any
other event, that was the catalyst for the civil rights movement, the moment
when all of America could look away no longer from the face of racism. ``It was
the awakening,'' says Walter Cronkite in the film.
The little girls had gone to church early for choir practice, and we can
imagine them, dressed in their Sunday best, meeting their friends in the room
destroyed by the bomb. We can fashion the picture in our minds because Lee has,
in a way, brought them back to life, through photographs, through old home
movies and especially through the memories of their families and friends.
By coincidence, I was listening to the radio not long after seeing ``4 Little
Girls,'' and I heard a report from Charlayne Hunter-Gault. In 1961, when she
was 19, she was the first black woman to desegregate the University of Georgia.
Today she is an NPR correspondent. That is what happened to her. In 1963,
Carole Robertson was 14, and her Girl Scout sash was covered with merit badges.
Because she was killed that day, we will never know what would have happened in
her life.
That thought keeps returning: The four little girls never got to grow up. Not
only were their lives stolen, but so were their contributions to ours. I have a
hunch that Denise McNair, who was 11 when she died, would have made her mark.
In home movies, she comes across as poised and observant, filled with charisma.
Among the many participants in the film, two of the most striking are her
parents, Chris and Maxine McNair, who remember a special child.
Chris McNair talks of a day when he took Denise to downtown Birmingham, and the
smell of onions frying at a store's lunch counter made her hungry. ``That night
I knew I had to tell her she couldn't have that sandwich because she was
black,'' he recalls. ``That couldn't have been any less painful than seeing her
with a rock smashed into her head.'' Lee's film re-creates the day of the
bombing through newsreel footage, photographs and eyewitness reports. He places
it within a larger context of the Southern civil rights movement, and sit-ins
and the arrests, the marches, the songs and the killings.
Birmingham was a tough case. Police commissioner Bull Connor is seen directing
the resistance to marchers and traveling in an armored vehicle--painted white,
of course. Gov. George
Wallace makes his famous vow to stand in the schoolhouse door and
personally bar any black students from entering. Though they could not know it,
their resistance was futile after Sept. 15, 1963, because the hatred exposed by
the bomb pulled all of their rhetoric and rationalizations out from under them.
Spike
Lee says he has wanted to make this film since 1983, when he read a New
York Times Magazine article by Howell Raines about the bombing. ``He wrote me
asking permission back then,'' Chris McNair told me in an interview. ``That was
before he had made any of his films.'' It is perhaps good that Lee waited,
because he is more of a filmmaker now, and events have supplied him a
denouement in the conviction of a man named Robert Chambliss (``Dynamite Bob'')
as the bomber. He was, said Raines, who met quite a few, ``the most
pathological racist I've ever encountered.'' The other victims were Addie Mae
Collins and Cynthia Wesley, both 14. In shots that are almost unbearable, we
see the victims' bodies in the morgue. Why does Lee show them? To look full
into the face of what was done, I think. To show racism its handiwork. There is
a memory in the film of a burly white Birmingham policeman who after the
bombing tells a black minister, ``I really didn't believe they would go this
far.'' The man was a Klansman, the movie says, but in using the word ``they''
he unconsciously separates himself from his fellows. He wants to disassociate
himself from the crime. So did others. Before long even Wallace was apologizing
for his behavior and trying to define himself in a different light. There is a
scene in the film where the former governor, now old and infirm, describes his
black personal assistant, Eddie Holcey, as his best friend. ``I couldn't live
without him,'' Wallace says, dragging Holcey in front of the camera,
insensitive to the feelings of the man he is tugging over for display.
Why is that scene there? It's sort of associated with the morgue photos, I
think. There is mostly sadness and regret at the surface in ``4 Little Girls,''
but there is anger in the depths, as there should be.
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4.5/5] also seen here: Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
CNN Interactive Paul Tatara
Memphis Flyer (Chris Herrington) review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Chris Pepus
In Brief: Spike Lee's
"4 Little Girls" - NYMag
John Leonard
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Todd LaPlace) review [4/5]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
4
Little Girls on a "Birmingham Sunday" - chimesfreedom
Interview: Four Little Girls Gary Susman (1997)
Philadelphia City Paper (Sol Louis Siegel) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
San Francisco Examiner (David Armstrong) review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
1963 Birmingham Church Bombing History Learning Site
Additional Information poem and historical review from Chicken Bones: A Journal
The 1963 Birmingham Church Bombing time line of events with available links
History of Church Fires: Six Dead After Church Bombing original story from The Washington Post, September 16, 1963
FBI reopens probe into 1963 church bombing CNN News, July 10, 1997
'Four Little Girls' takes director Lee into new territory Michael Okwu from CNN News, July 11, 1997
Church bomb felt like 'world shaking' Jeff Hansen and John Archibald from The Birmingham News, September 15, 1997
As Church Bombing Trial Begins in Birmingham, Past is Very Much Present Kevin Sack from The New York Times, April 25, 2001
Birmingham Bomber Bobby Frank Cherry Dies in Prison at 74 Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb from The Washington Post, November 19, 2004
‘Four
little girls’ killed in 1963 church bombing honored with Congressional Gold
Medal Scott Wilson from The Washington Post, May 24, 2013
Online archives Digital archives with photos and news stories from the Birmingam Public Library
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94640715 NPR audio report as father recounts the blast
16th Street Baptist Church bombing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
HE GOT GAME B+ 91
It
ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is
much more than that - for many young men it represents their only hope of
escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair. In The Last Shot, Darcy Frey
chronicles the aspirations of four of the neighborhood's most promising
players. What they have going for them is athletic talent, grace, and years of
dedication. But working against them are woefully inadequate schooling, family
circumstances that are often desperate, and the slick, often brutal world of
college athletic recruitment. Incisively and compassionately written, The Last
Shot introduces us to unforgettable characters and takes us into their world
with an intimacy seldom seen in contemporary journalism. The result is a
startling and poignant expose of inner-city life and the big business of
college basketball.
—Darcy Frey, book jacket from
the uncredited The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams, 1994
Spike Lee’s take on HOOP DREAMS (1994), an often amusing yet also dead serious message about how basketball is the new drug in the urban black community, as it can take you places you never dreamed or imagined. The amount of attention young black basketball players receive often begins in middle school, becoming an all-out war in high school of competing college interests, each one absurdly creating what they think is the right fantasy to feed into a young man’s imagination, including fast cars, women, and money, where legal and illegal incentives all weigh into the picture. A mix of gritty realism with fantasia and flashback, what truly sets it apart is the chosen use of music by Aaron Copland, which just feels like the heartland of America, traces of which could be heard in the orchestral music written by his father Bill Lee’s original soundtrack from Do the Right Thing (1989). In an extended opening credit sequence, Copland is heard over the opening montage that starts off as a reference to Hoosiers (1986), with white kids shooting baskets out in the middle of cornfields, but it slowly gravitates towards the more upscale suburbs and inner city playgrounds, where both Brooklyn and Chicago are duly noted, including the Brooklyn Bridge and the Michael Jordan statue outside the United Center, extending to the outer reaches of the country as well before a masterful crane shot takes us from the Atlantic Ocean to the housing projects in Coney Island to the concrete outdoor yards of the Attica Correctional Facilities that houses inmate Denzel Washington (sporting an Afro) as Jake Shuttlesworth. The music seems to have turned off many viewers, who prefer their basketball movies fast and freewheeling, more compatible with black music, but Aaron Copland, who happens to be white, Jewish, and gay, was born in Brooklyn where Spike Lee grew up, whose classical sound is expansive, grand, and eloquent, and may be the most American orchestral music ever written, incorporating jazz and folk into his music, literally liberating it from European influence, while also writing music for the film version of Thornton Wilder’s OUR TOWN (1940), a fictionalized portrait of small-town America. These references are not lost on Lee, who makes proudly American movies, suggesting basketball is as quintessentially American as cowboys or Abraham Lincoln.
Sports culture, if one follows the money, is a dominantly
male discussion in
Oddly enough, the plot bears a resemblance to John
Carpenter’s electrifying thriller Escape
from New York (1981), where Kurt Russell as prison convict Snake Plissken
is released from prison to perform a morally questionable, near suicidal
mission in exchange for the dubious government promise of his release should he
succeed, where the suspense is enhanced throughout by a diminishing time limit
that could produce fatal effects. Here
Jake is the convict, and his mission is to go into the projects of
The idea of pairing up Denzel Washington with a real NBA basketball player parallels a theme of social reality, which works brilliantly in the film, especially Allen whose shooting skills and talent on the court are indisputable, where Lee capitalizes on his natural grace and timing, turning it into cinematic poetry in motion. Real life coaches John Thompson (Georgetown), Dean Smith (North Carolina), John Chaney (Temple), Roy Williams (Kansas), Nolan Richardson (Arkansas) and Lute Olson (Arizona) appear on video to remind Jesus, “This will be the most important decision in your life,” which he hears a zillion times. While Lee is the credited screenwriter, his first since JUNGLE FEVER (1991), using actress Lonette McKee in both, he’s lifted more than a few pages from Darcy Frey’s book The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams, as both are set in and around Brooklyn’s Lincoln High School, each grounded in the game’s meaning and potential monetary significance to those living in the Coney Island projects, where basketball is both a trap to those who get injured or fail, and a ticket out to those few who succeed. The book follows three seniors and freshman Stephon Marbury, an eventual NBA all-star, where the others aren’t so lucky, as Darryl Flicking couldn’t pass the 700 SAT score needed to be NCAA eligible, becoming homeless afterwards where in five years he was eventually hit and killed by an Amtrak train. One of the other players currently works manual labor, where both the film and book expose the demeaning recruitment process, where teenage kids are tempted by the million dollar lifestyle of NBA stars (see a pulled from the headlines 2013 story where hotel, meals, and travel expenses, along with $20,000 were issued to a former coach to lure a college freshman player to an NBA sports agent: Kansas reviews McLemore coach allegations), where friends and family already have their futures lined up, completely dependent upon this kid’s potential future earnings, convinced he will make it, usually at the expense of his education.
Much of the movie’s tender and often heartwarming storyline is the friction that exists between father and son, the root of which is not initially known and slowly unravels through the use of flashbacks, but also the pressure that exists from being the best in the country, where so much is expected from you. Even if you keep your head and avoid the lure of temptation, those around you are more susceptible, where recruiters end up going after aunts and uncles or high school coaches, even girl friends, played here by a young Rosario Dawson. Everybody wants a piece of the gravy train, and no one wants to be left out, so they get their hands in early. But clearly, the film’s definitive mano a mano struggle is between Jake and Jesus (interestingly not named after the Biblical figure), both struggling with their own masculinity, where Jake’s dreams to succeed may have pushed Jesus too far in what amounts to bullying tactics, literally forcing him to succeed for the supposed benefit of the family, while Jesus completely rejects anything from his still incarcerated father, thinking of him as a stranger that no longer exists. Both are connected to a wounded past from which they haven’t recovered and both need to redefine themselves for the future if they ever expect to heal from past mistakes. Easier said than done, as this film suggests there are no easy answers, that the line between multi-millionaire and prison for a black man is a thin one, where a few split seconds in one’s life may make all the difference—but what a difference.
Black
Flix (Laurence Washington) review
He's at it again. Spike Lee is holding a mirror up to
society. Lee wants his audience to face facts. In his typical in-your-face
style, Lee's telling of college basketball recuiting shows that everybody is
shady.
Lee's story telling is tense, aggressive and true. Of
course the truth is viewed through Lee's camera lens, which is focused by his
subtle and often flashy internal perspective, but isn't that how every director
tells a story? So, like him or not, he's allowed.
Father/son relationships have come to
carry increasing weight in Spike Lee's
films, and this one exhibits a sober moral force. A convict, Jake Shuttleworth
(Washington), is unofficially paroled to Coney Island for a week. If he can
persuade his son Jesus, the hottest basketball prospect in the country, to sign
for the Governor's alma mater, Jake can get used to freedom. However, Jesus
(NBA star Allen) has his own agenda, and the man who killed his mother comes at
the end of a very long queue. The corrupt college scholarship system and the
business of sport in general gets surprisingly ambivalent, vaguely satiric
treatment - presented with these false profits and fast temptations, Lee puts
his trust in Jesus. Flashbacks to Jake's tough-love training sessions are
especially powerful, Washington exposing the aggression behind the
determination, but cumbersome subplots involving Jovovich as a hooker and
Dawson as Jesus' double-dealing girl don't help. Most scenes play too long,
with a surplus of ideas, textures, tones and characters, and after 134 minutes
it's clear Lee's problem with closure hasn't gone away.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5] also seen here: eFilmCritic Reviews
Flawed father figures are a recurring theme in Spike Lee's work. Think of the pizzeria owner Sal and his two sons in "Do the Right Thing," the uncomprehending dads in "Jungle Fever" and "Get On the Bus," the paternal but deadly crack lord Rodney in "Clockers," the musician struggling to support his family in the autobiographical "Crooklyn." Lee has had a tempestuous relationship with his own father, Bill Lee, a musician who scored Spike's early films; when Bill Lee got busted for heroin possession, he invoked his famous son's name to the police to get out of trouble.
He Got Game, Lee's 1998 film and one of his finest, feels
like a reconciliation of sorts. The story of a screw-up father and his
superstar son, it's perhaps Lee's most personal film since Crooklyn.
Denzel Washington is Jake Shuttlesworth, who's spent the last six years in
The hyperbole surrounding Jesus gets to be so intense it's funny -- though not
for Jesus, whom Lee presents as a martyr for the '90s. True to his name, Jesus
is being tempted right and left, and his indecision about which college he'll
attend is his way of avoiding, if you will, a crucifixion -- he won't be nailed
down. Movie directors as visible as Spike Lee has been may also feel crucified
by the media, betrayed by false friends who come sniffing around for money
(there's a montage of beggars who sound like people Lee may have dealt with).
Lee loves basketball, sees it as a graceful way out of the projects for many
African-Americans, but he's also all too familiar with the pitfalls of the
sports culture -- you'll recall him in the great documentary Hoop Dreams
advising athletes to use their heads.
As a filmmaker, Lee only gets better. The great young cinematographer Malik
Hassan Sayeed, with whom Lee has worked since Clockers, uses a saturated
and gritty palette to give the images a hyper-realistic texture. Lee doesn't
push as hard for effects now; he's mellowed -- Malcolm X marked the
beginning of a more mature and measured style -- and He Got Game is a
nimble and engaging work, with important scenes that feel casual and tossed-off
(that's a big compliment). He has also, thank God, dropped his curious habits
of having people walk down a street as if they were being pulled along on wheels,
and shooting entire scenes through a distorting lens (he uses that effect in
just two well-chosen shots here).
Casting the nonactor Ray Allen, a guard for the Milwaukee Bucks, was a major
risk that generally pays off. Allen is natural and low-key, if sometimes a
little too subdued in emotional scenes. His achievement is that he holds his
own with Denzel Washington, who should work more often with Lee; with other
directors, he can be a tad stiff and inexpressive, as if refusing to yield to
the poor movies (like Virtuosity and Fallen) he finds himself in.
Lee, however, knows how to deglamorize
He Got Game climaxes with Spike Lee's version of the Big Game in sports
movies: Jake and Jesus face off on the court, playing for Jake's future. Will
Jesus do the right thing? In the concluding scenes, Lee achieves his
reconciliation in an indirect way -- he tells us that even screw-up fathers can
teach their sons by being negative role models, examples of what not to
do. It's not much, but it's something.
The final sequence (which I won't reveal) isn't meant to be taken literally; Lee is saying that the ball is in Jesus' court, and that it's up to him to be the man his father couldn't be. In real life, Lee isn't only a disappointed son now; he's also a father himself, and the movie may be his acknowledgment that fatherhood is never easy.
The Myth of Macho: Denzel Washington - CraveOnline William Bibbiani from Crave Online
He Got Game - Deep Focus Bryant Frazer
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
Images - He Got Game Gary Johnson
Review for He Got Game (1998) - IMDb Scott Renshaw
Review for He Got Game (1998) - IMDb Alex Fung
Goal Tending - New York Magazine David Denby, also seen here: New York Magazine (David Denby) review
“He Got Game” - Salon.com Gary Kamiya
AboutFilm Carlo Cavagna, also seen here: AboutFilm.com
(Carlo Cavagna) review [B+]
Nick's Flick Picks review of He Got Game
World
Socialist Web Site review David Walsh
He Got Game - Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
He Got Game - Philadelphia City Paper Cyndy Fuchs
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Review for He Got Game (1998) - IMDb Ted Prigge
He Got Game - About The Story - Film Scouts conversation with the director and actors
Movie House
Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Review for He Got Game (1998) - IMDb Edward Johnson-Ott
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Cinema
in Focus (Denny Wayman and Hal Conklin) review [3/4]
Jesus vs. the Sneaker Pimps, Where Basketball Is a Religion ... Andrew Sarris from The NY Observer
Review for He Got Game (1998) - IMDb Paul B. Miller
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Review for He Got Game (1998) - IMDb Harvey S. Karten
He Got Game - QNetwork Entertainment Portal James Kendrick
A
Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
He Got Game | Spike Lee | Spectrum Culture Film Features ... David Harris
The Movie Report/Mr. Brown's Movie Site [Michael Dequina]
He Got Game | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule)
The Age review Philippa Hawker
He Got Game - Movie Lists - AMC Bradley Null
HE GOT GAME - Film Journal International Maria Garcia, feels more like a lecture than a narrative film
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Py Thomas
He Got Game | Movies Filmed on Long Island
Emanuel Levy Variety
The Globe and Mail review [2/4] Rick Groen
Baltimore City Paper: He Got Game | Movie Review Joe MacLeod
'He Got Game' - Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Products of the 'Hood - - Movies - Minneapolis - City Pages Leslie Dunlap
Austin
Chronicle [Russell Smith]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Peter Stack]
New York Times Janet Maslin
Kansas reviews McLemore coach allegations ESPN, May 6, 2013
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams: Darcy Frey ... Amazon.com
SUMMER
OF SAM B 87
Hello
from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine,
urine and blood. Hello from the sewers
of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the
sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in
the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed
in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks. J.B., I’m just dropping you a line to let you
know that I appreciate your interest in those recent and horrendous .44
killings. I also want to tell you that I
read your column daily and I find it quite informative. Tell me Jim, what will you have for July
twenty-ninth? You can forget about me if
you like because I don’t care for publicity.
However you must not forget Donna Lauria and you cannot let the people
forget her either. She was a very, very
sweet girl but Sam’s a thirsty lad and he won’t let me stop killing until he
gets his fill of blood. Mr. Breslin, sir, don't think that because you haven’t
heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather, I am still here.
Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest;
anxious to please Sam. I love my work.
Now, the void has been filled.
Perhaps we shall meet face to face someday or perhaps I will be blown
away by cops with smoking .38’s.
Whatever, if I shall be fortunate enough to meet you I will tell you all
about Sam if you like and I will introduce you to him. His name is “Sam the terrible.” Not knowing the what the future holds I shall
say farewell and I will see you at the next job. Or should I say you will see my handiwork at
the next job? Remember Ms. Lauria. Thank you.
In their blood and from the gutter “Sam’s creation” .44 Here are some
names to help you along. Forward them to
the inspector for use by N.C.I.C: [sic] “The Duke of Death” “The Wicked King
Wicker” “The Twenty Two Disciples of Hell” “John 'Wheaties” – Rapist and
Suffocator of Young Girls. PS: Please
inform all the detectives working the slaying to remain. P.S: [sic] JB, Please inform all the
detectives working the case that I wish them the best of luck. “Keep ‘em digging, drive on, think positive,
get off your butts, knock on coffins, etc.”
Upon my capture I promise to buy all the guys working the case a new
pair of shoes if I can get up the money.
Son of Sam
─Handwritten letter received by The Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin on May 30, 1977
In many ways this feels like a Spike Lee response to Martin Scorsese’s Italian working-class neighborhoods in Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Goodfellas (1990), gritty films shot on the streets of New York reflecting a daring authenticity, especially in the use of crude and profane language, where the word “fuck” is reputedly spoken 326 times, while the king of profanity, Joe Pesci, is nowhere to be seen in this film. While this could easily be seen as an extension of Do the Right Thing (1989), both shot in the sweltering heat of the summer, this is the first Spike Lee film to feature an all-white cast, delving into a distinctively Italian-American neighborhood in the South Bronx, interestingly set two years before 9/11 in the summer of 1977, a period of panic and distrust in New York City when David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz was going on his killing sprees. Eventually apprehended, Berkowitz was sentenced to 300 years in prison and remains behind bars. Ostensibly an exposé of a building paranoia where people end up being afraid to go outside, as entire neighborhoods are threatened, projecting their fear on outsiders, as the city comes under intense pressure to focus its attention on capturing a brazen, unseen killer that apparently lives in their midst. While Lee’s interest may have initially been upon the killer, whose violent outburst historically consumed so many people’s lives, where “Son of Sam” was the original working title, the script changed over time and focused more on the community, where Lee received plenty of negative feedback from the family members of several of the victims who were afraid of Lee’s overly sensationalized exploitation of such gruesome murders, thinking the movie might actually glorify the killer, while much of the actual production equipment was sabotaged during the shooting of the film with racist and anti-Spike Lee messages, where the community voiced their displeasure at being perceived in a negative light. All of this plays into a pervasive interactive mood of growing hostility where Lee interestingly combines the actual story of Berkowitz with fictional characters in order to recreate events that took place that summer, where the part of Berkowitz is a relatively minor character that is largely symbolic, who serves “mostly as a berserk metaphor for Lee’s view of the seventies as a period of amoral excess,” (Murray Pomerance, City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination), where apparently even Berkowitz has complained from prison about the film’s exploitation of “the ugliness of the past.” A companion to David Fincher’s ZODIAC (2007), the film’s underlying message appears to be a lynching parable, demonstrating how easy it is to erroneously rush to judgment, recreating a panicked lynch mob hysteria that recalls the Ken Burns documentary The Central Park Five (2012), but also earlier films, Stuart Heisler’s Among the Living (1941), William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), or even Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927). Roaming the streets for over a year seemingly at will, the serial killer only grew more brazen, leaving taunting notes for the police and press, triggering a fear and pandemonium in the city where people grew openly suspicious of anyone that was different.
Introduced by New York journalist Jimmy Breslin as one of the millions of
stories in the city of New York, this adds a Walter Cronkite touch from You Are There (1953 – 57), a television
news show that reenacted historical events, where the story of an unstoppable
psychopath on the loose, played by Michael Badalucco, is interspersed in
between newspaper headlines documenting one of the hottest heat waves the city
has ever experienced, including citywide blackouts, riots, looting, and another
Yankee pennant drive, with fingers of blame pointed in all directions, bringing
the city to a standstill. Into this
existing reality Lee introduces several fictional characters, including two
couples from the same neighborhood, John Leguizamo as Vinny, a hairdresser with
a roving eye towards the ladies, and Mia Sorvino as his beautiful but
all-too-nice wife Dionna who works as a waitress in her father’s restaurant,
both regulars in the local disco clubs, Summer of Sam Dance
SceneThere But For The Grace of ... YouTube (1:20), the place to be seen on
Saturday nights, where wide-collared shirts, bell-bottomed pants and lines of
cocaine intersect in a temporary escape from the doldrums of everyday
life. His best friend Ritchie (Adrien
Brody) is something of a hustler, initially seen decked out in all-punk attire,
even speaking with a phony British accent, but he’s just one of the guys from
the corner with designs on becoming a punk musician, soon hooking up with Ruby
(Jennifer Esposito), an attractive girl with a loose reputation in the
neighborhood who seems to overlook his ventures as a male dancer in a male
club, while also doing gay porno films on the side, thinking perhaps this
brings him closer to the performing side of the music business, where the
edgier and more off-the-wall the better.
While Vinny chides Ritchie for wearing a dog collar around his neck,
Ritchie caustically retorts, “You’re on a leash to a certain way of
thinking.” While Vinny regularly cheats
on his wife, his sexual needs are met elsewhere, especially with another
hairdresser, Gloria (Bebe Neuwirth), afraid to get down and dirty with his own
wife, feeling she is more of a saint for putting up with him. Like Harvey Keitel in Mean
Streets, Vinny’s repentant moral conscience is continually challenged
throughout by his unwavering unfaithful activity, where initially Lee intended
for Ritchie to be the lead character, but Leguizamo’s improvisational interest
captured his attention, as he seems to be the guy most affected by the
developing hysteria. Add to this mix the
rest of the neighborhood boys who comprise a kind of tragic Greek chorus, as
they become the voice of an inner consciousness gone wrong, reflective of a
racist Bensonhurst Italian-American mentality that
typically hates blacks and all outsiders, basically anyone that does not look
familiar, the site of an angry mob killing of Yusef Hawkins after initially assaulting him with
baseball bats in the summer of 1989, the third racially-motivated killing of a
black male by white mobs in New York City during the 1980’s, also including the
Murder of Willie Turks in Brooklyn (1982)
and Michael Griffith in Howard
Beach (1986). Like Scorsese before him,
or especially Do the
Right Thing, Lee delves under the surface of a different neighborhood,
conveying the agitated state of mind that might lead to repeated outbursts of
senseless violence, where in the manner of Fritz Lang’s definitive masterwork M (1931),
the bewildered police turn to the neighborhood crime boss (Ben Gazarra) for
help in finding the serial killer.
Written by the director in collaboration with Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli, who plays the part of Midnite, the gay club owner, the Son of Sam is initially seen alone at home in a frantic state, living in a dilapidated apartment, driven delirious by a barking neighborhood dog that he later believes is telling him to “Kill, Kill, Kill!,” shown in a mind-altering montage of hypersaturated colors with a surrealistic flourish, where it’s clear he’s been tainted by madness, narrating his disturbed thoughts as he prowls the neighborhood, killing unsuspecting couples that he catches necking in their cars, and then simply walks away, disgusted with the vile and revolting world he envisions around him, where he thinks of himself as a monster out of control, but he can’t stop himself, knowing he will kill again, leaving notes at the scene of the crime or writing letters to newspapers, taunting the police to make him stop. After a night drinking and dancing in the clubs where Vinny steps out briefly and cheats on his wife, they stumble upon a crime scene on the way home with two victims still in the car, their dead bodies untouched, where Vinny believes it’s a miracle it wasn’t him that was shot, as his little dirty business took place in a car nearby, where the killer could easily have gotten a good look at him. Believing God spared him this time, he vows to make the most of a second chance, promising to treat his wife better. Because the Son of Sam is known to target only brunettes, Vinny buys his wife a blond wig, which invariably turns him on and causes a sexual reaction where he is heard uttering the baffling words, “I feel like I’m cheating on you with you.” While it’s the era of the ultra chic and impossible-to-get-into Studio 54 and Plato's Retreat, a swinger’s sex club that catered to straight couples and bisexual women, Dionna goes along with the idea just to please Vinny, but he freaks out seeing her with someone else, blaming her for enjoying what was essentially his own guilty pleasure. She grows tired of his adolescent male tirades, incessantly blaming her for his own insecurity issues, eventually walking out on him. His own self-disgust parallels that of the killer, but in Vinny’s case, it sends him straight into the arms of the batshit guys on the corner, a bunch of knuckleheads ruled by rumor and innuendo who have witlessly been tabulating their own list of possible suspects from the neighborhood, which includes one of their own, Ritchie, whose deviant venture into punk rock and the squalid CBGB club is beyond their comprehension, deludedly thinking that he must be the killer, calling on Vinny to lure him out into the street. Driven into a state of frenzy by the nonstop media coverage, giving little thought to the idea that they could possibly be wrong, they instead roust incredulous suspects on the street with violent attacks, perpetrating their own brand of vigilante justice, as if they are ridding society of the bad elements, like a neighborhood watch group. Unfortunately they are driven by prejudice and hysteria, the preconceived venom that drives all lynch mobs, turning the end of the film into a bravura free-for-all led by the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” summer of sam (baba o riley) YouTube (4:04), which is itself a movie in miniature. Using rapid-fire cutting, slow motion, extreme close ups, oversaturated color, and overexposed film stock, Lee’s aesthetic draws attention to itself, where Ritchie performs a frenzied, diabolical ritual onstage, repeatedly stabbing a life-sized pillow dummy where the stuffing flies through the air in a maelstrom of confusion and mayhem, a visual mosaic that intermixes intoxicating scenes of New York, Reggie Jackson, and the killer himself, ultimately leading to a savagely grotesque beating that severely deviates from the jubilantly celebratory mood of the Yankees winning the World Series.
Lee himself makes an appearance in this film as John
Jeffries, a black TV news journalist sent into the front lines of the looters
and rioters, assembling his own Greek chorus, as we hear the voices of the
Bedford Stuyvesant community offer their views on the serial killings, speaking
directly into the video camera like a documentary film. The range of opinions includes those who
believe more blacks are killed on any given weekend than the sum total killed
by Sam, but in the modern world this is not considered a provocative enough
subject, just what passes for the ordinary, while another “thanks God” that it
is a white man killing white people instead of a black man killing white
people, as otherwise there would be the biggest race riot in the history of New
York City. This message is portrayed as
a film within a film, offering an angered “darker perspective” that becomes a
core reality, an underlying truth that remains hidden and out of sight from the
traditional thinking of the white neighborhood boys, but the looting taking
place before the cameras is an equally exaggerated and hysterical response to
the citywide blackouts. The city itself
fails to provide even the minimal standards of protection and service, allowing
rampant crime and spontaneous mayhem to rule the various neighborhoods of the
city, while the role of the media is simply to heighten the drama by creating a
feeding frenzy, taking an already incendiary situation and fanning the
flames. To his credit, Spike Lee shows
New York as a collection of separate ethnic and racial enclaves set in close
and uneasy relationships with one another, where an illusory peace exists only
so long as they don’t tread or trespass onto each other’s turf. These unwritten lines of demarcation define how
cities traditionally are formed, around racial and economic divides, creating
skirmishes and border wars that escalate over time as racial groups vie for
power and control. This is the same
territory of Lee’s Do the
Right Thing, now expanding into a different turf with much the same result,
as there is a similar breakdown of social order, fed by intolerant views of
bigotry and mistrust. Few urban
filmmakers are even exploring the impact of these invisible divides, where the
70’s was an era of white flight from the inner cities, but Lee makes it clear
both white and black communities can be destroyed from within by unwanted seeds
of destruction. Just as Radio Raheem
disrupts the unwritten rules of Sal’s pizzeria by refusing to turn the volume
down on his boom box, leading to a spontaneous race riot, David Berkowitz shows
a much more egregious disrespect for human life by perpetuating a series of
killings in his own neighborhood, which also implodes in similar fashion with a
volcanic eruption rising from within.
Much of the scathing criticism for the film stems from Lee’s depiction
of Italian-Americans as stereotypical caricatures, where they represent a
collective mindset as opposed to carefully constructed real-life characters,
but most everyone in the film, including Lee’s own portrayal of a fictional
reporter, are caricatures. What gets
lost is how this neighborhood group mentality reveals itself through
expressions that inadvertently reveal their own short-sighted views, like
“Bobby the fairy,” or “Billy the Jew,” where the heart of the film becomes this
choreography of the effects of an insular, xenophobic Italian-American
community in the Bronx. Lee's aesthetic
could hardly be called realist, but the significance of his work is inspired by
real-life events, which gives this film, even years later, a contemporary
context. Like Do the
Right Thing, Spike Lee depicts New York City as a melting pot ready to boil
over, where the film is less concerned with the psychopath than his
psychological effect on people living in New York City, especially the Bronx,
where the majority of the murders took place.
The lives examined have no direct ties to the killer or his activities,
but they are all profoundly affected by them.
Strands of neighborhood
discontent can ferment over time, but the root of the problem, maintaining the
racial and ethnic differences through continued geographical divides, where the
overriding concern becomes keeping others out at all costs, as if that is a
necessary condition for preserving the community, seems to have devastating
consequences. “That’s one of the
frailties of the human condition,” suggests Lee, where "People fear that
which is not familiar.” How do we get
past that? Like the historical moments of Selma (2014)
and Mandela:
Long Walk to Freedom (2013), but
also revelatory documentary exposé’s
like The
Central Park Five (2012) and The
Trials of Darryl Hunt (2006), Lorraine
Hansberry’s groundbreaking 1959 Broadway premiere of A Raisin in the Sun suggests that the intimate details of black
lives can have a profound effect upon overwhelmingly white Broadway audiences,
so long as they are rendered with a voice of honesty and authenticity.
From Hansberry’s
1969 autobiographical book To Be Young,
Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words:
25 years ago, [my
father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many
years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s
‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation's ugliest ghettos. That fight
also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile
‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… My
memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include
being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I
also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all
night with a loaded German Luger (pistol), doggedly guarding her four children,
while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington
court.
Time Out
review Geoff Andrew
This is less about the 1977 exploits
of serial killer 'Son of Sam' and more about the tensions that concurrently
arise in an Italian-American New York neighbourhood: not only does a local
Capo's decision to rid the 'hood of the murderous scourge through vigilante
methods foster paranoia, suspicion and violence, but the culture clash between
macho wiseguys and gays, disco straights and a punk just back from England
results in a scenario not so very different from Do the Right Thing.
Trouble is, the overlong narrative, however entertaining from minute to minute,
is a mess: Sam's (sometimes comically depicted) reign of terror sheds no light
on the dynamics of society at large, the characterisation is uneven, and there
are a few too many stereotypes on view for comfort - Italian-Americans,
especially, may not applaud the almost blanket depiction of them as violently
homophobic, misogynist boors.
Deep Focus (Bryant
Frazer) review [C+]
Spike Lee, one of the most consistently visionary American filmmakers, makes a sprawling mess out of the summer of 1977. The film's best scenes, like a fascinating take on the famous '77 blackout, aren't developed to their full potential, while the ostensible showstoppers, such as two sequences edited to great songs by The Who, fall odly flat. The resulting picture is all over the place -- I admire the hell out of Lee, and any new film he releases is surely an event, but I wonder if he'll ever reclaim the dead-on senses of place, character, and dramatic purpose that made Do the Right Thing a touchstone of contemporary American cinema.
Lee's premise this time out, one that's supported by people who actually lived through the events in question, is that the seemingly random rampage of David Berkowitz, better known as the Son of Sam serial killer, inflamed tempers and paranoia across all five boroughs of New York City. Set mostly among working-class Italians who eventually turn on one of their own, the film shows how fear and ignorance unite, with communities turning on themselves in times of crisis, looking for scapegoats.
Summer of Sam clearly wants to be a diffuse, Short Cuts-style portrait of the city in crisis, but the whole maelstrom in fact swirls around a young guy named Vinny (John Leguizamo), a well-meaning but impressionable and completely undisciplined hairdresser living in the Bronx. He loves his wife, Dionna (Mira Sorvino), but can't keep himself from cheating on her. He loves his best pal Ritchie (Adrien Brody), who has just returned from England with funny hairstyles and a faux punk attitude, but can't defend him against the venom spewed by the rest of the guys. In short, he's torn between allegiances to his newly outcast best friend and his neighborhood, to his wife and his dick. My main complaint was that, by the end of the film's 136 minutes, I was tired of watching him act like a dumbshit.
Vinny functions as the all-purpose spectator in the arena of social turmoil. Through his eyes, we see a nightlife where disco is king, where young brunettes wear blond wigs en masse (because the killer targets brunettes), and where punk rock is making an incursion on pop blissfulness. All these influences put pressure on his relationship with the patient Dionna, until he unravels completely after a night spent at a coke-fueled orgy.
But Summer of Sam gives us too much Vinny, especially when there are potentially fascinating subplots about, like the police investigation of the murders that has cop Anthony LaPaglia begging for help from gangster Ben Gazzara. The point is made -- even the mob is gripped by fear and disgust during this long hot summer. But the only consequence is a scene where a bunch of goodfellas spoiling for a fight with the killer wind up beating the hell out of an innocent motorist.
Apparently this was the worst of times, and it was the worst of times. While Summer of Sam shows us humanity at its lowest, it neglects to seek out goodness. You'd think stress and tragedy would inspire an occasional act of courage or selflessness, and the movie would have been bolstered immeasurably by just a little tenderness, reminding us what's in danger of being wiped out by our more base impulses.
Instead, it's ugliness from start to finish, punctuated by garish glimpses of the killer himself writhing around in his bedroom, threatening the neighbors and listening to a talking dog. We see him committing the murders, thick red blood flowing across the insides of car windshields, in a series of lurid inserts meant to demonstrate why these times were so frightening. Yes, they're the only real shock scenes he has, they serve as forceful punctuation for the story, and their impact is undeniable. At the same time, they dilute what Summer of Sam really aspires to do, which is to show the effect that Berkowitz's mere presence as a real-life bogeyman had on the rest of the city. This isn't a police procedural, nor was it meant to be. A more honest approach would be to forgo the sick fireworks, effectively silencing the killer's gunshots and amplifying the reverberations.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Summer of Sam (1999) Geoffrey Macnab from Sight and Sound, February 2000
New York City, the
summer of 1977. Bronx married couple Vinny and Dionna dance at a nightclub;
Vinny sneaks off to have sex with Dionna's cousin just near where serial killer
'Son of Sam' is about to kill another couple. On his way home with Dionna,
Vinny sees the victims and thinks Sam may be stalking him. Ritchie, Vinny's
best friend, has embraced punk rock; the local Italian-American guys think he's
a freak. Ritchie's stepfather tells him to move into the garage. He strikes up
a relationship with Ruby, one of Vinny's former girlfriends. Vinny claims to
love Dionna, but continues to cheat on her.
The police ask local
gangster Luigi for help in catching Sam. The city is sweltering and a lynch-mob
mentality is developing. Learning he's a dancer in a gay porn club as well as a
punk, the local guys decide Ritchie must be Sam. They try to get Vinny to help
them catch him. Meanwhile, Vinny's marriage is breaking up. Dionna moves out of
the apartment. Full of self-pity and high on drugs, Vinny betrays Ritchie to
the neighbourhood thugs who beat him up. Ritchie's stepfather rescues him,
telling the thugs that the real Sam, David Berkowitz, has already been caught
by the police.
Review
Summer of Sam, set in New York during the heatwave of
1977 when serial killer David Berkowitz was terrorising the city, has been
largely misrepresented by the press. A New York Times article in June
quoted relatives of Berkowitz's victims railing against its director Spike Lee.
"He feels that murder is entertainment," said one. Berkowitz himself,
now serving six consecutive life sentences, expressed his disappointment that
the film was raking up "what is best forgotten."
Berkowitz, however, is
only a minor player in the movie he helped inspire: Summer of Sam could
just as well have been called Summer of Reggie (while Berkowitz was on
his killing spree, baseball player Reggie Jackson helped the Yankees win the
World Series) or Scenes from an Italian-American Marriage. Lee's real
interest is in the relationships between members of a close-knit neighbourhood
in the Bronx. With tensions aggravated by the sweaty weather and the fear of a
serial killer in their midst, it's a community which is close to boiling point
- similar to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood in Do the Right Thing.
Lee captures brilliantly the creeping sense of paranoia that affected the city
and the strange, macabre thrill of having its own serial killer. (To avoid Sam,
who reportedly favours brunettes, women begin dying their hair blond or wearing
wigs.) With such craziness in the air, it doesn't even seem incongruous when
the killer begins to think a black labrador is talking to him, enjoining him to
"kill, kill, kill."
The film begins and
ends with veteran journalist Jimmy Breslin speaking directly to camera about
"the summer of Sam". His presence at once evokes the metropolis we
know from Weegee photographs and gritty cop dramas, and creates a strange kind
of nostalgia. In Summer of Sam, as in Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out
the Dead (set in the early 90s), we're seeing a New York which no longer
exists. Mayor Giuliani may have cleaned up crime (homicides are now at their
lowest since 1961, Breslin tells us) but he has also taken the heart out of the
city. But Summer of Sam also fits loosely into the serial-killer genre,
a line which stretches from M (1931) to Se7en. Several plot
points even rekindle memories of Hitchcock's The Lodger (1926): as the
lynch-mob mentality gets out of control, an innocent man is targeted simply
because he doesn't fit in.
Lee, who adapted an
original screenplay by Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli, isn't above
playing up the Italian-American stereotypes. Family loyalty and religious guilt
figure as prominently here as they do in Scorsese's movies. Well over two hours
long, Summer of Sam isn't taut, either. It is an ensemble piece full of
flamboyant minor characters (Tony Olives, Joey T), all of them played
beautifully but none developed in any great depth. Ben Gazzara's patriarchal
mobster has one big scene in a restaurant, but is barely glimpsed after that;
Bebe Neuwirth (Vinny's boss) and Patti Lupone (Ritchie's mother) seem similarly
underused.
Lee's focus is more on
Vinny's crumbling marriage to Dionna and his friendship with Ritchie. Mumbling,
cursing, intensely physical, John Leguizamo's Vinny comes across like a
diminutive version of Brando's Stanley Kowalski. Adrien Brody is equally
striking as the punk who wanders round New York "sounding like a British
fag," and looking as if he has just escaped from Carnaby Street. Berkowitz
then is only there to provide the historical context for what turns out to be
one of Lee's very best films - a sprawling, brilliantly acted character study
which touches on love, friendship and betrayal, while also managing to recreate
the last days of disco without a note of self-parody.
Summer Of Sam – Articles | Little White Lies Martyn Conterio
Spike Lee presents a teenage wasteland as the backdrop the story of one of America's most notorious serial killers.
Spike Lee’s 1999 film, Summer of Sam, saw fictional characters caught in the shadow of the very real .44 Calibre Killer slayings which came to a head in August 1977. David Berkowitz, a lonely postal worker, believed a talking dog ordered him to murder youngsters and dubbed himself 'the Son of Sam'.
Berkowitz, however, does not feature prominently. He’s a background figure. This is not a typical serial killer movie nor is it a study of madness. Lee, instead, explores a sense of collective panic among citizens. Summer of Sam is noteworthy, too, for the predominantly white cast – quite unique for a Lee joint in that period. The director cameos as news reporter John Jeffries, who in one comic scene, is accused by an elderly lady of not liking black people.
Lee chose writer Jimmy Breslin to introduce the picture. It’s a neat framing device. "Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls. I’m Jimmy Breslin. I’m a writer. I write about New York, the city of my birth and where I’ve lived and worked all my life. The city I love and hate both equally." The late 1990s was a time of optimism, but here we're invited to go back and take a look at a time when things were quite different.
The murders in the film exist as a sort of catalyst to subsequent events and their repercussions in the lives of four friends: Dionna, Richie, Ruby and Vinny. The killer is a bogeyman or a phantom haunting the midnight streets. His crimes force Vinny the philandering hairdresser into crisis mode whereas Richie ends up being accused of the crimes.
Lee is a New York filmmaker as much as Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen. Each have their own unique cinematic take on the place but Lee often presents his city as a powder keg environment where fear and suspicion threaten to inflame already fragile situations.
His reason for making the picture, which he intended only to produce at first, was his view the summer of 1977 was one of the city’s great stories. Lee, in interviews, described it as 'that crazy summer'.
The Italian-American community is depicted as racist and wary of other ethnicities. Their own grip on the situation slides and seen as an affront to their sense of identity and territory. The attitude is, 'This shouldn’t be happening in our neighbourhood.' The director used these notions and explored a community divided.
The stand out scene in Summer of Sam is a sequence cut to The Who’s classic 'Baba O’Reilly'. It begins with Richie (Adrien Brody), the burgeoning musician, putting on the record in his bedroom to enact a rock star fantasy. He stands with his Fender Stratocaster and mimes along. The music goes from being within to providing a soundtrack for a sequence of events.
Lee uses this musical cue to shift away from the young lad rocking out to grim, bloody reality as two lovers are shot while 'making out' in their car. This is a highly foolish thing to be doing given the current scare and targeting of these very people by Berkowitz. We see a man clamber out of his car and make a futile attempt at escape. He dies on the street covered in blood.
The montage, cut by regular Lee editor Barry Alexander Brown, builds up into a kaleidoscope of ephemeral moments, sometimes cutting back and forth around Richie at various junctures in his day-to-day existence. 'Teenage wasteland', sings Roger Daltry, a refrain that becomes both ironic and literal.
Despite the overt aesthetic flair in editing and music, there’s a documentary-journalism vibe at play within the images themselves – often shot handheld. We see people going about their daily lives which appear wrapped in drugs, gang violence and prostitution. This is a place devoid of community spirit and mired in the underbelly of life. Other segments introduce a guy shoot up in an alleyway.
Another neighbourhood local tokes a joint in the street with a Dead End sign comically situated behind him. We see Richie and Vinny (John Leguizamo) at a New York Yankees ball game (another NYC religion) and the dog Berkowitz thinks talks to him. The final image is of sweat-covered face – the murderer’s. A solitary drip from his nose acts as a cue to end.
As a further touch, the murder scene and select others utilise a swirling white light effect. This creates a strange sort of rock concert vibe. Interspersed are moments of Richie’s secret life, not only as a punk rocker, but male stripper and prostitute. We can see the character seeks solace in music and finds 'Baba O’ Reilly' to have resonance. He feels he belongs to the punk movement and it’s a world away from his inward-looking Italian-American neighbourhood.
Down the line this brings him into conflict with the local wiseguys who eventually accuse him of being the Son of Sam. Their deduction is based on him being a bit weird and having a Mohawk. In a final act of indignity, they get his best friend, Vinny, to lure him into a trap.
To provide context to the young couple slain, a television news report explains that last night a seventeen year old girl and twenty year old man were shot parked near a disco in Queens. This enables Lee to place the fictional elements of the montage in a loose time frame – the shooting of Sal Lupo, 20, and Judy Placido, 17, happened June 26, 1977.
In Summer of Sam emphasis is placed on how the murders affected the lives of people in the south Bronx and the city itself. Although not linked in any way to the killings both Richie and Vinny are near destroyed. It could well be the firebrand director’s most underrated film.
Spike Lee: Summer of Sam (1999) - Can't Stop the Movies Andrew Hathaway
That 70s Sequence: Remembering the Bad Old Days in ... R. Colin Tait from Cinephile
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review also seen here: Nitrate Online
Salon (Sarah Vowell) review also seen here: Vive la diffirence - Salon.com Sarah Vowell from Salon, June 30, 1999
Slate [David Edelstein] also seen here: Summer of Spam - Slate David Edelstein
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review
Movies 101 (Robert Glatzer) review
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Dust for Eyes
World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh, no film in recent years has created in me such a feeling of repugnance
CultureCartel.com (Jody Beth Rosen) review [3/5]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib, also seen here: Summer of Sam (1999). Director - Spike Lee. Son of Sam ...
indieWIRE review Danny Lorber
Political Film Society review Michael Haas
CNN - Review: Spike Lee's sizzling 'Summer of Sam' - July 6 ... Paul Clinton from CNN News
Summer of Sam Bursts With Trying to Be Important | Observer Andrew Sarris, also seen here: New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
Summer of Sam Review | CultureVulture Tom Block
TMe: Summer of Sam film review by Terrence Brady
blackfilm.com (Shelby J. Jones) review also seen here: July 1999: blackfilm.com presents "The Summer of Spike Lee" Shelby Jones from Black Film
Flak Magazine (Will Schmenner) review
Film Journal International (Ed Kelleher) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Michael S. Goldberger
Movie Magazine International review Heather Clisby
Kamera.co.uk review Andrea Henry
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2.5/5]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Summer of Sam (1999) – Movie Review | Andrew Geary
Spike Lee: Summer of Sam | Oeuvre - Spectrum Culture Danny Djeljosevic
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Ron Wells
Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [3.5/4]
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3/4]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [2/5] Lee has always had urges toward stylistic overkill, and here he goes right over the brink
The Spike Lee Joint Collection - PopMatters Jesse Hassenger, Blu-Ray, 4-disc
Spike Lee Joint Collection Vol.2 Blu-ray: Summer of Sam ... Blu-Ray.com, 4-disc
Summer of Sam - DVD Verdict Adam Riske, Blu-Ray, 4-disc
The Spike Lee Joint Collection, Vol. 2 (Summer of Sam ... William Harrison from DVD Talk, Blu-Ray, 4-disc
James Bowman review yet another mile-marker in Mr Lee's progress from interesting young filmmaker to boring commercial hack
MOVIE REVIEW: Summer of Sam -- Portrait of volatility - The ... Roy Rodenstein from The Tech (MIT), also seen here: The Tech (MIT) (Roy Rodenstein) review
Spike Lee's “Summer of Sam.” - Sean Munger
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]
Black Flix (Laurence Washington) review
Review: Todd McGowan's Spike Lee - Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard book review of Todd McGowan's Spike Lee, from Slant, February 26, 2014
Spike Lee Interview by Gerald Peary from The Boston Phoenix, July 1, 1999
Guardian Unlimited Interview November 18, 1999
eFilmCritic - The Spike Lee Interview Bill Baxter, December 4, 1999
Summer Of Sam Review | TVGuide.com
Variety.com [Todd McCarthy] also seen here: Review: 'Summer of Sam' - Variety
Summer of Sam is an almost boringly flawless portrait of a ... Alex von Tunzelmann from The Guardian
The film that made a serial killer weep Blaine Harden from The Guardian, June 25, 1999
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3/5]
Memphis Flyer (Susan Ellis) review
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Summer Of Sam Movie Review & Film Summary (1999 ... Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review also seen here: The New York Times Film Reviews 1999-2000 (pdf format)
Summer of Sam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
David Berkowitz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BAMBOOZLED
USA
Lee's satire on American TV is an
intriguing failure. Its story, about the mounting of a TV revival of a
blackface minstrel show, certainly has comic potential, and Lee has created a
considerable figure of fun in the isolated, central figure of Pierre Delacroix
(Wayans), the one black executive writer of the CNS network. Set against the
venality and shallowness of his ratings hungry boss Dunwitty (Rapaport),
Delacroix gains our sympathy. But, Lee also marks him as a sad dupe in sharply
funny scenes where homeless tap dancer Mantan (Glover) and his buddy Womack
(Davidson) are bamboozled by Delacroix and Dunwitty into playing frontmen to
stereotypical 'hill-niggers' and 'Alabama porch monkeys' for the pilot. It's
hard to know how to take him. The pilot of course is a hit, but success breeds
failure: conflict for Mantan and Womack, deep confusion for Delacroix, the
threatening attention of activists - and a loss of focus by the director.
The New Yorker: Richard Brody October 26, 2015
Spike Lee’s sharp, riotous satire, from 2000, zeroes in on the grotesque misrepresentation of blacks in American media—and their underrepresentation in the corporate offices that control it. Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is the sole black programming executive at a TV network. In order to prove his bosses’ obliviousness, he proposes a monstrous absurdity—a “Saturday Night Live”-style minstrel show, featuring black actors in blackface reprising vile stereotypes. To Pierre’s horror, the show is picked up and becomes a hit, restoring those stereotypes to popular culture. With a wide range of incisive, sardonic, hyperbolic humor and drama, Lee sketches the circular connections between racist images, racist policies, and the lack of leadership to resist them. The exuberant performances of the show’s stars—a comedian (Tommy Davidson) and a tap dancer (Savion Glover), whom Pierre has plucked off the streets—bring out Lee’s potent theatrical paradox. The pleasure of mocking stereotypes risks perpetuating them, which is why comedy—as embodied by the old-school comedians Junebug (Paul Mooney) and Honeycutt (Thomas Jefferson Byrd)—is, in Lee’s view, a high and serious calling. With Jada Pinkett Smith, as Pierre’s conflicted colleague.
Movie
ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
Discrimination between blacks and
whites in America today is as hot a topic as ever and Director Spike Lee takes
us on a psychedelic mind trip illustrating the complexities of Black-White
interactions with Bamboozled.
Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayons)
is a creative writer for a cable TV station managed by Dunwitty (Michael
Rapaport).
Dunwitty is looking for material
that will shock audiences to improve ratings (à la The Jerry Springer Show).
Delacroix initially comes with an idea for a show, Mantan: The New
Millennium Minstrel Show, where Blacks dress up in Black Face and satirise
racism, but the audience appear to miss the point and the humour generated
makes Delacroix and his show famous. Driven by greed for fame and fortune, he
ignores the racist implications resulting in disastrous consequences.
The message the movie appears to
be telling us (in the way Delacroix intended to do) is that almost all Black
entertainment today is made to satisfy the White majority. The movie also
directly implies that the mostly-White executives who control the Entertainment
channels support Black entertainment mostly in a condescending manner, one that
isn't that much different from Slave-era treatment of Blacks.
These are all powerful statements
to make and Spike Lee argues for their truth (quite convincingly) through this
role-reversal story where economics, class, and race intermingle in a complex
manner. I recommend checking Bamboozled out if you have the patience for
dialogue.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Bamboozled (2000) Xan
Brooks from Sight and Sound, May
2001
New York City, the present. The
only black executive at television network CNS, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans)
is pressurised by his white boss Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport) to devise a new
hard-hitting, trend-setting series. Aided by his sceptical secretary Sloan
(Jada Pinkett-Smith), Delacroix dreams up a satirical spoof of the old
black-face minstrel shows, which he hopes will backfire on the network in
general and Dunwitty in particular. Delacroix recruits two street buskers,
Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson), as the stars of his show,
renames them Mantan and Sleep'N'Eat and has them black their faces with cork.
Delacroix is taken aback when the
series, entitled Mantan - The New Millennium Minstrel Show, becomes a critical
and commercial success. Sloan begins an affair with Manray, while Delacroix is
lavished with awards. But the minstrel show has its critics, notably New York's
black activists and the militant gangster-rap group Mau Mau. Riddled with
self-disgust, Manray breaks down before the live studio audience and is thrown
off the set by Dunwitty's henchmen. Outside Manray is abducted by Mau Mau who
later execute him live on the internet. Grief-stricken, Sloan storms
Delacroix's office and shoots him dead.
Review
Spike Lee's Bamboozled
takes its title from a Malcolm X speech ("You've been led astray, led
amok, you've been bamboozled"). It arrives dedicated to Budd Schulberg,
writer of Elia Kazan's 1957 media satire A Face in the Crowd
(apparently one of Lee's favourite films). A kamikaze assault on racial
stereotyping, the picture polarised opinion in the US, where the internet
journal Salon called Bamboozled "a near masterpiece"
while prominent film critic Roger Ebert concluded that "Spike Lee has
misjudged his material... The power of the racist image tramples over the
material and asserts only itself." In a sense, both judgements are valid.
Yes, Bamboozled is a picture of genuine importance. Yes, it is
also crude, unstable and hazardous. In teasing and taunting the audience, it
often ends up bamboozling itself.
On the face of it, Lee's
intentions are clear enough. Shot on fuzzy-edged digital video, Bamboozled repackages
100 years of media stereotyping and rams it back down our throats.
Significantly, the film bows out with an extended montage from Hollywood's hall
of shame (archive footage from Birth of a Nation, 1915; the
glimpse of a corked-up Judy Garland; a black-face Bugs Bunny). But its
present-day setting drives home the point that little has changed. Lee's
broadsides at "Timmi Hillnigger", a pale-faced clothing mogul, and
white television network bigwig Dunwitty, the wannabe home-boy who's "keeping
it real", hint at an Afro-American culture that's been co-opted and
corrupted by the white establishment. More crucially, his Mantan - The
New Millennium Minstrel Show, a ghastly exercise in retro-racism -
commissioned by black executive Delacroix - in which black-face clowns gambol
around a watermelon patch, can only be intended as a one-step-removed satire on
mainstream media as a whole. (In recent months Lee has lambasted the depiction
of Afro-Americans on primetime television and in such Hollywood pictures as The
Patriot, The Family Man and The Legend of Bagger
Vance.)
But there is danger here too. For
while Lee is intelligent enough to realise that the situation is more complex
than a simple them-against-us showdown, he's not quite rigorous enough to force
this line of reasoning towards a satisfactory dramatic conclusion. One of the
film's key points, for instance, is the way in which black America is at least
part-way complicit in its ruin. The first person to applaud the Minstrel
Show is a black audience member, while the militant rap act Mau Mau turn
against the show only after they've failed an audition to appear on it.
Meantime Delacroix, played by Damon Wayans, is revealed to have run from his
roots and affected an over-formal diction that annoys his father, an old-style
Harlem comedian ("Nigga, where the fuck did you get that accent?").
And yet Wayans' protagonist is left frustratingly vague: a plot pawn, a random
mouthpiece. Is he motivated by greed, naivety or a desire to sabotage the
system from within? It's never made clear. In acknowledging black culpability,
Lee so dazzles himself that his film subsequently loses its bearings.
Judged on sheer voltage and
ambition, Bamboozled ranks among the director's finest pictures (Malcolm
X, Do the Right Thing), while its best spells evoke the
pitch and panache of Ralph Ellison's landmark novel Invisible Man
- a broad and bawdy call to arms. But the tale finishes up as a fascinating,
unresolved tumult. In one key scene, Delacroix is spooked by his "Jolly
Nigger Bank", a racist antique which begins feeding itself of its own
accord. Bamboozled is a lot like that itself. What we have here is a
mischievous cinematic play-thing; at once mocked and mocking, and more than a
little out of control. Undeniably it is Lee who lets it out of the box and
first sets it moving. But by the end you can't help but wonder whether it is
still him who's working the controls.
The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]
What better title than Bamboozled for a film in which the most electrifying dance numbers since the days of Vincente Minnelli occur within an updated minstrel show and feature a tap-dancing shaman with dreadlocks flying around his corked-up black face, a fast-talking sidekick (also a black actor in minstrel makeup), and a chorus line of coons, mammies, and pickaninnies? The sequence is so deliriously transgressive, and its ironies so tricky to unpack, that it puts the preachy satiric narrative in which it's framed to shame.
Bamboozled may prove to be Lee's most controversial, least commercial film. It's also a seriously schizophrenic work made up of two incompatible movies. One—a terrifying nightmare in which the confusion between identity and stereotype leads to martyrdom and murder—is affecting but underdeveloped, its potential undercut by the more dominant film, a justified but overly reductive attack on the television industry for its degrading representations of African Americans and on the audience that swallows the racist brew and begs for more.
Lee has never made a secret of his anger toward In Living Color. In part, Bamboozled is an act of revenge on the show and on one of its creators and stars, Damon Wayans, who's made to pay for his success in more ways than one. Lee has done Wayans no favors by casting him as Bamboozled's snobbish, confused, and cowardly protagonist, Pierre Delacroix, a Harvard-educated television writer. Pressured by his white boss (Michael Rapaport), whose blacked-up pose he despises, to write a cutting-edge series, Delacroix finds his inspiration in Amos 'n' Andy and The Jeffersons. His program, Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, set in a watermelon patch and starring "two real coons," Mantan and Sleep 'N Eat, is so tauntingly racist that he expects to be fired for insubordination. Instead, the show is a huge hit. Delacroix pockets his check, but his repressed rage and guilt drive him over the edge.
Wayans hasn't a clue how to play a character as cerebral and alienated from himself as Delacroix, and Lee gives him no help. Wayans's performance is so one-dimensional, stiff, and monotonous that it could hurt his career. It also nearly destroys the movie. As his assistant, Jada Pinkett-Smith is burdened with an unlikely character arc; she begins as the voice of moderation and ends as a combination of Cassandra and Antigone. It's a punishing role, though not as humiliating as that of Verna (Gillian Iliana Waters), the Jewish publicist (a female version of the music promoters in Mo' Better Blues) who only exists so Lee can take some anti-Semitic potshots.
If Bamboozled's primary story line is clumsy and badly acted, the subplot involving Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson), homeless street performers who become overnight sensations when Delacroix casts them as Mantan and Sleep 'N Eat, is extremely moving and filled with possibilities. The movie comes to life in the backstage scenes, where they look at themselves in the mirror as they coat their faces with cork, paint their lips fire-engine red, and try to swallow their dismay at what they have to do to earn a living. Mantan's stardom enrages the Mau Maus, gangsta rappers with stereotypes of their own to account for. Eventually, the Mau Maus (whose members include Mos Def and Canibus) hijack the movie and turn it into a tragedy in cyberspace or maybe inside someone's psyche. Narrative consistency is not Lee's strong suit.
On the other hand, iconography is. Lee is unparalleled among American directors in his talent for seizing upon hot, subversive images and having the guts to put them on the screen. The black collectibles that line Delacroix's shelves, the montage of Hollywood classics in which racist stereotypes were taken for granted, and, most of all, the minstrel show itself make Bamboozled a scary movie indeed. For the performers—Manray, Womack, Junebug (Paul Mooney), and Honeycutt (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), whose "niggers is a beautiful thing" routine boggles the mind—the minstrel show is an exorcism, and their discovery that the studio audience views it as mere entertainment is the first step in their coming to consciousness.
Bamboozled itself has the feel of an exorcism. Lee, whose own hands aren't completely clean (what about the booty call in He Got Game?), gets the demons out in the open. He isn't always in control, he doesn't think through the contradictions, but he reminds you that movies have power, that they matter, and for a few brilliant moments, Bamboozled matters more than any other American movie this year.
The Observer: Andrew Sarris October 09, 2000
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]
The House Next Door: Jason Bellamy in conversation with Ed Howard
Reverse
Shot: Michael Koresky July 12, 2007
DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review
Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover and Bill Chambers
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [3.5/5]
Flak Magazine (Sean Weitner) review
DVD Talk (Chuck Arrington) dvd review [5/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B]
Spike Lee on Race and the Idiot Box | The New York Observer Andrew Sarris
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman
3 Black Chicks...Review Flicks Rose “Bams” Cooper
hybridmagazine.com review Matt Block
Movie-Vault.com (Morgan Goldin) review
3 Black Chicks...Review Flicks Kamal "The Diva" Larsuel-Ulbricht
Exclaim! review Erin Oke
The
Christian Science Monitor: David Sterritt
Film Journal International (Chris Grunden) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4.5/5] Ron Wells
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review also seen here: Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
Kamera.co.uk review Monica Maurer
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [3/5]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/5]
The
Man Who Viewed Too Much: Mike D'Angelo
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Political Film Society review Michael Haas
PopcornQ review Q Syndicate
Movies 101 (Robert Glatzer) review
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum capsule
DGA Interview Interview by Darryl L. Hope from DGA, November 2000
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
The San Francisco Examiner: Wesley Morris
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
Facing Blackness (book): Ashley Clark excerpt from the book, Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled,
by Ashley Clark, from the Ebert site, October 20, 2015
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
25th HOUR A 97
USA (135 mi) 2002 ‘Scope
A personal and poetic response to the lives of those 9/11 victims, whose lives will be forever entangled in that one event, where everything changed after that day, where the future was no longer the future, where hope disappeared, where all the things that could have happened would, for certain, no longer happen. In an instant, it was taken away. Watch the last 10 to 15 minutes of the film, certainly one of the most extraordinarily powerful sequences I've seen in years.
A bold, beautifully filmed, raw and poignant look at the underbelly of America, as seen through some of the soiled and seamy lives of a few individuals in NYC, all searching for redemption, for another chance to do it right, with some terrific performances all around, but easily what is most powerful are the poetic references to 09-11, and how the strength of the characters is so indelibly rooted to NYC.
This film accentuates neither black nor white, but focuses on human beings, as if the collective sum of the consequences of their individual choices represents a vision of a newly developing morality...
“...this
life came so close to never happening”
In a brilliant and unparalleled ending, what a searing sequence of images, so exquisitely haunted by the chilling reminder of the unspoken, unseen ghosts of those missing lives, and the lives that will never be, filled with such an appreciation for life, that continually promises a world that might have been, before reminding us, instead, with a kind of effortless sock-in-the face, of how frail and vulnerable we really are, particularly in the aftermath of 09-11, despite our swaggering bravado.
This is a farewell to freedom, from the world we once thought we knew, revealing instead such a powerful portrait of people struggling to overcome their own personal traumas, both internally and externally. This is a shining testament to the resiliency of the human soul, as what we have, finally, is a work of art, a film that achieves a moving and enduring spirit of humanity.
Also, a few differences between the book and the film. In the book Monty drives a corvette, he's 27, it's his last night before prison, there's no bullpit jokes, the 4 DEA agents are all white and they don't catch Monty and Naturelle in the bath tub. Naturelle is a long distance runner, not a basketball player, which of course Spike couldn't help changing. But overall the movie is fairly faithful to the book. The Victoria Secret joke is there, Naturelle has the Puerto Rican flag tattooed on her ankle, the teacher is in the 62nd percentile. One interesting difference is the 3 options speech of the trader. In the book option number 2 was the trader blatantly imitating suicide putting his fore-finger to his temple and squeezing his thumb down, while in the movie it was taking a bullet with his teeth. Does suicide need to be softened for the masses? The fuck you speech, which is on pages 111- 113, goes on a bit longer and his fucks directed at the Knicks and Michael Jordan were of course purged by ardent court-side Knicks fan Spike. The student's tattoo was on her wrist rather than her navel, tho her teacher does ask her what her mother's reaction was to it. And the teacher stares at her white knees thru the holes in her jeans rather than staring at her bare belly. The crying after sex anecdote is told in a slightly different context. Monty's seduction of Naturelle is much more prolonged and involved. The end monologue doesn't include Naturelle, instead he mates with the bar owner's daughter.
This is the last day of freedom for
convicted drug dealer Monty Brogan (Norton). His best buddies Jacob (Hoffman)
and Slaughtery (Pepper) rally to show him one last night on the town, with or
without Monty's girlfriend Naturelle (Dawson), who may or may not have shopped
him to the cops. Terrified of what awaits him, and ashamed of his past, Monty
has no appetite to settle any scores - he just has one more favour he wants to
ask of his friends. Working from a script by David
Benioff based on his own novel, Lee is in 'director for hire' mode, though
New York stories remain his speciality. That special relationship with the city
probably accounts for the picture's doomy ambience, an undertow of melancholy
resignation doubtless magnified by the unscripted intrusion of 9/11. The Twin
Towers are a lacuna overshadowing Monty's relatively trivial fate. Rodrigo
Prieto gives the visuals a sombre lustre and Lee fashions numerous
striking, eventful scenes, but while 25th Hour has a several arresting
characters struggling with credible problems, regrettably Monty isn't one of
them.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Whether you love or
hate Spike Lee's movies, they're not sellouts -- even a didactic, hectoring
bummer like 'Jungle Fever' or 'Bamboozled' has integrity.
In 25th Hour, perhaps
Lee's most consistently compelling work since 1995's Clockers,
protagonist Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) spends his last day and night of
freedom before reporting to prison for a seven-year stretch. Monty got where he
is (in both senses -- a fancy car and a prison term) by dealing drugs. Yet we
see no drug deals in the movie. There are guns and thugs, but no shootouts.
There are flashbacks, but they serve only to flesh out Monty's life -- what
he's losing -- before this day and night. 25th Hour, written by David
Benioff from his novel, stays almost exclusively with Monty as his moments of
freedom tick away.
Part of what Monty is losing is New York, the city he loves, and Spike Lee is
not one to ignore 9/11's impact on the city. Two of Monty's friends -- Wall
Street hustler Frank (Barry Pepper) and schoolteacher Jacob (Philip Seymour
Hoffman) -- sit and talk, in a very long unbroken shot, in front of Frank's
window overlooking Ground Zero. "Bin Laden can drop another bomb right
next door; I ain't moving," says Frank, exemplifying the movie's (and its
director's) philosophy of pride and defiance in the face of disaster. Shooting
for the first time in widescreen, and aided by the deservedly hot
cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros, Frida, 8 Mile), Lee gives
us sprawling and heartfelt panoramas of the great city. Accompanied by his dog,
Monty sits on a bench staring out at the river; you know he's memorizing the
view.
Frank, Jacob, and Monty's girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson) take Monty out
for one last night on the town, and the mood is jocular yet muted, the
atmosphere heavy with the unspoken. Monty, who seems to be known and respected
everywhere, puts on a half-hearted show of indifference, but inside he's
terrified and furious at himself. Earlier, having dinner with his father (Brian
Cox) at the old man's bar, Monty goes to the bathroom and is set off by an
obscenity scrawled on the mirror; he launches into a stream of invective
(understandably but wrongly attributed to Lee, it comes right out of Benioff's
book) that savages everyone in New York -- strangers, friends, family -- and
finally turns viciously onto himself. In the highlight of this tense, angry
performance, Norton makes us see how love can flip into hate: He rails against
New York and everyone in it because he no longer belongs there.
Monty's dog is about the only one who loves him without complications. Frank
tells Jacob that, as much as he loves Monty, he deserves to be sent up. Jacob
is preoccupied with a Lolita-esque student (Anna Paquin) in his English class;
she tags along with Monty's group for a night at the club, and her teasing of
the flustered Jacob -- almost forcing him to act on his heavily repressed lust
-- is another of those unwatchably painful Philip Seymour Hoffman moments. In
general, Lee doesn't jump around much; he keeps the camera glued to Hoffman or
Pepper or Dawson long enough to poke the truth out of them. This director has
always given his actors room to breathe, create, surprise themselves.
In the gloomy dawn before his seven years begin, Monty goes about giving up
what little he has left, even his looks. Monty's dad offers to drive him to
prison, then starts talking about possibilities. I won't give it away, but it's
the most heartbreaking alternate-universe riff since the dead child really
grew up to be an Olympic-class swimmer in Stephen King's Pet Sematary.
But the movie insists on reality,
and '25th Hour' makes for a fine bookend piece to Lee's 'Clockers,' which also
considered the drug-dealer formula: You get caught or you get killed.
Everything else is details.
25th Hour Hour Glass, by Chris Fujiwara from the
The main idea of 25th Hour
is so strong, I almost wish it had been protected from Spike Lee’s mind. But if
it’s to Lee that this film owes its crudeness, unevenness, and stridency, it’s
also to him that it owes much of its emotional force.
The story unfolds on the last day
before Monty (Edward Norton), a successful drug dealer who’s been caught by the
DEA, must report to prison to serve a seven-year sentence. Because Lee and
screenwriter David Benioff (who adapted his own novel) take their time about
making Monty’s predicament explicit, the tension and sadness get a chance to
exist on their own. At its best, 25th Hour is a film of moods, where
what’s not expressed is more important than what is. Much of the dialogue consists
of avoidance maneuvers by which Monty and those close to him — his girlfriend
(Rosario Dawson), his father (Brian Cox), and his two best friends, Frank
(Barry Pepper) and Jake (Philip Seymour Hoffman) — circle around the hopeless
reality.
The film is immersed in New
Yorkishness. The main titles appear over a romanticized nocturnal Manhattan
skyline. Lee takes us on a tour of Manhattan: an esplanade along the East
River, the trading floor of an investment bank. The narrative is filled with
the kind of chance encounters whose possibility is so important to city life:
Monty picking up a wounded dog, a prep-school teacher and his student running
into each other outside a club. And New York multiculturalism is a big part of
the movie too: Monty visits his dad’s "Irish" bar, mixes with Russian
and Ukrainian gangsters, and has a Puerto Rican girlfriend.
It’s in trying to make New York
an explicit theme rather than a pervasive presence that 25th Hour goes
wrong — disastrously. The sight of the words "Fuck you!" scrawled in
the corner of a bathroom mirror in a bar touches off a long rant in which Monty
says "Fuck you" to everything that bothers him about New York:
Pakistani cab drivers, Korean grocers, gay men, and so on, each target
appearing on cue in a montage of snapshots of stereotypes. No doubt Lee wants
to shock us viewers out from behind our PC cover and get us to admit that we
all view people as stereotypes. But he makes it too easy for us to reject
Monty: the stereotypes are all images that would flash inside the skull of a
rich white heterosexual male New Yorker with no political awareness. By the
time Monty reaches "Fuck Osama bin Laden," Lee’s presumption of a
visceral response from the audience is as unpleasantly clear as the irrelevance
of the scene (or the response) is to the main concerns of the movie.
The next low point comes in a
scene in Frank’s high-rise apartment. The camera creeps up to Frank and Jake
and tilts down, revealing a perfect view of Ground Zero through the window.
(Juxtaposed with this image, the Middle Eastern vocal in Terence Blanchard’s
terrible score can only be heard as a reference to al-Qaeda.) The use of Ground
Zero as a backdrop for the friends’ bad faux improvised dialogue is
insulting. It’s irrelevant to the scene, which is itself gratuitous (reviewing
Monty’s situation, the two men merely state things the audience already knows
or can figure out). I suppose both this scene and the bathroom-mirror one can
be defended as "essayistic" and "Godardian" — as if Lee
were making a movie about whatever’s on his mind. But no essay should be as
exploitative and pretentious as this one, or, for that matter, as the unctuous,
overwritten encomium on rural America, recited by Brian Cox as if he were
narrating a Chrysler industrial, that mars the film’s striking conclusion.
If in spite of everything 25th
Hour is affecting, that’s partly because there are some fine performances,
especially Norton’s, and because the terrible energy of the theme of Monty’s
last night of freedom charges the atmosphere of the film’s best section — a
long sequence in a nightclub. The narrative flow is casual and evocative, and
Lee’s pace is relaxed enough to let him revel in an extended-time shot of Anna
Paquin’s high-school student, moisture glistening on her Ecstasy-sensitized
skin, moving across the room as if she were picking her way over the bodies at
an orgy. The sequence, combining a sense of pleasure in spending time with the
haunting awareness that time is being wasted, is the heart of the film, and by itself
it justifies 25th Hour.
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Monty
Brogan is a drug dealer. Recently pinched by the Drug Enforcement Administration,
he now faces a seven-year stretch in jail in Upstate New York, and the day
before he's to leave for prison, he reevaluates his life by visiting old
Manhattan haunts, connecting with family and friends and speculating as to who
set him up with the DEA. Spike Lee's "25th Hour" follows Monty
through this day-in-the-life, one tinged with almost tragic fatalism: He is
convinced he won't survive in prison, that young, handsome men like him are
walking targets for sexual predators, and his terror leads him to consider
suicide or running away forever from the life that he's built.
Such
is the premise of "25th Hour," a film that turns out to be much more
than the sum of its parts. With supreme control and restraint -- two qualities
the director hasn't always exhibited even in his finest work up to now -- Lee
delves deeply into Monty's shame and self-loathing, his relationships with his
father, friends and lover, and the existential dilemma of a man whose once
bright future is now a bleak smudge in his mind. Suffusing the entire drama,
both as a backdrop and as the warp and weft of Monty's guilt, is the film's
setting of New York immediately following the events of Sept. 11, 2001 -- a
city knocked back on its heels, in deep mourning and shock.
Surrounded
by the street reliquaries of flags and Xeroxed photographs that stood not just
for death and suffering but for heroism and survival, Monty feels that he has
betrayed not only those he loves and his own promise, but an entire city whose
ruins surround him as a collective rebuke. Among its many artistic
achievements, "25th Hour" arrives as the "Rome, Open City"
of post-9/11 New York, at once a neorealist, small-scale drama in the tradition
of Rossellini and De Sica and a movie that soars into dizzying visual heights. Like
"Gangs of New York," to which it makes a perfect historical bookend,
"25th Hour" swings for the fences and just witnessing Lee's assurance
and courage in making it is as rewarding as the always absorbing results.
Based
on David Benioff's novel of the same name and adapted for the screen by the
author, "25th Hour" pulls off the extraordinary feat of making
moviegoers identify with a morally corrupt protagonist without asking them to
like him. Edward Norton delivers an unshowy but brilliantly calibrated
performance as Monty, who has slipped into dealing presumably as the path of
least resistance. During brief flashbacks the audience sees that he conducted
his business in the pseudo-friendly, low-key way that allows dealers and users
to believe they're not hurting anybody, least of all themselves.
Also
in denial are Monty's beautiful girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), his
father, James (Brian Cox), and his best friends, Jakob (Philip Seymour Hoffman)
and Frank (Barry Pepper). Jakob, who now teaches at the prep school the three
friends attended, has been too wrapped up in his own fears and obsessions --
currently having to do with a flirtatious student played by Anna Paquin -- to
confront Monty on what he does for a living. Frank, a stockbroker, is more
outright hostile: Although he wants to be there for Monty on his last free
night, he admits that he thinks his friend deserves what's in store for him.
Through
its series of confrontations and encounters, "25th Hour" examines the
moral implications of Monty's plight, but often viewers find themselves
listening in on banal barstool exchanges between young men -- about girls,
about money, about sex and careers. Then, just when the audience is lulled into
thinking "25th Hour" is another quirky, observant little movie about
the way people behave, Lee delivers a scene of breathtaking intensity. Monty's
visit to the bathroom of his father's saloon ends with him yelling at himself
in the mirror in an anti-New York rant that turns into an aria of enraged
self-hatred. (It's like the montage of invectives from "Do the Right
Thing" recapitulated by Eminem and Tom Wolfe.)
Later,
Jakob and Frank engage in a petty argument in front of Frank's living room
window, which overlooks Ground Zero. It's a "hill of beans" moment,
one that recalls Bogart's line in "Casablanca" and reminds viewers of
the disproportionate scale of Monty's suffering. In his now-signature style,
which combines realism with bold, Brechtian breaks with the linear narrative,
Lee continually punctuates the action onscreen with surreal shots of people
moving dreamily through space or, as with the film's penultimate sequence,
highly pitched representations of Monty's inner life.
Soaked
with the mournful gravitas of last looks and long goodbyes, "25th
Hour" never tips its hand as to where exactly it's going; Lee works up an
almost excruciating sense of tension and foreboding as Monty approaches dawn.
Benioff's script is suitably subtle and allusive, its digressions artfully
drawing the audience further down its mysterious path. Lee's congenital
literalism -- in the past often expressed in a tendency to be too on-the-nose,
too polemical -- here serves him well, as he penetrates ever more deeply into
the music and meaning of every scene. He has elicited consistently
extraordinary performances: Norton takes hold of his character with the
intelligence and focus we now expect from this gifted actor, but don't overlook
Hoffman (in whose hands a simple sigh becomes an exhalation of deep anguish) or
Dawson and Pepper, who keep their characters' motivations always a little bit
unclear.
Working
with cinematographer Rodrigo Pietro, Lee uses his characteristic palette of
varying film stocks to create a movie whose very surface is alive with grain
and texture; his longtime composer, Terence Blanchard, has composed a
magnificent score that achieves the intimacy of Leonard Bernstein's music for
"On the Waterfront" (listen to the piano that accompanies the early
scenes with Monty and Naturelle) and the exalted emotion of Aaron Copland,
whose music accompanied the moving opening sequence of Lee's "He Got
Game." Reaching back to such mentors as Martin Scorsese -- whose
"Taxi Driver" and "Last Temptation of Christ" are paid
homage here -- Lee has nonetheless created a movie very much his own, one that
aches with the pain of his times and pulses with the rhythms of his city. But
with "25th Hour" Lee is not content to create merely a New York
portrait, although surely from this quintessential New York filmmaker that
would be welcome enough.
In the
startling, unforgettable masterstroke that concludes the movie, Lee starts out
by paying homage to one man's home town, but he slowly turns that gesture into
a hymn to America, in all its restless energy and outlaw spirit, its love of
reinvention and its seductive, elusive dreams. With the small story of a
relatively seedy character, Lee has created that rarity in filmmaking: a movie
we need, right now.
Spike Lee's "Uniquely American [Di]vision": Race and Class ... Ivan Cañadas from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2009
Feeling
the Unthinkable | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 16, 2003, also
seen here: The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Reverse Shot:
David Ehrlich May 01, 2013
DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter) review [5/5]
Slate (David Edelstein) review
25th Hour | Film Review | Slant Magazine Chuck Rudolph
Forum:
25th Hour / The Dissolve discussion
between Tasha Robinson and Mike D’Angelo, February 24, 2015
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]
filmcritic.com (Amit Asaravala) review [4.5/5]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
Ruthless Reviews review Erich Schulte and Matt Cale
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
CultureCartel.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [1.5/5]
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [A]
stylusmagazine.com (Jen Cameron) review
A Film Odyssey [Robert Humanick]
25th Hour · Film Review 25th
Hour · Movie Review · The A.V. Club
Keith Phipps
eFilmCritic.com (Robert Flaxman) review [5/5]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Kamera.co.uk review Tim Smedley
Movie-Vault.com (Scott S.) review
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [A] also reviewing HEAVEN
DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [4/5]
The Lumière Reader » Film » In Appreciation: 25th Hour Alexander Bisley
Slant Magazine Chuck Rudolph
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [5/5] G. Allen Johnson
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Scott Von Doviak
hybridmagazine.com review Mike O’Connor
Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Talking Pictures (UK) review Raffi Asadi
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3/4]
Film Journal International (Daniel Eagan) review
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
CultureCartel.com (Brandon Curtis) review [4/5]
blackfilm.com (Wilson Morales) review
eFilmCritic.com (John Rice) review [5/5]
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [5/10]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]
CineScene.com (Nathaniel Rogers) review
The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Exclaim! dvd review James Keast
Harvey S. Karten review [3.5/4]
25TH HOUR - DVD Walter Chaw from Film Freak Central, years later revising his views: Film Freak Central review
Movies 101 (Robert Glatzer) review
Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]
review Janet Maslin’s review of David Benioff’s book 25th Hour, from The New York Times, January 22, 2001
interview Box Office He Wants, Not a Drink, Charlie Leduff interviews Edward Norton and Spike Lee, including his use of post 9/11 images, from The New York Times, December 15, 2002
Spike Lee vs. Kenneth Lay and Mullah Omar. - By James Surowiecki ... I Hear New York Ranting, from Salon, January 9, 2003
Cinema Gotham: 25th Hour Spike Lee Interview DVD Talk, January 16, 2003
Ghosts of New York | Culture | The Guardian Danny Leigh interviews Lee from The Guardian, April 11, 2003
The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Rick Groen
Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
25th Hour Movie Review
& Film Summary (2003) | Roger Ebert January 10, 2003
25th Hour Movie Review
& Film Summary (2003) | Roger Ebert December 16, 2009
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
Spike Lee's Ode to New York City: Fuck You, from "25th Hour ... YouTube (5:06)
SHE HATE ME
USA (138 mi) 2004
Sometimes, there's nothing you can do
but sit and stare in disbelief as something very ugly unspools before your
eyes. Lee's latest is a horrific misfire in which he tries to deal with all the
Big Issues of modern America but ends up knee-deep in a mire of non-sequiturs,
iffy sexual politics, bad acting and a woeful script. Lee's noble mission is to
sweep through his twin themes of corporate and sexual corruption in the person
of Jack Armstrong (Anthony
Mackie), a high-flying biotech executive who valiantly spills the beans on
his company's misdoings. It's an obvious echo of the Enron scandal, and the
early moments of the film in which Jack negotiates the corridors and corporate
dialogue of his company are promising, even if David Bennent's diminutive
German scientist, Dr Herman Schiller (who leaps out of window and dies on a hot
dog stall), are a little troubling. Is this bad acting, we wonder, or are we
meant to feel the alienating chill of the corporate world? It's when Jack loses
his job that you begin to wonder whether someone has spiked your popcorn with
LSD. His girlfriend Fatima (Kerry
Washington) - now a lesbian - arranges for Jack to impregnate her partner and
other willing lesbians for $10,000 a pop, (going to a sperm bank would be, in
Fatima's words, 'like shopping for Gucci at Wal-Mart'). Animated sequences even
show us Jack's sperm, while a series of women groan and shriek beneath him.
Clearly, all that these lesbians need is a good shag from a potent male
high-flyer. Add to this some awkward flashbacks in which Lee parallels Jack's
story with that of the Watergate whistleblower Frank Wills and what you have is
a startling mess.
Exclaim! review Liz Clayton
Everybody wants to make their "evils of America"
movie these days and it seems Spike Lee couldn’t help but toss his ball cap
into the ring. "But why be simple?," Spike must’ve asked himself. Why
restrict this movie to a mere roasting of corporate wrongdoing and abuse of the
public trust and the common man seen through the lens of — who else? — a hard
done by African American male? And why not make that altruistic, righteous
whistleblower brother exceedingly well hung and, hilariously, in high demand by
a bevy of silky, purring, uber-feminine non-white lesbians looking to become
fertilised? Wait, this is too streamlined — what about if we throw in a Mafia subplot
for fun, cashing in John Turturro’s marquee while we’re at it?
When Lee made Do the Right Thing 15 years ago, with its rich caricatures of
racial extremes in fever-pitch Brooklyn, his tendency towards the wide-tipped
sketch of ethnic stereotyping was somehow forgivable, daring and part of the
appeal. As Mr. Lee nears 50, however, his broad strokes instead begin to
frighten. Within the first half-hour of She Hate Me’s desperately directionless
two-hour-and-18-minute racist and heterosexist tailspin, this horrifying
thought occurs: Spike Lee might actually think he’s being a reasonable
filmmaker here. He might actually think he’s being funny.
Instead of delivering a movie that makes sense on any level or actually jostles
any of the paradigms it seeks to attack — white corporate greed, the family
unit, the judicial process — Lee has run roughshod through a series of
disjointed sexual fantasies, whiney vignettes of black-suffered injustice and
an appalling paean to some kind of sick virile black hero fantasy that Lee
himself is about as likely to come close to as Spongebob Squarepants.
Along the way, Lee manages to insult whites, blacks, Jews, Latin-Americans,
Italians, straight women and especially lesbians, who in his fucked-up dream
world consist almost exclusively of totally hot, sweet-smelling femmes who just
happen to have a real weakness for big black dick. (In the interest of
equality, Lee tries once again to be funny by forcing his protagonist to
impregnate an entire team of butch rugby dykes, showing he’s heard of, cough,
both kinds of lesbians.) Also, all the lesbians have sex with one another as if
they were straight.
This movie should be career suicide — from its basic total ignorance to its
rubber Nixon masks, sperm cartoons, hackneyed dialogue and lead-footed
preachiness, but the only world sadder than the one She Hate Me portrays is a
world that might actually not hang this small-minded, insulting, out of control
filmmaker out to dry.
Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [0.5/5]
The politest way to assess Spike Lee’s latest polemic is to call it too ambitious. "An unholy mess" might come closer to the truth. Or how about a staggeringly confused amalgam of sex comedy and corporate drama that would be insulting if it weren’t so relentlessly silly? She Hate Me’s first point of interest is the professional downfall of Jack Armstrong (Mackie), a young VP at a biotech company who gets sacked for being a whistle-blower. The film then awkwardly segues into sexual hijinks, in which Jack – now unemployable – earns $10,000 a pop for providing sperm to a ravenous pack of lesbians. "Providing sperm" is a rather clinical way to describe what goes down: The lesbians, to a one, eschew the turkey baster route for an old-fashioned roll in the hay with the strapping Jack, and – even more absurdly – to a one, they all get their jollies in the process. Sure, Lee’s looking for laughs here, but there’s something so misguided, not to mention delusional, in his utterly male-centric understanding of a lesbian’s interest in the sex act with a man. When the lesbians – coarsely hollering for Jack to "show us your tube steak!" – demand that he strip naked for their inspection, one suspects that the filmmaker is trying to address sexual objectification in a way that Girl 6 did. But female sexual politics has never been Lee’s strong suit (see the aforementioned Girl 6 or even his provocative debut, She’s Gotta Have It), and he doesn’t fare any better with female homosexual sexual politics. Defenders of She Hate Me (an incredibly exclusive club, I imagine) might argue that to nitpick about Lee’s depiction of lesbians is to miss the larger picture, but I’d argue Lee’s vision is just myopic. His most prominent lesbians stomp around in stilettos (when they’re not lounging in lingerie) and speak to Jack in a perpetual come-on coo, whereas his corporate figureheads are slick, smarmy caricatures. Maybe the one-dimensionality of his characters is meant to achieve a fabulistic effect (especially when Jack links his plight to that of the security guard who busted the Watergate scandal wide open), but the execution is lacking, to say the least. And what the hell is John Turturro doing wandering in for a nonsensical cameo as luscious-lesbian Monica Bellucci’s mafia don Daddy? There are bright spots throughout – Q-Tip as an affable buddy with underachieving sperm, Terrence Blanchard’s lush score (even if it lends a heavyweight feel the film hasn’t earned), and one of Lee’s signature stylish montages, in which the expecting mothers howl in quick-cut labor pains. But the stilted Mackie, who must carry the film through its heavy-handed Enron-like plot and into its preposterous pregnancy gaffes, never connects. A stronger, more likable leading man might have been able to keep the film afloat, but I doubt anyone could save She Hate Me from its off-the-deep-end coda, in which Jack forcibly inserts himself, via deep-tonguing, into a lesbian dynamic. The larger point of She Hate Me, I gather, has something to do with personal responsibility and America’s worship of the almighty dollar (the opening credits end on a $3 bill with Bush’s dumb mug grinning down on us). But good luck ferreting those messages out from under the unsubtle stiletto heel of Lee’s man-hating/hetero-sex-loving lesbians, and from under the iron-fist of his numskull sexual and social moralizing.
Review:
She Hate Me - Film Comment Nathan
Lee, July/August 2004
Jack Armstrong never met a lesbian he didn’t fuck. It began
with his closeted ex-fiancée Fatima (Kerry Washington), who, on the eve of
their wedding, tossed their marriage bed with girl-on-girl action. Skip ahead a
couple years, and Jack (Anthony Mackie) is the vice president of Progeia, a
pharmaceutical company on the verge of launching an AIDS vaccine. Shocked out
of his complacency by the flamboyant suicide of a colleague, he decides to blow
the whistle on his company when he stumbles over financial malfeasance,
effectively blacklisting himself from corporate
A dozen other dykes needing tykes do not balk, however. Escorted by
maternity-pimp
What in GLAAD’s name is going on here? By conflating corporate and familial
accountability, Lee attempts to critique the hypocrisies of a commodified
culture. “We’re a family, and family protects its own,” warns Progeia honcho
Margo Chadwick (Ellen Barkin none-too-subtly made up like Martha Stewart).
Having betrayed the tribal code, John is cast out and discredited, his
scandalous sideline pressed into service for character assassination. In a
country where three out of four African-American families are fatherless, he’s
just another “nigger dropping babies all over the place,” per the black sec
agent who arrests him. Pardon my secular libertarianism, but thatâs ridiculous.
Setting aside the fuzzy logic behind all this old-school babymaking, Jack’s
clients negotiated a specific service on their terms, including generous
compensation (cold cash, hot snatch) and a contract relieving him of any future
responsibility. Whatâs the problem? The problem is that Lee (together with
co-writer Michael Genet) concur with the SEC scold and have no qualms
dismissing the notion of lesbian autonomy in order to make a point about male
accountability. Wracked with guilt (“I’m going to hell for this”), Jack makes
amends by inserting himself into Fatima’s and Alex’s lives, a contractual
revision he negotiates by inserting his tongue down their throats. Granted, by
refusing to label her sexuality, the
Thus does the brazenly titled She Hate Me lurch to a resolution so
willfully confrontational you might suspect Lee of being profoundly sarcastic.
But that doesn’t account for the stillborn subplots (Monica Bellucci as the
daughter of liberal Mafia don John Turturro), clumsy speechifying (listen up!
Circa Clockers, Lee defended himself against charges of homophobia in
the pages of The Advocate. “I’m sick of this fucking bullshit,” he said.
“I think people are free to pursue whatever they want to” (unless it’s an
unqualified pursuit of the same sex, evidently). Would he ever address
African-American homophobia in a film? “I don’t know that I’m capable of doing
it,” he admitted, “I don’t think I have the knowledge.” He was right.
New York Blade Online Rachel Kramer Bussel, July 23, 2004
She Hate Me :
DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Kim
Morgan
Reverse Shot review Michael Koresky
not coming to a theater near you review Rachel Lears
He's Gotta Have It - Movies - Village Voicepage 1 - Village Voice J. Hoberman from The Village Voice
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Some lesbians hate "She Hate Me" - Salon.com Gary Younge, August 16, 2004
Baby Shower |
The New Yorker Anthony Lane,
August 2, 2004
Film Freak Central review Bill Chambers
Looking Closer (J. Robert Parks) review
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Jason Whyte) review [4/5]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Political Film Society review Michael Haas
hybridmagazine.com review Nathan Baran
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
blackfilm.com review Wilson Morales
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web showing the IMDb ratings for Spike Lee films
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3/5] Michael Ferraro
Exclaim! dvd review Graham Duncan
Film Monthly Article Paul Fischer in Spike Lee/She Hate Me Interview, July 26, 2004
BBC: Calling the Shots Interview by Stella Papamichael from the BBC, September 2004, including a continued discussion about Lee’s film SHE HATE ME: Read Spike's views on the movie
Guardian/Observer
Variety.com
[Scott Foundas]
Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review D. Parvaz
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
INSIDE MAN B+ 92
USA (129 mi) 2006
Beginning with a Bollywood sounding opening song, adding a cultural universality which plays in perfect precision to a distinctive New York City montage, while Clive Owen, a criminal mastermind in close up, confesses to a perfect crime, apparently from a prison cell. So the entire film may be playing back in flashback mode. Opening in the theaters at the same time as another thriller, V FOR VENDETTA (2005), it’s interesting that both use a similar plot device in the commission of a crime, here the bank robbers wear sun glasses and masks, and dress all the hostages up in the exact same masks and jump suits that they are wearing while V improbably sends his Guy Fawkes mask to everyone in London to thoroughly confuse the police establishment, in each case allowing the criminals to perfectly blend in to the crowd. This has the makings of another bank heist caper, and even pays homage in the script to DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975), but this one surprisingly has other hidden motives buried beneath the layers of the 9/11 rubble, namely the politically connected cover ups of New York City’s finest, who conveniently make deals to keep the real problems from ever surfacing.
Denzel Washington plays another cocky police officer who makes a living as a smooth-talking hostage negotiator. In what appears to be an homage to SHAFT (1971), he keeps his girl friend simmering in the sheets while he’s out taking care of the city’s business, matching wits with the bad guys. Here he’s under police investigation on a drug case that’s suspiciously missing $140,000, but due to a convenient police personnel absence, he’s called into action on a bank heist in progress with hostages. Once this makes the news, Christopher Plummer, the bank CEO, a financier with something to hide, goes into action to protect his interests which are contained in a safety deposit box, calling in a mysterious, ultra-professional Jodie Foster, a shadowy figure who greases the wheels for the super rich and either clears the way for what they want or makes their problems disappear, all for huge sums of money. The rest of the film unravels through various hierarchies, as there’s a chain of command in place at every level, the perpetrators of the crime, and those responsible for providing law and order. The objectives of both remain obscure and unclear, covered up in a politically recognizable public persona that we all see on TV, where motives and explanations remain fairly standard, while their real purpose remains secretive and hidden and may never see the light of day. Anyone getting too close is either transferred, fired, or their careers ruined. In this film, Washington’s cop mixes it up with some pretty exclusive company.
While the thriller aspect of the film is well-made, suspenseful, and holds our interest throughout an anxious 24-hour day, from the morning of the heist until the next morning, with a few bleached out interrogation scenes, it’s the unpredictable people factor that rises above other similar films, such as the story of the beat cop who discovered the robbery in progress, who later tells Washington the story of how a gun was first pointed in his face, using pointedly racial imagery, or the actions of the police SWAT team, treating all innocent hostages just like criminals, especially those fitting Arabic profiles, or an interesting turn of events which requires, of all things, an Albanian translator, who negotiates her services only if her basketful of parking tickets can disappear. These little slice of life interludes humanize this otherwise typical genre film, where the sounds of the street, which Washington distinguishes himself by being so much in touch with, rises to an art form, while the clueless and out of touch language of the rich white suits at the top, such as the interplay between the mayor, Foster, or Plummer, remains a vague, empty aspect of the film that borders on stereotype and challenges credibility, interfering with the intelligence and skillful pacing that is established throughout. However, the coolness factor of both Owen and Washington is superb in a test of wills between two indomitable characters, while brewing just under the surface are wheels in motion where they could easily fly off the handle at any second, yet both maintain a charming wit and calm that perhaps no one else in the business could provide.
Time
Out London (Ben Walters) review
At first glance, a bank heist movie
seems an odd choice for Spike Lee:
there’s never been reason to think the notorious provocateur would be
interested in a genre outing. The set-up seems to offer an explanation: four
robbers enter a Manhattan bank and instigate a lock-down with military
precision, taking hostage several dozen staff and customers. A cross-section of
the city in mortal peril in a fortress of capital – what better vessel than
this microcosmic pressure cooker for one of Lee’s excavations of racial and economic
tensions in contemporary New York? But no. What follows is neither indictment
nor satire, but a slick, kinetic and relatively straightforward – which is to
say enjoyably twisty-turny – tranche of cat-and-mouse procedural. And given
Lee’s decidedly mixed recent output (‘She Hate Me’, ‘25th Hour’), that’s no bad
thing.
The face-off is between hostage negotiator Frazier (Denzel
Washington, noble as usual but affable and short on pomposity) and
unflappable lead robber Dalton (Clive Owen,
remarkably compelling given that his motivation and face are concealed for most
of the movie). Russell
Gewirtz’s screenplay offers no surprises but it’s satisfyingly
head-scratchy throughout, from its choppy chronology to the ambiguous roles of
supercool fixer Jodie Foster
(unusually perky) and bank boss Christopher
Plummer (usually reptilian). The narrative ducking and diving leaves room
for a few Lee-style asides – a Sikh complains of chronic harassment – but
nothing that adds up to a social argument. Like Dalton, Lee executes his
mission with aplomb, even if his motivation remains a little less clear.
Inside Man Chris Fujiwara from the
The kind of intelligent
entertainment that has not been Hollywood’s specialty for the past 40
years makes a comeback in the directorial hands of Spike Lee. Confounding all
the expectations that could be formed for a movie in which, as a press release
put it, “a tough cop, Detective Frazier (Denzel Washington), matches wits with
a clever bank robber, Dalton (Clive Owen), in a tense hostage drama,” Inside
Man is neither a formula commercial project nor the kind of cynical
exercise that comes to life only in marginal winks and flashes. Lee and
screenwriter Russell Gewirtz have made a film in which pleasures, tensions, and
calculations that would be peripheral (at best) in a standard heist movie
become central. And though some reviewers have claimed to find Lee at his most
impersonal here, this is, I think, a genre film of the best kind, in which the
personal style of the filmmaker functions with peak conviction, audacity, and
assurance. The only thing missing is the hammering stridency that has marred
even Lee’s best joints.
The plot is clever enough, and
Lee pays it just the right measure of respect by playing it from the points of
view of professionals for whom twists and turns are normal business:
Washington’s smooth hostage negotiator, Owen’s calm and ambiguous criminal
strategist, and an angular fixer (Jodie Foster) who descends on the crisis in
order to retrieve the safe-deposit box that proves to be the heisters’ main
object. Lee’s masterstroke is to treat the plot as a pretext for an alluring
and absorbing interplay of attitudes. This interplay becomes epic, in his
typical manner, by taking in differences of race, gender, power, and language.
As hyper–New York as anything he’s done, Inside Man works as a
complicated street dialogue in which people improvise their way through one
confrontation after another, glad of opportunities to deploy their wit and
their private obsessions.
Lee gets away with a high quota
of visual bravura — relentless panning, complicated convergences of characters,
mixed color schemes, cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s yen for reflective
surfaces — by making atmosphere, balance, and contrast his priorities. It’s a
film with a lot of pieces, and each one falls right. This neatness is also a
limitation: Inside Man doesn’t touch the deeper commitments and
uncertainties that make for high tragicomedy (as in the film’s obvious model,
Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, which it namechecks), and the story’s
hint at moral substance (in connection with the tainted past of Christopher
Plummer’s bank executive) is just a formality. The film operates within a world
view that makes behavior and competence all-important. But since it also makes
them interesting, it is, on its own terms (which are far from shabby), a
complete success.
Inside Man Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Inside Man is sharp, slyly hilarious, directed with an almost ruthless efficiency, and manages to smuggle in some pointed commentary on racism in the U.S. So why am I having such a hard time coping with the fact that I loved it? As many other reviewers have already noted, it's possible to consider this Lee's least personal film. (Some have even gone so far as to call its "jointness" into question. Yikes.) This is accurate up to a certain point, but who else but Lee would take such obvious pleasure in (for example) decking Denzel Washington out in a ridiculous white linen suit, or implementing an ambiguous flash-forward structure that at first blush serves to make his quick-witted black cops (Washington and Chiwetel Ejiofor) look like smarmy, trash-talking assholes? (It's no wonder Lee took a liking to a script like this, with its family resemblance to certain aspects of Clockers.) And of course, there's the ever-present "people-mover" shot, utterly unmotivated and as delightful as one of your uncle's corny, inappropriate old jokes. Even the resolutely Spike Lee touches that other commentators are (as usual) finding "obtrusive" work in this context. At first I wasn't convinced by Matthew Libatique's jittery cinematography, but it actually operates in a lock-groove with Terrence Blanchard's score. The overall style functions as a kind of bridge between contemporary TV police procedurals and the films and TV of the 1970s, especially the Sidney Lumet canon. The step-printing, the changing film stocks, all of these cheap tricks of the "C.S.I." empire, actually coalesce into something defiantly old fashioned. Lee's attention to the specific spatial parameters of New York City street life certainly helps. As Libatique's camera skitters across the crime scene, Blanchard's blaring horns recall the theme from "Kojak." It's a trip, and Lee never misses a beat, taking his cues from a deft, wise-ass script by tyro scribe [I've always wanted to use that silly phrase] Russell Gewirtz, previously of, um, the TV show "Blind Justice." (Apparently Gewirtz lost his sight, but not his vision. . . .) So Inside Man is an expertly crafted if frivolous entertainment, the best of its kind I've seen in quite some time. So why am I experiencing inner turmoil? It's not just that I'm not sure this is the kind of production I think Spike Lee ought to be spending his time on. I mean, why not? Sure, I prefer the anger and intelligence of Bamboozled, but this sort of mainstream effort is worthwhile, too. No, mainly it's that I don't want to seem like yet another dumbass critic implicitly trumpeting the amazing power of genre to rein in idiosyncratic directors. (This is one critical commonplace that unites broad segments among the auteurists and the Kaelites, two usually-diametrical camps.) This problem takes on particular weight with respect to Spike Lee. How many smug honky critics have endlessly bemoaned Spike Lee's "undisciplined," "in your face" directorial style? Inside Man certainly harnesses his prodigious talents for unique and satisfying ends, but I am in no way joining that chorus of cultural gatekeepers so anxious to see Lee "tone it down" for mass consumption.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Spike Lee, who just turned 49 (can you believe he's pushing fifty?) and is marking his twentieth year of feature filmmaking (I can't believe that either), has lost none of his energy or his voice. You can say some of his films are duds -- I certainly would -- but you can't say he's repeated himself, rested on his laurels, or taken money for a project he didn't believe in.
Inside Man, Lee's sixteenth narrative "joint"
(not counting numerous concert films and documentaries), shows what this
hot-blooded, sometimes hot-headed director can do when he decides to settle
down and tell a story. A story that's probably too convoluted and dependent on
plot holes, but still a restlessly engaging tall tale, a crackling
cops-and-robbers drama that outmuscles anything else out there. (Which isn't
hard.)
Carrying a little extra weight as hostage negotiator Keith Frazier, Denzel
Washington ambles through the movie with the lightness of a serious actor happy
to come to work on a smart piece of entertainment. Frazier's nemesis is Dalton
Russell (Clive Owen), the coldly shrewd mastermind of a bank robbery. Russell
and his three associates have taken a lot of people hostage, but they don't
seem in any hurry to do what most bank robbers do, which is to, y'know, steal money.
Their target lies inside a safety deposit box, which the bank's owner Arthur
Case (Christopher Plummer) does not want to be opened. Case calls on a higher
authority -- a sort of executive facilitator named Madeline White (Jodie
Foster) -- to intervene between the cops and the robbers.
Inside Man doesn't make a lot of logical sense when all is said and
done. It seems like a lot of sound and fury signifying an anticlimax. Yet I
doubt Spike Lee took this job just because he wanted a mainstream hit (as it
happened, the movie's opening-weekend take was a career best for both him and
Washington). Lee loves New York, and loves its jostling disharmony, its
short-tempered melting pot. Here, he gets to throw lowlifes in with the elite,
leading to a sharp dialogue bout between patrician Madeline and unshaven
Russell, or amusingly unlikely sparring between working-man Frazier and gray
eminence Case. I think Lee made the movie just to shoot the dialogue (by
Russell Gewirtz), and maybe secondarily to run a heist flick through the
blender of his style.
What I'll remember from Inside Man are the odd exchanges, like the one
between Frazier and a white cop who consciously has to check his reflexively
racist speech; Frazier chooses to let it slide, to let the cop be what he is,
as long as the conversation leads to some insight. Or the way Russell sits down
with a little black kid over pizza and registers surprise at the violent Grand
Theft Auto-like game on the boy's PSP. (I enjoy GTA myself, but Lee
has a point to make about gangsta culture playing itself out in games, and he
makes it well and hilariously.) Or the way Jodie Foster -- for once not playing
a role model -- enjoys being smug and powerful; I've always known she had a
terrific villain in her, and this role is about halfway there. The movie is
full of entertaining digressions, like the way hard-bitten SWAT cop Willem
Dafoe and another cop get in each other's face over a cryptic trick question
Russell asks Frazier. Or the difference between delivering pizza and sandwiches
to the hostages, and what it means when Russell ends a phone call by snapping
"Next time send sandwiches." Most of the movie is, in fact, an
entertaining digression.
I can't say Inside Man is up there with Dog Day Afternoon (one of
several predecessors it references), but it has the same interest in the people
in the situation, rather than just in the situation. Critics like Roger Ebert
have poked holes in the script's logic, as if every movie needed to be a
hermetic vault safe from nitpickers. Logic isn't Spike Lee's strong point. He
nails the irritable yet alive soul of New York -- particularly, now, New York
post-9/11 -- better than anyone else.
Sometimes he
doesn't have the right story or characters to animate his ongoing ode to the
city. Sometimes he does. And sometimes he just wants to enjoy himself, as he clearly
does here. 'Inside Man' is probably the most basically fun movie Lee has ever
made.
Michael Wood
reviews Inside Man and V for Vendetta · LRB 11 May ... Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, May 11, 2006
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review
Movie-Vault.com (Julian Boyance) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias
DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [HD DVD Version]
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [4.5/5]
SeeingBlack.com [Esther Iverem]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3/5]
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review reliving his Nightline experience with Spike Lee on TV
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review Page 2
The New York Sun (Meghan Keane) review
Alternative Film Guide [Andre Soares]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Slant Magazine review Nick Schager
Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [5/5]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
stylusmagazine.com (Arthur Ryel-Lindsey) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/5]
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C+]
eFilmCritic.com (Matt Seaver) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]
About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [B]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B-]
World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh
Eye for Film (Scott Davis) review [3/5]
3 Black Chicks...Review Flicks Kamal "The Diva" Larsuel-Ulbricht
Flak Magazine (Chris Shadoian) review comic strip
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Observer (Philip French) review
Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Wesley Morris
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
DVDBeaver dvd review [HD-DVD Version] Yunda Eddie Fung
WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS – made for TV A- 94
USA
(255 mi in Two Parts) 2005 HBO: When the
Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
Easily the definitive
Katrina film, as Lee has assembled massive documentation of epic proportions,
mostly from the survivors, but it’s a story that still lingers even years
afterwards, as the aftermath is at least as disturbing, if not more so, than
the storm itself and the initial absence of any governmental intervention. Astoundingly, despite all the public outrage
about the government abandoning the poorest and most helpless citizens stuck
for days in stifling heat, many lined up outside the Superdome with no food,
water, electricity, or toilet facilities waiting for buses that never came,
some retreated to their rooftops, some were left dead on the street for days,
many in hospitals or senior facilities were abandoned and all but left for dead
as well, where there were continued accusations of racial divisiveness that
suggested the overprivileged and upper class Bush simply didn’t care about poor
blacks, as evidenced by inappropriate comments made by his own mother (Barbara
Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off - New York Times). New Orleans remains a center of controversy
because they still haven’t got it right.
Despite the passage of months and years, it’s a shame how little has
changed and how difficult it has been for anyone to get the help they need to
return and rebuild their lives. Instead,
many families still remain scattered all over the
While the length of the film allows closer examination of political ramifications, where all the main participants are heard, it curiously lacks the personal focus that was so prevalent in Trouble the Water (2008), a film narrated by a Lower 9th Ward survivor, Kimberly Roberts, whose home footage takes us through the heart of the storm as well as her own family’s personal travails, some of whom did not survive, where she eloquently offers her own no-nonsense reaction to the government’s bureaucratic roadblocks. That film also adheres to a closer timeline of the events, labeling the chronological sequences —two days after the levees fail, or one week after the levees fail, which helps the viewers stay focused on the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. Lee’s film, on the other hand, is a blistering portrait of moral outrage extended over time, offering a greater variety of graphic images while using a chorus of voices to offer their comments about a variety of subjects, from the all but ignored Army Corps of Engineer reports both before and after Katrina, to the political fingerpointing where residents, community activists, historians, public officials, Mayor Ray Nagin, several State representatives, Governor Kathleen Blanco and the Bush administration officials are often at odds with one another, where Nagin indicates after surviving the first days of the storm that he was waiting for the cavalry to arrive, which of course, never happened, to outraged citizens, where especially poignant is the pissed off voice of Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a local resident who just grows more and more tired of all the namby pamby bureaucratic nonsense that simply continues to find ever more ridiculous ways to avoid helping people. The entire landscape is punctuated by New Orleans music and culture, including archival footage which is interspersed throughout, much of it due to local musicians from Donald Harrison or the marching second line Hot 8 Brass Band to Terrence Blanchard (Lee’s musical composer), who brings his elderly mother back to their destroyed family home, and a righteously indignant Wynton Marsalis who sings a captivating a cappella version of “St. James Infirmary.” (heard here years later with his own band, St. James Infirmary - Wynton Marsalis Tentet with ... - YouTube, 3:55)
While much has been told about the governmental failure to respond during this crisis, this film takes a good look not only at how difficult it has been to receive adequate compensation for their loss, but also how difficult it continues to be for those who wish to return to their homes, if only to rebuild where their now demolished house used to be, pointing out how certain business and political interests have rushed in to take advantage of the disadvantaged, buying up large portions of what appears to be unused land through the use of eminent domain, all but preventing some from ever returning. Since anything resembling what used to be the Lower 9th Ward was wiped off the face of the earth, so too have the jobs disappeared. When a sympathetic lawyer sent out several thousand already completed forms requiring only their signature indicating they are willing to be part of a group lawsuit, a form that is mandatory if they wish to sue the government for inadequate redress for their losses, he was stunned to discover how many responses he received by people who informed him of their illiteracy, as they could not read the form. Even before Katrina, Louisiana had one of the poorest educational systems in America, leaving many ill-prepared to join a changing workforce. For far too long, the rickety shacks that people were living in and the bare means subsistence levels that they were used to was not only poor, but third world poor, and for all too many, the punishment for being poor appears neverending, as the odds remain stacked against them, with the rules and continuing layers of bureaucracy continually changing, making it near impossible for anyone but the wealthy to succeed. Lee keys into this particular mindset, offering what appears to be psychological insight unique to this disaster, where many survivors face traumatic reactions resembling damaged war veterans, suffering from post-Katrina depression and Post Traumatic Stress symptoms.
Much of the testimony is heartbreaking and tearful, as are the pictures of the ravaged neighborhoods, where barely a house or a tree are left standing. Even for those few who choose to rebuild, where are their neighbors if the neighborhood remains demolished? Where are the churches, the grocery stores, the businesses? Since all are left to recover individually, or on their own, there is no governmental or collective effort to reach out to help rebuild the lost communities that have disappeared. If they were renters, as were about half, they are simply out of luck, while if they were homeowners, the other half, what chance do they have to succeed when not only their homes, but entire neighborhoods have been destroyed? Blacks have a right to be suspicious, as Lee even advances the possibility that the levees were intentionally blown up to flood the poorer regions in order to save the richer territory, as this was the historical strategy used in the 1927 flood (Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) at a time when the affected neighborhoods (St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes) were nearly all white. At the very least, there are many who believe this same mentality exists today, which explains why the business sector has such a scavenger land grab mindset to immediately rebuild the Lower 9th Ward in a new image, one much more prosperous than what existed before, and much less black. Blacks, on the other hand, believe they are fighting for their lives and the right to maintain the diversity of their culture, which, after all, is what makes New Orleans such a thriving city in the first place. Despite the power of the subject, and the historical relevance of documenting such a mindboggling disaster, the film is a sprawling work that has a tendency to cover the same territory, as Lee wants no voice to be left behind, which may be admirable, but it’s not as taut or well assembled as his earlier documentary 4 LITTLE GIRLS (1997), which still remains one of Lee’s best films.
Post note: Lee has also filmed a 5th Act a
year later, which is a follow up with many of the same talking heads that spoke
in his earlier film, which perhaps adds a greater sense of the futility felt by
so many of the excluded black residents, as over time, what were originally
only conspiracy theories about keeping poor blacks out of the rebuilding
process have only become more evident.
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts Michael Sicinski from the Academinc Hack
The
assignment -- the moral charge, really -- was to construct a document, a
memorial to the human toll of institutional indifference and its continuing
aftermath. In this respect, four hours is barely enough, although Lee's film is
astonishing in its scope and acuity. Most projects like this tend to serve as
externalizations of memory, tools that allow the past to become History and
thereby afford us the luxury of forgetting. And usually, we get unctuous
myth-making in the bargain, some sort of civically enforced uplift that
simplifies human tragedy into heroes and villains, mourning into some idiotic
approximation of righteous anger. Instead, Lee complicates matters at every
turn. Certainly the Bush administration, FEMA, and the Army Corps of Engineers
are squarely held responsible, as they should be. But over the course of Lee's
four acts (the hurricane, the flood, the emotional toll, and the ongoing
struggle to rebuilt despite the federal government), key figures like Mayor Ray
Nagin, Governor Kathleen Blanco, and former police chief Eddie Compass get a
fair hearing, emerging as imperfect players caught up in a larger systemic
failure. (Even disgraced FEMA chief Michael Brown catches a break, Penn Prof.
Michael Eric Dyson taking care not to defend him, but making it clear that he
was the government's designated scapegoat, and that Homeland Security Director
Michael Chertoff and President Bush should shoulder far more blame.) Lee also
takes care to provide the larger context to the Katrina disaster that the
majority of media outlets were (and still are) ill-equip ed to face. Yes, it's
about race and class, a "Chocolate City" left to fend for itself.
(Great Moment in Dark Sarcasm: one survivor's T-shirt reading, "FEMA
Evacuation Plan: Run, Motherfucker, Run.") At the same time, Lee and his expert
witnesses make clear that New Orleans, and Louisiana as a whole, were
economically left for dead long before the storm made landfall. In the third
and four hour, Lee and company make the case that with its substandard housing
and educational system, and with its oil and gas revenues pilfered via
governmental tax shelters and offshore accounting, Louisiana has long been
America's dirty little secret, an internal colony forced to endure conditions
analogous to those in the developing world. So, even if When the Levees Broke sometimes comes up short
(for example, hour three's discussion of post-Katrina depression and PTSD is
left as an underdeveloped drop-in), for the most part Lee has assembled the
definitive record of this dark, ongoing "moment" in U.S. history. And
if there's any single filmmaking strategy that seems misplaced here, it's Lee's
restraint. Like Oliver Stone, Lee no doubt realizes that he's a polarizing
filmmaker, someone to whom a large segment of the population won't listen, just
because of who he is. Nevertheless, the film's moments of stark stylization --
Wynton Marsalis singing "St. James Infirmary," or Terrence Blanchard
slowly walking down a demolished street playing the trumpet, or the disquieting
final credits montage, set to Fats Domino's "Walkin' to New Orleans, which
clearly owes a debt to Lars von Trier's "Young Americans" sequence at
the end of Dogville -- are so powerful that
I found myself wishing Lee had gone even further in using expressive filmic
means to channel collective rage. Instead, he often subsumes his methods within
the translucent cloak of documentary objectivity. This sometimes leads Lee's
sensibility astray. (Some zoom-ins on crying interview subjects, for example,
felt manipulative and intrusive.) But more often than not, When the Levees Broke reveals Lee's anger by
steadily building an open-and-shut case for the prosecution. This is more than
an artistic achievement; it's also a deeply humanistic one.
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review
[5/5] Don R.
Lee
When Hurricane Katrina crashed down on the Gulf Coast in 2005, I really didn’t realize what the impact was and what it would continue be. In all honesty, I’ve grown so tired of media hype on every little thing that “could” happen, I tuned out the coverage after about day three. Yet I was drawn back into the coverage abruptly when I learned that my favorite city in America was being destroyed and no one was doing anything to help the people there. I’ve been to New Orleans twice and never have I felt such a sense of history, tradition, culture and fun in America. When I saw what was happening to the citizens of New Orleans, I became sick. These people were Americans and they were being treated like trash that the Hurricane left behind. To say I was angry would be an understatement.
Even while Katrina was happening word was Spike Lee was headed to Louisiana to do a documentary on the debacle. Many people felt Lee would make the film all about race or that he’d be too angry and too one-sided to do a fair job covering what was happening, myself included. Yet what he came up with, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” does a surprisingly good job of being fair to all sides involved. There’s plenty of blame to go around and Lee allows for all sides to be heard.
“When the Levees Broke” is broken into four parts, as the title suggests. Part one details the lead up to and the first hit of the storm. Part two covers what happened while the storm was raging. People evacuating, being driven to the Superdome or the Convention Center. Part three delves into the losses of life, property and spirit thousands faced and to whom the blame was directly attributed. Part four is more about moving forward from this tragedy. Through it all, the film is visually every bit a Spike Lee movie with truly indelible images of destruction, rebuilding, death and life. Lee refuses to look away from the horrors of Katrina. We see dead bodies, people emotionally scarred for life, crying jags. It hurts to see, but it needs to be seen so we can understand what happened and never let it happen again.
Lee also stages a few timely scenes including a real New Orleans jazz funeral for Katrina and a powerful spoken word poem. Always known for his jazz scores, Lee again enlists his longtime composer Terrence Blanchard (a New Orleans resident) not only to add gorgeous arrangements to the film but also, as a victim himself. One of the most heart wrenching scenes in the film is when Blanchard brings his elderly mother home for the first time after the Hurricane. We feel like her house, which seems fine from the inside but is anything but once the door is opened, is our house or our mothers house. It’s simply unfathomable what happened to New Orleans.
Where Lee succeeds best is in the way he puts a face to the victims of the storm and subsequent flooding. He manages to make the story of such great loss extremely personal as we get to know these people and feel for them. Well, sort of feel for them. I simply cannot imagine standing by, in America, and watching my mother die from heat exhaustion. Or coming home to survey the damage done to my childhood home and discovering a parent dead in the kitchen. But, it happened and it happened a lot. I also found it amazing how Lee leaves no stone unturned. Sure, at over four hours, it’s easy to cover ground, but Lee manages to give just enough time to each subject. He also manages to give plenty of time to each and every entity that was to blame for what happened.
Many will argue that Lee only takes “the black side” of the issue. But New Orleans is a predominantly black city. Others will say Lee doesn’t cover what happened in Biloxi and other Gulf Coast cities. But this film is about New Orleans. It really doesn’t matter where your politics lie, after you see “When the Levees Broke,” you cannot deny that a huge disaster was hugely mismanaged in post 9-11 America. But what happened in New Orleans isn’t all about who’s to blame, it’s about what was done wrong so we don’t repeat it and the film seeks to make sure we don’t forget these people and what they’re going through. All hyperbole aside, “When the Levees Broke” is one of the most important film documents ever made. It’s an honest, fair and unflinching look at one of the greatest, and saddest, natural disasters to hit our shores.
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
In the course of Spike
Lee’s enormous documentary about Hurricane Katrina and the city of New Orleans,
“When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” the director shows us a
curious funeral on the city’s streets. In broad daylight, in the midst of
smashed homes, a group of men dressed in formal black-and-white accompany a
horse-drawn hearse that bears a casket marked “Katrina.” Walking in front of
the hearse, musicians from the Hot 8 Brass Band play a traditional hymn. They
play it slowly, however—so slowly that the “funeral” is as much an act of
derision as of mourning. At the end of the film, Lee returns to the procession,
but by this time, in adherence to New Orleans custom, the men are playing the
hymn up-tempo, with a defiant swing; the Katrina casket has been rudely placed
on the street, and the men shimmy around it. I would like to interpret the fast
tempo and the shimmy as a sign of renewal, but who knows? Throughout the movie,
the people of New Orleans come off as complicated and witty beyond easy
measure. They will keep New Orleans alive, but, as the movie makes clear, they
will keep it alive with whatever ironies of grief and mockery please their
taste and their humor.
Viewers seeking
detailed information about the economy and the politics of New Orleans will
have to go elsewhere. But anyone hoping to reclaim Katrina emotionally—to
experience what the city went through in all its phases of loss, anger, and
contempt—needs to see Lee’s movie, which is surely the most magnificent and
large-souled record of a great American tragedy ever put on film. (“When the
Levees Broke” will be aired in its entirety on HBO on August 29th and September
1st, 7th, 10th, 11th, 16th, and 28th; it will also be available from HBO’s
on-demand service until September 27th.) After the storm, HBO commissioned a
two-hour picture, but Lee visited the city nine times and wound up doubling the
length. It’s a complicated story he has to tell, encompassing the storm, the
flood, the evacuation to the Superdome, the looting, waiting for the Feds, more
waiting for the Feds, analysis of the broken levees, and attempts at
rebuilding. My guess is that Lee didn’t have the heart to cut down the
terrifying footage he had gathered or the mostly remarkable interviews that
constitute the main body of the movie. Keeping his own voice largely absent and
his presence invisible, he finds the city’s tattered survivors. He also
consults a variety of lawyers and local politicians, and such luminaries as
Harry Belafonte and Al Sharpton; the musicians and New Orleans natives Wynton
Marsalis and Terence Blanchard (the latter wrote much of the beautiful music
for the film); the historian Douglas Brinkley, who makes impassioned critiques
of Bush Administration officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency;
and the Mississippi man (a doctor) who publicly advised the Vice-President,
when he visited the area long after the storm, to go fuck himself.
Lee draws on stock,
news, and amateur footage, and also on still photographs, some of which
capture, with the devastating power of the greatest poetry or painting, the
charnel house on water that New Orleans had become. In the four hours, there
are repetitive passages but nothing that isn’t arresting or moving, and, for
all its length, “When the Levees Broke” is essentially a lyric work—a kind of
blues documentary, saturated in New Orleans’s foundational music and warmed
with the traditions of cadenced outrage and lament heard in the Lower Ninth
Ward and other abused neighborhoods. “When I seen the water, I knew we had to
get out,” a man recalls. He says he told his mother that they had to leave:
“And she say, ‘Why we have to go?’ And I explain it to her that the water was
comin’ up, risin’ up”—an exchange that sounds like lines from a Delta-blues
classic. The co-producer of the film, Sam Pollard, was also the chief editor,
and, with his editing team (Geeta Gandbhir and Nancy Novack), he shifts among
the interviews, hurricane footage, and stills with an almost tidal alternation
of emotional intensity and rest. In a video montage, grouped shots of corpses
floating in the water or sprawled on a car roof are held long enough for us to
register the horror of abandonment but not so long that the shots draw
attention to themselves as spectacle. The movie is heroic in the delicacy of
its craftsmanship.
After the storm, with
the government gone, their houses wrecked or displaced, and both official and
private papers destroyed in the flood, the residents of such places as the
Lower Ninth lack elementary validation. Stubbornly, they cling to their lots,
virtual squatters on their own property. Spike Lee finds them there, planted
amid stray boards and rotted couches. In his feature films, Lee has always
possessed a gift for tirade, but this time he doesn’t have to write anything;
he has only to release the flow. A few of his subjects are sombre and stunned,
but others scorch the camera with the ferocity of their invective, especially a
forty-two-year-old African-American woman named Phyllis Montana LeBlanc. Hell
hath no fury like a black woman scorned by her government, and LeBlanc is
blessed with a special skill: as her temper rises, she gets funnier and
funnier, and Lee brings her back repeatedly as she re-creates the stages of
official bungling in the aftermath of the storm—the delays, the
incomprehensible orders, the simple failure on the part of people allegedly
trained to handle emergency to understand how emergency works. The movie has a
surprising amount of joking and New Orleans mischief and orneriness. There’s
one element that seems unredeemable—the dead citizens lying all over the city,
bloated and discolored. It’s the primal curse of the Greek myths: the unburied
corpse, an offense against the gods and against civilization, too. That’s why
the mock funeral at the end of the movie, whatever its precise meaning, is the
most eloquent of gestures. Society may have collapsed, but a proper burial is
still fitting. The citizens of New Orleans graciously grant to the storm the
courtesy that the storm, in its rage, could not grant to them.
Film Comment: Eric Hynes August 31, 2015
Aired to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, during a summer when many residents of New Orleans still lacked permanent, or even adequate temporary housing, Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (06) chronicles a disaster that was still unfolding. Interview subjects recount events that took place mere months prior, often doing so perched in the settings of their protracted nightmares: in FEMA trailers without electricity, or a tent anchored where a house used to be, punctuated by staircase to nowhere. Lee was bearing witness to a wound that was still bleeding, and his film is a traumatized cry for help, for change, for a national reckoning. It’s a work of agitation, not quite propagandistic but certainly designed to have an effect beyond itself as it levels pointed critiques at the lax George W. Bush administration, lethally inept Army Corps of Engineers, and weaselly insurance companies.
You might think that When the Levees Broke would be consigned to its August 2006 date-stamp, offering viewers in August 2015 little more than an exhaustive historical record of a terrible moment. Yet while there’s value in such a document—language that Lee embraced with an opening scroll that referred to the work as a “film document”—When the Levees Broke was, and is, so much more than that. It exemplifies how a film rooted in a current event can also have a long legacy, and how a project with great political purpose can also become great art.
Note that though Lee calls his work a “film document,” he also subtitled it “a requiem.” Far from a simple vessel for information, When the Levees Broke assumes a rueful, emotive form, honoring the dead—both actual and metaphorical—through music in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Terence Blanchard’s bluesy, fore-grounded score is joined by an eloquent selection of preexisting songs; its metaphorical counterpart is the masterful construction of this 255-minute work by supervising editor/producer Sam Pollard and editors Geeta Gandbhir and Nancy Novack. When the Levees Broke is comprised of four fluid movements gathered under a single, sustained evocation. Music doesn’t merely accompany the film any more than it provides local color for the city in question. Rather it’s the body, blood, and spirit of the place, and Lee’s creation embodies and articulates this fully.
It all starts with a pre-credits montage to Louis Armstrong’s “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” The song’s complex coupling of sonic buoyancy (that somersaulting clarinet) with lyrical loss (that slight sustain of “do you know what it means”) is matched by a mix of recent images of the Big Easy at its best and worst, its most majestic and tragic. Shots of dancing are followed by shots of race riots, then shots of kids being airlifted out of the flooded Ninth Ward—of old New Orleans followed by a newly decimated New Orleans. It’s lively, rueful, ironic, distressing, and exquisite. The first song among many, “Do You Know” also acts as the lead movement of the first section, which in turn is the first of four movements within a single requiem. Lee begins with Armstrong’s evocation of New Orleans as both a place and an idea, longed for (then and now) and elusive.
Subsequently, all four episodes of When the Levees Broke conclude with “Walking to New Orleans” by Fats Domino, which plays over still images of citizens in distress. Like Armstrong, Domino sings of feeling removed from the city, except here he’s on his way back. The images don’t show a New Orleans one would seem to want to reclaim, but their play against the shuffling music isn’t ironic so much as defiant. Yes, the city is a disaster, and yes, they’re going back. “I’m gonna need two pair of shoes / When I get through walking these blues / When I get back to New Orleans,” Domino sings, and that’s the least of it for Lee’s subjects, many of whom have the tenacity and the commitment to recover and rebuild their lives, yet also have material and emotional needs that can’t be ignored. “Suitcase in my hand / Now ain’t that a shame / I’m leaving here today / Yes I’m going back home to stay,” Domino goes on, as we look at a picture of a completely submerged house. But the images keep coming, thwarting sentiment, marching forward along with Domino’s staccato, repeated chords.
Blanchard appears occasionally as a subject, aggrieved and livid about what’s befallen his family and hometown, yet as a musician and composer he’s scarcely ever absent from the film. His orchestral arrangements percolate, swell, and seethe, while his trumpet plays apace of Lee’s interviewees, mournful and proud, the connecting voice for a chorus of survivors, as well as notable players like former Mayor Ray Nagin, activist Al Sharpton, and actor Wendell Pierce. Throughout the four episodes we also hear both testimony and music from native trumpeter and jazz statesman Wynton Marsalis, rapper Shelton Shakespear Alexander, drummer Donald Harrison, and the Hot 8 Brass Band, among others. We follow the Hot 8 to the streets of New York during the months of exile after Katrina, and we visit Congo Square in New Orleans, where slaves were allowed to gather every Sunday to play African music, and in the process invented jazz. We walk around the halls of the sweltering, besieged Superdome as evacuators spontaneously perform “This Little Light of Mine,” their nightmare turned into a vigil, hope briefly restored among people marooned in their own city.
The first two installments of the series (which was originally broadcast over two nights) proceed chronologically through the days before, during, and after the storm, while the final two take things further into the aftermath and recovery. Pollard and the editors freely double back or flip forward, opening into different pockets of New Orleans past and culture. Rarely is any of this time travel marked, nor are side-alley tangents made to seem like divergences from a main road. It all rather flows, bends, and slides like Blanchard’s playing, all part of the story, the song. The entire series lasts for over four hours, but this is no slow cinema. The movie is always moving, it’s always going somewhere, and in time makes its way pretty much everywhere—from the French Quarter to the mountains of Utah, from Lyndon B. Johnson to Condoleezza Rice, and from traumatized survivors to the abandoned, unaccounted-for dead.
In the fourth and final episode, Lee thrillingly synthesizes story, music, history, reportage, documentary, and fantasy, by throwing a traditional New Orleans funeral for the storm herself. At the start of the episode a brass band saunters through the shadow of the breached levee, playing a somber, soulful version of “The Old Rugged Cross” while ushering a coffin labeled “Katrina” to a final resting place among the ruins of the Ninth Ward. And at the end, the same crew reverses course, turning the funeral parade into a party, singing the Albert Brumley spiritual “I’ll Fly Away” while dancing around the coffin and parading off into the city, the future, the land of the living. It’s tremendously moving, but also thoroughly appropriate in that it marshals the most defining aspects of a culture—its music, its iconography, its geography—toward offering a catharsis for that culture. The film is a requiem, a long, sad, angering exasperation, but this being New Orleans it also ends in a celebration, with the living and the ghosts of the dead gathered together in devotion and defiance to play a classic rousingly renewed. However things have or haven’t changed in the 9 years since, the song still really sings, and stings:
I’ll fly away, oh glory, I’ll fly away.
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,
I’ll fly away.
Just a few more weary days and then,
I’ll fly away.
As with the Armstrong and Domino tunes, it matters from whence the blues flows. “Just a few more weary days,” they sing. There was time yet. And for anyone fortunate enough to live in New Orleans, as well as those fortunate enough to watch or revisit Lee’s shattering film, there’s time still.
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum January 01, 2007
Spike
Lee's When the Levees Broke reviewed. - Slate Magazine Troy Patterson, August 21, 2006
CultureCartel.com (John Dean Alfone) review [4.5/5]
DVD Verdict (Adam Arseneau) dvd review
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
SeeingBlack.com [Esther Iverem]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
Creative Loafing [Felicia Feaster]
Edward Copeland on Film - Part 1
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (William Goss) review [5/5]
stylusmagazine.com (Andy Slabaugh) review
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]
Before The Flood Kaleem Aftab interviews Spike Lee for Sight and Sound
Agony of New Orleans, Through Spike Lee’s Eyes - New York Times Felicia R. Lee from The New York Times, August 3, 2006
When the
Levees Broke - Review - Television - The New York Times August 21, 2006
Hurricane Katrina The New Orleans Times-Picayune
Hurricane Katrina - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans - Wikipedia, the free ...
Slideshow: New Orleans floods WWLTV
Images from New Orleans US News
Mississippi Floods - Archive Collection - TIME articles from the archives
THE 1927 MISSISSIPPI RIVER FLOOD AND ITS IMPACT ON U.S. SOCIETY ... John Barry, Center for Bioenvironmental Research, 2002
CNN.com - 'Louisiana 1927' - Sep 1, 2005 Todd Leopold, September 1, 2005
New Orleans Levees Were Blown In 1927 - Were They Blown in 2005? US News and World Report, September 4, 2005, also seen here: Another Flood That Stunned America
American Experience | Fatal Flood | Timeline
Interview with Pete Daniel: The Great Flood of 1927 by Rick Shenkman, September 6, 2005
Will History Repeat Itself? -- In These Times David Moberg from In These Times, September 9, 2005
Study: La.'s incarceration rate leads nation | News for New ... Louisiana leads the nation in overall prison rate, from WWLTV News, December 1, 2006
Deadly lockdown in New Orleans | Salon News Robin Templeton from Salon, August 23, 2007
>: Louisiana's Incarceration Rate "Highest in the World" Mississippi Project, October 25, 2007
Racism in New Orleans Criminal Justice System: Among nation’s worst pre-Katrina, still worse now Jordan Flaherty from San Francisco Gray Panthers, August 30, 2007
Study: La.'s incarceration rate leads nation | News for New ... WWLTV in Louisiana, June 11, 2008
La.'s incarceration rate leads nation - Law Enforcement News Corrections One News Bulletin, August 15, 2008
D'Alliance New Orleans Solidarity, by Vera Leone September 3, 2008
Life After Hurricane Katrina - The Atlantic August 24, 2015
Who "Recovered" in Post-Katrina New Orleans? Jessica Desvarieux from The Real News Network, August 28, 2015, including a video (11:21)
Hurricane Katrina, 10 years later: The myths that persist ... Marta Jewson and Charles Maldonado from Slate, August 28, 2015
Katrina ten years later: photos of the scarred city - Mashable Tracing the Scars of Katrina, by Jeyhoun Allebaugh and Marcus Gilmer from Mashable, August 28, 2015
Ten years after Katrina, New Orleans is still a ticking time
bomb Sertan Sanderson from Deutsche
Welle, August 30, 2015
New Orleans after Katrina: A tale of two cities Martha Teichner from ABC News, August 30, 2015
10 Years Later, Hurricane Katrina's Impact Still Devastating On New Orleans ... Curtis Bunn from The Indianapolis Recorder, August 31, 2015
Spike Lee on Bill Maher: Someone blew up the Levees YouTube (3:01)
Clip of Lee expressing his views of the Hurricane Katrina and Tuskegee matters on Real Time with Bill Maher YouTube, Spike Lee Smells a Conspiracy (5:37)
MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA B 84
USA Italy (160 mi) 2008 ‘Scope
An incendiary war film that continues Lee’s dialogue on race to whoever’s listening out there, where the fight is not so much depicted by acts of war but by acts of racial bigotry, a film with an attitude and a fierce determination to set right the wrongs in Hollywood war films that all but eliminate blacks from the picture, featuring as this one does, film clips of John Wayne in THE LONGEST DAY (1962) leading his battalion of all-white troops through hell and highwater to defeat the Germans, leading Americans of all races to believe only whites defeated the Nazi’s. Lee has another agenda, similar to Rachid Bouchareb’s DAYS OF GLORY (2006) which adds a revisionist history to the Algerian omission in the liberation of France, where both films attempt to rectify a common misconception that people of color played little role in fighting for Allied freedom. In each instance, for their participation American blacks were promised constitutional freedom while DeGaulle promised Algerians equality and French citizenship, promises which were largely broken upon their return home. Riots and racial flare ups have continued unabated in each country for what is still perceived as racial inequities that continue to go unaddressed more than half a century after the war is over. Lee’s film is strident in nature, for which he makes no apologies, where every white commander is a flaming racist with no regard at all for the lives of black troops, which includes firing on his own troops because he doesn’t trust their intelligence information and sending them on suicide missions, believing none could actually survive, and when he finds the ones that do, he belligerently threatens and profanely mistreats them in the presence of their own troops. Whites at home are no better, perhaps even worse, where redneck restaurant owners refuse to serve “Negroes,” even those in military uniform, threatening to blow their heads off if they don’t leave his premises at once. These kinds of racial divisions are noticeably missing in the history of Hollywood films until Gregory Peck in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962) depicted a black man falsely accused of a white man’s rape or IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) showed Sydney Poitier as a black forensics’ expert continually having to prove that white man’s justice in the rural south kept arresting the wrong man, usually picking whoever was politically expedient. While this film is not in the same realm as either of those 60’s Academy Award winning pictures, it is vital nonetheless, even with its inherent flaws.
The story is told in
flashback, like so many war memories are, recalled personally and individually
over and over again, each having their own relevance, many of which are never
even spoken about but die silently with the individual. This film recalls one man’s journey where an
instant in the present triggers flashbacks to his experiences in
There’s an
interesting use of an innocent Italian child (Matteo Sciabordi) that one of the black soldiers rescues from
the rubble of an artillery strike, endearing him to that soldier even though they
don’t speak the same language or share the same skin color. The presence of that child is rife with
possibilities, an orphan of the war who at times talks to himself or an
invisible friend, but he also may have a strange connection to God, as many of
the so-called miracles in this films are connected to this child. There’s also a Nazi defector, a child
himself, a young Nazi soldier who witnesses atrocities so abhorrent that he
fires upon his commanding officer before escaping into the woods where he’s in
no man’s land, suddenly viewed by all sides involved as the enemy. There’s a Nazi commander who, when in Italy,
reads Italian poetry in order to better understand the Italian partisans or
freedom fighters, a man who is not demonized as a moronic stereotypical Nazi,
but something of a Renaissance man who is caught up in the madness of his own
country’s war. While barely mentioned in
the credits, both of these German characters are unique and unusually complex. And there’s a young Italian woman (Valentina
Cervi) who conveniently speaks English, whose
beauty both bedazzles and intrigues, the Sophia Loren character in earlier war
films who is seriously underused or misused in this film, typical of many of
the Italian villagers whose generic, near operatic characters are seriously
underwritten. Terence Blanchard's musical score is solemn with a hint of death in every note, as is
foreshadowed by the opening credits which is a montage of crosses. Still and all, what works in this film is a
connection to the 4 soldiers who remain disconnected to their own Army, still
significant today as it is their moral outrage that reflects the tone of this
film.
The
Globe and Mail (Guy Dixon) capsule review [3/4]
A powerful film which few directors
can deliver, and none quite the way Spike Lee can. It swings between ensemble
piece and close character studies, following four stranded soldiers from the
African-American 92nd Division, the Buffalo Soldiers, caught behind enemy lines
in Second World War Italy. The horrors of war and racial injustices are
overwhelming. And as ever, Lee and his gifted lead actors unveil centuries of
black American history and beliefs in even the simplest gestures and dialogue.
The only complaint, though a testament to Lee's mastery, is that what he gives
us could easily have run nine or 10 hours, rather than crammed into two-plus
hours. It's that rich.
The
Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
You've got to hand it to Spike Lee for managing to secure the financing for this big-budget, three-hour World War II epic, performed largely in Italian and German with English subtitles, and lacking so much as a single marquee name in the cast. But as Orson Welles wisely cautioned: The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. Adapted by James McBride from his own novel about the African-American "buffalo soldiers" who served bravely—and largely anonymously—for the U.S. during the Second World War, Miracle at St. Anna begins with a clunky 1980s prologue, eventually flashes back to the war, and then further flashes back within those flashbacks, all to tell the ultimately slight story of four soldiers from the all-black 92nd Infantry Division who find themselves stranded behind enemy lines. There, the men rescue a young Italian boy trapped in the rubble, and take shelter with a family of chatty, gesticulating, tea-leaf-reading villagers. At which point, you may begin to wonder if Lee really initiated this project or if it only fell into his hands after Roberto Benigni proved unavailable. The rest of the movie is piled to the rafters with cutesy-kid antics and even a mythical peasant hero named the Great Butterfly. Mostly, though, our heroes cool their heels for what must only be a few days, but feels like months.
The Onion A.V.
Club review
Noel Murray
Early in his
career, Spike Lee made movies so crammed with ideas—some endearingly personal,
some bracingly ideological, some painfully banal—that watching them could be as
excruciating as it was exciting. In recent years, he's shown more restraint,
and in the '00s, he's made three films (25th Hour, Inside Man,
and When The Levees Broke) as strong as any the decade has produced. But
Lee takes a giant step backward with Miracle At St. Anna, a socially
conscious World War II movie that telegraphs its leadenness in its first 10
minutes, and departs two and a half hours later, leaving behind only two or
three memorable scenes. (Even the worst Spike Lee joints usually offer more
than that.) Miracle is a botch of the first order, the kind of
ham-fisted agitprop that Lee would've made in the late '80s if he'd had the
budget for it—though it still would have been more forgivably freewheeling.
Miracle At St.
Anna opens with a black
postal worker shooting and killing a customer at his window. Attempts to
unravel why the man flipped out lead to the recovery of a rare fragment of
Italian statuary, and a story that stretches back to 1944, when the U.S. was
deploying the African-American "Buffalo Soldiers" to serve as bait
for the Nazis in Italy. In the story, one platoon advances farther than their
superiors expected, and gets involved in a standoff between the local fascists,
partisan rebels, and the Nazis. While plotting out their next move, the
soldiers reflect on why they're fighting on behalf of a country that shuns
them.
In the abstract,
this sounds like a fine idea for a movie. But the abstract doesn't contain
Terence Blanchard's relentless, mournful martial score, or the
routine-to-the-point-of-cliché battle scenes, or the broad comic relief that
borders on shuck-and-jive. Miracle At St. Anna stabilizes after an
outright awful first hour, and becomes merely a middling war movie with a
heightened social consciousness. And the movie reaches something like an
epiphany during one sublime scene where the American troops look at Axis
propaganda posters that depict the U.S. as a nation of mongrels. (At its
noblest, Lee's film is trying to counteract the Hollywood propaganda that has
written African-Americans out of the WWII narrative.) But for most of its
punishingly long running time, Miracle plays like School Daze
transplanted to the European front, with the token militant, the token
uplift-the-race type, and the token buffoon all marching inexorably toward
Checkpoint Irony.
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review
Spike Lee sometimes makes movies that are too provocative for critics to think straight. It's hard to imagine, say, his complex 2000 satire on race and the press, "Bamboozled," enjoying widespread acclaim upon its release, no matter its quality. But Mr. Lee's new World War II film, "Miracle at St. Anna," which opens Friday, is not an example of the director's volatile filmic chemistry blowing up the laboratory. It's just not very good, never mind compelling enough to sustain a 160-minute sprawl that, at the end, leaves one puzzling over where exactly the time went.
Adapted from the novel by James McBride, "Miracle at St. Anna" is about four American soldiers from the all-black 92nd Division who become marooned in an Italian mountain village behind enemy lines. They're survivors of a riverside slaughter partly caused by a racist commander's intransigence. A cast of young actors (Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso) play three of the "Buffalo Soldiers," with Omar Benson Miller in the fourth, irredeemable role of a superstitious Southern simpleton. A fearful Italian family's house provides shelter within the labyrinth of stone walkways and houses.
Bookending "Miracle" is a mystery, set in 1983, about a black postal worker who shoots a customer for no apparent reason. This strange frame is, typically enough, one of Mr. Lee's better moves, a blunt but interesting displacement of war's unknowability to outsiders. But the wartime subplots, in the screenplay by Mr. McBride, are poorly juggled and conceived; the friendship between Mr. Miller's character and a traumatized, possibly insane Italian boy, is a maudlin mess, as are the divisions within a local group of Italian partisans. A fierce street battle at the end is at least often nerve-wracking, and Mr. Lee's frequent director of photography, Matthew Libatique, achieves a humid prestige look.
Early in the segment set in 1983, a black veteran is shown talking back to a TV broadcast of John Wayne blustering in "The Longest Day," underlining the avowed purpose of "Miracle": to represent the experiences of black soldiers to an extent never achieved in war cinema. But in a sense, Mr. Lee has tragically tried to remake all of those movies at once, up to and including the true horror story of the Nazis' massacre of 560 Italian civilians. The result is exhausting for the wrong reasons, instead of being as disarming and adventurous as the filmmaker can be at his best.
The
Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Spike Lee's
"Miracle at St. Anna" is being marketed as a murder mystery involving
a priceless Italian artifact, as well as a fictional, inspirational parable
about a love that transcends language, race and the chaos of war. Yet the real
subject is the unsung heroism of black American soldiers during World War II.
Given the importance of that subject, the real mystery of Mr. Lee's movie is
why it's so diffuse, dispirited, emotionally distanced and dramatically inert.
The most obvious
clue lies in the punishing running time -- more than 160 minutes, plus an
end-title crawl. The screenplay was adapted by James McBride from his own
novel, and he and his director must have wanted to mine every page in their
pursuit of epic sweep.
The main story,
set in Tuscany in 1944 during the Italian campaign, centers on four infantrymen
of the all-black 92nd Division Buffalo Soldiers. After one soldier risks his
life to save a traumatized Italian boy, all of them become trapped behind enemy
lines, where their immediate salvation depends on partisans and villagers of
indeterminate loyalties. (And where the narrative slows to a crawl for tedious,
mostly subtitled digressions on the intricacies of partisan politics. All
that's missing is a ghostly turn by Anna Magnani or Raf Vallone.)
"Miracle at
St. Anna" contains plenty of material for a couple of other films -- a
terrible massacre of Tuscan civilians by Nazi troops, and the ostensibly
mystical but eventually mawkish relationship between the little boy and his
G.I. savior, Sam Train, a saintly giant of a man played by Omar Benson Miller.
What's more, those events of the now-distant past are set off by a plot-heavy
framing device that starts with a postal clerk committing a seemingly
inexplicable murder in Harlem in the early 1980s, and ends in the Bahamas with
a toxic dose of ersatz uplift.
The surfeit of
elements and themes can't explain the indifferent craftsmanship. Spike Lee has
made some brilliant films in the course of his prolific career; he also
directed an intricate and terrific commercial thriller, "Inside Man,"
that was released only last year. Yet his storytelling this time is fragmented
to the point of incoherence. The score, by Terence Blanchard, is relentlessly
elegiac. The battle scenes are long on explosion and short on invention. The
performances are stolid and unexceptional, apart from Mr. Miller's few touching
moments and a stylish cameo by Alexandra Maria Lara as the Nazi propagandist
Axis Sally.
If the lapses are
disappointing, the sense of missed opportunity is dismaying. In most of the
Hollywood war movies made during and long after World War II, American fighting
men were almost always white. The role that black troops actually played is an
important story, and might have been a powerful one in Spike Lee's hands.
Indeed, a sense of that power can still be gleaned from the DVD version of
Rachid Bouchareb's "Days of Glory," a magnificent French-language
film that played here two years ago, and told essentially the same story with
different skin shades -- four Algerian soldiers in the French army fighting
bravely against the Nazis for the nation they love while their fellow French
soldiers treat them like scum, and their casually despicable racist officers
use them as cannon fodder.
But the Bouchareb
film allowed the awful ironies of the situation to speak for themselves, while
Spike Lee keeps hammering them home with agitprop fervor and clumsy actors
playing racist officers as crude cartoons. The irony of the production as a
whole is that an impassioned filmmaker with a strong tale to tell has managed
to lose track of it. Instead of staying close to the troops and their travails,
the film wanders through wartime Tuscany like an addled tourist, mesmerized by
village life and eager for miracles.
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Never one to soft-pedal his ambitions, Spike Lee opens his
grandiosely garish World War II epic Miracle at
St. Anna with an old black man watching John Wayne in The Longest Day and muttering, “We fought for
this country, too.” It’s a naked declaration—a big fat cinematic placard—of
Lee’s intention to reclaim not only American history but American movies and
their whitewashing myths. And that’s cool. As the most prominent
African-American director of all time, Lee feels entitled, perhaps even obligated,
to challenge the malign neglect of the past. He was right to mouth off about
Clint Eastwood’s leaving black soldiers out of Iwo
Jima (although his case was blunted by having once mouthed off
about Eastwood’s audacity in making a Charlie Parker biopic—Lee wants to be the
keeper of his brothers’ stories). And he was canny to recognize in James
McBride’s novel about the all-black 92nd Infantry Division an ideal vehicle for
his Flags of Our Fathers—his The Longest Day. Lee’s canvas is impressively
vast. The shock is in how coarsely he fills it in.
In the jumpy prologue, set in 1983, the old John Wayne contrarian, a post-office teller, shoots an Italian at his window with a German Luger he keeps conveniently at his desk, and police searching his Harlem apartment find a long-lost marble head from a Florence bridge that was blown up by the Nazis. The film is a flashback in which we learn why the old man killed the Italian, and why he bristled at Wayne’s laconic avowal to hold a small Italian village, and who the hell is the middle-aged Italian guy who spilled his coffee in slow motion when he read about the murder. Along the way, there are hideous atrocities and holy resurrections, in addition to the heart-tugging story of a gentle-giant black soldier who adopts a traumatized Italian orphan. The movie skips from one formula to another, with clunky debates a constant: cynical blacks versus idealistic blacks; guilty Nazis versus bad Nazis; Italian partisans versus Italian Fascists.
Lee screws up his best ideas by trying to blow us away. (He does—but any blowhard can.) In the first battle sequence, the “buffalo soldiers” slosh through a Tuscan river while a Nazi truck blasts the voice of Axis Sally, the German counterpart of Tokyo Rose, to entice them to surrender. The promise of shelter and food (fried chicken, candied yams, etc.) is an obvious lie, but almost everything else hits home: They’re fighting for a country that once enslaved them and now keeps them segregated and small, that uses them for cannon fodder. But Lee can’t let the words hang in the air. He cuts to Axis Sally in her plush red lair, a lipsticked white temptress. Then the cartoon-racist southern colonel who’s miles from the scene refuses to believe these “uppity” Negroes have made it across the river and orders their location shelled. Lee lingers on the carnage—the limbless, writhing men, cut down by both Germans and Americans. Here, and in a scene in which the Nazis machine-gun an entire village, he thinks that showing the stark reality of war means shoving the horrors in our face.
When the carnage is over only four men are left: the stalwart Stamps (Derek Luke), the sardonic Bishop (Michael Ealy), the awkward, dark-skinned Hispanic translator, Hector (Laz Alonso), and the big simpleton, Train (Omar Benson Miller). It’s Train who clutches the injured Italian boy, Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi), and carts him to a nearby village—even after Bishop says to leave him be, that all white people are trained to hate blacks. Miller overplays the lovable-galoot act (“I ain’t never been this close to a white person”), but he’s hardly alone. The dialogue (by McBride) is subtext-free, and the actors go broad when they can’t go deep. It’s hard to tune in to their rhythms anyway: Terence Blanchard’s nonstop symphonic stirrings color every exchange. On its own terms, the score is gorgeous; Blanchard transforms martial themes into sighing lamentations. But the music elegizes the characters before they can speak. Their doom is in every bar.
When the soldiers stumble into a Tuscan village, Miracle at St. Anna injects a bunch of exuberant Italians, among them a stunning number (Valentina Cervi) who becomes the object of both Stamps’s quiet longing and Bishop’s salacious come-ons. There is one evocative moment, in which the men realize they feel more free, more at home, than they do in the States. But when Lee isn’t doing cinematic somersaults or mining for injustice, he doesn’t seem to know where to put the camera. The logistics of the plot make no sense, and he has nothing to sell but the theme of our common humanity—in which, on the evidence, I don’t think he believes. His heart is really in defacing American iconography, as when the black soldiers recall a Norman Rockwell-style diner back home and the owner’s refusing to serve them—even though a table was occupied by German prisoners. When the flashback ends, the men stare balefully into the camera. The seconds crawl: What are they glaring at? Us? It turns out to be some racist posters, but I can’t help thinking we’ve also been accused.
Miracle at St. Anna will doubtless be extolled by people who mistake Lee’s righteous clobbering for moral seriousness. But compare any scene to Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes (stupidly retitled Days of Glory in the U.S.), in which Algerians—French citizens—fight for a country that gives them no rights: The storytelling is measured, the encounters glancing but rich, the violence more devastating for its restraint. Compare the Taviani brothers’ sublime Night of the Shooting Stars, in which comedy bleeds into tragedy and the characters have so much stature you can’t believe they’re killing one another so absurdly. Lee’s climax is part punishing bloodbath, part florid religious uplift, and the coda is so maladroit it’s hard to believe anyone on-set could keep a straight face. (Does Lee believe this crap, or is he trying to outdo the end of Saving Private Ryan—which barely worked?)
When Lee made his studio caper picture, Inside Man, a lot of us praised his light touch, even his slickness, and I fear that might have been interpreted as a call for him to be more ingratiating to the mainstream audience and his Hollywood masters. It wasn’t. It was that he finally seemed to have enough confidence in his storytelling to keep his agenda below the surface. In movies like Miracle at St. Anna, the humanity can’t be force-fed or captured on a placard. It’s too evanescent. It’s only a miracle if it rises up out of the screen, as if by force of nature. It’s only a miracle if it looks easy.
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [3/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Cinematical (James Rocchi) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Spike Lee Goes To War Richard Corliss from Time magazine
Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review easily the most expansive film Spike Lee has ever done —it spans four decades and a couple continents — but it’s also one of his weakest, an absolutely blundered, needlessly convoluted, and frequently boring war film that squanders the good idea at its center
Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale, the worst film Lee has ever made, a bombastic, blow to the head misfire that regurgitates clichés
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [2/5] may not be the worst film, but it may well be the single most disappointing entry in Lee’s filmography
Movies 101 (Robert Glatzer) review filled with all the clichés of standard white war films
filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [2.5/5] also seen here: Reel.com review [2/4] a well intentioned but poorly constructed film
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review could be the longest and most expensive shaggy-dog story ever told
eFilmCritic.com (Brian Orndorf) review [1/5] as disorganized, unfulfilling, and lifeless a picture as Lee is capable of making
New York Press - ARMOND WHITE - Saving Private Conflicts easily one of the ugliest reviews out there
Spike Lee botches World War Two saga Miracle | Entertainment ... Kirk Honneycutt from The Hollywood Reporter, September 8, 2008
Lee calls out Eastwood, Coens over casting Eric J. Lyman from The Hollywood Reporter, May 21, 2008
BBC News: Eastwood hits back at Lee claims June 6, 2008
Marikar, Sheila; "Spike Strikes Back: Clint's 'an Angry Old Man'"; abcnews; Sheila Marikar from ABC News, June 6, 2008
Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee Go to War! E-Online, June 8, 2008
FOXNews.com - Spike Lee Ignites War of Words with Clint Eastwood ... Hannity & Colmes transcript June 10, 2008
Lee blasts Hollywood war mythology as Miracle at St. Anna debuts CBS News, September 7, 2008
SUGAR & SPIKE - New York Post Sandra Guzman talks to the director, September 21, 2008
Spike Lee film depicts soldiers he wanted on big screen: Black ... Interview by Sonia Murray from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 24, 2008
Spike Lee discusses 'Miracle at St. Anna' (and Obama) - Los ... Tom Roston from The LA Times, September 25, 2008
The miracle of Spike Lee | Salon Arts & Entertainment Interview by James Hannaham from Salon, September 25, 2008
Continue reading Interview: 'Miracle at St. Anna' Director Spike Lee Interview by James Rocchi from Cinematical, September 26, 2008
Spike Lee Goes to War With 'St. Anna' Sheri Jennings from The Washington Post, September 28, 2008
Spike Lee in the line of fire Ben Child, from The Guardian, September 30, 2008
The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [2/4]
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [2/6]
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [1/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [1/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Villagers recall terror of SS massacre Richard Owen in Sant'Anna di Atazzema from Times On Line, January 16, 2004
Former Nazi officers on trial over Italian massacre AP News in Rome, from Times On Line, April 20, 2004
Nazis too old to be jailed for massacre Richard Owen in Rome from Times On Line, January 23, 2005
Italian war veterans denounce 'insulting' Spike Lee film - Times ... Richard Owen in Rome from Times On Line, October 1, 2008
DA
SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS C 73
USA (123 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Kickstarter page
Spike Lee has reached a troublesome point in his career, initially thwarted from making the Jackie Robinson story that he’d been trying to make for over twenty years due to lack of funding, only to find himself in a mysterious gulf of sudden irrelevance where his career has been redefined by the remakes of other people’s movies, where many scratched their heads over his choice to remake the Korean torture porn classic, Park Chan-wook’s OLD BOY (2003), a disastrous $30 million dollar venture in 2013 that became one of the biggest box office bombs of his entire career, leaving him working in small television projects while struggling for the major financing needed for a feature film. Left to his own devises, he initiated a Kickstarter campaign (Kickstarter page), raising just under a million and a half dollars to remake Bill Gunn’s relatively obscure Blaxploitation film GANJA & HESS (1973), a black vampire film, supposedly a rival to BLACULA (1972), but shot on a $350,000 budget. The film was something of a surprise, the only American film to be shown during Critics Week at Cannes in 1973, where the director was determined to create something far more ambitious than a genre film, using vampirism as a metaphor to explore the idea of addiction in all its forms while introducing specifically black themes that had traditionally been left out of American cinema. Gunn was a television actor who previously wrote the screenplay to Hal Ashby’s offbeat THE LANDLORD (1970), who ironically died just a few months before the Cannes premiere of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), but this overlooked feature is a part of the post 60’s black independent film movement that Lee felt was in need of rediscovery, and if only out of curiosity, this film will lead many prospective viewers back to that original film.
Much like Gus van Sant’s shot-for-shot 1998 remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Lee’s film, shot in just 16 days, is at times a similar scene-for-scene remake that feels weakly unfocused and out of time, paying homage to a film and an era that remains puzzlingly off the radar for most viewers. And for those who lived to experience the revitalization of American cinema in the 70’s, largely due to the diminished power of major Hollywood film studios, unleashing untapped energy with a ferocity of spirit and imagination, Lee’s bland, badly acted, and almost wooden remake sadly falls far short. Perhaps, like Scorsese or Tarantino, Lee might have simply promoted an updated restoration of the original film and distributed Gunn’s film in arthouses across the country. Viewers probably would have been better served. Instead we are treated to another Spike Lee bust, as the film was initially released over the Internet before an extremely limited release, where most people will be viewing this film on television. While this tactic worked with Lee’s splendid Katrina documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), initially shown on HBO, there is little word-of-mouth buzz spreading any interest in this film, which may only titillate the interest of film scholars. The story of both films is nearly identical, where the unique interest is that it doesn’t follow the normal rules for European originated vampires, where you won’t see the enlarged teeth from a typical first bite or a stake to the heart, no coffins to sleep in the daytime, and no flying bats, but immortality can still be achieved, though it follows a path with a direct link to Africa.
Dr. Hess Green (Stephen Tyrone Williams) is a renowned art scholar and black archaeologist with an expertise in African civilization, living an excluded life of wealth and extravagance on the island of Martha’s Vineyard where the film was shot. Traveling by a chauffeur driven Rolls-Royce, his home is a lavish, museum-like display of African artifacts that are spread throughout his luxurious estate, where one item in particular, an Ashanti dagger is used when his trusted assistant, Lafayette Hightower (Elvis Nolasco in a role originally played by director Bill Gunn), grows delirious in a drunken state that resembles a nightmarish, out of control dream, stabbing Dr. Green and killing him with the cursed ancient knife before wandering offscreen and killing himself. Green mysteriously survives, however, with no sign of a wound, but an insatiable appetite for raw human blood. Seemingly immortal, his new life is defined by this unquenchable desire, seen driving into the city stealing blood bags from a hospital, but also preying upon lower class women, an unsuspecting prostitute and then another young mother. However he is soon visited by Hightower’s widow Ganja (Zaraah Abrahams) in an angered state looking for her missing husband, as she hasn’t heard a word about his whereabouts, but Green’s surrounding wealth has an intoxicating effect upon her, leaving her open to his powers of seduction, where she mysteriously joins Green in a world of the undead. Veering between B-movie exaggerated comedy, soft porn and horror, Lee combines a stylistic arthouse aesthetic along with a voluptuous former girlfriend named Tangier (Naté Bova) to introduce Ganja into the ways of blood feeding, using the director’s own fascination with lesbian sex and porn, prominently displayed in SHE HATE ME (2004) and Girl 6 (1996), becoming a confusing, mixed-up mosaic of salacious nudity, gratuitous gore, and often grotesque violence. While the film wants to articulate a weighty societal message, what’s missing is any sense of urgency, as much of what we see feels laughable, more like an exercise in camp, where many of the themes of the original, discovering one’s true racial identity or exploring the contrast between African spirituality and Southern gospel Christianity, simply get lost in translation.
Movie
Review - Da Sweet Blood of Jesus - eFilmCritic Rob Gonsalves
Even when Spike Lee remakes a horror movie, he can’t sell out.
For one thing, the “horror movie” he has remade is an artsy 1973
item named Ganja and Hess, a film nearly lost but later restored, and
generally known only to die-hard cult-flick fanatics and serious students of
African-American cinema. For another, Lee has taken a page from the original
film’s writer/director, Bill Gunn, and made the film with a leisurely,
unhurried pace, full of ennui … well, it kind of drags, if you want to
know. Under the new title Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Lee’s movie repeats
Gunn’s themes of vampirism as addiction and the painful dichotomy of a black
man torn between African spirituality and American Christianity. Lee certainly
doesn’t schlock things up. But, other than some left-field lesbian flirtation
late in the game, he doesn’t add much excitement, either.
As before, the new film follows scholar Dr. Hess Green (Stephen Tyrone
Williams) on his journey into blood obsession after his insane assistant stabs
him with a cursed ancient weapon. The curse renders Hess immortal but also addicted
to blood. He steals blood bags from a hospital; he preys on an AIDS-stricken
prostitute, then on a young mother. Eventually the assistant’s ex-wife, Ganja
Hightower (Zaraah Abrahams), comes looking for the assistant, and Hess seduces
her into the life of the undead. There are minor and major changes — for
instance, Lee disregards the climactic note of redemption on which Gunn sealed
his movie — but Lee mostly traces Gunn’s template, right down to some dialogue
(Gunn receives a 25-year-posthumous cowriting credit here).
I hate to say it, because I’ve always respected Lee’s work even when certain
bold attempts have flatlined, but Ganja and Hess will stay with me
longer than Da Sweet Blood of Jesus will. As a filmmaker, in terms of
technique and talent, Lee has it all over Gunn, but Gunn was serious and
passionate about this story in a way that Lee isn’t, quite. Lee is a fan of Ganja
and Hess, and he decided to honor it and its maker, but the material itself
doesn’t seem to light a fire in his belly. (It was a Kickstarter project, and a
lot of it feels like a movie that could be reliably shot on the quick and cheap
in Martha’s Vineyard, where Lee lives some of the year.) Gunn’s film, despite
or possibly because of its technical ineptitude, packs more DIY charm, and even
on Blu-ray it looks chewed up and bruised, adding to its dreamlike effect.
Lee’s film looks slicker, but to its detriment; it’s as though someone made a
pristine-looking remake of Last House on Dead End Street … or, more to
the point, George Romero’s Martin, another idiosyncratic vampire movie
that could go on a double bill with Ganja and Hess.
This particular story, with its specific concerns about racial authenticity, is
very much of its time. It doesn’t translate very well to 2015, when a young
black man’s biggest concern is not losing his African soul but being shot by
the cops. Lee’s version spends a lot of time on Ganja and Hess’s tragic love
story, which indicates a misreading of what made the story unique in the first
place. Stephen Tyrone Williams’ Hess is stoic and bland, lacking the brittle
power Duane Jones brought to the role, but Zaraah Abrahams is fun to watch as
Ganja, and she gets some heat going with the striking Naté Bova as an old flame
of Hess’s. But Gunn had more on his mind and in his heart than Skinemax
eroticism; his film was somehow lovable despite being completely uningratiating
and stubbornly elliptical, because it felt pure.
"Ganja and Hess" is art; "Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" is a copy of art, and I don’t know that Gunn would be flattered by it.
Da Sweet
Blood of Jesus: Race, Class, and a Lust for Blood Rachel Del Giudice from Film Comment, February 14, 2015
Following his remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Spike Lee tackles another bloody cultural artifact: the late Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult thriller Ganja & Hess (which screened here recently as part of Tell It Like It Is, our showcase of black independent filmmaking in New York). This time, Stephen Tyrone Williams is Dr. Hess Greene, an affluent professor of African art who, in a scuffle with his assistant (Elvis Nolasco, a Lee collaborator since 1995’s Clockers), is stabbed with a cursed Ashanti dagger. Now sporting a taste for blood, he meets his assistant’s wife (Zaraah Abrahams), and the two embark on what Lee dubs “a new kind of love story.”
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus blends the social awareness of all the director’s works (commenting obliquely on addiction and class inequity) with the invigorating roughness of a crowdfunded project shot in an astonishing 16 days. Musical highlights include Bruce Hornsby’s jazz piano score and a rousing gospel performance at the Lil’ Piece of Heaven Baptist Church of Lee’s Red Hook Summer.
Critics praised the intimacy with which Lee approached the subject matter, and the "unparalleled beauty he finds" in the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.
“Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,” Spike Lee’s new film, is a grisly and ghoulish vampire story. It is also an evident labor of love...Mr. Lee has earned a reputation as a polemicist and provocateur, but he has also been, from the beginning, a sensualist and a visual stylist,” noted The New York Times this week in their review of the film.
Yet for all its frenetic gore and sensuality Da Sweet Blood of Jesus remains a contemplative work, one in which Lee reflects upon his own rise to success and weaves it into a complex tale about the assimilation of African Americans into the upper echelons of society. Slant wrote about what an alienating transition it can be: “This film is a parable of the parasitic divide between the haves and the have-nots, between men and women, between blacks and whites. It's also about the loneliness and the social estrangement that characterizes life on any portion of this wide variety of social spectrums, uniting us, though it's just as knowingly occupied with the cathartic pleasure of the rarefied life that's enabled by mass suffering.”
The New Yorker observed this sense of being cut-adrift in their review as well: “The movie is distortedly expressive, almost hermetic in its subjective intensity, as flagrantly symbolic as Gunn’s, with an extra strain of self-doubt and even despair.”
Above all, Lee never lost sight of the daring cult classic that engendered his film. Speaking to blackfilm.com, he described his relationship to the original work and its visionary director: “We have the film as part of the legacy of Bill Gunn — a great, great filmmaker, playwright and director. This film is a child of Ganja & Hess.”
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a genre-smashing story of grotesque wealth and paralyzing desire embodied by the romance between two vampires.
“GANJA & HESS” with “DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS” Samuel Zimmerman from Fangoria
In 2013, the great Spike Lee turned to Kickstarter ostensibly to help fund a film with little commercial interest. Titled DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS, the picture was given an intriguing, vague synopsis that hinted at a story of vampirism. It read, “A film about human beings who are addicted to blood. It’s a new kind of love story (and not a remake of “Blacula”). It has however, ended up a remake of something else entirely: Bill Gunn’s hallucinatory addiction fable, GANJA & HESS.
A 1973 feature which boasts a starring role from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD’s Duane Jones, GANJA & HESS was long unseen in its proper form. Recut into the 76 minute Blaxploitation film BLOOD COUPLE (despite a rousing reception at Cannes), Gunn’s film was restored thanks to one surviving print and released on DVD in 1998.
Apparently highly influential on Lee, GANJA & HESS has now been refashioned into DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS, just months after his seemingly less passionate take on OLDBOY hit theaters. DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS premiered Sunday, June 22 at the American Black Film Festival in New York City where Indiewire’s Eric Kohn tweeted this image of the film’s press notes, which confirmed the film’s main source of inspiration.
Hewing close to GANJA & HESS’ plot and characters, DA SWEET BLOOD… stars Stephen Tyrone Williams as ancient art scholar Dr. Greene, who’s stabbed with a cursed blade and stricken with an addiction to blood. Soon, he’s in a torrid affair with Ganja, the widow of his deceased research partner (who is likely the counterpart of the suicidal George Meda, played by Bill Gunn, in GANJA & HESS). From there, reports indicate Lee has veered off into an entirely different tone. While pegged as being meditative, much like GANJA, reviews of DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS are finding the film unique and playful, a stylistic horror-comedy in line with Lee’s aesthetic and European art horror (indicated by the image above of Zaraah Abrahams as Ganja).
Jordan Hoffman at The Guardian writes, “The transformative nature of blood has inspired deep thinkers of theology as well as the crass schlockmeisters of cheap-o horror. For Spike Lee, his newest picture Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a hearty gulp from both glasses.” He later calls DA SWEET BLOOD… a “peculiar film that may be uneven, but is too unique and enjoyable to dismiss.”
Other write-ups and notes follow suit, describing DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS as messy, but winning and full of creativity and ideas. Not surprising, considering Lee is just that when at is most creative and energetic.
No news has broken on when the world at large will see DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS, but by virtue of it being a. A new Spike Lee joint, B. A new Spike Lee joint that’s something of a horror movie and C. A new Spike Lee join that remakes GANJA & HESS, I hope it’s quite soon. If you’ve yet to see GANJA & HESS, it’s currently available on DVD, Blu-ray and Amazon streaming. It’s utterly fascinating, alive filmmaking. Like its first audience is saying of DA SWEET BLOOD…, GANJA & HESS is imperfect, but truly special. For more, find Phil Nobile Jr.’s excellent look at its content and history here.
Spike
Lee brings the blaxploitation classic Ganja & Hess ... Ben Sachs from The Chicago Reader
Your
appreciation of Spike Lee's Da
Sweet Blood of Jesus will likely depend on whether you're familiar with
the movie Lee is remaking, Bill Gunn's low-budget cult classic Ganja &
Hess (1973). If you are, Lee's remake is a must-see; if not, you should
probably skip it. Lee follows the original so closely that Gunn, who died in
1989, gets cowriting credit. Jesus is so faithful to Ganja that
Lee even replicates some of the original movie's more amateurish qualities; the
pacing goes slack on occasion, the sets are noticeably underdressed, and the
acting is all over the map. This isn't just a tribute to Gunn but a commentary
on independent filmmaking today, though watching it without knowing its source
material might feel like listening to one end of a conversation.
Ganja & Hess tells the story of a wealthy black archaeologist, Dr. Hess Green, who becomes a blood-drinking immortal after his assistant stabs him with an ancient magical dagger from Africa. The assistant commits suicide, and his nouveau-riche wife, Ganja, comes looking for him at Hess's estate in Martha's Vineyard. She and Hess fall in love and marry, and he passes on to her the gift of immortality. During this time he occasionally goes off on his own to satisfy his ever-growing thirst for blood by preying on lower-class women. Soon enough Ganja becomes desperate for blood herself and also turns to murder, though in contrast to the guilt-ridden Hess, she exhibits no remorse.
This might sound like a typical horror item, but it hardly plays like one. Gunn tells the story elliptically; he never explains, for instance, when exactly Hess becomes immortal or what prompts Ganja's sudden devotion to him. Moreover the film is marked by unpredictable changes in tone. Some scenes are blatant satire, some are psychodrama, and some display the influence of contemporaneous avant-garde cinema, trading in symbolic imagery and associative editing. (There are also forays into soft-core pornography.) On one level Ganja is an allegory about black assimilation into upper-class America, the wealthy, unsympathetic Hess maintaining his lifestyle by murdering underprivileged blacks. Yet Gunn's open-ended symbolism hints at other themes that aren't so easy to parse. Consumed by remorse, Hess becomes obsessed with Christianity, though one can hardly tell whether the depiction of religious epiphany is satirical or sincere.
The remake is more straightforward as narrative, though Lee preserves most of the original's ambiguities, not to mention its overstated social satire and certain aspects of the story that seem dated today. Hess (Stephen Tyrone Williams) still refers to himself as "the only colored man on the block" in Martha's Vineyard, and, in classic exploitation-movie fashion, some scenes run a few minutes too long to accommodate songs on the soundtrack. Lee, known for his flamboyant imagery and jazzy editing, copies Gunn's drab visual style so reverently that viewers unfamiliar with early-70s underground filmmaking might think that Lee is simply phoning this one in. (There are relatively few winks to the audience, as there were in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse.)
The impoverished style is no affectation, but rather a show of respect to Gunn, who had to make Ganja & Hess quickly and with minimal resources. The film was financed by Kelly/Jordan Enterprises, a low-rent production outfit that hoped to cash in on the recent success of Blacula (1972) by making another vampire movie for inner-city audiences. The project needed a writer and director, so producer Chiz Schultz suggested his friend Gunn, an accomplished stage and TV actor who'd recently won acclaim for writing Hal Ashby's The Landlord (1970). Gunn balked at the offer initially, but after some consideration he began to view the project as a challenge; while delivering the lurid sex and violence the financiers expected, he would craft a personal art movie on the themes of religion and race relations.
Gunn presented the money men with a conventional horror-movie script before shooting, only to throw away most of it on set. He encouraged improvisation among his actors and in postproduction tried out a range of experimental techniques with editor Victor Kanefsky. Ganja & Hess won an international critics' prize at Cannes, though the executives at Kelly/Jordan were livid that Gunn had made something so arty and recut the movie to make it more like the trashy genre item they'd expected, renaming it Blood Couple. (Over the years it would play the exploitation circuit under no less than five other titles.) Gunn wouldn't live to see the film restored to its original form in 1998, though tales of its production became the stuff of legend and made Gunn a hero to the next generation of black independent filmmakers.
The most prominent of those filmmakers is Lee, who graduated from independent production to a successful career in the mainstream. Ganja anticipates Lee's work in its tonal shifts and blunt consideration of racial issues, and Lee modestly presents himself as Gunn's protege by refusing to top the original. He also acknowledges how far black independent filmmaking has come in the last 40 years by drawing attention to Ganja's impoverished aesthetic. In 1973 Gunn had to work in exploitation cinema to make an experimental film about black assimilation; nowadays any enterprising director can make whatever movie he wants for a lot less. (Even a cheapo production like Ganja cost $350,000; today one can make a much slicker-looking movie for one-tenth as much.)
Indeed Jesus is Lee's most hardscrabble production since the 1980s. He raised the budget with a Kickstarter campaign and a number of product placement deals, then partnered with a small distribution company to release the film. This process reflects the growing difficulty Lee encounters in getting his projects financed, but it also suggests a show of solidarity with filmmakers starting out now. Like such other groundbreaking independents as George A. Romero and Stephanie Rothman, Gunn took advantage of his independence to make radical political statements. Lee might replicate Gunn's dialogue and visual style, but what he really wants to hold up as a model is Gunn's audacity.
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway and Kyle Miner]
A “Late Film” from Spike Lee - The New Yorker Richard Brody
Review: Spike Lee's Kickstarter Exploitation B-Movie 'Da ... Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist
Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of Jesus Can't Top Its Inspiration Alan Scherstuhl from The Village Voice
'Da Sweet Blood of Jesus' is a mess, but a fascinating one ... Dylan Griffin from Sound on Sight
Lee's Strange Vampire Saga Turns Sour in Da Sweet Blood ... Todd Jorgenson from Front Row
Cultjer [James Arthur Armstrong]
Daily | Spike Lee and DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS - Fandor David Hudson
The Hollywood Reporter [John DeFore]
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus review - The Guardian Jordan Hoffman
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also wseen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus - Los Angeles Times Robert Abele
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus Movie Review (2015) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz
Review: 'Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,' Spike Lee's Vampire ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
CHI-RAQ B+ 90
USA (118 mi) 2015
‘Scope Official
site
While the
controversial title Chi-Raq is
designed to highlight the fact that Chicago is a divided city where most of the
city’s residents live safely tucked away from the black segregated
neighborhoods on the south and west sides known as Chi-Raq, viewed as a war
zone where the majority of the city’s murders take place, as the Englewood
neighborhood on the south side and Garfield on the west side have homicide
rates more than ten times higher than anywhere else in the city, where the rest
of Chicago seems oblivious to the bloodshed and violence taking place every day
in Chi-Raq, where all they know about
it is reported on the 6 and 10 o’clock news reports announcing the daily
killings taking place. Other than that,
the majority of Chicago remains totally clueless about those forced to live under
such atrociously primitive, third world conditions. Lee introduces the problem with statistics in
the opening credits, revealing more than three times as many people in Chicago
have been killed (7,356) since 2001 than those serving in Iraq (2,379), and
more than the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars combined (6,867), yet so little of the American political focus
offers any solution for this inner city crisis.
Opening with the bold-printed exclamation, “This is an emergency!” with
both beginning and ending warnings to “Wake up,” music has always played a
prominent role in Spike Lee films, from Public Enemy in Do the
Right Thing (1989), Stevie Wonder in JUNGLE FEVER (1991), Prince in Girl 6
(1996), where now, perhaps more than anything else, Lee’s film offers a soulful
prayer for the city, Nick
Cannon - Pray 4 My City (Explicit Version) - YouTube (3:27), where the
lyrics literally bathe the screen, “I don’t live in Chicago, I live in
Chi-Raq.” Using Chicago natives R. Kelly
and Jennifer Hudson, who lost her mother, brother, and 7-year old nephew to gun
violence in Chicago in 2008, as well as some of Chicago’s local talent, where
rap, gospel, drill music, and R & B rhythms, along with an eloquent
symphonic score written by Lee regular Terence Blanchard, merge together to
immerse the viewers in a pulsating, anthem-like, urban soundtrack that literally
encases the film with musical poetry that serves as a backdrop and
somber reminder of the harsh realities facing black youth in Chicago today, where in an early message, Chicago rapper
Tink joins R. Kelly in a rousing call to disarm, OST Chi Raq R Kelly, Tink
Put The Guns Down - YouTube (6:07):
Somewhere
in the world a boy or girl is being buried by their mother
Somewhere
in the world there is violence, brother against brother
Do
your dance, get in your zone, they can’t take you out that
Do
your dance, get in your zone, they can’t take you out that
Every
hood, every block, somebody’s dying over nothing
All
this hating gotta stop, we gotta know life is worth something
From
Chicago to L.A
Houston,
Miami
All
the way to St. Tropez
There’s
gotta be a better way
You
got to, you got to, you got to
You
got to, you got to
Put
the guns down, put the guns down
In much the same way that 80’s rappers N.W.A were spawned by a culture of police brutality in Straight Outta Compton (2015), this film echoes a similar reality of young black men in Chicago, where the ferociousness of gang violence has no bounds, continually escalating into ever more senseless and mind-numbing brutality, where the music adds a subjective voice that literally transforms this film into a rousingly entertaining Broadway style production. Working from an ancient Greek play from the 5th century BC, Lysistrata by Aristophanes, which takes place during the seemingly endless carnage of the Peloponnesian War, Lee’s bawdy satire co-written by Kevin Willmott is a modern era, comical revisit to equally brutal times, where rival gangs known as the Spartans (wearing purple) and the Trojans (wearing orange) are involved in fierce combat on the streets of Chi-Raq, which also happens to be the name of the rapper (Nick Cannon) running the Spartan gang, seen performing at a packed Hip-Hop club in a devastating opening sequence that erupts into gun violence, leaving dead bodies and chaos in its wake. Shown unscathed and relatively unconcerned afterwards, Chi-Raq is chilling with his exquisitely fine girlfriend Lysistrata, played by Teyonah Parris, who is the real star of the show. Her sex appeal is beyond description, bold and self-assured, turning men’s eyes wherever she goes, exhibiting a fierce individualism in her walk. When Chi-Raq’s lovemaking in Lysistrata’s home is interrupted by an eruption of flames accompanied by a drive-by shooting through the window, he runs out into the street firing a semi-automatic weapon at the culprit who gets away, none other than Wesley Snipes as Cyclops, the leader of the Trojans, a one-eyed pimp who seems to prefer dressing as a pirate. Living across the street is Miss Helen, Angela Bassett, a fierce intellectual whose living room is lined with bookcases, righteously offended by what transpires in front of her home, seen afterwards with her hands on her hips and a look that could kill on her face. While the audience is immediately aware of the escalating conflict, there is never any attention paid to what they are fighting over, a mystery that seems invisible from every headline-grabbing story as well, becoming one of the underlying blind spots in an American culture that refuses to look any further into the root causes of ceaseless black urban violence.
In a touch of farce, Samuel L. Jackson is Dolmedes, a wildly humorous, sharply-dressed, one might even say pimp-inspired narrator with a walking stick who often interrupts the story, stepping outside the action to interject his own snide and sarcastic comments that he always seems to relish, offering moral insight in the role of a Greek chorus, explaining how communities under siege aren’t really anything new. In a throwback to the earlier era, much of the film’s language has an iambic pentameter rhyming scheme, which rather than feeling old-fashioned, offers a playfulness in the way the characters relate to each other, where the artifice on display is way over the top, thoroughly exaggerated (filled with dick jokes), overly melodramatic, and satiric as hell, with nothing subtle about it, filled with exuberant singing and dancing, where it feels like the director has taken a page out of John Waters, as this could easily be presented on stage, which might be the preferred medium. With her house burned down, Lysistrata moves in with Miss Helen, who graciously allows her into her home, calling her boyfriend “Machine Gun Kelly,” suggesting she needs to do something about him, encouraging her to take a radical stand. Mindful of the original Greek play, where Lysistrata organizes a group of wives to withhold sexual privileges as a form of punishment for the militaristic exploits of their husbands who are the commanders responsible for the continued bloodbath in ancient Greece, Miss Helen draws a parallel to Leymah Gbowee (LeymahGbowee.com), a Liberian peace activist who in 2002 initiated a sex strike with the men fighting a particularly bloody 14-year civil war begun in 1989, which helped bring about an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003, ushering in new elections, ultimately won by one of her co-conspirators, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who in 2005 became the first female head of state in Liberia, a position she still holds, having recently been reelected, with the two of them sharing the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Dolmedes finds this particularly amusing, reminding the audience of the old adage that the best way to hide something from black people is to put it in a book, but declares Lysistrata’s intentions, as ridiculous as they sound, to be deadly serious, as desperate times call for desperate measures, actively seeking the support of women from rival gangs and the city at large, initiating public demonstrations, flooding the airwaves in protest, and generating slogans of “No peace, no pussy.”
A major turning point in the film is the senseless death of an 11-year old girl struck by a stray bullet, the daughter of Irene, Jennifer Hudson, mirroring her real-life personal tragedy which is at the heart of this film. While we’re used to seeing the repetitive pattern of grief-stricken mothers, the local news reporters pointing microphones in the faces of the victim’s family, neighborhood marches led by local pastors asking for an end to gun violence, including speeches urging the communities themselves to stand up to the murderers in their midst by turning them in to the authorities, with churches offering monetary rewards as an incentive, where nothing ever comes of it, as no one ever comes forward to identify the killers as they’re almost certain to be killed themselves in retribution. Placing plenty of blame all around, from the cops to the legal system to the tone-deaf politicians and even the residents themselves, what we’re not used to seeing is what Lee envisions in this film, which is a community that has literally had enough and decides to creatively take action into their own hands. It’s important to consider the role of Father Michael Pfleger (played in the film as Father Corridan by John Cusack), the white pastor of the mostly black St. Sabina’s Catholic Church on the south side since 1981, a pacifist and social activist in a similar role as Daniel Berrigan and Philip Berrigan, outspoken Catholic priests against the Vietnam war in the 1960’s (who happened to be close friends of Cusack’s parents), and one of the familiar faces seen in the funerals and public protests. Cusack’s fiery sermon offers the moral center of the picture, himself a tragic figure as he’s present at nearly every funeral, literally pleading for his neighborhood to summon their outrage and speak for the fallen victims, to rise up from the ashes of the dead and take responsibility for what happens in their own community, where the grim murder statistics speak for themselves. The question is how will they respond now that all this international attention is focused on Chicago at the moment, with the mayor recently firing the police commissioner, where the FBI will be conducting an extensive years-long search into the entire police operations, as recent cop-cam video evidence suggests police have been fabricating reports to justify the use of deadly force for years, where “the whole world is watching,” to coin a phrase from Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), one of the legendary films shot in Chicago.
Despite the rampant local criticism (Spike Lee Says Chicago Mayor Objected to 'Chi-Raq' Film ...), including many local writers, politicians, and citizens who are upset the film will depict Chicago in a negative light, they should be more upset about the murders themselves than any fictional movie depiction, as there’s nothing about this picture that is anti-Chicago, and is really a love letter to Chicago in hopes that they get their act together, where the creative efforts of the women in the film really dominate most of the action, though one of the best sequences is a fast forward el ride downtown from the south side where directly in the center of the picture is Trump Tower. While it’s a bit outrageous, so is the subject matter it’s dealing with, so to sit people inside a theater for 2 hours forced to deal with the excessive police reaction to minorities, including a murder rate that is through the roof, is probably a good thing. As of December 20, 2015, according to the Chicago Tribune in a graph that is updated regularly, there have been 2,887 shooting victims in Chicago just this year, topping the number of 2,587 for all of last year. Despite increased police presence, the ages of those killed seems to be getting younger and younger, as innocent kids are shot in broad daylight right in front of their houses, walking home from school, or riding the school bus, where it used to violate even the gang’s code of ethics to shoot young children, as if that was itself a cowardly act, but that doesn’t seem to bother this new age group of killers that continuously spray bullets in public places, where they could care less about the collateral damage. Perhaps it might surprise people to learn how many civilian victims also account for the large majority of those killed in war zones, where according to the June 2014 issue of the American Journal of Public Health seen here, extrapolated by antiwar author David Swanson:
The proportion of civilian deaths and the methods for classifying deaths
as civilian are debated, but civilian war deaths constitute 85% to 90% of
casualties caused by war, with about 10 civilians dying for every combatant
killed in battle. The death toll (mostly civilian) resulting from the recent
war in Iraq is contested, with estimates of 124,000 to 655,000 to more than
a million, and finally most
recently settling on roughly a half million. Civilians have been targeted for
death and for sexual violence in some contemporary conflicts. Seventy percent
to 90% of the victims of the 110 million landmines planted since 1960 in 70
countries were civilians.
INFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski] also seen here: The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski] and here: User Reviews from imdb December 4, 2015 | by Steve Pulaski (United States) – See all my reviews
Living in the suburbs of Illinois, for the last several years,
I've been seriously fascinated by the wealth of young rappers to emerge out of
the city of Chicago. This new wave of rappers, often put under the blanket
classification of "drill rappers" - music that emphasizes snares,
synthesizers, and cold lyrics concerning murder and violence - range from ages
nine to late twenties, and the music is often used as an auditory backdrop and
grave detailing of harsh realities facing black youth in Chicago today. Rappers
like Chief Keef, Lil Durk, Lil Herb, Montana of 300, and Young Chop (also a
producer who appears in this film, as well) have made careers off of
emphasizing their struggle and their reality in a way that echoes much of the
sentiments five young black men had in Compton back in the 1980's. Their story
was transformed into a triumphant film this year about rap, gang violence, and
gritty business called Straight Outta Compton. Now, the culture of drill
rappers, careless bloodshed, and pervasive murders gets its due in Spike Lee's
latest joint Chi-Raq.
The film is a modern, farcical retelling of Aristophanes' famous story of
"Lysistrata," a story about Greek women withholding sexual privileges
from their men in punishment for fighting the Peloponnesian War. Revolving
around a Chicago rapper named "Chi-Raq" (played by Cannon), Lee
focuses on the women in neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago, particularly
Englewood, withholding the same sexual pleasures until gang members agree to
stop the violence and start spreading peace; the decision comes after a
seven-year-old girl is killed with a stray bullet. Inciting this protest is the
film's own Lysistrata character, played by Teyonah Parris, who was also in last
year's "Dear White People." All of the women in Chicago choose to
take part in this protest, especially after hearing the fiery sermon of Father
Mike Corridan (John Cusack, a fellow Chicago native doing his own Father
Michael Pfleger impression with great passion).
The result is a city divided between abstinent women and horny men, with rival
gangs, the Spartans, of which Chi-Raq belongs, and the Trojans, led by a
one-eyed pimp known as "Cyclops" (Wesley Snipes), bitterly torn
between their desire to command the streets of their city and exhale their
frustrations and find some kind of romanticism in a cold environment.
Meanwhile, Lysistrata and other women of the city, including Miss Helen (Angela
Bassett in one of the best roles I've seen from her) and Irene (Jennifer
Hudson, another Chicago native), the mother of the murdered seven-year-old,
stay true to their concept of "no peace, no piece" (the latter p-word
is just a tad more vulgar in the film).
If you live in Chicago, then you've undoubtedly heard about the needless
controversy surrounding this film since the very moment Lee had any interest in
making a film about the city's gang violence. The nonsense surrounding this
film's title has made Lee seem like the person who, not only came up with it
(the origin of the word is questionable, though the term "Chiraq,
Drillinois" was made popular by Chicago rapper King Louie at the dawn of
the new decade), but also somehow started all the violence in the city. This is
sad because the bulk of the attention this film has been getting locally, not
only seems like the only attention the film is getting (I question if this film
has much national appeal), but the kind of attention that simply emphasizes
some sort of controversy thanks to negative remarks by Chicago's Mayor Rahm
Emanuel.
Lee's film is an uproariously funny, bitterly angry, and thoroughly enjoyable
farce on the very real and frightening issue of gang violence. This is
incendiary filmmaking at its finest, uncommonly urgent and begging for
attention without groveling for cheap pathos or an emotional response simply by
tossing around words like "homicides" and "murders." Lee
has made a career out of profiling race relations, but the sad thing is, from
the time he started making films in the late eighties with his amazing Do the
Right Thing, things in the black community have ostensibly stayed the same or
gotten worse. This adds to the reason Chi-Raq bills itself and its situation as
an emergency; it's sad this film even has to exist in the modern day.
Being that Lee has always been a very meticulous filmmaker, using small details
and both primary and secondary to embody larger themes and create more
believable environments, I found myself loving little intricate things about
Chi-Raq. Nick Cannon delivers a very believable performance here, despite
someone not growing up in Chicago nor, to my knowledge, being affiliated with
the musical culture of the region. One of the film's earliest scenes has
Cannon's Chi-Raq character rapping before an energized crowd with Young Chop
blaring trademark drill beats in the background. Cannon convincingly spits
lyrics concerning "tooleys" (guns), "lacking" (being caught
off-guard), the unflinching desire to kill a man's entire family, and other
lyrical hallmarks, all while showcasing a strong ability to rap.
Chi-Raq, given its subject matter, is playful and a lot of fun, which is a huge
plus for an overarching story this grim. Make no mistake, however, for this
isn't a film to lift your spirits nor does it disrespect or do anything to
trivialize the violence in Chicago (something that politicians and the cynical
public will assert despite never buying a ticket to see the film). This is the
rare case of a film taking a serious issue in a light-hearted way and creating
a piece of outspoken filmmaking that emphasizes pop art principles, whilst
giving its respective culture its due. You simply don't find enough films like
Chi-Raq, in terms of quality, bravery, and scope, and that, indeed, is the
double truth, Ruth.
'Chi-Raq' and the Myth of Chicago Gang Wars - The New ... Jason Harrington from The New York Times, December 7, 2015
Toward the beginning of Spike Lee’s new film, “Chi-Raq,” a gun battle erupts in a hip-hop club. It’s the latest salvo in an ongoing war between two fictional Chicago gangs: the Spartans, clad in purple, and the Trojans, in orange. (Lee’s film is a sly retelling of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” the Greek comedy whose heroine tries to end the Peloponnesian War by organizing women to withhold sex from their husbands.) In “Chi-Raq,” the leader of the Trojans is a cackling, piratical figure named Cyclops, bejeweled eye patch and all. Pitted against him is the rapper known as Chi-Raq, the boss of the Spartans. But as the conflict escalates, we never find out why the two gangs are warring — this, it seems, is simply what Chicago gang members do.
But is it? Adapting a fifth-century-B.C. comedy to the streets of Chicago is bound to involve some artifice, and Lee is entitled to a degree of creative leeway. But he also wants us to “wake up” — that’s the message burned into the film’s closing frame, just as in Lee films past — and seriously address the realities of gang-related violence in Chicago. I’ve spent a lot of time in Englewood and Auburn Gresham, the neighborhoods in which “Chi-Raq” is set, talking to scores of gang-involved people on the ground, both socially and while doing researching for a book. And from lifelong set-claimers to the violence-interrupters who work with them, the most common criticism I hear when it comes to portrayals of black Chicago gangs is the way they are shoehorned into this outdated, color-coded, Crips versus Bloods narrative — exactly the misconception that Lee’s film helps perpetuate.
Most shootings in black Chicago neighborhoods are no longer a result of epic clashes between street battalions. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, big gangs like the Black P. Stone Nation and the Gangster Disciples were structured like corporations — tightly run narcotics operations with chains of command. If, for example, an order came down that anyone wearing a rival gang’s colors was to be shot on sight, then that command was dutifully followed by soldiers on the corner. But by the close of the 1990s, with the end of the crack explosion and the federal prosecution of many of the gangs’ founders, the groups splintered into small sets that now only loosely identify with their founding “nations.”
Those sets — and their activities on the street — vary significantly, block by block. A few have their hands in drug trafficking and can become violent. Most are simply young men on the block, united for safety in numbers. None of them can hold neighborhoods hostage to the code of silence that thwarted crime investigations in the past: This fall, members of the Auburn Gresham community came forward to help the police find the suspects in the killing of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee. The sets don’t care what color anyone is wearing, or even which gang nation a person claims. Shootings rarely happen along flag-flying tribal lines. “It boils down to interpersonal disputes now in the black neighborhoods — arguments over money, over girls,” says Eddie Bocanegra, director of the Y.M.C.A.’s South Side violence-prevention program. “You don’t see large-scale, gang-motivated warfare anymore.”
Murders over money, over women: In any other neighborhood, we would call the killers youths committing crimes. In neighborhoods like Englewood and Auburn Gresham, we call them gang members, a label that has very real consequences. Reports of a person’s dying in a gang-related shooting come freighted with the implication that the victim didn’t get killed, but got himself killed. It can amount to victim-blaming. It’s a dehumanizing designation, based on the predominant image of gang members as marauding, gun-toting savages.
“People see ‘gang member,’ and the words ‘psycho killer’ instantly pop in their head. But that isn’t the case,” Andrew Papachristos, a Chicago native and an associate professor of sociology at Yale, says. A majority of residents who claim sets in Chicago are more like Trey, my close friend of 17 years and a member of the 81st Street Black P. Stones in Auburn Gresham. Trey has no violent criminal record and works full time as a security guard. In areas like Gresham, a lot of young men don’t have the luxury of opting out of affiliation with the local set; banding together in brotherhoods can be a survival strategy in neighborhoods where personal reputation is capital and walking the streets alone makes it more likely that you’ll be seen as weak.
It’s also important to consider what the old gang nations still signify to these small sets, on a cultural level. Many started out as politically conscious organizations in the civil rights era. In 1967, for instance, the Black Stones received a million-dollar federal grant to fund a teaching program. Two years later, Richard Nixon invited the Black Stones’ co-founder Jeff Fort to his inaugural ball. It’s no surprise that so many Chicago residents consider gang nations to be institutions, integral to the identities of their neighborhoods. If the murders of all those who affiliate with these groups can be lumped into one broad category — “gang related” — the category becomes, at best, unhelpful. At worst, it’s pernicious, a catchall for any black or brown person murdered in the wrong neighborhood.
That category could easily have included me. In 2006 I was shot at by a drunken 20-something man on the North Side of Chicago while riding in a car with three female friends. The reason? I was in the back seat next to the man’s ex-girlfriend. Enraged, he burst from his house, pistol popping. Luckily, his aim was bad, and my friend was a good defensive driver: The shooter only managed to crack the rear window. I learned later that he had loose ties to a Hispanic set. Since then, I have sometimes wondered how close I came, as a brown man, then in my mid-20s, to having my death trivialized by a two-word phrase in a police blotter.
The chimera of devious street tribes might give people a scapegoat for Chicago’s gun violence, but it doesn’t reflect the complex reality on the ground. And sending in tactical units to “destroy the gangs,” as the former Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy recently vowed, distracts from the structural problems that lead to gun violence in inner-city neighborhoods. When our solution to crime is to target gangs, we risk targeting whole swaths of people in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, almost all of them black and Hispanic. A real solution would involve more opportunities for employment and education, stricter policies on gun control and safe spaces for those who have been traumatized, in order to minimize the chance of violence being perpetuated — the same things people have spent half a century calling for in these neighborhoods.
'Chi-Raq':
Spike Lee's Urgent, Mesmerizing Call to End Gun ... Jen Yamato from The Daily Beast
In the wake of the Laquan McDonald tape, the legendary filmmaker’s latest opus is more timely than ever.
Concerned Chicagoans needn’t worry that
Spike Lee’s searing new joint about urban violence in America is a reductive takedown of their
hometown, even if Chi-Raq takes for its title the ultraviolent endonym
that makes many locals bristle. (Well, Rahm Emanuel might not love how it
depicts his mayoral counterpart as a horny stooge more concerned with
appearances than the city’s crime rate.) Lee plants his flag in the first four
words that flash onscreen, just in case the urgency somehow escapes you: “This
is an emergency.”
The real Chicago knows the feeling all
too well. The city is reeling this week from the release of graphic footage that captured the violent October 2014
killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, shot from behind as he was holding a knife
and walking away from the white uniformed police officer who pumped 16 bullets
into his body. Stories like McDonald’s make outrage over Chi-Raq’s title
and the part of town in which Lee held his premiere rather moot, even as they
reinforce his greater directive: to get America angry enough to care, and
invested enough to take action.
In typically ambitious Lee fashion, Chi-Raq
is a scorchingly pointed satire, and one whose beating heart bleeds onscreen
through an occasionally overstuffed but boldly stylized mash-up of heightened
comedy, rambunctious rhyme and rap, sexual vulgarities, and sweeping polemics.
It’s a wildly vibrant social pronouncement that co-opts its narrative
inspiration improbably, but fittingly, from the 4th century comedy Lysistrata.
Here the crux of Aristophanes’s Peloponnesian War comedy is updated into a
succinct yet provocative antiviolence mantra for its 21st-century heroine—a
local rapper’s girlfriend who rallies the women of her city to withhold sex
until their frustrated men stop the violence. Their fierce refrain is simple
and to the point: “No Peace, No Pussy.”
Chi-Raq unfolds after gunfire at a rap show sends a crowd scattering one night, escalating the heated turf war between young thug emcee Chi-raq (Nick Cannon), the leader of the purple-flying Spartans, and his bitter enemy Cyclops (Wesley Snipes, sporting a bedazzled eye patch and delivering what might be described as a curiously flamboyant Gucci Mane impersonation), who flies the orange colors of rival gang the Trojans. When Cyclops sets fire to Chi-raq’s house while Chi-raq and his lady Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) are knocking boots, war is officially on.
Lysistrata stands by her man, until two other very different women from her neighborhood open her cynical eyes and awaken her consciousness: Miss Helen (Angela Bassett), an old school Dr. King disciple who schools her younger counterpart in social awareness and personal responsibility, and Irene (Jennifer Hudson, who lost her mother, brother, and nephew to gun violence in Chicago), the mother of a young girl killed in broad daylight in the crossfire of gangbangers that no witnesses will dare snitch on. No longer content to be complicit in the destructively macho posturing of Chi-raq’s gangster rap culture, Lysistrata allies with Cyclops’s lady to start a grassroots movement to save their men from certain violent death, incarceration, or worse. Their crusade catches on in the suburbs and reaches a critical mass when it attracts the attention of the international media, getting women across the globe so onboard in the name of the ultimate goal—world peace—that even Michelle Obama’s got Barack hard up to end all wars.
Lysistrata’s no-pussy movement is a surprisingly clever device to hang Chi-Raq’s contemporary concerns on and provides some hilariously lascivious laughs (“I will deny all rights of access or entrance… from every husband, lover, or male acquaintance… who comes to my direction… in erection,” her chastity belt-wearing followers pledge). In her, Lee and co-scribe Kevin Willmott write a ballsy, self-possessed, and sensual heroine whose tumultuous relationship with the resistant Chi-raq works as gendered text and metaphor. Their early foreplay foreshadows the deep philosophical divide ahead as they invoke Biggie and Tupac, two titans of the East Coast-West Coast rivalry, who both fell victim to a culture of violence beyond their control.
Chi-Raq is mostly set in and around the hip-hop clubs, the African-American churches, and the bullet-ridden streets of Chicago, the per capita murder capital of America—one that’s claimed more lives, Lee reminds us in the first few minutes, than the wars waged overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as Chi-Raq’s world expands, Lee’s true target comes into focus: Chi-Raq is Chicago is America, and we are all, in our own way, responsible.
The film is at once searing and celebratory, and that goes doubly for the hard-charging original songs that propel the story forward, alongside dialogue spoken entirely in rhyme—a gimmick that works beautifully to highlight the similarities between traditional verse and contemporary rap. Cannon’s “Pray 4 My City” hits the emotional side of the trap spectrum, and his turn as the damaged, lean-sipping Chi-raq gives the film its final stab toward hopefulness. Meanwhile, Chi-raq paints kaleidoscopic colors with its vibrant soundtrack, interspersing the grimier rap tracks with a pastoral Terence Blanchard score and plaintive gospel-tinged R&B numbers. As Lysistrata’s forces take over a fortified U.S. armory building, a battle of the sexes cover of the Chi-Lites 1972 soul classic “Oh Girl,” sung by her army of cooped up ladies and soldiers wielding slow jams as weapons beyond the gates, unfolds with comical perfection.
Lee provides familiar faces to guide the way through his dense cinematic call to action. Playing a loose version of real-life Chicago activist Father Michael Pfleger (whose voice can be heard in the opening salvo), John Cusack fires up his African-American parish as he delivers a fiery sermon over the body of Hudson’s dead child: “Patti’s gone because our politicians are in the pocket of the National Rifle Association,” he roars. In stylized asides, Samuel L. Jackson’s cane-toting narrator Dolmedes helps the audience fill in gaps in the action on-screen, and Dave Chappelle turns in a brief cameo as a strip club owner desperate when his girls go on strike. Lee also folds in footage of Liberian women’s activist Leyhma Gbowee, whose Lysistrata-esque sex strike is credited with helping end her country’s second civil war a dozen years ago.
Chicago is a city so devastated by gang warfare that ABC News crusader Diane Sawyer tried to save it back in 2012, when she gathered local leaders, youngsters, and gang members to work out their problems on national television. Earlier that year, unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed in Sanford, Florida. Eventually Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland lent their names to the cause that’s since become a lightning rod for social activism in America. Those #BlackLivesMatter martyrs and more get a shout-out in Chi-Raq, a pop cinema audit of injustice and inequality in America so comprehensive, it name drops everything from the raid on Harper’s Ferry to the one-sided war of words between Meek Mill and Drake. There’s a lot of movie packed into Chi-Raq, as if Lee was trying to give every demographic and every generation something vital and relevant to cling to in one fell cinematic swoop. As the stakes grow higher with each passing tragedy, maybe the lure of a Spike Lee joint can light fires in the hearts and minds that headlines fail to reach.
America's
Mass-Shooting Capital Is Chicago - The Daily Beast Justin Glawe, October 8, 2015
Why
You're Wrong to Be Mad About Spike Lee's ... - The Root Demetria Lucas D’Oyley, November 6, 2015
Chiraq
War In Chicago Prevents Solutions - The Root Natalie Y. Moore, January 6, 2014
The New Yorker [Richard Brody]
Chi-Raq
is Spike Lee's larger-than-life love letter to Chicago Tasha Robinson from The Verge
Chi-Raq
Review | Flavorwire Jason Bailey
Chi-Raq
Is a Powerful Weapon in Its Own Right -- Vulture David Edelstein
“Chi-Raq”:
Spike Lee's blistering, outrageous ... - Salon Andrew O’Hehir
'Chi-Raq,'
His Best in Years, Spike Lee Looks to the Ancients Amy Nicholson from The Village Voice
'Chi-Raq'
Review: Spike Lee Spins Sexual Satire Into ... - TheWrap Kevin B. Lee
Chi-Raq, Spike Lee's searing satire, is the director's best film since 2002 Todd VanDerWerff from Vox
Alt Film Guide [Timothy Cogshell]
Review:
Spike Lee's 'Chi-Raq' Starring Nick Cannon, Teyon ... Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist
Review:
Spike Lee's 'Chi-Raq' Delivers The Satire We Need ... Kristy Puchiko from Pajiba
Spike
Lee Declares An Emergency In 'Chi-Raq' : NPR Scott Tobias
The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]
Spectrum Culture [Benjamin Aspray]
Chi-Raq: A
satire of social life in Chicago - World Socialist Web Site George Marlowe
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chuck Bowen]
Daily Verdict (Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas]
On Chiraq. |
hoodfeminism December 7, 2015
The
real war to be waged in Chi-Raq Derrick
Clifton from The Chicago Reader
Spike
Lee takes on Chicago gun violence, but where are the victims? Leor Galil from The Chicago Reader
A Chicago street film calls out Chi-Raq over its portrayal of local hip-hop Leor Galil from The Chicago Reader
Spike
Lee says Chi-Raq will save lives on the south side—but can't say how Ryan Smith from The Chicago Reader
Spike Lee's 'Chiraq' Isn't Strong Enough To Hold The City It ... Britteney Capri from Black Nerd Problems
First
Reviews of 'Chi-Raq' Say It's Spike Lee's Most Exciting Movie in ... Sam Adams from indieWIRE
'Chi-Raq':
Review | Reviews | Screen - Screen International John Hazelton
Chi-Raq
· Film Review Spike Lee's Chi-Raq is a fumble ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club
Review:
'Chi-Raq' Is The Year's Most Relevant Film - Forbes Mark Hughes
Chicago
vs. Chiraq: It's not Spike Lee's fault - Rolling Out Eddie Precise Lamarre from Rolling Out,
November 13, 2105
Spike
Lee Says 'Chiraq' Is A Love Letter To Chicago's South ... Krystal Franklin from Black America Web,
December 4, 2015
Chance
the Rapper Calls Chi-Raq 'Exploitative' -- Vulture
“Haters”
Claiming 'Chi-Raq' Exploits Chicago Violence
Why
Spike Lee used satire in 'Chi-Raq' to take a shot at gun ... Tre’vell Anderson interview from The LA Times, November 27, 2015
Teyonah
Parris hopes to 'inspire change' with her role in ... Tre’vell Anderson interview with actress
Teyonah Parris from The LA Times,
December 2, 2015
'Chi-Raq':
Film Review - Hollywood Reporter
Todd McCarthy
'Chi-Raq'
Review: Spike Lee's Blistering Satire | Variety Justin Chang
Chi-Raq
review: Spike Lee's urgent, angry – and very sexy ... Jordan Hoffman from The Guardian
Do
the right thing: Spike Lee's Chicago film must avoid the ... Britt Julious from The Guardian, April 10, 2015
Chicago
residents fighting back against Spike Lee and the .. Mark Guarino from The Guardian, June 8, 2015
Toronto Film Scene [Andrew Parker]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
'Chi-Raq' and Spike Lee's political vision Alyssa Rosenberg from The Washington Post, December 4, 2015
The real problem with Spike Lee's 'Chi-Raq' isn't about gun violence. It's ... Janell Ross from The Washington Post, December 4, 2015
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Spike
Lee's new movie Chi-Raq has an unconventional take ... Steven Zeitchik from The LA Times
Los Angeles Times [Mark Olsen]
'Chi-Raq'
Review: Spike Lee juggles warring impulses in ... Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune, also seen here: Chicago
Tribune [Michael Phillips]
Chi-Raq Movie Review & Film Summary (2015) Matt Zoller Seitz
Spike Lee rips Rahm Emanuel at 'Chi-Raq' premiere in New ... John Carucci from The Chicago Sun-Times, December 2, 2015
Review: Spike Lee's 'Chi-Raq,' a Barbed Takedown of Gang Wars, With Sex as the Weapon Manohla Dargis from The New York Times
In Spike Lee's 'Chi-Raq,' It's Women vs. Men, With a ... The New York Times
New York Daily News [Stephen Whitty]
Chi-Raq - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
How Chicago Became 'Chiraq' - The Daily Beast Michael Daly, April 22, 2014
Leeman,
Lisa
ONE LUCKY ELEPHANT C 72
USA (84 mi) 2010 Official site Ahali Elephants
Perhaps we can blame it all on BORN FREE
(1966), an adaptation of Joy Adamson's 1960 non-fictional book about raising
orphaned lion cubs in Kenya, which may be the first time viewers saw, National Geographic style, wild animals
being raised as pets by humans, literally hugging and petting them well into
adulthood, getting closer than humans should to wild animals that in a single
swipe are capable of mutilating people, including their trainers. Or more appropriately, what about Jack London
and his popular adventure stories Call of
the Wild, or White Fang,
providing romantic images idealizing animals in the wild? More recently, in 2003, who can forget the
horrible tragedy of Siegfried & Roy, renowned tiger trainers who took their
act to Vegas, billing themselves as “Masters of the Impossible,” so sure of
themselves that these animals would do them no harm until one of them, an
animal trained since he was a cub who had been performing together for six
years, suddenly turned on Roy, going for his neck, causing critical neck, head,
and brain damage, suffering a stroke and partial paralysis, but fortunately he
survived. Then of course there was FREE
WILLY (1993), earning over $150 million dollars, followed by several sequels,
an idealized children’s story about returning a performing Sea World Orca whale
named Willy back into the ocean. Compare
that to Dawn Brancheau, the Florida Sea World
trainer a year ago that was drowned as she was pulled underwater by an Orca
killer whale named Tillikum, who has now been involved in the deaths of three
persons, but is still performing. Lest
we forget these are wild animals, even when they act tame.
You won’t find any of that in this film,
or the beguiling face of Reese Witherspoon in WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (2011) for
that matter, which instead introduces us to David Balding, a likeable enough
portly gentleman running a circus in St. Louis, where the star of the show is
Flora, a 10,000 pound African elephant that he has raised since she was an
infant, developing a personal bond that he believes is much like raising his
own daughter. We see him walking the
animal back to his living quarters afterwards, where the police literally stop
traffic so Balding can walk him down the middle of the street which certainly
invites gawkers and staring onlookers.
He talks to her, pets her, has her do tricks for him, and rewards her
with treats when she obeys. Kids find
this kind of thing astonishing at the circus, but after more than a decade
performing together, Balding notices the animal has lost its love for
performing, leaving him in a quandary—what to do about his animal? While elephants live for half a century or
more, Balding is nearing retirement age, feeling the animal will likely outlive
him, so he starts searching for an environment with other elephants, which are
largely social animals, hoping to find an elephant sanctuary in Africa. But despite his best intentions, it’s
difficult to find a good home for such a massive animal, where she ends up in a
Miami Zoo temporarily until he can find a better alternative, where the
intrigue is how Flora will get along with the other elephants, or even if
she’ll remember how to be an elephant.
The footage of elephants that we see is quite appealing, where they seem
to connect, but we hear later that she acts out and misbehaves, becoming quite
aggressive. Eventually Balding finds an
elephant sanctuary in
But the story soon turns away from
Flora, the star of the show, taking an intimate view of the aging Balding
instead, who suffers from declining health and now sits in a wheelchair and has
difficulty walking, but becomes quite miffed when the sanctuary changes the
rules of the game and won’t let him visit his elephant anymore, as they had
initially promised, claiming she’s suffering from Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder, most likely from witnessing the slaughter of her own mother and her
herd by poachers when she was initially captured in Africa, leaving her an
orphan, developing separation and abandonment issues which they feel is
exacerbated by his human presence, thinking instead that she needs to bond with
the other elephants. This does seem like
an unsubstantiated and rather pat diagnosis, not shared by the one person in
the film who is seen in the most positive and objective light, the elephant
trainer at the Pittsburgh Zoo, a man who refused to utilize the harsh and
traditionally barbaric methods of inflicting pain to insure dominance during
training, where the tagline for
the movie turns into: Will Balding be
able to see his elephant again before he dies?—turning this into a rather
maudlin subject.
While the tendency to humanize these
animals may be laudable in some circles, making them cute and cuddly, where
they resemble children’s stories or fairy tale worlds where humans and wild
animals readily mix in a peaceful coexistence, it also calls into question the
issue of animal rights, as unless they are injured or harmed, which is how so
many animals end up in zoos, aren’t they better off remaining in the wild? This reminds us how poorly animals in the
zoos and the circus are treated, as so many seem to be locked up in cages,
hardly the freedom they would otherwise be accustomed to. The same can be said for performing dolphins,
one of the highlights at Sea World, as their synchronized swimming takes one’s
breath away, but Richard O'Barry, from the excellent documentary THE COVE
(2009), who actually captured and trained the animals used for the Flipper TV show (1964 – 67), calls into
question his own culpability, claiming the show actually turned the dolphins
into friendly “aquatic Lassies.” Going
further, he indicates these captive animals perform only because they are
terrified, as they are rewarded with food only if they do, becoming one of the
leading advocates “against” capturing dolphins.
By the end of this film, however, without really developing the
arguments raised, there is too little known about Flora and the
Post Script: In perhaps the ultimate irony, Carol Buckley, the owner and founder of the non for profit Tennessee elephant sanctuary, the one who barred David Balding from ever seeing Flora again due to her belief that it places too much potential trauma on the elephant, as it forces her to relive her original trauma when she does, has been barred from seeing her own elephants, except by appointment, asked to move off the grounds of the sanctuary, and kicked off the sanctuary board by the Board of Directors (Buckley was fired by the organization’s board in March 2010), largely due to her dictatorial management style. Buckley is suing the Board to have her own rights reinstated (Tennessee Elephant Sanctuary in Custody Fight). Balding’s response, now 73, “She created this place. But talk about karma.”
Village Voice Melissa Anderson
The love story between David Balding and Flora, the 10,000-pound main
attraction of Lisa Leeman’s temperate documentary, began in 1984, when the
orphaned baby elephant from Africa became the namesake of the one-ring circus
in St. Louis that Balding co-founded. One Lucky Elephant begins in 2000,
the year the soft-spoken impresario decides to retire Flora from performing—she
does a neat balance-beam trick—and find her a suitable new home. A safari camp
in Botswana
is nixed, as is the Miami zoo, where she attacks an employee. In 2004, after
subdued, persistent pressure from Balding, the pachyderm is admitted into the
Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. And then, to the sound of too many mandolins,
Balding’s biggest heartbreak begins: The sanctuary owner refuses his many
requests to visit the animal he refers to as his “daughter,” insisting that it
will trigger PTSD. Leeman takes this Dumbo mumbo-jumbo at face value while spending too
much time filming Balding (whose girth over the years grows to rival that of
his former charge) making pleading phone calls. Yet One Lucky Elephant,
like My Dog Tulip and Nénette—two other movies
about interspecies devotion and fascination that have recently played at Film
Forum—admirably, and gently, raises questions about the folly and hubris of a
relationship that may only ever be one-sided.
Time Out New York [Keith Ulhich]
There’s plenty of Dumbo-esque cuteness in director Lisa Leeman’s documentary about an elephant, Flora, and her circus-impresario owner, David Balding. Leeman originally set out to make a feel-good tale of Flora’s retirement from three-ring life—Balding planned to place his adopted pachyderm in an African reserve in 2000—and you can see remnants of that movie throughout. (A few too many reaction shots of children in doe-eyed awe; a quirky musical score that sounds like it’s trying to coochie-coo audience heartstrings.)
Thankfully, life took Leeman and her crew down more-interesting paths—nearly a decade’s worth. For a variety of reasons, Balding’s Africa plan falls through, and he has to search for another home for his five-ton pet. The ideal location is the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, a sprawling habitat where Flora could roam freely, and where she is finally admitted in 2008. This is where the doc gets really intriguing: Balding deals (none too well) with separating from Flora; the creature goes wild (to the point that she’s diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder); and we hear fascinating testimonies about whether the animals are more emotional or instinctive creatures. That One Lucky Elephant ultimately comes down on the side of anthropomorphizing Flora and her kind is extremely disappointing—a little clear-eyed ambivalence would have helped the film feel more focused and less like patchwork.
Onion AV Club Allison Willmore
It’s often the highest expression of our love for the creatures in our lives that we assign human emotions and motivations to their actions, wanting to believe they’re just like us. But be it fluffy Shih Tzu or three-ton pachyderm, an animal is still an animal, no matter how much we will it otherwise. One Lucky Elephant is a poignant documentary whose simple premise masks a substantial emotional wallop, examining both the genuine sense of connection within animals, and the unfair presumption of that desire.
Circus Flora is a small St. Louis attraction named for the African elephant who for years served as its centerpiece. Adopted by circus producer David Balding after poachers killed her mother, the baby Flora was raised as a kind of surrogate child. But in her teens and full-grown, Flora has reached a size where she could easily accidentally hurt someone, and has lost any apparent enjoyment in show business, becoming moodier and no longer reliably responding to commands. Balding starts searching for a new home for her, realizing “she needed to be an elephant, not a dog or a daughter.”
Finding a suitable home for an elephant is no easy task, and Balding’s search is complicated by his unspoken inherent belief that no one can care for Flora as well as he has, and the fact that Flora isn’t socialized to live with others of her kind. Left temporarily at a zoo, she attacks a trainer. Placed at last in what seems to be the best possible shelter, she triggers an argument between Balding and her new caregiver, who believes the kindest thing he can do for the elephant is leave her alone to adjust to her new life.
One Lucky Elephant would make an affecting pairing with James Marsh’s upcoming Project Nim, another film about an animal treated like a human until its essential wildness made that impossible. But unlike the latter doc, One Lucky Elephant isn’t about neglect so much as it’s about the limits of love. Filmmaker Lisa Leeman, who spent nine years on this project, unpeels layers of Flora’s history, complicating our understanding of this particular relationship between man and beast. But the film never casts doubts on the sincerity of Balding’s deep affection for Flora, even as Leeman’s sympathies shift toward believing the ideal solution to this problem would be for elephants to not be kept in captivity or used for performing at all.
Moving Pictures Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]
Ten years in the making, Lisa Leeman’s documentary first crosses paths with an African elephant named Flora and her keeper David Balding in 2000. Flora has been the namesake and centerpiece of Balding’s St. Louis circus for 16 years. But she’s a teenager now and doesn’t enjoy performing anymore and, frankly, is getting to be a bit much to handle. When we meet her, she’s merely mischievous, playfully interrupting an on-camera interview with Balding. But one gleans from his slightly exasperated tone that this is everyday behavior for an animal he considers his daughter.
Concerned that maybe he didn’t do right by Flora by adopting her, and feeling guilty for keeping her from socializing with other elephants, Balding has decided to retire his star attraction from the big top. Thus begins a decade-long odyssey to find Flora a new home.
Balding first considers returning Flora to Africa, where she’ll give rides at a safari camp. That doesn’t work out for various political and transportational reasons, and he finds her a temporary home at the Miami Metrozoo. It’s the first time Flora has lived with other elephants, and we learn about animal behavior by watching her interact with alpha female Peggy.
When Flora attacks a zookeeper, however, it’s clear not only that it’s time for her to move on but that there’s more to this story than we’ve been led to believe. Leeman uses the opening to reveal that this isn’t the first time Flora has attacked a human, and Balding’s blind spot with regard to his beloved pet is exposed.
All along, Balding has desired to move Flora to Carol Buckley’s elephant sanctuary in Tennessee. When Buckley finally opens her preserve to African elephants, Flora’s itinerant days are over, but so, too, is her and Balding’s special relationship. Flora’s behavior worsens, and Buckley determines that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, opening another chapter in the film about the trauma experience by elephants taken into captivity.
Leeman exquisitely controls the dissemination of information in “One Lucky Elephant,” peeling back the layers of the story to deepen our understanding and emotional investment in the subject. The passion these grand animals inspire is palpable , even the victim of an attack still marvels at her pre-violence experience with the elephant, and is brought to tears by the memory.
A significant part of the narrative in the third act depends on Balding’s desire to reunite with Flora. One gets the sense, though, that the correspondence and phone calls between him and Buckley discussing the issue occurred for the benefit of the cameras. Still, there’s no question that this man loves his elephant , and by the end we do, too , despite the fact that, as Buckley observes, “Flora is the example of all that can go wrong with the best intentions.”
Movieline [Stephanie Zacharek]
Slant Magazine Joseph Jon Lanthier
REVIEW | The Affecting 'One Lucky Elephant' isn't a Nature Story; it's a Family Crisis Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
Filmcritic.com Sam Kressner
Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
Gordon and the Whale [Kate Erbland]
Film-Forward.com [Kevin Filipski]
JEsther Entertainment [Don Simpson]
Review: One Lucky Elephant (2011) - rec.arts.movies.reviews ... Mark R. Leeper
One Lucky Elephant — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine John P. McCarthy
“One Lucky Elephant” is Everything That’s Wrong With Documentary Today Christopher Campbell from Spout, also seen here: Spout [Christopher Campbell]
One Lucky Elephant - Movie Review of One Lucky Elephant - 2010 Jennifer Marin from About.com
Film Journal David Noh
ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]
The NYC Movie Guru [Avi Offer]
ONE
LUCKY ELEPHANT Facets Multi Media
indieWIRE LAFF ‘10 | Lisa Leeman and Cristina Colissimo’s Interspecies Love Story “One Lucky Elephant,” director interview, June 19, 2010
INTERVIEW | 'One Lucky Elephant' Director Lisa Leeman on Her Doc That Took 10 Years to Make indieWIRE interview, June 8, 2011, also seen here: Director interview
Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden
Arizona Reporter » REVIEW: One Lucky Elephant Susan Granger
One Lucky Elephant | 'One Lucky Elephant': Review - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
The Trick an Animal Cannot Learn - Movies - New York Times Manohla Dargis
Tennessee Elephant Sanctuary in Custody Fight Malcolm Gay from The New York Times, October 27, 2010
Buckley was fired by the organization’s board in March 2010 Nick Beres from News Channel 5, March 22, 2010
Jack London - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Siegfried & Roy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Free Willy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SeaWorld trainer killed by killer whale - CNN
Whale Kills Trainer at Sea World - YouTube YouTube (2:16)
Sigfried and Roy, the very last performance YouTube (8:24)
Legrand,
Gilles
THE
MAIDEN AND THE WOLVES (La Jeune Fille et Les Loups) D 59
A movie about where it is as opposed to what it is, making this is a
good film to walk out on, as it’s fairly ludicrous. The director seems to have no clear idea why
he’s making this film at all other than taking some terrific footage in the
snowy mountainous regions of
Years later she’s grown into a beautiful woman (Laetitia Casta) who has
attracted the eye of Émile (Jean-Paul Rouve), the richest kid in town, the man
who would be mayor who thinks he can have and control everything. Angèle however is still pursuing her
veterinary dream via a circuitous route, by attaching herself to a Russian
adventurer/bush pilot who tracks down wild animals for zoos, but on their first
flight, he is forced to make an emergency landing on a snowy mountainside
crashing the plane. He builds her a fire
and leaves his pistol as he treks through the snow for help, but the subsequent
rescue party can’t find any sign of her and suspect she’s dead. Wolves find her, allegedly recognizing her
scent, and take a liking to her, actually saving her life, but so does a crazed
mountain hermit Giuseppe (Stefano Accorsi) who all but lives with wild animals
and becomes attached to her beauty, turning this into a beauty and the beast
story as he nurses her back to health in his remote mountainside hovel. The story couldn’t be more preposterous, as
wild wolves befriend them both, as if they are the last two on the planet who
can communicate or understand them, creating a safe haven that is the last
refuge of wolves left in
Festival
of New French Cinema Michael
Wilmington from The Reader
In the years after World War I, a mountain belle (Laetitia
Casta) joins forces with a crazy hermit (Stefano Accorsi) to save a wild wolf
pack from predators, among them the woman’s rotten-rich fiance (Jean-Paul
Rouve). Director-cowriter Gilles Legrand belongs to the French tradition of
grand, loony visionaries that stretches from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Raymond
Bernard, and Abel Gance all the way back to Georges Melies. Legrand has a
penchant for lush period movies (he produced Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule), and Yves Angelo’s cinematography of the
snowy slopes and cliffs is eye-popping. This makes a nice, nutty companion
piece to Carroll Ballard’s eco-classic Never Cry
Wolf, as long as you don’t try to reconcile it with the real world. 110
min.
12th Annual Festival of New
French Cinema
Facets Multi-Media
While
humans may be at the head of the food chain, there exists in the wild signs of
intelligence and even emotion that suggest our fellow creatures understand
trust, loyalty and family on a much deeper level. Producer-turned-Director
Gilles Legrand (Malabar Princess) returns to the French Alps for The Maiden and the Wolves. This Gallic yarn stars French actress and supermodel
Laetitia Casta as Angele, a feisty Edwardian-era femme whose fate becomes
entangled with that of the last wild wolf pack on
Variety Leslie
Felperin
Producer-turned-helmer Gilles Legrand (“Malabar Princess”) returns to the
French Alps for his sophomore feature, “The Maiden and the Wolves,” a ripping
Gallic yarn that should match or exceed the robust figures of its predecessor
in Francophone countries after Feb. 13 opening. Bewitching, lushly produced pic
casts French pinup Laetitia Casta as a feisty Edwardian-era femme whose fate
becomes entangled with that of the last wild wolf pack on
Not long before World War I, in a French Alpine town near the Italian
border, a pack of slaughtered wolves is delivered to local taxidermist Leon
(Patrick Chesnais). A surviving black cub comes down from the mountains looking
for his family, and is saved from discovery and certain death by
The Great War comes and goes, making local foundry owners the Garcins rich. Family patriarch Albert Garcin (Michel Galabru), who happens to be Angele’s godfather, has given a free lifetime’s lease of a shack in the hills to a gypsy woman (played in flashbacks by Elisa Tovati in which she’s seen, literally, having dances with wolves on stage). Her son Guiseppe (Stefano Accorsi), who appears to be slightly mentally handicapped, guards the wolves he’s befriended up there, especially the black pack leader he calls Carbone.
Now grown, Angele wants to become a veterinarian specializing in wild animals, despite the fact that everyone scoffs at the idea of a woman vet. In search of experience, she hooks up with circus owner Zhormov (Miglen Mirtchev), who’s keen to capture a wolf from the mountains above her hometown.
Unfortunately, Zhormov’s plane crashes in the snow and he must leave an injured Angele behind while seeking help. Recognizing her smell from his days as a pup, Carbone rescues her with his pack, and she falls into the care of Guiseppe.
Script (credited to helmer Legrand, Philippe Vuaillat and Jean Cosmos) satisfyingly knits all the story strands together by the end. Although largely family-friendly, pic does contain a scene where Angele bares a breast for art’s sake, and adult themes are lightly touched on via mentions of illegitimate children and the suggestion that Guiseppe might ravage Angela at any moment.
Kids of all ages, however, will adore the animal scenes here, which feature some of the finest lupine thesping ever committed to celluloid. (Moments in versions of “White Fang” or “The Call of the Wild” might compare if the creatures there weren’t merely half-dog, half-wolf crosses.) A sequence in which young Carbone has to defend himself against a bird of prey is a particular knockout. The human perfs aren’t bad either, although a little hammy in places.
Legrand’s helming rattles along at a breathless clip, and the whole thing looks like a treat, thanks to a rock-solid tech package.
Camera (color), Yves Angelo; editor, Andrea Sedlackova; music, Armand Amar;
production designer, Arnaud de Moleron; costume designer, Pascaline Chavanne;
sound (Dolby Digital), Miguel Rejas; supervising sound editor, Thomas
Desjonqueres. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (market),
Mont
Blanc - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lehmann, Michael
HEATHERS B+ 92
Dear
Diary: My teen-angst bullshit now has a
body count. —Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder)
Fuck
me gently with a chainsaw. Do I look like Mother Theresa to you? —#1 Heather Chandler (Kim
Walker)
From the crazy, soulful notes of Sly & the Family Stone performing a
rendition of the Doris Day song “Que Sera, Sera,” initially sung in the Hitchcock
film The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) before becoming a staple on her own TV show, this
takes us back to the safe conservatism of the 50’s when a consumer-oriented
society was a happy society, an era that promised a better life in the suburbs,
a car in every garage, and a chance for your kid to go to college. There weren’t any red flags then about
troubled teens in high school, as that was typically attributed to the juvenile
delinquents dropping out of wood shop.
But this film from the late 80’s is the blueprint for satiric troubled
teen movies in the future, adding a mix of the HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971) sardonic
take on suicide as a source of humor to go along with Kubrick’s apocalyptic
Cold War masterpiece DR. STRANGELOVE (1964), poking fun of a situation as dire
as a single misguided nuclear warhead that can lead to the destruction of the
world. Black comedy rarely works as well
as it does here, featuring extremely witty, cutting edge dialogue written by
Daniel Waters that goes for the jugular, actually inventing a cliquish high
school slang vernacular that isn’t remotely real, but it’s wildly cruel and
used to great effect, as the slang is used to maintain a clique’s superiority
over others, to keep their foot on other’s throats til the very end of the
movie when the studio insisted on a tagged-on ending. This film puts the exclamation point on the
feel-good John Hughes high school movies from the 80’s and predates the
shootings at Columbine, which occurred a decade later, or the follow up films
ELEPHANT (2003), or MEAN GIRLS (2004), where both a realistic and satiric stab
at life in high school predominated public thought wondering what went wrong with
our kids today, especially the ones that seemingly had everything.
In the acid-tinged HEATHERS, the croquet kids are already well outside
their parent’s reach, as they’ve invented a code expression of telling parents
and adults what they want to hear, because they figure adults aren’t really
listening anyway, so by telling them what they’re used to, by never varying the
routine, they give the impression of stability and are free to do whatever they
want. This is a learned language,
something they don’t teach in school, and those that are good at it rule the
school. The origin of the more
commercially accessible MEAN GIRLS starts here, only this film is meaner,
funnier, and has a much darker edge. At
the top of the food chain are three high school Princesses each named Heather,
aka #1 Chandler (Kim Walker), #2 Duke (Shannen Doherty) and #3 McNamara
(Lisanne Falk), who have allowed a fourth girl named Veronica (Winona Ryder) to
join their exclusive clique of the prettiest and most popular girls in school,
put down artists who assert their dominance over the teeming throngs through
cruelty and sarcasm, usually making someone else the butt of their jokes. These are girls that have nothing better to
do than think up malicious plots to demean and ridicule those that are weaker
than they are, thereby maintaining their image of superiority. Even Heather # 2 sometimes questions whether
#1 is going too far, but #1 will always ruthlessly assert this is how she
maintains her rule as #1. It’s as if you
could go back in history and actually hear the Czar’s own children discussing
the various ways to rule through terror.
Ryder is especially good at expressing Veronica’s ambivalence, as on the
one hand she likes the popularity, but is not comfortable accepting the
trade-off of being liked at the expense of having to accept Heather’s sadistic
cruelty, and writes in her diary how much she actually resents and hates
Heather #1, thinking the world would be a better place without her. Well, be careful of what you wish for.
In walks a new kid from out of town, where “the only thing that’s
changed in seven different schools is the locker combination,” the cryptic as
ever Christian Slater (see him as another student rebel in PUMP UP THE VOLUME
made a year later) as J.D, a black leather clad, motorcycle riding outsider
with a perfect Jack Nicholson nasal accent from THE SHINING (1980), a cynical
charmer who appeals to Veronica’s darker and perhaps baser impulses. Both loath the high school mainstream, but
J.D. is crazy enough to act upon it, taking advantage of Veronica’s animosity
towards Heather #1, so he poisons her drink, implicating Veronica in the crime,
using her talents to write the perfect suicide note, only to be shocked that
Heather #1 is more popular dead than she ever was alive, as all the people that
hated her are suddenly stumbling over one another to offer loving
tributes. (See the outrageous Bobcat
Goldthwait movie WORLD’S GREATEST DAD [2009] for more) And it doesn’t stop there, as in another
prank, J.D. pulls a gun on a couple of sneering jocks, shooting them with
blanks, which he thinks is good for a laugh.
(Remember, this was pre-Columbine when there were no alarms going off
when a kid brings a gun to school.) When
J.D. replaces the blanks with real bullets, Veronica is aghast with horror,
thinking it was all supposed to be a joke, like one of the cruel pranks the
Heathers play. Real life, it turns out,
is so much worse. By the time Veronica
comes to her senses and realizes just how sociopathic J.D. can be, it’s a heavy
burden that falls on her shoulders. In
no time, Heather #2 is worse than #1 ever was and Veronica’s world is
spiralling out of control, where all she really wants is a return to normalcy,
which draws the ire and sage advice of her mother: “When teenagers complain that they want to be
treated like human beings, it’s usually because they are being treated like
human beings.” Elevating the art of
teenage funeral scenes to the surreal, including one where the parishioners are
all wearing 3D glasses, Veronica dreams she meets Heather #1 again, and she’s
just as nasty dead as when alive, leaving Veronica little choice but to put an
end to the viciousness. There are
moments of this film that feel like being locked inside a Hieronymous Bosch
painting with no escape. Perhaps that’s
what being a teenager feels like.
Crazy
for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
The ultimate film about the dangers of high school popularity.
A cult classic that will have you laughing out loud despite your better
judgement. Ryder and Slater are pitch perfect in there first major starring
roles, playing young lovers whose darkest feelings are turned into a darkly
comic reality. Slater's wacky Jack Nicholson impression gets a little tiresome
by the end, but then again, his character is supposed to be insane. Who better
to emulate than the man that made "Here's Johnny" two of the most
terrifying words on the planet. The supporting cast, especially the young
ladies who play the Heathers, are so dead-on as the mean-spirited popular kids
that we all knew and hated, that you're not really sad to see them die. In
fact, for most of us, the onscreen fulfillment of that fantasy is what makes
HEATHERS so enjoyable. The ending is way over the top, but you can't expect
realism from a film where teen suicide is portrayed as the best way to get your
15 minutes of fame. This film is only for those who like their comedy black
with a little sugar. Fans of the Farrelly brothers need not apply.
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
More of the macabre: Anchor Bay’s
reissue of this 1988 teen classic includes the laserdisc commentary with
director Michael Lehmann, writer Daniel Waters and producer Denise Di Novi as
well as a new documentary interviewing just about anyone you’d care to name —
including star Winona Ryder, who’s apparently still bucking for Heathers 2.
(The IMDb lists a sequel, called Killing Mrs. Duke, in preproduction,
but that’s hardly a reliable guarantee.) Now that I’m not 17 and obsessed with
it, I can see the film’s flaws a little more clearly, especially the way the
black comedy all but drops out for the film’s second half. But it’s hard to
think of any movie since that’s captured teenage alienation with the
remorseless gallows humor it deserves — an informal poll conducted over the
last few weeks has turned up possible successors from Rushmore to Ghost World,
but it’s tough picturing any of them having the thunderous and lasting impact
of Heathers. (If anyone knows what alienated 17-year-olds are watching
these days, please do let me know.) In
addition to spawning generation-engulfing crushes on Winona and Christian
Slater, it pioneered a new way of looking at high school, not just as a
formative period, but as a microcosm of the whole world: As Slater’s J.D. puts
it, "People will look at the ashes of Westerburg [High] and say, ‘Now
there’s a school that self-destructed, not because society didn’t care, but
because the school was society!’ Now that’s deep." One thing’s for
certain: Without Heathers, there’d be no Buffy.
Dark comedy is a strange thing. What might
strike one person as hysterically funny another may just plain sick. There may
be no better illustration of this fine line than Heathers, a very good film that can offend some just by a vague
description of its plot. Heathers
stars Winona Ryder as
Veronica, the only non-Heather member of a four-person clique at an
upper-income high school. Veronica isn't like the other Heathers, who dress
well and terrorize "the inferior" of their high school. Veronica has
the look, but not the psyche of a snob.
Enduring
the cruelty of the other Heathers, especially leader Heather Chandler (Kim
Walker), Veronica begins to write awful thoughts in her diary. Soon, Veronica
meets J.D. (Christian Slater), who dresses is black and carries a gun to school
to frighten elitist jocks. J.D. fascinates Veronica and she begins seeing him,
despite the other Heathers' ridicule. One night, Heather Chandler forces
Veronica to go to a party at a nearby college where Veronica fights off the
advances of drunken frat guys and ends up puking on Heather's shoes. Heather
promises to tell everyone at school about the escapade, once she gets over her
own hangover -- which J.D. and Veronica decide to help her with, resulting in
Heather's death. To protect themselves, Veronica and J.D. make Heather's death
look like a suicide and that is where the plot plunges into the darkest topic
of its jet black humor -- teen suicide. While suicide isn't ordinarily
considered a laughing matter, the film's angle on it works. It succeeds,
sometimes hilariously, sometimes poignantly, at showing the hypocrisy and
stupidity of how people react to suicide. Heathers hits its satirical targets dead on. Suicide,
which Veronica describes as "teen angst bullshit with a body count,"
cliques and parental relationships all become sources of humor under the
movie's microscope. Ryder does an excellent job as Veronica and Slater, once
you get used to his pseudo-Jack Nicholson performance, is good as well. Heathers is not for everyone, but for those with a
taste for satire and humor with a macabre edge, it shouldn't be missed.
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
“Heathers” is not pretty in pink, all pompoms and puppy love, but bodacious in black, chalkboard noir, the dark side of the wonder years. A cracked satire of the teen genre, it's slangy, raunchy and gutsy as a prom date with Carrie.
Caught somewhere between the numbing amorality of "River's Edge" and the heartfelt sap of John Hughes, "Heathers" chides the pursuit of popularity as it tackles the thornier topic of teen-age suicide. More than just one of the best movies so far this year, it is a revolution in young-adult entertainment.
These teens aren't boy-crazy, giggly or mall-fixated. They are political animals, and in the heroine's case especially, their characters are fresh and full-bodied. Winona Ryder, Hollywood's most impressive inge'nue, is the focus as Veronica, the fourth most popular girl at Westerberg High in Sherwood, Ohio. Though only a junior, she has made it to the top. Shaking off her grade-school-geek pals, she has become a member of the Heathers -- an exclusive clique named for its founders -- Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty) and Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk).
"Heathers" is the rare teen movie that looks at high school feudalism from an insider's lofty perspective. There's no easy-to-love underdog looking to get in, but rather this stunning quartet for whom dweebs are doormats. To maintain their power, the Heathers wipe their feet on the fat and the unfashionable.
When Veronica questions their cruelty, Heather Chandler explains that popularity is not for weaklings. "Real life sucks a loser dry," says the little despot, who rules with an iron fist and a velvet hair ribbon. With perfect accessories and a menacing smile, she might be the evil queen of "Snow White" in a wardrobe from Benetton.
Though Veronica thinks of Heather the First as her best friend, she wishes she were dead. Scribbling furiously in her diary, she confesses her growing ambivalence about her place at Heather's side. Caught in that pimple-pitted purgatory between childhood and maturity, she tentatively starts to carve out an independent personality. Rebelliously she takes up with a transfer student, a socially unacceptable, filthy rich juvenile delinquent.
J.D. (Christian Slater), James Dean by way of Faust, mesmerizes Veronica -- one burning look in the cafeteria leads to a game of strip croquet, which leads to manslaughter. Imagining him a kindred spirit, she tells him her fantasies about Heather. A man of action, he takes it further, becoming a guerrilla in a personal war against the popular.
Kim Walker creates such a delicious vixen in Heather, it's a shame she has to go so soon, but go she must. J.D. "accidentally" kills her when he dares her to drink a kitchen cleaner cocktail. Veronica, a gifted forger, writes a suicide note: "People think just because you're beautiful and popular, life is easy and fun. No one understood that I had feelings too." To Veronica's everlasting astonishment, Heather becomes a media martyr, memorialized in glowing sound bites.
Asked what she will be doing after the funeral, Veronica says, "I dunno. Mourn, maybe watch some TV." For a while she is glad to be rid of Heather, figuring the world will be a better place without her. Alas, Heather the Second, perhaps even nastier, is crowned; the body count climbs and suicide becomes the "in" thing at Westerberg High.
Deadpan reactions to grievous ills are the stuff of black comedy, but the notion that murder-suicide is funny is bound to cause a ruckus. But Daniel Waters, who based the screenplay on a high school newspaper column, means to send up suicide, to strip it of any glamor or nobility. He and debuting director Michael Lehmann haven't quite done that, though they have devised a strangely hilarious morality play.
The buoyancy of tone and raw young colors contrast with the heroine's deepening guilt and growing wisdom. And in the end, she must break with her lover and mete out justice like one of Charlie Bronson's angels. "You're not a rebel. You're a psycho," she says. "You say tomato and I say tomahto," he says. And love is snuffed like a spat-on match.
J.D. is one nasty hombre. Then again, maybe Ryder just got sick of Slater's impersonation of Jack Nicholson. In his first time out as a villain, he bankrupts his role with this son-of-"Shining" shtick. Ryder, on the other hand, makes us love her teen-age murderess, a bright, funny girl with a little Bonnie Parker in her. She is the most likable, best-drawn young adult protagonist since the sexual innocent of "Gregory's Girl."
"Heathers" is about the loss of a deeper innocence, an internal passage made without the aid of oblivious parents, idiotic faculty or babbling ministers. Veronica defines innocence and guilt in her own way, rejecting Valley Girl values for Rambo's. For all the talk of suicide, the moral of the story is one of America's best loved: All people are created equal -- even the nerds.
Edward Copeland on Film (20th anniversary) March 31, 2009
DVD Times Alex Hewison
Heathers Scent of Dominance, by Nick Burns from Jump Cut, May 1991
The Bleak Genius of Heathers, 25 Years Later Alan Zilberman from The Atlantic, March 31, 2014
Movie-Vault.com (J. Alan Terzino) review [9/10]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Mandel) dvd review
Movie Gazette (Anton Bitel) dvd review [9/10]
Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Mike Long
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review Special Edition
DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [3/5] Special Edition
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez) dvd review Special Edition
DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD Verdict- Limited Edition Locker Set [Daryl Loomis]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review 20th High School Reunion 2-disc
DVD Verdict (Mac McEntire) dvd review ['20th High School Reunion' Edition] 2-disc
DVD Talk (Phil Bacharach) dvd review [4/5] ['20th High School Reunion' Edition] 2-disc
KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review 20th High School Reunion Edition, 2-disc
The Trades (Rachel Jaffe) dvd review ['20th High School Reunion' Edition] 2-disc
DVD Talk (Brian Orndorf) dvd review [4/5] ['20th High School Reunion' Edition] 2-disc
The DVD Lounge - 20th High School Reunion Edition [Danny Cox] 2-disc
DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version] 3-disc
PopMatters [Jesse Hassenger] also reviewing SEX & DEATH 101
The Onion
A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] also
reviewing SEX & DEATH 101
Cinescape dvd review Pamela Harland
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [5/5]
The Spinning Image (Wayne Southworth) review
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [4/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Andrew Hesketh) review
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [5/5]
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review offering a few
film quotes
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [D] ['20th High School Reunion' Edition] Missy Schwarz
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) - Wikipedia, the free ...
Doris Day - Que Sera Sera lyrics
Lehotsky, Juraj
BLIND LOVES (Slepe Lasky)
Slovakia 2008
Blind
Loves (Slepe Lasky) Lee Marshall at Cannes
A film its actors will never see, Blind Loves traces four blind
people in the
The film's
quirky aesthetic and refusal to fill in conventional backstories for its four
subjects will limit the audience, but this charming and thought-provoking curio
could easily prove to be a hit on the indie circuit (in fact, sales at Cannes
are already brisk).
The first
story is that of Peter, a blind music teacher who lives with his blind wife in
an apartment where the television is on much of the time. We see him coach his
blind pupils in a music school where nobody bothers to turn the lights on when
it gets dark; and in one of the film's most gloriously bizarre passages,
reminiscent of Jan Svankmajer, we see him walking in stop-motion animation
under a watery stained-glass sea, where he has a close encounter with a cute
animated octopus.
Next up is
Miro, a blind, gypsy version of Tony Manero, who is desperately courting a
partially-sighted girl called Momi, whose parents disapprove of the match.
Elena, a young blind woman, discovers she is pregnant and frets about the fact
that she will never see her baby – will she be born blind as well? Finally we
meet Zuzana, a pretty teenage girl who, despite her disability, attends a
regular school. We see her messaging a friend on her computer, chatting about
secret dreams and dream lovers. Later, the two of them get ready to go out on
what, for Zuzana, appears to be a blind date with a sighted boy. The last ten
minutes reprise the four stories and provide a feelgood uplift that is tender
without being overly-sentimental.
What's
fascinating here is the tension set up by the question of how much of this is
staged. Undoubtedly, Blind Loves offers a window onto the intimate
details of a world that few sighted people ever enter. Watching Peter and his
wife uncertainly clink champagne glasses in a toast at the end is both funny
and moving; seeing Elena and her husband feeling the Christmas tree lights to
see if they're on is funny too, but it also makes us realise how important
appearances are – even for people who can't see them.
The camera
is laconic and respectful, the lighting mostly sombre except for some
delightful, pastoral outdoor scenes in full sun. As one would expect, music is
a constant presence – from the quirky movie theme music that Peter improvises
on his electronic keyboard to the stirring Tchaikovsky orchestral pieces (the
Nutcracker Suite, the Romeo and Juliet Overture) that send
romantically-inclined Zuzana into raptures.
Leigh, C.S.
PROCESS B+ 91
France Great Britain
Only the hand that erases can
write the true thing. —Eckhardt
von Horchheim (1260 – 1327)
A very disturbing film – not as hated as Honoré’s MA MÈRE (2004) was at the Chicago Film Festival, but few found this scintillating. Some simply dismissed it outright and found it easy to despise, thinking it overly pretentious and the worst that an art film can offer. Stylistically exquisite, using a precise cinematic style which produces stark imagery from Angelopoulos’s cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis, balanced by the unique and powerful qualities of Béatrice Dalle, the woman in black, from Betty Blue (37°2 Le Matin) (1986) and Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard (Dix-sept fois Céci... (2002), once more putting herself on an edge of reality where none of us have ever ventured. In this film, she never says a single word, but the camera meticulously follows her through 29 exacting scenes as she becomes further and further distanced from this world until eventually, through a series of long, abstract, unexplained viewpoints, we eventually see her take her own life.
Emotionally unapproachable throughout, the filmmaker is himself a performance artist, book editor, former art critic and exhibition curator, also a teenage American fashion designer prodigy in the early eighties who uses a distinctively elegant visual design of minimalist detachment. Opening with an apparent failure to drown herself in the bathtub, next Dalle is sitting before a mirror, an actress preparing to go on stage, hesitatingly putting her wig on. What follows is the best scene in the entire film, beginning with a long, single take from backstage, the camera views a lit stage, the motionless actors on the stage, and the completely passive audience sitting in the dark in the background, under the lights, which are flooding the scene. Dalle is unable to utter a single word, and the camera moves slowly past the audience, which is surprisingly polite, veering up to the top row where the theater staff are busily trying to figure out what’s wrong, which is shown by a flurry of movement of two individuals who manage to move towards the stage. On stage, the actors light cigarettes, stare at one another, but Dalle turns her back to the audience and silently cries.
It wouldn’t be Béatrice Dalle if there weren’t a sexual scene involving two men, and here the violent, animalistic sex eventually leaves Dalle separated and worlds apart from the other two. After an attempt to eat ground glass, we learn of several tragedies, that she has one breast missing from a mastectomy, but also that she lost her daughter in a car accident while she was driving, and her husband (Guillaume Depardieu) crippled, with the song "Freedom" performed by J Mascis & The Fog J Mascis and the Fog - Freedom - YouTube (4:20) blaring, and at the time, neither she nor her husband were paying any attention to their crying child in the car. She spends the rest of the film shattered, erasing all meaning from her life, as she is seen blacking out line after line from books and diaries.
Interestingly, the film is interrupted by the title and various quotations from time to time, also, strangely and mysteriously annoying, the film is not subtitled. While there are only two scenes with words, one, a long extended sequence where she is burning all her possessions while listening to a voice on a tape recording, which began as the voices of her husband and child replayed over and over again, but this eventually becomes the monotone drone of a long, unsubtitled poem read by her husband, which turns out to be “Les Noyades (The Drownings)” from Poems and Ballads (1866) by Algernon Charles Swinburne, seen in its entirety here: Les Noyades—Algernon Charles Swinburne, Book, etext, including a critique of the poem by Karen Alkalay-Gut here: NOYAD18. The poem references a series of mass executions, especially priests and nuns, as well as women and children, known as the Drownings at Nantes during the Reign of Terror at the onset of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. There’s also a radio discussion on Holocaust denial with subtitles omitted, but that is the entire dialogue for the entire film.
By the end of the film, the musical track is a spare, hauntingly expressive, oblique piano score that sounds like chromatic fifths written for the film by John Cale, an eerie score that is an interesting counterpart to the lovely, yet spacious Arvo Pärt piano music “Spiegel im Spiegel” Intro - Gerry - Gus Van Sant - YouTube (5:21) that plays in GERRY (2002). With the page open from Julia Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, an art book with a photo of a Holocaust victim, she tattoos her own arm to match the arm in the photo. She takes a subway ride of death where, wordlessly, someone leaves her a suicide kit. By the end of the film, Dalle is alone in an ultra-stylish, modern suite with giant windows overlooking the Eiffel Tower, the Seine River, and a stream of traffic moving below, moving figures representing the life passing before her, the life she is leaving behind.
There’s a brief epilogue, followed by a loud outburst of music that plays over the credits, a very upbeat song, sounding very much like David Bowie called “That’s Entertainment,” sung by a group called The Jam The Jam - That's Entertainment - YouTube (3:33). There’s an interesting contrast between the passive audience in the beginning of the film and the audience that leaves the theater after experiencing this film, where the question becomes: After witnessing death, are they still as passive and as emotionally uninvolved?
Les
Noyades
by Algernon Charles
Swinburne, from Poems and Ballads (1866)
WHATEVER a man of the
sons of men
Shall say to his heart of the lords above,
They have shown man verily, once and again,
Marvellous mercies and infinite love.
In the wild fifth year of the change of things,
When France was glorious and blood-red, fair
With dust of battle and deaths of kings,
A queen of men, with helmeted hair,
Carrier came down to the
Till all the ways and the waves waxed red:
Bound and drowned, slaying two by two,
Maidens and young men, naked and wed.
They brought on a day to his judgment-place
One rough with labour and red with fight,
And a lady noble by name and face,
Faultless, a maiden, wonderful, white.
She knew not, being for shame’s sake blind,
If his eyes were hot on her face hard by.
And the judge bade strip and ship them, and bind
Bosom to bosom, to drown and die.
The white girl winced and whitened; but he
Caught fire, waxed bright as a great bright flame
Seen with thunder far out on the sea,
Laughed hard as the glad blood went and came.
Twice his lips quailed with delight, then said,
“I have but a word to you all, one word;
Bear with me; surely I am but dead;”
And all they laughed and mocked him and heard.
“Judge, when they open the judgment-roll,
I will stand upright before God and pray:
‘Lord God, have mercy on one man’s soul,
For his mercy was great upon earth, I say.
“‘Lord, if I loved thee—Lord, if I served—
If these who darkened thy fair Son’s face
I fought with, sparing not one, nor swerved
A hand’s-breadth, Lord, in the perilous place—
“‘I pray thee say to this man, O Lord,
Sit thou for him at my feet on a throne.
I will face thy wrath, though it bite as a sword,
And my soul shall burn for his soul, and atone.
“‘For, Lord, thou knowest, O God most wise,
How gracious on earth were his deeds towards me.
Shall this be a small thing in thine eyes,
That is greater in mine than the whole great sea?’
“I have loved this woman my whole life long,
And even for love’s sake when have I said
‘I love you’? when have I done you wrong,
Living? but now I shall have you dead.
“Yea, now, do I bid you love me, love?
Love me or loathe, we are one not twain.
But God be praised in his heaven above
For this my pleasure and that my pain!
“For never a man, being mean like me,
Shall die like me till the whole world dies.
I shall drown with her, laughing for love; and she
Mix with me, touching me, lips and eyes.
“Shall she not know me and see me all through,
Me, on whose heart as a worm she trod?
You have given me, God requite it you,
What man yet never was given of God.”
O sweet one love, O my life’s delight,
Dear, though the days have divided us,
Lost beyond hope, taken far out of sight,
Not twice in the world shall the gods do thus.
Had it been so hard for my love? but I,
Though the gods gave all that a god can give,
I had chosen rather the gift to die,
Cease, and be glad above all that live.
For the
And the sea would have pitched us from shoal to shoal;
And I should have held you, and you held me,
As flesh holds flesh, and the soul the soul.
Could I change you, help you to love me, sweet,
Could I give you the love that would sweeten death,
We should yield, go down, locked hands and feet,
Die, drown together, and breath catch breath;
But you would have felt my soul in a kiss,
And known that once if I loved you well;
And I would have given my soul for this
To burn for ever in burning hell.
Leigh, Julia
Julia Leigh was born in Sydney in 1970. She studied Arts/Law at the University of Sydney. The Hunter, her début novel, has been published around the world and has won numerous awards, including a Betty Trask Award and the 2001 Prix de l'Astrolabe. It was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, longlisted for a US National Book Critics' Circle Award and was a finalist for the Meilleur Livre Etranger. Julia Leigh was chosen by the Observer as one of twenty-one writers to watch in the millennium, and the New York Times selected her book as a 'Notable Book of the Year'. Leigh currently resides in Princeton, Massachusetts.
"Leigh, Julia" brief bio from The Australian Literature Resource
The Hunter by Julia Leigh | Penguin Books Australia Penguin Books, March 5, 1999
The Richmond Review, Book Review, The Hunter by Julia Leigh David Remy book review from The Richmond Review, 2001
THE HUNTER by Julia Leigh Hammer Books, 2004
Disquiet Review book review on the Dove Grey Reader, April 10, 2008
Disquiet Review Sophie Gee book Review from the Age, April 14, 2008
Disquiet Review Catherine Keenan book review from the Sydney Morning Herald, April 18, 2011
She’s Really Lost the Plot Kirsty Gunn book review of Disquiet from the Observer, April 26, 2008
Quelle horreur Justine Jordan book review from The Guardian, May 2, 2008, also seen here: Review: Disquiet by Julia Leigh | Books | The Guardian
Disquiet Review book review on Tom Conoboy’s Writing Blog, May 17, 2008
Julia Leigh's 'Disquiet' reviewed on the official website of writer ... John Holten book review from Laura Hird’s The New Review, 2008, offering several links to other reviews
25 New Faces - Filmmaker Magazine - Summer 2008 Scott Macaulay
"Director
in fairytale debut as Sleeping Beauty selected for Cannes" Michael Bodney from The Australian, April 15, 2011
Palme pioneers: women directors at Cannes | Film | The Guardian Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian, May 10, 2011
Local
work makes top tier Michael Bodney from The
Herald Sun, May 11, 2011
Two
Aussies find they really Cannes
Michael Bodney from The Australian, May 13, 2011
Australian
film panned by Cannes critics AAP
from The
Australian, May 13, 2011
Karin Badt: Cannes 2011: Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty: Female ... Karin Badt from The Huffington Post, May 23, 2011
"Once
upon a time" Michael Bodney
from The Australian, June 18, 2011
Cannes | Sleeping Beauty's Julia Leigh: 'I like to get under people's ... Brian Brooks interview at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 12, 2011
Cannes Q&A: Julia Leigh on a Modern-Day 'Sleeping Beauty ... Dennis Lim interview from The New York Times, May 15, 2011
Interview with Julia Leigh Simon from ScreenWize, June 2011
Interview with Sleeping Beauty director Julia Leigh Matthew Pejkovic interview from Trespass magazine, June 11, 2011
Not the Sleeping Beauty you know - Telegraph David Gritten interview from The Daily Telegraph, September 11, 2011
Julia Leigh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SLEEPING BEAUTY B- 80
It’s hard to fathom what women find groundbreaking in sexual objectification these days, but in this film novelist Julia Leigh has brought her talents to screenwriting and directing, creating a mystifyingly strange film defined by its emotional passivity, which may be a comment on the human condition, as we’re allowing anything to happen to the planet without reacting with much outrage, the United States invaded Iraq under false pretext, but the world sat around and offered little response and instead simply allowed it to happen, and AIDS is ravaging through the continent of Africa while many progressive African leaders still remain in denial about even acknowledging the disease and how it spreads, doing little to counteract its horrific impact. What separates humans from the other animals is supposedly the human consciousness, but do you suppose Ms. Leigh is suggesting we’re simply not using ours or that we’re sitting around and allowing governments and wars to run amok, where the feeble human outcry is pitiful? Perhaps, yet this is expressed through a strictly sexual contextualization, where Emily Browning plays Lucy, a college student who also works as a Xerox copy girl, a waitress, and side jobs as a high class prostitute, but needing more cash, becomes an upscale specialized call girl for an exclusive men’s club serviced by scantily clad women designed to please. Lucy hasn’t reached the level of prostitute there yet, as she’s considered entry level material, but should things go well, career advancements are offered.
Lucy’s specialty at the men’s club is taking a sleeping potion that effectively puts her to sleep, where men can do anything they wish except penetration, where she wakes in the morning without any recollection of what transpired. This is a job that requires beauty, where amnesia is built right into the job description. This seems to fit into Lucy’s impassive demeanor, where she has few friends, doesn’t care much about school, yet allows strange things to happen to her, where she signs up for weird scientific experiments which are difficult to watch. She seems to have a serious relationship with a guy known as Birdman (Ewen Leslie) who we never see leave his room, as he’s apparently an ex-addict, yet their dialogue together feels intentionally forced and artificial, as if this a standard routine between them, perhaps learned behavior which feels like a variation of the outlandishly tame Ozzie and Harriet TV show of the 1950’s. So they spice things up by drinking vodka. Still, despite a personal connection, she remains perfectly detached, never showing the slightest feelings, which is exactly how she expresses herself in all her other work, including her specialized nighttime performance of Sleeping Beauty.
Leigh’s sensibility is a writer, where the accumulation of details is a refined skill, where Geoffrey Simpson’s lush cinematography is significant as well, opening in a dreary medical lab, continuing to find more elaborate settings until eventually she’s photographed under ideal circumstances and appears to be a porcelain doll, perhaps a perfect expression of female beauty, like THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975), whose beauty remains illusory. In this view, women are perceived as empty receptacles, like a beautiful vase that holds fresh flowers, which will be useless in a week after the flowers wilt. The real flaw is that in her pursuit of perfection, she’s incapable of any real connection in the world, as evidenced by the near perfect exterior veneer at the men’s club, which is all about manner and the appearance of luxury and hedonism, as the men themselves are old and withering, rather pathetic imitations of the virile men they once were, now disgusted with themselves and their lives, hardly the sort of men who could appreciate the sexual company of any woman any more, so they purchase a picture of pretense, an unsoiled, artificial world where women are no more than decorations, like a wall painting to look at. The unique formalism of the film couldn’t express more human detachment, where the stark nudity on display is stylishly empty, like turning the pages of a magazine. Not sure this ever really makes its point, but the experience is unsettling.
Palme
pioneers: women directors at Cannes | Film | The Guardian Charlotte Higgins at
Julia Leigh, whose
"erotic fairytale" Sleeping Beauty is already attracting a frisson of
excitement ahead of its premiere tomorrow, says there were a significant number
of women behind her film debut (she is adapting her own novel): Leigh's
producer, and the purse-string-holders at the Australian funding bodies, are
female. She has also had the good fortune to have been mentored by fellow
Australian Jane Campion, whose The Piano is the only film by a woman to have
won the Palme d'Or (and even then not outright: the accolade was shared with
Kaige Chen's Farewell My Concubine). Campion "reminded me to stay attuned
to my instinct, to respond energetically, to service the film," Leigh
says. "There were many occasions when I was being battered in the high
seas. Her encouragement was vital comfort and ballast."
Sleeping
Beauty Geoff Andrew from Time Out
Australian
writer-director Julia Leigh’s first feature comes to Cannes trailing an
endorsement by Jane Campion, who reportedly saw the film and decided to
‘present’ it. It’s not hard to see why, since Leigh’s study of a student (Emily
Browning) who funds herself by signing up for work that’s at first merely a
matter of waitressing private dinners in alluring lingerie, but soon takes her
into darker realms, clearly echoes Campion’s own interest in the experiences of
curious, strong-willed and sexually confident women. But it’s not so much the
New Zealander’s work that springs to mind when watching ‘Sleeping Beauty’, but
that of certain Austrians: Jessica Hausner (a certain creepiness here is
reminiscent of ‘Hotel’), Michael Haneke, even perhaps Ulrich Seidl (though
Leigh’s approach is more sympathetic and far less gloatingly grotesque than
his).
The sensibility is lucid and cool, as what the press
release calls a ‘haunting erotic fairytale’ proceeds towards its faintly predictable
denouement. Lucy finally awakens to the complexity and consequences of her
involvement in a hostess routine which has her visiting her madame’s mansion,
being plied with a sleeping draught, then lying naked in a bedroom, literally
unconscious as to what takes place before she awakes. We see, unlike her, the
ageing wealthy men who respond in various ways to her nubile flesh – though
penetration, everyone including Lucy is told, is strictly forbidden. But
eventually, after several such jobs, she too wants to know what her unseen
admirers are up to…
Around this slim, slightly repetitive narrative thread,
Leigh builds a portrait of a woman happy with her sexuality but somewhat
uncertain about how to relate to people on other levels; her relationship (whether
a friendship or something more professional is unclear) with an adoring, ailing
druggie is as close as she gets to more ‘meaningful’ interaction, just as she
barely seems properly connected with her studies or the various part-time jobs
she performs. Indeed, if it weren’t for the strong, brave, subtly nuanced lead
performance by Browning, it might be difficult sustaining one’s interest in a
protagonist so emotionally passive.
The film also deserves praise for the precision of its
imagery and for the careful balance it maintains between realism and ritual,
mythic allusion and psychological credibility. At times it slides too far in
the direction of genre cliché – the madame’s meticulous methods of preparing
Lucy’s sleeping potion in a likewise meticulously decorated milieu feel like a
redundant mannerism – and in the end it promises more than it delivers. But one
awaits Leigh’s second feature with interest.
The Lumière Reader [Steve Garden]
Across the ditch, award-winning Australian writer Julia Leigh has managed to drop the cat among the pigeons with her debut feature, Sleeping Beauty, a film that polarises critics and audiences alike wherever it plays. Once viewed, reading the various ‘for’ and ‘against’ commentaries could be a good way of measuring where you sit along the line between ‘entertainment’ and ‘art’. If glacial or highly stylised European art cinema (Bunuel, Haneke, Breillat, Seidl) or the likes of David Cronenberg’s Crash, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Steven Soderbergh’s little seen but superb The Girlfriend Experience leave you cold, Sleeping Beauty may not be for you.
While the support of Jane Campion has no doubt been considerably helpful, Leigh’s film is a far cry from anything Campion has done in terms of formal and thematic daring. Aptly titled in more ways than one, Sleeping Beauty is a very impressive debut indeed, and regardless of touchstones and influences, Leigh’s is a unique and assured voice. There’s a vampiric chill at the heart of the film, perfectly mirrored by Leigh’s cool palette. Her stylised depiction of privilege and decadence is rigorous and exacting, predominantly ‘one scene one shot’ long takes with little camera movement. Elegantly composed and beautifully balanced, this study of emotional and spiritual dislocation (set in a world where even a simple touch requires contractual consent) is a high-risk high-wire act, where one false step could have brought the enterprise crashing to the ground. Naysayers of course claim that crash it certainly does, but it doesn’t take much to discern within such criticism the expectation of a quite different film to the one they encountered. One such expectation might stem from the use of the term ‘erotic fable’ in promotional material, a misleading (if not patently false) notion at best. The prospect that any viewer would find any aspect of the film erotically stimulating given the patently darkly and unsettling context is an even darker and more unsettling one.
Emily Browning is fearless in the central role, conveying her character’s self-loathing and barely contained anger with economy and subtlety. In an early scene, she (Lucy) willingly participates in medical research for money, submitting to tubes being fed through her nose and down her gullet. The penetrative nature of this sequence parallels her later role as a ‘sleeping beauty’, where she is paid to be drugged unconscious so that clients of a high-class brothel can have their anonymous (though strictly non-penetrative) way with her. Browning handles the complexity of the role with great skill, and both she and Leigh use her nudity (or more to the point, her nakedness) to great confrontational effect, making it clear that the film’s concerns are a million miles away from mere titillation.
If Browning’s performance fails to win the recognition it deserves, it will only serve to highlight the widespread misunderstanding Leigh’s fiercely original film is being subjected to. In this respect, Sleeping Beauty inadvertently exposes the somewhat dire state of affairs in contemporary film criticism and appreciation. If anyone doubts the negative impact of corporate movies on film culture, check out the critical response to this film. Sleeping Beauty asks many questions, but the final, most pertinent question is left for the audience to ponder. It would have been great to see Leigh’s film alongside Catherine Breillat’s similarly titled film. The comparison would have been fascinating. It’ll have to wait.
Sleeping
Beauty: Cannes Review David Rooney
at The
Emily Browning stars in director-screenwriter Julia Leigh's
debut feature about a young woman who goes into high-end prostitution.
“You will go to sleep; you will wake up. It will be as if those hours never existed.” That quote from the Australian feature Sleeping Beauty is part of the job description of an emotionally detached young woman who drifts into high-end prostitution involving no actual sex. Regrettably, it could also describe the experience of watching the movie.
In 1989, Jane Campion’s first feature, Sweetie,
was unveiled in the
The endorsement of a past Palme d’Or winner (Campion took the top Cannes
prize in 1993 for The Piano) probably helped secure writer-director
Leigh’s film this prestigious berth. But such prime placement can be a
disservice.
An anti-erotic fairytale, the film is a ponderous muddle of literary and
cinematic allusions. Leigh acknowledges novellas by Yasunari Kawabata
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as loose starting points, but Georges
Bataille also comes to mind, as do films from Belle du Jour to
Eyes Wide Shut. It almost feels like one of those middle-class gutter
odysseys to which Isabelle Huppert might have lent her commanding intensity a
decade or so ago. (These tales of alienated
Leigh casts Emily Browning (Sucker Punch) as Lucy, a disaffected waif whose existential malaise steers her like a zombie through college classes, hookups in singles bars and thankless jobs, from office worker to waitress to medical lab test patient. Answering an advertisement seeking attractive young women, Lucy is inspected by Carla (Rachael Blake), a regal blonde matron with a client list of well-heeled old geezers. “Your vagina will be a temple,” Carla coolly informs Lucy in one of the script’s more unfortunate lines, indicating that penetration is off limits.
Outfitted in skimpy white undergarments Lucy goes to work with a team of waitresses in black bustiers and bondage gear. She pours booze at private dinner parties while guests mutter over their brandy about her creamy complexion. Carla, however, is quietly auditioning Lucy for her house specialty – the Sleeping Beauty Chamber. Knocked out with a potion, Lucy is put to bed in a room of Carla’s isolated mansion, where clients get a night alone with her.
While none of this acquires much dramatic urgency, the film’s exploration of submission, violation, objectification and depersonalization is treated with the utmost solemnity, its sterile surfaces undisturbed by even a ripple of humor. Leigh draws vague parallels between the customers’ treatment of Lucy’s passive body (tender, cruel, fumbling) and her own inadequate responses to the suffering and physical decline of her friend Birdmann (Ewen Leslie). But her curiosity to know what happens during her comatose nights gets the better of her, finally breaking down her emotional wall.
There’s almost a somnambulistic quality to Browning’s performance that makes you curious to know how Lucy became so anesthetized. But Leigh’s cryptic clues are stubbornly and self-consciously elusive, leaving the character’s potential complexity untapped. Visually, too, the film remains uninvolving, its glacial pacing further slowed by exceedingly sparing camera movement, resulting in a look that's neither sensual nor unsettling.
Is Sleeping Beauty an Artful Rumination on Sex and Power or Merely Soft-core Titillation? Dan Kois from Slate, December 2, 2011, also seen here: Sleeping Beauty: Don’t Be Fooled by All the Nudity. This Movie Is More Scary Than Sexy. or here: Sleeping Beauty
“Sleeping
Beauty”: A young woman’s creepy sexual odyssey Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, December 2, 2011
CANNES
REVIEW | “Sleeping Beauty” Puts Emily Browning in a Sexually Unnerving Position Eric Kohn from indieWIRE,
Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]
Review:
Sleeping Beauty offers sexually supercharged role for - HitFix Drew McWeeny at
Sleeping
Beauty Fionnuala Halligan at
Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller & Andrew L. Urban]
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]
The Reel Bits [Sarah Ward and Richard Gray]
The
House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
at
Mayer Nissim [Digital Spy - Cannes 2011]
Cannes
Film Festival 2011: Day One – Midnight in Paris, Bellflower, and Sleeping
Beauty Glenn Heath Jr at Cannes from
The House Next Door, May 11, 2011
Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]
Plume-Noire.com [Moland Fengkov]
Matt's Movie Reviews [Matthew Pejkovic]
SHORT TAKE:
“Sleeping Beauty” (***1/2) Guy Lodge
at
Cannes
’11, day one: Woody Allen and naked self-victimization Mike D’Angelo at
At
the Cannes Film Festival: The New Woody, Sex Games and the Return of Lynne
Ramsay Simon Abrams from L magazine,
Melissa Anderson on day two of the 64th Cannes Film Festival ArtForum, May 12, 2011
FirstShowing.net Cannes 2011 [Alex Billington]
Movies World Ajay Singh
Glued To The Seat [Alan Harris]
Sound On Sight Laura Holtebrinck
Ramsay's back with a vengeance, Leigh one to watch Mike Goodridge from Screendaily, May 12, 2011
Emily
Browning Replaces Mia Wasikowska in 'Sleeping Beauty ... Alex Billington from First Showing,
The
Playlist: Emily Browning To Lead Julia Leigh's Sex-Drama ... Simon Dang from the indieWIRE Playlist,
Cannes 2011.
Julia Leigh's "Sleeping Beauty"
David Hudson at
25 New Faces - Filmmaker Magazine - Summer 2008 Scott Macaulay interviews the director, Summer 2008
Julia Leigh - The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative An interview with the director, April 2011
Cannes
| Sleeping Beauty's Julia Leigh: 'I like to get under people's skin' Brian Brooks interviews the director from
indieWIRE,
Karin Badt: Cannes 2011: Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty: Female ... Karin Badt interviews the director from The Huffington Post, May 23, 2011
Interview
with Sleeping Beauty director Julia Leigh
Matthew Pejkovic interview from Trespass
magazine,
Review:
Sleeping Beauty Peter Bradshaw at
Cannes 2011 diary: We need to talk about Kevin and Faye Dunaway Xan Brooks at Cannes from The Guardian, May 12, 2011
Palme
pioneers: women directors at Cannes
Charlotte Higgins from The
Guardian,
Cannes
2011: Sleeping Beauty Sukhdev Sandhu
at
Leigh, Mike
Leigh, Mike Art and Culture
It took Mike Leigh many years to
perfect his dramatic technique and find the ideal actors to collaborate with,
but he did. Ever since he discovered improvisation while training as an actor
at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he has made it the core of his
productions. Beginning without a script, Leigh instructs his actors to
improvise scenes, sometimes for months on end.
Gradually characters come into
focus and a story crystallizes -- but not the usual cardboard characters or
pablum stories of the movies. Leigh and his troupe specialize in "real
life," limning working-class personae and acting out the vagaries and
absurdities of the everyday.
He made his first feature film,
"Bleak Moments," in 1971. The film was compelling but not commercial,
and Leigh disappeared into the world of British television production for more
than a decade. When he reemerged in 1988 with his next film, "High Hopes,"
a method was born. “High Hopes" traces the struggles of a working-class
couple in London. 1990’s "Life is Sweet" continues on this vein,
exploring the eccentric relationships between a pair of mismatched twin
daughters and their oddball parents.
Leigh himself was born into an
unusual family. His parents were left-wing Zionists who settled in Manchester,
England; their own parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe at the turn of the
century. Like the Japanese British novelist Ishiguro, Leigh sees the world from
an outsider's point of view, as if peering through the looking glass of the
diaspora. Perhaps it is his position at the periphery that allows him to depict
with such painful clarity the foibles of his culture.
Leigh’s films are critiques of
the repression, deception, and violence in British culture. In
"Naked" (1993) an angry-at-the-world rapist wanders the streets of
London ranting at passersby. And in "Secrets and Lies" (1996) a young
black woman seeks out her birth mother, only to find a dysfunctional
lower-class white woman who initially denies their connection. If Leigh's
lessons are occasionally heavy-handed, his scenes are famously idiosyncratic:
his actors ad lib through awkward moments, making the improbable seem real.
Through his dramatic method and stark narratives, Leigh remains an apt
commentator on a culture that has struggled to redefine its identity since the
Second World War.
BFI
Screenonline: Leigh, Mike (1943-) Biography Richard Dacre, Directors in British and
Irish Cinema
Mike Leigh completed his second feature film seventeen years after his stunning debut with Bleak Moments in 1971. In those intervening years he solidified his reputation with innovatory theatre and television productions, but his ambition to be a film-maker looked in danger of being unfulfilled. Other directors, including Stephen Frears, retreated into television during this period, but Leigh was additionally hampered by his method of evolving a script through improvisational workshops - too uncertain a process for most film financiers.
Mike Leigh was born in Salford on 20 February 1943, the son of a doctor, and was educated at Salford Grammar School before gaining a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1960. This was followed by spells at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, the Central School of Art and Design, and the London Film School. In 1965 he started to devise and direct his own plays, completing nine before the production of Bleak Moments at the Open Space Theatre in 1970. Bleak Moments became the basis for Leigh's first film, a seemingly simple tale about a woman (Anne Raitt) who looks after her mentally disabled sister in suburban south London. Struggling towards meaningful social contact, she has a desultory friendship with another woman from work and embarks on a fumbling relationship with an emotionally stunted teacher (Eric Allan). But audience expectations are constantly undercut, and the portrayal of individuals adrift among social forces they are ill-equipped to handle, an aspect that came to characterise Leigh's work, is edgy and uncomfortable.
In the years between Bleak Moments and High Hopes (1988), his next fully-fledged cinema film, Leigh made nine feature-length television plays (one of which, Meantime, was given a limited theatrical release), as well as shorts and theatrical productions. Leigh encouraged actors to go beyond the naturalistic in their characterisations; desperate situations, masked by humour, are caught unflinchingly by dramatic lighting and an often static, but precisely positioned camera. The best-known of these television plays is Abigail's Party (BBC tx 1/11/1977), a quickly taped studio reconstruction of one of Leigh's most successful stage works. Despite the fact that it was conceived for the stage rather than television, it became a comedic tour-de-force that impinged on the English national psyche. Beverly, the woman played by Leigh's then wife Alison Steadman, is a kind of character who recurs in various guises throughout Leigh's work - a person who adopts the trappings of what they regard as a sophisticated lifestyle with an over-confidence and lack of taste that serve to emphasise their empty existence. It takes them into a cultural vacuum which both mirrors and masks a personal despair.
In 1988 Film Four and British Screen agreed to back Leigh in a second theatrical feature. The resulting film, High Hopes, centres on a disjointed working-class family. Cyril is in a loving relationship with his long-time girlfriend Shirley in a run-down flat in King's Cross. His sister has followed the upwardly mobile path to unhappiness, emptiness and appalling taste with her aggressive entrepreneurial husband. Their mother lives in a council house marooned among gentrifying neighbours. Within this framework Leigh explores many interconnecting themes, not least the possibility of having children, an issue that threatens to divide many Leigh couples. Through Cyril's frustrations at the futility of his socialist beliefs and his struggle to keep bitterness at bay, Leigh comments sharply on the changes in British society and re-endorses the importance of humanist over materialist values.
Much of the family drama was familiar to people from Leigh's television work; but a renewed visual confidence appeared in scenes like the explosive family argument at the elderly mother's surprise birthday party where the camera focuses hard on Edna Doré's expressive face as voices are raised in anger around her. The film's critical acclaim and relative commercial success, plus the support of producer Simon Channing-Williams, joint founder of Thin Man Films in 1989, established Leigh as a major British film director. International renown steadily increased with his three subsequent films - Life is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993), and Secrets & Lies (1996), all made with backing from Channel 4.
Although Leigh has been accused of patronising his characters and encouraging the audience to look down and snigger at their antics, most of them, despite their eccentricities, are ordinary individuals courageously struggling with limited resources to confront life's problems. Brenda Blethyn's Cynthia in Secrets & Lies - an unmarried woman who endures a boring factory job, lives unhappily with a daughter who regards her with sullen resentment, and is dependent for survival on her more successful brother - faces life's injustices with enterprise and humanity. It is one of Leigh's greatest strengths that his films recognise and celebrate the heroism of seemingly insignificant characters as they try to overcome their limitations, express themselves, and do the right thing.
The character quirks of speech, gesture, and appearance encouraged in his actors - what Leigh terms a 'running condition' - sometimes inspires acting that plays too close to the surface and distracts the viewer from the film's action, as with Jane Horrocks in Life Is Sweet and Katrin Cartlidge in the flashback sequences of Career Girls. But these characters remain flesh and blood, and are never merely caricatures, monsters or victims. Leigh's films demand second (or more) viewing, after which things usually fall into place and what initially appeared irritating can subsequently seem extraordinary. Career Girls, especially, is a film that grows in stature as time passes. The flashbacks, acting more as the essence of memory rather than accurate depiction of the past, yield a contrast which helps define the characters and plot changes in social realities between the two eras.
In Naked, David Thewlis's performance was regarded as controversial less for its stylistic quirks than the character's unrelenting misogyny. We first see him attacking a woman at night in Manchester, and then follow him to London on a journey that becomes a picaresque cruise through other peoples' vulnerabilities. Thewlis makes his character, Johnny, an articulate misanthropist. He acts with a breathtaking disregard for people's feelings, but the fact that he remains unshakeably committed to his own view of the world allows even this despicable character a sort of heroism.
If Naked revealed Leigh as bold enough to disregard political correctness and allow his characters unfettered freedom of expression, Topsy-Turvy, his study of Gilbert and Sullivan, showed him flexible enough to adapt his usual method of working to create a unique costume drama built around well-known historical personages. Leigh takes his time - a leisurely 160 minutes - and breaks all the rules about character arcs and plot structure. Gilbert's eccentric father, sisters and mother appear unannounced and disappear as unexpectedly; long sequences of rehearsal and performance break up the narrative. But this enhances rather than diminishes the film. Leigh's fascination with the process of artistic creation, and his willingness to give his supporting cast the space to develop as rounded characters, moves the film beyond a conventional film biography. Jim Broadbent's Gilbert and Alan Corduner's Sullivan are charismatically convincing, but Leigh's real achievement is in setting their lives and work among a vividly depicted array of performers, lovers, servants, wives and the paraphernalia of backstage life. Gilbert, Sullivan and their collaborators were the epitome of Victorian optimism, but like most of the characters in most of Leigh's films, they are shown to be troubled, flawed, and deeply human, the dying fall of the film's ending capturing the melancholy as well as the exuberance of artistic performance.
All or Nothing - set like all his cinema films in London - marked a return to small-scale family drama. Over time Leigh has built up a pool of actors, constantly refreshed, on which he can draw with confidence. In All or Nothing, regulars Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen and Marion Bailey join talented newcomers Alison Garland and James Corden as struggling working-class people facing huge emotional crises. The depth of characterisation achieved is typical of Leigh's deeply compassionate and thoughtful films, and is equally evident in Vera Drake, which is set in 1950 and focuses on a cheery working class woman housewife who helps women rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies at a time when abortion was illegal. Despite its low budget, clever casting (Vera is played with uncanny conviction by Imelda Staunton, but as in Topsy-Turvy all the characters surrounding her come dramatically to life), and an unerring sense of the grim austerity of post-war Britain make it one of Leigh's most satisfying films, confirming his status as a major film-maker.
The Best of Possible Worlds: Mike Leigh's Another Year - Film Comment Amy Taubin interview from Film Comment, January/February, 2011
Mike Leigh’s Another Year is a rare film in that it focuses on a happily married couple nearing retirement age. Tom (Jim Broadbent), a geologist, and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a psychotherapist, have been together since college. They live in a lovely suburban house and derive a great deal of pleasure from tending their garden. Could anything be less dramatic or more heartening? Perhaps because of their shared equanimity, Tom and Gerri act as a magnet for some very unhappy people, among them Ken (Peter Wight) a longtime friend, and Mary (Lesley Manville) who works as an office assistant to Gerri’s medical group. Lonely and terrified of losing her youth, Mary comes to depend on Tom and Gerri’s friendship to a degree the couple has never encouraged. If Tom and Gerri are the film’s center, Mary is its energy—most of it negative. Leigh has finally given Lesley Manville a role that makes big demands on her expressive range, and she rises magnificently to the occasion.
This interview with Mike Leigh took place this past November. Because Leigh’s method of working with actors and creating his films out of improvisation is well known, it is almost entirely excluded from the discussion.
AMY TAUBIN: I think Another Year is the most Chekhovian of your films. It has something to do with the film being structured around the four seasons, and the importance of Tom and Gerri’s garden. They don’t live in a country house, as in The Cherry Orchard or the other plays, but the attention they pay to growing vegetables on their allotment or community garden makes it seem as if they do. Also, there is a great deal of talk about happiness and unhappiness.
MIKE LEIGH: Much as I’m a great admirer of Chekhov and I do regard him as an ancient influence in some way, I never really thought about Chekhov until we’d made the film and people started to make this observation. I can certainly resonate with and indeed am flattered by the comparison. You haven’t actually used the word “rural,” but you’re sort of talking about that. Generally speaking, this one is an urban film about urban people—well, suburban, obviously—but it is about an urban spirit. But the allotment and its currency in the film becomes a metaphor for nurturing, and in that sense for the cyclical nature of life, obviously.
So the allotment is a short car ride from their house?
Absolutely. During the development of the film when I was creating the world with the actors and all the rest of it, I did run into a couple of narrative and dramatic conundrums. One of which was how to dramatize Tom and Gerri’s green, nurturing, planet-caring thing. We’d got the notion that they had an allotment, but I couldn’t quite see how to make that interesting. I was also looking for how to open up the narrative potential of Mary’s occasional visitations to Tom and Gerri, given that she is actually in the end, quite a peripheral person in their lives, but the kind of person who insists her way into your life if you let them. And since my films ordinarily have quite a short dramatic time span—you know, a week, a few days, a month maybe—that was presenting a problem.
And then the third thing that happened was that I hit the point that I always do, where I need to sit down with Dick Pope, the cinematographer, and the designers to share with them some notion as to the film that’s going on in my head so that we can start to talk about the look of the film, and so that Dick can shoot tests of some kind. With Happy-Go-Lucky [08], I talked about Poppy’s explosive personality and we agreed it should be bright colors. With Naked [93], I talked about its bleak, nocturnal, solo journey and we arrived at a palette by shooting tests that was monochromatic and dark. I wasn’t quite as clear talking about this film because it’s so complex. Dick said, “I get the spirit of it. I will shoot some footage as a test.”
What he shot was four different visual options, four looks. When I looked at them, it suggested to me the idea of four seasons, which totally opened up the film and tapped into what I was actually trying to say with it, which is obviously, that metaphor of life. It made it possible to dramatize the allotment in an interesting way and it opened up a longer time span, so that we could explore visitations from Mary. And it liberated each season, each chapter, each act of the film so that I could have a different mood, a different prevailing spirit, and start from a different angle and introduce a new character. And that, perhaps, is what also may give it a Chekhovian feel.
Although this may be true of some of your earlier films as well, I thought that there was a strong subtext about alcoholism. It begins in the first scene where the extremely depressed woman [Imelda Staunton] is talking to the doctor in the clinic where Gerri works, and she says that she doesn’t drink, but her husband does. And then of course Mary is an alcoholic, as is Ken [Peter Wight], Tom and Gerri’s longtime friend.
I don’t think it’s a new issue in my films. You could go right back to the first, Bleak Moments, which I now realize has quite a number of things in common with Another Year. But alcoholism is not about alcohol, it’s about pain. We know that people are driven to alcohol because of the pain, and it’s the pain that we’re talking about.
You also give us Tom and Gerri, who seem to be quite happy…
Well, they’re happy in a real way, as far as it goes.
But the question is to what extent will they or should they make interventions in the lives of the unhappy people who look to them for solace or support.
I think it’s wrong to talk about Tom and Gerri, as some have, in terms of them sitting on the fence and not intervening in any circumstances. I don’t think that’s true. It only really crops up with Mary. With Ken, who is clearly much closer to them than Mary ever was because he is an old friend from way back, they really are concerned and proactive and clearly want to take responsibility for him in some ways, though they still feel helpless because it is a difficult and long-distance situation. The moral dilemma they have in relation to Mary is where you draw the line, particularly when someone oversteps the mark and abuses friendship. And also, from Gerri’s point of view, it’s a professional issue. I think it’s important, when toward the end, Gerri says, “You need help, I’ll talk to one of my colleagues.” Some people have said if Gerri thinks Mary needs help, why doesn’t she get her help. But as a professional, you don’t counsel one of your friends. And also I think people have misread the end of the film. Some people have suggested that Tom and Gerri, not least Gerri, are cold and unsympathetic to Mary toward the end. I think that it’s important that people remember that when, in the last act, Mary shows up at the house, she does so at an extremely inopportune moment because they have got their bereaved brother-in-law there, and they are going to have a private and very special family event, and it just is a damn nuisance when somebody shows up at the wrong moment, uninvited. Given that, I think they’re pretty sympathetic to not throw her out. They ponder it, but they don’t because they can’t and she’s there at the table. But that leaves us with a great complexity and that’s how the film ends.
I did not read them as unsympathetic, I mean, I thought they had extraordinary patience.
More than you and I would have.
Yes, indeed. Your last film, Happy-Go-Lucky, was so much about that character’s determination to be happy. She seems to have lucked out in that she had the DNA for happiness. In Another Year, it seems that the majority of people don’t have that enormous will or those genes. And it also seems tied to the issue of aging and feeling that certain options are closed down or, even if you are with a partner, that one person will die before the other.
This is true. It is about looking back with either joy or regret, looking forward with warmth and optimism or into a black hole of terrifying horror. And that is indeed what the film is about.
Looking back at the performances these same actors have given in your previous movies is a way to see all the individual films as one extended movie. We bring their histories in your movies to each succeeding movie.
I absolutely would agree with what I think you’ve just said, which is that the films are all very different from each other within my, as it were, “genre,” but at the same time there’s no question that it is one long continuous film, there really is.
And what would you say that “genre” is?
Well, that is just my mode of film, I mean no more than that. I’m merely talking about that particular combination of realism and some kind of heightened eccentricity and my take on the world, and the relationship between form and content, between a very disciplined and restrained kind of shooting in relation to an organic exploration of situations, and truthful and courageous performances.
What is also classical is your use of music. Could you talk a little bit about that?
The first three films, Bleak Moments, Hard Labor, and Nuts in May, didn’t have music at all. And two later films, Who’s Who and Grown-Ups, didn’t either. And at first, although I was greatly inspired by many a film that did have music, my feeling was that music was unnecessary and would, in some way, clutter the proceedings for my own purposes. And I think that’s quite an interesting and important place for me to have been at in the beginning when I was formulating my sort of style and finding out how to make my own films. But of course, it has become central. I think the most important thing to begin with is to say is that the five composers I’ve worked with—principally Andrew Dickson and, more recently, Gary Yershon, but also including Rachel Portman, Carl Davis, and in the case of Career Girls, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Tony Remy, who did the only jazz and the only electronic music track that I’ve had—all start off with an emotional response to the film. In other words, this is not detached music, this is not clinically applied music. It comes from a real gut response to the mood and spirit of the film. And apart from Career Girls, I really have preferred to work with composers who use live classical instruments. And I work as closely with them as I do with everybody else. The contribution of the composers is always very personal and original for them, but the input from me is also very personal and there is a certain kind of spirit and style in the music, which is very much music of my taste, really. In this film, there’s quite a substantial passage toward the end where there isn’t any music. We had sketched in possible cues, but in the end the music is of course the stronger for being balanced with the silences or the passages where you don’t have music. If you plaster music all over a film it simply anesthetizes the whole experience.
In most movies, music cues the audience’s emotions and covers the insufficiency of the actors—the difficulty they have expressing emotions or sustaining a tone. In your films, the performances are so emotionally rich and have such clarity in terms of tonal shifts. Lesley Manville is extraordinary at playing two different emotions or desires at once. It’s staggering when she does that. I always ask myself why you would think you need music when you have that.
Music brings out the flavor. It adds to that. It enhances it. I couldn’t agree more that music, when it’s illustrational or compensatory is awful. But I hope that in these films that the music doesn’t do that.
It doesn’t.
Do you have a favorite film of mine?
Hard. But I think Naked and Topsy-Turvy still. And they both seem like anomalous films. They also—and this is a weakness on my part—have the most to do with a kind of glamour one expects in a movie.
Yes, and both of them subvert that glamour in some way.
And I love Meantime for Gary Oldman and Tim Roth when they were young and innocent as actors. Which films do you like most?
Oh, it’s much harder for me to say. Although I’ve got a great soft spot for Meantime for some reason which I’m never quite sure about. And I’m so astonished by Topsy-Turvy when I see what we achieved, apart from anything else, with such limited resources.
It seemed to me that Another Year must have had something to do with the death in 2009 of Simon Channing Williams [Leigh’s long-time producer]. You dedicated the film to him.
Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. The sense of loss that I and many people involved with this film felt certainly informs the film to some degree. But over and beyond that, it’s a deeply personal film in terms of relationships and loneliness and other things. Let me add to what I’ve said. I wanted it to be very much an homage to Simon and it feels an appropriate film to be that . . . Let me go back. I picked up something interesting you said about Lesley Manville’s performance, that she does contrasting emotions simultaneously. What we’ve tried to do, and I think she pulls it off brilliantly, is this: her character behavior is such that it enables you to see the woman she is at the same time as the young woman she once was and who she’s desperately trying to hang on to, and also the old woman that she’s terrified of becoming. You can see all of those things on different behavior levels within her performance. I think that is worth identifying.
There’s that line in the last scene about her having been a bartender on the beach, and suddenly you see what she looked like at that moment when she thought she had a future that could have gone anywhere. Devastating. I think that some people find that character too painful to deal with.
Too near the bone. I think that’s right. Mary is a victim of many things, but mostly the received propaganda that a woman has to be sexy, a woman has to be gorgeous, and it stitched her up for life. She is not liberated, everything that has happened to her is a function of that misguided, received notion. There’s a bloke somewhere who described the film as misogynist. Which of course reminds me of the reaction in some so-called feminist quarters when Naked came out, that it was regarded as a misogynist film, which is rubbish because it is obviously taking to task such negative aspects of male behavior.
Interestingly, the happiest person on the screen is Gerri, who is far from being a standard beauty. And so she may have escaped that indoctrination because she realized it couldn’t apply to her and so she ignored it.
Yeah, but actually she was also lucky. She met a guy and it worked apparently. I mean there’s luck, too, you know.
What’s radical about the narrative structure is that Mary is peripheral to Tom and Gerri, and the film is located literally in their world—yet, she is the film.
I was experimenting with that and I think it sort of comes off.
Most of the action takes place in Tom and Gerri’s home and on their allotment. You don’t see Mary’s flat, or where Tom and Gerri’s son Joe [Oliver Maltman] lives.
I felt it was important that you don’t. But you learn about them. Mary and Ken talk about their flats and their lives in the kind of obsessive way that solitary people do. But I felt that to see them at home would break the discipline of the film and deflect and dissipate the focus of how and why we see them in the context of Tom and Gerri’s life.
But then, in the last act,
you go to Ronnie’s home for the funeral of his wife. And it’s so different from
Tom and Gerri’s home.
Yeah, and that’s important. But you’re also looking at a piece of Tom’s
history, aren’t you? Also, you can’t beat a good funeral.
It may not be the most apt cue, but what are you up to next?
Well I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to redirect one of my old plays, Ecstasy, and then I’m going to create a new play at the National Theater. And we’re trying to raise the money to do a major film about J.M.W. Turner, the painter. I’ve been trying to do this for years. But unlike Topsy-Turvy, where we just got rid of all the exteriors when the budget shrank, you can’t get rid of the exteriors in a film about Turner. I never talk about what I’m going to do, but it’s such a major thing to try and raise money for that it is just as well that everybody knows I want to do it. And also, you never know, because I’d hate anyone else to do it.
Mike Leigh - Playwright, Screenwriter, Director - Biography.com biography
Mike Leigh - Literature profile
Mike Leigh
- Director - Films as Director:, Publications - Film Reference Julian Petley, updated by Robyn Karney
Mike Leigh | British
writer and director | Britannica.com
biography
Mike Leigh Facts -
Biography - YourDictionary
biography
Mike Leigh - Literature biography
Mike Leigh - NNDB brief bio and filmography
Mike Leigh | London Film School brief bio
Mike Leigh | London Screenwriters' Festival brief bio
Mike Leigh
» Humanists UK brief bio
Mike Leigh - Movies, Bio and Lists on MUBI
Mike Leigh | BFI Mike Leigh’s ballot of ten greatest films on 2012 Sight and Sound poll
Mike Leigh's career in pictures - Telegraph
All
10 entries tagged British Film Directors, Kinoeye - Warwick Blogs
Mike Leigh -
Strictly Film School Acquarello
reviews of several films
Mike Leigh film comments by Piero Scaruffi
The Way They Live Now - The New York Review of Books Ian Baruma on Mike Leigh’s screenplays, January 13, 1994
Shortcuts
to Happiness [SECRETS AND LIES] | Jonathan Rosenbaum October 25, 1996
The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd - Salon.com Michael Sragow, December 23, 1999
From
Titipu, with love | Dallas Observer
Gregory Weinkauf, January 27, 2000
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Film of the Month: Topsy-Turvy (1999)
Andy Medhurst, March 2000
<em>The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the ... - Screening the Past Mas Generic reviews The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World, a book by Ray Carney and Leonard Quart, June 27, 2003
Bright Lights Film Journal :: Bereavement in British Cinema R.L. Armstrong, July 31, 2004
Improvisation – the Mike Leigh method | Mark Poole September 6, 2004
Hard Labor:
Vera Drake - Film Comment Amy
Taubin, September/October 2004
Mike
Leigh's 20th Century Snaps: Vera Drake and Naked - Bright ... Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2005
Mike Leigh,
Topsy-Turvy and the Excavation of Memory • Senses of ... Wheeler Winston Dixon from Senses of Cinema, October 20, 2005
So
Mike Leigh Is Jewish After All. But Is It Good for the Jews? – The ... Nicole Taylor from Forward, December 2, 2005
Pricks in
December: Mike Leigh's Naked - Bright Lights Film Journal Anna Domino from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2006
Review: Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh The World According to Mike Leigh, book review by Phillip French from The Observer, May 25, 2008
Mike Leigh and His Affinity for Writing Brilliant Female Characters ... Matt Mazur from Pop Matters, February 18, 2009
Another
Year And The Films Of Mike Leigh - The Rumpus.net Will Di Novi, March 8, 2011
Mike
Leigh's process and techniques | Actor Hub UK | Actor Guide ... Actor Hub, 2014
10 Essential Mike Leigh Films You Need to Watch « Taste of Cinema ... Mathilde Frot from Taste of Cinema, July 12, 2014
With
love and squalor: Mike Leigh's brand of realism is perfect for Turner Ryan Gilbey from The New Statesmen, October 23, 2014
My
home life was a battlefield: Mike Leigh tells of early traumas | Film ... Vanessa Thorpe from The Guardian, November 16, 2014
Mike
Leigh: BAFTA Fellowship in 2015 | BAFTA
February 2, 2015
6
Filmmaking Tips from Mike Leigh - Film School Rejects Landon Palmer, February 4, 2015
Mike
Leigh's Mr. Turner Distorts Artist for Political Purposes | New ... Dominic Green from The New Republic, February 17, 2015
Where
to start with British filmmaker Mike Leigh? Try these five films ... Drew Hunt from Chicago Reader, March 22, 2015
Mike Leigh | Jacqueline
Riding What does a Historical Consultant do? ‘Researching Mr. Turner’ talk at
Derby Film Festival, May 3, 2015
Mike
Leigh's 'Abigail's Party': The 70s British cult TV inspiration for ... Louis CK’s Horace and Pete, Dangerous
Minds, May 12, 2016
Mike
Leigh's Remarkable Family Drama 'Secrets & Lies' Is 20 Years ... Tambay Obenson from Shadow and Act, September 29, 2016
Mike Leigh: Writing a Screenplay
with Actors - Indie Film Hustle
Jonathan Roberts, February 27, 2017
The
Best of Mike Leigh — Coney's Loft | Culture magazine & creative ... Jack Henderson from Coney’s Loft, May 23, 2017
BOMB Magazine — Mike Leigh by Bette Gordon Bette Gordon interview from Bomb magazine, Winter 1994
Interview:
Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies, 1996) - Patheos Peter T. Chattaway interview, October 16,
1996
Mike Leigh Improvises on History | Village Voice Amy Taubin interview, December 14, 1999
I’m Allowed to Do What I Want – That Amazes Me Sean
O’Hagan interview from The Observer, December 4, 2004
Mike
Leigh - VICE Steve Lafreniere
interview from Vice, October 1, 2008
Mike Leigh · Interview · The A.V. Club Scott Tobias interview, October 23, 2008
An interview with
British filmmaker Mike Leigh - World Socialist Web Site David Walsh interview, December 5, 2008
The Believer - Interview with Mike Leigh March/April 2009
Mike
Leigh: 'This is the most deeply personal film I've made' with Time ... Dave Calhoun interview from Time Out London, 2010
Mike Leigh: The Hollywood Interview | The Hollywood Interview Alex Simon and Terry Keefe interview, December 30, 2012
Mike
Leigh explains what was 'terrifying' about filming 'Mr. Turner' - LA ... Kenneth Turan interview from The LA Times, May 15, 2014
Mike Leigh interview: 'A guy in the Guardian wants to sue me for ... Hermione Eyre interview from The Spectator, October 18, 2014
Mr. Leigh on
Mr. Turner - Creative Screenwriting
Holly Grigg-Spall interview, December
17, 2014
'That's
a Fairly Silly Question': An Interview with Mike Leigh | Hazlitt Calum Marsh interview from Hazlitt, January 9, 2015
BLEAK MOMENTS B 87
It
is hard to get on a London bus or listen to the people at the next table in a
cafeteria without thinking of Mike Leigh. Like other wholly original artists, he has
staked out his own territory. Leigh’s
London is as distinctive as Fellini’s Rome or Ozu’s Tokyo.
—Ian Buruma from The
New York Review of Books, January 13, 1994
While the British are known for their mannered reserve, this
film accentuates how their repressed politeness veers towards social
dysfunction in a series of bizarre and awkwardly uncomfortable moments, where
the effects of prolonged isolation leave one ill equipped to adjust to the
changing world outside, where this becomes a challenging portrait of lost and
lonely souls that feel out of place and out of time. Of particular interest, this work stands
apart from the rest of the director’s work as it would be 17-years before Leigh
would make another feature film, spending his time in theater and television, a
time when British cinema almost ceased to exist, or, as Leigh describes, it
“was alive and well and hiding-out in television, mostly at the BBC.” Defined by his fiercely independent minded
and individualistically creative working methods, as evidenced by his painfully
intimate character studies, Leigh’s signature style is already evidenced in
this early work, where characters are only developed after months of
rehearsal. Impressed by the
improvisatory working methods of John Cassavetes in Shadows
(1959), where “The world of the characters and their relationships is brought
into existence by discussion and a great amount of improvisation —that is, improvising a
character. And research into anything
and everything that will fill out the authenticity of the character.” It is only through this relentless rehearsal
process that a script can take shape, integrating actions and dialogue, as only
then does the writer/director understand what characters he’s dealing with,
where he likely has specific actors in mind to play these parts. Mike Leigh was trained at the Royal Academy
of Dramatic Art, also a succession of art schools before finally studying cinema
at the
Leigh initially works one to one with
each actor, usually revealing only what’s essential for that character to know,
so in this manner each actor is responsible for developing and transforming
their own character, pitted against others in intensive rehearsals, not knowing
what other actors have similarly been informed, while Leigh is responsible for
integrating the various characters into a storyline. By whatever measure, his methods certainly
bring results, as his cast lists have included several of
Leigh’s film is basically a painfully
realistic snapshot of a moment in time, opening over the credits with the
melodious sounds of an out of tune piano, where Sylvia (Anne Raitt) is stuck in
a state of emotional paralysis with no room for growth, sharing her suburban
home with her mentally disabled sister Hilda (Sarah Stephenson), where she is
saddled with providing full-time care for her, often spending her evenings
sipping glassfuls of sherry, while also working a dead-end job as an
accountant’s secretary, having little or no time for anything else. Sitting across the desk from the perpetually
smiling and somewhat ditzy world of her coworker Pat (Joolia Cappleman), she
listens to her weekend adventures, imagining the world through someone else’s
eyes, but Pat’s about as far removed from reality as Sylvia, living a
claustrophobic existence with her mother (Liz Smith), both continually harping
on minor details while getting on each other’s nerves. Sylvia’s world alternates between brief
moments with two men, the always well dressed, erudite, and overly polite Peter
(Eric Allen), a young school teacher who waits for her on the way to work each
day, and a shy and scruffy lodger Norman (Mike Bradwell), with his nervous
laugh and inability to make eye contact, who rents space in her garage
supposedly to print magazine leaflets, but he spends more time playing guitar and
singing folk songs in his idle time, heard here singing “Freight Train” Mike Leigh / Bleak Moments "The Cocaine
Song" YouTube (2:35).
Sylvia invites Norman inside for a cup of tea, where Hilda loves to hear
him play. There are two signature
scenes, one is an afternoon tea party that Sylvia arranges with all the
principles invited, where they sit around politely with absolutely nothing to
say to one another, as they are instead seen nervously staring at the floor or
fidgeting with their cups, where the suffocating atmosphere is further
heightened by close ups on everyone’s faces, each one embarrassed by the
intrusion of the camera into their private space, while the other is a date
with Peter that is a disaster in the making.
Taking place in a nearly empty Chinese restaurant, with a single
customer in the corner who delights in staring at them the whole time, the
couple can’t seem to find their way with the menu, especially when the waiter
has no patience for their stumbling style, reducing every offering to a number,
trying to simplify what is taking them forever to decide. Peter only grows more irritable by the
rudeness of the waiter (which may explain the emptiness of the restaurant),
filling the air with a feeling of discomfort, where the deafening silence and
the stares from the corner only makes them more self-conscious and ill at
ease.
This excruciatingly gloomy date is
intercut with by an even more grotesque scenario, as Pat brings Hilda over to
her home, where both Pat and her mother vie for Hilda’s attention. Pat treats Hilda like a play doll or a pet,
where she’s constantly trying to entertain her and win her affections, like
she’s still a baby, while her mother, who appears bedridden, is more natural
and just says whatever comes to her head.
But Pat drives her mother batty by snatching up her artificial teeth
sitting on a nearby bedside table and placing them in a box, claiming they
shouldn’t be sitting out fully exposed in front of company, claiming this isn’t
polite, while her mother screams for her teeth.
All their frustration only upsets Hilda, who can’t comprehend all the
fuss. By the time Peter returns back
home with Sylvia for coffee, she decides a little sherry is needed as well, and
keeps the drinks coming, at one point refilling his glass against his stated
wishes, where we think he might be on the verge of apoplexy from the tension in
his face. Nonetheless, he behaves like a
perfect gentleman, even as he polishes off his drink and Sylvia all but invites
him to bed, “I was just saying something to you in my head... I was saying...
take your trousers off.” This blunt
expression is evidently more than he can bear, so instead they share a quiet
kiss before he dashes out in a flash of panicked relief. Her attention turns to Norman in the garage,
whose manner couldn’t be more opposite, singing some delightfully silly song
about marijuana, but he’s excited about an evening in the West End, leaving
Sylvia alone to contend with her thoughts.
When Norman moves out shortly afterwards, as the magazine plans are a
bust, the emptiness of her life feels complete, as she’s completely boxed in
with nowhere to go. She amateurishly
picks out single notes on the piano, feeling very raw and primitive, before
turning into the recognizable melody of “Freight Train,” where it’s evident
even these painfully uncomfortable moments are preferable to solitude. The film caught the eye of film critic Roger
Ebert, rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert], who wrote “This film is a masterpiece, plain and simple,” while
also winning the Gold Hugo for Best Film at the 1972 Chicago Film
Festival. In a Sight and Sound British essay on Leigh, Andy Medhurst
remarked: “This England is specific,
palpable and dire, though aspects of it are at the same time liable to inspire
a kind of wry resignation. . . . If anything, Englishness is revealed as a kind
of pathological condition, emotionally warping and stunting, to which the only
response can be a kind of damage limitation.
What many of Leigh’s films suggest is that to be English is to be locked
in a prison where politeness, gaucheness and anxiety about status form the bars
across the window. . . . His best films ( Bleak Moments, Grown-Ups, Meantime
) exemplify his skills as a choreographer of awkwardness, a geometrician of
embarrassments, able to orchestrate layers of accumulated tiny cruelties and
failures of communication until they swell into a crescendo of extravagant
farce.”
BFI Screenonline: Mike Leigh on TV Tony Whitehead
In the light of Mike Leigh's later status as an internationally successful filmmaker, it is surprising to reflect that, after his first feature Bleak Moments (1971), he did not get the chance to make another film for the cinema for 17 years. Fortunately, he was able to hone his skills by working in television during that time, in common with other directors such as Ken Loach and Stephen Frears.
Bleak Moments | Chicago - Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Mike Leigh's auspicious first feature focuses on the painful gaps
in communication between a lonely accountant's clerk (Anne Raitt) and an
uptight schoolteacher she halfheartedly tries to seduce. Kitchen-sink realism
with a vengeance, punctuated by painful and awkward silences, this was made
before Leigh formed a fully coherent social and political view of his material,
but his feeling for the characters never falters. One can find a glancing
relationship with Cassavetes's first feature, Shadows, but the style and
milieu is English to the core. This might seem overlong, and the drabness and
emotional constipation may drive you slightly batty, but the film leaves a
powerful aftertaste.
Bleak Moments | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Steve Grant
A long, brooding and often painfully funny film, this depicts the interacting lives of sad, lonely people: a secretary in her late twenties stuck at home with sherry, paperbacks and a mentally-retarded older sister; her prematurely spinsterish workmate similarly imprisoned with a cadaverous hollow-cheeked mother (Smith again splendid); a shy schoolmaster and a folk-minded stumblebum hippy (Mike Bradwell), all drifting between repression and loneliness as the action shifts from drawing-room to garage, to classroom, to a restaurant complete with one of the world’s most truculent waiters. Seeing this film after so long one is struck yet again by the enormous honesty, intelligence and compassion of Leigh’s work which may explain why despite its occasional awkwardness and refusal to compromise he has such a large and devoted following. Raitt and Joolie Cappleman as the pitiable typists stand out with Smith in a fine cast set in the clear, calm Eastman sea of Leigh’s cinematic imagination.
This promising debut feature film by one of
Feeling trapped in the quiet desperation and frequent absurdity of an unsatisfying life, the alcohol-tippling spinster desperately seeks contact with other people; alternating her attentions between a tongue-tied schoolteacher, Peter (Eric Allan), and a would-be folk-singer, Norman (Mike Bradwell) who rents the garage. Peter asks Sylvia out to dinner, and she accepts. Their dinner date turns out to be a painful and humiliating experience before the night is over. Hilda meanwhile, is left in the care of Sylvia's stressed workmate, Pat (Joolie Cappleman), and her mother (Liz Smith). Beneath the acid wit there is also sympathy for the carer, and a disturbing vision of Britain's repressive social and political society.
Bleak Moments 1971 Lucy Skipper from BFI Screen Online, also Show full synopsis
Bleak Moments (1971) is Mike Leigh's first feature film. The film presents a stark portrayal of human isolation, centring on the failure of personal communication and social interaction. In its uncompromising outlook, it is closer to Meantime (1983) and Naked (1993) than to Leigh's more optimistic works.
Hilda's (Sarah Stephenson) isolation is immediately apparent through her disability, yet equally all of the characters are unable to understand or express themselves and are therefore isolated from each other; seeming both to crave company yet unsure of how to interact.
There is a constant sense of falling short; of things not going as they should, for example, Sylvia's (Anne Raitt) desperate attempts to forge connections and play hostess are countered by her misplaced urgency when offering nuts to her guests and the awful failure of all the characters to engage in successful conversation.
Set in an anonymous and indistinct suburban South London, the film is composed primarily of dark interiors cut with occasional shots of residential streets, mirroring the insular and confined existence of the characters. Similarly, there are few mentions or references to the wider world or even to life outside of the immediate vicinity; when Norman mentions he is going to the West End this seems distant and alien. Even the score - Sylvia's tortured piano playing and Norman's (Mike Bradwell) lacklustre guitar - is generated within the film itself. Leigh has said of the film, "it seemed appropriate to deal with what you might call private acts, loneliness, isolation, non-communication, without looking at the society outside." With such an exclusive focus on character Leigh heightens this sense of solitude, of not belonging.
Bleak Moments is not plot or dialogue driven, nor visually stunning. No extreme or shocking events ensue; no great injustices or hardships are endured. Yet the film is both haunting and disturbing. It is because it is at once unremarkable in its content and yet tangible and true that it is so affecting.
Originally conceived as a stage play, Bleak Moments was made with British Film Institute backing for just £18,000. The film premiered at the London Film Festival and won major awards at the Chicago and Locarno Film Festivals. However, it was poorly received by the public on general release in 1971; it was met with a much warmer reception on its re-release in 1984.
Bleak Moments | DVD Video Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Gary Couzens
Mike Leigh: Bleak Moments - people on the ...people.bu.edu Ray Carney
The Way They Live Now - The New York Review of Books Ian Baruma on Mike Leigh’s screenplays, January 13, 1994
lights in the dusk: Bleak Moments
Kathie Smith: Mike Leigh's BLEAK MOMENTS
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Cashiers De Cinema: BLEAK MOMENTS (1972) - Mike Leigh
The
Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Edinburgh
U Film Society [Danny Carr]
Mike Leigh · Interview · The A.V. Club Scott Tobias interview, October 23, 2008
Mike Leigh on his first film, Bleak Moments | Film | The Guardia Laura Barnett interview from The Guardian, January 1, 2013
Mike Leigh: his 10 best films - Telegraph - The Telegraph Marc Lee, November 4, 2010
Movies - The New York Times Janet Maslin from the New York Times, also seen here: Full Review
Bleak Moments - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mike Leigh / Bleak Moments "The Cocaine Song" - YouTube (2:36)
ABIGAIL’S PARTY
Great Britain (102 mi) 1977 made for TV episode for “Play for Today”
Along with Scum, one of the few Play for Todays to have made a sizeable
impact into popular culture. Alison Steadman gets grotesquely down to Donna Summer
before hosting the half-hearted suburban drinks do from hell, revealing the
proto-Thatcherite anti-social mores of the newly-minted suburban middle classes
in the process. With Tim Stern as Beverley's anti-social husband Laurence
(whose weak heart condition eventually gets the better of him in the final
confrontation) and meek Janine Duvitski as Ange (with thick husband Tone in
tow). Add nervous teacher Sue - escaping from the titular party her daughter is
holding next door - and a pentagon of mutual loathing and incomprehension is
drawn among the Dralon. Something of a cult these days, rep companies up and
down the land recreate it in minute detail - rare is the production, it seems,
in which the leading actress will dare to move away from Steadman's original
swooping Essex intonation, or the decor away from the original MFI
shelving/Tretchikoff painting/ice-and-slice chic. It's a bit of an odd state of
affairs, all told, that what began as a series of improvisations (the way Leigh
always works with his actors) has become set in stone, as it were. This can
tend to give the whole thing a seventies-in-aspic air that trivialises it if
you're not careful. OK, the performances tend to grotesque characterisation,
but the central thrust - of the dimmer-yet-forceful lower middle classes
steamrollering the more reserved, thoughtful types on their way up, and
disintegrating their own lives in the process - is more important than the
oft-quoted Roussos specifics. Since these references litter the dialogue, and any
major update would doubtless fail to match the wit of the original, this
remains a problem for the play when seen today. Fortunately it doesn't take
much of a mental leap to notice the Beverleys and Laurences still very much
extant today.
Review
by Mike Leigh's biographer Ray Carney
Abigail's Party is a house of mirrors in which reflected images have completely replaced the originals–Beverly, for example, being less a hostess than something much more unsettling: someone playing at being a hostess. In a sense, there is no Beverly. When we look for her we find only an actress playing a part, a ventriloquist's dummy mouthing someone else's words, an impersonation of a person. She has given up her identity, such as it is, to play a role, which she acts out not only in public but, more disturbingly, even in private. That is the importance of the opening minute or so in which she is alone on camera. We watch her "acting" even when no one else is present. She is not performing for an audience–her husband or her guests, but doing something much spookier: For herself. She is validating herself to herself.
In this night of the living dead, there is no Beverly separable from the part she plays. Her identity is completely synthetic–a shaky structure of prefab "attitudes," poses, self-regarding routines, and shop-worn hostess-with-the-mostest affectations. Like some brilliant, performing circus animal, Beverly provides a dazzling "display" of canned phrases, gestures, and tones that simulate states of thinking, feeling, and caring without ever getting within three martinis of the reality.
We can recognize the theatricality of Beverly's performance not only through of Alison Steadman's tonal archness in her line delivery, which inserts brackets around each of Beverly's gestures and quotation marks around each of her utterances, but even in the script. There is something artificial, imitated, derivative, or inauthentic about virtually every line of dialogue Beverly utters. It all feels "scripted"–and it is, not by Leigh, of course, but by Beverly.
Beverly inhabits a realm–call it hostess-speak–in which verbal expressions bear no relationship to real feelings (or an inverse relationship, as in the case of the syrupy "please" she intermittently coos in Laurence's direction, which is not in the least a polite request but a snarled imperative and threat). Like the Hollywood air kissing Beverly's speech resembles, social interaction in this world becomes a kind of bad acting in which you "indicate" your emotions instead of actually feeling them. (Real, messy emotion would only get in the way, impeding the smoothness of the performance and embarrassing the audience.) Since each of the participants in the drama knows it is all theater, the fraudulence, the archness, is not concealed but cultivated and proclaimed, as a way of expanding their identities and intensifying their presence.
As that way of putting it is meant to suggest, the problem Leigh is examining is much deeper than what is normally connoted by insincerity. Beverly (like all of the other characters in Abigail's Party) is not covering up her real feelings and thoughts. That would be an entirely more conventional dramatic situation. It would suggest that she knows what she is doing. It would imply that she was simply trying to fool people (a fairly simple situation in life and art), when the real problem is that she is fooling herself (a much more interesting state of affairs). Beverly is completely and utterly sincere; she means what she says; she is not being deceitful. Which is the true problem. There is no reality lurking in the depths; everything is fake. Beverly's ideas and emotions are no different from her jewelry: both are equally cheap knock-offs. Her most private, inner experiences are as clichèd as her expressions.
Most films, particularly American ones, cultivate what might be called a "surface-depth" understanding of the relation of falsity and truth. Surfaces, appearances, expressions are potentially delusive or misleading; truth lies in the depths. It is hidden somewhere underneath visible expressions. If you cross-examined Laurence and Beverly in private, and dug for the truth, you could get them to confess to their lies. This simply is not the situation Leigh imagines. He holds us on the surface and, in fact, tells us that the surfaces are all there are. There is no realm of "truth" underneath or distinguishable from the realm of "falsehood." There are no secrets to exhume. There are no psychological depths to mine–or at least none that matter–in Abigail's Party . No one is being deceitful. No one is covering up anything. That would simplify understanding. We could dive down and discover the truth as we do in films like Citizen Kane or Casablanca. The situation Leigh imagines–here and in all of his work–is far more complex. There is no escape from slippery, shifting, multivalent surfaces. There is no realm of unsullied, uninflected reality underneath. Everything is mixed. We must live in the flux....
–Excerpted from Ray Carney, The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
HIGH HOPES
Great Britain (112 mi) 1988
High Hopes is great British
miserablist Mike Leigh’s comment on class and social change in late-80s London.
The dour wit and sharp dialogue is there, in a story about a bolshie socialist
motorbike courier named Cyril (Philip Davis), and his broody girlfriend Shirley
(Ruth Sheen), who are looking after his mother as she slips into senility, and
dealing with the aforementioned upper classes as they invade their patch.
The movie begins with the arrival
in London of a hapless young man named Wayne (Jason Watkins), who leaves the
tube station in search of his sister's apartment. Lost and looking for
directions, Wayne meets Cyril and asks for his help; Cyril is unable to make
sense of the information given to him, so invites Wayne home to consult a
street map. Cyril and Shirley live in small flat, supported by Cyril's earnings
as a motorcycle courier. The couple are amused by Wayne's inexperience and
naivety of London, but they do genuinely try to help him out. The following
morning, Wayne leaves the flat in search of his sister's place as Cyril and
Shirley wave goodbye.
Later, Cyril and Valerie's pay a
visit to Cyril’s mum, a bitter old woman named Mrs. Bender (Edna Dore), living
in solitude in the last semi-detached flat on her street not yet gentrified.
Her next-door neighbours are the pompous Boothe-Braines, two status driven
yuppies, Rupert (David Bamber) and Laetitia (Leslie Manville), a pair of
upper-class twits who like to forget their converted row house was recently a
public council house. Cyril's hysterical sister Valerie (Heather Tobias) is
materialistic and middle-class, married to philandering husband, Martin (Philip
Jackson), who sells used cars. In attempting to parody the thick-skinned
detachment of the upper classes and the naff excesses of the aspirational
lower-middle classes, Leigh relies on stereotypes and unbelievable situations,
like Sloane rangers living in Kings Cross - as yet not a real phenomenon.
A few minutes into Mike Leigh's delightful High Hopes, you may think you know where the movie is taking you, but believe me, you don't. High Hopes -- in story, characters, tone, and structure -- refreshingly confounds the humdrum expectations we moviegoers have built up over years of continuous exposure to formulaic product-pictures.
In its own leisurely and unassuming way, this bracing and unpredictable film dares to tease, trick and seduce us with savage satirical wit and gentle compassion. In the process, High Hopes becomes a cleansing and renewing experience, stripping away those dingy layers of lusterless formula that have accumulated over time (clogging and dulling your cinematic senses), as if they were so many sticky old coats of waxy yellow build-up on your linoleum. Writer/director Leigh (who later became well-known in America with Life is Sweet, Naked, and Secrets & Lies) magically combines personal and political concerns, outlandish caricature and understated naturalism in a film that moves you in marvelous and unexpected ways.
We wander casually into High Hopes, just as wide-eyed as Wayne, a dough-faced small-town boy in his 20s who has just set foot in the bustling, sprawling metropolis of London. Hopelessly discombobulated by his first exposure to the big city, Wayne asks directions of a scraggly-bearded and bespectacled motorcyclist named Cyril (Philip Davis). The lost boy's good-natured naiveté catches Cyril off-guard, and when he can't help him decipher the inadequate address his mum has provided him, Cyril invites Wayne home to consult a street map.
This becomes our means of introduction to Shirley (Ruth Sheen), Cyril's girlfriend of a decade or so, who makes tea for Wayne and acquaints him with their family of cacti -- all of whom are christened with euphemisms for the male genitals except for the biggest and prickliest, named (what else?) Thatcher.
Cyril and Shirley are one of the most convincing couples in modern movies. Former college Marxists, they've settled down in their mid-30s as working-class intellectuals, trying to adjust the utopian/revolutionary ideals of their youth to fit the realities of growing up. You can actually feel their history of mutual growth and accommodation in the unconsciously intimate rapport they've come to share. Having been shaped slowly and naturally over so many years of everyday use, it now fits them like a second skin, as comfortable as the well-weathered jeans and wrinkled woolen sweaters they wear. As they respond to the unexpected appearance in their lives of this rather odd, orphaned stranger, they communicate subtly in a fluent private language of touches and glances.
Their ease with each other, and the teasing but nurturing attitude they take toward Wayne, makes Cyril and Shirley immediately likeable. They're amused (even a bit charmed) by Wayne's inexperience in the urban world, and even rib him about it a little, but they genuinely try their best to help him out. We, too, feel somewhat protective of Wayne and hope these people won't hurt or take advantage of him. When they prove worthy of his (and our) trust, we want to get to know them better. Cyril, his face obscured behind the bushy blond beard of an aging radical, and Shirley, with her homely/adorable Shelley Duvall overbite, certainly don't look like motion picture lead actors. They look too real, like those character actors to whom you always wish the movie would devote more screen time.
By this point, having followed him through the credits sequence and into Cyril and Shirley's apartment, we've pretty much imprinted on Wayne and expect him to lead us through the rest of the film. We can only hope, then, that Cyril and Shirley will become his friends. (Or maybe adopt him: making a bed for Wayne in the spare room and tucking him in for the night, Shirley exhibits a touching, maternal tenderness.) We know that Wayne (and we) will be in good hands with them -- and, besides, we really like these people and want to hang out with them some more.
The next morning, Wayne toddles off in search of his sister's place as Cyril and Shirley wave goodbye and ... (surprise!) the camera remains with Cyril and Shirley. Wayne turns out to be a minor character in the grand scheme of things, just passing through the picture. In High Hopes (not unlike life itself), you never know just who is going to figure prominently, or which seemingly innocuous incidents will turn out to be crucial events in people's lives.
Not much happens, really. Cyril and Shirley make an afternoon pilgrimage to the tomb of Karl Marx and pay a visit to Cyril's 70-year-old mum, Mrs. Bender (Edna Dore), who suffers from the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease. Mrs. Bender lives alone in her semi-detached home, the only remaining working-class tenant on an otherwise gentrified block. Her dingy housefront stands out like a single tobacco-stained tooth in a row of gleaming whites.
Mrs. Bender's next-door neighbors are the supercilious Boothe-Braines, Rupert (David Bamber) and Laeticia (Leslie Manville), a pair of upper-class twits who spend most of their time chattering and consuming at restaurants, the opera, or their weekend country house. Leigh presents the Boothe-Braines as hideous, grating (but appallingly funny) caricatures, in clashing contrast to the low-key, naturalistic manner of Cyril and Shirley.
Meanwhile, Cyril's perpetually hysterical sister Valerie (Heather Tobias) -- all fluttering eyelashes, twitching limbs and nervously tittering laughter -- lives a materially spoiled but emotionally unfulfilled middle-class life with her boorish, philandering husband Martin (Philip Jackson). Neglected by her spouse, Valerie in turn neglects her mother and devotes most of her time and energy to shopping and doting on her Afghan hound, whom she calls Baby.
In a strategic sequence of loosely-structured, open-ended scenes, Leigh slowly allows his ideas to emerge through his characters. An underlying/unifying motif that keeps bobbing to the surface in High Hopes is that of children as our only hopes for the future, if there is to be one. This is a movie about the responsibilities of being a parent, and a child, in the '80s.
Shirley aches to have a child, but Cyril is too disillusioned with society to want to bring a kid into this uncertain, chaotic, corrupted mess of a world. And yet, we can easily see what good parents they would be from the way they treat Wayne and Mrs. Bender (who has become something of a child to her own children). Childless Valerie has a surrogate baby in her dog, but remains a silly, helpless and irresponsible child herself -- as do the ridiculous, immature Boothe-Braines.
On a greater scale, the movie examines our responsibilities as citizens, and as a culture, to care for the elderly, the homeless, and others who cannot care for themselves. It's a difficult, infuriating tangle of issues and emotions, and Leigh does not (cannot) provide simple, artificial solutions for his characters, or for society at large.
But for a wondrous moment at the end of the film, High Hopes rises above the mundane confusion of everyday life and gives us a fleetingly transcendent overview, a glimpse of clarity and tranquility at the "top o' the world," that restores perspective and revitalizes hope. That's a rare blessing -- and High Hopes is one precious miracle of a movie.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Danny Carr]
The Tech (MIT) [Corinne Wayshak]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
FILM
FESTIVAL; A Portrait of Thatcher's England - The New York Times Janet Maslin
LIFE IS SWEET
This is life as the suburban nightmare of a lower
middle-class family in the
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
A lower middle class family in a London suburb muddles its way through life. Wendy (Alison Steadman) holds things together with her good-natured energy, always laughing at everything and more than a trifle overbearing as a mom. Her husband Andy (Jim Broadbent) hates his job managing a kitchen at a restaurant, and he's a bit of an impractical dreamer, getting suckered into buying a dilapidated snack wagon from a friend (Stephen Rea). They have two daughters: Natalie (Claire Skinner), the one relatively sane person in the film, who looks upon her family's antics with puzzled bemusement, and Nicola (Jane Horrocks), an angry, foul-mouthed bulimic who spends her time moping indoors and playing weird sex games with her secret boyfriend (David Thewlis).
Leigh pulls off the neat trick of making a comedy about wildly eccentric characters without looking down on them. This is partly due, perhaps, to his famously improvisatory methods, in which the cast members create their characters and dialogue through extensive rehearsals. The people are three-dimensional enough to make us feel as if we're simply sitting among them as equals, and the laughter is therefore always tinged with self-recognition, and sometimes with more than a little pain. An extensive subplot features Timothy Spall as a friend of the family who attempts to launch a French restaurant--one of the most ludicrous restaurants ever conceived, with menu items so revolting that I was almost rolling on the ground laughing. But the hilarity is tied up with failure and a sad fit of self-destruction. Leigh's comic world view tends to wind up on a serious note.
Everyone is in fine form, with Steadman and Broadbent anchoring the show. But the funniest, most vivid, and at the same time the most cartoonish performance is by Horrocks, with her rubbery, squinting little face, screechy voice, and wild mess of hair, smoking furiously and telling everyone off. She's wonderfully obnoxious, and then we get to see the fear and self-hatred behind the rage. The film's ultimate simplicity of feeling is its greatest strenght. There's nothing trite about Nicola finding some relief and healing through tears. Neither should the title be taken as a joke. For Leigh, life really is sweet. And the mix of humor and hurt helps make it so.
DVD Times Gary Couzens
Watching a film again, particularly after some
space of time, can be an interesting experience. Something you raved about at
the time now seems less wonderful, or a film may have grown in stature over the
years. I saw Life is Sweet on its British cinema release in early 1991.
Seeing it again [in 2000 for this DVD review – GC], having watched everything
Leigh has made since in between, puts it in perspective. It's still a very good
film, funny and moving, and one of Leigh's most optimistic works, but in
retrospect it seems a dry run for Secrets & Lies, with themes and
techniques that would be developed further in that film.
Leigh says that his intent is to make films about "the unextraordinary
lives of ordinary people – and making that interesting and meaningful". Life
is Sweet follows an ordinary family in Greater London. Andy (Jim Broadbent)
is a chef who dreams of setting up his own business. He's married to Wendy
(Alison Steadman). They have twin daughters. Natalie (Claire Skinner) works as
a plumber; Nicola (Jane Horrocks) is unemployed and, unknown to the rest,
bulimic. This film is very much character-driven; what plot there is centres
round family friend Aubrey's (Timothy Spall) disastrous attempt to open a
restaurant, the Regret Rien, and how Nicola finally faces up to the mess her
life is in.
Like much of his work, Life is Sweet was developed from improvisations
with the cast. Leigh has been accused of caricature, certainly a fault of the
earlier High Hopes. Here, some of the characters do border on
caricature, but always something happens that shows them in greater depth.
Wendy, with her annoying braying laugh, is shown to be the force that holds the
family together. Andy, a man who cannot get round to fixing the front door or
doing up the patio, and who is all but conned into buying a broken-down mobile
snack bar, is a man who hasn't given up on his dreams. Natalie is happy to be
single and to work as a plumber. Aubrey, all studied coolness masking
suppressed rage, is much more two-dimensional, but even he has his moments:
when no-one turns up to his restaurant, he gets blind drunk and clumsily
propositions Wendy before passing out on the floor. Nicola is quite believable
as a pain in the neck to all around her, spouting feminist rhetoric she clearly
only half understands, and inviting her boyfriend (a very young-looking David
Thewlis) for loveless afternoon sex sessions – in a blackly funny scene, he
ties her to the bed and licks chocolate off her. But we find out that some
trauma (not specified, but there's a hint it was rape) sent her life into a
tailspin. At the film's climax, her mother breaks through her self-loathing in
a scene that's quite heart-rending and brilliantly acted by Steadman and
Horrocks. That's not to disparage the rest of the cast, all of whom are
excellent. That extended rehearsal and improvisation time paid off: Steadman
(who was Leigh's wife at the time), Broadbent, Skinner and Horrocks are not
related to each other, but you can believe in them as a family. Visually, Leigh
aims for a heightened naturalism. Dick Pope's photography is sharp and clear,
but doesn't draw attention to itself. Leigh uses small details of production
design and costume to give further insights into his characters.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Review/Film
- The New York Times Vincent
Canby
NAKED
Great Britain (131 mi) 1993
Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Harral]
Naked marks Mike Leigh's leap from small-scale urban satire (High Hopes, Life is Sweet) to film-making of an altogether darken more morally and intellectually challenging (and disturbing) nature.
The subject of both controversy and acclaim ( Mike Leigh - voted Best Director at Cannes 1993, David Thewlis - Best Actor) on its release, Naked follows mouthy Manc Johnny (Thewlis), driven by existential rage and an almost palpable sense of millennial panic on his nightmare odyssey through a blackened Britain.
After raping a woman in Manchester, Johnny flees to London and turns up at Louise (his ex-girlfriend)'s home. After taunting her careerist aspirations he sleeps with and abuses her house-mate, and wanders off in to the London night. Despite Johnny's street encounters and his own lack of any fixed abode, it would be a mistake to view Naked as a filmic plea on the behalf of the homeless; Leigh's treatment of the down and out Scots; Archie and Maggie is consistently unsympathetic. The director's real objective, to evoke a genuine sense of national (and personal) crisis, is far more ambitious. In Johnny, his verbose, miserable and misogynistic bastard of an anti-hero, he has created an entrancing wanderer in his apocalyptic vision of 90s Britain.
The absolute power of Naked to engage our minds and emotions is in no small pad due to the sheer magnetic force of David Thewlis' uttedy mesmerising performance. Wise-cracking Johnny is Leigh's release valve, his jokes are dark and funny, but seem to stem not from any human warmth, but rather from a need to disguise his spiky misanthropy.
Naked's tendency toward misogyny and sexual violence is undeniably distuting. Leigh's directorial ambivalence towards Johnny's actions and his reluctance to publicly clarify what his intentions were when he created such a sexual brute of a character; seemed only to have exacerbated doubts about his integrity. Unresolved, this situation remains one of the film's biggest problems.
Naked is nevertheless, a bleakly brilliant film. Leigh's vision of third-world Britain is haunting enough; Thewlis's Johnny is simply unforgettable.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
For more
than three decades, director Mike Leigh has been Britain's chief chronicler of
working-class struggle, but he never created a character who could articulate
his station in life quite like David Thewlis in 1993's Naked. With a
mangy nest of brown hair set atop his bedraggled face, Thewlis looks a little
like a rat that's emerged from the crawlspace. But he knows he's stuck in a
maze, and his keen intelligence only serves to magnify his despair. He could be
mistaken for any other raving derelict on a street corner, but his misanthropic
rants are so convincing that's he's more like a prophet of doom, anxious to
poison his listeners with news of the apocalypse. While others escape to the
opiates of television or alcohol, Thewlis continues to pose the essential
questions, and he's haunted by the fact that the answers never satisfy him. For
example, he refers to the human body as "the most sophisticated mechanism
in the entire universe," but his appreciation is tempered by cynicism:
"It's like this wet, pink factory, but what the fuck are they making in
there? What's the product?"
For Thewlis,
the product is bile. His aggression manifests itself eloquently in speech, but
lest the audience cozy up to him too easily, Leigh opens the film with a
demonstration of how it gets worked out through brutality, too. Drawn by his
scruffy charm, women are generally the unwitting victims of his free-floating
anger, and the scene that plays out at the beginning, as he apparently rapes a
woman in an alleyway, isn't much different from the consensual sex later in the
film. After fleeing Manchester for London, Thewlis takes temporary refuge with
his ex-girlfriend Lesley Sharp and her roommate Katrin Cartlidge, who takes an
immediate liking to him, much to her peril. Thewlis' aimless wanderings through
the dingy London nightscape lead to several encounters with its lonely
inhabitants, including an unforgettable sequence in which he shares his
philosophy with a security guard who watches over an empty space.
For the sake
of balance, Leigh introduces a counterpoint to Thewlis in Greg Cruttwell, a
callow playboy who's just as sadistic as Thewlis at his worst, but who
leverages his considerable power, wealth, and privilege. Even if Cruttwell
didn't seem more like a political construct than a real person, Naked
wouldn't need him anyway, because Thewlis' undeniable magnetism still draws
sympathy even when he reaches his lowest moments. He's the walking wounded, an
embodiment of England's forgotten underbelly, and there's something improbably
and touchingly noble about his struggle to survive. The DVD includes a terrific
commentary track recorded before Cartlidge's 2002 death, plus Leigh's hilarious
1987 short "The Short And Curlies," which stars Thewlis as a man who
speaks only in one-liners. In Naked, Thewlis is like that character gone
to seed: Instead of one-liners, he speaks in monologues, and the Man Upstairs
isn't listening.
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
Mike Leigh, a neo-Dickensian filmmaker noted for his unsparing portraits of
both
Leigh, who also took a
Even a half-wit wouldn't open the door for the scuzzball, but Sophie is up there in the cabbage-in-the-brains department. She not only lets him in, she serves tea. "Are you Louise's mate?" she asks. "Her primate," retorts Johnny, who has no illusions about his quarters at the zoo.
Sophie lets her blouse drop off her shoulder, but he doesn't respond to her enticements until Louise comes home from work. "You look like {expletive}," she says. "I'm just trying to blend into the surroundings," retorts Johnny, whose nastiness inexplicably endears him to most everyone he meets. Louise, a clerk with low self-esteem, is obviously still wrapped up in Johnny, who taunts her by having sex with Sophie.
Still a self-pitying adolescent in his thirties, Johnny can be amusing with his manic flights of logorrhea, his dazzling use of alliteration and his far-flung interests in the butterfly effect, Nostradamus and the big-bang theory. But mostly he's a macho creep whose urge for rough sex overtakes him in a second sex scene with Sophie. It seems Johnny got hold of John Wayne Bobbitt's Sex Manual.
There are five such scenes, the most brutal of which involves the women's wealthy and sadistic landlord, Sebastian (Greg Cruttwell), who beats, bites and rapes Sophie -- his way of working off the overdue rent. When Sebastian refuses to leave, Sophie and Louise go out and discuss the politics of abortion at the local pub.
In the meantime, Johnny has wandered off in search of new amusements, a pilgrimage that takes him to the stoop of a vacant office building. "What goes on in this postmodernist gas chamber?" he demands of the night watchman, who explains that nothing goes on. He's merely guarding space. And to think how many homeless people could be living here: Leigh's point is obvious, though well taken, if you don't mind a bit of pretentious Marxism.
The night goes on and Johnny meets other people and has other conversations that are sometimes impossible to understand because of the guttural accents. After a time he is beaten up by thugs and returns to Louise's flat, where the others are all gathered. Louise tucks the wounded into bed and then, in a surprising show of backbone, picks up a carving knife and threatens to Bobbitt Sebastian. The bully backs down, and a third roommate (Claire Skinner) returns from a vacation trip and pretty much sums things up: "It's beyond me, the way you girls choose to live your lives."
It's hard to be sympathetic to any of this lot of losers, who make the cast of "Alfie" look like the road company of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
Pricks in
December: Mike Leigh's Naked - Bright Lights Film Journal Anna Domino from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2006
Mike
Leigh's 20th Century Snaps: Vera Drake and Naked - Bright ... Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2005
Cynthia Fuchs (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
Strictly Film School Acquarello
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
How we
made Naked | Film | The Guardian
Phil Hoad interviews actor Greg Cruttwell and director Mike Leigh,
November 18, 2013
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
FILM - 'Naked' - The New York Times Vincent Canby
SECRETS AND LIES
Great Britain (142 mi) 1996
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
After being spoon-fed
a diet of sentimental products with simplistic, morally clear characters,
moviegoers will likely be disarmed by Secrets And Lies, the new movie
from British director Mike Leigh (Naked, Life Is Sweet). The
story of a black woman's discovery of the white mother who gave her up for
adoption as a teenager—and the ripple-like effect the event has on the white
woman's somewhat estranged family—is told with an honesty sadly missing from
most attempts to dramatize family life. Leigh paces his film slowly, allowing
his actors room in which to exploit the improvisational style he has seemingly
perfected over the course of his career. There's not a weak performance in Secrets
And Lies, a fact made more notable by the seeming ease with which the cast
performs as an ensemble. It's odd that it takes a movie like this, which
minimizes stylistic intrusions and allows the cast and story to propel
themselves to a charged, conciliatory conclusion, to remind us how good
filmmaking can be.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Alison
Dalzell]
For the last three decades Mike Leigh has been Britain's pre-eminent chronicler of dysfunctional families. He has a brilliant insight into social facades and emotional frailties and is able to produce comedy from the little tragedies of real life. He works closely with his actors and much of the script is developed from improvised material so that acting, writing, and direction form a unified whole. Secrets and Lies brings together seasoned Mike Leigh players to a familiar social setting and is deservedly his most critically acclaimed and popularly successful film to date.
The story revolves around the gloriously pathetic Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), whose chaotic life with her grown-up daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) in a run-down terrace house contrasts with the suburban success of her brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) and his social-climbing wife Monica (Phyllis Logan). With Roxanne's 21st birthday approaching Maurice suggests throwing a party to bring the family together. Just as Cynthia is feeling that things will improve she is knocked completely of balance by a phone call from the daughter she gave up for adoption before Roxanne was born.
Much in the film is intensely funny, but the humour is never cruel. We are allowed to see the fragility and genuine anguish of the characters as well as their ridiculous pretences. Cynthia is deeply embarrassing to her family, as well as to us the audience, but there is real warmth in the unlikely friendship which grows across race and class boundaries with her estranged daughter Hortense (Marianne JeanBaptiste). Lives are blighted by secret resentments and longstanding grievances but there are always flashes of humour and hope. We come to know and care about these characters through a combination of broad comedy and minute gestures and looks which convey their feelings so well. This is the perfect antidote to all those high concept, special effect driven, event movies which have been littering cinemas more and more thickly of late. The drama and comedy in Secrets and Lies grows from an understanding of and love for the intensely real and sympathetic people we see on the screen.
This is a wonderful little gem
that might have slipped into obscurity if the Academy members didn't have to
look so hard for candidates for Best Actress. Several nominations ended up
going to the piece, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, Best
Supporting Actress and Best Original Screenplay. It won none, of course, but it
did help to make the general public aware of the film.
Clips from the film, of course,
were featured on the Awards' telecast. The plot seemed rather typical soap
fodder: A young black woman looks for her adopted mom and finds her to be a
white woman. But the clips alone, just seconds of the film, were enough to show
us that there was more at work here. The actresses were so charming in their
roles that the scenes literally jumped from the screen. One was immediately
hooked.
In my first trip to the video
store in quite some months, I saw that it was available and immediately grabbed
the film. It was the best film I had seen in ages. Small and quiet, the film is
a marvel. Director Mike Leigh has crafted a multi- layered, mega-dimensional
piece that goes much deeper than the mere synopsis would indicate.
The three most remarkable pieces
of acting come from Timothy Spall as the long suffering Maurice (pronounced
"Morris"), Brenda Blythen as the rather ditzy Cynthia and Marianne
Jean- Baptiste as the soft spoken Hortense. The females garnered Best Actress
and Best Supporting Actress nods respectively. Spall, of course, is deserving as
well, but the Actors category was filled with Hollywood
names. Spall remains a steadfast supporter of all the women in his life
throughout the film and Leigh, who also scripted here, gives him the films most
wonderful soliloquy. Blythen and Jean-Baptiste, meanwhile, play such opposites,
that it is marvellous to see them together, even though Leigh's unhurried pace
makes us wait almost an hour for that moment. Blythen is simply marvellous as
sort of a sweet yet silly middle aged, lower class factory worker. We get to
know her as well as Jean- Baptiste on their own terms before Leigh brings them
together. The younger actress is more quiet in her character but affects us
just as much. What is remarkable about the characters, and Leigh's script, is
that we get to see a rather big picture before the film really begins to
evolve. Finally, when the two worlds of the film meld, we see that it is the
mother, not the daughter, who really needs the coming together that the plot
promises. It is she who will really gain the most.
Leigh does so many wonderful
things here that one cannot really quibble over his small missteps. The best
part of the film is the "flavour" Leigh gives the piece by showing us
Spall at his job. His character is a portrait photographer and Leigh lets us
sit in on some of the more humorous moments of several sittings. It gives us
several moments of levity in the film. We get to see Spall makes his subjects
comfortable and evokes smiles from them. This is really utilized for a stunning
moment in the film's climax where Spall says the killer line "i've spent
my whole life trying to make other people happy." He has not only suffered
to do this in his home life but his professional life as well. It's a
captivating moment on screen.
Leigh also includes a couple of
unnecessary scenes which make the film a little long in the center, but who
cares. He includes a scene with Spall and a former business partner that really
has nothing to do with the plot. My only guess is that he is trying to show
Spall as a fair person -but also let us know that he is not a doormat.
Also of note in the cast are
Phyllis Logan as Spall's wife, who has a wonderful subplot all her own; Claire
Rushnrook as Blythen's white daughter Roxanne, who plays a great little pain in
the arse, Elizabeth Berrington as Spall's assistant Jane; Lee Ross as Roxanne's
working class boyfriend Paul and Leslie Manville as a rather quirky yet
competent social worker. The plot could have several of the family upset over
the revelation of a black daughter to a lower class white mum, and Ross' seems
the most likely candidate to be used in this capacity. But, wisely, Leigh
simply doesn't go there. It makes the film all that much more interesting when
Leigh opts to go for more complex, more deep issues.
Leigh seasons the film with
wonderful yet quiet score music from Andrew Dickson. His sombre pieces, evolved
from chamber music perfectly punctuates the score. In a lot of ways, it reminds
one of how Hal Hartley uses music in his films. Also of note behind the scenes
is the work of Maria Price who costumes the characters quite nicely, giving
Blythen some rather humorous yet appropriate outfits to wear.
"Secrets and Lies" is a
great film. Complex and captivating, it is so much more than what it could be.
Leigh takes what normally would be simply a pedestrian plot yield and fastens a
heartwarming and bittersweet plot that makes us cry and makes us smile. That is
still something special.
Bright Lights Film Journal :: Bereavement in British Cinema R.L. Armstrong, July 31, 2004
Shortcuts
to Happiness [SECRETS AND LIES] | Jonathan Rosenbaum October 25, 1996
Slant Magazine Eric Henderson
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
DVD Verdict Diane Wild
The Tech (MIT) [Stephen Brophy]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
'Secrets &
Lies' - latimes Kenneth Turan
from the LA Times
Secrets
and Lies - The New York Times Janet Maslin from the New York Times
CAREER GIRLS
Great Britain France (87 mi) 1997
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
On a roll
after Secrets And Lies, Mike Leigh turns in another sharp, affecting,
comically tinged character study, this time concerning two college
roommates—one (Katrin Cartlidge) defensively aggressive, the other (Lynda
Steadman) morbidly shy—who reunite for one weekend after six years. Over the
course of the weekend, the women encounter (and the film has the smarts to
comment upon the implausibility of this) everyone who was important to them,
shaping the course of their friendship during their formative years. By
alternating between the reunion and a series of flashbacks, Career Girls
highlights the fully fleshed-out performances of its leads. Small character
traits have been thought out and followed through in a way that makes sense.
Like Leigh's recent hit, Career Girls' apparent simplicity creeps up on
you, and it becomes apparent that, when nothing much appears to be happening,
there's a good deal going on. The emotional effects creep up as well, and by
the time the former roommates say goodbye, it should be a familiar and moving
moment for anyone who's ever been involved in the intimate entwining of lives
depicted so well here.
MIKE LEIGH'S RUMPLED and melancholy "Career Girls,"
about two former college roommates reuniting for a weekend, cuts through the
artificial flavorings of this summer's movies like the very best bittersweet
chocolate. It's more a morsel than a meal, not as substantial and cathartic as
last year's Oscar-nominated "Secrets and Lies," but anything at all
by Leigh reminds us that movies can be about what it means to be
alive in this world, right now, surrounded by real people -- not just offer
fantasy thrill rides through celebrityland.
Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie
(Lynda Steadman) haven't seen each other in the six years since graduation, and
the hesitant, jerky rhythm of their reunion suggests how seldom, still, either
woman tries to get close to anyone. "You're so mature," Annie
marvels, taking in Hannah's elegant, cream-color clothes and microwave-graced
apartment with its sunny yellow walls. "It looks like piss," Hannah
quips about the color, and they slide into the grooves of their peculiar
friendship: Annie's the sweet but perilously sensitive one, while Hannah
shoulders her way through life with caustic, self-deprecating humor, her
cynicism worn proudly on her sleeve.
To show just how much both women
have changed, Leigh uses flashbacks, for the first time in his career. The
flashback is a basic cinematic device, but it feels strangely mechanical, even
invasive, here. The thrilling thing about Leigh's films has always been the
meatiness of the performances, the way each actor carries her character's whole
lifetime of hurts, misadventures, dreams, grudges, plans, disappointments and
hunger right there in her face and voice. He's never much needed flashbacks or
explanations because the way he prepares his performers -- with weeks of
careful character building and improvisation, winnowed down to the final script
-- fills them up with the imaginary experiences of the characters and then
makes them transparent. In "Secrets and Lies," Marianne
Jean-Baptiste's character's happy childhood showed in the lovely, generous
serenity with which she greeted the world, while Brenda Blethyn's panicky,
grating endearments betrayed years of emotional deprivation.
"Career Girls" wants to
show us how Hannah and Annie's poised adulthood rests uneasily over a wobbly
teenage past. The flashbacks have a raw, exaggerated quality: Annie hiding the
nervous dermatitis on her face behind a curtain of hennaed hair, Hannah
stabbing at everyone with her blunt, aggressive jokes. "You do look like
you've done a tango with a cheese grater" she tells Annie the day she
moves in, triggering a teary dash for the bathroom. No one can accuse Leigh of
sentimentality -- he depicts late adolescence as a swamp of self-consciousness
and insecurity that the girls seem possibly incapable of surviving. Hannah's
leather jacket and pathetic hipster haircut alone are enough to break your
heart, so utterly do they fail to achieve the cheeky, defiant effect she seeks.
It's Leigh's MO to introduce us to
people whose company we're not sure we can endure for the next two hours, then
craftily win our sympathy. Annie's flinching and twitching and Hannah's
hyperactive patter almost scuttle that plan -- they feel more like caricatures
than anyone in a Mike Leigh movie has for years. In that, "Career
Girls" harks back to the savage comedy of Leigh's early TV films for the
BBC, ruthless little set pieces like "Nuts in May" and
"Abigail's Party." Back then, he could grind our noses into human
vanity and hopelessness with a ferocity that even Samuel Beckett would envy. In
"Career Girls," wallflower Annie leads on a classmate who's even more
a misfit than herself, then backs off once she's gratified her craving for romantic
attention. Misery, this tells us, breeds cruelty as often as kindness.
But Annie and Hannah do survive and
evolve, and in the contemporary scenes in "Career Girls" they've
gained the strength to revel in the sort of girlish larks they missed during
their surly adolescence. In the movie's funniest scene, they do a little
speculative house hunting for Hannah and find themselves getting the grand tour
of a high-rise condo from a lecherous young yuppie. (Scenes of people showing
off their houses seem to be as essential to Mike Leigh films as car chases are
to action movies.) "On a clear day, I bet you can see the class struggle
from here," says Hannah, peering out the window. "What's your name,
luv?" asks their oily host, and she promptly replies
"Rumpelstiltskin."
Cartlidge's Hannah, who owes the
softening of her once-prickly exterior to the tenderness she eventually learned
to feel for fragile Annie, has grown up to be an irresistibly sardonic
commentator on the absurdities of modern life. With her crooked teeth and
lantern jaw, Cartlidge may not be technically beautiful, but her fiery
intelligence gives her the magnetism of a bruised Judy Davis. Steadman has a
harder job of it -- Annie's plaintive, high-pitched voice (she's the kind of
woman who has multiple, shifting food allergies) really sets the teeth on edge.
But she does grow, losing her rash, mustering a small store of courage to face
a callous ex-boyfriend and, when the women run into the man she once rejected
-- now a half-mad derelict -- finally able to see the truth in his accusation:
"You don't think about anyone but yourself."
That meeting, like the big
confessional denouement of "Secrets and Lies," tends to underscore
Leigh's message a bit more emphatically than seems entirely necessary, but it
still works. Not every misfit makes it through the trials of youth in one
piece, and even Annie and Hannah carry scars they can't, and shouldn't, forget.
Her
Brilliant Career: Honoring Katrin Cartlidge (1961-2002) - Bright ... Julian Upton from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2003
Career
Girl: Tribute to Katrin Cartlidge • Senses of Cinema Richard Armstrong from Senses of Cinema, October 4, 2002
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Katrin Cartlidge Remembered Matt Arnoldi
Review for Career Girls (1997)
- IMDb Scott Renshaw
DVD Times Gary Couzens
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin
TOPSY-TURVY A 95
Great Britain USA (160 mi) 1999
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Over the
course of his nearly 30-year career, director Mike Leigh has become the poet
laureate of contemporary working-class Britain, best known for such
uncompromised yet deeply humane social dramas as Life Is Sweet, Secrets
& Lies, and Naked. For obvious reasons, his sumptuous and hugely
entertaining Topsy-Turvy—a period musical-comedy about the making of
Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado—is a major departure, but it may
also be his most personal work to date, an affectionate nod to the theater
brimming with sharp insights into the artistic process. At the very least, he
must have identified with the creative dilemma facing composer Arthur Sullivan
(Allan Corduner), who, as the film opens, feels a similar impulse to strike out
into more expansive territory. After a string of popular comic operettas with
librettist William Gilbert, including H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates
Of Penzance, their partnership is threatened by the lukewarm reception to
their latest effort, 1884's Princess Ida. But when Gilbert's wife
(Lesley Manville) drags him along to a Japanese cultural exhibit, his initial
skepticism gradually melts into giddy inspiration as he's wowed by its colorful
exoticism. Leigh takes his time with this crucial and fascinating backstory,
carefully establishing Gilbert and Sullivan's opposing temperaments while
setting the stage—literally and figuratively—for the main event. Then, with
invigorating passion and razor-sharp wit, Topsy-Turvy meticulously
documents the first production of The Mikado as it progresses from
inception to glorious fruition. Given an altogether different milieu to create
from scratch, Leigh's typically obsessive attention to detail pays off in both
the complicated musical numbers and the tiniest minutiae, including a hilarious
running theme on the latest technological gizmos. A great movie could be made
out of nothing but Broadbent's bemused reaction shots, but Corduner is every
bit his equal in a less showy role. The nearly imperceptible shift in their
dynamic together and apart is one of the film's subtler pleasures. For Gilbert
& Sullivan, The Mikado arose from a need to break out of what was
expected and deliver something new and surprising; that pretty aptly describes
what Leigh has accomplished with Topsy-Turvy.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Film of the Month: Topsy-Turvy (1999)
Andy Medhurst, March 2000
Imagine how startled you'd be to discover that Krzysztof Kieslowski had
secretly made a series of knockabout comedies (Three Colours: Nurse, Three
Colours: Camping and Three Colours: Up the Khyber) or that Martin Scorsese's
next picture was to be set in an antique shop in Chipping Sodbury. Multiply
that surprise a hundredfold and you'll be half way to grasping the shock value
of Tospy-Turvy. It's a "Mike Leigh film", but you'll scan the screen
in vain for the images and sounds that phrase conjures up. Instead of
tragi-comically half-articulate people in questionable cardigans, Topsy-Turvy -
an account of a few key years in the career of the popular English operetta
team Gilbert and Sullivan and their circle - offers lavish period costumes and screeds
of florid dialogue. Leigh the poet of the underclass seems to have been
replaced by Leigh the reveller in middlebrow theatrics. Mike the minimalist has
delivered a film which frequently merits the adjective 'rollicking'. Has the
man who I'd insist was
Mercifully not, though there are a few stretches in this overlong film where he teeters on the brink. Leigh's appetite for the music is evidently immense, resulting in too many indulgent performances of their songs. Yet there's still plenty here to satisfy Leigh devotees, if they can peer past the aspidistras. The staging is as rich and complex as one would expect, there is the typically judicious balance of heartbreak and farce, and there are several diamond-sharp moments when an apparently casual observation illuminates a whole architecture of social assumptions.
Nonetheless, the film marks an inarguable departure. Leigh is dealing with real historical figures, flirting with traditional genres (the biopic, the backstage musical, the dreaded heritage movie), and shedding his trademark heightened naturalism for a full-blooded plunge into thespian excess. Theatricality is not just the hallmark of the film's method, it forms one of its principal subjects. This allows Leigh (who is also, let's not forget, a seasoned stage director) and his actors to have great fun recreating a world of backstage bitching and production politics while simultaneously indicating how people's egos, health and relationships suffer in such a hothouse atmosphere. Timothy Spall's performance as the ageing star Richard Temple, for example, is a perfectly judged study of juxtaposed fragility and bombast. Throughout the film, Leigh contrasts on-stage polish with private insecurity, the latter manifesting itself in alcoholism, drug dependency and dangerous levels of vanity.
He's also keen to explore the dynamics of creativity, setting the happily repetitive librettist Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) in conflict with composer Sullivan's loftier ideals. Gilbert finds it both perplexing and hurtful that Sullivan (Allan Corduner) wishes to dispense with a hit formula, while Sullivan, anticipating the Woody Allen of Stardust Memories, is terrified of being so seduced by a profitable rut he might never fulfil his true potential. This tension between them is so fundamental Sullivan's abrupt and underexplained change of heart to embrace The Mikado strikes one of the film's few false notes. It's tempting to speculate how their dispute relates to Leigh himself. Following the huge success of Secrets and Lies (after which Career Girls, for all its deft pleasures, did little more than mark time), should he choose a Gilbertian path of more-of-the-same, or follow Sullivan towards ambition and risk? In such a context, Topsy-Turvy's unexpected lurch into costume territory seems a bold move, paradoxically lending a dash of daring to this usually ultra-conservative format.
On the surface, Leigh's script urges us to root for Sullivan, not so much because he is particularly admirable but because Gilbert is such a buffoon. Broadbent, however, is so magnificent as Gilbert we can see beneath the gruff foolishness of the facade to the emotionally stunted man underneath. The son of two clearly deranged parents and the husband in a stilted marriage, Gilbert clings to his formulaic writing because formulas offer certainty, a certainty unattainable in the destabilising realm of emotions.
This fear of feeling provides the film with an emotional climax that's one of the greatest scenes in any Leigh film, as Gilbert's wife Kitty (Lesley Manville, hitherto underused) finally, if obliquely, confesses her longing for children. Gilbert listens as she hovers on the edge of a breakdown but can offer her nothing but bluff masculine evasion. The English dread of open emotion is one of Leigh's abiding obsessions (it forms the core of his excruciatingly precise first film Bleak Moments), and his ability to locate it even here, amid all those galumphingly good-humoured songs, is another reason why Topsy-Turvy is more than just another costume outing.
It's this attention to the anxious underbelly of Victorian culture that does
most to save Topsy-Turvy from descending into pictorialism. The film leaves us
in no doubt that 19th-century
There are other, more tantalising asides which further underline how the gathering momentum of modernity was unsettling the texture of the times. A running joke concerns the impact of new-fangled technologies such as the electric doorbell, the fountain pen and the telephone, but it's a joke with darker implications about how older ways of communicating were being sidelined. There is the brief journey Gilbert makes through the poverty-stricken streets that lie just beyond the Savoy Theatre; and there are enough hints of queer undercurrents in the backstage milieu to remind us that the Oscar Wilde trial was only a few years away.
These social comments are never crassly driven home, but they resonate strongly in the mind afterwards. That's how Leigh works best, since when he peddles undisguised propaganda the results can be as thin as the one-dimensional Thatcher-bashing which marred High Hopes. Topsy-Turvy, like Life Is Sweet or Meantime, steeps you in a culture so deeply it's only by looking back and peering closely you can detect how wider forces have cruelly impinged on individual lives. In that sense, despite its initially disorienting costume trappings, It's very much "a Mike Leigh film" after all.
The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd - Salon.com Michael Sragow, December 23, 1999
Topsy
Turvy - Bright Lights Film Journal
Eve Kushner, October 1, 2000
Mike Leigh,
Topsy-Turvy and the Excavation of Memory • Senses of ... Wheeler Winston Dixon from Senses of Cinema, October 20, 2005
Nitrate Online (Gregory Avery)
World Socialist Web Site David Walsh
Chicago NewCityNet [Ray Pride]
Movie Reviews UK Michael S. Goldberger
Topsy-Turvy Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Reel.com DVD review [Carrie Wheadon]
The Tech (MIT) [Vladimir Zelevinsky]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
From
Titipu, with love | Dallas Observer
Gregory Weinkauf, January 27, 2000
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin
ALL OR NOTHING B+ 92
Great Britain France
This is a Sokurov antidote, whose films, to some, appear cold, vague, and emotionally distant. Well this is an emotional warhorse, a film that gets in the face of some pretty pathetic individuals that live in a dreary housing project, using a series of ever-evolving, individual melodramas, wave after wave of malaise, accompanied by this truly uninspiring music that I found relentlessly depressing, but quite effective, as the pervading feeling is that life’s weariness is inescapable; there is no end in sight. I felt there was an uneven quality to the film; some moments were brilliant, such as the cab driver’s unexplained ride, which actually resembled RATCATCHER for me, or all of the scenes that featured Ruth Sheen as Maureen, “Don’t It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue,” and Kathryn Hunter as the deliciously interesting cab passenger, Cecile. I felt the audience lost patience with some of the weaker characters. But then about two-thirds into the film, there is a dramatic shift. The dreadful (for me) music stops, and it all plays out in natural sound, like an actual play, and there are some emotional bombs that are dropped on the audience. Perhaps we can quibble about whether the mother, Leslie Manville, loses some of the dramatic balance, but she certainly pulls us into this unbelievably raw, Eugene O’Neill style, personal intensity, which closes the film - uneven, but certainly worth the price of admission.
Mike Leigh has given us powerful portrayals of the underclass before, in such films as Naked, Secrets and Lies, and Life is Sweet, but none more powerful and moving than his latest, All or Nothing. Here he looks at three families living in a dreary South London housing complex, capturing their lives with an intimacy that is almost unbearable. All or Nothing has a documentary feel, as if the camera was just planted in the middle of the living room to observe. The conditions are familiar: unemployment and underemployment, alcoholism, teen pregnancy, isolation, and the inevitable loss of self-esteem and despair. This is, however, more than a drama of oppressive social conditions, but also of lack of communication between people who desperately need love but are too afraid or lethargic to ask for it.
Phil (Timothy Spall) is an overweight taxi driver who gets up late in the day and works intermittently, barely communicating with his family, except for a few grunts. His philosophy of life is expressed as "We're all born alone. We die alone. There's nothing we can do about it." It is obvious, from the start that something is amiss at home. Phil says nothing when his son Rory (James Cordon) hurls words of abuse at his common-law wife Penny. Rory is an obese bully who does nothing but lay around the house, watching TV and hurling insults at everyone in his path. Sister Rachel (Alison Garland), has a job cleaning up at a nursing home, but seems to only be going through the motions of living when she's not interacting with patients. Penny works in a supermarket and does just about everything to keep the family going, but it never seems to be enough.
The film's sub-plots add to the feeling of life reeling out of control, although none of them are fully developed. Maureen's teenage daughter is pregnant by some lout that doesn't give two hoots about her. Another resident, unemployed Samantha (Sally Hawkins) hates her parents and finds herself seducing a very strange young man (Ben Crompton) lurking in the shadows of the complex grounds. The film eventually concentrates mainly on Phil and his family. When a medical emergency occurs, the family begins to open up and express long buried feelings of hurt and resentment. Spall's performance is a revelation. His unshaven face, disheveled hair, and hangdog expression communicate deep resignation.
The film is bleak, but Leigh mixes its heartbreak with joy. When a neighbor (Ruth Sheen) sings ''Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,'' at a karaoke bar, her eyes shine with a glow that seems at odds with the rest of her life, but is so contagious that even her most dispirited friends take notice. Leigh does not offer simple solutions, but seems to be telling us that although life is painful, we can reach beyond the pain to get in touch with the beauty. He shows us that love is the glue that holds families together, and that either there is love or there's nothing. As a result, All or Nothing pulsates with a humanity that, in spite of its bleakness, is life-affirming and ultimately uplifting, reminding us that beyond bitterness, there is love, and beyond suffering, there is grace.
A HOUSING PROJECT in South London . A tubby kid kicking a soccer ball against
the wall. A teenage girl dressed in slutty attire, hanging around, watching the
dilapidated buildings.
A deathly silence in this
concrete complex of working-class families, interrupted occasionally by verbal
misery: sarcastic comments, obscenities. A world of lethargy, quick-trigger
anger and hopelessness.
This is the setting of "All
or Nothing," Mike Leigh's bracing and ultimately humanistic symphony, in
which the Bassett family, their neighbors and workmates soldier through the
everyday: some with resignation, others with anger or bitterness, one or two
with kindness or a sense of humor.
It's so hard, being alive. And in
Leigh's exquisitely textured film, we see characters coming up tragically short
in so many ways, as they try to make it through a job, a relationship or just
another day. And there's the bloody morning again.
Imagine the glorious hallelujah,
then, when the members of one family find – quite by accident – that they might
just love one another.
Phil (Timothy Spall), a hangdog
Bassett, is a cash-poor taxi driver who gets up late and constantly asks his
wife and two teenage children for change. His spouse, Penny (Lesley Manville),
is a cashier at Safeway, who sees a lot of money during the day but brings
little of it home.
Phil's lost in himself, his
suffering face obscured by a mop of greasy hair. But in his own irresponsible
way, he's also a lowercase saint, ever mindful of a fare-challenged customer's
need for dignity. Penny's withering quietly from Phil's neglect and his lack of
money. But she keeps her frustration hidden, for Phil's sake.
Both are emotionally brutalized
by her son Rory (James Corden), an overweight teenage couch potato who can't
withstand a conversation without bitter rancor. Bringing up the quiet rear is
Rachel (Alison Garland), Rory's withdrawn sister, who works in a senior home
and carries her own heavy load. Not that anyone asks.
Leigh doesn't stop with the
Bassetts. He introduces us to a wider circle around them, ranging from the
sullen Ron (Paul Jesson), Phil's unfriendly workmate who backs into a stone
pillar, then claims a female driver hit him, to the sunny Maureen (Ruth Sheen),
who lives next door.
Maureen, who works with Penny and
loves to sing karaoke on Saturday nights, is a hint of the sunlight that could
break through this overcast human gloom at any moment. She refuses to be
daunted by anything, including her surly daughter, Donna (Helen Coker).
"Where are you going?"
Maureen asks Donna, as the teenager dolls up for an outing.
"Out," says Donna, curtly.
"Oh, I've been there,"
says Maureen.
"Have you?" says Donna,
continuing the sarcasm.
"Yeah, gets a bit packed
though, doesn't it?"
A Leigh movie is always good for
acerbic, semi-humorous conversation like this. But there's more to it than that.
Motivations, secrets and lies lurk inches beneath the pithy language.
In "All or Nothing,"
many of those revelations are brought to bear, particularly in the Bassett
household after an alarming incident brings the family desperately together.
But throughout this and other tribulations, Andrew Dickson's soothing score
assures us a heart is beating somewhere in this movie, that things are somehow
on the mend; that there's hope.
Leigh has created another
remarkable work, up there with his best, including "High Hopes,"
"Life Is Sweet," "Naked," "Secrets & Lies"
and "Topsy-Turvy." And once again, his actors (particularly Spall and
Manville) seem to be living directly on the screen.
This seems like the right
opportunity to pay tribute to one of Leigh's troupe: Katrin Cartlidge, who
passed away Sept. 7 of complications from pneumonia and septicemia. The British
actor was sublime in everything she did for Leigh, major or minor, including
"Naked," "Topsy-Turvy" and "Career Girls." She
was first-class, too, in other films. Lars von Trier's "Breaking the
Waves" and Milcho Manchevski's "Before the Rain" come most
immediately to mind. Although she's not in this particular film, the Mike Leigh
universe will never be the same without her.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Reasons To Be Cheerful Ryan
Gilbey from Sight and Sound, October
2002
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Shadows on the Wall [Rich Cline]
Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
VERA DRAKE A- 93
Great Britain France New Zealand
A perfect rainy day movie, this is a near documentary, ultra-realistic film shrouded in dreariness and gloom, almost completely engulfed in a state of bleak detachment. This film meticulously follows the rounds of Vera, a self-sacrificing cleaning woman who is generous to a fault, a perfectly ordinary woman played by Imelda Staunton, who helps girls in need by performing bedside abortions in the postwar WWII London of the early 1950’s, actually showing a succession of abortion scenes in very matter of fact sequences, as if they are nothing out of the ordinary. Despite the daily evidence of her kindness and caring nature, she is abruptly arrested one night after one of the girls nearly dies, when the girl is forced to seek medical attention. The investigation promptly leads to Vera, who, by scarcely uttering a word, reveals all. We discover that she and her family live in Dickensian dire straits, in a poorly lit, cramped working-class flat where she also cares for her elderly mother, that she completely kept this secret from her family, and that she never took a dime for her services, which she provided out of the goodness in her heart. Nonetheless, she is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in a highly restrained yet melodramatic family drama that sometimes feels like we’re in the middle of LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT.
The film contrasts the ease with which the rich girls obtain easy medical
access, with the full support of the Catholic nuns, while the poor girls have
to scrounge around the neighborhoods seeking any kind of help they can
find. This humorless, completely austere
film features plenty of close ups of Staunton, and while they are powerfully
moving, this is an unabashedly melodramatic directorial device, particularly
her breakdown during the initial police investigation, again whispering her
guilt to her husband, and finally during the courtroom ruling which displays,
simultaneously, tearful incomprehension and remorse, balanced against the heartless,
emotionless step by step routine of the police and judicial procedures. It should be noted that abortion was
legalized by the end of the 1960’s in Great Britain
Vera Drake Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
A woman's work is never done . . . Could we call
this one fine wine in a pop-top can? Leigh's film is exquisite in its
construction of detail and attention to procedure. He lulls you into a level of
warm acceptance, all the better to implicitly ask us to consider his mother's
generation which, for reasons of patriarchy and the state, had to forge a
continuum between acts that we have the luxury of mentally separating --
putting the kettle on for a soothing cup of tea, and inserting a rubber
hand-pump syringe into young women's uteruses to inject soapy water for the
induction of miscarriage. As Vera Drake herself continually iterates to her
questioners, she "helps." Whether it's her family or female strangers
from the lower classes, desperate to circumvent (Leigh pointedly names the
statute three times) "the Defense of the Person Act of 1861," Vera
acts out of a genuine desire to serve others, though Leigh is careful to make
clear that it is never an ideological desire. Rather, Vera's commitment to
providing abortions to those in need, free of charge, is an engrained part of a
particular historical, gendered habitus. Vera is an organic part of a
larger network of women and lower-class subjects who mustn't grumble, who have
to muddle through. Leigh constructs a total environment for this unseen world,
with its postwar tenements and burnished oaky pubs and pantry shelves lined
with biscuit tins and cans of corn and beans. And within this warm,
experiential world (worn and lived in, like a pair of boots or your grandma's
baking apron), Leigh makes room for Imelda Staunton to inhabit Vera Drake,
motherly, cherubic, with untold history written in the wrinkles of her hands
and the socially-forgotten depths of her own body. While
BFI | Sight
& Sound | Vera Drake (2004) Ryan Gilbey from Sight and Sound, January 2005
London, 1950. Vera Drake (Imelda
Staunton) lives with her husband Stan (Phil Davis) and their grown-up children,
Ethel (Alex Kelly) and Sid (Daniel Mays). She works as a cleaning lady, and
secretly performs abortions for girls in trouble. When one of her patients
almost dies, the police call at her house where the family is celebrating
Ethel’s engagement to Reg (Eddie Marson), and the pregnancy of Joyce (Heather
Craney), Stan and Vera’s sister-in-law.
Vera is interviewed at the police
station, where she is shocked to learn that her friend Lily took payment for
booking the abortions. Prior to being arrested, she confesses her crime to
Stan. Next morning, she is granted bail. Sid initially spurns her, and Joyce is
reluctant to visit. At the trial, Vera is sentenced to two years and three
months. In prison, she meets other women jailed for the same crime.
Review
Older audiences might let out a
warm sigh during the moment in Vera Drake when the title character, a 1950s
domestic whose twinkling eyes are buried in a doughy face like raisins pressed
into a bun, retrieves a key from beneath a doormat. In his third period work
(after the 1993 play It’s a Great Big Shame! and Topsy-Turvy
from 1999), Mike Leigh proves himself adept at stemming the flow of nostalgia.
Viewers who find solace in that key under the mat, or in the talk of bread and
dripping, will be brought up sharp by the punishment doled out to Vera when it
transpires that she has been performing illegal abortions. Her husband Stan is
a mechanic whose work ethic is: "Bring ’em in, mend ’em, push ’em back out
again." Not so different really from Vera.
The picture documents post-war
English class prejudice as methodically as Fassbinder mapped out West Germany’s
social and racial battleground in Fear Eats the Soul (1974). Class
tensions manifest themselves in Leigh’s film in the contrast between Vera’s
clients, most of whom undergo their terminations in squalor, and the experience
of Susan Wells, a rape victim whose relative wealth, as well as her insider
knowledge of the correct phrases to use in a psychiatric interview
("suicidal feelings", "madness in the family"), allows her
a short stay at a bright clinic. The class divide is symbolised by visible
barriers. A hospital screen, an IV stand, a staircase, a court bench - each
cleaves the frame starkly in two.
The unifying factor is Vera,
played by Imelda Staunton, who gets the kind of adoring close-ups, if not the
wardrobe and hairdo, that a Hollywood star would kill for. She is frequently
the only active element in a shot, scuttling between rooms filling teacups and
emptying bedpans for incapacitated relatives and neighbours. Once she has been
arrested, her stillness reverberates. With no further need to keep track of her
errands, Dick Pope’s camera goes into a funk. Those constant chirruping offers
of tea, which Vera seemed to make in every alternate line, dry up, leaving our
ears parched. The mention of a hot beverage has never sounded so cruel as when
it is made by a WPC unaware that she has assumed Vera’s defining function as
bluntly as she has confiscated her wedding ring. Vera’s identity will follow.
Leigh gives the movie her name, but in the final line of dialogue, which hurts
like a stubbed toe, a prison warden reduces her to "Drake".
The film’s cleverest trick is to
withhold for dramatic effect those elements that have grown comforting in
earlier scenes. Vera’s absence from the family home, for example, is
articulated when Leigh begins stinting on the tight, busy compositions that had
previously denoted warmth and camaraderie. In those scenes set at mealtimes in
the Drake household, he seems out to break some record for the largest number
of faces squeezed into a medium shot. Once Vera is gone, the film must adjust
itself to the change in temperament. Alone in her cell, she misses the old
bustle, and so do we. When she is out on bail, Leigh stages an agonising
Christmas dinner scene in which the camera cannot bring itself to capture
everyone in a single tableau. Instead it takes in each family member
individually during an extended pan round the room, just as Fassbinder did in
that slow single shot in Fear Eats the Soul when Emmi announces to
her vicious children that she has married Ali.
Like Fassbinder, Leigh uses the
position and movement of the camera to underline the social implications of the
narrative. He has made an exceptionally quiet film - Vera whispers her
confession to her husband Stan in his ear, while those who felt battered by Leigh’s
last film, All Or Nothing (2002), will be relieved to learn that
it is nearly two hours before a raised voice is heard in Vera Drake. The camera
expresses more anger than any slanging match.
An exceptional breadth of context
and compassion is evident here, though the film is as much a triumph of
production design as it is of acting, writing and direction. Eve Stewart has
created a network of dimly lit passageways from which cramped doorways open on
to sitting rooms where conflicting designs (floral patterns compete on the
lampshades, wallpaper and curtains in Vera’s house) increase the claustrophobia
still further. When the film has decamped to cells and courtrooms, the eye
yearns for a return to that tangled chaos which the characters have made for themselves.
There is no going back. The doors that have been open throughout the movie
begin closing one by one - on a girl hospitalised by her violent reaction to an
abortion, on Vera in her cell and again on Vera when she returns home and is
snubbed by her son. In the last scene of Fear Eats the Soul,
Fassbinder had the doctor close the door on Emmi as she comforted Ali in his
hospital bed. Leigh leaves it ajar in the final shot of Vera Drake, framing the
bereft family before using a simple piece of film language to express their
emotional devastation - the fade to black, that door which no character may
reopen.
Hard Labor:
Vera Drake - Film Comment Amy
Taubin, September/October 2004
The heroine of Mike Leigh's wonderfully subtle and relentlessly harrowing new film is a cheerful, compactly built middle-aged woman who spends her waking hours in perpetual motion. Indeed, the first thing one might notice about Vera Drake is her gait. She seems to have arrived, likely early in life, at the simplest and most reliable method of moving forward while transferring weight from one leg to the other. Compared with the way most people propel themselves about the world, this is a remarkable accomplishment. We can sense in her walk a modest pride in her own purposefulness and efficiency. The opening and penultimate sequences in Vera Drake show Vera walking. In the difference between the way she moves at the beginning and at the end of the film lies the story.
Vera Drake is something of a flip side to Leigh's Naked. These are the only films among his 17 features and TV dramas in which Leigh focuses the narrative on a single character. (Jim Broadbent's performance may dominate Topsy-Turvy but the film is about the creative collaboration of Gilbert and Sullivan.) Naked's Johnny is a dark spirit who wreaks destruction on himself and anyone who gives him an opening, while the sunny Vera is regarded as “good as gold” by just about everyone who knows her. But Vera, no less than Johnny, lives according to an ethical code that places her outside the law and the established social order. And both characters, therefore, cause those around them, in varying degrees, to question their own relation to societal rules they've taken for granted.
The film is set in London in 1950, when the experience of the war and the blitz still dominated the collective consciousness. Vera (Imelda Staunton) lives with her husband, Stan (Phil Davis), and their two adult children, Sid (Daniel Mays) and Ethel (Alex Kelly), in a cramped flat in a dingy working-class neighborhood. Everyone in the family has a full-time job. Stan works in his brother's car-repair shop, Sid in a men's clothing store, Ethel on an assembly line in a lightbulb factory. Vera cleans the houses of several upper-middle-class families; at home, too, she's the cook and cleaner-upper. In between her paid domestic service and her homemaking duties, she finds five minutes here and there to visit sick friends and relatives, offering a cuppa, a biscuit, and an encouraging word. Her happiness—this is a woman who sings while she works in her kitchen—is contagious, although it might strike one that her generosity and her strict budgeting of her time are somewhat at odds. Vera manages to do a great deal for others by refusing to imagine situations that might be too much for her to cope with. It's the kind of dissociation that's characteristic of saints or borderline schizophrenics. That we are able to discern so much about a character from about 25 minutes of exposition, composed simply of fragments of daily life—no high drama, no overt statements of purpose or desire—has to do with the meticulous attention paid by the director and his leading actress to rhythms, textures, and small details of behavior. Staunton, who's working here with Leigh for the first time, is best known to American audiences as the voice of Bunty, the adorable hen, in Chicken Run and as the nurse in Shakespeare in Love.
At the end of what we might call the film's first act, Vera pays a visit to a nervous young woman, and although she hums a tune while putting the kettle on, we have a sinking feeling that the water she's heating is not for tea. Among the services Vera performs, free of charge, is one she refers to as “helping girls out.” Vera is an abortionist at a time when abortion is illegal in England. During the course of the film, she performs four abortions. Leigh depicts the procedures in exacting detail, but also with great discretion, as though Chardin had painted the implements Vera uses-a syringe, rubber tubing, a grater, a bar of soap, and a basin of water-arranged on a bed, in a still life.
In terms of the expressive elements he employs, Leigh treats the abortion scenes just as he treats every other scene in the film, in part because Vera doesn't view what she does as in any way out of the ordinary. If a mother of six with an abusive husband knows she won't be able to feed yet another child, or a young black woman with no family is terrified of having a baby on her own, Vera is there to help. But we in the audience are aware of what Vera refuses to consider, and it makes us horribly anxious. Sooner or later, one of these abortions will have a bad outcome. A woman will get sick or die, and the police will find out about Vera. We watch the happy family gatherings and the courtship of tongue-tied Ethel by a similarly shy Reg (Eddie Marsan)—what an endearing couple they make—dreading what's to come.
For Leigh, the starting point of Vera Drake was, without question, the issue of abortion. He dedicated the film to his parents, “a doctor and a midwife,” and, in an interview, he told me that because his parents' practice was largely in a working-class neighborhood, he was aware, since childhood, of women who performed illegal abortions. In previous films, Leigh wove abortion into the fabric of sexuality in marriage and out of wedlock. But it is so central to Vera Drake that Leigh even shows us, as a counterpoint to Vera and the women she “helps out,” the options that were available to wealthy women for terminating unwanted pregnancies. When Susan (Sally Hawkins), the daughter of one of the families Vera works for, discovers that she's pregnant as the result of being date-raped, a friend gives her the name of a doctor, who, for a hefty fee, arranges for a psychiatrist to certify that she is emotionally unstable. Thus she is allowed a legal abortion in a clinic that looks like a college dorm.
A newcomer to Leigh's films, veteran editor Jim Clark points up the difference money makes to women in need of abortions without allowing the film to become overly didactic. Clark's clipped and straightforward editing may be the primary reason that Vera Drake seems slightly more austere and heady than Leigh's other films. Clark unfailingly cuts at the precise moment that we have discovered everything we need to know in a shot, but a beat or two before we might have expected it to end. As a result, the film sidesteps melodrama at every turn, taking a very different approach to its subject than Claude Chabrol's powerful-in-its-own-right The Story of Women (88). Members of Leigh's regular production team—cinematographer Dick Pope, production designer Eve Stewart, and composer Andrew Dickson—also contribute some of their most restrained and nuanced work, as does the ensemble cast, and particularly Leigh regulars Peter Wight as the police inspector and Phil Davis as Vera's husband.
Almost as much of a period piece as Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake likewise suggests that the past is still with us. Certainly abortion, although it was legalized in Britain at the end of the Sixties (just a few years before it became legal in the U.S.), is still an issue that sets moral compasses aquiver. About halfway through the film, Vera is arrested and the rest of the narrative deals with the reactions of family, friends, the police, and the courts to the news that a woman regarded as the soul of goodness is a criminal. No one is more deeply affected than Vera herself, whose identity is completely shattered. She has never allowed herself to consider the danger to herself or to the women whose pregnancies she aborts. She has never thought about the consequences to her family, who until this point had been completely left in the dark, of her being branded a criminal. She has simply “helped out”—she can never bring herself to say the word “abortion”—and there's an inference that she was once in need of the same help that she has been offering. But when the police come to arrest her, she doesn't lie or protest. “I know why you're here,” she says, and Leigh holds on her face as it seems literally to crumble. It's an extraordinarily demanding moment, and Staunton more than fulfills it, because she somehow communicates that it is defining not only for Vera but for the film as well. What's at stake here is both a character in crisis and the meaning of realism itself. We are not watching a documentary. We are watching a work of narrative fiction in which the truth of lived experience informs the truth of the form. At their most compelling, Mike Leigh's films, like Chardin's paintings, make us consider both life and art.
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Shroom
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Imelda Staunton Interview - Vera Drake Star Imelda Stau...
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY B 87
Great Britain (118 mi) 2008 ‘Scope
Are
you happy?
This question is asked several times throughout the film, almost as a
throwaway line, as it can easily get lost in the continuous babble of the lead
character known as Poppy (Sally Hawkins).
While she asks it of others, the question is more appropriately asked of
her. For the opening thirty minutes or
more, it is impossible to wipe that smile off her face, as if it is
artificially attached. Whether good or
bad circumstances, she simply exudes a dizzying good humor that feels more like
a reflex action than the real thing, as if all the nervous chatter coming out
of her mouth is covering up something that lies beneath. She lives with a more grounded roommate Zoe, Alexis Zegerman, her best friend in the
world, as they traveled through Australia and Southeast Asia together and now
both teach inner city elementary school children in London, but the storyline
implies there is perhaps more to their relationship. Poppy, however, is also interested in men, as
if bisexual curiosity offers a means to explore her own sense of unfulfilled
identity, which at age thirty is still an open question. It is as a teacher that Poppy finally gets
serious, as her tendency to overreact to everything in general is in perfect
synch to the world of first graders, as rather than berate an obviously troubled
child who is starting to hit other children, she befriends him with the hopes
of earning his trust. Her affection is
in earnest, but the audience wonders what troubled past of her own remains
concealed. This is exacerbated further
in a somewhat surreal scene where she inexplicably puts herself in harm’s way
and visits an obviously crazed homeless man (Stanley Townsend) and tries to
connect with him, as if attempting to bring him some degree of warmth or
happiness. Some give their pocket
change, Poppy gives her smile and good cheer.
But upon returning home, she conceals where she’s been, as if she can’t
really explain it even to herself.
Leigh is known by
his connection to theater and his rigorous improvisational rehearsals not only
prior to shooting but prior to developing his story. Unfortunately, much of this film feels like
an attempt to string together several of these worked out sequences, never
really creating a cohesive whole. As a
result, the story becomes a contrast in moods told in different segments, a
visit to a book store, girls night out at the disco, Poppy’s stolen bicycle and
her subsequent decision to take driving lessons from an irascible,
pathologically uptight misanthrope (Eddie Marsan) who is the living
personification of road rage, flamenco dance classes from an infinitely
charming (“This is My Space!!!”) Spanish instructor from Seville (Karina Fernandez, who it turns out is not
even Spanish), who encourages women to seek their flamboyant side, a gentleman
caller, and visits to her discordant family members, as well as scenes from
school. What these scenes all have in
common is that they are revealed from the singular perspective of Poppy’s
character, which becomes clearer and of greater interest over time. Despite this development, Poppy continues to
remain a mystery, as she obviously wants to please the world around her but the
magical unanswered question is why? What
motivates her? Behind the smiles and the
giggles and the sarcastic, smart aleck comments, one wonders if she’s truly
happy or simply pretending to be.
Throughout the
film we wait for the other shoe to fall, for Poppy’s relentlessly cheerful
disposition to be put to the test, but strangely, it never is, not seriously
anyways, which is something of a disappointment, as it leaves us in limbo with
the glass half empty and half full. What
are we to make of this? While the look
of the film is filled with bright cheerful colors, red and yellow cars and
Poppy’s own psychedelically charged bohemian outfits, with a different pair of
knee-length boots for every day of the week, there’s an overly strident string
quartet from Gary Yershon’s score heard throughout the film that has a carnival air about it, as if we are
caught on a merry-go-round, whose somewhat pompous notes on occasion offer a
sneer of disapproval, like the intrusion of gray clouds, perhaps the voice of
the director or some smug I-told-you-so narration. The constant theme of chamber music reminds
us this is a chamber drama which offers a window into the typically intensely
realistic Mike Leigh rendering of the human condition, dressed up here with
bright sunshine and good cheer, but the picture of happiness on display here
nonetheless borders on the artificially realized and the surreal, remaining equally
elusive, hard to find, and arguably out of reach.
Paste Magazine Jesse Jarnow
In Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy (Sally
Hawkins) makes her own charmed life in London, following a trail of giggles
between a stolen bike, a disturbed driving instructor, bookstore clerks, nights
spent partying with her flatmate, and most other situations that might arise
for a single 30-year-old woman. Like Audrey Tautou's Amélie remodeled for extroversion
and erased of an interior monologue (and an external dream world, for that
matter), Hawkins is charming—to a degree. Though she moves through Mike Leigh's
film with grace, she rarely seems to arrive anywhere. She learns to drive, but
literally has no destination in mind. There are laughs, of course, but where
there is drama—mostly via bottled-up driving instructor Scott (Eddie Marsan)
and one of Poppy’s young students—it rarely comes with any depth. Eventually,
we find Poppy, but she’s already found herself a half-dozen times by then
anyway.
Happy-Go-Lucky JR Jones from the Reader
A new drama by British director Mike Leigh is always cause
for celebration, though if you saw his last two--All or Nothing (2002),
about a modern working-class family coming apart at the seams, and Vera
Drake (2004), about a good-hearted 1950s matriarch who performs back-alley
abortions--you may not have been in a mood to celebrate afterward. Conscious
perhaps of his reputation as a misery monger, Leigh takes a step back from the
abyss with this story about an irrepressibly cheerful primary school teacher
(Sally Hawkins) who loves her work, loves her friends, and loves a night out at
the pub. Intent on learning to drive, she meets her opposite number in a
furiously pissed-off instructor with horrendous teeth (Eddie Marsan). When the
teacher started feeling pain in her spine, I immediately diagnosed meningitis and
predicted an agonizing death as punishment for her giddiness. But Leigh pushes
the story in a more interesting direction, asking whether people find happiness
or simply will it on themselves.
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [5/6]
Her real name is
Pauline (Hawkins), but everyone calls her Poppy, and no nickname could describe
her better. A schoolteacher in London, Poppy possesses an Energizer Bunny
enthusiasm for life; even a stolen bike can’t derail her optimistic outlook.
She’s so relentlessly cheery that you might miss the telling moment when,
discussing work with her best mate (Zegerman), Poppy admits that negligent
parenting “makes me so angry.” A microflicker of rage appears before she snaps
back to default mode; with one small expression, the actor reveals just how
complex this little Ms. Sunshine is. Happiness is Poppy’s protective shell
against the world. Without that aggressive glass-half-full attitude, she might
be consumed by the tsunami of negativity washing upon her.
We take Mike
Leigh’s gifts for granted, knowing the collaborative nature of his
filmmaking will inevitably produce something brimming with humanity. Yet what
the director and cast do with this character study is miraculous. Everything
from a flamenco teacher’s breakdown to Poppy’s Naked-ish encounter
with a vagrant offers sly, subtle revelations about this woman. The
extraordinary Sally
Hawkins earns every bit of the nearly unanimous praise she’s received to
date, but Eddie
Marsan’s ability to make a racist, sociopathic driving instructor
sympathetic is equally amazing; spouting paranoid rants and compulsively
shouting to check the mirrors, his anti-Poppy is clearly damaged. But Marsan
doesn’t treat the character as the sum of his hatreds any more than his
counterpart portrays hers as mindlessly happy. They’re as close to messy,
multilayered human beings as cinema can produce. We should consider ourselves
lucky to have met them.
Cinema
Scope Review (Richard Porton)
Mike Leigh—celebrated playwright, filmmaker, and world-class blowhard—rarely misses an opportunity to pay homage to his own work. In the case of his latest film, Happy-Go-Lucky, he sums up his agenda as life affirming and “anti-miserablist”—a riposte to critics who consider him an avatar of British realist gloom. Audiences familiar with Naked (1993), or the self-parodic All or Nothing (2002), might assume that a certain misanthropy and pessimism— either fairly bracing in the case of Naked or the embodiment of dime store existentialism in All or Nothing— is Leigh’s stock in trade. Yet Happy-Go-Lucky’s peppy protagonist, Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a chirpy primary school teacher prone to muttering manic, or smart alecky, asides as she traverses London, is nothing if not a purveyor of sweetness and light. A revamped ‘30s screwball heroine, Poppy resides in north London with her rather thick kid sister Suzy (Kate O Flynn) and wisecracking roommate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman). Revealed eventually as a reservoir of empathy despite her ditzy façade—a loving mentor to her pupils and a fount of maternal concern for the local homeless population—she is nearly christened a secular saint by the end of the film; Our Lady of Bad Jokes might be an appropriate appellation.
Despite widespread assumptions that good-natured, well-intentioned characters are intrinsically boring, there is in fact a well-established, if somewhat murky, cinematic tradition devoted to evoking “goodness” in a nuanced, unsentimental fashion; Hara Setsuko’s complex portrayal of the seemingly selfless Noriko in Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1954) comes easily to mind. In any case, while there is nothing wrong with Leigh’s desire to depict one woman’s unadulterated happiness without undue sentimentality, the film becomes the victim of Leigh’s own penchant for frequently facile shtick and the pitfalls of his cherished methodology of transforming actors’ improvisations into a final shooting script.
While Leigh’s best films—particularly early television landmarks such as Grown Ups (1980), Home Sweet Home (1982), and Meantime (1983)—effortlessly combine comedy and pathos, the synthesis of gags and melodrama seems strained in Happy-Go-Lucky: much of the narrative trajectory, slight as it is, appears recycled from earlier, better Leigh films. Even Hawkins (indisputably a talented performer—and certainly a relentless one—and winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlinale) appears to have, whether consciously or not, merged elements of previous echt-Leigh eccentrics into her superficially idiosyncratic portrayal: Poppy’s facetious logorrhea invokes the considerable less beneficent verbal tics of David Thewlis’s Johnny in Naked while her neurotic gestures recall the late Katrin Cartlidge’s Hannah in the equally slight, although considerably more poignant, Career Girls (1997).
Of course, self-plagiarism is not necessarily a serious transgression. The more serious complaint about Happy-Go-Lucky is that its fragile meld of comedy and social commentary fails to convince on all accounts. For one thing, Poppy, despite Leigh’s avowals that his films reflect nothing more than the contours of everyday life, is more of an idealized sketch of a Free Spirit than a believable human being. Perhaps more disconcertingly, in a movie that depends on a character’s humour for its quotient of charm and buoyancy, her impromptu quips, presumably nurtured during the extensive rehearsals, are rarely, if ever, funny. (To take one of the more egregious examples, when asked during a trip to her sister’s suburban home if she wants a baby, she replies, “Want a baby? No thanks, I just want to have a kebab.”)
Happy-Go-Lucky’s relatively stripped down narrative—the film is basically an interlinked series of vignettes—promises more than it delivers. To wit, since the looseness of the story elements gives a place of pride to comic interludes, the fact that many of these set pieces prove inferior to comparable material in sitcoms with more polished dialogue and characterizations such as Seinfeld or The Office makes one conclude that the chorus of acclaim for this punishing movie is more attributable to the weight of Leigh’s pretensions than any actual comic brio.
This disequilibrium is most evident in the critically celebrated confrontations between the uninhibited Poppy and Scott (Eddie Marsan), her profoundly repressed, paranoid, and racist driving instructor. Comedy traditionally relies on confrontations between spontaneous characters and rigid, authoritarian antagonists. But even given the two-dimensionality endemic to farce, the face-offs between Poppy and Scott fail to beguile. In a truly democratic comic universe of discourse, even the most insufferable twits such as John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty, Ricky Gervais’ David Brent, or Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge (to cite only British examples) have some redeeming, even appealing, qualities. The deck, however, is precipitously stacked in Happy-Go-Lucky. Poppy is the quintessence of benign lightheartedness and her driving instructor from hell is the devil incarnate.
Of course, some of Leigh’s defenders might claim that this Manicheanism is merely the product of his enlightened political concerns—and it is of course difficult not to prefer Poppy’s sprightly abandon to Scott’s crazed authoritarianism. Unfortunately, Happy-Go-Lucky’s political agenda is as wanly schematic as its limp humour. In a pivotal subplot, Poppy intervenes to help one of her troubled students, a bully whose truculent behaviour is obviously caused by domestic strife at home. Yet the creaky symmetry of her attempts to aid this unfortunate kid—an incipient Scott no doubt—is oddly narcissistic and apolitical. Her altruism nets her a hunky love interest, a social worker named Tim (Samuel Roukin) called in for a consultation with the problem child. The overall effect is much more New Agey than radical; if you perform good deeds, you’ll reap rewards in your personal life.
For those of us who have encountered Leigh in press conferences and one-on-one interviews over the years, perhaps the most grating aspect of Happy-Go-Lucky is the fact that he is temperamentally much closer to the irascible Scott than to the sunny Poppy. In Amy Raphael’s recently published Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, the enormously defensive Leigh (who interprets even the mildest criticism of his work as monumentally insulting) strenuously denies that he’s even slightly defensive. In this light, despite the dangers of ad hoc psychological analysis, it is difficult not to conclude that Poppy’s escapades constitute an extended wish-fulfillment fantasy for the dyspeptic director. (The charitable explanation for Leigh’s behaviour is that he does not “suffer fools gladly.” But since Raphael’s book chronicles Leigh’s tendency to inveigh against all of his critics as “stupid,” the man’s overweening insecurity is all too glaring.) Acerbity is not by nature superior to sweetness and generosity. Nevertheless, since Leigh appears to have more affinities with his gloomier protagonists than with inveterate optimist Poppy, Happy-Go-Lucky, is, good intentions notwithstanding, a rather fraudulent and half-hearted enterprise.
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
Pajiba (Phillip Stephens) review
not coming to a theater near you (Jenny Jediny) review
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [A]
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) review
indieWIRE review Eric Hynes from Reverse Shot
DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
The Onion A.V. Club review Noel Murray
Spoutblog Review (Kevin Buist) with working comments from the director
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5] also seen here: Reel.com review [3.5/4]
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
Marilyn Ferdinand's critique from Ferdy on Films
David Phelps The Auteur’s Notebook
Vadim Rizov The House Next Door
UnderGroundOnline [Keith Uhlich]
Ed Gonzalez Slant magazine
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Poppy Seen Ray Pride from New City
CBC.ca Arts review Martin Morrow
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
Talking Pictures (UK) review Emma Farley, with comments from Leigh’s longtime producer (11 films together), Simon Channing-Williams
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Vinyl Is Heavy Review (Ryland Walker Knight)
Twitch (Michael Guillen) review also seen here: The Evening Class
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
World Socialist Web Site Richard Phillips and Ismet Redzovic
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Stop Smiling Review (Patrick Z. McGavin)
Screen International review Jonathan Romney in Berlin
Nick Schager Lessons of Darkness
Ella Taylor LA Weekly Blog
Notes from last night's screening of HAPPY-GO-LUCKY Gabe Klinger from Cine-File
Transcript of the Guardian interview with Mike Leigh at BFI Southbank, London Interview by Sarfraz Manzoor, April 17, 2008, also including: Read part two of the interview and questions from the audience
Q&A With Mike Leigh on His Casting Process and How Much He Hated The Red Balloon Interview by Brent Simon from New York Magazine, October 10, 2008
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/6]
The Independent Review (Kaleem Aftab)
The Guardian Review (Mark Brown) in Berlin
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [4/4]
Austin Chronicle (Josh Rosenblatt) review [2/5]
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
ANOTHER YEAR B 89
Great Britain (129 mi) 2010 ‘Scope
It’s interesting how, over the years, Mike Leigh has
continued to utilize new faces as his leads, pulled from among his staple of
performers, almost as if he’s rotating the importance of their roles. Ruth Sheen and Lesley Manville, faces we
recognize as they are among the most loyal in his entire troupe, have finally
been given prominent roles. Jim
Broadbent (4th film together) goes back to LIFE IS SWEET (1990),
while Ruth Sheen (5th film) and Lesley Manville (6th film)
go back to HIGH HOPES (1988). This film
centers around the stable lives of suburbanites Tom and Gerri, Broadbent and Sheen,
both working professionals who earn a comfortable living, as much of the film
takes place inside their home. Added to
the mix is the harried and unsettled life of Mary (Manville), a woman who works
as a secretary in the same building with Gerri but who’s always in a state of
flux, a heavy drinker who’s desperately in need of getting into someone’s ear
where she can blab with the best of them.
Mary is a vulnerable and sympathetic figure who wears her heart on her
sleeve while being affectionate and overly man friendly, but is younger and
lacks good judgment, making rash, impulsive decisions which contrasts with the
polish and sophistication of the married couple who simply lead more orderly
lives, which usually requires hearing the latest disasters that Mary
continually finds herself in.
Nonetheless, there’s a somewhat breezy tone set by the ease of
conversation that flows when they’re together.
This is countered by the dour opening sequence featuring the familiar
face of Imelda Staunton, stonefaced here as a woman who is seeking medical help
for sleepless nights. When she’s
referred to a counselor (Sheen), it’s clear she’s so set in her ways that she
couldn’t possibly budge an inch either way if she tried. When asked to rate how happy she is from 1 to
10, she immediately identifies with a 1, knowing there’s absolutely nothing she
can do about it. While the opening is
pronounced and starkly bleak, it quickly settles into the more comfortable
conversations typified by backyard
The structure of the film is told with the passing seasons, broken by a familiar scene of Tom and Gerri spending their afternoons tending to their section of a communal garden, where they’re constantly bringing new vegetables to plant, an outdoor hobby they obviously both share, bringing rubber boots as they’re up to their knees in mud. Like a greatest hits album, the progression of the year is shown through the careful selection of a few scenes from each season, where with scant narrative detail, relationships change, as we see someone fall in love, someone die, or someone have their hopes dashed. Behavior is noticeably different, where the audience is treated to the development of character through long sequences, as lives unfold before our eyes in real time. This is not one of Leigh’s more deeply intense and troubling films, as there’s a jovial and lighthearted atmosphere with plenty of broad humor, but it’s surprising how much depth he’s able to squeeze out of ordinary lives, where the points of view of the characters shift radically over time, oftentimes beginning with subtle shifts of tone which have more serious ramifications through the passage of time. Little things escalate and become overwhelming obstacles when seen from someone else’s point of view.
The audience may laugh at the easy going nature or apparent silliness of an earlier scene, where the laughter turns to pathos when seen later in a different context, when the effervescent smiles have changed dramatically to quiet stares, accompanied by an emotional paralysis, where the easy earlier flow of conversation comes to an abrupt stop. These are literally scenes that may leave the audience speechless, as the razor sharp precision of Mike Leigh’s sleight-of-hand theatricality hasn’t lost any of its depth or profundity. This is simply a subtler version of what we’ve seen before, where the age of the characters onscreen may have something to do with it, where ordinary lives change dramatically, oftentimes without the slightest notice, where by the time one figures it out, it’s probably much too late. In fact, the entire tone of the film turns on that final shot, which brings into question the supposedly kindly motives of Tom and Gerri, now seen strictly as snobbish professionals, unlikable people really who don’t have the same patience anymore for someone like Mary, who is seen as a nuisance from a lower class who never seems to get her harried life in order. This is Chekhovian drama without the fireworks, but these characters onscreen are completely familiar to us by the finale, and when Leigh slows down the pace to a glacial crawl, eliminating all the superficial frivolity, the emotional impact is devastating, paralleling that opening sequence with Imelda Staunton.
The usual Leigh combination of high hopes, bleak moments and laughter in the dark – this time more formally structured than usual in terms of screenplay, as four sections – one per season – follow a middle-aged couple (Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen), their friends (Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, etc) and family (Oliver Maltman) over the course of twelve months.
Performances are predictably the strong suit, and while Manville has been getting all the attention and awards “buzz” for her showy, touching turn as a chatterbox neurotic alcoholic (like Wight’s character, Manville’s never simply drinks when she can gulp), veteran David Bradley – who only appears in the “winter” segment – is at least as effective with much lower-key work as an uncommunicatively glum widower.
As ever with Leigh, the comedy veers close to a dependence on caricature on occasion - especially via Karina Fernandez´s gratingly upbeat Katie, who could have wandered into nearly any Leigh picture of the last decade. But this isn´t enough to significantly detract from a novelistic, nuanced and pleasingly ambiguous work that easily sustains attention over what looks on paper like a dauntingly protracted running-time.
Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]
No punches pulled: The first image in Mike Leigh’s superb drama is a severe close-up of the great Imelda Staunton as a depressive British housewife. Her dour, weight-of-the-world expression resonates throughout Another Year, even though this isn’t her story. She’s the emblematic entrée into the devastating tale of happily married suburbanites Tom (Broadbent) and Gerri (Sheen), and their erratic acquaintance Mary (Manville), whose friendship slowly declines over the course of a year.
The film charts their division seasonally, beginning in spring and ending in winter. In lesser hands, this might seem schematic, but Leigh uses the structure to attune us to subtle, often surprising shifts in character—as mysterious in their own way as that illusory moment when summer becomes autumn. It’s likely you’ll initially gravitate toward the wedded couple, whose contented life (backyard barbecues, steady jobs, a home that glows with heart) is enviable. And for certain you’ll recoil from their in-your-face gal pal, who inevitably ends up offending whomever she’s around. (Manville gives a quintessential Mike Leigh performance, using every possible half-drunken facial tic to both repel and mesmerize.)
But these characters are more than what we see on the surface, and it’s thanks to Leigh’s rigorous yet generous eye that we never just gawk at the drama. Our impressions become fascinatingly muddled: Tom and Gerri’s happiness seems suspect the more we learn about them (they appear to passive-aggressively leech sadness from their life). And as Mary tries with increasing effort to maintain the friendship—especially after a disastrous flirtation with her friends’ lawyer son (Maltman)—her desperation becomes uncomfortably recognizable. Our sympathies and frustrations no longer gravitate toward one or the other, but to all. We know them, and though we might like to think otherwise, we’ve been them.
Another Year
Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun,
Mike Leigh
isn’t the sort of filmmaker to make major departures with each new film, to
decide suddenly to experiment with sci-fi or set an entire film in a broom
cupboard. He can certainly surprise, as with the hellish urban odyssey of
‘Naked’ or the Victorian operatics of ‘Topsy-Turvy’, but mostly this
67-year-old British director makes contemporary, humane dramas about fictional
ordinary folk and, from film to film, gently builds on themes and interests
relating to how, why and where we live our lives today.
But there’s a cyclical, contemplative tone to ‘Another
Year’ that’s unfamiliar, especially after the short, sharp energy bursts of
‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ and the climactic tragedy of ‘Vera Drake’. Like ‘Life Is
Sweet’ or ‘All or Nothing’, it’s another film that warmly observes a married
couple, their family and their relations with themselves and the outside world.
Yet there’s a wisdom and restraint to this film and a confidence of purpose
that makes it Leigh’s most mature work to date.
It follows a year in the life of a sixtysomething
couple, Tom (Jim
Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen).
He’s a commercial geologist; she’s an NHS therapist, a member of ‘the caring
professions’, says her husband, adding jokingly, ‘I don’t care.’ They live
together in a home on a quiet street somewhere in suburbia that reflects their
settled, earthy personalities. They’re social creatures, and it’s their
interaction with friends and family that Leigh focuses on, mostly in their
home, over lunch, dinner or a drink at their kitchen table.
Through Tom and Gerri, we meet others at close
quarters. Some, we encounter briefly, such as Gerri’s depressed patient, Janet
(Imelda
Staunton), or a friend, Jack (Phil Davis),
with an absent, troubled wife. Others, we come to know better. There’s their
old friend Ken (Peter Wight), who visits from the North during the summer and
masks an unhappy personal life with ample smoking, drinking and eating, and
their son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), a balanced professional who seems sanguine
about being single and pops round to see them at home or at their allotment.
It’s at the latter where we see Tom and Gerri at work
each season, their gardening offering a nod to the film’s sense of time
passing, cycles turning and life going by as we move through spring, summer and
winter, each chapter titled as such. Later on, during a beautifully filmed,
sombre winter trip to a funeral in
Each of Tom and Gerri’s friends and family throw light
on how stable and contented Tom and Gerri’s lives are, and vice versa. But none
more so than Mary (Lesley
Manville), a colleague of Gerri, a secretary, a little younger, and a woman
whose self-image is all askew. She’s single and unhappy, with a traumatic
romantic history, but tries to hide it through mania, wishful thinking,
delusions about her age and, again, alcohol. Mary also behaves badly, and a
run-in with someone close to Tom and Gerri tests their patience, causing Mary
to be temporarily exiled from their welcoming nest.
Mary emerges as the film’s great tragedy, the
embodiment of Gerri’s comment: ‘Life’s not always kind, is it?’ Her presence
turns ‘Another Year’ from a study of contentment into a portrait of loneliness
and longing. Mary tests the patience of both her friends and us, bringing us to
another of Leigh’s chief interests: the limits of compassion. How far can we go
to help others? Is there always an element of self-interest to caring? And why
do we seek comfort in those who can’t offer it? They are all questions that
ring in our ears as the film closes on a powerful, open image. It reminds us of
Manville’s quietly devastating performance and the stellar work of her fellow
cast.
Another Year: movie review - CSMonitor.com Peter Rainer, Related: Ten best movies of 2010
On the surface, Mike Leigh makes movies about the humdrum lives of ordinary people, but there’s nothing humdrum about the psychological revelations he brings forth, and his people are far too acutely observed to seem ordinary.
His latest movie, “Another Year,” is a quintessential Mike Leigh performance. It deepens as it goes along until, in the end, in its final close-up, it overwhelms. Leigh’s movies have a way of sneaking up on you. The mundane morphs into moments of shattering emotional power. This is why Leigh is often described in Chekhovian terms. Like Chekhov, Leigh at his best has a resounding feeling for the sorrows and delusions of people who are trying to make it through life without being swallowed up by fate.
In its focus on the sadness of the middle class, “Another Year” may seem like generic Leigh, but there’s a twist here. At its center is, for a change, a happy couple: Tom (Jim Broadbent), a geological engineer nearing retirement – “I dig holes!” he explains – and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a psychological counselor in a medical clinic. These two, with their frayed bohemianism, are entirely comfortable with themselves.
They spend quality time year-round puttering in their garden, and the film itself takes place over the course of a year, with sections keyed to the four seasons, beginning with spring. Throughout the cycle Tom and Gerri host a succession of friends and family in their comfortably ramshackle North London home. The human interactions require as much weeding and pruning and cultivating as the garden.
Tom and Gerri’s contentment is presented as a given. It is also what attracts the friends and malcontents who enjoy their hospitality. They want to be happy and, without quite realizing it, they look to Tom and Gerri for a key to unlock the dungeon door. (If Leigh had provided Tom and Gerri with a few deep rifts of their own, kept out of sight of their friends, the film would have been even more darkly comic than it is.)
The central guest, who appears in all four sections, is Mary (Lesley Manville), a longstanding friend of Gerri’s who works as a receptionist at the clinic. An attractive divorced woman closing in on 50, Mary acts and dresses several decades younger than her age.
Her giggly desperation is transparent. Tom, who is easygoing but not without his quick darts of temper, tolerates her. Gerri is more indulgent. At times she seems to relate to Mary more as a clinical therapist than as a friend, and this gives her a slightly forbidding, unsympathetic aspect. But Tom and Gerri are right to keep some slight distance between themselves and Mary, especially when, midway through the movie, she oversteps the line. In her own flighty way, Mary sucks up the air in the room. (She also sucks up the wine.) She’s as expansively deluded as Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Her biggest delusion is that Tom and Gerri’s 30-year-old son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), whom she has known since boyhood, is interested in her. Unlike his parents, Joe sees what Mary is up to with him. Her wispy entreaties to meet him for a drink are met with broad, pasty smiles. In his own way, Joe, who is a community lawyer, is as therapeutically inclined as his mother. Despite everything, he has a fondness for Mary, and he indulges her without leading her on.
Manville’s performance at first seems too tricky and cluttered. Compared with the naturalness of the rest of the cast, she appears to bear down on us from behind footlights. But it makes sense that Mary carries on like a distressed diva. She dramatizes her life as a way of investing it with meaning, with complication. Without the tumult she would be ineffably lonely. She is anyway, especially when she is around other people. By the end, she has no more arrows in her perfumed quiver. Leigh gives us a long lingering shot of her, and she is, for the first time in the movie, very still.
Leigh works up his scripts from only the barest of outlines, and films only after months of rehearsal and improvisation, and this perhaps explains why the characters and situations seem so lived-in. People with only minimal amounts of screen time have a novelistic amplitude.
Tom’s childhood friend Ken (Peter Wight) is a perfect instance. He bustles his way into the North London home, and immediately we think we know who he is. Chunky and expansive, he wears a T-shirt that says “Less thinking, more drinking.” But he drinks to blot out the dead-endedness of his days, and his woe is so unsheathed that even Tom, who is pacific by nature, recognizes that something must be done. At one point Gerri looks over at Ken and mutters, “Life is not always kind,” and when she says this, it’s as if Leigh was laying a benediction on Ken and all others like him. There is an infinite kindness in how Leigh brings these people to the fore. He doesn’t humiliate them. He respects their pathos.
When Mary, for example, explains away her wayward life by saying, “I blame my big heart,” we can spot her delusion, and yet, she does have a big heart. She tells Gerri that she is “a very good listener,” and what she is really saying is: “Tell me the secret of your happiness.” Who cannot identify with that? Leigh does not set these people apart from us. They are us. Grade: A. (Rated PG-13 for some language.)
WEBTAKES: Another Year — Cineaste Magazine Leonard Quart, 2010
After Happy-Go-Lucky, his most boldly colorful, upbeat, and breeziest film, Mike Leigh, in Another Year, has created a somber, darker work. Divided into four chapters representing the seasons, Another Year displays the seamless ensemble acting of many Leigh regulars—actors with real faces conveying the nuances and reality of human behavior. The characters are late-middle aged, close to Leigh’s age of sixty-seven—ordinary people whose options in life are contracting.
The main action takes place in the home of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen performing a variation of Shirley--the wise, loving friend she played in High Hopes more than two decades ago), a happily married couple satisfied with their jobs, nurturing and compassionate with their adult son Joe (Oliver Maltman) and their friends, and engaged in life-affirming activities like growing vegetables on their allotment. The couple is at ease with each other and with their lives--uniquely so for characters in a Leigh film. An almost incandescent quality in Tom and Gerri is heightened by their interactions with the emotional cripples who surround them, relationships that form the core of the film. A prologue sets the stage when a forbiddingly impassive, deeply broken-down Janet (Imelda Staunton) appears for a counseling session in Gerri’s office. However compassionate, Gerri cannot reach Janet, whose resistance to therapy and genuine communication deems change impossible.
Among the friends Tom and Gerri host for frequent dinners in their comfortable, lived-in home are Mary (Leslie Manville), a fiftyish divorced secretary who works at Gerri’s clinic, and Ken (Peter Wight), Tom’s boyhood friend from Derby. Although hardly impassive, both are in sad shape, perhaps beyond hope. Mary’s frenetic talking, clumsy sexual innuendo, heavy drinking, and nervous tics express a depth of loneliness most overtly registered in her hunger for a man—she comes on to Joe, some 20 years her junior, and displays a cruel, embarrassing resentment when he brings his new girlfriend Katie to dinner to meet his parents. Barely aware of others in the midst of her jittery, self-absorbed free associations, Mary needs people to listen to her. Ken is as sloppy as Mary is well, or overly well-groomed. He drinks, eats and smokes too much—perhaps self-destructively so—hates his job and his solitary life, ruefully claiming as his motto: “Less thinking, more drinking.” In his way, he expresses depths of loneliness equal to Mary’s and a deep resentment that youth has passed him by. Keenly observing his characters, Leigh constructs some stunning scenes. When Tom, Gerri, and Joe attend the winter funeral of Tom’s sister-in-law, all the dysfunction of his brother Ronnie’s family comes spilling out. Ronnie (David Bradley), appears isolated and almost as mute as Janet as he sits in his weathered house on a dreary, mean street in Derby. His only son Carl (Martin Savage), explosive and punkish in all black, arrives late to the funeral, bristling with rage toward his father. It all rings so true, creating an even starker contrast with the serene calm of Gerri and Tom’s life—and their loving relationship with Joe.
It’s Mary, however, who occupies the center of the film, her self-pitying and self-deceiving behavior both pathetic and slightly risible. She treats Ken—the only man who displays the slightest interest in her—with utter contempt. Through lingering long takes and close-ups, the camera captures Mary’s attractive, well-preserved face, made up a bit too-heavily in her attempt to hide her age and a frayed quality beneath--whether from a hang-over, gnawing envy, or a profound misery. Manville carefully calibrates Mary’s upbeat manner to reveal a disturbing, sometimes spiteful unrest. There is just too much of Mary, demonstrating one of Leigh’s few flaws (to my mind)—a tendency to allow his trademark stylization of character to turn cartoonish at times (Aubrey in Life is Sweet comes to mind). Although Mary cannot be seen merely as a caricature, it is hard at times to understand how Tom and Gerri tolerate her--unless Gerri, an attentive and perceptive listener, feels the need to play therapist in her off-hours. Whatever the case, Manville and Leigh have collaborated to create a fully-layered, memorable character who can irritate, embarrass, and elicit viewer sympathy.
Leigh’s view of the human condition has always mixed desperation with the possibility of happiness—a vision deriving from sharp observation of daily behavior, not some abstract philosophic perspective. But the question remains: What is Leigh trying to project by centering the film on and rubbing our faces in Mary’s despair? Of course, different kinds of hysterical, destructive, and pathetic characters have been an integral part of the Leigh oeuvre (e.g., Brenda Blethyn in Secrets and Lies; David Thewlis in Naked; Tim Spall in All or Nothing), as have more upbeat ones. In Another Year, however, Leigh’s unsentimental and unsparing portrait of Mary is the film’s most indelible. Here, as in so many of his films, Leigh is aiming to capture the uniqueness and irreducibility of even the simplest and most ordinary of people.
Yet all is not anguish and desolation. When, in the film’s final scenes, Mary arrives unannounced at Tom and Gerri’s home for solace, her last bit of bravado shattered, she encounters the emotionally closed-off Ronnie. Self-consciously and uncharacteristically, she tries to be responsive to his situation, his detachment pushing her into deeper depression. When the entire family, including Joe and Katie, gather for dinner, all but Mary, who looks utterly forlorn, appear at ease with life. Although the long-take image of a pitiful Mary is the final one we see, it cannot be taken as the film’s final word. It is people like Tom and Gerri, in their meaningful work and loving familial connections that the film values and even celebrates. They have found a way of dealing with time’s passage and the whiff of mortality—something Ken and Mary are incapable of doing, perhaps, in part, because loneliness so overwhelms them.
If Another Year is not Leigh’s very best work, it remains a poignant, humanly truthful film that, through a minimal narrative, a great deal of talk, penetrating close-ups and reaction shots, and unhurried editing rhythms—captures the emotional intricacy of ordinary life, with its mixture of joy and extreme pain.
Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Armond White reviews Mike Leigh's Another Year -- NYPress
New
York Magazine [David Edelstein]
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
Phil on Film
[Philip Concannon]
Cannes Movie Review: Another Year (2010) – RopeofSilicon.com Movie ... Brad Brevet
Richard Schickel: 'Another Year': The Tragedy of Everyday Life ... Truthdig
Another Year Review | There's Nothing Tragic About Being Fifty ... Drew Morton from Pajiba
Another Year - CBC.ca Martin Morrow
Val Kermode Eye for Film
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
film review: Another Year > Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy - indieWIRE
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anton Bitel]
Little White Lies Magazine [Jonathan Crocker]
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
The Village Voice [Karina Longworth]
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf]Movie Review - Another Year - eFilmCritic and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]
Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Blue Valentine, Another Year, Biutiful | Film Reviews by Joe ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal
Cinematical [Eric D. Snider] a shorter review seen here: Movie Review - Another Year - www.ericdsnider.com - The Official ...
Another
Year | Review | Screen Mark Adams at
Another Year - DAILY FILM DOSE: A Daily Film Appreciation and ... Blair Stewart
Digital
Spy [Simon Reynolds] at
Sound On Sight Laura Holtebrinck
Cineuropa.org [Camillo de Marco]
Combustible Celluloid film review - Another Year (2010), Mike ... Common Sense Media [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Talking Pictures (UK) review Daniel Sarath
Another Year — Inside Movies Since 1920 Richard Mowe from Box Office magazine
Another
Year: Best Film in Cannes Fest?
Patrick McGavin at
CANNES
REVIEW | No Country for Old Men: Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” Eric Kohn at
Another
Year Aaron Hillis at Cannes May 17, 2010
Cannes
2010. Another Year Daniel Kasman at Cannes May 18, 2010 , also here: The
Daily Notebook [Daniel Kasman]
Cannes
'10: Day Four Mike D’Angelo at
The
House Next Door [Matt Noller] at
Cannes
Review: "Another Year"
Anthony Kauffman at
On
the Mike Leigh Miserable Index, Where Does His Cannes Entry Bilge Ebiri from The Vulture, May
16, 2010
Cannes
2010. Mike Leigh's "Another Year"
David Hudson at Cannes May 15,
2010
Lesley Manville on Another Year and Why She Doesn't Care About the Golden Globes Mike Ryan interviews actress Lesley Manville from Movieline magazine, January 3, 2011
Mike Leigh Discusses Another Year and Why He Will Never Make a Superhero Movie Mike Ryan interviews Leigh from Movieline magazine, December 21, 2010
Ray Bennett at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 15, 2010, which includes an interview with Leigh, May 13, 2010 here: THR
Another Year | Movies | EW.com Owen Gleiberman
Variety Reviews - Another Year - Film Reviews - - Review by Leslie ... Leslie Felperin
Dave Calhoun at
Another Year – review | Film | The Observer Philip French
Another Year – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Charles Gant at
Another Year (12A) - Reviews, Films - The Independent Anthony Quinn from The Independent
Independent.co.uk - First Night: Cannes [Geoffrey Macnab] May 17, 2010
Another Year: The truly exceptional achievement of happiness - The ... Liam Lacey from The Globe and the Mail
'Another Year' review: Leigh proves again he's not just another ... Stephen Whitty from The Star-Ledger
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York
Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott,
MR. TURNER B 88
Great Britain France Germany (150 mi) 2014 ‘Scope
Aloft all hands, strike the
top-masts and belay;
Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds
Declare the Typhon’s coming.
Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying – ne’er heed their chains
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?
Fallacies of Hope, unfinished poem by J.M.W. Turner, 1812
A rather somber and self-reflective work delving into the late period life (coinciding with the director’s own late period) of 19th century British landscape painter J. M. W. Turner (1775 – 1851), a controversial and misunderstood figure in his day, but now recognized as one of the preeminent landscape artists from the late Romanticism era (1770 – 1848) who prefigured both the Impressionist and more abstract Modern artists. The son of a renowned barber and a mother inflicted with mental disturbances, the artist was initially trained in pencil sketches and watercolor, known for keeping extensive sketchbooks, traveling widely throughout Britain, particularly in Wales, but also France and Switzerland, studying in the Louvre art museum in Paris, where he eventually earned his reputation as an oil painter and as a master of maritime scenes where his emotional style is expressed through more dramatic renderings, reflective of a highly active imagination. Instead of observing or portraying nature as it is, Turner emphasizes the power nature has over man, hitting a nerve with the public as he moves away from form and definition, where his landscapes present tumultuous waves from a stormy sea that seem about to envelop anything in their path, accentuating a highly unique aspect of nature, using blurry or undefined images that require the viewers to use their own imaginations, offering a contrast of vibrant color and unsettling emotion. As Turner grew older, he grew more eccentric, having few close friends other than his father who lived with him for thirty years and worked as his assistant. His father’s death in 1929 had a profound effect on him, leaving him socially isolated where he was subject to bouts of depression. The film shuns the conventional biopic style and instead turns more abstract, creating a film of brief, episodic moments where the viewer is required to fill in the missing gaps, meticulously shot by Dick Pope, expressed with great craftsmanship and intimate detail, where the artist’s imagination often blends into the reality depicted onscreen, literally taking the audience inside several Turner landscapes that eventually blossom into several of his best known paintings. The downside is the use of several CGI enhanced landscapes that add an unnecessary touch of the surreal, an odd mix to an otherwise unscrupulously realistic work.
First and foremost is the man himself, where Timothy Spall, known for making the most of smaller character roles literally inhabits the role of a lifetime as Turner in much the same way J.K. Simmons approaches Whiplash (2014), as both literally devour their roles as somewhat vile and despicable human beings, yet both characters believe they are capable of achieving greatness. Spall’s sheer physicality will turn off many viewers who prefer movies with matinee idol good looks, where instead he’s a sight for sore eyes, describing himself at one point, “When I peruse myself in the looking glass, what I see is a gargoyle,” displaying a rotund figure with crooked teeth and a face that seems weathered by the storms, a kind of grumpy, Grinch-like figure that for a good portion of the film barely utters a word but instead resorts to any number of audible sounds emanating from his character, from grunts and groans to sobs and indecipherable mutterings, rarely offering lucid opinions or points of view, all of which have a way of keeping his inner thoughts mysterious and self-contained. We learn much more about him by the way he confidently struts and traipses around the remote countryside alone and paints outdoors in all manner of light, where his figure is seen silhouetted against the first yellow bursts of a shimmering morning to the fading violets and pinks of the evening sky, returning to his studio afterwards where he’s tended to by his long-suffering housemaid Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson), a near mute caretaker whose slavish devotion and cruel mistreatment at the hands of Turner is reminiscent of the dutiful Irm Hermann in Fassbinder’s THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972), one of the most silently oppressed characters in all of cinema. This rough edge of callous indifference adds an element of pitiless cruelty to his gruff persona, a disregarding meanness that does not endear him to audiences, yet does reflect the Dickensian coldness of the times, while also reflecting similar attitudes towards his insufferably demanding wife (Ruth Sheen) and two children that he refuses to recognize.
This irascible quality of Turner’s disposition plays like an inside joke to Mike Leigh fans, where Turner’s bristling recalcitrance with art critics matches Leigh’s own intemperate outbursts, both displaying a recognizable impatience for the limited outlooks and imaginations of others. Opening a year or so before his father’s death, the film begins with the director taking the audience inside a Turner painting in progress, with a luxurious extended shot of a windmill silhouetted against an orange/yellow sky, as the camera follows two Flemish women carrying buckets of water on their shoulders, tracking them as they make their way down the banks of a canal before finally revealing the figure of Turner in a top hat feverishly sketching the scene. This serves as a wordless introduction into the director’s third historical period piece out of twelve films, the others being TOPSY-TURVY (1999) and VERA DRAKE (2004), two of his best efforts. Roughly spanning the last 25 years of his life, Turner’s life coincides with the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the rise of the Industrial Revolution, though it plays out onscreen in small, self-contained scenes where nothing out of the ordinary happens, yet we are pulled into his world through several key relationships, the most prominent being his father (Paul Jesson), a larger than life figure whose unconditional love for his son emanates his every move. “The darkness is to a purpose,” he informs visitors to Turner’s studio as they briefly wait in a dark candle-lit room before entering a gallery of his paintings where the landscapes and seascapes are literally throbbing with light, where the artist at work is seen in another room peering through a peep-hole at the prospective customers. This thoroughly contrived act of salesmanship offers a hint of humor between father and son who both seem to relish this little bit of chicanery, though it’s a fascinating introduction to his works, with turbulent waters reflecting the frenzied intensity of the waves, where the sunset in the background exhibits a power that nature has over man, portraying nature’s beauty, serenity, and peace, while the variety of layered colors can be seen shining through, creating a glowing and luminous effect.
Like other works featuring pre-occupied and thoroughly unlikable protagonists, such as the Coen brother’s Inside Llewyn Davis (2012) or Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (2014), this is a hard sell, even to viewers drawn to the artistry of Turner, as this is no flattering portrait, but instead appears driven to debunk any thought of heroic nobility in his character, where he sleeps in his clothes and paints all day, accentuating his crudeness in social company, where he is hardly a gentleman, as the lewd behavior on display in his personal life is diametrically opposite the shimmering beauty reflected in his paintings. Frederick Wiseman’s recent film National Gallery (2014) includes a lengthy discussion about one of his earlier works, The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, 1817, see Original, where Turner as an artist is depicted in particularly reverential language. At least part of the problem here may be gleaned from Turner’s biographer, A.J. Finberg, who found the subject something of a bore, admitting privately the difficulty he had trying to find what drove the artist, as he was a private man who didn’t lead a particularly eventful life, appearing to be such an ordinary man, “The real trouble is that the only interesting thing about him is that he was the man who painted Turner’s pictures … [He] is only the unimportant nexus that binds the work together.” Unlike John Constable (1776 – 1837), at the time his rival as the greatest of all English landscape painters, Turner was never educated formally and was barely able to express himself clearly even in the simplest business correspondence, yet early on he often attached to his exhibits quotations from his own particularly gloomy epic poem Fallacies of Hope. The rivalry with Constable is evident during a mocking scene at the Royal Academy of Art, where the summer exhibition on display shows how paintings are literally all squashed together with barely an inch of wall space between them, which Turner describes as a veritable “cornucopia,” as various styles inevitably clash with one another, where he dabbles some red paint, the prominent color in Constable’s nearby painting, on one of his own completed canvases, where viewers nearly swoon in disbelief, hardly realizing the enhancement. Queen Victoria was not an admirer of his works, calling them “vile,” and “a yellow mess.” Due to the uneventful and anti-hero depiction of the protagonist, the film is one of Leigh’s least emotionally engaging works, something his other films are known for, even as he introduces Marion Bailey (the director’s real-life partner), who may actually be the best thing in the film as the last object of his affection, the warmhearted and pleasantly lucid owner of a boarding house in the seaside town of Margate he frequently visits when taking trips into the countryside. Even she, however, cannot elevate the aloofness and often unconcerned nature of the material.
Budget limitations reportedly prevented Leigh from covering Turner’s career-defining visits to Europe, especially Venice, and instead created a narrower focus on various domestic settings at home in England. Of special significance, Turner turned down the offer of a millionaire who wanted to buy his entire collection, deciding instead to bequeath the entire British nation with his collections, giving them away to the public who could enjoy his paintings for free. When Turner died, his will was contested by the family he refused to recognize, amassing a fortune of over £140,000, citing more than 19,000 drawings and sketches in pencil, including about 300 colored drawings, leading to a long, protracted court battle, though the works of art contained in his own house became the public property of the nation under the care of the National Gallery of London, which currently lists nearly 32,000 of his recorded works. Eleven sketchbooks were belatedly discovered in Turner’s house, including some that were made for his lectures as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, while five containing “material of an erotic nature” were deliberately set aside early on by the court. His bicentennial was celebrated in 1975 by a vast exhibition at the Royal Academy, comprising some 450 works, while in 2009 – 2010 the Tate Gallery in London and Grand Palais in Paris celebrated “Turner and His Painters,” retracing the artist’s evolution and personal vision. In 2011 – 2012, the National Gallery featured a major exhibition of Turner alongside 16th century Italian painters Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, as well as 17th century Dutch Masters Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer. Turner’s stature as an artist has never been greater, where today this seemingly borderline inarticulate man is viewed not only as a man out of his time, but a true visionary, arguably the finest painter and one of the greatest artists in British history.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Michael Glover Smith
Mike Leigh's brilliant, quasi-secretive methods of creating his unique brand of cinema—his completed screenplays apparently grow out of intensive improv-workshops with his actors—always yield spontaneous and dynamic results but there is something particularly fascinating about seeing his style applied to period pieces (as in TOPSY TURVY, VERA DRAKE, and now this); Leigh has a way of making the past feel more alive and less mummified than other directors. MR. TURNER is a biopic of 19th-century British painter J.M.W. Turner, a master famed for the diffused light in his seascapes, and focuses on the last couple decades of the artist's life. Turner is inhabited by Timothy Spall, a terrific character actor with a stout physique and weak chin, who tears into his biggest movie role with aplomb—he and Leigh conceive of Turner as a larger-than-life, eccentric and self-centered prick whose face is twisted into a permanent grimace and who communicates with those around him, when at all, primarily through grunts, groans and other guttural utterances. The film essentially asks the age-old question of how an artist can be so sensitive to the beauty of nature while also being so insensitive to the people around him. While it's not likely that Leigh “identifies” with Turner in the manner of, say, Hayao Miyazaki and the artist-protagonist of THE WIND RISES, this is clearly a deeply felt work through which the filmmaker does convey personal feelings—perhaps nowhere more than in the unflattering and satirical portrait of a pretentious art critic. Leigh's stock company of actors (Karina Fernandez, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Peter Wight, etc.) turn up to do creditable work but this is Spall's show all the way.
Movie
Mezzanine [Anna Tatarska]
Mike Leigh is a true Cannes veteran, having been a part of the main competition five times already, and winning twice (the Best Director Award in 1993 for Naked, and the Palme d’Or in 1996 for Secrets & Lies). This year’s Mr. Turner tells the story of J.M.W. Turner, a legendary British painter and a true visionary, whose unique interpretations of natural forces have been firmly imprinted into the world’s heritage. Despite his artistic achievements, Turner was a rather ordinary bore, whose own biographer A.J. Finberg admitted privately to having problem finding traces of his magic in the real person. Who else could’ve made an interesting film about an uninteresting man if not Leigh, the expert of finding gloriousness in moments of ordinary being?
Mr. Turner is told chronologically, following the last few decades of the painter’s life, peeking into Turner’s innovative work techniques,and his quarrels with fellow members of Royal Academy of Arts. Turner, brilliantly played by Leigh’s longtime collaborator Timothy Spall, is being defined throughout the film as much by his words and actions as his behavior. Spall creates a whole lexicon of murmurs, wheezes and snorts. Mr. Turner is not a man of words, but his inarticulate communication might even be richer than his arsenal of painting, tools and ideas. Leigh has written a witty, well-crafted script that despite not having too much content, is satisfying and engaging, ironic and funny. Leigh’s long-time cinematographer Dick Pope infuses the film with a recognizably Turneresque feel. Not exactly an imitation, but a truly independent, unique piece of art itself.
Financial Times [Nigel Andrews]
Awkward, gruff, bearish, obdurate, with sudden twinkles of redeeming charm. The portrait of the artist in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner is uncannily like a portrait of Mike Leigh. If so, who will complain? Auto-referential or not – and what’s wrong with authorly identification (“Emma Bovary, c’est moi” said Flaubert)? – this JMW Turner lives, breathes and vividly, variedly grunts (a researched quirk here made droll and expressive) in Timothy Spall’s bewitching performance, boorish yet beatific.
We’ll even forgive – let’s clear this up first – the freedoms Leigh has taken with John Ruskin. The impotent spouse and genius of yester-week’s Effie Gray becomes a prattling young twerp (Joshua McGuire) enraptured with his brilliance: “I find myself marvelling at my own depth of perception.” If it’s a liberty, it’s at least an adventurist one. Turner might well – who knows? – have seen Ruskin and his kind as comic relief in his career, even if Ruskin was its champion. Who wants a grateful genius? A scorn for establishments of every kind, including the critical fraternity (even spasm’d by supportiveness), is probably organic to the rebel energy of Romanticism.
This Turner is an unmade bed of a human being: rumpled, unwashed, inchoate, yet full of the reeky, enduring warmth of passion and the restless ley lines of yesterday’s dreamings. We get towed into the paintings as Turner creates them. “Staffa”, “The Fighting Temeraire”, “Rain, Steam and Speed”. Then we’re towed out again into a life that, thanks to Dick Pope’s magisterial cinematography, glows with the vitality and raspy golden-yellow radiance of the Turner vision-world.
Another rule of Romanticism: when art is a vocation and governing passion, life gets ad-libbed as best it can. Turner sired children he didn’t want from wives abandoned in his wake. Leigh’s film suggests he also had sex with his housekeeper of 40 years Hannah Danby (superb study in tortured fidelity from Dorothy Atkinson). Later the painter hitched his wandering sun to Margate landlady Sophia Booth, played with an appealing shopworn incandescence by Leigh’s partner Marion Bailey.
It’s a beautiful film because it isn’t afraid of beauty’s uglinesses. Artists don’t personify the ideal or dazzling worlds they envision. They are the workshop, not the work. So it’s right, in a biopic, that we see the mess of the creative life. The paint-smeared hands and clothes; the unkempt love affairs; even the magicianly misbehaviour of the moment when Turner, outwitting John Constable at a Royal Academy “varnishing show”, plants an ugly-seeming gob of red paint on one of his own seascapes – horror, vandalism (we think)! – and then transforms it, with the sweetest and simplest brush flick, into a sea buoy so real you could touch it.
Hannah McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Hannah McHaffie]
Mike Leigh is the reason I love cinema. When I was in my late teens I discovered Secrets & Lies, High Hopes, Life is Sweet and Vera Drake. Then in my first year at University I saw Another Year and it sealed the deal. I was reminded of why I’d chosen to study film, why I adored British cinema and why Leigh is such a unique and fearless director. I discovered him and Loach at the same time and there work holds a very special place within me – I am often moved to tears by their films just because I am reminded of the beginning of my love affair with the moving image. Leigh gets more out of his actors than any other director working today. Unlike my other favourites such as Allen or Scorsese, he often waits several years between projects. This is usually due to the method that he requires his performers to commit to. It is a long process creating characters such as Vera Drake. Actors are given months, or even years, to immerse themselves in their characters, creating complex back stories and learn certain trades and professions. Timothy Spall demonstrates such dedication in Leigh’s latest masterpiece Mr. Turner. Portraying landscaper painter, J. M. W. Turner, Spall has already deservedly won the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. He devours the role, portraying Turner as more of an animal than a man. It is a staggering feat within contemporary performance. I marvelled at Spall’s characterisation for the film’s entire 150 minutes. He captures Turner with an eccentricity, a passion and a complex and internal sorrow. We don’t like Turner but we are fascinated by him. He causes as much suffering as he himself suffers. He is selfish, solitary and at times monstrous but the work he creates on a canvas overwhelms – spilling out into the film’s aesthetic.
The supporting cast are as enchanting as Spall. Marion Bailey plays Turner’s mistress. She is vulnerable yet strong-willed. She is kind hearted and brings out the best in Turner. Dorothy Atkinson is the film’s greatest surprise. Her performance as Turner’s housekeeper is painful to watch and she develops it so steadily and expertly that our pity and sorrow for her grows constantly. Leigh conducts many of his usual acting family in Mr. Turner with familiar faces such as Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen making wonderful appearances. Mr. Turner is as masterful as Secrets & Lies, demonstrating that Leigh is as powerful a cinematic presence as he was during the nineties. He continues to maintain an astonishing respect for his audience. He never feels the need to conclude or provide unnecessary exposition. Like life itself, Leigh allows scenarios to stay open, unresolved and unknown. There is a really satisfying closure that comes with the lack of insight we have into certain characters and their endings. Leigh has saved one of his best till last. Understated, explosive and turbulent, Mr. Turner is romantic, raw and challenging viewing. Emotions are constantly high but there is comedy and charm that evens out the film’s intensity and tames its wild, beastly characters. There is plenty of the typical Leigh-like naturalism at work here but just enough artistic absurdity to make Mr. Turner fresh and unexpected. Leigh remains one of the greatest director’s working today. If Mr. Turner does indeed turn out to be his final film then he couldn’t have chosen a more triumphant way to exit the arena.
The Metropolist [Jean-Baptiste de Vaulx]
In an era when the biopic has become a staple diet of mainstream movie production-lines (everyone from Assange to Lance Armstrong is getting one), it’s refreshing when a film delivers an unconventional take on the genre. Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s film about probably the most famous British painter, the landscapist JMW Turner, is not your usual biopic.
Leigh is known for his excellent improvisation work with actors and naturalistic inter-personal human dramas, so if there’s one thing he aims to be, it is true-to-life. And summing up an entire life through a conventional movie arc, going from point A to B with the required amount of goals and hurdles along the way, is certainly not true-to-life. People are more complicated than that, especially great artists like Turner.
Instead Mr. Turner follows a structure that is episodic, consisting of a loose series of sketches from Turner’s life ranging from 1828 to his death in 1851, without ever making it obvious how much time has gone by from scene to scene. It’s not quite Boyhood but it’s not a million miles away. What’s important is that, as enjoyable as the individual scenes are, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; combined together they form a memorable evocation of a time, place, and of an artist possessed by many contradictions.
As Turner, Timothy Spall is remarkable, finally getting the role of a lifetime which his talents have long deserved. He took painting lessons for two years, a testament to his and Leigh’s desire for authenticity. It makes a big difference to see Spall get his hands dirty with pigment, and dabble his brush over canvases, without cutting to someone else’s hand. He also has the walk and language (“Brook your ire, sir!”) of this 19th century British eccentric down to a tee. But his grunting steals the show – he’s invented a whole vocabulary of throaty sounds, for every possible occasion, from the frustration of listening to a monologue by famed art critic John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) to a hearty throat-clear of agreement.
There’s also a spectrum in Turner’s life relationships, with the film not shying away from a warts-and-all depiction of its protagonist. He is capable of negligence and cruelty (especially towards his daughters and their mother, as well as with his loyal housekeeper (Dorothy Atkins) whom he uses for his sexual needs but otherwise ignores), but also of warmth and affection, as seen in his camaraderie with his supportive father (Paul Jesson) and with a lonely Margate widow (Marion Bailey) whom he eventually settles with in a house by the Thames. Turner’s professional relations also enter the frame, via scenes of exhibitions at the Royal Academy and encounters with fellow painters such as Haydon and Constable (the way Turner has a sly dig at the latter being a highlight).
Mostly though, dealing with people is for Turner an unwanted distraction from what keeps him ticking: his art. This is a portrayal of a tireless artist, who lives to paint, and seeks inspiration everywhere and anywhere, in trains, in the new invention of photography, by taking trips to the countryside or being tied to a ship’s mast, all in order to find something new to paint. Even on his death-bed he strives to get up to draw a sketch.
Naturally enough, to reflect this glorious painter of light, Leigh and his usual cinematographer Dick Pope have come up with a subtle visual scheme recreating the light and colours of Turner’s work. There are wide shots of majestic landscapes and skies, and interiors bathed in gorgeous wispy light. But while Turner painted grand depictions of nature’s splendour with barely any space for human figures, Mike Leigh’s focus is always on people. His own canvas is a multi-faceted (dare we say impressionistic?) portrait which stands alongside any of his best films and will surely amply reward further viewings years down the line.
Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner Is Subtly Terrific - Vulture David Edelstein
“Wild” and “Mr. Turner” Reviews - The New Yorker David Denby
Mike
Leigh's JMW Turner biopic Mr. Turner, starring ... - Slate Dana Stevens
Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw]
Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]
Slant
Magazine [Chris Cabin]
The House Next Door [Budd Wilkins]
Cannes
Report: Timothy Spall Gives the Performance of His ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
Mr
Turner review - Digital Spy Stella
Papamichael
Little White Lies [Sophie Monks Kaufman]
Review:
Mike Leigh paints his own portrait in lovely ... - HitFix Guy Lodge
Mr. Turner / The
Dissolve Keith Phipps
kamera.co.uk - film review -
Mr. Turner (2014) - Colin Odell ...
Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc
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Empire of
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Cannes
Film Festival 2014: Part One - Reverse Shot
Jordan Cronk
MUBI
[Daniel Kasman]
Rediscovered Love: The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her ... Dan Spira
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]
Mr. Turner | Film
Society of Lincoln Center
Daily | Cannes 2014 | Mike Leigh's MR. TURNER ... - Fandor David Hudson
'Mr.
Turner': Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Leslie Felperin
The Independent [Geoffrey MacNab]
Mr
Turner is the most complained about film of the past year due to ... Nick Clark from The Independent, July 13, 2015
Evening Standard [David Sexton]
Daily Telegraph [Robbie Collin]
Huffington Post [Brandon Judell]
Examiner.com [Rick Marianetti]
'Mr.
Turner' movie review: Timothy Spall paints a masterpiece Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post
'Mr. Turner' an unblinking portrait of British artist J.M.W. Turner Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
Lust for Light in Mike Leigh's "Mr. Turner" - Roger Ebert Michał Oleszczyk
J. M. W. Turner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Fighting Temeraire by JMW Turner (1839)
Mary Somerville - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lelio, Sebastian
NAVIDAD
Chile France (104 mi) 2009
Navidad Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily
Three young people
share a moody, and eventually steamy, brief encounter in Sebastián Lelio’s
introspective, low-budget Navidad. For much of its running time, this
unapologetically low-key second film from Chilean director Lelio – following
his debut La Sagrada Familia - feels claustrophobically miserable, but
as its emotional encounters unfurl, it warms up considerably. The film will
surely consolidate Lelio’s reputation at fests, and be a particular draw for
events angled at teen/youth audiences. Even so, the intense yet decorous sexual
shenanigans of its final stretch are unlikely to boost modest sales prospects.
The film is set on
Christmas Eve and begins with two teenagers, Aurora (Martelli) and Ale (Ruiz),
breaking into a deserted, rundown dilapidated house in the countryside. The
place once belonged to Aurora’s family, and she has come in search of the
record collection that belonged to her late father.
Ale, meanwhile,
has been booted out of school by his stern father, who also happens to be the
principal. Deciding to stay overnight, the couple mooch around, canoodle and
gently bicker, until tensions between them come to a head over a letter that
Ale finds addressed to Aurora. She confesses it is from another girl that she
has slept with, provoking Ale’s jealousy and decision to leave.
On the way out,
however, Ale finds somebody passed out in the greenhouse: 15-year-old diabetic
Alicia (Rodriguez), who has run away from her mother, and hopes to meet up with
the father she has never met. The older couple rescue Alicia, and the three
share some food and a joint and sit around talking about life, love and other
contemplative matters.
The generally
claustrophobic mood of the film lifts when the trio – plus a puppy found en
route – head into town for the rendezvous that Alicia has supposedly set up
with her dad. As expected, the rendezvous doesn’t work out, and Aurora and Ale
have to take the distraught Alicia in hand once again. The three head back to
the house, where they soon find more agreeable ways to amuse themselves than
opening Christmas presents. The coda, following the three in their separate
directions, is sweetly philosophical and hopeful.
A character-led
piece par excellence, Navidad is intelligently written, but its
restricted dramatic scope means that it is just on the right side of feeling
like filmed theatre. Nevertheless, the film draws energy from the charm and
acting skills of its minimal three-person cast, of whom Manuela Martelli stands
out as Aurora, the most experienced and confident of the trio. Diego Ruiz
captures the prickliness of the confused and moody rich boy rebel, while Alicia
Rodriguez’s Alicia is touchingly waifish. The sexual chemistry is palpable
between the three, who throw themselves whole-heartedly into their eventual
extended clinch - which proves warmly erotic despite no clothes being shed,
other than Ale’s shirt.
Visually, however,
the film leaves much to be admired. Benjamin Echazarreta shoots elegantly in
HD, with plenty of close-ups enhancing the intimacy, but the dominant dark
autumnal brown of exteriors and interiors alike becomes a drag on the eye very
early on. A distinctive score sourced from Aurora’s father’s records –
legendary singer Victor Jara plus assorted hippie-era Latin American pop –
sporadically livens matters up.
GLORIA C+ 78
Spain Chile (110 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Official site [Japan]
Not as cool as the original Laura Branigan version singing “Gloria” Laura Branigan - Gloria YouTube (3:52), or Van Morrison with an earlier song from Them, Them Gloria Original 1963 YouTube (2:36) singing G-L-O-R-I-A, Glo-o-ria, or even a cover version from the Chicago garage rock band Shadows of Knight Gloria - The Shadows of Knight YouTube (2:33), but one guesses anyone who’s never heard those prior versions of the song might find this film version enthralling, as they’re hearing it for the very first time. But hey, the song was even used in Adrian Lyne’s FLASHDANCE (1983) for Christ’s sake, and interestingly enough to despairing effect after getting amped up in an ice-skating sequence, so what are we talking about? Not sure what to make of all the festival love for this film, as any movie with a distinctively disco soundtrack is going to alienate a certain element if it’s not used in a clever manner, and it was impossible to separate Paulina García’s look as the lead character Gloria from Dustin Hoffman in drag playing the role of a woman in TOOTSIE (1982), as their look is remarkably similar. The problem is how grounded this film is in mainstream cinema, where it remains on the surface, revealing the obvious, but never really digs deeper or provides much more. Despite being in nearly every shot of the movie set in Santiago, Chile, we still know very little about the lead character of Gloria other than the fact that she’s desperately lonely, ten years divorced in her late 50’s, working a dull job, where she appears as disconnected from her own family, including two grown children, as she is from any pulse of student political activity, where instead she’s rather typical of dull and insipid bourgeois middle class thinking, people who have the luxury to think about themselves all the time, showing little reflective ability or much of a social conscience. Instead we watch her go through a midlife crisis where there are few evenings when she is not plied with alcohol, where she is not an altogether sympathetic figure.
To its credit, this feminist-light film insists that Gloria is altogether ordinary, constantly seen humming or singing along to the radio, where she never exhibits signs that she is remotely special or unique, instead she is the picture of mediocrity, but her divorce has left her isolated and excluded from the mainstream, so she tries hard to fit in, where it’s extremely important for her to get out of the apartment and socialize with others, to be seen in public and make contacts. So while constantly wearing the same insincere smile, she goes dancing at a local singles club for the middle-aged and sips cocktails, which is the sum total of her social life. Much of her life is left unfilled, such as her job, where we’re not even sure what she does for a living, as she has no interaction with any of her associates, which quite frankly, seems rather strange. Even if it’s just an office job, with little or no job satisfaction, one of the few pleasures of lonely people is having contact with other people, even at a lousy job. Instead it’s only the lonely hearts dance club that feels inviting, where she soon meets another middle aged man, Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), where they end up in the sack together, where the film does not shy away from expressing nudity. While they obviously enjoy each other’s company, their conversations are always interrupted by cellphone calls, where both spend much of their time connected to these annoying electronic devices, but Rodolfo simply can’t turn his phone off, where he’s always receiving catastrophic calls from his grown daughters, which he continues to receive during dinner dates, often excusing himself, claiming they need him, much to Gloria’s expressed resentment, as the melodramas of overly dependent, grown individuals who must learn to handle their own affairs should simply not be her problem, but Rodolfo constantly gives in to their demands for his time. Nonetheless, Gloria takes this guy seriously enough to bring to her son’s birthday party, a family gathering where they drink, reminisce, and look at old family photos, but to everyone’s surprise, Rodolfo ends up missing, having left without telling anyone. Despite his pleas afterwards about being ignored, Gloria tells him to grow a pair of cojones and gives him the brush off.
In a strange moment where Gloria observes a dancing skeleton
(like a puppet show) in a crowded street scene, this deathly image of mortality
apparently inspires her to give Rodolfo another chance, where they are seen
checking in together at a swanky hotel.
After another interrupting phone call, Gloria is about to walk out the
door, for good, but turns semi-naked and seduces him instead, a decision she
quickly learns to regret, as Rodolfo does another disappearing act from the
hotel, leaving her high and dry, where her inappropriate actions afterwards, getting
drop dead drunk in the company of strangers, leaves her in a disheveled and
disastrous state in the morning where she can’t remember what, if anything,
happened. This collective memory lapse
is reflective of a generation under a 15-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet
in
In contrast to its submission for last year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, No—a somberly serious drama about the country’s political unrest in the 1970s—Chile’s submission this year, Sebastián Lelio's Gloria, deals with the more intimately scaled problem of entering romantic relationships in your twilight years. Primarily an intricate character study of a woman in her 50s, Gloria stars Paulina García as its gregarious title character, whose hobbies include frequenting singles nights and engaging in extreme sports.
García's extraordinarily organic performance instantly piques our curiosity toward this woman, so openly generous in letting us see the spirit beneath Gloria’s blatantly flirtatious aims. Even as she plays the character as unreasonably independent at times, she never becomes tiresome, her passion and sense of adventure irresistible characteristics of an older woman with an irrepressibly young soul. Her hedonistic impulses and carefree outlook on life encourage us to root for her romantic happiness even as Lelio’s film ultimately asks us to consider whether her charms are deceptive.
Once Gloria begins a relationship with fellow divorcé Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), we in the audience begin to see her from an alternative perspective, one that challenges our preconceived notions of what constitutes rational behavior for a woman her age. Can one expect to find an elderly suitor without any baggage? Where does one draw the line between being imposingly outgoing and downright inconsiderate? In addressing these issues, Lelio and García force the audience to reflect on our views of what we all expect from interpersonal relationships at any age. It’s up to the viewer to decide whether Gloria’s habits are healthy, and whether conceding elements of her personality should be necessary in accommodating a long-term love.
While cinema is rife with stories of younger women seeking out love, Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria forgoes the expected angst and instead revels in the quiet chaos of life as it follow the adventures of a lonely, fun-loving 58-year-old divorcée living in Chile. Anchored by a strong performance from Paulina García (for which she won the Silver Bear at last year's Berlinale), Gloria admirably bypasses familiarity even if it ultimately never quite reaches next-level greatness.
When she’s not at her office job or practicing yoga, Gloria (García)—who lives alone underneath a noisy neighbor while her kids are off living their own lives—finds herself heavily drawn into the local nightlife and, with it, the thrill of the male gaze, frequenting singles' clubs looking for a romantic connection. One could say Gloria is in the mood for love, but it'd be more accurate to say she’s driven by an in-the-moment spirit of spontaneity and action. (One could call this film Take This Waltz: Chilean Nights, sans the expectation of self-discovery and preservation.) She finally finds a hint of romance with Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), an ex-naval officer who is also a recent divorcé. Despite the connection they strike with each other, Rodolfo, to Gloria's increasing frustration, is unable to commit to her in any serious fashion.
While much of the film’s stock is placed in Gloria and Rodolfo’s courtship, Gloria never sheds its intended aim of soulful character study—which turns out to be as much of a fault as it is a virtue in this case. Though the film is laudable in its studious avoidance of becoming a preachy tract about the supposed plight of middle-aged women in Chilean society, Lelio is perhaps a bit too overzealous in trying to turn Gloria into a symbol of strength of rejuvenation. Though the film is filled with sad and honest truths about the ways we all live, Lelio mishandles the fate of the film’s most important male character, making Gloria’s resilience too easy by turning him into a one-dimensional villain.
Thankfully, Gloria’s saving grace is found in the central performance from García, an actress who emits a certain ephemeral glow that radiates throughout the entire film. Whether she’s firing a paintball gun or laughing hysterically on the ground with her yoga classmates, García’s physical attributes, lived-in loneliness, and sense of mystery remain intact, offering a backbone for the film even when it falters.
The film opens and closes with Gloria surrounded by music and bodies in motion. The first of these shots finds Gloria in the background, ordering a drink from a bar, static, excluded from those casually dancing around her. In the last scene, however, Gloria dances freely and alone to a Chilean cover of, naturally, Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.” Lelio’s film is not so much the standard tale of a woman learning to blossom at such a ripe age as it is a more unexpected search for what’s next once the blossoming has subsided. By that life-affirming final scene, Gloria’s short-lived romance has become an afterthought, with the chaotic mystery of life continuing on around her. Some might find this conclusion a bit too cute (ending the film with “Gloria” might be too on-the-nose for some tastes), but García has embodied this character with such warm sympathy that it's still affecting anyway.
Sight
& Sound [Maria Delgado]
The first time the viewer sees Paulina García’s Gloria at the bar of a crowded nightclub for middle-aged singles, the sound of Frecuencia Mod’s upbeat ‘Duele, duele tu amor’ (‘Your Love Hurts’) rings out. With a glass of pisco sour in her hand and her arm positioned confidently on the bar, she casts her eye around the room and then swings purposefully across the dance floor to introduce herself to a potential new partner as Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ resonates across the room. The sonic commentary offered by the two opening numbers sets the scene for Sebastián Lelio’s perceptive and entertaining study of a feisty, free-spirited 58-year-old divorcee, putting aside the pain of past relationships in her search for passion, companionship and a partner who shares her zeal for dance.
Gloria’s early scenes are framed against a series of torch-song numbers that both comment on the action and complement the snippets of exposition revealed by Gloria’s encounters and conversations. Divorced for over a decade, she lives in a small apartment where she suffers upstairs neighbours – it is never clear if it is a single disturbed neighbour or a warring couple – arguing noisily late into the night. She leaves buoyant messages for her grown-up daughter Ana (Fabiola Zamora) and son Pedro (Diego Fontecilla), reminding them to call her – the implication being that she hears from them less than she would like.
Gloria is single and lonely but refuses to give up. She croons along in the car to Massiel’s ‘Eres’ (‘You Are’) as she drives to work. The lyrics – “You are the response I couldn’t find in my silence… You are my king” – point to the traditional relationship model she’s searching for. The plethora of songs and music that underscore the film’s action, from the melancholy of Bach’s Partita in D minor for solo violin to Paloma San Basilio’s ‘Libre’, position Gloria’s adventures within a litany of tales of emotional survival in the aftermath of romantic heartbreak.
Gloria is surrounded by a number of less than perfect relationships. “Are you going to tell me what to do?” thunders one of her neighbours to the other, ominously. Her son Pedro responds in an acerbic tone to the absent mother of his small child when she rings home. Her ex-husband Gabriel (Alejandro Goic) evidently has a strained relationship with his daughter – he is the last to know that she is expecting her Swedish boyfriend’s baby.
And yet the film seems to suggest that Gloria’s family dynamics are no more problematic than those experienced by other characters in the film. The recently divorced Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), the retired naval officer Gloria begins a relationship with, has two grown-up daughters who appear utterly dependent on him. When Gloria brings him along to meet her family at Pedro’s birthday dinner, Rodolfo sheepishly reveals that his daughters never graduated, have no employment and still live at home. Indeed, on many levels Gloria enjoys a good relationship with her children: she visits her son and helps with his sick baby; and when she drives Ana to Santiago airport to catch a plane to join her boyfriend in Sweden, Ana appears genuinely distraught at parting from her.
The film’s pulse comes in many ways from García’s brave and beautiful central performance. She dominates the movie from the very beginning as the camera picks her out in the swarming disco. She is present in every frame and Lelio shapes the film to ensure that the viewer is given the sense of entering her world, sharing the front seat of her car as she drives to work and the intimacy of her lovemaking scenes with Rodolfo.
Her large round glasses frame slanting, expressive eyes and heavy lids noticeably dressed up with eye shadow; her flicked-back hair has something of a 1970s feel. García exudes the humanity of Carmen Maura’s genial Pepa in Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), with the sexual energy of Diane Keaton’s Theresa Dunn in Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977). Her positive outlook and willingness to try anything – including bungee jumping and marijuana – generate Rodolfo’s pick-up line: “Are you always this happy?”
Gloria and Rodolfo’s sexual encounters are marked by the sight of flabby flesh and the sounds of slobbering kisses and heavy breathing. Gloria is a film about ageing and the management of change: Rodolfo has had a gastric bypass to deal with obesity but can’t handle his sagging waistline. He constricts himself within a girdle – a potent metaphor for his own emotional imprisonment – which Gloria rips off with a glorious sense of purpose. Gloria herself is diagnosed with glaucoma and must take action to avoid going blind.
The film’s strength is that it operates both as a compelling character study of an alluring, humane protagonist whose fragility and resourcefulness sit side by side, and as a wider contemplation of the state of the nation, without the latter dimension ever appearing forced or imposed. There are scenes of protests on the TV as Gloria chats on the telephone at home, testifying to the wider turmoil besetting Santiago; she is framed by crowds of protesters carrying placards as she leaves a city café; and at a dinner party she bemoans the cost of medical treatment while her friend describes Chile as a ghost nation. Like Gloria and Rodolfo, the country is managing transition, from the lasting infrastructures of a dying dictatorship to a more pliable democratic model.
But whereas Gloria is determined to move forward and let her children live their own lives, Rodolfo is trapped by a past that he can’t (and perhaps doesn’t even want to) let go. The fact that his adult daughters rely on him financially and emotionally is perhaps a comment on a generation who grew up in the shadow of a dictatorship that would not let them make decisions for themselves. Rodolfo seems content to let this culture of dependency continue, to the detriment of his relationship with Gloria.
Hernández imbues Rodolfo with childish attributes: pleading eyes, overblown declarations of devotion, a petulant inability to deal with not being the centre of attention. He takes Gloria paintballing on their first date. “Men like to play war,” he informs her in a telling indictment of the macho culture that spawned and cocooned the Pinochet regime. The disclosure of Rodolfo’s military past leads to an awkward silence at Pedro’s birthday dinner. “Who is this man?” asks Ana after his embarrassing silent departure.
There is an admirable visual economy to Gloria. The central protagonist’s emotional state emerges not only through the music, which works, the director has said, “almost like a Greek chorus”, but also through image association: a dancing skeleton in a shopping arcade embodies both Gloria’s sense of mortality and her lissom energy; the use of Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony as she sits at the hairdressers with her hair sculpted in tight curls suggests a parallel with the ageing Aschenbach in Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971).
At the end of the film, Gloria embarks on a spring clean, hoovering her car (and by association her life) of unnecessary clutter. She returns Rodolfo’s paintballing guns with a flourish: dressed in black dress, heels and a red sequined bolero jacket, she fires green paint across both Rodolfo and his house while his overweight daughters rush like giant toddlers to his aid – a playful reference to Women on the Verge.
In the final sequence she styles her hair in the mirror, cigarette in mouth, creating a new look for herself. Singing along to Umberto Tozzi’s ‘Gloria’ at a wedding party, she refuses an invitation to dance and subsequently takes to the floor at her own rhythm. Her style is all her own: passionate, fearless, determined and, like Lelio’s film, eloquently uplifting.
The House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima]
Gloria Offers an Answer for the Age of the Ageless | Village ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice, also seen here: The glories of Gloria | City Pages
Slant Magazine [Tina Hassannia]
Gloria / The Dissolve Tasha Robinson
Paste Magazine Tim Grierson
White City Cinema [Michael Smith]
Review: Chiles glorious Gloria lights up the Berlinale ... - HitFix Guy Lodge
NYFF Review: 'Gloria' - Film.com Stephanie Zacharek
Review: 'Gloria' Is Endlessly Watchable & Wonderful|The ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Screen International [Mark Adams]
Movie Mezzanine [Dan Schindel]
Little White Lies [Sophie Monks Kaufman]
theartsdesk.com [Kieron Tyler]
Blu-rayDefinition.com [Tim Baros]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]
Charleston City Paper (T. Meek)
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Gloria Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Susan Wloszczyna
'Gloria,' a Chilean in Her Late 50s Embraces Passion - The ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times
Lelouch, Claude
C’ÉTAIT UN RENDEZVOUS
Jerry
Kindall: C'etait un Rendezvous
Important:
The film described below is available
on DVD at quite a reasonable price compared to the VHS dubs that have been
going around for years.
On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch
mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a
friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the
heart of
No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.
Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.
Now, thanks to the miracle of the Internets, you can watch it in your browser.
Update: It's been posted to the MetaFilter front page and the original server where the video is hosted (not mine) has apparently taken it offline. Here's a torrent posted on the MetaFilter thread by Civil_Disobedient. You can also watch it at Castpost or get it from one of the mirrors put up by Something Awful users (1 2) or the Coral cache.
Update the Second:
The MetaFilter thread raises
the possibility that the car was not actually a Ferrari but Lelouch's own
Mercedes (the audio from the Ferrari would have been overdubbed) and that
Lelouch himself was the driver, but was only given a ticket, not arrested. Also
there's the tantalizing tidbit that the only lookout was a confederate posted
at the Louvre with a walkie-talkie -- which afterward turned out to be broken.
One poster in the Something
Awful thread claims Lelouch admitted to being the driver (years later) and
although he was given a ticket, the mayor of
C’était un rendezvous Anthony Nield from DVD Times
Since his 1966 breakthrough film, Un Homme
et une femme, director Claude Lelouch has become known as the purveyor of a
particular kind of film: the glossy soap opera. Whilst remarkably prolific,
each feature film has suffered from the same flaws: interminable length, an
inability to engage with the characters (even in such a film as Les Uns et
les autres with its multiple plot strands), and most damningly an overly
glossy visual style. In fact, no other director manages to bore quite like
Lelouch, quite an achievement when one considers some of his films’ subjects:
French songstress Edith Piaf for Edith et Marcel; Victor Hugo’s classic
novel Les Miserables (here the director felt it necessary to add a
modern-day parallel storyline just to increase the level of schmaltz); and even
switching to the western genre for Un Autre homme, une autre chance.
Indeed, the soap opera tag becomes fitting when you consider that Les Uns et
les autres was made into just that.
For C’était un rendezvous, however, Lelouch eschews his usual stylistic
excesses: the film has no characters as such, no dialogue and lasts for only
eight minutes. The plot, if such a term is appropriate, encompasses a car
journey through
It is this element that has allowed the film to gain its cult following,
particular amongst motor enthusiasts; indeed, the DVD sleeve is plastered with
quotes from Jeremy Clarkson and ‘Car & Driver’ magazine. Admittedly, my
interest in this subject is negligible at best, rather my reason for tracking
down and purchasing a copy was prompted by my enthusiasm for the obscurer
aspects of cinema, and given the film’s reputation it certainly fits this this
description. The legend of C’était un rendezvous (detailed in the
production notes accompanying the disc) revolves around Lelouch’s alleged
arrest and the belief that a famed formula one racer may have been
commandeering the vehicle, and it is these elements that have driven the film
underground. It is only with the release of this DVD that the film finally gets
a legitimate home video release, having spent many years being solely
“available” on second or third generation bootlegs which have eagerly swapped
hands for up to and around sixty pounds.
The most obvious reference points for the film buff, as apposed to the motor
buff, are the classics of car chase cinema. Owing to the film’s reputation it
is only right that the comparisons be made with the giants of this most
cinematic of scenes; Bullitt’s
An interesting film, and certainly Claude
Lelouch's best, though one that is unlikely to find a wide appeal. Emphasising
this fact are the scanty extras and the admittedly hefty price tag for a film
which lasts under ten minutes.
Speed of a Car: C'était un Rendezvous Glenn Elert
C'était
un Rendezvous DVD
C'était un rendez-vous - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Rendez-vous presented in full on video.google
LE COURAGE D’AIMER C 72
aka: The Courage to Love
France
A likeable film, a feel good movie that your mom or grand-mom would love, a love comedy with a lush romantic musical score that explores the ramifications of the ups and downs of love through a succession of popular songs, offering breezy melodies that stick in your ear long after the film is over that bears the stamp of commercialization all over it, yet it’s interesting that this, at least partially, is what the film attempts to examine, the process of creating a successful hit. How do you get discovered? What price do you pay? Do you give up your career for love, or vice versa, do you give up love for your career? An Italian street musician, Mossimo Ranieri, sings on the streets of Paris in near total obscurity until an attractive young girl, Maïwenn, decides she’d like to sing along, falling in love and doing what lovers do on the streets of Paris until she gets discovered and turned into a star, the latest glamour girl whose picture gets plastered all over the magazine covers, leaving her partner behind, alone again and back to obscurity. But as she can barely carry a tune, her rising star falls as quickly as it rose, and unbelievably, her former partner becomes all the rage, as he can actually carry a tune and writes a hugely successful song after the break up called “The Courage to Love.”
There are several interrelated stories that are interwoven into the storyline, most all involve couples on the ropes that are challenged, but then get back together again, the most interesting of which uses Mathilde Seigner in dual roles as twin sisters. Lelouch even gives himself a role as a filmmaker who wants to make a film bringing the two still popular singers back together again, based on a best selling book she has written which is a confessional tell all apology for all the mistakes she made with Mossimo. The most interesting sequence is Lelouch directing the two of them in close ups, telling each they are hopelessly overacting, then criticizing each unadventurous successive take, as if he somehow just discovered that neither of them can act. This close confrontation opens up old wounds, breaks open new wounds, and yet somehow, the show must go on in the form of Massimo actually performing the ever popular river dancing to his songs. Oh what the public yearns for. Inexplicably, the ‘Scope film makes little use of the wide screen, but Lelouch may have wanted to use it simply to watch all the close ups he filmed. Everything is neatly wrapped up in a completely conventional finale that is so unthreatening and so safe that it looks like it should play well on the Late Show.
ROMAN DE GARE (Crossed
Tracks) C+ 77
Another breezy, lightweight suspense/comedy/thriller/love
story that throws in a few plot twists, including an escaped serial killer on
the loose that attracts the attention of young girls with magic tricks, a
narrative advanced by a late night radio show that plays hummable French love
ballads, impressive fast track road photography reminiscent of Lelouch’s
legendary C’ÉTAIT UN RENDEZVOUS
(1977) showing time passing by a car whizzing through traffic, and a
convoluted, off track romance that is as hilarious as it is preposterous. Despite the old-school charm of this film,
which has much more in common with the director’s own post WWII generation than
the present, the performances really carry the film, as otherwise this would be
a nostalgic, picture postcard movie that reminds us all of what a wonderful
thing it is to be French. Poking fun at
an American President, an unlikely victim of terrorists in the latest hot off
the press dime store novel, supposedly poisoned by vintage
Provincial life in France never had it so good as portrayed
under the assured hands of Lelouch, which may as well be a travel brochure for
green pastures and the fresh mountain air of the French Alps, with horses
prancing around in the morning fog and countless sheep running free. There’s even an offscreen pig butchering
scene that seems to go on endlessly. Huguette’s
daughter is there with her grandparents (Lelouch’s own gorgeous daughter Shaya),
who of course is pissed that her mother rarely comes to see her, so she feigns
casual disinterest. At the engagement
dinner with invited friends, of course there is family entertainment, where
It’s all played for good light-hearted fun, with a soundtrack filled with the songs of the late Gilbert Bécaud, whose popularity couldn’t extend beyond the borders of France, but this lounge singer style seems to be very popular in France right now, as evidenced by Gérard Depardieu’s César winning role as an over-the-hill lounge lizard singing wrenchingly sentimental sad songs in THE SINGER (2006). But rather than dwell on mystery or outright suspense to make things interesting, Lelouch instead returns to schmaltzy music and plenty of close ups, as if reliving the themes of A MAN AND A WOMAN (1966) more than 40 years later. Then it worked, sort of, cashing in on the American fascination with foreign films at the time, becoming an art house hit, but here it feels like packaging a product with a familiar brand. My guess is Lelouch is the epitome of everything Ardent stands for in this film, a phony artist who prefers the comforts of a lavish lifestyle to actually having to work for a living. The twist here is that Ardent in real life is a prolific reader and speaks four different languages fluently, the former companion of François Truffaut, both had a penchant for Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, and American playwright Arthur Miller. Writing, apparently, runs in her veins. The same cannot be said for Claude Lelouch.
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Claude Lelouch has directed many films, but forever lives in the shadow of his one international breakout hit, A Man and a Woman (1966). This new film isn't exactly a return to form; it's more like a pretty good attempt at a Hitchcockian thriller, even if it strains credibility once too often. The ghostwriter (Dominique Pinon) for a famous author (Fanny Ardant) picks up a girl (Audrey Dana) at a truck stop and comes up with a new idea for a novel -- his own. A serial killer comes into it as well as deception and a disappearance, but Lelouch is terrible at leading his viewers astray. Still, thanks to the able cast and crisp cinematography, it's mostly unpretentious and reasonably entertaining.
If "Roman de Gare" is Claude Lelouch's best film in many years, an opinion that has been widely expressed, that's definitely damning with faint praise. Lelouch has spent most of his 46-year filmmaking career as the designated pop lightweight of French cinema, a reputation only cemented by his huge international hit from 1966, "A Man and a Woman." A glossy, enjoyable thriller that isn't quite as tricky or Hitchcockian as it wants to be, "Roman de Gare" gets by on high style and nice central performances by rubber-faced Dominique Pinon (better known for comic roles) as a mysterious motorist and Audrey Dana as the dumped, self-pitying woman he picks up at a rest stop. (The title, by the way, refers to the best-selling novels sold at train stations; we might say "airport fiction.")
Is Pinon's
The
Village Voice [Ella Taylor]
Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman may be one of the
silliest love songs in the canon of French fluff, but 42 years on, it gets a
beguiling makeover in this new soufflé from the director, who seizes the day
both to trade on and shake off his enduring reputation as
The Onion A.V.
Club [Sam Adams]
Smarting from the
critical and commercial failure of his two-thirds-completed "La Genre
humain" trilogy, director Claude Lelouch (A Man And A Woman)
premièred Roman De Gare under a pseudonym, a fitting debut for a movie
that is rife with deception onscreen and off. Oozing brittle hauteur, Fanny
Ardant plays an author of glossy thrillers who has just released her first
literary novel. But as Ardant savors the praise of critics, Lelouch cuts away
to an encounter between a distraught woman (Audrey Dana) whose fiancé has just
dumped her by the side of the road,† and a man (Dominique Pinon) who claims to
be Ardant's long-term ghostwriter.
In Roman De
Gare, no one is who they say they are, and identities are picked up and
discarded as the need arises. Without withdrawing the possibility that Pinon is
who he claims, Lelouch also stirs up suspicion that he may be an escaped serial
killer known as the Magician, who lures his teenage victims with magic tricks,
or a Parisian schoolteacher who has abruptly deserted his family—or, perhaps,
some combination of all three. While the audience is hunting for clues to
Pinon's identity, Dana enlists him to pose as her estranged husband-to-be,
adding yet another layer of deceit. Even the pun-riddled dialogue does double
duty, although much of the wordplay is lost in translation. (Ardant's literate
thriller is called Dieu Est Un Autre, a strained pun on Rimbaud.)
Shuffling
storylines and shifting time frames, Lelouch empties out his bag of tricks,
hoping viewers will be so entranced by his misdirections that they won't notice
the occasional cheat. But the movie's bubbly charms start to fizzle as the
layers peel back. Lelouch is fine as long as he keeps his hands moving, but at
the final flourish, he has nothing up his sleeves. Roman De Gare's
neatest trick is Pinon's performance, which draws out a hitherto unseen
leading-man allure. Pinon's oversize features have long been a boon to
filmmakers with a love of the grotesque (see: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who has yet
to make a feature without him). Here, Pinon runs with the chance to play
against type, letting his past catalogue of freaks and madmen fill in the
underlying sense of unease. At this point, the strangest thing he can do is
play normal.
The
House Next Door (Vadim Rizov)
I'd never seen a film by Claude Lelouch
before Roman de gare—odd,
because the man's directed 41 one of them, including 1966's famed A Man And A
Woman. Lelouch was French cinema's whipping boy before Luc Besson—too frothy
and substanceless, presumably—and he's well aware of it. Roman's press kit
comes with a long, remarkably defensive interview where Lelouch lays out the
terrain: "The title 'roman de gare' refers to popular literature, which is
not derogatory," he explains, sounding like Stephen King. "What works
commercially is not necessarily bad." The film came together under a
pseudonym—Lelouch became "Hervé Picard," a young director making his
first film. "I wanted to send a message to those who dismiss my
work," the auteur continues. "I wanted one of my movies to be seen
for what it really was and not as a Claude Lelouch film."
So what's a Claude Lelouch film anyway? Visually light and
skillful, Roman de gare is lifestyle porn both high and low, offering up
A radio announces that a pedophile rapist has broken loose
from prison, and Lelouch layers an extremely slow dissolve—a first-person POV
shot of hands and feet climbing down a rope over a car driving fast and
reckless, the camera poised on the dashboard. It's an elegant way to speed
things up quickly, and much of Roman de gare excels in this kind of
stuff—Lelouch does long shots of motion nicely, even if he's no Bela Tarr. The
murderer's face is never shown, but girl beware—if your fiance ditches you in a
gas station, perhaps it's not better to take the first ride a strange-looking
man offers you. Especially if said girl—Huguette (Audruey Dana)—is a
self-proclaimed "airhead," and the man (Dominique Pinon) is a
shifty-looking creep. But Lelouch gives his fugitive the MO of enticing kids
with magic tricks, and that's how much of the movie functions—sleight-of-hand,
misdirection, harmless contrivances to keep the plot moving. By the time
Huguette and the man—masquerading, for complicated reasons, as her
fiance—arrive at her parents' house and Lelouch places a chopped-off pig's head
dead-center of the frame, you know there's no serious reason to get tense: any
move that hambone couldn't possibly be earnest.
Unremarkable but smooth, Roman is a trip back to the good
old middlebrow days, when would-be film snobs went off to the art-house to gawk
at expensive clothing, pretty countrysides, chain-smoking and fresh country
food—the "French film," presumably always reducible to the same
elements. Roman gives people the unchallenging fare they want, and it does so
cheerfully; it's a pleasant enough film, remarkable more for Lelouch's
persistence than anything. Not being interested in solely mortifying my
aesthetic flesh, I was hardly immune to the genial, glossy takes on both
luxury—yachting to
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
indieWIRE Nick Pinkerton from Reverse Shot
Reel.com [Chris Cabin] also seen here: Filmcritic.com
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Lemesle,
Nolwenn
PIECES
OF ME (Des morceaux de moi) C 73
France (89 mi) 2012 Website Trailer
This is a film that gives people the opportunity to see French actress
Adèle Exarchopoulos in another film, as she is notable for being one of the
leads in the Palme d’Or prize winning film Blue
Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitr... (2013), where both lead actresses
were also awarded Palme d’Or prizes alongside the film’s director, the first
time that’s ever happened. This is a
much more traditional teen angst film, highly uneven, with signs the first time
writer/director is in over her head, but it’s also a kind of audition or dress
rehearsal for the suddenly infamous actress, and it may have been the role that
got her the part, as the film has been released 6 month’s earlier in France
than the Cannes prize winner. Like kids
with iPhones stuck to their hands, Exarchopoulos plays Erell, a young teenage
girl that carries her video recorder with her at all times, that is constantly
filming friends and family members without ever asking permission, and through
this documentary lens the director attempts to recreate an alternate reality
existing within the present, one that does not fade from memory or alter its
shape over time, but represents, at least to Erell, a kind of ultimate
truth. Erell is in nearly every shot of
the film, where her face is particularly camera friendly, though she’s always
angry about having to live in a dead-end working-class town, believing she’s
suffocating, where she hangs around with a group of boys, an oddball cast of
eccentric characters reflective of the region, Gabin, Javier, and Fingers,
mostly sitting around doing nothing, with one guy continually making up stories
to impress others, while another thinks up ways to get back at a dog that bit
off his finger, and yet another continually has designs on getting a tattoo.
Into this world walks Sarah (Adélaïde Leroux), Erell’s older sister, now
6-months pregnant, arriving unexpectedly at the door with her husband in tow
after not being heard from in more than four years. The twist to the story is the contentious
mother/daughter relationship between Erell and her terminally ill mother (Zabou
Breitman) with MS, where Erell believes her mother is a tyrant, always ordering
people around, and while she would like to spend more time with her mother,
she’s always lying around in front of the TV.
In Erell’s eyes, her mother uses her illness is an excuse for just about
everything, but it doesn’t excuse the hostility directed towards her,
especially since she believes her mother has always favored her older
sister. Her father (Tchéky Karyo) is
more easygoing and continually defends his wife, and while he realizes she can
often make things difficult for people, he doesn’t believe she would
intentionally be hurtful towards anyone.
Nonetheless, the strained emotions between them that are always on edge
are exacerbated by Erell’s accusatory tones, where she’s always pointing her
camera in her mother’s face, even when she’s in no mood, always getting a
negative reaction, which generates continuous friction in the home, with Erell
receiving the brunt of the negativity.
Since the mother can never get out of the house, all the activity inside
the home has a claustrophobic feel where bodies and emotions are constantly
bumping into one another.
The original music by Ronan Maillard and Troy Von Balthazar (from Chokebore, an American indie band) sounds cheesy at times, actually cheapening the naturalistic flavor of the film, while at other times, when the guitarist is actually sitting there strumming as Erell and the boys are just sitting around, it couldn’t sound better. While it’s a fairly slight coming-of-age story that doesn’t really address the complexity of the mother’s illness, but instead uses the severity of the illness in storyline only, offering little sympathy for what she’s actually going through, where she has to constantly remind people how sick she is, a fact ignored by most of the characters, including the filmmaker. Despite this major factor, the focus of the film shifts all sympathies toward the plight of Erell, ignoring her rather irresponsible point of view, literally blaming her mother for feeling and acting bad, as she is in complete denial throughout about her mother’s illness, making the stereotypical teen flight for freedom, in this case, feel rather hollow. While France exports only the top tier of their films made each year, the bulk of their industry output produces more conventional and less inspiring efforts that only play in France. Were it not for the name of Exarchopoulos, this all too familiar film would hold little interest abroad.
Pieces
of Me (2012) - My French Film Festival
A crazy father old before his time, a tyrannical, sick mother, a sister who disappeared four years ago and me, Erell, who films everything, all the time... A fine family portrait. I live in the same town I've always lived in. You're born here, you die here. And between the two, there's nothing to do except hang out with my buddies, Gabin, Javier and The Major. One night, my sister Sarah reappears. The pieces of me are put together again.
Pieces
of Me | Cambridge Film Festival
With the Palme d'Or going to BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR and its release in the UK in the autumn, the star of that film and this, is about to become a well-known face in the UK, Adèle Exarchopoulos is barely off screen at the centre of this troubled family. Her mother is terminally ill, her sister disappeared some years ago, but Erell struggles on dealing with her own demons as she fights her way through her teenage years. Then one day, her sister re-appears, pregnant and with her boyfriend. In a fantastic performance, and well-supported by the rest of the cast, Exarchopoulos is clearly a star and PIECES OF ME a great bitter-sweet vehicle to show off her talents.
49th
Chicago International Film Festival Preview, Pt. 1 | White City ... Michael Glover Smith at White City Cinema
For those not wanting to kick out the extra cash for the pricier
“gala presentation” of Blue is the Warmest Color (or if you missed the
chance due to its inevitably being sold out), this affecting 2012 drama also
offers a chance to check out the impressive acting chops of Adele
Exarchopolous. In Pieces of Me, the Gallic-Greek thesp plays Erell, a
girl living in a dead-end small town who must contend with a terminally ill
mother, an absent-minded father, and an older sister who abandoned the family
years earlier but unceremoniously returns home 6-months pregnant. There is also
plenty of humor, and the provincial milieu — best exemplified by Erell’s
coterie of knucklehead male friends — is nicely drawn; this makes palpable
Erell’s desire to transcend the boredom of her daily routine, which, one
assumes, must be rooted in the biography of first-time writer/director Nolwenn
Lemesle. Although there are rookie mistakes on display as well (making Erell an
amateur filmmaker and including an overuse of faux-documentary segments), the
French tend to excel at naturalistic dramas with strong regional flavors and
this is, on the whole, certainly no exception.
Adèle
Exarchopoulos | Screen Comment Ali
Naderzad
Adèle Exarchopoulos seems to have unlimited amounts of energy and charm.
Will she follow Mélanie Laurent (“Inglourious Basterds”) and Léa Seydoux
(“Mission Impossible”) to
What’s striking about Exarchopoulos is the pout (sulky and delicious). Then, there’s the self-assuredness and the strong voice. At 19, Adele Exarchopoulos has an intense and troubling presence. On a recent fashion shoot she said, “I like to dress up, experiment! In fact, I’m still building my full style.” Exarchopoulos is living proof that one’s added-value is not necessarily attached to number of years on the job. Discovered when she was only twelve she got a part in “Boxes” (2007) starring Serge Gainsbourg’s significant other Jane Birkin. The young actress then appeared in 2008′s “The Children of Timpelbach” by Nicolas Bary.
Exarchopoulos–she grew up with a guitar teacher father and a mother who
works as nurse and has two younger brothers–was born nineteen years ago in
Even before the top nod at
Lemmons, Kasi
EVE’S BAYOU A 96
This film has the feel of a literary adaptation, written by this first-time
director, set among well-off black Creole families in Louisiana
Eve's Bayou Olivier Barlet from Africultures, January 10, 1999
"The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old". Eve delves into her past and tells the story of her tenth summer - the story of a family trying to survive despite her father's constant affairs. In an attempt to understand, Eve turns to her aunt, a medium, who shows her how she can make contact with the spirit world. The climax comes when Eve, unable to deal with her secret, contacts a voodoo witch. The film tries to make the most of the Louisiana Bayous, those dead-end fingers of the meandering Mississipi, with its moss-covered trees, to lend this cultural quest an air of mystery. However, the fantastic setting is smothered by over-smooth photography and an excess of violins. Even Jurnee Smottlett's (Eve) solid performance is insufficient to restore the sense of intimacy needed for such an evocation of a community's collective memory and feminine power of imagination. What a pity, since actress Kasi Lemmon's first work as Director is also actor Samuel L. Jackson's first as producer (he also plays the father) - the joint effort put into such a demanding film was a big risk.
TALK TO ME A- 94
One of the more hilarious and entertaining films of the year, a film
DREAMGIRLS (2006) tried to be, but couldn’t pull off despite two award winning
performances by Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy, as the showcased musical
numbers smothered the lame attempts at social commentary. In this film, it’s one of the better films
out there on authentically capturing the times with Don Cheadle in a 60’s afro
recreating the “Keep it real” ghetto persona of DC radio legend Petey Greene and
his off-the-charts fly girl doing her own exaggerated Foxey Brown imitation, Taraji
P. Henson (from HUSTLE AND FLOW [2005]) strutting her funky sexual stuff following
him stride for stride, who open the film with a memorable conjugal prison visit,
preceded by Greene as a raucous yet highly observant prison deejay playing
James Brown’s “This is a Man’s World,” accompanied by his “Wake up, Goddamn
it!” (decades before 1989 when Spike Lee stole a similar riff for the opening
of DO THE RIGHT THING) profane prison take on events inside and what it takes
to scratch “another day off the wall.”
While this is another one of those Hollywood trips down memory lane
where they love to bring people back to life onscreen, usually with award
winning success, think Idi Amin, Queen Elizabeth, June Carter Cash, Truman
Capote, Ray Charles, Aileen
Wuornos, all best actor/actress winners in recent years, but Kasi Lemmons has
more in mind, as she uses Cheadle’s brilliant “voice of the streets” performance
to illuminate the period of the late 60’s, a time when people actually had
something to say, an era of lost heroes, JFK, Bobby, Malcom X, Martin Luther
King Jr, all shot down for speaking their minds. This film highlights a lesser known
personality who had a significant impact in the DC area, not only as an ex-con
who became a legendary radio personality, but as a social activist and a Lenny
Bruce-style advocate of telling the truth through free speech.
This could also be seen as another one of those buddy films, as it follows the interrelation of two men over the span of their lives, Petey Greene and Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) a radio executive at WOA-AM, the man who hired Greene, one a loud, spontaneous, free-wheeling ex-con while the other is a quieter, more carefully composed speaker who has the look of a corporate lawyer, who on the surface couldn’t be more different, yet both made their mark in radio history. The story was actually written in part by Hughes’s son, Michael Genet, who along with fellow screenwriter Rick Famuyiwa, took their time to get this story right, accentuated throughout by the perfect musical choices of the day from Terence Blanchard, who has also scored about a dozen Spike Lee films. Several key scenes come to mind, none funnier than Greene’s jaw dropping entrance to the WOA studio in search of a job, who along with his girl, Vernell, simply blow everyone’s mind with their outlandish display of verve and theatrical funk on parade, another at Greene’s favorite pool hall, where he and Hughes compete in a colorful high stakes game of 9-ball in his attempt to land a job at the studio, but it’s more a defining lesson on blackness. But easily the turning point of the film is the seminal moment in 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated, when street rage was at its angriest, as cities across America burned in a fury of unspoken agony, where street credibility was needed to help calm the quelling storm outside, easily Greene’s finest moment, where fellow coworkers in the studio actually applauded the depths of sincerity elicited in his radio performance relating the ethical thoughts of King’s protests against the unethical turbulent violence exploding on the streets, an extended sequence that culminates with Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a superior moment in the film as the song has a personal history with both men, but it’s given even greater significance cast against the almost dreamlike Armageddon that captures the utter chaos of the moment. Anyone who’s ever lived through that moment realizes the delicate hand that is taking us back through that monumental precipice in history.
Hughes has such faith in Greene that he becomes his manager, where he
does his own impassioned, profanity-laced stand up comedy act as well as
hosting his own TV show, mimicking the infamous image of Black Panther Minister
of Defense Huey P. Newton sitting in that high-backed wicker chair, humorously talking
about life from the black perspective, which ultimately leads to a shot on
Johnny Carson, the pinnacle of success for a rising young comic, which leads to
another one of those riveting, stand out scenes. But the two strong willed men clash over what
constitutes success, as Greene is out of the Sweet Sweetback school of
blackness, never trusting the Man, never wanting to become so successful that
you become the Man, while Hughes wants to win over all of America, and
following in Greene’s footsteps, becomes a successful deejay to do it,
ultimately buying the radio station himself, the first of many successful
business ventures. There’s a poignant
scene from Vernell who comes to visit Hughes late in the film, this time
without any of the flamboyant outfits, playing it completely straight, letting
him know that Greene is seriously ill.
It’s a touching moment in an unconventional film that takes seriously
its role of representing the times, where music played a much more culturally
defining role commenting on the social fabric of the Civil Rights and Vietnam era
with all the color and the activism that brought people together. There was a time when all that mattered in
our lives, when it was significant to hear a guy on the radio telling people to
just “Be yourself” when the right leaning serve and protect laws of the
land seemed to suggest otherwise.
I’ll
tell it to the hot
I’ll
tell it to the cold
I’ll
tell it to the young
I’ll
tell it to the old
I
don’t want no laughin’
I
don’t want no cryin’
and
most of all
no
signifyin’
Reel Movie Critic [Pam and George Singleton]
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Petey Greene (Don Cheadle of Hotel Rwanda,
and Reign
over Me) got everybody talking, as a “tell it like it is” radio DJ in
It was the era when classic soul music was being made at the same time the social fabric of the country was changing because of the Viet Nam War and the Civil Rights movement.
When Petey cons his way into an early parole, he looks up Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejofor of Dirty Pretty Things, Children of Men, and HBOs Tsunami: The Aftermath), the brother of a fellow inmate, and someone who had cracked to Petey to come and see him about a job when he got out. Dewey is program director at WOL-AM, a popular urban radio station geared to black music that sees its audience slipping away to edgier DJs.
Dewey is a button-down type, in charge of hiring, and on his way to the top at the station owned by E.G. Sonderling (Martin Sheen). How Petey fast talks his way onto the air for the first time, with Dewey’s help, is funny but it also offers a critical look at how people stereotype one another.
Petey was able to keep it real in prison, and now on the outside, in part because of his sexy girlfriend Vernell (Taraji P. Henson of Hustle of Flow). Now he’s able to connect with the radio audience, not just because he plays good music but he’s always up front with his on air persona.
Petey pulls no punches with his biting social commentary and his invitation to listeners to call him with their thoughts. “Talk to me,” he tells them.
The film’s mix of hilarious circumstances still manages to keep one grounded, even with the events surrounding the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the impact of the Viet Nam war (with not too subtle connections to Iraq).
Substance abuse and dreams of being on top of the world are the things that limit what Petey and Dewey can do together. If this story were not true, this would be a spoiler. You know things will crash, just not when, and to what extent the damage will be.
Petey’s popularity eventually surpasses that of his fellow star disc jockeys, Nighthawk (Cedric The Entertainer of Charlotte's Web) and Sunny Jim (Vondie Curtis Hall).
We’ve seen excellent biopics in the past about American black men such as Ali and Ray. There are, however, a few notable differences between this film and those pictures. They were internationally known as entertainers by both the public and themselves. Both Petey and Dewey were tough guys but we get a glimpse of that inner self that men generally regard as weakness. That is, love and respect for another man without any homosexual overtones. Talk to Me digs deep in this area.
Director Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou and The Caveman’s Valentine) captures the flavor of Melvin Van Peebles’ How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass (2003), which was an update on the 1971 classic Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Michael Genet (Spike Lee’s She Hate Me, and who is Dewey Hughes’ son) and Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood) co-wrote the screenplay.
Take all of the above, add in the great music from the late ‘60s, with a sultry score by Terrence Blanchard, some biting, sarcastic humor about Motown, and you have a movie that is not to be missed. Talk to Me tells quite a story about this slice of American culture.
Review: Talk to Me Jeffrey M. Anderson from Cinematical
Radio has to be one of the most un-cinematic things on the planet; it's a guy sitting in a booth for four hours talking into a microphone, or maybe playing some music. And yet radio has a kind of special magic about it. A person's voice comes sailing through the airwaves and landing in our homes, and it has the power to captivate, to soothe and to make sense of the world. Radio has appeared in a surprising number of good movies: Wolfman Jack and Stephen Wright, respectively, provided atmosphere in American Graffiti (1973) and Reservoir Dogs (1992), Robin Williams brought humor to the troops in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Christian Slater brought hope to high school students in Pump Up the Volume (1990).
It's probably a great deal more difficult to make a movie about podcasting, and so with her new film Talk to Me, director Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou, The Caveman's Valentine) returns to the past for the story of Ralph "Petey" Greene (Don Cheadle), an ex-con who became one of Washington DC's most recognizable personalities in the 1960s and all the way up to his death in 1984. Lemmons starts her movie with a bang, with Petey's signature line: "Wake up, Goddammit!" as Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) rolls out of bed, puts on his suit and makes an excursion to prison to visit his brother (Mike Epps). Lemmons intercuts Dewey's progress while Petey "raps" about imprisonment. Dewey may be free, but he's trapped, too.
Dewey works at soul radio station with an all-black staff, but run by the white, sympathetic E.G. Sonderling (Martin Sheen). Their star DJ is the smooth, sexy Nighthawk (Cedric the Entertainer), who shows up to work wearing furs and walking his various small dogs. Nighthawk burns candles while on the air, while the lightweight, coma-inducing Sunny Jim Kelsey (Vondie Curtis-Hall, Lemmons' husband) has the morning slot. Petey manages to get himself released from prison, moves in with his loyal girlfriend Vernell (Taraji P. Henson) and jive-talks his way into a job. Even though Petey and Dewey instantly clash, and despite testing the FCC with his language, Petey becomes an instant hit. From there, Lemmons traces Petey's history as his star rises, Dewey becomes his manager and their relationship deteriorates.
Lemmons' major achievement is the way that she has been able to trace nearly 20 years of history while still allowing the film to live in its current moment. Most films of this type, even classics like Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1961), have a tendency to hit only highlights, like a stone skimming over the water but never getting wet. Lemmons allows her film to slow down and bathe in real-time emotions. Lemmons has always been good at this type of pause and reflection, most notably in her extraordinary debut, Eve's Bayou (1997), which is surely one of the greatest achievements in African-American cinema, as well as her follow-up, the misunderstood The Caveman's Valentine (2001). The first film had a kind of voodoo mood, while the second employed "magic realism." This new one lives through the spirit of radio.
This time, however, Lemmons' film may stir up some enthusiasm
over its amazing performances. (Lemmons was an actress herself in small roles
in The Silence of the Lambs and Hard Target among other films, before turning
director.) In many
Lemmons' tour-de-force moment comes in the movie's
centerpiece: the 1968 death of Dr. Martin Luther King. Witnessing the angry
rioting in the streets, Petey climbs into his booth and begins the long process
of talking the city down, sharing in their pain and trying to re-establish the
ideas that King fought for. Done a thousand times before, it's a sequence that
could have gone south quickly, but Lemmons saves it with her confident, almost
dreamlike rhythms and Cheadle's superior performance. The sequence finishes off
with Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," which has already been
established as an important song to both Petey and Dewey. Like magic, the song
floats through the air, bringing understanding and hope to everyone who
listens. It has been made special through radio, and now it gets a new layer,
being married to Lemmons' images. It will never sound the same again.
Boston Globe Ty Burr
In "Talk to Me," Don Cheadle plays a scrappy little
explosion by the name of Petey Greene, and every moment he's hot-wired with the
joy of running his mouth. Greene (real name Ralph Waldo Greene ) was a disc
jockey and activist in
Before that, he was in prison. The movie, which has been directed by Kasi Lemmons ("Eve's Bayou") is smart, conflicted, and immensely entertaining, and it's about that moment in African - American culture when the street voice became the only one saying anything close to the truth. "Wake up, goddammit!" was Petey's sign-on of choice decades before Spike Lee shouted similar sentiments from the opening frames of "Do the Right Thing ."
Cheadle's character is only half of "Talk to Me," though. On the other side of the glass is Petey's producer, WOL program director Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor ), who has made every compromise his star has rejected. A kid from the projects who put himself through school, Hughes wears a suit, speaks crisply, and is determined to bring his people through the front door of the white-owned media.
Petey just looks at this guy and cackles. Actually, he scorns Dewey as "nothing but another white boy with a tan," "Mr. Tibbs," and several things not suitable for a family paper. Yet the two men are joined by a shared sense of mission. "I guess I need you to say the things I'm afraid to say," says Dewey, "and you need me to do the things you're afraid to do."
If that line sounds didactic (and it is), know that it comes at the end of a bar room pool game that's one of the most exhilarating movie sequences of the year, a scene so beautifully written, staged, played, and edited that you sit there in the dark with a fool grin on your face. The newly paroled Petey is playing the producer for a chance to get on the air -- he was a hit with the convicts as a prison DJ -- but they're actually competing to see who's the real black man. The scene ends with a satisfying bang, upending our assumptions about both characters.
The first half of "Talk to Me" is similarly alive with filmmaking skill and the rush of taking chances. The delight is infectious, buoyed by a soundtrack of irresistible soul classics that comment tartly on the narrative and by a cast that just won't quit. Cedric the Entertainer has a few choice scenes as a fellow DJ called The Nighthawk , whose melted-butter tones, like Barry White's , are at odds with his bulk. Martin Sheen turns the station owner into a figure of perplexed and intelligent decency.
Especially wonderful is Taraji P. Henson as Petey's longtime
girlfriend Vernell, a vision in Foxy Brown period clothes with a pixie smile,
lollipop legs, and a filthy mouth. After "Hustle & Flow ," this
is at least the second movie Henson has stolen, and will
After a while, "Talk to Me" pivots into a different movie. The turning point is the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, when black Americans fully understood that a change wasn't going to just come, that they'd have to take it. Cheadle plays Petey's on-air performance that night, when the disc jockey almost single-handedly calmed the rage of D.C. rioters, as furious and sorrowful and absolutely certain this wasn't what the Reverend wanted. It's a tricky tone and the actor nails it; when the other characters applaud Petey at the end of his stint, you feel they're praising Cheadle, too.
After this, the movie becomes obsessed with the theme of
"keeping it real," which is Dewey's battle more than Petey's. (Not
surprisingly, co-screenwriter Michael Genet is Hughes's son.) The producer
learns a new sense of pride from his DJ's bluntness -- cue the afro and
dashikis -- but he also thinks he can sell it to white
That's where he, and to a lesser extent the movie, get into trouble. How do you mass-market a voice of dissent? Dewey thinks he knows, but the deepening anxiety on Petey's face says it all. Maybe he looked into the future and saw what happened to Richard Pryor .
So Cheadle recedes from "Talk to Me," as Petey walks off "The Tonight Show" and dwindles into inconsequence (he died of cancer in 1984). Ejiofor, an extremely smart actor, does what he can to enliven Dewey's progress toward racial self-respect, but the character's too compromised. Worse, he's too dull. The movie bets on the big picture but puts its money on the wrong horse.
In a closing title, we learn that Dewey Hughes went on to buy WOL, which is now a cornerstone of Clear Channel Communications -- the faceless corporate behemoth that has successfully packaged individuality right off the airwaves. "Talk To Me" apparently wants us to think that's progress. I could tell you what Petey Greene might call it, but I can't print it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eitsutpOc Petey Greene on “How to Eat a Watermelon”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=X3S3qx-lXUo Petey Greene interviews Howard Stern in 1981
Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano)
Speaking loud, proud Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert)
The New York Times (A.O. Scott)
Leni, Paul
THE MAN WHO LAUGHS
The Man Who Laughs Eric Henderson
Early on in Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs, the
surgically perma-grinning Gwynplaine looks at his dressing-room mirror. A
one-time son of English royalty who as a boy was turned into a carnie freakshow
by political enemies, Gwynplaine spends his time as a travelling performer
whose wide crescent smile sends the great unwashed into tizzies of both horror
and, eventually, delight. As he looks at himself in the mirror, he is struck
with the hollow ghastliness of his life, and his face sags into a visage of
misery, with the exception of his continued grin. A moment of bravura acting by
Conrad Veidt (already famous for his portrayal of Cesare in The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari), it is topped by a wonderful cinematic grace note when
Gwynplaine closes the doors of the mirror and finds them ironically painted
with the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy. Whether it was because Lon Chaney
had recently signed a contract at MGM and was unavailable for work at
Universal, or because the movie mogul Carl Laemmle had a great eye for German
expressionism, The Man Who Laughs took the Universal "super
jewel" series of gothic horror to new and unparalleled heights in
cinematic intelligence. Like many a German expressionist nightmare, The Man
Who Laughs (based on a novel by Victor Hugo) is a collision of
non-complementary angles and framing that confuses as often as it elucidates.
At the same time—and unlike Caligari or Leni's own Waxworks—it is
also remarkably clean in its delineation of action. In the same manner that
Veidt is both the film's central monster as well as its main source of pathos (all
but laying out the blueprint for James Whale's Frankenstein), the film's
fascination with bric-a-brac and its tendency toward spare, minimalist
compositions is evidence of a stylistic schism. This obsessive dualism that
runs throughout the film also informs the love triangle between Gwynplaine, his
blind co-star girlfriend Dea (the Madonna, played by Phantom of the Opera's Mary Philbin) and the
Duchess (Ms. Ciccone lookalike Ogla Baclanova, whose most famous role would
come a few years later as the ill-fated femme fatale of Tod Browning's Freaks).
It's a little off-putting (and probably also a function of Laemmle's insistence
that The Man Who Laughs rival Phantom's phenomenal box-office
success) that all superfluous characters basically adhere faithfully to one of
two sides of the classic good-evil dichotomy, but even that framework could be
taken as a critique on Leni's part of Hollywood's psychologically limiting
archetypes. Conrad Veidt's terrifying grin masks the horror of having one's
looks be objectified at the expense of their humanity.
León de Aranoa, Fernando
PRINCESAS
Spain (109 mi) 2005
Princesas Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
A 5, yes, but Mr. de Aranoa's game is a lot closer than the
score would indicate. The review in Variety
called it "Loachian," and that's about right. It's a
social-conscience piece about the plight of callgirls in
Leonard, Robert Z.
IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMERTIME
USA (102 mi) 1949 uncredited co-director: Buster Keaton
Time Out review Tom Milne
A musical remake
of Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner, with the period moved back to
1906, the setting shifted to a Chicago music store, and Garland at her most
captivating as the shop assistant waging a war of attrition with her bossy
superior (Johnson), unaware that he is the lonelyhearts pen pal with whom she
has already fallen in love. The fragile charm is rather let down by an
indifferent score, although Garland makes the most of her numbers and the rest
of the cast give sterling support. Liza
Minnelli made her bow as the child at the end.
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
While Garland and Johnson make an intriguing couple, this
story doesn't give them much fodder to form a warm romantic connection, which
is something of a problem for a musical based on finding your one perfect love.
Of course, before they can live happily ever after they have to fight to be
together...or in this case just bicker endlessly until they discover their true
feelings. Besides casting, the only aspects that are different about this
remake of THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER
is that this version is in color and it incorporates musical numbers into the
story. Can't employ one of the best cinema voices and not give her some tunes
to sing. For those unfamiliar with the plot, Garland and Johnson play music
store employees who loathe one another while on the job, but are also
unknowingly in love with each other through the mail. Their correspondence
precedes their actual meeting and since the letter writing is anonymous – it
began because of a personal ad – they put their best feet forward for their
secret loves.
Nothing compares to the sheer pleasure of this paper union, leaving them blind
to the opportunities right under their noses. It's as contrived as a film can
possibly be and the only reason it works at all is the pure talent of its'
leads. The peppy tunes don't hurt either. The music and colorful art direction
help to give the film a sense of fun and vitality the 1940 version lacks. The
main trouble with this rendition is they've made Garland's character so caustic
and haughty it's hard to believe that Johnson would continue to pursue her once
he realizes who she is. A good letter sure carried a lot of weight in those
days. It's nice to see Garland given the opportunity to stretch and play a more
adult role, this just isn't a very attractive direction for her to go in. Those
who like musical comedies will be entertained enough, but this is far from the
best film in either Garland or Johnson's repertoires.
In the Good Old Summertime - TCM.com Roger Fristoe
The original title of MGM's musical remake of The Shop
Around the Corner (1940) was The Girl From Chicago, with June
Allyson and Frank Sinatra announced as its stars. By the time it went into
production as In the Good Old Summertime, however, Allyson had become
pregnant and was replaced by Judy Garland, with Van Johnson stepping in as
leading man. Reset from a leather-goods shop in Budapest to a music store in
turn-of-the-century Chicago, the story once again tells of pen pals who fall in
love without realizing they are coworkers with a disagreeable on-the-job
relationship. As in the original, the climax comes during the Yuletide season,
providing Garland with the opportunity to sing a lovely song called "Merry
Christmas."
Garland's other songs in the film include "Meet Me Tonight in
Dreamland," "Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey," "Mr. Law
Plays the Barbershop" (performed with a male quartet) and an especially
spirited rendition of the Eva Tanguay signature song "I Don't Care."
Garland's reputation at MGM by this time was that of a troubled genius who
often caused delays and skyrocketing budgets. But, according to John Fricke in
his 1992 book "Judy Garland: World's Greatest Entertainer, "Garland
completed four of her six songs for the film in one session, never requiring
more than three takes. She also managed to breeze through the filming."
When studio head Louis B. Mayer asked Johnson what had allowed Garland to get
through the production so easily, her costar replied, "We made her feel
wanted and needed. We joked with her and kept her happy." Producer Joe
Pasternak elaborated: "A great artist is entitled to a lot more latitude.
The quality that makes her great makes her feel more deeply. All of us felt -
and you don't often feel this way in Hollywood - we would accommodate ourselves
gladly to work with Judy... We knew her magical genius and respected it."
In the Good Old Summertime marked a beginning and an end.
Two-and-a-half-year-old Liza Minnelli, the daughter of Garland and director
Vincente Minnelli, made her (un-credited) film debut in the final scene as the
child of the now-married Garland and Johnson characters. And Buster Keaton, in
a supporting role, made his final appearance at MGM, where his silent-comedy
triumphs had included The Cameraman (1928) and Spite Marriage
(1929).
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Barrie Maxwell
MediaScreen.com
dvd review Nick
Zegarac
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Mark Zimmer) dvd review
The New York Times review T.M.P.
Leone, Sergio
The Sergio Leone Home Page Biography section from definitive website
Sergio Leone, born in 1929 in Rome, son of silent film director Vincenzo Leone, is best known for the creation of the spaghetti westerns. After making and writing several sword and sandal epics Leone decided to adapt Yojimbo, a samurai film by Akira Kurosawa. Leone turned it into the western A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, starring an unknown Clint Eastwood. Leone got much of his style, both in the complicated mise-en-scene and the use of Ennio Morricone's music from Yojimbo (but not the trademark Kurosawa wipe edit). A Fistful of Dollars created the spaghetti western genre which encompassed more than 200 films, sharing the features of being created in Italy, frequently being filmed in Spain, featuring self-assured killers with no names, scores either by Ennio Morricone, or in his style, and, of course, the shootout.
Leone's style grew from imitating Kurasawa to his own style, which uses editing in combination with Morricone's scores to create incredible emotional peaks, dramatic camera movements, and, his trademark, the extreme close-up of the eyes of the characters. After A Fistful of Dollars came For A Few Dollars More, and finally, the ultra-classic The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. These are considered a series, since the main character is always Clint Eastwood, and he always lacks a name.
The next Leone film was made in 1968. Once Upon a Time in the West is a significant departure from Leone's earlier westerns. This film is stylistically a spaghetti western, yet Leone directs this film with incredible care and beauty, matched only by Morricone's classic score. Once Upon a Time in the West represents a quantum leap forward in film-making for Leone. The scenes are slow, beautiful, and powerful. The movie is a homage to the simplicity and honesty of the old west, doomed from the beginning of the movie to death by progress. This film, even more than the others, needs to be viewed in wide-screen (letterbox) format, since the atrocious pans and scans during crucial moments ruin the mood. This film is perfect, and needs to be seen in the perfect format.
After Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone made a different type of spaghetti western, one that deals with mercenaries and revolution: A Fistful of Dynamite (aka Duck, You Sucker). The genre is called a "Zapata Western", and although Leone did not create it, A Fistful of Dynamite is one of the genre's most memorable films. Another great example of the Zapata Western is Burn! (aka Quemada!), starring Marlon Brando, which is also essentially a film of this type, even though it is set on an isle off of South America in the 1700's.
Finally, Leone in 1984 created his second masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in America, starring Robert De Niro and James Woods. The film is nearly four hours long, and was badly butchered for American release. The American version for some strange reason is still shown on A&E occasionally (strange because the American version is neither as artistic, nor as entertaining as the true version). The film is quite a departure for Leone, since it deals with Jewish gangsters in New York City's Lower East Side. The film's direction is slow, deliberate, impeccable, and intense. Of all Leone's films, this film has the best plot, portraying the lifelong struggle of a mobster wrestling with his criminal side.
Sergio Leone died in 1989.
Sergio Leone - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications Stuart M. Kaminsky from Film Reference, also seen here: Profile from Filmreference.com
Not since Franz Kafka's America
has a European artist turned himself with such intensity to the meaning of
American culture and mythology. Sergio Leone's career is remarkable in its
unrelenting attention to both America and American genre film. In France,
Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol have used American film as a touchstone for their
own vision, but Leone, an Italian, a Roman who began to learn English only
after five films about the United States, devoted most of his creative life to
this examination.
Leone's films are not realistic
or naturalistic visions of the American nightmare or fairy tale, but comic
nightmares about existence. The feeling of unreality is central to Leone's
work. His is a world of magic and horror. Religion is meaningless, a sham which
hides honest emotions; civilization is an extension of man's need to dominate
and survive by exploiting others. The Leone world, while not womanless, is set
up as one in which men face the horror of existence. In this, Leone is very
like Howard Hawks: as in Hawks's films, death erases a man. A man who dies is a
loser, and the measure of a man is his ability to survive, to laugh or sneer at
death. This is not a bitter point in Leone films. There are few lingering
deaths and very little blood. Even the death of Ramon (Gian Maria Volonte) in Fistful
of Dollars takes place rather quickly and with far less blood than the
comparable death in Yojimbo. A man's death is less important than how he
faces it. The only thing worth preserving in Leone's world is the family—and
his world of American violence is such a terrible place that few families
survive. In Fistful of Dollars, Clint Eastwood's primary emotional
reaction is to attempt to destroy the family of the woman Ramon has taken. In
the later films, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Once upon a Time
in the West, Duck, You Sucker and Once upon a Time in America,
family life is minimal and destroyed by self-serving evil, not out of hatred
but by a cold, passionless commitment to self-interest. Leone's visual
obsessions contribute to his thematic interests. Many directors could work with
and develop the same themes and characters, but Leone's forte lies in the
development of these themes and characters in a personal world. No director, with
the possible exception of Sam Fuller, makes as extensive us of the close-up as
does Leone, and Leone's close-ups often show only a portion of the face,
usually the eyes of one of the main characters. It is the eyes of these men
that reveal what they are feeling—if they are feeling anything.
Such characters almost never
define their actions in words. Plot is of minimal interest to Leone. What is
important is examination of the characters, watching how they react, what makes
them tick. It appears almost as if everything is, indeed, happening randomly,
as if we are watching with curiosity the responses of different types of
people, trying to read meaning in the slightest flick of an eyelid. The visual
impact of water dripping on Woody Strode's hat, or Jack Elam's annoyed reaction
to a fly, is of greater interest to Leone than the gunfight in which the two
appear in Once upon a Time in the West. The use of the pan in Leone
films is also remarkable. The pan from the firing squad past the church and to
the poster of the governor, behind which Rod Steiger watches in bewilderment
through the eyes of the governor's image, is a prime example in Duck, You
Sucker. The shot ties the execution to the indifferent church, to the
non-seeing poster, and to Steiger's reaction in one movement.
The apparent joy and even comedy
of destruction and battle in Leone films is often followed immediately by some
intimate horror, some personal touch that underlines the real meaning of the
horror which moments before had been amusing. The death of Dominick and his
final words, "I slipped," in Once upon a Time in America
undercut the comedy and zest for battle. There is little dialogue; the vision
of the youthful dead dominates as it does in the cave scene in Duck, You
Sucker, in which Juan's family lies massacred.
At the same time, Leone's
fascination with spontaneous living, his zeal for existence in the midst of his
morality films, can be seen in his handling of details. For example, food in
his films is always colorful and appetizing and people eat it ravenously.
The obsession of Leone
protagonists and villains, major and minor, with the attainment of wealth can
be seen as growing out of a dominant strain within American genres,
particularly western and gangster films. The desire for wealth and power turns
men into ruthless creatures who violate land and family.
Leone's films are explorations of
the mythic America he created. Unlike many directors, he did not simply repeat
the same convention in a variety of ways. Each successive film takes the same
characters and explores them in greater depth, and Leone's involvement with
this exploration is intense.
SergioLeone.com webpage with a biography and links
Biographical article from Once Upon a Time in America
Sergio Leone • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Daniel Edwards from Senses of Cinema, October 4, 2002
A Fistful-of-Leone!: Sergio Leone article and film review site by Cenk Kiral
How I Reach to
the Master In the relentless pursuit of the art work of
the master Leone, by Cenk Kiral
A Fistful of Leone
Trip a guide for those who wish to plan a trip featuring significant locations
in Leone westerns, by Cenk Kiral
All-Movie Guide bio from Lucia Bozzola
Sergio Leone | Italian
director | Britannica.com
biography
Sergio Leone
| Biography and Filmography | 1929 - Hollywood.com biography
Sergio Leone - Movies, Bio and Lists
on MUBI
www.fistfulofwesterns.com including a Sergio Leone section
The Dollars Trilogy Wiki - Fandom
Sergio Leone brief bio from Michael den Bore from 10kbullets
Images Movie Journal - Spaghetti Westerns John Nudge
The History of Cinema.
Sergio Leone: biography, reviews, links Pierro Scaruffi, including film comments
Sergio
Leone, 67, Italian Director Who Revitalized Westerns, Dies ... Obituary from The New York Times, May 1, 1989
FILM
DIRECTOR SERGIO LEONE DIES AT 60 - The Washington Post Obituary,
May 1, 1989
Finding Their Religion - Movies - Village Voice - Village Voice J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, August 17, 1999
A Fistful of Dollars • Senses of Cinema Tony Williams, October 5, 2003
A Fistful of Dynamite/ Duck, You Sucker/ Giù la testa • Senses of Cinema Karli Lukas, October 5, 2003
Sergio
Leone's "Dollars" trilogy reviewed. Elbert Ventura from Slate, June 27, 2007
Homosexuality and the
Italian Spaghetti Western – Offscreen
Jenna Bond, November 2007
Dario
Argento on working with Sergio Leone | Film | The Guardian Dario Argento, May 14, 2009
Sergio
Leone | The Surrealist Western – Chasing Light Doug Kim from Chasing Light, June 10, 2010
Film Studies For Free: A Fistful of "Spaghetti Western" Studies various links, August 14, 2010, also seen here: A Fistful of "Spaghetti Western" Studies | Film For Fun
Sergio
Leone's Wild West - Panoram Italia Amanda
Fulginiti and Gabriel Riel-Salvatore, November 1, 2010
The
Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone - The Spaghetti Western ... January 9, 2011
Once Upon a
Time... Sergio Leone - Harvard Film Archive November 19, 2011
5
Unmade Movies From Spaghetti Western Maestro Sergio Leone ... Oliver Lyttelton from indieWIRE. April 30,
2012
Sergio
Leone: Something to Do with Death | PopMatters Oliver Ho, May 17, 2012
Sergio
Leone - 10 Directors Who Have Never Made A Bad Movie ... Matt Barrone from Complex Pop Culture, July 18, 2012
Sergio
Leone: Ranking His Films From Worst To Best - WhatCulture.com July 3, 2014
Ingredients
for a Spaghetti Western – The Style of Sergio Leone ... HDNet Movies. July 25, 2014
BBC
- Culture - The lasting legacy of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Luke Buckmaster from BBC Culture, February 10, 2016
The
Best Films by Sergio Leone You Must See - Culture Trip Richard Lawler from The Culture Trip, November 2, 2016
7
Cinematic Trademarks of the Master of the Spaghetti Western ... V. Renée from No Film School, December 5, 2016
All
9 Sergio Leone Movies Ranked From Worst To Best « Taste of ... Thor Magnusson from Taste of Cinema, May 17, 2017
TSPDT - Sergio
Leone They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
INTERVIEW
WITH SERGIO LEONE - American Film, 1984 - Scraps ... Pete Hamill interview from American Film,
June 1984
INTERVIEW:
"Interview with Sergio Leone" (1987) - ASX | AMERICAN ... Marlaine Glicksman interview from American
Suburbx, September 1987
Interview with
Professor Christopher Frayling Cenk Kiral interview with Leone biographer
October 22, 1997
Luciano Vincenzoni Feature and Interview with Screenplay
writer Vincenzoni by Cenk Kiral, April 25, 1998
Face To Face With
Sergio Donati Interview with the
screenwriter
for ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, by Cenk Kiral, January 23, 1999
Clint
Eastwood: How the West was won | The Independent Damon Wise interview on Leone with Clint
Eastwood, April 20, 2009
Title sequences
from Sergio Leone films — Art of the Title Title sequences from several films
Sergio Leone Western
Classic Movies, Western Movie Locations ... Unique Almería, movie locations
Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)
New York Film Academy's 20 Great Movie Directors
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Sergio Donati's Web Page Screenwriter for ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
Sergio Leone (1929 - 1989) - Find A Grave Memorial
Sergio Leone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS
Italy Spain Germany (99 mi) 1964 ‘Scope
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Though far less operatic and
satisfying than Leone's later work, his first spaghetti Western with Eastwood
still looks stylish, if a little rough at the edges. Based on Kurosawa's Yojimbo,
it set a fashion in surly, laconic, supercool heroes with Eastwood's amoral
gunslinger, who plays off two gangs against one another in a deadly feud. All
the classic Leone ingredients were there - the atonal score, the graphic
violence, the horrendous dubbing - and the film's Stateside success changed the
face of a genre.
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kian
Bergstrom
More than most directors, Sergio Leone knew two extremely important things about cinema: the grosser and more bodily the thing, the more that can be done with it on screen; and that nothing is more beautiful than the disconnect between the abject and the pure. Leone was one of the great masters at orchestrating a genuinely kinetic experience in his films, creating an indefinitely suspended sensation that every aspect of the depicted world was in the process of being discovered, and discovered to be both baser and more harmonious than we ever imagined before. Structured as a series of punchline-less jokes, FISTFUL creates intricate patterns of triangular conflict that are perpetually and violently shrinking, played out in the vastness of a single eye-twitch or lip-lick, each existing solely to be brutally unresolved by the entry of yet another figure into the frame, the rhythm, the aggression. While its reluctance to grant any sense of the heroic, or even the dastardly, to its characters and the languid luxury it takes in the rituals of death convinced many upon its release that it was at best a nihilistic formal exercise and at worst an amoral propaganda piece, FISTFUL is instead comedy of the highest order, a film that discovers and transmits a fundamental exuberance and exhilaration within every cut, track, costume, and sound, as though the fact that cinema exists and can do these things is reason enough for joy. (It is.) It's not for nothing that the central organizing image from FISTFUL is a deliriously filthy pair of Clint Eastwood eyeballs in perfect Techniscope composition, for those two eyes, shot between those two sprockets, are about to detonate.
A
Fistful of Dollars - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
The Western genre was in dire need of a revival in the
early sixties and even John Wayne in the lead was no guarantee that the film
could draw a large audience anymore. Ironically, it was Italy, not America,
that revitalized the Western with the release of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Sergio Leone's reworking
of the samurai classic, Yojimbo (1961), by Japanese director Akira
Kurosawa (The latter's most famous film - The Seven Samurai (1954) - was
also transformed into a Western, The Magnificent Seven starring Yul
Brynner). Although most critics at the time attacked it for its excessive
violence, the film's influence on the genre cannot be dismissed for Leone's
vision of the Wild West was harsh, unromantized and devoid of honorable men,
unlike the Westerns of John Ford. It was a place where survival was a daily
challenge and a man's ability to cheat death was the only thing that mattered.
Leone's cynical view of the frontier was emphasized by his often startling
compositions that cut between extreme facial close-ups, stark landscapes, and sudden
explosions of violence. No less effective was the unconventional music score by
Ennio Morricone which mixed electric guitars with choruses of grunts, groans,
and human cries. And, of course, A Fistful of Dollars is primarily famous for launching
Clint Eastwood's career and for creating the prototype of all the 'Spaghetti
Westerns' that followed. The genre would flourish for almost a decade,
providing expatriate American actors with steady work and providing the
European film industry with a steady cash flow.
Like Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars
is the story of mercenary who arrives unannounced in a small town where two
families are locked in a deadly power struggle. Having no allegiance to either
side, this mysterious stranger hires himself out to both factions and
eventually succeeds in annihilating the entire town with the exception of the
coffin-maker, bartender, and bell-ringer. The basic plot and the amoral hero
are also reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett's novel, Red Harvest and The
Servant of Two Masters, an 18th-century farce by Carlo Goldoni.
Clint Eastwood's involvement in A Fistful of Dollars was purely a stroke of luck. He
was bored with his role as Rowdy Yates on the popular TV Western, Rawhide,
and was looking for other acting opportunities. When his agent informed him
that a film company in Italy was interested in him for a Western entitled The
Magnificent Stranger, he dismissed it at first but then reconsidered.
According to the biography, Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel, the
actor recalled, "I've never been to Italy. I've never been to Spain. I've
never been to Germany. I've never been to any of the countries (coproducing)
this film. The worst I can come out of this is a nice little trip. I'll go over
there and learn some stuff. I'll see how other people make films in other
countries." What Eastwood didn't know was that the role had been offered
to numerous other actors before him like Rory Calhoun, Charles Bronson, and
James Coburn, who said "it was just about the worst script I'd ever seen."
It was actually expatriot American actor, Richard Harrison, who recommended
Eastwood for the role when he was unable to take the part due to prior
commitments.
When Eastwood arrived in Italy, he carried with him a sleeveless sheepskin
jacket, bleached black Levis, and cigars, all of which he used in developing
his character. The famous poncho was a gift from the director. He soon
discovered that Leone spoke no English and neither did the rest of the cast and
crew with the exception of a stuntman named Benito Stefanelli and a film
representative from the Rome office. At first Eastwood had some major
disagreements with Leone, particularly over the script which he found too
verbose, but after convincing the director to cut his dialogue to a minimum,
the two men began to collaborate more productively.
It turned out to be a grueling eight week shoot with one week at Cinecitta's
Rome studio and the remaining time spent on location in Manzanias, Spain (near
Madrid) and Almeria, a bleak and inhospitable area in the Andalucia region.
Most of the extras and bit players were recruited from the local Gypsy
population and the set was completely unlike any Hollywood production Eastwood
had ever worked on. The actor later said, "We had no electricity; we
didn't have a trailer with a toilet. We just went out behind rocks." There
were times when the production was almost shut down due to cash shortages but
Leone prevailed, shooting multiple takes on each camera setup in case the
Italian film labs damaged the footage and improvising when necessary. In fact,
for one scene, Leone needed a tree for a hanging sequence and confiscated one
from a local farmer by pretending to be a highway official who was in charge of
removing dangerous trees.
Upon completion of A Fistful of Dollars,
Eastwood returned to America where he had no idea of the success he was about
to experience. Leone's Western became a huge hit in Europe when it was released
and soon Eastwood was called in to redub his dialogue for the English language
version. It too did phenomenal business in the U.S. and paved the way for two
more sequels with Leone - For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). Not only did A Fistful of Dollars make Eastwood an international
superstar but it established him as new type of Western hero, or more
accurately, anti-hero - one whose mercenary motives and guilt-free killing were
more in line with the chaotic sixties when traditional values were in question.
One final footnote: Although A Fistful
of Dollars is generally acknowledged as the first "Spaghetti
Western," it actually had several antecedants including Michael Carreras' Savage
Guns (1961), which was filmed in Spain and starred Richard Basehart, and Terror
of Oklahoma (1961), directed by Mario Amendola, both of which were made a
good three years before A Fistful of Dollars.
Cinema
'67 Revisited: A Fistful of Dollars - Film Comment Mark Harris, February 15, 2017
In my 2008 book Pictures at a Revolution, I approached the dramatic changes in movie culture in the 1960s through the development, production, and reception of each of the five nominees for 1967’s Best Picture Academy Award: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Doctor Dolittle. In this biweekly column, I’m revisiting 1967 from a different angle. As the masterpieces, pathbreakers, and oddities of that landmark year reach their golden anniversaries, I’ll try to offer a sense of what it might have felt like to be an avid moviegoer 50 years ago, discovering these films as they opened.
In the early spring of 1964, Clint Eastwood, a TV actor looking to break into movies, signed a contract to spend his sixth-season hiatus from his sidekick role on the CBS series Rawhide in Italy and Spain, making a Western called Magnificent Stranger for a novice director, Sergio Leone. Leone knew of Eastwood only because he had happened to see the 91st episode of Rawhide, “Incident of the Black Sheep,” and was happy to get him at the bargain-basement price of $15,000—which was $10,000 less than Charles Bronson had demanded.
It was a gamble for both men—and two years later, one that did not appear to have been particularly wise. In Richard Schickel’s Eastwood biography, the star recalls that when producers saw the dailies, they responded, “Jesus, this is a piece of shit.” Eastwood went back to his TV show, and even though he returned to Europe the following summer to make a second picture for Leone, he assumed that neither movie would ever be seen in America. Originally, Leone didn’t even put his name on the first films—since Italian-made Westerns were more marketable to audiences if they appeared to come from America, he billed himself as “Bob Robertson.”
Not that American Westerns, in 1967, were a particularly hot commodity—or a commodity, period. Over the last decade, network TV shows—not just Rawhide, but Wagon Train, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Virginian, and Cheyenne—had appropriated the genre, tamed it, and replaced its majesty, danger, and high stakes with familiarity, domesticity, and repetition. This was not so much murder as assisted suicide, since by the mid-1960s, big-screen Westerns had pretty much done themselves in. Other than a few elegiac gestures from John Ford and Howard Hawks, the Western had offered little of value—giant, heavy-limbed misfires like The Alamo and How the West Was Won, spoofs like Cat Ballou, and halfhearted quasi-modern takes like the James Garner–Sidney Poitier team-up Duel at Diablo all seemed to suggest a genre on its last legs, expiring under bright-blue Technicolor skies on prairies and mesas that audiences could probably have traversed blindfolded by then.
It’s hard to overstate what a sharp contrast Bob Robertson’s Magnificent Stranger—or, as it came to be known, A Fistful of Dollars—offered to unsuspecting audiences. Crude, cheap, and brutal, with dim lighting, laughably casual dubbing, and an almost wordless storytelling style stripped down to the most elemental, stark visual gestures, except when it exploded into baroque violence, Fistful was, both literally and metaphorically, the darkest western to have reached American screens in years, a bleak story of a taciturn gunslinger who plies his trade in a hellish town whose most cheerful resident seems to be the constantly employed coffin builder.
If you look on IMDb, Fistful’s release date is listed as 1964, with For a Few Dollars More following in 1965. But to American moviegoers at the beginning of 1967, the movies did not exist, and Eastwood was, at that point, not even a workaday TV actor—his show had been canceled. Leone’s two films had shown all over Europe, where their star was starting to develop a cult following, and on U.S. Army bases, but they had never found their way to U.S. movie theaters.
That was all about to change, thanks to the shrewd intervention of United Artists, which had recently experienced blockbuster success with its first four James Bond films and was eager to create a new franchise. In early 1966, UA agreed to finance the third and most elaborate Eastwood/Leone collaboration; later in the year, the company struck upon a marketing gimmick. It would acquire Leone’s first two movies and roll them out early in 1967—A Fistful of Dollars in February and For a Few Dollars More in May—and package them as the first two installments in a trilogy (although the films had not been written or conceived that way and there is no plot continuity between them) about a gunslinging “Man with No Name” (he actually had a name, but that was easily gotten rid of). At the end of 1967, UA would then release the third movie, which the New York Times reported would be called Good, Ugly and Evil. Variety later corrected that, saying that “the title of the third film would be changed to get ‘Dollar’ into it.”
A few kinks had to be ironed out: The films needed to be redubbed (Eastwood, fortunately, had kept notes about his own dialogue, since he knew Leone’s crew would just throw their copies away), and a financial settlement had to be reached with the producers of Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 Yojimbo, of which A Fistful of Dollars is essentially an uncredited remake. UA didn’t have high expectations for Fistful—the company thought the series might start to take off with For a Few Dollars More—and the New York Times did not help, with Bosley Crowther calling the first movie “cowboy camp of an order that no one has dared in American films since, gosh, Gary Cooper’s [1929] The Virginian’ and dismissing Eastwood as “simply another fabrication of a personality” in a movie that he called “egregiously synthetic but engrossingly morbid.” Crowther went on to inveigh against the film’s morals in a Sunday column, bemoaning “the dismally mercenary attitude” of its hero, who comes into a town riven by two warring factions and who “isn’t even committed to the triumph of either side…It is a dangerous overturning of the apple-cart, and…it is likely to do some lasting harm.”
Give Crowther credit for at least guessing correctly that the movie would have real impact. Although Fistful underperformed in New York, nationally it grossed more than 40 times the $100,000 UA had invested to purchase it, and the following two films did even better. Eastwood’s lone gunman, operating above and apart from the law, narrowing his eyes at everything around him in hostile contempt, and living by a self-generated moral code rather than one imposed by the uncivilized society around him, proved the perfect antihero for a generation that felt vast mistrust for organized authority, armed or not. And audiences who didn’t give a thought to politics but just wanted to see bad guys get shot could get satisfaction from this one-size-fits-all-ideologies maverick as well.
In a year in which The Dirty Dozen and Bonnie & Clyde would soon shatter all rules about acceptable screen violence, the Leone films helped set the table; today, directors and movie lovers view them as milestones in the very genre that Crowther was sure they would help to destroy. And fifty years later, it’s particularly rewarding to watch them quickly in sequence. Back-to-back-to-back, they’re a study in escalating ambitions; Fistful was made for just $250,000 and looks it, clocking in at a lean 100 minutes, For a Few Dollars More had three times the budget and runs for 132 minutes, and various cuts of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (they never did get ‘Dollars’ into the title), which cost $1.2 million to make, run anywhere from 161 to 179 minutes, with Ennio Morricone’s score reaching a peak of orchestral ecstasy that is a long way from the lean, ambient soundscape he created for the first film. By then, Leone’s visual approach, so bare-bones in Fistful, had flowered into something almost operatic; watching in sequence, one gets the sense that he felt he had to burn the western to the ground first in order to build something new and spectacular two movies later.
The quasi-trilogy did not launch the “spaghetti western” genre—Time noted that by 1967, more than 180 “eastern westerns” had been made—but it did bring a new, more pared-down, iconographic, and blood-soaked take on the Western to American shores and replace some of the genre’s moral certitude with a dose of Vietnam-era cynicism and nihilism. (One can draw a pretty straight line from Leone to Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 The Wild Bunch.)
After 1967, Eastwood’s and Leone’s careers diverged swiftly—perhaps in part because Eastwood got tired of Leone disparaging his acting ability. Although Leone would live 20 more years, he would direct only three more movies (for his next, Once Upon a Time in the West, he finally got the star he had wanted for years, Charles Bronson). Eastwood, for his part, never looked back—in the year after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he made Hang ’Em High, Coogan’s Bluff, and Where Eagles Dare, securing his perch as a movie star. His status as a critic’s darling would be longer in coming; in 1967, he was greeted with perplexity, with culture writer Judy Stone shrugging, “Why has ‘Fistful’ become the latest craze? Darned if I know. I sat by myself in the uneasy stillness of a screening room… mystified… well, if the French can make some kind of genius out of Jerry Lewis…” She asked Eastwood if he understood it and the 36-year-old actor’s reply hinted at the savvy auteur to come: “Looking back,” he told her, “I think we were better off for having had an offbeat director. The conventional guy would have either tamed the picture down to another backlot Western or taken the satiric comment and made it slapstick and unpalatable. This way, it appeals to someone looking for that kind of comment, but it doesn’t alienate the viewer who wants an action-packed film.” By then, Eastwood had already made one decision he would never reverse: One particularly grueling day on the set of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he said he’d had it with Leone’s way of making pictures. “Never,” he told Eli Wallach, “trust anyone [making] an Italian movie.”
A Fistful of Dollars • Senses of Cinema Tony Williams, October 5, 2003
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Sergio
Leone's "Dollars" trilogy reviewed. Elbert Ventura from Slate, June 27, 2007
Dragan Antulov
retrospective [7/10]
A Fistful of Dollars Fistful of Leone
A
Fistful of Dollars Prologue - A Fistful-of-Leone! Chasman from Fistful of Leone
A Fistful of Dollars Ron Cotton from 10kbullets
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Ted Prigge retrospective [4/4]
E.J. Winner
retrospective ["From the Glass Key
(1942) to Last Man Standing (1996)"]
DVD Verdict - The Sergio Leone Anthology [Bill Gibron]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review The Sergio Leone Anthology
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] The Sergio Leone Anthology
Paul Newman and Sergio Leone Are Still Golden, page 1 - Movies ... Jim Ridley from The Seattle Times
Edward Copeland on Film [Odienator] The Leone Trilogy
DVD Journal David Beaks, The Leone Trilogy
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
A Fistful of Dollars Comparison (MGM region 1 vs. region 2) Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
A Fistful of Dollars
- Wikipedia
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
Italy Spain
Germany Monaco (132 mi)
1965 ‘Scope
For a Few
Dollars More, directed by Sergio Leone | Film ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew
The one in which Eastwood and Van Cleef, bounty hunters both, reluctantly join forces to take on psychotic bandit Volonté and his gang (which includes Kinski as a hunchback). Not as stylish as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but a significant step forward from A Fistful of Dollars, with the usual terrific compositions, Morricone score, and taciturn performances, not to mention the ubiquitous flashback disease.
For
a Few Dollars More - TCM.com Bret Wood
Riding high from the European success of A Fistful of
Dollars (1964), Clint Eastwood and director Sergio Leone quickly reteamed
to make For a Few Dollars More
(Per qualche dollaro in piu, 1965), arguably the best entry in the
trilogy they made together.
Gary Cooper may have been tight-lipped in High Noon (1952) and James
Stewart might have seemed ruthless in The Naked Spur (1953) but
audiences could hardly have been prepared for the cold-hearted amorality
personified by Eastwood in Leone's Italian Westerns.
Reprising his role as the nameless, virtually wordless, poncho-draped drifter,
Eastwood finds himself competing against a Bible-toting walking arsenal named
Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), as they vie for the bounty on the head of the
outlaw Indio (Gian Maria Volonte). The motivation of Eastwood's lone gunman
(nicknamed "Monco," Italian for "monk") is stictly
monetary, while Mortimer is driven by a lust for revenge. In spite of their
differences, they form a brittle alliance to accomplish their shared goal,
systematically outwitting and outgunning Indio's band of depraved desperados -
including Klaus Kinski, upon whose hunched back Eastwood strikes a match in one
moment of inspired black comedy.
Like the woolen serape and the weathered low-brimmed hat, the narrow toscani
quickly became the Eastwood character's trademark. Leone (who died in 1989)
once recalled that the actor pleaded with him to forego the Tuscan cigars in For a Few Dollars More. "We can't
possibly leave the cigar behind," Leone responded, "It's playing the
lead!" The same might be said of Ennio Morricone's score, which
accentuates the film's barbarity with musical flourishes so stylized and
grandiose they are almost comical, but which perfectly suit the exaggerated
stylings of the Spaghetti Western.
Curiously, neither film would be released in the United States until 1967, by
which time Leone and Eastwood had already completed their third collaboration, The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Eastwood's paycheck had increased from
$15,000 for the first film to $50,000 for the second and would reach $250,000
(plus 10% of the grosses) for the third. Before the year was out, Italy could
no longer afford the star it had created. Eastwood had graduated from character
actor to big-screen sensation, a position he has carefully protected to this
day.
Although For a Few Dollars More
was two years old by the time it reached American screens, it was still a bit
too "new" for many viewers. Numerous critics attacked the film's
unique blend of graphic violence and morbid wit. The film was derided as
"Western Grand Guignol" (Time), "a treat for
necrophiles" (NBC's "Today Show"), and "constructed to
endorse the exercise of murderers" (The New York Times). Little did
they realize Leone and Eastwood's degenerate sagas helped revitalize the
Western genre, even as they ushered in an era of heightened screen violence
that would reach its peak with Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969).
The morbid humor of For a Few Dollars More
has likewise infected the American action film, and is clearly evident in the
sarcastic benedictions muttered by stone-faced Stallones and Schwarzeneggers as
they coldly dispatch their foes.
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy reviewed. Elbert Ventura from Slate, June 27, 2007
Dragan Antulov retrospective [9/10]
For a Few Dollars More Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
The Dollars Trilogy: For A Few Dollars More
For a Few Dollars More Fistful of Leone
Ted Prigge retrospective [4/4]
DVD Verdict - The Sergio Leone Anthology [Bill Gibron]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review The Sergio Leone Anthology
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] The Sergio Leone Anthology
Paul Newman and Sergio Leone Are Still Golden, page 1 - Movies ... Jim Ridley from The Seattle Times
Edward Copeland on Film [Odienator] The Leone Trilogy
DVD Journal David Beaks, The Leone Trilogy
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
For a Few Dollars More Comparison (MGM region 1 vs. region 2) Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE
UGLY
Italy Spain (161 mi) 1966 ‘Scope 2005 Special DVD version (179 mi)
All
Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
The last and grandest film in the "Dollars" trilogy, Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966) is actually a prequel, featuring Clint Eastwood's serape-less Blondie in a search for stolen gold during the Civil War. While the titular trio's quest seems simple, Leone renders the proceedings epic through the constant intrusions of a chaotic, war-torn universe. Rather than an ideal space, Leone's widescreen desiccated western landscape is a harsh environment ruled by brutality, but, as Eastwood's ironically labeled "Good" affirms upon witnessing a fruitless military battle, state-sanctioned bloodshed is even more destructive than individual venality. Still, Blondie's dry wit and Eli Wallach's buffoonish "Ugly" inject the violence with dark humor, while Ennio Morricone's famed score alternates between stately and tongue-in-cheek. In a final shootout set in an enormous circular cemetery and composed of extreme close-ups of the three leads, Leone sends Eastwood's Man With No Name out on a properly operatic yet wry note. The "good" triumphs, but, in Leone's West, it's all relative. Greeted with critical disdain for its stylistic flourishes and sadism, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly became a hit, and Leone's artistic influence can be seen from Eastwood's directorial work to John Woo's action theatrics.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Michael Glover Smith
Sergio Leone is to the "spaghetti western," a popular subgenre of American-set westerns made in Europe in the 60s and 70s, what Jean-Pierre Melville is to the French crime film: Leone, like Melville, made outrageously entertaining movies that reflected a punch-drunk love for American genre fare, the conventions of which he inflated to a near-operatic scale after refracting them through his own unique cultural sensibility. And THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY remains the high point of both Leone's career and the spaghetti western in general. It's the third and most ambitious installment of a trilogy (preceded by 1964's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and 1965's FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, both of which also feature Clint Eastwood in his career-defining "Man with No Name" persona) but this Hollywood co-production works perfectly as a stand-alone feature. The plot concerns the misadventures of the title trio (filled out by Lee Van Cleef as the heavy and Eli Wallach, the true heart of the film, as the Mexican bandit Tuco), all of whom are in search of $200,000 in buried gold coins. That these events unfold against the backdrop of a borderline-Surrealist, European's-eye-view of the American Civil War somehow feels ineffably right: Leone's exuberant visual style combines with Ennio Morricone's legendarily innovative score to lend THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY a singular tone that is at once comical, cartoonish, and, in Dave Kehr's astute phrase, "inexplicably moving."
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Eric Henderson from Slant magazine
It seems inconceivable now that
spaghetti westerns, specifically those served up by Sergio Leone, were once
considered to be somehow less faithful to the western tradition than
Hollywood's crippled efforts of the same time period (look no further than the
musical Leone's star Clint Eastwood made a few years down the road: Paint
Your Wagon). The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (shorn of nearly 20
minutes for its original American release) is surely one of the most compelling
validations of the western genre's most elemental touchstones: the quiet
stoicism of men who were islands unto themselves, the necessity of according
respect to that unforgiving bitch that is The Land, and the malleable but
unquestionably unbreakable divisions between good and evil. Eastwood's Man with
No Name might have a latently (postmodern) unscrupulous streak in his race
against Lee Van Cleef's "Bad" and Eli Wallach's "Ugly" to
find $200,000 worth of buried gold, but the scene where Eastwood covers a dying
Civil War soldier with his trench coat confirms that there's really nowhere
near as much room for debating his moral alignment as there was even in the
later work of John Ford. Perhaps audiences viewing the film during its original
release were looking for that moral clarity that characterizes
"respectable" westerns and were thrown off by Leone's unbridled
cinematic flamboyance. The director's uniquely impassioned and architectural
Italian sensibilities turned the American Southwest (or, rather, whatever
portion of Spain his producers decided would suffice) into a dreamlike terrain
of bombed-out ghost towns that still invariably host cathartic shoot-outs,
amphitheater-shaped graveyards that seem nearly a mile in diameter, and wide
vistas that alternate with extreme close-ups without nary a medium-shot buffer
in sight. And, of course, those alternately lush or obtuse snatches of Ennio
Morricone music that you're never quite sure are merely musical accompaniment
and not possibly emanating from the action on the screen (as when a Confederate
P.O.W. band plays accompaniment to a prolonged beating or when desert birds
seem to be whistling along to the signature fourth-inversion riff). He
sometimes sacrifices lucidity for effect (as when Wallach's motormouth
inexplicably goes all tacitly Van Cleef for one compelling scene as he
"shops" for a new gun), Leone's cinema, now fully embraced by
cinephiles and fanboys alike, is practically a genre unto itself. But his
synchronicity with Eastwood's protagonist (and, thereby, the cowboy mythos en
toto) as a rogue, conflicted iconoclast casts him in the same rarified echelon
of directors who, like Ford or Huston, clearly attempted to live out their own
legends.
The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly - TCM.com
Lang Thompson and Jeff
Stafford
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(1966) is one of those films everybody feels like they've seen even if they
haven't. It's inspired numerous other movies, scenes from it have been parodied
or re-created in several films and TV shows, and the theme song even went to #2
on the pop music charts. Proof of the film's power, though, is that it's
survived all this activity and still seems fresh every time you see it.
Like so many spaghetti Westerns, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a tough-minded tale
about changing loyalties and pure human greed. It follows the adventures of
three men who are after hidden gold: a mysterious loner (Clint Eastwood), a
bandit (Eli Wallach) and a bounty hunter (Lee Van Cleef). Of course it's not
quite that simple. Neither of the men trust each other--with good reason--and
there's a little matter of the Civil War raging around them. Leone stated,
"What do 'good', 'bad' and 'ugly' really mean? We all have some bad in us,
some ugliness, some good. And there are people who appear to be ugly, but when
we get to know them better, we realise that they are more worthy."
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
was the third film director/writer Sergio Leone made with Clint Eastwood, a
cinematic trilogy of sorts that established the actor as a major star and put
Leone on the international map. In fact, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly originally was
intended to have the word "dollars" in the title to capitalize on the
previous two films (A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More).
They made a great impact in the U.S. because even though made over a space of
several years the three films were released here in barely a single year
(January to December 1967). Unfortunately, conflicts between Eastwood and Leone
came to a head during the dubbing sessions for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the two never
worked together again, though Eastwood has always been quick to point out his
debt to Leone.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
had a budget of $1.2 million (more than the previous two films combined) with
$250,000 and a percentage of some profits going to Eastwood. (Shortly before
filming, Eastwood worked with the great director Vittorio De Sica for a segment
of the anthology film The Witches, 1966.) Leone was always a history
student and did extensive research into the period, using some of Matthew
Brady's famous photographs among other documents in the Library of Congress.
Leone claimed with some truth that his films were more accurate than most
American-made Westerns (even if they were filmed in Spain). They aren't
documentary re-creations, though, since you can find a few anachronisms like
dynamite a few years before it was invented.
When shooting started, the film's working title was The Magnificent Rogues
which didn't quite fit the three gritty, sometimes ruthless characters;
screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni eventually came up with the famous final title
(which is the same in Italian with only the order changed). Though Leone
usually followed scripts very closely, Wallach's character was given more and
more space as production progressed, something that couldn't have pleased
Eastwood. In fact some of this uncertainty lasted into the final editing and
dubbing stages when parts of the story were still being reworked by Leone.
(Several filmed scenes, including a love scene with Eastwood's character and a
local woman, were eliminated entirely.)
The mix of acting styles and Leone's epic visual sense are perfectly
complemented by the music of Ennio Morricone. The composer worked on all but
one of Leone's films (his first, The Colossus of Rhodes, 1961) and
stamped his unique style so thoroughly on the genre that spaghetti Western
parodies always try to mimic him. For the final shoot-out of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
Leone filmed to Morricone's pre-recorded music, a technique he would take much
further in the next film, Once Upon a Time in the West. (Leone
reportedly didn't like to be in the screening room with Morricone because the
composer would laugh at everything, intentionally funny or not.)
In an interview with Gregory J. M. Catsos for Filmfax Magazine, Eli
Wallach recalls the making of The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly: "It was a dirty, hot location. We filmed in Rome,
Italy, and Almera, Spain. That was the most exhausting film I ever did. The
studio had no concept of time. You'd go to work when the sun came up, and
worked until the sun went down. We worked this way, six days a week, for four
months. The living conditions weren't that good, either. They didn't have any
trailers or air conditioning and didn't provide for the social amenities. One
day, we were shooting out in the hot desert in southern Spain. After one scene,
I said to the director, Sergio Leone, "I have to go to the bathroom, Where
is it?" Leone pointed to the desert sand and shouted, "There!"
"Leone was very particular about how to make this film. He wanted it to
have strong visual moments, and it did, likeme about to be hanged, or the
closeups on the eyes. He used a lot of close-ups instead of dialogue....When I
met Leone, he was wearing a belt and suspenders. I thought, "How unusual
that is!" So I told him I wanted my character 'Tuco' to dress that way.
Leone's answer was that he wanted me to play this scummy outlaw with "no
holster for his gun!" I asked, "Where do I carry the gun, then?"
He explained, "You'll have a concealed gun tied to a rope; a lanyard,
around your neck." "So," I asked, "the gun dangles between
my legs, right?" He said, "Yes. When you want the gun you twist your
shoulders and then the gun will be in your hands." I asked him to show me
how I could shoot a gun this way. He said "Like this!" He put the
lanyard on, twisted his shoulder, and the gun hit him right in the groin!
Undaunted, he said, "On second thought, just put the gun in your
pocket." (Oddly enough, Wallach wasn't even the first choice for the role:
Leone had wanted Charles Bronson who was already committed to The Dirty
Dozen but would later appear in Once Upon a Time in the West.)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
confused most critics when it first appeared, getting mostly negative reviews
("dramatically feeble and offensively sadistic" according to Variety).
There were even concerns about its length - whether audiences would sit through
the whole thing and whether theatres could schedule enough showings in a day to
turn a profit. But The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
was a popular success and its true value as a modern classic became recognized
with such folk as Leonard Maltin rightly proclaiming it the
"quintessential spaghetti Western."
Dragan Antulov retrospective [10/10]
Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy reviewed. Elbert Ventura from Slate, June 27, 2007
Images Movie Journal John Nudge
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
Salon (Max Garrone) dvd review
Film Freak Central review [Travis Hoover] on Restored, Uncut version
100 films Lucas Mcnelly
The Dollars Trilogy: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Fistful of Leone
not coming to a theater near you (David Carter) review
Ted Prigge retrospective [4/4]
DVD Verdict - The Sergio Leone Anthology [Bill Gibron]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review The Sergio Leone Anthology
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] The Sergio Leone Anthology
Paul Newman and Sergio Leone Are Still Golden, page 1 - Movies ... Jim Ridley from The Seattle Times
Edward Copeland on Film [Odienator] The Leone Trilogy
DVD Journal David Beaks, The Leone Trilogy
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web, also reviewing ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1968
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] in 2003
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
USA Italy (175 mi) 1968 ‘Scope
The Western is dead - or so they tell
us. Long live Leone's timeless monument to the death of the West itself,
rivalled only by Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for the title
of best ever made. We're talking favourite films here, so only superlatives
will do. Worth starting at the beginning: a stakeout at a deserted station, Jack Elam
and a fly - the most audacious credit sequence in film history. A soundtrack
never bettered by any Dolby knob-twiddlers - unnatural sounds of 'silence' and
Morricone's greatest score, handing Bronson his identity with a plangent,
shivery harmonica riff, carrying Leone's crane shots upwards over a railhead
township, clip-clopping Robards into the rigorous good/bad/ugly schema.
Countercasting (sadist Fonda) and location choice (Monument Valley) that render
an iconic base for Leone and collaborators (Bertolucci and Argento, no less) to
perform their revisionist/revolutionary critique of the Classic American (i.e.
Fordian) Creation Myth. And more, too. Critical tools needed are eyes and ears
- this is Cinema.
Once Upon a Time in the West Nick Schager from Slant magazine
Sergio Leone made a fistful of great films, but
none better than 1968's ode to the fading American frontier, Once Upon a
Time in the West. The film, about four lives headed on a collision course
in a grimy, ramshackle town of the Western plains, is set against the backdrop
of the encroaching railroad, which promises to bring civilization to this
unruly, harsh country. And with progress, the coal-devouring locomotives also
bring death—death for the American West's unspoiled beauty, death for an
uncomplicated rugged individualism, and death to the cowboy, who has no place
in the newfangled modern world of corporate villainy and commerce.
Leone, an Italian stylist who made a career out of transforming melodramatic
genre pictures into wild, fiery, violent statements about the country that had
inspired his cinematic dreams, uses West as a means of dramatizing that
fateful instant when the Old West of gunslingers and shootouts mutated into the
New West of manifest destiny-inspired greed and corruption. But as its
fairytale title implies, the film is also interested in casting this historical
turning point as a parable about the death of the Western itself. Much like The
Wild Bunch (except with more beauty and pathos than Sam Peckinpah would
ever deign to muster), Leone wants his multi-pronged fable to be not only
history, but myth as well.
This mythologizing was a somewhat predictable turn for Leone—his cinematic
landscapes had grown more expansive and daring throughout the course of his
Clint Eastwood-headlined Man With No Name trilogy. On the other hand, West's
devotion to classic Western iconography and archetypes can be seen as a mildly
startling departure from the revisionist Westerns he had become famous for. The
Man With No Name trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars
More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) was infamous for its
upending of traditional Western tropes, the most obvious being the notion of
the cowboy as a noble, stabilizing force of purity and honesty.
With West, Leone made certain that surface similarities existed between
the film's characters and those found in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—Charles
Bronson's stoic harmonica-playing loner can be equated with Eastwood's
"Good" Man With No Name; Henry Fonda's vicious Frank is Lee Van
Cleef's "Bad" Sentenza; and Jason Robards' wily bandit
This modus operandi can be gleaned from the film's riveting opening scene, in
which a trio of rough-and-tumble killers quietly awaits the arrival of a train
at a dilapidated local station. The men, calmly standing in the noonday sun
with the sweaty swagger and bloodthirsty eyes of desperados, are stock
characters from a hundred previous Westerns. The way Leone orchestrates their
waiting game, however, is something akin to the way Beethoven arranged his
symphonies. Using a mixture of intense close-ups (Leone's signature stylistic
flourish) and painterly long shots, and casting the scene in almost complete
silence (thus enhancing the immediacy of the environment's sounds), Leone
instills this rather routine set-up with near biblical grandiosity.
One of the men's vain attempts to dissuade a fly from resting on his face
becomes transfixing in Leone's tight Panavision close-up, and the director's
patient camera wisely lingers on these nasty, no-nonsense thugs just long
enough to instill in them a sense of legendary vileness. When the train finally
arrives with Bronson in tow, Leone marries Ennio Morricone's hauntingly skuzzy
guitar riffs to a gorgeous deep-focus shot angled upward from the ground near
the trio's boots, with Bronson a tiny but nonetheless imposing speck in the distance.
The effect is a transcendent moment that encapsulates the quintessential,
doom-laden instance in all Westerns that occurs right before hands flash down
to holsters and gunfire erupts.
Bronson's Harmonica (he gets no formal name, as befitting a ghostly renegade)
has arrived in town to meet with Henry Fonda's wicked, power-hungry Frank.
After disposing of Frank's goons at the station, Harmonica slowly finds himself
drawn into a drama involving Claudia Cardinale's Jill McBain—the feisty and
jaw-droppingly gorgeous widow of a slain local businessman—and Robards' scruffy
outlaw Cheyenne, who's being framed for the murder of Mr. McBain and his three
children. Since Leone shows us their execution, we know that Frank has killed
the McBains, but the motivation for their murder is revealed with great
prudence.
Repeatedly, West's most flawlessly executed moments involve acts of
exposure or revelation. Each character's face is initially revealed to the
audience either through measured zooms or graceful, swirling pans around the
character's body, and Leone uses his elegantly dreamy pace to consistently
tantalize us with hints of things to come. Mrs. McBain, a former prostitute,
arrives from
Much has been made about the influence of Italian filmmakers Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci—who are
credited with helping Leone conceive the story (written by Leone and Sergio
Donati)—on the film. Still, even though West's pensive, tragic
romanticism recalls vintage Bertolucci, and its abundant use of visual and
aural signifiers brings to mind Argento, the film's seductive interplay between
image and sound—a relationship that would reach its apex with the director's
final film Once Upon a Time in America—is trademark Leone. The director
harmoniously links disparate sounds and images: the buzz of a fly or a gunshot
segues into the howling whistle of a train and the squeaking of a weathervane
becomes the plaintive whine of a harmonica. Leone similarly uses the sounds of
the natural world as a means of slowly revealing information—when the crickets
stop chirping while McBain and his kids prepare for Mrs. McBain's welcoming
feast, it's clear that trouble is brewing—and punctuates the action with
Morricone's passionate, haunting score.
Leone employs his florid, expressionistic directorial style to convey an
overriding tone of wistful resignation over the land barons' arrival. Although
Mr. Morton, the sickly railroad tycoon who wants McBain's strategically-situated
plot of land, pays the dastardly Frank to do his dirty work, Leone reserves
compassion for this frail man intent on fulfilling his dream of seeing the
Inside his opulent cable car, Morton asks Frank (who is seated in Morton's
throne-like chair), "How does it feel sitting behind that desk,
Frank?" Frank, sensing the changing tides, replies, "It's almost like
holding a gun. Except much more powerful." Frank desperately desires the
power that Morton's money and influence commands, and the film becomes, in
part, a portrait of his failure to straddle the line between old world (shoot
first, ask questions never) and new world (wielding money as a weapon)
criminality. "You've learned some new ways," Harmonica tells Frank
before their climactic showdown, "even if you haven't given up the old
ones." This, ultimately, is his undoing. Frank dies not because of a lack
of proficiency with a six-shooter, but from an inability to wholeheartedly reject
the gun in favor of the checkbook.
If Frank's death provides a fitting conclusion to the film's conventional
"good vs. evil" conflict, it provides little closure for Harmonica or
Images Movie Journal John Nudge
Once Upon a Time in the West - TCM.com Lang Thompson
Once
Upon a Time in the West (1969) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Lang Thompson
Sound in Film The Importance of Sound in Film – Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ by Stefann Herrmann, November 13, 2000
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]
DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review
PopMatters (Elbert Ventura) review [Special Collector's Edition]
The Digital Bits dvd review [Special Collector's Edition] Todd Doogan and Bill Hunt
Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers
Once Upon a Time in The West Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
Once Upon a Time in the West Fistful of Leone
Raging Bull Mike Lorefice and Vanes Naldi
Ted Prigge retrospective [4/4]
100 films Lucas Mcnelly
Kinocite K. H. Brown
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale
Apollo Movie Guide [Ryan Cracknell]
The Village Voice [Chuck Stephens]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web, also reviewing THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE
aka: Duck,
You Sucker
Italy
(157 mi) 1971 ‘Scope
Initial U.S. theatrical release (120 mi)
Having already, in Once Upon a Time
in the West, taken energetic liberties with the typical (John) Fordian
Western, it's not surprising that Leone should have taken a sideswipe at
another of the director's stereotypes, the revolutionary Irishman, in the
second part of his trilogy of political fables. But the specific IRA background
of Coburn's Sean is as ultimately unimportant as the specific Mexican setting:
with characteristic flamboyance, Leone is more concerned to build a composite
of the all-purpose, all-causes revolutionary 'John Doe' from Sean's informed
commitment and the naïve brute force of Steiger's Juan. The most wry of the
political spaghettis, and wholly wonderful.
A
Fistful of Dynamite (Duck, You Sucker) - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
During the Mexican Revolution (1913-1914), Juan, a peasant
turned outlaw, forms an unlikely alliance with Sean Mallory, an expatriate IRA
terrorist and dynamite expert. Together the duo plots to rob a bank but in the
process, Juan becomes an unwitting participant in Sean's political agenda.
Through a series of comic misadventures, Juan becomes a local folk hero but he
also incurs the wrath of the Federal Army who take revenge on his family and
village.
A Fistful of Dynamite
(1971) is known by many titles; in Italy it was titled Once Upon a Time the
Revolution and when it was first released in the U.S., it bore the title Duck,
You Sucker. Producer/director Sergio Leone originally offered the project
to Peter Bogdanovich and then to Sam Peckinpah. The latter accepted the
assignment but then the financial backers insisted on a less problematic
director. Leone, who only wanted to produce, gave the film to his assistant
Giancarlo Santi. As for the casting, Leone wanted Jason Robards, Jr. to play
Juan and Malcolm McDowell as Sean. Once again the studio wanted more
established stars so Leone hired Rod Steiger and James Coburn though it meant
deviating from his original premise of an older man becoming politicized by a
younger one. Ironically, Coburn had originally been approached to play the 'Man
With No Name' in Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) but turned it down,
paving the way for Clint Eastwood's international success.
Once production began on A Fistful of Dynamite,
Steiger and Coburn insisted on being directed by Leone and not Santi,
explaining that they had agreed to do the film with the understanding that
Leone was directing it. The director later commented that Steiger "thought
of the film as very serious and intellectual and had a tendency to come off in
the style of Pancho Villa. Once he understood his mistake, everything went very
well. Coburn, that's something else. With him, it's the star system: you
explain the scene to him, he says "yes, sir" and off he goes and does
it."
A Fistful of Dynamite
is permeated with the political disillusionment of the sixties and its numerous
depictions of human slaughter reflect the same sense of futility that marked
America's involvement in Viet Nam. At the same time, the film often veers off
into sequences of broad comedy creating an unusual Western hybrid that swings
from high tragedy to low humor. With the added complication of a title change
and some severe cuts in the English language version (the Italian release was
twenty minutes longer), A Fistful of Dynamite
failed to reach a wide audience. Yet fans of spaghetti Westerns will find much
to enjoy here, from Steiger's flamboyant performance to the spectacular action
sequences to Ennio Morricone's haunting score - the 'Sean' theme is guaranteed
to stick with you for days. And critics continue to champion the film for its
unorthodox depiction of opposing ideologies - revolutionary (Sean) versus
anti-revolutionary (Juan) - with no easy answers for either side.
A Fistful of
Dynamite/ Duck, You Sucker/ Giù la testa • Senses of Cinema
Karli Lukas, October 5, 2003
Raging
Bull Movie Reviews review Mike Lorefice and Vanes Naldi
A Fistful of
Dynamite
Fistful of Leone
DVD Verdict - The Sergio Leone Anthology
[Bill Gibron]
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review The Sergio Leone Anthology
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] The Sergio Leone Anthology
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA
USA
Italy (229 mi) 1984
‘Scope Initial U.S.
theatrical release (139 mi)
In 1968, Noodles (De Niro) returns to
New York an old man after 35 years of exile, ridden by guilt. His cross-cut
memories of the Jewish Mafia's coming of age on the Lower East Side in 1923,
their rise to wealth during Prohibition, and their Götterdämmerung in
1933, provide the epic background to a story of friendship and betrayal, love
and death. While Leone's vision still has a magnificent sweep, the film finally
subsides to an emotional core that is sombre, even elegiac, and which centres
on a man who is bent and broken by time, and finally left with nothing but an
impotent sadness.
Reverse
Shot review
Nick Pinkerton
For his slyly political Scope comic books of a Cinecitta
West conjured from grandiosely recalled childhood serials, Sergio Leone may be
remembered as the penultimate director of movie-movies, but in his final
decades-in-the-making effort the filmmaker took a downright literary turn.
Leone’s sole outing into the other unmistakably American genre is a huge,
woozy, opium-scented thing that reverently and lovingly exhumes pieces of
classical gangster and noir films (Fred Zinnmeman’s Act of Violence,
among others) and replays them, poker-faced, through a lyric filter of Dickens,
Gatsby, and Proust (“What’ve you been doin’?” “Been goin’ to bed early,” goes
one exchange early in the film). The result is something uniquely beguiling and
labyrinthine; you can try to hold on to a different one of its thematic threads
with each viewing, only to be hypnotized and submerged as they tangle, unsnarl,
and finally dead-end into the dumb grin of Robert De Niro’s Noodles. Along the
way you get popcorn American history, startling sepia sexual candor, rumination
on the vagaries of memory, the immortal Tuesday Weld as a jazzy, jizzy nympho,
and, yes, more than a few stillborn subplots that sputter off into the nouveau
night. The 229-minute film contained on this DVD is the longest ever
domestically available, but adds only a few minutes of graphic violence to the
long-standard “Director’s Cut.” One is left only to imagine the fabled version
of 40+ minutes greater length. Very simply one of the finest filmic
achievements of the Eighties or any decade, Once Upon a Time in America
could only grow greater with its girth.
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Sergio Leone was a master of genre revisionism, and yet it's funny to find that few people characterize his final film, Once Upon a Time in America, as an example of such. A hallucinatory, melancholic meditation on grief, ambition, and betrayal, Leone's film purports to be a gangster film but, in reality, is something more like a romantic evocation of a gangster film. Like his groundbreaking spaghetti westerns (of which Once Upon a Time in the West, coming soon to DVD, is the finest), Leone uses familiar genre tropes as a means of creating a dream-like collage of images and sounds that seek to convey an emotion, a passion, rather than a traditional narrative logic. In Once Upon a Time in America, Leone marries a European art-film sensibility -- embodied by the film's two framing devices and an intricate flashback structure -- to his flamboyant and slightly cartoonish trademark cinematic mannerisms (tight close-ups, charged revealing shots). The result is a haunting, thematically complex movie that, instead of a straightforward genre film, works like an elegiac poem about the cost one pays for dreaming big and trusting blindly.
Childhood pals-turned-Prohibition-era gangsters Noodles (a powerfully understated Robert De Niro) and Max (James Woods) are the film's yin and yang, polar opposites who are nonetheless inextricably bound to one another by a shared dream of power and success. The film follows an elderly Noodles in the 1960s after he is mysteriously summoned back to New York. His journey home leads to recollections of his youthful escapades -- drinking and fighting with friends, running petty scams, and his love affair with the ethereal Deborah (played by Jennifer Connelly as a girl and Elizabeth McGovern as a woman) -- and eventual rise to prominence in the crime world. Along with pals Cockeye and Patsy, Noodles and Max become bootleggers and business owners, and eventually become entwined with a union leader (Treat Williams) who's slowly shedding his idealistic morality.
Noodles' journey is an act of self-discovery in which the veil of illusions he has lived under throughout his adult life is torn away to reveal a reality of greed, treachery and pathetic wastefulness. Yet after Noodles discovers that what he thought was real was simply a carefully-executed deception, the story's reliability is called into question by a final image of a stoned De Niro brightly smiling at the camera (through a veil, no less) in an opium den. The implication is that the entire film has, perhaps, been merely one petty criminal's guilt-ridden fantasy from his spiritual deathbed. However, answering this tantalizing question -- Is the film a dream? -- is beside the point. Leone is interested in the mood, the atmosphere, and the grand gestures of the gangster novel primarily as a means of reaching some larger truth about human interaction - how man's dreams and desires are driven by feelings of self-interest, self-loathing, and self-doubt, and how one's motives are always inscrutable to others. It's an entrancing and stirring epic from one of the cinema's most expressionistic artists, and one of the most consistently fascinating films I've ever seen.
As for the DVD, Warner Bros. has done an absolutely smashing job with the audio and video restoration. A few minor specks of dirt can be seen on the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, and the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack isn't quite as enveloping as one might like, but there's really nothing to complain about when it comes to this audio/video presentation. The extras, on the other hand, are a bit of a letdown. We get an all-too-brief 20-minute excerpt from the documentary Once Upon a Time: Sergio Leone, and a commentary from Time magazine critic Richard Schickel that, simply because of its length (the film is, after all, 4 hours long), provides only sporadically enlightening material.
Movie-Vault.com
(Paul Coughlin) review
"Once upon a Time in America" was Sergio Leone’s
final film and represented a change of genre for a filmmaker who mostly worked
within the confines of the Western. Here he is examining the gangster genre,
re-presenting the familiar conditions of the genre and reworking them to create
an intricate and detailed investigation of a world of big-time aspirants with
small-time capabilities.
Fundamentally Once upon a Time in America is the story of Jewish gangster David
“Noodles” Aaronson (played as an adult by Robert De Niro), his childhood in the
slums of New York, his brief rise to a place of prominence within the fertile
world of prohibition America and his eventual old-age in which he loses
everything, including the belief he has had in his life. The narrative plays
out in three section– 1921, 1933 and 1968–and explores the relationships
Noodles cultivates with various people and importantly examines the
relationship he destroys with his childhood love Deborah (played as a young
girl by Jennifer Connelly and then by Elizabeth McGovern as a woman). Noodles
seems to believe he has a right to Deborah’s love but almost every action he
takes or movement he makes blocks his opportunity to ensure his dream will be
realised. Leone constructs the narrative in a series of flashbacks and
flash-forwards which serve to disrupt the comfortable flow of events. The film
operates like a hallucination or a dream; jump cuts, extreme violence and gross
betrayal recall the impression of a nightmare. Yet, as cynical and despairing
as Leone’s film is, it is ultimately a celebration of the value of friendship
and devotion and it’s lyrical moments–many between the young Noodles and
Deborah–offer an incontestable promotion of humanity.
Leone strategically employs the gangster genre so as to undercut its usual
concerns. Gangster fiction has had a tradition of strong-willed likeable
criminals whose illegal affairs have held a special attraction for the viewer.
Paul Muni and Al Pacino both played variations on the Scarface character but
they both had one thing in common, a charm and charisma borne of unbreakable
confidence. The gangsters of Once Upon a Time in America are quite simply
losers. When Noodles returns to New York after a self-imposed thirty-five year
exile he tells his old friend Moe: ‘You can always tell the winners at the
starting gate - the winners and the losers.’ Noodles then assesses himself as a
loser and his estimation is absolutely appropriate. Robert De Niro’s
performance as the adult incarnation of Noodles in Once Upon a Time in America
is a perfectly pitched encapsulation of a dejected born-loser. Leone’s film is
set clearly in a modern world where the ways of the mythical hero of his
earlier Dollars Trilogy is impossible. With Once upon a Time in America Leone
examines a world that surveys political corruption, institutionalised violence
and bloody betrayal.
Betrayal and friendship is the axis on which Leone’s film twists and turns back
and forth in time. It is the friendship between Noodles and his long-time
associate Max (James Wood plays the adult Max) which chiefly concerns Leone.
Companionship is a key element in each of Leone’s previous films and with Once
upon a Time in America he represents it as a binding and unbending human
connection which survives all manner of torment and deception. Ultimately
Noodles and Max will fall out and each will betray the other in one way or
another but their friendship and the kinship on which it was founded remains
intact. In the film’s penultimate sequence the two elderly friends come
together and discuss, in veiled terms, the bond they once shared and how it now
ties them together despite the impossible predicament they are now in. Although
it is not spelled out this scene demonstrates Leone’s thesis, that friendship
can endure anything.
DVD Times Mike Sutton
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers
Raging Bull Movie Reviews review Mike Lorefice and Vanes Naldi
Once Upon a Time in America Fistful of Leone
Once Upon a Time in America: An Experimental Epic Roberto Bartual from Fistful of Leone
DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review [Special Edition]
The Digital Bits dvd review [Special Edition] Robert A. Harris
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Leopold, Nanouk
GUERNSEY B- 82
Netherlands Belgium
A film showing Iranian restraint with a European sensibility, reminding me of the meandering aimlessness of L’AVVENTURA, only instead of discovering a friend is missing on a mysterious island, a woman discovers a friend has committed suicide. The film deals with the aftermath of the unexplained internalization, where words are useless, and one loses any sense of what came before, as she becomes engulfed in an entirely new perspective. The Dutch director was present and indicated her earlier influence was Tarkovsky in film school, but that now, her taste runs closer to Atom Egoyan and Michael Haneke. Personally, I found Kiarostami as one of this film’s biggest influences, as ever since TASTE OF CHERRY, filmmakers around the world are placing cameras inside cars, all heading nowhere, and where nothing in particular happens inside the car except an internal realization that can’t be explained. Add to that Antonioni’s wandering souls searching for an explanation of the meaninglessness of it all. The problem with this concept of making a film that goes nowhere is that it’s obviously been done before, and this film really fails to open any new ground, though it’s told in an interesting manner, as you can get lost in the film’s quiet and meandering lengthy silences.
The director indicated the story began as a woman pregnant in another
country, that’s it, claiming the sensibility is so different in a foreign country. From that, she gave the Dutch woman, Anna
(Maria Kraakman), an attractive husband and child at home, a purposeful job
working on water irrigation projects in Egypt Guernsey
is just a tax shelter where the rich grow richer. In her rounds following her husband, Anna
discovers he’s having an affair and all but stops speaking to him. Their world at home is oppressive and routine. Her outlet is her travel, where at least the
world looks different, and people behave in a different manner. Sometimes the slightest change in your
routine offers one a different perspective.
When they visit her father on his new home on the island, its palatial
splendor resembles the Alhambra
WOLFSBERGEN B- 81
Oh
what a tangled web we weave,
When
first we practise to deceive!
—Sir Walter Scott from his epic poem Marmion, 1808
Moody and atmospheric, beautifully shot on ‘Scope by Richard von Oosterhout, but overly detached, so much so that one may eventually lose interest altogether. This would have to be described as post or neo-Antonioni, as it delves completely into the interiors of people’s lives, which are revealed by the exact framing of the exterior shots. This is another one of those interconnecting stories, where we’re initially introduced to several woman whose lives intersect, but eventually the men in their lives are included as well. Nearly wordless, where the camera barely moves at all, every shot however is highly stylized and carefully composed, featuring characters that barely speak to one another, where the spaces between them becomes an ever widening abyss, where even they lose interest in one another, except for the necessary family connections which by the end are intimately gentle, but still separated by a vast interior void. Opening with a static shot of a forest, where only the degree of light changes, where we see a prospective buyer examining a white-toned apartment with giant windows overlooking a similar-looking forest, which turns out to be a facsimile, as everyone’s lives eventually return to a house with a giant back yard which leads to that opening forest. Following her earlier work GUERNSEY (2005), another near wordless film studying the aftermath of death, this film deals with the prelude, where the family patriarch has sent out a letter to his family that later in the summer he intends to end it all. Everyone’s lives are too busy dealing with their own shortcomings and separations to take it seriously, but after a series of relationship adjustments, most all of which end badly, they all congregate in his home by the woods. Interestingly, his favorite past time is listening to a late Beethoven quartet, where the stereo system has an ongoing sound gap, so this gorgeously lyrical music keeps being interrupted by these nagging gaps of silence. “It doesn’t matter,” he says, “As long as you know the music well.”
Much like the earlier German film YELLA, Leopold fills the screen with banal detail, where the rhythms of ordinary life are mostly shot in silence, where there are no great dramatic performances, mostly everyone keeps to themselves. And when the characters make an effort to communicate no matter what, where their intrusion into other people’s space actually feels more like rape, the results are disastrous. Among the most affecting scenes are witnessing the children having to listen to their parents scream and fight with one another, where the older daughter (Merel van Houts) tends to break things, anything to change the perceived reality. The extent to which she suffers is brilliantly shown in what could be described as a Bergmanesque moment, or a cry from the wilderness, a shot of heightened family dysfunction which seems to alert all to a problem much larger than their own. This same daughter wakes early one morning and sees the presence of a wolf looming from the interior of the forest, a death metaphor that eventually connects all the characters together. I preferred the earlier work, but both of them together could serve as bookends, as the commonality of theme is situations where words are useless, a prelude and aftermath on death.
www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij)
Dutch director Nanouk Leopold comes into her own as a recognisable auteur with her third feature Wolfsbergen, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a Dutch family that plays to her strengths. Showcasing some of the most talented actors from the Dutch-language area as well as what can now be called Leopold’s signature cinema of silence, Wolfsbergen will find an appreciative niche audience in arthouses that are not afraid of extremely austere, high-quality goods. The film is part of the Forum here at the Berlinale and will probably rake in more money abroad than at home, where, undeservingly, Leopold’s pure cinema is something of an oddity in the local film landscape.
Guernsey, her previous feature which screened in Cannes as part of the Director’s Fortnight, made its intentions clear from the start and Wolfsbergen does likewise with a minutes-long shot of a dead pine forest in which the only movement is caused by dancing rays of sunlight that sometimes break through some unseen clouds. It is the director’s litmus test for the audience: if you become restless and impatient here, it is better to leave straight away. Short scenes then set up most of the characters, who all seem to have received a letter from aging family patriarch Konraad (Piet Kamerman), who announces he does not want to live beyond the first anniversary, coming up in summer, of his wife’s death by disease.
Rather than throwing the entire family in turmoil and fits of hysterics, nothing much happens. Konraad’s daughter Maria (Catherine ten Bruggencate), who cries when she reads the letter, has become estranged from her dentist husband Ernst (Jan Decleir) for an unknown reason and not even allows him into their shared bathroom. She continues to worry about a new flat where she intends to take Konraad as if nothing happened. Their daughter Sabine (Tamar van Dop) is too tired to read the letter at first and then puts off contacting her family members when her husband Onno (Fedja van Huêt, also the husband in Guernsey) informs her of its contents. Sabine’s sister Eva (Karins Smulders), who, after an abortion seems to cry about everything and nothing throughout the day, has not received a letter at all.
Though the Netherlands are well-known for allowing euthanasia within its borders, a glut of local Dutch films that treat this subject, including the recent Simon and Ik omhels je met duizend armen (A Thousand Kisses, with Ten Bruggencate in Konraad's situation) suggests the topic is still on the mind of many. The event is not the main theme of Wolfsbergen, however, but rather the entry point into the lives of the characters of the Wolfsbergen family, who all act differently upon hearing Konraad’s news but who are united in the fact they all fail to address it properly, leaving it to the men married into the family (Decleir, van Huêt and Oscar van Woensel, who plays Sabine’s beer-gulping ex) to see to the urgent emotional matters at hand. The women are too absorbed in their own problems, preferring to lie down rather than face the matters head-on, which somewhat ironically gives Konraad the peace he craves.
Like Guernsey, Wolfsbergen is not only filled with silences but also about silence. In her cinema, Leopold explores the types of silence that are very much part of life but are often ignored in film: the awkward silence between strangers or people who realise they barely know each other; the annoying silence between those who have become estranged; the deep-cutting silence after two siblings tell each other the truth or the beneficent silence between two lovers, who need not say a word to each other and can still be perfectly at ease. There is also the silence of being alone with one's thoughts, the deafening silence a person leaves behind after their death and the calm silence and allure of death through euthanasia.
The women in Wolfsbergen all seem to cloak themselves in silence as if it were a protective blanket, though often this only furthers their isolation. Konraad, who lives alone in the isolated family mansion surround by fields and forests, even has a broken old turntable that plays his vinyls with short squeaks of silence at every turn. "It doesn’t matter," he says, "As long as you know the music well". His explanation is key for not only his attitude to life but also, if inverted, for Leopold’s view of cinema: we know about the big moments in life and here she concentrates on the small moments, leaving it the viewer to fill in why, for example, Maria and Ernst are not communicating -- though some hints are given in editor Katharina Wartena's fluid alternation between the various storylines.
The rigidly composed cinematography, again by Richard van Oosterhout, is majestic and a major element in establishing the right mood. The film’s last scene is a both an incredible directorial coup de théâtre and Van Oosterhout’s moment to shine: a Dutch interior and an Italian master’s Body After the Deposition meet each other in perfect harmony. And again in silence. If you understand the tone of that silence, you will know if it is a happy ending.
Last Night With Riviera [Matt
Riviera]
Wolfsbergen comes to
An old widower sends a letter to all but one of his family members to inform
them of his upcoming suicide. The news is greeted with apparent indifference,
certainly not panic nor distress. His daughter Maria is estranged from her
husband Ernst, to whom she barely says a word, even though they share the same
house. She looks like she hasn't smiled in years.
Maria's own daughters aren't faring much better. The older daughter, Sabine, is
having an affair with her depressed ex-lover, while her own kids suffer under
the strain of their parents' difficult relationship. Sabine's younger sister
Eva is single, unlucky in love and has little to live for herself. Clearly the
sensitive one in the family, Eva cries all the time - which perhaps explain why
she never received a letter from the patriarch in the first place.
Leopold's new film is a great showcase for some excellent acting talent. The
director's minimalistic approach to dialogue, action and locations focuses our
attention on the performances. Long, static close-ups offer challenging
opportunities for the actors to convey complex - and contradictory - emotions,
often without opening their mouths.
Inded, each character in this slow but immensely rewarding drama seems locked
in a prison of silence (deconstructed in this great review).
The women have isolated themselves from the men in their lives, yet are clearly
suffering as a result. The men try to reach out to them but seem paralysed, as
if they didn't speak the same language. The letter, by failing to elicit proper
responses, is the catalyst which slowly sets events in motion, as the men who
have married into this disfunctional family start to take matters into their
own hands - for better or worse.
Composition is a key element in this carefully constructed film. Characters are
often shot through doorways, with a third of the frame hidden from view by a
wall, a screen or a piece of furniture. This device heightens the sense that
secrets are harboured, that the truth is partially obscured by the partitions
these characters have built around themselves. Sometimes these walls are real,
too. Architecture is very present in Wolfsbergen, from the small, grim
studio Maria is buying for her father to the austere building site Eva has
moved into.
Each scene is deliberately framed to reflect the barriers which keep everyone
apart. There's a vertical motif running throughout the first half of the film.
It starts with the opening, static shot of a forest, which lasts for several
minutes. Then every frame seems divided by vertical lines which isolate lone
human figures in invisible urban cages. Walls, corners, doorways, ladders,
flagpoles and scaffolding cut through nearly every frame like bars in a prison.
Wolfsbergen begins its silent journey in a bleak place, with a snapshot of
a family frozen under layers of ice. As the ice thaws, characters begin to
reach out to each other and the vertical motif starts to disappear.
Stylistically, the turning point occurs when Ernst - who has decided to offer
his father-in-law some company in his final days - hangs a clothes line in the
forest to dry out some sheets. This horizontal line breaks the vertical pattern
made here by the massive tree trunks while the white sheet acts as a peace
offering.
From then on the framing begins to reflect the possibility of intimacy, as
characters meet face to face, side by side, cheek to cheek, in a bathtub, on a
bed, around a fire. The discreet forces at play in this film - both in form and
content - sneak up on the viewer almost imperceptibly. Their cumulative effect
packs a mighty emotional punch, all the more powerful for its subtlety. The
superb ending is both simple and hopeful - a moving tableau which remains
etched in the viewer's mind long after the lights go up.
The Lumière Reader Mubarak Ali
Wolfsbergen (2007) Ferdy on Films
IT’S
ALL SO QUIET (Boven is het stil) B- 82
Netherlands Germany (93 mi)
2013 Website
From the maker of GUERNSEY (2005) and WOLFSBERGEN (2007), both films
with a post-Antonioni feel, this film as well feels heavily stylized,
oppressively so, delving into the bleak, interior lives of a few isolated
characters. Nearly wordless, where the
camera barely moves at all, every shot is carefully composed, featuring
characters that barely speak to one another, where the spaces between them
becomes an ever widening abyss, remaining separated by a vast interior
void. Based on Gerbrand Bakker’s award
winning novel The Twin, the story
concerns the chilly relationship between a father and son living in a farmhouse
raising cows and sheep, where the dutiful, middle-aged son Helmer (Jeroen
Willems, who died at age 50 before the film could be released) is forced to run
the farm on his own while also taking care of his aging father Vader (Henri
Garcin), a gruff patriarch used to having things done his way, who hasn’t yet
come to terms with his own physical deficiencies, as he can’t walk, but hates
being dependent upon others, especially after Helmer moves him to a bedroom
upstairs where he lays in bed alone, as if waiting to die. For Helmer’s part, the time spent with his
father couldn’t be more harsh and oppressive, where he wordlessly goes about
his business before leaving him alone, where the picture of his life is one
spent doing little more than performing chores, as the film uses a documentary
style of realism to show the meticulous nature of his dreary work while also
revealing how socially alone and isolated he is on the farm. Incorporated into the daily routine is a
visit from a dairy truck driver (Wim Opbrouk), who seems friendly enough, but
Helmer tends to avoid any extended involvement.
This is a film of quiet subtlety and conviction, where less is more. While the book mentions a dead twin brother,
where Helmer drops out of school to take his place fulfilling his family
obligations on the farm, the film only hints at the ongoing resentment between
father and son, as if he could never live up to his brother’s favored status in
the eyes of his father, suggesting the harsh realities may have also included
brutal beatings at the hand of his father.
The film is largely seen through Helmer’s eyes, where his stoic nature
is expressed through a powerful sense of alienation and detachment, where more
is hinted at in each relationship, especially with the arrival of a young
18-year old farmhand, Henk (Martijn Lakemeier), seen as a sturdy lad, but he
has no real aptitude for farmwork.
Instead more is revealed through long pauses or short gazes, suggesting
a homoerotic subtext, which may also explain the curt demeanor with the dairy
farmer. When a sexual moment actually
bubbles to the surface, it leads to disappointment and confusion, as the film
is not ready to explore anything openly, as everything remains deeply repressed
under the surface. Despite the presence
of a new young partner, the banality of Helmer’s existence is overwhelming,
where disappointment is very cleverly expressed in subdued measures, where two
playful young boys, presumably from a neighboring home, visit the farm every
now and then, but over time, only one comes to visit, as the other has lost all
interest. This may as well be the story
of Helmer’s life, as slowly, and certainly not by choice, the world around him
seems to lose all sense of fascination, while his life is one of unspoken
suffocation, as if time has literally passed him by.
QUEERTIQUES.com
[Roger Walker-Dack]
From the recent Berlin Film Festival comes this overwhelmingly sad tale of a closeted gay Dutch farmer whose intensely private and repressed life seems to be heading towards either the point of no-return or a major turning point. Helmer is 55 years old and when he is not attending to the few cattle and sheep he tends on this small isolated farm, he is looking after his aged father whose health is rapidly diminishing. Both are men of few words and it is very clear that even though they are dependent on each other, they can barely tolerate each other's company. In this slow pot-boiler of a story we only learn towards the very end, why the father and son loathe each other.
The middle-aged dairy truck driver who comes to collect the milk daily, is equally shy as Helmer, although he is obviously keen on the farmer. There is the definite possibility that Helmer feels a similar attraction but as he has been starved of any human contact for so long, he cannot respond to either the driver, or even to the female neighbor who offers to help care for his father. So the Driver announces he is quitting his job and leaving the area to go live with his sister.
When Helmer employs Henk an 18 year old to be a live-in farmhand, the young man turns out to be equally as lonely as him. He reaches out to Helmer one night in desperation, but he of course has no idea of how to even start to comfort the youth, so the lad soon leaves.
Despite it's slow pace and the unrelenting sadness of Helmer's solitude, there is something remarkable compelling in this tale of repression that ensures you are vested in its outcome. As his father fades rapidly, Helmer takes to re-decorating the Farmhouse for the first time in years. It is the first visible sign that he actually has any hope for his future when he will be totally alone. And then, amongst the mourners at his father's funeral, he spots the Dairy Driver who has returned to do more than just pay his respects.
The relief you feel as the movie ends is quickly shattered when you see from the credits that the movie is dedicated to the memory of the late Jeroen Willems who had played Helmer so superbly. It is a beautiful performance and a wonderful tribute to a remarkable actor.
Gerbrand Bakker's award-winning novel, The Twin, on which
Nanouk Leopold's laconic drama, It's All So Quiet is based, is a
different sort of beast than the film, having a similarly pastoral setting and
tone, but a plot that makes a distinct detour, maintaining the themes while
modifying the presentation of sexuality.
In Bakker's book, Helmer (Jeroen Willems) lives in the shadow of his dead twin.
He dropped out of school ostensibly to mirror the farmer lifestyle of his
brother, living in quiet isolation with his ailing father and quotidian
responsibilities. Similarly, the film represses causality, hinting at
resentment between Helmer and his father (Henri Garcin), hinting at a deceased
brother and a sense of hardness in paternal disappointment without exploiting
the concept of twin as inescapable shadow.
Instead, the love story and widow angle is dropped entirely in favour of
homosexual yearning as representation of subdued identity. Rather than
introducing a widow and a nephew as the book did, positing romantic
rejection—the widow chose Helmer's brother over him—the film modifies the
character of Henk (Martijn Lakemeier) into a passively violent, sexually
confused farmhand of no relation.
Demonstrating ambivalence towards male authority figures, he responds to his
new boss with simultaneous submission and petulance, unable to gain the
affection he desires within the context he needs. Their collective quiet within
the vacuum of expansive isolation manifests in implicit communication barriers
and an eventual physical expression. It's more revelatory in action than it is
sexualized, having less of a romantic context than the tense conversations
between Helmer and Johan (Wim Opbrouck), a dairy truck driver that makes his
romantic interests evident.
Like the novel, Leopold's contemplative, parabola of a film doesn't reveal its
hand through exposition, letting the action happen before it's explained. It
takes time to understand why Helmer seems to hate his father. Their banal
experience and the eventual exploration of death as form of reconciliation is
shown ritualistically through the changing of beds, awkward baths and a series
of terse, carefully worded exchanges that suggests mutual disdain.
This is also the case with Helmer himself. His inability to verbalize or act on
any of his desires demonstrates his resignation, so removed from the self that
his fumbling attempts to connect are barely discernable. As framed by intimate
camerawork and an earthy palette, this naturalistic, extremely subtle
performance—by the late Willems—is as cautiously rendered as the subject
matter.
Just as the novel took pages of seemingly mundane description to hint at a
bigger human truth and allude to a theme within the obsessive observation that
isolation, quiet and repetition brings, Leopold's film mostly observes
characters within drab surroundings, taking everything in and leaving it to us
to interpret what we see.
Berlin
Review: 'It's All So Quiet,' A Tender Tale of Death and Farming From Nanouk
Leopold Eric Kohn from Indiewire
Not much happens in "It's All So Quiet," a tender portrait of middle-aged frustrations set on a desolate farm, but nearly every moment is steeped in deep sadness. Dutch filmmaker Nanouk Leopold's adaptation of Gerbrand Bakker's bestselling novel moves with such extreme patience that it's borderline experimental, but the atmosphere ultimately provides a vessel for the tragic backstory only revealed once the feelings takes shape. By then, it's nearly an afterthought; "It's All So Quiet" foregrounds mood ahead of its context, universalizing the emotion therein.
For long stretches of time, Leopold merely sets the scene, then dwells in it. Middle-aged farmer Helmer (the late Jeroen Willems in one of his final credited projects) spends his long, somber days caring his ailing father Vader (Henri Garcin), a bedridden man frustrated by his extreme reliance on his son for the most basic of needs. In a seeming act of defiance to his demanding elder, Helmer moves Vader to the top floor of the farmhouse and reorganizes the lower level to suit his own preferences. That's the most plot the movie offers for a good hour.
Rather than kicking off a new chapter in the reclusive bachelor Helmer's life, the opening moments merely establish the pace of his solitary world. In between the time he spends gazing mournfully out the window and caring for his beloved sheep and cows, Helmer barely interacts with the outside world. He has pleasant exchanges with the affable dairy truck driver (Wim Opbrouk) as well as the two children who visit him from next door, but generally remains so reserved that it appears he has given up on the ability to proactively engage with his surroundings. Cinematographer Frank van den Eeden (who also shot Leopold's previous feature, "Brownian Movement"), relies on the natural light that often casts a pale blue throughout Helmer's modest home, creating an icy feel on par with the protagonist's leaden demeanor.
The persistent tone is nearly ruptured by the arrival of farmhand Henk (Martijn Lakemeier), an 18-year-old boy drawn into Helmer's sullen world and seemingly desperate to free him from it. Like most of the plot, the precise source of Henk's motives is initially unclear, but as the bond between the two men grows, so too does Helmer's willingness to address the cause for his downbeat existence. Leopold boldly masks the stakes of this extremely low key chamber piece in waves of mystery that can often yield frustration as one searches for the big picture -- but once it takes the shape, the pieces come together with powerful clarity.
Avoiding a single tell-all moment, Leopold's screenplay slowly defines the sources of the tension through minor exchanges and thoughtful performances heavy with insinuation. The filmmaker's style invites speculation before allowing it to dissipate in a wave of understated passion. Although easy enough to figure out, the reason for Helmer's grief is so vividly realized through the misery preceding it that the revelation of its root cause is almost unimportant.
More than a heavy drama, "It's All So Quiet" essentially focuses on the morbidity of feeling close to death -- both physically and spiritually -- along with the process of renewal that can follow. Leopold's careful staging of the scenario contains shades of Carlos Reygadas' similarly lyrical and country-set "Silent Light." In both movies, nature takes on definition as a palpable force with greater substance than the precise demons haunting each character. Stillness dominates, from the first shots of cornfields at sunrise to the final one that finds Helmer lying among them. When "It's All So Quiet" comes full circle, the title is virtually an understatement.
Criticwire grade: A-
HOW WILL IT PLAY? While audiences may receive the film well at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it had its world premiered, its small scale story and lack of commerciality means that it will have a tough time finding a distributor. Its main reception is probably tied to festival screenings.
User
Reviews from imdb Author: JvH48 from
Amersfoort, The Netherlands
It's
All So Quiet: Berlin Review - Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
It's
All So Quiet | Variety Boyd van
Hoeij
Lepage, Robert
NÔ
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Nô (1998) Richard Falcon from Sight and Sound, April 1999
1970. At the French-Canadian
pavilion for the Osaka World's Fair, Sophie Maltais is performing in a Feydeau
farce. She learns she's two months' pregnant and rings her political-playwright
boyfriend Michel to say she's staying in Japan to have an abortion. But when
she discovers he is receiving a visitor even though it is 4:00 am Quebec time,
she doesn't tell him. Imagining Michel is having an affair, Sophie rebuffs her
besotted co-star François-Xavier but accepts a dinner invitation from Canadian
cultural attaché Walter and his wife Patricia. Sophie gets drunk and sleeps
with Walter, but Patricia catches them in flagrante delicto.
Michel's visitors in Quebec are
members of a radical separatist theatre troupe hiding from the police. They
plan to plant a bomb to protest against the introduction of repressive
anti-terrorist measures. The plans go disastrously wrong when Michel sets the
bomb on Osaka time. The group just make it to safety before it detonates. Sophie
learns about the imposition of martial law at home, abandons her plan to abort
the baby and returns to the devastated apartment where she is arrested and
immediately miscarries.
1980. Sophie and Michel watch the
results of the referendum on Quebec's independence. After the
'No'-to-independence lobby wins, Michel starts to persuade Sophie to have a
child with him.
Review
Robert Lepage's first feature Le
Confessionnal informed us that, "Quebec carries its past on its
shoulders like a baby." Nô, the theatrical maestro's third
feature (after The Polygraph), extends his preoccupation with
Quebecois cultural identity by setting itself at perhaps its most difficult
historical juncture. In 1970, then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
responded to separatist terrorists' kidnapping and murder of a government
minister by instituting martial law, stationing armed forces on the streets of
the province. Given the seriousness of Lepage's first two features, what
surprises here is the sly and absurd humour he deploys to tell the story
against this backdrop.
As he did with Le
Confessionnal , Lepage interlinks two complementary narratives in Nô,
although far less intricately. In the Japanese sequences, he also
introduces an overt theatricality, a contrast with the earlier films'
self-conscious meditations on cinema and reality. Derived from the final
section of his seven-hour play The Seven Branches of the River Ota,
Nô contrasts the controlled elegance of a Noh play - with the
measured tread of its performers, the impassively elegant masks and costumes -
with the garish, frenetic Feydeau farce Sophie is performing in, chosen to
represent French-Canadian culture to the world. In the dinner scene with the
genially lecherous Canadian cultural attaché Walter and his loquacious,
vinegary wife Patricia, a preoccupied Sophie responds to Patricia's needling
with a drunken outburst about the awfulness of the play that turns into a rant
about the liberation of Quebec. Patricia provokes this outburst by favourably
commenting on the play's Victorian costumes, a clear code for saying it stinks.
Lepage foregrounds the kitsch 70s
fashions worn by Sophie and makes us aware of Walter's outrageous sideburns and
his suit, both of which could pass muster in the Feydeau farce. These deliberately
colourful and stagy Japanese sequences build to a not entirely successful coup de cinéma: after Patricia discovers Walter has slept with
Sophie, the film space morphs into the stage of the French farce and the
characters take a bow before a rapturous audience. This is audacious and fun
stuff, but does little more than overemphasise one central idea: that official
attempts to sell French-Canadian culture abroad at this time were farcical.
The real farce, though, occurs in
the film's black-and-white Montreal scenes with Sophie's boyfriend Michel and
his would-be separatist-terrorist theatrical friends. While Michel bickers with
his comrades about the syntax in their communiqué, in another room two
policemen on a stakeout argue about whether there are three or four terrorists
in the room on the basis of their takeaway order. The absurdity of these
sequences makes for entertaining and appealing comedy, with Lepage and his
performers maintaining the same dominant tone of indulgent mockery informing
the Japanese scenes.
Although the visual coding here
is blunter than in Lepage's screen debut (Le Confessionnal
employed different film stocks to distinguish sequences set in Quebec in 1952
and 1989; here we alternate between colour and black and white), the transitions
between the two narratives are still visually flamboyant. This is particularly
the case in the shock cut from actor François-Xavier, sitting in a photo booth
and lashing out at the glass in front of the lens, to Michel's bomb shattering
the window of his apartment.
Colour enters the Quebec scenes
with Sophie's return to Michel's wrecked apartment where she loses the baby,
the camera tilting to show the blood running down her legs. Is Lepage
suggesting that the abortive conclusion to this farcical quest for cultural
identity and self-determination is the endangering of the future? Or is he
saying the opposite? It's deliberately vague, but points to tragedy behind the
farce just as Alfred Hitchcock in Le Confessionnal finally
declares film's narrative to be not suspense but tragedy.
Behind the impressive facade of
the Noh play also lies the reality of a Japanese culture in which Sophie's
blind Japanese translator Hanako is ostracised for being an ibakusha - a person disabled by the Hiroshima
bomb. At this point, Lepage inserts a shot of an atomic mushroom, drawing vague
comparisons with the Quebec bomb. This must have been clearer in Lepage's
original theatre version, inspired by a visit to Japan in 1994, just before the
fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. Here, the weight of the image and
its connotations exceed Nô's design and prompt a fleeting,
unfavourable comparison with the most famous movie about a Francophone actress'
brush with Japanese history, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour
(1959).
Nô's coda is an affirmative one. The title
also stands for the result of the 1980 referendum on Quebecois independence. It
resolves the two narratives by uniting the couple for the first time on the
screen together, but leaves us ultimately perplexed about the film's wider
perspective on the issues it has alluded to. Nô is witty, always
intriguing and amusing, and maintains the director's reputation as an inventive
cinematic stylist. But set against the visual and creative richness of Le
Confessionnal, Nô can't help looking both insubstantial and
claustrophobic.
FAR SIDE OF THE MOON
Canada (105 mi) 2003
Far Side of the Moon Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Looking over the available reviews, I seem to be virtually
alone in not really liking this film. On paper it's the sort of conceptual
piece I ought to groove with, but I think that's a large part of the problem --
Far Side exists almost
exclusively on paper, a film made from a play about a thesis that is told from
the perspective of a frustrated academic trying to defend his thesis. It's hard
to pull this kind of thing off with the requisite finesse, since there's always
the danger of the film appearing a little too eager to display its superior
intellect. Like fellow Canadian cine-philosophes John Greyson, Jeremy Podeswa,
and Jean-Claude Lauzon, Lepage commits to certain conceptual structures (space
program as metaphor, actualized vs. overly introspective brothers) and won't
let go, even when the material calls for a lighter hand. Even the stylized
visuals are plodding and deliberate, especially the play with scale and
graphic-match transitions. On the level of mise-en-scène as well as
performance, Far Side
is wall-to-wall Lepage, and there's not a lot of breathing room. Given that
Lepage wrote and directed, even adapting from his own one-man stage play, it
makes no sense to say he miscast himself, but here's a guy who would pull focus
upon entering any room, and as Philippe the academic he's apparently supposed
to be well-nigh invisible. Lepage plays both brothers quite deftly, although
his doughy Jeffrey Jones presence sticks out in nearly every context, drawing
attention to itself as an awkward physical fact. And complaining that Lepage
made a film about his own dual performance is equally redundant, since Far Side is explicitly about narcissism. See? He's got
every base covered. In this regard, a third Lepage is ever-present, the one who
is straining to whip his conceits into an emotionally plausible framework. Far Side struggles for fanciful
weightlessness but for me there was only the leaden, deeply etched intaglio of
whimsy, along with the obtrusive force of preordained reconciliation. Lepage
has fashioned the perfect film for anyone anxious to spend 105 minutes orbiting
the earth with proliferating metaphors that never so much as threaten to touch
down.
LeRoy, Mervyn
LITTLE CAESAR
Slant
Magazine [Jeremiah Kipp]
Even though it set the "rise and fall"
structure of the gangster film, Little Caesar feels stilted when stacked
up against its tougher depression-era contemporaries: Howard Hawks's Scarface
and The Public Enemy starring
James Cagney. There are no moments of vivid ferocity here. Despite Edward G.
Robinson's memorably smarmy turn as the wildly ambitious pint-sized thug Caesar
Enrico Bandello, Little Caesar plays with kid gloves. The gangland
violence is kept to a discreet minimum, drawing its momentum from observing
Robinson munching on cigars, bossing around his wooden co-stars, and gloating
in corpulent joy as he moves up the mob ladder. The subplot involving would-be
thug turned professional dancer Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) is so
entirely lacking in heat that he and love interest Olga (Glenda Farrell) only
succeed in blending in with the wallpaper. The rest of the company includes
stock characters like the tough Irish cop and the medium-level mob boss with no
backbone—and if they innovated the clichés that defined a genre, they never
succeed in pushing the envelope like the thinly veiled incest of Scarface,
or the smash-your-face bullying and brutality of The Public Enemy. Still, Little
Caesar endures because of Robinson, not so much because he's tough but
because he's got a Napoleon-sized ego and a schoolboy's smile when things are
going his way. He enjoys living like a rich pig so much, we've got to mourn his
loss when he's sent back to the gutter. Inevitably riddled with bullets in the
grand finale, the pudgy Robinson earns our wholehearted sympathy when he sighs
into the darkness, "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?"
Perhaps we mourn his loss all the more because he's the only true thing in Little
Caesar worth giving a damn about.
DVD Times Mike Sutton
The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
Film Freak Central [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
filmcritic.com Christopher Null
The 10 best last lines - in pictures Philip French #6 from The Observer, January 28, 2012
I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN
GANG
Muni gives a brilliant performance as
a regular guy wrongly convicted of murder and subjected to the hardships and
beatings of a dehumanising chain gang regime. Later, Muni escapes and makes a
successful career as a civil engineer, only to be dragged back to jail some
years after when his real identity is discovered. Some of the social commentary
now seems a little heavy-handed, but the film still packs a hefty punch. The
details of chain gang life are tough and harrowing; the scene in which the
governor cites Muni's outstanding contribution to society as evidence of the
character-building benefits of the chain gang system defies belief; and the
downbeat ending is a killer.
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang - TCM.com Scott McGee
It is the end of the "War to End All Wars," a
conflict that was also known as World War I. One soldier, James Allen (Paul
Muni), returns to the United States fully invested with the promise of a new
life, a new career, and a new direction that was impossible before victory in
Europe and the advent of the "Roaring Twenties." So, Allen refuses
his family's advice of returning to his stable, but dull factory job, and
strikes out on his own, with the hopes of becoming an engineer. But from town
to town, year to year, success eludes him and unemployment takes its toll.
Penniless and destitute in the Deep South, Allen becomes implicated in a crime
that he did not commit and is sentenced to 10 years of hard labor on a chain
gang. He spends years of being treated like an animal by the inhumane prison
system. But he waits, biding his time for the perfect moment to make a break
for freedom.
When I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) was first released, it
arrived in American movie theaters in a storm of controversy. As opposed to
other controversial films of its time, the furor was not over issues of
censorship concerning sex and violence, but the film's depiction of the
barbaric penal systems in use in the Deep South, particularly in the state of
Georgia. Public knowledge of the harsh chain gang system was nothing new. In
fact, Robert Elliot Burns, the person on whom the James Allen character is
based, wrote a book entitled I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang,
so the general public was aware of Burns' harrowing story. But to a much larger
audience than the novel could ever reach, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
showed in striking detail just how powerful the talking picture medium could
be, particularly in the field of social change. The film fueled a storm of
protest from the general public that resulted in the reform of the prison chain
gang system in the American south.
Cinematically, the film is a striking example of the economy of Hollywood
narrative storytelling. Robert Elliot Burns' real-life tale is condensed into a
tight 90-minute plot, with no superfluous plot threads. Despite its relatively
short running time, Chain Gang shows just how powerful a film story
could be, providing it is told right. And director Mervyn LeRoy took every pain
to make sure that this story was filmed just right, starting with the perfect
lead in Paul Muni. One of the most revered actors of his day, Muni
revolutionized screen acting in the post-silent screen years. At a time when
actors were still struggling to find the right "voice" for the
talkies, Muni, a celebrated stage actor, brought a theatricality to the screen
that helped "legitimize" the relatively new talking picture from a
technological phenomenon to the natural evolution of the film medium.
I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang Jeremiah Kipp from Slant magazine
Maybe it's the cynic in me, but I never felt convinced Warner
Bros. cared as much about solving social injustice as they did presenting
tough, lurid, lapel-grabbing narratives that would pack audiences into
theaters. Nevertheless, they were able to have their cake and eat it too with
films like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, which was instrumental in
swaying public opinion. The inhumanity and soul-crushing horrors of slave labor
in the penal system, where the gruesome punishment didn't fit the crime, is
neatly interwoven into a highly gripping plot that still holds up today. It
feels more like an uncompromising prison film than a message movie, so its
frequent heavy-handedness seems more like unabashed pulp rather than
sanctimony.
World War I veteran James Allen (sweaty and paranoid Paul "Scarface"
Muni) comes home and suffers the humiliation of seeking a job in the Depression
era, even rejected when he attempts pawning his war medals only to discover a
hundred other guys already had the same idea. He becomes unjustly imprisoned,
and rather than playing up the "wrong man" angle for suspense, Fugitive
shows a series of degradations in prison so bluntly it incites the viewer to
moral outrage. From before dawn to after dusk, the convicts are shipped out to
a slab of rock to chip away all day long, enduring beatings from the sadistic
guards. When a man gets horsewhipped off-screen, the camera pans along the
faces of convicts listening to his screams—an effect far more haunting than if
we saw the torture. One look at the plate of inedible gruel they're doled out
for breakfast and dinner, then a glance at the way the prisoners are chained
like animals, and you're 100% behind Muni's desire to get the hell out of
there.
The prison scenes are blatantly manipulative—and effective—but Fugitive
really takes off during an intense escape sequence, including a close shave
where a near-doomed Muni hides underwater as his above-water captors are
literally inches away from him. When Muni arrives in
There's bleak humor in the fact that the only job Muni can get is as a road
laborer swinging a pick-axe, and even as he quickly gets promoted rapidly he
finds himself in another prison: a calculating bitch (Glenda Farrell) who
forces him into a marriage in exchange for keeping his chain-gang secret, then
proceeding to spend all his money (and then some) on booze and an endless line
of extramarital affairs. Only with a character as noble as Oliver Twist or
David Copperfield are people able to endure such misery, and Paul Muni plays a
character so single-minded in his pursuit of freedom, so damned anxious for
even the smallest victory, that he makes Fugitive absolutely riveting.
And the movie really shows its balls during its climax, where Muni is forced to
go back to the chain gang and plan another daring escape. When he
gets out this time, though, Muni looks like a scurvy rat that's nearly drowned.
Asked how he survives, he backs away into the darkness seething, "I
steal!"
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4.5/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Joe Armenio) dvd review
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] from 7-disc DVD Controversial Classics
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) - Articles - TCM.com
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE BAD SEED B 88
In over a hundred years of movie history, there has never been such a wretchedly evil child character, except perhaps in that TV Twilight Zone episode ("The Twilight Zone" It's a Good Life (1961) featuring that horrid little boy (Anthony, age 6) who could make people disappear when they made him angry. This is one of the seminal works, not so much for any cinematic flair, but for the unforgettable performance from child actress Patty McCormack as the “bad seed,” an 8-year old girl who presents herself as all sweetness and light, who is identified as a “perfect little ray of sunshine,” pampered and spoiled to the point of being the biggest brat in history. This little girl still takes our breath away with her ghoulish intentions, reminiscent of a teenage Tuesday Weld in PRETTY POISON (1968). Perhaps in horror flicks there are evil characters who are designed to look and act every bit the part they are playing, but this story is set in the presumably safe confines of the 1950’s Eisenhower era middle class, a time of prosperity and comfort when every parent’s expectations were to provide their children with more than what they had themselves, including economic security, a chance to attend the best schools, and not to want for anything. It is in this privileged upper class environment that we discover this perfect little girl in pigtails performing her perfect curtsy for her teacher, yet fuming underneath when she was not awarded the class medal for best penmanship. At a school picnic, where she is the only girl still wearing a dress, she was the last one seen with a boy that drowned, mysteriously losing the medal that was pinned to his shirt. This begins a journey of coincidental accidents that mysteriously occur whenever this little girl doesn’t get her way.
What’s truly unusual about this film is the heightened theatricality, as if we’re witnessing a live stage performance. Much of the stiff, formalistic dialogue feels more suited to the page than to the ear, while the melodramatic swooning and series of scene stealing performances are enough to challenge the likes of Scarlett O’Hara for pure caricature. Even the swirling strings by Alex North are near comical with their exaggerated tone, beautifully filmed in black and white by Harold Rosson, though the sets are mostly restricted to one central family living room, giving this the highly restricted feel of a claustrophobic chamber drama. Despite the legendary aura of McCormack’s performance, it’s curious to note the utter incompetence of the adult world surrounding her, where the stench of their moral ineptitude and sheer foolishness is delightfully covered in a veneer of privilege and social status, which is perfectly flushed out by the dead boy’s mother, Eileen Heckart, obviously from a lower economic status, who always appears drunk and borderline hysterical, yet remains mercilessly honest about the disparity in their lives. Despite her inebriated state, when she asks for a drink, a bar on wheels appears like a godsend, complete with glasses and a fully stocked ice bucket! Also interesting is the increasing degree of guilt the mother (Nancy Kelly) feels after discovering what her daughter is really up to, which is excessive in equal degrees to the complete lack of remorse her daughter feels, whose motto is: "Why should I feel sorry? It was Claude Daigle got drowned, not me." This reaches the breaking point in a perfectly drawn out scene with her daughter’s speeded up piano exercises, exactly as it perplexed George Bailey a decade earlier in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), where each is pushed to the absolute limit wondering if they can take another moment of unending agony.
There are of course other versions of serial killers, just none so young and well equipped as this one to elude getting caught. She’s a child who is naturally at ease in the company of adults, always perfectly mannered, preening and performing without a hair out of place, like a trained vaudevillian, but strangely hasn’t a child friend in the world, as she has no use for mere friendship. She demands adoration and accepts nothing less. When she’s not onscreen, the film slows with mere mortals and gets garbled in psycho babble, wondering aloud whether criminal behavior might be genetic or a product of social environment, like “growing up in slums with other criminals,” which is the favored version of the era. The world is a naïve and simpler place without evil in it. This somewhat literary film has some of the relish of the underrated THE HONEYMOON KILLERS (1970), after all, who else asks for a peanut butter sandwich or to go roller skating or locks themself in a room playing surgically precise piano scales after committing a gruesome murder? Her very presence increases the intensity level tenfold, and the audience is simply baffled by the sheer audacity of her ways. But pride goeth before a fall, and taking liberties from the original play which has the little girl still playing piano at the end after killing off half the cast, this film version is considerably less bleak, though oddly mystifying in bringing the cast back for a final curtain call, a puzzling finale where McCormack finally gets her comeuppance in more ways than one.
FilmFanatic.org
[Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]
Although it’s undeniably campy
and somewhat dated, The Bad Seed maintains its status as the most
notorious movie ever made about “evil children”, and thus holds a special place
in cinematic history. Moviegoers may be inured to watching cold-blooded murders
committed by hardened criminals, but it’s something different altogether to
contemplate them carried out blithely by a young girl (not a teen) in blonde
pigtails and a pinafore — someone who is deeply loved by her family, and given every
possible privilege. It is this disparity which remains the primary seduction of
the controversial story (originally a novel, then a hit Broadway play), about
the unpredictably hideous effects of heredity.
When I first watched The Bad
Seed years ago, I remember being deeply disturbed by the character of
Rhoda, and unable to reconcile her spooky amorality with my rather idealized
notion of childhood. Watching it again recently, however, I was primarily
affected by the film’s true protagonist: not Rhoda, but her mother, a
sympathetic character struggling to come to terms with what is essentially an
impossible truth about her child. While many find Nancy Kelly’s performance to
be campy and overblown, I was genuinely moved by her dilemma.
It’s impossible to review The
Bad Seed without briefly discussing Patty McCormack, who pioneered the
title role on Broadway before immortalizing it in celluloid. While her
performance is uneven — she uses too many broad facial expressions which are
more appropriate for the stage than cinematic close-ups — she nonetheless has a
strong presence on screen, and shows far more talent than we’ve come to expect
from most child actors. Her portrayal as Rhoda is not easily forgotten, and
will most likely remain this character’s definitive incarnation.
FilmFanatic.org Comment: writer93_99, on January 9th, 2007 at 6:01 pm said:
Absolutely
a must - and betcha can’t watch just once! It’s true that, nowadays, ‘The Bad
Seed’ is seen as camp, but it differs significantly from other camp ‘greats’
like ‘Mommie Dearest’, ‘Showgirls’, just about anything late in Joan Crawford’s
career. This is because (as stated) mom has a very reeeal problem on her hands.
Films that are 100% camp have no room for quality of that type. Though we may
find ‘TBS’ funny at times, its powerful dual dynamic prevents it from being a
pure laugh fest.
The
book’s author, William March, was something of an eccentric as well as a
repressed gay man with issues. It’s noticeable that, though compassion for them
appears at times, the female characters are drawn in a way that denotes
misogyny (which allows mom Kelly, neighbor Varden and the grieving Heckart to
give powerhouse performances). This feeling reaches its apex in Rhoda. She is
scary. We get more hard facts about sociopaths from modern films like ‘Silence
of the Lambs’ - so ‘TBS’ is dated in that sense - but Rhoda’s complexity is
such that you see more in her each time you see the film. (Sometimes it’s
understandable that she’s pissed: why would adults, when talking to her, use
words like ‘penurious’ and ‘adroit’?!) Myself, I don’t find McCormack’s
stunning performance uneven and am always amazed at how she ‘turns it on and
off’ throughout: i.e., watch how she goes from “Oh, I like them.” - when she’s
given sunglasses as a present - to “Where’s the case?”
If you
like the film, DO read the book. It’s a quick (in some ways juicier) read and,
as many know, has a more fitting ending.
Music:
Alex North did ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ years later. There’s a certain
resonance from his terrific work here.
Best
non-Rhoda line is Mrs. Daigle’s: (when she notices Rhoda is being kept from
her) “I’ll apologize to Rhoda, too, when I can get an interview with her.”
Lesbian
alert: Miss Fern to Rhoda’s mother, “Smooth the lines from your brow, my dear.
You’re so much prettier when smiling.”
Best
shot: deep-focus of Rhoda in shadow throwing shoes into incinerator while mom
is beyond, under the pure light of an overhead lamp.
Patty
McCormack is The Bad Seed - Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris, April 1, 2000
The
Bad Seed
came out in 1956, the same year as Carousel and Tea and Sympathy.
But while the latter films — one a grandiose musical, the other a social
problem drama — are typical of their time and place, The Bad Seed seems
to be have been dropped into projection rooms from another planet. The film’s
main character and driving force, Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack), has no
obvious antecedents in movie history and didn’t exactly spawn a new genre.
She’s a charming pigtailed eight-year-old whose apparently perfect manners mask
a genetically engineered mini-murderess.
Not
surprising given its subject, the film was problematic from the start. Warner
Bros. wasn’t thrilled by director Mervyn LeRoy’s insistence on importing most
of the cast from the hit Broadway version. (Perhaps they envisioned Joan Crawford or
Lana Turner in the mother role.) When they did relent, there was a thornier
problem. The Johnson Office, which determined the releasability of major studio
films, refused to certify the script because of the ending, which followed the
original in having Rhoda blithely playing "Claire de Lune" on the
piano after murdering half the cast. No matter; Warners had the ending changed
so she’s killed by a lightning bolt, and the censors were happy with this
heavenly retribution. Still, there was some feeling that showing a little girl
being blasted to hell wasn’t quite right, and the film offers a breakthrough
"proscenium-busting" second ending that reminds the viewer it was
only a movie after all.
In
his autobiography, director LeRoy dispatches The Bad Seed in a scant two
pages; maybe nobody told him it’s revered as a camp classic, a widespread
guilty pleasure, and a beloved showcase for some of the most rivetingly
overwrought acting in movie history — all overseen by that vision in pigtails
and rollerskates, Rhoda.
For
those sad souls who haven’t seen it (or haven’t seen it in a while), here’s the
story. Rhoda Penmark lives with mother, the nervous Christine (Nancy Kelly),
and a doting but often absent father played by William Hopper. They live in a
sheltered world of private schools and manicured lawns, shepherded in Daddy’s
absence by doting, buffoonish landlady Monica (Evelyn Varden). Their lovely
little world — punctuated by Rhoda’s grating curtsies, smarmy good manners,
tacky piano stylings, and the toxic mantra "What would you give me for a
basket of kisses?" — begins to unravel when one of Rhoda’s classmates
turns up dead. Christine gets increasingly unhinged by hints that Rhoda doesn’t
take defeat kindly, and it seems the deceased — little Claude Daigle — had the
temerity to win the class penmanship medal. This in spite of the fact that, as
Rhoda screams, "Everyone knew I wrote the best hand!" More puzzling
deaths follow until Nature weighs in to reclaim the little beast.
There’s
considerable film time devoted to the debate, then current no doubt, about
whether evil can be inherited; and the staging is often, well, stagey, with
self-consciously dramatic entrances and exits, and hothouse dialogue more
suited to Broadway than cinema. That said, The Bad Seed is an actor’s
dream, and these actors work every inch of it. This was recognized at the time;
Nancy Kelly was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, and McCormack and Eileen
Heckart were nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
The
most celebrated scene belongs to neither Rhoda nor Christine, but to Claude’s
boozy mother Hortense. This "poor creature," as Christine refers to
her with subtle hauteur, comes a-calling in a drunken stupor, convinced her
boy’s death is somehow linked to Rhoda. This sequence, brilliantly played by
Heckart, becomes a riveting dance between the upper-class perfection of the
Penmarks and the slobbering incivility of the working class as exemplified by
the Daigles. The film scores comic points in the midst of the carry-on when
Hortense blurts out that the prim Miss Fern, Rhoda’s teacher and enemy, dyes
her hair. Adding to the comic confusion is the fact that Mr. Daigle looks more
like his wife’s father than her husband.
Heckart’s
screen time is more memorable for being limited. Nancy Kelly mines much of the
same emotional terrain in most of her many scenes. And oh, does she mine. You
can practically see the pick-axe under her skirt. Her bag of acting tricks is
ready to burst, and she deploys them shamelessly in a rhapsody of
hand-wringing, table-clawing, eyerolling, whisper-to-a-scream hysterics that
could be excised as individual lessons on acting no-no’s. Hilariously weird
indeed (and much noticed by modern audiences who respond with appropriate
guffaws) is her constant anguished pummeling of her stomach in what looks like
an ongoing assault against the uterus that produced this demon seed. (This
legendary bit of business was even immortalized in the cover art of the VHS
tape of the film.) And after seeing the mileage she gets out of her daughter’s
name, few will believe that "Rhoda" has only has two syllables or
should ever be pronounced in a normal tone.
More
charming histrionics come from Henry Jones as the leering, demented janitor
Leroy, who’s wise to Rhoda’s tricks. He gets some of the film’s most amusing
dialogue, as when he says, "I’ve seen some mean little gals in my time,
but you’re the meanest." (He doesn’t say how he’s managed to meet enough
other "mean little gals" to make the comparison.) He has wonderful
flights of fancy describing to her the rarely sighted "stick
bloodhound" police use to find killers by sniffing out bloody murder weapons,
and the "little blue and pink electric chairs they have for little boys
and girls." Rhoda listens with a mixture of indulgence and annoyance,
until she gets sick of his prattle and kills him.
Presiding
over all this is Patty McCormack’s glacially calm Rhoda. Her performance is
surprisingly sensible and mostly restrained, at least until she’s exposed. Then
she almost outdoes Nancy Kelly in sheer volume of consumed scenery. Like the
older, hammier actors around her, McCormack could work a phrase or a bit of
business to a happy death, and could even convince us in a quiet moment that
there was a rather sad little girl under the murderously sweet surface.
McCormack was apparently an unusually grounded person, particularly for a child
star. The director recalled asking her how she felt about playing "a girl
who kills people," to which she replied in her best Rhoda sing-song voice,
"Oh Mr. LeRoy, I’m having so much fun!"
Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)
The Bad Seed : DVD
Talk Review of the DVD Video
Kim Morgan, also seen at Sunset Gun here: Sunset Gun:
You Lie All the Time ...
Ruthless Reviews Matt Cale
The
Bad Seed - TCM.com Frank
Miller
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Monsters At Play Bradley Harding
HorrorTalk Alien Redrum, offering plenty of photos
DVD Verdict Paul Corupe
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)
eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum)
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
Lester, Richard
Lester, Richard Art and Culture
Richard Lester is the Brian
Epstein of film. Or maybe the George Martin. Knowingly pop yet classically
grounded, Lester made films with a unique stamp. Artful camera work, action
shot simultaneously from several viewpoints, and rapid cutting techniques are
hallmarks of his work, which combines elements of French New Wave and Russian epic
with the style of TV commercials.
That’s why it’s no wonder he
directed the Beatles in their first two screen ventures, "A Hard Day’s
Night" (1964) and "Help!" (1965). These films would solidify the
band’s reputation as one of the most profound cultural forces in England -- and
far beyond. The pseudo-documentary style deftly constructs a personality for
the fan-mobbed lads that is carefully intimate and satisfying. Lester fashioned
a kind of frenetic, bouncy, as-the-mood-strikes-you attitude with sequences of
the band alternately cavorting on hill sides or devoting themselves to their
music with utter earnestness. The musical segments, some of which show the band
playing and some of which use the music as a background, laid the foundation
for what would later become the music video: MTV owes a great debt to Lester.
"Help!" parodies James
Bond adventure flicks in an even greater attempt to transform celebrity into a
full-time art form. In the movie, the Beatles travel around the world in order
to save Ringo from a human-sacrifice cult in India. The film begs for a
Post-Colonial analysis, but for its day it pushed the limits of cultural
juxtapositioning, irreverent humor, and quick cutting.
The American-born Lester was
precocious from the start; he entered college at 15 and was a successful
director for CBS by age 20. He would give that up, though, to embark on a
two-year bum’s ride around the States, playing the guitar or piano for a meal.
After this interlude, he came back to television; he fell in with Peter
Sellers, who compounded his wacky sensibility, while spending time in England.
Their relationship led to the television masterpiece "The Goon Show."
Lester wasn’t always completely
the nut -- but he was eclectic. He could embrace by turns the blockbuster
("Superman II, III"), the Western ("Butch and Sundance: The
Early Days"), or the swashbuckler ("The Three Musketeers,"
"The Four Musketeers"). He could also move into serious drama.
"Petulia" surprised many critics for its mature and honest exploration
of romantic relationships. The film dwells heavily on mood, characterization,
and psychological ambiguity, and became a source of inspiration to the American
directors of Coppola’s generation.
Calling him a genius would be too
much. However, he kept testing himself, kept moving in new directions, and kept
exploring. Art is supposed to be a serious affair, but Richard Lester showed
that there’s as much art in fun as there is in searching the soul.
Richard Lester Interviewed by Steven Soderbergh 11/08/99 from the Guardian
A HARD DAY’S NIGHT
Great Britain (87 mi) 1964
digitallyobsessed! DVD Reviews Debi Lee Mandel
"Let's all get up and dance to a song/That was a hit before
your mother was born/Though she was born a long, long time ago/Your mother
should know/Your mother should know..."
Or your older brother, or your favorite aunt—somebody you know experienced
Beatlemania first hand. Those of us (ahem) old enough to have experienced it,
even young, remember it as a time of breathless anxiety, of generational
hysteria. In my review two years ago of MPI's The Complete Beatles DVD Collector's Set,
I said, "Even in retrospect, there is nothing anyone can find in any
attempt to dissect Beatlemania that can change what HAPPENED." You can
read all that, here.
It will suffice to say, you had to be there. If you can open your imagination,
this DVD will get you close.
A Hard Day's Night brought Beatlemania to critical mass on both sides of the
Atlantic. The quickly inaccessible quartet were now as close as the local
theater, and surging hordes of screaming, fainting and sobbing kids mobbed the
doors as if the Fab Four were there in person. From the opening chord (G11sus4
to trivia freaks) of the title song, John, George and Ringo ran towards the
camera, onto the screen and into our lives forever. (Don't panic—Paul makes his
appearance 1 minute 53 seconds later.)
The setup is deceptively simple: a day in the life of The Beatles. The wickedly
clever script by Alun Owen busies John, George, Paul and Ringo—along with
Paul's grandfather, John McCartney (Brambell) and their road managers (Norman
Rossington, John Junkin)—in the close quarters of a moving train, presumably
from Liverpool to London ("Does he know what he's unleashed on the
unsuspecting South?"), heading to a television appearance that evening.
While some of the dialogue is ad lib, it all sounds as if it were; thus is the
genius of the writer and the natural talent inherent in these inexperienced
boys. The banter is still as witty today as it was then and in certain scenes,
more poignant. While Wilfrid Brambell carries the weight of the subplots on his
slight but steely shoulders, the four stars are always in focus and manage
their way like pros. Victor Spinetti, the overanxious TV director, inspires
some of the best unscripted barbs and earns his laughs as well.
Once the gang arrives in London, it doesn't take long for grandad to escape and
havoc ensues. JPG&R split off and have various adventures and encounters on
their own, thereby establishing unique aspects of their individual
personalities. Of course, this led to generalizations and stereotypes for the
"real" Beatles, but it did help to distinguish the four moptops for new
fans.
There is indeed story structure here, and something more important: gone is the
"Hey kids, I've got an idea, why don't we do a show right here?!"
concept—although John says it just for fun—and instead, a new way of making
movies is born. Not just music movies, but movies. The Beatles revolutionized
music; Richard Lester revolutionized cinema. Combining the boys' natural
exuberance and charisma with the cinéma vérité that was coming out of France at
the time, this new director gave motion pictures a much needed shot of
adrenaline that rushes past us at an ever-increasing pace to this day. On a
$150K budget, this crew made history. Perhaps it's time to take a step back,
Hollywood.
AHDN agilely portrays how JPG&R were surrounded by adults who condescended
to them as well as the kids who worshipped them. When Ringo goes off on his
"This Boy" wander, he meets an (almost) 11-year-old boy who talks
about how things are with his mates and then runs back to where they're
playing. For a moment, Ringo looks on the four carefree boys before moving on.
Mostly, however, this is a played-for-laughs comedy, and some of the real gems
are visual. I can't begin to imagine how many times I have seen this film, over
the years and especially this past week; yet with every viewing I still see
something more. One bit new to me happens as they all run out of the police
station for the last time. John and Paul lead the way; a few seconds later,
there's John again, behind the last bobby. No special effects or even editing
here, just one of the oldest tricks in the book, which makes it all the more
fun.
Despite the mayhem, all four Beatles arrive back at the studio on time and the
show goes on. The film culminates in the only early Beatles concert in which
you can hear the music—because it was overdubbed. After all the entertaining
shenanigans, this is pay dirt. The beat, the harmonies, and the songs with
which we can still sing along, even if clipped and overlapped a bit—a choice
I'm sure Lester regrets—are still money in the bank. I doubt anyone complained
back in 1964, and it's too late now.
All these years later, I still want to press my lips against John's mouth in
that lingering close-up as he sings I Should've Known Better. I should know
better, but I don't. And while I don't recommend this sort of behavior, that's
the way it was... is, if you were there.
Sensation aside, The Beatles were music magic and these four boys matured into
a talented musical partnership that impacted and inspired generations to come.
The dream may be over, but The Beatles are forever. This release makes it so.
Britmovie
A Hard Day’s Night was rushed
into production to take advantage of Beatlemania in 1964. Director Richard Lester
and writer Alun Owen capture the Fab Four in celluloid and bring a new mixture
of inventiveness and humour to the genre, while the Beatles deliver a number of
their classic songs.
A Hard Day's Night is not only
one of the best rock 'n' roll films ever made but also among the finest films
of 1964, an immensely funny study of 36 hours in the lives of the Beatles.
Mobbed by their hysterical fans, John, Paul, George, and Ringo board a train
for London, where they are to do a live TV appearance. Norman Rossington and
John Junkin are the Beatles' managers who accompany them on the trip along with
McCartney's grandfather (Wilfred Brambell).
In London, the boys cavort at a
swinging night-spot before going in search of grandfather, whom they find
chatting up a buxom bird at a casino, and drag him back to the hotel over his
angry protests. At the TV studio the next day, TV director (Victor Spinetti)
goes crazy because of their improvisations and refusal to conform to his rules
during a live TV broadcast. Paul’s grandfather convinces Ringo that he is
unappreciated by the rest of the group, and advises him to go flaunting himself
around London. Ringo puts on a trench coat and wanders around the streets of
London alone, closely followed by a policeman, he ends up at a police station
from which he is liberated by the other Beatles just in time for their live TV
performance.
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Slate [David Edelstein] including clips from the film
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
Richard Lester: A Hard Day’s Life Steve Burgess from Salon
A Hard Day’s Night Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
100 films Lucas
CultureDose.net [Laurie Edwards]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
DVD Verdict - Collector's Edition Bill Gibron
Apollo Movie Guide [Mike Gower]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
HELP
filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]
The Beatles were probably the best and the most
commercially successful rock band of all time. You can argue that the Rolling
Stones or the Clash were better, or that the Grateful Dead sold more tickets.
But the Beatles had the greater cultural influence, and there is no denying
that they recorded at least a hundred outstanding songs, which demonstrated
considerable variety.
While later albums such as "Sgt. Pepper's" and "
The point is that the Beatles were artistically at their peak during the time
that "Help!" was made. They were also near their peak in popularity,
although Beatlemania had lost a little of its momentum. Their fame was so
enormous that it is difficult to see them as actors in Help!, rather than as pop music icons. Especially when they are
playing themselves.
The second film starring the Beatles was less well received than the first. A Hard Day's Night was well grounded and often had the feel of a documentary.
Help! was absurdist, without a real plot and characters. While
often very funny, the film was frustrating to those who prefer continuity over
mood.
But the film's silly, lightly satirical nature suits the British style of
humor. Director Richard Lester was actually born and raised in
Lester was the one responsible for creating the feel of Help!, although many of the Beatles' quips were undoubtedly
ad-libbed. John Lennon seems to be enjoying himself the most, especially during
his scenes with 'mad scientist' Victor Spinetti. Spinetti was also in A Hard Day's Night, and would appear in The Beatles' misfiring surreal
television special, Magical Mystery Tour.
But Ringo is the star of Help!. Apparently taking his cue from Bob Denver of
"Gilligan's
You see, Ringo is wearing the sacrificial ring of an obsessive, ridiculous
'Eastern' cult. (Surprisingly, nobody from
It's all very silly, but the thin plot does allow for many droll remarks from
the Fab Four. And the running gags are good: Ringo must be painted red before
his execution, the mad scientist wants to rule the world, the soup is full of
inedible non sequitors, and the completely useless Scotland Yard inspector
can't stop using the adjective 'famous'.
The color cinematography and costumes are also very good. They are easy to
underrate given the film's silly style, as is the case with the film itself.
But it is during the songs that the film is at its best. The songs are even
better than those in A Hard Day's Night, which hardly seems possible. There's only seven of them,
but that's enough for John, Paul and George to each get a chance to sing lead.
Ringo doesn't get to sing, but after all, he's the star of the film, and the
one wearing the big red ring. Although the Beatles are clearly lip synching,
the props and camera angles are imaginative.
Richard Lester would later direct John Lennon in the unsuccessful anti-war
comedy How I Won the War (1967), and Paul McCartney for his 1991 concert tour
documentary Get Back. Fans of Lester's slapstick style might want to see The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, his best films from the 1970s.
digitallyobsessed! DVD Reviews Debi Lee Mandel reviews the Beatles DVD
Collector’s Set
Film Threat Brad Laidman
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE
WAY TO THE FORUM
Shallow Focus (English) Daniel Paikov [In Hebrew]
Between the two
peaks of his career, the Beatles films of the 1960's and the Superman sequels of the 1980's, Richard
Lester directed some of the most important works of their time. A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is not one of them.
Still, in Funny Thing Lester perfected one of the dominant
comic styles of the last few decades, the parodic farce: from the early films
of Woody Allen to Airplane! and Scary Movie.
Adapting a fashionable stage musical, Lester cut most of the songs, added to
the original's verbal humor an obscene amount of visual gags, and filled out
the theatrical New York/Jewish cast with British and Australian actors. Thus
was created a jumble of clashing acting styles and types of humor that
emphasized not quality, but quantity and momentum.
No one followed in Lester's footsteps more than Mel Brooks. Brooks not only
based a large part of his spoofs on Lester's innovations, but went as far as
casting Zero Mostel, star of Funny Thing, in his first film as
director, The Producers, two years later, as well as recycling
the combination of Jewish humor in an Ancient Rome setting in History
of the World: Part I. Brooks did not manage, or maybe even try, to
reproduce Lester's cinematic sophistication. When one aspires to pure
vulgarity, complexity would be overkill.
Review of A Funny Thing
Happened on the Way to the Forum Pauline Kael
There
is a sequence of a girl dancing in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum but the director, Richard Lester, breaks it up so much with camera
and editing that we can’t see the dance, only flashes of parts of her body, and
we can’t even tell if the girl can dance because the movement is almost
totally supplied by his means. This technique is a good one for
concealing the ineptitude of performers, but Lester’s short-term camera magic
keeps cutting into and away from the comedians (Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Jack
Gilford, Michael Hordern), who never get a chance to develop a routine or to
bring off a number. What are we being distracted from?
There
was probably no way to predict that Lester’s style would be at war with the
form, which in Plautus, as in the musical comedy adaptation by Burt Shevelove
and Larry Gelbart, with Stephen Sondheim’s songs, seemed the least strict
imaginable; one might have thought it open enough for almost any kind of
improvisation. But, seeing the result, we get the sense that Lester thinks it
would be too banal just to let us see a dance or a pair of comedians singing a
duet. Yet if they’re good, they’re a lot less banal than camera movement
designed to cover emptiness. We go to see great clowns precisely for the way
they move, for the grace and lightness of their style. The marvel of burlesque
is that those lewd men become beautiful: their timing and skill transform the
lowest forms of comedy. When Lester supplies the rhythms for them by film
editing he takes away the one great asset of burlesque: that triumph of style
which converts leering into art. He takes away their beauty and they become
ugly and gross; he turns artists back into mugging low comics. (He also uses
the women execrably: they are blank-faced bodies or witless viragos.) Some of
the best moments are the least doctored: Hordern’s vocal inflections, a
satirical entrance song by Leon Greene. Lester’s technique works successfully
intermittently—as in the parody recap of the love duet which is lovely, like
the song in the snow in Help!
It’s
difficult to make dance and song “work” on screen, and it’s understandable that
a talented, inventive director should fall back upon what looks so
“cinematic”—the nervous camera, the restless splicing, the succession of
“visual” jokes. But the sight gags of television commercials have a purpose:
they are there to sell something and they make their point and they’re over. In
Forum as in The Knack, when Lester strings these gags together,
they’re just pointless agitation—just “clever” and “imaginative.” He proceeds
in fits and starts and leaves jokes suspended in mid-air: it’s as if he’d
forgotten what it’s all for. And for an audience the experience becomes one of
impatience and irritation—like coitus interruptus going on forever.
eFilmCritic Reviews iF Magazine
Funny
Thing - The New York Times Vincent Canby from the New York Times
HOW I WON THE WAR
The Spinning Image Review Graeme Clark
At the end of World War II, by the
This subversive war satire (and war movie send-up) was scripted by Charles Wood
from the novel by Patrick Ryan, and unsteadily set out to put forward the view
that soldiers, not only of the Second World War, but of any war (this was
released at the time of the Vietnam conflict), were taken advantage of by their
country's leaders and their lives thrown away. It's probably best known today
for being the only film that John
Lennon starred in without the Beatles, but in truth, if you're expecting
his second billing to indicate a co-starring role, then be prepared to see him
rather lost, throwing away sardonic comments, in the ensemble supporting cast -
it's the hard-working Crawford who appears in almost every scene.
Goodbody is put in charge of a regiment, the "Musketeers", and sent
to
This is no conventional war movie, it's self-consciously wacky and determinedly
disillusioned about heroics, two attitudes which make for a cluttered result.
Director Richard
Lester is not afraid to add slapstick - Crawford ends up stuck headfirst up
to his middle in the sand - and Wood's lines include many wry observations and
non sequiturs, which has the effect of seeming like many conversations on the
same subject all mixed up together. Constantly threatening to collapse into
confusion, the film isn't all that funny either, as its abrasiveness and
awkwardness dulls the humour and dilutes the sympathy for the more hapless
soldiers, who need all the sympathy they can get in their situation.
The higher echelons of the army are represented by Colonel Grapple (Michael
Hordern), who sums them up by being aloof, uncaring of the danger his men
are in, and possibly insane with power. Goodbody is making his way up the ranks,
and his troops all secretly want to kill him, forcing themselves not to at
times. When the soldiers finally succumb to the inevitable, i.e. getting
killed, they return to be represented as ghostly, silent figures in different
colours corresponding to battles - green, pink, orange, blue - but Goodbody,
the man whose inept decisions has put them in that position, remains not only
unharmed, but still in charge. How I Won The War believes that even in a just
war, the soldiers are exploited and prey to the whims of their superiors, and
if they don't end up dead, then they're certainly not enjoying many benefits,
either, no matter that they win. A contentious opinion, and not one which is
smoothly conveyed by this jumbled film because they don't offer a convincing
alternative. Music by Ken Thorne.
DVD Times Mike Sutton
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
NY Times Original Review Bosley Crowther
PETULIA
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
In the late '80s, Saturday
Night Live ran a sketch called "The 1960s Movie." In about five
minutes, it included swinging Londoners, double entendres, and if memory
serves, a person in a gorilla suit, all set to an insanely catchy theme song
with a chorus of something like "It's a '60s movie! It's a '60s
movie!" Not a great sketch, but a fairly accurate one that lumped together
the clichés of '60s comedies from What's New Pussycat? on. In its
opening strokes, 1968's Petulia looks like one of those movies. Based on
John Haase's novel Me And The Arch Kook Petulia, it stars Julie Christie
as a transplanted free-spirited English rose who, seemingly on a whim, singles
out square-looking divorcing surgeon George C. Scott for an affair.
The resemblance pretty
much stops there, although there's no mistaking the film for the product of
another decade. Filmed in San Francisco at the height of Haight-Ashbury, it
captures a city where the explosion of freedom has caused some collateral
damage. Scott has left his wife (Shirley Knight) and two kids for reasons even
he doesn't seem to understand. The times give Christie an excuse to behave, in
Scott's words, like a kook. But by degrees, director Richard Lester and editor
Tony Gibbs reveal the sadness barely hidden beneath her kookiness, flashing
back to bits of her life with husband Richard Chamberlain and forward to things
to come.
Lester, continuing his
New Wave-inspired experiments from A Hard Day's Night and The Knack…
And How To Get It, structures the film ingeniously, but the form is always
in service to the emotions, even when the emotions remain beneath the surface.
Scott and Christie wander through antiseptic locations where hippie craziness
has begun to creep in: a formal ball, a near-tryst at a fully automated
drive-in parking-garage/hotel, a late-night trip to a brightly lit supermarket.
But even as the film suggests crumbling traditional values might be a good
thing, John Barry's score provides a constant reminder that not everyone who
struggles to be free gets to enjoy their freedom. Scott sits alone in his all-mod-cons
bachelor pad as visions of the war flash on the television; Christie's
outwardly carefree attitude won't help her slip her chains. It's a true '60s
movie.
DVD Talk [Phil Bacharach]
Richard Lester might not have known it at the time, but when the noted
director ventured to
And yet Petulia does not simply delineate Sixties artifacts. This keenly observed art film finds the counterculture of that era being swallowed up and taken over by a nation of overwhelming wealth, commercialism and consumerism.
That doesn't mean Petulia is preachy; far from it. Scripted by Barbara Turner and Lawrence B. Marcus, the picture is essentially about two lonely and bored people desperate to find passion in an increasingly dispassionate world. The Sixties-drenched setting is tapped to add shades of meaning, but it nevertheless remains a backdrop. Indeed, much of Petulia's genius stems from such shadings, particularly stylistic flourishes that result in a work of stunning freshness -- even nearly 40 years after its theatrical release.
George C. Scott portrays Dr. Archie Bollen, a recently divorced surgeon whose life is tossed upside down when he becomes romantically entangled with a recently married kook named Petulia Danner. Played by the luminous Julie Christie, Petulia is Holly Golightly with a hallucinogenic twist -- capricious to the point of combustible, flighty to the point of causing motion-sickness. Complicating matters is her husband, David (Richard Chamberlain), a rich pretty boy who harbors a nasty violent streak.
Unbeknownst to Archie, he and Petulia are linked by a Mexican boy (Vincent Arias) who Archie operated on after the child was hit by a car. The story of the boy -- along with several related story threads -- unfolds in fragmented sequences that attest to Lester's appetite for cinematic experimentation. In a nonlinear narrative, the filmmaker employs flashbacks, flashforwards, quick edits and jump cuts. It might sound difficult to follow, but the viewer quickly becomes acclimated to the movie's internal rhythms.
Petulia and Archie, bristling against their respective stratums of affluence and respectability, feel like casualties in a world teeming with things (automated hotels, 24-hour groceries, high-tech greenhouses, fake TV sets in hospital rooms), but precious little heart. "You're a lonely, screwed-up mess," Petulia tells Archie, but she could just as well be sizing up most of the film's inhabitants.
Terrific performances abound. Scott and Christie demonstrate why they were among the most exciting actors of their heyday. Christie, who had won the Oscar two years earlier for Darling, is particularly devastating in the movie's final – and memorable – image. The picture's supporting players are equally superb, with Shirley Knight and Joseph Cotton stealing scenes as, respectively, Archie's ex-wife and David's venomous father.
Moreover, it is worth noting that Petulia's production values are superb. John Barry's saxophone-fueled score is jazzy and haunting, while legendary cinematographer (and later director) Nicolas Roeg captures the City by the Bay in all its splendor.
Crushed by Inertia Lons
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Movie
Review - - PETULIA - NYTimes.com - The New York Times Renata Adler from the New York Times
New DVD's: Richard
Lester's 'Petulia' - The New York Times
THE THREE MUSKETEERS
Great Britain USA (105 mi) 1973
The
Four Musketeers Slightly
Tragic Slapstick, by Russell E. Davis from Jump Cut, 2004
JUGGERNAUT
Juggernaut
We
Bombed in Mid-Ocean, by Gerald Peary from Jump Cut, 1975
Leth, Asgar and Milos
Loncarevic
GHOSTS OF CITÉ SOLEIL B+ 90
Comparisons will inevitably be made
with the over-rated fictionalized depiction of young, gun-happy, child thugs in
the poorest Brazilian ghetto in Fernando Meirelles’s eye-opening 2002 film CITY
OF GOD, but those will largely be misleading, as the Brazilian film accentuates
youth crime with a slick stylization to the point of idealization or fixation, which
is hardly the case here in an unflinchingly candid documentary view of life in
the crime-ridden slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti during the waning years of the
Aristide rule, when the increasingly unpopular President allegedly employed the
use of Chimères, street gangs or thugs from
the poorest city slums, to intimidate opposition demonstrations, clearing the
streets using a gangster style, open display of guns on the street, turning
their neighborhood, called Cité Soleil, into what the United Nations labelled “the most dangerous place on
earth.” Rather than explore the cause of
these circumstances, as Haiti has historically been one of the poorest
countries in the world for well over two hundered years, the filmmakers instead
gain remarkably close access to several of the gang leaders, two of whom are
brothers, calling themselves 2Pac and Bily, both of whom routinely speak directly
to the camera explaining the choices they are forced to make each passing day,
offering their views through a kind of pumped up macho gangsta rap, supported
by an over amped techo music beat from Wyclef Jean that is in synch with the
saturated colors, rapidly moving hand held camera, and quick editing cuts that
help make what we see literally jump off the screen with a dizzying sense of
motion and energy.
These are not boys, however, even
if they have adolescent rapper idealizations, as they each demonstrate a sense
of understanding their elevated role in this dog-eat-dog, kill-or-get-killed
street mentality which was not of their choosing, but they adapted themselves
well to the impoverished circumstances they were born into with a mix of
ruthless authority and free wheeling style, where truckloads of young guys
carrying automatic weapons was not an uncommon sight, or driving down the
street in cars with rifles sticking out of all the windows, all of which
expressed the neighborhood presence of “their” soldiers. When fights broke out, weapons broke out as
well, usually with serious fatalities, and strangely, the camera is never far
away from the center of action. For a
group of white Danish filmmakers to routinely capture such intimate, close
range shots documenting a mafia style presence of black street violence in such
an impoverished all-black neighborhood is nothing less than astounding, as at
one point, one of the soldiers threatens to kill them just to steal their
camera. The brothers are similar, but
different, as Bily is still under the spell of voodoo charms and superstitions,
while 2Pac ridicules this practice as a weakness, constantly undermining all
the competition to anoint himself as head kingpin.
Perhaps the most inexplicable and
distracting turn of events involves the only white person seen on camera, a
French relief worker named Lele, a young sympathetic blond who becomes Bily’s
girl friend while tending to the wounds that his soldiers inevitably
incur. Lele has the astonishing bad sense
to actually get in bed with this group of street criminals, supplying them with
government information about them as it becomes known, as it’s unlikely these
guys read the newspapers or watch much TV, as they don’t even use cell phones,
so she becomes an intelligence source and their closest, most intimate female
companion. Well, she’s French, so go
figure. But this has a strange way of
weaving itself into the film’s structure, as wherever these guys go, she’s at
their side, occasionally lying with them on the bed, moving first into bed with
one brother, then dumping him (on camera) as she befriends 2Pac. Since this film is about capturing “real events,”
this is a head scratcher and offers multiple possibilities, one of which is
that she craved the attention, like a groupie, and loved being included in a movie
alongside Haiti’s toughest thugs, and one other that can’t be dismissed is that
she may have been a government agent, a plant, an informant, who was exchanging
sex for first hand knowledge about the the gang operations. This latter possibility gains credibility as
we discover at the end of the film that she’s living safely somewhere in
France, which is hardly the outcome of the two brothers, whose options always
included the possibility of death, hence, their fascination with gangsta rap
lyrics that elevate death to an aura of mythical heights.
As Aristide is driven from office, the influence of the Chimères diminishes as well, becoming an easy target for military operations who go door to door searching for weapons and known outlaws, much like the Iraqi deck of cards used at the beginning of the American incursion into Iraq, with a similar hierarchy for the most wanted, with these two brothers at the top of the list. As the police network closes in, it becomes obvious they are cornered like rats. Relying on guns, depending on guns for power, they are now beaten at their own game, outmatched by militarized organizations with more soldiers and significantly more guns. The brothers remain defiant, but can see all too clearly what the future holds for them, as street thugs are simply not equipped to go into battle against an army. Lele, as it turns out, offers them little help in this matter and apparently saves herself. There’s a wonderful use of the Brian Eno song “An Ending (Ascent),” which has an almost anthem-like spiritual quality to it, as scenes of a subdued 2Pac somewhat affectionately playing with his baby daughter are shown. But this is a man the viewer will never sympathize with and his daughter will hardly ever know. This plays out like a dream sequence from a Michael Winterbottom film, using similar camera and quick cut editing techniques, but in the end, this is not fiction, and it’s not how but *what* is shown onscreen that is relentlessly captivating, showing us scenes we would never see elsewhere, haunting us long after we’ve left the theater.
For the resident expert on Haitian affairs, and Haitian
films, one should turn to Raul Peck.
Born in Haiti but raised in the Congo and France, his magnificent 1993
film THE MAN BY THE SHORE brilliantly depicts the fear under the Papa Doc Duvallier
regime, easily the most ruthless and murderous of the recent string of brutal dictators,
and whose blistering capitalistic exposé,
PROFIT AND NOTHING BUT! Or Impolite Thoughts on the Class Struggle
(2002) is similarly brilliant. His portrait of the
Chicago
Reader JR Jones
Filmmakers Asger Leth and Milos Loncarevic
plunged into
Ghosts of Cite Soleil Charles
Coleman from Facets Multi-Media
How is my life gonna
be? I don't know. Maybe good, maybe bad. I don't know. Lord knows. —2Pac
In 2004, 200 years after
Filmmaker Asger Leth attained an incredible level of trust from his subjects
that allowed him to capture unfiltered scenes of brutal honesty; scenes not
just of terrifying violence but also of intimate moments between the lovers
that serve as startling counterpoint to the world outside, where life seems
completely hopeless. Directed by Asgar Leth and Milos Loncarevic,
Denmark/U.S.A., 2006, 35mm, 88 mins. In English, French and Haitian with
English subtitles. In Creole and French with English subtitles.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
The opening crawl
to Asger Leth's documentary Ghosts Of Cité Soleil reminds viewers that
Haiti was part of the New World "discovered" by Christopher Columbus,
that it's only a two-hour flight from Miami, and that the Port-Au-Prince slum
dubbed Cité Soleil is, according to the U.N., "the most dangerous place on
Earth." Leth may seem to be coming on a little strong, playing up Haiti's
violence and proximity to the U.S., but he clearly intends Ghosts Of Cité
Soleil to be pitched at a hysterical peak. The movie follows two brothers,
2Pac and Bily: the former is a ganglord who wants to be a rapper, and the
latter is an armed supporter of Haitian president Jean-Baptiste Aristide. The
film opens shortly before Aristide is deposed, and it catches the chaos of a
country in bloody transition. Leth also captures the drama that arises when
2Pac and Bily share the affections of a French aid worker named Lele.
Leth even shoots
the moment when Lele walks up to Bily on the street, hugs him, and tells him
that 2Pac is her man now. It's one of a handful of scenes in Ghosts Of Cité
Soleil that raise questions about the movie's legitimacy. Not that Leth
staged anything, but given that he's making a movie about people who take
comfort in the self-aggrandizing mythology of hip-hop culture, it's highly
likely that his subjects are elevating their macho posturing because of his
camera's presence. Either way, Leth never confronts the brothers about the
morality of their guns-and-adultery lifestyle. Instead, he crafts the film with
the burnished look and restless style of an edgy contemporary action movie,
turning thugs into legends.
In doing so, Leth
has made something undeniably exciting. Ghosts Of Cité Soleil moves
restlessly from parties to crime scenes (and parties about to become
crime scenes), and periodically, he abandons his principal characters to cut in
file footage and news reports about what's happening with Aristide's removal
and the subsequent U.S. occupation. That sense of scope is necessary to
establishing the stakes for 2Pac and Billy and their scant couple of blocks of
turf. The new provisional government promises an end to the violence in the
streets if the gangs will give up their guns, while the gangs know that they
keep the guns because they're usually fighting the government. If
nothing else, Leth shows how wrung-out and careless everyone gets amid constant
bloodshed. "We don't need peace," one says. "We need school for
our kids. Food. Sleep."
indieWIRE Nick Pinkerton from Reverse Shot
"Rap music influenced them people deep over there; they
will live by it and they will die by it. And it ain't no
The film focuses on brothers Bily and "Haitian 2Pac," slum gang leaders
trying to preserve their neighborhood influence in the wake of 2004's military
coup and the forced abdication of the presidency by Jean-Baptiste Aristade, who was, according to the brothers'
claims, their employer and benefactor. The pervasive influence of American
hip-hop culture is everywhere - Haitian 2Pac has a soldier named "50 Cent," his underlings wear Sean John gear, and when pressed into
a tight spot he'll express his personal plight through the title of one of his
namesake's albums: "It's me against the world." Of the hip-hop
martyrs, Biggie and Big L are the clearly superior lyricists, but it's Tupac Shakur, with his
beyond-the-grave prolificacy and messianic "Follow me"s, who has
become the icon, spraypainted on walls in Sofiatown and aboriginal
Director Asger
Leth-son of Danish filmmaker and former Consul to
The almost complete eschewal of social and political contextualization aside, there are occasions when the film comes through on the level of pure visceral experience - as a portrait of jumbled, sordid life in the lower depths wracked by cataracts of senseless violence, a human hell to recall Stephen Crane's slum stories. Leth and Loncarevic are keenly aware of the unique opportunity before them - shooting a revolution! - and seem frantic to capture everything, with some extraordinary stuff resulting: a squalling newborn carried off by the ankles, forceps clamped on its umbilical cord; a routine dispensing of foodstuffs that, in a muddle of bluff and bullshit, descends straightaway into violent anarchy. Such inspired interludes only increase the disappointment when Leth decides to fasten 2Pac's story onto the familiar "race-against-time-to-escape-the-ghetto" narrative arc. It may be that stories of slum life too often end the same way, but that doesn't mean they should feel so familiar.
Film Journal International (Frank Lovece)
Fatalism hangs over the documentary Ghosts of Cité Soleil
like blunts from the lips of chimeres, the "ghosts" who haunt the
series of
Many of the rest have to do with the way rap and hip-hop braggadocio has become
the language of power among the quasi-political gang leaders who control the
streets. Armed with automatic weapons and given cars and just enough money to
dispense ward-heeler favors among the desperately poor, these chimere chiefs
live little better than the other teeming slum-dwellers. Spewing trash talk
that makes David Mamet look like Mother Goose, peppered with preening, threats
and an inordinate use of the words "gangster," "criminal" and
"thug," the chiefs we see aren't particularly out for themselves.
Stranded in a preternatural poverty of mud, disease, violence, little drinking
water or electricity, and an overwhelming disregard by the monied
powers-that-be, they claim to want two things: political peace and a rap
career. If it weren't so horrific, it'd be absurdly funny.
That same might be said of Leth's approach, which is impressively all-access--a
relief worker/lover of one of the chiefs having provided introductions and
passage through the historic events of February 2004--but squanders that
extremely rare view of the heart of the beast. With a willfully blind eye to a
fuller context, Leth fashions a sentimental story of, in his own press-material
words, a "practically Shakespearean" tale of two brothers "both
in love with the same girl!" Exclamation point his.
Those two brothers are Winston "2pac" Jean Bart and James
"Bily" Petit-Frere--not that Leth gives you those full names,
offering instead only their tags, as if conferring outlaw medals. Each leads a
chimere gang; the film mentions five such gangs, with news reports counting as
many as 32 at the time. The woman is a piece of work named Éleonore
"Lele" Senlis, whom the film, suspiciously, IDs only as an
unspecified "French relief worker." Spies often use "relief
work" as a cover, and aside from an artist with five kids, the only online
reference to a relief worker named Éleonore Senlis appears to be an
advisory-board member of a UNICEF-related HIV/AIDS project. That the film shows
her spending far less time bandaging and comforting than she does playing Mata
Hari--dispensing political advice to each brother and sleeping with one--brings
up obvious questions about exactly what kind "relief" she's there to
provide.
There are a lot of questions the film doesn't ask as it skims over the unrest
that culminated in a coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by
"Cannibal Army" rebels Guy Philippe, Louis-Jodel Chamlain (a former
death-squad leader) and Butteur Matayer (head of the Revolutionary Anti-Aristide
Front). The brothers whom the mysterious Senlis introduced the filmmakers to
say their resources came from Aristide; some commentators have since claimed
the brothers were paid to say so. The film does has an anti-Aristide slant--and
there are, in fairness, debates to this day about his election, his sudden
departure from the country, and more--but what truly ruins the documentary's
credibility besides its vagueness about Semlis is Leth not mentioning, just for
instance, that opposition candidates André "Andy" Apaid and Charles
Henri Baker are what human-rights organizations call sweatshop owners, and that
both objected to Aristide wanting to double the minimum wage. Given the
incomparable poverty of
I could give many more examples. You have to admire Leth and his team's
intrepidness in gaining unprecedented access and staying alive. But this
privileged-class filmmaker is so enamored of his romantically outlaw subjects
and the woman in-between, his film is just one step removed from "The Real
World:
“Power is a gun in
Just two hours from
In this labyrinth of unforgiving realpolitik, everyday gunfire and casual
aggression remain brutal facts of life, with 2Pac contributing his share in the
turf he divides with his more guarded brother Bily. Leth's film scores it
greatest success in conveying a nerve-scraping sense of danger enveloping the
nation, with an eye for the blistering violence that crackles on and off like
short-circuiting electric wires, mirroring the power outages that beset the
capital and force meetings to take place lit by flashlight beams.
Documentaries don't come much more intimate than this, as Leth's camera stands
beside 2Pac in the shower and nestles in the sweaty bedclothes beside him until
we can taste the salt in the humid air. The director takes palpable relish in
his access, but his filmmaking feels personal in the wrong way—unquestioning
and indulgent—because it maintains no distance whatsoever from his subject,
trading in the allure of voyeurism that leaves a disturbing aftertaste of
enabling.
Coming out of music videos and commercials (he shot his more famous father's
contributions to Lars von Trier's The Five
Obstructions), Leth employs an oppressively artful style of
spasming camerawork and grainy bleached color, with jittery cutting amongst
multiple angles, but its apparent complexity is all visual patchwork.
Deceptively striking and busy to the point of distraction, it leaves a hollow
feeling that in this film aesthetics trumps ethics.
Anyone can see that 2Pac's life expectancy will be short, but his own youth and
pumped-up gangsta swagger make him unable to understand his rapid progress
toward literally becoming a ghost. To construct moments of pathos, Leth applies
devices of melodrama to turn the strutting 2Pac vulnerable as he tries to
leverage a record contract through Wyclef Jean, or when he spares some
attention for his young daughter. Still, the film's most interesting enigma is
Lele, a Frenchwoman who maneuvers the two brothers like chess pieces, a kind of
tropical Madame Dubarry dispensing advice on political strategy and stroking
their egos while sharing 2Pac's bed. Intentionally or not, Leth seems oblivious
to her position as an aid-worker (a notorious cover for intelligence
operatives), noting only that she's now back in
Shortly after the invasion of
Leth doesn't go in for analysis, so he presents the political insurrection as a
surprise, rather than the outcome of failed opposition attempts and the
ruthless suppression of strikes, including a general strike to protest the
International Monetary Fund's schemes to repeal minimum wage laws and privatize
telephone and electricity services. For all the film's flashy style and dynamic
surface excitement, it paints a disappointingly glib vision of
Electric Sheep Magazine Nick Dutfield
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Ghosts
of Cité Soleil (2006) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially
offensive") Matt Cale
Cinemattraction.com [Sarah Manvel]
Los Angeles Times
Kevin Crust
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Leth, Jørgen
THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS
Lessons of
Darkness [Nick Schager]
Those who find Danish auteur Lars Von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) to be an insufferable, egomaniacal pain-in-the-ass will undoubtedly find much to loath about The Five Obstructions, a fascinating (and oft-times infuriating) documentary in which Von Trier instructs filmmaker Jorgen Leth to remake his abstract short film The Perfect Human (which Von Trier puzzlingly finds to be “perfect”) five different times under varying sets of difficult circumstances. The point of this cruel experiment is twofold – to torture the mild-mannered Leth (not unlike how Von Trier reportedly likes to torment his own actors and actresses), and to help Leth transcend his safe, comfortable artistic space. Von Trier’s conditions range from demanding that no shot by more than 12 frames long to making Leth shoot in the most miserable place he can imagine (a Bombay ghetto, apparently) and forcing him to recreate his short as a cartoon, but much of the film’s tension comes from Leth’s regular attempts to slyly circumnavigate Von Trier’s rules. That Leth’s new films seem to improve upon his original confirms The Five Obstructions’ position that artistic inspiration frequently flourishes not in an environment of complete freedom but, rather, one of sometimes-severe restrictions, but it also subtly stands as Von Trier’s “told you so” rebuke to critics who decry his harsh work methods.
Danish provocateur Lars von Trier has achieved notoriety for two reasons. Thematically, he has created some of cinema’s most memorable martyrs and subjected them to the cruelest of ordeals in his gut-wrenching epics. Stylistically, he has formulated the influential Dogme 95 manifesto that imposes strict filmmaking rules. In The Five Obstructions, von Trier does a variation on both with devious glee.
He persecutes mentor Jørgen Leth into remaking Leth’s 1967 short The Perfect Human with seemingly impossible restrictions – such as no shot exceeding half a second. Believing this will be a therapeutic experience for his hero, von Trier encourages Leth to make crap. Much to von Trier’s dismay, Leth rises to the challenge. To finally render Leth powerless, von Trier makes his own “obstruction” then credits Leth as director.
The exercise proves that artificial limitations actually inspire filmmakers to creatively express the same ideas using different means. A testament to Leth’s talent, the various Perfect Human updates are as witty and enthralling as the original. In a year flooded by uninspired remakes (Dawn of the Dead, Around the World in 80 Days, The Stepford Wives, The Manchurian Candidate, Alfie, et al), it’s refreshing to see someone thinking outside the box.
filmcritic.com Jeremiah Kipp
Anyone who makes art knows that creativity is born from
limitations. The Five Obstructions idealizes this notion. Danish
provocateur Lars von Trier makes a challenge to his old film professor (and
renowned experimental filmmaker) Jørgen Leth: Remake his poetic 1967 short film
The Perfect Human five times, according to arbitrary (and sometimes, in
Leth’s words, “satanic” or “diabolical”) rules concocted by von Trier. The
Five Obstructions is a documentary about Leth making those five remakes,
filtered through von Trier’s rules.
Ever since Breaking
the Waves, von Trier has been imposing his own self-made limitations on
his movies with varying levels of success. Indeed, he comes off in The Five
Obstructions as the bad guy, a carefully cultivated image that’s more
annoying because it’s so calculated. Von Trier’s sadistic glee is the least
interesting part of Obstructions, and Leth is the more compelling
subject: an artist grappling with the art of making movies. When faced with the
first obstruction-- where no clip must last more than 12 frames, the movie must
be shot in Cuba, the questions posed by Leth’s experimental short must be
answered, and so on -- Leth creates a vivid, collage-poem where the 12 frame
structure creates beautiful, dreamlike swirls of movement and daring editing
jumps. When faced with Leth’s stunning and beautiful completed work, von Trier
seethes in mock exasperation: “The 12 frames were a gift!”
Leth keeps smiling and remains buoyant as von Trier continually tests his
mettle. The challenges grow increasingly more difficult (“Make a film in the
worst place on earth, where you are the Perfect Human!” transforms into
a meditation on power, privilege, and a surprisingly touching self-criticism.)
Leth is at his most lost when von Trier assigns him no rules at all, although
the documentary footage of Leth wandering “lost” through hotel hallways strains
the metaphor.
Unlike much of von Trier’s work in recent years, which to me feels deadening
and oppressive, The Five Obstructions is a work of inspiration and hope.
Clearly, von Trier idolizes his mentor, Leth, even as he gently mocks him. Leth
withstands all manner of mockery and comes through as a hero, a humanitarian
man, and an artist who makes good on his promise to make good films despite any
obstacle. The Five Obstructions may be a little too padded with Leth
worrying over what he’ll do, and the best parts are the challenge and the
finished result of the challenge. The documentary footage in-between does serve
its purpose, though, for the patient viewer. The final film culminates the
whole of The Five Obstructions, and when Leth’s voice-over says, “This
is how the Perfect Human falls,” my heart leapt for joy. If an artist learns
through his failures, his weaknesses, then those cannot be separated from his
strengths. The terms themselves become arbitrary. Through obstructions comes
art, and one admires the courage and temerity of Leth, or any artist, through
their struggle. That’s not idle hero worship. Through that struggle, Leth has
created works as beautiful and moving as any art I’ve seen in recent years.
Even those of us who admire many
of Lars von Trier’s films, are undaunted by his vaunted anti-Americanism (indeed,
find it more advertised than present), and enjoy his Dogme dogmatism for the
artistic lark that it is, can occasionally be exasperated by his woeful
self-indulgence and a moral obtuseness of Brobdingnagian proportions.
The Five Obstructions is a case
study of Von Trier’s serious shortcomings, a self-constructed autopsy made in
collaboration with fellow Dane Jørgen Leth. According to the notes
provided with the film, Leth is a “revered cultural figure” in Denmark
The Perfect Human’s style seems
to be influenced by the Jean-Luc Godard of the Masculin/Feminin era and
animated by a mild rebelliousness against the norms of Danish social
democracy. Perhaps. In any event, it shows a man and woman in
semi-formal dress performing everyday functions – dancing, eating, sleeping –
while Leth provides faux anthropological commentary on the soundtrack. It’s
a film designed to fit the phrase “small potatoes.”
In 2000, Von Trier challenged
Leth to remake the film under a series of limitations – the obstructions –
invented by Von Trier. He wouldn’t remake the film in its entirety five
times, but take a portion of the movie – the eating, the dancing, the
love-making – and reinvent it.
The two begin with the first,
dancing segment of The Perfect Human, which sends Leth to Cuba. We don’t
just get Leth’s finished product at first; but also get to watch him setting up
his movie behind the scenes, a peek of production that produces remarkably
little in the way of insight. Leth does figure out that one of the
obstructions that Von Trier sets for the dancing sequence, that no shot last
more than 12 seconds, is actually meaningless. The fact that you have to
cut every 12 seconds in no way effects continuity or even rhythm if the
filmmaker doesn’t want it to.
The film Leth ends up with is a
mildly entertaining divertissement though there is a hint of what’s to come.
The “revered” Danish artist includes a shot of a Cuban woman naked from the
waist up. There is no nudity, partial or otherwise, in his original film,
whether because of Danish mores at the time of because his actress refused to
undress. Of course, in Cuba today, Leth is able to peel dollar after
dollar (or whatever currency he uses), off his bankroll to cajole a poor woman
from a poor country to peel off her shirt in order to give his film a “sensual”
cast.
Back in Denmark, Leth and Von
Trier have a good laugh over how Leth has easily surmounted the first set of
obstructions. So Von Trier comes up with what he himself says is a
diabolical plan. The recreate the eating scene, Leth must go to a sire of
the most extreme human misery and film himself eating a sumptuous meal.
Ah, this is truly diabolical, Leth agrees. The two Danish artists also
agree that they will not indulge themselves with phony liberal guilt.
That has nothing to do with real morality, after all.
For his site of misery, Leth
picks Falkland Road in Bombay, which he has visited before. Falkland Road
is a red light district but nothing like, say, the relatively clean,
respectable prostitution district of Amsterdam. Falkland Road is rife
with AIDS. Most of the prostitutes are children who have been forced into
prostitution, who have their virginity auctioned off, who are worked to
death. The depravity and perversion are unspeakable, a disgrace to
humanity.
This is where, dressed in a
tuxedo, Leth films himself preparing and eating a fancy meal to the music of
Verdi (who would have been shocked). The ethical violation is
appalling. Later in the film, Leth will recount how he tossed and turned
in his hotel room for two whole sleepless nights afterwards. Poor baby.
No wonder he is revered in Denmark, having such a rarified sense of morality.
Von Trier himself is unhappy with
the film. He had told Leth to shoot with a plain white backdrop so that
we would see nothing of the poor and oppressed. But Leth had used a
semi-translucent screen as background, which allowed a few members of the
“suffering masses” to press parts of their body into sight on thus into
consciousness. Go back and shoot again. What an exquisite sense of
artistry! But, Leth says, he cannot. He is too shaken by the
experience to repeat it. What an exquisite conscience! We are
indeed blessed that a country as small as Denmark has produced such a pair of
towering, er, somethings.
A viewer would notice that of all
the obstructions he lists, Von Trier never tells Leth to go out and actually
make a movie. And, indeed, no one connected with this project ever
does. The Five Obstructions is more an advertisement for the
whiter-than-white sensibilities of the two principles than a film. As
another critic once said of another movie, it belongs to the history of
publicity, not the history of cinema.
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Read Full Review Matthew Wilder from Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages
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The Five
Obstructions - Wikipedia
Levinson, Barry
All-Movie
Guide Hal Erickson
One of the more versatile American filmmakers of his
generation, Barry Levinson's
movies showcased subjects as diverse as the immigrant experience, mob intrigue,
and political satire. He earned particular acclaim for his
semi-autobiographical portraits of life in 1950s
Born in
Levinson's
first directorial job was the low-budget Diner
(1982), the first installment of his "Baltimore trilogy" (the others
were Tin Men
(1987) and Avalon
(1990)); Diner
served to showcase several stars-to-be, among them Mickey Rourke,
Ellen Barkin,
Daniel Stern,
Paul Reiser,
and Michael Tucker.
A poignant, critically acclaimed, coming-of-age story, the film helped to
establish Levinson
as a bankable director; this status was further solidified with such purely
commercial projects as The Natural
(1984) and Young Sherlock
Holmes (1985). In 1988, Levinson
tackled one of his most ambitious projects in Rain Man,
the remarkable saga of a disaffected yuppie's deepening relationship with his
autistic savant brother. An all-around success, the film won numerous Oscars,
including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman).
Levinson
had little difficulty imposing his own personal stamp on such star-oriented
films as Good Morning,
Vietnam (1987), starring Robin Williams,
and Bugsy
(1991), starring Warren Beatty.
Although he has made few missteps in his career, Levinson
suffered an intensely personal defeat with Toys
(1992), a morality tale acted out in a toy manufacturing company. The film had
been a pet project of Levinson's
for nearly 20 years, and, when finally completed, it proved to be a complete
turkey. Similarly disappointing was the director's Jimmy Hollywood
(1994); a comedy starring Joe Pesci
as a struggling actor, it sank at the box office. He had greater luck with Sleepers
(1996), the disturbing tale of four lifelong friends seeking retribution for
torture and sexual abuse they suffered as young boys at a reform school. The
following year proved to be a banner one, as Levinson
had two critically acclaimed hits, one as the producer of Donnie Brasco,
starring Johnny Depp
as an undercover cop who develops a dangerous friendship with mobster Al Pacino,
and the other as the producer/director of the sharp political satire Wag the Dog,
starring Dustin Hoffman
and Robert De Niro.
Following a semi-disastrous foray into science fiction with Sphere
(1998), Levinson
literally and figuratively returned to his home turf in 1999 with Liberty Heights.
The story of two Jewish boys growing up in
The 21st century started off in a less than stellar way for Levinson
as his comedy An Everlasting
Piece struggled to get a release in the
The next year he made the quirky comedy Bandits
featuring a love triangle between Bruce Willis,
Billy Bob
Thornton, and Cate Blanchett.
That film was a mild success, but the same could not be said of his next
feature, Envy.
The Ben Stiller/Jack Black
comedy, with a script originally conceived by Larry David,
failed to find support from the studio that funded it as well as from
audiences. To steady himself, Levinson
teamed yet again with Robin Williams
for the political satire Man of the Year,
about a political comic who ends up running for the Presidency.
Film
Reference James M. Welsh, updated by
Robyn Karney
A
Levinson Profile from the Gods of
Filmmaking
Levinson, Barry They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
DGA
Interview by Ted Elrick, March 2000
Guardian
Unlimited Interview by
501 Movie Directors: A
Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
DINER
Directing from his own
script, Levinson revels in detailed observation in this rites-of-passage movie
about a college student returning home to Baltimore for the Christmas holidays
in 1959, and picking up with the old gang as they try to fend off adulthood and
marriage by hanging out at the local diner and talking about football, women,
cars and rock'n'roll (Stern is particularly fine as the R&B buff,
memorising record label serial numbers with religious awe). Not a lot to it,
but the sense of period is acute, the script witty without falling into the
crude pitfalls that beset other adolescent comedies, and the performances are
spot-on.
Der Apfel Ist Ab to Dirty Dancing Pauline Kael
A wonderful movie, set in Baltimore
Edinburgh U
Film Society [John Moffat]
Many films are based around a
question: Citizen Kane is based around the question, "must power
corrupt?"; Crimes and Misdemeanours is based around the question,
"is God blind?"; and Diner is based around the question
"do you want that sandwich?"
The first and best Barry
Levinson's Baltimore
Levinson's script shows the joy
of conversation at its most tangential. As in real life, when someone in this
film is asked the question, "who do you prefer: Sinatra or Mathis?",
he simply replies, "Presley."
While working on the script for High Anxiety,
Barry Levinson was telling stories about his old
Levinson has done some fine work over the years directing such movies as The
Natural, Rain Man, Bugsy, and Wag the Dog, but Diner is his
directorial debut and is the film that will be most notably associated with
him.
I'm not sure that I'd call Diner a great film, but it certainly is
memorable. Levinson's film has a number of significant scenes that will be
indelibly marked in your brain after a single viewing, has a great many quotable
lines, and has a now legendary ensemble cast.
Set in the late 1950's in
That's essentially the "plot" of Diner. Things happen during
the course of the film, but that is not all that important. This is a character
piece, and we are introduced to a number of young unknowns in this 1982 film
who will go on to notable film careers.
While Levinson had a basic script to work from, he often allowed these actors
to continue on and improvise dialogue, and many do shine here. Some outstanding
performances are turned in by Steve Guttenberg (Eddie Simmons), Mickey Rourke
(Boogie Sheftell), Kevin Bacon (Timothy Fenwick, Jr.), Timothy Daly (Billy
Howard), Daniel Stern (Shrevie Schreiber), Ellen Barkin (Beth Schreiber), and
Paul Reiser (Modell). We can look at this cast today and marvel at its All-Star
quality, but just remember that these were all relatively unknown actors at the
time. For example, Kevin Bacon had worked in soap operas and had bit parts in
movies like Animal House and Friday 13th (he didn't last long
there) before Diner. Afterwards, he worked in so many movies that nearly
everyone who's been in film is connected to him (check out the Kevin Bacon
game).
I was especially touched by Barkin's work. She plays "vulnerable"
really well here, as the good-hearted wife who is under-appreciated. After
Shrevie has blown up at her for not sorting his records by their proper genre
and not knowing who Charlie Parker is, she is left crying and is doubting her
self worth. She attempts to cover when old flame Boogie comes looking for her
husband, but lets on that she is hurting. Later there is a memorable scene
where Barkin thanks Boogie for not following through on a sexual liaison that
would have led to a real disaster, and it feels like she is drawing this from
real life experience and isn't acting.
Much of the movie feels this way, and that gives real strength to Diner.
Levinson knows these characters, gives them real dialogue to work with, and
then lets these actors improvise some of their own material. This may be
Levinson's first directorial effort, but it was sheer genius on his part to
gather this ensemble together early in
It had been a while since I had first seen Diner, but certain scenes and
lines had remained. Who can forget Boogie's bet about his ability to have a
sexual encounter with a first date? It may be difficult to eat popcorn at the
movies again without laughing.
The encounter between Shrevie and Beth about his records is a real classic that
rings so true with those of us who fell in love with rock and roll. When Beth
expresses shock that anyone would care about the flip side of a record, Shrevie
goes ballistic: "Every one of my records means something! The label, the
producer, the year it was made ... When I listen to my records they take me
back to certain points in my life, OK? Just don't touch my records, ever! ...
"
There are two scenes concerning marriage angst that are especially memorable as
well, and both involve Steve Guttenberg. The first occurs when Shrevie is
talking with Eddie about the difference that marriage makes. He can't
participate in some of the "old" conversations anymore; at least not
the ones that talk about trying to find a way to have sex, yet he thinks he
likes the idea of being married.
That may be of some solace to Eddie since he's having his own doubts about his
impending marriage: "I think I'll be missing out on things." Eddie
even sets up a hilarious scenario of requiring his fiancé to pass a football
test, and it's obvious that he will be greatly relieved if she fails. Anyone
who sees this film will remember that scene and will be amazed that his fiancé
does as well as she does on this ultimate football trivia test, focusing
primarily on the Baltimore Colts. After all, what normal person would know that
the first team colors were green and gray?
As we get older, our memories may fade and get fuzzy. Like Kevin Bacon we may
feel like "there's something going on that we don't know about." In
such times we can still return to "the old days" when rock and roll
ruled and the Universe meant something. Though it's not a great film,
Levinson's first film can help fill a void we may feel as we age. It feels
comfortable to those of us who lived during the late 50's and early 60's. Back
in my home town, we had a place called the Maid Rite, but that's long ago and
far away. If I get a hankering for these old days I can pop this video/DVD into
the player.
After all, "we always got the diner."
Diner -
TCM.com Paul Tatara
Diner The Politics of Nostalgia, by Deborah H. Holdstein from Jump Cut, 1983
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
DVD Verdict Harold Gervais
eFilmCritic.com Slyder
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
THE NATURAL
This upbeat adaptation
of Bernard Malamud's gritty allegory of the world of baseball is one of those
test cases for the mood or generosity of the spectator: give yourself over
completely to its wide-eyed brand of mythologising, and it will reward you with
a tidal wave of emotion, hero-worship and strange medieval morality tale; a
flicker of disbelief, however, and you'll see nothing but its faults. The
Arthurian basis to Redford's rise to baseball stardom means that the narrative
can include very un-Hollywoodlike devices such as an unexplained 16-year gap
when he is out in the cold, expiating his fall from grace with a murderous
femme fatale. Moreover, this mythological basis releases the cast from the
necessity for naturalism (despite the title). There are also other things to
enjoy: a great line up of supporting actors (especially Brimley and Farnsworth
doing their grouchy old man double act), Caleb
Deschanel's photography, Randy Newman's
score. Let yourself go and be rewarded by the sight of a hero running home to
victory through clouds of fire.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)
I had this wonderful, jowly old professor of medieval history
in college who, in between furious bouts of his chain smoker's cough, happily
volunteered that his all-time favorite movie was The Natural, which he
saw as a straight-up retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And
certainly as baseball movies go, this isn't one that smacks of authenticity, or
that even wants to—it's self-consciously mythical, playing on the lore of the
game, the sort of stuff that will only make number-crunching sabermetricians roll
their eyes. Well, leave those guys to their spread sheets and their fantasy
leagues, because this is a grand American story, deliberately archetypical,
almost to its detriment. That is, the myth sometimes gets in the way, and
occasionally we feel like we're watching types and symbols, not right fielders
and middle relievers. But so much of
It's tough to resist the baseball metaphors when writing about this movie, or
about the book on which it is based, so I won't, especially since it's a movie
about, in part, temptation—Bernard Malamud was swinging for the fences with his
novel, one that gets at baseball as a classic part of the immigrant experience,
and that doesn't recoil from the darkness that's always been a part of the
American dream. Robert Redford stars of course as Roy Hobbs, who makes it to
the show at an age when players are thinking about hanging up the spikes, and
there's more than a little of both the cowboy and the noir hero in Hobbs. He's
a man with a past, and he doesn't care to discuss it; he's been nursing some
ancient wounds, and makes it his business to keep everyone at arms length.
Whatever his age or his history, however, the fella can hit, and he's out to
prove that he's the best you ever saw.
Director Barry Levinson brings his love of the game to this project, though it
had to have pained him on some level for the great American hero to be playing
for
This Knight of course has his sword, Wonderboy, and he jousts with a literal
prince of darkness—Robert Prosky is bombastically wicked as the Judge who owns
the team, wants always to sit in the dark, and pulls for his nine to lose, for
business and gambling reasons. (This improbable story line is pretty much
parroted beat for beat and played for comedy in Major League.) Glenn
Close doesn't have the iconic stature of Redford—hardly anybody does, I
suppose—so at times it feels like she's not up to handling the mantle of being
Roy's angel—and having much more fun, anyway, is Hobbs' own Mephistopheles, Max
Mercy, played with relish by Robert Duvall.
We all know of course that baseball isn't in fact a Manichaean drama, and that
the groupies hanging at the team hotel probably aren't as deranged as Barbara
Hershey or as wicked as Kim Basinger; and that a coaching staff made of
crotchety old sorts like Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth is the stuff of
central casting exclusively. But it's pretty to think that the uniforms are
that gorgeous, that the game is that stately, and it's deliberately nostalgic
for a time when the players wore flannels on the field and fedoras off of it,
and when their worst vices were poker games on the team train. If you've got
even a modicum of baseball fan in you, you've got to be stirred by the movie's
climax, and I bet you've played it out, in your head or on the school yard,
more than once. It's a bit over the top, maybe, but it's easy and pleasurable
to lose yourself in—and, really, isn't that what the movies and baseball are
for?
Sports Illustrated (Frank Deford)
The first half hour of The Natural is simply beautiful, not only in
the richness of the film and the texture of the story, but also in all that it
evokes of the pastoral
And then, out of the blue, when
As Ron Fimrite pointed out in his recent story on
That's the constitutional failing of The Natural, and while all else
may seem like nitpicking, the movie is otherwise blemished by an interminable
last act that deteriorates into melodrama, as first one villain and then
another struts across the screen.
What separates The Natural from the Steinbrenners, however, is spirit
and effort. The devotion that colors the project is everywhere in evidence,
starting with an attention to detail that all but reincarnates the National
Pastime of the '30s. The use of period newspaper headlines to move a story
along is a hoary device, but it was never more artfully applied. The clothes,
the language (when was the last time you heard someone say "swell"?),
the trains, the poses and, above all, the lighting are exquisite.
Special credit must also be given to Satan, for surely none but Beelzebub
himself could preserve the 46-year-old
He invests the mysterious Roy Hobbs with a proper enough mixture of humor
and distance as he wends his way through a maze of allegories. Surely, it must
not be easy being, in succession, Rapid Robert Feller, Sir Lancelot, Eddie
Waitkus, Captain Marvel, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Casey of Mudville and
Glenn Close, as The First Love, is a most beguiling presence. When she rises in the crowd at Wrigley Field, an Ophelia in white, shimmering like the lady who holds up the flame at Columbia Pictures, I was perfectly at ease with that kind of mythology.
So perhaps one man's myth is another man's prison. For many, it might be quite possible to enjoy this film on both its levels, but my own devotion to baseball prohibits me from accepting what the non-fan can swallow with ease. As a romanticist, I can believe that love conquers all, the check's in the mail and girls just wanna have fun -- beam me up, Scotty -- but, damn it, baseballs can only be hit so far and ballplayers can only hit them just so often. Trick around with that and nothing else of mere human emotions and values can be accepted, either. Possibly this is one baseball film that will be appreciated more by people who don't know baseball than by those who do. We shall see. Still, though it overreaches and postures, The Natural almost manages to be a swell movie.
James
Berardinelli's ReelViews
The
Natural - TCM.com Jay S.
Steinberg
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also seen here: The Natural (Director's Cut) Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film
The Natural Mr. Smith Goes to the Ballpark, by Rob Silberman from Jump Cut, 1986
DVD Verdict Harold Gervais
The Onion A.V. Club: Director's Cut [Scott Tobias]
Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
FulvueDrive-in.com [Chuck O'Leary]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
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DVD Verdict - Director's Cut [Ryan Keefer]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Brad Laidman
filmcritic.com Christopher Null
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Read the New York Times Review » Vincent Canby
TIN MEN
Levinson's Tin Men are aluminium
siding salesmen not averse to posing as Life magazine photographers to
get the foot in the door to offload their wares on the unwary householder.
Among themselves, their vision is Jonsonian, and their respect is reserved for
the fittest alone. A feud develops between two of them, BB (Dreyfuss) and
Tilley (De Vito), over a bumped Cadillac fender, and escalates beyond
knock-for-knock reprisals to the cruel seduction of Tilley's wife (Hershey) by
BB as revenge. But BB finds himself hoist by his own petard when he falls in
love, a depleting experience which has not previously figured in his game plan.
Happily, the film does not turn squashy, and allows its salesmen to preserve
their duplicity. It's a confident return to form and to Baltimore for the Diner
man. A terrific cast grabs the naturalistic speech patterns, and Hershey
manages movingly to register her reality as the sole bearer of human values.
Washington
Post [Rita Kempley]
Back in 1963, a salad bar was still a smorgasbord, "Bonanza" was
Across the aisle was "Diner" writer-director Barry Levinson, who now serves up "Tin Men," every bit as beguiling and loosely structured as his first Bal'mer movie. Here, Levinson embellishes his memories of those Damon Runyonesque days in a sentimental celebration of the soldiers of capitalism.
A master of mood, if not momentum, Levinson offers a loving recreation of the aluminum interlude (it wasn't quite an era). And he lets the characters take us where they will, like dogs on a leash snuffling trees. Though a generation older than the "Diner" kids, the tin men prove as irrepressible, and irresponsible.
"Bonanza"-bashing, Sinatra and the reprised character Bagel (Michael Tucker) connect the friendly Levinson films. "Tin Men," with Danny DeVito, Richard Dreyfuss and Barbara Hershey, tries for a more linear story that focuses on the relationship that develops between two rival rapscallions after a crunching first impression.
Dreyfuss, as "BB" Babowsky, has a 16th of a mile on his Cadillac when he collides with a regal ragtop driven by Ernest Tilley, a tough-as-nails tin man played by DeVito. The fender-bender escalates into a major feud -- a fin for a fin, a taillight for a taillight -- till Babowsky tires of the game and takes Tilley's wife Nora. With surpassing ingenuity, the ladykiller seduces Nora (Hershey) over a shopping cart. Pretending to be a recent widower, he feigns a lack of nutritional knowhow vis-a-vis TV dinners. "I'm learning to eat again," he says, batting his eyes.
DeVito no doubt fills his most complete role -- not just some short crank but a troubled hustler who's taking a licking from the IRS, the Home Improvement Commission, and now this guy Babowsky. And Dreyfuss, as the cocky BB, is feeling deep down like Peggy Lee when she sang "Is that all there is?" There's a little of Willie Loman in both men -- and a little Frank Perdue, for local color.
There's a salt-of-the-earth electricity between Dreyfuss and Hershey that contrasts with the crackle between Dreyfuss and DeVito. But the real joy of this work comes in the interchange between the heroes and their siding-company cohorts.
Especially memorable is comedian Jackie Gayle as Tilley's partner Sam, a big-hearted palooka upset with TV's depiction of life on the Ponderosa -- because Lorne Greene is a 50-year-old with three 47-year-old sons and all three of his wives died in childbirth. Tony Award-winner John Mahoney also shines as Babowsky's partner Moe, in one of a slew of moving performances from an exceptional cast that includes Stanley Brock, Bruno Kirby, Seymour Cassel and Richard Portnow.
Levinson, whose sense of place is unsurpassed, fails again to come up with a satisfying conclusion. Watching "Tin Men" (and "Diner") is a little like watching a movie by Eric Rohmer -- less a story than a character study. "Tin Men" is a tale of transitions and a test of mettle, as sweet as a slow dance, as classy and cumbersome as a Coupe de Ville.
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]
Washington Post [Richard Harrington]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
AVALON
Barry Levinson's
"Avalon" is a rich, graceful work of lulling sentiment. Sprung from
Levinson's memories of his grandfather and the immigrant culture he knew as a
child, it is a love story. But in this case the love object is the past, and in
the larger sense the American past as reflected in the eyes of the people who
came here and encountered the country in its innocence as the realization of
their dreams of freedom and enterprise.
"Avalon" is made with a
master's confidence. Levinson, who with this movie completes the trilogy of Baltimore America
Avalon, the Baltimore
A few years after Sam's arrival
he brings over his wife, Eva, and while some attention is given to these early
years, the bulk of the film takes place during the boom after World War II,
when their son, Jules, is grown and married and has a son of his own. The
film's point of view is split between Sam (who's played brilliantly as an older
man by Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his grandson, Michael (Elijah Wood). But
Levinson also presents a colorful ensemble of nephews, aunts and uncles. The
Krichinskys are a tight-knit group who work, raise their families and celebrate
holidays together. During their clan meetings they determine which charities
they will contribute to, make plans to bring over other relatives, and bicker.
The bickering has the quality of
ritual; the same complaints -- like Eva's bafflement over the celebration of
Thanksgiving or Uncle Gabriel's (Lou Jacobi) grousing over being excluded from
the cutting of the turkey -- are trotted out on every occasion. And their
bantering has the same hilarious borscht-belt rhythms that Levinson wrote for
his characters in "Diner" and "Tin Men." This table talk
and family kvetching serves something other than a comic function; it reveals
the origins of those routines.
These are funny people, and
Levinson is at his best when he turns the picture over to them. But there's
also a sonorousness to the emotions the filmmaker expresses as he traces the
transitions in the family. At the root of this is his attachment to family
tradition, to the manner in which business is conducted -- even if it's the
business of cutting up the Thanksgiving turkey -- and his sense of place. One
of the most poignant moments comes when Jules, who along with his cousin Izzy
(Kevin Pollak) has grown increasingly successful in the retail appliance
business, moves his family to the suburbs and he and Sam stand in the living
room of their old house, recalling the things that happened there.
What Levinson is showing us is
the birth of the suburban middle class and, by exploring Jules and Izzy's
business expansions, the spawning grounds for middle-class anxieties as well.
Still, Levinson isn't interested in mere sociology. He's interested in
behavior, particularly the behavior of ordinary people, and he keeps the
narrative centered in the details of family life.
Levinson has always assembled
strong ensembles for his Baltimore films, and "Avalon" is no
exception. In the bigger family scenes, he creates a feeling of intimate byplay
between the actors. They spar and overlap neatly and, in the case of an
exchange centering on the movie "Stagecoach," masterfully. The lead
performances too are movingly expert. As the older Sam, Mueller-Stahl has a
touch of dashing Old World poetry in him. He gives the movie its soulful
plaintiveness. And he's just as effective in his scenes with Eva, who is played
by Joan Plowright in a manner that suggests what Margaret Dumont might have
been like if she'd turned cantankerously dotty.
There are good performances even
in the smaller roles. I loved Pollak's wisecracking inflections as Izzy; also,
Jacobi's ethnic spritzing as Uncle Gabriel. But perhaps the picture's best
moments come from Aidan Quinn, as Jules, and Elizabeth Perkins, who plays his
wife, Ann. Ann is fed up with having her mother-in-law constantly underfoot,
correcting whatever she does and in general treating her like a dolt, and
Perkins is riotous in the collection of shrugs and body twists she executes in
place of telling her off. Ann isn't a complainer, but in bed one night with
Jules she cuts loose, and her angry resentment is a comic tonic.
Quinn, on the other hand,
probably has fewer comic lines than anyone else. He's the serious one, the
worrier, and you can see how all the optimistic rhetoric he's digested over the
years from his father has weighed him down. He always seems a little pinched,
as if he's expecting a bill to come due (he usually is), and his performance
anchors the movie and keeps it from flying off into empty schmaltz.
Levinson's hand does shake a
little late in the film. Also, at times the film seems almost too polished and
symmetrical; Levinson, in fact, may be trying too hard to get it all right and
manages instead to leave everything a little too pat.
What this amounts to, though, is
third act problems. He can't resolve his story, so he settles instead for a
neatly wrapped package. But the gift inside the wrapping is a luxurious one.
With "Avalon," Levinson reaches into his deepest self, and an artist
can't be asked to do much more.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez)
The Digital Bits Brad Pilcher
IndependentCritics.com [Richard Propes] also seen here: The Peaceful Critic
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
WAG THE DOG
A sex scandal is about to break around
the President, threatening to derail his re-election bandwagon less than two
weeks before polling day. Veteran Conrad Brean (De Niro) quickly formulates a
rescue policy: to deflect public attention, the US will go to war. Not in real
life, but where it matters, on America's TV screens. He co-opts veteran
Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Hoffman) and they thrash out the details: the
rumours and denials of military mobilisation, the video footage of terrified
refugees, the rousing patriotic anthem. And the venue? How about Albania.
Adapted from Larry Beinhart's novel American Hero by Hilary
Henkin and David Mamet,
this is intended as an airy semi-political comedy. Lazily assembled by director
Levinson, it slides into a series of soft, extended skits on engineering a
media war, not helped by several badly handled leaps in the story. In short, a
telling symptom of the malaise of mainstream American cinema - once capable of
producing such taut political thrillers as The Candidate and The
Parallax View.
The Onion A.V.
Club [Nathan Rabin]
Filmed in only 29
days on a comparatively small (for Hollywood) budget, Barry Levinson's Wag
The Dog is the loosest, funniest, and sharpest film he's made since his
brilliant debut, Diner. Working from a script by David Mamet and Hillary
Henkin, Wag is the story of a brilliant spin doctor (Robert DeNiro)
who's recruited by the president's chief aide (Anne Heche) to divert attention
from a potential sex scandal involving the president and a teenage girl. His
ingenious solution is to create a fake war to distract the public, for which he
recruits a famed movie producer (Dustin Hoffman) to produce a trumped-up
skirmish with Albania. Wag gets off to a rollicking start, with both
Hoffman and DeNiro tearing into their roles with fervor. DeNiro imbues his
tweedy, Machiavellian schemer with an understated menace, while Hoffman turns a
character that could have easily descended into a familiar archetype (the oily,
egomaniacal Hollywood producer) into a funny, dead-on caricature of a
workaholic hopelessly in love with his own power to manufacture illusions.
Things tend to fall apart toward the end, particularly during Woody Harrelson's
ill-conceived, pointless cameo as a mentally ill convict who is paraded before
the public as a lovable war hero, but for the most part, Wag The Dog is
an oft-hilarious, witty, scathing satire that represents four gifted if uneven
artists (De Niro, Hoffman, Levinson, and Mamet) at the top of their respective
games.
World Socialist Web Site David Walsh
Wag the Dog is a funny and pointed film about American
political life, with remarkable relevance to contemporary events. The US
president is running for a second term. When, only 11 days before the
population is to go to the polls, he is accused of sexually molesting a teenage
girl, his spin-doctors go into action. Their aim is to distract the public by
creating a war with Albania.
Dustin Hoffman is marvelous as
Hollywood producer Stanley Motss, hired by the president’s advisers to whip up
public opinion in favor of war. Motss, who feels his efforts as a producer have
gone unrecognized, meets every crisis with the refrain, “This is nothing!” and
regales his listeners with horror stories drawn from his life in the film
industry.
Certain moments of the film stand
out: the recording of a heartfelt “We are the World”-type anthem, sung by a
racially and sexually correct chorus, promoting the worst sort of jingoism and
militarism; the transformation of a video clip of an actress running across a
studio soundstage holding a bag of Tostitos into “news footage” of a terrified
villager--with a kitten in her arms--escaping Albanian terrorists.
Wag the Dog demonstrates at the very least that there are
substantial numbers of people in this country who increasingly see through the
cynical manipulations of the politicians, their consultants and the media.
Barry Levinson’s film, moreover, is not simply an angry response to immediate
events, a piece of agit-prop. It reflects thinking, over an extended period of
time, about a whole host of issues in American society: the pervasive
dishonesty and corruption; the generally degraded state of politics; the
transformation of news programming into a branch of entertainment; the
opportunism of so many artists. The film deserves to be seen.
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala)
Wag the Dog is an incredibly witty movie, a rare blend of
cynicism, humour, and intelligence. The movie is about a spin doctor working
for the Presidential re-election campaign, who must create a situation that
will distract the public from the President's scandalous affairs.
To this end, Conrad Bream (Robert
De Niro), the spin doctor, with the help of movie producer Stanley Motss
(Dustin Hoffman), manages to convince the public, using media manipulation techniques,
that America is at war with Albania. The headlines that result from this
manipulation soon take precedent over the President's alleged tryst with a
young girl.
Of course, such an elaborate hoax
cannot be sustained without others getting in the way, and the movie is about
how, despite all odds, Bream and Motss manage to pull it off. The movie
chronicles the success of this hoax, with a healthy dose of non-seriousness and
humour.
Wag the Dog requires a greater suspension of disbelief than
most action movies do: The President stages (the appearance of) a war without
any approval from Congress. The President appears to be present in Albania
without actually being there and no one raises an eyebrow. Even a country which
no one has heard of in the U.S. and the international community would sit
quietly during these allegations and be completely ignored by the media. But
this exaggerated tale only makes the satire stand out more sharply.
Besides the humour, the areas
where Wag the Dog succeeds is in letting us know that the media is in
the business of making money, and they will report whatever sells the most
product. Likewise, the Presidential campaign is not about the events the occur
during a Presidential term, but the spin that is put on them.
The most disturbing thing about Wag
the Dog is that it shows how easy it is to whip up the American populace
into a frenzy using patriotism as a dangling carrot. Every event conjured up by
Bream--the war, the martyr (played brilliantly by Woody Harrelson), the theme
songs---are carefully crafted to incite the populace. And the fact of the
matter is that the general populace follow the media, even the tabloid kind,
like sheep. The "tail" wagging the "dog" symbolises those
who control the media, and the "dog" which lets itself be wagged by
its own tail are represented by the American people. What Wag the Dog
doesn't show, but what we should realise, is that real life events can be
staged more easily than the hoaxes in the movie. Consider, for example, the
current escalation of U.S-Iraq rhetoric just as President Clinton facing a
series of personal scandals.
The performances are spectacular
all around. Both De Niro and Hoffman produce some of their best work. The
acting by the supporting cast is also excellent. It is rare for me to notice
the music in a movie as I'm watching the movie (exceptions are movies like Star
Wars where anthems are created), but in this case, Mark Knopfler (of Dire
Straits) does a brilliant job with his subtle guitar work, especially during
the beginning. Don't miss this one.
Wag
the Dog - Bright Lights Film Journal Robert Castle, April 1, 2002
Apocalypse, Nu? - NYMag David Denby, 1991
Nitrate Online Elias Savada
Review for Wag the Dog (1997)
- IMDb Scott Renshaw
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
PopcornQ Rob Blackwelder, Spliced Online
Film Journal International (Bob Satuloff)
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
DVD Review Guido Henkel and Lieu Pham
Mutant Reviewers From Hell Lissa
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Janey Maslin
LIBERTY HEIGHTS A- 94
Director Barry
Levinson's fourth film set in
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Liberty Heights (1999) Andrew O'Hehir from Sight and Sound, November 2000
1954. Life in the Jewish
neighbourhood of north-west Baltimore known as Liberty Heights is changing.
Sixteen-year-old Ben Kurtzman, his older brother Van and their friends are
meeting gentiles, white and black. Their father Nate, who has seen his
burlesque business dry up, runs an illegal numbers racket. Ben is interested in
Sylvia, a black girl at school, while Van falls in love with a blonde he meets
at a party. Sylvia's father forbids her to see Ben. Van befriends a rich WASP
named Trey, not realising his girlfriend is Dubbie, the blonde from the party.
A drug dealer named Little Melvin
wins Nate's lottery, but Nate can't pay him. Little Melvin kidnaps Ben, Sylvia,
and two other teenagers from outside a James Brown concert. Nate then
surrenders the business to him, but soon gets it back. After Trey is injured in
a crash, Van and Dubbie sleep together. Ben bids Sylvia farewell and heads off
to college; Nate is arrested and imprisoned.
Review
Outside of
Yet
Levinson has spoken of his desire to counter stereotypes with this film, to emphasise that in 50s Baltimore Jews could be racketeers as well as lawyers and blacks could be doctors as well as hoodlums. This is no doubt a noble point, but it's essentially essay material rather than drama. Sylvia, for example, is an implausibly perfect angel; her first conversation with Ben is about the meaning of the 23rd Psalm. Despite the efforts of Rebekah Johnson, the role is, in its own way, just as thin a racial stereotype as Orlando Jones' incompetent, jive-talking Little Melvin.
The weakness of the Ben-Sylvia relationship also suggests that Levinson
isn't sure who his protagonist is. Ben is obviously the authorial stand-in but
his story isn't as compelling as Van's or Nate's. Adrien Brody is suave and
Mediterranean-handsome as Van, and Carolyn Murphy nearly makes the shiksa-goddess
role of Dubbie believable. But you can't help thinking that Nate, who sets his
family on the path to assimilation yet destroys himself in the process, should
have been the centre of the film. Played by Joe Mantegna without an ounce of
self-pity, Nate is a man of doomed pride and flawed principle, who celebrates
Rosh Hashanah every year by going to the synagogue, then to the Cadillac dealer
to see the coming year's new models. He is the great creation of
World Socialist Web Site Andrea Grant-Friedman
filmcritic.com climbs to Liberty Heights Robert Strohmeyer
culturevulture.net Bob Aulert
Philadelphia City Paper review by Cindy Fuchs also seen here: PopMatters
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
eFilmCritic Anthony C. Ferrante, iF magazine
The Z Review Michael Brendan McLarney
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
Village Voice (Michael Atkinson)
Film Journal International (David Noh)
Baltimore City Paper (Heather Joslyn)
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Memphis Flyer [Chris Herrington]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer)
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov)
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
WHAT JUST HAPPENED?
What
Just Happened? Patrick Z. McGavin
from
Barry Levinson's new comedy, What Just Happened? is a
desultory
Levinson has already
made this film, conflating parts of his earlier works Jimmy Hollywood
and Wag the Dog. He repeats those films' desperation and cynicism
without interjecting any new observations or insights.
The movie lacks the
sulfurous nastiness of Robert Altman's The Player, Christopher Guest's The
Big Picture or Blake Edwards' SOB, movies that were dark valentines
to the business that also managed to be furious, angry and very funny. Any
episode of HBO's Entourage is more acute and revealing.
Financed by 2929
Entertainment, the movie debuted in Sundance's Premiere section. The high
quality cast and above the line talent almost certainly guarantees a top-notch
company will put the work in play, like Sony did with previous 2929
Entertainment project We Own the Night.
It seems also likely
to continue Levinson's recent streak of poor commercial performers (Man of
the Year, Envy, Bandits). Likewise, given the difficulty of
comedies translating in foreign markets, home ancillaries are bound to be the
preferable destination.
Producer Art Linson (The
Untouchables) adapts his own same-title book about his experiences as a
savvy and shrewd industry player. The movie focuses on the frenzied personal,
social and business nexus of Ben (De Niro), a producer caught in a rush of
activity, simultaneously trying to complete a contentious post production on a
Sean Penn action movie and begin new production on a Bruce Willis project.
The movie opens at a
test screening preview of the Penn film, the crowd clearly incensed by the
movie's harsh ending involving the killing of a dog.
Ben must pacify both
his director, a British hot head named Jeremy (Wincott, the only truly
impressive performance) and run interference with the studio chief (Keener)
who's demanding major changes in advance of its Cannes premiere.
The Willis film is
also a nightmare with the imperious star appearing just before the start of
principal photography overweight and sporting an egregious ugly beard he is
refusing to shave. Ben's appeal to the star's agent, Dick Bell (Turturro), is
likewise a lesson in futility.
The personal life of
the twice-divorced man is uneasily interpolated against his business dealings
and points out how increasingly unaware he is of the inner life of either his
teenaged daughter Zoe (Stewart) or his second wife Kelly (Wright Penn). The
movie's not entirely without laughs.
Outside of Wincott,
the only two performers who appear to be having any fun are Penn and Willis,
gently playing off their own reputations. Ben's observations are never
sardonic, cutting or particularly revelatory. The movie's best parts show the
social hierarchy, the way a younger associate is dispatched from a room or Ben
being ritualistic humiliated by a Vanity Fair shoot or a Hollywood
lunch.
Levinson never finds
the right tone, and he never satisfactorily balances the real and the imagined.
Penn and Willis are the only believable performers; the characters played by
Keener, Turturro or Stanley Gucci's screenwriter appear wrong in their
behavior, the clothes they wear or their actions and ambitions.
Like Brian DePalma's Femme
Fatale, the movie recreates the pomp and circumstances of the Cannes Film
festival and gets pretty much every single part of the festival wrong. In the
end the movie appears to argue that
The movie's title is
likely to be all too apt. The film-makers should heed David Mamet's warning in
Sidney Lumet's The Verdict and never ask a question for which they don't
know the answer.
Levring, Kristian
THE INTENDED C+ 77
Great Britain Denmark
Shot in Malaysia
FEAR ME NOT B 85
Written by the director along with Danish screenwriter superstar, Anders Thomas Jensen, who has written no less than forty films since 1996, including two Dogme films, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s MIFUNE (1999) and Kristian Levring’s earlier film THE KING IS ALIVE (2000), also Lone Scherfig’s WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF (2002), and Susanne Bier’s OPEN HEARTS (2002), BROTHERS (2004), and AFTER THE WEDDING (2006), among others, and while this is a well made and troubling film, it is not in that same kind of company, despite the presence of actor Ulrich Thomsen who played such a prominent role in the initial Dogme film THE CELEBRATION (1998). Right away the structure of the film is troubling as we’re listening in voice-over to the brooding first person narration by Thomsen as Mikael, a middle aged family man who is troubled by the transition from work to plenty of free time on his hands from a lengthy leave of absence from his job for unspecified reasons that are never explained. While living on an idyllic lakeside location in a beautifully modernized, glass-windowed house designed by his architect wife, it’s irritating having to listen to his self-serving diary entries, much of which sound petty and immature, as not once does he ever think of others. Despite this nagging device to move the story along, the film is uninvolving and feels overly sluggish, as what we discover is actually a small-minded, uninteresting, egocentric husband who is prone to lying to his family, blaming his independent wife Sigrid (Paprika Steen) for all his troubles and neglecting his teenage daughter Selma (Emma Sehested Høeg) by allowing her whatever she wants as it largely doesn’t concern him. When his brother-in-law mentions a trial group for a new anti-depressant on the market, a “Swedish” product, he jumps at the chance to participate, thinking this might be the answer to his problems. As he meticulously documents each noticeable change, he remarks that his disposition improves, but runs into a roadblock when several of the patients get into a rumble in the waiting room, where even the mild-mannered Mikael gets a sucker punch in, which he barely makes note of, thinking only of himself when the trial group is disbanded and patients are instructed to return all medicine supplies, wondering why all participants should have to suffer because of the bad behavior of only a few.
Mikael lies by claiming he threw out the pills, but he solemly attributes a new independent streak to the medicine, bolting the first chance he gets, making a break from his family, claiming he is visiting his sick elderly mother. He returns instead to his childhood home which he hasn’t visited in 20 years. Annoyingly, Mikael lies to just about everyone, including himself, offering feeble explanations for why he’s returned there, apparently unable to accept his current situation, where days of doing nothing but listen to his iPod turn into weeks, eventually returning home after making the least possible effort to visit his mother. On his ride back home, he turns into a sadistic monster to a young girl who hitches a ride, someone near his daughter’s age, making her regret ever getting into his car. When he returns, he vows to turn the tables on his wife by making a few adjustments, where the film starts to resemble Fassbinder’s MARTHA (1974), especially the sunburn scene, where little by little he starts to exert his sadistic domination over his wife and daughter, and even the wife of his brother-in-law, as he attempts to settle the score with everyone, but using his passive-aggressive behavior where he’s never to blame, as he’s only doing what others have always wanted him to do, or at least, so he believes. The film showcases his wretched behavior, which is really masculinity on display, as this film captures the essence of how guys can be real “assholes,” all the while claiming others force them to behave this way. Like MARTHA, it’s ultimately a battle of wills, where guys have to have the upper hand and control the behavior of their women, actually enjoying seeing them suffer on occasion. What Mikael has to do in order to accomplish that task is unthinkable, as he basically turns into a thug. But unfortunately the film lets him off easy, taking a middle road, which avoids having to deal with a worst case scenario. The exacting tone of the film gets very creepy and horrific towards the end, turning this into the horror genre, where the banality of one man’s life creates an emptiness that he can’t bear, as he blames everyone around him for what he feels, but it’s mostly a masquerade for masculine asshole behavior on parade, where this film does an excellent job displaying their abusive, controlling nature.
Fear Me Not Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
Ohhh, no. Be afraid. While I sat out The Intended, I
did find quite a bit more value in Levring's The King is Alive than many
other viewers I spoke with at the time. The melodramatic contrivance -- a bunch
of bourgeois know-nothing tourists waiting for certain death while stranded in
the middle of the desert kill time by staging King Lear -- said a lot
about civility (a Danish, if not a Scandinavian preoccupation) as a thin mask
for barbarism, as well as allowing a brutish sexism to express itself in rather
baroque ways. (To wit: by the time all is said and done, Jennifer Jason Leigh's
corpse gets peed on.) But Fear Me Not, which I suppose could be said to
play like a black comedy, almost works in an opposite direction. (This isn't
entirely shocking, since gender politics have taken something of a global
about-face in the last decade.) Something of a crypto-remake of Nicholas Ray's Bigger
Than Life, Fear Me Not focuses on Mikael (Ulrich Thomsen), a civil
servant on extended rest leave from work. After puttering around the house and
irritating his architect wife Sigrid (the peerless Paprika Steen, given little
to do here but "be blithely imperious," then "be in peril")
and teenage daughter
User comments from imdb Author: ReganRebecca from Ottawa, Ontario
Got a chance to catch the world premiere of Fear Me Not, directed and
written by Kristian Levring, at the Toronto Internal Film Festival.
The film examines the deterioration of the life of a man in his mid-40's facing
a mid-life crisis exasperated by the fact that he has become addicted to a
prescription medication with nasty side effects.
Ulrich Thomsen dominates the movie as Mikael, a doctor who has recently taken a
sabbatical from work only to find himself bored and at a loss at what to do
with his time. On a whim he enters into a medical study examining the side
effects of a newly developed anti-depressant. When he, and other patients,
begin to exhibit violent tendencies Mikael finds that he is both unable and
unwilling to stop taking the drugs. Fascinated by the positive outlook on life
that he gains from the little pills Mikael finds himself acting out increasingly
aggressive and violent fantasies on strangers and even his own family and
friends.
Ulrich Thomsen does great work here portraying the mostly docile and kind
Mikael with great depth and persona. Even in the midst of acting out his most
cruel fantasies Thomsen displays a sense of uncertainty and bewilderment at his
own actions as if he, along with the audience, is shocked at the dramatic
results that the pills have produced. Paprika Steen, in a supporting role as
Mikael's wife Sigrid, turns a mediocre role into something exciting. Even small
scenes, like when Mikael and Sigrid are playing scrabble, are filled with
tension as we watch Sigrid drift between anger, annoyance and hurt as she tries
to convince Mikael to go back to work.
The cinematography is gorgeous and includes plenty of lush scenery. The editing
really adds to the overall mood of the piece, the frequent jump-cuts helping to
enhance the fragmented, jittery feelings as Mikael finds himself being
splintered between two sides of himself.
As a whole the movie is decent but a last minute twist in the final act turns
the movie into full blown melodrama. Despite the histrionics of the final ten
minutes and the rather disappointing conclusion told mostly through voice-over,
the movie is still worth watching for Thomsen and Steen's performances as well
as the enticing and astonishing build-up as Mikael goes from a placid
family-man to a malevolent, abusive husband.
Levring and Thomsen were actually at the screening and had a brief q & a
afterwards. It was really cool, Levring talked a bit about his inspiration for
the film and mentioned Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which really came across in the
way that the pill popping scenes were filmed and edited.
Cut Print Review [Anders Wotzke]
Modern medications have the ability to rectify chemical imbalances, or even create them, but at what cost? The unknown side-effects of such meds has long been a psychological thriller waiting to happen, one that Danish screenwriter Anders Jensen (a lovely name, might I add) explores with chilling consequence in Fear Me Not. Yet the film falls victim to an imbalance of its own; director Kristian Levring can’t quite decide whether to settle for a drama or a thriller, leaving the film somewhere in the middle. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that anyone going in with expectations belonging to either of the genres will probably have their opinions left somewhere in the middle too.
A beautiful lakefront house, a loving wife and a respectful teenage daughter is not enough for 42 year old Mikael (Ulrich Thomson). Taking a break from work, Mikael desperately looks for something to take his mind off of the monotony that has become his life. When his friend lets on that a pharmaceutical company is trailing a new anti-depressant, Mikael willingly signs up in a hope that it will solve all his problems. Yet the trial gets abandoned when the drug proves to have unexpected side-effects that cause erratic behaviour. Unwilling to simply give up the euphoria and sense of freedom induced by the pills, Mikael continues the trial in secret. Soon enough, the side-effects start to take their toll, leading Mikael down a dark path that sees him gradually lose control of his inhibitions.
Levering’s direction reveals Mikael’s initial
discontent with great skill; if he’s not implying that Mikael is escaping
reality by frequently listing to his iPod - one of the most antisocial
invention of recent times - then the spatial gaps that exist between Mikael and
his wife are greatly accentuated within each frame. Mikael’s degrading mental
stability is chilling yet captivating; the odd juxtaposition of shots and an
unsettling use of jump cuts is effectively used to distort our perception of
time and stability as Mikael becomes obsessed with his new-found sense of
freedom. The moment things do start getting out of control, you realise just
how invested you are in Mikael’s character, making his perverse decisions all
the more unnerving. Ulrich Thomson’s intense performance does exceptionally
well at keeping you on his side, no matter how immoral he becomes. You’ll also
find yourself supportive of Mikeal’s wife Sigrid (Paprika Steen) and
daughter
However, the psychological mind games of Mikael
are few and far between, causing the build up of tension to derail just as soon
as it picked up speed. For this reason, Fear Me Not reaches a
momentary peak in tension just past the half way point, almost feeling as
though it’s working backwards from then on. That being said, the films climax
is refreshingly handled; narrowly avoiding the conventions of
Verdict:
Fear Me Not takes an unnerving look at the psychological dangers that potentially could derive from modern society’s dependence on prescription medication. Yet the moments of great drama and tension are not readily able to coexist in a film that otherwise boasts strong performances and solid direction.
They Shoot Actors, Don't They? Katarina
Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair) capsule review
User comments from imdb Author: Grann-Bach (Grann-Bach@jubii.dk) from Denmark
Variety (Dennis Harvey) review
THE
SALVATION C 74
Denmark Great Britain South Africa
(89 mi) 2014 ‘Scope
A conventional western with big named stars, shot in South Africa using
painted backdrops resembling John Ford’s infamous Monument Valley in the
American West, but unfortunately the viewer can’t escape the wretched excess of
sadism that is so prevalent throughout this picture, from start to finish, as
if similar themes from Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN (1992) were used as a model of
success. In truth, the excessive
sadistic streak is a poor substitute for authenticity, as it hides and covers
up the human dimension of these outlaws, making them one-dimensional characters
that few of us have ever met in real life, as people are simply more
complicated than that. This need to
saturate Hollywood films in sadism is an unpleasant phase of the industry at
the moment, where once it runs its course, perhaps they’ll get back to making
good movies again. This Danish
production is a reminder that immigrants once helped settle the West, building
homes, working the land, and trying to survive in America’s unforgiving
territory. Set in the 1870’s, following
Danish wars with Germany and Austria in the First Schleswig War (1848–51) and the Second Schleswig War (1864), losing both,
resulting in significant loss of land, after which there was a considerable
migration of people overseas looking to start a new life, the film stars Mads
Mikkelsen as Jon, an ex-soldier, now a peaceful European settler living in the
American heartland with his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) in a house they
built. With both coming from Denmark
seven years earlier to stake their claim and start a life, the film opens as
Jon’s wife Marie (Nanna Øland Fabricius, Danish singer-songwriter
and dancer better known by her stage name Oh Land) and
10-year old son arrive on a train to join them.
Hopping on a stagecoach that will take them to their homestead outside
of town, two gun-toting outlaws kick out the other couple that was supposed to
be riding with them, turning this family reunion into a more ominous journey,
where drink eventually gets the best of them, turning the outlaws into beasts,
killing the boy, throwing Jon off the stage where he’s left for dead while they
have their way with his wife. Following
on foot, he tracks them down where they’ve killed the driver and his wife as
well, wallowing in their drunken delirium, and shoots both men dead, a small
recompense for what he’s lost.
After burying his wife and child, when he returns to the town of Black
Creek he discovers one of the men he killed is the brother of notorious outlaw
Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a former officer of the Confederacy and a man
who bleeds the town dry by intimidation, where the sheriff (Douglas Henshall)
and mayor, who also doubles as the undertaker (Jonathan Pryce), both do his
bidding, bowing down to his every demand.
Delarue rounds up the town and tells the sheriff he has two hours to
find the killer of his brother or he’s to pick two people from town that will
be killed. An impossible task, they
actually pick an old woman and a mentally challenged boy to be sacrificed, but
for Delarue, that’s not good enough, as he continually escalates the stakes,
murdering another man in cold blood for starters, claiming there will be more
by the hour until they find the killer.
Jon is implicated by a frontierswoman who helped him survive his perilous,
near death journey, where his brother is thrown into jail while he is handed
over to the outlaws, strung up on a post with both feet off the ground,
brutally beaten, and left to rot under the hot sun as he considers his
fate. The Princess (Eva Green), a
formidable presence of a woman and the widow of the man he killed, has a large
scar across her lips where she had her tongue cut off by Indians, supposedly
rescued by that scoundrel of a husband.
She controls the business end of this band of cutthroats with her air of
upper class sophistication, wearing only the finest garments money can buy,
becoming something of a fashion plate out in the middle of nowhere. With his brother gone, Delarue takes
advantage of the situation by ravishing the Princess, forcing himself upon her
with a certain degree of arrogance and relish, where it’s obvious she has
nothing but contempt for this man. One
of the problems with the Western convention is the reliance upon cliché’s,
where good and evil become moral absolutes, where bad men are such loathsome
examples of a depraved humanity that they become caricatures of the
psychotically deranged. Delarue is a
direct descendant of Gene Hackman’s Little Bill Daggett deriving such sadistic
pleasure in UNFORGIVEN.
It doesn’t take much effort to figure out that the two brothers will ultimately have to stand up to this gang of killers before a cowering town of weaklings, following in the footsteps of Gary Cooper in HIGH NOON (1952), but before the day is done, blood will line the streets of Black Creek which will come to resemble a town of corpses. Because of the exaggerated way it complies with western expectations, much of this is inadvertently humorous, where some of the dialogue is so over-the-top that it comes across as overly stereotypical. Using plenty of CGI digitally altered images, there are majestic desert landscapes that suggest an endless frontier, but the Delarue ranch lies in the middle of a bleak and barren desert where nothing grows, where they actually have buzzards circling overhead as Jon has another near death encounter. Rescued by his brother however, who makes his own clever escape, it’s clear these two have their work cut out for them. Because of Jon’s weakened condition, Peter hides him in the mountains while he sets off in another direction, hoping to confuse the tracking killers, but in no time at all Jon realizes he must face the end of the journey alone. Meanwhile, the Princess takes advantage of the confusion surrounding the prisoner’s escape to make her own run for it, taking the money from the vault and heading for the train out of town. While there’s some degree of suspense to her efforts, especially after she believes the train has safely begun to move, but the approach of men on horses seals her fate as she is captured and led back to the ranch. Rounding up some kid from town whose father was murdered right before his eyes, Jon sets out to singlehandedly accomplish what no one else has dared by standing up to these killers. It has the look of a military operation, where each attack comes in phases, but there’s nothing here that we haven’t seen before. Mikkelsen, as always, is simply outstanding, as is Jeffrey Dean Morgan as his ruthless counterpart, but no one else in the cast distinguishes themselves in this rote version of a classic western standoff, where the outcome is all but determined before the first frame is shown. Even the music by Kasper Winding is a conventional Hollywood score, where despite Levring’s best efforts, there’s nothing particularly surprising or inventive that he brings to the genre.
Which
movies to see—and which to skip—at the 50th Chicago International Film Festival JR Jones from The Reader
The Salvation The decline of the
Movie
Mezzanine [Anna Tatarska]
Westerns might have lost their lead in the genre business, but have never really died. Being resuscitated sinusoidally over the decades, the last few years have been especially fruitful when it comes to varied reinventions of the seemingly old and rigid structure. John Hillcoat’s The Proposition and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford are just two of those successful attempts. In The Salvation, Danish director Kristian Levering does not attempt to turn the codified structures upside down. Instead he delivers a very entertaining, pure breed, old school western with a modern twist – and mesmerizing casting including Mads Mikkelsen and Eva Green. These are two actors who are proficient when it comes to expressing emotions without dialogue. Eyes and facial muscles are very busy here, as it’s their twitches and blinks, tension/release that dictate the pace of this classically narrated yet still very contemporary film.
The story by acclaimed scriptwriter and director Anders Thomas Jenssen is a
one of Jon (Mikkelsen), a Danish immigrant and ex-military who, after eight
years in the
Eva Green creates a character that’s interesting in terms of
the Western’s gender politics – a mute, mutilated woman who despite her
handicap is as strong a fighter as the men who surround her, consciously using
her appearance to her advantage, as bait or as a shield. Mikkelsen continues
his lone-warrior-on-the-trail streak (
Live
For Films [Piers McCarthy]
A Danish immigrant named Jon (Mikkelsen), living in 1870s
From the distinctive flair of the Dogme movement, Kristian Levring’s new film couldn’t be further from the style that helped bring him to the public’s attention. There still remains an odd aesthetic to The Salvation; not that a Danish production of American Western wouldn’t throw some difficulties into the production. The budget restrictions and South African location work lessen its scope, giving it a somewhat artificial feel. Levring’s heart is in the right place, despite every hurdle and it is, in nearly every respect, a loving homage to the genre that John Ford helped establish. At times, the stringent reconstruction of the genre does push the film into pastiche territory, yet helped by several matchless facets.
One such addition to the Western cannon is Mads Mikkelsen as the tough
protagonist. Mikkelsen is now an extremely recognisable face thanks to
The supporting cast (mainly American) are what make The Salvation
stumble. It’s ironic how the actors who grew up in the country and industry
that helped spawn the Western catalogue feel the least believable. Partly due
to Anders Thomas Jensen and Levring’s script, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Douglas
Henshal have horribly laughable dialogue. You could blame the actors for
hamming it up, though it is clear how Levring ignores a lot of subtlety in his
ambition to make a Western. Only Jonathan Pryce and Mikkelsen imbue a sense of
nuance (with Mikkelsen a master at this method, especially
The creation of the town and landscape quietly sits in the background, never
magnified for its design. Even without a proper exploration of the setting, the
atmosphere is unmistakable. A luscious, towering rock that can always be seen
from the town’s periphery is a magnificent find from the location scouts. It
stamps the horizon with a
“This is a Western” is paraded all the way through The Salvation; undoubtedly a grating element to some people’s viewing experience. For the fans, however, it can mean your expectations are never dashed, just handled flagrantly at times. Predictable as it may appear, there is so much satisfaction in watching the final showdown. As with most Westerns, the conflict builds to a gloriously violent crescendo. Like Open Range, Django Unchained and now The Salvation, the modern technologies and craft of cinematography and stunt-work allows for a grand spectacle. The Salvation’s stand-off does not forgive the film its over-the-top Western rejuvenation, though it leaves you feeling entertained rather than exploited as a cinemagoer (after all, Levring is banking on Western enthusiasts to see his modern entry).
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
The
Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Cannes
Film Review: 'The Salvation' - Variety
Peter Debruge
The
Salvation (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Levy,
David Guy
A
LOVE AFFAIR OF SORTS D- 50
USA (91 mi) 2011
The entire venture feels like it was made for YouTube viewing, as if the film was shot on iPhone or using the video feature of a cell phone, where the tops of people’s heads are routinely cut off, where the jittery movement of the camera and the jostling of background noise are regular annoyances that the audience is forced to endure. As an expression of the self-indulgent culture of Los Angeles, where all people can think about is themselves, which they do continuously, this is about as narcissistic an expression as you’re going to find, as the film is simply pointing mobile cameras in the faces of a few people’s ordinary lives, as if waiting for something significant to happen, which of course, sorry to disappoint, it never does. If that in itself is reason enough to see a movie, more power to you. But the filmmaker not only places himself in front of the camera, a vapid and completely uninteresting character with zero personality, but he has the gall to suggest that meeting his female heroine, the somewhat attractive and level headed Hungarian Buddhist Enci (Lili Bordán), is completely by accident, and that her interest in him is somehow naturally spontaneous, while it is quite clear there’s nothing real about it. The facetious plot which documents their budding friendship is about as contrived as you’ll ever find in the movies, where nothing that happens is remotely believable, yet the tale is spun as if pointing cameras has a mesmerizing effect on these two individuals who are strangely drawn to one another.
Despite the continual awkwardness between these two individuals, they pretend like they have actual feelings and affection, yet what the viewer sees onscreen is no chemistry whatsoever except these phony lines of supposed attraction. The only real moment occurs when Enci stomps away from David and his friend and steps outside for a smoke, where she confesses before the camera what an idiot she is as she has no interest in this guy whatsoever. Everything that happens after that moment is a betrayal of the truth, a façade, a smokescreen invented to supposedly please an audience, more likely the adolescent male fantasy of the director, but it is entirely misguided. As a reflection of “me” culture, where people continually post pictures of themselves on the Internet, this film deserves a place right next to all the other posted videos of people doing stupid things. But as a genuine film, this is a stab in the dark, a facsimile of the real thing. What passes for a story is preposterous, as is the presence of the filmmaker before the camera, but when he’s called upon to document Enci and a date with her Hungarian boyfriend, the waves of self-consciousness suggest three’s a crowd, yet he doesn’t have the decency to politely leave. He forces his film down the audience’s throat whether they want it or not, whether it’s interesting or not, and whether it has any value or not. These things matter in the conception and development of a film, but this director attempts to bypass all that art, intelligence, and preparation and simply wing it. The result couldn’t be more indulgent or a bigger waste of time, but not really offensive enough to rate an F.
Time Out New York [Nick Schager]
Shot on a Flip camera with inept herky-jerkiness, David Guy Levy’s indie concerns a wanna-be auteur (Levy) and a beautiful stranger (Bordán) who decide to incessantly film each other, in order to reveal “the deepest parts of our souls.” Riiiight. A faux documentary that clumsily tips its meta hand through rehearsal footage and confessional interviews, it’s an amateur-hour effort in both form and content. Self-aware narcissism has rarely been this unjustified—or insufferable.
A
LOVE AFFAIR OF SORTS Facets Multi
Media
A Love Affair of Sorts is an intimate drama about a boy, a
girl, and a camera. David Guy (David Guy Levy, who is also the director) and
Enci (Lili Bordán) play a couple who meet in a bookstore, where he catches her
in the midst of shoplifting, and she sees him in the midst of furtively filming
her with his flip camera. Through the course of that day and evening, they
start a tentative relationship, with his omnipresent camera serving as both
bridge and barrier to their connection. Things are further complicated with the
inclusion of Enci's boyfriend Boris (Iván Kamarás), and David's brutally honest
friend Jonathan (Jonathan Beckerman, playing himself, and unaware until the end
of the film that it was fictional). Only later do we discover that neither they
- nor the film we have been watching - are what they appear to be.
A Love Affair of Sorts is the first full length feature to be shot on a
flip camera, set in an era when everything we do is photographed - or could be
- as well as a modern twist on romance in the digital age.
Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]
David (David Guy Levy) is a successful painter—judging from his home, not the canvases we see—alone for the holidays in Los Angeles. On the Flip Video camera he is using to self-document his dull life, he catches a young woman shoplifting. Assured David won’t turn her in, they become friendly, and Enci (Lili Bordán), who’s a Hungarian nanny, is recruited to collaborate and co-star in what is now a film about them, the mixed p.o.v. shots of which compose A Love Affair of Sorts. Guy Levy is a teddy-bearish schlub; Enci is a “10,” with an appropriately studly boyfriend (Iván Kamarás). David and Enci’s dynamic as co-directors is soon established: he, petting and fawning; she, coquettish but obviously disinterested. Threatening to take over the narrative are character breaks where Guy Levy and Bordán (accent dropped) appear as “themselves,” discussing the improvised project they’re working on playing David and Enci, and revealing a parallel unrequited emotional involvement in a behind-the-scenes real life that is no more or less credibly authentic. The performances are awkward enough to be valid, with several scenes amusingly near to veering into “amateur” porn territory, but Love Affair shows little ingenuity with its pocket-cam mobility. It is part of the film’s premise that the movies are only a pretext to serve personal needs. Given how little the murky finished product offers an outside audience, this comes across all too convincingly.
The Onion A.V. Club [Alison Willmore]
A Love Affair Of Sorts is billed as the first feature to be shot entirely on Flip cameras. Given that as of April, the Flip is no longer being manufactured, there’s a good chance it’ll also end up being the only feature to earn that designation. The Flip is an artifact of technology made redundant by the inclusion of cameras and video recorders on smartphones. As a case in point: Oldboy’s Park Chan-wook won the prize for best short at this year’s Berlin Film Festival with “Night Fishing,” shot entirely on the iPhone 4.
A Love Affair Of Sorts does not make this seem like any great loss. The Flip was created to be cheap, small, and easy to operate, ideal for shooting things on the fly. Used for a long-form project, it makes for a physically taxing movie, jiggling and off-center and filled with dizzying whip pans. Though this doesn’t make it any easier to take in, the amateur camerawork is part of the storyline: Writer-director David Guy Levy plays a man documenting himself for an art project, or maybe just for company, as he spends the holidays alone. He catches a pretty girl shoplifting from a bookstore, and after he reassures her that he doesn’t intend to get her in trouble, they become friends. Lili Bordán co-stars as the Hungarian nanny of a family currently out of town on vacation, and soon she’s showing up with a Flip of her own, so the pair can film their budding relationship and possible romance.
“I didn’t have a really good thesis going into this,” Levy’s character tells Bordán, but Levy the filmmaker certainly does, and it probably involves discussion of “gaze” and “directorial control.” Bordán, who has a boyfriend but is happy to flirt with her vulnerable, seemingly well-off new acquaintance, comes across as predatory, particularly given how she’s introduced. But the main story is framed by a narrative rug-pull in which the two leads appear to drop their characters and talk as themselves, at which point Levy is cast as the suspect one, given how he uses the project to get closer to an actress with whom he hopes to get more involved. These discussions are more engaging than the film, which is infuriatingly navel-gazing and insubstantial. It’s like a reality show in which the viewers are only allowed to see backstage interviews where people overanalyze the actual action, all of which took place somewhere unseen—where it was hopefully shot on professional-grade equipment.
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
A Love Affair of Sorts - Box Office Magazine Vadim Rizov
IndieWire: director interview June 21, 2011
The Hollywood Reporter [Jone DeFore]
Los Angeles Times [Robert Abele]
Los Angeles Times Sophia Lee
A Love Affair of Sorts :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews
The New York Times [Neil Genzlinger]
Lewandowski, Rafael
THE MOLE (Kret) B- 80
This bears a strange familiarity with Jan Hrebjk’s recent Czech film Kawasaki's Rose (2009), as both explore the de-mythification of historical heroes that may have played an iconic role in establishing a free democratic society from the repressive chokehold of Eastern European totalitarian dictatorships, from an era when Poland utilized the Russian Communist interrogation and intelligence gathering methods of the Secret Police. The director establishes a typical working rhythm of life in the present day, where the father and son, Zygmunt (Marian Dziedziel) and Pawel (Borys Szyc), live together and run a second hand clothing business buying up clothes in Northern France and then selling it in Southern Poland, requiring lengthy road trips abroad to regularly gather the merchandise, which has cut short Pawel’s wife Ewa’s (Magdalena Czerwińska) budding professional career, as she needs to stay home with their preschool age son. Ewa is the daughter of a miner killed in the Solidarity miner strike riots of 1981 when a Communist police force intervened, leaving several miners dead, where she has been attempting unsuccessfully to seek compensation for the damages caused by the government’s actions, made more difficult as all the evidence has been destroyed. Zygmunt shows outright disgust and contempt at the idea of continually looking backwards, though he himself was considered one of the union heroes of the strike. This is another Polish film suggesting the nation can’t escape its past, a familiar theme in many of the former Eastern Bloc nations, where they remain connected at the hip with the dark days of the Soviets.
Pawel doesn’t share
his father’s views about the past, where all the evils of the world are caused
by Communists, but has been apolitical and knows little about his father’s past
activities other than what is already widely known, where is family looks up to
him as one of the nation’s heroes.
Purely by chance, on a cigarette run, Pawel sees a picture of his father
on the front page of the newspaper with the word “Traitor” written across the
photo suggesting he was a government informer, a “Mole” for the Secret Police
during the Solidarity strikes, a charge his father vehemently denies to Pawel,
but it doesn’t stop the press from camping out at their doorstep awaiting his
official response which never comes, leading many to suspect he is complicit
with the accusations. Pawel remains
troubled by his father’s response and the effect it has on Ewa’s family, who
are outraged at his silence. In this
state of confusion, there is a renewed interest in a re-examination of just
what happened, but Pawel is stymied in attempting to discover the truth, not
knowing who to trust or who to talk to, as he has picked up the mantel of
preserving his father’s reputation as it continues to be smeared by the
newspapers.
This film
beautifully evokes the paranoia of a witch hunting atmosphere where suspicion
is rampant, where no one can be trusted, which suggest the fragile state of a
budding democracy. The film takes a more
conventional turn using the sinister device of the original Communist Secret
Service Agent, known as Garbarek (Wojciech Pszoniak), still miraculously living
in Poland, but he must have been living under a rock somewhere, as he is the
most despised man in the nation, apparently the only one who can unravel the
truth about the Communist secret links.
But of course, why would anyone believe him? The stability of the nation should never rest
on the shoulders of a man like this, as he’d just as soon sell out his own
mother, offering zero credibility. Yet
in this dramatic turn, all of
Kino Mania: September 2011 | Krakow Post
It seems that Central
European cineastes needed at least a couple of decades to get to grips with
national struggles for reconciliation after 1989. The Czech drama Kawasaki’s
Rose, which was submitted for Best Foreign Language Film at the 83rd Academy
Awards, blazed a new trail. As well as dealing with the same issue, both Jan
Hrebejk’s Kawasaki’s Rose and Kret end up with scenes of everyday life that are
disturbing in their banality. French-Polish director Rafael Lewandowki has put
aside his accomplishments as a documentary film maker to direct a family drama
dealing with the unpredictable effects of the ‘lustracja’ (political cleansing)
campaign during the Kaczynski administration. In Lewandowki’s film, the
‘victim’ of the moral cleansing is former miners’ leader Zygmunt, aka ‘The
Mole’ (Marian Dziędziel), who is accused of having covertly supported the
bloody pacification of a protest under Martial Law. Zygmunt, tried and
convicted by the media, decides to relocate from Bielsko-Biała to the
Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, where the largest Polish diaspora in France is to be
found. Paweł (Borys Szyc), who does not believe the charges against his
father, is married to Kasia (Magdalena Czerwińska) the daughter of a miner
killed during a strike. Kret evokes the witch-hunting atmosphere and climate of
mutual suspicion of the period beautifully. Szyc takes the lion’s share of the
credit as the tormented Paweł. Lewandowski’s drama, which was ludicrously
marketed as a thriller, honorably represented Polish cinema at the Montreal
World Film Festival.
The poster sends a clear message: this is a thriller about a guy infiltrating a (possibly) illegal organization. My first thought — a Polish version of The Departed. Boy, was I wrong!
We follow the Kowals — a three-generation family. Paweł (Borys Szyc)
and Zygmunt (Marian Dziędziel), the grown-up son and his father, work
together – we could say they run a small business. They buy up cheap clothes in
Is this a movie about a family struggling with simple, everyday life? After
the first few scenes, it seems this way. It develops quite slowly, and it’s
hard to figure out what the story is at first. Then, it hit me. Literally. The
story of the Kowals is just a pretext to once again (in Polish cinema) talk
about 1980′s PRL and SB.
Zygmunt was known as an oppositionist and Solidarity leader in the 80s. He’s
been respected for his active patriotism. However, one day an appalling news
leak into the press: Zygmunt was covertly working for SB, infiltrating his
former work place, a coal mine in
There are two issues that sadden me in this production. First, the subject matter. Why every (other) Polish movie insists on going back to the 80s? Don’t get me wrong — I’m Polish myself, but it doesn’t mean I have to be stuck in the past. Kret proves the sins of the fathers fall on the sons, and we, as the nation, can’t escape our past. I disagree. I don’t understand why the PRL times affect a regular Polish family in such a way as if they still lived back then. Although Paweł argues at one point that he doesn’t care about the past and wants to live normal life, he does quite the opposite. Actually, he does the worst — becomes emotionally and physically involved with his father’s case. The movie also asks a question about patriotism. What does it take to be patriotic? What’s more important: your family or your country? Should people fighting for Polish independence in the 80s be considered good only on those grounds? The vision of the movie becomes quite clear: don’t judge cause you never know what you would have done back then. Plus, respect your country and your history. I beg to differ. Many of avid Solidarity members emigrated during those harsh times either escaping communist repression, or simply to earn money and back their families up (the movie includes such examples). How can we respect people who no longer give a damn for the country they used to fight for? I know, I know — the matter’s more complicated and it’s a slippery slope to pass judgments so easily as I might seem to.
The second troubling issue is Paweł’s wife. Ewa is by far the most unrealistic female character ever, or at least recently. Obviously created by male screenwriters, she embodies a perfect wife (never a word of complain or any grudge), mother (having time for her son even if she’s super tired), lover (pretty, with nice breasts, always ready to satisfy his man), student (managing to pass all her exams and successfully defend her M.A.), and a daughter-in-law (ever respectful and understanding, loving her father-in-law as her own). I could add that she also cooks, cleans the house, and doesn’t act like a bitch (sorry for the expression) during the only sorry ass fight she and Paweł have (sorry for the expression again). It seems to me that the creators take away her right to behave like a human being, and shape her into a perfect, imaginary wife. Once again, don’t get me wrong, I’m a young Polish woman, but we all have a breaking point. I vote against!
I can’t put myself in a position of a foreigner who watches this movie. I for one see it as bleak and boring at times. The dark colors make the Polish reality look dreary and who-would-want-to-live-in-this-country kind. Kret does not feel like a contemporary production, but a jump into the past. Plus, the very ending, the quite pathetic and out-of-the-blue conclusion to the story, strikes as baffling. If the reason for the characters’ actions is supposed to give us a lesson in morals, it’s pointless and confusing. Another try at dealing with our past, and another fail.
Long days, pleasant nights,
V
Lewinsky,
Micha
THE
FRIEND (Der Freund) B- 81
Switzerland (90 mi) 2008
After writing several screenplays and making an award winning short,
this is the Swiss director’s first feature film that examines the repercussions
of a young woman’s suicide, featuring a breakout performance by melancholy folk
rock artist Emilie Welti, also known as Sophie Hunger, as the film opens to her
song “Leaving the Moon” (YouTube - Sophie Hunger - Leaving the moon)
which she beautifully performs in a colorfully lit small club. A young college student Emil (Philippe
Graber) can be seen traveling by train to see her perform that matches a
similar real life event by the young director who first saw her perform there
as well. Her character Larissa meets
Emil by chance afterwards and in a desperate manner urges him to pretend to be
her boyfriend for her parents. Already
smitten by her, he agrees before really understanding the details, which he
never learns because she’s dead before he can discover why. The rest of the film deals with her family’s
reaction to her loss, which mysteriously includes Emil claiming to be her
boyfriend, which comes as a complete but welcome surprise to them. Emile is by nature shy and awkward, still
living at home with his overprotective mother, so his sheepish behavior and
vague recollections allow him to pull off this ruse, as he appears so harmless,
bearing a slight resemblance to the timid peeper in Kieslowski’s A SHORT FILM
ABOUT LOVE (1988). In the course of this
deception, he meets her sister Nora (Johanna Bantzer) who is the most deeply
grieved by her sister’s loss, who clings to him for support, as she has
closeness issues of her own with her icily reserved family.
While the film is beautifully shot and the characters overall are solid,
nothing matches the vivid depiction of the opening scenes when Larissa was
alive, leaving behind an extended secondary story that simply isn’t all that
interesting. Larissa is the character of
interest, somewhat fascinating in her mystery, so when she’s gone in the
opening ten minutes of the film, the subsequent developments never rise above a
casual interest. While we hear more sad
songs by Hunger throughout the film, the viewers are never as connected to
anyone else. Emile himself, suddenly the
center of attention, grows somewhat in stature, but hardly enough to make an
entire film about, as he’s about as quiet and reserved as they come and there’s
not a chance in the world that I’d ever call him—or the circumstances he finds
himself in—interesting. Imagine A SHORT
FILM ABOUT LOVE without the girl. That’s
a morbid thought.
FRIEND, THE (Der Freund) Ken Rudolph
Philippe Graber is a young actor who reminds me
of Michael Cera, in other words an actor perfectly attuned to the Zeitgeist as
postmodern schlubb hero. Here he portrays a college student who obsesses
over a local club folk singer, a girl who has her own problems. He doesn't
precisely stalk her...he's actually a pretty together young man; but when out
of the blue she approaches him and asks him to pretend to be her boyfriend to
please her parents, he's interested. The gentle, unpredictable,
emotionally resonant story of what happens when his "girlfriend" dies
and he gets involved with her grieving family totally involved me.
Boyd van Hoeij Variety
An awkward youngster
becomes a widower before he even has his first kiss in "The
Friend," a low-key drama about loss and rebirth from Swiss
rookie Micha Lewinsky. As in the recent Gallic musical "Love
Songs," the story uses grief as a vehicle for character
development and self-discovery, though the only character who belts out songs
is the singer girlfriend whose death triggers the unexpected blooming of a
nerdus maximus. Pic won best feature at the Swiss Film Awards and could find a
friendly reception at fests before an afterlife on Euro tube and DVD.
When talented young
singer Larissa (Emilie Welti) asks gawky Zurich student Emil (Philippe Graber,
excellent) to pretend to be her "friend" in front of her family, he
readily agrees. Given that Emil has been trying to work up the courage just to
talk to her, the request feels like a godsend.
But before Emil has
had the opportunity to play make-believe, Larissa's sister, Nora (Johanna
Bantzer), informs him his "girlfriend" has died. When asked to meet
the family and help plan the funeral, Emil -- perhaps swept up by the first
opportunity to act out the role he has desired for so long -- simply goes along
with it all.
The easy acceptance by
Larissa's parents (Andrea Burgin, Michel Voita) and sister turns Emil from a
wallflower into a grown-up, assertive young man. For the first time in his
life, he becomes an attractive partner for the ladies -- and Nora seems to be
the first person to notice.
Film explores some of
the same issues as the 1987 Patrick
Dempsey starrer "Can't Buy Me Love" -- notably, how simple
popularity can help a youngster develop his sense of self. But with the shadow
of death never far off, "The Friend" is no romantic comedy. And
rather than being set among high school cliques, this straightforward drama
focuses on families.
Scribe-helmer
Lewinsky, who got his start as a screenwriter, weaves a subtle portrait of loss
and personal growth. Elliptical storytelling withholds some info until quite
late (including the cause of Larissa's passing) and leaves open the possibility
that her odd request might have been wishful thinking on Emil's part.
At times, Lewinsky has
to rely on the cast to make some of the more far-fetched plot twists credible.
Graber's perf as Emil helps keep things grounded, turning what could have been
a creepy manipulator into an overly shy guy who just makes some questionable
decisions. Bantzer, as the sibling with the "Brideshead
Revisited" syndrome, is a nice foil, while singer Welti, in a
small role, is impressive.
Melancholic, guitar-based
score was co-written by Welti (credited as "Sophie Hunger"). Rest of
the tech package is TV-friendly. Original German title translates as both
"friend" and "boyfriend."
Camera (color), Pierre Mennel;
editor, Marina Wernli;
music, Marcel Vaid,
Sophie Hunger; production designer, Marie-Claude
Lang Brenguier; costume designers, Charlotte Willi, Milena
Pfleiderer; sound, Laurent
Barbey, Patrick Becker; assistant director, Florian
Engelhardt; casting, Ruth
Hirschfeld. Reviewed at Brussels European Film Festival (competing),
June 29, 2008. (Also in Locarno Film Festival -- Appellations Suisse, Shanghai
Film Festival -- Panorama.) Running time: 86 MIN.
MySpace.com - superterz - zürich - Electroacoustic - www.myspace ...
YouTube - Sophie Hunger - Leaving the moon from the film Der Freund (3:47)
Sophie Hunger - Schiffbaufest 2007 -III- Behind The Curtain (3:33)
Sophie Hunger - Schiffbaufest 2007 Zürich - I (3:53)
Sophie Hunger - Schiffbaufest 2007 - II - Spiegelbild (4:03)
Sophie Hunger - Ne me quitte pas - Zurich Helsinki Klub - 30 (4:30)
Sophie Hunger - The Sad Fisherman - Take-Away Show Kidam (4:55)
YouTube - Sophie Hunger - Ne me quitte pas - Take-Away ... (6:12)
Sophie Hunger - Beauty Above All - Take-Away Show Kidam (6:42)
Sophie Hunger - Rise and Fall (7:23)
Lewis, Gough
SEX: THE ANNABEL CHONG STORY
Austin
Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Best known as the adult
film actress who in 1995 gleefully submitted herself to "the world's
largest gang-bang" when she had sex with 251 men in a 10-hour period, the
Taiwan-born Chong comes across as a porn star conundrum in Lewis' film, half an
intelligent gender theorist and half an incomprehensible nymphomaniac.
Ultimately as disturbing as it is entertaining, Lewis follows Chong (real name:
Grace Quek) from her classes as a gender studies student at USC (from which she
now has her degree) to the palatial estates of L.A.'s notoriously shady porn
barons and from there to Taiwan, where Chong reveals to her horrified mother
what, exactly, she's been doing in America all these years. Clearly, Quek is an
anomaly in the industry, a well-spoken, forthright young woman with a clearly
defined and sexually politicized agenda. Her alter-ego, Chong, is merely a
muddled, dull-witted, and pathetic figure in need of some serious therapy
sessions. It's where these two personalities intersect that Lewis finds the
fascinating duality inherent in the porn business, leaving the viewer wondering
who, indeed, is being exploited here.
Charlatan, victim or post-modern sex
goddess? The three faces of student turned gangbang queen Annabel Chong (aka
Grace Quek) dreamily overlap in this disquieting documentary. Grace herself
seems keen to look on the bright side and is all the more irritating for it.
But as we trawl through the various dishevelled porn producers surrounding her,
something shifts. She's clearly detested by her colleagues, and the fans are
just as scary - one shows us a photo of her dressed all in white: 'She looks so
innocent,' he pants, 'I really like that one.' As the film delves deeper,
following Grace to her parents' home in Singapore and then to the scene of a
gang rape in London, things become even more distressing - and chronologically
disjointed. It's almost as though the past is trying to head off the present;
the seemingly endless 251-man gangbang Grace endures with the most terrifying
of smiles. And for what? A year later, her record gets broken by Jasmin St
Claire (Grace there to watch, gimlet-eyed). Snatches of conversation,
meanwhile, alert us to the health risks. It's not pity that makes us love
Grace. She's a willing freak, buttressed between notoriety and failure; but her
indifference to the mainstream commands respect.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Sex The Annabel Chong Story (1999) Linda Ruth Williams, May 2000
Sex: The Annabel
Chong Story • Senses of Cinema Gaby Bila-Gunther,
July 18, 2000
Sex: The Annabel
Chong Story • Senses of Cinema Dmetri
Kakmi from Senses of Cinema, December
28, 2000
Sex:
The Annabel Chong Story - Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris, July 1, 2000
The
Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn
Johanson
Sex: The
Annabel Chong Story Gerald Peary
The Onion A.V. Club
[Scott Tobias]
Village Voice (Jessica Winter)
filmcritic.com
abstains from Sex Christopher Null
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
One on one with Annabel Chong –
Offscreen Mark Penny
interview, September 1999
Annabel Chong : Sex:
The Annabel Chong Story - Spike Magazine
Robin Askew interview, October 1, 2000
Philadelphia
City Paper review by Sam Adams
New York
Times (registration req'd)
Sex: The
Annabel Chong Story - Wikipedia
Lewis, Jerry
Feature: Jerry Lewis: The Clown Who Cried Eric Henderson from Slant magazine
Among
The thematic elements of Lewis's work are as relevant today as ever, but sadly
there's a whole generation of fresh-faced, dedicated young postmodernists to
whom The Daily Show's Jon Stewart's frequent pinched-off vocal
expressions of befuddlement might as well be a reference to The Simpsons'
Dr. Frink, and not Lewis's own Dr. Kelp. (Never mind that the Simpsons
character that owes the biggest debt to Lewis is Krusty the Clown.) And, to
them, the only recognizable contribution Lewis has brought to the world of
entertainment is preempting network television every Labor Day in order to
stage his annual telethon on behalf of the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Hopefully, a mammoth chunk of Paramount DVDs released on
Born Joseph Levitch in
Tashlin directed some of Lewis's best early outings (Artists and Models,
Rock-a-Bye-Baby), but eventually Lewis grew restless with raking in
unprecedented profit shares (six on the dime) from his films and itched to take
his comedic theories to the next level, to become, as the title of his later
film theory text read, a "total filmmaker." From that first
self-directed showcase, the nearly dialogue-free collection of blackout
sketches and celebrity-dissection The Bellboy, right through his own
late-inning comeback (Hardly Working, Cracking Up) following the
notorious The Day the Clown Cried debacle (the film is still probably the
most famous
of unviewable films), Lewis has indeed been the example of
auteurism-the sculptor of a body of works whose collective personality enhances
the individual pieces.
Jerry
Lewis - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications Charles Derry from Film Reference
In France, Jerry Lewis is called "Le Roi de Crazy" and adulated as a genius by filmmakers as respectable as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol. In America, Jerry Lewis is still an embarrassing and unexplained paradox, often ridiculed, awaiting a persuasive critical champion. This incredible gulf can in part be explained by American access, on television talk shows and Lewis's annual muscular dystrophy telethon, to Lewis's contradictory public persona: egotistical yet insecure, insulting yet sentimental, juvenile yet adult, emotionally naked yet defensive. Were not the real Lewis apparently so hard to love, the celluloid Lewis might be loved all the more. And yet a Lewis cult thrives among American cinephiles; and certainly The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, The Nutty Professor , and Which Way to the Front? appear today to be among the most interesting and ambitious American films of the 1960s.
Lewis's career can be divided into four periods: first, the partnership with singer Dean Martin, which resulted in a successful nightclub act and popular series of comedies, including My Friend Irma and At War with the Army , as well as several highly regarded films directed by former cartoonist and Lewis mentor Frank Tashlin; second (after professional and personal tensions fueled by Lewis's artistic ambitions irrevocably destroyed the partnership), an apprenticeship as a solo comedy star, beginning with The Delicate Delinquent and continuing through Tashlin's Cinderfella ; third, the period as the self-professed "total filmmaker," inaugurated in 1960 with The Bellboy and followed by a decade of Lewis films directed by and starring Lewis, which attracted the attention of auteurist critics in France and overwhelming box-office response in America, culminating with a string of well-publicized financial failures, including Which Way to the Front? and the unreleased, near-mythical The Day the Clown Cried , in which clown Lewis leads Jewish children to Nazi ovens; and finally, the period as valorized, if martyred auteur, exemplified by Lewis's work as an actor in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy and Lewis's sporadic, unsuccessful attempts to reestablish his own directorial career. Lewis's appeal is significantly rooted in the American silent film tradition of the individual comedian: like Chaplin, Lewis is interested in pathos and sentiment; like Keaton, Lewis is fascinated by the comic gag which could only exist on celluloid; like Harry Langdon, Lewis exhibits, within an adult persona, childish behavior which is often disturbing and embarrassing; like Stan Laurel, whose first name Lewis adopts as an homage in several of his films, Lewis is the lovable innocent often endowed with almost magical qualities. What Lewis brings uniquely to this tradition, however, is his obsession with the concept of the schizophrenic self; his typical cinema character has so many anxieties and tensions that it must take on other personalities in order to survive. Often, the schizophrenia becomes overtly autobiographical, with the innocent, gawky kid escaping his stigmatized existence by literally becoming "Jerry Lewis," beloved and successful comedian (as in The Bellboy and The Errand Boy ) or romantic leading man, perhaps representing the now absent Dean Martin (as in The Nutty Professor ). Jerry Lewis's physical presence on screen in his idiot persona emphasizes movement disorders in a way which relates provocatively to his highly publicized work for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Schizophrenia is compounded in The Family Jewels: what Jean-Pierre Coursodon calls Lewis's "yearning for self-obliteration" is manifested in seven distinct personalities. Ultimately, Lewis escapes by turning himself into his cinema, as evidenced by the credits in his failed comeback film, which proudly announce: "Jerry Lewis is . . . Hardly Working. " This element of cinematic escape and schizophrenia is especially valued by the French, who politicize it as a manifestation of the human condition as influenced by American capitalism.
Much must also be said about the strong avant-garde qualities to Lewis's work: his interest in surrealism; his experimentalism and fascination with self-conscious stylistic devices; his movement away from conventional gags toward structures apparently purposely deformed; his interest in plotlessness and ellipsis; the reflexivity of his narrative; his studied use of extended silence and gibberish in a sound cinema; the ambiguous sexual subtext of his work; and finally, his use of film as personal revelation.
The last decade has seen a slight diminution of Lewis's reputation as a director (Lewis having directed television situation comedies, but no features), but an augmentation of his reputation as an actor and icon. His King of Comedy appearance now seems definitely a major performance in the American cinema, as does the Scorsese film a major statement about the American lust for celebrity. Ever since that film, a variety of younger directors have used Lewis as icon and/or as reflexive comment on the Lewis career. Perhaps Lewis's most interesting showcase is his 1995 performance as a Las Vegas comedian in Funny Bones , directed by Peter Chelsom. It is hard not to see Funny Bones as a deadly look at the Las Vegas side of the Lewis persona, complete with the jazzy Sinatra score and the institutional insincerity: Lewis is the funny father who overshadows his psychologically wounded and relatively untalented son, his own celebrity having a dark, depressing underside and a deleterious effect on family life.
Lewis as George Fawkes admits that he was not true to his talent and confesses, "It kills me that I used writers, instead of using me." The film's philosophy—"I never saw anything funny that wasn't terrible, that didn't cause pain"—seems a natural segue to other recent events in the Lewis life: his autobiography, written in 1982, chronicled, among other things, his addiction to Percodan and his driven personality. His ex-wife, Patti Lewis, followed with her own autobiography—whose title tells it all: I Laffed 'til I Cried: Thirty-six Years of Marriage to Jerry Lewis. And although Lewis has dedicated his life to raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, he has been virulently attacked by many adults with the disease—particularly in 1992 and 1993—who claim he publicly demonstrates a patronizing, demeaning attitude and exploits them with a pity which makes their lives in society harder, not easier. Lewis responded by attacking his accusers equally virulently, thus creating great pathos and bitterness all around: yet another fold in that seamless garment which is Lewis's life and art. Comic performances in films by younger French directors added little to Lewis's reputation, but a recurring role in the TV series Wiseguy in 1989 and a triumphant Broadway appearance as the devil in Damn Yankees in 1995, which reprised all his "Jerry Lewis" shtick, have been well received. Perhaps only Lewis's death will allow any definitive American evaluation of his substantial career.
The
Great Depression: Jerry Lewis' Last Movies - Cinema Scope Christoph Huber
One of the highlights of the year was the great (35mm!) Jerry Lewis retrospective presented by the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum, which confirmed him as one of modern cinema’s key auteurs. Still, there remains the great divide. By this I do not mean obvious, yet excruciatingly opaque distinctions (Jerry the actor vs. Jerry the director; how to differentiate Frank Tashlin from Jerry Lewis in their collaborations) or those that have devolved into useless clichés (French vs. American reception), but the very clear line that runs exactly halfway through his oeuvre. His first six films as a director, from The Bellboy (1960) to The Family Jewels (1965)—all made for Paramount Pictures, where Lewis had risen to major movie stardom the previous decade in a series of vehicles co-starring longtime stand-up partner Dean Martin, and seemed to enjoy remarkable creative freedom—by now have been enshrined as classics, and there is no reason to dispute their evident excellence. However, the subsequent six films—not counting the puzzling lacuna left by that notorious cause célèbre The Day the Crown Cried, shot in 1972, held up by litigation, and ever since having remained locked in Jerry’s vault—are neglected despite scattered endorsements. Seeing them again on the big screen (with one exception, noted below), often in astonishing prints that one never would have expected, confirmed that these half-dozen orphans are more than overdue for (re)consideration. So, a first attempt in six capsules…and one Lewisian question mark.
Three on a Couch (1966). “There couldn’t be two Christopher Prides,” is one of the first sentences with which Jerry’s character introduces himself. That Pride is an artist given to masquerade and manipulation for reasons of the heart once more underlines the prominence given by Jerry to parallels between his film incarnations and his real-life situation. Overall, Three on a Couch may not be Jerry’s greatest achievement, but the touching and even the dark parts of his shenanigans resonate. Despite a few quintessentially Lewisian detours into the crazy—for example, an incredible, incoherent monologue in entomologist disguise, consisting of perfectly timed rapid-fire half-sentences nervously delivered with utmost conviction—this is the first of his directorial efforts for which he takes no co-writing credit. The screenplay is essentially a typical farce, obliquely reflecting that boulevard theatre perennial Boeing Boeing, the film adaptation of which Jerry had co-starred in a year earlier. Three on a Couch follows Jerry’s deliberate divorce from the “kid” aspect of his persona, already announced in many ways with The Family Jewels. As Pride, he is the romantic lead, whose mounting hysteria is purposely more interesting than anything relating to the three dream-lover types (plus one’s sister) that he impersonates, which register almost as sarcastic self-parodies (cigar-chomping cowboy, nerd scientist, etc.). The film builds to a climax with an extended party scene, but Lewis replaces Blake Edwards’ elegance with his own impressive, increasingly oppressive and nightmarish arrangement of frenetic comedy via crisscrossing encounters. Also worth noting is that the multiplication of Jerry here is a ruse, just a series of performances, and not some surreal proliferation as elsewhere. Stalwart supporter Kathleen Freeman, usually suffering sensationally at the hands of Jerry’s slapstick, is even allowed to switch sides for once—while Buddy Lester climbs new peaks of inebriated inspiration, including an unforgettable cab-door slow-burn—then saves the day after Jerry’s trick has been exposed and only the threat of suicide remains. A work of disconcerting containment.
The Big Mouth (1967). If Thomas Pynchon were a filmmaker instead of a novelist and had directed only The Big Mouth, he might have understandably left it at that—so we should be grateful Jerry stepped in and continued. In the film, individual identity implodes (its arbitrariness, a key Lewis theme, becomes fully threatening) while paranoia is rampant, possibly even inevitable as the only sane reaction to an insane world governed by unspeakable forces—no wonder Jerry as Gary Clamson gives up speaking as the narrative progresses, amplifying the link to The Bellboy with its (almost-)mute Jerry and vacationland premises, this time San Diego in full colour and turned completely sour. Mild-mannered bank examiner Clamson’s annual fishing holiday disintegrates after he (literally) reels in his gangster double and is given a treasure map, which Fu Manchu-type enforcers (ridiculous fake beards included) try to retrieve, resulting in three nervous breakdowns, each hood frozen into an eternal stage of comedy: a dumb dog, a stooge (Larry Fine), and a Buddy Lester showcase of twitching nerves and garbled speech. Police are of no help, but suffer their own breakdown, sidetracked into debating the meaning of their own codes; an FBI agent turns out to have long retreated into mental collapse. Jerry disappears into disguises (Kabuki in Sea World?), but there is no refuge, only hysterical extension (as in the Möbius strip chase moment and the good ol’ leg-stretch gag) or elliptical reduction, as overall breakdown leads towards wanton aggression in all directions. (This is especially true of the finale, in which several protracted showdown possibilities—helicopter rescue; then Clamson cornered by gangsters on the shore only to be saved by the unlikely reappearance of his double—are telegraphed via a handful of quick shots.) Meanwhile, Robert Aldrich’s house composer Frank De Vol strolls around to intermittently interrupt the proceedings as narrator, madly dashing off in the end to expose that he’s not wearing trousers. Painfully funny indeed, The Big Mouth precedes Preminger’s Skidoo and Edwards’ The Party by a year, and like those films is a visionary splintered-society satire cutting through delusions. (What’s real? Advertising and Col. Sanders, who appears in an otherwise pointless cameo.) Only complaint: it should be longer.
One More Time (1970). Understandably, but unfortunately, neglected even by Jerry enthusiasts (and not included in the retrospective, but unearthed on an old VHS tape), this is the only film Jerry directed without starring in: a sequel to Salt and Pepper (1968) with Sammy Davis, Jr. and Peter Lawford as the eponymous groovy-guys duo drawn into a murder plot. Which brings us to the problem with the narrative (much more pronounced here than in Three on a Couch), which weighs down the film with exposition and weak comedic banter, filmed competently enough and allowing for occasional auteurist insights. (There’s a good reason why Jerry usually prefers a freewheeling structure.) But the interest lies elsewhere, in digressions like a butler serving a meal so slowly that inserts show Lawford growing a beard, flowers withering, and white streaks appearing in Davis’ hair, or a non-sequitur trip to the cellar leading to a monstrous line-up unique in horror history, as Davis’ Hammer pals Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing cameo unbilled in their signature roles. Sudden urges for punchy visualizations are welcome, but rare: at a funeral, the leg-parade of hot black-clad groupies sidetracks an assassin’s cross-haired gaze; a weird explanatory flashback while looking at the painting of a castle (the corresponding picture-postcard view on film comes with the end credits). But Jerry is always tickled by performance, notably Davis’ songs and comedy routines, which obviously cannot compare to the Jer. His actors put on acts for each other (a costume party included), and Jerry lavishes the insistent attention on them that he usually centres on himself. It is at times hard to bear, leaving the audience with a koan to contemplate: What’s Jerry without Jerry? (A bandleader’s voice.)
Which Way to the Front? (1970). Probably the most sustained demonstration of rhythmic brilliance in Jerry’s work. He starts out bored at a board meeting, sucking on a pacifier, as palpable exhaustion, even despair, hangs over his richest man in the world, Brendan Byers III, and his staff. These protracted silences are followed by an increasingly breathless movement to a pile-up of rat-a-tat pseudo-Teutonic gibberish, mostly—but not only—by Jerry himself, who is seen preparing by listening to “Music to Mein Kampf By.” Confronted with the draft board’s rejection (the one word that the supercapitalist cannot bear), Byers III insists on “every man’s right to be killed fighting for his country.” The year is supposedly 1943—the insert of the date itself a quiet joke in the opening scene, with decor, attire, haircuts, etc. undisguisedly contemporary, as are later stylistic choices like transition swish-pans and punch line freeze-frames. But how far can you be from Vietnam? The absolutely idiotic yet stroke-of-genius coda even continues (ending) the war in Asia, Jerry-trademarked buck teeth and all. Before that (and long before Tarantino), this Jewish retribution fantasy updates the old Nazi impersonation shtick to The Dirty Dozen (1967) times: buying his own army, Byers starts a private war, leading first to his German double Field Marshal Kesselring, with everybody in the platoon getting to strut their version of his silly walk, before Kesselring is captured in a surreally spasmodic scene, then abruptly replaced by Byers, causing a topsy-turvy confusion. (Soon after, Jerry-as-Byers-as-Kesselring mutilates/decorates a German soldier bearing Lewis’ own birth name, Levitch.) As a finale, there’s the uncanny meeting of finance and Führer, who first performs The Great Dictator (1940) ballet in slow motion, then does a satchel-with-a-bomb exchange pas de deux with Jerry. Which way to the Clown? The mind boggles. (It was screened in a superb British premiere print, thus even bettered by the UK release title Ja, ja, mein General! But Which Way to the Front?)
The Day the Clown Cried (1972/????). Who knows? Only Jerry…
Hardly Working (1980). What a comeback: “Jerry Lewis Is Hardly Working,” is the pun in the credits, and the shorter, lesser US cut is even front-loaded with a montage of signature moments from earlier films, set to the famous typewriter sketch accompaniment, as if Jerry needed a reintroduction after a decade of big-screen absence. Made on the cheap and on the spot in Florida (closing a circle with The Bellboy), this may be the most melancholic film in the Jerriad despite numerous uproarious bits like the Japanese chef assault. In The Family Jewels, Jerry’s classic clown make-up masked the bad, here it can no longer mask the sad: Bo Hopper, insecure circus performer, has his brief moment of affirmation, then the banks close down his tour. “There is no place for clowns in this world,” Bo later muses (except for politics, he adds: Hardly Working was released first in West Germany 11 days after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, and over a year later in the US), and his attempts to gain employment are inevitably foiled by a natural penchant for disaster (demonstrations range from elaborate slapstick at a gas station to an off-screen symphony of shattering glass as he’s shown out of a mirror factory). Applying himself as a mishap-prone postal worker, Bo gradually manages to fit in, until he succeeds with a postal delivery tour de force of mechanical precision—he’s become a cog in the machine, but realizes it will cost him his soul. It’s the outsider’s fictional last stand in a real landscape of economic decline, still saturated by commercial content, with Jerry’s generally overemphasized product placement reaching the point of inversion: the world itself has become a billboard. It’s product as magic potion, as phrased in the opening narration of The Errand Boy (1961), whose depressive undertow has spread outwards from Hollywood to conquer the Earth. Down to Jerry’s disappearance into the landscape in an undistinguished last shot, this would have been a perfect final film.
Smorgasbord (The Movie) (aka Cracking Up, 1983). Thus, inevitably, he made another, making the ever-present concept of suicide in Jerry’s films (literally or artistic, attempted or accidental) the through-line for a last loose, soaring series of sketches, stripped down to essentials. Jerry—”Who else?” asks the credits, while Marcel Marceau beautifully sings the main theme—plays Warren Nefron, first seen failing to end his life (loose noose, etc.) until a gunshot is discharged into a TV set, which shoots back: the world reclaimed as stage for a final performance, including a bit of bank-robbing turned musical show for the surveillance camera, or minutes of meticulous slipping and sliding on squeaky furniture and a red studio floor in the office of a psychiatrist whom Warren regales with his grotesque family history reaching back to 15th-century France. There are further misguided suicide attempts: dousing himself in gasoline, Jerry casually searches his pockets only to realize he has forgotten a lighter, then stoically wanders off in wet defeat as the wind whistles. Ultimately redemption is glimpsed, although the rest of the world is instantly engulfed by chaos again. A tacked-on last scene shows Jerry leaving a screening, asked how the movie was: “It’s really good, you know!” The only possible shortcoming, as pointed out by Jerry expert Chris Fujiwara: “Too entertaining.”
Jerry
Lewis and Martin Scorsese - Film Comment
a conversation, March 2, 2016
Last October at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the Iconic Characters of Comedy series, Jerry Lewis sat down with Martin Scorsese in a meeting of great filmmaker minds. On the eve of the Museum of Modern Art’s series “Happy Birthday, Mr. Lewis: The Kid Turns 90,” here are a few abridged highlights of their conversation.
An Introduction
Martin Scorsese: When I think of comedy, there are so many legendary names that come to mind. One of them is here tonight, of course. He doesn’t need an introduction, but I’m going to introduce him anyway. I saw him for the first time in the movies in the late ’40s. He had a partner at the time, and as the years went on, we got to know him better and better. And he did it all, from stage to TV to movies. He and that partner worked with a great film director named Frank Tashlin, who created a whole new kind of era in movies. He started to direct pictures himself and as a director he was a true pioneer. He’s the author of a definitive book on filmmaking and film technique, and the first moviemaker to use video assist, a technology we all use now and take for granted. We always talk about independent cinema; he really is an independent artist, a real independent filmmaker—and stayed that way.
When I made my picture The King of Comedy, I had a casting decision. I said, “Who could epitomize the art of show business?” Then I realized, “Who is prominent in all aspects of show business? Who’s done it all?” Stand-up, stage performances, comedy teams, recording artists, Las Vegas, The Copa New York, film director, film innovator and pioneer, TV performer, TV talk-show guest, TV talk-show host, a true artist and a true renaissance man of entertainment, of cinema, of comedy—the true king of comedy, Jerry Lewis.
Inspirations
MS: What about the first film you saw made an impression on you?
Jerry Lewis: Every filmmaker, as you know and I know, had that first film wonderment. For me it was Captains Courageous—Spencer Tracy, Melvyn Douglas, Lionel Barrymore, Mickey Rooney, John Carradine….
MS: It’s a wonderful movie. I screened it for my daughter on 35mm on a big screen… What about performers who influenced you? Filmmakers, directors, performers…
JL: At the beginning, I heard Carol Reed was a wonderful director and I made sure that I saw the work. But when I think of magnificence in film, you have to put Billy Wilder right at the top. The writing he did with I.A.L Diamond was just marvelous… There’s nothing to correct in [Victor Fleming’s Captains Courageous]. It was sheer magic, and the performance of Spencer Tracy made you realize why you’re not an actor. What I took from Tracy was that he had a wonderful time. I got that from his performance, and I knew that I had to find the device where I could have a wonderful time.
MS: Exactly, exactly.
JL: Because there wasn’t once that I can recall that I’ve been in front of the camera where I was annoyed or impatient. Once we rolled, the magic that came from that camera went into my heart and I fell in love with stuff that was so bad it was ridiculous, but I learned from that. Then I learned that the director had a lot to do with it and I loved that. But then, I started to look at straight films. I would never look at comedy for me—I looked at comedy as a viewer, but I would never look at any comedy for “Jerry.”
The directors that I admired early on were the same directors that I admired 25, 30 years later. George Roy Hill had my attention immediately, and I can go on and on and on and it’s not interesting. The first three days that I was at Paramount, they couldn’t find me. I was in the editing room, I was in the camera room, I was in wardrobe, I was in miniatures…I would go everywhere on the lot (except the legal department). I learned about all of the stuff that I wanted to know from the people working there. Editors: wonderful! Archie Marshek was editing something, and I would spend a half-hour with him and learn pretty good. But what I did with the camera was different from what they did and I didn’t need to copy. I needed to bring my own dimension from my own emotion to what I wanted to do…
MS: And you said you were also in the editing room with Stanley Kubrick?
JL: Yeah, he was cutting 2001. He was cutting it across the hall from me at Metro in London, and he walks in every day and says, “How do you write a joke?” I said, “How do you write a joke?” He said, “I would never do it because I don’t know how.” I said, “Well, whatever you’re doing is making you a living so what the hell is your problem?” He wanted to know literally how that visual joke worked, how did it start. And it’s tough to go back and remember how you did it. You knew Stanley, did’t you?
MS: No, just once or twice on the phone, that was it.
JL: Well, what you could do is go to the home and ask for who’s the nut in the house, and if they pointed to the nut, you’d know it was Kubrick. But we had great times—there was nothing he taught me that I’d wanted to reuse…
Setting the Scene
MS: Is there an underlying theme—with humor being the vehicle—in the film work that you’ve done? Something that draws you to create these things?
JL: You know, it’s so different. To talk to another director is very difficult because he’s going to steal everything you know! But the joy for me, when I finish writing, is getting it on its feet. You take a look at what you enjoy most, and I enjoy it all, from the setup to the actors, the movement, the camera marks, the cues… It very difficult to give another man your timing. I love that I’m looking at [Scorsese] and I’m telling him—he knows all this! The world of what we do is so huge, and when you have a small scene, but it has the plotline, you’ve got to protect it. You work very hard with the actors, you let them come easily to it, and then build. And at the finish line you have the scene. When people begin in film, they find out the director is the doctor, the brother, the father, the friend, the compatriot, and you go to the director when you have a problem. As any good actor knows, he’s there for you to find out what he wants, and if he hasn’t made it clear, ask him again… In my book, The Total Film-Maker, I confessed that everything I know I got from Hitchcock and a few of those other fat guys.
MS: The first film you directed, The Bellboy [60], is a film that is very intense in terms of the framing. You directed, produced, wrote it, and starred in it. In a way, it’s like a virtual dictionary of visual thought and visual thinking. And to this day, there’s a constant battle between the literature in film, in the dialogue and in the story, and the visual. You went all the way visually with The Bellboy—you even used pantomime in that! Can we talk a little about that approach, or the purity of that approach?
JL: Mime was very important to me because you didn’t have to remember the words. It was important to me because mime was always at the bottom of all comedy. And when you’re doing it, you have to keep your mind clear. You can’t get in the way of the scene or become part of that. You’re supposed to be here as an individual and as a single person doing what you’re doing. Now you bring the ensemble in, and you dress it, and you work it, and he has to be funny. Sometime he [“Jerry”] gave me problems. When he got overly anxious, he would screw me up and I would yell to the crew, tea time! Get coffee or do something, cause I’ve got to have a talk with the star of the movie! I I looked at the mirror and said, do you want to make this, or what’s your plan? And I would talk back to myself.
MS: That’s great. But it’s true, then you’d have to compose yourself and really watch the body language of everyone else in the frame too, that you’re playing off of. So you’ve got to control that also. Then when you cast your pictures—with Kathleen Freeman, Buddy Lester, all these people—how do you determine that a person can really fit into the design?
JL: I wanted Buddy to play a gangster, so I put a scar that went all the way down his face. You knew the minute you looked at him he was a bad guy. When you do it in make-up is one thing but then you have to do it with the actor, as you know. And when the actor isn’t really hearing you that’s when the video assist saved my life so many times. I take him over to the video assist and I tell him, let me ask you if you want me to print this, and I played the scene for him and his body is all over the place. I say to him, watch what you do when he asked you the question, and he watches and says, I never stand that way. He says, why do I do that? And I say, because you forget that the body speaks pretty much by itself. It doesn’t need you, but with you, I would appreciate if it knew what it was talking about.
MS: And besides Buddy, who else did you work with that you felt was really crucial?
JL: Well, I could never make a film without Katy Freedman.
MS: Oh, she was amazing.
JL: I wrote a seven-page scene—single-spaced!—to replace the scene we were going to shoot the next day. And I brought it in at six in the morning, had it printed, distributed it to the crew, and I said to Kathleen: “Whatever you learned in the last week, forget it, because here’s what we’re doing.” I gave her the seven pages, she knew them better than I did! And she did it in take one. That’s what she was. And I love when people say, is it true you had an affair with all your leading ladies? I say, do you think that’s true? I worked with Agnes Moorehead!
Innovation and Revision
MS: So how did you decide to make the video assist?
JL: I didn’t want to ask anybody, “How was that?” That was something that was against my nature. “How was that?” Jesus, if I don’t know how it is, why am I asking him? But I knew there was a way for me to see what I was doing, so I went to Tokyo, and I met with the Morita family, co-founder of SONY. And the son of Morita stayed with me for four months, working on the video assist. I used it on The Bellboy for the first time. Marty, you know this as well as I do, a lot of directors don’t want to use it because you see how they work, and they don’t want you to see how they work. And there are times when they work, and they don’t want you to see how the work is not great.
MS: And everybody sees.
JL: So it became a wonderful protection. They’re not going to fool with the video assist because it’s going to tell you everything. And the beauty of it was, you could tell an actor a hundred times about weight distribution. If you’re standing on your right foot, then I’m getting half an eye. You need to stand here. And then we’d try it and then I’d get another half an eye. You need to put your weight 50 percent here, 50 percent there, and say the line. Now try it. We’d roll video assist. Show it to the actor. Then he’d go onto the set and do it perfectly. I found that to be a tremendous tool.
MS: Yes. I think the very first video assist I used was a two-inch black-and-white on King of Comedy. That was the first time I used it—and that was 1981!
JL: Two-inch.
MS: Yeah, and that was it. Before that, the camera operator was very important—still is, of course! But he was the one you turned to for “How was it?” Because that was the take, in terms of movement or whatever. So you were blind in a way. It’s amazing. How do you deal with writers? Working with writers must be an ego situation where everybody’s gotta throw in the best. Does it come from the days of working on television or stage in a similar way?
JL: Pretty much. But when you have writers that aren’t doing you, they’re bringing material that’s for another movie! What the hell is that? You have to be so careful because if they are taking your idea, they’re developing it in their mind. They’re not coming to you with it. What did you have in mind? Writing was always a joy for me when I could be alone. And you know what that is, Marty: you can sit sometimes and the fingers don’t do anything, and you just sit. Wonderful, white paper staring at you: what are you gonna do now, putz?
MS: You’d never done that—a script that was handed to you in any way?
JL: King of Comedy!
MS: Yes, but that was as an actor. Except for one scene where I had Jerry direct for me, and that was the scene of the woman in the street. Do you remember? And that was fascinating to watch: the way he worked with her—a really good actor—for the timing. The telephone call: please say hello to my husband. What we did is we had long, long lenses so people didn’t know [we were filming]. People actually thought in the street this was happening. I was hiding, and observing you.
JL: I knew I was safe because he had The Total Film-Maker in his chair all the time.
MS: I also feel that way about the music in your films. You know how they always say, the city is another character. That’s another character—the music is another character. It really is in your pictures. There are so many routines that are done with music, but one of the key things I remember is from The Ladies Man [61], which is a big influence on me. That house that’s cut in half and you pull back and you see the entire studio and everything. You know, in Gangs of New York, the Old Brewery was cut in half in the beginning of the film and we pull back and it’s the same thing, only they were doing totally different things in the room.
JL: That set cost me $895,000. And that was in 1960-something. I had wonderful actors—wonderful performers that never got in the way of comedy. They helped it. They brought an energy to the comedy. It must be rough for an actor to work with a comic. What you have to remember is: the actor thinks you’re God, you’re all-powerful. And that’s the way they should think because then they get to listen to what the director has to say. They listen carefully. I have worked with so many actors that didn’t listen. They weren’t hearing you. I’d say to the actor, I know you never thought you’d be in the presence of a super-Jew, but try to concentrate.
MS: But did you ever have a situation where actors contributed stuff that you hadn’t planned on?
JL: I used to tell them, bring it to me. Because all I’m going to say is yes or no. And actors who had this wonderful feeling about the project would bring me things. And they were wonderful. But sometimes you say, “What do you do for a living? Don’t bring me that!” And I’ve turned down things that came from the crew that were wonderful and I tried them, but they’d turn a 10-week shoot into a 17-week shoot.
MS: But I was getting to the music thing: for example, in The Ladies Man there’s this great scene where the woman in black goes into that room, and I had never seen anything quite like it when I first saw that. The crispness of the color, too! I don’t know if this was VistaVision, but all your films of that period feel that way. And you finally go in the room and there’s this snake-like apparition, and it turns out it’s Les Baxter with the entire orchestra!
JL: If you’re going to do fantasy, or make-believe, it gives you tremendous freedom but it mustn’t get in the way of the joke, or the action. The decision-making process is something people don’t know about a director in a film. The decision-making process doesn’t happen at the scene, at the print. It happens when the director is looking at the footage and says, “We can do it better. I got a better idea.” I’ve done it a number of times.
MS: And shot again?
JL: Yep—and the first way was better!
MS: I know! You did all that and the first take was the one two weeks ago…?
JL: You would tell Thelma and she’d say, “You got it already!”
All in the Timing
MS: The thing about The Ladies Man and The Bellboy and The Family Jewels [65] and all these films is, we didn’t learn in the sense that we went to the theater to learn. What I was fascinated by was that the structure of the story was so loose that you can open a door and get into an orchestra with Les Baxter. You can get the house cut in half. There’s Helen Traubel, she’s doing her routine. There’s a story, but is there a plot? I don’t know! And so, with these pictures, it opened our heads to say you don’t have to be stuck to a three-act structure in terms of narrative. You can make a film about a guy trying to get into a building. This really freed us in terms of thinking about what cinema is. So in terms of the timing within the frame, he does that masterfully, of course. But then in terms of the editing, how does one deal with that, if you come in for a tighter shot? When, as you set the time in The Colgate Comedy Hour, you put your foot in the turkey dinner? You remember? I saw that live.
JL: “Take your filthy hands off that bird!”
MS: The timing was impeccable. And you told me there was a slave camera, another camera that picked it up immediately. Have you had some very interesting relationships to these kinds of situations in the editing room? In terms of pacing.
JL: Well, you know how many times you plan something for a wide shot with a lot of animation and then all of a sudden you come to it and it’s not what you really want to do. And you start trimming and taking a piece from here and a piece from there… And I’ll play that back when I sit in the editing room, and I’ll do what I used to call “death march” footage—you’re going to get killed unless you fix this!—and you talk to yourself once in awhile.
MS: It’s true, because the pacing is like music. And you do music. You know, as a recording artist, you conduct an orchestra. Comedy is music in that way. Cinema is music. That timing carries through. It’s impeccable. I’d seen some of the Chaplin films earlier, but they are not the way your stuff was presented at that time in the late ’50s/early ’60s. To be able to respond to a visual image that had such fluidity to it in terms of pacing and comic timing. We’d never really seen anything like it. And the scripted scenes and improvised scenes: the improvisation that you would do physically would fit within the scripted scene. That’s another issue, I think: you had more control of it because you were doing it.
JL: I had holes to fall in all over the set. You never know when I’m going to use one! I gave of myself completely. I’ve got so many more scars on my body, you’d think I’d played NFL football! I came out of a three-story window into cardboard boxes, which were supposed to save me, and I landed on the corner of them. I’ll show that to you later. No, I won’t.
MS: I was talking earlier about the visual and the verbal, and the benefits of thinking about comedy in visual terms as opposed to the verbal ones. Because it opens the door, and I’m quoting here, “to incongruity and laughter.” And there’s a structure to visual comedy that you talked about. I mean, verbal comedy is wonderful, but the visual comedy is so much more complicated.
JL: It gets to the brain faster! The eyes see the visual faster than the ears hear hearing. And when you’re sure of something and you go full throttle, you see it’s right but you’ve got to do it with the actors. You can’t guess. No guessing!
MS: So when you do it with the actors, and you start to get an idea for a picture and you’re talking about it, you get a character idea. How do you build that character, how do you approach it?
JL: I think the character drives you. When you get it the way you want it, get him the way you want it, he’ll drive you pretty much to get you on his side. Fellow performers make it a competitive scene, and I’ll say to the actor, remember what I told you about what you should be doing here? Your idea doesn’t work! You’ll never make a film thinking that way. You want to do it the way I asked you?
MS: It always goes back to the adrenaline. If you’re not enjoying it, it’s no good. But you’ve also said, and I have a quote here: “Comedy comes out of violence, which is a brother to tragedy. When it’s funny, the audience will reject the violence.” And obviously from Chaplin to Chuck Jones this holds true. Could you tell us a little bit more about that quote?
JL: Yeah, I think it comes out of pain. It comes out of uncertainty… To do comedy, you can learn how to talk about it. But you can’t do anything with this. If it’s missing the visual, you gotta start over again.
Overview
for Jerry Lewis - TCM.com biography
Jerry
Lewis - Actor, Television Actor, Theater Actor, Philanthropist ... biography
Jerry Lewis |
American comedian | Britannica.com
biography
Jerry
Lewis • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Chris Fujiwara from Senses of
Cinema, July 10, 2016
Jerry Lewis - Movies, Bio and
Lists on MUBI
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Fickle Finger Of Fame Jonathan
Romney from Sight and Sound, June
2005
The King of Comedy by Chris Fujiwara - Moving Image Source Chris Fujiwara from Moving Image Source, November 17, 2008
Jerry Lewis -
GENIUS! | PopMatters Bill
Gibron, September 7, 2009
Jerry
Lewis, by Chris Fujiwara | Jonathan Rosenbaum April 11, 2010
The
Jerry Lewis Film Nobody Has Ever Seen | Mental Floss Eddie Deezen, September 5, 2011
Where
to start with Jerry Lewis' considerable, oft-misunderstood ... Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club, November 15, 2012
Le
Grand Jerry Lewis - The New York Times
May 18, 2013
The
French Really Do Love Jerry Lewis, Call Him “Akin to Godard ... Bruce Handy from Vanity Fair, July 19, 2013
Why
Is Jerry Lewis Suddenly So Popular In Vienna? | IndieWire David D’Arcy from indieWIRE, November 5,
2013
Jerry
Lewis Is Still Alive (and Still a Piece Of Shit) - VICE Meegan Koester, March 24, 2014
Jerry
Lewis: where's the respect? | Bradlands | Sight & Sound | BFI Brad Stevens from BFI Sight and Sound, November 18, 2014
Jerry
Lewis the Auteur | The New Yorker
Richard Brody, October 8, 2015
French
Connection Films | Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown 60-minute documentary film, 2016
'The
Day the Clown Cried': Footage of Jerry Lewis' Movie Is Online ... Lamarco McClendenon from Variety, June 17, 2016
Deconstructing
Jerry: Lewis as Director (Introduction) • Senses of ... Daniel Fairfax from Senses of Cinema, July 10, 2016
Three on a
Couch (1966) • Senses of Cinema
Chris Fujiwara, July 10, 2016
The
Nutty Director by David Schwartz - Moving Image Source conversation between Jerry Lewis and Peter
Bogdanovich, February 20, 2009
THE BELLBOY
USA (72 mi)
1960
Slant Magazine - Film Review: The
Bellboy
Eric Henderson
The Bellboy
opens with a comically defensive apologia-cum-defense of the film's alleged
"plotless" nature via Jackie Mulchen (actually character actor Jack
Kruschen), the "executive producer in charge of all productions" at
The Bellboy is nearly silent, in what could easily be taken as a nod
toward French comedy titan Jacques Tati, though Lewis centralizes and
foregrounds his cinematic alter ego (the bumbling, premasculine social misfit)
whereas Tati spent his career trying to move himself back into the fabric of
society. It could more likely be that the silent schematic is merely one
characteristic of a cinematic work by a man intent on stripping away all
elements that might distract from his more immediate themes: celebrity
solipsism, as well as the havoc wreaked on solipsism by the intrusion of an
alter ego. (It's a theme that would eventually be refined and partially sterilized
in The Nutty Professor.)
The titular bellboy is
If it's established early on that Lewis, as Stanley, is the film's central axis
(best demonstrated in the scene where, in about a minute flat, he sets up some
800 or so chairs in rows), it doesn't take very long for the arrival of Lewis
as a confident, henpecked version of himself to throw Stanley's equilibrium
off-kilter. Almost immediately, Milton Berle also arrives as himself, and,
compounding the joke, eventually shows up as another of the hotel's bellboys.
There's a fascinating and seemingly throwaway gag that hints at the essence of
Lewis's celeb-tweaking joke involving
Having Jerry Lewis the performer juxtaposed against Jerry Lewis the star isn't
the only way The Bellboy satirizes the film medium's inherently
sealed-off, aquarium qualities, and how they are conducive to nourishing the
star-making phenomenon. At one point, the concierge calls for
Laurel's infringement on the film's universe disrupts The Bellboy's very
mise-en-scène, to the point that when, later in the film, Lewis is shown eating
next to a window that turns out to be a view into the bottom of the hotel pool
that Laurel happens to be strolling by, it's unclear who is the initiator of
the "joke," such that it is, and who is the victim—in essence, who is
doing the watching and who is being watched. Lewis as
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Fickle Finger Of Fame Jonathan
Romney from Sight and Sound, June
2005
Deconstructing
Jerry: Lewis as Director (Introduction) • Senses of ... Daniel Fairfax from Senses of Cinema, July 10, 2016
THE LADIES’ MAN
USA (106 mi)
1961
The Ladies' Man Eric Henderson from Slant magazine
In a career with its fair share of public
relations blunders, probably the most notorious faux pas made by Jerry Lewis
was his 2000 proclamation that he has never liked any female comedians and that
he considers women's function in the general scheme of things "as a
producing machine that brings babies in the world," either the woeful
words of a severely disillusioned man battling various physical and mental
ailments or a misguided, Andy Kaufman-esque attempt at performance art
stand-up. At any rate, the comment isn't so radically out of step from the
Jerry Lewis who made the masterpiece The Ladies' Man, which even though
it could undoubtedly be taken as a manifesto on machismo, also happens to be a
bizarre, sexually ambiguous, cantankerously skeptical burlesque on the ascent
of feminine independence and the resulting commodification of masculinity,
especially of the domesticated variety.
Lewis stars as a disconnected graduate from Milltown ("a very nervous
little community") magnificently named Herbert H. Heebert (more than once,
the shrill manner in which some of the female characters yell out his name ends
up more closely resembling the epithet "pervert"). After discovering
his girlfriend making out with a letterman, Lewis seems to regress on the spot
into a total presexuality, an adolescent form of misogyny that dictates that he
can't be around women, period. (Ten minutes in, Lewis is already wallowing in a
Freudian quagmire of repressed homosexuality, amplified by Lewis's one-shot
cameo in drag as his own mother.)
So where does he find his first job? In a women's boarding house, naturally.
Lewis (the director) effectively validates Herbert's mistrust of women by
having the boarding house's owner, the regal Miss Wellenmellon (Helen Traubel),
and maid, Katie (Kathleen Freeman), go out of their way to obfuscate the nature
of their establishment during Herbert's "job interview," which
consists mainly of an impromptu psychoanalytical session wherein Herbert gets
his disappointment in women off his chest. (It's worth noting that both women
are portrayed as being emphatically past their sexual prime, so Herbert isn't
threatened.) They hire him and sneak him up to his room through the back
hallways. It isn't until the next morning that Lewis reveals not only the
throng of 30 gorgeous women with whom Herbert will be sharing living space (the
film's onscreen universe), but also the mind-bogglingly immense dimensions of
the ant-farm set that is meant to represent Wellenmellon's mansion.
Lewis pulls the camera out as far as it will go while keeping the strutting
lines of women in perspective, but he also cannily reveals the edges of the set
to accentuate its artificiality, in effect showing the audience that the onscreen
space isn't meant to be taken concretely, but also as an extension of Herbert's
entrapped psychological state. There are basically two rooms that are
emphatically privileged as "offscreen space," the room in which
Wellenmellon and her girls keep "Baby," a roaring, unidentified
creature (which almost surely represents its namesake: the consequences of
heterosexual discovery), and a mysterious room belonging to a "Miss
Cartilage" that Freeman nebbishly demands Herbert never enter.
Herbert is introduced, more or less, to the house's inhabitants when he
delivers their mail. The extended, comic-strip nature of his mail route is an
effective way to showcase what Herbert would consider myriad examples of
exaggerated feminine flirtatiousness. There's the exotic suth'n guhl and her
carmelly drawl, the bobby-soxer's explosive libido, the aggressively erotic
tango dancer ("Thanks for the mail, now baby let's wail!").
His routine brings him to the latter of the two forbidden rooms, which he
doesn't return to until the end of the film. Having connected with one of the
ingénues (the only one, it would seem, that's needy in an isolated way that
Herbert understands), he works up the courage to enter the, umm, portal, where
he discovers a gothically sensual woman who he shares a dance within a fantasy
space totally removed from the clearly defined dimensions of the rest of the
house.
The sexual implications of the scene are all too clear. Especially given that
only a scene or two earlier revealed the culmination of Herbert's comic
subservience: when, during the live television uplink for "Up Your
Street," his cufflink is caught on Miss Wellenmellon's corsage, bringing
him down to his knees next to her as she reclines in her throne-like chair, his
limp wrist pointed in towards his chest in the definitive social and theatrical
image of houseboy demasculinization. The Ladies' Man is a wild,
exuberant reflection of Lewis's diverse comic tones (slapstick, absurdism,
blackout sketches), but it is also perhaps Lewis's definitive take on his
cinematic alter ego's perpetually thwarted priapism.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Fickle Finger Of Fame Jonathan
Romney from Sight and Sound, June
2005
Deconstructing
Jerry: Lewis as Director (Introduction) • Senses of ... Daniel Fairfax from Senses of Cinema, July 10, 2016
THE ERRAND BOY
USA (92 mi) 1961
Slant Magazine - Film Review: The
Errand Boy
Eric Henderson
The self-reflectivity of The Errand Boy
is so pervasive it truly becomes the content of the film, and alone justifies
Lewis's reputation as a master of postmodern sentiment. In the prologue, the
narrator gushes over the magic of
The chairman and CEO of "Paramutual Pictures" is perplexed as to how
his studio could possibly be losing money, especially since most of the
pictures they release are hits. His solution is to hire someone to spy on the
productions on his lot, but someone too stupid to realize he's eavesdropping.
They decide on the boy sloppily pasting up a billboard poster for the next
Jerry Lewis movie (which we are presumably watching), Morty S. Tashman (Lewis).
As with most of Lewis's films, those expecting the set-up to find a direct
answer in the film's outcome will be sorely disappointed. The remainder of the
film mostly consists of Tashman wandering from set to set, from script girls'
office to costume shop to studio commissary to Hollywood premiere (where he
inadvertently becomes arm candy for a breathy starlet whose resemblance to
Marilyn Monroe certainly adds another layer of intrigue, given Lewis's recent
claims to have banged JFK's lover), ostensibly there to spy, but far too
concerned with not destroying everything around him to really pay any attention
to possible economic imprudence.
The scene in the commissary is a great example of what Chris Fujiwara wrote was
"Lewis' willingness to let a scene's formal properties determine its
unfolding, and it demonstrates his use of duration and repetition as sources of
humour." Three children show up at his candy counter, and the first
requests a quarter worth of jellybeans, which are stored in a gargantuan glass
vase on the highest shelf, requiring Lewis to climb a rickety ladder (on
wheels, even) to retrieve them. Since he returns the vase to its place on the
shelf between kids, and all three want the same thing, the joke really isn't
that he has to climb the ladder time and again, but rather that the sheer
length of the gag has extended far beyond the initial humorous climax (where
most comedians would move onto the next gag).
When Tashman, later in the film, tries to clock out for the day at Paramutual's
front gate, he finds that the time clock refuses to punch his card. But of
course Lewis can't clock out of his own movie, which revolves obsessively
around his examinations of his own status as a filmmaker and as a performer.
Earlier, I suggested that The Errand Boy's set-up doesn't resolve itself
in a forthright fashion, which isn't exactly the final truth. In the end, Lewis
has cheekily suggested that the reason Paramutual can't seem to make their
financial ends meet is because they're foolish enough to hire volatile people
like himself, groom them to be stars and let them run untethered on their
backlots.
In that, the film is a revolutionary call to arms, a challenge to everyone in
the system to remain true to their own radical spirit. However, Lewis is too
aware of his own hypocrisies to presume himself. The film ends with Tashman,
now a successful Hollywood bigshot, showing the new poster boy the art of
gluing billboards, and as it turns out the new guy is also Jerry Lewis, suggesting
that no matter how unique and brazen anyone in Hollywood might consider
themselves, they've always depended on learning the lessons of their mentors
(which is probably why Lewis's character's name sounds so naggingly like
Tashlin). And there will always be someone down the line who will steal your
schtick.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Fickle Finger Of Fame Jonathan
Romney from Sight and Sound, June
2005
Deconstructing
Jerry: Lewis as Director (Introduction) • Senses of ... Daniel Fairfax from Senses of Cinema, July 10, 2016
THE NUTTY PROFESSOR
Slant Magazine - Film Review: The
Nutty Professor
Eric Henderson
When Eddie Murphy reimagined what was easily
Jerry Lewis's most critically accepted directorial effort, 1963's The Nutty
Professor, he also indulged in the Lewis-like gag of casting himself in
multiple roles. But while Murphy's conceit was a technical feat (as concerned
with drawing attention to the make-up and photographic cartwheels as it was
with Murphy's admittedly astonishing collection of caricatures), the tone of
his stunt served to confirm the title character's sense of isolation from his
genetic and societal legacy. In other words, he is normal; it's civilization
that's a decidedly different "other." This is a total reversal from
Lewis's films, which are almost preoccupied with the concept of both inter- and
intra-personal duality.
When the geeky and ineffectual Dr. Kelp ponders if he will always be a
henpecked loser, he flashes back momentarily to a nightmarish childhood memory
of his simpering father cowering before his mother. In the background, Lewis is
dressed up as Kelp as a child, though Edith Head's costumes don't so much
suggest Lewis playing a child as they do Lewis playing an adult projecting
himself as a child. It's a paranoid, Jungian portrait of womb anxiety. Nutty
Professor isn't the only film in which Lewis delves into the schisms within
his own psyche. But perhaps one reason that the film is popularly cherished and
canonized to an extent that none of his other films have managed is because he
and co-writer Bill Richmond concocted a simple, easy-to-digest Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde formula to sanitize Lewis's darker psychological strains.
It's interesting that Nutty Professor is the follow-up to The Errand Boy, given that the earlier film
saw Lewis damn near drawing up a referendum against the effortless falsehoods
and emotional tactics that
On the other hand, the latent misogyny of Herbert Heebert and Morty Tashman's
clandestine desire to wreak destruction are divorced from "Jerry
Lewis," the actor who in his previous films enjoyed walking along the line
of performance and stardom. Instead, they go to Buddy Love, the Hyde persona
that Kelp becomes when he drinks his own chemical cocktail. Buddy is pure
narcissism, overreaching confidence, not just Lewis the Movie Star, but Movie
Stardom itself personified. Lewis's portrayal of Buddy is so successfully
severe that most consider it a satirical riff on his old Vaudeville partner
Dean Martin, even though weighing the film's duality against Lewis's
career-long theme of narcissism unto solipsism (in addition to
behind-the-scenes gossip about his occasionally volatile personality) would
seem to peg Buddy as Lewis's own raging id. (Well, to be fair, the pomaded
pompadour flip is admittedly 100% Dino.)
I don't mean to suggest that Nutty Professor is in any way a
conventional film, despite the overtly segregated psychological layout. If
anything, it contains some of his most outré directorial flourishes to date.
The transformation sequence is filmed in his laboratory from above, with the
splattered ingredients of his potion creating a crazed backdrop of primary
colors that stain his white lab coat. When Dr. Kelp shows up to his classroom
with Buddy Love's hangover from the night before, his headache is conveyed
through a barrage of exaggerated sound effects. Ultimately, Lewis and
Though many of his films end with a overtly voiced moral, of sorts, many of
them can't help but sound hollowly platitudinous amidst Lewis's thematic
free-for-alls. The Nutty Professor's supreme triumph is that when Kelp,
heartbroken and emotionally naked in front of what might as well be the world,
admits that "if you don't think too much of yourself, how do you expect
others to?," it's not only a tear-jerking TKO, but also places Lewis's own
fascination with the ravaging effects of his self-inquisitive ego probes into a
plain and urgent context.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Fickle Finger Of Fame Jonathan
Romney from Sight and Sound, June
2005
Deconstructing
Jerry: Lewis as Director (Introduction) • Senses of ... Daniel Fairfax from Senses of Cinema, July 10, 2016
THE PATSY
Slant Magazine - Film Review: The
Patsy
Eric Henderson
When six showbiz managers find themselves out
of work after their main attraction dies in a plane crash, they hatch up a
scheme to use their collective talents to gerrymander a star of their own.
Unfortunately, their choice is Stanley, the hotel bellboy (very possibly the
same character Jerry Lewis played in his directorial debut). The Patsy
plays a little bit like the Kelp/Love dialectic, where half of the film takes
the empathetic baton from the thrilling climax of The Nutty Professor and the other half
engages in the sort of distanced deconstruction of the entertainment business
that marked the most effective sequences of The Errand Boy. Indeed, one of the most
surprising elements of The Patsy is that Lewis and co-scenarist Bill
Richmond (who makes his cameo appearance here as a rehearsal pianist who Lewis
lassoes with his own hair) found enough in their reserves to essentially remake
Errand Boy merely two films down the pike. However, while Errand Boy
seemed to be making the argument that any schlub can be plucked from the most
random of places and groomed and tamed and promoted to the mass audience and
become a star, The Patsy's essential modification is that it presents
the antithetical case wherein no amount of physical training, cosmetic aid or
underground whisper campaigns can hide the true nature and limitations of a
would-be. (This plays awfully well to anyone who considers the unexamined ego
to be an ego not worth lauding.)
The film is steeped in this notion right down to the most minute sight gag,
such as when Lewis glances over at his backup singers at a recording session
and sees three versions of himself dressed in drag, which is decidedly an
extreme case of failed sartorial effort as all three women exude dashed dreams
and embittered resignation. Stanley's sputtering, abortive path to showbiz
success is peppered with moments like this, with misguided singing lessons
ending in shattered houses (when Jerry Lewis transfers his protagonist's
embarrassment to inanimate objects, he doesn't do so half-assed) and ill-advised
test run stand-up performances at the hostile Copa Café leading up to his
performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Realizing that Stanley will
founder, his managers (well, the five old men of the group, excluding the sweet
young thing played by Ina Balin that Stanley has the hots for) write him a
farewell letter in anticipation of dreadful reviews. Stanley receives the
letter moments before his performance and, miraculously, his publicity
emancipation leads him (and the film) into a magical pantomime routine that
garners him the breakthrough that manager-imposed restrictions had been
curtailing (a performance that is so elaborate—and one that depends on a trove
of film tricks such as film speed variations—that it leaps straight out of the
film's narrative and becomes, like Errand Boy's puppet confessional
interludes, a quasi-Gnostic brand of cinematic self-fulfillment.)
Also, while Errand Boy occasionally comes off a tad caustic in its view
of behind-the-scenes drones, The Patsy reflects a genuine affection for
the artisans and jacks-of-all-trades that make careers like his possible.
(Indeed, without them, he could easily be back at the Copa Café, sweating out
dud sets to dead crowds.) When Stanley is at a department store being fitted
for a new suit of clothes and the scene fades from the fitting crew entering
the fitting room to what would presumably be the transformative reveal, Lewis
riffs on the expectation by not having himself step out, but the proud tailor,
who is cheerfully oblivious and so proud of his work (yet unseen) to realize
that he's blocking the future star's entrance. (When Lewis finally steps down
and gazes at his new look in the mirror, the designer greases his wheels
exclaiming "This is you." To which Lewis replies,
appropriately enough, "What, do you expect another fella?" Yes. Yes
they do.) Of course, Lewis's compassion is far from saccharine. When the film
comes to its daring, illusion-killing non-conclusion—Lewis revealing that the
seeming 10th floor balcony is really just a backdrop and then walking off The
Patsy's soundstage set with his ingénue—he jests "Crew, that's lunch.
One hour for the actors and seven days for the technicians," which brings
to mind Homer Simpson's epic slouch-off with a group of Teamsters. With The
Patsy, Lewis is generous enough to give the whole Dream Factory credit for
the gags.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Fickle Finger Of Fame Jonathan
Romney from Sight and Sound, June
2005
Deconstructing
Jerry: Lewis as Director (Introduction) • Senses of ... Daniel Fairfax from Senses of Cinema, July 10, 2016
THE FAMILY JEWELS
Slant Magazine - Film Review: The
Family Jewels Eric Henderson
In his Senses of Cinema profile on Jerry
Lewis's directorial career, Chris Fujiwara notes that The Family Jewels
is something of a transitional film between Lewis's classical period and his
diffuse, presumably more uncontrolled films. Considering that it brings back a
reasonable facsimile of Dr. Julius from The Nutty Professor, it occasionally plays
like the extended version of his film-capping curtain calls. In a storyline
that dangles perilously over the edge of cutesiness at a number of turns, Family
Jewels centers around a rich, recently orphaned girl, Miss Donna Peyton
(Donna Butterworth, in a thankfully unsugary performance that's half
precociousness and half tomboy), who will inherit her family's $30 million till
if she successfully chooses one of her six uncles to be her new father.
Like Nutty Professor, the film's premise seems to center around a very
clear set of narrative rules, but they are all but undercut in the first scene
by the notion that Donna's most suitable guardian is her family's chauffer
Willard (Lewis, who also plays the film's parade of six uncles). The two
exchange hugs, kisses, in-jokes, and every other possible iteration of filial
love to the extent that the film's eventual plot outcome is as devoid of
"suspense" as possible. This accounts for the vaguely funereal tone
of the film, set clearly by the scene Fujiwara isolates: the desultorily
contemptuous monologue spoken by Donna's Uncle Everett (in clown make-up) about
how much he loathes his audience, "squealing brats" all of them.
What he doesn't realize is that the only member of his audience at the moment
he's venting (the other clowns dismiss him as a greedy bastard) is Donna
herself, peeking through the curtains to get a better look at her uncle before
introducing herself.
Rather significantly, the end of the aborted Uncle Everett visit is the same
point in the film where Lewis, as a director, lets his comedic set pieces
stretch out longer than he ever had up to that point, not only interrupting the
narrative, but stopping it dead in its tracks and making it march backwards
(which, at one point, he literally does to a regiment of soldiers marching in a
parade). Whereas Donna's first visit with Uncle James at least led to a
reminiscence from the crusty old sea salt and, therein, some semblance of
ersatz bonding, the film's remaining stops are all exercises in avoidance.
Donna visits Uncle Julius, a fashion photographer, and is mistaken for a child
model for his cereal ad shoot. For the next five minutes, Donna sits on a bed
with three bikini-clad "mother" figures, who hold milk and bowls,
while Julius crashes around his studio (at one point adjusting the f-stop of
the film's camera itself).
The next scene, easily the film's longest, has Donna visiting her Captain Uncle
Eddie, a DIY airline pilot who attempts to fly five members of a Red Hat
Society-like gang of motorcycle ladies to
Deconstructing
Jerry: Lewis as Director (Introduction) • Senses of ... Daniel Fairfax from Senses of Cinema, July 10, 2016
THREE ON A COUCH
Slant Magazine - Film Review:
Three on a Couch
Eric Henderson
Jerry Lewis, who had spent the first part of
his directorial career cha-cha-ing down the narrow division between notions of
the self and the other, seemed to have reached an impasse with 1965's The Family Jewels, in which he split his
psyche into no less than seven pieces. Though some were more or less
recreations of previous incarnations (Kelp v.2.0), probably the most tenuous
role was that of Willard, whose role in the film was more or less an
eccentricity solvent, to be held against the six other unsuitable guardians.
That is to say, the film seemed to indicate a widening gulf between the models
of self and other. Three on a Couch, his moving and discernibly
reassured follow-up (and his first film as a director away from Paramount
Studios), doesn't restore order to Lewis's outline, but instead coasts on the
resultant psychological furrowing.
The film's "Willard" equivalent, Christopher Pride, has been offered
the chance of a lifetime to make his mark as an artist after being commissioned
to paint a mural in Paris. The problem is that his fiancée, psychiatrist
Elizabeth Acord (one of the more deliciously parseable names in a brimming
collection of covertly, but far from subversively, symbolic Lewis character
nomenclature), can't just up and leave her patients in the middle of their
therapy, especially the three young women with more advanced stages of romantic
avoidance. Lewis portrays Chris as a straightforward, if perhaps a tad pushy,
gentleman, whose almost impeccable sense of control (or, perhaps more
accurately, his sense of entitlement surrounding his need for control)
is shown under an increasing duress. Not so much because Elizabeth isn't
properly bowled over by his professional and artistic coup—she is, and Janet
Leigh is frequently asked to bend over backwards and shimmy for happiness—but
because his even attempt to maintain command is not enough to preserve his
sense of direction.
And Three on a Couch is a film that flies any number of directions.
(Like The Patsy and The Nutty Professor, the film seems to
switch genres with the change of every scene.) One reason that it ends up being
among his most fully satisfying films (aside from having one of the most
uniquely organized uses of color cinematography in his entire body of
work—contrasting Chris's apartment's panoply of combinations and patterns with
the monochromatic psychotherapeutic lights in Elizabeth's office), is its sweet
and sour tendency to find a cosmic relationship between utter chaos and
insistent stasis. (Not to say that this wasn't always a Lewis trait, but
perhaps it took a pair of outsider scripters to allow Lewis to focus his
vision.) Chris reasons that if he can manipulate
The comic disparity between what Chris is attempting to manipulate and what he
is capable of harnessing builds slowly up to the spectacular surprise party at
Three on a
Couch (1966) • Senses of Cinema
Chris Fujiwara, July 10, 2016
The
Great Depression: Jerry Lewis' Last Movies - Cinema Scope Christoph Huber
Lewis, Joseph H.
GUN CRAZY
aka: Deadly Is the Female
Time Out London (Tom Huddleston) review [4/5]
While 1940s cinema was packed with devious dames, few can
match Peggy
Cummins’s hellcat sharpshooter Laurie Starr for sheer manipulative allure.
Meeting Laurie at a small-town carny, clean-cut gun nut Bart (a perplexed John Dall)
is transfixed by her charms and prowess with a pistol. The two cut a swathe
through the Southern states, holding up banks and evading a tightening police
dragnet.
‘Gun Crazy’ is a magnificently enjoyable film, distinguished by Joseph H
Lewis’s restless, catch-all directorial style; visually, the film ranges
from classic gritty noir to hyperstylised modern gothic, to a startling single-take
hold-up sequence shot on crowded streets. The filmmakers never miss a chance
for a sly Freudian aside: from Bart’s little problem with guns (he can point,
but he can’t shoot) to Laurie’s zealous lust for control, ‘Gun Crazy’ is awash
with hysterical symbolism. A genuine treat.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
The legacy of Joseph H. Lewis was cemented by GUN CRAZY, a B noir whose audacity well exceeds its small budget. The film's visual ingenuity is still remarkable: Lewis stages tracking shots in reverse, creates odd compositions that intentionally leave faces or key actions out of the frame, and—most famously—shoots a bank robbery in a single long take from the back of a car. Along with some of Val Lewton's productions, it's one of the few U.S. films of the 40s that can be compared to CITIZEN KANE in its go-for-broke stylization. But the psychological element of the film (so pronounced it can't really be called "subtext") is fascinating as well, as John Dall's emotionally stunted antihero is pulled into crime by a femme fatale as protective as she is conniving. This makes him different from the standard noir hero, who's confident but merely unlucky. Given his introversion and child-like fascination with guns, Dall is vulnerable to misfortune from the very start. This would place GUN CRAZY among the most fatalistic noirs, if it weren't for Lewis' overt sympathy for the character, which in turn makes the Rocky Mountain manhunt of the third act even more intense. The accomplished black-and-white cinematography is by Howard Hawks regular Russell Harlan.
Slant
Magazine review Eric
Henderson
It's actually a damned good thing that Joseph H. Lewis, proud
member of Andrew Sarris's clan of "Expressive Esoterica," had as
exciting a visual flair and as much a taste for zero-flab pacing as he did.
Otherwise, Gun Crazy, his 1949 "pre-Bonnie &
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A+]
There comes a point where the act of criticism breaks down, and I'd be hard-pressed to tell you exactly why I think Peggy Cummins is just awesome as Annie Laurie Starr in Gun Crazy. She's a little awkward -- in every scene, if you're listening carefully, you can hear her trying to squelch her native British accent. But it's not an impediment to her performance, which is as raw and sensuous as they come. Through much of the movie, Cummins redefines the relationship between sex and violence, eyes afire, mouth agape, bright gobbets of pure sex dripping from her open lips.
Her boyfriend is played by John Dall, who performed in Rope and Spartacus but was never better than he is here. After the style of Jimmy Stewart, Dall's Bart Tare is a little goofy and a little eager, but he makes a likeable, believable gun fetishist. His friends and family explain that Bart just likes guns and would never willingly hurt another living thing, but we understand that there's something unwholesome about him. He's a sucker for Laurie, but not a chump -- Laurie takes advantage without practicing open deceit, meaning that Bart knows pretty much what he's getting himself in for.
Most importantly, you do not get the feeling from this film that Bart Tare has trouble getting it up. Director Joseph H. Lewis later said that he instructed his two leads to perform like dogs in heat. He got more or less what he was looking for.
"We go together like guns and ammunition," Laurie tells Bart at one point. It's one of the most perverse lines in all of film noir, a figurative sex-death fusion that predated fashionable nihilism. (There's no doubt that Laurie and Bart were the movies' original Bonnie and Clyde.) Remarkably, the fish-out-of-water performances live up to that promise. Gun Crazy is probably the most perfect B-movie ever made. Presumably because the original title appealed to low craving, the studio slapped a new title on the picture, Deadly is the Female, but it didn't stick. As a title, Gun Crazy is sensational and unapologetic. It's not just a suggestion of deviance -- it's a promise.
It's common knowledge now that the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo worked on this picture, using Millard Kaufman as a front. Nowhere could the Trumbo influence be more evident than in the hodgepodge of scenes that open the movie, explaining Bart's history. We see a young Bart (played by a 16-year-old Russ Tamblyn) steal a six-shooter from a shop window on a rainslicked small town street. As he runs away, Bart trips and falls at the feet of the sheriff, towering over him unexpectedly. Bart winds up in a courtroom, where a judge puts Bart's weird gun fixation on trial, describing it as "a dangerous mania." Supported by flashbacks, Bart's friends and what's left of his family testify that Bart would never hurt another living thing -- but the judge nevertheless orders Bart to go away to reform school, where he'll be separated from the weapons he loves most until he's of age.
Years later, after a stint with the army, Bart returns home and hooks up with his old buddies. When the three of them go out to a carnival, disaster strikes -- Bart is amused (and probably aroused) by the performance of fetching sharpshooter Annie, and takes her up on her offer to outshoot any man in the tent. To Annie's chagrin, Bart wins the duel, and is soon hired on to join the carnival doing what he does best. Annie and Bart seem like two misfits truly made for each other, but it's not long before they find themselves out of work and desperate for cash. And while Bart insists that he has no aspirations of becoming a stickup artist, Annie refuses to become a pauper, and scorns his timidity. "You'd better kiss me goodbye," she suggests. And we understand that there's no way in hell he'll agree to do that.
The centerpiece of the film, the apex of its low-key, low-budget dazzle, is a bank heist seen entirely from the back seat of a stolen Cadillac. The dialogue between Bart and Annie as they roll into town is improvised -- they didn't even know where they would park -- and Lewis himself claims that bystanders were convinced that a bank had just been robbed. Lewis's Hollywood contemporaries watched the movie over and over again, trying to figure out how he synchronized so much rear projection footage -- but the whole sequence is absolutely real, shot on the cheap and by the seat of the pants. There were directors who shot heists with more style, who dollied cameras through city streets with more complicated grace, but nobody had ever made robbery look like such a cheap, gritty thrill or so completely accompliced the viewers. No problem -- watch, from the back seat, those glances Annie keeps throwing over her shoulder, teeth bared, a weird animal ecstasy taking hold. Oh yes, Cummins got this one just right.
The ostensible moral of the story is that women will ruin your life, and the underlying message -- as put across in the very final scenes -- is that it may be better to betray lovers than friends. Still, the indignation doesn't run very deep. This is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too kind of moralizing, the kind that revels in the very flesh and gunsmoke that it pretends to disdain for the sake of propriety. It's true that Bart looks kind of bombed-out by the time his big adventure is over, but all that gunplay is undeniably more exciting than the dreamy family life his friends enjoy. If he had it to do all over again, given the choice between two very different sorts of American dream, I'll bet Bart would come out shooting every time.
For the rest of us, it may be enough just to take a ride in that back seat. Gun Crazy is a great film noir, but it's something else, too. It's a critical element in the myth of America-according-to-the-movies that stands outside of concerns of style or genre. In so many ways -- from the adrenaline rush of bank robbery to Cummins' perfect little beret -- Gun Crazy is more crucial, more sordid, and more artful than its dozens of lovers-on-the-lam descendents.
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Images Movie Journal Gary Johnson
Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review
Gun
Crazy - TCM.com David Halat
Gun Crazy Michael E. Grost
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
filmcritic.com (Aaron Lazenby) review [4/5]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review
April 6 Patrick Murtha’s Diary, March 6, 2010
Movie Magazine International review Monica Sullivan
Little White Lies magazine Jason Wood
Gun
Crazy (1950) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Jeremy
Arnold, 5-disc Film Noir Collection
DVD Verdict Rob Lineberger and others, 5-disc Film Noir
Collection
The Onion A.V.
Club [Scott Tobias] 5-disc Film Noir
Collection
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Barrie Maxwell, 5-disc Film Noir Collection
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams] 5-disc Film Noir
Collection
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4.5/5]
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [4/5]
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
The Long Take: Gun Crazy - Video - YouTube YouTube (3:37)
The Long Take: Gun Crazy (3:38)
THE BIG COMBO
Time Out review Tom Milne
Terrific gangster movie, although - despite the syndicate shenanigans promised by the title - it's more of a film noir focusing on the private, obsessional duel between Wilde's cop and Conte's gangster, each variously haunted by a woman and virtually becoming the other's alter ego during the course of their deadly vendetta. A film structured by viciousness and pain (amplified by two peculiarly hideous torture scenes involving a hearing aid), it's a dark night of several souls perfectly visualised in John Alton's extraordinary camerawork. Even better than Lewis' earlier - and remarkable - Gun Crazy.
Shadows and lies are the stars of The Big Combo, a
spellbinding black-and-white chiaroscuro with the segmented texture of a
spider's web. Caught in the center of this sticky, elastic clutter of light and
shadow is Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), the girlfriend of a mobster with
information about a mysterious woman named Alicia that may be of interest to
police lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Wallace's real life hubby Cornel Wilde).
John Alton's lush camerawork is so dominant here you wouldn't know Joseph H.
Lewis was also behind the camera. The story doesn't have any of the he-she
psychosexual politicking that juices the director's Gun Crazy, but
that's no loss given this film's richer returns. The set-pieces are fierce, as
is the
Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review
By 1955 film noir was nearing the completion of its ‘cycle’ (generally held to end with 1958’s Touch of Evil - thereafter we’re talking ‘revival’ or neo-noir). So it’s not surprising to find this late entrant is surprisingly modern: crime is now corporatised and suspects wind up dead (by the hands of suspicious associates) after being merely visited by the protagonist cop, a neurotically obsessive loner. In the 1940s a visit from Bogart meant he would rough you up himself.
That’s not to portray The Big Combo as some antediluvian Dirty Harry. With cameraman John Alton’s cinematography mapping its highlights this flick is unmistakably noir. Its plot turn to unearth the meaning behind one whispered name – ‘Alicia’ - is not only explicitly Kane-esque, but in tune with noir ’s preoccupation with memory and buried secrets.
But the more graphic violence for which it is now remembered is undeniably a link to what would soon become staple fare. The torture scene centering on a hearing aid is as brutal - and eccentric - as Roman Polanski’s nose job on Jack Nicholson in Chinatown some twenty years later.
Director Joseph H.Lewis is best known for Gun Crazy, a late-40s precursor to His-and-Hers crime sprees like Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands. Away from Alton’s bravura compositions, which kick in right from the opening titles (themselves an adrenalin rush of nighttime cityscapes and melodramatic 50s jazz) the film’s exposition is static, even flat at times. My theory is that cinematographer Alton effectively directed the film’s highlights. For chilling point-of-view can anything top the silent barking of the assassins’ tommy guns as the victim’s hearing aid is ripped away? Alton’s fingerprints are also undeniably all over The Big Combo’s famous final shot where, echoing Casablanca, the two survivors walk together (but not touching) side by side into the all-enveloping fog that is their future.
The
Big Combo - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
The last in a cycle of low-budget film noirs directed by
Joseph H. Lewis before he turned his attention to Westerns and television work,
The Big Combo (1955) is a rather unique entry for its genre due to its
frank sexuality, extreme sadism and John Alton's stunning black and white
cinematography that places the story in a world of shadows, spotlights and
claustrophobic lighting schemes.
At the center of the story is Lt. Diamond (Cornel Wilde), a cynical cop who has
become obsessed with arresting Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), the head of a
powerful crime syndicate who has cleverly eluded the authorities for years.
Diamond's motivation, however, is clearly driven by his attraction to Brown's
blonde mistress, Susan (Jean Wallace, the wife of Cornel Wilde), a former
socialite and once promising pianist whose relationship with Brown is a mixture
of sexual dependency and masochism. Aiding Brown in his operation is Joe
McClure (Brian Donlevy), a defeated rival who now serves as his
second-in-command, and a pair of hit men, Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl
Holliman), who are inseparable, bound together by their blood lust.
The Big Combo ran into trouble with Hollywood's censorship board which
trimmed a few scenes from the final release version due to the violence. By
1955 standards, the film was extreme in its depiction of certain sadistic acts.
For instance, Diamond is captured at one point by Brown's henchmen and tortured
by having a hearing aid placed in his ear and the volume of a live jazz drum
solo turned up to the highest frequency. Writhing from the intense pain,
Diamond eventually passes out as Brown watches dispassionately. In another
scene [SPOILER ALERT], Fante and Mingo ambush Diamond's apartment emptying
their machine guns into Rita (Helene Stanton), a burlesque dancer and former
girlfriend who was waiting for Diamond to come home. We see her limp arm drop
into the frame, her fingers still holding a smoking cigarette as the neon sign
outside flashes its stark lighting across the room. As for the implied
homosexual relationship between Fante and Mingo, it seems much more obvious now
than it did in 1955. Not only are the two killers shown sleeping in the same
room together but they often mirror married couples in their intimate exchanges
with each other. There's a scene where the duo are starting to chafe under
Brown's enforced quarantine from the law and Mingo grabs Fante's arm in an
emotional moment, pleading "when we get out, let's never come back."
[SPOILER ALERT] At the end, faced with Fante's lifeless body after an explosion,
Mingo breaks down in tears, calling out to his beloved partner, "Don't
leave me Fante!"
The most controversial scene, however, is one which defines the master-slave
relationship of Brown and Susan. After trying to rebuff Brown's sexual
advances, Susan succumbs to his lustful kissing that begins on her lips, moves
to her neck and back and travels down her body out of the camera range while we
see feelings of shame and sexual ecstasy play across her face. According to
director Joseph H. Lewis in Peter Bogdanovich's Who the Devil Made It,
it wasn't an easy scene for Jean Wallace to do, even though Lewis had clearly
defined the character she was playing: "...you're attracted to this man
because of his lewdness...This is what attracts you: no respectable man from
Nob Hill is going to love you the way this gangster's going to love you.."
The trouble began when Lewis described the scene to the actress: "Jean,
when this man takes you in his arms, he doesn't stop kissing you on the lips,
he doesn't stop at your earlobe, he doesn't stop at your neck, he doesn't stop
at your tummy. He covers you all." She said, "Oh, how dare
you? Why, even Cornel doesn't talk to me that way!" I said, "I wasn't
aware I was talking to Cornel's wife - you're playing the part for Christ's
sake." So she said, "Will you do me a favor? Now I know - I know what
you mean - you don't have to say any more. But, the day we have to shoot this
sequence, will you get Cornel off the set? Because I can't face him." I
said, "OK."
The kissing sequence was filmed to Lewis's satisfaction but, as expected, Wilde
was furious when he found out about it, shouting "How dare you shoot a
scene like this with my wife? How dare you?" The censors decided
they better have a look at it as well and Lewis was called into the projection
room where one representative said, "This filth of showing a guy going
down on a woman is not for the American audience." And I said,
"You're the one that's filthy. That wasn't my intention at all. I left it
to your imagination. If you want to imagine this, that's up to you...." He
said, "Hell, what was the intent?" I said, "You supply me with
the emotion, that's why I left it to the audience. But don't tell me I'm
filthy, or a filthy director." And they left it in, of course. They had no
basis. But Cornel never forgave me."
Originally, the working title of The Big Combo was The Hoodlum
and it was based on a story by screenwriter/producer Philip Yordan. It was
supposed to have been filmed in Eastman color but due to budgetary constraints
it was shot in black and white at the Kling Studios. The movie was also the
first joint effort of Security Pictures, Inc. (Yordan's company with his
partner Sidney Harmon) and Theodora Productions, which was owned by Wilde and
his wife.
After shooting began on The Big Combo, Lewis decided to make a casting
change. "We had cast Jack Palance in the part," the director
recalled, "and he was very flighty and wanted to do things in a manner I
didn't understand; nor did the producers. One afternoon, the day before
we were to start shooting, I think, they wanted to get a decision from him as
to what his attitude would be. Apparently it wasn't the proper one, and they
decided to call it quits. They came to me and said, "Who else can play the
part?" I said, "I know a guy who'd be great - Richard Conte."
Phil said, "Gee, he'd be wonderful." Nick was playing tennis at the
club and we got him. He read the script that afternoon, said he'd like to do
the part, and the next morning he went to work. So if there's anything in his
characterization that had great appeal, I attribute it only to his
talent."
On a stylistic level, The Big Combo is even more impressive than Gun
Crazy (1950) with Lewis utilizing John Alton's chiaroscuro-like effects to
comment on and express the main characters' psychological states. The scene
where Susan is pursued and apprehended by Fante and Mingo has an exaggerated
theatrical quality that borders on the hallucinatory. Lewis's use of sound is
also innovative, particularly in the way he often uses music (both jazz and
classical) to disorient and oppress his protagonists. One of the best examples
of his sound design employs complete silence: [SPOILER ALERT] In McClure's
death scene, his hearing aid is removed and the viewer experiences his demise -
silently blazing guns - from his deaf and helpless perspective.
The Big Combo is much more highly regarded today than it was in 1955
when it was considered as little more than a B-movie crime thriller. Variety
wrote that "It is done with grim melodramatics that are hard-hitting
despite a rambling, not-too-credible plot, and is cut out to order for the
meller fan who likes his action rough and raw. One torture scene in particular
will shock the sensibilities and cause near-nausea." The New York Times
was more dismissive, calling it "a shrill, clumsy and rather old-fashioned
crime melodrama with all hands pulling in opposite directions." The
reviewer also singled out Wilde for criticism, stating that he "plays his
murkily defined role with uncertain vigor, and small wonder." Joseph H.
Lewis, however, feels The Big Combo is one of his better film noirs
though it doesn't top his personal favorite, Gun Crazy, from five years
before.
Probably the best argument for spotlighting The Big Combo as a textbook
example of the film noir genre is this entry by Carl Macek in Film Noir: An
Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style: "There is a sense of
fatalism and perverse sexuality found in The Big Combo that exists in
few noir films...Much in the same way as Lewis's classic Gun Crazy,
there is an affinity between sex and violence; and the exploration of futility
presents an ambience strangely reminiscent of an earlier period of noir films,
such as Scarlet Street [1945] and The Woman in the Window [1944].
These attitudes combine with John Alton's photography to create a wholly
defined film noir, as the striking contrasts between the black and white
photography and Lewis's sexual overtones isolate The Big Combo's
characters in a dark insular universe of unspoken repression and graphic
violence."
The Big Combo Michael E. Grost
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Film Noir of the Week Karen
The Big Combo mardecortesbaja, October 10, 2007
DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review
Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
The New York Times review H.H.T.
DVDBeaver dvd review Gregory Meshman
TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN B 86
USA (80 mi) 1958
Something of a
morality tale written under the alias Ben Perry by blacklisted writer Dalton
Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, in what could be considered a dry run
before he became the first blacklisted writer to use his own name when he wrote
the screenplay for SPARTACUS (1960), adapted from a novel by another
blacklisted writer, Howard Fast, where the Romans defeat a slave rebellion, and
when the captured slaves refuse to identify the leader, Spartacus, all are
crucified, a reference to the actions of the House of Un-American Activities
Committee. Interestingly, the lead actor of the film, Sterling Hayden,
was forced to testify before the same committee after parachuting behind enemy lines
during WWII to join Tito’s Yugoslavian partisans fight against European
fascism, when he briefly joined the Communist Party, eventually forced to name
names before the committee, something he later disavowed. The interest in
TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN comes from the gripping performance by Hayden, who plays
an immigrant Swede who has been working whaling ships for thirty years sending
what little money he could to his father in Texas to help buy land and a
farmhouse, returning home, finally, to join his father after being away nearly
20 years. Shot in just 10 days on a B-movie budget, using a renowned
innovator from the 20’s in developing the three-strip Technicolor
process, Ray Rennahan, who received an Academy Award, along with Ernest Haller,
for his outstanding color photography in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), though this
film remains Black and White. What’s particularly memorable about this
film is the infamous use of a harpoon in a street gunfight, a near surrealist
image that defies Western lore.
By the time George
Hansen (Hayden) arrives in town, his father has already been shot in cold blood
on his own land by Johnny Crale (Ned Young, also blacklisted, and an uncredited
screenwriter), a notorious gunman dressed all in black doing the bidding of capitalist
moneyman Ed McNeil (Sebastian Cabot), a land speculator who is driving everyone
off their land as he’s secretly discovered the presence of oil. Anyone
refusing to budge, once threatened, must face the consequences of Johnny Crale,
where the town sheriff is on McNeil’s payroll as well, looking the other way,
supposedly covering all tracks. For Crale, murder is a business
opportunity, where he sees himself as something of a partner to McNeil, though
it’s clear only one of them, behind the scenes, is handling all the business
affairs, collecting all the land deeds for what is otherwise seen as barely
marketable farmland. Hansen’s unexpected presence changes the playing
field, as the town population has already disappeared in fear, where all that’s
seen is an empty ghost town, with an immense saloon/hotel that features a long
bar with no customers and an empty room except for a lone table with Crale
playing cards with the saloon girl Molly (Carol Kelly), a woman who seems to be
held against her will, suffering continual insults by the man with the
gun. It’s Crale that explains what happened to Hansen’s father, leaving
out the identity of the gunman, while the sheriff warns Hansen that the land is
off limits while an on-going investigation is in effect, forcing him to stay at
the hotel under the watchful eyes of McNeil and his henchmen, who beat him up
and throw him on the night train out of town. In an astonishing sequence,
Hansen is seen the next morning walking alone along the train tracks through a
vast and empty desert landscape that initially appears to be an excellent matte
painting, but as the camera holds the shot, it looks like he keeps walking into
infinity.
From the outset,
the music by Gerald Fried is uniquely heroic, featuring plenty of tympani
drumbeats during the initial stand-off, shown as a tease before the opening
credits, Terror in a Texas
Town. Opening Credits - YouTube (2:58), along with an acoustic guitar and
trumpet, where the boldly pronounced trumpet theme is synonymous with Hayden’s
character, who quickly figures out the lay of the land, urging people to stand
up for themselves instead of cowering like weaklings, as eventually their turn
will come to be run off their land and who will offer help? Hayden is
surprisingly persistent, showing a flair for honesty and hard truths, a
stubborn man who refuses to back down, though in a memorable turn, he speaks
with a Swedish accent throughout, where in Trumbo’s story, the poor immigrants
are minorities being forced off their land by the ruthless interests of big
business, who is the real villain in the developing West. When Crale
tries to evict a Mexican neighbor of Hansen’s father, Jose Mirada (Victor
Millan), emboldened by Hansen’s heroics, he decides to stand up to him, even if
that means dying with dignity like a man instead of a cowardly dog. This
changes the psychological reign of terror, as bullies are not used to having
people stand up to them. Even Molly, seen in the role as a subservient
fallen woman, warns the silent voices of the men in her town to start standing
up for themselves. In a riff on the theme of HIGH NOON (1952), where a
lone man must act alone against the forces of evil, Hansen grabs his father’s
harpoon, the only thing he brought with him from Sweden, to exact
justice. In what is truly a bizarre scene, a stand-off with a harpoon and
a six-shooter, with the townspeople standing passively in back, it plays out
like a samurai swordfight movie, where quick reflexes take their opponent by
surprise, shown this time using different angles, followed to its rightful
conclusion: Terror
in a Texas Town (1958), final confrontation - YouTube (2:07). This
was the director’s final film before finishing his career in television,
certainly one of the strangest westerns in recollection, using plenty of overt
symbolism (apparently in the 50’s moral clarity is found at the tip of a
harpoon!) in an otherwise low key film that continually accentuates the frame’s
noticeable emptiness, a town seething under the surface with cowardice and
fear, until finally in a burst of action the tables are turned.
Take a hired gun with a steel fist and an almost tragic awareness of his failing nerve (Young). Pit against him a stolid Scandinavian armed only with a whaling harpoon (Hayden), and the film does at least achieve the kind of bizarre climax appropriate to its low-budget format. The rest is a triumph of expression over economy: Lewis makes a virtue of the frame's emptiness (the budget, it seems, didn't run to extras), and disguises the excessive talk with unobtrusive camera movements that show a craftsmanship and pureness lacking in many more expensive films. Something of an exemplar of its type.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
This sublime Western oddity was the last film directed by Joseph H. Lewis, one of the true, undisputed artists of the American B film. The script, by blacklistee Dalton Trumbo, is pure Lefty pulp: a harpoon-toting Swede (Sterling Hayden) must defend the hardworking people of his frontier hometown against a rotund, waistcoat'd capitalist (Sebastian Cabot) and his black-gloved henchman. Lewis' expressive, exaggerated, slightly nightmarish style renders everything in outsize, cartoony dimensions; it's a film of big faces, big gestures, and big empty spaces—all best appreciated on a big screen.
Articles Michael T. Toole from Turner Classic Movies, also seen here: Read TCM's article on Terror in a Texas Town
The final feature film from a major cult director - Joseph H.
Lewis, Terror in a Texas Town (1958) is an imaginative low budget
Western which casts Sterling Hayden as George Hansen, a Scandinavian whaler who
returns home from the sea to find that his father, a farmer, was killed by
hired gunslinger Johnny Crale (Nedrick Young). It seems that an enterprising
businessman named McNeil (played by a seductively evil Sebastian Cabot) wants
to buy up all the surrounding land and drill for oil. Crale is only part of
McNeil's scheme which includes bullying the local farmers into selling their
land. But Hansen isn't selling under any circumstances. As expected, the film
ends in a showdown but we doubt you've seen one as weird as this - Hansen armed
with his harpoon and Crale with his colt .45!
The premise, of big business trying to muscle in on small farmers and the
thirst for the revenge that follows, is not particularly original. What makes
this film unique is that it emphasizes style over content - and talk about
style! Lewis takes the traditional Western with its natural, outdoor setting
and transforms it into a dark saga about vengeance and death. The stark, black
and white photography and the slow, fluid camera movements have more in common
with film noir than the standard horse opera. Of course, there are some weak
points; Sterling Hayden's Swedish accent comes and goes like the tide and some
of the supporting performances, particularly the young actor who plays the
Mexican boy, are almost embarassingly amateurish. But the kinetic editing and
exaggerated compositions give the film a deep sense of brooding and menace that
is unlike any other "B" Western.
Interestingly, Lewis was set to retire when his friend, the actor Nedrick
Young, handed him the script for Terror in a Texas Town. Young had been
blacklisted and this picture was his chance to get back into the business,
along with the screenwriter for the film, Dalton Trumbo, one of the infamous
"Hollywood Ten" who was blacklisted during the McCarthy-era witch
hunts of the late forties and early fifties. Excited by the script, Lewis
agreed to do it because he had nothing to fear from working with blacklisted
artists as this was going to be his last film anyway. Short on money and time
(he had to wrap the film up in ten days), Lewis had gained plenty of experience
working on low-budget Westerns early in his career and understood the pressure
of making a film quickly. By incorporating ten to twenty scenes into one shot
and covering it in various angles and points-of-view, he pulled off the feat
with tremendous aplomb.
Anyone with a passing interest in some of the more innovative B pictures of the
fifties owe it to themselves to check out Terror in a Texas Town and
some of Lewis's other work: My Name Is Julia Ross (1945), a terse little
thriller about a case of mistaken identity, Gun Crazy (1949), a
variation on the Bonnie and Clyde story told with gripping narrative skill, and
the astonishing film noir thriller, The Big Combo (1955), which is as
raw and edgy as any gangster thriller made that decade - all ingenious efforts
that prove Lewis was one of the great low-budget stylists of his era.
Dave's Blog About Movies and Such [Dave Enkosky]
A Harpoon wielding Swede marches down the street of a dusty Western town. Behind him follows a horde of bloodthirsty townspeople. As the group arrives at the town saloon, a man in black (seen only from behind) emerges to face the angry horde. He taunts the Swede, telling him to move closer. He wants to give the harpoonist a fair fight. You see, in whaling harpoon/six-shooter duels, distance of the essence. Reluctant, the Swede turns around to face the crowd. Bluntly, credits appear. Throughout the titles, random clips from scenes to appear later in the film, form a back-drop.
And so begins Joseph H. Lewis' final feature film, Terror in a
Texas Town. To say this is an unconventional opening for a fifties western
is an understatement. Although cold
opens were becoming more commonplace at this time (especially in the TV
world), few were non-chronological scenes to appear later in the film. Even
more striking is the use of later movie footage during the credits. The effect
is especially jarring.
And Lewis doesn't even let up after the opening credits have run their course.
He cuts bluntly from the titles to a nightmarish nighttime scene. Rowdy cowboys
torch a house and ride off into the darkness. Close-ups of teary-eyed adults
and children punctuate the scene. Just what is going on here? Few directors of
the time (or now, for that matter) had the cojones to so tease and confuse an
audience. Master that he was, Lewis waited until the breaking point before
bringing any kind of meaning to all these disparate, striking images.
Such was the norm for Lewis. Why this stylish director of B Noirs and
Westerns is not better known, is a mystery to me. Given even the most routine
scripts he still managed to churn out movies distinctly stamped with his unique
vision. Indeed, a formative filmmaking period in the thirties spent on poverty
row Westerns, instilled in the young director an attention to visual detail. So
bored was he by the hackneyed scripts he was assigned, that he began to gussy
up the images (many times with foreground images of wagon wheels) so as to
distract the audiences from the pablum they were watching. Employing a fluid
camera and inventive compositions, Lewis' work behind the camera rivaled such
contemporaries as Ophuls, Hitchcock, and Ford. Perhaps Lewis' lack of
recognition is due to his propensity for filming trite scripts.
Such was not the case with Terror in a Texas Town, however. Working from
a script by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (fronted by Ben Perry),
Lewis helmed a film on par with the best psychological Westerns of the era. The
Swede in the opening scene, George Hansen (Sterling motherfuckin' Hayden), is
the son of a landowner who was the victim of intimidation and finally murder at
the hands of the black-clad gunman, Johnny Crale (Nedrick Young, another
black-listee and one of the film's uncredited screenwriters). The elder Hansen
wasn’t alone, of course. All of the homesteaders in this quiet Western town
have been feeling pressure to leave. What these peaceful townsfolk don’t know is
that they sit atop one of the biggest oil deposits in the region. Unfortunately
for them, oil tycoon Ed McNeil (Sebastian Cabot) uses the black gold to
pleasure himself and will stop at nothing to have complete access to the stuff.
McNeil employs Johnny to scare the bejeezus out of those who refuse to sell
their land to him.
Essentially a revenge picture, Terror in a Texas Town also acts as a
treatise on the decreasing value of human life in a rapidly expanding,
continually civilized Western frontier. In this town, a life is only as
valuable as the few hundred dollars it takes to pay off the law, or to hire a
gunmen. Thematically this film would see echoes in David Milch's brilliant,
canceled show Deadwood. Although Lewis' picture may be a film-history
footnote, its influence can't be discounted. It's also a helluva way to finish
a film career.
Electric Sheep Magazine Paul Huckerby
DVD
Savant Glenn Erickson
Terror
in a Texas Town (1958) Thomas Pluck
from Decisions at Sundown
Terror in a Texas Town Review (1958) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
Now playing: the ever-strange Terror in a Texas Town Ben Sachs from The Reader
Gerald Peary - interviews - Sterling Hayden 1984
Terror in a Texas Town - Movies - The New York Times Stephen Holden, also seen here: The New York Times
Lewis, Richard J.
BARNEY’S VERSION C 75
An erratic and horribly uneven version of the vulgar and boisterous life of Barney (Paul Giamatti), loosely based on the Mordecai Richler novel, who also provided the original source material for the esteemed Canadian film about growing up in Montreal as a Jewish teenager in THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ (1974), starring a very young Richard Dreyfuss. They play out as bookends in the author’s life, where Kravitz was a bundle of nervous energy, a smart and overly ambitious kid who would stoop to anything to make an extra buck, while Barney has already discovered financial success by producing the long-running, yet brainless and sleazy television soap opera O’Malley of the North that resembles Russ Meyer without the sex and nudity. The performances are excellent, but there's something missing in the tone of the story where the witty sarcasm of the book does not translate well onto the screen. While it should be this sprawling uproariously funny work, it's instead a fidgety affair with only intermittent humor, much of it way over the top in Jewish stereotype. Never as nuanced as a Barry Levinson film, the premise is a bit outrageous, where at his second marriage (his first wife committed suicide) he goes existentialist at his own ridiculously exorbitant Jewish wedding to Minnie Driver, which seemingly goes on forever, wandering around as if in an alcoholic daze questioning the meaning of it all, until he sets his eyes on Rosamund Pike, which alters his life forever, immediately falling head over heels for her and telling her so, which is not exactly in good taste at one’s own wedding. How about waiting a week? So while that’s the real issue, Barney and his equally candid father, Dustin Hoffman, are portrayed as more uncivilized lower class Jews, not in the same financial bracket as Driver and her ostentatiously rich father, so there’s a wedge between them from the beginning.
The two don’t appear destined to spend the rest of their
lives together and are aided by a miniature side story, which is a film in
itself. Barney’s best man at the wedding
is a real loutishly off-color character, Boogie Moscovitch (Scott Speedman),
think
Barney wastes no time rediscovering Pike, who he’s been pursuing all along, and who’s rather flattered at the gesture. And what’s not to like, especially considering he’s an obnoxious, insecure, cigar-smoking alcoholic with a flair for bad taste, and the film does a few time alterations, jumping ahead to when they’re already married with grown children before moving back to early childhood again, where she sacrifices her budding career in the radio business to become a mother of two children. They appear happily married and content, where she is “the one” for him, but he drinks too much and indulges in only what he wants, like insulting her friends and watching hockey games in bars, leaving her feeling less than satisfied, so when a good looking guy shows up around the lake (Bruce Greenwood), a guy already working in the radio business, Pike gets the urge to return to work, with this new guy, of course. Barney’s life spirals all out of control, initially suspecting something’s up before he makes a stupid decision on a drunken binge, literally driving her into his arms. Like the sexual incident in his earlier marriage, Pike uses this for all it’s worth, even having the kids gang up against him, ultimately moving in with the hunk in the radio business, something Barney unfortunately can’t even remember, as he has early onset of Alzheimer’s Disease and continues to believe they’re happily married. It’s a tragic story of lost opportunities, told with plenty of gusto by a first person narrator who may be known for embellishing as he looks back on his life, suggesting there’s also plenty to be grateful for. Anna Hopkins as his daughter makes a terrific screen appearance, while brief cameos of Canadian filmmakers Denys Arcand (as the erudite waiter), not to mention Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg (as TV directors) grace the screen.
Time Out New York [David Fear]
Can someone sign Paul Giamatti up to play every bellyaching, sex-obsessed Jewish antihero of 20th-century literature from now on? If you can say one thing about Richard J. Lewis’s movie of Mordecai Richler’s novel, it’s that the film proves the 43-year-old star may be the only one who could do those great überschlemiels justice. His Barney Panofsky has the precise amount of self-aggrandizing delusions, sad-sack charm and slow-burn irritation to suggest the rich protagonist that Richler put on the page. Barney may be the kind of guy who hits on another woman (Pike) at his own wedding—to be fair, she is his soul mate—but the actor makes this mess of a human being seem oddly gallant instead of grotesque. Just think of what he could do with Alexander Portnoy, Henry Bech or Moses E. Herzog!
Giamatti and Pike provide the heart of Barney’s Version—one that is unfortunately trapped in a broken-down body. A former TV director, Lewis has a knack for turning the movie’s various story strands—a murder mystery, a bittersweet romance, a buddy comedy, a disease-of-the-week weepie—into the equivalent of the shamelessly pandering small-screen programming you’d find on basic cable. Even if you can forgive the crude JAP caricatures (et tu Minnie Driver?) and the blatantness of the film’s attempts to make you sob, you’re still left with lovely actors stuck in a lackluster cover version of the real thing.
Barney's Version | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
The problem with adapting Mordecai Richler’s 1997 novel Barney’s Version to film is the same problem that hits so many book-to-film adaptations: The book gets into the head of a complicated man, while the film merely observes him. The book is a first-person confessional, an explication of the life and philosophy of the eponymous Barney Panofsky, a Jewish Canadian television producer with a checkered love life and a great deal to answer for. The film, lacking narration or much explanation of the character, is an outsider’s version rather than his own. It’s intriguing, but almost always frustrating. Barney is a memorable character, all acidic jabs and unrelenting, outsized selfishness. But while 132 minutes can’t do credit to an entire life, it’s an awfully long time to spend with someone so loathsomely focused on himself, and so hard to comprehend.
Paul Giamatti plays Barney over the course of more than three decades of life, beginning with a modern-day scene where he hatefully crank-calls his third ex-wife (Rosamund Pike) at 3:30 a.m., then flashing back to 1974 Rome, where he met, impregnated, and resentfully married his hateful first wife (Rachelle Lefevre). Their disastrous relationship seemingly sets him up to briefly see his rich, spoiled, but game second wife (Minnie Driver) as a catch, but at his wedding, he spies Pike from afar, declares himself in love, and begins a determined pursuit. All this wends through a handful of other plots, including his work on a terrible but long-running Canadian soap opera, and his relationship with a drug-added but brilliant writer (Scott Speedman) whom Barney is accused of murdering.
It’s a complex life, and Barney is a complex man. Giamatti plays him richly, as a smug, glib hypocrite who’s quick to judge people and dismiss them, or use them and discard them, but who nonetheless deeply loves Pike, their children, and his father (Dustin Hoffman, in his most restrained performance in many years). But in spite of all the layers at work, in spite of Giamatti’s riveting performance, and in spite of Richard Lewis’ sharp but unhurried direction, far too much is missing from this film. Most tellingly, it elides over the good periods of Barney’s life, the ones where he’s presumably not being a vicious prick, and the ones that would explain why Pike in particular accedes to his sweaty, drunken attempts to court her. Her character is a cipher who only comes into focus when she’s disappearing from his life. Meanwhile, his character spends two hours under the microscope and never entirely comes clear. Lewis’ sad, striking portrait suggests characters with vast inner lives, in a story to rival Portnoy’s Complaint or The World According To Garp. But their interior lives stay hidden, and what’s on display isn’t nearly enough.
The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]
The late Canadian writer Mordecai Richler, best known south of the border for the film version of his 1959 novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, was a bellicose practitioner of Jewish fiction in the manner of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, with a mad helping of Joseph Heller. The joyfully anachronistic Richler took fierce delight in skewering the politics and culture of his beloved, hopelessly divided home province of Quebec, but his subject was human venality in all its forms, invariably seen through the eyes of a haplessly unreliable Jewish narrator as acute in his perceptions of the vanities and follies of others as he is blind to his own.
So it comes as a big letdown that director Richard J. Lewis (who made Whale Music and a whole lot of CSI, and should not be confused with comedian Richard Lewis), working from a reasonably faithful screenplay by Michael Konyves, has made such a mushy pudding out of Richler’s 1997 last novel. Barney’s Version misses every opportunity for raucous picaresque fun that the book throws its way, while squandering a wealth of transatlantic performing talent led by Paul Giamatti. Giamatti mugs away gamely as the titular un-hero, Barney Panofsky, a Montreal producer of schlock television whom we meet adjusting poorly to geezer status and reflecting, with insufficient Richleresque bile, on his magnificently botched life. Regrets, Barney’s had a few, leading with the loss of his adored third wife, Miriam (Rosamund Pike, a cool, intelligent beauty but a bit of a stretch as a sensible Jewish radio talk-show host), to a Vegan New York producer (Bruce Greenwood).
The other lost love of Barney’s life is Boogie Moscovitch (Scott Speedman), an erudite alcoholic who, long ago
in a young-blade sojourn in
Somnolently paced and emotionally constricted, Barney’s Version never finds a rhythm or, for that matter, a theme to call its own. Worse yet, give or take a few moments of televised hockey, the Canadian-born Lewis strips the novel of Richler’s rambunctiously Dickensian sense of place and local character, missing a golden opportunity to dispose of tired clichés about milquetoast Canada. Pay close attention in the movie, and you’ll catch cameos by three homegrown filmmakers who I bet would have made Barney’s Version their own without ditching Richler’s vitally iconoclastic spirit. Quebecois director Denys Arcand, a perfect match for Richler’s antic exuberance, has a couple of brief reaction shots as a waiter, while Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg come and go so fast, I missed them altogether.
However you place Richler in the literary pantheon—he was praised by some as a clear-eyed observer of postmodernity and dismissed by others as an equal-opportunity bad-mouther—he was a gleeful provocateur who wrote in funny, excoriating, entertainingly hectic prose. And he had passion to burn: When Richler’s Barney tells Miriam he’ll never give up on her years after their marriage is over, you believe him even though his chronic unreliability as a narrator is accelerated by alarming portents of senility. Though movie-Barney faithfully gets the right words out, you can’t help thinking that this sweetly uxorious, if clueless fellow who strays here and there gave up not just on Miriam but on life itself long ago. Barney’s Version may be dedicated to Richler, who died in 2001, but I can see him now, rolling his eyes.
Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel
REVIEW: Paul Giamatti Anchors a Sprawling Barney's Version | Movieline Stephanie Zacharek from Movieline
Review: Barney's Version (TIFF 2010) - The Moviefone Blog Monika Bartyzel
Barney's Version reviewed: A bracing jolt of pure, uncut Paul ... Dana Stevens from Slate
Filmcritic.com Rachel Gordon
Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Christian Science Monitor [Peter Rainer]
DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: eFilmCritic Reviews and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]
Jewish Daily Forward [John Semley]
Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
Barney's
Version Chris
Bumbray from JoBlo’s Movie Emporium
The Parallax Review [Mark Dujsik]
Barney's Version + No Strings Attached - FILM FREAK CENTRAL Ian Pugh
Critics At Large: Deserving Better: The Film Adaptation of ... Shlomo Schwartzberg
Eye for Film : Barney's Version Movie Review (2010) Amber Wilkinson
film review: Barney's Version > Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy
Shadows on the Wall | Barney's Version Rich Cline
Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson, also seen here: Common Sense Media [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Boxoffice
Magazine [Barbara Goslawski]
INTRIGUED: The Blog [Katherine Brodsky]
CBC News - Film - Richler's ghost Martin Morrow
Barney's Version | Movies | EW.com Owen Gleiberman
Variety Reviews - Barney's Version - Venice Film Festival Review ... Justin Chang
Barney's Version: Barney as an Everymensch - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey
Barney's Version: The truth, or something funnier than that ... Peter Howell from The Toronto Star
'Barney's Version' Review: Paul Giamatti shines as a man who makes ... Stephen Whitty from The Star-Ledger
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Chicago
Tribune [Michael Phillips]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott,
Novelist’s
Self-Portrait, Distilled on Screen
Charles McGrath from The New York
Times, November 24,
2010
Lewton, Val – Horror producer
Val Lewton bio from Bruce Eder
A Columbia University graduate and former writer, Val Lewton first made a name for himself in films
as an assistant to David O. Selznick
in the 1930s, and co-directed the Bastille scene in A Tale of Two
Cities (1938). In 1942, Lewton became a producer at RKO,
specializing in low budget but extremely effect chillers, such as Leopard Man (1943), Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim
(1943), and Curse of the Cat People
(1944), co-writing several of them. Lewton hoped to move into A-pictures, but
his slightly higher budgeted Bedlam (1945) failed to make as much money as
was hoped, and he was told to continue with smaller scale films. He left RKO
and continued trying to produce movies elsewhere, but none of his subsequent
pictures had the style or appeal of those small-scale, atmospheric chillers
which Lewton virtually directed himself, so precisely did his scripts indicate
what he wanted from his directors. Lewton died of a heart attack in 1951 while
trying to revive his career.
Martin
Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton - The Man in the Shadows
Turner Classic Movies and Oscar®-winning director Martin
Scorsese (The Departed) are putting a chill in January with a brand new
90-minute TCM production looking at the life and work of master filmmaker Val
Lewton. Scorsese is producing and narrating the documentary, which takes a
close look at the innovative and creative producer who fashioned a lasting body
of uncannily beautiful and unsettling films on meager budgets. Martin Scorsese
Presents: VAL LEWTON – THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS is written and directed by
Kent Jones and premieres on TCM Monday, Jan. 14, at 8 p.m. (ET). It will be
followed by a marathon of Lewton classics.
Born in Yalta, Russia, Lewton came to America as a child. After graduating from
Columbia University, he became editorial assistant for legendary producer David
O. Selznick. It was during this time that he helped film the revolutionary
sequences in Selznick’s A Tale of Two Cities and conceived of the famous
boom shot in Gone with the Wind in which Scarlett walks through rows and
rows of dead and wounded Confederate soldiers. (Interestingly, he advised
Selznick to pass on making Gone with the Wind, which he considered to be
a lousy book.)
Lewton was also an accomplished author, with 10 novels to his credit, along
with six non-fiction books, a book of poetry and even a book of pornography.
The legend goes that when RKO was looking for new producers, someone told the
executives that Lewton wrote “horrible novels,” which they misunderstood to be
“horror novels.” So in 1942, he was put in charge of a special unit at RKO
assigned to churn out low-budget horror films. But Lewton wasn’t content to
simply make quick and easy shockers. He created a less-is-more school of poetic
filmmaking, wherein shock effects are replaced by shadows and sounds, with the
unseen often proving to be just as chilling as the seen.
Lewton’s highly psychological works, several of which he also scripted, were
made in collaboration with directors Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise and Mark
Robson. They include some of Hollywood’s most memorable thrillers and horror
films: Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The
Seventh Victim (1943), The Body Snatcher (1945), Isle of the Dead
(1945) and Bedlam (1946). Lewton’s influence was strong and can be seen
in many later films, from Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) to M. Night
Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others
(2001).
Val Lewton - Films as producer: J.P. Telotte from Film Reference
A minor novelist and story editor for David O. Selznick, Val Lewton joined RKO Studios in 1942 to form a "horror" unit, producing low-budget films to compete with Universal's successful monster series. Gathering about him young but talented directors like Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, and Robert Wise, and writers like DeWitt Bodeen and Ardel Wray, Lewton put together a production group that turned out a string of critically acclaimed and financially successful films between 1942 and 1946. More than simply the producer for this group, Lewton served as a kind of creative centerpiece, overseeing every project, and contributing his considerable skills as a writer and judge of what is cinematic.
While forced to work within a number of severe limitations, Lewton did find substantial room for creativity within the horror/fantasy format. The budgets for his films typically ran to $150,000 and the shooting schedules to approximately 28 days. Whenever possible, standing sets were used and RKO contract players employed. And since the films were slated for double bills, running time seldom exceeded 75 minutes. Given these conditions, along with studio-assigned, audience-tested titles, Lewton and his coworkers were generally free of front-office interference in the design and shooting of their films. Thus when faced with an assigned title like I Walked with a Zombie, they could essentially discard the original magazine piece on which the film was to be based and instead adapt Jane Eyre to a West Indies setting, or even create a thoughtful study of childhood anxiety and fantasy out of The Curse of the Cat People. That such creative developments were largely Lewton's own doing is attested to by his coworkers on the horror unit. Not only did he often initiate specific projects, but, as his secretary notes, for each screenplay "the last draft was always his."
What is probably most distinctive about the nine fantasy films and two melodramas Lewton produced between 1942 and 1946, though, is their visual style. While most horror films of the period, and especially the Universal series, emphasized horrific appearances—wolfmen and Frankenstein monsters in exotic locales—Lewton's productions capitalized on limitation by employing suggestion, leaving portions of every shot in shadow and inviting viewers to populate the screen with whatever terrors they might imagine. As he described his guiding strategy, "If you make the screen dark enough, the mind's eye will read anything into it you want! We're great ones for dark patches." Through the strategic placement of shadows and sharp editing, viewers could thus be primed to expect an attacking panther in Cat People, even though nothing more than a bus appears, or to interpret a tumbleweed as a leopard in The Leopard Man.
This emphasis on "dark patches" represents more than just a stylistic trait, though. It points to Lewton's consistent concern with how we see and understand the world around us. Throughout the Lewton films, after all, there are characters who suffer, or cause suffering for others, because they have such a narrow perspective, one determined by their rational biases or, as with Cat People's protagonist, their superstitious beliefs—in effect, because of certain "dark patches" within their psyches. What Lewton apparently realized is that the greatest terrors are not necessarily in our environment, but in the mind, which in turn represses our fears or projects them onto others, thereby filling the surrounding world with horrors of our own devising. Thus the play of shadows, of light and dark in these films is not simply atmospheric. If monsters do show up in them, they take in their true shape from a basic human inability to dispel the darkness inside us, or from our failure to accept those ambiguities that characterize the human world. For this reason, the Lewton films often employ unlikely, even unconventional, threatening figures, such as an anthropologist in The Leopard Man and a doctor in The Body Snatcher. Such figures of authority gone mad underscore the very fragile nature of the world we construct for ourselves.
Removed from this fantasy formula and paired with less talented directors, Lewton was not as successful. After leaving RKO to work as an independent writer and producer, he turned out only three films, none of which earned the critical praise of his earlier movies. It is that early work, and particularly the fantasy films, that would influence filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, and would prompt James Agee to praise the "gentle, pleasing, resourceful kind of talent" that Lewton brought to the movie industry.
Lewtonsite Erik Weems from the Val Lewton B-Unit Web
Page, which includes his
seminal bio-essay, also tribute pages to performers who worked with
Lewton
EULOGY Manny
Farber’s eulogy of Val Lewton at The
Nation, April 14, 1951, from the Val Lewton B-Unit Web
Page
The Val Lewton Screenplay Collection Index which includes a working biography, also several articles downloadable in PDF format
his analysis of The Leopard Man (1943 film) Chris Fujiwara excerpt from his book, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (2001)
Noir of the Week The Seventh Victim (1943), essay by Steve-O from Film Noir of the Week, October 16, 2005
Fear Itself: Val Lewton's The
Ghost Ship - Rouge (1943 film) Fear Itself: Val Lewton’s Ghost
Ship, essay by Donald Phelps from Rouge
(2006)
Mademoiselle Fifi (1944 film) essay from the AFI Tribute pages to Robert Wise
Curse of the Cat People (1944 film) essay from the AFI Tribute pages to Robert Wise
CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE Manny Farber’s 1944 review at The Nation, March 20, 1944, from the Val Lewton B-Unit Web Page
The Body Snatcher (1945 film) essay from the AFI Tribute pages to Robert Wise
Richard Van Busack I Walked With a Producer, by Richard Van Busack from Metroactive Movies, November 2, 2000
DVD Times - The Val Lewton Horror Collection in October - Full ... Dave Foster from DVD Times, June 20, 2005
Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton Mark A. Vieira from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2005, also seen here: Hollywood Horror: From Gothic To Cosmic (Harry N. Abrams, 2003)
Roderick Heath's "Les Fleurs du Mal: The Leopard Man and Le Corbeau" Roderick Heath from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2005
Erich Kuersten What It Takes to Make a Softie, from Bright Lights
Film Journal, November 2005
The prince of Poverty Row | Film | The Guardian Barry Gifford from The Guardian, April 7, 2006
Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures (University of California Press, 2005) description of book written by Alexander Nemerov, from University of California Press
Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures ... - Senses of Cinema book review by Saige Walton from Senses of Cinema, November 5, 2006
Variety RKO genre films get Twisted, by Michael Fleming at Variety, June 14, 2007
Greenbriar Picture Shows The Thinking Man's Exploitation Shockers --- Part One, Lewton essay by fim historian Ross McElwee, July 1, 2007
Greenbriar Picture Shows More on Val Lewton, Part Two essay by Ross McElwee, July 8, 2007
Greenbriar Picture Shows Buzzsaws and Body Snatching In St. Louis --- The Lewton Conclusion, Part Three essay by Ross McElwee, July 15, 2007
Cat People • Senses of Cinema (1942 film) Brad Weisman essay from Senses of Cinema, August 27, 2007
I Walked With a Zombie • Senses of Cinema (1943 film) Martha P. Nochimson essay from Senses of Cinema, August 27, 2007
AFI FEST, entry 3 Doug Cummings reviews Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, from filmjourney, November 13, 2007
Cat People (1942): Another sound – the panther – it screams like a woman Tony D'Ambra from Films Noir.net, November 17, 2007
kamera.co.uk - feature item - Val Lewton's A Grade B-movies ... excerpt from Horror Films, by Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell from kamera.co.uk, December 2007, also see: Kamera Books
Serendipty Merge Divide on CAT PEOPLE and THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, from Serendipity, December 12, 2007
The Reeler's Miriam Bale I Walked with Val Newton, by Miriam Bale from The Reeler, December 12, 2007
Dispatches From Zembla Alok Zembla on the Val Newton Documentary, December 18, 2007
a coffee break THE GHOST SHIP photo by Peter Nellhaus at Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee, January 13, 2008
Flickhead The Val Lewton Blogathon essay, January 13, 2008
The Evening Class Val Lewton Blogathon, by Michael Guillen, January 14, 2008
The Evening Class: VAL LEWTON BLOGATHON: <em>I WALKED WITH A ... Michael Guillen interviews Cinema Now author Andrew Bailey, January 14, 2008
profile
and review: val lewton: the man in the shadows J.C. Loophole from The Shelf,
January 14, 2008
Lewton/Tourneur
- The Lennon & McCartney of Cinema C. Jerry Kutner on THE
SEVENTH VICTIM, from Bright Lights After
Dark, January 14, 2008
The House of Mirth and Movies
Mrs. Emma Peel on THE BODY SNATCHER, from The
House of Mirth and Movies, January 14, 2008
Lewton's Calypsonian: Sir Lancelot I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, by Michael McMorrow from Cult Film Confidential, January 14, 2008
Signal Bleed Cat Peoples, Josh Bell from Signal Bleed compares Lewton's 1942 version of CAT PEOPLE to Paul Schrader's 1982 remake, January 14, 2008
THE VAL LEWTON BLOG-A-THON: "THE LEOPARD MAN" (1943) Mark Osborn at Tractor Facts, January 14, 2008
The Val Lewton Blog-a-thon: The Leopard Man » THE LEOPARD MAN essay by Peter Nellhaus at Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee, January 14, 2008
Have you seen The Leopard Man? Richard Harland Smith from Movie Morlocks, January 15, 2008
Film Forno » Blog Archive » Val Lewton, Cat People, Martin Scorsesce Joe D’Augustine from Film Forno, January 15, 2008
Roderick Heath's erudite essay The Isle of the Dead, from Ferdy on Films, January 15, 2008
Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) Campaspe from The Self-Styled Siren, January 16, 2008
TV: Retroactive Revelation Horror master Val Lewton gets worthy treatment in TCM marathon, by Eric Kohn from The New York Press, January 16, 2008
More Than Meets the Mogwai
The Curse of THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, by Aaron W. Graham from More Than
Meets the Mogwai, January 17, 2008
Val Lewton Blog-a-thon - Rambling Thoughts Bob Turnbull on Val Lewton’s 9-film DVD box set, from Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind, January 18, 2009
Val
Lewton Blog-a-thon - Rambling Thoughts Bob Turnbull on the 9-film
Lewton DVD from Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind, January 19, 2008
Val
Lewton Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary, July 27, 2008
The Unrivaled Canon of Val Lewton. | HorrorsNotDead.com -- A ... Adam Charles from Horror’s Not Dead, July 10, 2009
ICONS
OF GRIEF: VAL LEWTON'S HOME FRONT PICTURES (book ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, October 30, 2016
QPORIT:
VAL NEWTON AT LINCOLN CENTER FILM SOCIETY
Martin Scorsese Presents:
VAL LEWTON - The Man in the Shadows - A ...
No Bed Of Her Own Depression era
novel written by Val Newton, from Kingly books
TCM synopsizes Turner Classic
Movie synopsis of Newton’s first novel, No
Bed of Her Own
YEARLY LEASE Chapter
One of Lewton's 2nd novel, Yearly Lease
(1932), from the
Val Lewton B-Unit Web Page
DVD Verdict Review - The Val Lewton Horror Collection Brett Cullum extensive review from DVD Verdict Review, October 2005
A Salute to Val Lewton Dick’s Picks from DVD Classics Corner
Val Lewton — A Register of His Papers in the Library of Congress
Val
Lewton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows on YouTube (32 seconds)
I Walked With A Zombie -
Original Trailer 1943 (59 seconds)
Cat People - Original Trailer 1942 (1:11)
THE LEOPARD MAN TRAILER 1943
VAL LEWTON (1:19)
Isle Of The Dead - Original
Trailer 1945 (1:31)
The Curse Of The
Cat People - Original Trailer 1944
(1:45)
The Body Snatcher - Original
Trailer 1945 (1:47)
CineMassacre's Monster Madness #9 (2:02)
Bedlam
(1946)-Sensational Secrets of Infamous Mad-house!! (3:15)
Cat people
(Il bacio della pantera)_shadowing and pool scene (5:33)
Two Legs - Blues for Val Lewton song tribute by Two Legs (6:26)
Jacques Tourneur 1-3 -
Fearmakers Collection (8:04)
Jacques Tourneur 2-3 -
Fearmakers Collection (8:08)
Jacques Tourneur 3-3 -
Fearmakers Collection (6:56)
I Walked With a Zombie 1/9 (9:19)
I Walked With a Zombie 2/9 (8:14)
I Walked With a Zombie 3/9 (7:50)
I Walked With a Zombie 4/9 (7:42)
[TRANSLATED] I Walked With a Zombie 5/9
I Walked With a Zombie 5/9 (8:37)
I Walked With a Zombie 6/9 (6:42)
I Walked With a Zombie 7/9 (7:22)
I Walked With a Zombie 8/9 (7:33)
I Walked With a Zombie 9/9 (5:50)
L’Herbier, Marcel
L’ARGENT
France (195 mi) 1928
L'Argent Tom Milne from Time Out London
One of the great silent movies: a superlative adaptation of Zola's novel about warfare in the world of international finance when one tycoon sets out to ruin another. Full of delicate metaphorical touches, the film has an intricate narrative fluidity that never betrays its origins in a densely plotted novel. What chiefly amazes, though, is the extreme sophistication of L'Herbier's visual approach: vast architectural sets dwarf the humans scurrying in frenzied quest of fame and fortune; scenes in echoing corridors leading to the bank anticipate Antonioni as people come and go between massive pillars, aware of each other and of conflicting interests, but never quite connecting; strange, gliding movements of the camera, constantly zeroing in to isolate the private motivations of a character, or withdrawing to reorientate the context, to make new connections, to suggest wider implications. Deliberate mystification is one of L'Herbier's tools. One scene, an unmistakable premonition of Last Year in Marienbad, has the camera travelling sinuously through halls and corridors before discovering a benign old gentleman - the eminence grise, we realise, behind a Stock Exchange collapse - feeding his lapdog. Not for nothing did Resnais acknowledge his debt to L'Herbier.
Film Reference
[Roy Armes] also seen here: L'Argent - Film
(Movie) Plot and Review - Publications - Film Reference
Marcel L'Herbier is a key figure of 1920s French cinema and
his modernization of Emile Zola's novel, L'Argent , released in 1929 on
the eve of the sound revolution, is his most ambitious work. The scope of the
film is inspired by Abel Gance's Napoléon , but rather than talk of heroes,
L'Herbier has chosen to attack what he hated most, the power of money. Though
he took Zola's novel as his starting point, he retained little beyond the title
and the outline of the plot. The film's action is transferred to the 1920s and
unfolds within opulent, over-sized sets built by Lazare Meerson and André
Barsacq. The film's largest set, however, is an actual location, the Paris
Stock Exchange borrowed for three days over Easter and filmed with a complex
multicamera technique by a team led by Jules Kruger, who had earlier worked on Napoléon.
The visual style, echoing the major spectacles of 1920s German cinema, is
enhanced by the presence of Brigitte Helm and Alfred Abel, as the villains in
L'Herbier's cast. Despite the enormous resources deployed—the film cost over
three million francs— L'Argent' s plot line is remarkably
straighforward: a young aviator and his wife become involved in a dubious
financial scheme set up by the lecherous and unscrupulous Saccard. The latter
in turn is destroyed by an even more sinister figure, the banker Gunderman,
abetted by the Baroness Sandorf. Though thwarted in his attempt to seduce the
wife and destroy the aviator when he is ruined, Saccard is left in prison
plotting his next financial coup, while Gunderman rules untroubled.
The 1920s was a period in which directors like Gance and L'Herbier seized the opportunities for individual expression offered by the disorganization of the French film industry. This was a cinema in which the key contributions of noted set designers were set against a continuing interest in location filming. As L'Argent shows, a preoccupation with visual effects—decor and movement, masking and superimpositions, slow motion photography, symbolic lighting and so on—did not imply any disregard for the real social world or for nature. L'Argent was not particularly highly esteemed by traditional film historians, but recent critical work, especially that of Noël Burch, has pointed to the great richness of the film even if the "modernity" claimed for it remains a problematic concept.
L'Herbier, like other 1920s filmmakers, refused to subordinate the visual style of his filmmaking to the demands of narrative continuity, which was already dominant in the United States and elsewhere. The type of cinema of which L'Argent is a key example can only be understood if the claims to primacy of narrative are disregarded and film is accepted as a mode of expression which may legitimately captivate its audience by other means. In this sense a work like L'Argent forces upon us a widening of the conception of cinema to take in forms fundamentally alien to the Hollywood tradition. The question of what value is to be attached to this alternative approach is, however, more complex. Noël Burch and others have prized L'Argent very highly as an example of a vitally important modernist cinema. But in a sense this distorts history, since the conventions L'Herbier was disregarding were not as fully established in France, and the Hollywood-style production practices which would have supported them were totally lacking. Moreover the weight of 19th-century traditions of art and literature weighs heavily on L'Herbier, and a true evaluation of L'Argent would need to take into account also the conventional content, subject matter and ideological assumptions, as well as the visual and rhythmical audacities. But Burch's claims do make a refreshing alternative to the customary denigration of 1920s French cinema and open fascinating perspectives for future research.
Electric
Sheep Magazine Peter Momtchiloff
One of the ways Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Argent blazed a trail for cinema was in its unashamed updating of literary source material. It is commonplace now for a novel or play to be mined for its plot while leaving the inconvenience of the period setting behind, but L’Herbier’s 1928 treatment of Zola’s 1891 novel outraged members of the French dramatic establishment. Certainly the modernisation is opportunistic, with Guyana substituted for the Middle East as the secondary location, in order that the character of Jacques Hamelin can be not only a pioneering engineer but also a daring transatlantic aviator. But the central subject is, of course, not adventure but money, not Guyana but Paris, and a contemporary setting surely helped L’Herbier to give his story bite.
Dramatically, it remains a distinctively 19th-century story, of a pure-hearted young woman at the mercy of greed and lust, her dashing husband led astray by his ambition. It is hard now to see the Jacques character as heroic or glamorous, perhaps because the appeal of Henry Victor’s style of manly suffering has faded. Line Hamelin is played with sass by Marie Glory (now at 103 one of the last surviving silent stars), but the real fun comes when the bad guys are on screen. Pierre Alcover and Alfred Abel are highly entertaining as the rival financiers Saccard and Gunderman, contrasting personifications of greed, violent and icy respectively. But even they are outdone by supporting actors. Brigitte Helm (of Metropolis fame) is the slinkily depraved Baronin Sandorf, writhing in satin and feathers, who will do what it takes to support her gambling habit, even to the extent of allowing the grotesque Saccard to free up her assets on the zebra-skin rug. Best of all, in an eye-catching minor role, is the pioneering lunatic and junkie Antonin Artaud, inventor of the Theatre of Cruelty.
The film is made with more vigour than precision. To a large extent, it seems to have been filmed on the hoof, though prepared with great care and planning. The settings (often spectacular) are arranged and lit, the actors go for it, and the cameras do their best to capture it as it happens, often sacrificing clarity for excitement. I am inclined to take the view that cinematographer Jules Kruger did a valiant job just getting this big mess of action on film. The approximate focus, bumpy camera movements, and inconsistency of lighting and texture make L’Argent incoherent as a visual work of art, but this is perhaps a small price to pay for the energy, scale and vividness of the scenes captured. Visually, L’Argent is a splendid study of the temples of power, animated with considerable narrative energy. For spectacular set-pieces L’Herbier took over the Bourse, Le Bourget airport, and the Place de l’Opéra, without stinting on the extras. The swift succession of lively and varied scenes and tableaux (often just a few seconds, and the more effective for their brevity) are edited together with considerable fluency and zest into an enjoyable yarn.
Ultimately, I don’t think that L’Argent works in the way L’Herbier intended it to. The film doesn’t present a very deep or enlightening critique: it is as unsubtle as L’Herbier’s description of it as ‘a fierce denunciation of money’ suggests. But it does vividly evoke how the wide world of commerce depends on the relatively small world of the financial entrepreneurs, how deceit and guile alike underlie financial stability. Further insight from the past into our current woes? Well, there are some interesting suggestions early on about the relations between propriety, public opinion, and financial success. But in the end, I think L’Argent is too successful as entertainment to work as a didactic piece. The moral is presumably supposed to be that love of money is wicked, but Alcover plays the villain with such straightforward brio that it is hard to despise his greed as we are meant to. Baronin Sandorf is supposed to be another case-study in the depraving effects of love of money, but she seems to enjoy her vice so much that it comes to look rather enviable. What the film actually seems to end up showing us is that cool pursuit of money triumphs over vulgar love of money, but that vulgar love of money might be more fun.
Money
Makes the World Go Mad - Film Comment Michael Almereyda from Film Comment, September/October 2009
The restoration of this hefty, propulsive, and preposterous 1928 film comes with an irresistible tag of relevance. The story—“inspired” by Emile Zola’s 1891 novel of the same name—concerns catastrophic financial malfeasance and corrupt stock-market maneuvering, played out alongside more intimate varieties of betrayal and deceit. The more startling fact is that L’Argent displays, in every shot and scene, the outsize talent of its writer-director, Marcel L’Herbier, whose reputation on English-speaking shores has been largely misplaced in the shadows of French film history.
The movie’s intricate plot links the fluctuating fortunes of Nicolas Saccard, rapacious owner of the Bank Universal, and his new partner and patsy, intrepid aviator Jacques Hamelin, with equal attention paid to Hamelin’s wife, Line. The latter functions first as a catalyst for the alliance, then as a compromised enabler when the banker’s scams soar out of control.
As incarnated by Pierre Alcover, a bulky, big-bellied presence, Saccard makes money the way Godzilla breathes fire. Grinning or glowering, he radiates the neediness, narcissism, and will to power of a supremely spoiled infant, and pretty much steals every scene in which he appears. Most of these feature one of two exceedingly alluring women: Marie Glory, as the aviator’s adorable, increasingly agitated wife, and Brigitte Helm (the snake-hipped robot temptress in Lang’s Metropolis) as Saccard’s soulless former mistress.
Mme. Hamelin insists she wants money for her husband’s sake—a bit of self-deceit that gets tested and heightened as the story streaks along. Hamelin is played by Henry Victor, a tall, earnest lunk with Frankensteinian stitching sewn into his left temple, the trace of an injury sustained in a plane crash in distant French Guiana. In time, presiding over oil fields on this sultry foreign turf, the pilot will don a pith helmet and an eye patch and stare at his blurry hand. He will also be visited by a Saccard accomplice played by Antonin Artaud, whose grooved cheeks and deep-set eyes project a world of morbid complicity lurking in the story’s background. (Alfred Abel, another Metropolis alum, appears as Saccard’s nemesis, a rival financier, and Lang’s Mabuse films seem to have offered L’Herbier a model for how these capitalists track and trade millions by means of weighted looks and brow-bulging telepathy.)
Melodrama trumps economic exegesis—is this a surprise?—as L’Herbier works valiantly to provide concrete visualizations for the fickle abstract movements by which international finance bestows great wealth or snatches it away. The camera glides and surges through enormous Art Deco sets, giving a sense of scope and consequence to hectic phone calls and transparent lies. Despite the vast spaces at his disposal, L’Herbier also goes for dynamically claustrophobic, low-angle close-ups—the sort of shots that might be anachronistically characterized as “Wellesian.” Another of the director’s favored strategies is to intercut glamorous and grotesque faces with wide overhead views of swarming antlike crowds. In one particularly compelling sequence, his camera swooping like Spider-Man, L’Herbier draws a direct equivalence between the launch of Saccard’s desperate financial scheme and the takeoff of Hamelin’s airplane, building to an incredible feeling of exhilaration and release.
In the Zola novel, Hamelin is a mere engineer. Filming less than a year after Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, L’Herbier cannily made him actively adventurous, airborne, a hero primed to fall. Otherwise, unlike the novel, the movie focuses exclusively on the high end of the social strata. In this giddy, decadent universe, L’Herbier seems to say, the pursuit of wealth is a collective fever dream from which no character wants to wake.
But for Saccard money is also a conspicuous sublimation, a substitute for love and sex. There’s an accompanying sense, at the heart of the story, of moral crisis, corruption, and ever-mounting hysteria—the expression of which falls to the level eyebrows and quivering pristine features of Marie Glory, who manages to be gloriously bland and erotic all at once. She’s ravishingly, defileably wholesome. Helm slithers through the proceedings wrapped in form-fitting reflective fabrics, but it’s Glory’s quick smile that provokes the movie’s most heated action. And so, after a wrenching, spasmodic groping session with the aviator’s wife, the rebuffed banker resorts to blunt blackmail. Trading a threat of financial ruin for an invitation to a party in her honor, Mme. Hamelin shows up at Chez Saccard—another palatial set, replete with marble steps, a spurting fountain, and a retinue of musicians and dancing girls. The little woman brings her little black pistol. The ensuing action, sandwiched between dizzy high-angle shots and shimmering double exposures, doesn’t quite cover the fact that the story has worked its way into a corner, landing, with perfunctory piety, in a crowded courtroom. And although a closing scene with Saccard caps the movie on a sardonic note, L’Herbier avoids deeper conclusions about his characters or the economic system they’ve nearly brought to collapse.
What does it say about the filmmaker, and his medium, that, despite this concluding tameness, L’Herbier’s compositions, lighting, and camera moves remain terrifically bold? It’s tempting to find further significance in the fact that the making of L’Argent ran two million francs over budget, qualifying it as the most expensive film ever produced in France up to that time. (It was also L’Herbier’s last silent picture. His filmography consists of some 40 titles, stretching into the Fifties, plus a run of documentaries produced for TV. He was a fundamental figure in the French film industry, and a prolific writer, authoring hundreds of theoretical texts and, in 1979, the year of his death, an autobiography—but nothing yet has been translated into English.)
Here’s hoping that the restoration of this epic leads to a closer and broader review of L’Herbier’s full career. In the meantime, I can’t help but hanker for Guy Maddin to shoot a fittingly deranged alternate ending for L’Argent, as G.B. Shaw once supplied a new last act for Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. The two women, Helm and Glory, would wind up in bed together, of course. The aviator, completely blind, would risk one last, brave, out-of-focus flight. And Saccard, left to his own devices, would start stuffing the Art Deco sets into his ravenous mouth before setting out, once again, to devour the world.
Marcel L'Herbier's L'Argent - Senses of Cinema Shari Kizirian, September 5, 2015
World
Cinema Review: Marcel L'Herbier | L'Argent Dougls Messerli
About
Money: A Documentary on 'L'Argent', Marcel L'Herbier's Film Craig Keller from Cinemasparagus, December
30, 2008
L'ARGENT (Marcel L'Herbier, 1928) | Dennis Grunes
Fashion in Film Festival – Marcel L'Herbier | Silent London
DVD Outsider Slarek
Read Adam Micklethwaite's Film Review of L'Argent Eye for Film
Eye for Film : L'Argent DVD Review (1928) Adam Micklethwaite
User reviews from imdb Author: Trent
Bolden from Chinatown, California
User
reviews from imdb Author: Hyzenthlay_and_me from United Kingdom
User
reviews from imdb Author: allenrogerj from United Kingdom
User reviews from imdb Author: ky_chong
User
reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England
London
Festival Celebrates Marcel L'Herbier - The New York Times May 5, 2013
DVDBeaver.com - DVD Review [Gary Tooze]
L'Argent (1928
film) - Wikipedia
Lhotzky, Georg
MOSS ON THE STONES (Moos auf
den Steinen) – made for TV
Austrian cinema in the 1960s Austria's 1960s Film Trauma: Notes on a Cinematic Phoenix, by Robert von Dassanowsky from Fipresci magazine (excerpt)
The only true Austrian film of 1968 was one made for television,
an ORF production with the regional West-Film (Bregenz) company, and only later
entered European cinemas. But Moos auf den Steinen (Moss on the
Stones) was without doubt the most remarkable and memorable Austrian film
of the decade. Based on the 1956 novel by Austrian author Gerhard Fritsch, the
film features Erika Pluhar, Heinz Trixner, Fritz Muliar, Louis Ries, and
Wilfred Zeller-Zellenberg, who have all indelibly become associated with this
pioneering work. In the midst of the worst crisis in
While it suggests the capitalist exploitation of a romanticized
imperial past in the Second Republic, Lhotsky's work also is a metafilmic
commentary on the 1950s imperial epic films, in which the audience desired to
"costume" themselves in a mythic past for a few hours in a fantasy of
identity, which must then be abandoned for Cold War reality. Most important,
however, is the exposure of this nostalgia as a symptom of
Li, Bianca
DANCE
CHALLENGE
C+ 77
France (94 mi) 2002
Debbie Allen Does Paris. A stunningly energetic dance flick, something along the lines of FAME, only this group of hip-hoppers spend most of their time on the street, or practicing in abandoned warehouses, not in school, all in preparation for the famous Battle of the Dance Groups, the winner gets a trip to America to compete with the best hip-hoppers that New York City has to offer. Everything else in this story is silly, or just plain lame, filled with exaggerated humor, particularly the overly hysterical, lead performance of the director-choreographer herself, but the dance sequences are colorful and nearly jump off the screen, paying tribute to the Nicholas Brothers, Fred Astaire, or Gene Kelly's SINGING IN THE RAIN sequence using garbage can tops instead of an umbrella, and musicals of every decade from Busby Berkeley to WEST SIDE STORY. Even the inevitable dance-off does not disappoint, building to a fever pitch, pitting first one group against the next, then individuals, each trying to outperform the other's moves in an extended finale which breaks into a delirious computer-enhanced fantasy. What was interesting was the level of seriousness this film gives hip-hop, integrating the dance form as a modern day urban ballet, and I'd have to say the dance portions hold up quite well, even though the impression here is that dancers can immediately achieve effortless perfection with little or no hard work, but the physical talent and the non-stop, creative, combustible energy level is simply breathtaking.
Li, Gong – actress
Gong Li | Chinese actress |
Britannica.com
Life
after Gong Li | Film | The Guardian
Howard Feinstein, June 15, 2000
Asia Pacific Arts: An Accent on Acting: An Interview with Gong Li Brian Hu from Asia Pacific Arts, December 20, 2006
8 Things you probably didn't know about beautiful Chinese actress ... Nancy Z from Drama Fever, May 15, 2015
Top 10 Best Gong
Li Movies - China Whisper Peter
Wang, November 19, 2015
Li Shaohong
BLUSH (Hong Fen)
User reviews from imdb Author: rikkihon from United States
If you look at the film as an analysis of communism, you will see how one woman follows the communist's path for rehabilitation, while the other runs from the re-socialization process. As they grow in the cultural revolution, you can see how Socialist China starts to effect each person, with shocking results at the end. In this movie, rich land owners go to poverty stricken men, while self-sufficient women turn into Buddhist monks. With clever use of rain as a symbol for loss, this film deconstruct the opposition between old society and the war, between losing one's old life and gaining a new one, and even between sadness and happiness. The use of the color yellow is for Chu Yi's life, and the use of the color red symbolizes the Chinese revolution. Also in this film, the countryside dwellers speak mandarin, a deliberate usage by director Li Sho Hong, one of the few 5th generation female directors in Chinese Cinema.
Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris
Westerners sometimes view mainland China as a monolith incapable
of critical analysis of its own history. Some viewers may be surprised then at
Li Shaohong's Blush. Set in 1949 at the beginning of the the transition to
communism, the film opens with the takeover of a Shanghai brothel and the
"re-education" of its whores. Two of them, Qiuyi (Wang Ji) and Xiaoe
(He Saifei), are best friends who follow separate paths — the intense Qiuyi
becoming the mistress of a rich man, Lao Pu (Wang Zhiwen), while frivolous
Xiaoe labors for the state in a textile mill. After Lao Pu fails to defend her
against his mother, the intransigent and now pregnant Qiuyi shaves her head and
joins a Buddhist monastery. Ironically, Xiaoe ends up in a miserable marriage
with the father of Qiuyi's child, Lao Pu, forming a lethal love triangle. Blush
is based on a popular novel by Su Tong, of Raise the Red Lantern fame, but the
film, with its strong period atmosphere, striking performances, and sometimes
subtle attacks on the excesses of the Revolution, clearly belongs to this
talented director. Available on VHS from the usual sources. A zany fetishist
for bald women has documented the film's convent head-shaving for like-minded
pervs here.
Blush Shelly Kraicer from a Chinese Cinema Page, also seen here: Chinese Cinema Page review
A subtle, exquisitely filmed melodrama that hides a lot
beneath its surface. Set immediately after 1949, the story follows two former
prostitutes, the older, savvy Qiuyi, and her younger naive "sister"
Xiao'e, as they struggle to fit into the "New China". Two problems:
in between an engrossing first hour and a stunning final scene, the film can
drag a bit: one gets the feeling that too much of the original novel (by Su
Tong) was squeezed into 2 hours. And the performances aren't always riveting
enough to overcome the weight of the narrative, with two happy exceptions: Wang
Ji's powerful performance as Qiuyi, and Wang Zhiwen's enigmatic Lao Pu, the
former landlord becomes involved with both women.
Xiao'e's solution to reconstructing herself as a "new Chinese" is
socialist-conventional, and ultimately leads nowhere. She goes through
Communist reeducation, marries Lao Pu, bears his child, but doesn't grow, can't
hold onto any of these. Qiuyi, on the other hand, escapes from the CPC's
reindoctrination, chooses the path of traditional Buddhist renunciation, and
successfully rebuilds her identity. She suffers a string of losses
(miscarriage, lover, family), but is rewarded finally with a substitute for
each one of these, and, according to the female narrator, is in the end
"content."
What's wonderful about Blush is how it envelopes its narrative in a highly
aestheticized style. The cinematography is gracefully, delicately controlled:
from the strikingly distant, indirect camera placement (many interior scenes
are shot down long hallways, or from the dark, through door frames), to an
absolutely superb control of colour. Specifically, the use of yellow, which
holds the key to the film's preoccupation with resignation, loss, and
renunciation. Yellow is Qiuyi's colour: the walls of the convent she flees to;
the tray for her cast off hair; and the umbrella she carries with her (which
she identifies as a symbol of separation).
It pays to connect Blush to other recent Chinese films that end with a spirit
of Buddhist resignation: Clara Law's Temptation of a Monk (which also employs
the shaved-head motif), and Huang Jianxin's Back to back, face to face. And
think back to the tradition of principled intellectual resistance by Ming
scholars to the Qing conquest, which often involved withdrawl, retreat to
Buddhist monasteries.
How
to Read the Revolution | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader, October 3, 1996
Blush from Novella to Film: The Possibility of Critical Art in Commodity Culture Jian Xu from Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (Spring 2000, p 115-63)
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Philadelphia City Paper (A.D. Amorosi)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
Li Yang
'Banned
filmmaker' is a relative term Arthur
Jones from Variety, February 8, 2007
SHANGHAI -- George Orwell might have put it this way: All underground films are banned, but some are more banned than others.
China's authorities have spent the last decade taking tentative steps toward relaxing their iron grip on the film industry, gradually allowing in more foreign pictures and letting domestic production companies work independently of the state-owned studio system.
But their practice of slapping bans on directors who take independence too far suggests real change is a long way off.
"We had all the right permissions to shoot, but the plot changed during the shoot, and by the time we finished, it was a very different film," recalls helmer Lou Ye, who was banned for five years from making and distributing his films in China in the wake of the acceptance of his movie "Summer Palace" into the Cannes Film Festival last year.
At the time, it was widely reported that the film -- which featured full frontal nudity and scenes of the 1989 student uprising in Tiananmen Square -- was banned because permission to play at foreign festivals had not been granted by the Beijing Film Bureau.
According to helmer Lou, however, the Film Bureau's censors told him the ban was applied for "technical reasons. ... They said that the picture and sound quality were not high enough for release."
It's a familiar story. Many of China's most famous directors (among them Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Jiang Wen) have had bans of various lengths and degrees of severity applied at some point during their careers, often for playing their films in foreign festivals without Film Bureau permission.
Some might say it has even lent them a certain cachet -- international arthouse distribs sometimes joke that nothing sells a Chinese film better overseas than a "Banned in China" sticker on the DVD.
Officially, Chinese films go through three stages of approval by the Film Bureau. Permission to shoot is granted after approval of the film's script (sometimes just a synopsis is enough). Permission to distribute and, separately, permission to play in overseas festivals are granted after approval of the film's final cut. Ironically, it is films such as "Summer Palace," which pass the first stage but not the second and third, that are most often banned.
Truly underground Chinese films, which don't apply for any approvals at all -- around a dozen or so of which play at overseas fests each year -- seem to escape punishment.
"A young director shooting an arthouse film on DV knows that he has no chance of distribution in China, so he probably won't apply for permission to shoot, let alone permission to join a festival" explains Maria Barbieri, who helps select Chinese films for the Udine Far East Film Festival and consults for Venice Film Festival.
"But for a low-key film like this, the authorities often won't care -- it would never have had distribution in China anyway, so the director is usually left alone. It is the better-known directors -- like Lou -- who are more likely to get into trouble."
Li Yang's "Blind Shaft," a story about corruption and murder in China's notoriously dangerous coal mines, ran afoul of the authorities in 2003, though in his case even the length of the ban was unclear.
"I was told after I shot 'Blind Shaft' without any permission that I wouldn't be allowed to shoot anything in China for a while," he says.
Li's ban appears to be over now, however; his latest film, "Blind Mountain," cleared script approval last year (minus a few scenes cut by the censors) and is now in post.
"The difficult thing for filmmakers is that the censors
don't make the rules clear," says Lou. "If we knew the rules, we
could stick to them. But at the moment, each film seems to be judged
separately."
Sydney Film Festival Blind Shaft director speaks about filmmaking ... interview by John Chan from the World Socialist Web Site, July 18, 2003
Li Yang (director) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BLIND SHAFT
China Hong Kong Germany (92 mi) 2003 Blind Shaft website
Time Out Tony Rayns
This underground
feature by a first time director (Li trained as an actor and went on to study
in Germany) combines the strengths of other recent indie films from China with
some of the weaknesses of government approved studio movies. Two murderous
con-men roam northern China taking casual work in the region's dangerous and
unregulated coalmines. They pick up stray, unemployed kids, kill them in faked
mining accidents and then pose as aggrieved relatives demanding compensation.
The climax is at once expected and unpredictable. Strengths: fluid location
filming, often in clearly difficult conditions, and credible performances from
the mainly non-pro cast. Weaknesses: the underlying reliance on melodrama, and
a regrettable tendency to spike the naturalistic dialogue with pontifications
on China.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Li Yang's
muckraking noir made it no closer than the Trenton Film Festival, but perhaps
its scandalous depiction of modern China is best enjoyed behind closed doors. A
documentary filmmaker making his fiction debut, Li begins Blind Shaft
with five minutes of workers at a remote coal mine making their way to work.
Effortless naturalism turns to utter shock as two miners abruptly split a third
man's skull with a pickax. It turns out the two are con men of a particularly
nasty variety, passing young men off as their relatives, faking their deaths in
cave-ins, then collecting hush money from the owners of unregulated mines.
Their coldheartedness, though, starts to thaw when their next victim turns out
to be a fresh-faced boy who looks even younger than his 16 years. Noir and
neorealism battle it out as the movie interweaves genre machinations and potent
critique; as they enjoy a post-homicidal meal, one man spies an embezzling official
on television and cries out, "He should be executed!" At once vicious
satire and subversive thriller, Blind Shaft is certainly one of the
angriest movies to come out of China in recent years, and one of the more
exhilarating as well.
Political Film Review Michael Haas
Coalmining, a dangerous and dirty business, is the occupation
of the protagonists of Blind Shaft (Mang jing). China
has plenty of coalmines, some of which operate illegally. Tang Zhaoyang (played
by Wang Shuanghao) and Song Jinming (played by Li Yixiang) are veteran
coalminers who have come up with a scheme to profit from serial murders in the
mineshaft. They befriend a coworker, pretend to be a relative, fake a
landslide, then kill him, and then extort money from the coal mine operators,
who fear that a police investigation of the death will expose their illegal
operation. Then they move on to another mine to repeat the same scam. When the
film begins, one such scam is run successfully, so they take their money to
town to recruit another patsy, though Song first sends some of his earnings to
his family. Soon, Tang discovers clean-cut sixteen-year-old Yuan Feingming
(played by Wang Baoqiang), whose father has been away from his family and whose
sister needs money to go to school. On the ruse that Yuan is Song's nephew,
they manage to get employment at another mine. However, Yuan is a very decent
boy. He reads an "interesting" history textbook, refuses to have sex
with a prostitute, arranges to send his first paycheck to his sister, and uses
his second paycheck to buy a live chicken for the consumption of his two
friends as well as neighboring miners. Song, who believes that he and Tang may
have killed Yuan's father, does not feel comfortable about killing Yuan, but
Tang is more ruthless. The ending, however, is not what the serial killers
originally plan. Clearly, the AFLCIO is right that working conditions in some
Chinese mines are not up to international standards, notably in matters of
worker safety and housing. The film also demonstrates that many men are out of
work in China, and they line up awaiting employment much as do illegal aliens
around Home Depot stores in the United States. Blind Shaft
boldly highlights the illegality of the mines and the gangsters who run them by
paying off local Party officials, but that is how capitalism restarted in China
in the first place; the communist economy led to starvation, so pragmatic local
officials allowed small-scale free market enterprises so long as they would get
their cut. The lyrics of the song "Long Live Socialism," as sung in
the film, have even changed to celebrate capitalism as the "sexual climax
of socialism," which is manifestly present in small-scale shopkeepers at
the open markets around the town in the film. As the authorities have banned
the film in China because of the implicit political and social commentary, the
film's director Li Yang now lives in exile. The Political Film Society has thus
nominated Blind Shaft for an award as best film of
2004.
Film Comment: Blind Shaft Matthew Plouffe
Awarded the Silver Bear at this year's Berlin Film Festival,
Li Yang's feature debut Blind Shaft serves up a slice of no-income
lifestyle brimming with dreary documentary realism. What results is an
illuminating sociopolitical portrait which highlights an unpleasant truth about
Censor griping aside, it should be reiterated that today's Chinese cinema is
fascinating to follow if only to see where new films will fall in the widening
"Generation" gap. A slow transition to Sixth Generation dominance on
the international festival circuit continues to yield the occasional
praiseworthy newcomer for every directorial wunderkind like Jia Zhangke (Unknown
Pleasures). And with the stench of cheese-stuffed crowd pleasers like Chen
Kaige's deplorable Together currently emanating from the remains of
Fifth generation all-star oeuvres, audiences and filmmakers alike have reason
to pray for directors willing to sacrifice Chinese screen-time for
uncompromised integrity. At 44, he's not a young prospect, but Li Yang's ballsy
lash at the heart of a socioeconomic blemish should set him on the fast track
to Sixth Generation stardom.
With coal-streaked faces hardly discernible from their gray surroundings, Blind
Shaft's Song Jinming (Li Yixiang) and Tang Zhaoyang (Wang Shuangbao) take
one last drag off a group cigarette before dropping to the black floor of a
mine with a handful of others. Headlamps emerge from the darkness as Song and
Tang trod deep into a corner of the cave, shovels in hand. A few moments of
work, they set explosives, and Tang calls out to his "brother,"
nearby. A fellow worker approaches and friendly banter ensues, but the man suddenly
receives a deadly strike on head. Song and Tang furtively step out, blow the
explosives, and leave him buried in smoky rubble. At the surface, Tang
convincingly claims faulty-shaft-collapse and argues with the mine owner over
compensation for the death of his brother, threatening to reveal the illegal
operation. For fear of being found out and shut down, the owner concedes,
sending Tang and Song away with 28,000 yen in their pockets. Not bad for a
day's work.
A night in a nearby town includes a trip to a red-light brothel where the duo
merrily sing "long live socialism" to the marching beat of Karaoke
machine. One hand on a prostitute's thigh, the other on a glass of alcohol, not
a word of mourning is uttered. Over soup the following day, an eerie truth
lingers at the back of Shaft's cutting dialogue and when Tang runs into
an impish 16-year-old outside the noodle shop, the duo's M.O. becomes
frighteningly clear. The teen, Yuan Fengming (Wang Baoqiang), is in search of
money to pay for his sister's education; he left school himself for lack of
proper funds after his father went missing. Tang lets him in on the mining jobs
and agrees to let the boy tag a long under one decievingly innocuous condition:
He has to pose as Song's nephew. The scam is that simple. Song and Tang drift
from mine to mine along the fringes of the Shanxii province, forced to work in
the illegal shafts due to the job-starved economic environment. The meager pay
doesn't amount to much especially considering the insufferable living situations
and backbreaking work, so mid-mine, they pick up other
job-hunters-cum-family-members and fake a collapse. A little blackmail, they
collect, hit the town hard and do it all over again.
With current victim in tow, they quickly find another mine and settle in. But
when Song learns that the boy's deceased father was their previous victim, his
one-track motivations merge with a disarming empathy. Delaying the murder, he
argues with Tang that Yuan should lose his virginity before he's offed; in their
efforts to let the boy "die a man," they take him to a brothel, but
innocent, youthful guilt intervenes and the experience doesn't end well for
anybody. Slowly, Song's feelings for the naive boy begin to interfere with the
macabre business relationship he's established with Tang and when the time
comes for the deed to be done, Shaft's deadly denouement flips
expectation on its head. In a short coda, billowing smoke rises from a
crematorium. In a world in which life seems so fleeting, death so easily forgotten,
Yang's final image of loss possesses an ineffable gravity, understated and
towering overhead.
Yang's background in documentary film is an obvious influence on Shaft's
look and feel; here, we're considering the work of a filmmaker who is
interested in succinctly revealing the dire truth his country's government
would prefer to sweep under the rug. The extensive press packet notes that more
than 7,000 miners die each year, and recalls a 2001 mine collapse in which the
death of more than 40 miners was covered up with support of the local
government who helped bury and cremate the bodies. Shaft's diegesis echoes
Yang's own words. He writes, "The mine owners do not spend money on buying
the necessary safety equipment, but rather use huge sums of money to bribe the
party cadres and government bureaucrats, in order to obtain the various
permits...(they) totally disregard the lives of the miners...there is no
protection and guarantee for the lives of the miners at all." He
continues, "Under the pressure of heavy duties and taxes, many peasants
can hardly make a living by growing crops...Many children have to stop going to
school and start working because they cannot pay the school fees... On
television and newspapers, all people can see are the big achievements of the
developing Chinese economy. But who is there to care about people: human
sentiments, the souls and minds of the people, and social morality? Who cares
about this huge mass of people struggling at the lowest stratum of the Chinese
society?"
His statements hit harder when considering Yang's approach criminalizes his
protagonists, then works backward to draw some understanding from the audience.
Most importantly, Blind Shaft is far from any political propaganda and
its devotion to the fictional complexities of character, mark a discerning
documentarian at the helm. Honorably, amidst the current influx of ill-crafted
pseudo-documentary confusions, Yang chose to go one way. Uniquely, he chose to
do so employing all of the appropriate artistic tropes to justify his decision.
In
I mentioned before my fascination with the
“There Is No Sixth Generation!” Director Li Yang on Blind Shaft and ... Feature and interview by Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, July/August, 2003
Cultural Review Decency as Redemptive: A Review of Li Yang’s Blind Shaft, by Sharon Hom from Cultural Review, November 1, 2004 (pdf)
DVD Times Michael Sunda
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Images Movie Journal David Gurevich
World Socialist Web Site David Walsh
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
filmcritic.com Don Willmott
Film Journal International (Maria Garcia)
Mining Life -- Li Yang's Blind Shaft Screened in 2003 AFI Film Festival Xenia Shin from Asia Pacirfic Arts
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)
d+kaz . intelligent movie reviews [Daniel Kasman]
Kamera.co.uk Bob Carroll
Offoffoff -- The Guide to Alternative New York Joshua Tanzer
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson)
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
KFC Cinema Joseph Luster
Filming the Dark Side Of Capitalism in China - New York Times Joseph Kahn, May 7, 2003
Going underground | Interviews | guardian.co.uk Film Going Underground, article and interview by Xan Brooks from The Guardian, November 3, 2003
San Francisco Chronicle [Carla Meyer]
New York Times (registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell
Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]
DVDBeaver Henrik Sylow
BLIND MOUNTAIN (Mang Shan) A- 93
A harrowing film that knaws away at the audience’s threshold to withstand pain, as this film relentlessly leads its heroine down a dead end path and then leaves her there, easy prey to whatever backwoods customs exist in this isolated rural mountainside village that might feel a kinship with the depraved families in DELIVERANCE (1972), where no one asks questions about incest or in-breeding. An optimistic college graduate is excited about entering a new career gathering medicinal herbs from outlying rural regions and selling them for a profit in the cities. Believing this is a quick way to pay off her family debts incurred from sending her to school, she enters this business arrangement with high hopes. As they get further and further away from civilization entering into stunningly beautiful mountain landscapes, she and her partners are happily greeted by what feels like a grateful community. Awakening alone the next morning with her partners missing as well as all her money and identification, the victim of being drugged, she soon discovers she’s been duped by her partners, that she’s really been sold into marriage to one of the hapless local farm boys who has nothing to offer but a lifetime of abuse and dirt poor deprivation. When she protests, she’s locked into a room, eventually bound and gagged, beaten and raped by her supposed husband, whose family encourages him by holding her down so he can rip her clothes off. With everyone in the entire community aligned against her, more so than she realizes at first, as she is but one of many purchased wives who are routinely sent into such remote regions that there is really very little hope of any escape. Many tried it, but are now permanently disfigured or crippled, an example of what can happen if they’re caught, as the women are used exclusively for work and to have babies, which is their system of making capitalism work, by guaranteeing a good return on their investment. The capitalistic exploitation is only for openers, becoming more about entrenched law-breaking still existing within a larger society, which interestingly is beyond the grasp of the police and the doctrines of the Communist Party.
Within no time at all, we realize we’re watching a Chinese
version of DOGVILLE (2003), though not as endlessly long and without that snarky
narration constantly exuding a sense of artificiality throughout. Instead, it’s set in an isolated village
where another helpless woman who has done no wrong to anyone (Huang Lu as
Nicole Kidman) is chained and repeatedly raped, spied on wherever she goes and
forced to perform hard labor under excessively hostile conditions while being
tormented and psychologically victimized into believing there is no possibility
of escape. Every potential avenue is
blocked, as the police, the village officials, the postman, the hospital staff,
neighbors and family are all conspiring against her as they band together to
accept the husband’s position that she’s his wife and therefore he owns her. End of discussion. Women simply have no other options in this
neck of the woods, shot by Lin Jong in the
Qinling Mountains near Xi'an, Shaanxi province in
Despite her educational background, she never attempts to
use it to her advantage, as it’s not beyond belief that she might outsmart the
dumb as scum mountain folk, but that’s not in the script, which is to accentuate
the extent of their vile iniquity and send this innocent woman through eternal
hell and damnation here on earth, shot without any musical score in a near
documentary style without a hint of artificiality or remorse, vividly depicting
her psychological descent showing what it’s like being held captive, where like
Steve McQueen in THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963), she keeps getting returned to the
hole. The audience grows a little weary
of the brutal extent to which there literally is no escape, how there is a
Fritz Lang M-like mob mentality against anyone who dares interfere, which
begins to resemble a lone human against a village of zombies who are waiting
for the arrival of ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968).
Come to think of it, there’s a slight resemblance in gentle dispositions
between Mia Farrow and Huang Lu,
unfortunately this film doesn’t have the brilliant technical mastery of Roman
Polanski (in his prime!) behind the camera, a man who knew how to manufacture
psychological tension, instead relying on repeated patterns of social unjustice
towards women portrayed with such an effortless, naturalistic tone, which still
leaves the audience squirming in their seats at the conclusion of this film, as
there’s simply no comfortable outcome.
Cinema of discomfort, magnifying the malaise
du jour, manipulating the audience’s expectations with a firm pull of a
rope, a push over a cliff, or a pillow over the face, all releasing the wound
up tension with an instantaneous unthinkable tragedy, like the fallen lovers in
Romeo and Juliet, whose
families are shamed into ending their vengeance against one another. One wonders if these creatures in the down
and dirty
Bob Matter, Facet’s volunteer:
This is only director Li Yang's second feature film, and it's a
zinger. The cinematography is beautiful, chock full of pastoral scenery shot in
a remote village in mountainous northern China. The lighting, colors, framing,
and sound is spot-on. To top it off, it is a powerful story with a superb cast,
most notably the star Huang Lu who plays a recent college graduate who is
kidnapped and sold to a peasant farmer to be his wife, which is Chinese for
child-bearer and domestic slave.
Huang Lu's natural beauty, stoicness, determination, and benevolent character
in the face of her dilemma instantly endears her character to you. Underlying
the overt story of the officially illegal practice of wife-buying in China is
the gnawing worm of western free market capitalism, debasing community values
in exchange for materialism.
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg)
Lars von Trier was
accused of anti-Americanism for making Dogville, a film that confounded
simple interpretation and deliberately flaunted its artifice. Li is not nearly
so coy with Blind Mountain, which sets a near-identical story in rural
China. Advised that she could make money selling medicine, a cash-strapped
college grad (Huang) is duped into visiting a mountain village, where she’s
drugged, forced into marriage, beaten and raped. No one will help her: Her
husband bought her for 7,000 yuan, and she can’t leave until she pays him back.
While Dogville
was a collage of found Americana, the more realism-concerned but similarly
Brechtian Blind Mountain, set in the early ’90s, fixates exclusively on
capitalism. Even hospital visits require cash, and for every character in the
film (including the police), laws protecting property supersede those
proscribing slavery. It’s no coincidence that the heroine’s best shot at rescue
comes when party officials visit the town.
As in his equally
hard-hitting Blind Shaft—and unlike some of his colleagues in China’s
Sixth Generation movement, such as Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye—Li wields drama like
a blunt instrument. Some have billed Blind Mountain as a commentary on
the shortage of marriageable women in China, so it’s disappointing that Li
finally seems more interested in crude revenge fantasy. Still, censors
reportedly required the director to make cuts, so it’s possible that deeper
levels have been trimmed away.
Time Out New York (David Fear)
Straight out of
college, Bai (Huang) believes she’s hit pay dirt when she gets the opportunity
to sell herbal medicine to rural mountain dwellers. After she’s drugged and
abandoned by her patrons, however, the reality of her situation becomes clear:
Bai has been “married,” i.e., sold to a farmer (Yang). Rape, beatings, hard
labor and a numbing sense of hopelessness characterize her new life. The entire
village conspires to keep her from leaving; each near-escape is choreographed
like a nightmarish horror-movie set piece. (Imagine a Chinese version of The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, minus the gore, chain saws and guy in a
human-skin mask.) Even when our heroine thinks she’s found a way out, the
audience knows the score: We sense that the postman Bai passes letters to isn’t
sending them, or that the schoolteacher (Yunle) who promises freedom in
exchange for sex will prove a dead end, long before she clues in.
Part
Asian-miserablism slog and part PSA—parents, don’t let your daughters become
custom-order brides!—Blind Mountain puts its unlucky female
protagonist through paces that date back to Griffith. It’s not that director Li Yang
doesn’t wring some potent, socially conscious humanism out of his baldly
melodramatic scenario. But unlike Blind Shaft (2003), in which he
sublimely and effectively criticized the corrupting influence of capitalism
within a satisfying noir, the message overpowers the medium. For all its
regional specificity and grit, the majority of Blind Mountain’s turns
could have come from any Hollywood-issue flick. You can practically hear
Charlize Theron bidding for the remake rights.
Tuesday's
Film Roundup | the Beijinger Blog | thebeijinger.com November 27, 2007
Li Yang, director of the recently-released Blind Mountain, gave a talk this morning to a motley-crew of listeners as part of the Channel Zero documentary-making class that continues until Dec 2 (click here for more info about the classes). Li talked about the making of his films Blind Shaft (Mang Jing) and the more recent Blind Mountain (Mang Shan) – which after careful consideration by SARFT has been allowed to screen in mainstream cinemas. See below for screening times.
Li Yang was quick to point out that Blind Mountain has been cut in 44 places. After watching the film, one does begin to wonder whether this has seriously affected the end result, or whether it was actually Li Yang's own failings as a filmmaker that has made it as unconvincing and lifeless as it is. The only "real" actress in the film is Lu Huang, who plays a kidnapped university student sold to a rural villager as his "wife," bears his child and fails repeatedly to escape. This story, which is meant to be a documentary-cum-movie, fails partially because Li Yang chose to cast real people from the villages.
Because unlike watching a documentary, where you are convinced that these are real people and thus forgive their ineptitudes at acting, in a film where ordinary people play the parts, there is a sense of not knowing how to receive this film – is it realistic or just bad acting? It seems somewhat unprofessional on Li Yang’s part to give central parts – the husband's, for example – to rural folk whose ineffectual beatings (and raping) makes the viewer cringe rather than gasp.
With Blind Mountain, 6th Generation
Chinese maverick Li Yang continues his scorched-earth treatment of 5th
Generation heroic peasant stereotypes launched by his debut feature Blind
Shaft (no doubt Li is aiming for a trifecta of sightless locale titles).
Picture a Zhang Yimou pastoral with a pigtailed Gong Li or Zhang Ziyi getting
gangbanged by an entire household and you'll see how far Chinese cinema has
come in the past decade, for better or worse. Huang Lu, looking less glamorous
but more authentically rural than Zhang's starlets, plays Xuemei, a college
student sold unwittingly into marriage to a family in a remote mountain village
where the seeming majority of young mothers have been abducted. Her
protestations fail to move the family, who alternate vicious beatings and rape
sessions with gentle assurances that she will acquiesce to captivity once their
son's seed springs forth the child they so desperately seek. Her resulting
attempts to escape lack ingenuity but are filmed with a hand-held life-or-death
urgency that keeps the film compelling from start to finish. While the
propulsive narrative gives the film a considerable degree of accessibility,
it's also the spur that keeps Li from settling into probing more deeply into
the social forces governing this crisis beyond the level of generalization. At
times the film unexpectedly hints at empathy with Xuemei's captors, thoroughly
impoverished farmers who can barely pay taxes on the pig they sold in order to
purchase the bride. But such nuances quickly succumb to stark, outrageous
depictions of the villagers as zombies groping after Xuemei like a Chinese
hillbilly version of Rosemary's Baby. Everyone is depicted as
self-interested, from the bumbling county police officials who are too afraid
to contend with the locals, to citizens on the street who refuse to intervene
in "a family matter" whenever Xuemei attempts to seek sanctuary from
her captors. Even Xuemei's self-righteous condescension toward the villagers
occasionally registers through her victimhood, and through her eyes we are
given the sense of living in China as if among a billion impassive bystanders.
There may not be a lot of nuance to this dystopia, but Li's monomaniacal
insistence on showing the dark despair lurking in the unheralded corners of
Chinese society achieves its own strident integrity and leaves a haunting,
inconsolable impression.
Four years ago, documentarian Li
made a promising - if somewhat overpraised - fiction debut with Blind Shaft, a stark indictment of safety-standards in
rural Chinese coal-mines. "The film is so-so as a con-artist
thriller," [I noted at the time] "OK as a character-study
morality-tale, but is most effective as a depressing expose of a society that
seems to combine the very worst aspects of capitalism among communism's shattered
remnants." Li now revisits similar thematic terrain with his follow-up,
which again chronicles grim goings-on in China's rural backwaters. But Blind
Mountain represents a major leap beyond Blind Shaft - one
that catapults writer-director Li to the very front rank of his nation's
impressive body of film-making talent.
It's on one level an absolutely
cracking psychological thriller - a claustrophobic nightmare of confinement
playing on universal fears. On another level, it's a piercingly specific portrait
of a deeply dysfunctional society, one which will hopefully bring international
attention to a particularly shocking practice which surely has no place in any
modern nation worthy of the name.
Nearly all of the adults with whom
Xuemei comes into contact seem to care about one thing only: money. Even when,
in a fit of desperation, she slits her wrists, the rudimentary A+E department
at the nearest "hospital" won't begin treatment until her
"family" have handed over banknotes. "Barbaric" is the word
Xuemei uses on more than one occasion to describe her new "relatives"
and their fellow villagers, and using the most direct and simple means Li
places the viewer four-square in the shoes of his hapless heroine.
He doesn't need to spell out the
socio-economic background which has led to the villagers' shocking wife-buying
activities: a single scene in which a baby girl is found drowned in the local
pond is sufficient to point the finger of blame at the national one-child
policy, or rather the way such a policy has inadvertently led to a country with
a large excess of adult males - some of whom cross the line into inhumanity in
their search for a spouse.
----- from Hollywood Reporter review (by Ray Bennett): CANNES -
Massive applause broke out at the end of the first press screening of Li Yang's
extraordinary film "Blind Mountain," and it was as much for its final
act as for the quality of the picture. The film screened in Un Certain Regard.
Even though Chinese authorities forced the director to make many cuts before it
could be shown in
BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge
“Blind Mountain” is director Li Yang’s follow up to his much praised 2003 debut, the mining horror story “Blind Shaft” and sees him continue in his quest to shine a harsh light on some of the darker and frequently hidden aspects of life in China today. Here, he explores the clash between modern values and the backwards traditions and beliefs which still persist in some rural areas by tackling the heartbreaking issue of abduction and forced marriage.
Unflinching and horribly believable, the film inevitably became the subject of controversy and ran into trouble with the Chinese censors, though went on to win considerable praise and to enjoy a successful run at international festivals, including Cannes where it screened in the Un Certain Regard category and won the director a well deserved standing ovation of applause.
The plot follows the unfortunate Bai Xuemei (the young though extremely talented actress Huang Lu, who turns in an amazingly brave performance) who takes a job selling medicines to villagers in a remote rural area in Northern China. On her first trip she is drugged and deserted by her colleagues, who it turns out have sold her to a family as a bride for their aging son De Gui (Yang Youan). Repeatedly raped and beaten, the poor girl tries many times to escape, only to be chained up in her small room like an animal. Although she gradually adjusts to her imprisonment and life in the mountain village, she refuses to give up hope, though things soon go from bad to worse.
Whereas “Blind Shaft” worked in part as a black comedy, albeit in a particularly bleak and sardonic manner, “Blind Mountain” is an unremittingly grim affair that never shies away from the sheer hopelessness of Xuemei’s awful predicament or offers up any easy solutions. Although the film is depressing, Li completely eschews melodrama and artificial tension by taking a very matter of fact, almost non-fiction style approach, wisely relying upon the situation to generate sympathy rather than any unnecessary emotional cheap shots. Indeed, part of the film’s power arguably comes from the fact that the viewer actually knows very little about Xuemei or her backstory, focusing instead on her unending abuse, highlighting the frightening fact that this is something which could potentially happen to any young woman of her age.
As a result, the drama is wholly convincing and the film certainly works as a harrowing depiction of a real social problem. It does frequently make for difficult viewing, especially during the brutal early scenes of Xuemei’s captivity, though Li’s skill as a storyteller ensures that it never degenerates into a catalogue of misery, retaining a very human spirit of defiance throughout.
As well as painting a very ugly picture of rural life, Li also manages to work in plenty of social and political criticism. Probably the most disturbing aspect of the film is not so much De Gui’s torture of his unwilling wife as the way that the rest of the village not only refuse to help, but seem to approve of and even complicity involve themselves in the situation. This is particularly true in the case of his monstrous parents, who in their minds are simply following an age-old tradition and who take the matter coldly as a purely practical affair. Perhaps even worse is the way that the local authorities refuse to get involved, either brushing it off as a family dispute or simply bowing to the will of the village mob. Again, Li shows restraint and maturity in never portraying any of them as evil two-dimensional villains, instead attacking their barbaric mindset, and through this questioning the reality of development in modern China. Of course, the film could be accused of pandering to stereotypical impressions of rural China, especially if the cynical view is taken that it was likely produced mainly for overseas audiences, though the story is heartfelt and genuine enough to make any questions as to Li’s intentions rather immaterial.
Visually, although grounded the film is surprisingly beautiful and even poetic thanks to some gorgeous cinematography from Lin Jong, who added a similarly well-balanced mixture of grit and elegance to the likes of “Sunflower” and the early efforts of Ang Lee. Here this works particularly well, as the magnificent picture postcard mountain scenery contrasts effectively with the rotten humanity of the villagers. The film certainly has a documentary air, underlined by the naturalistic performances of the cast and the lack of a musical score, and this only serves to make it all the more credible.
Harrowing and powerful, “Blind Mountain” stands as an excellent example of social conscience cinema and confirms Li as one of China’s most talented and challenging directors. Although hard going and painful to watch for the most part, the film is expertly crafted throughout, and builds to what must be one of the most rewarding cinematic climaxes of recent years, with the Cannes applause only too understandable given the sheer visceral feeling of release it brings.
Blind Mountain Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack, asking the question what is realism?
Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel
Film Journal International (Maria Garcia)
New York Sun [S. James Snyder]
From One
Red Balloon to the Next: The 2007 AFI Fest/American Film ... Bérénice Reynaud from Senses of Cinema, March 16, 2008 (discussed after Silent Light)
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Blind Mountain (Mang Shan) Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily
Reel.com [Chris Cabin] also seen here: Filmcritic.com
Big Picture Big Sound [David Kempler]
BLIND MOUNTAIN previously at Film Forum in New York City photographic film website
Los Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]
New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
Li Yu
FISH AND ELEPHANT
China (106 mi) 2001
Fish and Elephant Shelly Kraicer from a Chinese Cinema Page
It's always interesting to welcome a "first" in
Chinese cinema, and Fish and Elephant 's publicity material trumpets it
as the first lesbian-themed mainland film. Novice director Li Yu has delivered
an engaging film that successfully takes up the challenge, in a thoughtful,
often humorous way, even if it doesn't transcend its trail-blazing agenda.
Li Yu is a twenty nine year old filmmaker who was famous as a TV host in
Xiaoqun and Xiaoling are two single
Li Yu's style can be a bit rough and ready: some scenes are carefully composed,
and use the almost square 16 mm format effectively. In these, Li favours long
takes and an economically motionless camera. Other scenes, though, seem a bit
awkwardly framed and imprecisely cut, as if the director hadn't completely
worked out her visual design. But there are advantages to this shoot-as-you-go
style, too, not the least of which is a real sense of documentary realism, of a
straightforward, unmanipulated honesty that serves its subject particularly
well. In fact, the film does contain more than a seed of documentary. Li Yu
explained that she found it difficult to find professional actresses for the
two leads, given the lingering sense of taboo that still extends to portrayals
of lesbians in mainland Chinese cinema. She eventually found Pan Yi and Shitou
(who play respectively Xiaoqun and Xiaoling) in a
Does the "first lesbian mainland Chinese film" necessarily constitute
the beginning of a genre, or a movement? Fish and Elephant does not seem
interested in assuming these sorts of burdens: it opens a door, treats its
subject with sensitivity, a graceful, intimate, good humoured honesty, and a
lack of pretension. Its flaws are those, entirely forgivable, of a first film,
of a novice director who really wants to try to cram all of her ideas into one
work. A last act swing towards melodramatic gunplay is jarring in tone, and Li
Yu just can't quite pull it off, within the clearly marked constraints of the
domestic dramatic comedy that she's established. Fortunately, after this
excursion, the film smartly rights itself with a wonderfully ambivalent coda,
offering what looks like comedy's traditional closure, while hesitating to tie
up every loose end. A final scene replays a visual trope that's been threaded
throughout the film: the camera looks at the action from a position at a slight
distance, on the outside, through a screen. Perhaps this is Li Yu's way of
representing her own, and much of the audience's position with respect to the
film's subject. It's a perfectly poised distance that she establishes, one that
ironizes without alienating, observes without fetishizing.
Without any fanfare,
this is a special treat, one of the most sublime and drop dead gorgeous films
of the year, a rare mix of the hopelessness of the current generation, as
portrayed by lounge singer Nan Feng, Chinese actress Fan Bingbin, a fearless
in-your-face girl who steadfastly stands up for her friends, and her two
admirers, bike courier Ding Bo, handsome Taiwanese actor Chen Bo-lin, and his
comically rotund sidekick known as Fatso, Fei Zao (Fei Long), reflecting the
down and out, rebellious youth style of Jia Zhang-ke’s UNKNOWN PLEASURES
(2002), and the classical elegance of an earlier generation, reflected by a
towering performance by Taiwanese actress Sylvia Chang. Little do we know what’s in store for us in
this movie, as it starts out like many other coming of age films, establishing
a near documentary rhythm and lifestyle of this threesome, much of which is
captured through vibrant street scenes, where their infectious energy
represents the pulse of the nation, but they feel no connection to their
country or their future and are largely disconnected from their families,
living day by day, spending what they earn in food keeping Fatso happy. Their easy going style with one another is
quite reminiscent of the French New Wave, shot in vérité style by Zheng Jian,
who also edits the film, where their casual and mostly reckless behavior often
finds them clashing with others, where their offbeat, non-conformist manner
sets them apart. When performer Nan Feng
accidentally hits a front row patron in the groin with her swinging microphone
onstage, she loses her job at the same time their home is about to be
demolished, finding a new apartment in the home of a retired Beijing Opera star
Chang Yueqin (Chang), a quieter, much more reserved personality. No one thinks this living arrangement will
succeed, least of all Chang who is constantly criticizing their rude manners
and behavior, usually mocked and mimicked behind her back afterwards.
We soon learn Chang
has a deceased son she never talks about, as his photo is in the living room,
and Chang secretly keeps a car in a garage which still has a bashed in
windshield. When the kids find the car,
they get it started and go on a joyride, experiencing momentary bliss on the
road but eternal condemnation from Chang upon their return, where she is
heartbroken at their sign of disrespect.
What follows is a train ride sequence where the three hop a freight, one
of the most breathtaking wordless sequences seen all year both in length and
poignancy, passing through endless mountain tunnels and some of the most
impressive natural scenery in China, beautifully accompanied by original music
from Peyman Yazdanian. Interjected into
this harmonious beauty is real life news footage of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake
killing nearly 70,000 people, leaving nearly 5 million people homeless, where
on Buddha Mountain this trio eventually finds a shattered Buddhist temple in a
lush mountainous landscape in ruins, where the Master on the premises indicates
he plans to rebuild, which becomes a prominent theme of the film, where these
rootless stragglers need to find something worth holding onto. When Ding Bo, who never expresses his
feelings, is caught with another girl,
But it is the
haunting beauty and quiet personal devastation of this film that most
impresses, freely moving the characters in and out of the frame, continually
changing the focus on who remains onscreen, perfectly expressing the restless
anxiety of youth, never amounting to much, never seemingly satisfied, but along
with the tragic implications of the earthquake, the director also adds the
breathtaking beauty and extreme tranquility of the world that is also within
their reach, using a complicated editing scheme, often changing the pace,
reflecting the changing rhythms of the characters. The style evolves as the interior world of
the characters changes as well, each broken and damaged in differing ways, the
wounds becoming more exposed, where each has an unspoken sense of the tragic
depth of each other’s anguish and pain, which holds them together, like an
extended family, where quietly Chang becomes a silent force onscreen, nurturing
them in ways they’ve never dreamed possible, becoming a dominant presence in
their lives. The director blends
together poetic notions of fragility and loss, loneliness and friendship, but
also a haunting regret and a renewed sense of place in the world, filling a
spiritual void. But the aftermath of
this film is one mixing grief with the haunting beauty of the mountainous
landscape filled with lakes, natural springs and spectacular waterfalls. Renewal or rebirth is the quality of
transcending life’s endless series of tragedy and pain, where this film is
beautifully affixed on the journey of that transcension.
User
reviews from imdb Author: Kenji Chan from
Buddha Mountain - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com
Three 20-something buddies drift like free-spirits through Chengdu, Sichuan:
Nan Feng, a gorgeous and fearlessly feisty bar singer (played by Chinese
superstar Fan Bingbing), and her two admirers, bike delivery guy Ding Bo
(heartthrob Taiwanese idol Chen Bo-lin) and roly-poly Fei Zao (played by Fei
Long). When Nan Feng accidentally assaults a well-connected bar patron, the
three need to find not only compensation money but also a new place to live.
They find the apartment of Chang Yueqin, a retired but agelessly elegant
Since Li Yu’s debut film Fish and Elephant (VIFF 01), she has developed a unique space in Chinese cinema,
one where a commercially viable independent art film can thrive.
SCREENED AT THE 2011 NEW
YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL: It doesn't always work out this way, but ending the
trip to New York City for the Asian Film Festival with "Buddha
Mountain" turned out to be a nice way to decompress. After a non-stop
barrage of movies where even the relatively sedate family picture featured a
time-traveling samurai, this picture from China about a group of struggling
Chinese friends would have been a fine palate cleanser even if it wasn't
genuinely good on its own.
Three young people in
Chengdu need a new place to live. Nan Feng (Fan Bingbing) is an aspiring singer
who gets in financial trouble when a man who claims he was injured at one of
her shows starts shaking the bar where she plays down; Ding Bo (Berlin Chen)
dropped out of college and uses his motorcycle to work as an unlicensed
courier; Fei "Fatso" Zao (Wang Helong) does odd jobs and gets teased
for being overweight. Tossed out of their current apartment, they wind up
renting a room from Master Chang Yun-qin (Sylvia Chang), a one-time Peking
Opera singer with her own issues whose fastidiousness inevitably leads to
clashes with her boarders.
Buddha Mountain is the sort of movie western audiences don't see from China
very often - it's contemporary, small in scale, and tells a tale of ordinary
people; it's also written and directed by a woman. That last bit is apparently
quite rare in China, and with at least one of writer/director Li Yu's previous
films (Lost in Beijing) banned, it wouldn't be surprising if this film was a
truly independent production. It certainly feels like one, with its
ground-level photography of what feel like found locations and appealing but
not glamorous cast of characters. It's also refreshingly free of the
nationalism that has been omnipresent in recent Chinese cinema - there are no
reminders of the glorious history, propagandic praise for the government, or
pointed displays of prosperity.
Perhaps nobody benefits more from this low-key approach than Fan Bingbing.
Despite a filmography filled with glossy period pieces and slick action flicks,
she turns out to be at her best here, where - instead of being made-up,
coiffed, and costumed to bland perfection - she is able to let her hair down
and play Nan Feng as a volatile young lady whose acting out is clearly borne of
frustration and anger; she's fierce enough to storm into the gang that teasing
Fatso and leave them a quivering mass but also be completely believable when
confronted by a situation she can't control. It's a fantastic performance that
one might not think she had in her from years of roles that frequently amounted
to just looking pretty.
Sylvia Chang also gets a meaty role to chew on as the group's new landlady. She
brings an angry dignity to Master Chang, an often disdainful sense of
superiority to the others that the actress plays like a well-tuned instrument,
piling fury at the youngsters' lack of respect on top of the simple anger at
what they've done, augmenting it with scenes of quiet devastation and a harsh
inability to forgive that recalls a similar emotion in Still Walking, even if
the expression is completely different. What's more impressive is how she
retains much of the weight of her character's burden even as she starts to
connect and form a family with the rest.
The boys' roles aren't quite so strong as Fan's and Chang's, but they do a lot
of things right - the moment where Fatso's actual name is first spoken, late in
the film, is just right, for instance. One thing that's on them more than it is
on the ladies is how they find the overlapping space between these protagonists
being confused and adrift and also being the sort of selfish jerks that Ms.
Chang must see them as. All of the characters have a fair bit of growing to do,
and Li Yu gives them the right sorts of small encounters and adventures to
manage it. She elicits a low-key but impressive spirituality when the
characters visit an earthquake-ravaged Buddhist temple, and beautifully
illustrates their lack of direction by having them spend some time riding the
rails.
There are, perhaps, a few
issues with how she ties things together in the end - a character separating
from the group makes more sense than the return, and the ambiguous ending may
not quite walk the line between realism and symbolism. Mostly, though, it's an
impressively crafted story whose simple and honest emotion shows why
independent filmmakers are so important, no matter where they may be.
cineAWESOME! [James McCormick]
Variety Reviews - Buddha Mountain - Film Reviews - Hong Kong ... Russell Edwards
2008 Sichuan earthquake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Liang Ying
TAKING FATHER HOME B- 80
China
Using a completely non-professional cast that is made up mostly of family and friends, this is an interesting first feature that uses a somewhat raw, minimalist verité style, shot in the rarely seen interior Southwest province of China, a remote agricultural region that unfortunately was shot on a borrowed video camera, which washes out most of the color. Adapted from a Chinese novel about a young teenage boy traveling to the city to get medicine for his ailing father, the actual Chinese title is A BOY CARRYING GEESE OVER HIS SHOULDER, where an innocent 17-year old boy, Xu Yun, decides to leave home in the rural agricultural provinces, carrying two ducks in a basket on his back in search of his missing father in the city, a man that abandoned his family 6 years ago. Much like Pinocchio entering the real world, Xu Yun is easy prey for con artists and hoodlums who have plenty of fun at his expense, leaving him traumatized and nearly wordless for the rest of the film, quietly brooding in his isolation, unable to comprehend this foreign dilemma within his own country. His character is defined by running everywhere he goes, like he's being powered by remote control. A kind police officer takes him under his wing and gently advises him to return home, but when Xu Yun is resolute, despite every lead coming up empty, he graciously continues to help him, teaching him how to fend for himself in the process.
There’s an up and down quality to this film, a cheaply made Chinese indie production looking at times amateurish, yet that's also part of its fresh appeal, overly sympathetic to the pathos of the young man, poorly acted, excessively chatty in the beginning, but Chinese in the audience were howling at the non-stop slang, which appeared poorly translated. The film turns into a coming of age story, featuring a hummable, childlike Bobby McPherrin-sounding melody that plays throughout the film.
While the search continues,
the film continuously blares radio announcements to evacuate the vicinity, as a
flood is approaching. Coming up empty in
his initial attempts, all appears lost until he accidentally hears his father’s
name spoken in a nearby telephone call, as it appears he is in hiding as a
result of his widespread debt. Xu Yun
faces an uncertain future, as the father he went searching for did not wish to
come home with him, and was more interested at the thought of getting rich due
to the rising property values after the flood than any connection to his
family. The town and the region are
forced to evacuate, which is linked to Chinese citizens being forced to adapt
to the hardships from everchanging political climates, using the imagery of
widespread damage from the flood, such as loss of one’s livelihood or home,
even death, forcing people to continually move to different regions and start
their lives all over again. The use of
black and white documentary images of a real flood raging through the area is
quite effective, as the power is unmistakable, leaving a bleak emptiness in its
wake.
Libov, Howard
FAVORITE SON B- 81
USA (90 mi) 2009 ‘Scope
What starts out as a fairly mediocre story about a somewhat quirky 30-year old guy still struggling in minor league baseball, ancient by baseball’s standards, with little chance of ever getting to the majors, who by mysterious circumstances ends up playing in his own hometown, but the storyline soon shifts into something altogether different, becoming something of a psychological thriller by the end told with the pace of a slow burn. But there’s nothing indicating that’s where the film is heading. Not exactly welcomed back home with open arms, David (Pablo Schreiber) feels continually out of place, as while he’s a decent enough guy, he tends to say and do the wrong things for inexplicable reasons, making others feel uncomfortable in his presence, like a social outcast, whether it’s picking up a local waitress (Lenore Zann) or what appears to be an old high school friend or girl friend, Joan (Kellie Overbey), whose son Ross (Connor Paolo from Gossip Girl) vandalizes his car. David takes an interest in the young teenage boy who apparently lost his father, thinking they both share a baseball interest and perhaps he could help straighten him out. Little does he know what’s in store for him, as Ross is a foul-mouthed school bully who alienates him immediately, basically calling him a loser who can’t even get out of double A baseball. This attitude signifies an immediate downturn in David’s life, as soon enough he’s given his walking papers both by the baseball team and Joan when she discovers David roughed up Ross after a verbal incident. Despite being told never to see her son again, they continue to cross paths, usually in out of the way places where they develop something of a strange friendship, though at a distance, as both appear isolated from everyone else, and perhaps most of all, themselves.
Instead of a small town baseball movie, or even a guy returning home after an unexplained ten year absence, this turns into a peculiar relationship movie between David and Ross, as through an eerie flashback sequence, Ross reminds him of his own childhood when David was a victim of his own family’s violence, which may strangely be the reason he feels mysteriously drawn to this young boy, as he reminds him of himself. But it’s not as simple as that, as instead the film veers into creepy territory, as David can resemble a stalker, a guy who can’t help what he does, where he becomes the walking wounded, a guy who lives on the fringe of society, who by his own actions remains on the outside where he can only occasionally look in. By the same measure, the audience is similarly kept on the outside, not really knowing the source of his own childhood trauma. But whatever it was, it has left everyone who sees him now wondering why he ever returned, as if he’s only drudging up bad memories, which only isolates him further, making him feel completely powerless. When David attempts to share what he thinks are warning signs about Ross’s disturbing behavior with his mother, she just about shoots him right there on the spot. He has become so despised, it has the feeling of an early Twilight Zone episode where he might have information that could save the town but no one will listen to him or take him seriously, instead they throw rocks at him whenever they see him.
The film actually moves into mysterious thriller territory,
reminiscent of Gregg Araki’s MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004), though not nearly as
unique or openly original, but I was surprised we were even entering into this
same territory, a terrible mix of repressed memory from sexual abuse where the
horrors of the past become the horrors of the present, where David is forced to
relive the same traumatic events once again, changing the tone altogether from
the helplessness of being ostracized to a highly dramatic suspense sequence, as
only late in the film does the audience understand what David’s been running
from his entire life. If the truth be
told, however, Schreiber does not carry the film, as the real strength is
Connor Paolo as Ross, who’s simply electrifying in his full frontal assault
attitude, which is evidently what he does to make himself feel important, no matter
how weird, where at times I was reminded of the tagline from GUMMO (1997) — “Teens in the Wasteland!!” Every scene is improved by his presence, by
the more we know about him, where eventually the blurred lines between the two
childhoods become indistinguishable. The
director teaches film at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey,
and other than a professional editor and cinematographer, used his own students
as the film crew, including deciding the on-the-set positions. This is a real low cost indie film using
borrowed equipment and nearby locations with a $20,000 budget, told almost like
a ghost story, unfortunately shot on video which has the effect of flattening
the screen, with well chosen original music by
FAVORITE SON Facets Multi Media
A story of family,
of dreams deferred, and of a final chance at redemption. David Paxton, nearing
the end of his minor league baseball career, returns to his hometown as much
less the hero he once assumed he would become. When he meets Joan, and her son
Ross, David believes he has found a way to acquire the love, support and family
he's long been yearning for. But his overheated romancing of Joan makes her
wary, and his attempt to mentor Ross meets with the boy's undisguised contempt.
It appears his dreams of a future have died, and David's simmering rage threatens
to erupt into violence. But David and Ross, a disturbed 12-year-old heading
down a path of increasing destructiveness, somehow find their way to each other
and start up a most unlikely, mostly clandestine, friendship. David must break
out of his own isolation to help the young boy and confront the dark secrets
that haunt both their lives. He must become a father figure in a way he never
imagined, and in so doing become a genuine hero off the field.
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [2/6]
There’s still room
for another film about the mind-set of the AA ballplayer, but even those who
worship at what Susan Sarandon once called the church of baseball may find
their faith tested by this rote exercise in indie miserablism, which goes
unhelped by a lead actor whose only register is “pep talk.” On hiatus from the
season and bored with banging the local floozies, David (Schreiber) returns
home for some ill-defined soul searching. Next year’s gonna be his year for the
majors—he’s got his speech prepared and everything. But until then, he fancies
himself a protector for an old friend (Overbey) and her troubled son (Paolo),
who’s grown up without a dad. Will David turn family man? Or is he damaged
goods? The saving grace of Favorite Son is that it keeps you guessing
for a time—only to dash your dreams.
To compensate for
the fact that it has no plot to speak of, Favorite Son doubles down on
the motivational backstories. Suicidal fathers, deadbeat dads, domineering
coaches, abuse—there’s not an action in this film that isn’t directly prompted
by a trauma or insecurity. And as Chekhov might have said, if a baseball bat
appears in act one… This sort of tidiness may earn good grades in screenwriting
classes, but it doesn’t make for good movies.
Bloomberg News Article Interview by Rick Warner from Bloomberg, August 18, 2008, also seen here: Director interview
Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Howard Libov's small office at the College at Florham in Madison, New Jersey, is cluttered with books, videotapes, movie posters and hygiene products such as Speed Stick deodorant and a bottle of Listerine.
Hidden in a corner is a framed poster for the film professor's award-winning 1999 short ``Little Man.'' That drama was the basis for his new feature ``Favorite Son,'' about an aging minor-league baseball player who returns to his hometown, still haunted by a childhood secret.
``I'm more organized than I look,'' Libov joked as he sifted through a stack of papers on his desk, searching for the shooting schedule for ``Favorite Son.''
Libov, 51, needed organizational skills for the low-budget movie he directed with a mostly student crew from his college, part of Fairleigh Dickinson University. He's planning to show it on the film-festival circuit, hoping to find a distributor willing to take a chance on his shoestring production.
``We've got a plan,'' said Libov, casually dressed in blue jeans, a black T-shirt and sneakers on a sweltering summer afternoon. ``We know it's a crowded marketplace out there for indie films, but all you need is for the right person to see it.''
``Favorite Son,'' which stars Pablo Schreiber, Connor Paolo and Kellie Overbey, was filmed in 30 days during the summer of 2006, but Libov just put the finishes touches on it in June. With the exception of Libov, cinematographer Ben Wolf and editor Emily Gumpel Clifton, virtually the entire crew was made up of Florham students whose only compensation was academic credit or a minor ownership stake in the movie.
Beg, Borrow
To save money, Libov filmed at nearby locations in New Jersey, borrowed a high-definition camera from Wolf and got free use of an editing studio. Excluding borrowed equipment and donated services, Libov said, out-of-pocket expenses for the movie totaled less than $20,000. Union rules allowed the actors to accept minimal salaries because of the film's ultra-low budget.
``There were no big trailers or fancy catering,'' said Schreiber, who plays the ballplayer. ``All vanity went out the window.''
Schreiber, half brother of actor Liev Schreiber, said he was initially a ``little nervous'' about working with so many inexperienced students. His doubts disappeared as the filming progressed.
``The more we shot, the less I worried,'' said Schreiber, 30, who also appears in the new Woody Allen film ``Vicky Cristina Barcelona.'' ``Everybody rose to the challenge and did a very professional job.''
R.E.M. Bassist
Brian Gonsar, 26, produced ``Favorite Son'' a few years after graduating from Fairleigh Dickinson. He's now a commercial producer for the international ad agency BBDO in New York.
``It was a great learning experience,'' Gonsar said. ``With a small movie, you get to do a little bit of everything.''
Libov recalled the next-to-last day of filming, when the cast and crew were exhausted from the hectic shooting schedule.
``There was a rumor going around that we might finish that night,'' he said. ``I told everyone, `We'll try, but I can't guarantee anything.' Our wardrobe designer, Sandra Tuerk, said, `Don't worry, we all want to be here. We'll stay as long as it takes.'''
Libov co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Stewart, who also collaborated on his first feature, ``Midnight Edition,'' a 1994 film about the relationship between a reporter and a death-row inmate. The evocative soundtrack was composed by Murray Attaway of the band Guadalcanal Diary, and the closing song was recorded by R.E.M. bass player Mike Mills.
``When you do a movie like this, you rely on as many friends as possible,'' Libov said.
Indie Market
One crucial scene was filmed at Commerce Bank Ballpark, home of the minor-league Somerset Patriots baseball team. Libov wanted to use a real crowd but only had 15 minutes to shoot after the game ended.
``We did six takes in 11 1/2 minutes,'' he recalled. ``That might be some kind of record.''
Now that ``Favorite Son'' is completed, Libov faces an even bigger challenge -- trying to sell it at a time when the number of indie films is soaring and the number of indie distributors is shrinking. Time Warner Inc. recently announced it is shutting down its Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures units, and corporate restructuring has also led to cutbacks at Paramount Vantage and New Line Cinema.
``It's a tough time,'' Chris McGurk, chief executive officer of Overture Films, said in an interview. ``There's more movies out there and fewer avenues to get them distributed by solid, independent companies.''
Still, McGurk points to movies like Fox Searchlight's ``Little Miss Sunshine'' and Overture's ``The Visitor'' as proof that small indie movies can succeed in a hyper-competitive market. ``Little Miss Sunshine'' (2006) won two Oscars and has grossed $100 million worldwide, while ``The Visitor'' has made $9.3 million since opening in April.
“If you've got a good movie that's compelling and moves the audience, somebody's going to find it,'' McGurk said.
Lichtenstein, Mitchell
HAPPY TEARS
USA (95 mi) 2009
Screen International review Fionnuala Halligan
Mitchell
Lichtenstein (Teeth) tackles some conventional subject material in an
unconventional way in Happy Tears, throwing up a surreal performance
from Parker Posey and a surprisingly warm supporting turn from Demi Moore as
two sisters reunited in the family home as their tomcat father Joe (Rip Torn)
slowly surrenders to dementia.
Posey’s out-there
Jayne is a love-her-or-loathe her character (like Sally Hawkins in Happy Go
Lucky or Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married). Those who go
along for the ride will enjoy Lichtenstein’s deliberately individualistic
storytelling; from striking dream sequences as experienced by Jayne to an
unforgettable turn from Ellen Barkin as a crack whore. The story always feels
edgily, sometimes jerkily, unpredictable before surprisingly opting for a
conventional wrap. Not everyone will buy into Lichtenstein’s world, and its
prospects will depend on notices and word of mouth. Either way this should have
a solid shelf life on DVD, buoyed internationally by the presence of Moore and
Posey.
Lichtenstein, son
of legendary pop artist Roy, presents Jayne as somebody who has the greatest
difficulty acknowledging the realities of life - in fact, she refuses to deal
with most things she doesn’t like. Whether or not she’s mentally all-there is
left for the viewer to decide. Jayne is initially shown buying outrageously
expensive blue boots in a sequence where the shop assistant turns into a
vulture; such playfulness is an elevating factor in Happy Tears.
Jayne is avoiding
her sister, the down-to-earth Laura (Moore) who alone is looking after their
father Joe (Torn) at the family home in Pittsburgh. While the sisters obviously
have humble beginnings, Jayne has married into money; her husband Jackson
(Carmargo) is, in what is probably a nod to the director’s own story, the son
of a famous artist who is overwhelmed by his late father’s legacy (Cy Twombly
canvases are used).
This financial
inequality is a source of friction in the family, although Jayne is obviously
much loved by them all when she finally does arrive. Now she has to face up to
the consequences of her father’s illness, which includes a memorable bout of
incontinence, and meet his latest ‘girlfriend’, the obviously-crack-addicted
Shelly (Barkin). Back in San Francisco, her husband appears to be having a
nervous breakdown.
Posey is
unforgettable as Jayne and this performance will please her legion of loyal
fans. Although Moore never really looks as if she’s at home in the shabby
Pittsburgh lodging or her hippy costumes, she is a warm and sympathetic
presence throughout in a difficult supporting role to a flashy character.
DP Jamie Anderson
copes admirably with the challenges Lichtenstein has thrown him on an obviously
low budget.
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review
Lien, Jens
THE BOTHERSOME MAN B+ 90
A filmmaker who started his career playing rock n roll music in London, eventually changing gears and enrolling in film school, this is a Norweigan black comedy written by Per Schreiner featuring theater of the absurd, somewhat along the lines of the savagely original Swedish film SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000), showing from the outset a starkly original production design by Are Sjåastad, where each image of the film is beautifully framed, icy cool cinematography from John Christian Rosenlund (who also filmed FACTOTUM), outstanding use of several orchestral pieces of Grieg music on the soundtrack, and a phenomenal use of an early Icelandic location at the Sprengisandur National Desert Reserve. From the outset, as a young couple is engaged in a truly revolting kissing marathon off to the side, a man throws himself in front of an oncoming commuter train. The next shot sets up the rest of the film, as the degree of seriousness is amazing. A lone outpost lies in the middle of a vast desert surrounded by distant mountains, as a tracking shot slowly moves to the left of the gas pumps, allowing an approaching bus to become the center of the frame. The lone passenger, our suicide victim, is left on the side of the road as the bus turns around and retreats from where it came. A lone banner greets the man in big letters reading “Welcome,” as a man from the outpost slowly climbs up a ladder and pulls it down. The welcoming committee has fulfilled its mission. A car with two nondescript men in the front leads this man to an unnamed urban landscape, where skyscrapers with cool exteriors dominate our field of vision, with very little, if any, trees or natural vegetation. On the road into town, two guys are gleefully playing badmitton. The man, without a cut or a mark on him, is assigned a specific apartment, a job as an accountant, and a place to work, as the car quietly pulls away.
Trond Fausa Aurvåg is the Bothersome Man, who could just as easily be the Dangling Man, the Joker, the Hanging Man, or a variety of bad omen tarot cards, but more like a character right out of Kafka who’s uncertain who he is, what he’s doing, how he got there, or why. He’s greeted by name in a completely sterile work environment, asked if he needs anything, and assigned his own office with a wall of glass windows and a computer, without a single piece of dirt to be seen anywhere on the premises. Smiles and generic niceties greet him, as everything is in perfect order. He’s invited to his boss’s dinner party where each guest is indistinguishable from the next, the plates, the glasses, the food portions are identical, but he meets a girl sitting next to him who’s interested in interior decorating. Together they build a perfect little house that resembles pictures seen in magazines. They have mechanical sex together. Everything is bliss, but still he wonders? What am I doing here? We see him at a dim, neon-lit bar having a drink, before heading to the men’s room where he overhears a man in the stall complaining that no matter how much he drinks, he can’t get a buzz, that food has no taste, that he misses the taste of piping hot chocolate. Curious, the Bothersome Man follows the man to his basement apartment where he disappears into the darkness of the night. Later, he drives back to the outpost and follows the bus, wondering where it comes from, but it disappears in the dust, leaving no tracks in the sand. Stunned, he realizes there’s only one way in, and no way out.
The Bothersome Man meets a new girl, a luscious blond, and immediately takes interest, finding her so much more interesting than the interior decorator, who he decides to leave. The decorator’s only concern is to wait until after a dinner party she has arranged over the weekend. When the Bothersome Man arrives on the doorstep of the new girl, he whisks her off to a prepared romantic dinner, where the Latin music playing is right out of a Wong Kar-wai film, and he serves her notice that he’s seriously interested, but she can barely distinguish him from the other guys she likes. So he returns to the scene of the crime, the exact same subway station with the same loathsome lovers glued to each other’s lips. The results are graphically horrific, yet comically absurd, as the Bothersome Man only succeeds in making a bloody mess of himself, returned by two nondescript men in silver cars to his home with the decorator, where his gruesome image resembles that of a flesh eating zombie. Without a trace of emotion, she informs him they’ve been invited to go go-karting. Is he interested? Before you know it, he’s cleaned up and as good as new. At work, anytime anyone asks him how he’s doing, if he actually tells them, they leave uncomfortably without a word, as in the sterile universe, problems simply don’t exist. There are nondescript men in silver cars who clean up all the messes so no one else need be bothered.
One day the Bothersome Man returns to his job but someone else is sitting at his desk, and he’s politely told he’s not needed anymore, so he returns to the basement apartment, where a lonely man acknowledges he made a mistake by saying those things before, but they hear music coming from a crack in the wall. All of a sudden, the film turns into Tsai Ming-liang’s THE HOLE, as he brings in power tools to get a closer look at where this idyllic sound is coming from, which also includes a baby crying, and there are no babies in “the city.” In their darkened cave, the two men sit together and listen, believing they’re onto something. When the neighbors ask about the noise and the demolition in the apartment, claiming they too can hear things, they immediately cover their tracks and deny everything, but they’re lured by classical voices which may as well be sirens. Eventually the Bothersome Man gets close enough to reach his hand through the crack, where he feels a tray of pastries and knocks them to the floor. He is smearing his face with these pastries as the nondescript men take him away, driving him past the two men playing badmitton, back to the outpost in the desert where the Welcome sign greets a new passenger, but he’s stuffed into the luggage compartment on the other side of the bus. After a long punishing ride, where he again hears the alluring sounds coming from somewhere, the bus comes to a stop. From a vantage point inside his closed confinement, he kicks out the compartment door and walks outside, which appears to be a raging snowstorm, as the bus pulls away. All I could think of was “Welcome.”
Time Out Nigel Floyd
In this uneven but intriguing satirical comedy, a bewildered man is given a job as an accountant in a futuristic blue-grey world of clinical office buildings and soulless designer homes. His colleagues are polite but cool, their dinner parties oddly stilted affairs. There are hints of something lurking behind this façade of frigid normality: a man is impaled on the railings below an open office window; the sound of children’s laughter is nowhere to be heard; the plaintive strains of a musical instrument emanate from a lighted basement window. Oddball futuristic fun with a serious, if confused, message.
User reviews Author: mcswain-1 from Norway
Totally different, with loads of understatement and black comedy, this is a film few get to see, but those who do will remember it. This movie creates its own universe, and is fascinating in every way. What it is about? Estrangement, I believe. Probably up to the viewer, but I found that this movie tries to say something about the coldness and emptiness behind all the designer furniture and perfect facades. Don't know if I'm right. But this movie really got to me. See it. I really hope the team behind this movie makes more movies, and that they will continue to do so in their own, some kinda weird style. And I forgot: The Casting here i superb, with Trond Fausa Aurvåg being perfect in the role as the Bothersome Man, who doesn't understand where he is, what he is doing and why. The acknowledgment of not understanding the purpose of life (in the city), is what makes him bothersome. All the others do as they are told, and pretend (?) to be happy. This movie is a good and humorous comment on life in 2006.
User reviews Author: (roland@atkinsononfilm.com) from Portland, Oregon, United States
Trond Fausa Aurvaag stars as Andreas, a solitary 40 year old
man who opens this film by leaping to his death under an oncoming subway train
(we hear a gruesome crunch, not the last of these we'll confront). We next find
him, bearded and disheveled, arriving as the lone passenger on a bus that
delivers him to a forlorn old gas station in the middle of a barren high plain
reminiscent of
He meets various people over the next weeks, takes a lover, relaxes. But there
are unsettling aspects to his new life, for that is what it appears to be.
Alcohol no longer makes him or anyone else high. Food looks great but has
little flavor. Even sex, while easily available, seems bland . The women he
takes up with seem more interested in the quarters they live in, and his
ability to provide for them materially, than they are in him.
Horrid events occur: he sees a suicidal man, now dead, impaled on a sharp edged
wrought iron fence. At the office, on impulse, he slices off his finger in an
automated paper cutter. People seem to take such occurrences in stride, showing
little or no affect. There are uniformed attendants in gray blue jumpsuits,
driving gray blue minivans, who calmly, mutely service people like these. When
they take Andreas home and he unwraps the dressing from the stump of his finger
he finds it (magically) whole again, without a trace of trauma. Hmmmmm.
Things go on like this. Andreas attempts suicide again in the local subway but,
while battered terribly (over the course of a night, he's hit and dragged by
three different trains), he is able to walk away. Bloodied and looking like a
cadaver when he returns to his lover's house, she merely smiles and mentions
they have been invited to friends' for dinner later in the week. Hmmmmm.
Later he discovers an underground shaft that appears to lead to another world.
He and an associate blast a tunnel but, just short of his goal of escape from
this bizarre dystopia, the men in gray blue arrive, drag the two away, seal up
the tunnel, but immediately release the men without incarceration, trial or any
other punishment than enforcement of their unwanted stay in this odd paradise.
But Andreas continues to be bothersome. He acts unhappy, which turns out to be
the worst offense here, one that in time leads him to be expelled from the community.
He's taken back to the desert, forced into the cargo bay of the bus, and driven
away. At some point the bus stops, Andreas kicks the door open, and disappears
into a white, featureless expanse marked by howling winds, like the middle of a
blizzard. The bus pulls away, the screen fades to final darkness.
There you have it. I strongly disliked the film, and more than once had to
resist the urge to leave, though it does hang together, and its protagonist is
a mildly interesting character. This film will certainly be a candidate for my
annual Metaphysical Melange Award. What we seem to have here is purgatory, or
hell, or heaven, a nether world where you go after death but where, unlike in
Sartre's formulation, there is indeed an exit. My grades: 5/10 (C) (Seen on
Cinemattraction.com
[Sarah Manvel]
“The Bothersome Man” is for everyone who resents the bylaws in American shopping malls, or London’s Canary Wharf – private properties where careful attention has been paid to the landscaping, and free-speech rights don’t apply.
Andreas’ (Trond Fausa Aurvaag, a little like Hugh Laurie in his Wooster days) office is comfortable. His window looks out over the Scandinavian city’s gleaming landscape. He lives with a woman, Anne-Britt (Petronella Barker), who obsesses over the layout of their bathroom. His colleagues flick through sofa catalogs, discussing which is contemporary and which is casual. But none of them is better than the other. Everyone says “sure, if you want” or “that would be nice.” No one expresses his or her feelings. It’s doubtful their feelings even exist.
Andreas hops off the bus in front of a gas station in a lava desert, hitches a ride with a man who offers him his name, house keys and details of his job before dropping Andreas off in front of his apartment in the city. He goes to work the next morning and it’s as if he has always been there. Did all his colleagues get their jobs this way? If it were you, would you ask? Everyone wears smart grey or black suits. It’s all very pleasant. No one complains. Nothing’s wrong. Except a man in a bar complains – rightly – that food has no flavor anymore. And men in grey boiler suits (Who are they? Who do they work for?) clean up the body of a man impaled on fence railings.
Is it seeing the body that makes Andreas wonder? Or is it when he accidentally slices off his finger, only to unwind the bandages back home and find it painlessly reattached?
Unusually, “The Bothersome Man (Den brysomme mannen)” is adapted from an award-winning radio play by Per Schreiner. After the showing at the London Film Festival, director Jens Lien explained how hard he and Schreiner worked to translate the radio narration of Andreas’ disaffection into visual terms. They have done so brilliantly: The tasteful, lifeless and perfect production design by Are Sjåstad mutates well-designed flatpack living into a dystopian horror show. You’ll never look at an Ikea catalogue the same way again. And by refusing to explain the surreal elements of his film, Lien packs it with a tremendous punch. This city, its niceness and the lack of flavor isn’t all there is. And the film forces us to ask ourselves if it is all we want.
Culture Wars [Ion Martea] (excerpt)
'No. You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent.' (Harold Pinter, No Man's Land)
The Theatre of the Absurd, through its most obvious precursor Dada Theatre, was originally developed by two Romanians working in Paris, and brought to utter perfection by Beckett and Pinter. Cinema, despite its avant-gardistic period in the 1960s America, has never truly got to grips with the creation of artistic empathy through the Absurd. A Dane, two Norwegians and a Swede show at the 50th Times BFI London Film Festival that Cinema of the Absurd is not only possible, but has proved capable of producing some of the strongest, most thought-provoking works at the festival.
Kierkegaard's definition of the term is that, 'to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith' (Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, 1849). In creating a narrative, the Absurdist artist then is not only constructing characters that do not act rationally (though they do not have to be irrational), but has to impose an overarching vision of the piece driven by instinct, rather than rationality.
The Norwegian film The Bothersome Man is clearer about the thought process at work in the construction of an Absurd film. Jens Lien introduces Andreas (a tour de force from Trond Fausa Aurvaag) as a man with no past, present or future. The disjointed narrative, moving senselessly through time, shows Andreas meeting a person he does not know, who gives him a job he doesn't know how perform (though he seems to be dealing well with what looks like accountancy), easily meeting a woman he moves in and out with, and a lover who loves everyone. If it sounds like Kafka, that's not far off, though one needs to add an abundance of Grieg's lyricism. Nevertheless, Lien is not so much interested in the absurdity of the social organism, so much as questioning the need for emotional sensations in a world that is perfect in its very outset.
The concern for the metaphysical emerges as an unexpected tragedy in the rigidity of a world with all the perfect lines one could wants to hear. Therefore in the mere recreation of a rational world, Lien's instinctual search for humanity remains as a poignant afterthought, highlighting the tragedy of not being able to cry at laughter, or laugh at sobs.
'When something really works, it works on many different levels,' considers Moodysson. Lukas, Lars, Jens, Joachim - all have achieved individually a multi-layered canvas that is provocative in its refusal to accept the rational consciousness. It may not be quite the same as the Theatre of the Absurd, but these Scandinavians are building the foundations for a novel cinematic movement. As with any movement, they do not need to sit around tables and debate with each other whether they are creating something that might be recognised academically at a later stage. The aim is to make the best films they can, and to pursue their faith in their own potential. Maybe not all is icy and silent in 'no man's land'.
The Bothersome Man is a dark, nasty little movie that's never quite as deep or as clever as it imagines itself to be. Based on a Norwegian radio play, the film tells the story of Andreas (Trond Fausa Aurvaag), an office worker who throws himself under a subway train seconds after the film opens. The next time we see him, he's the lone passenger on a battered bus to the middle of nowhere. Stepping out of the bus, Andreas finds himself standing on a wide plain, with dark mountains in the distance. Nearby is the only building as far as the eye can see, an old gas station sporting a makeshift "WELCOME" sign. The station's solicitous attendant drives Andreas to "his" apartment in a large, modern city, and tells him where to go to work in the morning.
This, then, is the afterlife. And, in director Jens Lien's new film, the
afterlife looks a whole lot like western Europe today, complete with glass-clad
skyscrapers, classical facades, and an old town full of winding streets and elderly
people who look like they've lived there for 50 years. Everyone is well-dressed
and friendly, albeit it in a superficial way. Marriage is encouraged because it
looks good; what goes on inside the home or within the heart is of no
consequence. No one actually forms emotional attachments, but the appearance of
closeness and happiness is in place, and that's what's important. Food has no
taste, alcohol no kick, and it's impossible to die, but hey, those are the
breaks.
In a none-too-subtle way, Lien is drawing a parallel between Andreas' existence
is that distant, sterile world, and the slick, polish lives the upper classes
live in first world nations today. (In fact, given the afterlife's obsession
with furniture and fixtures, there's a good chance the place is actually
located in a creepy, alternate
Despite these disappointments, however, The Bothersome Man is far from a
complete loss. It never looks less than fantastic, and Aurvaag's tired, pale
face provides a perfect contrast to the sharp edges and gleaming surfaces
around him. There's also a ceiling entirely covered by light bulbs hanging from
long cords, the wonder and wit of which almost make the film worth seeing on
their own. Additionally, the fact that the film was based on a radio play (and
was written by Per Schreiner,
the author of that play) results in a movie uncommonly focused on sounds. It's
not that the effects in the film are particularly subtle or carefully layered,
but simply that they're foregrounded much more than is generally the case. Long
sequences are dominated by sound effects, from footsteps, to creaking signs, to
the loud and gory (and probably not remotely realistic) sounds of human flesh
being demolished by a hurling train. In fact, the plot's central mystery
revolves not around a person or event, but rather around a haunting, siren-like
sound. Overall, though, the film is a good-looking, rather unpleasant trifle
that seems to simultaneously take itself too seriously and not seriously
enough, preferring to hide behind its impressive, clever packaging instead of
investigating actual philosophical questions.
Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
Perhaps "The Bothersome Man"--a nerve-janglingly
odd film directed by Norwegian newcomer Jens Lien--is set in hell. Perhaps it
is set in a heaven gone terribly wrong, a would-be paradise of sterile
modernist decor where everything is provided for, people live empty,
predictable lives and where at least one man, Andreas, is cracking up. Or
perhaps the film is simply Lien and scriptwriter Per Schreiner's satiric view
of modern urban
Actually it's all of the above--a simple but cryptic story done so sparely,
precisely and often wordlessly, that it flows by like a bad dream.
We first see the central character, harried-looking Andreas (Trond Fausa
Aurvag), watching two lovers engaged in loveless-looking public necking in a
subway station. A scene that will be repeated later. Suddenly Andreas jumps
before the oncoming train and, just as suddenly and strangely, he is being
dropped off, alive and unhurt, by a bus at a lonely looking cafe in the desert.
A chatty driver takes him to the city (
Soon Andreas is in an arranged-marriage-style relationship with a
mild-mannered, single-minded interior designer, Anne-Britt (Petronella Barker),
and an illicit love affair with Ingeborg (Birgitte Larsen), his bizarrely
compliant mistress from the office. But for all his comfortable routine, and
undemanding life, Andreas remains disturbed by the absence of children, by the
tastelessness of the food, the joylessness of the sex, and the strange dead
lassitude of everyone and everything around him. He begins to explore dangerous
territory, beginning with a mysterious crack in acquaintance Hugo's (Per
Schaaning) cellar room.
"The Bothersome Man," a multiple award winner at international film
festivals, is full of cool nightmare imagery, by a moviemaker with a lot of
talent. If you're familiar with movie science-fiction dystopias (or
anti-utopias), all the way from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" to Jean-Luc
Godard's "Alphaville" to George Lucas' "THX 1138" and
Andrew Niccol's "Gattaca," much of it will strike overfamiliar
chords. But this movie is made with formidable assurance, a compelling look,
quiet skill and impressive economy. Hell, heaven or dark mirror of urban yuppie
life today, Lien's "Bothersome" vision makes you feel Andreas' cold
sweat and quiet desperation--which may be our own as well.
The Bothersome Man Rob Nelson from the Village Voice
A
New Home With a Stepford Vibe
Jeannette Catsoulis from the New
York Times
Liénard, Bénédicte
A PIECE OF THE SKY B+ 91
France Belgium Luxembourg (85 mi) 2003
This is a film that's actually about something, and while it may not hit every note, its authenticity is not in dispute. Exquisitely detailed, socially committed work, closely resembling the camera style of Benoit Jacquot's A SINGLE GIRL, which follows, in real time, a working class girl moving in and out of the rooms and hallways of an upscale hotel, drawing attention to the heightened contrasts of the social milieu's being examined. Here, the film parallels the stories of two different women, one working in a dreary, assembly line croissant factory, while the other is serving time in prison for unnamed union involvement at that factory, now being forced to perform prison labor. Each institution resembles the other, as there are punitive components within each, where the bosses divide and deceive their victims, subjecting them to harsh consequences if they don't comply, such as the factory worker being sent to prison or inmates being sent to solitary confinement. There is a heightened atmosphere of repression where snitches constantly turn against one another to gain favors, contributing to a rule by fear, where the spirit and morale of both groups is constantly threatened and broken down, sometimes brutally, by this systematic dehumanization that institutionally degrades and exploits poor women like themselves. Reminding me of the scenes of marching men on the streets in Bela Tarr's WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES, there are repeated shots of women walking in the prison hallways together, usually without saying a word, just part of the constant repetition of the same routines every day, as they are released from the locked prison cells and marched off to their forced prison jobs. There's a sort of GRAND ILLUSION scene here where the women inmates put on a musical sketch for the warden and the guards. One group sings the praises of love, as if from behind bars, this is the road to freedom, how they would do anything for love, dye their hair, rob or steal - all circumstances which partially explain why the women are in prison in the first place, most from a relationship gone bad with a man who eventually ratted on them. Séverine Caneele, from HUMANITY, brilliantly portrays the prisoner, taking the stage with her steely resolve to spout the film's message of unity, perhaps a bit overplayed, that women need to stand up for one another, to rebel against the forces that are trying to rob them of their dignity and their spirit, that they need to stand together and stay strong. Solidarity forever. I’m in lock step with this one.
Lillard, Matthew
FAT KID RULES THE WORLD B 84
USA (98 mi) 2012 Official site
Though structurally quite different, this film bears a resemblance to the Stephen Chbosky novel and movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), especially how kids project themselves into a world of fantasy, where Troy, Jacob Wysocki from Terri (2011), a nerdy and oversized high school kid has been an outcast for years, now fat, ostracized and alone, where his home life is worse after his mother died, leaving him and his younger brother to fend for themselves with their Dad, Billy Campbell, something of a Marine drill seargent, an overly strict father whose kids actually call him “sir.” The film plays out like a working class fantasia immersed in the gritty reality of Seattle, a place where too many wayward kids end up as runaways or homeless. The fantasy element is immediately apparent, as Troy is standing on the curb imagining his own successful suicide jumping in front of a bus, then acting it out in real life except some kid comes out of nowhere to rescue him, literally tackling him just inches away from the oncoming bus, saving his life. What’s interesting about this Good Samaritan kid, Matt O’Leary as Marcus, is he immediately asks for $20 for saving his life, something that makes the poor kid feel even lower. Despite the occasional intersect, both actors play dual leads throughout the film, as their lives are definitely on different tracks. Troy at least has a home and something resembling a stable life, even as an outcast, while Marcus has already gotten kicked out of school, kicked out of house and home, and kicked out of his own band, a punk group called P.O. I., which doesn’t leave him many options, so he kind of hangs onto this fat kid who’s too insecure to tell him to get lost. Marcus invents an entire fantasy world around Troy, pretending to be friends where they play in a rock band together with Troy as the drummer, occasionally crashing at his house, as he literally has nowhere else to go.
Mike McCready, lead guitarist for Pearl Jam, writes most of the musical score, creating a kind of offscreen punk musical soundtrack that’s not like anything else out there, yet it whole-heartedly embraces the interior world of a couple of outcasts, both angry at how the world treats them. While Troy is a gentle giant, a soft-spoken kid with a large body, but meek as a lamb, afraid to talk to girls or even find a friend, Marcus is a completely energized, hard corps punk rocker, but he’s such a rebellious fuck-up and so unreliable that everyone’s abandoned him literally ages ago, as he’s so disappointingly unreliable that he’s screwed people over so many times until now they’re sick of him. But for Troy, time spent with Marcus feels like an actual adventure, a continual spiraling-out-of-control road trip, something he’s never had as he barely leaves the house, spending gobs of time playing video games on his computer, apparently communicating online with other computer geeks. While Marcus inevitably gets into trouble, breaking into his own family’s house, stealing whatever he can find, including pills from medicine cabinets, where life is a continual quest for getting high, the problem is he often ends up sleeping on the street, continually running out of options. When Troy’s Dad lets him shower and have a meal, the guy eats like a feral animal that hasn’t seen food in months. The contrast in lifestyles is the crux of the movie, as Marcus is continually driving Troy to be in a punk band, as if this is every guy’s ambition.
Initially Troy is literally swept off his feet in a rush of unbridled energy, where at least occasionally he actually runs into cute girls who happen to like underground music and visit punk clubs, where Marcus grabs the onstage limelight, a guy that literally feeds off the attention, if only momentary.
But like everybody else, Troy gets lied to and hoodwinked by Marcus, who makes promises he can’t keep, never showing up when he’s supposed to, and letting him down time and again. Troy’s attempts to learn how to be a drummer are pathetic at best and his first onstage experience turns into a brief momentary disaster that instantly goes viral on YouTube. While Troy is humiliated and embarrassed, he’s dumfounded at all the attention he receives afterwards, where any recognition, even negative, is more than he’s ever received before. This kind of drives him to take himself more seriously, where he spends endless hours learning how to play, where he’s never very good, but just the thought of playing onstage feels like a dream. Of course, Marcus continually lets him down and screws him over, bringing heavy doses of unwelcomed negativity into their relationship, most all of it coming from a drug-addled brain that’s nearly fried, eventually crashing on the street in a frightful mix of overdose ecstasy and panic, where each guy’s life is nightmarishly spiraling in opposite directions. Troy’s decision to be there for the recovering kid in the hospital speaks volumes, while Marcus remains the same reckless fool who starts hoarding all the mind-altering pills. While there’s nothing remotely pretty about any of this, the edgy tone of never being accepted in life comes through loud and clear, where kids all-too-often are afraid to fail, which prevents them from even trying, where they just accept their miserable solitary existence. This film’s upbeat tone is expressed through the anger and aggression of punk music, where no one needs to be like anybody else, or care what others think of them, as life can get ugly, as imperfect people are prone to making mistakes. Jacob Wysocki and Matt O’Leary both excel at conveying the pent-up confusion in a teenagers’s life, where you want so much more than what you have, which is an unending emptiness. Perhaps the film is overly optimistic, but it interestingly has a kind of PUMP UP THE VOLUME (1990) feel where people can come out of the shadows of teenage obscurity.
In setup, Matthew Lillard's directorial debut, Fat Kid Rules
the World resembles the genre format and tonal structure of the films he
used to act in more than a decade ago. It has the hyper-realized adjacent
reality that teen issue comedy's are known for, where character archetypes flip
and show their tender side at the drop of a hat, as well as a narrative that
rests on broad moral issues—suicide attempts, drug abuse, etc.—as instigator
for change.
Similarly, it takes the road of familiarity in developing its obese
protagonist, Troy (Jacob Wysocki), as an outsider, approaching the world
diffidently and begrudgingly while manic fantasy visualisations—such as visions
of suicide ideation and the sexualisation of female classmates—make external
his every hollow whim. But, just as Troy envisions his ideal suicide, stepping
out in front of a moving bus, his inevitable peer bond with the homeless,
musician drug addict—Marcus (Matt O'Leary)—who saves him, takes the film in a
slightly different, more thoughtful, direction.
Though Troy is unable to interpret social phenomena outside of defence, Marcus'
persistent, irreverent and extroverted nature works as a force of nature in
helping him step outside of his comfort zone. Similarly, Troy's grounded
maturity works simultaneously as an anchor and a crux for Marcus, enabling his
drug addiction but giving him motivation to make strides in the straight world.
This focus on character, which is expressly evident in the relationship between
Troy and his rigidly-defined father (Billy Campbell), as well as his
relationship to food, substituting it for the affections of his long-deceased
mother, is what aids Fat Kid in being slightly more than the sum of its
parts. While visually bland and lacking in any sort of pacing structure, the
guileless sensibility and even twee nature of it all make it difficult to mock,
or dismiss, the somewhat cartoonish depictions of teen life and musician
dynamics.
While dated and clumsy, this examination of relationship imbalances and the
actualization of ego validated externally, has an abundance of heart that
almost compensates for its limited technical and narrative aptitude.
WBEZ Jim DeRogatis
Many and widely varyied in quality are coming-of-age films charting the journey of a troubled teen from the world of the lonely outsider to a member of a small but vibrant alternative society offering acceptance, excitement and pride in weirdo geekdom. But I’ve rarely seen one that captures punk rock as the ideal vehicle for this trip as well as Matthew Lillard’s Fat Kid Rules the World.
Based on the 2003 young adult novel by KL Going, the movie made its premier at the South by Southwest Film Festival earlier this year. I missed it there, and its limited release came and went quicker than a hardcore punk tune. But I finally caught up with it last weekend after watching Lillard talk about his decade-in-the-making labor of love in a brief preview for Comcast On Demand.
Lillard, 42, probably is best known for Scream or playing Shaggy in the 2002 Scooby-Doo film (though he also appeared in the much cooler SLC Punk). You’d think from these credits that he’d be an unlikely choice to capture the subtly poignant tale of Troy Billings (Jacob Wysocki), a 296-pound Seattle teen who’s saved from committing suicide by a homeless, drug-addicted, gay-prostitute guitarist and songwriter (Chicagoan Matt O’Leary), who further saves him/takes advantage of him by prompting him to learn to play drums for a technically non-existent band.
Yet Lillard has made a brilliant and touching film, one that provides a male answer to classics in the genre such as Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. And it’s all the more surprising for the fact that its indie budget could only afford pretty much unknown music on the soundtrack (with the exception of a memorable cameo by X’s “The Hungry Wolf,” rightly hailed by O’Leary’s character as one of the best album-openers ever).
Now, as might be obvious to anyone who’s ever read any of my Vortis Diaries, I’ve got a very personal connection to the tale of a fat kid who discovers a bigger, better world by playing the drums. But the strength of the movie is that you never have had to deal with learning how not to hit yourself in the eye with your drum stick or the value of having a strong-enough drum throne, as Troy does, to appreciate the freedom that making art with others — whether it’s filmmaking, theater or playing an instrument as loud, hard and fast as possible — represents at a particularly vulnerable time in your life.
“At some point, all of us were that kid,” as O’Leary said in that Comcast clip.
The other actors perfectly compliment the two teen leads; particularly strong are Billy Campbell (last seen as the creepy Seattle politician in AMC’s The Killing) as Troy’s equally wounded dad and the unknown Megan Day as the aspiring drummer’s biggest fan. Screenwriters Michael Galvin and Peter Speakman are adept at conveying both the pathos and the humor in the story, and the rainy-day cinematography frames the tale perfectly.
The only real misstep is the cheesy “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” rooftop concert climax. But you can not only tolerate but actually long for a little bit of cheese after spending 90 minutes rooting for an antihero for whom nothing until that point has come easily or had the faintest whiff of triumph.
The fact is, despite all the amputations, as Lou Reed famously sang, rock ’n’ roll still has the power to save your life. And that’s a story that never gets old.
User reviews from imdb Author: Steve Pulaski from United States
Jacob Wysocki is the kind of actor where, the minute look into his
soul-penetrating eyes that say more than words ever could, his sympathy begins
to tug at your fragile heartstrings, and after spending an hour and a half with
his character, rarely leaving the frame, you feel shaken and riveted. He's
playing a character seemingly more in-tuned with life than his character in
Terri, his acting debut, and in certain stretches, he appears more comfortable
and confident as an actor.
He gives Fat Kid Rules the World, actor Matthew Lillard's directorial debut, a
powerful life and impact as he effortlessly takes the thin concept presented
and makes it into a convincing, ninety-minute portrayal of an obese social
pariah and his fight to gain back his confidence and motivation, at first
assuming he ever had any. Wysocki plays Troy Billings, who is seen fantasizing
about a grisly suicide attempt in the opening minutes of the film. When he
finally attempts his tragic fate, by walking in front of a bus, he is saved at
the very last second by Marcus McCray (Matt O'Leary), a homeless drug addict
who is one of the leads in his underground band. One wonders why a character
like this would save a defenseless fat kid from an ugly fate. Then he asks him
for $20.
Troy's homelife is rather grim as well; his father (Billy Campbell, whose
performance will most likely be overshadowed, but is very, very wonderful)
wants nothing but the best for his son, like all fathers, and for that reason,
seems to give him more leniency than he should/ Troy's younger brother couldn't
care less about him, and when it is revealed that their mother died, we
question if this family were ever tightly bound together or if they were always
coldly isolated from each other. When Troy begins prolifically hanging out with
Marcus, Troy's father becomes conflicted in the sense that he is happy his boy
found a friend, yet displeased with his friend's reckless, inconsequential
behavior. When Marcus comes up with the spur-of-the-moment decision that him
and Troy should form a rock band, with Troy on the drums, their relationship
begins to become stronger and they start to understand the life the other one
lives.
I worried that this film would mirror too closely to Wysocki's overlooked
Terri, in terms of direction, tone, and plot, but that assumption was thrown
away well before the first act ended. The "Terri" character in that
film seemed to be more content with being an outsider and simply just wanted to
be left alone, while we can see that Troy, here, is hungering for attention and
acceptance. Meeting Marcus is arguably the best or worst thing that could've
happened to him, yet we are left to answer that question.
The film is a little slow, but we are given much in the way of greatness in
terms of writing and photography. Written by Michael M.B. Galvin and Peter
Speakman, based off the K.L. Going novel of the same name, Fat Kid Rules the
World, delicately paints the Troy character and the world around him,
photographing it in hazy yet artful beauty, and giving him a story to tell that
makes him marginally stand out from the rest. His story is not that far off
from the story of Angus Bethune in another overlooked film by the name of
Angus, starring Charlie Talbert as the title character, an overweight kid who
simply hungered for acceptance and the feeling of not being ostracized. It is
that specific quality that makes this film wholesome and understandable, and
very, very unselfish.
I come full circle by saying that Wysocki's performance is by far, one of the
best of the year. His mind and attitude is all one hundred percent and his
capability as an actor bleeds from the second he steps on screen. He rightfully
achieves sympathy, and even empathy, without being heavy-handed or cliché in
his performance. Not to mention, Lillard gives this material the sensitivity
and honest direction it needs and deserves. I just hope that Wysocki will not
find himself type-cast in the role of the hopeless obese teen and branches out
to find great work, surrounded by characters who love and accept him. We all
deserve that.
Slant Magazine [Glenn Heath Jr.]
Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw]
Lost in Reviews [Sarah Ksiazek]
Review: 'Fat Kid Rules The World' A Modestly Affecting ... - Indiewire Gabe Toro from The Playlist
Flavorwire [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fat Kid Rules the World : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical
Fat Kid Rules the World Review: Don't Call It a Comeback, I ... - Pajiba Daniel Carlson
'Fat Kid Rules the World': Struggling Outsiders in Seattle | PopMatters Jesse Hassenger
Film Threat
Mark Bell
School Library Journal [Kent Turner]
Village Voice
Sherilyn Connelly
Chicago Reader Ben Sachs
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
FAT KID RULES THE WORLD Facets Multi Media
AV Club: Director interview Will Harris interview, October 8, 2012
Scorecard Review: Director interview Nick Allen interview, November 29, 2012
Variety
'Fat Kid Rules the World' review: Slow - San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] also seen here: Roger Ebert
Lima
PLANTATION
Brazil
Adapted by the director from José Lins do Rêgo Cavalcanti’s 1932 novel, Plantation Boy, the first of five stories in his Sugar Cane Cycle, a semi-autobiographical work set in the author’s birthplace of Pilar in the northern region of Paraíba in Brazil, known for its vast space for sugar plantations, where very wealthy families lived a life of seclusion in this remote region. The book describes the clash between an old colonial system based on slave labor and the introduction of the more modern era of industrialization, in the process exploring the national character by realistically portraying distinctive regional cultures, taking an interest in social issues. In addition to writing the screenplay, the director also wrote two of the songs used in the film, which are sung untranslated.
Using a rich, novelistic style supported by visually austere imagery that
is very much in harmony with the immense land it depicts, reminiscent of
Russian filmmakers of the 30's, Vertov or Dovzhenko, the film opens in 1920 as
a silent film scored for a piano, where a young boy witnesses his mother being
murdered by his father. Afterwards he is
shipped off into the countryside to live with family when the opening credits
roll, introducing the viewer to natural sound.
Filmed in black and white by Reynaldo Paes de Barros, there are
noticeably bold, striking visuals supported by equally bold use of music, which
features orchestral and guitar music by Heitor Villa-Lobos, as well as the Kyrie
section of the Congolese Catholic Mass “Missa Luba,” also very tender piano
music taken from Robert Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood.” As the first story of the cycle, this
reflects the author’s childhood, which contrasts two parallel stories, that of
the young boy who is sent to a remote sugar cane plantation to live with
relatives after witnessing the shocking death of his mother, who then loses his
cousin, followed by his kind step-mother who leaves as a result of marriage,
even his pet lamb which is slaughtered for food, these losses are set against
the backdrop of an old-style plantation system run on slave labor geared for
exports. The plantation is run by an old
Colonel, who bought the title of “Colonel,” who owns his own militia and still
feels nostalgic about the Emperor and the old ways before “May 13th.” Although slaves were officially abolished May 13, 1888 , the racial
distinctions are quite clear in this film, the social system is clearly
established. The schoolmaster punishes a
black girl, who is not allowed to ride home in the carriage with the whites,
the maid washes the Colonel’s feet, and he is served by a hired hand who he
does not trust to shave his face, and he places a disobedient servant in wooden
foot stockades. As we follow the young
boy, we see that he develops a closer affection with the servants than to the
landowners, who are seen as cold and distant.
When a young white girl his age comes to visit, she is used to being
waited on by servants, like the owners, and she expects things to remain the
same. By the end of the film, the boy
leaves this isolated life and returns to the city, seeing his brief life pass
before his eyes as he fondly reminisces about the life he is leaving behind.
Liman, Doug
GO
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Go (1999) John Wrathall from Sight and Sound,
September 1999
Los Angeles, Christmas Eve.
Desperate to raise $400 to avert her eviction, supermarket-checkout girl Ronna
agrees to work an extra shift to cover for Simon, who is going for a night out
in Las Vegas. When Adam and Zack arrive, hoping to buy 20 Ecstasy tablets from
Simon, Ronna offers to supply them. Ronna gets the drugs from Simon's source,
Todd. At Adam and Zack's, she realises it's a set-up, and flushes the drugs
down the toilet. She goes back to Todd and gives him 20 aspirins in place of
the drugs, claiming the sale fell through. Then, with her friends Claire and
Mannie, she goes to a rave, where she sells more aspirin and makes the $400 she
needs. Realising the drugs are fake, Todd follows Ronna to the rave. As he
chases her through the car park, she is run over.
Returning to the start again, we
follow Simon to Las Vegas, where he accidentally shoots a strip-club bouncer,
Victor Jr, in the arm. Simon escapes, but he leaves Todd's borrowed credit card
behind at the club. Returning to the start again, we follow Adam and Zack, an
actor couple pressured by Burke, a cop, into setting up Ronna. After the sting
goes wrong, they go to the rave, where they run over Ronna and leave her for
dead, only to realise that Adam is still wearing the hidden microphone from the
sting. Returning to dispose of Ronna's body, they find her still breathing and
move her to ensure that someone else discovers her.
Looking for Ronna, Claire meets
Todd and goes home with him for sex, but Victor Jr shows up, looking for Simon.
When Simon arrives moments later, Victor plans to shoot him in the arm in
revenge. Ronna wakes up in hospital and goes to the supermarket, where she
meets Claire, and remembers she left Mannie passed out at the rave. They return
to the deserted site and find him.
Review
Like Doug Liman's first film Swingers,
Go follows assorted young Los Angelenos around the city's
nightspots - and in the central episode, to Las Vegas and back - in search of a
good time. But there the similarity ends. While Swingers (scripted
by Jon Favreau) was a gentle series of variations on a theme, John August's
script for Go is frenetic, audaciously structured and plot-heavy,
packed with enough incident for at least three films.
Structurally, Go is
in the tradition of Mystery Train and Pulp Fiction,
divided into three stories which happen over the same timespan (in this case, a
single night) and which gradually inform each other. The way Ronna, after the
near-death experiences of her night out, ends up neatly back at work the
following morning also echoes Scorsese's After Hours. Like these
films, but unlike Swingers, Go isn't really concerned
with character development. This isn't a coming-of-age story: the characters
don't learn anything from the experiences of their big night. This is made
clear at the end, when the wasted Mannie, who has spent most of Christmas Eve
passed out under a pile of scrap metal, blithely asks, "What are we doing
for New Year?" Next week, the implication seems to be, the cycle will
start all over again. (It's tempting to perceive an allusion to Monopoly in the
way the story keeps returning to the same initial scene, a narrative equivalent
of passing "Go".)
The film's sense of frenetic
activity purely for its own sake provides an apt reflection of the clubbing
experience. Like a good DJ, Liman is skilled at varying the rhythm, building
things up and then slowing them down. The first episode, 'Ronna', follows her
attempts to obtain, then dispose of, then replace 20 tablets of Ecstasy. But
within the film's simple, logical progression Liman finds room for two
hilarious digressions exploring the drugs' effects on Mannie: an extravagant
Latin dance fantasy in a supermarket and a deadpan 'conversation' with
drug-dealer Todd's cat, conducted entirely in subtitled 'thoughts'.
The second episode, 'Simon',
picks up speed, hurtling through furious plot twists as Simon's night out in
Las Vegas takes in gambling losses, a gatecrashed wedding, three-way sex, a
hotel fire - and all before the story really starts. Then the third episode,
'Adam and Zack', slows right down again, straying into a bizarre shaggy-dog
digression about a creepy Christmas dinner at the home of their police contact
Burke before finally contriving an excuse for the pair to go to the rave, where
their story collides with Ronna's.
As on Swingers, Liman functions as his own director of photography, giving him total control over the film's look, from grimy naturalism to drug-fuelled fantasy. He also elicits sprightly performances from his eclectic cast, ranging from committed indie kids (Sarah Polley from Atom Egoyan's films, Nathan Bexton and James Duval from Gregg Araki's) to US soap stars (Jane Krakowski of Ally McBeal, Scott Wolf of Party of Five) to British former child star Desmond Askew.
THE BOURNE IDENTITY B- 82
USA Germany Czech Republic (119 mi) 2002 ‘Scope
The
Bourne Identity David Denby from The New Yorker
In this latest iteration of the international thriller, two young
people—an amnesiac American who possesses mysterious violent skills (Matt
Damon), and a beautiful European vagabond with a taste for adventure (Franka
Potente)—race across
FAIR GAME B- 81
USA (106 mi) 2010 ‘Scope
“
This film is a bit unsettling for a variety of reasons, one of which is the nauseating unpleasantness of revisiting the Bush years, which feel so dirty that all the Macbethian hand wringing could never wipe off all the blood on our hands, and the other is the presence of Sean Penn, a poster child for liberal politics and causes, and here he has a chance to go on his soap box. Whatever else this may be, which is a biographical look at the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame by the Bush Administration as punishment for her husband Joe Wilson’s questioning of the Bush evidence used to go to war in Iraq at a time when the Administration demanded unanimous support for their completely fabricated, all-too fictitious war, this is also an ambitious attempt to take a stab at influencing the writing of history. As Wilson rightly points out when giving a talk before a group of college students, what do people have a better recollection of, the reasons Bush gave to go to war, or who Valerie Plame is? Everyone seemed to know Valerie Plame. So the media, a compilation of television, newspapers, radio, blogs, books, magazines, and the movies, all contribute to the public’s overall knowledge of certain historical events. It may seem odd that a director famous for THE BOURNE IDENTITY (2002) might be used in this role, but let’s be reminded that Limon’s father was Arthur Limon, one of the prosecutors in the Iran-Contra Affair.
Naomi Watts is actually uncommonly good as Valerie Plame, as
she walks the fine line between snappy dresser and assertive and smart female
personality. She can do both with
ease. But in a male dominated, old boy’s
club world like the CIA, and on sensitive undercover assignments to the Middle
East where Muslim women cover their heads with a Hijab, it must have been
hellish to be taken seriously. There is
no mention of that here. Instead it
shows Plame seeking to alter the misguided Bush priorities within the framework
of her work section, where she persuades senior advisors of the importance and
legitimacy of her mission, which is to get all of the Iraqi nuclear scientists
out of Iraq alive, especially when it is discovered there has been no nuclear
development program in Iraq since the USA bombing of the nuclear plant during
the first Bush war. But Saddam was
interested in keeping those guys around.
But her plans were thwarted by the Office of the Vice President,
specifically Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff who
distrusted the CIA, belittling their inability to make decisions, even as they
insist they are an intelligence gathering agency that writes reports and makes
recommendations to others who make the decisions. And it was Cheney’s personal world view,
along with others in the Administration, that disregarded those CIA
recommendations as if they were never written when deciding the
The film does show the smear campaigns and the full extent of the lies that the Bush Administration was willing to concoct in order to discredit both Plame as a third rate operative on the government payroll and her ineffective, loud-mouthed, liberal leaning husband that simply regurgitated the Democratic line, which was repeated endlessly, as FOX News can be seen here in their infancy. Once more, this is a film shot using a digital camera which is evident from the outset, as the dizzying handheld camera movements can get nauseating in the quick pace of the opening, where the color is completely drained from the picture, leaving on the screen a drab looking film. If this is what movies will look like in the future, the future does not look good. But there are really two parts to this film, as the first part examines the actual CIA mission of Valerie Plame, while the second part examines the fallout after her cover is blown, where it’s clearly apparent that her contact’s lives were screwed. While it pulls at the heartstrings somewhat, and toes the solidly liberal line, by the end the film slows down as it takes a more introspective examination of their lives and their marriage which this incident nearly tore apart. There’s an all too brief sequence with Plame’s father, played by the always brilliant Sam Shepard, which seems to heighten just how important it is to have someone around who remains centered when the world around you is spinning out of control. He is the stabilizing influence of the film, as they had to re-prioritize what mattered most in their own lives before they could move on. The film is based on memoirs written by Plame and her husband, and it is what it is, and nothing more.
The US/UK
invasion of Iraq is in that strange space between current affairs and history.
Cinema has only just begun digesting the Shock and Awe™ of 2003 and, just as
crucially, what led to it. Not long after George W. Bush announced
"Mission Accomplished" on May 1 that year, the identity of covert ops
agent Valerie Plame Wilson was leaked to the US media, seemingly as retaliation
for a newspaper column by her husband Joe disputing claims that the Iraqi regime
had bought uranium in Africa. Fair Game is based on books by Valerie
and Joe (played here by Naomi Watts and Sean Penn) and explores how the affair
affected their personal lives, as well as asserting the essential value of
truth to democracy.
Despite his claims to the contrary, director Doug Liman (The Bourne
Identity, Mr & Mrs Smith) has made an issue pic. Watts does a
fine job of getting the politics and personality across, but Penn's casting is
a double-edged sword. He's believable, impassioned, and brilliantly captures
both the moral and self-publicising tendencies of his character, but when Penn
does issues there's always the risk of feeling preached to. The script pushes
him across that line on occasion, with some of his dialogue approaching
speech-making even away from the lectern
But it's a solid film, and the story is certainly one worth telling, for both
its political and personal truths. As well as sympathy for its protagonists, it
generates a genuine feeling of anger and disgust at those who would lie to the
world and happily distort fact with scant regard for the people twisted and
torn apart in the process. Despite its flaws, this movie feels necessary.
Fair
Game Mark Adams at Cannes from
Screendaily
Doug Liman’s Fair
Game, the only US film in the Cannes main competition section, arrived
modestly and left pretty much the same way. It is an intriguing real-life drama
story - distinctive mainly because of Sean Penn’s desk-banging performance -
but all rather pedestrian and straightforward.
It is predictably right-on filmic fare that is eminently watchable but just not massively memorable. It will get attention due to real-life story it is based on, but like a number of the recent Iraq-themed dramas it is unlikely it will set the box office alight. Look for respectful reviews and a healthy home entertainment life.
The first half of the film is all relatively by-the-numbers. Valerie Palme (Naomi Watts) is a covert officer in the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation section, and leading a team into the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the run up to the War. She is a super-efficient agent by day and an even more efficient wife-and-mother by night, keeping her identity under wraps at dinner parties etc.
Her former diplomat husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), who was once an ambassador in Africa, is asked by her superiors to go Niger to look into rumours of sales of enriched uranium. He finds nothing and reports back, with all at the CIA accepting his conclusions.
The second section of the film kicks in when the Bush administration ignores his findings and starts to use aspects of his report to justify its call for a war on Iraq. Joe reacts, and writes an editorial in the New York Times drawing attention to mistruths within administration. To detract from the coverage, White House officials leak Valerie’s covert status and state that Joe was asked to visit Africa and report back by the CIA.
With her job ruined and contacts overseas placed in danger, Valerie is pushed to breaking point, and the couple’s marriage is put under event great strain by Joe’s insistence to fight the government through press and public appearances.
It is all pretty solid, if unexciting, drama. Initially the film is largely about Valerie (Watts is suitably efficient and glacial, though her performance is perhaps too understated) as she hops around the world recruiting sources; chairs highly-technical meetings, and then pops home to put her young twins to bed and canoodle with her hubby.
There are a few moment of much needed humour when the couple crack some obvious 007-type jokes, though even at this early stage Sean Penn (lank hair and glasses to indicate he is an academic type) starts to irritate as her outspoken husband who is a bit of a know-all when it comes to world politics.
Penn actor takes over in the film’s second part as his character launches of grandstanding speech-making appearances where he gets to deliver a series of pronouncements. One knows that he is right and our liberal sympathies are with him…but you do just want him to sit down and keep quiet for a while.
During this period of the film Valerie is left to mooch around the house, getting increasingly disappointed with her husband and her former employers. The climax of the film sees her finally standing up for herself as she gives evidence at an official hearing - at this point Liman switches to real footage of Valerie Palme giving evidence. And yes, she does look rather like Naomi Watts.
Fair Game is a fascinating real-life story that is rather diluted by the by-the-numbers script and director Doug Liman’s love for hand-held camerawork that tends to dull rather than heightens any tension. Liman - whose films include The Bourne Identity, Mr and Mrs Smith and Jumper - never seems to have a firm grip on the drama…or sure how to reign in Penn, who does tend to seem at his happiest when making speeches in movies.
It isn’t so much that his character isn’t correct in his anti-White House stance, but rather that he dominates a film which is far more interesting when tackling Valerie Palme and her CIA/housewife double-life.
IFC.com [James
Rocchi] James Rocchi at
Cannes from IFC, May 20, 2010, also seen here:
James Rocchi
As has been said of robbery, so it is for espionage: You can do a lot more with a fountain pen than with a gun. "Fair Game" tells the story of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) and Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), a Washington couple like any other -- kids, money woes, marital strife -- and unlike any other, with his past as an ambassador and diplomat and her covert work as a CIA operative working in nuclear non-proliferation.
In the lead-up to the
After delivering genre excitement with varying degrees of success in "The Bourne Identity" (excellent), "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (glossy trashy fun) and "Jumper" (a blatant sellout no one wanted to buy), Doug Liman tries to bridge the distance between run-and-gun excitement and solid, serious drama with "Fair Game," premiering as the only film from an American director in competition at Cannes. It's a well-made and stirring movie, on the level of both the personal (How will this marriage survive?) and the political (How will this nation survive?). "Fair Game" is nicely shot, written in a blunt and brisk style that assumes you're capable of following along, a rare pleasure in the modern American cinema.
Liman's casting choices work;
Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, adapting both Plame and
And that is the greatest challenge "Fair Game" faces; it's a movie
about the fact we don't live in a movie, a drama about how the thousands of
lives and millions of dollars wasted on the war with
Detractors will suggest that "Fair Game" feels like someone took the stiletto-sharp satire of "In the Loop," turned it around and cudgeled you with the blunt handle. But "Fair Game" doesn't want to succeed as satire; it wants to remind us that the joke's on us, and the joke's not funny. Others will sneer that if you took the Oscar-caliber actors out of the lead roles and opened the camera up two stops to let some light in, "Fair Game" would be revealed as a TV-movie, but I think Liman's film specifically succeeds as ambitious and engaging cinema because there's something hard and unyielding at "Fair Game"'s core that can't be mocked or dismissed: We were lied to, and we live in the consequences of that lie.
Love,
War, and Lies J.R. Jones from The Reader
Fair Game Patrick McGavin at Cannes from Emanuelle Levy,
May 20, 2010
CANNES REVIEW | Media Stars Gone Natural: Doug Liman’s “Fair Game” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 20, 2010
Cannes
2010: Doug Liman's 'Fair Game' Features Measured And Powerful Performances In
An Uneven, Perhaps Unnecessary Picture Kevin Jaggernauth at Cannes from The Playlist,
May 20, 2010
Cinematical (Joe Utichi) review
Screencomment.com [Ali Naderzad]
The House Next Door [Matt Noller]
David Bourgeois At Cannes: Fair Game — Can This Marriage (and This Movie) Be Saved? at
Cannes from Movieline magazine, May
20, 2010
Cannes '10: Day
Nine Mike D’Angelo at Cannes May 21, 2010
Brad Brevet at Cannes from Rope of Silicon, May 20, 2010
Boxoffice Magazine (Pete Hammond) review [4/5]
Cannes
2010. Doug Liman's "Fair Game"
David Hudson at Cannes from The Auteurs, May 20, 2010
EXCLUSIVE: Doug Liman on Fair Game: 'It's a Really Great Movie' S.T. VanAirsdale interview at Movieline, May 12, 2010
Naomi Watts and Valerie Plame Wilson Talk Fair Game Kevin Gray interview from New York magazine, October 17, 2010
HollywoodReporter.com Kirk Honeycutt
Xan Brooks Cannes film festival diary: nearing the end
of this Fair Game, at Cannes from The
Guardian, May 20, 2010
Cannes
'10 Day 9: Hey, America's here!
Wesley Morris at Cannes from The
Boston Globe, May 20, 2010
Cannes
#8: Of lies and ghosts and fathers
Roger Ebert at Cannes, May 21, 2010
Family
ties make 'Fair Game' a personal endeavor
Rachel Abramowitz from The LA
Times, May 20, 2010, also seen here:
Rachel Abramowitz
World Events
Rumble at Cannes Manohla Dargis at
Cannes from The New York Times, May
21, 2010
Limosin, Jean-Pierre
YOUNG YAKUZA C- 67
A documentary about the yakuza in
Instead, we watch a local rap group sing aggressive anthems to themselves, trying in some way to matter in much the same way as these apprentice yakuza’s who are at the bottom of the food chain. What we discover is that the government keeps initiating new reforms to eliminate the yakuza from mainstream society, barring them from entrance if a store posts a sign to that effect, from most hotels and public bath houses, and making them subject to arrest when traveling in groups of three or more if they fail to immediately disperse when ordered by the police. Like the samurai in the days of old without the noble tradition, these men serve no useful purpose in the modern era and have effectively been outlawed from society and are only allowed to meet amongst themselves. Despite their aggressive notoriety, they don’t seem to serve any purpose other than that of a local street gang. When we hear about one individual in the organization who attempts to intervene in a situation with excessive force, he only ends up in jail where he’s likely to languish, as the yakuza have no effective legal means to get him out. It’s a sorry sight to see how insignificant they have become, where eventually Naoki leaves on his own accord without a word to anyone. Interesting that the title character, our “young yakuza,” simply disappears off the face of the earth midway through the film, leaving little else for the film crew to cover, so instead we watch some heavyweights in a pond search ridiculously for a pair of missing sunglasses. What the film fails to do is address the yakuza’s place in traditional Japanese society. Where did they come from, why do they exist? Why are there still 86,000 of them still in existence? Instead all we see is a couple of guys walking down the street with bodyguards who help him in and out of his big limo car. If the terms of making the film were “not” to reveal what these guys do for a living, then why make the film at all? Even a manga film does a better job than this, where a fictionalized, exaggerated existence trumps a film where the reality is nothing much happens over the course of a 90-minute film.
Young Yakuza Facets Multi-Media
Yakuza is a term which originally stems from the world of
gambling, but the word, literally meaning 'eight-nine-three', has other
connotations. In
A wayward Japanese youth's
apprenticeship with the Nipponese mafia provides an intriguing premise but
little substance in French docu "Young Yakuza." Like
Japan's other cultural touchstone, the geisha, the Yakuza have found expression
in both Japanese and Western movies seeking to reveal arcane practices and
strict hierarchy, but have remained veiled in secrecy. Pic observes rather than
delves. Due to no fault of the filmmaker, docu loses direction due to an
absconding protagonist. Fests may want to take a peek, but a lack of meat will
disappoint.
At docu's beginning, concerned mother Mrs. Watanabe considers a proposal from a friend that she hand over her unemployed, criminally disobedient son, Naoki, to the local yakuza gang boss in order to mold her boy into a more disciplined and useful member of society.
With
nothing else to do, 20-year-old acne-faced Naoki agrees to begin a 12-month
engagement with the Kumagai clan (or gumi) of Tokyo's Shinagawa district. Boss
of the clan is Mr. Kumagai. With a face like a battered Noh mask, the gang boss
explains that circumstances are getting tougher for the yakuza now that, with
police encouragement, shopkeepers and businesses are successfully banning
gangsters from their premises. Kumagai further laments that recruitment is a
problem because discipline is out of fashion with young Japanese and that
unpaid servitude is a distinct disincentive.
After a
casual job interview with Kumagai-san, Naoki is issued a tracksuit uniform and
ordered to get a haircut. Initial indoctrination involves the right procedure
on how to prepare and deliver the boss's tea. Pic tentatively shows glimpses of
the tattooed gang members (most spectacularly in the bathhouse scenes) and the
full array of mundane duties Naoki is expected to perform -- from housework to
nightclub security.
Months
later, at docu's three-quarter point, having gained the gang leader's trust,
Naoki is given a day off when his (unseen) uncle is ill even though his
colleagues are busy offering crowd control backup to Tokyo police during a
Shinto festival. In a manifestation of every documaker's nightmare, Naoki goes
missing. Kumagai speaks of his conflicted feelings of betrayal and parental
inadequacy, but has no real interest in tracking his missing protege.
Likewise,
the helmer turns his attentions to the legal problems of a fully fledged yakuza
who has beaten up an ordinary citizen, but as this new protagonist remains
off-camera due to his arraignment in jail, the pic never really recovers.
Part of
the dilemma is inherent in Kumagai-san's perimeters for involvement in the doc.
As he explains, Yakuza are involved in legitimate businesses but also exist in
parallel to mainstream Japanese society.
There's
a line that separates their "shadow world" from wider society and the
gang boss emphatically states he will not allow the film to cross that line.
Consequently,
though intriguing, docu offers little more than a superficial glimpse of the
yakuza realm. Instead, the film relies heavily on exoticism that allows the
recording of intriguing images without revealing anything of depth or
significance.
Helmer
does himself no favors by letting the film run to 99 minutes, as the rudderless
narrative brutally exposes the padding. Naoki appears once more at the film's
ending, but the reasons for and his activities during his absence remain
unexplained.
For a
docu, lensing in 35mm is a luxury, but the film's appearance could easily be
mistaken for lower-quality stock. Music by Japanese rappers aims to string
sequences together with gangsta street cred, but is ineffectual.
Camera (color), Julien
Hirsch, Celine
Bozon; editor, Tina
Baz; music, RGM, Xavier
Jamaux; sound, Nobuyuki Kikushi, Masaki Hatsui, Takeshi Ogawa, Francois
Musy. Reviewed at Cannes
Film Festival (noncompeting), May 19, 2007. Running time: 99 MIN.
Chicago Tribune (Maureen M. Hart)
Filmmaker Jean-Pierre Limosin, (“Carmen,” “Novo”) returns to
the documentary form with this disjointed immersion into a clan of Japanese
Yakuza (organized crime consortiums).
Before embarking on his 18-month project, Limosin agreed to Yakuza clan leader
Mr. Kumagai’s filming conditions, which barred any recording of the gang’s
criminal activities.
As a result, one might think that the practices of geisha and Yakuza dovetail
nicely, given the time Limosin devotes to capturing the nuances of tea preparations
by newbie members.
That limitation aside, “Young Yakuza” suffers a more serious blow when its
cinematic portal—20-year-old Naoki, who joins because his mother just can’t
deal with him anymore—takes a hike midway through.
He reappears at the end, but in the meantime, we’re left with some confusing
management issues (Mr. Kumagai evidently makes a bad business decision and must
reconstitute his crew) and some Japanese rap (which contains in English the
adjective form of a 12-letter word so popular with U.S. rappers, proving some
things are universal).
Limosin’s film gets some traction when Kumagai reflects elegiacally on the good
old days of the Yakuza (think “Lonesome Dove” in
If Limosin had made Kumagai the heart of his film, Naoki’s wanderlust would
have been but a footnote in a more interesting film.
Lin,
Justin
STAR
TREK BEYOND C+ 77
USA (120 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official Site
Speaking of 60’s idealism - - let’s see what the Star Trek series is up to these days. Eschewing the exaggerated expense of the 3D experience, one of the things that’s so surprising about the series ever since its earliest conception is the presence of such a variety of life found in the outer galaxies, where we find green people, blue people, orange people, and species of all shapes and sizes, where a diversity of life is expressed through a preponderance of rubber masks, each one shaped uniquely different to reflect a different planet of origin. While we’re yet two-hundred years or so away from the period portrayed, there is scant evidence so far that the universe looks anything like this. Still, part of the look of the future comes from the rapidly changing social dynamic that was taking place when the TV series originated in the 1960’s, where the show was ahead of its time in intentionally reflecting racial diversity, something that has proved overwhelming popular through the course of its evolution into movies. Even today, Star Trek sets a certain social standard that remains part of its original mission, where they’ll kick ass if they have to when provoked into battle, but otherwise they are a peacekeeping mission, one whose intent is to spread peace and brotherhood throughout the universe. All noble intentions, where the show is like a United Nations mission into outer space, yet the focus of most films remains the action sequences, in particular the spectacular battle sequences, where computer graphics take center stage, yet this has also been the Achilles heel of the movie series, each one having to outdo the previous episodes, forcing the hand of the studios, apparently, as now they’ve chosen none other than Justin Lin, the director of THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS sequels three through six, films that simply provide nonstop action sequences. While there is an art to bringing this relentless earthbound storm and fury into the cosmos, the stylistic mechanism is the same, where the feature attraction, just like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), is an unending barrage of explosions, where the look of the film has only grown more similar to the ten episode and still counting Star Wars series, both resembling hell and havoc in outer space. If anything, this only reveals the limits of space saga sequels, as they all look alike after a while, even as they go to such extremes to accentuate diversity in discovered lifeforms. What J.J. Abrams discovered in his original Star Trek (2009) was tapping into the personalities of the beloved TV series figures, where the next generation of actors playing the same roles duplicated their human characteristics, as that was the most appealing aspect of the original show. That nearly disappeared in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), ditching Abrams this go round (hired to direct the latest STAR WARS venture), instead concocting a formula for what will likely be a summer blockbuster movie.
While there remain traces of recognizable personality-suited dialogue, none more evident than Scotty (Simon Pegg), who continues to call Jaylah (Sofia Boutella, a surprise breakout star), a newly introduced female alien creature, “lassie” throughout, which couldn’t be more endearing, although one might attribute this to the fact that Pegg is a cowriter of the film, so writing lines for himself, even as others are routinely ignored, comes with the territory, while there are occasional other touches as well, such as Bones (Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy) stealing a bottle of prized alcohol from Chekov’s locker to share with a particularly beleaguered Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), which was also a nice way of paying tribute to the recently deceased Anton Yelchin who played Chekov, as he died in an unfortunate car accident just before the movie was released. But for the most part, that’s not the draw of this movie, as the familiar characters are overlooked once again, barely used for anything other than window dressing, while continually overshadowed by the larger action sequences, where this may as well be another comic book action figure movie. The plot is minimal, representing the simplicity of the earlier TV series, whose goal was the cram as much as possible into a shortened 50-minute running time, where mostly they sat around chatting on the deck of the USS Enterprise until they approach an unknown space ship, hailing it for identification before all hell breaks loose if the ship has malicious intent, where the entire budget is spent establishing alien looks and uniforms, perhaps a few scenes on a foreign planet, along with some ship-to-ship battle scenes largely viewed from the hectic panic and anxiety of the bridge, where the familiar characters are thrown about like ragdolls, while Spock (Leonard Nimoy) usually offers a last minute suggestion to the Captain (William Shatner), who initiates last second evasive maneuvers to escape from harm’s way once again. That’s pretty much the format, as they all have a good laugh about it afterwards, though there are meandering excursions along the way, some constituting an entire episode, but the Enterprise crew from the television show spent much of their time in close quarters on the bridge, where the banter of their dialogue, in good times and bad, filled time and space, where it was their personalities that was the draw. The pattern from the very beginning was that Kirk hogged most of the action sequences as well as the scenes on the ship, where many in the original cast came to despise William Shatner and his gargantuan ego, though as the series waned there wasn’t much action to speak of, as it was such a low budget operations. Now we’re talking about a budget of nearly $200 million dollars. Three years into a five year mission, the Enterprise pulls in for shore leave, where certainly one of the dazzling set pieces is Yorktown, a Starbase re-envisioned into a thriving, modernistic METROPOLIS (1927) in outer space, complete with architectural marvels of intersecting, multi-directional arches, each with its own unique urban skyline, given full futuristic scope, all built inside a protective bubble, like living inside of a snow globe without the snow, retaining its specially designed shape when turned in every which direction, suggesting it provides its own gravity field.
Little has changed except they’ve all grown a bit older, where a middle-aged existential crisis seems to dominate Kirk’s thoughts, finding it harder to tell “where one day ends and the next begins,” reassessing his career ambitions, thinking he might seek a promotion, where perhaps it’s time to offer the ship to the command of Spock (Zachary Quinto). Meanwhile, Spock’s undergoing his own inner transformation, having been informed of the death of Ambassador Spock (Leonard Nimoy), making him especially sensitive to the survival of the Vulcan species, thinking he may need to leave the Enterprise to play a leadership role on the planet of New Vulcan. Of course, when the two have a momentary pause to discuss their thoughts, neither one utters a word, too embarrassed apparently to bring it up, saving it for later. Also if you blink you may miss the insinuation that Sulu (John Cho) is gay, seen wordlessly placing his arm around his partner, who is carrying their baby daughter. That’s a tell-tale sign that something’s about to happen, as a distressed vessel of unknown origin suddenly approaches the Starbase pleading for help, with a single person Kalara (Lydia Wilson) arriving in an escape pod, suggesting her ship is stranded in a region not yet explored by Starfleet, resurrecting the Enterprise to the rescue. But the move proves disastrous, as an enemy is lurking to ambush the unsuspecting crew, overwhelming their ship with a flock of tiny metallic ships that resemble killer bees, containing huge destructive capabilities, literally sawing the ship in half, with some of the crew escaping in rescue pods while the main section crashes to the planet surface, where now Kirk is in the exact same position as Kalara, a captain separated from his ship and crew. Krall (Idris Elba) boards the ship taking the entire crew prisoner, including Sulu and Uhura (Zoë Saldana), frantically searching for an artifact seen earlier, though it was viewed with little importance at the time, while this commander considers it the essence of his mission. Scratched up from the bumpy landings, Scotty lands on the planet surface alone, Kirk arrives with Chekov, while Spock and McCoy are stranded as well, where communication devices are inoperable. Scotty is impressively rescued by Jaylah, displaying a warrior mentality, a lone survivor of an alien community destroyed by Krall, where she has skillfully survived in the interior of a lost Starship, the USS Franklin, an earlier vessel that went missing over a hundred years ago. While primitive by state-of-the-art modern standards, it’s a relic from the past, yet has been modified by Jaylah’s ingenuity, including the protection of an invisible shield around it in order to remain undetected. Scotty gets to work and quickly makes the needed repairs, eventually reunited with the other Enterprise officers, forming a plan to storm the prison and rescue the hostages. Meanwhile Krall has been torturing the crew in search of the artifact, handed over to him by Kalara, who sabotaged Kirk and the Enterprise, as the device is the missing piece of a deadly weapon that can disintegrate lifeforms in seconds, which is immediately put to a grisly test with Kalara. With his mission completed, Krall leaves to attack Yorktown, followed by all his killer bees, with plans afterwards to go after the entire Federation.
But first, Kirk must re-power the Franklin after a century
spent in mothballs, where the plan is to energize the rescued crew back to the
ship, an extremely handy device that is featured prominently throughout this
film, saving some of the heroes at precarious moments, as the rescue mission
doesn’t exactly run smoothly.
Nonetheless, it’s a harrowing moment followed by an even more daunting
task. By reviewing the ship’s logs, Kirk
and Uhura are able to identify Krall as Balthazar Edison, the former captain of
the Franklin, whose life was prolonged, yet warped and physically deformed by
his planet’s technology. But the logs
show his growing resentment and disillusionment when he and his crew have been
left stranded by Starfleet, where his increasingly paranoid belief is that this
was deliberate, that the words of the Federation are a hoax that hold little
meaning, turning into an angry and maniacal renegade soldier holding a personal
vendetta against the Federation, much like Special Forces Commander Colonel
Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), who must be wiped out in order to stop the
spread of his venomous ideology. Having
fought the early wars that led to the success of the Federation, he has now
gone rogue in his obsession to destroy them, where he was searching the
universe for the ultimate weapon to accomplish the task, believing he now
finally holds it in his hands. It’s a
race back to Yorktown to save that world from the incendiary fury of a
seemingly invincible madman with a doomsday weapon, as they race across the
galaxies to meet him head-on. But first
they have to solve the little problem of the killer bees, surmising there must
be a unifying coordination directing their actions that needs to be altered and
disrupted, creating a disconnect within their electrical circuitry. Something as old-fashioned as radio transmissions
seems to do the trick, causing interference within their unifying
transmissions. Jaylah has a thing for
Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” Public
Enemy - Fight the Power - vidéo Dailymotion YouTube (5:16), playing
a significant role in her formative years, which would have made an excellent
choice, linking the STAR TREK series to the streets of urban America in Do the
Right Thing (1989), but the musical selection instead becomes a much
safer choice in the Beastie Boys “Sabotage” Sabotage
- Beastie Boys - Vevo YouTube (3:02), wreaking havoc within their
operating systems, causing them all to self-destruct. In the high-powered confusion of this
neutralized invasion, however, Edison, returning to his original form and
shape, has been unleashed into the anonymity of an unsuspecting public carrying
his deadly device with him, with plans to flood the ventilation systems. Like King
Kong (1933) climbing to the top of the Empire State Building, Edison
has similar aspirations, where Kirk has to head him off, going mano a mano in
hand-to-hand combat, becoming a battle of wills, each trying to gain the upper
hand. “You won the war!” Kirk shouts at
him, “You gave us peace!” It was that
very peace that left Edison alone in the universe without a purpose, a victim
of his own delusional obsessions, though it’s clear both men are cut from the
same cloth, Starship captains from different eras, mirror images of one
another, both hell-bent on carrying out their mission, where good and evil have
a common root, but produce decisively different outcomes. In keeping with the times, the story turns
into a paranoid thriller about stopping a suicide bomber, where all of humanity
hinges in the balance. Although it’s an
outer space apocalyptic melodrama, the format is the same as any western, where
in this continuing saga, there’s never any doubt about who’s going to win.
The Star Trek movies have been all over the map. Some have been great, others terrible, a few somewhere in between. That range of quality is due to the fact that, no matter the iteration, the franchise has always suffered something of an identity crisis. Films with the original cast (Shatner, Nimoy, etc.) struggled to figure out what Trekkies wanted decades after the show was cancelled. Ones featuring the Next Generation cast struggled to distinguish themselves as something more than bigger episodes of the TV series. The recent entries, meanwhile, have struggled to determine what audiences are looking for in a modernized version of the material.
The J.J. Abrams-directed 2009 reboot was a character-based origin story that managed to stay true to the property while still being accessible enough for non-Trekkies to enjoy. The first sequel, Star Trek: Into Darkness, took things that had been established in that picture, then tried to go deeper and, as the title suggests, darker with them. Audience reaction was mixed. For the new Star Trek Beyond, the filmmakers have gone in the polar opposite direction, delivering a light-and-fluffy Trek adventure. That may sound like a good idea on the surface, but Beyond is ultimately the least satisfying of this new batch.
The plot is about as basic as they come. Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and the crew are attacked by an alien named Krall (Idris Elba), who is in search of an important artifact that will give him immense power. The Enterprise is shot down, leaving the crew scattered on a distant planet. Scotty (Simon Pegg) enlists the help of Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), an alien of a different race who is also stranded. Everyone tries to reunite, find a way to take down the villain, and return to Starfleet Headquarters.
Star Trek Beyond has good performances from the entire cast, with Karl Urban a real standout this time as Bones McCoy. It looks great, as there are tons of eye-popping visual effects and a few ingeniously-conceived shots from director Justin Lin (the fourth, fifth, and sixth Fast & Furious movies). It is fast-paced, never slowing down or allowing the viewer to grow bored.
None of those things are the problem. The issue is that Beyond tries to be a “hip” Star Trek story. Star Trek can be many things; hip is not one of them. It can be socially relevant, it can be exciting, it can be metaphorical, it can be imaginative...we could go on all day. Perhaps as a response to the heaviness of Into Darkness, this one bends over backwards to not take itself seriously and to avoid being seen as stuffy. That approach really isn't the strong suit of this modern interpretation.
For example, Scotty introduces himself to Jaylah by his given name, Montgomery Scott, then tells her to call him by his nickname. Instead, she repeatedly refers to him as “Montgomery Scotty.” Jaylah also listens to rap music. (“I like the beat and the yelling,” she says.) A key sequence strangely involves the Enterprise crew using the Beastie Boys' song "Sabotage" in battle. Action scenes, meanwhile, are almost comically over-the-top, relying on improbable coincidences and absurd situations. In one, Kirk hops on a motorcycle and is cloned via a sort-of human Xerox machine so that Krall can't determine which one is really him riding around. The action often plays like one of the latter Fast & Furious movies, in that it seemingly believes that the crazier something is, the better it will be.
That attitude is not a good fit for Star Trek. Important plot points and character motivation often get lost amid the strained efforts to be freewheeling. It's probably safe to say that anyone who goes to see a Star Trek movie at this point wants to spend more time with Kirk, Spock, Sulu, and the others. Scenarios that keep them front and center are best. Beyond puts its “let's make this a party” attitude in that position, turning our heroes into little more than accessories. This especially undermines the story's attempt to wring out a meaningful ending.
Beyond is not the worst Star Trek movie, but it's also far from the best. If the franchise is going to go forward – and it most certainly will – the gatekeepers would be wise to take a look at the most successful installments in all the big screen versions and figure out why they worked so well. What they have done with Beyond is likely to leave fans, devoted and casual, scratching their heads in bewilderment.
'Star Trek Beyond,' With Chris Pine, Idris Elba, And ... - The Atlantic David Sims
In these dark times, you might expect Star Trek Beyond to echo the tone of the previous film in this storied franchise, Star Trek Into Darkness. That was a paranoid thriller about suicide bombers, super-soldiers, and ethical rot at the heart of government—a decidedly dystopian tale. Happily, Beyond sweeps all of that aside, delivering a rollicking adventure about the transformative good of teamwork and unity that’s just as silly and enjoyable as that might sound. It’s no complex masterpiece, but it’s exactly the kind of fun steeped in effervescent goodwill that Hollywood should be delivering right now.
Like the two previous Star Trek films (which were directed by J.J. Abrams), Beyond stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, and others as younger, alternate versions of the original Enterprise crew, whose adventures tend to be a little heavier on the action beats and CGI mayhem than Gene Roddenberry’s original ’60s TV show. After making a royal mess of Into Darkness and moving on to the Star Wars franchise, Abrams handed the reins to the confident action director Justin Lin. Having revitalized the Fast & Furious franchise (directing the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth entries), Lin uses the same magic to spruce Star Trek up. Unlike Abrams’ sweeping 2009 reboot, Beyond can seem slight at times, but in a way that recalls the best of the franchise, harkening back to Roddenberry’s original, optimistic view of the future.
Some might scoff, but Lin’s time with Fast & Furious shines through even if the Enterprise crew is less muscle-bound. There’s a focus on squad unity, with Captain Kirk’s team thriving by acting as a surrogate family—one that always has fun and tosses out one-liners as the action clangs around them. Everyone is given at least a moment to shine: John Cho’s stoic family man Sulu, Karl Urban’s growling curmudgeon Bones, and the sadly departed Anton Yelchin’s endlessly enthusiastic Pavel Chekov. Beyond, written by its star Simon Pegg (who plays the irascible engineer Scotty) and Doug Jung, is rarely five minutes from an action scene, but it doesn’t get overwhelmed by the endless set-pieces. Its two-hour running time breezes by in a blur of day-glo adventure and derring-do.
Beyond begins with Captain Kirk (Pine) bored by the generally utopian universe he lives in, shuttling through deep space on diplomatic missions for Starfleet and longing for some real action. He gets it quickly enough: Embarking on a rescue mission into a remote nebula, the Enterprise is attacked by a hive of alien ships, and crash lands on an uncharted planet ruled by a tyrant named Krall (Idris Elba). For most of the film, Krall is rather thinly sketched: Speaking guttural, halting English and mugging behind layers of scaly makeup, Elba can only do so much with the role, which doesn’t get much context until the film’s climax.
Still, he represents a basic threat to everything Kirk and company stand for, ranting about Starfleet’s emphasis on diplomacy and peace, and cursing their pathetic emphasis on solidarity. Meanwhile, the Enterprise crew, scattered to four corners of the planet by Krall’s assault, have to come together to stop him, making an alliance with another stranded alien warrior named Jaylah (Sofia Boutella). Pegg and Jung’s script is simple stuff, mostly avoiding the lovable ponderousness of past editions of Trek (there’s no Patrick Stewart reciting Melville and Tennyson, though Spock does at least slip in a Shakespeare line). Perhaps this reflects Hollywood’s current lows more than anything else, but it’s refreshing to see a blockbuster that has any kind of philosophy, especially one this good-hearted.
Best of all, just as he did with the Fast & Furious franchise, Lin never hits the audience over the head with the crew’s sweeping sense of diversity and the power they draw from their egoless camaraderie. Early on, as the crew takes some shore leave on a space station, you catch a sweet, subtle glimpse of Sulu embracing his husband and child; when Uhura is captured by Krall, she doesn’t need her boyfriend Spock’s help in escaping his clutches; and there’s a continuation of the brotherhood between Scotty and his three-foot engineering assistant Keenser, a beady-eyed, fungus-resembling creature who sneezes acid any time he has a cold.
Like the best Star Trek moments, the lessons learned are about embracing each other’s idiosyncrasies and banding together to fight for a common good. That’s the kind of message Hollywood blockbusters should promote more often, but it feels especially relevant to the present. When he created Star Trek 50 years ago, Roddenberry was hoping to reflect humanity’s best qualities in a paean to the future it could create for itself. It’s heartening to see Star Trek Beyond continuing that noble cause.
Review: The Lively Star Trek Beyond -- Vulture David Edelstein
The new Star Trek picture — called, for no particular reason, Star Trek Beyond — is a wild ride, fast and crazy kinetic, a bombardment in the manner of the Fast and the Furious movies by the same director, Justin Lin. Of course, “fast” and “furious” are adjectives that “classic” Trek fans loved the series for not being. But in some ways it’s a relief to leave that more deliberate universe behind. The new, slavishly imitative cast members haven’t made these characters their own, and there’s an eerie quality to their attempts — as if the future will bring not just starships and teleportation but also androids replacing long-dead actors. It’s better to have a well-made, unapologetic action-adventure like this one than a creepy stab at replication.
Not that the script — by actor Simon Pegg and Doug Jung — doesn’t pretend to aim high. Early in Star Trek Beyond, Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) stares forlornly into the distance. He’s having a midlife crisis. He wants to leave the untethered world of starships and settle down as an admiral on terra firma — or anywhere firma. This seemed very strange, given that he was handed the command of the Federation’s flashiest vessel straight out of Starfleet Academy (shouldn’t he have served on other ships first?) and that Pine looks as if he’d still be carded when buying beer. Spock (Zachary Quinto), too, is itching to leave the Enterprise, in his case to rebuild the lost civilization of Vulcan. Can these two really be on their way out in only the third movie? It seemed like a setup to me.
But you can forget the jacked-up drama once the Enterprise arrives at Yorktown, a pretzel-tiered metropolis full of CGI and actors with elaborate makeup jobs in the middle of space. (The scenes were shot in Dubai, the continued existence of which seems a shakier prospect than Yorktown’s.) From the moment the starship glides into port, it’s clear that Lin’s visual imagination dwarfs that of his predecessor, J.J. Abrams. So what if his shots streak by so fast you can only half-follow the action? Coherence is a small price to pay for beauty. This is like Abstract Expressionism.
Most of Star Trek Beyond is set on the blue planet Altamid, where the Enterprise is destroyed with sadistic thoroughness, taken apart by scores of little ships that swarm and strike like bees. The crew can’t reach Yorktown or other starships because a storm has knocked out the phone lines — no, actually, it’s because they’re inside a nebula — and you know what that means. The characters are thrown to the winds, leaving them crashed down on Altamid in groups of two.
Kirk and Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) dodge the death rays of a small woman with a large rubber brain-pan and then slide down what’s left of the Enterprise’s saucer section. (It looks like the best water park ride imaginable.) A badly wounded Spock and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) sling insults back and forth before realizing that, in the absence of Kirk — who’s like the girl whose attentions they’re fighting for — they have no reason for resenting each other. It’s an especially ridiculous conflict in this new Star Trek series, since Quinto doesn’t have Leonard Nimoy’s talent for appearing utterly neutral while curling his eyebrows with unspoken judgments, thereby driving McCoy the hotheaded humanist into spluttering rages. Quinto has wounded eyes and lips that quiver petulantly. He’s the kind of Spock who should make McCoy say, “Chill out.” As for Urban, he’s the Looney Tunes Junior version of DeForest Kelly. The imitation is a hoot, but it’s just that—an imitation.
A word about Sulu (John Cho), who, with Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and the rest of the Enterprise's ensemble, ends up held captive on Altamid: In one earlier scene on Yorktown, there’s a shot of him with his arm around the waist of another man. This is supposed to signal that he’s gay, which has reportedly troubled the original Sulu, George Takei. Takei thinks — rightly, I’m sure — that the revelation has more to do with his own post-Trek celebrity than with the character of Sulu. The only hitch is that there is no character of Sulu. It’s ridiculous to speak of the original Sulu or Chekhov or Uhura as if they’re anything but a Japanese-American actor, an actor with an embarrassingly fake Russian accent, and a leggy African-American actress. The raging camera hog William Shatner made certain that those actors never had anything but the most rudimentary dialogue, and Scotty only got attention because of a few memorable catchphrases. Sulu could don a pink angora sweater and it wouldn’t affect his “character.” He and the new, more assertive Uhura are blank slates on which to write their own stories.
Pegg, meanwhile, has written himself a lot of good hysterical Scottish shtick, and the movie’s best scenes feature Scotty and an alien named Jaylah — a star turn for Sofia Boutella, who played the baddie in Kingsman: The Secret Service who bisected people with her blade-legs, and who’ll soon be seen in the title role of The Mummy. Boutella has a good, sharp, surly face with an improbably delicate cleft chin. Her features register even under a pound of white makeup slashed with black lightning bolts. Kayla is like a kickboxing Pocahontas. More than anything, she wants revenge on the movie’s number-two villain, who caused the death of her father.
Which brings me to the number-one villain, Krall, who brought down the Enterprise. He’s a huge guy with a leonine-alien face, a thunderous voice, and horrendous diction, which means I never fully caught his reasons for wanting to destroy Yorktown and everything else that the Federation has polluted. I was stunned to learn that under all that prosthetic muck is the great Idris Elba, which suggests the problem with most prosthetics: They make actors as dissimilar as Elba and Oscar Isaac look pretty much alike — and I’d so rather look at Elba’s (or Isaac’s) naked features. Christopher Plummer did the audience (as well as himself) a favor when he refused to submit to six hours of makeup to play a Klingon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and Ricardo Montalban needed nothing more than long white tresses and weights to build up his pecs to play the scariest Trek villain of all. That said, I did enjoy the interview in which Elba said his makeup helped him answer the old question, “What’s my motivation?” His motivation was to blast through his scenes so he could get all that fucking rubber off his face.
Despite the complex structure, the movie still comes down to two men pounding on each other in a small space while a clock tick-tocks toward Armageddon. At least Lin knows how to shoot his fights from unexpected angles and with enough spatial-temporal variables to keep us jolt-addicts rocking in our seat, happy to be dizzy.
But Star Trek Beyond is steeped in a larger sadness. Spock’s melancholy is triggered by news of the death of ... well, Spock, meaning the first iteration of Spock, meaning Nimoy, who died before shooting commenced. (If you haven’t seen any films in this new cycle, you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. I barely I have a clue what I’m talking about.) The other loss, of course, was the 27-year-old Yelchin, who died after the film was completed and whose obituaries led with his cartoonish Chekhov (with its deliberately phony Russian accent) rather than the other, more daring performances he had given in all manner of indie films. But in his final turn as Chekhov, he’s so exuberant that he practically bounds from scene to scene, as if he’d finally said to himself, “Chekhov is anyone I want him to be — and I want him to be madly optimistic and alive.” The thought of his tragically absurd death brings you crashing down to Earth. Why do real malfunctioning machines have to mess up our high-tech utopian fantasies?
Sight & Sound [Kim Newman] July 22, 2016
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Star Trek Beyond -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lindholm, Tobias
A HIJACKING (Kapringen) B 87
Denmark (103 mi) 2012 Official site
The Danish put their own characteristic spin on everything,
from the moody and melancholy tone of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the national support the country provides through a
system of public grants provided to artists, funding theater, museums, and
various film projects like this one. The
nation itself is a country of 5 million people populating a small collection of
about 50 islands, where the national economy is built upon a huge commercial
shipping fleet, where nearly every family has someone employed in the industry,
including the director’s own father. So
in 2007 when a Danish cargo ship was hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian
Ocean, it became a personal story that nearly everyone in the country could
intimately relate to, as someone from their family could be sitting out there
in the middle of the ocean subject to the wild whims of heavily armed
pirates. The film is something of a
follow-up of an earlier American documentary Stolen
Seas (2012), which examines the impact of an actual November 2008 hijacking
of the CEC Future, a Danish cargo ship
traveling through the Gulf of Aden, events that alerted the world to the
revival of this seemingly barbaric 18th century practice, becoming commonplace
in the modern era along the East African coast of Somalia. While that documentary does an excellent job recreating the hostage
negotiations process, where much of what’s revelatory is gleaning insight into
the little known Somali culture through the eyes and ears of the American
educated Somali negotiator, who was not one of the original hijackers, but was
hired exclusively due to his language proficiency. In contrast, this film is a fictionalized
recreation of real events that examines the impact that piracy has on the
effected Danish families back home and the company executives in
Largely seen through the differing eyes of two individuals,
Mikkel (Pilou Asbæck), the
hijacked ship’s cook, spending most of his time at gunpoint in isolation with
two other crew members, separated throughout from the rest of the crew, and
Peter Ludvigsen (Søren
Malling), the wealthy CEO of the shipping company, constantly seen in a cramped
executive boardroom with the other major players, where what’s interesting is
that both men are intentionally kept as much in the dark as possible, offering
no clues that might in any way be considered helpful. Instead the crew is continually bullied and intimidated,
where they’re not even allowed to use the bathroom for the first month, forced
to live in their own putrid stink in sweltering heat with no air
circulation. Meanwhile the suited
executives have to deal with Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), often heard on the phone, but
never seen, where they refuse to provide information about the crew, insisting
they speak exclusively about money. The
company hires an expert on hijacking, but Peter refuses the advice to hire an
impartial negotiator, insisting that he carry out his chief executive duties,
which includes working in the best interests of the company and the crew. What might surprise some is the polite and
overly courteous language displayed between Peter and Omar, where neither wants
to convey any hint of weakness, both crunching numbers, behaving as if they are
dealing in the world of high finance.
While this is Peter’s specialty, he’s never before been threatened by
the execution of his crew members if he doesn’t produce a high enough number. At times, both sides crumble under the
pressure, made worse by not knowing what to expect, often quickly cutting off
phone lines to elevate the dramatic suspense.
While these death threats are typical piracy maneuvers and practiced
techniques, one still never knows just what they’re dealing with on the other
end of the phone line, where like police hostage negotiations, the important
thing is to maintain regular contact and make use of what little trust can be
established.
Time drags on and days turn into weeks, where the growing frustration eventually turns into months, where the families live in a state of hysteria, never knowing if their loved one is living or dead, where the company cannot provide any information, as they don’t want anything getting into the newspapers or television reports where it can be used against them. The impact grows typically unrealistic, as the board can’t understand why negotiations can’t be wrapped up like any other high stakes deal, and family members are shunned from the excruciating pressure that falls on the shoulders of Peter, who really has to shut out all outside conditions to be able to stand what he’s doing, which is prolonging the agony of men’s lives and obliterating the hopes of the families that have lived for months without them. Onboard, the ship quickly runs out of food and psychological tensions only escalate, where the hijackers finally allow Mikkel to call his wife, but interrupt the call screaming at the wife to demand that the shipping owner pay the ransom money, and then quickly hang up. The effect is brutal, as are the lingering conditions onboard, which resemble the unbearable treatment of POW’s in Vietnam, thrown into the empty storage shell of the vessel, like living in a cave with no light whatsoever, losing whatever shred of humanity they have left. In the end, both sides behave like animals, stripping themselves of that same humanity, showing literally no mercy whatsoever, as these are the terms of the game. What sets this version apart is the understated minimalism, stripped down to the bare essentials, providing as little as possible, using a cinéma vérité style to show a wrenching documentary style realism, where brief moments of crippling emotional violence fill the screen, followed by an interminable silence, where one waits, but time needlessly drags on, turning this into a brooding and morbid exercise of prolonged misery and doom, where a feeling of helplessness prevails, as all tactics fail, yet both sides continue to wear down and eventually exhaust the other into submission. This is a particularly gloomy film with ominous reverberations, exposing a tiresome and damaging process that may alter the lives of those who pay the ultimate price, like any soldier returning from the particularly catastrophic conditions of war, where the haunting ferociousness of the experience has the capacity to extinguish the human spirit.
As is the standard for global cinema, the corporate ideology, and
resultant insinuation of psychotic behaviour, is an easy target for
vilification and criticism. Perceived as smug, desiccated and passionless,
their cutthroat perspective on financial success over the sanctity of human
life and well being is taken to a literal level in Tobias Lindholm's gritty but
straightforward drama, A Hijacking.
The film opens with a successful corporate takeover, where Peter Ludvigsen
(Søren Malling), the CEO of a large shipping company, drives down the sale
price of the other company by several million. Preening like a peacock, his
inflated ego leads to a bizarre decision when one of his shipping vessels is
hijacked by Somali pirates that demand a ransom for the lives of his employees.
Despite hiring a professional negotiator (Gary Skjoldmose Porter) to aid in
resolving this issue without any bloodshed, Peter decides to handle the
negotiations himself, inserting his cavalier corporate attitude into a life and
death struggle.
Using a realist, documentary style, the majority of the film unfolds on the
ship, where Mikkel (Johan Philip Asbæk), the cook, attempts to survive and
negotiate with his captors while living in his filth, pissing and defecating in
the corner of the same room where he and his shipmates sleep.
Since the negotiations drag on for weeks, an increasing number of flies swirl
around the fetid living quarters, heightening the reality of the situation.
Mikkel even manages to develop a comfort zone with his captors, which is
routinely challenged when they threaten his life and force him to slaughter a
small goat (a scene depicted quite vividly, showing a lack of maturity on the
part of Lindholm).
While this attention to detail and increasing desperation are impressively
rendered and depicted with an appropriate sense of horror, there's an overall
sense that the story is going nowhere. We know that the captors will be either
saved, murdered or wind up in a nasty fight to the death, but other than this,
the trajectory is limited the obvious grotesquery of living conditions and
critique of pampered CEOs.
Perhaps this is why Lindholm resorts to sensationalist tactics, such as showing
a close-up of an animal slowly bleeding to death, wheezing for breath. It's as
though his ego is as inflated as the subject of his criticism, since he seems
to think that his "art" is justification for the death of a living
creature.
Tales of pirate drama on the high seas have come a long, unpleasant way since Errol Flynn. Borgen and The Hunt co-writer Tobias Lindstrom’s debut as solo writer-director explores the human factor behind Somali pirate headlines, with the cool grip Nordic drama fans now expect.
Inspired by the real seizure of two Danish freighters, Lindstrom uses a parallel narrative split between Copenhagen and the terrifying emptiness of the Indian Ocean, where the crew of his fictional freighter are trapped below decks by Somali captors. At their shipping company’s HQ, CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Soren Mallig – Borgen’s editor Friis), an invincible contract-closer, takes personal charge of negotiations, against the strong advice of Aussie hostage expert Connor (Gary Skjoldmose). Meanwhile on the ship, sunny-natured cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek – Borgen spin doctor Kasper) is among the human collateral herded and dehumanised by the armed pirates. Their fate hangs on the words Peter chooses as he haggles the ransom over thousands of miles on a mobile phone.
“Do you have an appointment?” Peter absently asks his wife, before his emotionally mastered life sinks under the weight of the seemingly infinite negotiations. But even as Peter starts to crack, his cool, clean office is contrasted with his hostage employees’ fly-blown quarters. These men are floating off the shore of the corporate world, stuck in a gun-happy, piss-stinking place of brutal physical consequence, only dimly understood in Copenhagen. Lindholm draws no explicit lesson from this. He lets the shit-and-rust-brown light below decks and HQ’s gleaming surfaces state simple, physical facts.
Lindholm admits to being a dryer writer than his collaborator on The Hunt and Submarino, Thomas Vinterberg, and a concern for authenticity dumped the relevant cast and crew on a freighter previously seized by pirates, for secret filming in Indian Ocean wastes where history might have been repeated. Back in the boardroom, Skjoldmose isn’t an actor, but a hostage crisis expert who has led such negotiations in real life. His advice mostly seems counter-intuitively, hostage-death-sentencing bonkers. How strange that it’s right.
A Hijacking’s realism doesn’t anyway rest in documentary detail. It’s in the incremental traumatising of the ship’s crew, Mikkel especially, longing for a reunion with his family after a long voyage that now stretches agonisingly out of his grasp. There’s a touch of mutual Stockholm Syndrome, as pirates and hostages break the shared boredom with an afternoon’s fishing. In the drunken aftermath, the Danes revert to Viking type, bonding with the Somalis for a moment. Mikkel, turned into a shuffling slave by the pirates’ machine-guns and prone to sobbing panic attacks, gives a truer account of this crime’s cost.
A Hijacking is schematic at times, especially in the boardroom scenes. The simply tense device of Peter being unable to see his words’ consequences, sometimes suggested with a machine-gun’s rattle, does work well though. And by its end, you may feel The Hunt’s final gut-punch again.
Negotiations with modern pirates
Danish director Tobias Lindholm (who has worked with Thomas Vinterberg on a lot
of writing, including the admired 2012 Mads Mikkelsen film The Hunt and
penned the "Borgen" TV series) gives us in Hijacking an
intense process-story based on a real events -- several recent hijackings of
Danish ships by Somali pirates. About to head home, the Danish cargo ship MV
Rozen is seized in the Indian Ocean. But in the film, the actual moment of
the hyjacking is bypassed. Instead the film begins by establishing ship's cook
Mikkel Hartmann (Pilou Asbæk) as a warm and human guy with wife and young
daughter back home by showing him call them from the ship. Then the story skips
ahead to when the hijacking has actually happened. It divides its focus between
the Rozen and the shipping line's Copenhagen head-office. Originally
Lindholm thought of depicting everything from shipboard. But in an interview he
recounts how his mother was a classic socialist and so he decided it would give
him some sort of extra maverick son pleasure to look at things also
particularly from the capitalists' point of view. We get plent of long looks at
the raw, ragged, scary events on board as well. The result is a peculiar kind
of procedural that balances the naturalistic with the traditionally
suspenseful, bosses with the grunts. Lindholm and his fine case have produced a
very authentic-feeling story and a fine feature, his second, his first working
solo (his first was the 2010 prison drama R, co-directed and co-written
with Michael Noer).
Ignoring the advice of hired hijacking expert Connor Julian (played by actual
corporate security officer Gary Skjoldmose Porter), the company's CEO, Peter C.
Ludvigsen (Søren Malling), makes the decision not to use a professional
negotiator but do his own dealing by phone -- and occasionally by FAX -- with
the hostage-takers, represented by Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), a multilingual
translator/middleman hired by the pirates, who seem to speak no English,
certainly no Danish. It is the cool but arrogant Omar with whom Peter, in
consultation with Connor Julian, must constantly deal, carrying out a
traditional bargaining process that starts at $21 million requested by the hijackers
and $210,000 offered by the company. As the Somalis slowly go down and the CEO
slowly goes up, the days turn into weeks and then months, Mikkel and his
shipmates aboard the Rozen must endure rapidly deteriorating conditions and
increasingly harrowing psychological pressures. The film provides a growing
sense of the dangerous responsibility Peter has taken on himself (there are
other partners who pressure him) as well as the suffering of the family members
at home.
Hollywood Reporter's Neil Young called A Hijacking "One of the more unheralded
standouts at this year's Venice," and it has qualities of mainstream
appeal, even if its being Danish and conveying most of its excitement through
talk (negotiation) rather than action (armed encounter) make it partly a hard
sell internationally. There are some choices that are limitations. The film
provides good authentic feel in the shipboard and boardroom scenes, but does
not expand secondary characters in depth, showing the ordeal primarily through
Peter and Mikkel.
Pick of the week: Hijacked by Somali pirates - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir from Salon
Paste Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Andrew Robertson]
Electric Sheep Magazine [Evrim Ersoy]
In A Hijacking, the Pirate Life Is Tense - - Movies ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek
A Hijacking (2013) Movie Review - Film School Rejects Caitlin Hughes
Indiewire (The Playlist) [Oliver Lyttelton]
Film-Forward.com [Christopher Bourne]
The House Next Door [Michal Oleszczyk]
Review: A HIJACKING, A Gritty Anti-Thriller | Twitch Todd Brown
Michael
Nordine Filmmaker magazine
Movie Reviews A 'Hijacking' Where Business And Personal ... - NPR Ella Taylor
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
AFI Fest 2012: A Hijacking and Berberian Sound Studio | The House ... Oscar Moralde from The House Next Door
Review: A Hijacking - Community.compuserve.com Harvey Kartem
Little White Lies [Michael Leader]
FilmFracture [Kathryn Schroeder]
Hollywood Jesus [Darrel Manson]
Interview: Tobias Lindholm on Meeting the Demands of the Insanely Stephen Saito interview of the director from The Moveable Fest, June 2013
Hollywoodreporter.com [Neil Young]
A Hijacking – review | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks
'A Hijacking' is a business drama with human ... - The Boston Globe Ty Burr
Examiner.com [Rick Marianetti]
'A Hijacking' review: Film's technique is as singular as its refusal to ... Chris Hewitt from St. Paul Pioneer Press
Austin Chronicle [Steve Davis]
Willamette Week [Curtis Woloschuk]
Review: 'A Hijacking' rides waves of tension - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
'A Hijacking' director not scared of Hanks in 'Captain Phillips ... Mark Olsen from The LA Times
A Hijacking Movie Review & Film Summary (2012) | Roger Ebert Olivia Collette
A Hijacking (Movie);Hijacking, A - Movies - New York Times A.O. Scott
MV Danica White - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Somali Pirates Free Danish Ship, CEC Future, After Ransom ... Jan M. Olsen from The Huffington Post, January 16, 2009
BBC NEWS | Africa | Inside story of Somali pirate attack Rob Walker from The BBC News, June 4, 2009
A
WAR (Krigen) B 86
Denmark (115 mi) 2015 Official Facebook
Denmark sent 9,500 military personnel to Afghanistan between January 2002 and July 1, 2013, according to Danish reports, which totals more than 60% of their entire military force, where 42 soldiers were eventually killed, more per capita than any other European country. Making matters worse, Denmark aired a blockbuster TV drama series that was screened throughout Europe that was entitled The Killing (Forbrydelsen) (2007, 2009, 2012) where in the second season the story veered into a mass cover-up of civilian killings in Afghanistan involving Danish soldiers, which was further accentuated by the release of Janus Metz Pedersen’s incendiary documentary film ARMADILLO (2010) that won the Critic’s Week 1st Place Grand Prize award at Cannes in 2010. Armadillo was the name of the operating base in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan where the filmmaker spent six months with Danish soldiers who were situated less than a kilometer away from Taliban positions, where at one point they are caught in a hellish firefight with insurgents that was partly filmed by a camera strapped to one soldier’s helmet, where the dire situation they found themselves in only resolved itself following the success of a hand grenade. What shocked the Danish public were the comments of a young soldier who claimed they were exhilarated afterwards, high on adrenaline, and just sprayed the vicinity with machine-gun fire, killing everyone, wounded or dead, then posed for pictures (reminiscent of Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse) that portrayed themselves as boastful heroes next to piles of dead bodies, which led to a political inquiry and opened up questions back home about the morality of their mission. While there have been American films depicting the nightmarish psychological effect on soldiers sent to war regions, like Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s Restrepo (2010), and prior to that, DEER HUNTER (1978), showing the destabilizing effects of the Vietnam War, this is one of the few films depicting what is essentially a Danish view of the war, something not really seen since the devastating ethical dilemma of Susan Bier’s BROTHERS (2004). As the co-writer of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (Jagten) (2012) and the writer/director of A Hijacking (Kapringen) (2012), Lindholm has established himself as a guardian of emotional authenticity, never overdramatizing situations that are intensely real and bracingly uncomfortable.
A welcome relief from the overly simplistic, hero worship trends that have defined American war movies of late, which are little more than patriot adulation, where Michael Bay’s latest, 13 HOURS: THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI (2016), has been referred to in political debates and played in rented stadiums by Republican candidates running for President (namely Donald Trump in Iowa), generating some chilling comments by Christopher Hooks from Gawker, January 15, 2016, who witnessed the world premiere at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home of the Dallas Cowboys football team, often referred to as “America’s team,” I Watched Michael Bay's Benghazi Movie at Cowboys Stadium With 30,000 Pissed-Off Patriots:
Bay has an almost
pornographic feel for the physics of modern war: The cartoon arcs of RPGs in
flight; the swiveling, passionless eye of a Predator Drone; expensive,
bullet-riddled cars careening through city streets; planes and helicopters and
technicals and men with guns, all in hues bordering on the psychedelic. But the
human element is less firmly in his grasp, and the moral landscape of the movie
is poisonous.
In the first decade
after 9/11, Hollywood didn’t really know how to handle America’s new wars. To
the extent films addressed them at all, they tended to focus on how they
damaged ordinary people. Movies like Home
of the Brave, In the Valley of Elah, and The Hurt Locker were not uplifting—at their worst, they could be
moralizing and turgid. And they were not successful. The broader culture
honored the rank-and-file men and women who sacrificed to fight America’s wars:
Support the troops.
In the last few years,
as the wars changed shape and expanded, a strange thing happened. The culture
began to focus not on ordinary soldiers, but on extraordinary ones—Navy SEALs,
special forces operators, military contractors. The movies changed—Act of Valor, Lone Survivor, American
Sniper. They celebrate heroes, they take place in a vacuum of political
context, and they’re hugely profitable. Strangely, they cater to people who
think Hollywood hates them. Film studios, suddenly, learned to love the wars.
13
Hours fits neatly in this new genre. It’s a story told from the
perspective of men of extraordinary martial prowess in a deeply unfamiliar and
hostile place, surrounded by faceless and unknowable enemies, desperate to
survive. It’s a siege movie, and the major plot points would make just as much
sense if they were transposed to a movie about a zombie attack, or an alien
invasion.
Perhaps in response to bombastic Hollywood overkill, this Danish film, among the five finalists in the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars, is instead a more measured and intelligent approach, scrutinizing the effects of the Afghan war on multiple fronts, not just the frontline soldiers, but their families back home, while also evaluating the overall impact this has on a rapidly developing, modern European perspective. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been the first wars Denmark has fought since the Second World War, immersing a new generation of youth into combat situations, where families become invested in the wounded or the dead, where in a small nation of 5.5 million, it’s hard not to know someone who was affected. Using real soldiers instead of extras, Lindholm’s insistence upon unflinching realism places the viewers on the front lines in another film about normal people stuck in abnormal situations. We see the war largely from the Company commander’s viewpoint, Claus Pedersen (Pilou Asbaek), who’s attempting to establish trust with the locals of Helmand province in a peace-keeping mission, but it’s a difficult proposition, as the villagers are caught in between opposing forces, where they are visited by the Danish NATO peace-keeping forces by day, while the Taliban make threats against them by night. Even those with good intentions may feel paralyzed, rather than emboldened, by this seemingly futile power struggle. Early on Claus loses one of his men when a young soldier strays slightly off path and gets blown up by an IED, or hidden roadside bomb that is buried just below the surface. This has a way of unnerving Claus’s men, in particular one soldier named Lasse (Dulfi Al-Jabouri) who was particularly close to the deceased. As a way of calming his men down, he steps outside of the commander’s tent and accompanies the men on daily patrols, where his daily presence has a way of reassuring them. This is ironic, as back home we see his wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) struggle with raising three children alone, especially the oldest son who has been getting into fights at school, clearly missing his father and in need of the same reassuring guidance that Pedersen provides his men. Despite the distance between them, Claus tries to call home at regular intervals, maintaining personal contact, where there are parallels between the difficulties encountered with communicating with his family and the challenges of maintaining good relations with a local community that is highly suspicious of their presence. In each case, the family and the villagers get shortchanged, while the soldiers themselves end up being stuck someplace in the middle of nowhere.
Spending the majority of the time with Pedersen and his unit, they have the feel of familiarity when all hell breaks loose, as the unit comes under attack during a routine patrol, initiated by the deaths of an entire family that was last seen talking to the patrol, setting a trap for their ambush. With bullets and grenades coming from all sides, Lasse is seriously shot, where they are able to pull him back into the safety of their position while remaining pinned down behind a wall unable to see the source of incoming fire. Pedersen’s courage under fire is severely tested, as headquarters refuses to send a medical helicopter until they can identify the location of the enemy, while a young man’s life hinges in the balance. The intensity of the moment is ratcheted up by increasingly claustrophobic, handheld cinematography by Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, where the viewer is pulled directly into the heart of a frenzied battle zone. With screaming profanity as the only recognizable language in their chaotic predicament, life and death choices have to be made under the worst conditions imaginable. With no musical cues or heart-thumping beats of percussion, Pedersen orders air support to take out a building compound where they believe the enemy is hidden. In the aftermath, Lasse receives the necessary medical care and his men get out alive. But shortly afterwards, his unit receives an unexpected visit from military officers investigating Pedersen’s conduct, where he’s immediately shipped home and charged with killing eight civilians without proper military authorization. What has been a harrowing story out in the field changes course completely, where instead we get a glimpse of the Danish military court system which is systematically expressed in meticulous detail, instigating a somber reflection and accountability for what seemed like a few crazed moments of nerve-wracking combat. In stark contrast to American films, which readily resort to exaggerated stereotypical depictions of heroism, accentuating extended battle scenes, this film only spends a few instantaneous moments in furious combat, then spends the rest of the film sorting out the consequences. Using a cool and detached style reminiscent of Jan Verheyen’s Belgian courtroom drama The Verdict (Het Vonnis) (2013), the court offers what amounts to a truth and reconciliation committee on Europe’s involvement in foreign wars, where what appears to be good intentions eventually becomes a humbling experience that spells disaster. While Pedersen’s men are present in the courtroom, much like the way police fill courtrooms involving one of their own, it becomes an open-ended yet somewhat absurd question for judges and prosecutors in Copenhagen to grasp the harrowing conditions under which soldiers in Afghanistan operate, where one man can’t be held accountable for the madness of war, yet the film was largely instigated by just such an incident in 2012, Danish officer faces trial over alleged killing of civilian, a case that probably never went to trial. Instead this is more likely a supposition, asking if preserving the lives of your own men in combat is worth the calculated risk of killing civilians. Certainly your own men are appreciative and can point to your actions for saving their lives, but those that were killed have families as well, where their perspective often goes unheard. In this film, at least we consider the far-reaching and long-term consequences, which is certainly a more conscientious and healthy way to approach the subject.
Combat
mission in Afghanistan is over | The Post
July 22, 2013
According to military figures,
Denmark sent 9,500 personnel to Afghanistan between January 2002 and 1 July
2013. Although the last combat troops have now left Afghanistan, a number of
Danish defence personnel will remain in the country in order to train the
Afghan police force and to man special units and tanks. According to reporting
by Politiken newspaper, the roughly 300 Danish soldiers who will remain in
Helmand province will participate in combat if necessary but will have the
primary focus of securing the withdrawal of other Western forces between now
and the end of 2014.
Review: A War --
Vulture David Edelstein
Tobias Lindholm’s A War is an upending morality play centering on Danish soldiers in Afghanistan, where their country (a member of the NATO alliance) has had a strong military presence since 2002. Who knew? The Danes, I guess, who can’t be too happy that they’re still having to pay for the Bush-Cheney administration’s cock-ups in the early days of the invasion. In the movie, they don’t seem too plugged into Afghan culture. The protagonist, Claus Pedersen (Pilou Asbaek), is a commander who commits, depending on your perspective, a tragic mistake or a war crime — or both.
Pedersen’s squad is based in rural Afghanistan and charged with protecting civilians from assaults by the Taliban. He’s an unusually hands-on commander, embarking on patrols with his men even when he could stay on the base. He’s there when one of his company steps on an IED, loses part of a limb, and bleeds out in agony. Later, a traumatized soldier named Lasse begs to leave, but Pedersen tells him — gently but firmly — that he can’t return to Denmark. Pedersen has to tell his own wife (Tuva Novotny) as much when she begs him to come home, saying their three sons need him. One boy is acting out toward other kids. The littlest one eats something he shouldn’t and is rushed to the hospital.
Pedersen is similarly firm when an Afghan man and his family risk their lives when they show up at the gates of the base and beg to be taken in. Earlier, the man’s young daughter had received medical treatment from the Danes for an infection, and he’s convinced the Taliban will retaliate by killing him, his wife, and his children. Pedersen won’t be swayed, though, even when a fellow officer, a woman, gazes at him, appalled. Regulations are regulations.
I won’t spell out what happens next, but it’s a worst-case scenario on many fronts — an attack from all directions in a civilian sector by Taliban soldiers whom the Danes can’t even see much less count. Lindholm’s camera techniques — ultra-subjective, hand-held jitters and swerves — don’t seem fresh anymore, but his situation is novel, and crazy-making. That traumatized soldier he forced to stay is horribly wounded, and there’s no way a Medevac helicopter can land without information about the enemy’s location that Pedersen doesn’t have. Every choice is potentially disastrous. So-called “elementary rules of engagement” don’t seem so elementary anymore.
The last third of A War — set in Pedersen’s house and then a Danish courtroom — is in a different style than what has preceded it. It’s plain, prosaic, legalistic — a different movie. But, of course, the film’s two pieces are not meant to fit together. Pedersen’s lawyer, as well as the soldiers under his command, ask how people can pass judgment when they weren’t there, under fire. If it’s difficult to dismiss the fierce moral outrage of Pedersen’s female prosecutor, it’s almost impossible to root for a conviction. In both cases, humanity loses. But then, it has lost already.
I fear I’m making Lindholm seem more morally relativist than he is. Art is said to be “the politics of the impossible,” so he’s not required to pass sentence, to say whether he thinks Claus Pedersen deserves shame and prison and the designation of “war criminal.” What he is saying is that the man was out of his depth and that most if not all of us would be, too. That strikes me as an implicit condemnation of this particular occupation — even though, in interviews, Lindholm has insisted he’s taking no stand on the Western presence in Afghanistan. Maybe he really believes he’s not. In his other films — especially The Hunt, starring Mads Mikkelson as an unjustly shunned teacher, and A Hijacking, another thriller that comes down to terrible choices and ends on a bitterly tragic note — Lindholm finds a unique balance between social and individual responsibility. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
In any case, Pedersen clearly stands condemned in his own eyes. Although there isn’t a scene in which he weeps or shares his anguish, Asbaek (who will be seen this year in another psychologically fractured role, Pontius Pilate in the Ben-Hur remake) plays him as frozen in time and unlikely ever to emerge from under his protective shell. A War confirms the darkest, least mentionable secret of traumatized veterans — that what haunts them is not just what they saw and what was done unto them, but what they did.
Deep Focus: A War - Film Comment Michael Sragow, February 11. 2016
A harrowing, heart-rending portrait of a Danish company commander in Afghanistan, A War is named A War, not The War or simply War, for the same reason that Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm called his crackling film about Somali pirates A Hijacking (13). Without inflating any of it into sermonizing melodrama, this formidably talented writer-director finds the universal within the specific. He’s got great depth of focus, and even his peripheral vision is 20-20. At 38, he’s already a master at creating immersive dramatic environments, then making them resound with far-reaching implications, whether about the contradictions of a civilized nation sending its young men into combat, or the calamitous communication gap between European and Third World peoples. As he also demonstrated in the devastating script he wrote with Tomas Vinterberg for that director’s The Hunt (13), depicting a kindergarten teacher wrongly accused of child molestation, Lindholm is both hyper-observant about the immediate reality of torn-from-the-headline stories and exquisitely attuned to eternal quandaries of morality and character. While zeroing in on an inadvertent atrocity committed during the war in Afghanistan, Lindholm illuminates the modern paradox of enlightened men and women trying to maintain humane standards of behavior in pitched combat.
Earlier this week, at a preview screening for Academy members in Los Angeles, Lindholm said he had attempted to do the opposite of war films that dramatize the dehumanization of troops. Instead of going the route of (for example) Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, he aimed to humanize the troops. He said that’s why he made the family of the hero/antihero, Claus Michael Pedersen (Pilou Asbaek), a constant presence in the movie, both for the audience (with cross-cutting) and for Claus himself (with cell-phones). It will come as no surprise to fans of The Hunt or Lindholm’s scripts for the sensational TV political drama Borgen that he is marvelously natural at expressing the strains of marriage and parenthood. As Maria Pedersen, the Swedish actress Tuva Novotny offers an unsentimental portrait of domestic valor as she raises their two young sons and daughter. The children themselves are refreshingly and, at times, alarmingly spontaneous.
Lindholm accents the humanity not just in Pedersen’s home life, but also in Pedersen’s leadership of his troops and his perilous interplay with Afghan civilians. What’s daring about A War is that, while never “breaking bad,” Pedersen ends up making a battleground decision that costs nearly a dozen civilian lives—and, back home, tests the ethics and loyalty of his wife and comrades-in-arms. The aura it conjures is both gritty and eerie.
This movie rescues the concept of “the fog of war” from cliché and overuse. Here the fog of war is both a mind-clouding physical condition and an ethical miasma. Yet Lindholm sets up his conflicts lucidly and unsparingly. In Afghanistan, Claus dispatches men on numbingly repetitive patrols. They make themselves vulnerable to IEDs and the Taliban in order to protect peaceful Afghans and, at least in theory, enable them to rebuild their shattered communities. Lindholm clarifies from the beginning that in this rural waste strewn with hidden explosives, and with enemies lurking behind any ridge, idealistic goals become hopelessly abstract to fighting men.
Claus commands a mixture of fragile neophytes and battle-hardened veterans. They are mostly played by real veterans—and even the roughest and toughest among them look vulnerable as they roam through rock and sand in what used to be called “Indian file.” One Dane takes a comrade’s designated spot in the patrol line, gets blown up, and bleeds out; his death overwhelms the man who switched positions with him, Lasse (Dulfi Al-Jabouri), who begs to be sent home. Claus neither cheers Lasse up with patriotic bromides nor slaps him back into his senses like a latter-day Patton. Instead, he urges Lasse to place a private call to his younger sister, sip some coffee, then stay behind and work in camp for a couple of weeks. Claus himself fills in for Lasse on patrol—a humane act that puts undue pressure on his own nerves and stamina and sets a disaster in motion.
Via Claus’s eyes and binoculars—and his smarts and sensitivity—Lindholm captures the horrors and absurdities his troops face. In the absence of interpreters, even a poignant interchange threatens to become a catastrophe, as a father begs the soldiers to treat his daughter’s burned arm. Lindholm inserts one instance of utter military clarity: a Danish sniper takes down a motorcycling rifleman who digs up an IED and uses a child as a human shield. Both Claus’s commands and Lindholm’s direction are precise and analytical. In routine war movies, Claus’s dispassion would be an expression of callousness: he keeps his back to the target as he mutters orders to the sniper. In A War, it’s a sign of sanity and professionalism. Later, Lindholm presents the men’s celebration of their kill without apology, and without glorification, either. Lindholm allows audiences to absorb complex, tense situations like a roadside checkpoint where Danes toss Afghans from their cars and subject them to humiliating searches before allowing them to move on. This movie starts at the point where naïve antiwar movies end. It isn’t about learning that war is hell. It’s about soldiers and civilians alike struggling to operate in a world they know is hell.
At home, Lindholm frees the parallel tensions in Pedersen’s family from any melodramatic or sentimental hype. Normal daily life is filled with more than enough pressure for a mother of three. The middle Pedersen child, Julius (Adam Chessa), fights with a classmate (and takes a bite out of his shoulder), refuses to walk into his school without his mother, and taunts his preternaturally calm, slightly older sister Figne (Elise Søndergaard). She’s not quite mature enough to help her mother oversee the cute little toddler of the family, Elliott (Andreas Buch Borgwardt), who’s as difficult to anticipate as kittens. Lindholm judiciously deploys a mobile, handheld camera on both the front line and the home front. Rather than cover every hidden corner of a crisis, he puts viewers in the position of a soldier pinned down by fire—or a mother unable to find a moment’s peace without her youngest child gaily swallowing a batch of pills. Lindholm realizes that the beauty of this documentary-like technique is counter-intuitive: it lies in subjectivity, not objectivity, in allowing an audience to take on the stripped nerves of a fighter who can’t see his enemy, and the nerve-rattling uncertainty of a mother who can’t keep her eyes on her boys every single minute.
The movie’s setup is strong and simple, but its reverberations are challenging and mysterious. Lindholm holds to the Danes’ perspective without shortchanging the plight of Afghans caught in the crossfire between them and the Taliban. According to military protocols, Claus must refuse shelter in his base camp to the family of the burned girl, though he knows it spells almost certain doom for them. The repercussions of that act, along with the traumatized Lasse’s return to battle and Claus’s sixth sense for trouble brewing back home, may affect this compassionate leader’s judgment. During a brutal ambush, his core belief that he must save every man he can under his command puts him into adrenaline overdrive. Lindholm walks us so surely into Claus’s mindset that we’re as surprised as he is when he gets charged with a war crime. His homecoming is bittersweet, emphasis on the bitter. He and Maria seem startled when his defense lawyer (Søren Malling) says that as a matter of law, he’s a man who killed eleven innocent people.
The casualness of the Danish courtroom allows the unpretentious profundity of this film to flower. As his shrewd attorney and the no-nonsense prosecutor (Charlotte Munck) thrust and parry, and as his men exude silent support from the gallery, Claus confronts the unforeseen consequences of his group survival instinct—the awful mute evidence of atrocity resulting from a decent commander’s effort to preserve his troops. As Afghanistan comes to Denmark, the war there enters a super-rational Western legal battleground. It’s as if we’re witnessing the quiet collision of two worlds.
Lindholm has the clarity and nuance of a gifted social novelist and the rare filmmaking ability to get his complicated perceptions on the screen. If he were adapting a sprawling war novel we might sense him organizing and editing incidents and simplifying their meanings. But putting together an original script from bits and pieces of real war stories, working in full collaboration with his actors and non-actors, Lindholm has created a movie with just the right amount of heft.
The entire ensemble helps this writer-director fill the screen with double- and triple-decker feelings, but there are two supporting standouts: Novotny is a wonder as she hides her burdens with forced gaiety on the phone to her man, and Dar Salim roots the film in warmth and sanity as Claus’s best friend Najib. In his blisteringly honest courtroom testimony, Najib tells the prosecutor, “You don’t know what it’s like to be out there,” and Salim makes every syllable sting. (Salim and Malling as well as Asbaek did sterling work on Borgen.)
Asbaek fully inhabits the pivotal role and provides the protean sensibility that drives the movie to its powerhouse finish. The way Asbaek plays Claus, he uncannily picks up on his wife’s mixed signals and domestic difficulties over the phone, and when he does get home, he plays easily with all three of his children—something we rarely see in films about battle-hardened warriors. He’s such a magnetic actor that he effortlessly dominates a scene even when he’s ceding it to others—as when Salim’s sympathetic Najib grabs the phone to lighten the mood with Claus’s son Julius (who charmingly tells an awful joke).
Lindholm and Asbaek have forged one of the great filmmaker-actor partnerships in contemporary cinema. In Borgen, Asbaek is superb at exploring the dark corners and unusual, inchoate tenderness of an ultra-savvy and articulate character. For Lindholm’s big-screen adventures he plays characters who are anything but slick. In A Hijacking he’s a magnet for audience sympathy as the hijacked ship’s cook, an endomorphic Everyman who grows gaunter and more elusive as the film goes along. He provides the emotional high point when he croons a traditional Danish song, mostly to himself, to mark his daughter’s birthday. In A War, Asbaek is dynamic as a leader who wants to do the right thing but will never be able to square his capacious, deeply embedded empathy with the primal urges to protect his own men and his family.
At the L.A. screening, Lindholm told the audience that he didn’t let the cast see the last five pages of the script, and that he’d shot two endings. It’s a testament to his filmmaking and emotional sophistication that he used bits and pieces of each version in the final film.
When the judge (played by a retired Danish jurist) delivers her verdict at the climax of A War, a welter of emotions wash across Asbaek’s face. Sadness and confusion bleed into each other. You know he’ll never be the same. Lindholm’s film makes us measure the price combat exacts in the conscience, heart and soul of one valiant commander. Asbaek carries the fate of the earth in his furrowed brow. His anguished eyes will follow you home.
Venice Review: Tobias Lindholm's Bruising, Brooding 'A Wa ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
A War locates the fine line between duty and war crime JR Jones from The Reader
Joshua Reviews Tobias Lindholm's A War [Theatrical Review] Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast
Slant Magazine [Clayton Dillard]
Film-Forward.com [Christopher Bourne]
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Independent Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]
NISIMAZINE Zuzanna Grajzer
Denmark’s Oscar-Nominated ‘A War’ Is A Smart, Sensitive, Troubling War Movie Charles Bramesco from Uproxx
The Film Stage [Tommaso Tocci]
World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]
'A War': The issues at stake are more complex than the film ... Peter Rainer from The Christian Science Monitor
Spectrum Culture [JC Macek III]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Angus Wolfe Murray]
War (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk
Review of the Blu-ray Ryan
Keefer
A
War · Film Review A War is almost too measured in its ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club
The Coops Review [Freda Cooper]
FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]
Tobias Lindholm's 'A War' - Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl from The Village Voice
Director Tobias Lindholm Discusses Meeting With Taliban ... Chloe Schildhause interview from Yahoo, February 13, 2016
Interview:
Tobias Lindholm and Pilou Asbaek on Waging “A ... Stephen Saito interview from The Moveable Feast,
February 9, 2016
Foreign
Oscar Nominee Tobias Lindholm Invites Sympathy ... Ryan Lattanzio interview from indieWIRE,
February 9, 2016
Academy Awards 2016: 'A War' director Tobias Lindholm ... Mark Olsen interview from The LA Times, February 14, 2016
PSIFF
2016—A WAR (2015): Q&A With Tobias Lindholm Michael Guillen interview from The Evening
Class, January 14, 2016
The
AFI FEST Interview: A WAR Director Tobias Lindholm October 25, 2015
Hollywood Reporter [Boyd van Hoeij]
A
War review – nailbiting tension, suffocating stillness | Film ... Mark Kermode from The Observer, also seen here:
A
War review - The Guardian
A
War review – standard issue Afghan war drama | Film ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
The Independent (Geoffrey Macnab)
A War, film review: Fighting to hold on to humanity in ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent
A War - The Telegraph Tim Robey
The London Economic [Miranda Schiller]
Irish Film Critic [Alex Saveliev]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
Movie review: Oscar-nominated 'A War' is a low-key and
effective morality tale Rob
Thomas from The Capital Times
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Seattle
News and Events | 'A War' Is an Earnest, Danish ... Robert Horton from The Seattle Weekly
Review:
'A War' - Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan, also seen here: Review:
'A War' effectively shows the havoc that combat ...
A War Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny
Review:
'A War' Tracks a Conflict from Battle Zone to Court ... Nicolas Rapold from The New York Times
A War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Danish oficer faces trial over alleged killing of civilian Søren Sjøgren, May 1, 2012
Denmark
Rallies Public Behind Afghan War - WSJ
Alistair Macdonald from The Wall
Street Journal, February 24, 2010
Armadillo:
the Afghanistan war documentary that shocked ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Guardian, June 3, 2010
Afghanistan:
When Even the Danes Turn on the War... - The ... Harvey Morris from The New York Times, March 13, 2012
The
Danish engagement in Afghanistan
Ministry of Defense, March 20, 2015
Linklater, Richard
Film
Reference profile by Robin Wood
Once, in Hollywood, directors
were anonymous (despite the fact that their names appeared on many
films): I was not aware of Howard Hawks or Leo McCarey until very late in their
careers, despite the fact that I had seen a number of their films. Then, in the
brief heyday of the Auteur theory, directors became briefly important:
some filmgoers, at least, became aware of their names. In contemporary
Hollywood, directors are largely superfluous. Aside from one or two
tenacious auteurs like Scorsese, what does it matter anymore who
directed what? Hollywood films today are, for the most part, produced by
cine-illiterate corporations and directed (apparently) by anyone who happens to
wander onto the set. They are made by technicians, the directors of
"stunts," and the special-effects department.
It is in this context that the
careers of several courageous young independent filmmakers, with the nerve to
reveal certain seemingly obsolete or unwelcome qualities like integrity,
conscience, and personal vision, have to be considered: I have in mind
especially Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki, and Richard Linklater. All three are
clearly auteurs in that their films are thematically and stylistically
consistent and recognizable; but the same could be said of Ken Russell or David
Lynch, so that one should add that their work is also distinguished by real
intelligence. It is certainly arguable that Safe (Haynes), The Doom
Generation (Araki), and Before Sunrise (Linklater) are, Scorsese
aside, the three best American films of the 1990s. Each now has a following,
and so long as their living arrangements don't require a house in Beverly Hills
and more than one swimming pool, there seems no reason why they should not
continue to make the finest American films currently being produced.
One may begin at (so far) the
end, with Before Sunrise, an oasis in the desert of contemporary
Hollywood where one may again breathe fresh air and drink unpolluted water. A
film built upon the long take, by a director who trusts and works with his
actors for character and nuance, instead of relying on TV-style editing; a film
that expresses, at every point, a refinement, a grace, a sensibility one
believed long ago destroyed by the advance of corporate capitalism;
incidentally, a film that begins with Purcell (Dido and Aeneas) and
(almost) ends with Bach (the Goldberg Variations): one could not predict such a
film, not only from the Hollywood context, but from Linklater's previous work,
intelligent and distinctive as that is. One also wonders whether anything like
it can be done again, given the feebleness of public response and the
half-hearted polite interest of most reviewers. At least it was honored at the
Berlin Film Festival, but I have not found it on a single critic's list of the
best films of 1995 (except my own private one, where it has first place).
With its Vienna setting,
including a visit to the Prater, and its overriding concern with the redefinition
of romantic love, it seems inevitable to compare it with an earlier
masterpiece, a film of equal delicacy, subtlety, and emotional fineness,
Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman—the differences being, of course,
more important than the parallels. In Letter, "romantic love"
entailed lifetime commitment (even when unreciprocated), an existence sustained
solely by illusion, and ultimate tragedy; but the basis for that was the
subordinate position of women, their complementary options of wife or prostitute,
both selling their services. "Romantic love," as fantasy, represented
the heroine's only means of transcending the ignominy of her situation. Before
Sunrise redefines romantic love in a world where the lovers meet on a level
of full equality, where permanence of any kind and on either side is uncertain
and no longer necessarily desirable. Everyone with whom I have discussed the
film asks what is implied by the ending: Will they or won't they keep their
date in Vienna six months later? I think the more interesting question the film
raises implicitly is, Would it be better if they did or if they didn't? Is it
better to imprison yourself in the still-dominant conventions of "the
couple" (marriage, family, permanence), or to keep fresh the memory of one
perfect, magical night, and go on from there? The film's refusal to answer either
question perhaps accounts for its commercial failure: audiences still seem to
resent being left in a state of uncertainty, even though most of their members
live in one.
Despite its extreme difference, Before
Sunrise has certain aspects in common with its two predecessors, Slacker
and Dazed and Confused. All three take place in less than twenty-four
hours; each presents a world in which nothing is certain anymore and where no
future is guaranteed; although each is situated within a single town or city,
all three are about wandering; in all three, the characters are essentially or
literally homeless, if only for the time period of the film. In Slacker,
the only home besides cheap, impermanent apartments is that of the first
character (aside from Linklater himself, the stranger whose arrival in town
initiates the chain of interlocking, overlapping episodes), who is arrested and
removed from it for deliberately running down and killing his own mother. In Dazed
and Confused, home is something to be escaped from, and in Before
Sunrise two people, strangers without money in a foreign city, spend the
night wandering the streets. Their attraction to each other clearly has little
to do with any possible domestic future.
All three films are distinguished
by Linklater's complex relationship to the characters and the action,
delicately poised between sympathy and critical distance. His characters are
neither indulged nor held up to ridicule, they are presented generously but
quite unsentimentally. The various "slackers" of the first film are
frequently bizarre and slightly absurd, but this is understood in terms of
their alienation from a culture that offers them no hope and breeds paranoia. Dazed
and Confused (the least unconventional of the three, and the one commercial
success) is at once modeled on and an antidote to American Graffiti,
without a vestige of that film's condescending, audience-flattering
"cuteness." It also never descends into nostalgia for "the best
days of your life." It depicts quite uncompromisingly the brutality and
stupidity of initiation rituals, the variously corrupted and brutalized seniors
using the (relatively) innocent young as the victims of their own frustrations,
their acquired sadism, the physical cruelty of the males echoed in the females'
desire to humiliate their juniors. Indeed, "initiation," in a very
real sense, is enacted in one of the plot-threads, wherein a freshman learns,
as a way to "belonging," the destructive behavior of his elders. One
character, despite severe pressures from both his coach and his peers, manages
to preserve his integrity—by refusing to sign a paper promising to forswear
drugs and alcohol. In the context Linklater creates, it is a heroic gesture.
Finally, one must acknowledge
Linklater's brilliant work with actors, whether the huge cast of
non-professionals in Slacker, the multiple narratives of Dazed and
Confused, or the marvelously subtle, flexible and nuanced performances of
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise.
Richard Linklater -
Filmmaker - Biography.com
biography
All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Ankeny
Richard Linklater • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Brian Price from Senses of Cinema, July 25, 2003
Richard Linklater - Movies, Bio
and Lists on MUBI
Cosmic Babble: Waking Life | Richard Linklater - Film Comment Chris Chang, September 10, 2001
Good Vibrations (WAKING LIFE) | Jonathan Rosenbaum October 26, 2001
To Live or Clarify the Moment: Rick Linklater's Waking Life • Senses of ... Kent Jones from Senses of Cinema, March 13, 2002
reverse shot : online : summer 2004 Linklater Symposium
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum Spur of the Moment, Before Sunset, July
02, 2004
Profile: Richard Linklater John Patterson from The Guardian, July 17, 2004
BFI | Sight & Sound | Debrief Encounter Nick James on Before Sunset from Sight and Sound, August 2004
Finding
Freedom the Second Time Around: The Politics of Before ... Finding Freedom the Second Time Around: The
Politics of Before Sunset, by Kevin B. Lee from Senses of Cinema, October
28, 2004
Richard
Linklater - Texas Monthly
Katy Vine, December 2005
Clearly,
Clearly, Dark-Eyed Donna: Time and A Scanner Darkly ... Nathan Kosub from Senses of Cinema, November 5, 2006
From Slacker to Dazed and Confused to Bernie: I ... - Slate Magazine I Watched Every Richard Linklater Movie, by Seth Stevenson from Slate, April 26, 2012
Richard Linklater by David T. Johnson • Senses of Cinema Mary Harrod book review, September 2012
The One Night Stand That Wasn’t: Before Sunrise and Before Sunset‘s Jesse and Celine Carleen Tibbetts from Bitch Flicks, May 31, 2013
The Flattening of Celine: How Before Midnight Reduces a Feminist Icon Molly McCaffrey from Bitch Flicks, July 2, 2013
Moment To Moment - The New Yorker Nathan Heller, June 30, 2014, also seen here: Why Richard Linklater Makes Movies
Richard Linklater Reviews His Filmography | Vanity Fair Mike Hogan, July 8, 2014
The
Films of Richard Linklater, Ranked Worst to Best | IndieWire Max O’Connell, July 10, 2014
The Bad Mamas of Contemporary Cinema Mara Gasbarro Tasker from Bitch Flicks, August 1, 2014
Boyhood (Featuring Girlhood) Robin Hitchcock from Bitch Flicks, September 18, 2014
Richard
Linklater And The Artistic Restraint Of 'Boyhood' - Forbes Mark Hughes, February 19, 2015
7
Things You Didn't Know About Richard Linklater – IFC K. Thor Jensen, February 19, 2015
Richard
Linklater by Ethan Hawke: TIME 100 | Time.com April 15, 2015
6
Essential Films According to Richard Linklater - No Film School V. Renée, November 4, 2015
Richard
Linklater on His 'Dazed and Confused' Sequel: 'It's a First ... Marlow Stern from The Daily Beast, January 28, 2016
Richard
Linklater Still Dreams of Playing the Outfield - Men's Journal Reeves Wiedeman, March 2016
Richard
Linklater's Everybody Wants Some an ode to baseball | SI.com Ali Fenwick from Sports Illustrated, March 11, 2016
Richard Linklater on Baseball, College Life and His New Film The New York Times, March 12, 2016
Richard
Linklater: A Humanist Director | Southern Fried Karma June 28, 2016
The
Philosophy of Richard Linklater - Study Breaks Magazine Jesse Sisler, March 29, 2016
A
Beginner's Guide to Richard Linklater | Consequence of Sound Blake Goble, March 30, 2016
A Letter From Nicole Perlman Austin Film Festival, March 30, 2016
Behind
the Camera: Richard Linklater | Highsnobiety Brian Papish, March 31, 2016
Louis Black on Making a Film About Richard Linklater's Obsession ... Julia Felthensal from Vogue, August 4, 2016
Obsessed
with Boyhood: The Latent Misogyny Running Rampant in Richard Linklater’s Films Maya Bastian from Bitch Flicks, November 30, 2016
Richard Linklater on the Future of the Austin Film Society: “This is the ... Erik Luers from Filmmaker magazine, March 14, 2017
SOMA Magazine
» Archive » The Slacker Richard Linklater
Cale Finta, July/August 2017
TSPDT - Richard
Linklater They Shoot Films,
Don’t They
Mindjack interview with Linklater Interview by Jon Lebkowsky (1992)
Hanging
Out with Richard Linklater: On Directing, subUrbia and ... Interview by Tim Ryhs from Moviemaker magazine, February 1, 1997
You Can't Hold Back the Human Spirit: An Interview With Richard Linklater Interview by David Walsh from the World
Socialist Web Site, March 27, 1998
FUTURE
5: Richard Linklater, “Slacker” for the New ... - IndieWire Interview by Eugene Hernandez and
Anthony Kaufman from indieWIRE, January 12, 2001
reverse shot : online : summer 2004 Interview by Michael Koresky and Jeff
Reichert, Summer 2004
'I've never been
in the firing line like this before' - The Guardian Xan Brooks interview May 22, 2006
Richard Linklater
· Interview · The A.V. Club Noel
Murray interview June 14, 2006
Culture Pulp Comic Strip Interview Mike Russell comic strip interview July 16, 2006
Lost in America: Richard Linklater Interview - Film Comment Gavin Smith interview, July/August 2006
Grazed and Abused Rob Nelson interview from Mother Jones magazine, October 27, 2006
The
Schizoid Man - Filmmaker Magazine Scott
Macaulay from Filmmaker magazine,
Winter, 2006
The film that changed my life: Richard Linklater Hermione Hobe interview from The Observer, April 11, 2010
Richard
Linklater - Page - Interview Magazine Matthew McConaughey interview of Richard
Linklater, July 8, 2014
'I
Have No Excuses': An Interview with Richard Linklater | Hazlitt Adam Nayman interview, April 20, 2016
Richard
Linklater's Alamo Drafthouse Memories - Austin Monthly - May ... Jason Heid interview from Austin Monthly, April 20, 2017
Ranked 31st on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best Directors
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Richard Linklater - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SLACKER
A little like David Byrne's True
Stories, minus the music and plot, this is a freewheeling,
documentary-style celebration of the bizarrely normal, charmingly oddball, and
terminally hip residents of Austin, Texas. It starts with a guy boring a taxi
driver to death with talk about parallel realities, shifts gear when the
backseat philosopher sees a woman hit by a car, then swerves into comic absurdity
when the victim's son is arrested for her murder. And that's just the first
five minutes. After this, one character from each scene provides the link to
the next, as we encounter a string of bar-room philosophers, New Agers, old
anarchists, and other weirdly entertaining specimens - one of whom is hawking
what she claims is Madonna's cervical smear. At times, it's like watching
someone else's home movies, but there's something oddly compelling about such
studied eccentricity.
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
"Slacker" is a work of divine flakiness. The heart and soul of this small-budget gem by independent filmmaker Richard Linklater are devoutly given over to that deep, rich vein of crackpot Americana. Set in the college milieu of Austin, Tex., it presents a gaggle of anarchists, master's candidates, castoffs, drifters, parlor philosophers, all of whom talk, nonstop, for the sheer pleasure of hearing themselves talk. They talk because they have to; they're unburdening themselves, obsessed with the whirring of their own psychic gears.
The film's spirit is that of late-night radio call-in shows, where the log of the nation's consciousness is rolled over and all the hidden, crawly things underneath are caught in the bright flashlight's beam. The film was scripted, but it doesn't feel like it. In fact, it doesn't seem written at all; it's more like Linklater merely scribbled down transmissions received in the fillings of his teeth.
The film has no story per se or dramatic development; it's an orgy of wacko yammering -- Linklater's Tower of Babble. People enter the film, deliver their spiels, then disappear, never to be seen again. One gabs about his book on the Kennedy assassination called, tentatively, "Conspiracy a Go-Go, another about how NASA and the Soviets have conspired to hide the fact that we've been on the moon since the '50s, and still another about how, on Saturday morning cartoons the Smurfs, who are blue, are preparing children for the arrival of Krishna, who is also blue.
In one encounter a young man and his friends are chatting on a street corner when a stringy girl runs up enthusiastically, jar in hand, claiming that it contains Madonna's Pap smear. In another, a group of housemates enters the room of one who, during the night, had cleaned out all of his stuff and moved on, leaving only a stack of cryptically encoded postcards on the floor. The last one says simply, "Stay tuned for future episodes."
There's a relaxed openness to surprise in Linklater's direction; it's filmmaking without maps, or at least that's the impression it gives. Linklater moves from one exchange to the next with miraculous ease; it's the sort of seamlessness you find in the late films by Bunuel, in which the filmmaker seems capable of shifting narrative gears at will. Linklater's control seems all but invisible here. But this kind of stylistic lucidity can only be the result of determined calculation and planning. The kind of happy accidents he captures don't come about by accident.
Perhaps the special insight Linklater has into the muddled psyches of these disenfranchised, mostly white, mostly college-educated kids contributes to the film's lackadaisical poise. He knows his turf, and he identifies with the unstructured, going-nowhere lives. He celebrates their marginality, their dedication to not working, to just hanging out. As one character puts it, "I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it."
There is a genuine sensibility here, a sense of rebellion, connecting the lives of these fringe-dwellers, but it would evaporate instantly if any attempt were made to define it. That's its beauty -- its grungy amorphousness. In another age, these characters might have been hippies or anarchists; they have disdain for the so-called workaday establishment, but it's a passive resistance that they offer up. No programs, no platforms, just nonparticipation. One character's words might represent the whole mind-set: "Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy."
Of course, Linklater indicates, all this verbiage could amount to nothing more than an elaborate rationalization for doing nothing. But doing nothing, posing, pontificating and just getting by emerge here as chosen alternatives. These people are doing just what they want to do; they may be about 90 percent cracked, but they're free, and Linklater pays homage to their home-grown, wiggy independence. This is a work of scatterbrained originality, funny, unexpected and ceaselessly engaging.
Richard Linklater's Slacker
is a genuine American original that manages to work its low-key magic on an
infinitesimal budget of $23,000. Using a cast of about 100, Linklater's camera
prowls around his hometown of
In some ways it's like watching an old Monty Python episode, as they searched for the "link," or transition, that would lead from one vignette into another. Except that Slacker is ALL links, and the transitions are effortless. Linklater's roving camera just floats from one eccentric with too much time on his/her hands to another, as these folks spout their theories -- in coffee shops, bars, libraries and private residences -- on every conceivable subject, from UFOs to JFK assassination theories to Elvis sightings to Charles Whitman to whether you can really tell the difference between television and first-hand experience.
The movie's serendipitous structure mirrors the free-associative imaginations of its many characters. Most of them are in their 20s, at that awkward stage just after college where they're not quite sure what to do with themselves. So they kill time in limbo, sitting around talking and thinking and drinking and smoking and theorizing and dreaming.
"I may live
badly," says one of the scraggly, stringy haired denizens of this
Whenever one of them encounters another, there are the usual stammers and awkward pauses, and then somebody asks: "Hey, well, what have you been doing?" The answer, invariably, is something like: "Not much," or "Just lollygaggin' around," or "Been gettin' lots of sleep."
And speaking of sleep: Slacker has the fluid structure of a dream -- inspired by Luis Buñuel's surrealist The Phantom of Liberty. It begins with a dream-image that seems like something out of a Wim Wenders movie: A man asleep, his head leaning against a bus window as the sun comes up, the world outside passing by like a dreamscape. That man, the one who sets the movie in motion, is played by writer-director Linklater. Once he awakens and gets off the bus, he climbs into a taxi and starts the picture spinning.
"Man, I just had the weirdest dream..." he tells the uninterested cabbie. "There was nothin' goin' on, just staring out of windows..." And then he got this idea. "You know in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow and they do that little dance at the crossroads and they think about going in all those directions and they end up going in that one direction?" he sputters.
"All those other directions, just because they thought of them, became separate realities. I mean, they just went on from there and lived the rest of their lives... you know, entirely different movies, but we'll never see it because we're kind of trapped in this one reality restriction type of thing." (Although Slacker was made years before somebody with way too much time on his hands discovered the "connection" between Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz, it was probably one of these guys who stumbled onto it. Hey, and come to think of it, the main character in Linklater's next movie, Dazed and Confused, is named Pink -- after the band... Conspiracy or coincidence?)
Slacker is like a hundred little movies strung together. It floats freely between realities, giving us glimpses into the cracks between the ones we usually see on screen. People in this movie do all the things we normally do, but characters in movies never seem to have time for: lay around, read the paper, hang out, have inane conversations, go for walks, pass the time of day.
That Wizard of Oz-type crossroads comes into play shortly after Linklater's character disembarks from his taxi and witnesses an apparent accident: A station wagon runs over an old lady with a bag of groceries at an intersection. But at this point, just when it seems something is about to "happen," instead of closing in on the action, Linklater's camera slowly recedes.
We eavesdrop from an ever-increasing distance as the bus guy, a jogger and a passing motorist -- all confused -- stop to help, while other cars zip by on the main thoroughfare. The set-up emphasizes how each of these lives is following its own set of vectors, intersecting or ricocheting off of others for only a moment before caroming off in some other direction.
Finally, when the camera is about half a block down the street, the hit-and-run car pulls into the frame below and we follow the driver into his apartment, where he enacts a series of private rituals. Turns out, he's just run over his mother.
That's the closest the movie gets to a "dramatic incident," and it's something that actually happened to somebody who lived in Linklater's apartment building, which is also where this scene was shot. Linklater has said he was always intrigued by what this fellow did when he returned to the apartment and just waited for the police to find him.
Those moments -- of waiting, daydreaming, vegging out, hypothesizing and generally mulling things over -- are what make up Slacker. The movie could be described as a series of comic digressions upon digressions, sort of like Nicholson Baker's brilliantly and infuriatingly funny, footnote-riddled novel, The Mezzanine.
For those of us whose daydreaming brains are in synch with Linklater's, Slacker is a source of endless fascination. And even if you're not particularly interested in one character, you know it'll be only a few moments before another comes along to distract you. As one of them says: "I've got band practice in, like... five hours. So, I thought I'd be moseying along..."
Reverse Shot review Eric Hynes
Slacker
(1989) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Nathaniel Thompson
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr
Reverse Shot review Joanne Nucho, Mysterious Object at
Noon
meets Slacker
Images
(Kendahl Cruver) review
not coming to a
theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
DVD Verdict
(Bill Gibron) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Ryan Arthur) review [4/5]
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[3/5]
DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser) dvd review [5/5] [Criterion Collection]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review
[4/5] [Criterion Collection] Brad Cook
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Town
(Christopher Long) dvd review Special Edition
DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen
Kevin Patterson retrospective [3/4]
The Spinning Image (Daniel Auty) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2/5] also seen here: Movie Vault [Goatdog]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Slacker: 15 Years Later including interviews from some of the participants, by Brian Raftery from Salon, July 5, 2006
Austin Chronicle (Chris Walters) review [4/5]
Washington Post (Dana Thomas) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DAZED
AND CONFUSED B+ 91
You
know, the ‘68 Democratic convention was probably the most bitchin’ time I ever
had in my life. Hey guys, one more
thing: This summer, when you’re being
inundated by all the American bicentennial Fourth of July brouhaha, don’t
forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of
slave-owning aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.
—Ms. Stroud, teacher (Kim Krizan)
All
I’m saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my
life, remind me to kill myself.
—Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London)
Linklater’s first successful film SLACKER (1991), an unconventional narrative made on a budget of just $23,000, along with Soderbergh’s earlier SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE (1989), made for just over $1 million dollars, helped usher in a new era of low budget, independent filmmaking of the 1990’s, opening the doors for other newcomers like Kevin Smith who was able to make CLERKS (1994) for $230,000, but also Quintin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) or Larry Clark’s KIDS (1995), altering the concept of what it costs to make good films. A decade later Soderbergh had a similar effect by going digital, redefining the filmmaking process by significantly lowering the expenses, in effect, permanently altering the look of films today. Much like his predecessor, DAZED AND CONFUSED represents another near plotless film that takes place in less than 24 hours on what is essentially the last day of high school on May 26, 1976, using a slew of undiscovered or non-professional actors on a free-wheeling, multi-layered expedition throughout the day and night looking for something to do. Reflective of small town values in the heartland of Texas, kids will go to any extremes to avoid boredom, the common denominator in just about every kid’s life at this age, turning it into a hilarious road movie of sorts, using a potent, electrically charged rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack that to some may sound like heavy metal shitkicker music, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, etc, bands that shortly afterwards went into a sharp decline from their decadent, drug-tinged road activities, where the excess was a prelude to punk, though War and Dr. John are the only featured bands that are not all-white, as there’s an absence of R & B or soul music that otherwise dominated the times in urban cities, like Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Earth, Wind, & Fire, or Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. But that’s a whole other story, as the only black kid featured in the cast is Melvin (Jason O. Smith), a guy seen playing craps in the hallways that also plays football and hangs with a white crowd.
Shot in Austin, Texas, the film is one of the few that actually provides a window into the way its residents live, especially those living on the economic margins feeling an apathy or cultural disconnectedness from mainstream society. With a rich mix of characters, and choice dialogue, the film takes a rather absurdist glimpse into the social rituals of high school, especially the existing power dynamic that pits upper class seniors against lowly freshmen, two groups that in many other parts of the country simply ignore one another, as freshmen would never be worth the time of day to many seniors. But here, seniors get a chance to prey on a weaker species, using an age-old hazing tradition to pounce on young freshmen, chasing them down in cars, singling them out for sadistic thrashings, attacking in organized groups, using wooden paddles to whack their backsides, where freshmen are expected to take their medicine as a rite of passage. While the freshmen view it as an idiotic ritual, the seniors feel as if it’s their just rewards for finishing high school, as they’re finally liberated from spending untold numbers of hours in wretchedly boring classes with teachers they simply had no interest in, where most of the time it felt like drudgery. On this final day of school many seniors aren’t even in the classrooms, yet they’re wandering the halls at will discussing what they’re going to do this summer. Free of the 50’s nostalgia of AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), the film uses a similar structure, bringing together a large gathering of kids in search of a party, spending most of the time following groups in cars or walking down the street, meeting at local hang-outs, like burger joints, drive-ins, pool halls, bars and liquor stores, all the while listening to blaring music coming out of the car radios. While it reverts back to simpler times, the film could almost be described as an anthem to drunk driving, as it shows little regard for the hazards of driving while stoned or intoxicated, where this kind of behavior is deemed as just another one of the male rite of passages. Most of the time, however, nothing is happening, with no plots, or even subplots, as instead they drive around aimlessly and congregate in small groups waiting for something to happen, where they’ll drink beer, smoke a joint, and hope they run into someone who can tell them where a party is.
Opening with a slow-motion shot of an orange muscle car pulling into a high school parking lot to the sounds of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” Aerosmith - Sweet Emotion - YouTube (4:40), the idea of cruising sets the film in motion, with Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” Alice Cooper - School's Out - YouTube (4:33) igniting a mad rush of freedom, leaving behind the empty hallways and lockers that are suddenly turned into dead zones. With boy seniors spreading out in all directions searching for incoming freshmen to flog, we witness the particularly obnoxious and domineering behavior of the senior girls, none more authoritarian than Parker Posey as Darla, ordering the incoming freshmen girls to the ground in the school parking lot where they can be covered with ketchup, mustard, flour, and raw eggs, with some forced to propose to senior boys. While it all unravels in a confusing and haphazard manner, with a host of characters continually entering and exiting the screen, two characters initially stand out, Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), the star quarterback who will be back for another year, who basically plays football in order to get laid, ordered to sign a pledge prohibiting the use of alcohol or drugs over the summer, which all the other players apparently signed, but not Pink, so he continually gets berated by his football coach. The other is a mirror version in the younger Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), an 8th grade star pitcher who wonders with his friends what high school life will be like, dreaming of high school girls “putting out,” where he is singled out by the seniors for paddling after his sister tells the boys to go easy on him, where the worst of the offenders is Ben Affleck as O’Bannion, a pathetic figure of a dimwitted senior that had to repeat his senior year. After they lay in wait for Mitch after a game, running him through the ringer, Pink gives him a ride afterwards, feeling sympathetic, inviting him to a party afterwards where one of his friend’s parents are expected to leave for a vacation. But when a beer keg arrives before they leave, his parents grow overly suspicious, changing their plans, which seemingly alters the plans of every kid in town, as the party will have to be relocated. Kids just drive around, cruising aimlessly, until finding out the new destination. Reportedly one-sixth of the film’s budget was spent on acquiring the rights to the array of 70’s musical songs, where the word “man” is said 203 times in the film, while the word “fuck” is used 59 times.
The notable pothead is Rory Cochrane as Ron Slater, an
easygoing, likable guy who is lit up throughout the film, who is willing to do
just about anything so long as weed is present, who goes on a few crazed
philosophical tangents, while a Woodward and Bernstein duo of intellectuals,
Adam Goldberg as Mike and Anthony Rapp as Tony, over-analyze just about
everything, usually accompanied by the redhead Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi, married
a decade later to American musician Beck), who inquisitively asks, “Which one of you had the theory about how
president Ford’s old football head injuries is affecting the economy?” After deciding on the need for more alcohol,
while swigging beer in the backseat, Mike decides he doesn’t want to go to law
school anymore, coming up with one of the memorable lines of the film when he
confesses abruptly, “I wanna dance!” Matthew
McConaughey as Wooderson is the older master of ceremonies, the ultimate party
animal who coined the phrase “all right, all right, all right” in this film, a
phrase he has used throughout his career, even at the Academy Awards, making it
sound downright sleazy, a guy who trolls high school years after he’s done with
it still searching for young girls, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” Standing in front of the Emporium, a local
pool hall and arcade for teenagers that is a central meeting point, kids simply
coalesce while drinking beer and listening to music, including Mitch, who is
welcomed by an older crowd, drinking beer and smoking marijuana for the first
time, where they go on a drunken neighborhood spree destroying mailboxes. To the sounds of Nazareth - Love Hurts -
YouTube (3:36), there are
also inevitable boy/girl link-ups, where Mitch gravitates to a sophomore girl
Julie (Catherine Morris), Tony becomes linked with an attractive incoming
freshman girl Sabrina (Christin
Hinojosa), seen earlier getting humiliated by Darla, while Wooderson has a
thing for redheads, exchanging phone numbers with none other than Cynthia, much
to the surprise of Woodward and Bernstein, as she’s the smartest and most
literate girl around. Running into his
middle school friends at the Emporium afterwards, they come up with a plan to
get revenge on O’Bannion, subjecting him to his own paint smear, dumping a can
of paint all over him, leaving him not only surprised, but embarrassed and
utterly humiliated. It’s the type of
prank that perfectly mirrors the same type of adolescent humor found in AMERICAN
GRAFITTI.
Once the Emporium closes, the mythical keg party finally
materializes on the outskirts of town outdoors in a park area under a Moon
Tower, which, of course, kids climb up for a sense of daring adventure. With a feeling of reckless abandon,
heightened by a clever musical soundtrack that includes the funky swamp music
of Dr. John, Dr. John - Right Place Wrong
Time - YouTube (2:54), kids finally have something to celebrate with
an anything goes kind of beer bust, where drugs of all nature instantly appear,
as kids literally spill onto the screen into a stream-of-conscious mosaic of
drug chatter and drunken machismo, where sloppy drunks inadvertently fall to
the ground in hysterics and psychedelic flower children sing spacey songs, like
Milla Jovovich as Michelle plunking her acoustic guitar while gazing at the
stars singing “The Alien Song,” MILLA JOVOVICH-"The
Alien Song (For Those Who Listen)" LIVE ... YouTube (4:27). While the party sequence is broken down into
several haphazard moments, Cynthia spouts philosophic about her every other
decade theory, “The fifties were boring.
The sixties rocked. And the
seventies—oh my God, they obviously suck.
Come on! Maybe the eighties will
be radical,” Mitch Kramer is seen wandering aimlessly through the crowd, eventually hooking up with Julie, before
being called a little Casanova by the seniors, actually a bit envious at the
little man’s smooth prowess with the ladies.
The two are seen making out under the stars later that night, while Mike
(“I feel like I’m being stalked by a Nazi.”) goes all ape-shit over an
obnoxious taunt, deciding he’s Mike Tyson for an instant, getting in a single
punch before being pummeled by a drunken redneck. Once the beer runs out, Tony drives Sabrina
home, giving her a sweet kiss good night, while Pink and the football gang
decides to relive old times smoking a joint on the 50-yard line. Of course, they are interrupted by security,
handed over to the coach, who berates Pink for hanging out with a bunch of
losers, reminding him of his priorities to the team. Pink gracefully exits back to his comrades in
crime, crumples up the pledge and tells the coach he might play football next
year, but his top priority of the summer is actually getting Aerosmith tickets
with his loser friends. With the dawn
already upon them, Mitch returns home only to find his mother still waiting up
for him, but despite the smell of alcohol she decides to be lenient this time
as he falls into his bed, with thoughts of everything that happened still
swirling around his head, putting on headphones playing Slow Ride- Foghat (Full
Version) - YouTube (8:16), while the football gang of stoners decide to head up the road and buy the
Aerosmith tickets while they can, where their future is an open book of blank
as yet unwritten pages.
School's breaking up for the summer of
'76. The seniors debate party politics while next term's freshmen run the
gauntlet of brutal initiation rites, barely comforted by the knowledge that
they'll wield the stick one day. No one's looking much farther ahead than that.
This has a free-wheeling, 'day-in-the-life-of' structure which allows
writer/director Linklater, in his second feature, to eavesdrop on an ensemble
cast without much in the way of dramatic contrivance. There's a quirky
counter-cultural intelligence at work: sympathy for those on the sidelines, and
a deadpan pop irony which places this among the hippest teenage movies. While
the camera flits between some two dozen youngsters (played by uniformly
excellent unknowns), Linklater allows himself to develop a handful of stories.
Seriously funny, and shorn of any hint of nostalgia or wish-fulfilment, this is
pretty much where it's at.
Dazed
and Confused | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Belonging to an international trend that might be called the plotless examination of bored teenagers, Richard Linklater's third feature (1993) begins right after the end of spring term in 1976; a lot of the stupidity it lingers over and criticizes (though nostalgia a la American Graffiti threatens to overwhelm the critique) has to do with the brutal hazing of junior high school kids by juniors and seniors. I enjoyed some performances (especially by Wiley Wiggins and Rory Cochrane) but hankered after the precise sense of place and the elliptical treatment of character that gave Linklater's Slacker some of its distinction; here one learns enough about the characters to realize how little Linklater knows about them, and so little about the location (despite the Texas license plates) that one often feels stranded in Anywhere, USA. What survives is a better-than-average teen movie but not much more, at least if you aren't a member of Linklater's generation. With Jason London and Milla Jovovich.
Dazed and Confused covers 24 hours in the lives of a group
of kids in a Texas town. It’s 1976, and it’s the last day of school – the day
juniors become seniors, and seniors are cast out into the world. We follow a
bewilderingly huge number of the kids through the afternoon, evening, night and
following morning as they party, listen to music, smoke dope, fight, kiss,
argue, cruise around in their cars. It’s like a less-nocturnal American
Graffiti, updated to the post-Vietnam era, with an Altmanesque interest
in everybody and everything that’s going on. It’s an upbeat film, one that
seems weirldy aimless on first viewing – but second time around the aimlessness
is what makes Dazed and Confused such a satisfyingly different film.
There’s no plot as such – there are plots and subplots, but they’re
extremely loose and underplayed, and some of them aren’t even resolved, at
least not in the way other high-school movies may have led you to expect.
Instead, this is a firmly character-based picture, and it works mainly because
the young actors are so well-chosen, such interesting types, who make each of
the kids believable, rounded, though not necessarily likeable individuals. It’s
no accident that so many of them (Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Matthew
McConaughey, Renee Zellweger, Joey Lauren Adams, Milla Jovovich) went on to
become much bigger names, though Wiley Wiggins, Anthony Rapp, and (especially)
Sasha Jenson Nicky Katt are at least as impressive. The soundtrack is equally
well-chosen and unobtrusive, resisting, like the film as a whole, the easy
clichs of retro-70s kitsch. Linklater is a sly film-maker, by no means
in-your-face but with a definite directorial plan – a plan which pays enormous
dividends to viewers who take the trouble to key into his unique film’s unique,
nimble rhythms.
Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused sets out to be a kind of American Graffiti for early-'90s slackers. While George Lucas' wistful 1973 comedy was set on the last night of summer in 1962 in a small California town, Linklater's shaggier, more lackadaisical film takes place on the last day (and night) of school in 1976 in a small Texas town. Both movies make extensive use pop music to evoke their respective periods. If American Graffiti's signature tune was the Beach Boys' "All Summer Long," Dazed and Confused's is Alice Cooper's "School's Out." (The Led Zep title tune isn't in the picture, although "Rock and Roll" is.) And just as American Graffiti, in its day, touched off a wave of nostalgia for the music and styles of the late '50s and early '60s (e.g., Happy Days), and Dazed and Confused displays a similar, almost archeological interest in the physical and cultural trappings of the mid-'70s -- the days just before pop music reached its nadir of slickness and decadence with disco, only to be wiped away by the cleansing scourge of punk.
Actually, you can hear the seeds of both in the movie's soundtrack, from bland and bloated mid-'70s corporate rock (Peter Frampton's "Do You Feel Like We Do," Rick Derringer's "Rock & Roll Hootchie Koo") to early pop-metal (Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," Kiss' "Rock & Roll All Nite") and snide and sassy proto-punk (the Runaways' "Cherry Bomb"). The soundtrack also features such '70s hallmarks as Aerosmith, Deep Purple, War, Ted Nugent, Black Oak Arkansas, Steve Miller, Lynyrd Skynryd, Seals & Crofts, Dr. John, ZZ Top, Thin Lizzy, Foghat, Nazareth, Sweet and some guy named Bob Dylan. Dazed and Confused doesn't just re-create the mid-'70s, it actually looks like it could have been shot then. The movie's tiny budget may have had something to do with its graininess and flat colors, but, heck, that's exactly the way all those low-budget teen movies looked.
The reason I mention the music and the period first is that the songs (and, by extension, the time in which the songs were in the air -- on Top 40 stations and "progressive" FM album-oriented rock outlets) act as characters that comment upon, co-mingle and party with the flesh-and-blood kids on the screen. (There's virtually nobody over 21 in the picture -- except for Wooderson [Matthew McConaghey].) Music is never more important to your image and self-esteem than when you're in high school, and these kids, like those before and after, identify themselves by the music they listen to. For those of us in the audience, hearing some of these songs again is like going to a party where you bump into old, forgotten friends... and a few individuals you would have been happy to have never encountered again in your lifetime.
The 31-year-old Linklater's previous film, Slacker, was a sort of shoestring, stream-of-consciousness shaggy dog story -- except that it didn't really have a story. The camera simply drifted from one character, one oblique conversation, to another until the movie was over. The similarly relaxed narrative drift of Dazed and Confused is pretty much determined by its limited time frame: 18 hours overlapping the last day of school and the morning after (aka, the first day of summer vacation). Sure, there are recognizeable characters to whom we return again and again, but writer-director Linklater doesn't force any big epiphanies on us, thank you. He just picks up characters and then drops them with a seemingly artless randomness that's refreshing. It's kind of like a Texas teenage Nashville crossed with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, with people wandering in and out of the picture all the time.
One big thing that
distinguishes Dazed and
Confused from American
Graffiti is Linklater's lack of nostalgia. Although the styles of
the times (skinny-wasted flair swabby jeans, long, straight hair parted in the
middle, etc.) are presented with an almost fetishistic attention to
verisimillitude, the movie isn't saying there was anything particularly
wonderful about them -- despite the sad fact that you can now get bell-bottoms
at The Gap. (A friend of mine has a theory that, because of the clothes and
personal grooming modes of the period, nobody has a good picture of themselves
taken during the '70s.) In other words, Dazed and Confused isn't an ode to a more innocent era seen
through the haze of a 17-year distance. The 11-year gulf between American Graffiti's 1962 and the
year of its release, 1973, seems far greater than the one between the 1976 of Dazed and Confused and 1993. And
yet there are a few crucial differences. As the Dazed and Confused press kit (ironically) notes, in the year
of America's Bicentennial, "Sex is still safe; drugs aren't dangerous yet,
and booze hasn't gotten MADD." Well, at least our attitudes about sex,
drugs and booze were different then -- for better or worse. But to its credit, Dazed and Confused doesn't make
any tsk-tsk value judgements or push the ironies of hindsight down our throats.
In 1976, while popular music was
teetering on the fulcrum between corporate rock and punk, politically
American youth culture was tilting in another direction, from the rebellion and
altruism of the '60s to the mindless conformity and greed of the Reagan-Bush
'80s. The title Dazed and Confused
isn't just a sex-drugs-booze-rock'n'roll reference; it's a fairly apt
description of our moral and political state of mind at the time. As one of the
characters says: "If these are the best years of my life, remind me to
kill myself."
Oh yeah, about that "story": It's basically about hanging out and
getting buzzed with a bunch of high school juniors anticipating their senior
year and a handful of graduating junior high eighth graders dreading their
freshman year. The senior males have a tradition of ambushing and hacking the
incoming freshmen boys with customized wooden paddles, while the elder females
have devised similarly humiliating initiation rituals for the freshmen girls,
such as making them lay down in the parking lot and squirting them with
condiments, or forcing them to propose marriage to senior boys. Randy "Pink"
Floyd (Jason London), the school's star football quarterback, jeopardizes his
senior season by refusing to sign the equivalent of a loyalty oath: a document,
written by his coach, in which he is supposed to pledge not to indulge in drugs
or alcohol. (Gosh, look how far we've come: Today, companies routinely subject
new employees to drug tests that are most likely unconstitutional -- and hardly
anybody makes a fuss about it.)
Freshman Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins, who gives the movie's best and funniest performance), gets a sampling of what the next four years are going to be like as the little brother of Jodi (Michelle Burke), a "popular" senior. Other characters include: Mike (Adam Goldberg, a bit over the top), a high school Richard Lewis who writes for the school paper and is prone to endless neurotic soliloquies about the meaning of life; Tony (Anthony Rapp), Mike's similarly dorky best friend who unexpectedly develops an interest in incoming ninth-grader Sabrina (Christina Hinojosa) when she expresses reservations about subjecting herself to the traditional hazing rituals; Cynthia (Marissa Rabisi), the intellectual, platonic buddy of Mike and Tony who suddenly finds herself pursued by Wooderson (the aforementioned McConaughey), a guy who graduated several years ago but still hangs around to impress young girls with his muscle car; and, of course, Slater (Rory Cochrane), the school stoner. You went to school with 'em, too: the times may have changed, but high school archetypes are pretty much timeless.
Dazed And Confused · The New Cult Canon · The A.V. Club Scott Tobias
“When I was making it, I was horrified, because I was reliving my past point by point. I’d be on the set and I’d look around, and I would be back in 1976, a freshman in high school again. And those weren’t necessarily good memories. I was revisiting sorrows and horrors. I was making it from a distance, so it perhaps came out more positive than negative, but it’s not all fun and games.” —Richard Linklater on Dazed And Confused
Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused tanked badly when it hit theaters in 1993. Blame any number of factors: a nascent distributor (Gramercy Pictures) that had the backing of a major studio (Universal), but not the resources; an episodic structure that culminates in nothing of life-changing consequence; and ironically, a no-name cast that was actually chockablock with future movie stars like Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey (plus Renée Zellweger as an extra). It was revived as a cult favorite on video—and later, as a succession of psychedelic Universal DVD “special editions” that were special only for their power to shake down fans again and again. (Criterion eventually came to the rescue on that front.) Dazed And Confused had become a stoner classic, the centerpiece of a dorm-room rotation that would later include the likes of Friday, The Big Lebowski, Half Baked, and Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle.
It’s easy to see why getting baked to Dazed And Confused might be appealing, beyond the second-hand smoke from joints that circulate freely through bedrooms, muscle cars, recreation halls, and open-air parties—a utopia regulated about as strictly as the gas station where a boyish incoming high-school freshman can walk off with a sixer. There’s the classic-rock soundtrack, a K-Tel compilation of mid-’70s hits from the likes of pre-shitty Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, ZZ Top, and Foghat, all evoking pangs of nostalgia even in those who were born well after 1976. There’s a stoner icon in Slater (Rory Cochrane), who offers up a soliloquy on George Washington’s vast fields of weed (“he knew it’d be a great cash crop for the Southern states”) and his wife Martha greeting him with a “big fat bowl” every night. And above all, Linklater imports some of the episodic looseness of his breakthrough film Slacker, allowing viewers to drift in and out of scenes casually, without any hard demands on their attention. It’s a sweet, smoky haze of a movie.
Yet as funny and pleasurable as it is, Dazed And Confused isn’t like Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar, or any of the straight-up pot comedies with premium re-watch value. Amid all those good vibes, there’s a melancholy tone that’s been curiously denied as the film’s cult following has amassed. Though no artist can dictate or control how their work will be received, Linklater’s film is about painful rites of passage: the ritual hazing of freshmen; the quarterback who moves effortlessly between cliques, wrestling with a decision that will turn his teammates against him; the nerd who starts a fight and loses, badly, rather than resign himself to being “an ineffectual nothing.” In every case, these are kids who feel penned in by tradition and expectation, whether they’re warily submitting to the business end of a shop-crafted paddle or forced to sign a bullshit clean-livin’ commitment statement in order to lead that championship season.
Then again, one of the vicarious joys of watching Dazed And Confused is seeing how much freedom its characters have to roam. In our age of surveillance cameras, GPS trackers, and strictly enforced anti-smoking and carding ordinances, it’s unthinkable for teenagers to wander off the grid or buy some beer while the convenience-store clerk looks the other way. Dazed And Confused’s few shows of parental authority—the parents who suspend their vacation when a keg deliveryman shows up at their house, or the coaches who try to curb their players’ hard-partying summer—mostly prove futile, a hassle more than a restriction. For dusk ’til dawn, the town is theirs to prowl: the drive-thru, the pool hall, the Moon Tower, and, for a time, the 50-yard line of the football stadium. At one point, Adam Goldberg and Anthony Rapp, as the film’s “Woodward and Bernstein” wiseacres, even muse about the adult community’s odd indifference to teenage shenanigans:
But when the rumbling bass of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” under the opening credits kick into a slow-motion shot of an orange GTO convertible as it rounds the high-school parking lot, that first wave of nostalgia hits hard. On the last day of school in small-town Texas in 1976, the future seniors wander casually in and out of class while middle-school boys while away the last few minutes playing paper football and talking about girls with huge knockers. Though the incoming freshman can expect some abuse—sometimes accompanied by genuine hostility, courtesy of Parker Posey as a queen-bee type and a hilariously belligerent Ben Affleck as a two-year senior—the only troubled characters in Dazed And Confused are the heads of each class: Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), the good-natured quarterback who doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a jock and told not to run with the wrong crowd, and Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), in many ways his heir apparent, an 8th-grade star pitcher whose awkward transition comes with extra pressure (and extra beatings).
Linklater doesn’t inflate any of these conflicts to a big dramatic crisis—he isn’t making a TV movie where some kid winds up dead and there’s some sobering message for us to process in the end. He’s not even making American Graffiti, the film’s most obvious (and by and large inferior) predecessor, which ends its early-’60s reminiscence with ominous portents of the Vietnam War. Dazed And Confused is just one night in the life that ends with nothing more or less consequential than Pink and his buddies peeling off to score some Aerosmith tickets. (Side note: How less-than-wonderful to live in a time where these same kids would have dispersed to a computer and hit the “refresh” button at Ticketmaster.com over and over until some Ticketmaster-associated broker offered them upper-deck seats at five times face value. Let’s see Linklater lay down “Slow Ride” over that scene.) He punctuates some particularly vivid moments in slow motion—think Pink on the field, or another middle-schooler, Sabrina, going through the car wash—but the film never gets out of line. (Oddly, Linklater’s sour SubUrbia errs by doing precisely the opposite, though that’s mostly the doing of writer Eric Bogosian.)
As Linklater says in the quote above, shooting Dazed And Confused from a distance of 17 years made it “come out more positive than negative,” but he finds a bittersweet note between those two poles. At key points in the film, characters voice their frustration with the times: Pink says, “If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself,” and at the Moon Tower, another kid (Marissa Ribisi, Giovanni’s twin sister) offers the “every other decade” theory, claiming, “The ’50s were boring, the ’60s rocked, the ’70s obviously suck… Maybe the ’80s will be radical.” One line is bitter, the other ironic, but Linklater, through the benefit of perspective, suggests the possibility that all teenagers in every era think they have it bad, but they may well look back with fondness over the good times they had and took for granted. Nostalgia can be a tricky enterprise: It frames the past in a golden hue, deceptive in the way it minimizes the pain, and precious in the way it allows great memories to bubble to the surface. It’s possible that Pink, 20 or 30 years later, will start referring to these as the best years of his life, and not be remotely inclined to kill himself.
Many of Linklater’s best films—Slacker, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Waking Life—have the quality of a reverie, powered more by the flow of ideas and little moments out of time than any devotion to plot points. The many indelible touches in Dazed And Confused are owed to the vividness of Linklater’s memories or some minor detail in the performances: The listing of Gilligan’s Island episodes on a blackboard, which feels like the birth of a particular strain of cultural discussion; the emphatic curl of McConaughey’s right arm when he completes the sentence, “That’s what I love about these high-school girls…”; the brief glimmers of confidence that cross Wiggins’ face on the few occasions when he isn’t totally exasperated; the beautiful overhead shot of the Moon Tower (cue Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone”) when the keg is cashed and the night is over. This is the summer of ’76 the way Linklater remembers it. How others have received it, more on the sweet side of bittersweet, is out of his control.
Dazed and Confused: Dream On . . . Criterion essay by Kent Jones, October 25, 2011
Dazed and Confused: Not So Long Ago,
But Very Far Away Criterion
essay by Chuck Klosterman, October 25, 2011
The ’70s Obviously Sucked—NOT! (Or at Least Not the Music, Anyway) Criterion essay by Jim DeRogatis, October 25, 2011
Behind the Scenes of Dazed and Confused photo gallery, November 07, 2011
Dazed and Confused (1993) - The Criterion Collection
Dazed and Confused Carson Lund from Cinelogue
From Slacker to Dazed and Confused to Bernie: I watched every ... Seth Stevenson from Slate, April 26, 2012
Dazed and Confused (1993) - This Distracted Globe Joe Valdez
The Last Thing I See [Brent McKnight]
Dazed and Confused - TCM.com Paul Sherman
'Dazed and Confused' Is Perfectly Sincere | PopMatters Shaun Huston, December 18, 2011
An Essential Entry in the Up-All-Night Canon: Dazed and Confused ... Mark Lukenbill from Slant magazine, October 14, 2013
21
Things You Might Not Know About 'Dazed and Confused' | Mental ... Adam D’Arpino from Mental Floss
'Dazed and Confused' 20th Anniversary: 20 Craziest Facts About the ... Marlow Stern from The Daily Beast, September 24, 2013
Bragging
Rights: 'Dazed and Confused' « - Grantland
Katie Baker, September 22, 2015
Every
Dazed and Confused Character, Ranked by Coolness | WIRED Brian Raftery from Wired magazine, April 15, 2016
Movies That Everyone Should See: “Dazed and Confused” « Fogs ... Dan Fogarty from Fog’s Movie review
'Dazed and Confused' (1993) - Best Movies #4 - ComingSoon.net Brad Brevet, July 10, 2014
'Dazed And Confused' Would Never Work Today - Huffington Post Mike Ryan, October 11, 2013
The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
The Focus Pull Film Journal [Taylor Sinople]
Dazed and Confused - Archive - Reverse Shot That Old Feeling, by Elbert Ventura, June 24, 2004
6 Scenes We Love From 'Dazed and Confused' — Film School Rejects Christopher Campbell
Sound On Sight Ricky D
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Theo Alexander]
Dazed and Confused 20th Anniversary - Dazed and Confused and the ... Stephen Marche from Esquire magazine, March 6, 2013
Dazed and Confused – Richard Linklater and the horrors of teenage ... Lisa Thatcher
MISE EN SEAN – Dazed and Confused (1993) Eugene Film Society Sean Hanson, September 4, 2014
Images From My All Time Favorite Films: Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993) Jeremy Richey from Moon in the Gutter, July 20, 2009, also seen here: Harry Moseby Confidential Wallpapers (Dazed and Confused)
Home Theater Info DVD Review Doug MacLean
VideoVista [Noell Wolfgram Evans]
Film @ The Digital Fix - Dazed and Confused: Flashback Edition D.J. Nock
digitallyOBSESSED! [Dan Heaton] - Flashback Edition
DVD Movie Guide [Colin Jacobson] - Flashback Edition
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr, Flashback Edition
DVD Verdict [Dennis Prince] - Ultimate Party Collection with FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH
DVD Talk [Bill Gibron] Criterion collection
DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] Criterion collection
Dazed and Confused: Criterion Collection (1993) | PopMatters Chris Barsanti, Criterion collection
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion collection
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Criterion collection
Film @ The Digital Fix - Dazed and Confused (Criterion Collection) Eamonn McCusker, Criterion collection
digitallyOBSESSED! [Dan Heaton] - Criterion Edition
DVD Verdict [Brendan Babish] - Criterion Collection
DVD Movie Guide [Colin Jacobson] - Criterion Collection
DVDTalk HD DVD Review [Joshua Zyber]
Fulvue Drive-in [Nicholas Sheffo] - HD-DVD
High-Def Digest [Steven Cohen] Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Michael Rubino] Blu-Ray
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray
DVDizzy.com - Criterion Collection Blu-ray with Pictures Criterion Blu-Ray
DVDTalk.com - Blu-Ray [Jamie S. Rich] Critrion Blu-Ray, also seen here: Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
Dazed and Confused | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Chris Cabin, Criterion Blu-Ray
DAZED AND CONFUSED – Hammer to Nail Michael Nordine, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan] Criterion Blu-Ray
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Dazed and Confused (1997) Edward Jahiel
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
Permanent Plastic Helmet [Ashley Clark]
Film Reference profile by Robin Wood
Dazed and Confused and the Cinema of Aimlessness - Slate Michael Agger, October 26, 2011
Dazed and Confused: a Great Nostalgia Trip – Step On Magazine April 11, 2015
Dazed and Confused Movie Analysis and Review - HubPages October 26, 2011
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Harral]
All Movie Guide [Matthew Doberman]
Movie Ram-blings Ram Samudrala
10 Best Stoner Movies of All Time - Rolling Stone listed as #2, by Rob Sheffield, June 6, 2013
20 'Dazed And Confused' Quotes You Should Still Be Using Everyday Stephen Tompkins from Uproxx, November 8, 2014
Dazed and Confused - Movie Scripts and Screenplays
Dazed and Confused (1993) - Filming Locations - IMDb
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A] Jeff Labrecque, June 2, 2006
Review: 'Dazed and Confused' - Variety
Review: 'Dazed and Confused' - Variety Ken Eisner
Dazed and Confused: No 19 best comedy film of all time - The Guardian Phelim O’Neill, October 18, 2010
Montreal Film Journal [Kevin N. Laforest]
'Dazed and Confused' - Washington Post Desson Howe
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Charles Cassady, Jr.]
Deseret News, Salt Lake City [Chris Hicks]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Dazed and Confused Movie Review (1993) | Roger Ebert
Movie Review - - Reviews/Film; Nervously Contemplating Life After ... Janert Maslin from The New York Times, also seen here: The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review, and here: Dazed and Confused - The New York Times
Dazed and Confused (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BEFORE SUNRISE A 95
USA
Interesting concept, as this movie is a choreography of
connecting “small” moments between a young man and a woman, strangers who meet
on a train, all pieced together by conversation, where the audience can’t
really distinguish between what was written beforehand and what was improvised
on the spot, which is what gives this film a feeling of genuine spontaneity
throughout. Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke
are French Sorbonne student Céline
and American tourist Jessie, both of whom meet on a train not far from Vienna
where Jessie is scheduled to catch a plane the next morning. But their conversation together is so
personally intense, he takes a chance and asks if she’ll join him for the
lay-over, which is about 14 hours before his morning flight. She, of course, agrees, and the film is nothing
more than their few moments together before they go their own separate ways, Céline to
There are many beautiful moments in the film, as they
discuss their first kiss, having to say goodbye, their previous relationships,
their views on love, and even whether or not they should sleep together, all
compressed into a tightly written script that never for a moment feels long, as
they are continually interested in one another, obviously attracted, where
spending time together is a luxury they would never have experienced had they
not agreed to this brief interlude, as otherwise they would forever look back
at their lives plagued by a neverending doubt about what could have been. As they walk or take busses or the train,
they discover the beauty of one another as images of
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Céline (Delpy), an easy-going
Parisian, is on her way back from Budapest to study at the Sorbonne; Jesse
(Hawke), a young American, is at the end of a Eurorail tour. They meet on a
train just outside Vienna; by the time they reach the station, they've hit it
off well enough for Jesse to propose that Céline spend the next 14 hours wandering
the city with him, until his flight leaves for the States. Intrigued, she
accepts. So begins an unexpected adventure of the heart. What's magical about
Linklater's entrancing movie is the way he and his actors manage to convey the
emotional truths that underlie all the talk as the potential lovers test each
other's opinions and commitment. Funny, poignant and perceptive, this is a
brilliant gem.
Before
Sunrise Anthony Lane from The New Yorker
The hip ennui that Richard Linklater conjured up in "Slacker"
and "Dazed and Confused" seemed rooted in
There's a key line of dialogue about halfway through Richard Linklater's bittersweet romance, BEFORE SUNRISE, where Julie Delpy explains that the only real magic in the world exists in the space between two people. Much of the spaces in the film are filled with dialogue but the most affecting and telling moments are the silent gaps in between.
The premise is disarmingly simple. Ethan Hawke plays an American touring Europe on a train, his last stop being Vienna, where he is to fly home to Texas. He meets a charming French woman (Delpy) on her way to Paris and they start talking. By the time the train stops in Vienna, they've already made a connection and she gets off the train with him for a romantic day and night, after which their future together is uncertain.
Like all great romances, BEFORE SUNRISE straddles the line between romantic projection and reality. We love CASABLANCA not just because of the endearing connection between its characters but also because, in the end, we know that this connection is so fleeting. Even though reality finally steps in, our memories of these emotions will stay with us. We'll always have Paris.
Linklater leaves us with plenty of memorable scenes: from that first awkward silence in a listening booth to the scene at the top of the giant ferris wheel from "The Third Man" to an exchange of feelings when the two pretend to talk to their closest friends over the phone. The physical gestures of the two actors (particularly Delpy) also linger in the mind long after the credits have rolled.
Linklater's philosophy comes across better there than in his previous films, SLACKER and DAZED AND CONFUSED. He uses the train as a perfect metaphor for time. Before we reach our final destination, it's these detours, these moments out of the rush of time, that are really important. Perhaps it's the greatest argument for this "slacker" mentality. We are far too preoccupied with moving forward in time that we never stop to take the detours that make life worth living.
BEFORE SUNRISE is a beautifully observed romance that really distinguishes Linklater from his peers. His film radiates with emotion, not simply the cleverness of the Coen Brothers or the energy of Quentin Tarantino. It announces him as a major American talent, one whose fascination with the connections between people holds infinite possibility.
Movieline Magazine review Michael Atkinson
First, let's get over the simple fact that Julie Delpy is so
soulfully, adorably satisfying to gaze upon that I could do little else for a
year and never miss the real world. Willowy, alabaster madonnas like this don't
happen every day, and the impact of her loveliness shouldn't be underestimated.
But in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, Delpy's Celine is just a
down-to-earth French student who, beautiful or not, is full of self-doubt.
Delpy's tough job, then, is to make Celine into a complete, believable,
four-dimensional person, and do so with a dangerous amount of talk and not much
of a plot. The results are sly and amazing: we believe Celine like we believe
few movie characters. When the film's over there's a pang of remorse--it's as
if an intimate friend just jumped on a train and left town.
Jesse (Ethan Hawke), a pretentious slacker using up his Eurail pass, asks
Celine, whom he's just met, to hang with him in Vienna for his last night on
the continent. She agrees, and what transpires is a friendship/courtship in
miniature as the two yak their way through the city all night, voicing pensees
Linklater has carefully written as, alternately, witty, insightful or
half-baked utterances that smart twentysomethings who are attracted to each
other might actually say. From the start, Celine is trying to impress Jesse and
trying to be "real" at the same time. Delpy makes the struggle human,
with her scrunched-brow giggle whenever Jesse says something Celine's not
certain is funny, with her slightly theatrical expression of deep thought, with
the blush she adds to Celine's nervous habit of trying to fill in
conversational gaps, and with her believably awkward handle on American slang.
And all this comes in tiny, subtle doses.
Celine's smart as a whip, but Delpy's portrait of her reveals
how much she's still growing into herself. When Celine chirps out beauts like
"Men are lucky we don't bite off their heads after mating...," Delpy
gives her a big, goofy smile. In a scene that takes place in a bar, during
which the two actors semi-improvise about the characters' recent romantic travails
while playing pinball, Delpy particularly shines. It doesn't sound like a big
deal, but we so rarely see actors do anything more complicated than driving a
car while they act that it's startling to watch how Delpy deals with splitting
her attention between her dialogue and her pinball game--the amused flusters
and frustrations ("Merde!") she lets out are completely real.
Thanks to Delpy's dancing face and salmon-mousse voice, and the brains behind
them, Before Sunrise comes off as an unusually realistic romance. The
peculiar kind of graceful clumsiness Delpy gives Celine brings a grand
poignancy to what could easily have been hokum. When Celine quietly muses about
the presence of God--"not you or me, but just this little space in
between"--Delpy handles the moment with such delicacy you forgive the
line's youthful self-seriousness. In fact, Delpy brings such a light touch to
all the potential self-seriousness of this film (Hawke's Jesse is guilty of far
more egregious philosophizing than Celine), you end up rooting for these two,
hoping they will, as they promise when she gets on the train in the morning,
see each other again some time.
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Jesse, the young hero of Richard Linklater's enormously charming "Before Sunrise," isn't having a very good time on his European vacation. He had saved up to meet his girlfriend in Spain, but almost as soon as he arrives, she blows him off. Despondent but not yet ready to return to the States, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) buys a Eurailpass and bums around Europe for a couple of weeks until he's so tired of the scenery slipping past his window that he welcomes the arrival of his departure date in Vienna and the chance, finally, to go home.
But Jesse's luck is about to change. While approaching Vienna by train on his very last full day in Europe, he meets Celine (Julie Delpy), a French student on her way back to Paris, and after some brief, rather clumsy attempts at idle banter he invites her to the club car for some serious conversation. Soon these strangers on a train begin trading stories, sharing their dreams and secrets, their views on relationships, death, romance and whatever else comes to mind. Their conversation is fractured and rambling, and perhaps because of their tender years, not terribly deep. But there is also a touching guilelessness and eagerness to connect in their words to one another. And so, when the train arrives in Vienna, Jesse -- whose plane doesn't leave until the next morning -- makes a bold proposal: Get off the train with me here. We can walk around the city, taking in the sights, talking and getting to know one another. In the morning, I'll fly out of here, but at least we will have had an adventure together.
To Jesse's amazement, Celine accepts her new friend's offer. After stashing their bags at the station, the two meander around the city and, initially, from the way they bump into colorful eccentrics along the way -- like the actor who plays a cow in an avant-garde theater piece -- it looks as if Linklater might simply be content to apply the same loose, free-associative style he unveiled in "Slacker" to an Old World setting -- a sort of "Slackers in Europe."
But as the bond between the characters continues to blossom, the peripheral figures begin to recede into the background. At this point it might seem that the film begins to lose its personal edge to become a more conventional romantic story about young lovers on holiday. But the movie is too talky, too exploratory -- and ultimately too downbeat -- to qualify as mainstream. As Jesse and Celine schmooze and gambol, they aren't just discovering each other, they're discovering themselves as well, testing their ideas about life and, perhaps, putting them into words for the first time.
Naturally there are conflicts. Celine, who seems the more mature of the two, is also a romantic -- and with her long, tendrilly blond curls, she certainly looks the part of a fairy tale princess. Jesse, on the other hand, is a born skeptic, and because of his recent fiasco in Spain, not particularly psyched about the possibility of true romance between men and women. For a time, this contrast of views creates a certain edginess and suspicion in their friendship -- especially when Celine remarks that men should feel lucky that women let them live after sex -- giving rise to the thought that maybe the adventure wasn't such a good idea after all.
This specter of sexual violence -- casual though it may be -- isn't the only shadow in this surprisingly absorbing film. During Jesse and Celine's long day's night together, Linklater creates a suspended, out-of-time feel, as if the characters had stepped off the train and into their own romantic dimension. But underneath the surface, there is also a vague feeling of rootlessness and confusion and perhaps even fear. For all their displays of worldliness and sophistication, these raw kids are trying to make sense of a world that refuses to make sense. What's remarkable is that they connect at all; but then Linklater's point may be that in order for love to bloom, the partners must come to each other without any prior knowledge or expectations or cultural baggage.
What's also impressive is how Linklater manages to keep all these different ingredients in balance -- and that the result is so tender and enlivening. In this regard, Linklater owes a substantial debt to his stars. As Jesse, Hawke doesn't so much thrill us with his acting as disarm us with his awkward boyish allure. And Delpy, with her pale, clear-blue eyes and high forehead, makes a perfect foil for him, making him seem more grown-up and less of a lightweight.
Though Linklater allows the movie to wander, he never allows the pace to slacken, and more often than not he finds some unexpected bit of found poetry or cultural kitsch to make the digressions worthwhile. "Before Sunrise" is not a big movie, or one with big ideas, but it is a cut above the banal twentysomething love stories you usually see at the movies. This one, at least, treats young people as real people.
The Before Trilogy: Time Regained Criterion essay by Dennis Lim, March 01, 2017
The Before
Trilogy - The Criterion Collection
Reverse
Shot review
Love Me Tonight, Erik Syngle,
Summer 2004
Tucson Weekly (Zachary Woodruff) review
The House Next Door [Dan Jardine]
DVD Times Gary Couzens
My Summer of Before Sunrise Rebecca Schuman from Slate, June 13, 2013
Not Another Teen Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]
eFilmCritic.com (Dr Nick) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Jason Whyte) review [5/5]
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
The Digital Bits dvd review Bill Hunt
Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review
DVD Talk (Chris Hughes) dvd review [4/5]
The
Before Trilogy Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov
The Before
Trilogy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest
Steve Cohen
The
Before Trilogy: Criterion Collection (Before Sunrise / Before ... Randy Miller III from DVD Talk
Blu-ray
Review: Criterion Packages Love and Time in Linklater's ... Zach Gayne from Screen Anarchy
The Before
Trilogy | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine
Budd Wilkins
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [3/5]
The Tech (MIT) (Scott Deskin) review
Georgia Straight (Ken Eisner) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
Edinburgh U Film Society (Ben Stephens) review
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
Before
Sunrise/Before Sunset: No 3 best romantic film of all time | Film ... Ryan Gilbey from The Guardian, October 15, 2010
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Los Angeles Times (Peter Rainer) review
Before Sunrise
Movie Review & Film Summary (1995) | Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Vienna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SUBURBIA
USA (121 mi) 1996
Time
Out review
Geoff Andrew
Linklater's
film covers much the same territory as Slackers and Dazed and
Confused. It charts one long momentous night in the lives of a group of
suburban 20-year-olds, for whom entertainment consists mainly of booze, banter
and arguments with the Pakistani proprietors of the convenience store where
they habitually hang out, and examines the friends' reactions to the visit of a
former schoolmate-turned-rock star. Allegiances shift, animosities erupt,
violence rears its head, tragedy looms. While it's true that playwright Eric
Bogosian's screenplay fails to avoid the kind of tidy twists and
contrivances favoured by theatre, and that the reluctance to leave the street
corner setting makes for a certain staginess, Linklater keeps matters
engrossing, partly through the strong performances he elicits, partly through
his firm grasp of the rhythms, colours and moods of suburban existence.
Crucially, no character is quite as he or she first appears, nor is the film's
attitude towards the kids simplistically sympathetic or condemnatory.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Richard Linklater specializes in movies about young people who aren't going anywhere -- 'Slacker,' 'Dazed and Confused,' 'Before Sunrise,' and his latest, 'subUrbia.' Yet there's more going on in Linklater's films than in most overplotted, hyperactive Hollywood movies.
Linklater is a great miniaturist: generally, he stakes out a
24-hour period, introduces his characters, and lets them talk, hang out,
connect or not connect. Linklater's work might be summed up by John Lennon's
line that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.
subUrbia is Linklater's first project that he didn't also write. His
collaborator here is the acidic playwright Eric Bogosian (Sex, Drugs, Rock
& Roll), adapting his own play about a group of college-age slackers
who haunt a convenience-store parking lot. With Bogosian on board, the movie
carries a more didactic message — and is a bit darker — than Linklater's fans
may be used to. The tension underneath the movie is the friction between
Bogosian's tense urban sensibility and Linklater's relaxed, generous style.
Bogosian forces Linklater to look at kids who won't escape and grow up to be
successful indie filmmakers.
The closest thing subUrbia has to a hero is Jeff (Giovanni Ribisi), who
lives in a pup tent in his parents' garage and has vague dreams of being a
writer. Jeff's girlfriend Sooze (Amie Carey) has similarly vague ambitions;
she's the type who wants to say deep things with her performance art and then
has to explain to her baffled audience exactly what she's saying. Sooze
wants to go to New York to be brilliant and controversial, while Jeff doesn't
plan on vacating the pup tent any time soon.
Jeff hangs out with two drunks he grew up with: Tim (Nicky Katt), who dropped
out of the Air Force and is bitter and sarcastic about everything, and Buff
(Steve Zahn), a more cheerful loser who spins around in happy oblivion. The
stage (and it does sometimes feel like a stage, despite Linklater's best
efforts) is set for confrontation between these slackers and a
local-boy-made-good named Pony (Jayce Bartok), who hit it big as a rock star
and is now passing through town with a limo and a hip publicist (the ubiquitous
Parker Posey).
Pony, whose physical resemblance to Linklater may or may not be a coincidence,
at first comes off like a poseur. But the film doesn't let the other characters
off the hook that easily. As fatuous as Pony sounds ("I'm an observer of
life"), at least he got out and did something, as opposed to
hanging around and talking about how it's pointless to do anything because,
like, it's all a big capitalist scam anyway, man.
'subUrbia' feels too mechanical at times, too symmetrical and ironic in a way that works better on stage. There's a fake death and a possible real one, and Linklater seems to chafe a bit at the darkening tone; he's in his comic element when Buff is whooping it up in the limo and swiping lawn leprechauns. Linklater is clearly at ease with Buff; he's a drunken goofball and a liar, but in his own way he's more honest than anyone else in the movie.
Reverse Shot review Tracts Of My Tears, Joanne Nucho
Salon (Scott Rosenberg) review
The Providence Journal review Michael Janusonis
Edward Johnson-Ott review [3/5]
Albuquerque Alibi (Angie Drobnic) review
Dragan Antulov retrospective [4/10]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
DVD Verdict (Paul Corupe) dvd review
Film Scouts (Leslie Rigoulot) capsule review
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Monsters At Play (Christopher Hyatt) dvd review
All Movie Guide [Brian J. Dillard]
Variety.com [Godfrey Cheshire]
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Philadelphia City Paper [A.D. Amorosi]
The Boston Phoenix review Alicia Potter, including an interview with director Richard Linklater
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Barry Walters) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
WAKING LIFE D 60
USA
A dull soliloquy of endless ethereal monologues spoken as if in a perpetual daydream that brought back memories of being lectured to, as the tone of the entire film is as if what it has to say is so extremely important that it begins to sound entirely self-serving instead of interesting. While the look of the film has a Gauguin-like watercolor appeal which seems to constantly be moving, the dry, overly intellectualized ramblings just left me cold, as I wasn’t interested in a single thing it had to say. This is the kind of film tailor made for DVD in-home viewing, where you can tune in whenever the feeling hits you, repeat sequences one finds curious, and not simply feel hijacked by the endless monotony of it all while stuck inside a theater.
Acclaimed in the US, Linklater's movie
has Wiley
Wiggins, the lanky longhair in Dazed & Confused, bumping
pinball-style from one encounter to the next, with each acquaintance offloading
his or her own pet theory of life, the universe and everything. Among them are
the likes of Ethan Hawke
and Julie
Delpy, Austin, Texas's finest characters and crazies, and Linklater
himself. It would be easy to dismiss as 'Slackers - Part Deux', but for the
inspired conceit of shooting the film twice: once as a conventional DV feature,
which then became the template for computer animator Bob Sabiston.
Sabiston's woozy, pulsing dream imagery is something else. Wiley gradually
realises that (a) he's in the middle of the weirdest dream of his life, and (b)
he can't wake up. This is one movie where nodding off would seem an appropriate
response. The endless philosophising is a bit sophomoric and more jokes would
help, but this is one of a kind that grows more absorbing the longer it runs.
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[1/5]
This is your worst nightmare. You are dazed and confused and keep meeting intense academic types in the street. You don't know why they want to lecture you on the metaphysical meaning of dreams, but they do. You couldn't care less, because their language is waffly and you don't understand a word of it.
Occasionally you levitate, which is cool, because they can't unravel the secrets of the id when you're half way to the ceiling. A man says, "The worst mistake you can make is to think that you are alive when, in fact, you are asleep in life's waiting room." Instead of dismissing him as a deranged idiot, you stand there like some disciple, measuring his vibe count on the wowmaster.
Dreams are weird and you are in a dream, which is why everything is wobbly. Some might call this animation, but it's not really. The film was shot with real actors and then coloured in afterwards. The result is reminiscent of a moving Impressionist picture, painted by a drunk.
There is no story. Wiley Wiggins wanders about suburbia in what is probably Austin, Texas, although there are indications that New York's involved somewhere. Tedious people accost him with their ideas. Occasionally, a new character turns up on his/her own and delivers bland/violent opinions. There is a politician driving through deserted streets, blahing garbage through a microphone, and a prisoner in a cell, shouting obscenities at the four walls. Are they connected? Whooooo knows.
A recognisable Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who were in Before Sunrise together, are affectionate in bed. Instead of doing what people do between the sheets, they talk. "We are telepathically sharing our experiences," one of them says. The brain can take only so much misinformation. You have to switch off.
After the bar-room bore and the pretentious novelist, levels of sanity reach breaking point. "I keep thinking I'm waking up, but I can't," a multi-coloured Wiggins says. "It seems to go on forever." He's not lying.
This is the work of writer/director Richard Linklater, who amazed festival groupies with Slacker, his hilarious documentary-style ensemble debut, in 1991. It seems that he needs to take himself less seriously and come back into the land of the living.
Waking Life is so far up his colon, only a surgeon can save it.
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]
Waking Life is less a conventional 'movie' than a series of philosophical mini-essays on the meaning of existence, structured around a wandering 'dreamer' figure (Wiggins). The whole film is 'enhanced' by having every image turned into a kind of cartoon, with each section handled by a different animator. The uneven results will provoke the full range of responses: Waking Life will be embraced and loved, avoided and hated in equal measure. A litmus phrase: "At night, I go salsa dancing with my own confusion." Intrigued? Welcome in. Annoyed? Best to keep out.
As for the animation, however… there's a spookily transcendent moment of levitation very early on, but most of the cartoony improvisations are clunkingly prosaic - at one point, drugs are mentioned and a ghostly syringe floats into the frame. Elsewhere, the technique undercuts the seriousness of what's being said: whoever Eamonn Healy is, he presumably won't be best pleased to see his head ballooning up and down as he expounds his theories of human evolution. You keep wondering - how much difference would it make if the animation were removed? Is it really worth the staggering palaver involved?
Without the animation gimmick, we might be in danger of realising how close the film comes to vanishing up its own asshole. This tone is often smugly self-referential, with endless name-dropping comment on the meaning of films, and of dreams, and their interplay with reality. It all becomes a little monotonous and repetitive, and it's no surprise to find out that Linklater is from Austin, the major university town in Texas - the movie is like walking through a college dorm and listening to the students banging on, each of them convinced, like mankind through the ages, that this is the most important time to be alive - one could call it the pivot-of-history fallacy. The upside, of course, is that there are more bizarre ideas and asides here than in a dozen 'conventional' films, even those outside mainstream Hollywood. A figure looms out of the shadows to tell us that Kierkegaard's last words were 'Sweep me up.' Does this mean 'lift me to a higher plane' or 'discard me with the rest of the garbage'? It's not a bad motto for the film itself.
In the end, Waking Life succeeds or fails on this kind of moment-by-moment basis. One minute, you're tearing your hair out at the way it reduces philosophical and scientific research to the level of urban-myth anecdote, telling us things that real movies, great movies, have the imagination to show. The next, you're thanking Linklater for introducing you to some amazing ideas and people - someone called Speed Levitch delivers a great, crazy monologue on a bridge that's worth the price of admission alone - the animation actually adds to the experience. Much more low-key, but just as engaging, is John Christensen, a dream-theorist who informs Wiggins how he can tell whether he's dreaming or not - it's a trick you will try at home, the next time you're asleep.
filmcritic.com (Max Messier) review
[5/5]
Today, most films are bloated, uninteresting,
narrative-driven drivel, filled with beautiful people, a hit soundtrack, and
closely following the storyline of some bestseller close enough so that it
doesn't offend a legion of Oprah's Book Club readers. Waking Life is
something altogether different, a work of abstract art that recalls Buñuel,
Lynch, and Cocteau.
Most people will not understand Waking Life. Some will find it to be one
of the most brilliant pieces of film ever produced. I found it to be beyond
words; a combination of film, groundbreaking computer animation, and a
difficult and profane script that produces a sublime interpretation of
existence.
The film loosely follows the exploits of a young man (Wiley Wiggins) who is
faced with the realization that the life that he living is only but a dream, or
a series of dreams states with an unknown purpose. The film follows Wiley as he
controls an omnipotent perspective into complex personal diatribes, candid
conversations between lovers and friends, and one-on-one discussions with over
60 colorful characters, Slacker-style, crisscrossing and intersecting
through his dream states.
In these dream states, Wiley covers complex issues which range from the purpose
of collective memories; the integration of man and machine into one equal
being; the purpose of God and death in the human psyche; the joys of living in
this imperfect world; the notions of memory control based upon evolution; and
free will in relation to theological and physical limitations. During these
interactions, Wiley slowly discovers his own destiny within these dream states
and of the consequences one must face with that knowledge. All of these soapbox
speeches sometimes lead to the profane, illogical, and rambling notions of a
crazy person. The impact, though, is phenomenal.
The writer and director of the film Richard Linklater, best known for Slacker
and Dazed
and Confused, tackles heavy subject matter and succeeds admirably.
Linklater’s attempts in answering some of life’s most complex issues are
achieved superbly; his conversation pieces even manage to reach plausible
conclusions in a short amount of time.
The metaphysical expressionism of the film is made even more powerful by the
awe-inspiring animation work of Bob Sabiston, who created unique
"interpolated rotoscoping" software to give Wiley's dream world a
surreal and Dali-esque movement and feeling. In every scene of the movie, all
stationary items such as tables and chairs seem to float, refusing the laws of
gravity. Characters are either given great detail or are reduced to resemble
child-like drawings that would hang on the family refrigerator. The film feels
like you're watching a combination of the works of Basquiat, Picasso, and
Warhol brought to life.
Beneath the drawings, the film is shot in real life using real actors,
including Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, and Adam Goldberg. Over 30 artists were
then brought in to paint over individual characters of the film using
Sabiston’s animation software. The result is proof that both the painter’s
brush and the filmmaker’s eye can combine to achieve visions of wonder and
profoundness.
Cosmic Babble: Waking Life | Richard Linklater - Film Comment Chris Chang, September 10, 2001
One of the promo items for Waking Life is a coloring book. If you take a stab at it with your crayons, you'll be neatly implicated in the film's philosophical subtext. Richard Linklater's new movie is animated, but the imagery and action are derived from real people. The cast was shot with digital cameras, and the subsequent footage was first edited and then processed with computer software and a device called the Wacom Tablet—the sexy beast of current animation. Video is manipulated into painterly impressionism with the stroke of an electronic pen. When applied to handheld moving images the tablet creates a whole new way of seeing. Perspective develops new dimensionality; shifting planes of space appear isolated, as if there were discrete strata between foreground and back. The results range from the almost life-like to the downright phantasmagoric. The coloring book distills the film's imagery into black and white outlines; and anyone who fills them in brings them back to "life" with whatever colors they happen to choose. Once the crayons are put away the final look is determined by both the original presence of reality in front of a camera, and by subsequent artistic interpretation and its implicit freedom of choice. It's a significant point; the film continuously ponders the existence of free will. The book is a brilliant example of a filmmaker turning questions of determinism and ontology into marketing strategy.
Parts of Waking Life
revisit people and events from previous Linklater films. Its overall structure
resembles Slacker: It’s a tour of personalities rather than a story; and
its “characters” are more likely to pontificate than converse. Babble reigns;
linear narrative evaporates. And even though the film may seem to be nothing
more than a series of discontinuous intro philosophy lectures, a grander theme
gradually emerges.
The nameless main
character (Wiley Wiggins) is introduced asleep on a train—a recurrent Linklater
motif. As the film proceeds, this fact gathers momentum; he soon suspects that
he’s fallen into some sort of permanent dreamstate. “Dream is destiny” is Waking
Life‘s guiding principle; and the primacy of dreaming is introduced in the
film’s opening section. A young boy, perhaps Wiley in his youth, gazes up at
the night sky. A shooting star passes overhead. The event triggers a surreal
reaction: The boy floats off the ground. But he’s able to grab the door handle
of a parked car and thereby prevent himself from drifting off into the cosmos.
This act will take on theological significance by the film’s end.
The way in which
different sequences are handled with distinct visual treatments is
extraordinary. Not only does Linklater cast colorful actors, he heightens their
characteristics by providing them with their own color schemes. This is taken
to fascinating extremes. In certain instances the visuals are completely
unreal, yet wedded to specific thematic realities: In one scene a prisoner
ruminates on his condition and talks about the violence he will unleash on the
people responsible for putting him behind bars. His fleshy torso is depicted in
flickering shades of blood red as he speaks of grinding cigarettes into his captor’s
eyes. In a sense, he’s literally burning. This and a couple of other violent
scenes are the exception in terms of the overall film, which consists of 37
vignettes, but it’s fairly startling stuff coming from a director best known
for Slacker and Dazed and Confused.
Just as Waking Life
looks back literally at the previous Linklater films, it gives the act of
retrospection lyrical meaning. There’s a sequence featuring Before Sunrise
leads Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke together in bed. Delpy says she has a
recurring vision of herself as an old woman near the end of her days. Her
“waking life,” she explains, is her older self’s memories. By this point the
film’s title starts to waver around what it signifies, much the same way the
animation wobbles around the original source image. One way of asking what the
words “waking life” mean would be to define its opposite—which isn’t that easy.
Is it sleeping death? Or, perhaps, putting death to sleep? (Also: to animate
means “to bring to life.”) In either event, mortality is key, and with it comes
an attendant element: God.
One of the most mystical
sequences in the film, and for me its theoretical centerpiece, is titled The
Holy Moment. It’s the only scene in which a cast member is identified by name.
Caveh is, in the real world, the indie actor and director Caveh Zahedi, whose
work includes the appropriately titled I Was Possessed by God. (Since Waking
Life‘s cast consists of 55 real people—i.e., no matchup with character
names—on some level the film, for all its hallucinatory stylistics, can be
taken as a documentary.) Caveh sits at a table with another man and dominates
the conversation with an excited exegesis on the great Catholic film theorist
André Bazin. The film is very much preoccupied with its own ontology, and this
is the perfect opportunity to let it all hang out. (Ontology: a subset of
philosophy that deals with explanations of the nature of being. Since an
ontology—there can be several—claims to describe the true nature of things,
it’s helpful, especially here, to associate the practice with some sort of
privileged view.) Caveh explains Bazin’s belief in the power of the camera to
record reality and, by extension, God incarnate. He goes on to describe how the
continuous experience of God, a sort of frame-by-frame “Holy, Holy, Holy,” is a
state of affairs he would find impossible to deal with for prolonged periods
because the intensity would cause him to stop talking and weep. Caveh suggests
they have a Holy Moment; and we, the audience, are privy to it. What follows is
a tremendous demonstration of the film’s visual style. Caveh stops speaking and
locks eyes with his friend. His hair has been moving in wave-like patterns
throughout his speech, but it now takes on supernatural pulsations. His pupils
dilate wildly. It’s as if they have indeed become one with the moment. They
begin to speak, the moment is broken, and at the end of the scene the
characters morph into clouds.
Other aspects of divine
intervention are more discreet. Consider this: Linklater himself appears near
the film’s beginning. Wiley gets into a car that looks like a boat; the
director is in the backseat next to him. A skipper-like person, prone to
nautical musings, drives the vehicle. The Skipper asks Wiley where he wants to
be dropped off, but Wiley doesn’t have an answer. Linklater, with a tone that
is paradoxically deliberate and random, says, “Go up three more streets, make a
right, go two more blocks and drop this guy off on the corner.” “Where’s that?”
asks Wiley. The Skipper replies, “I don’t know, but it’s going to determine the
course of the rest of your life.” So what about free will? The ending of the
film turns the question into a genuine quandary. Wiley re-encounters Linklater
in a bar playing a pinball machine—a pretty savvy metaphor for determinism. He
voices his concern that he’ll never escape his perpetual dreamstate; Linklater
answers with a convoluted treatise on the nature of time that strings together The
Book of Acts, Philip K. Dick, a reincarnated housepet, and other elements.
We are, he explains, in a continuous process of postponing God’s invitation to
join him, with a constant repetition of the phrase, “No thank you; not yet.”
Wiley doesn’t seem to grasp the implication for his own predicament; he finally
asks his director for help. Linklater replies, “It’s easy. Just wake up.” And
Wiley does. (Or does he? And, by obvious extension, will we?) The film’s
remarkable ending is multivalent. But one thing’s for sure: This is the only
instance in movie history of a director playing God in animated form.
To Live or Clarify the Moment: Rick Linklater's Waking Life • Senses of ... Kent Jones from Senses of Cinema, March 13, 2002
Good Vibrations (WAKING LIFE) | Jonathan Rosenbaum October 26, 2001
AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [C] Introduction and 4-Part Essay
Reverse
Shot review
Life Is But a Dream, Michael
Joshua Rowin
A
beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity Jonathan Eig on movies like The Sixth Sense, The Others, The Usual
Suspects, Waking Life, A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, Memento, Mulholland Drive,
and Donnie Darko,
from Jump Cut, Summer 2003
Holy Moments Darren Hughes from Long Pauses, October 22, 2002
VideoVista
review Paul
Higson
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [5/5]
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
hybridmagazine.com review Michelle Fajkus
The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
PopMatters (Ben Varkentine) review
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review also seen here: PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review and here: Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs)
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [4/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4+/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [2/5]
CultureCartel.com (Lee Chase IV) review [5/5]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Plume Noire review Anji Milanovic
Kamera.co.uk review Sean Patterson
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Scott Von Doviak
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review
Flak Magazine (Clay Risen) review
Eye for Film (David Stanners) review [3.5/5]
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [1.5/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [2/5]
DVD Talk Aaron Beierle
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [1/5]
Nitrate Online (Interview) Cynthia Fuchs interviews Richard Linklater, November 2, 2001
The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Liam Lacey
The Boston Phoenix review Steve Vineberg and Peter Keough, which includes a gallery of images: Waking Life
Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
THE SCHOOL OF
ROCK
USA Germany (108 mi)
2003
Totally preposterous, even ridiculous, especially the behavior of all the adults, but who can argue with the message that you need to "Stick it to the Man!" or with Jack Black's way over the top, wonderfully comic performance, or the kids strutting their stuff at that talent contest. I especially loved the work of the back up singers and the roadies, or some of the less important positions. Sort of a kids version of "Fame, I want to live foreverrrr..." as they get their chance to have their 15 minutes of fame. Despite being predictable and formulaic in a film otherwise filled with caricatures, the kids do outgrow their robotronic roots and evolve into genuinely interesting kids. The outrageous humor extends to all age groups, but the best experience is seeing a room full of kids, as the spirit of fun captured in this film is infectious.
Brilliant
Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Jack Black carries this baby all by himself. Well, not entirely
by himself: he taps the most positive revolutionary consciousness of the past
half century and enjoys musical aid from the likes of the Ramones, Led
Zeppelin, and Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers; but it would have all
seemed terribly out of place if Jack Black had been. But he's not. You can see
him feel the power of rock welling in his veins and rushing to his brain, even
if you don't believe in it yourself (in which case, go file something, loser).
I have to admit that I had never considered that "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg"
might properly serve as the musical centerpiece for a film aimed at liberating
the minds of 21st century youth and so I, too, have underestimated the power.
Mea Culpa. Yeah, so maybe it's all a little bit hokey (in an ultra-hip way),
and the denoument reeks of what Pete Townshend called "that rock 'n' roll
dream that never came down." I like it. "I'm gonna go form my own
band, and we're gonna start a revolution. I feel sorry for you people."
As teacher training films go, The
School of Rock is different. It's not just that our hero, Black's quack
supply teacher Dewey Finn, is to all purposes a headbanging jackass who can't
even spell his claimed name ('Schneebly'); nor that his tutoring style has all
the selfless delicacy of Brian Glover's football refereeing in Kes. What
makes his encounter with a class of prep-school fifth graders the greatest
breakthrough in pedagogy since Bill and Ted met Socrates is his discovery that
even square kids might yet be saved by a swift baptism in the rejuvenating
fount of Rock. Of course, some will see Dewey's class rock-band project as just
one big fat joke. Sure, he's a geek, a deadweight: 'I've been mooching off you
for years, and it's never been a problem until she showed up,' he protests to
his dweebish pal Ned (screenwriter White), whose carping girlfriend wants Dewey
to grow up, clock on and clear out. But what kind of sick society feeds its
offspring Christina and Puff Daddy, and buries the riffs of Sabbath and the
mighty Zep in the section marked 'sad-sack '70s timewarp'? To hear the New
York Times, School of Rock's call to arms couldn't really happen
('The molding of a fifth-grade class into a well-oiled rock machine in a few
weeks is also inconceivable'), but Linklater leaves cynicism at the door,
folding Black's hairier solo instincts into the group mix. A cathartic class
comedy for kids of all sizes, it's Bugsy Malone in rock pomp, Slacker
meets Spy Kids.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal
2011’s BERNIE confirmed that director Richard Linklater is
essentially a shaggy moralist—an artist whose work suggests how society
ought to function and how people ought to treat one another. In
retrospect, his previous Jack Black vehicle, SCHOOL OF ROCK, reveals
similar interests. Aside from ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, I can't recall
another teen film that so blithely dismisses the cynical clichés of campus
cliques, rival gangs, or the bright line that separates cool kids from
everyone else. Black might rail against The Man, but that can't disguise
SCHOOL OF ROCK's insistence on the classroom as a functional and
egalitarian polity. In its vision of rock music as consensus, SCHOOL OF
ROCK is something like an inversion of SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: in
Linklater's movie, the fragmented rehearsals suggest the slow stirrings of
creation. These unostentatious but fluidly masterful sequences form the
backbone of the film, real-time demonstrations of collaboration
and outstanding classroom management in action. (In the more than ten
years since its release, SCHOOL OF ROCK has become more political—a vision
of ed reform that doesn't kowtow to neo-liberal priorities like highstakes
testing or union busting.) Black's performance is typically remarkable—he
cavorts like a cartoon character, congenitally incapable of small
gestures. Black's every line of dialogue is accompanied by two or three
irrelevant bits of business. (Compared to Black, every other adult in the
movie turns in a notably self-effacing performance, particularly the
uncharacteristically uptight Sarah Silverman.) What ultimately sets SCHOOL
OF ROCK apart from its aspirational bullshit peers like DEAD POET'S
SOCIETY or CONRACK is Linklater's habitual assertion that slackers and
punks already make a valid contribution to society without cleaning
themselves up or even leaving the house.
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
The story of "School of Rock" is a familiar song -- the journey of arrested adolescent/adult Dewey Finn (Jack Black) to maturity, helped along the way by the wisdom of children -- but the fun is in the performance.
Jack Black is the perpetual-motion comic, a manic imp with rubber legs, dancing eyes and a mouth that can't help but curl into a devious grin with every stray thought that passes through his mind. Perfect casting for Dewey, a rock god wannabe acting out his heavy-metal fantasies in third-rate bands who tire of his strutting and preening.
The script by Mike White ("The Good Girl") hits all the expected notes, from the contrivance that lands narcissistic Dewey into a substitute teaching position at a high-performance elementary school, through the chorus of life lessons learned by both the terminally irresponsible Dewey and his oppressed fifth-grade charges as the vanity project becomes a group effort, right to the upbeat fade-out.
Overstuffed with cute tweenage overachievers poised to rebel (whether they know it or not), their demanding parents and a brittle, tightly wound principal (Joan Cusack), this comedy could have turned into an anonymous studio assignment.
But director Richard Linklater powers the film with the energy and attitude and beat of his soundtrack. You can feel the charge that Dewey gets as his passion grabs these kids. At times, it's as if Black himself operates on that emotional wavelength: a big kid reminding these stressed-out children what it's like to play.
Like most high-concept comedies of this ilk, it's pure fantasy (no one hears the thrash of drums or screech of amplified guitars in an elementary school building?) Everyone blossoms and no one -- not even Dewey -- will suffer any consequences. But for every scene of Dewey cheerleading a kid out of self-censorship or shyness, there is a moment in which the mere act of thrashing out a rock song becomes a shout of defiance from an otherwise voiceless kid.
This is rock 'n' roll rebellion with a small "r," but Linklater and his cast play it for real.
Let's
come right out and say it: "School of Rock" made me laugh harder than
any movie I've seen this year. The giggles start coming right at the get-go,
when Jack Black, as the
fiercely committed but less than inspired rock-and-roller Dewey Finn, howls his
way through a song, then hurls himself shirtless and triumphant into the mosh
pit... where the horrified crowd declines to catch him.
It takes
much more than the world's indifference to dampen Dewey's passion. "I
serve society by rocking!" this unreconstructed slacker announces--shortly
before he's dumped by his band. Meanwhile, his nerdy substitute-teacher
roommate Ned (screenwriter Mike White), egged
on by his nagging girlfriend (Sarah Silverman), threatens to evict him unless
he forks over the rent. Desperate for cash, he steals Ned's name and his gig
subbing at a prestigious prep school, where he instructs his startled students
to take recess all day. But when he discovers the kids have musical skills, his
great idea is born: he'll turn the uptight preppy grinds into a down-and-dirty
rock-and-roll band.
Richard Linklater,
director of "Slacker" and "Before Sunrise," is not a
filmmaker you'd expect to be making a studio movie that sounds, on paper, as
formulaic as "The Bad News Bears." But "Bad News Bears,"
let's not forget, was a terrific formula movie, and so is "School of Rock."
Linklater was an inspired choice on the part of producer Scott Rudin, for he's
naturally resistant to cutesiness and sentimentality, and his comic timing
proves pitch perfect. If this is "selling out," it should happen more
often.
The casting
of the kids is spot on, from the prissy grade-grubber (Miranda Cosgrove) who
becomes the band's super-efficient manager (having rejected the assignment of
"groupie") to the painfully uncool, piano-playing Chinese-American
kid (Robert Tsai) who has no idea what his teacher means by "sticking it
to The Man." The kids, in essence, play group straight man to Black, and
Black gives back everything he's got. It's a bravura, all-stops-out,
inexhaustibly inventive performance. I don't know how much was improvised, and
how much comes from White's sharp screenplay, but Black may never again get a
part that displays his mad-dog comic ferocity to such brilliant effect. He, and
the movie, kick ass.
Jerry Saravia
review [3/4]
Okay, so it happened. Director Richard Linklater, the creator of the phenomenal "Slacker" and "Before Sunrise," has helmed a mainstream comedy geared for kids and some adults. "The School of Rock" looks like it may be a saccharine confection of simplistic morals and values with its parents' seal of approval that it will appeal to all ages and not likely offend anyone. The major surprise is that the movie is a kick in the head, a swift comedy with a brazen, animalistic performance by Jack Black.
Black plays rock n' roll guitarist, Dewey Finn, a lover of the old 70's bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Somehow, though, he doesn't realize that his tastes may be too ancient for most. He is the guitarist of a band that votes him out for doing too much riffing and too many jumps from the stage. Finn is sure that he will make it on his own, despite the fact everyone has little to no confidence of his talents. Even Ned (Mike White), his old buddy and current housemate, tries to evict him, mostly for not paying the $2200 of rent he owes. One day, Dewey gets a call from the local private school that Ned is needed to do some substitute teaching. Dewey pretends to be Ned and subs for a science class. Disaster is in the horizon when he tells the class to take recess while he snoozes. Slowly, he realizes that the students have musical talents waiting to be tapped into, namely for Dewey's own band-in-the- making.
The best scenes involve the classroom, especially when Dewey teaches them the finer points of singers, songs and bands from the 1970's. Of course, the students have no idea what he is talking about - when he asks them about their favorite bands, they respond with names like Christina Aguilera. This is going to be hard work but Dewey is up to the task, including having the students practice with their own musical instruments (it helps they attend a music class). Dewey wants to rock with as much gusto as possible - this guy lives and breathes rock music and expects everyone to do the same.
Naturally, there is nothing in this movie that can't be foreseen. The addition of the strict school principal (Joan Cusack), who is unaware that Dewey is not the teacher he claims to be, results in the usual cliches and obligatory scenes where the students' parents are outraged with a cartoonish fury. The difference is in the execution of such time-honored formulas, and director Linklater opts for a sentiment-free attitude. It helps that Jack Black is not receptive to sentiment either, coming from the "High Fidelity" school of the take-charge-and-rebel attitude. Dewey is a character who is not out to change students and their values - he just wants them to rock and rock loud. It is a real pleasure to see Black at work, exuding his body fat and arched eyebrows to really deliver the heart of rock and roll in all its gut-wrenching glory. He is the life of the party, even if he guzzles a beer or two in the process.
What doesn't transmit as forcefully are the supporting characters - amazing considering the script is written by co-star Mike White ("Chuck and Buck"). Joan Cusack, the most underutilized comic actress in Hollywood, is not given enough scenes where she is more than the one-dimensional, rigid principal she plays. Same with Mike White as Ned, Dewey's former bandmate, who has opted for temping, excuse me, subbing as a career. Even Ned's girlfriend is given the bitchy shenanigans that are normally associated with tedious screenwriting, not real life.
Save for those flaws, "The School of Rock" is a rockin', happy excursion into the world of Jack Black and his own philosophies on rock and roll. You may not learn much, but you'll rock with joy.
Reverse
Shot review
Rock ‘n’ Roll Middle School,
by Jeff Reichert
Slate (David Edelstein) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Slant
Magazine Nick Schager
The
Filmsnobs (James Owen) review
School of
Rock Henry Sheehan
Flak Magazine (Stephen Himes) review
Kamera.co.uk
review Deryck
Swan
The
Providence Journal (Michael Janusonis) review [3.5/5]
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review Leslie Katz
Jigsaw
Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review
[4.5/5] KJ
Doughton, also seen here: Nitrate
Online (KJ Doughton) review
Village
Voice (J. Hoberman) review
PopMatters
(Elbert Ventura) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale
Xiibaro
Productions (David Perry) review
[3.5/4]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Rich Rosell) dvd review
CultureCartel.com
(Lee Chase IV) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Ryan Arthur) review [4/5]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[3.5/5]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review
[3/5] Rick
Kisonak
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
stylusmagazine.com (Josh Timmermann) review
VideoVista
review John
Percival
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
sneersnipe
(David Perilli) review
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [3/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [2/5]
Exclaim! dvd review Noel Dix
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Rick Groen
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Hartlaub) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
BEFORE SUNSET A 96
USA (80 mi) 2004
Hollywood directors have largely become anonymous corporate entities, where aside from a few individualistic names like Martin Scorsese or the Coen Brothers, the names of the directors are interchangeable, as films today are actually made by corporate technicians that oversee stunts and special effects. Within this group consortium, a few individuals from the mid 90’s stand out, like Todd Haynes’ SAFE (1995), Gregg Araki’s THE DOOM GENERATION (1995), and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995). While these films were never commercial blockbusters, all three establish a personal vision, as they do set a tone for intelligence and stylistic novelty, becoming part of the new American independent movement. Before Sunrise stands out even among the director’s own output, built upon long takes and an established trust between a constantly moving camera and the subtle nuances of slowly developing characters, establishing an exquisite sensibility defined by cultural refinement and grace, beautifully incorporating the music of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Bach’s Goldberg Variations that begin and end the film, all examples that couldn’t be farther from the Hollywood model. Despite the overall originality of the film, which is like nothing else of its time, an intimate blend of writing, architectural romanticism, and the naturalistic feel of the performances involved, the film was barely recognized, winning Best Director at Berlin while receiving little other acclaim, where the film is not listed on the Top Ten list of a single notable critic (see Critic’s Top Ten: Eric C. Johnson | Behold, the Mutants Shall Wither...). Like Linklater’s two earlier films, SLACKER (1991) and DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993), all three take place in a 24-hour period, each represents a world of uncertainty, and while they all occur in a single geographical location, the films feature wandering characters far removed from any sense of the comforts of home. This underlying sense of alienation from a constantly shifting world in flux, where the future is anything but certain, remains at the core of Linklater films, distinguished by a complex relationship to the characters. Like his earlier film, BEFORE SUNSET spends much of its time walking through city streets, where the fluid movement of the camera matches the effortless flow of an unending conversation, given such a naturalistic, improvisational flair that it’s as if they are discovering their emotions for the very first time on camera, feeling at the same time overly exhilarated and quietly melancholy, beautifully capturing the blossoming of youth like no other film in recent memory.
How does one describe this film, which may be even better than its predecessor? One must definitively declare it’s a romantic film without the artifice of love, with a finale that is simply sublime and unforgettable. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who along with the director are credited with the screenplay, meet in Paris nine years after a rapturous one-night affair (brief images remind us), which was described in a previous film, Before Sunrise, made by the same director in 1995, featuring the same two actors spontaneously meeting on a train to Vienna where the thought that they would never see one another again permeated their every waking moment, never leaving their last names or addresses, as that would have been too conventional. However, before they departed, they agreed to meet after six months. The earlier film ends ambiguously, never revealing the outcome. Now Hawke is in Paris at the end of a book tour, speaking to a small gathering at a bookstore about his novel, a fictionalized account of that affair. He is asked about that very ambiguity, and answers vaguely, but sees out of the corner of his eye, the girl with whom he had the affair. As he has about an hour before he must leave for the airport, flying back to New York, the two of them very carefully re-acquaint themselves, slowly feeling each other out and reconnecting their lives while walking through the back streets of Paris, sitting in parks, and at a café, even taking a boat ride on the River Seine before his limo driver meets them. For about 70 minutes, the camera follows them in real time with a succession of tracking shots, where every gesture, every wince, every smile is captured. The two are smart, attractive, funny, and real, and the time is spent with the two of them talking non-stop, rarely stopping to pause or reflect. The only complaint perhaps is that they talk too much. While what they say to one another is genuinely moving at times, the non-stop verbiage is also an onslaught to the viewers, reminding one of Woody Allen’s romantic best or Éric Rohmer, with flourishes of anxiety and self-deprecating wit, but more challenging and intense, continually searching to find the right thing to say, with gushes of honest, unpretentious realism. Where it all leads to is a wonderment. Very tasteful, nothing overdone, everything exactly in synch with these two characters who are brilliantly effortless, especially Delpy, who singlehandedly steers this film into one of the most beautiful endings captured on film, beginning with a song, A Waltz for a night (Before Sunset) Julie Delpy YouTube (4:01), leading to the rhythm and grace of Nina Simone singing “Just in Time” Before Sunset - YouTube (4:33).
Before Sunset David Denby from The New Yorker
A lovely sequel to "Before Sunrise," the charmingly diminutive
romantic movie that Richard Linklater made in 1995, in which Jesse (Ethan
Hawke), a footloose young American, and Celine (Julie Delpy), a student from
Paris, spent a night talking and making love in Vienna. Nine years have gone
by, and Jesse, now a novelist, is hawking a book in
Cine-File
Chicago: Michael Castelle
Each film in the Delpy/Hawke/Linklater BEFORE series has
succeeded as a dialogue by being, in reality, a trialogue—with the
screenwriting a collective process, the content is always closer to WAKING LIFE
than MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, a lattice of thoughts and ideas, sequentially
highlighted in each new setting and context. The character of Jesse, for
example, can be initially characterized by an unlikely oscillation between
"Ethan Hawke" mode—the disenchanted downtown celebrity who'd rather
keep it real writing novels, turning down blockbusters, and picking up girls in
the Chelsea Hotel lobby—and "Richard Linklater" mode: the everyman
intellectual, reading voluminous quantities of philosophy and literature but
deliberately never using any words a freshman UT stoner wouldn't use. And in
BEFORE SUNSET, Celine becomes rather more "Julie Delpy"—a dedicated
artist and musician (and now, composer and director)—with Delpy's own songs
(from her self-titled 2003 album on the Belgian PIAS label) bookending the film.
The ingeniously relaxed acting and Steadicam cinematography is especially
impressive given that the location shooting here (much more so than 1990s
Vienna in the middle of the night) was undoubtedly a total nightmare; more so
than its engaged interrogation of the possibility of thoughtful and reflexive
romantic love among creative artists, filming 15 straight summer mornings in
Paris without filling the frame with tourists might be the most heroic
achievement of the entire series.
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
Richard Linklater's 1995 "Before Sunrise" opened on a chance meeting between a young American tourist, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), and a French college girl, Celine (Julie Delpy), and ended with a bittersweet parting and a promise of a reunion in Vienna in six months. No letters, no phone calls, no contact, just an impulsive romantic vow and a charmingly naive faith in happy endings.
Linklater, Hawke and Delpy pick up nine years later in "Before Sunset," the older, wiser and just as confused sequel to the lovely brief Vienna romance. Jesse is in a Paris bookstore, his last stop on a tour promoting his novel inspired by that fateful night, when a familiar face and an unsure smile lurking among the bookshelves catches his eye: Celine.
It's the first meeting since that life-changing encounter for the former lovers, who are now 32. Their initial awkwardness eases into a familiar intimacy and they spend an afternoon on a lazy walking tour of Paris as they catch up on their lives.
Jesse and Celine are smart characters with substantial and interesting experiences -- he's a novelist, she's a conservation activist -- and lives that, at least on the surface, sound fulfilling and rewarding. Hawke and Delpy (who collaborated with Linklater on the script) make them warm, engaging people. But this is no "My Dinner With Andre."
Conversation and confession chips away at their facades and they slowly drop their defenses and expose the regrets, frustrations and what might-have-beens that their meeting stirs up.
Hawke, who so often comes off as glib and conceited, carves out a character with a depth created from disappointment and compromise.
Delpy's smiles become increasingly sad, masks to keep her composure from cracking as old embers are fanned back to life.
Snappy retorts and clever remarks have too often been confused for smart talk by American screenwriters.
The dialogue here is deft, intelligent and laced with a sense of humor that is both defensive and revealing, and Linklater's graceful direction flows naturally and easily, giving it all an understated authenticity.
Romantic, real and as generous as it is vulnerable, the art of conversation has rarely been so acute, honest and revealing.
Before Sunset Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Writing about this film poses particular challenges. I could
describe it as "barely there," but that would be misleading. It isn't
shambolic like Napoleon Dynamite,
not even remotely. If anything, Before
Sunset's dominant aesthetic feature is a loose amalgam -- can't
call it a "tension," really -- between a strict time structure
(80-sum-odd real-time minutes) and the airy, dispersive gabfest contained
therein. Within this framework, Linklater's film subtly reverses itself,
becoming less leaden as it progresses, without necessarily becoming
"realistic." We begin with a rigid framing device, with Ethan Hawke's
Jesse at a
Before Sunset Nick Schager from Slant magazine
You can make a strong argument that Richard
Linklater's Before Sunrise doesn't require a sequel. A nimble 1995
romance starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as unacquainted travelers who
spend a heady day and night in Vienna together before separating—with the
beguiling possibility of a future rendezvous—during the film's tantalizing
conclusion, it was a sweet, euphoric gem that convincingly conveyed the
transcendent power of conversation. Linklater, however, respectfully disagreed,
and, as it turns out, wisely so. Before Sunset reunites Hawke's Jesse,
now a novelist who's married with a young son, and Delpy's Celine, an
environmental activist mired in a passionless relationship, in
As with Linklater's original, the beauty and grace of Before Sunset is
its unparalleled ability to capture the idiosyncratic rhythm and cadence of
everyday dialogue—the fitful starts, stops and interruptions of excited,
nervous conversation, and the way in which two people engaged in discussion can
get caught up in the intoxicating flow of ideas and emotions. Linklater's
unassuming camera predominately situates itself either directly in front of, or
behind, the ambulatory couple, and this fluctuation between showing and hiding
the characters' faces—also found in scenes such as a third act car ride that
begins with a shot of the driving automobile's exterior while the duo's voices
can be heard chatting—conveys the primacy of the spoken word. Linklater's ear
is attuned to the commonplace sounds of life, so that when there's a momentary
respite from Jesse and Celine's banter, the natural creaks of steps on a
rickety old staircase or the monotonous splashes of water against a tourist
boat's hull help the director express the alluring vibrancy of the natural
world surrounding these former lovers. And like two actors slipping comfortably
into the roles of their lives—in part because they seem to be playing minor
variations on their real-world selves—Hawke and Delpy bring a natural,
optimistic slacker humanism (him) and a neurotic, wishful pessimism (her) to
their restless strangers in the sunset.
Yet despite the familiarity of the film's tempo, Before Sunset
substitutes its predecessor's revelatory tone for a somber wistfulness that
subtly reflects the advanced age of its now mid-30s protagonists. Idealistic
dreams of future love and bliss have given way to despondent fears that their
one chance at happiness nine years earlier was an opportunity forever lost,
only to be replaced by the unfulfilling dreariness of unhappy lives punctuated,
at best, by minor satisfactions. That they delicately dance around contemporary
Franco-American politics almost immediately after finding each other
exemplifies the characters' maturation from carefree, optimistic youths to
realistic adults who more fully recognize and accept the many barriers
(cultural, political, geographic, personal) that are conspiring to keep them
apart. Linklater, however, is a dogged optimist and a devout believer in
conversation as a holy unifying force, and thus as Jesse and Celine debate the
nature of desire (is it a healing impulse or a corrupting one?), consumerism,
and New York City, introspection and analysis ultimately become the vehicles by
which this stunning film's romantics learn, step by step, to progress from an
unstable state of fragmentation to one approaching contented completeness.
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review
Like many intelligent
women of advanced political beliefs, Celine detests the ideology of the
soulmate. She says as much, with torso-twisting vehemence, about three-quarters
of the way through Before Sunset, shouting the word "evil" at the
notion of there being one right person for her. Although she is, by all
conventional standards, a strikingly beautiful woman and still young, you can
see weariness in her face as she rails about the wasted years, when she either
pursued the phantom of true romance or else felt dead because she'd abandoned
the chase.
Like many intelligent,
advanced women, Celine also has learned that the heart has its reasons. Despite
the justice of her tirade, despite the genuine outrage behind it, she makes her
speech in the back seat of a luxury car, driving through a shimmering Paris
afternoon with a man who gives her exactly the right response, always, and has
the looks of an endearingly scruffy dream.
Were this scene to happen
in another American movie, you might grouse about
He also knows what people
are like when they gather in an audience: They demand honesty and substance but
also want their wishes fulfilled, and will give a filmmaker just ninety minutes
to do it. Gifted enough to oblige, and happy to do so, Linklater satisfies on
all counts. He draws you into an intense, richly textured interchange between
two wholly credible characters--that's the explicit side of Before Sunset--and
at the same time, implicitly, conducts a formal experiment, in which he reveals
the requirements of a good movie by systematically ticking them off.
I could watch this picture
twice a day for the rest of the summer.
But before I rave on, let
me explain the premise of Before Sunset for those who have not yet been
introduced to Celine (Julie Delpy) and her possible soulmate Jesse (Ethan
Hawke). When moviegoers last saw these characters, at the end of Linklater's
1995 Before Sunrise, they were saying goodbye at the train station in Vienna,
having met just a day earlier, and were sharing one of the most convincingly
passionate kisses in film history. From a chance encounter on a westbound
train--she, a French girl, was on her way home from Budapest, and he, the
American boy, was bumming around--they had gone together impulsively into the
city, to wander through the late afternoon and evening, to talk about
everything beneath the sun and moon and to share the Taj Mahal of one-night
stands. Why Taj Mahal? Because for all the magnificence of the encounter, Celine,
at age 23, had a head full of gravestones, and Jesse, equally young, believed
that every good experience will wither and be lost. Rather than expose
themselves to routine and disappointment, the two chose not to exchange
telephone numbers or even last names but pledged to meet on the same platform
in a year's time. No! Make that six months!
The rendezvous, we now
learn, did not take place. But nine years later, in
It
is a retrospective film, obviously: a meditation on opportunities lost,
fantasies recollected, alternative selves that did not appear. From the
beginning, though, you may feel that the one-time lovers have grown more
confident and hopeful, now that they're older. What's past is past; and yet
time is more slippery than we usually think, as Jesse says near the start of
the film, speaking with the philosophical air of a pothead (or a Proust). Time
remains open to all sorts of possibilities--and that's what Linklater goes on
to prove.
He
does so by setting a deadline for the lovers, as he'd done in Before Sunrise.
It seems that Jesse has a plane to catch and must leave for the airport in an
hour and a half--as long as it takes for a feature film to unspool. The events
that follow fill this cinematic slot precisely, because Before Sunset, unlike
its predecessor, takes place in real time. In the earlier film, a cut or a fade
to black made minutes or even hours disappear. In this picture, a stroll
through the
What
happens? First of all, a movie draws us through space; and so the camera in
Before Sunset is almost always traveling. It accompanies Celine and Jesse from
the Shakespeare & Company bookstore to a cafe, then along a garden
promenade between buildings and down to the
What else
happens in a movie? We visit with attractive hybrids: characters who are both
dramatic inventions and extensions of the actors' personalities. Here again, Before
Sunset satisfies the requirement, since it would be hard to find more
pleasant companions for ninety minutes than Celine-Delpy and Jesse-Hawke. She
has a little frown that gathers between her eyes, offsetting the loose and
sunny aura of her hair, the broad conviviality of her lips. His hair might
belong to a 5-year-old who just got up from a nap, and the mischievous smile
pulls up one corner of his mouth; but along the cheeks run hollows that
resemble twin dueling scars. These extraordinarily good-looking people are
roughed-up enough to be interesting. What's more important, though, is that
they interest each other. They can't stop confessing, teasing, commenting,
contending, laughing abruptly in the middle of the conversation and talking on
top of one another's words, so great is their desire to respond to one another.
Where does the characters' interplay end and the actors' begin? It's impossible
to say, since Delpy and Hawke collaborated with Linklater on the dialogue. All
I know is that these lovers delight in the answer more than the statement; and
their pleasure becomes the audience's.
A movie
may also give pleasure by flattering the audience. It invites us to imagine
ourselves as ordinary people, only a little better--which is why the
"average" social class gains some luxe on the screen, the
"normal" job gets more excitement and daily inconveniences (bills to
pay, diapers to change) fade away. In this spirit, Before Sunset makes
Jesse a bestselling novelist and gives Celine a meaningful job, with travel, at
an environmental NGO. Money is not a pressing problem; domestic encumbrances
remain out of sight. We're able to feel that Celine and Jesse are good people,
and that we, too, are good, caring and intelligent for dreaming ourselves into
their company. The trick here--an excellent one--is that the lovers know
they're in a time bubble. When it pops and life's mess pours in, Celine and
Jesse won't seem so admirable.
But will
the bubble pop? A movie builds suspense; and as the minutes tick by in Before
Sunset, the people on screen and in the audience alike wonder more and more
intently if Jesse will catch that airplane.
I will say
no more, except that time has rarely passed in a film with such apparent ease
and spontaneity, yet with such rightness in every moment. Working with the very
rudiments of movies, Linklater, Delpy and Hawke have sustained a flawless
performance--one that's warm, thoughtful, funny, sexy, charming and in all ways
alive.
Make that three times a day.
The Before Trilogy: Time Regained Criterion essay by Dennis Lim, March 01, 2017
Before Sunset (2004)
- The Criterion Collection
The Before
Trilogy - The Criterion Collection
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Debrief Encounter Nick
James from Sight and Sound, August
2004
Finding
Freedom the Second Time Around: The Politics of Before ... Finding Freedom the Second Time Around: The
Politics of Before Sunset, by Kevin B. Lee from Senses of Cinema, October
28, 2004
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum Spur of the Moment, July 02, 2004
Cinepassion Time Measured in Heartbeats, Fernando F. Croce, June 6, 2004
Before Sunset Beyond
Words, Chris Fujiwara from the Boston Phoenix
PopMatters
(Michael Healey) review
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
The New York Observer: Andrew Sarris
The
Village Voice: J. Hoberman June 22,
2004
Reverse
Shot: Michael Koresky January 04,
2005
Reverse
Shot: Chris Wisniewski Listed as
#4 from Best of the Decade, December 28, 2009
Reverse Shot: Michael Joshua Rowin Mortal Beloved, Michael Joshua Rowin, July 1, 2004
Reverse Shot: Jeff Reichert Things to Come, Jeff Reichert, July 1, 2004
Reverse Shot: Suzanne Scott Old Haunts, Suzanne Scott, July 1, 2004
Reverse
Shot review
Reverse Shot’s #1 Film of the Year 2004, Michael Koresky, Spring 2005
Reverse Shot review Eric Hynes, Spring 2005
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
filmcritic.com (Norm Schrager) review [4/5]
Movie-Vault.com
(Aaron West) review
The
Film Journal (Peter Tonguette) review
The
Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review
Kamera.co.uk
review KJ
Doughton
stylusmagazine.com (Akiva Gottlieb) review
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B+] also seen here: Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film and here: d+kaz: Daniel Kasman
Salon: Stephanie Zacharek July 02, 2004
The Film Journal (by Rick Curnutte) review
DVD Times Gary Couzens
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Film Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw and Bill Chambers
Slate (David Edelstein) review
Looking Closer (J. Robert Parks) review
Before Sunset Kevin O’Reilly from DVD Times
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review Page 2
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review
The Providence Journal (Michael Janusonis) review [4/5]
Kinocite Beth Gilligan
eFilmCritic.com (Jason Whyte) review [5/5]
Movies 101 (Robert Glatzer) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Dan Heaton) dvd review
DVD
Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review
[4/5]
DVD Town
(John J. Puccio) dvd review
The
Before Trilogy Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov
The Before
Trilogy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest
Steve Cohen
The
Before Trilogy: Criterion Collection (Before Sunrise / Before ... Randy Miller III from DVD Talk
Blu-ray
Review: Criterion Packages Love and Time in Linklater's ... Zach Gayne from Screen Anarchy
The Before
Trilogy | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine
Budd Wilkins
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [A]
World
Socialist Web Site review David Walsh
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [5/5]
hybridmagazine.com review Ellen Whittier
sneersnipe
(David Perilli) review
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Eddie Cockrell Variety
Interview: Ethan Hawkes Geoffrey Macnab from The Guardian, June 18, 2004
Five more films for the nine-years-later treatment Xan Brooks and Sean Clarke from The Guardian, July 21, 2004
Before
Sunrise/Before Sunset: No 3 best romantic film of all time Ryan Gilbey from The Guardian, October 15, 2010
The Observer (Philip French) review
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Boston Globe review [4/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
The Los Angeles Times: Manohla Dargis
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Before Sunrise Blu-ray - Julie Delpy - DVD Beaver
FAST FOOD NATION
USA (116 mi) 2006
indieWIRE:
Cannes '06 Critics Notebook: Almodovar and Actresses ...
Anthony Kaufman at Cannes, May 20. 2006 (excerpt)
Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation," an adaptation of Eric Schlosser best-selling novel, also tries to weigh the political with the personal, and similarly, doesn't always find the right balance. Remarkably even-handed considering the material, Linklater's "Fast Food Nation" doesn't effectively demonize the fast food machine as much as convey the way its many intricate parts function. While characters as diverse as Kris Kristofferson's earthy rancher and Ethan Hawke's bohemian uncle all talk about the evils of the industry ("there's shit in the meat" is the film's most provocative claim), the film largely eschews direct indictments, leaving this viewer, at least, feeling hungry for more.
Linklater may be lauded for the film's subtlety, sympathetic characters and meandering narrative, but the story feels soft, requiring more of the bile of "Tape" and less of the slipperiness of "Slacker." It's not until near the film's end where Linklater finally reveals the "killing floor," a gory verite sequence that recalls George Franju's 1949 slaughterhouse shocker "Blood of the Beast."
Cannes: Volver | The Wind that Shakes the Barley | Fast Food ... Give Pedro the Prize, by Jason Solomons at Cannes from The Observer, May 21, 2006 (excerpt)
A didactic strain has dominated the early part of
Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear) is a new marketing exec at burger chain Mickey's, home of The Big One. When faeces is found in the meat patties, he's sent to investigate, undertaking a journey to middle America, its immigrant-staffed industrial plants, bland estates and malls. The film is trying to be Traffic with burgers: illegal Mexicans (including Catalina Sandino Moreno) provide cheap labour; meanwhile, student activists, including Avril Lavigne in her film debut, plan to free the cows whose GM-enhanced manure is polluting rivers.
While images of cow slaughter may put even a Frenchman off his steak tartare, the dialogue is trite and the acting (from Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Bruce Willis and Kinnear) barely acceptable.
The
French Connection: TOC’s Cannes Film Fest blog, day 3
Helen Gramates at Cannes from Time Out Chicago
I don’t think I’ll be eating the French national dish of steak frites (or McDonald’s, for that matter) any time soon, after two of today’s film screenings, Fast Food Nation and Taxedermia. Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater—screened in competition and is one of two films from the director to appear simultaneously in Cannes—a distinction no other director can claim. His other film, A Scanner Darkly, appears later in the festival’s non-competitive parallel section, Un Certain Regard.
At the morning screening of Fast Food Nation, the frenzy to get in was palpable (never mind that it had already screened twice the night before for press only). The security attendants who guard the various entrances to the Lumiere theater (the main theater, with the famous red-carpet staircase) are trained to be lukewarmly polite at best and can be quite gruff when it’s called for (like when people are clamoring to get into a Lars von Trier film—that is, pre-Manderlay). I arrived 25 minutes before the screening, and people were frantically passing through the entrances and up the stairs to get scanned by body wands and have their bags rifled through (that all started after 2001). Happy to have made my way in with no interference, I settled in, and by the time the screening started not one seat in the theater seemed to be empty—and that theater must seat about 2,000.
Fast Food Nation takes the ideas of the non-fiction book of the same name by Eric Schlosser and fleshes out characters affected by Mickey’s Fast Food, an imaginary restaurant chain. In adapting the book to film, both director and author traveled to Colorado and became inspired to focus on three main characters: The chain’s ostensibly well-meaning marketing executive (played by Greg Kinnear), a hard-working teen at the chain (Ashley Johnson), and an illegal immigrant (Catalina Sandino Moreno) trying to make it as best she can while avoiding dangerous work at the meat packing plant. Watching the film with an international audience, I couldn’t help but feel a sinking sense of recognition as the worst bits of American culture—everything from teen malaise (the film touches ever so slightly on Columbine in one scene) to corporate greed (how to market meals to the Teletubbies audience) to social injustice—was presented under the neon lights of our ubiquitous fast food chains.
Building to the film’s climax, Linklater doesn’t spare us when showing
actual footage of the meat warehouse slaughter room—it’s reported that he was
granted access to the areas but had to work quickly and somewhat
surreptitiously in filming the scenes. I imagine for the well-traveled
'I've never been
in the firing line like this before' - The Guardian Xan Brooks interview May 22, 2006
Director
Richard Linklater is known for his gentle, Gen-X movies. Now he's taking on the
American meat industry with Fast Food Nation.
Richard
Linklater's film Fast Food Nation ends on the killing floor, as cattle march
placidly up a ramp to be slaughtered. We see them shot and shackled, sliced and
diced. Grey loops of intestine come sweeping down the conveyor belt like some
demented version of The Generation Game. Inside the cinema at Cannes, the
audience groaned and covered their eyes.
Fast Food Nation is Linklater's filleted, fictionalised take on Eric
Schlosser's 2001 bestselling exposé. The director worked with Schlosser on the
script and then shot it at speed, with A-list actors (Bruce Willis, Greg
Kinnear) camped out in a motel, and a Mexican slaughterhouse doubling for the
abattoirs of
We are hiding out in the dark corner of a hotel bar. Linklater and Schlosser
flew into
Schlosser strikes a more cautious note. "You say that now," he says gloomily. "Wait and see how you feel when the movie comes out." At home the author has been targeted by a website bankrolled by the food lobbies, and routinely finds his book readings disrupted by protesters. "Rightwing nuts," Linklater calls them.
It remains to be seen whether the film of Fast Food Nation will ruffle as many feathers as the book did. Undeniably, it does a fine job of converting Schlosser's source material into a multi-strand drama in the style of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, covering all aspects of food production, from the impoverished migrants who work the packing plants to the grinning executives in their sun-drenched boardroom. But the film is essentially a drama, not a documentary. Linklater suggests that this makes the message easier to swallow, arguing that an audience will respond better to a human story than a thicket of facts and figures. "Characters take you beyond the politics. You can watch a movie and like it without necessarily agreeing with what the director is saying." Schlosser concurs: "This is a fictional film, but the plot elements are all taken from real life," he says. "All of this really happened at one stage or another."
Even so, some major changes have been made. The star of Schlosser's book is McDonald's, but in the film the corporation has been relegated to the role of background artist, a name to be dropped in business meetings. Instead, the action focuses on a fictional fast-food chain called Mickey's, which we are led to believe is a little bit like McDonald's, except (of course) for the fact that it exploits its workforce and specialises in hamburgers that contain a high "faecal content".
Linklater and Schlosser insist that there is no way they could have found a bigger role for McDonald's. The fact that the brand crops up at all, they explain, is only down to their own perseverance. "It's one of the most frustrating things about making a film," says Linklater. "Out in the real world there is no avoiding these companies; they're shoving themselves down your throat every waking second. Then suddenly you make a film and you can't even put them in the background, or you could get sued."
If the film is at all critical, the situation is harder. "These days we can be sued for disparaging an industry. It's like it's a felony to say something bad." Linklater shakes his head. "I think they should make it a felony to criticise a film product. Particularly my film product. It's anti-American. I'd like to see people get sued if they wrote a bad review of my movie. If you can't say something nice you shouldn't say anything at all."
"We're joking about this, but it's true," says Schlosser. "You can't criticise these big corporations. If you do you're an anarchist, socialist, whatever."
I suspect, though, that Linklater has always relished his role as an anarchist-socialist-whatever. This is the man who name-tagged a generation with his 1990 breakthrough Slacker and who has since steered a wild, iconoclastic course through American cinema. His films are airy, loquacious, full of warmth and wit. One thinks of those star-crossed chatterboxes, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise, or the criss-crossing interactions of the teenage revellers from Dazed and Confused. "My plan B has always been to make a film about people who talk a lot," Linklater explains.
Now, at the age of 44, he is able to mix mainstream crowd-pleasers such as
Inevitably, our conversation circles back to the killing floor. Linklater
tells me how Mexican abattoirs are much the same as American ones, except
cleaner; how the workers in the
"It was the craziest situation," he says. "So many of the crew came out saying, 'I will never eat meat again.' But maybe it was all the smells. The warm blood. I swear to God it must have activated some long-dormant enzymes in my stomach, because I came out smelling a medium-rare steak, straight off the grill."
He pauses to chew metaphorically over the implications. "And wouldn't that have been the ultimate failure of this film? If it turned me into a meat eater." By this point he is looking alarmed. "I wouldn't have eaten the steak," he insists, as much to himself as to me. "But for a second there I almost could have."
Unhappy Meal Stuart Klawans from the Nation
Beyond Hollywood review James Mudge
PopMatters (Brian Holcomb) review
Pajiba (Jeremy C. Fox) review
World Socialist Web Site review Peter Daniels
Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Slant Magazine review Preston Jones
Film Monthly (Andrew Dowd) review
Culture Wars [Iona Firouzabadi]
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Heaton) dvd review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Plume Noire review Sandrine Marques
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Don R. Lewis
The Lumière Reader Tim Wong
Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] at Cannes
Fast Food Nation Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily
Film School Rejects (H. Stewart) dvd review [B] also seen here: Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [3/5]
Political Film Review Michael Haas
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Monsters and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [3/5]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
cinemattraction (Sarah Manvel) review
The New York Sun (Steve Dollar) review
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [2/5]
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Culture
Wars [Rob Lyons]
Variety.com
[Todd McCarthy]
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Observer (Philip French) review
The Independent (Robert Hanks) review [2/5]
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [4/6]
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [2/6]
Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2/5]
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review [2/4]
Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review
L.A. Daily News review [2.5/4] Glenn Whipp
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
A SCANNER DARKLY B 89
It’s fucked up,
fucked up
A very comical and patently absurd glimpse of that bleak place we call home, with a few moments that are astonishingly clever, but in the end becomes just another paranoid sci-fi conspiracy caper. While it resembles the moving colors animation, this is a much more approachable and entertaining film than the endless philosophical monologue known as WAKING LIFE. Based on a 1977 Philip K. Dick novel, at least partly based on the author’s own drug experiences in the Southern California drug subculture, writing “I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel,” where at the end, as in the book, the film lists the names of many of his friends who suffered serious medical ailments, including many who died. The film visualizes an overzealous police state that literally drugs the unsuspecting public to keep them in line, and uses some of their own police personnel to work undercover, mixing with the regular folk, as the eyes and ears of the State, seen here in amoral terms, as through a series of double cross acts by the State, which encourages ordinary citizens to spy and report on their neighbor’s suspicious activity, they’re willing to risk the lives of a few of their own officers, not to mention the deteriorating health of the entire population, all for their own so-called public good.
Set in a vague everchanging time period of “seven years from now in Anaheim , California
The problem here is the outrageous storyline and humor get sabotaged by the look and feel of the film, which, very much like the drug experience, after the initial burst of originality (getting high) begins to wear off, there’s a feeling of coming down, where everything starts to look familiar and feel disappointingly tame and overly detached, as represented by the vacuous, impersonal feel of the characters. Unfortunately, as there is no resistance to this system of any kind at all, which must have become obvious to some after awhile, instead there is only blind obedience and a benign resignation to the inevitable. The humor is left behind and only appears in the first half of the film, the better half, as the film weaves into the serious inner workings of an over-controlling police department, filled with faceless, humorless humanoids that run the world, who may as well be victims of THE INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Reeves himself, begins to have doubts about who he is, and is referred for medical tests due to his faltering job performance, and discovers the left and right sides of his brain are acting in polar opposites to one another, each providing contrary evidence, exhibiting deteriorating signs of his own addiction, leaving him in a state of flux wondering what to believe. There’s a wonderful scene where he’s in bed with one girl, who turns into another girl, leaving him permanently confused. Like many employers, he’s sent off the plantation once he’s of little use to them anymore, and sent out to pasture in a State sponsored residential agriculture recovery program where they secretly grow the drug that puts millions to sleep.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
Richard Linklater sets his adaptation of cult science-fiction author (and longtime junkie) Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel in a surveillance society "seven years from now," where the government has eyes and ears on everyone (except the corporate Big Brother who provides the surveillance) and narcotics agents are guerrilla fighters in a failed drug war turned addiction epidemic.
To capture the drug-induced paranoia and social disconnection, Linklater uses a technique called interpolated rotoscoping, a kind of low-tech motion capture he first used in "Waking Life." After the actors are filmed, animators digitally trace, paint and rework the raw footage into sketchy images that throb with a free-floating impermanence.
Keanu Reeves is under the digital paintbrush as Agent Fred, a drug enforcement agent burnout in a suit that smears his "real" identity into a vague, shifting Everyperson and an addict of the mind-scrambling super-drug Substance D, which he pops like pep pills.
Studying surveillance tapes of meaningless, incoherent conversations between Bob Arctor (aka himself) and his reality dropout roommates, conspiracy-theory-spinning Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and brain-fried Luckman (Woody Harrelson), Agent Fred turns downright schizophrenic as he fingers himself and his sort-of girlfriend, Donna (Winona Ryder), as his prime suspects.
Linklater can't quite embrace the complete resignation to conspiratorial corruption of the novel -- he has to pull out some hope -- and the results are not exactly emotionally involving. Like the hazy characters themselves, we lose the thread of the story in the distracted, mind-numbing diversions that become these dysfunctional characters' entire lives.
But the film is weirdly fascinating in its own maverick way. The undulating, morphing animation creates a state of flux and a fragile, drug-addled perspective, and Linklater's portrait of the empty lives of dead-end social floaters and the mental breakdown of longtime addicts is unsettlingly underplayed.
The atmosphere of schizophrenia, paranoia and disconnection from reality is the most faithful screen adaptation of Dick's sensibility to date. While it may not make for gripping drama, the nervous disorientation makes it hard to shake the experience loose.
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
"Darkly" is right.
Everything about this movie from director Richard Linklater is murky,
mysterious and confusing - but intriguing and often weirdly gripping, too. It
is playing in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, and is certainly a lot more
interesting than Linklater's other film here at Cannes, in the main competition
- the anti-burger drama Fast Food Nation.
A Scanner Darkly is an adaptation
of Philip K Dick's paranoia thriller of the near future, animated by Bob
Sabiston, using his unique and instantly identifiable digital-rotoscope
technique, in which live action is recreated as a throbbing virtual reality. It
was used on Linklater's hallucinatory fantasy Waking Life (2001) and in one
section of The Five Obstructions (2003) by Lars Von Trier and Jorgen Leth, but
the effects here are much more subdued: less freaky, less spacey - in keeping
with the downbeat mood.
In 2014 or thereabouts, America
has become a surveillance police-state to prosecute the war on drugs, in
particular a new, universally available and instantly addictive substance
nicknamed "D" - for Death. Keanu Reeves plays Bob Arctor, an
undercover narc on the verge of a crack-up. For public appearances as a cop, he
has to wear a special hi-tech disguise to protect his identity, including a
strange mask which shows his face as a shifting kaleidoscope of features.
It is wearing this bizarre outfit
that we first see him addressing a war-on-drugs conference, sponsored by the
New Path pharmaceutical corporation, specialising in detox techniques - and
like, all corporations in the movies, there is something very dodgy about it.
Arctor's impending breakdown is
accelerated when he is ordered to spy on his druggie friends: the babbling,
hyper-active Barris (Robert Downey Jr), slacker Ernie (Woody Harrelson),
unhappy Freck (Rory Cochrane) and the beautiful cokehead Donna (Winona Ryder)
with whom, in his dopey way, he is in love. But things get very strange and terrifying
when, in the line of duty, he must enslave himself to the pitiless Death drug.
A Scanner Darkly is a very dour
film, labouring under a lowering sky of paranoia and repressed discontent.
Reeves' own performance is typically opaque, and occluded and alienated further
by the animation. The movie itself is often startling and engrossing, but the
question of what the heck is going on, and why, is never entirely absent from
your mind.
The answer, when it comes,
provides an effective, existential chill, though without entirely dispelling
the bafflement. Not a triumph, but a clever rendering of the subversive spirit
of Philip K Dick.
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review
Let's say you could
extract a gram of pure cocaine from a common aerosol product, using only a
plastic bag and the freezer compartment of your refrigerator. Or imagine that
with a few pennies' worth of Styrofoam, you could construct a silencer for the
gun that every citizen today ought to carry. In Philip K. Dick's novel A
Scanner Darkly, the drug-addled Barris believes he can accomplish these
home-handyman projects, so nifty and delusional--or perhaps he just pretends to
believe. Maybe his megalomaniacal incompetence is a show, put on by the
duplicitous Barris to distract other druggies from his real purposes, whatever
they might be; or maybe he simply, pathetically hopes someone will take his
boasts at face value, until the cocaine inevitably fails to crystallize and the
gun goes boom.
Motives repeatedly get
lost in the narcotic haze of A Scanner Darkly--both in the novel and in
Richard Linklater's film adaptation, which comes into theaters ripe with the
taste of your own well-masticated tongue. What's clear is that this adaptation
would have been unthinkable without a nifty, semi-homemade technology of its
own, which actually works: a system that turns live-action footage into
metamorphic animation using computers much like the one on your desk.
Linklater first toyed
with this technology in Waking Life (2001), in which he played with
software developed and overseen by Bob Sabiston. You might say that Waking
Life was the 1.0 Slacker release of a Linklater animation, since it offered
instead of a plot a profusion of freely associated narratives, each segment of
which blossomed forth in its own visual style. In A Scanner Darkly,
Linklater has again relied on Sabiston's ingenious aerosol-and-Styrofoam
technique, but this time he's applied it not just to a plot but to an
obsessively intricate one, in which betrayals are piled upon suspicions heaped
on double-dealings propped up by deceptions and brain malfunction, until the
teetering structure resembles a model of the Brooklyn Bridge built out of
burned matchsticks; and all of this is animated (under the supervision of Tommy
Pallotta) in a single visual style that may be likened, appropriately enough,
to camouflage.
The screen becomes a
continually reassembled puzzle of flat, pulsing blobs of color--tans and
browns, a saturated green like late-August leaves, pinks that sometimes suggest
the onset of liver disease--here creeping around one another's borders, there
floating one over another in thin layers. Figures shift and blur into the
ground; the ground won't stay put. At its most extreme, this camouflage effect
is localized in the "scramble suits" worn by the story's narcotics
agents, who disguise themselves beneath an electronic fabric that swarms with
fragmentary images of human features, rapidly and randomly projected. This
isn't solely a matter of protecting the undercover cop's identity. In the
'60s-era opposition of dopers versus straights--a binary scheme that Linklater
preserves from Dick's novel--the narc ostensibly upholds social norms and so
must have not one public face but many, conforming to the "vague
blur" of consensus. Inside the scramble suit, though, dwells a watchful
individual, hidden, isolated and disaffected. As the camera penetrates to this
inner self, the animator's patches resolve into an image that's stable, more or
less, and legible. It's Keanu Reeves.
In company with Winona
Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr., who join him in lending the movie
their well-known physiognomies, Keanu provides a touch of photographic
realism--though too light a touch, I think, to feel reassuring. Much as Keanu's
character lets slip his sense of identity--as you'd expect of a drug-addicted
undercover narc assigned to carry out intensive surveillance on himself--so do
you lose your grip on the actor's physical presence. He's here and gone, real
and imaginary, in a way that exceeds the usual limits of cinema's waking dream.
This animated dream attaches itself to the waking state like a crust, borrowing
movement from the substrate of reality while coloring and changing and supplanting
it.
There's something
opportunistic about this process, in a good sense. I can imagine Linklater
finishing Waking Life back in 2001 and wondering what he could do next
with Sabiston's uncanny machine. I think of him rooting through his library and
coming up with A Scanner Darkly as the perfect subject to feed into the
hopper. But I also note the date of Waking Life--year zero of the global
"war on terror"--and realize that Linklater found more in Dick's
novel than a rich source of hallucination and paranoia, ideal for him to
animate. Linklater must have been newly hungry for material about the national
surveillance state, and A Scanner Darkly could feed that appetite, too.
From almost its first
scene, Linklater's film plays up the political implications of Dick's
cautionary tale of drug abuse. When Keanu, the scramble-suited narc, is called
up before a civic boosters' club in Anaheim, California, to deliver a
propaganda speech for his department, he listens miserably to the host
describing him as one of "the troops fighting for us" against the
"drug terrorists." This fight (like Bush's "war on terror")
entails all-encompassing vigilance and perpetual suspicion; and so Linklater
adds to the story a vast wiretapping center where agents seated at computer
screens seem to be monitoring everyone's conversations at all times. (You
glimpse the place when Keanu, now in street clothes, walks out of police
headquarters and phones his heartthrob, Winona, to arrange a drug buy.) Later,
in another scene that would have fit well in the novel but can be found only in
the film, Linklater has Keanu and Winona encounter a protest speaker at a
shopping mall. The man, shouting into his bullhorn, insists that powerful
people in and around the government want the drug traffic to continue. It makes
them money, he says; it gives them an excuse to exert control. At this point an
unmarked van rolls up and a cop in riot gear steps out, to shock the protester
into unconsciousness, toss him into the rear and silently drive away.
This isn't to say that
Linklater reduces the war on drugs to a pure metaphor of the war on terror; but
the realities of drug use clearly do not move him as much as they did Dick,
whose novel is charged with anger at the drug traffic and a deep, intimate pity
for its victims. Though set in 1994 and published in 1977, A Scanner Darkly
is steeped in an insider's knowledge of 1960s drug culture, making it one of
the most backward-looking of futuristic novels. The film retains some of this
retro feel--even at the Bears Club Lodge in Anaheim, the squares are no longer
that square--but for the most part Linklater brings you into the present, if
not into the world of "seven years from now" that's announced in an
introductory title. The price of this contemporaneity is the loss of precise
turns of phrase, points of reference, social attitudes that bind the novel to
its era but also tie it to a specific lived experience rather than to a
generalized slackerdom.
But then, Linklater
also thins out much of the novel's underbrush and many of its suffocating
vines: the theological entanglements, for example, and looping strands of
existentialist speculation. By cutting to the story's political core, Linklater
has given A Scanner Darkly the coherence the book never had, and he has
done so without diminishing Dick's scattershot brilliance--which is to say, his
life.
I come to Robert
Downey Jr. in the role of the inventive Barris. Here Downey is in semi-cartoon
form, his gestures balletically extended, his eyes popped as an aid to the
animators, his smooth baritone poured onto the soundtrack with an extra dollop
of malicious glee. Given the movie's showiest role--demented clowns are always
more expressive than gloomy, self-controlled narcs--Downey manages to be as
absurd, compelling, convincing and irresistible as you've ever seen him,
despite the challenge of being morphed into computerized paint. But Woody
Harrelson is just as good, throwing around his long body and stoner's wit with
blithe self-abandon; and so is Winona Ryder, who drifts dreamily in and out of
her scenes swallowing her r's as if they were an especially succulent brand of
Southern California candy.
Keanu remains Keanu.
The bouncy dude with limited range has long since become a man with something
pained and doubtful in his manner. Linklater has recognized and respected this
sense of constraint and also an enduring underlying sweetness that can be
allowed to emerge later in the character. I had wearied of Keanu, as would
anyone, I think, who'd sat through both The Matrix Revolutions and Constantine.
Thanks to A Scanner Darkly, I'm able to like him again.
He's one of the people
who bring life to this heady, improbable project, which you wouldn't have
thought could crystallize but somehow did. A Scanner Darkly is funny,
unnerving, astonishing, urgent. It's my kind of summertime special-effects
extravaganza.
Clearly,
Clearly, Dark-Eyed Donna: Time and A Scanner Darkly ... Nathan Kosub from Senses of Cinema, November 5, 2006
A
Scanner Darkly (2006) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
The New York Sun (Andrew Stuttaford) review
Chicago
Reader: Movie Reviews Andrea Gronvall
A Scanner Darkly Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
New York Observer
(Andrew Sarris) review
Beyond Hollywood review Brian Holcomb
PopMatters (Chris Barsanti) review
Slant Magazine review Jeremiah Kipp
SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
The Village
Voice [J. Hoberman]
CBC.ca Arts
(Andre Mayer) review
stylusmagazine.com (Arthur Ryel-Lindsey) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [3/5]
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
d+kaz.
Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C+]
The Onion A.V. Club review Keith Phipps
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD DVD Version]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [A]
World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4.5/5]
A Scanner Darkly Lee Marshall in Cannes from Screendaily
DVD Verdict (Geoffrey Miller) dvd review
DVD Talk (Preston Jones) dvd review [3/5]
Between Productions [Robert Cashill]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
sneersnipe (David Perilli) review
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Film School Rejects (Neil Miller) review [A]
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
The Village Voice [Rob Nelson] at Cannes
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3/5] Peter Voner Haar
Film Monthly (Tony Licardello) review
filmcritic.com (Anne Gilbert) review [2/5]
DVD Verdict (Dennis Prince) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Talk (Matthew Hinkley) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (David Ryan) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Monsters and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]
The Lumière Reader - DVD Mythily Meher
Film Fortress (Colin Le Sueur) review
The Providence Journal (Michael Janusonis) review [4/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] cartoon
The Independent (Robert Hanks) review [3/5]
The Guardian (Philip French) review
Time Out London (Ben Walters) review
Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Hartlaub]
Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
'A Scanner Darkly': Keanu Reeves, Undercover and Flying High on a Paranoid Head Trip Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, July 7, 2006
A Scanner Darkly (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
here The first 24 minutes of the film may be seen on YouTube
ME AND ORSON WELLES B+ 92
USA Great Britain (114 mi) 2009 ‘Scope
"How
the hell do I top this?" —Orson Welles (Christian McKay)
Richard Linklater movies tend to have a modernist bent to them, where you can feel at times as if you’re lost in a minefield of existential drift. But that is certainly not the case here in what amounts to a charming and thoroughly enjoyable piece of nostalgia, set in 1937 when Orson Welles was attempting to open his Mercury Theater production with a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with Welles playing the part of Brutus. With wall-to-wall jazz music and a typewriter style opening title sequence, one would swear we are about to witness a Woody Allen movie, but we are soon introduced to a strange new world, all led by the larger than life persona of the young 22-year old Welles who has yet to make a single movie and is full of swagger and theatrical bluster, where the performance by British actor Christian McKay just nails the all-too-perfect speech intonations and sardonic facial expressions of Welles, a young genius child prodigy who has yet to take the world by storm. But his self assurance and bullying sarcastic wit are on full display, obviously a man on a mission who is just getting his first taste of his own powers, literally browbeating his cast into submission, refusing to accept anyone else’s way except his own, showing them to the door quickly if they refuse. So everyone defers to his judgment. After all, he takes credit for every idea, even Shakespeare’s, calling it an Orson Welles production of Shakespeare, where he gets top billing, deleting characters and scenes on a whim whenever the mood suits him, but also making everyone feel that despite the fact they are receiving no salary, they are just a few days away from being a part of theater history.
Welles is like a traveling road show that rolls in and out of town, driven by the breeze of destiny, where the story is really about a small bit player, a 17-year old high school student Richard (Zac Efron), who happens by chance to see Welles on the street in front of the theater, playing up to his enormous ego, all lies and pretense, but he wins a role in the play which is opening in a week. The film is limited to this memorable week of rehearsals, revealing behind the scenes vignettes of the principal players, but especially Welles who dominates every scene, as even when the cast sits around doing nothing, “We’re waiting for Orson,” his aura remains evident at all times. To learn his part, Richard is referred to Sonja (Claire Danes), the behind the scenes, all purpose secretary who is likely already sleeping with Welles (along with pretty much every other female), as she’s waiting for her chance to meet David O. Selznick and a chance to play in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939). Through flirtatious means, the two become fast friends, which they remain throughout the film, though she trusts Richard simply because he has no clout, so she can be open and honest with him, guiding him through the egos and everyday disasters that take place each day on the set.
Efron is not very good in the play, but that
hardly matters, as he’s playing a young novice who’s not supposed to be very
good, but he fits comfortably into the production, enthralled by the world
around him, which features excellent performances all around. In perhaps the film’s best scene, Welles
whisks “the kid” into a cab with him into the radio studio where he observes
Welles perform a skit on a live radio broadcast, but along the way Welles drops
his guard and reads a passage from Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons, where he
mourns “everything gets taken away from you,” a stunning personal admission
considering the Hollywood brass did exactly that to his career just a few short
years later, destroying his original ending on that film and effectively
destroying his Hollywood career. When
Welles ad-libs an Ambersons passage
on the radio, adding a delicious soliloquy for
himself, he’s profoundly seeing his career years ahead of himself. Outside of Welles, James Tupper is absolutely
brilliant as the suave and ever cordial James Cotton, the man behind the scenes
of so many of Welles’s successes, while Eddie Marsan plays the constantly perplexed
theater manager and old friend, John Houseman.
While Richard is quickly informed of his status, “You’re not getting
anything except the opportunity to be sprayed by Orson’s spit,” Orson has a
habit of initially bolstering each actor’s confidence with flowery praise, such
as seeing “images of magnificence” in their eyes before bringing them back down
to earth with his rapid fire rounds of terse criticism. Thankfully, Linklater does show various
scenes from the theatrical premiere, all of which feel like a special treat, so
the audience is rewarded and never for a moment feels cheated in this
film.
While this is an ambitious behind-the-scenes
glimpse of a theater production in the making, filled with unbridled wit and
humor, along with a select few poor souls who unfortunately feel the
ignominious wrath of an undeterred mad hatter in charge, the focus doesn’t
always swirl around Orson Welles, the man who commands the salacious interest
in every scene, where it’s hard to take your eyes off such a brilliant
rendering of his overwhelming personality.
Instead, the week’s events are seen and filtered through the somewhat
bland eyes (think Tab Hunter) of the young thespian who’s still taking classes
in high school, an idealistic, wide-eyed everyman character whose life was
forever altered by this experience.
Perhaps not up to the caliber of Cassavetes brilliant OPENING NIGHT
(1977), or Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), both the ultimate masterworks in
revealing the wrenching behind-the-scenes activities of a stage production, or
even Desplechin’s delightfully offbeat ESTHER KAHN (2000), this film is
nonetheless fueled by the supercharged performance of a young, unheralded actor
who perfectly captures the undominable spirit of Orson Welles, a legendary,
larger-than-life figure who is one of America’s greatest and most controversial
artists.
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Richard Linklater's "Me and Orson Welles," a
cheerfully fatuous coming of age comedy, was adapted from a novel by Robert
Kaplow. The setting is New York in 1937. That's when the preposterously
precocious Welles, at the age of 22, was directing his Mercury Theater
production of "Julius Caesar," a daring adaptation set in fascist
Italy. Strictly speaking, Welles isn't the movie's central character; the Me of
the ungrammatical title is Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), a high school student
who inveigles Welles into casting him as the lute-playing Lucius. Still, Welles
is Welles. He was always at the center of everything, and he certainly is here.
What's more, he's played by an excellent English actor, Christian McKay, who
bears, or somehow simulates, a facial resemblance to the great man, and nails
Welles's expression of pouty, aggrieved amusement. But Mr. McKay is in his
mid-30s, and doesn't conceal it, so what's the point? By taking the kind
out of wunderkind, the movie also removes the wunder.
For those who care less about Orson Welles and more about the heart-throbby Mr. Efron, the point is clear: put the young star of Disney's "High School Musical" (who just turned 22 himself) into a nostalgic period piece and give him a chance to develop his acting chops. But Mr. Efron's fix on the period suggests a GPS struggling in a low-signal area, and the movie becomes an affectionate, name-dropping exercise in historical mutilation. Among the members of the Mercury Theater, John Houseman is played by Eddie Marsan, Joseph Cotten is played by James Tupper and Norman Lloyd is played by Leo Bill. Mr. Lloyd, who was born one year before Orson Welles, is an irrepressible raconteur and an endlessly zestful observer of the movie scene. I dare not imagine what he'll think of "Me and Orson Welles." Though, no, I dare.
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
A real charmer, “Me and Orson Welles” is the work of a director who takes nostalgia, romantic possibility and the theater seriously, without being a pill about it.
Richard Linklater’s film version of the Robert Kaplow novel tells a fairy tale based in fact. Strolling the Manhattan theater district one day in 1937, the story’s fictional protagonist, a New Jersey high school student played by Zac Efron, stumbles into Orson Welles, John Houseman and their Mercury Theatre associates. In an eye-blink, young Richard is hired to play the lute-strumming role of Lucius in Welles’ modern-dress revival of “Julius Caesar,” opening in a mere week. These were history-making times for Welles. Already in 1937 the impresario’s involvement with the incendiary musical “The Cradle Will Rock” (Tim Robbins made a rather hectoring film about it) burnished the Wellesian reputation for nerve and publicity. Welles’ “Julius Caesar,” drawing eerie parallels with Mussolini’s regime, featured actors Welles would use later in Hollywood, ranging from panicky Brit George Coulouris (played in Linklater’s film by Ben Chaplin) to elegant Virginia horn-dog Joseph Cotten (James Tupper). “Me and Orson Welles” has Richard falling for the Mercury’s jill-of-all-trades, Sonja, played by Claire Danes. Her character is neither a simple ingenue nor a vamp. Danes, reliably excellent, creates a woman of ambition as well as heart.
The film’s press so far has focused on Christian McKay’s portrayal of Welles, and it is indeed something to see. Even more so, to hear: McKay (who is British, and a fair bit older than was 22-year-old Welles in 1937) gives us a boy-man who, practically since birth, has been told he is a genius with a fantastically expressive voice, and who uses that voice for theatrical effect even when he’s nowhere near a stage. The script by Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo stays true to novelist Kaplow’s source material, setting Welles up as the maelstrom who wises up a teenager and then whirls onward.
Much of the film was shot on the Isle of Man, with bits of London filling in for Depression-era Manhattan. Not since Mike Leigh’s Gilbert and Sullivan portrait “Topsy-Turvy” (1999), detailing the birth of “The Mikado,” has a film devoted so much screen time to the ins and outs of theatrical endeavor so rewardingly. (Cinematographer Dick Pope, a master at evocative interior lighting, worked on both pictures.) This theatrical bent may be surprising given director Linklater’s resume; then again, the resume in question is one of the most unpredictable in contemporary American cinema, zigzagging from the hazy Texas ambience of “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused” to the quiet, piquant marvels “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” to “The School of Rock” and “Fast Food Nation.”
Working on a modest budget Linklater manages some lovely visual flourishes, my favorite being a tracking shot that scurries, puppylike, after Welles as he rushes from theatrical rehearsal to a radio gig at CBS. This isn’t a bravura, strolling-into-the-Copa-in-“GoodFellas” example of the single take. Rather, it’s unostentatiously interesting — controlled chaos, crystallizing the chaos as lived, and generated, by Welles.
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [A]
Richard Linklater's "Me and Orson Welles" is one of the sweetest and most heartfelt movies ever made about a life in the theater. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has closely followed Linklater's career, which encompasses everything from "School of Rock" to "Waking Life" to the great young-love duet, "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset." He has both a populist's touch and a humanist's eye. It's a great and rare combination, and it serves him particularly well in this movie about a theater-struck high school teenager unceremoniously ushered into the fabulous world of that sacred monster, Orson Welles.
Quite by chance, Richard Samuels (Zac Efron) is cast in the bit role of Lucius in Welles's daring adaptation of "Julius Caesar," which is in its final week of rehearsal. (The actors are uniformed as Italian Fascists.) He enters into a world within a world where emotions run as high offstage as on and everyone is in fearful awe of the 22-year-old boy genius (Christian McKay).
Linklater and his screenwriters, Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo, adapting the novel by Robert Kaplow, showcase the wraparound tumult of putting on a production, and they do it as if this sort of thing had never been filmed before. When Linklater made his "Sunrise/Sunset" films, the first stirrings of love seemed to be taking place right before our eyes. Similarly incandescent, "Me and Orson Welles" showcases an ardor for theater – for life lived at its highest pitch.
For Richard, the theater is also his entrance into a more earthly infatuation. Welles's all-purpose assistant Sonja (Claire Danes) is lusted after by most of the troupe's actors, who also include Norman Lloyd (Leo Bill) and Joseph Cotten (James Tupper). Bemused by his innocence, she leads Richard on. Gaga from her attentions, he fancies the infatuation runs both ways. What he doesn't recognize is Sonja's all-purpose drive to get ahead. When he discovers her relationship with Welles is more than all-business, she explains pragmatically, "I have to take care of myself," and the words hit him like slaps.
Efron has the sleek, retro look here of a 1930s matinee idol, a young Tyrone Power perhaps. He's charming. The big splash in the cast, though, comes from McKay's Welles. With the exception of Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman Capote in "Capote," I have never seen a famous-person performance this accomplished. It's not just that McKay, a British actor who has performed as Welles on stage, looks and sounds uncannily like the real deal. He gives us Welles as a fully formed creation – an enfant terrible with the wiles and mores of an aging roué. This genius is a credit-hogging behemoth whose instinct for the right theatrical effect is as unerring in real life as on the stage (for Welles, the distinction may be moot). Linklater makes you feel exactly as Welles's Mercury Theater players did: They may cower before him and curse him behind his back, but they know that this is the experience of a lifetime. They feel bludgeoned and anointed at the same time.
Welles in this film is so larger than life that, for a while, I was afraid he might become a roaring caricature. But Linklater gives Welles a beautiful, brief sequence where, riding with Richard en route to a radio show taping, he pulls out a marked copy of Booth Tarkington's novel "The Magnificent Ambersons" and drops his guard for a moment. The book, he ventures, "is about how everything gets taken away from you," and the moment is extraordinarily moving not only because we know that Welles years later will direct the film of "The Magnificent Ambersons" (which the studio took away from him and recut). It's moving, and also creepy, because this prodigious young man resounds with a sense of loss he has yet to fully experience in his own life. We think, too, of the losses in his movie career as it unfolded, the botched and unfinished projects. We think of Welles's legendary self-destructiveness that, here, in nascent form, is already gathering force.
But all thoughts of impending gloom are momentarily stayed on opening night, when Welles's production of "Julius Caesar" gets a standing ovation. He mutters to himself, "How the hell do I top this?" The glint in his eye tells us he's not worried in the slightest. Richard, meanwhile, cast off by Welles, remains enthralled. This teenager has just experienced something much bigger than himself. He speaks in the end about how all of life seems to be ahead of him, and you can't help but share in his rapture. Grade: A (Rated PG-13 for sexual references and smoking.)
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
Remember that Orson Welles himself didn't always look like Orson Welles. He was a master of makeup and disguise, and even when appearing in the first person, liked to use a little putty to build up a nose he considered a tad too snubbed. The impersonation of Welles by Christian McKay in "Me and Orson Welles" is the centerpiece of the film, and from it, all else flows. We can almost accept that this is the Great Man.
Twenty-four years after his death at 70, Welles is more than ever a Great
Man. There is something about his manner, his voice and the way he carries
himself that evokes greatness, even if it is only his own conviction of it. He
is widely thought of as having made one masterpiece, "Citizen
Kane" (1941) and several other considerable films, but flaming out
into uncompleted projects and failed promise. Yet today even such a film as
"The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942), with its ending destroyed by the
studio, often makes lists of the greatest of all time.
Oh, he had an ego. He once came to appear at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre. A
snowstorm shut down the city, but he was able to get to the theater from his
nearby hotel. At curtain time, he stepped before the handful of people who had
been able to attend. "Good evening," he said. "I am Orson
Welles -- director, producer; actor; impresario; writer; artist; magician;
star of stage, screen and radio, and a pretty fair singer. Why are there so
many of me, and so few of you?"
Richard
Linklater's "Me and Orson
Welles" is one of the best movies about the theater I've ever seen,
and one of the few to relish the resentment so many of Welles' collaborators
felt for the Great Man. He was such a multitasker that while staging his famous
Mercury Theatre productions on Broadway, he also starred in several radio
programs, carried on an active social life and sometimes napped by commuting
between jobs in a hired ambulance. Much of the day for a Welles cast member was
occupied in simply waiting for him to turn up at the theater.
Most viewers of this film will not necessarily know a lot about Welles'
biography. There's no need to. Everything is here in context. The film involves
the Mercury's first production, a "Julius
Caesar" set in Mussolini's Italy. It sees this enterprise through the
eyes of Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), a young actor who is hired as a mascot by
Welles, and somehow rises to a speaking role. He is star-struck and yet
self-possessed and emboldened by a sudden romance that overtakes him with a
Mercury cohort, Sonja Jones (Claire
Danes).
The film is steeped in theater lore. The impossible hours,
the rehearsals, the gossip, the intrigue, the hazards of stage trap doors, the
quirks of personalities, the egos, the imbalance of a star surrounded entirely
by supporting actors -- supporting on stage and in life.
Many of the familiar originals are represented here, not least Joseph Cotton
(James Tupper), who co-starred with Welles in "Citizen
Kane" and "The
Third Man." Here is John
Houseman (Eddie Marsan, not bulky enough but evocative), who was Welles'
long-suffering producer. And the actor George
Coulouris (Ben
Chaplin), who played Mr. Thatcher in "Kane." All at the
beginning, all in embryo, all promised by Welles they would make history. They
believed him, and they did.
McKay summons above all the unflappable self-confidence of Welles, a con man in
addition to his many other gifts, who was later able to talk actors into
appearing in films that were shot over a period of years, as funds became
available from his jobs in other films, on TV, on the stage and in countless
commercials ("We will sell no wine before its time"). Self-confidence
is something you can't act; you have to possess it, and McKay, in his first
leading role, has that in abundance.
He also suggests the charisma that swept people up. People were able to feel
that even in his absence; I recall having lunch several times at the original
Ma Maison in Beverly Hills, where no matter who I was interviewing (once it was
Michael
Caine), the conversation invariably came around to a mysterious shadowy
figure dining in the shade -- Welles, who ate lunch there every single day.
Efron and Danes make an attractive couple, both young and bold, unswayed by
Welles' greatness but knowingly allowing themselves to be used by it.
Link-later's feel for onstage and backstage is tangible, and so is his
identification with Welles. He was 30 when he made his first film, Welles of
course 25, both swept along by unflappable fortitude. "Me and Orson
Welles" is not only entertaining but an invaluable companion to the
life and career of the Great Man.
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
PopMatters (Chris Barsanti) review
Critic's Notebook [Alex Beattie]
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
Slant Magazine review Andrew Schenker
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]
Cinematical (James Rocchi) review
DVD Talk (Jason Bailey) review [4/5]
Screen International review Allan Hunter
The Onion A.V. Club review [C] Nathan Rabin
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B-]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3/4]
Film Freak Central review Ian Pugh
Bina007 Movie Reviews [Caterina Benincasa]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman
The Hollywood Reporter review Kirk Honeycutt
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6]
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [3/6]
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Interview: Xan Brooks meets RIchard Linklater Xan Brooks interview from The Guardian, December 1, 2009
Awesome Orsons: Who's the best on-screen Welles? Ben Child from The Guardian, December 8, 2009
The Guardian UK [Catherin Shoard] Catherin Shoard interview of Zac Efron from The Guardian, September 18, 2009
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [4/5]
Independent.co.uk [Jonathan Romney]
The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sandhu Sukhdev
Me and Orson Welles: Christian McKay interview David Gritten interview from The Telegraph, November 26, 2009
Me and Orson Welles - the author's take Robert Kaplow from The Telegraph, December 3, 2009
Washington Post (Michael O'Sullivan) review
Austin Chronicle review [3.5/5] Kimberley Jones
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [4/4]
Los Angeles Times [Betsy Sharkey]
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Film: Citizen Welles as Myth in the Making Dennis Lim interviews the director from The New York Times, November 20, 2009
BERNIE B 87
USA (104 mi) 2011
I’d never seen a movie told from the perspective of a group of gossips, but in this case it seemed like the proper narrative technique that would reveal everything you could ever really know about the town and the people involved. —Richard Linklater, director
The American South continues to be a subject of fascination,
where even at the most recent Cannes Film Festival, three new films prominently
featuring the South were represented there, Jeff Nichols’ MUD (2012), shot in
Arkansas, also Benh Zeitlin's BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (2012) and Lee
Daniels’ THE PAPERBOY (2012), both shot in Louisiana, with two of these films
also starring Matthew McConaughey, who has apparently become synonymous with
the face of the South. Even documentary
filmmaker Werner Herzog took his camera team to Conroe, Texas in Into the
Abyss, a film that explores the ramifications of the death penalty, where
the state had no problem executing someone with a lifelong history of untreated
mental illness, interviewed a week before his execution where there’s not an
ounce of comprehension about what he’d done.
Richard Linklater was born in Houston, Texas, but relocated to Austin,
where he often makes use of the state of Texas in his films. Pulling a story ripped from the headlines,
based on a Skip Hollandsworth article the director read in The Texas Monthly, January 1998,
Midnight in
the Garden of East Texas., BERNIE is a highly satiric, comically
lampooning, Christopher Guest style faux documentary about a real event, using
fictionalized observers who continually offer wry comments, a Greek chorus,
known as the Gossips by Linklater, authentic townspeople that knew the real
Bernie who were used as extras, completely indistinguishable from professional
actors, who are seen throughout savagely discussing a scandalous event that
supposedly shocked the tiny East Texas town of Carthage, Texas, population
6,779. This is a Christian, Bible-belt
community where everyone knows everybody else, where there are few secrets to
hide, but one thing they could all agree on was what a hateful woman Marjorie
Nugent (Shirley MacLaine) is, a cantankerous 81-year old widow who generally
despises everyone. The commentary is so
odious that all MacLaine has to do is scrunch her face into a perpetual scowl,
otherwise known as a prune face, guaranteed to get laughs without even uttering
a word. Still, Nugent is exquisitely
played and is perfecftly believable as an eccentric old hag that probably hides
all her money behind the wallpaper in the walls of her immense country manor
filled with wild game animal heads with antlers mounted on the wall, which
reflect the manly presence of her former husband, a filthy rich tightwad of a
banker who left her everything.
The title character, however, is Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), the carefully groomed assistant funeral director who leads the choir in church every week, a beloved figure in the community because he’s always nice to frail old ladies, a man who takes seriously the meticulous aspects of preparing the human remains for a funeral, making them look so natural, known for finding just the right poetic expressions in describing how the deceased finally met their demise, always making it sound so comfortable, often singing the favorite hymn of the deceased to commemorate the occasion. As is his custom, he follows up with visits to the family of the deceased after funerals as a way of checking up on them, but also bringing anything they may need, His visits to Nugent are met with a quick slam of the door, but his persistence pays off, as eventually she lets him in the door, where they hit it off splendidly, where he even persuades her to rejoin the church, which she had been avoiding for years. Bernie teaches Sunday school, coaches Little League, dedicates his life to charity work, and even directs and performs in the community musical theater, where he can be seen triumphantly marching while performing the lead role in The Music Man, which, interestingly enough, is about a conman who travels from town to town as an always upbeat marching band instructor selling merchandise he doesn’t have, taking the cash and breaking hearts, before moving on to the next town. But Bernie doesn’t have a conniving or contentious bone in his body, always lending a helping hand, the kind of guy who just can’t say no to anyone. Black does an excellent job in the role, wonderfully singing his own hymns, creating a sycophantic, gay-leaning, asexual character that is beloved by all, the exact opposite of MacLaine’s Marjorie Nugent, who remains the embodiment of evil, whose own family attempted to sue her for money, so she hasn’t spoken to any of them in four years.
Meanwhile, Bernie and Marjorie travel around the world together, strictly as traveling companions, though rumors suggest otherwise, where Bernie’s highest attribute becomes his ability to befriend the one person in town no one else could tolerate, where Linklater fills the screen with plenty of distinctive Texas character, including a sheriff, a hardnosed, crime sniffing district attorney (Matthew McConaughey, yet again), along with an oddball assortment of friends and neighbors that comprise a socio-demographic of the region, including the “cousin-countin’ rednecks” in the next county. No one seems surprised when Nugent turns up missing except her stockbroker, who is missing his commissions, as no one really talked to her anyway, and Bernie goes to great lengths pretending she’s still alive, continually suggesting she suffered a minor stroke and was not up to seeing people. But all that changes when they discover her body in a storage freezer, where Bernie readily admits to the crime, claiming Nugent forced him into becoming her personal slave, continually making non-stop demands 24 hours a day, constantly interrupting whatever he was doing with trumped up personal emergencies, until he had no life left at all except to serve her every whim and demand, claiming he just snapped, shooting her four times. Suddenly with a frozen corpse on display, this twisted tale takes on another dimension, as her hypocritical family arrives on the scene in a tearful state, and everyone wants a piece of her estate, including the government. Bernie, on the other hand, is facing life imprisonment, a staggering prospect considering he befriended the town’s meanest citizen, whose death is something many in the community would have paid handsomely for. The film veers into the dark social commentary of Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry (1955), interestingly enough also starring a young Shirley MacLaine, where the town not only accepts Bernie’s murderous actions but embrace him for giving so much of the deceased’s money away to charitable causes. The film is never as interesting without MacLaine as it is with her in it, though she has a near wordless role, but her screen presence is enormous, used to wonderful comic effect. Something of an affectionate love letter to the East Texas region where Linklater grew up, the director puts the real face of Bernie onscreen near the end, where behind all the levity, his life is a testament to the sadness and real human tragedy that underlies this story.
Bernie Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Tom Huddleston
Linklater returns to his small-town Texas roots for this unpredictable, witty, funny-peculiar true tale of a popular mortician and his doomed friendship with a wealthy widow. Black adds a slippery, obsequious veneer to his usual lovable doofus as Bernie, the most popular and generous guy in the town of Carthage, whose one act of unkindness is unfortunately both extreme and highly illegal. Despite its roots in a real tale, this is an unashamedly playful and idiosyncratic film for Linklater, closer to the Wes Anderson of ‘Rushmore’ than to his own back catalogue. The result is slight and sometimes awkward, but very funny and lovingly presented.
In 1998, journalist Skip Hollandsworth wrote the article,
"Midnight in the Garden of East Texas" for the Texas Monthly,
outlining the murder of the curmudgeonly and elderly Marjorie Nugent (played
here by Shirley Maclaine) by the stout, well-mannered and effete town
mortician, Bernie Tiede (Jack Black).
Having befriended her in a cultural capacity, accompanying her to NYC for
Broadway shows and fancy hotel visits, his patience for her intense and
controlling disposition resulted in four bullets in her back with a .22 rifle
and a protracted stay in a garage freezer while he lied about her whereabouts
and spent her money, even going so far as to donate it to various town
charities and organizations.
Linklater's adaptation of the story is a subdued, dark comedy of sorts, playing
out like a less enthusiastic Drop Dead Gorgeous, interspersing
interviews with real people and a mostly theatrical, superficial narrative that
ostensibly acts out these interview findings. At times, the narrative devolves
into camp mockery of Southern archetypes, finding humour in metaphors about
possums and kissing cousins, which reinforces the seeming template critique, or
analysis, of Bible belt beliefs, where class system jealousy and social performance
prove more valuable – hypocritically – than upholding the Ten Commandments.
The overriding gag here is that the townsfolk were so pleased with Bernie's
overall friendly disposition, generosity and propensity for musical theatre
that they actually justified the murder of Marjorie by noting that she was a
miserable bitch. It's an interesting perspective that reinforces the darkly
comic tone of the film, mixing shocking, but amusing interviews with a
narrative about a man whose self-serving motivations are masked by politeness.
Bernie never grasps the nature of its tone and structure, leaving the
relationship between Bernie and Marjorie entirely on the surface, which only
makes the amusingly candid nature of the interviews that much more intriguing.
It almost seems like this particular cinematic experiment might have been
better served up as a mildly satirical documentary.
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anton Bitel]
Sometimes a film can take on the character of its protagonist in the particulars of its style, and so it is that Richard Linklater's Bernie, like the man after whom it is named, is joyously camp and colourful, and not a little eccentric – even unhinged.
Bernhardt Tiede II is a real person, but the text at the film's beginning that promises us a 'true story' is presented – paradoxically - as the curlicued title of a story book. Tiede and the story's other principals may be dramatised by actors (including Linklater's past collaborators Jack Black from School Of Rock and Matthew McConaughey from Dazed And Confused), but the many folk who provide this film with its vox-pop chorus are Tiede's real friends and fellow townspeople, offering a commentary on proceedings which, for all its gossipy tendentiousness, is the genuine article. For in this strange but (mostly) true tale, fact and fiction make curious bedfellows, and questions expressly posed by further storybook titles - "Who is Bernie?", "Was it romance?", ''Was Bernie gay?", "Guilty or innocent?" - receive answers that are in no way univocal.
Though an outsider from Louisiana and of ambiguous sexuality, Tiede (Black) is welcomed into the bosom of small-town Carthage, in east Texas, where he takes – and quickly takes to - a job as assistant director in a funeral home. Creative, caring, kind and full to the brim with community spirit, Tiede is both a born salesman and well liked by all who meet him. Tiede does not just 'cosmetise' the town's dead, but follows through with attention to those left behind, helping the bereaved through their grief with smiling visits and even gifts – and so he comes to meet the widow Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), a mean old heiress universally hated for her peremptoriness and incivility.
As Tiede gradually becomes Nugent's constant companion, escorting her on world tours and bending over backwards to fulfill her every unreasonable demand, a strange relationship develops between this mismatched pair. When Nugent drops out of the public eye entirely, and Tiede starts using his power of attorney to plough Nugent's money into local goodwill projects, Nugent's accountant Lloyd Hornbuckle (Richard Robichaux) and the town's tenacious DA Danny Buck Davidson (McConaughey) smell foul play – but even when, in August 1997, Nugent's body is discovered hidden in her own freezer, some nine months after she was shot four times in the back, the Carthage community rallies in support of its favourite citizen, and still refuses to regard Tiede as anything but a man wrongly convicted of first-degree murder by a jury of 'trailer trash' from nearby San Augustine.
Co-written with Skip Hollandsworth, whose 1998 Texas Monthly article "Midnight In The Garden of East Texas" first drew the director's attention to Tiede, Bernie is a morally confounding comedy that flips our every expectation on its head. Here a confessed liar and murderer is transformed into an amiable local hero, a dogged lawyer is ridiculed as the manipulative villain of the piece, and the people of Carthage adopt a far more flexible and forgiving attitude towards justice than is usually associated with Texas, known for its inclemency and executions.
Of course, the facts of the case tell their own story, but in focusing on the often hilarious views of Tiede's fellow townspeople, Linklater has created an affectionate and decidedly off-kilter portrait not just of a man, but also of the community that chooses to embrace him. The film may be a love letter to east Texas (where Linklater was born and bred), but behind all the sunny smiles, country courtesy and good nature hides a very dark story of a criminal undertaking – because, no matter which way you dress it, a corpse is still a corpse.
It's hard to reconcile Richard Linklater, the young-turk auteur who gave us 1991’s Gen-X manifesto Slacker, with Richard Linklater, the movie industry vet (Fast Food Nation, The School of Rock, Bad News Bears) who delivers Jack Black's latest: a pleasantly quirky crime comedy called Bernie. The documentary-like, stream-of-consciousness ramble that was Slacker established Linklater's Austin-based indie street cred. That Independent Spirit Award-winning film ends with one of the most underrated anti-art statements of the late 20th century—the director’s restlessly kinetic, nihilistic tossing of a 16mm camera off a cliff.
Not that Bernie represents any sort of sad, corporate sellout on the part of Linklater (unlike, say, director Penelope Spheeris’ journey from punk rock opuses Suburbia and The Decline of Western Civilization to slovenly remakes of The Beverly Hillbillies and The Little Rascals). It’s just that aside from the inclusion of fellow Austinite Matthew McConaughey (who worked with Linklater on Dazed & Confused and The Newton Boys), Bernie isn’t recognizable as something from Linklater’s résumé.
For starters, Bernie is based on a true crime article from Texas Monthly. Black plays the subject of that article, one Bernie Tiede—a mild-mannered, churchgoing mortician loved by one and all in his tiny East Texas community of Carthage (pop. 6,779). Depending on whom you listen to—his defense lawyer or the prosecution—Bernie was either a calculating lothario who romanced his way into the life of a wealthy, 81-year-old widow or the long-suffering friend and companion of a horrible battle ax.
To give the man the brownie points he deserves, Black conjures up a vivid character here. This isn't the usual braying buffoon he’s overworked of late (Gulliver's Travels, Year One, Tropic Thunder). Bernie is by turns sad, sympathetic, odd, gregarious and mysterious. His love for gospel music and his affinity for Broadway classics give Black the opportunity to open up his pipes (in a non-joking way, for a change). The object of his “affection,” on the other hand—universally hated biddy Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine)—is nasty, petty, cruel and murder on the eardrums. MacLaine effortlessly dusts off her sour-tempered widower character from Steel Magnolias. It’s to her credit that the recycling goes nearly unnoticed, but the Oscar-winning actress has little to do here other than yell occasionally in Black’s direction.
There’s probably a fine story to be found in the twisted tale of Bernie and Marjorie, but Linklater just hasn't cracked it. The script is incredibly slim, and the slow-going film stretches what little narrative it’s got to the breaking point. McConaughey moseys on by as a suspicious district attorney fixing his skunk-eye on Bernie. But he's got less to do than MacLaine. That’s a bummer. McConaughey’s character might have been the most interesting one in this story—a small-town lawyer blistered and berated by friends and family for having the brass to actually prosecute poor ol’ Bernie Tiede for his crimes.
To pad things out, Linklater includes lots of talking-head interviews with the actual, real-life Carthage townspeople who knew Bernie and Marjorie back in the day. It’s a potentially interesting idea, mixing fictionalized narrative with documentary reality. Sadly, there isn’t a lot of depth to be found in these Greek-chorus interviews. Without exception, people loved Bernie and hated Marjorie, adding little to our gossipy tale of woe. It’s hard to tell if Linklater is lampooning these local yokels or celebrating their homespun loyalty. Either way, one can’t help but suspect (hope, anyway) there were a few more layers to the real story.
Not here. Linklater lays out Bernie and Marjorie’s relationship as flatly and pedantically as an episode of “Dateline NBC” (minus Chris Hansen’s unctuous narration). There are a lot of questions raised by this story. For starters, there’s the seemingly crucial question: Did Bernie seduce Mrs. Nugent, or was he actually gay? Black plays it close to the vest. Bernie’s passion for musical theater might be a dead giveaway, but the movie demurs at giving us a definitive answer. That seems like both important information and a potentially interesting trait for a film to study. But no. For a movie whose title alone is enough to indicate a specific character study, Bernie doesn't dig very deep.
It’s kind of a shame. This is the kind of film you want to like. Linklater is trying something different here. Black gives his most nuanced performance in years. The script isn’t what you'd call laugh-out-loud funny, but it offers plenty of wry, morbid humor. It’s genial and endearing and original. And surprisingly lacking in anything resembling a point.
The People Speak: Richard Linklater's Bernie - Cinema Scope Adam Cook
One could label Richard Linklater’s oeuvre “sideline cinema”: it exists on the margins of the popular film world. Unlike a Tarantino or Wes Anderson, “Linklater” is too diffuse to be a brand, his filmography too varied (trailers for his films ensure that he’ll forever be “the director of Dazed and Confused [1993]”) and his arthouse appeal too modest. While Slacker (1991) placed him at the forefront of the American indie movement of the late ’80s and early ’90s, Linklater has shuttled unconcernedly between “mainstream” and “independent” films ever since; where a contemporary like Gus Van Sant has alternated for-hire jobs like Good Will Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester (2000) with declarative, capital-A “art” films such as Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Paranoid Park (2007), Linklater’s work refuses such neat separations. The same directorial intelligence—always recognizable, yet never emphatic (or egotistical) enough to constitute itself as a signature—guides all of his films, from studiedly small-scale efforts like Tape (2001) to such “commercial” jobs as The School of Rock (2003) or Bad News Bears (2005): a careful attention to performance, a restrained yet palpable formalism, and a commitment to collaboration as both method and frequent subject. What’s perhaps most interesting about Linklater is his apparent contentment to remain in this productively marginal mode rather than cultivating an assertively auteurist persona, making the films he cares to irrespective of scale, scope, genre, or how they might be categorized.
For those who don’t know the story behind Linklater’s latest, Bernie, what follows is a very condensed summary. (For more, see the entertaining article by Skip Hollandsworth on which the film is based: http://www.texasmonthly.com/1998-01-01/feature4.php.) In the small Texas town of Carthage, eccentric assistant funeral director Bernie Tiede (Jack Black, sporting a subtle Southern accent and a very controlled comic edge) is a fount of relentless goodwill, consoling the bereaved and habitually bestowing gifts upon the townspeople. Bernie is so universally beloved that the town’s conservative populace even turns a blind eye to the fact that he is, as they say, “a little light in the loafers”—which makes it all the more curious when he befriends the rich and roundly despised 89-year-old Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine). The odd couple soon begins to spend all their time together, and extravagantly, as they frequently travel the world (or at least the world’s hotels) in luxurious fashion. When Marjorie’s increasing cruelty and possessiveness finally outstrips Bernie’s seemingly boundless good nature, Bernie spontaneously shoots her in the back four times with a rifle. He hides the corpse in a freezer and convinces everyone that Marjorie is too ill to see anyone; it takes nine months for police to discover the body. What is even more astonishing than this gentle man’s seemingly inexplicable crime, however—and what constitutes the true subject of both the article and the film—is the townspeople’s reaction: not only do they not condemn Bernie for the murder, but they passionately support his acquittal despite his plainly evident guilt.
While this strange tale could serve equally well as tortured psychodrama, pensive sociological inquiry or Sundance-ready rural comedy, Linklater takes an intriguingly different tack. From its opening title card, which endearingly proclaims “What yer fixin’ to see is a true story,” Bernie feels like a piece of folklore created communally by the people of Carthage, told in their vernacular and imbued with their distinctive personality. The opening sequence, which cross-cuts between Black’s Bernie and interviews with real citizens of Carthage recalling Tiede, establishes the mix of documentary and recreation that Linklater pursues throughout the film—but, crucially, without the reliable stylistic divisions that would separate “fact” from “fiction,” as some of the interview subjects are readily recognizable actors (e.g., an excellent Matthew McConaughey as the town district attorney) playing the “real” people.
With this one, deceptively simple stroke, Linklater transforms Bernie from straight docudrama into something more intriguing: at once an attentively veristic portrait of a real town and its people, and a meditation on how such “real” places and people are the sum total of shared imaginings. On the first point, Bernie is both a loving celebration of these Texans—their neighbourly ethics and singular vernacular presented wholly without condescension—and a critical and clear-eyed apprehension of their less laudable traits, hinting at their endemic homophobia and putting “Christian behaviour” under a critical lens. Bernie would make an unlikely but unusually apt double bill with Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss (2011), another true Texan murder tale: despite the enormous gulf between the sensibilities of their respective directors, both are distinctly humanist in their sensitive and respectful treatment of individuals; both leave one with a fondness for the Texan personality; and both conjure dark, troubling portraits of tormented souls.
It’s a testament to Linklater’s achievement that the film’s disturbing core event—a brutal killing performed by a repressed homosexual whose unknowable inner torment finally found expression in murderous rage—is never lost sight of beneath all the affability and charm. One significant omission Linklater makes from the real-life story is the discovery of sex tapes in Tiede’s home that apparently feature Tiede with several of the town’s married men—a detail which is perhaps linked to the fact that males were the usual recipients of Bernie’s generous gift-giving. While it may seem like a conservative choice to leave out such a provocative detail, Bernie is ultimately not bent on reconstructing reality. The film’s Bernie Tiede is the Bernie created by Carthage and its citizens; they are the storytellers. Yet in yielding what would seem to be his authorial prerogative by faithfully rendering the Bernie as seen by Carthage, Linklater actually increases the perceptual tangle: foregoing any attempt at psychological explanation and portraying Bernie as the unfailing good Samaritan all describe him as, Linklater makes his crime all the more disquietingly ambiguous. It’s possible to read a fairly subversive notion into this seemingly guileless yet brilliantly complex film: that the town’s belief in Bernie’s innocence outweighs the nuisance of fact. Rather than blind, justice is very much in the eye of the beholder, as if any needed reminding. While Carthage’s citizens may not have gotten the final word on Bernie’s fate, Linklater provides them with a consolation: the gift of shaping this film.
Weekend at Bernie's: East Texas Murder ... - The New York Observer Rex Reed
Deep In the Heart of Texas with Richard Linklater's ... - Village Voice Nick Pinkerton
Bernie | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias
Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey] also seen here: DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
BERNIE Matt Cale from Ruthless Reviews
Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]
Bernie - Filmcritic.com Movie Review Chris Barsanti
Movie Review - Bernie - eFilmCritic Peter Sobczynski
Bernie, directed by Richard Linklater and starring ... - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens
From Slacker to Dazed and Confused to Bernie: I ... - Slate Magazine I Watched Every Richard Linklater Movie, by Seth Stevenson from Slate, April 26, 2012
The House Next Door [Jesse Cataldo]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]
Bernie Review | This is Just a Tribute! You Gotta Believe Me! - Pajiba Brian Prisco
Review: Bernie | Jeffrey M. Anderson
Review: Richard Linklater' s ' Bernie' Starring Jack ... - indieWIRE Edward Davis from the indieWIRE Playlist
Headhunters | Bernie | Sounds of My Voice ... - The Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
SXSW 2012 Review: 'Bernie,' The Nicest ... - Film School Rejects Jack Giroux
Bernie : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Tyler Foster
Shalit's Stache [Matthew Schuchman]
Criticize This! [Andrew Parker]
Bina007 Movies [Caterina Benincasa]
Boxoffice Magazine [David Ehrlich]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
EricDSnider.com [Eric D. Snider]
Celluloid Heroes Radio [Charlotte Skeoch]
ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]
Bernie director Richard Linklater on the delicate art of ... - The AV Club Scott Tobias interview, April 26, 2012
Shirley MacLaine talks about Bernie, Alfred Hitchcock ... - The AV Club Sam Adams interview, April 26, 2012
A Q&A With Skip Hollandsworth :: Texas Monthly Karina Munguia interview, May 2012
The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Bernie: Macabre comedy flirts with delicious ... - The Globe and Mail Jennie Punter
Shirley MacLaine, Jack Black make striking match in ... - Boston Herald James Verniere
Critic Review for Bernie on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday
Midnight in the Garden of East Texas. Skip Hollandsworth from The Texas Monthly, January 1998
Lights, Camera, Carthage! Skip Hollandsworth from The Texas Monthly, May 2012
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Bernie movie review by Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips ...
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Bernie - Movies - The New York Times Manohla Dargis
BEFORE MIDNIGHT A- 94
USA (108 mi) 2013 Official site
While the roots of
this film may be Roberto Rossellini’s divorce among the ruins film Journey
to Italy (1954), it’s also
beginning to resemble Michael Apted’s UP series, a British TV documentary that
re-examines the lives of the same individuals every seven years, beginning at
age 14 in 1970, currently up to age 56 in 2012, where American director
Richard Linklater has envisioned a continuously evolving romantic theatrical
piece for the same man and woman in what amounts to a modernistic two person
chamber drama. Beginning as two
strangers that meet on a train in Before
Sunrise (1995), their delightfully charming conversation has such a
naturalistic flair, and though every word is written, it has such an
improvisational feel, beautifully balanced by fluid, handheld camerawork that
follows them as they talk while walking through a literal travelogue of
Vienna. In Before
Sunset (2004), the couple returns a decade later where the camera follows
them in real time walking through the streets of Paris in a succession of
gorgeously choreographed tracking shots, where the mood of both films is
defined by a sensed intimacy between the two characters, American novelist
Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Parisian born Céline (Julie Delpy), playing out at
9-year intervals, with Jesse seen at ages 23, 32, and now 41, whose continuing
saga is captured in this third film of what may be just another chapter of a
neverending drama. The question has
always been whether this conversational style would veer into Éric Rohmer territory, where mundane
issues of the middle class intelligentsia would inevitably crop up along
with an undercurrent of romanticism and erotic yearning that remains
deceptively hidden under the surface, where repressed surface clues,
like facial reactions, might reveal more than what certain characters are
loathe to admit. In fact there is a
dinner sequence of this film that could just as easily have been scenes from
Rohmer’s AN AUTUMN TALE (1998), a film where the audience is privy to a
pastoral wedding celebration of wine and endless dinner conversation taking
place in the open air vineyards of the Rhône valley. Here in the Peloponnese
Peninsula of Southern Greece the conversation takes place among invited summer
guests of an elderly writer named Patrick, Walter Lassally in his first acting
role at age 85, who in real life is a cinematographer that won an Oscar for
ZORBA THE GREEK (1964), though the house is actually set in Kardamyli and
belonged to recently deceased British travel writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor.
While not so much about falling in love as staying in love,
this is another film defined by conversation, becoming a comic, yet agonizing
and brutally honest exploration of interpersonal conflict that treads into
darker territory, where instead of dreamily wondering about what could be, this
film gets into the nuts and bolts of changing moods and expectations within a
marriage, as lingering doubts set in, and the romance that was once
all-consuming has become a tiresome afterthought of what’s now missing, where
each must contend with the reality of broken dreams. From the outset Linklater alters the rhythm
through the setting, where Jesse is seen dropping off his somewhat reticent
14-year old son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) at the small local airport and
sending him back to his mother in
Linklater has done well to balance the interest in each character,
where these films literally embody the lives of fictitiously created
individuals, yet with a comic frivolity carrying the weight and complexity of
reality throughout, befitting of any quality human life drama. What stands out in BEFORE
On a personal note - - everything troubling about the film, the suffocating opening car sequence, the insufferable, Rohmeresque dinner conversation, and the constricted, claustrophobic confines of the supposedly “perfect” hotel room at the end, all of which lack the freedom of movement and utterly delightful use of space found in the opening two films, led to a reminder afterwards (thank you Eric) that this is precisely the point of the film. Every hope and dream must face the fact that only through sacrifice and persistent effort does it ever stand a chance of becoming reality.
It's been nine years since Before Sunset, when Celine
(Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) ran into each other in France during his
book tour. After rekindling their passion for each other and inherent physical
and mental connection, having a slightly less idealized approach to world
values and ideology, they were left with a quandary. Having a wife and child
back in the U.S, Jesse was trapped between obligation and opportunity, which
helped give that film some of its emotional heft.
When Before Midnight starts, Jesse and Celine are married with twin
daughters. Jesse is dropping off his son at an airport in Greece to return to
America where he lives with his mother.
This action ultimately defines the central conflict of the third film in Richard
Linklater's conversation and character based Before trilogy, leaving
Jesse considering moving back to Chicago to be closer to his son, much to the
chagrin of Celine, who has a new job opportunity in Paris, France where they
live.
Initially, their conversations are about the ephemeral nature of life,
comically acknowledging the weirdness of parenthood with Jesse stealing his
daughter's half-eaten apple while she sleeps and lying to them about the reason
for skipping a trip to some ruins. This extended opening conversation between
the now-married couple sets a tone of comfort between the two, adding some
levity to the joys and disappointments of a long-term marriage.
This protracted opening scene re-establishes the tone of the series perfectly,
vacillating between playful superficial banter and heavier stabs at value
shifts and priority changes for a couple that is now in their early 40s.
From here, Midnight steps back from the usual extended dialogue scenes
between the couple to draw parallels between them, an older couple that openly
disparages each other without emotional, or negative, reaction, and a younger
couple in the throws of idealized physical passion. Celine and Jesse fall in
the middle of this divide, frustrated by each other's imperfections and
disappointed by the fact that physical attraction and excitement eventually
gives way to tolerance and (ideally) friendship.
This existential woe and preoccupation with the ephemeral nature of life
propels the final two acts of the film, where the couple rent a hotel room to
escape from their kids and daily responsibilities to reconnect. What they find
is that without the many quotidian distractions keeping them rushing around
without pause, they are left arguing about disappointments and annoyances in
each other and the unglamorous realities of parenthood.
Because Delpy and Hawke have an established chemistry, these single shot
arguments and outbursts, often hinting at gender roles and expectations—Celine
rolls her eyes when Jesse suggests she can't have a rational discussion—are
extremely intense, realistic and powerfully true to life in a way that cinema
is rarely able to capture. They even manage to capture the reality of marital
distress by injecting seemingly incidental observations and personality
tics—Jesse corrects Celine when she says that Sylvia Plath put her head in a
toaster, rather than an oven, which leads her to complain about his need to
correct arbitrary facts—which comes off as mood-lightening comedy to the
viewer.
Even though Midnight isn't quite as emotionally powerful as Sunset
within the text of the film, the overall observation of marital life and love
after the agreement to live "happily ever after" being nothing like
the romanticized ideal is something that lingers long after Jesse and Celine
are left to live out their life off camera.
There is something deeply painful and beautiful about the frank and
uncompromising observations made within this adult love story that reminds us
of the importance of forgiving those around us for not being entirely perfect.
Flirting turns to
squabbling
Bravely, it's the second real-time sequel to the 1995 Before Sunrise
(each at nine year intervals from the last) amd Jesse and Céline aren't meeting
or re-meeting and feeling the chemistry as before but a long-cohabiting couple
debating whether the chemistry is still there. It probably is, but the magic of
the whole talky formula fades in this version. Mind you this is classy, grownup
stuff. The collaborative team of Linklater, Delpy and Hawke know very well,
even a bit too well, what they're doing by now, and Hawke and Delpy remain an
attractive couple. But despite fine writing and terrific acting all the arguing
seems overly tinged by the argumentative, somewhat crazy persona Delpy has
honed in her own two relationship films.
The glamorous Greek resort setting doesn't help much, nor does a middle section
of a farewell dinner out of doors with Greek friends whose speechifying and
toast-making, with the best spirit in the world, add the kind of formality
Hawke and Delpy are at such pains to hide from their own studiously casual
performances. The aim is admirable: to add a philosophical basis, considering
the nature of modern love (what role digital media play now, for instance), and
comparing how various longtime couples have related to give a broader context.
But if these are three acts, and there is a definite theatricality (in which
Hawke's deep experience by now as a theatrical director may play a part), act
two doesn't add much about Céline and Jesse, leaving us with acts one and two.
Act one is a tour-de-force argument in the car, where the bone of contention is
Jesse's desire to move to Chicago to spend time with his son by his first wife,
Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), whom he's just said goodbye to a the airport.
Céline won't hear of giving up an important new environmental job and carting
their twin daughters from Paris to the Midwest.
Act three is an idyllic evening in a resort hotel set up by their Greek friends
for the couple that turns into a long argument about Chicago, and everything
else. There's a distinct impression that this is an ideal couple who have very
good problems. Céline's fault-finding with Jesse fails to reveal any glaring
faults on his part; and she suggests that his worry about not seeing Hank more
often is unnecessary because the boy is doing well and their relationship is
good. This lengthy debate is a chance to show off the pair's acting chops, but
very little is resolved except to suggest that Jesse may be able to coax Céline
into bed at the hotel for some special love-making after all.
In a walk-and-talk sequence earlier, the couple talk about each other's looks
and attractions. They trade pretty crude accusations of momentary sexual
infidelity, with Jesse convincingly squashes with a declaration of his long
faithfulness, sincere love, and loyalty as a husband and father. He at least
insists he still finds her beautiful; and he exhibits arguably even more
sexiness and charm than when he was younger. Again, what's the problem?
Nonetheless if this is a cliff-hanger, as the first two "Before"
films were, what's uncertain now is whether the couple will break up as a
result of the many little resentments all this talk has aired.
But if I ask what the problem is with this relationship that began so
romantically and was rekindled into an unofficial marriage nine years later,
you can ask what my problem is with this accomplished film. It is a pleasure
indeed to see actors age with their characters this way and lovers of the
original formula will not find it completely gone here. Indeed even if this is
a less magical moment in the series, if this goes on to be a kind of feature
film version of Apted's "Up" series, the next one could still be the
best yet, because the gathering complexity of experience chronicled here is
fascinating.
Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]
Built around a refreshingly simple concept, Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset were also predicated on a potential tonal conflict: Movies concerned with the revelatory power of serious discussion, they also operated within a transparent daydream scenario, with serendipitous encounters, picture-postcard settings, and irrational declarations of love at first sight. It's a testament to the filmmakers that they were able to shape this into a workable dynamic, using a rigorous basis of well-scripted discourse to ground an otherwise far-fetched story, a balance which allowed for serious shading on romantic tropes without fully surrendering to frothy fantasy.
That tension couldn't be sustained perpetually, however, and it's satisfying to find the series crossing a perceptible boundary with Before Midnight. Picking up on the saga of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) after the now-requisite nine years of silence, the story continues to grow, this time by weighing down the fantasy angle with heaps of pragmatic ballast. Unmarried but united by children and a host of mundane responsibilities, the former trans-Atlantic soul mates are now a committed couple, no longer just a theoretical entity ready to be activated for another round of flirty debate. They have history and obligations, in addition to a growing sense of conjugal exhaustion, feelings made to seem even more prominent by the looming ruins of the film's Greek setting.
There are other clear differences between Before Midnight and its predecessors, from the inclusion of new characters to the lack of a dangling time limit, but the greatest change has to be this onset of middle-aged weariness, which adds a measure of levity not present in either of the previous films. At the tail end of a six-week vacation in the southern Peloponnese, the couple relaxes at the expansive home of a Greek novelist, their banter with the other guests introducing familiar topics of sex, gender, love, and politics. Gifted an oceanfront hotel room for their last night in the country, the two begrudgingly take up the offer, strolling through a picturesque village on their way to the shore. It's their first chance to be alone, which means it's also an occasion for nagging concerns to flare up, with the usual flirty interplay steadily building into a tense battle of wills.
The initial bickering stems from Jesse's frustrations about his teenage son, who lives with his mother in Chicago, meaning that his visits are isolated to summer and Christmas vacations. But eight years of history means that no argument is ever about just one thing, and the same delirious magnetism that impelled the couple through two films worth of mutual infatuation now has an opposite effect, dredging up the bitterness of old fights and unresolved fears. All this is enveloped by vague impressions of disaster. Celine references Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy, and some initial similarities between that film and this one seem to foretell bad things to come. The discussions are so realistically convoluted, however, and so divided between positive and negative moments, that it's impossible to tell whether they're heading toward reconciliation or destruction. The conversational beats and patterns are the same as they always were, but something heavier has developed here; the magic has dissipated, and the realities of everyday life have eaten away at the edges of their storybook romance.
The downside is that, despite an impressive script enlivened by fully conceived characters, natural acting, and languorous long takes, Before Midnight never feels especially cinematic. It may not be fair to compare Linklater to Abbas Kiarostami, but considering the sunny southern European setting and one long scene shot through a car windshield, Before Midnight seems to acknowledge a debt to Certified Copy, a movie that explored similar issues of fatigue, with an equally pronounced focus on talk. The difference is that Kiarostami's masterpiece felt firmly like a movie, with a dense layer of visual imagery adding inflection and color to the verbal sparring. Linklater's film devotes the bulk of its attention to words, while the camera tags along ineffectually, mostly concerned with leaving the actors space to perform.
Yet what the film lacks in technical ambition it usually makes up for in linguistic dexterity; this is still a resoundingly solid piece of craft, from a collaborative group that's clearly invested in the development of this story. The lack of a defined visual perspective may leave things feeling slightly stagey, but the meticulous construction of these conversations, so loose and lively despite their airtight scripting, is enough for Before Midnight to feel like a major accomplishment. These films have always been about the power of words, their ability to bridge gulfs of time and space, the thrill of ideas and opinions taking definitive shape. But as the characters age, they're also less about fantasy; the spaces between these two people were once pools of idealized mystery. Now they're clogged by years of trauma and conflict. Whether you live in Paris or Chicago or amid the ancient splendor of Greece, ideal love never stays unspoiled forever; even the strongest feelings sometimes fade, irrespective of the desires of either party, and while words have the capacity to heal, they have just as much power to hurt.
The Before Trilogy: Time Regained Criterion essay by Dennis Lim, March 01, 2017
The Before
Trilogy - The Criterion Collection
For Fans of its Predecessors, Proceed with Armor for ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek
Before Midnight: Very True Romance | TIME.com Mary Pols
Before Midnight, directed by Richard Linklater, reviewed. - Slate ... Dana Stevens
Paste Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]
White City Cinema [Michael Smith]
Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
Review: Richard Linklater's 'Before Midnight' once again ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Review: 'Before Midnight' | The Playlist - Indiewire Blogs Rodrigo Perez
Before Midnight - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Before Midnight Review: So Darlin', Save the Last ... - Pajiba Daniel Carlson
'Before Midnight' Toys With Our Relationship With Time | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Before Midnight Isn’t About Us, but It Sure Feels That Way David Haglund from Slate, May 24, 2013
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Sound On Sight Lane Scarberry
theartsdesk.com [James Woodall]
Before Midnight (2013) Movie Review from Eye for Film Amber Wilkinson
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
[Sundance Review] Before Midnight - The Film Stage Dan Mecca
Combustible Celluloid Review - Before Midnight (2013), Richard ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
The
Before Trilogy Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov
The Before
Trilogy Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest
Steve Cohen
The
Before Trilogy: Criterion Collection (Before Sunrise / Before ... Randy Miller III from DVD Talk
Blu-ray
Review: Criterion Packages Love and Time in Linklater's ... Zach Gayne from Screen Anarchy
The Before
Trilogy | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine
Budd Wilkins
The
House Next Door [Zeba Blay]
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
David Edelstein on 'We Steal Secrets' and 'Before Midnight' -- New ... David Edelstein from New York magazine
Before Midnight (2013) Movie Review - Film School Rejects Kate Erbland
Review: Before Midnight - Community.compuserve.com Harvey Karten
Paste Magazine [Jeremy Mathews] shorter version
Before Midnight: the search for a happy ending Xan Brooks interviews the director and the two lead actors from The Guardian, June 13, 2013
Richard Linklater on Before Midnight Francesca Babb interviews the director from The Guardian, June 14, 2013
Before Midnight Review - Hollywood Reporter John DeFore
Before Midnight: The conversation continues, and beautifully so Rick Groen from The Globe and the Mail
'Before Midnight' review: From time to time, you get ... - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Oregon Herald [Oktay Ege Kozak]
Before Midnight Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Pablo Villaça from the Ebert site
Movie Review: 'Before Midnight' - NYTimes.com - The New York Times A.O. Scott
On the trail of Patrick Leigh Fermor in Greece | Travel | The Guardian Kevin Rushby from The Guardian, September 28, 2012
BOYHOOD A 97
USA (166 mi) 2014 Official site
This
is the worst day of my life. I knew this
day would come, except why is it happening now?
First I get married, have kids, end up with two ex-husbands, go back to
school, get my degree, get my masters, send both my kids off to college. What's next?
My own fucking funeral? …I
just thought it would have been better.
—Olivia (Patricia Arquette), reflecting on the various
stages of her life as her teen son is off to college
Arguably
Linklater’s greatest film, a different kind of American Dream movie that works
as a summation of his entire career in a single film, where the accent is not
on big drama, but instead has a meandering spirit and a gentle curiosity,
expressing autobiographical roots of having grown up in the state of Texas,
where young boys are continually told what they need to do to become a
man. While the film doesn’t have the
romantic scope of his Before Trilogy,
Before
Sunrise (1995), Before
Sunset (2004), and Before
Midnight (2013), where the first two are among the best romantic love
stories of the modern era, thriving on the spontaneity of the moment, yet the Trilogy, original as it is, doesn’t have the epic sweep of this
film, which actually captures an entire childhood, following the same cast over
the course of 12 years as we watch a boy and his family grow up before our
eyes. It’s an extraordinary work,
beautifully written, where despite the length, nearly three hours, time flies
by, where part of the film’s heartache is watching it fly by all too quickly,
which is exactly the feeling parents get as their children grow up and are
suddenly off on their own someplace. The
transition from childhood to adulthood is something of a shock to the system
for most parents, as in a nanosecond they’re gone. This film may be viewed by parents or young prospective parents, but it’s largely seen through the eyes of a young boy at
various phases in his life, whose seemingly endless journey through childhood
feels like a lifetime. If anything, we
don’t get to spend enough time with this kid and his family, because we’re
drawn into the shifts and changes and subtle intricacies of his life like few
other coming-of-age films, much like Truffaut’s wondrous The
400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), which remains the director’s
most personal, an intensely touching portrait of young adolescence, or Bergman’s FANNY AND ALEXANDER (1982), a
film that similarly investigates the filmmaker’s earliest childhood beginnings,
his youngest film in sensibility, originally conceived as a 4-part TV movie
that was just over 5-hours in length, just to name two films that may be at the
pinnacle of cinema history. To include
this film in their company may seem like overreach to some, but the idea of
following the same child through 12-years of real time in their life is quite
simply revelatory, something that’s never been done before in a fiction film,
as life literally passes before our eyes, where the experience is like no
other.
In interview with Andrea Mandell from USA Today, January 16, 2014, Richard Linklater recalls the stigma of coming from a “broken home with his sisters,” What happened at the Critics' Choice Awards?:
But as I got older, especially once
I became a parent I realized no one was broken.
No one failed. This happens to so
many people. It's just life…And all
these little imperfections we carry around with us, that's really just the
essence of life itself. Life doesn't
give you perfect — but it does give us all an opportunity to care about one
another and be supportive.
Whenever one heaps accolades on a film, it leads to
heightened expectations of viewers, where people often feel they don’t live up
to those expectations. In the case of
Linklater, all of his films, even his very best, are small films made with
modest budgets where the intelligence of the material, attention to detail, and
overall artistry stand out, where they have enough commercial appeal to cross
over into mainstream audiences, yet are wholeheartedly art films. Gathering his stable of actors, a relatively
small crew, and a $200,000-a-year budget, Linklater directed scenes for a few
days in various Texas locations every October from 2002 to 2013, beginning two
years prior to Before
Sunset (2004) and a year after the first Harry Potter film opened in theaters, somehow directing nine other
features while still working on this project, creating a film in time-lapse
photography depicting the maturation of a boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from
a seven-year old first grader until an eighteen-year old young adult entering
his first year of college. With minimal
plot or major dramatic moments, this novelesque film accentuates the importance
of even minor secondary characters, becoming the best character study since
Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (2011),
winning Best Director at the Berlin Festival, where the viewer is fully
invested in the major characters as they become known to us much like fictional
characters from a book, as they are so fully developed in our
imaginations. In fact, much of the
appeal of the film is how it crosses into literary territory, where it’s as
fully realized as a major novel, but condensed into a much shorter time period
that elapses in what feels like real time.
The reason for this is Linklater’s writing, which is nothing less than
brilliant, writing such naturalistic dialogue that allows the characters to
grow and expand while remaining such utterly authentic human beings, where
flaws aren’t something to hide from or be ashamed of, but the major dramatic
thrust of the film is trying to overcome them, often having as little success
as the rest of us in our ordinary lives.
What continually captures our interest is just how honest and
unpretentious Mason is, always a bit laid-back, kind of an easygoing and mellow
kid with a vivid imagination, where throughout the film adults are continually
reminding him what he “should” be doing, where rules are continually explained
throughout every stage of his childhood, becoming amusingly absurd after
awhile, especially the degree of importance this plays in the mind of the
adults, whose lives are less than stellar examples themselves.
For people who like films to be thoroughly explained with a clear and
understandable narrative, this may be foreign territory, as there are no big
dramatic scenes and little to no action, instead it simply flows effortlessly,
much like life does, using a minimalist, understated style that allows the
viewer to immerse themselves into these typically ordinary lives that could
easily be our own story. According to Michael Glover Smith, Now Playing:
Boyhood | White City Cinema, “Boyhood is the purest, most complete expression of
Linklater’s considerable artistry to date — the single masterpiece that he has
seemingly been working towards for his entire career.” As
was the case with his Before
Trilogy, Linklater has discovered a newfound maturity in his work, where
this film is far more ambitious in scope than any other American director
working today, rivaling the intensely unique autobiographical family portion of
Terrence Malick’s majestic 2011
Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life, where this entire film is
similarly comprised of connecting pieces of small intimate moments. Mason’s older sister Samantha, Lorelei Linklater,
who is in real life the director’s own daughter, actually only 3-months older
than Ellar Coltrane, makes a smashing performance entrance mimicking Britney
Spears Britney
Spears - Oops!...I Did It Again - YouTube (4:11) as she wakes up her
brother with a pillow to the face, greeting the morning with a manic energy
designed to annoy the hell out of him, likely mirrored by thousands of other
8-year old girls across America. It’s
easily her best scene in the entire film, shot with an authentic look of home
videos (which were all the rage) while exquisitely capturing the year
2002. The film actually opens on a black
screen with the faint sound of guitar strums quickly growing louder and more
emphatic, becoming the sumptuously optimistic lyrics from Coldplay’s “Yellow” Coldplay - Yellow - YouTube
(4:32), a beautifully chosen anthem to childhood with its promise of such a
bright future.
Look
at the stars,
Look how they shine for you,
And everything you do,
Yeah, they were all yellow.
I
came along,
I wrote a song for you,
And all the things you do,
And it was called "Yellow.”
While the song plays, young 7-year old Mason is lying in the grass gazing upwards into the sky, lost in thought with that dreamy look of wonder on his face that expresses the curiosity and interest that not only introduces the film, but establishes the tone of his early life as he takes us on his own personal odyssey through time. After quickly meeting his mother Olivia, Patricia Arquette looking positively luminous in the early scenes, Mason heads off on his bike exploring what there is to do, where kids are spray-painting graffiti on dilapidated cement walls, before returning home later to watch TV or play video games. Noticeably absent is their father, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), where the viewer is able to pick up some fragment of a conversation that suggests he’s been off working on a boat in Alaska somewhere havoing his own personal adventure, but he’s arriving back in Texas in a souped-up GTO, presents in hand, and enough energy to burn to make up for lost time with the kids. In a poignant moment afterwards, the two kids run to the bedroom window upstairs overlooking the driveway to see (hopefully) if their Dad will be spending the night, but the flailing arms and body language says it all, as Olivia lays it all into him about his dereliction of responsibility, where he abdicated his role in parenthood long ago, making it quite clear that he has zero points in her eyes. Even so, despite his boyish ways, a rocker at heart who still relies upon spontaneity and spur-of-the-moment impulse, it’s clear the kids hold an entirely different view of their father, missing him terribly while having lots of fun when he’s around, not wanting him to go anywhere. So their Dad sticks around for awhile, works out a schedule with their Mom, and sees the kids every other weekend, keeping in contact and being a regular presence in their young developing lives. Part of the beauty of the film is the ease of dialogue, seemingly effortless after awhile, where it all builds trust with the audience, who begin to connect with these characters, as their lives start to matter.
The time shifts are so gradual we barely notice, as there
are no screen titles indicating time has passed, instead there are subtle
differences, like changes in hairstyles, music or cultural references, or there
are major changes in their lives that weren’t there before. The kids have moved to
Despite this turn for the worse, life goes on, as they move again when Olivia gets her teaching certificate and becomes a professor at the local Community College offering lectures on the behavior psychology theories of B.F. Skinner and John Bowldy. If you blink you’ll miss Olivia’s next marriage to Jim (Brad Hawkins), who’s as young as Bill was older, almost lost in the kid’s teenage years where their thoughts lie elsewhere, where Linklater almost cuts him out of the film, once a swaggering presence as a returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran, but he loses his footing, attempting to make a stand with Mason one night on the porch after polishing off a six pack or two, demanding respect through intimidation tactics, but he has no authority, where his army uniform has been replaced with a Texas Department of Corrections uniform, eventually disappearing from view and is not missed by anyone, another of a long line of poor choices by Olivia. Ironically, her initial choice was the right one, as Mason Sr. turns out to be the loving and responsible father she always wanted, even if it comes a decade or so too late, as he cleans up his act, gets married, sells his GTO for a minivan, trades in his musical dreams and his rebellious ways for a tie and a pair of slacks and a stable marriage. Both Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke (in their early 30’s when shooting began) offer superlative performances throughout, with the film as much about them as it is their children, where Hawke has been in no fewer than eight Linklater films, where he’s a director that appears to bring out the best in him. One must acknowledge Linklater’s brilliant work with actors, which includes the casting of non-professionals alongside the marvelously subtle and nuanced performances of his impressive leads. But the real surprise is the degree of authenticity from Ellar Coltrane as the central character, a moody and dreamy kid who’s often seen as quiet and passive throughout, but he always finds a way to fit in even as he hangs around the outer fringes. When his Dad gives him a camera for his birthday, he’s never seen without it, as it helps him document the changing world around him. When he finds his first real girlfriend in high school, Sheena (Zoe Graham), he’s suddenly outwardly talkative, unleashing pent-up feelings held deep within for years, but over time he returns to his usual shy reserve, where she thinks he has a gloomy outlook. Perhaps the key to the film, much as it is in literature, is experiencing people as they really are, flawed and complicated human beings continually making tough choices and not always succeeding. “Humanistic, warmly optimistic, and still somehow unsentimental and melancholic, this is a film of such sincerity and honesty, that its collection of small observations accumulate as real wisdom,” writes Adam Cook in the Mubi Notebook. “Linklater has made a ‘life is beautiful’ movie, but it’s one made of real nuance. It’s hard not to be convinced by its conviction in the preciousness of passing moments, the gathering of memories, the opening of possibilities.” One of the most ambitious and rewarding film projects of our time, the film ends much as it begins, with Mason lost within himself gazing out over the horizon at what may as well be his own bright future, his head filled with seemingly insurmountable thoughts, where the feeling conveyed is the joy of being alive, where the eloquent song playing over the finale is “Hero” Family of the Year - Hero (Official Music Video) - YouTube (3:17).
Let
me go
I don't wanna be your hero
I don't wanna be a big man
I just wanna fight with everyone else
Your
masquerade
I don't wanna be a part of your parade
Everyone deserves a chance to
Walk with everyone else
While
holding down
A job to keep my girl around
And maybe buy me some new strings
And her a night out on the weekend
And
we can whisper things
Secrets from our American dreams
Baby needs some protection
But I'm a kid like everyone else
So
let me go
I don't wanna be your hero
I don't wanna be a big man
I just wanna fight like everyone else
Oooooohh...
So
let me go
I don't wanna be your hero
I don't wanna be a big man
I just wanna fight like everyone else
Your
masquerade
I don't wanna be a part of your parade
Everyone deserves a chance to
Walk with everyone else
The unprecedented qualities of Richard
Linklater's decade-in-the-making Boyhood
articulate the most obvious of journeys, that of aging, growing up, and
changing. The coming-of-age genre has been done so many times that it is
something of revelation to witness an entirely new approach, rendering this
"obvious" journey in the least obvious of ways. Shot between 2002 and
2013, the film follows a boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from about age 6-18.
The film's title is slightly misleading in that while Mason is the protagonist,
the film still fleetingly catalogs his divorced parents' (Patricia Arquette and
Ethan Hawke) progression through parent/adulthood, his sister's own
adolescence, and, ultimately, is more broadly a study of time and the moments
that form it.
Seamlessly held together by the uniform
aesthetic of being shot on 35mm film, Boyhood
jumps from one year to the next with the subtlest of transitions. Moments from
one year bleed into the next, capturing the transience of living. Blink and
another year passes. When looking back on a year lived, one does not have 365
days of memories, but rather a brief sort of flash. Linklater brilliantly finds
a way of conveying this, as well as the relentless march of moving forward.
Humanistic, warmly optimistic, and still somehow unsentimental and melancholic,
this is a film of such sincerity and honesty, that its collection of small
observations accumulate as real wisdom.
Perpetual, unavoidable change is made
palpable by the film's softly pronounced form. Linklater's quiet, unassuming
style works perfectly with the film's expansive (yet downplayed) ambitions. The
slightest gestures—soft push-ins with the camera, for instance—take on the
weight of the world. Watching the actors age creates an incredible effect.
Watching the children awkwardly grow through prepubescence and adolescence
becomes intensely moving. One can't help but be proud and amazed as the adults
they will become start to shine through the cracks. On the other hand, the
aging of the adults likewise takes on a power, though a different one.
Arquette's character moves from one challenging marriage to another, and the
unfairness of life takes its toll. The film dedicates a significant amount of
time to charting her own self-actualization, and Linklater privileges her
growth as much as that of Mason, suggesting that every stage of life is pivotal.
We are always in the process of becoming. It's hard not to want to grasp at
life as it passes, to slow it down, but Boyhood
so fully acquaints one with the futility of such an instinct.
So: Linklater has made a "life is
beautiful" movie, but it's one made of real nuance. It's hard not to be
convinced by its conviction in the preciousness of passing moments, the
gathering of memories, the opening of possibilities.
Clever signifiers indicate what year we
are in: songs on the radio, tech devices (Game Boys, a Wii, iPhones),
elections, mentions of Facebook. In fact, it's rather remarkable to consider
Linklater & co. were able to organically fit all these things in as
temporal markers, but perhaps it came naturally (questions regarding the
meticulousness of the film's overall design versus its on-the-go-ness arise).
Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" warns us the film is nearing its end. Surely,
the most unique and special dynamic from this recording of time is in how the
viewer can interact with the film, recognizing shared elements and objects,
reflecting on their own past.
Again, the film's title fails to
encompass its scope, and while Linklater has specific things he wants to say
(or show) about growing up as a boy in Texas, by the end of the film its
perimeters almost feel arbitrary. Life is always being lived, equally so in
every instant. Appropriately then, the film ends in the middle of a moment
(much like it begins). It is not an end, but just a point where the camera must
finally stop rolling. The movie stops, but the journey continues.
Over the 23 years he’s been making feature films, Richard Linklater’s interest in the different ways cinema can represent time’s elasticity has always been one of the most interesting qualities of his work. In the casually ruminative side-journeys of the characters of Slacker, the leisurely pacing across the entirety of the Before trilogy, and the psychodramatic real-time experimentation of Tape, to name just a few films, he has insisted on engaging with and subverting audiences’ expectations of how long scenes should last. Even Dazed and Confused (1993), arguably his most well-known film and the one revered among certain crowds for being an emotionally freewheeling, nostalgic throwback to the high times of youth, is largely a time-condensed rumination on how we all constantly and longingly look forward and backward in time, unable—or, even more tragically, unwilling—to enjoy life for the unpredictable, atomistic endeavor it so inevitably becomes. Boyhood, Linklater’s newest film, takes this interest in the depiction of time to its simplest and most creatively rewarding end. With his primary actors, a relatively small crew, and a $200,000-a-year budget, he directed scenes for a few weeks in Texas every October from 2002 to 2013.
The film is ostensibly about one child Mason’s (Ellar Coltrane) journey from first grade to his first days of college, but the film regularly widens its gaze to chronicle the growth of his family as a whole: his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, Richard’s daughter) and his parents Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), who are separated as the film begins. Obviously, the most distinct advantage of Linklater’s unusual shooting plan is being able to watch each of the actors mature over the course of the film’s nearly three-hour running time, and each of the performances is wonderfully modulated. But this is Coltrane’s film through and through, and young actors should take note of his dexterous, nuanced ability to capture the subtlest of attitudes and mannerisms possessed by someone going through intense physical and emotional change. Too often, films about youth glibly narrow their gaze to the experience of the teenage catharsis, using the supposedly transcendent power of the first kiss, first time driving alone, first time using drugs or first sexual experience to stand in for the entirety of the coming-of-age experience. Boyhood averts this trap by focusing on the smaller moments between those commonplace touchstones with whole years collapsed into single invisible cuts, without any dissolves or orienting on-screen titles.
This results in a shambling, narrative-averse film that works mostly because of its unassuming manner. Linklater’s intuitive camera setups are often quite simple, paring down most of the film’s scenes to relatively straightforward medium shot/close-up/reverse close-up shot sequences. There are hardly any shots positioned above the height of the characters, and even the film’s few overt stylistic flourishes retain the low-key hallmarks of Linklater’s previous work (near the middle of the film, for example, there’s a lengthy Steadicam shot of Mason and a female friend walking down a street and talking that plays like something out of a middle-school-aged variation of the Before series).
Indeed, one of Boyhood’s most laudable qualities, besides its general reluctance to give way to the lure of nostalgia, lies in Linklater’s abject refusal to render Mason’s childhood as anything other than unexceptional, at least on the surface. It’s simply presented as a boy’s journey, rendered acutely through mundanity. This is reflected beautifully in the film’s many unironic musical cues, which are consistently accurate to the time periods with which they’re paired. Coldplay, Blink-182, Soulja Boy, Gotye and Arcade Fire all make appearances on the film’s soundtrack, because of course they would. Linklater recognizes and embraces popular culture’s continual grasp on the development of a child; acting as ever-present elements of Boyhood’s milieu, these cultural cues serve double-duty as both casual indicators of the filming date of each scene and, cumulatively, as a deftly scaled representation of a single child’s fluctuating interests, desires, and beliefs over the course of a 12-year period. The empathetic murmurs of recognition that can be heard from the audience when Mason watches Dragon Ball Z as a young child, attends the midnight book release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as a fourth-grader, or assists his father with putting up Obama/Biden signs in the run-up to the 2008 election each impart a reflective thrill in their own right, just as they provide an effective cross-section of the ages, sensibilities and tastes of those viewing the film. It’s in moments like those that Boyhood becomes a story of life in America during the early 2000s as much as it is a rendering of one boy’s experiences. Similar to the instantly recognizable cultural moments, the adult characters’ conversations about the war in Iraq or the financial crisis quickly establish themselves as quietly totemic indications of the constantly shifting tenor of the country between each particular segment.
Boyhood does so many things well that its few missteps—which include some broad characterizations and, late in the film, the woefully misguided return of a minor character from earlier—are easily forgiven. But even the much-discussed drunken-stepfather archetypes that Linklater employs are undergirded with such honesty that they end up working well enough in the grand scheme of things. Ultimately, what makes Boyhood Linklater’s masterpiece is how its marvelous scene-to-scene dexterity helps it gradually accumulate into something that has an undeniable introspective power. It’s a collection of small moments, of seemingly forgettable instances, that add up to one of the most essential American depictions of a life lived.
Shot from 2002 to 2013, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood charts a dozen years in the life of a family: Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), Olivia (Patricia Arquette), and Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke). Related mainly from Mason Jr.’s point of view as he and the actor who plays him ages from six to eighteen, Boyhood is somewhat unprecedented as a cinematic gesture, wearing its formal concept so casually that it can be an overwhelming experience precisely for the disconcertment it provokes. Here are 12 aspects of it—one for each year that the film covers—that attempt to explain what Linklater and his collaborators might be up to.
1. A longitudinal experiment, the likes of which are rare in cinema. Michael Apted, François Truffaut, David Perlov, Michael Winterbottom, James Benning, Eduardo Coutinho, and Linklater previously (in the Befores) have all designed projects that return to the same real-life or fictional characters after lengthy intervals, but Boyhood, unlike some of its precedents (i.e., Apted’s Up saga), exists as a kind of high-concept film that doesn’t have any interest in calling attention to its concept. Linklater’s strategy is to bury each of his 12 yearly ellipses in discreet, quotidian moments, and although plenty of visual and aural signifiers are employed (shifting family dynamics and hairstyles, pop songs that came and went), they could hardly be called gimmicks. Linklater once said, “You can only be clever in a film once,” which could function as a motto here.
2. A logistical anomaly. By all accounts, Boyhood shouldn’t exist. No one in the cast or crew was legally bound to the project for more than seven years, the film’s chief financing entity (IFC) could have folded or lost interest, and even Linklater could have been lured away by other, more appealing or pressing activities. Still, the project resisted every difficulty presented to it (including, in one episode, trying to make a very pregnant Arquette appear not so) and came out remarkably consistent. It’s an impressive feat for a director to have patiently negotiated such an outcome—even more so if you consider that Linklater directed nine other features while working on Boyhood.
3. A home movie. Aside from the trivia that some of Linklater’s own personal artifacts—such as Mason Sr.’s vintage GTO—show up in Boyhood, the filmmaker’s placement of his eldest daughter, Lorelei, in a prominent role, and his two youngest, Alina Mae and Charlotte Rona, in one scene, lend the film a family album-like quality. These are more than smart set-dressing or casting solutions: see, for example, a scene where Lorelei’s Samantha performs to a Britney Spears song with such gusto that one can imagine Linklater plucking a version of the scene from a (real) family dinner.
4. A central and southern Texas ethnography. Like Dazed and Confused (1993) and Bernie (2011), Boyhood affectionately catalogues the peculiarities of Linklater’s home state. Early on, Mason Sr.’s eager Obama campaigner is contrasted with a Confederate flag displaying reactionary slogans that his kids run into while planting campaign signs in neighbours’ front yards. Even though the owner of the flag is painted as an aloof racist caricature (Clint Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski is not far off), Linklater mitigates this by showing how Mason Sr.’s liberal idealism mellows after he marries into a conservative Christian family. Resigning to his surroundings, Mason Sr. doesn’t even wince when Mason Jr. receives a personalized Bible and a rifle from his new step grandparents as birthday presents. These outcomes might be typical of a larger American experience, but since the film is set in Texas, and Linklater knows the place like no other, Boyhood’s observations about politics and religion feel particularly astute.
5. A quest for truth. It sounds pretentious to say this about a film that’s basically free of any heavy-handed gestures, but the hidden aim of Boyhood is to dismantle that convention in mainstream narrative cinema that characters’ lives have to be defined by prescribed momentous events (first kisses, nuptials, etc.). Mason Jr.’s personal trajectory is never forced upon us; he becomes assertive and more interesting over time. This makes his maturation plausible in a narrative sense (and the film’s conclusion satisfying), but also aligns with the film’s philosophical view that life’s substance is found in the in-between moments. Linklater seems content to offer us scene upon scene with little charted progression other than that which can be physically evidenced by the aging process. Boyhood’s linearity is disconcerting for its lack of movie-world artifice; even small details, like Mason Sr. showing his kids how to skip a stone, enrich the film’s overall examination of the real.
6. A film by Richard Linklater and a partial autobiography. There are nods to Linklater’s previous films dropped in for fun (David Blackwell reprises his role as the liquor store clerk who sold Wiley Wiggins’ Mitch a sixer in Dazed and Confused), but it’s the feeling that Boyhood functions as part-autobiography that’s most intriguing. Linklater was born in Houston and raised in a lower-middle-class environment by a single mom (who was surely the model for Arquette’s Olivia), and the economic constraints of the family’s living situation that we see in the film are depicted in a way that seems to come from first-hand experience. Beyond that, Linklater has remarked that specific scenes—such as when Mason Jr. digs up a bird that he buried a few days earlier to see how it’s decomposing—are recollections from his own childhood. Mason Jr.’s development as a photographer, however, is distinct from Linklater’s trajectory as a high-school baseball prodigy: if the film were strict autobiography, Ellar Coltrane’s character would have evolved into a jock who goes to college on a sports scholarship.
7. A time capsule of the United States in the ’00s. Linklater has the intelligence to allow history to impose detours and leave its marks on his film; it’s a work that’s dated on arrival, and that’s exactly the point. Some of the pop-culture zeitgeist of the era (notably, Harry Potter mania) is included purely for the sake of it, while discussions of Bush and Obama are more pointed and lend greater emotional complexity to the film. In a stand-out exchange, Olivia’s third live-in partner, ex-Marine Jim (Brad Hawkins), talks about his tour in Iraq and what set his unit apart from others—a scene that not only challenges the notion that Marines are not independently minded, but also illuminates the xenophobia that led to so much needless violence during the occupation. If, as Christian Metz said, most films are difficult to explain because they’re easy to understand, Boyhood works against that grain: it’s easy to explain because it’s difficult to understand, “difficult” because it’s as much about dealing with our collective American history post-9/11 as it happens as it is about the narrative at its centre.
8. A tribute to observational cinema. Linklater has remarked that his first feature, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1989), was directly inspired by the unassuming, observational style of Chantal Akerman and James Benning, and Boyhood also seems to be taking cues from these filmmakers in its insistence on examining and attempting to reveal poetry in the ordinary. The film’s opening image of Mason Jr. staring up at the sky (a wink to Benning’s model of “looking and listening”) sets the contemplative tone of much of what’s to come. If there’s any work in Linklater’s filmography that Boyhood most resembles, it would be this first feature; even if the earlier film has virtually no dialogue (which Boyhood, admittedly, has quite a lot of), it shares with Boyhood a seamless design that’s basically at the service of nothing much happening, in the ordinary sense.
9. A film with incidents. Boyhood depicts Mason Jr. often surrounded by his grade- and high-school peers, many of whom we only see once or twice over the course of the film; near the end, for example, he invites a friend to tag along to his family graduation party, and the emphasis of the scene shifts casually to the friend’s timidity as he’s surrounded by people who he’s never met before. Inconspicuous details such as these keep adding up over the course of the film’s 164 minutes, deployed not necessarily to comment on Mason Jr.’s development so much as to create a sense of the transitory. Linklater’s cinema has never been about predestination or fate. There’s no holistic belief system at work: things just happen. For example, in the film’s most nightmarish episode, Olivia’s second live-in partner, a divorced college professor with two kids of his own named Bill (played by Austinite Marco Perella), lets alcoholism violently unravel his family life, an outcome no one could have wished or expected.
10. A film about motherhood. The film’s title is somewhat misleading: if Boyhood certainly chronicles Mason Jr.’s experience, it also allows us to see Mason Sr. and Olivia mature alongside their son. Olivia herself resides at the core of the film, heroic for her resilience and commitment to her kids, and tragic for her inability to make suitable decisions for her long-term happiness. Arquette is so sublimely perfect, so believable as a single mom struggling with poverty (even maintaining the same bad haircut for much of the film), that when her character finally breaks down toward the end, she achieves the kind of saintly purity that one associates with certain Bresson characters.
11. A film about fatherhood. In the first episode of the film, Mason Sr. is absent—we’re told he’s gone off to Alaska—but he soon returns to earn the family’s trust again, with somewhat middling results throughout. Olivia’s interim suitors turn out to be duds, and we see Mason Sr. suddenly grow into a hugely sympathetic, albeit somewhat squarish, model for both Mason Jr. and Samantha. Relinquishing his GTO for a minivan, trading in slacker duds for church casual, and earnestly foisting onto his son a post-Beatles compilation of the best of John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s solo projects, Mason Sr. is a cliché an earlier version of himself may have loathed, but as he comes full circle he understands the trade-offs better than anyone. “What’s the point? I sure as shit don’t know,” he says, hoping to strike a resonant chord with his imminently off-to-college son. “We’re all just winging it.”
12. A self-aware film. As Mason Sr.’s final nugget of wisdom may indicate, there’s a certain reflexivity at work here (and would anyone have expected otherwise from the director of Waking Life [2001]?); Olivia articulates what the audience has been thinking all along when she describes her life as “a series of milestones”: “Next it’ll be my funeral.” It’s a cheeky gesture to be sure, but one that nevertheless manages to be completely devastating. As a counterpoint, when Mason Jr. follows his new college friends on a drug-enhanced hike through Big Bend, the emphasis is shifted to the present, as he observes, looking out towards the limitless horizon (and us), “It’s, like, always right now.”
It's
About Time - Film Comment Holly
Willis, July/August 2014
Richard Linklater’s Boyhood spans 12 years, but it’s always in the moment
The title of Richard Linklater’s new film is misleading: Boyhood isn’t really about boyhood at all. True, it charts the nervous insecurities, roiling family dramas, and quotidian travails of a particular boy. And there are connections to be drawn between this film and the images of maturing young men crafted by other directors throughout the history of cinema: François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, for example, offers a parallel, while Gus Van Sant’s gritty young hustlers in My Own Private Idaho and Larry Clark’s wiry boy bodies in films like Kids and Bully offer counterpoints. But at its core, Linklater’s attentive portrait of a Texan boy named Mason is less about what it means to be a young male than it is an evocation of another key theme in the filmmaker’s body of work, namely time. And not just time as a philosophical concept, but our time, the present moment, and what it means to be alive now. Right now.
The film focuses on Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter), mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette), and father Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) learn, grow, and fight, ignore, and taunt one another, facing life’s myriad ups and downs over the course of a dozen years. What makes Boyhood so remarkable, though, is that Linklater actually shot the film in short annual increments across 12 years, so that we witness not just the arc of a story but the actual physical and emotional transformations of the characters—and the actors—as they grow and age. Accordion-like, the film collapses those 12 years into just under three hours. The effect is stunning.
Mason/Ellar slowly transforms from a boy in first grade to a young man who, at age 18, is ready for college. His sister also grows up before our eyes, from a bratty kid bent on harassing her younger brother to a pensive young woman pondering what’s next in life. Their mother endures a series of bad partners while trying to build a career and take care of her family. And their father drifts in and out of their lives, a goofy boy in a grown man’s body who refuses to acquiesce to adulthood and its responsibilities, until he capitulates two-thirds of the way through the story, trading in his prized GTO for a minivan to appease a new wife and baby.
Mason and Samantha are little kids, then tweens, and then teens, their soft and round young faces becoming more angular and specific, their bodies elongating—Mason develops a slow, lanky insouciance, while Samantha turns into a dark-eyed, petite twentysomething. For Olivia and Mason Sr., the transformation is more subtle, but no less striking as time marks its passage across their faces, creasing their eyes, while the weight of wisdom settles over their hunched shoulders.
Linklater’s latest temporal gambit shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Anyone familiar with the director’s increasingly sophisticated body of work knows that time is a recurring theme. In films as radically diverse as Tape (01), which unfolds in real time, or Waking Life (01), in which the story’s dreamy meandering creates the sense of a continuously unfolding present, Linklater has repeatedly explored the vicissitudes of temporality, and line after line of dialogue in these movies reflects on the subjective experience of time, or questions its philosophical significance, or considers its sly complexity. “Time goes by, and people cry, and everything goes too fast,” sings Céline (Julie Delpy) at the start of Before Sunset (04), for example.
Indeed, Linklater comes closest to the feat of Boyhood and its temporal exploration with his Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight trilogy, a masterful chronicle of love and marriage similarly shot at intervals, in this case spanning 18 years. The story begins with Before Sunrise (95), when Céline and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meet on a train. Jesse convinces Céline to join him in Vienna for the evening before he catches a plane home, and the two spend the next 12 hours together. The film continuously reminds us of time—we’re aware of the pair’s constraints, and the half-day shared between them feels very much like real time. And this sense of real time is enhanced by several particularly long takes, including a beautiful unbroken six-minute shot on a streetcar as the couple talks. We can feel the present moment unfolding before our eyes.
The story picks up nine years later with Before Sunset, a film that bumps the temporal experimentation up a notch by making the two-hour movie cover a two-hour span. Once again, we experience a sense of urgency due to Jesse’s impending departure and the literal reality of the minutes passing. Simultaneously, we also feel the pull of the past, the sense of longing and loss for a relationship that never had time to blossom. These two temporalities merge overtly in the opening shots, as Linklater introduces a series of flashbacks, intercutting imagery of the characters in 1995 and in the present; on a metaphorical level, the images from Before Sunrise imbue Before Sunset with an aura of memory—recollections of a woozy past rich with ardor underscore the urge to rekindle old yearnings.
With the newest film, we lurch forward another nine years, into a marriage and a sense of intimacy fraught with tension, bitterness, and the weight of time spent together. Before Midnight (13) is set in Greece as Jesse and Céline, along with their twin daughters, try in vain to enjoy a vacation together. If the previous two films delight in their ability to conjure the delicious pleasures of early romance and erotic possibility, Before Midnight burns with its unerring portrait of lovers who feel like they have exhausted all the possibilities and are thus stuck not with the unknown but the known. They comprehend all too well each other’s irritating foibles, disappointing flaws, and pettiness. Céline’s self-righteousness is grating, and Jesse’s immaturity—after all these years—is infuriating. Bickering has replaced flirtation; disdain has replaced desire; and the way forward requires a new reckoning with intimacy. The temporal experimentation in this film is less overt than in the previous two films in the trilogy—the film is structured as a series of vignettes. Each segment, however, boasts a vivid sense of the present tense thanks in part to the use of long takes once again.
Overall, the brilliance of the trilogy lies in its beautiful demonstration of how time unfurls, not necessarily forward in an easy and smooth progression, but in fits and starts, in moments of searing intensity surrounded by years of relentless longing and frustration. Time opens up into a languorous sprawl, which might concentrate in one moment, then clip along in a blur of months and even years.
The trilogy achieves something else quite remarkable: it charts Linklater’s two-decade maturation, and that of a generation that grew up alongside him. And it’s this sense of maturation that infuses Boyhood, catapulting it beyond a typical indie-film narrative to something far more ambitious in scope.
Boyhood begins in black with just the sound of a guitar strumming. It’s the opening riff of Coldplay’s “Yellow.” Then we see a blue sky dotted with puffy clouds, and as the lyrics begin—“Look at the stars, see how they shine for you”—the film reveals a close-up of a boy’s face (one that recalls Linklater’s own boyish looks). It’s Mason, and he’s lying on the grass, his pensive eyes gazing upward, and in both his dreamy countenance and his sense of wonder, we’re invited to consider the passage of time through his perspective, and therefore with interest, curiosity, even serenity. The film’s point of view will embody these qualities throughout. A minute later we meet Mason’s mother, Olivia, and a few minutes after that, the boy is riding a bike, then spray-painting graffiti, watching TV, bowling with his dad. There’s a violent stepdad, baseball games, camping trips, visits with grandparents, the prom, and high-school graduation. There are quiet conversations, brooding accusations, and surprising revelations. We move from age 7 to 8 to 9, and then suddenly at some point—oh my God!—Mason is a sulky teenager with long stringy hair and pouty lips. One event rolls into another, time unfolds, and, as in so many of Linklater’s films, there’s no traditional narrative structure to force conflict, no three acts to dictate development. Instead, a series of non-hierarchical situations take place, or perhaps more accurately in this case, they take time.
Hawke has described Boyhood as an example of “human time-lapse photography,” and in so doing, he identifies the film’s essential feat: it returns cinema to its original mandate, to reflect reality as it occurs in time in a sequence of images. This is an important point. The displacement of celluloid images by digital images has been a consistent source of cultural anxiety for more than a decade now, as has the concomitant loss of trust in the veracity of images. Distrust of the digital is wrapped up in our larger ambivalence about technological progress, and our conviction that the modern condition of living in a state of distraction is directly tied to the dizzying array of new devices.
Linklater, however, renews our expectation of cinema as a realm of wonder—but not by advancing its techniques or reveling in its increasing capacity to reshape reality in its portrayals. Just as the goal of time-lapse photography is to present normally imperceptible phenomena for scrutiny—flowers blossoming, clouds tumbling across the sky, and so on—he finds a way to give us the lives and bodies of his characters, who grow and change against the backdrop of the world and its events.
Boyhood allows us to move back and forth between the figure and ground of story and history, between fictional characters and our own world, and in the process we witness the passage of time for a sustained and unparalleled duration.
We live in an era that celebrates the self-regarding glimpse (selfies), that has found some strange pleasure in the repetition of seven-second video loops (Vines), and that has even engineered something as ineffably ephemeral as the Snapchat image that vanishes after 10 seconds. Time as it’s represented in contemporary image culture is instantaneous, fleeting, and quickly forgotten. Looking at our culture more broadly, we constantly fret about the accelerating pace of contemporary life and about the future, which used to sprawl in front of us across a vast horizon and now looms all too close. Even glaciers are moving faster, and events that were previously calculated to take place in 500 years are now supposed to happen in 50. Time is no longer thought of in terms of progress or a contemplative unfurling of placid duration. Against this backdrop, Linklater proposes a different vector: he invites us to be present—to look at the stars and see how they shine for us.
A year or two before Linklater began shooting Boyhood, author, economist, and “technology thinker” W. Brian Arthur argued that we need to adopt a new kind of knowing to align with a technology-based economy. In a world characterized by rapid change and technological development, it is no longer enough to rely on previous experience or old frameworks for understanding and knowledge. While previous eras emphasized order, determinacy, and stasis, our current era emphasizes, in Arthur’s words, contingency, indeterminacy, sense-making, and openness to change. In the 2005 book Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society, Arthur described a new way of knowing in this context, explaining: “You need to ‘feel out’ what to do. You hang back, you observe. You’re more like a surfer or a really good race-car driver. You don’t act out of deduction, you act out of an inner feel, making sense as you go. You’re not even thinking. You’re at one with the situation.”
In a sense, this way of knowing is what Linklater represents in Boyhood. We’re invited to hang back and observe rather than rely on conventional story frameworks. We’re asked to feel and empathize with Mason and the other characters rather than enjoy the usual roller-coaster ride of dramatic conflict. We’re asked to be open to indeterminacy and change. Can we accept the film’s invitation to be at one with the events on screen?
A new era requires a new sense of time, and dozens of artists, especially media artists, have been engaging with time as a topic—from Douglas Gordon’s iconic 1993 video installation 24 Hour Psycho, which slows Alfred Hitchcock’s 104-minute film down to last 1,440 minutes, to Christian Marclay’s 2010 The Clock, which excerpts and arranges snippets pegged to certain times culled from the history of cinema to create a 24-hour chronicle. An army of media artists, including Sharon Lockhart, Tacita Dean, Bill Viola, Mark Lewis, and Candice Breitz, to name just a few, participate in similar temporal investigations with films, videos, and installations. Taken together, this work disrupts the easy forward flow of the past rolling into the present toward an oncoming future, in order to explore new configurations. Time is suspended and questioned; it is reconfigured, recombined, reoriented.
Linklater bridges the gap between these more art-oriented projects and contemporary narrative cinema. He offers us a new sense of knowing time by inviting us to be present as it unfurls. His perspective is deftly formulated by Mason, who says with wonder toward the end of Boyhood: “It’s as if all of time unfolded so that we could be here.” It has, asserts Linklater. It has.
Moment To
Moment - The New Yorker
Nathan Heller, June 30, 2014
PopMatters [Chris Robé] January 7, 2015
Boyhood, starring Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette ... - Slate Dana Stevens
Boyhood / The Dissolve Noel Murray
Linklater's Glorious Boyhood Captures Life in Bloom ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
Boyhood is the fatherhood of the manhood Tal Rosenberg from The Reader
The House Next Door [John Semley]
PopMatters [Bill Gibron] July 11, 2014
Little White Lies [Vadim Rizov]
Sight & Sound [Ashley Clark] July 11, 2014
A Dream Controlled David Liu from Kino Obscura, July 16, 2014
Review: Richard Linklater's 'Boyhood' is an ... - HitFix Guy Lodge
Movie Review: Boyhood -- Vulture David Edelstein
Now Playing: Boyhood | White City Cinema Michael Glover Smith
ErikLundegaard.com [Erik Lundegaard]
INFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]
BeyondHollywood.com [Brent McKnight]
Movie Mezzanine [Dan Schindel]
Movie Mezzanine [Kevin Ketchum]
'Boyhood' Review: Linklater's Loving Ode To Family ... - Pajiba TK
Richard Linklater's unique masterpiece 'Boyhood' - HitFix Drew McSweeny
Review: Richard Linklater's 'Boyhood' Is A Remarkable Tim ... Rodrigo Perez at Sundance from The Playlist
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]
PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Home Theater Info DVD [Douglas MacLean]
DVDizzy.com - Blu-ray & DVD [Luke Bonanno]
DVD Verdict (Blu-ray) [Erich Asperschlager]
DoBlu.com Blu-ray [Matt Paprocki]
And So it Begins... [Alex Withrow]
A Grownup Boyhood — The Atlantic Christopher Orr
Ruthless Reviews (potentially offensive)[Goat]
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Angeliki Coconi]
Film-Forward.com [Jack Gattanella]
Movie Mezzanine [Morad Moazami]
Spectrum Culture [David Harris]
Grolsch Film Works [Michael Pattison]
Review: BOYHOOD, An Extraordinary Chronicle Of ... - Twitch Ben Umstead
The Real Story Of Life Itself - Badass Digest Devin Faraci
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
HannahMcHaffie.com [Hannah McHaffie]
Boyhood - EyeForFilm Amber Wilkinson
Boyhood - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
In Review Online [John Oursler]
The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 2014 [Erik Beck]
Memories of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Richard Linklater's Boyhood Ben Sachs from The Chicago Reader, August 6, 2014
How the influence of existentialist philosophy plays out in Richard Linklater's filmmaking Ben Sachs from The Chicago Reader, August 13, 2014
Boyhood
Director's Unused Acceptance Speech - Above Average February 24, 2015
Richard Linklater Explains His Secret Movie Boyhood ... Amy Nicholson interview from The Village Voice, July 9, 2014
Richard Linkater about the film for Keyframe Sean Axmaker interview from Fandor, July 7, 2014
Read our interview with director Richard Linklater Adam Woodard interview from Little White Lies, July 7, 2014
"Don't be an a--hole": Richard Linklater talks about "Boyhood," Matt Zoller Seitz interview from the Ebert Site, May 20, 2014
Boyhood: Sundance Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Richard Linklater's 'Boyhood' Results From ... - Variety Peter Debruge
Boyhood review one of the great films of the decade | Peter ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
Boyhood review - The Guardian Mark Kermode
Vancouver Weekly [Indrapramit Das]
WE Vancouver [Curtis Woloschuk]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
Examiner.com [Jana J. Monji] also seen here: Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
Boyhood - Washington Post Ann Hornaday, July 17, 2014
How Richard Linklater made me a better film critic - The ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post, July 12, 2014
The most important parenting lesson from Oscar nominee ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post, February 12, 2015
Why 'Boyhood' deserves to win the Best Picture Oscar - The ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post, February 18, 2015
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Oregon Herald [Oktay Ege Kozak]
Review: 'Boyhood' - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey
Boyhood Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz, July 11, 2014
21 Years: Richard Linklater - Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz, November 10, 2014
New York Times [Manohla Dargis]
Boyhood (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! C+ 78
USA (116 mi) 2016 Official
site
One of the reasons
we need more women filmmakers is that there are so few stories like this about
women, while there are a gazillion male-centric, coming-of-age movies, all targeting
a certain period of adolescent indulgence.
Few will be as relaxed and laid-back as this one, feeling like a
comfortable pair of old worn out jeans that haven’t been pulled out of the
drawer or closet for a while, yet somehow still manages to fit. For those looking for a nostalgia trip, this
one hits the nail on the head, doing an excellent job of recreating a rather
innocent look of the 80’s. Unfortunately
for those who actually lived through that era, this may remind you of many of
the things you didn’t like about it, as it was the decade of Ronald Reagan as
President, yet you’ll find no mention of that in this film. It’s like leaving Vietnam or Civil Rights out
of the 60’s — hard to do. It was the era when homelessness became
prevalent in all major urban centers across America, yet little was done about
it, as instead there was a movement afoot to cut taxes and government spending,
where the idea of providing services for the poor was starting to become a
thing of the past, even ignoring the suicide of the leading advocate for the
homeless, Mitch Snyder, who became completely disillusioned after his pleas
were ignored by a government that preferred turning a blind eye, using a
similar response to the AIDS crisis in New York until after it reached epidemic
proportions. That’s also not mentioned
in this film. To be fair, the specific
time period of the film is set in the fall of 1980, the last days of the Carter
presidency, occuring during the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis, when
Reagan was about to be elected. It’s
funny though how people living their lives during similar time periods have
completely different recollections, where it’s almost as if these things never
happened—out of sight, out of
mind. Yet here we are some thirty to
forty years later and the homeless epidemic continues unabated, where there are
even frequent faces of the homeless seen mulling about just outside the theater
where this film was seen. This decade was the turning point in American history
when poverty became expendable, no longer a condition to be eradicated, but
accepted as collateral damage. Too bad
for them, so to speak, became the mantra of societal indifference. That’s one of the reasons nostalgia pieces
aren’t always successful, as they’re likely to be amusing to some, but
offensive to others.
This film plays out
like a college fantasia, where the density of the writing suggests this could
easily be produced onstage as a theatrical piece (a subversive gay musical
comes to mind with an all male review, in the manner of the ANCHOR’S AWAY
segment in the Coen’s recent Hail,
Caesar!, hopefully directed by Tarnation’s Jonathan
Caouette), where there aren’t any real cinematic cornerstones to the film, as
it’s more a character sketch of rather doofus college athletes on the baseball
team in search of drugs, alcohol, and getting into the pants of members of the
opposite sex at the University of Texas in Austin, showing a raucous side of
party life that existed “before” the AIDS crisis, though it feels greatly
exaggerated here, feeling more like a euphoric romp through Spring Break,
satirically viewed as if being a horndog was a permanent affliction. While some of this is mildly amusing, what
stands out is the lack of any real character development, as none of the many
featured athletes are really that interesting (with the exception of one guy
that pulls an Ally Sheedy from THE BREAKFAST CLUB), so by the end of the
picture nothing feels all that memorable.
Less ambitious and entirely calculated, it’s a lighthearted, comedic
shift from the more dramatically compelling works of 2014
Top Ten List #1 Boyhood and
his Before Trilogy, Before
Sunrise (1995), Before
Sunset (2004), and Before
Midnight (2013), all of which get more intensely involved in the
character’s lives. Not so here, as this
feels much more generic and homogenized, even a bit homophobic, never really
digging under the surface, like it’s trying too hard to be likeable and
pleasing, to be all things to all people.
While it’s alleged antecedent is the director’s playful stoner comedy Dazed
and Confused (1993), one might also find traces in the John Hughes teen
flick FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF (1986) to find a similar feeling of smug male
arrogance, where much of this similarly plays out like a wish fulfillment
fantasy sequence. While it certainly
falls in line with a “boys will be boys” scenario, delving into the
testosterone-driven subtext of male masculinity, driven by out-of-control
hormones and a Southern, sexual swagger, where it seems all guys are
competitively vying for the Alpha male top dog title, it conveniently settles
into a rhythm of easy laughs and boorish juvenile pranks. Never really concerning himself with plot in
his movies, preferring shared experiences from a specific time and space, the
lowbrow tone is established right from the opening shot, with Blake Jenner as
incoming freshman pitcher Jake Bradford driving his muscle car through the
heart of the college campus to the sounds of The Knack’s “My Sharona” The Knack - My Sharona live
(HQ) - YouTube (4:54) while scoping
the streets for female ass, finding plenty in every direction, like he’s
arrived in pussy Nirvana.
As we are introduced to the rest of the jocks living in the
two baseball houses, it’s an eclectic mix of older and younger teammates, each
a bit offbeat and strange, showing an acute disdain for the new guy, where
there’s a mystifying amount of peacock strut in every off-putting remark
designed to knock someone else off the perch, giving them the green light to
take center stage and shine solo. It’s a
weird system of endless competition for top cock on the block, where they all
just naturally play this silly game of one-upmanship. While Finnegan (Glen Powell) is seen reading
Jack Kerouac and smoking a pipe, he never stops talking shit shrouded in the
verbose language of literacy and philosophy, a kind of smartass know-it-all
that loves to ridicule the inferiority and inadequacy of others, while Tyler
Hoechlin is McReynolds, the heavily moustached Tom Selleck of the group, a guy
that can never get enough of himself in the mirror, thinking he’s God’s gift to
women, yet he’s the senior and unspoken leader of the group. Wyatt Russell is a perpetually zonked
California surfer dude turned pitcher named Willoughby, who turns out to be a
stoner guru (“You gotta tune in, man”) with an extensive Twilight Zone collection of VHS tapes and a VW van parked outside,
while Niles (Juston Street) is the 95 mph fastball throwing pitcher from
Detroit that supposedly already has scouts following him, yet he’s so buffed up
and full of himself with fake stories and myth that he’s really just a nerdy
geek in disguise. Jake’s own roommate is
Billy Autrey (Will Brittain), which might come as some surprise, as all we ever
hear him called is Beuter, as his country bumpkin accent is so thick it’s like
he was raised in a backwoods swamp, a guy that doesn’t take to jokes or
socializing very well, spending all of his time on the phone talking to his
girlfriend, while Roper (Ryan Guzman) thinks he’s the epitome of the male
species, believing he has the finest ass on the entire campus, accordingly
wearing the tightest fitting pants. Dale
(J. Quinton Johnson) is the token black player, yet he’s smooth enough to pass
as just one of the guys, usually taking a more relaxed approach, but he’s a
sleazeball like all the rest and is in on all the pranks as well. While there are many more to this motley
crew, the group is all bluster, yet they’re feeling no pressure and no pain, as
the baseball season doesn’t even begin until the following spring, so the film,
oddly enough, counts off the minutes and hours before the fall classes begin,
where the entire film is a 72-hour prelude to reality. Taking
a cue from the ultra-conventional style of filmmaking from Clint Eastwood in Jersey
Boys (2014), where a succession of stage performances were shown
through a series of revolving set pieces, Linklater uses a similar device as
the boys head out to the bars and dance clubs to chase after girls, going
through a similar change of venue from the Day-Glo disco of the Sound Machine, EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!!
Sound Machine Clip (57 seconds), where they immediately get kicked out, to the URBAN COWBOY look
of a country bar, offering a bull-riding machine, cowboy hats, and the
obligatory line dancing, to the frantically berserk mosh pits of a punk club,
where a group hilariously does a punk version of the Gilligan’s Island theme song, Gilligan's Island
Theme Song - YouTube (1:31).
But no college experience would be compete without finding a
girl, where an anonymous come-on to a couple of attractive girls from a car
stuffed with guys is skillfully rebuffed, but brings success to the guy in the
back of the car that keeps quiet, none other than Jake, the driving force of
the film, as the slim storyline is built around his initial impressions, which
includes a first look at Beverly (Zoey Deutch), who looks strangely familiar,
as she turns out to be the daughter of Leah Thompson from BACK TO THE FUTURE
(1985), the highest grossing film of the year, also starring in both
sequels. While the baseball boys
dominate the film, a tribute to their obnoxious attempts to hit on every
attractive girl they see, where they literally can’t help their leering eyes,
Jake and Beverly constitute a diversion from all the surrounding madness, where
a split-screen telephone call results in their first official date, quickly
realizing that opposites attract, as she’s an illustrious member of the theater
department, vying with other rabid theater majors for any part in the school
productions, where the competition is a huge step up from high school when
these two were at the top of the food chain, getting all the recognition, while
now they’re both just hoping for an opportunity. Admittedly awkward at first, where she has a
giant poster of Joni Mitchell in her dorm room, they quickly develop a
conversational rhythm and an easy feel for each other, developing into romance,
as she invites him to a theater party later that evening. Of course, once they hear about it, all the
other baseball bums want a free invite, giving him the business until he
relents. While the film’s music and
décor, not to mention hair and fashion styles, are uncannily accurate, it still
feels ridiculously silly to witness a scene of all the young dudes stuffed into
a car rapping energetically to Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” EVERYBODY
WANTS SOME Movie Clip - Rappers Driving (2016) Richard Linklater Comedy HD
(1:02), each one carrying their own verse, never missing a beat, where the artificial
staginess of the choreographed routine somehow mocks the more familiar natural
vibe of this director. The film is a
testament, however, to how routinely guys cover up their insecurities and
overall awkwardness, especially at this stage in their lives, turning the art
of courtship into a game of showmanship and male dominance, a kind of
diversionary pretense where instead of paying attention to the young ladies,
it’s still all about themselves, where they remain the center of attention, an
egotistical state of mind from which they have no escape. Part of this is the adulation and special
attention that is heaped upon gifted athletes starting from a young age,
whether deserved or not, where it creates a euphoric condition inside their own
swelled heads that makes them think they are somehow invincible. While much of this feels like being stuck at
an endless frat party, it is a time capsule of a more innocent time when it was
easier not to be deluged by the problems of the real world.
Review:
Everybody Wants Some - Film Comment
Nick Pinkerton
Richard Linklater’s dozen-years-in-the-making domestic epic Boyhood was an art-house smash, and deservedly so—a distinctly American shomin-geki built around an audacious conceptual gambit. And like any work deemed “critic-proof,” Boyhood garnered its share of clickbait backlash, one common theme being that it was overrated by a critical establishment made up of somewhat socially awkward white males who saw themselves mirrored in the film’s somewhat socially awkward white male protagonist. Whatever else might be said about Everybody Wants Some, it won’t face the same accusations.
Linklater’s latest, an ensemble comedy set on a Texas campus during the three-and-a-half days before the start of classes, is focused on a pack of wild alpha males: the college’s nationally ranked baseball team who sit on top of the social pecking order and know full well that they do. Our point of entry to this world is Jake (Blake Jenner), an incoming freshman pitcher who has at least a recessive freak gene in his DNA (which we know because his milk crate of LPs contains a Devo record). Mike Schmidt moustaches are all the rage with teammates, but otherwise these ballplayers are social-utility players, sampling the various identities available on and around the university. One night they slip into polyester Arrow collars and cruise the local disco; another, it’s pearl-button shirts and line dancing at the honky-tonk. Jake runs into an old teammate from back home who’s living at the off-campus punk house and who ropes him into going to a show, while his pursuit of a drama student (Zoey Deutch) leads to the whole team crashing an art-school bash. The goings-on there are pretty insufferably whimsical, but can you remember undergrad drama parties? (I almost wished ex-jock Linklater had gone full-on bildungsroman, and had the team crash a program of 16mm structuralist films.)
From the opening percussion of “My Sharona,” period soundtrack cues from Zeppelin to Van Halen goose up the action in Everybody Wants Some, which takes its title from a Women and Children First track. The raucousness seems forced at first, but appropriately enough for a movie dealing with the gelling of a team identity, the ensemble gradually loosens up and settles into a comfort zone. Though the film is concerned with a group of young men who’ve been raised to be fiercely competitive in every aspect of their lives, rivalries are mostly brushed aside as soon as they arise. Little dust-ups are quickly forgotten, and the only indication that life is something other than an endless summer comes in the character of Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a hippie transfer from San Luis Obispo who’s eighty-sixed from the roster when it’s discovered he’s actually 30 years old and has been peripatetically drifting between college clubs, trying to stay on the mound and clear of the adult comedown that comes with the acknowledgement that he’ll never be a major leaguer.
Jake, for his part, seems level-headed enough to face the inevitable, expressing a basic understanding of the Sisyphean nature of baseball. It’s another instance of Linklater’s fondness for the plainspoken homiletic philosophizin’ that must account for some of his popular appeal, though his aversion to traditional dramatic conflict remains quietly radical. Throughout the extended Dionysian spree of Everybody Wants Some, nary a rain delay darkens the blue skies of these characters’ lives, and few deep shadows creep into cinematographer Shane F. Kelly’s bright, clear lighting scheme. Linklater has never been a pictorialist likely to land on One Perfect Shot Twitter accounts, but his purpose is to privilege his players. His latest is, to borrow from Henry Miller, an “incurably healthy” film, about nothing so much as the pure pleasure of having a body and a mind to play with, and a smorgasbord of opportunities for putting both to work.
SXSW Review: Richard Linklater's 'Everybody Wants Some ... Charlie Schmidlin from The Playlist
While his obsession with time remains intact, for his latest film, “Everybody Wants Some!!,” director Richard Linklater strips loss and melancholy from the framework and lets the consummate entertainer within take over. Fixed in a freewheeling state with this “spiritual sequel” to “Dazed and Confused,” the filmmaker only allows hints to peek through of a reality where people might fall in and out of love, or a mother might watch her son with pride and sadness as he grows up and heads to college. Instead, baseball, beer, and the next party fill the frame with an infectious quality of camaraderie, built on a cast ripe with chemistry and their ability to showcase Linklater’s unique ear for dialogue.
The story is set in the fall of 1980, in the lead-up to the first day of classes at a fictional Texas university. As one might expect, the plot follows a relentless hangout session with a sea of blond-haired (and one Afro’ed) baseball players, all living under frat house roofs and using the film’s Van Halen-inspired title as their guiding directive in life. Their quest to get laid takes us through every social strata of college life, only stretched to excess, as each theater group and punk collective is given the largest canvas possible on which to play.
Our main pair of eyes throughout is Jake (Blake Jenner), a young freshman pitcher who picks up where Ellar Coltrane left off in “Boyhood.” Entirely reactive, naïve, and frankly a bit dull, he is pure audience cipher, but he slides into a functional straight-man role in the super-sized ensemble. Will Brittain, Ryan Anthony Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Glen Powell, J. Quinton Johnson, and Wyatt Russell are only a few of the new faces that Linklater has assembled with his casting team, but they have presence, as well as uncanny, had-to-be-intentional likenesses to older actors (Matt Dillon, Billy Crudup, Robert Redford, and, naturally, Matthew McConaughey, to save you time in the theater).
Personalities are gradually parsed out through Linklater’s unhurried script: the hot-headed team captain McReynolds (Hoechlin); the tactful Finn (Powell), who can turn on his Philosophy 101 jargon or country charm when needed; Willoughby (Russell), who can be relied upon to strike a bong up when needed; and the patient Dale (Johnson), who serves a mediator to all ranks on the team. Only a few strays live outside of the vibe the rest of the film lays down, like resident oddball pitcher Niles (Juston Street), who feels too outlandish and desperate to ever gain sympathy or laughs.
Details lead the story as well, with costume designer Kari Perkins giving each character a suitably broad ‘80s-era look — tight t-shirts and jeans, collared shirts, and tank tops rule the day. Perkins’ work is equally matched by DP Shane F. Kelly and production designer Bruce Curtis, both of whom land on a peculiar vibe in their approach between lived-in and expressionistic. We never feel that the characters actually sleep in these apartments and frat houses, yet these locations draw us into their reality nonetheless. Linklater is clearly having a ball in this particular sandbox, whether in soundtrack selection (Van Halen, Blondie, a swath of disco), his expertly staged baseball sequences and party scenes, or his ability to conjure a finely tuned punchline (“Cats don’t belong in fridges” being one of many quotable lines).
The several times the filmmaker ventures outside of the team’s claustrophobic rituals, namely through run-ins and encounters with the university’s women, we glimpse exactly how much of a fantasy world the guys truly live in. The filmmaking often follows into their wish fulfillment — Linklater relishes the opportunity for a female mud-wrestling match, while perhaps two women in a film of dozens actually speak, or differ in screen direction from “gaze longingly at the leads.” One who doesn't, theater major Beverly (played by Zoey Deutch), starts to tip the scale by guiding Jake into her performance art interests, but it isn’t long before the rest of Jake’s team crash in to survey the new scene.
The strength of Linklater’s films has always been their ability to capture the textures of lived experience, and “Everybody Wants Some!!” is no different in that regard: it is a confident, hugely enjoyable return to a universe that treats the connection to “Dazed and Confused” not as an obligation or cash grab, but as inspiration to match that film’s level of energy and chemistry. Proper distance will prove its cultural staying power, while its cast becomes a new class of acting talent, but for now, it seems best just to soak in this worthy two-hour haze of fleeting, fondly remembered college experiences. [B+]
Everybody
Wants Some!! misses what's best about Dazed and Bryan
Bishop from The Verge
Richard Linklater has never cared about plot in his movies and he’s never really concerned himself with adhering to genre, either. What Linklater loves to do is is simply hang with his characters, and whether it’s the ‘70s teens of Dazed and Confused, the constantly evolving relationship of Jesse and Celine in the Before Sunrise series, or the 12-year-trek of Boyhood, the results have been consistently wonderful. Through some magical form of cinematic alchemy, Linklater’s single-minded focus on characters translates into engaging moviegoing experiences that feel both incredibly personal yet undeniably universal.
Given how I’ve felt about his work, I was excited to kick off my SXSW by seeing his latest film, Everybody Wants Some!! (two exclamation points, just like the Van Halen song). The long-gestating project has been described — and is being marketed — as a “spiritual successor” to Dazed and Confused, and the comparison is apt. It’s about a freshman’s first few days after arriving at college on a baseball scholarship, and it’s all too easy to imagine Dazed’s Jason London in the lead role if the movie had been made 20 years ago. The outrageous characters are there, as are the raucous shenanigans, all accompanied by Linklater’s fondness for both nostalgia and stoner humor. It all clearly works exactly as Linklater intended, but there’s just one tiny problem: hanging out with these characters can actually be pretty annoying.
Blake Jenner is Jake, starting his college career at a school in Southeast Texas. In what seems like a total movie contrivance (but is apparently pulled from Linklater’s own life), the members of his baseball team all live together in a pair of houses, where they’re left to their own devices. The movie takes place over the last few days before class starts, as Jake learns the ropes from his aggressively-posturing teammates: they get drunk, they get high, but most of all, they look for girls. The title Everybody Wants Some!! isn’t just a Van Halen reference; it’s the literal description of nearly every single character’s driving purpose in life as they hit clubs, bars, parties, and back again.
Jake, of course, is the audience surrogate: he’s the athlete that’s a little smarter and more well-read than all the rest, and would actually consider talking to a girl instead of just trying to get her into bed. But he’s surrounded by several other characters who, while they don’t leave the same impression as Rory Cochrane’s Slater or Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson from Dazed, do distinguish themselves from the rest of the ensemble. Wyatt Russell (Kurt's son) is particularly riveting as a baseball pitcher-turned-pot-smoking-shaman, and Glen Powell (Scream Queens) is consistently hilarious as Finnegan, a shameless player whose ability to spew pseudo-intellectual nonsense is second only to his impressive mustache. Relative newcomer Juston Street is unforgettably manic, consistently one twitch away from completely blowing his top. But for all of those great performances, there are other characters that just slip quickly from memory: The Dumb Freshman, The Hyper-Competitive Guy, The Kid With The Silly Facial Hair.
Ultimately, despite the fact that these characters all have their idiosyncrasies, they’re largely cut from the same cloth: they’re all jocks, they all just want to find girls, and they all really love getting drunk. Part of what Linklater is doing here is romanticizing and mythologizing his own collegiate experiences, and all of the elements I’ve talked about are de rigeur for any college movie, whether it’s Revenge of the Nerds or Old School. And it would be disingenuous to suggest that it's not true to life — whether that life is Linklater's or any other current or former college kid. The problem with Everybody Wants Some!! is that it doesn't offer much beyond that: it’s a movie about bros, for bros, and there are only so many conversations about how sweet it would be to get laid one can take before things start getting really, really old.
What’s most peculiar about it is that it’s a problem that feels relatively new in Linklater’s work. Dazed and Confused had its share of alpha jocks cruising for girls, of course, but that film also featured a rich diversity of points of view: geeks, stoners, dweebs, good kids looking to be bad, bad kids looking to be good, and every other variant of the high school social strata you could imagine. Everyone was given focus, and the result was a movie that felt rich, sincere, and universal. Everybody Wants Some!!, on the other hand, feels limiting — like you’re stuck at a frat party without a ride after everybody’s gotten too drunk. It becomes even more obvious with Jake starts hanging out with a performing arts major named Beverly (Vampire Academy’s Zoey Deutch) late in the movie. She’s the only real female character in the entire film, and the moment she becomes part of the storyline the movie begins to metamorphosize into something much more compelling — and much more in line with Linklater’s more recent work. Away from his teammates, Jake drops his macho pretense, and begins to explore what college is all about: exploring new things and new ideas on the way to discovering who he really is.
In all fairness to the film, that theme does pop up from time to time, particularly in its excellent use of period music. Jake and his bros hit bar after bar in their pursuit of getting lucky, and it takes them everywhere from a punk club to a disco joint to a cowboy saloon. (There’s also a phenomenal sequence when several of them perform a flawless rendition of The Sugar Hill Gang’s "Rapper’s Delight"). The players all try on different identities — different clothes, ways of talking, and attitudes — to try to fit into each scene, and while it’s all in the same base pursuit it does hint at the prospect of self-discovery that is facing them all.
The SXSW opening night screening of Everybody Wants Some!! was framed by mentioning how important Linklater’s work has been to the festival and the local filmmaking community at large, and I’m sure I’m committing some form of Austin treason by not unequivocally loving the movie (the crowd I saw it with certainly seemed to). But it’s a movie from a writer-director whose work I respect and enjoy, that doesn’t seem to include the same kind of nuance and emotional realism that’s made him so compelling. Linklater is in many ways a kind of movie secret agent, making films that are unconventional in form and function, but so effortlessly entertaining that the audience may not ever realize that’s what they’re seeing. Everybody Wants Some!! still pulls that trick off, but despite its laughs and moments of fun it can’t help but feel like a step back.
LA
Review of Books [Jill Richards]
“Everybody Wants Some!!” Is Richard Linklater's Personal Best - The ... Richard Brody from The New Yorker
Sight
& Sound [Pamela Hutchinson] May
15, 2016
Everybody Wants Some!! - The Atlantic David Sims
Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!!, reviewed. - Slate Dan Kois
Review: Linklater nails another anthropological ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Waking
Boyhood: Richard Linklater's College Bros Get ... Bilge
Ebiri from The Village Voice
Where
the boys are: Richard Linklater's “Everybody Wants Some ...
JoAnna Novak from Salon, April
11, 2016
Linklater's 'Everybody Wants Some!!' Is the Cure for All Our ... Lara Zarum from Flavorwire
Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
Review: Everybody Wants Some!! Is Effortless Fun -- Vulture David Edelstein
The Film Stage [Michael Snydel]
Fun and Games - The New Yorker Anthony Lane
SXSW 2016 Review: 'Everybody Wants Some!!' is an Old School ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
Everybody Wants Some in Richard Linklater's new ... - The AV Club A.A. Dowd
Everybody Wants Some!! - Little White Lies David Jenkins
Everybody Wants Some!! - Paste Magazine Nick Schager
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Next
Projection [Derek Deskins]
'Everybody
Wants Some!!': SXSW Review | Reviews - Screen Daily David D’Arcy
Spectrum Culture [David Harris]
'Everybody
Wants Some!!' Movie Review | Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Creative Loafing [Matt Brunson]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Angus Wolfe Murray]
SassyMamaInLA.com [Courtney Howard]
Why Yes, the Set of 'Everybody Wants Some!!' Was Exactly as Rowdy ... An Oral History of Everybody Wants Some, From Six of its Baseball Bros, as Clay Skipper interviews six of the lead actors from GQ magazine, April 12, 2016
Richard
Linklater Goes To College — 22 Years Later — In 'Everybody ... Rachel Martin interview with the director
from NPR, April 17, 2016
Linklater
on Everybody Wants Some's Gay Subtext -- Vulture Jennifer Vineyard interviews Linklater from
Vulture, April 29, 2016
'Everybody
Wants Some': SXSW Review - Hollywood Reporter John DeFore
'Everybody Wants Some' Review: Richard ... - Variety Dustin Chang
Everybody Wants
Some!! (2016), directed by ... - Time Out
Joshua Rothkopf
Everybody
Wants Some!! review: Richard Linklater's new college ... Nigel M. Smith from The Guardian
Everybody
Wants Some!! review – Richard Linklater's ... - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Everybody
Wants Some!! review – jocks away | Film | The Guardian Wendy Ide
At
last, a film about the 80s that tells it like it was ... - The Guardian Ryan Gilbey from The Observer
Everybody
Wants Some!! film review: Witty and ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab
Everybody
Wants Some!! hits the perfect 1980s groove - review Robbie Collin from The Telegraph
Irish Film Critic [James Land]
Toronto Film Scene [Mark Hanson]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
'Everybody Wants Some!!': Another sweet nostalgia trip from Richard Linklater Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post
Charleston City Paper [T. Meek]
Austin
Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Richard
Linklater's 'Everybody Wants Some!!' - Los Angeles ... Mark Olsen from The LA Times
Rogerebert.com [Sheila O'Malley]
Review: In 'Everybody Wants Some!!,' Casual Sex and Casual Philosophizing A.O. Scott from The New York Times
Everybody
Wants Some!! (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lintberg, Leopold
THE LAST CHANCE A- 93
Switzerland
Hard, newsreel-like scenes that predates Italian realism, with excellent suspense, supposedly liked by Hitchcock, originally shot as a work of resistance, censored until 18 days after the fall of the 3rd Reich for its unflattering portrayal of Germans as well as the Swiss.
Lipman,
Ross
NOTFILM
USA Great Britain (130 mi) 2015 Official Film Site
Review: Notfilm
- Film Comment Scott Eyman, April 1,
2016
Samuel Beckett had the enchanting voice of a natural actor—gentle, paternal, with a brogue that didn’t soften his incisive phrasing. Listening to Beckett’s verbal melody is one of the primary pleasures offered by Ross Lipman’s Notfilm, a lengthy documentary about the making of the playwright’s 1965 Film—a dour 22 minutes of existential panic. Two hours might seem to be overkill for an unsuccessful experimental short, but Notfilm is enthralling.
Lipman shoots his documentary in black and white, and divides it into discrete segments—a section on Beckett, one on Buster Keaton (recruited after Beckett was loftily informed that Charlie Chaplin didn’t act in other people’s scripts, even if they had won the Nobel Prize), one on the production itself, and one on Alan Schneider, the film’s director. Film, which Lipman restored while working on the documentary, is a shaky job, typical of Beckett in that it concerns negation and the difficulty of surviving within that fearful knowledge. Keaton goes about his business with the brisk assurance of a professional, but he was understandably confused by filmmakers who went to the trouble of hiring a comedian but didn’t want him to provide any laughs. Keaton wasn’t in the dread business, but he did his best to give his employers what they wanted, even though he privately thought they were in over their heads. (There is a briefly delightful moment when Keaton is trying to usher a cat and a dog out of the none-too-convincing set that represents his shabby apartment. When the cat goes out, the dog comes in, and vice versa. Surprisingly, the sequence was not Keaton’s contribution, but derived from Beckett’s script.)
Film clearly reveals that Schneider, a director for theater (including American premieres for Beckett’s most celebrated works), had zero aptitude for film. Part of the problem was that he was overawed by Beckett and underawed by Keaton. The director of photography was the great Boris Kaufman (À propos de Nice, On the Waterfront, Splendor in the Grass), but even routine panning shots seem strangely stilted, and Schneider doesn’t have a clue about how to find visual equivalents for Beckett’s prose. (A far better choice would have been Ingmar Bergman, who understood theater and film, and had more than a nodding acquaintance with fear.) Yet the problems visible in the movie were embedded in the affinities of its author. Beckett was an avant-garde minimalist comfortable with the stage, which is intrinsically stylized, but he was helpless before the fact that movies thrive on a layer of behavioral realism that was alien to him.
Lipman talks to the late Barney Rosset, Beckett’s American publisher, who financed Film, as well as the great Billie Whitelaw, the playwright’s primary acting muse. He caught them late, on the downhill slide. Rosset is clearly failing, while Whitelaw is coherent, although she was living in an assisted living facility when she was interviewed. Brisker interviews are offered by Leonard Maltin, who observed the filming for a day; James Karen, who acted in the picture opposite Keaton; and Kevin Brownlow, who interviewed Beckett about the production. Beckett was slightly waspish on the subject of Keaton; he told Brownlow that “Keaton not only had a poker face, he had a poker mind.” It is the (surreptitiously recorded?) tapes of Beckett’s meetings with Schneider, Rosset, and Kaufman that are most revelatory. Schneider and Rosset both approach Beckett on bended knee and don’t nudge him into sharpening his approach for the specific needs of the camera. Kaufman is far more pragmatic, and properly worried; he presses Beckett and Schneider for specifics about converting metaphysical concepts into some kind of physical scenario that he can shoot.
Notfilm has a huge advantage over Film in that its subject is concrete rather than theoretical. Superficially, it’s about the making of a film that even Beckett called “an interesting failure.” But as we witness Rosset and Whitelaw struggling beneath the oppressive weight of age, the documentary becomes about memory and its fading. In other words, the obliteration that awaits us all—the foundation of Beckett’s art.
Notfilm | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Derek Smith
“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.”
–Martin Heidegger
A comical dance of Heideggerian phenomenology, Samuel Beckett’s 20-minute experimental short film, aptly titled Film, the prolific writer’s sole venture into the medium (he did, however, make a number of televised plays), is an oddity quite unlike anything else. A completely silent film devoid of a soundtrack or dialogue, aside from a amusingly condemning “Shhh!” near the beginning, Film begins with an extreme close-up of an eye opening and closing followed by the camera gliding through a courtyard and, upon meeting of several individuals eye-to-eye, causes them to look back in horror and collapse. It then finds its true protagonist, played by the inimitable Buster Keaton, who in 1965 took this job merely for the money, wearing a trench coat and his signature porkpie hat with a scarf covering his face as he attempts to flee the camera. What follows, in equally comical and frustrating measures, is a chase of sorts, a cat-and-mouse game between Keaton and the camera where, in Beckett’s terms, the camera eye (E) persistently pursues the object (O), who flees its deadly gaze.
Ross Lipman’s Notfilm approaches Beckett’s avant-garde curioso from various philosophical and historical angles in an attempt to understand how such a strange project with even more bizarre casting and production issues came into being as well as how Film fits, however awkwardly, into the Beckett canon. Lipman, like a good film studies scholar, rigorously structures the documentary, dividing it into acts focusing on different aspects and stages of the film (pre-production, production, themes, etc.), but his acute attention to detail often leads him down avenues that are of interest only to those obsessed with the minutiae of Beckett’s works. The audio recordings of production meetings are fascinating in offering a rare opportunity to hear Beckett speak and some of the talking head interviews offer humorous asides (Leonard Maltin’s visit to the set as a 14-year old Keaton fan) and glimpses into the mood behind-the-scenes and on-set, yet Lipman also finds it necessary to include numerous interviews about director Alan Schneider and various producers of the film that feel like extraneous and occasionally tedious additions.
Despite the mixed bag of historical background that takes up large chunks of the film, Notfilm thrives when it hones in on the philosophical and cinematic nature of Beckett’s inquiry. It is here that his attention to detail pays off, with insights from himself, famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, film historian Kevin Brownlow and Beckett’s favorite actress, Billie Whitelaw, along with Beckett scholars and collaborators providing a context for what Film was attempting to achieve. Even if it is, as Beckett says, an “interesting failure,” its inquiry into consciousness and the nature of being is sought through such purely cinematic means that it is a film far more valuable for the discussion it leads to than for what it actually accomplishes on-screen and while Notfilm plays like the collective extra features on Film’s Blu-ray, in this case it is the extra-textual material rather than the text itself that contains the most interesting content.
Incorporating clips of earlier, equally meta avant-garde films, particularly Man With a Movie Camera, and numerous Keaton films, which often examined the nature cinema as it relates to consciousness (Sherlock, Jr.) and the camera itself (The Cameraman) in a way surprisingly similar to Beckett, Lipman successfully contextualizes the intellectual and cinematic explorations that theoretically drive Film. In its best moments, Notfilm breaks free of the restrictions of its film-about-a-film roots and waxes poetic about the nature of film itself where “we become aware of our own being and self, ”expanding on the limited scope of “E” and “O” as presented in Film and relating them back to the early roots of cinematic expression and to Beckett’s own ontological queries into the nature of being and man’s innate struggle to fully perceive and comprehend him/herself. In these moments, Notfilm becomes about so much more than it is and as scattershot and uneven it is, rambling through its 2+ hours, it justifies its own existence, not as a behind-the-scenes/historical documentary, but as a film steadfastly grasping at the meaning of its own medium and it’s approach within it. It’s meta, but in the least obnoxious way possible and as tough as it is to sit through at times, it’s worth the effort to get to the beautiful nuggets of gold it occasionally mines.
Buster
Keaton did his own stunts, which included working with Samuel ... JR Jones From The Chicago Reader
The meeting of minds between Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett might have been one of the greatest in performing-arts history if their minds had actually met. In July 1964, the silent-comedy legend arrived in New York City to spend three weeks shooting an avant-garde short from a script by the lionized Irish playwright. Beckett was strongly influenced by the great clowns—Vladimir and Estragon, the eternally patient protagonists of Waiting for Godot, are nothing but a pair of baggy-pants comedians—and while the play was first being staged in Paris, Beckett got to see Keaton perform at the Cirque Medrano. Both men pondered the inescapable joke of existence, one trading in the low art of slapstick, the other in the high art of avant-garde poetry. But Keaton was only a hired hand on Film, which is better remembered now for the oddness of the men's pairing than for its artistic merit.
This weekend director and film archivist Ross Lipman will appear at University of Chicago and the Music Box for screenings of his fascinating video essay Notfilm, which exhaustively documents the conception, realization, and public reception of Film. As a documentary, it could use a tighter edit and a more generous music score, but as a research project, it's impressive. Lipman has gotten his hands on audiotapes secretly recorded by the film's producer, Barney Rosset, in which he, Beckett, director Alan Schneider, and cinematographer Boris Kaufman debate how Beckett's abstract ideas can best be visualized onscreen. Drawing on such varied witnesses as actress Billie Whitelaw, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, filmmaker Kevin Brownlow, and critic Leonard Maltin, Lipman provides vivid portaits of the production personnel who struggled to accommodate Beckett's rigid vision, and of Keaton, who stubbornly claimed not to understand the story but did more to make it work than anyone else.
Mutual shyness couldn't have helped matters. Beckett was notoriously reclusive, unhappy to be photographed and unwilling to be recorded or filmed. In fact Film was his attempt to work through a growing preoccupation with the human eye and its object—identified in the script as E and O. The camera would be E, and Keaton would be O, desperate to escape observation as he runs through the city in a heavy overcoat, his face covered. Beckett, as Lipman observes in voice-over narration, had written "a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid." His screenplay contained no dialogue, and the action was spelled out in minute detail, with diagrams explaining the camera movements he wanted. As O fled, the camera would lag behind, staying just out of his peripheral vision at a 45-degree angle lest he see it and speed up. During the production conference, the others pressured Beckett to drop this idea, but he was adamant.
What separated Keaton from the creative team was lack of education. Beckett had graduated from Trinity College in Dublin and was a protege of James Joyce; Keaton had grown up in vaudeville as part of an acrobatic act with his parents, and according to biographer Marion Meade, people close to him suspected he was functionally illiterate. A decade earlier he had been offered the role of Lucky in the first U.S. production of Waiting for Godot and had handed the script unread to his wife, who advised him to turn down the role. When Schneider visited the 68-year-old comedian in Los Angeles to talk about Film, Keaton seemed baffled by the script and suggested a few gags to liven it up. "I said that we didn't normally pad Beckett's material," Schneider later remembered. That summer, as cast and crew convened in Manhattan, Schneider took Beckett to Keaton's hotel, but they found the actor drinking a beer and mutely absorbed in a baseball game on TV. (Even Beckett found him standoffish, Brownlow recalls with great amusement.)
Beckett and Schneider were interested in Keaton only as a performer; you have to wonder if they understood they were dealing with a cinematic genius. Actor James Karen, who put Schneider in touch with Keaton and played a small role in Film, remembers his frustration with the writer and director: "Beckett had never made a movie, nor had Alan Schneider ever directed a movie. And there they were, with a master of moviemaking whom they never took into their confidence." The irony is that Keaton might have latched on to the film's technical challenges; some of his most brilliant work dealt with tricks of perception and the paradoxes of cinema. In his short The Playhouse (1921), multiple exposures allow him to play every role; in Sherlock Jr. (1924), he leaps up into the frame of a movie and joins the action, stunned when the picture cuts to a new scene and he's not where he thought he was. A brilliant architect of sight gags, Keaton had a pronounced sense of geometry that might have served Beckett's idea of a man being continuously stalked just outside his field of vision.
As it stood, Schneider had problems just getting footage in the can. Film was supposed to begin with an elaborate street scene in which six pairs of characters parade past the camera. From Rosset, Lipman has salvaged outtakes in which the camera pans over the wide expanse of a deserted street, recording all six couples in motion; closer shots focus on an old man and his wife, then a woman pushing her baby in a carriage. But when the day's footage was screened, strobe effects ruined some of the panning shots, compromising the sequence. With no budget to bring back the actors, Beckett decided to cut the sequence entirely and turn immediately to Keaton as O, running along a dilapidated brick wall near the Brooklyn Bridge with the camera in hot pursuit. In Notfilm, Karen peruses a book with photographs of Keaton on location, roasting in his overcoat with his iconic flat hat pasted on his head. "Buster would never complain," says Karen. "Over 100 degrees in the shade, and there was no shade. I had to fight them to get him a chair."
Even as a performer, Keaton had his work cut out for him: the overcoat hid his body, and Beckett insisted that his face not appear onscreen until the very end. O, safely inside his cell of a room, contrives to cover up the window, the wall mirror, and even the goldfish bowl, anyplace from which he might be observed. He pulls down a picture of a godlike deity with enormous eyes and tears it into pieces; he sits in a rocking chair reviewing old photographs of himself and shreds them too. At the climax of Film, O finally comes face-to-face with E and stares in shock at his own image. Keaton understood the story perfectly—talking to reporters on location, he remarked, "A man may keep away from everybody but he can't get away from himself"—yet later he preferred to play dumb. Lipman includes footage of him on a TV show, saying, "It was one of those art things. I was confused when we shot it, and I'm still confused."
Notfilm necessarily focuses on Beckett, with Keaton as a supporting player. Yet when Film premiered at the Venice film festival in September 1965, Keaton was given a rapturous welcome not as its star but as a filmmaker in his own right. Unlike Film, his great silent work was the product of glorious improvisation; he and his writers, left to their own devices on their own little back lot, would begin with a character in trouble and then dream up gags to get him out until they had a picture. Mentally, this process was every bit as demanding as Beckett's theater, dealing in practicalities of time and space that a stage dramatist could only imagine. How sad that Beckett and Keaton couldn't find a way to communicate. Whatever absurdities Beckett might have dreamed up for his plays, nothing could have been crazier than amateurs making a film called Film while one of the greatest filmmakers of all time sat around between takes, his face buried in a newspaper he couldn't read.
An
Odd Couple: Samuel Beckett & Buster Keaton | Moving Image ... Peter Monaghan from Moving Image Source, September 3, 2015
Recontextualizations: Samuel Beckett's FILM and Ross Lipman's ... David Ehrenstein from Fandor, Apil 13 2016
To
be, or not to be perceived — The Critic as Artist — Medium Letizia Gatti, August 8, 2015
Tony Pipolo on Ross Lipman's Notfilm -
artforum.com / film Ton Pipolo from Artforum, April 7, 2016
Notfilm | Film
Review | Slant Magazine James
Lattimer
Ross
Lipman's Doc 'Notfilm' Actually Enriches Samuel Beckett's Only ... Alamn Scherstuhl from The Village Voice
Buster
Keaton And Samuel Beckett Walk Into A Movie Studio ... : NPR Howie Movshovitz from NPR
Film
Review: Notfilm | Film Journal International Eric Monder
Samuel Beckett / Buster Keaton: FILM and
NOTFILM
Interview
with archivist and director Ross Lipman about his Beckett ... When
Beckett Met Buster, by Dana Stevens interview from Slate, April 8, 2016
Notfilm':
Film Review - Hollywood Reporter
Franck Scheck from The Hollywod
Reporter
The
rundown on Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton's tribute to silent ... Pamela Hutchinson from The Guardian, April 11, 2016
ADiff
review: Notfilm lets Samuel Beckett speak - The Irish Times Tara
Brady
Review:
'Notfilm' gifts us with a charming look at an unlikely Beckett ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
Review:
'Notfilm' Tells How Beckett and Keaton Collaborated - The ... A.O Scott from The New York Times, April 1, 2016, also seen here: Review:
'Notfilm' Informs How Beckett and Keaton Collaborated ...
Lisberger, Steven
TRON
Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair) capsule review
Directed by Steven Lisberger, Tron follows skilled hacker Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) as he's sucked into a computer by a malevolent program and forced to participate in a series of dangerous games - with the film primarily following Flynn's efforts at taking the system down from the inside. It's an intriguing premise that's employed to mostly underwhelming effect by Lisberger, as the filmmaker demonstrates an ongoing reluctance to explain the rules that govern the movie's alternate reality - with the opening stretch set inside the computer immediately cultivating an atmosphere of almost stunning perplexity (ie how long have these programs been sentient? why are they battling one another? who designed their little outfits? etc, etc). There's consequently little doubt that the film does take a considerable amount of time to get going, with the real-world stuff - involving Bridges' character and his efforts at hacking into the mainframe - providing the proceedings with much needed bursts of context. But given that the majority of the narrative transpires within the computer-generated landscape, Tron's decidedly thin storyline does become more and more problematic as time progresses - which ensures that the compelling vibe established by a handful of early sequences, ie the justifiably legendary light cycle race, is ultimately replaced by an atmosphere of head-scratching indifference (with Lisberger's increasingly overblown and flat-out incoherent directorial sensibilities cementing this feeling). It's finally impossible to label Tron as anything more than a hopelessly dated relic of the early 1980s, with the film's status as a bona fide cult classic nothing short of baffling.
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review
The interior of a computer is a fine and private place, but none, I fear, do there embrace, except in "Tron," a dazzling movie from Walt Disney in which computers have been used to make themselves romantic and glamorous. Here's a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun.
The movie addresses itself without apology to the computer
generation, embracing the imagery of those arcade video games that parents fear
are rotting the minds of their children. If you've never played Pac-Man or
Space Invaders or the Tron game itself, you probably are not quite ready to see
this movie, which begins with an evil bureaucrat stealing computer programs to
make himself look good, and then enters the very mind of a computer itself to
engage the villain, the hero, and several highly programmable bystanders in a
war of the wills that is governed by the rules of both video games and computer
programs.
The villain is a man named Dillinger (David
Warner). The hero is a bright kid named Flynn (Jeff
Bridges) who created the original programs for five great new video games,
including the wonderfully named "Space Paranoid." Dillinger stole
Flynn's plans and covered his tracks in the computer. Flynn believes that if he
can track down the original program, he can prove Dillinger is a thief. To
prevent that, Dillinger uses the very latest computer technology to break Flynn
down into a matrix of logical points and insert him into the computer, and at
that point "Tron"
leaves any narrative or visual universe we have ever seen before in a movie and
charts its own rather wonderful path.
In an age of amazing special effects, "Tron"
is a state-of-the-art movie. It generates not just one imaginary computer
universe, but a multitude of them. Using computers as their tools, the Disney
filmmakers literally have been able to imagine any fictional landscape, and
then have it, through an animated computer program. And they integrate their
human actors and the wholly imaginary worlds of Tron so cleverly that I never,
ever, got the sensation that I was watching some actor standing in front of, or
in the middle of, special effects. The characters inhabit this world.
And what a world it is! Video gamesmen race each other at blinding speed,
hurtling up and down computer grids while the movie shakes with the overkill of
Dolby stereo (justified, for once). The characters sneak around the computer's
logic guardian terminals, clamber up the sides of memory displays, talk their
way past the guardians of forbidden programs, hitch a ride on a power beam, and
succeed in entering the mind of the very Master Control Program itself,
disabling it with an electronic Frisbee. This is all a whole lot of fun. "Tron"
has been conceived and written with a knowledge of computers that it mercifully
assumes the audience shares. That doesn't mean we do share it, but that we're
bright enough to pick it up, and don't have to sit through long, boring
explanations of it.
There is one additional observation I have to make about "Tron,"
and I don't really want it to sound like a criticism: This is an almost wholly
technological movie. Although it's populated by actors who are engaging
(Bridges, Cindy
Morgan) or sinister (Warner), it is not really a movie about human nature.
Like "Star
Wars" or "The
Empire Strikes Back," but much more so, this movie is a machine to
dazzle and delight us. It is not a human-interest adventure in any generally
accepted way. That's all right, of course. It's brilliant at what it does, and
in a technical way maybe it's breaking ground for a generation of movies in
which computer-generated universes will be the background for mind-generated
stories about emotion-generated personalities. All things are possible.
End of Line: My Love/Hate Relationship with Tron Mike Ryan from Movieline magazine
I have a really strange relationship with Tron. I’ve always been quite fascinated with Disney’s 1982 video-game action-adventure — owning three different home-video versions of the film, keeping some of the original toys, concluding letters to my grandparents with the phrase “END OF LINE” and, for the better part of the last three years, wallpapering my iPhone screen with its movie poster… All of which I guess is only interesting insofar as it’s such an awful movie. With the release of Tron: Legacy this weekend, however, revisionist historians are having an Internet field day with their outpourings of love for the original film. Where have these people been the last 28 years?
I don’t mind Steven Lisberger’s film getting some better-late-than-never attention, and I have no problem with anyone admiring Lisberger’s work for what it could have been — or rather what he and Disney wanted it to be. But come on. The movie is beyond boring. Not that it started out that way for me: The first time I saw a commercial for the original Tron was, I’m pretty sure, during an episode of The Greatest American Hero (or, possibly, something called Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters which I was forced to watch by my Mandrell Sisters-loving father). I was immediately hooked: Look at these people, whoever they are, they glow! You must understand how interesting glowing people are to a 7-year-old boy; I mean, I watched 12 hours of a show starring Desi Arnaz Jr. called Automan simply because Arnaz fought crime with a character who glowed from the neck down. Keep in mind, too, that this was 1982. It had been two years (an eternity to me at the time) since the last Star Wars movie, and I was running out of adventures for my current set of action figures. There are only so many times that Luke Skywalker can team up with Boba Fett to defeat the unlikely evil duo of Lobot and Walrus Man. But here was Tron! They had Lightcycles and glowing characters! Tron was to be my destiny.
For weeks, all I could talk about was the mighty Tron, whoever that was. I counted the days until I could finally see this film that would surely change my life, and on the afternoon of Saturday, July 10, 1982, my parents took me to our local Wehrenberg theater in suburban St. Louis to finally see Tron. About 35 minutes in I fell asleep.
I mean, really: Nothing happens in this film. Jeff Bridges, as Flynn, gets sucked into a computer (one impression that Tron did leave on me: I never quite trusted that Commodore 64 again) and, as a result, he must get “over there.” You see, Flynn is “over here,” but to get home, he must go “there.” And there’s your plot for Tron. Anyone who tells you differently is lying. The cool Lightcycles? They were in the film for about 10 minutes. The ending of the film — a freeze frame on the top on the Encom building with the three principals — made it feel like I was watching an episode of Magnum P.I. Even the toys were awful. Seriously, look at these things. What was I supposed to do with those? They look like Jell-O molds.
Also, at that age, I couldn’t grasp the fact that Tron, the title character, wasn’t the main character. Sure, Tron (played by Bruce Boxleitner) was a part of the film, but to me it would have been like if Raiders of the Lost Ark had been titled Sallah. I became so anti-Tron in late 1982 that my mom had to drag me kicking and screaming to a showing of Kiss Me Goodbye (a story about a ghost named Jolly, played by James Caan, who visits his widow, played by Sally Field), which happened to star that terrible, boring Jeff Bridges guy from Tron. I did not fall asleep during Kiss Me Goodbye. Conversely, in late 1982, I would religiously watch Boxleitner play a character named Frank Buck in a short-lived television show called Bring ‘Em Back Alive — a show that also starred Cindy Morgan, who happened to be the female lead in Tron. I never made the connection that either of these two actors appeared in the bane of my young, cinemagoing existence.
Yet here’s what I can’t fully explain: The longer I went without seeing Tron, the more I liked it. It was almost a formula, one that resembled: “Lightcycles equal cool. Tron has lightcycles. Ergo, Tron must be cool.” By fourth grade, I would be known to leave a movie such as The Last Starfighter and declare, just to piss off my friend, “Yeah that was good… but it wasn’t as good as Tron.” Honestly, I didn’t really know anyone at the time who had seen Tron (not many people did; the film only made $33 million, which was OK at the time, finishing second in its first week to the fifth week of E.T.), so I could stand at the top of my own little sci-fi mountain and declare: No, your opinion doesn’t matter unless you’ve seen Tron. (Related: This is why people become Internet movie writers: so we can Tweet about how great a film is that we saw early, then forget about it the second it’s shown to the masses.)
But at the time I really believed what I was saying. Yes, I remembered that I fell asleep, but that was surely because I was so much younger and there was no way that my brain could have possibly understood the greatness that must have been unspooling in front of me. The concept of a movie about users and programs was so ahead of its time — and it was — there was no way I could have appreciated it in 1982. It was the mid-1990s before I actually saw Tron again. I just knew that this time I would fully appreciate what the movie was trying to say.
Nope, still terrible. In fact, it was a little worse because the glowing people didn’t have the same effect on me as they did in the early ’80s. Still, again, by the mid 2000s, Tron was restored as a great film in my mind. This ended for good (I hope) about six months ago when I made the mistake of watching it again. This time it just pissed me off because, although aesthetically pleasing, I felt so much more aware of how close Lisberger and Co. were to making something truly innovative and great.
But something strange happened between my second and third viewings. In 2008 a teaser trailer for a Tron sequel — inexplicably titled TR2N — premiered at Comic-Con (a trailer, incidentally, that has no actual scenes from what would become Tron: Legacy). All of the sudden, everyone was a Tron fan; the consensus grew that the original was pure genius. My perpetrated fraud was becoming reality. And today, only two days from Tron: Legacy opening in theaters, all people want to talk about are the merits of the original film. Where were these people when I was in fourth grade? (OK, probably still in someone’s womb.)
None of this is to say a person can’t genuinely like Tron. But this new, overwhelming wave of passion doesn’t really add up. It almost feels like people are going purposely overboard with their love for the first film to make up for their earlier dereliction — catching up with some sort of predetermined critical notion of Tron that states, “Yes, this is a great film, and if you don’t like it you lose your street cred.” But Tron is not Blade Runner: a visionary work of style, storytelling and character that will cost you your street cred if you can’t make a convincing case for any opposition you might have. It’s time to make the distinction and move on as moviegoers.
In any event, I’ve been down this same long, winding Tron road, and I know where it goes. Tron was my one chance to be a contrarian — to defend a film that’s really not worth defending. Now that everyone seems to defend Tron, I admit I’ve lost my niche. When I see these fans’ glowing (no pun intended) Tron tweets, I can’t help but think, I know what you’re doing! That used to be my sh*tty movie!. I just hope people who watch Tron for the first time watch it for what it is: A fairly groundbreaking film, visually, but light on anything resembling entertainment or plot. Even Disney realizes the original is a snore fest: Plans to re-release Tron ahead of Tron: Legacy were summarily, quietly scrapped.
I’ve since thought about trying to adopt something else as my new offbeat niche movie, even going so far as to replace my iPhone wallpaper with art from The Last Starfighter. Alas, it’s just not taking. I think my argument could be good, too. It just wouldn’t be as good as Tron.
Bright Lights Film Journal review Digitizing the Cold War, by James Corbett, May 2007
John
Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film/TV
Tron - TCM.com
Emily Soares
This Distracted
Globe [Joe Valdez]
not coming to a theater near you
(Rumsey Taylor) review, also seen here: dvdfuture.com (Rumsey Taylor) dvd
review
Pajiba (Brian Prisco) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review
Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley) review, also see the script
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Mutant Reviewers from Hell review
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
The Digital Bits dvd review Brad Pilcher
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dvd review
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dvd review
DVD Times Raphael Pour-Hashemi, 20th
Anniversary Collector’s Edition, 2-disc
DVD
Journal Damon Houx, also seen
here: CHUD.com (Damon Houx) review
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review, 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, 2-disc
DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review [20th Anniversary
Collector's Edition]
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Edition] Brad Pilcher
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review [Collector's Edition] Joshua Tyler, 20th
Anniversary Collector’s Edition, 2-disc
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review [20th Anniversary Collector's
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DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Michael
Pfug, 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, 2-disc
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Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review James Reader, 20th
Anniversary Collector’s Edition, 2-disc
DVD Authority.com (Christopher Bligh) dvd review [20th Anniversary Edition]
UpcomingDiscs.com (Gino Sassani) dvd review
Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Widge
Three Movie Buffs review
rec.arts.movies.reviews (Walter
Frith) retrospective
Tron Richard Scheib from The Science Fiction,
Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark)
review
Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review
Lessons of
Darkness [Nick Schager]
rec.arts.movies.reviews (Zoe Blade)
review
Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry
Knowles) review
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo)
review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review
Brilliant
Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M.
Anderson) review
Variety review
Time Out review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Litvak, Anatole
BLUES IN THE NIGHT
USA (88 mi) 1941
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Barrie Maxwell
The film itself is an entertaining blend of blues music and melodrama directed by Anatole Litvak (City for Conquest, The Snake Pit) that clocks in at an efficient 88 minutes. Jack Carson, Richard Whorf, Priscilla Lane, Elia Kazan, and Betty Field head the cast playing an itinerant blues quintet who find themselves mixed up in revenge and murder at a roadhouse. Also on board are the always-reliable Lloyd Nolan and former Dead End Kid Billy Halop. The film is not earth shattering, but is a good example of product from the polished production entity that Warners was in the early 40s. Typical of the Warner expertise is the superb montage work by Don Siegel who would go on to become an accomplished director (Dirty Harry). The script is by Robert Rossen who would go on to the likes of The Hustler; actor Kazan would become the acclaimed director of A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront; and actor Richard Whorf would become a director for numerous TV series. Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer were responsible for the music, including the Oscar-nominated title tune. Warners provides the title with a crisp, clean transfer that preserves the film's mild grain. Contrast and shadow detail are very good. The mono sound is in typically good shape for a Warner DVD release and conveys the film's songs with decent though obviously modest fidelity. Included among the discs's supplements of two musical shorts, an audio outtake, the theatrical trailer, and three cartoons is the superb, Oscar-nominated short Jammin' the Blues, a beautifully atmospheric filming of a jam session highlighting music, singing, and dancing. Recommended.
User reviews from imdb Author: bmacv from Western New
York
There's much in Anatole Litvak's Blues in the Night which suggests that
Martin Scorsese borrowed heavily from it for New York, New York (though
Scorsese cites The Man I Love as his chief inspiration). A melodrama set in the
jazz world, it explores the volatile relationships and raffish milieu of a
troupe of players trying to keep body and soul together without abandoning
their musical ideals.
Five rough and ready amateurs form a band in St. Louis and start touring the
south – Memphis, New Orleans. Richard Whorf is their leader; trumpeter Jack
Carson and canary Priscilla Lane (whose character's name is `Character') are
man and wife; and among the rest is the young Elia Kazan. On the road
complications ensue: Lane, pregnant, thinks the free-and-easy Carson will take
a powder if he knows a kid's coming; riding the rails, they hook up with a
lammed-up mobster (Lloyd Nolan). Nolan offers them a gig at his roadhouse (The
Jungle) in New Jersey, the spires of Manhattan just across the river. Around
him, however, swarms a strange menage: Betty Field, his hard-as-nails
ex-squeeze; Howard Da Silva, bartender and jack-of-all-trades; and the
excellent Wallace Ford, as a has-been hanger-on. The grasping Field snares
Whorf and pries him away from the band; when she tires of him, now piano man in
a glitzy novelty band, she gives him the air. He hits the bottle, loses his
talent, goes round the bend. But Field's not through with him yet, or, for that
matter, with Nolan....
The film is full of surprises. Don Siegel did the clever montages, cutting his
teeth, (as it were), and Robert Rossen's script stays fresh and slangy: just
when you spot another cliche coming round the mountain, he sneaks in a low-key,
well-acted vignette. Litvak modulates the tone expertly, starting out light and
insouciant and darkening his palette as the story advances, with heavy
foreshadowings of film noir. It's a significant milestone in the formation of
the noir cycle, and why it isn't better known remains one of cinema's
mysteries: Blues in the Night is an involving, inventive musical drama.
Turner Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford
Among the films released by Warner Brothers in 1941, Blues
in the Night was a bit of an anomaly. The story of some gifted itinerant
jazz musicians and a female vocalist (Priscilla Lane) searching for their big
break amidst an endless series of one-night stands, the movie is actually a
pastiche of several movie genres. It's a musical; the Harold Arlen-Johnny
Mercer score includes "This Time the Dream's on Me" and the haunting
title song plus Jimmy Lunceford and his Band appear in one sequence. It's a
drama; the various band members, all displaying different temperaments from the
manic-depressive bandleader (Jack Carson) to the free spirited clarinettist
(Elia Kazan), often clash while touring on the road. It's a film noir; an
escaped convict joins the band and his relationship with femme fatale Kay Grant
(Betty Field) spells doom for the group, paving the way for a tragic climax.
Most importantly, however, Blues in the Night is unique for featuring
two future directors in supporting roles. Elia Kazan, cast as the clarinet
player Nicky, would, of course, go on to direct acclaimed films like A
Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and East of Eden (1955). Richard Whorf
(in the role of Jigger), on the other hand, specialized in light entertainments
like Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) and Champagne for Caesar
(1950).
For Kazan, Blues in the Night would prove to be his final film as an
actor. He had previously played the heavy in a James Cagney drama, City for
Conquest (1940), directed by Anatole Litvak, and although he received good
notices for his performance, his career soon took a different path. In his
autobiography, A Life, Kazan recalled that "when City for
Conquest opened, the review that generally passed as the industry's
judgment on the movie and the people who'd made it appeared in the Hollywood
Reporter. Arthur Kennedy and I, as newcomers, were praised, but a
distinction was drawn. After predicting a great future for Arthur, the Reporter's
critic had written: 'However, Elia Kazan, having equally as much ability,
because of his looks will present a casting problem.' I had a different final
judgment; it was: "I sure as hell can direct better than Anatole
Litvak." Kazan's confident attitude was confirmed by working with Litvak
yet again on Blues in the Night: "Warners had bought a play I'd
owned for a while, then given up on. It was about a jazz band and the conflicts
among its members. I hadn't been able to get up the money for a production, so
the author and I decided to sell it. Litvak, who knew nothing about this kind
of music, was going to direct it. I suppose he was looking for another
"real American" subject to shake off the label "European
director." He'd offered me the part of the clarinet player, but I hadn't
been anxious to work with him again, so had delayed my response. The house in
the country decided me. The job would bring us the money we needed, and it
would give me a chance, alone in California, to clear my head."
Kazan would live to regret his decision for in his autobiography, he later
wrote, "Acting," an old critic said, "is a lamp placed in the
soul of man so we can see who we are and who we wish we are." Not that
summer, not on the Litvak set. When Blues in the Night comes on the
late-late show, I advise you to skip it....I decided that summer that I'd never
act again. And I never did." Yet despite, Kazan's harsh opinion of the
film, Blues in the Night is a consistently fascinating melodrama with a
schizophrenic personality; it's jarring combination of soap opera and musical
numbers is enhanced by occasional sharp dialogue by screenwriter Robert Rossen
and moody black and white cinematography by the great Ernest Haller (an Oscar
winner for Gone With the Wind, 1939). Then there's that unforgettable
title song which was nominated for an Oscar and proved to be so successful that
the film's title was changed from Hot Nocturne to Blues in the Night
just prior to its theatrical release.
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [3/5]
The New York Sun (Gary Giddins) review
DVD Verdict (Ben Saylor) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
Blues In The Night Andrew
Movie Mirror Sanderson Beck
Variety (Christopher Meeks) review
The New York Times review T.M.P.
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Liu Chia-Liang
DRUNKEN MASTER II
aka: The Legend of Drunken Master
Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York (link lost):
Let's face it—nobody goes to a Jackie Chan movie to hear the scintillating
dialogue or to marvel at the exquisite production design or to ponder the
trenchant examination of man's inhumanity to man. We just want to see Chan's
inhumanity to man, by way of gravity-defying roundhouse kicks and body blows
thrown so quickly that they can scarcely be detected at the standard 24 frames
per second. There's only one relevant question to be asked of a Jackie Chan
movie, really: How astounding are the fight scenes and stunts? In the case of
this sequel to 1979's Drunken Master, finally being released in the U.S.
six years after its international premiere (and at least two years after it was
acquired by Dimension Films), the answer is: pretty damn astounding...once they
finally turn up.
Unlike the folks who made The
Legend of Drunken Master, I won't burden you with extraneous plot details.
For some reason, an inordinate amount of screen time has been devoted to a
perfunctory switched-packages story line, in which Wong Fei Hung (Chan)
mistakenly winds up toting a valuable antique in lieu of the ginseng that his
father (Lung) intended to prescribe to an elderly patient. Needless to say, the
antique was stolen property, and the hilariously urbane thugs who swiped it
want it back; as the title suggests, Wong's ability to fend off his
well-tailored attackers is inversely proportional to his degree of sobriety at
any given moment. Simple enough, right? Yet the exposition—poorly dubbed into
English, to add insult to injury—drags on and on, until even the most ardent
Chan fanatic may find himself eyeing the exit signs.
Stay put. Although the first hour is something of a tough sit (apart from some inspired mugging by Mui, playing Wong's feisty, mah-jongg–obsessed stepmother), the final 40 minutes feature some of the most virtuosic martial-arts action committed to celluloid since the death of Bruce Lee. Staggering back and forth, lolling to and fro, mincing even more than usual (a development one might have thought impossible), Chan puts a gracefully distorted spin on otherwise familiar moves, provoking gasps and laughs simultaneously. Terrific as he is, though, he's nearly upstaged in the lengthy finale by his real-life bodyguard, Low Houi Kang—a tall, dapper brute with almost superhuman control of his right leg. Running some 12 near-stroboscopic minutes, this sequence alone compensates for the preceding longueurs—and for the oddly abrupt ending that immediately follows. Not that anybody goes to a Jackie Chan movie for the poignant epilogue.
Liu Fendou
OCEAN FLAME
Ocean
Flame Dan Fainaru at
This over-stylized tale of mad love Hong Kong-style, featuring gangsters and copious sex and nudity, plays like a more modest but no less ambitious companion piece of sorts to last year's steamy Lust, Caution. Tailored for a western audience, its visual compositions and hints of surrealism should bring it a receptive response at festivals although its long running time will limit prospects on the art house circuit.
The film begins with Wang Yao (Liao Fan) just released from prison. An unscrupulous pimp whose business involved blackmailing and roughening up his girls' clients, he discovers his best friend and business partner Zheng Zhong (Hai Yi Tian) is now paralyzed. Helping him back to his dingy apartment, Wang then grabs a gun and makes off for his former lover Lichuan's mother's house.
Flashbacks to eight years previously reveal how he began a passionate relationship with a barmaid Lichuan (Mok). Warning her that he's not a nice man, he proceeded to treat her brutal contempt and though they were united by an overwhelming passion, he made sure that she always understands who has the upper hand even during their (explicitly-filmed) intimate moments. Meanwhile, with Zheng, he took control of a patch belonging to another pimp Gunzi (Lam Suet).
The film's ending brings the story back to the present for a final sequence that was signposted too early on and that reveals nothing new.
The real stars of this picture are cinematographers Chen Ying and Chan Chor Keung; the colour palette and the composition of the frames is always creative and interesting. The script, based on a Wang Shuo novel, suggests the influence of such s/m classics as The Story Of O, but Liu's sluggish direction can't help but expose the holes in the plot and he self-consciously has his cast strike poses reminiscent of frames in European noirs.
Liao Fan plays the villainy of his character with relish but lacks the authority the role needs. The suggestion that his vile nature stems from his lack of confidence doesn't make him either more likeable or interesting. Monika Mok, in her first film role, bravely attempts to flesh out the character of a despondent woman victimized by the man she loves, while Hai Yi Tian successfully holds his own in a relatively small but sympathetic part.
Liu
Hao
CHEN
MO AND MEITING (Chen Mo he Meiting) B 83
The subject of the
film, children of the Cultural Revolution in
Liu Jiayin
OXHIDE
By Shelly Kraicer Oxhide from Cinema Scope
The most important Chinese film of the past several years—and one of the most astonishing recent films from any country—doesn’t come from the so-called Sixth Generation, formerly underground Chinese rebel directors whose output has fed Western film festivals regularly since the early 90s (e.g., Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Zhang Yuan). Nor does it come from the newly anointed masters of the Fifth Generation, whose leaders, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, are busying themselves these days crafting media content, cinema morphed into blockbuster-ready marketing opportunities. The film is called Oxhide (a literal, though pleasantly strange direct translation of the Chinese title Niupi ), and it comes from young female first-time director Liu Jiayin.
Liu is a 23 year old Beijinger currently enrolled in the Masters program of
the literature (i.e., screenwriting) department of the
Oxhide stands out from the multitudes of digital films that bubble
up every month from the astonishingly fertile cultural well of present-day
So far, so minimal. Liu’s formal choices are absolutely clear and unvaried. The film is in 23 scenes, each scene shot in one continuous take from a stationary camera. The shortest shot is just under two minutes; the longest is a Jeanne Dielman-like dinner preparation. Its format is widescreen DV, Liu using the frame to capture what looks at first like merely the middle slice of each scene: often all we can see are torsos, hands, the top of a table, or the bottom of a couple of heads. This aesthetic choice is partly dictated by the extremely cramped space she lives in, one that’s typical for working-class Beijingers still housed in the un-modernized parts of the city centre. ‘Scope framing accentuates this sense of extremely tight focus, of a scene that is made only partially visible. We only get pieces, and have to infer the rest from visual and aural clues. Within these constraints, Liu knows how to design the frame so that it sings. Each setup is precisely arranged, with an astonishingly well-developed sense of balance and, in scenes with action, a beautifully clear choreography of movement in counterpoint.
Liu’s precise control of offscreen sound and space keeps the film intelligible: even if the beginning of a scene is difficult to decipher, we eventually hear and see enough to know what’s important. One characteristic example: the second scene opens with a view down to a desktop. A bit of a machine is in the upper right, and we hear voices apparently discussing Chinese calligraphy. Finally, the conversation resolves into the father instructing his daughter about formatting a text; she types in response to each of his suggestions; and after about six minutes, the visual punch line: the machine in the upper right starts to sputter, and coloured pages emerge. It’s a printer, and we can almost make out the content of the shop signs she’s printing for her father: “50% off sale.” While the signs are printing, Liu uses the time and extra screen space to run her brief credits, naming herself as the film’s screenwriter, cinematographer, and director.
This scene also exemplifies a principle of Oxhide’s dramatic construction: Liu loves a punch-line. Though she’s chosen a rigorous form, Oxhide is genuinely funny. Out of the stressed, frequently quarrelsome interactions of the family, Liu finds moments of humour, and places them right at the end of most of her chapters. Whether it’s her father’s realization that a pull-up bar he has engineered can’t actually help lengthen his daughter’s lower body, or his insistence that a truly correct sesame paste can be made only by stirring the glop clockwise, many of the chapters play as comedy.
Though Liu insists the film is carefully scripted, the relentlessly close, absolutely still camera catches the family in what feel like documentary-style moments of self-revelation. Chapters that end in abrupt flares of minor violence are as frequent as punch lines. We learn that much of the stress is economic: the family is getting poorer—they used to have a car and a larger apartment—and now there seem to be a monthly struggle to meet the rent. The film’s central crisis, a moral as well as a financial one, is precipitated by the act of printing those “sale” signs. Customers, the father complains, demand discounts, but for him discounting his goods is akin to denigrating the value of his labour and skill. It’s a question of dignity, his definition of his worth as a person. Liu characteristically converts her father’s unbearable sense of humiliation into a moment of humour when he apologizes to the long-expired cow whose skin he’s working with for failing to do justice to said cow’s sacrifice.
The father emerges as something of a tragic figure by the final chapters: a generous sensibility ground down by a society that no longer has space for his art. Liu Jiayin’s accomplishment here is to give the viewers a feeling that they are discovering a new way of looking, coming into being right before their eyes. Her film’s gaze shows us what we couldn’t see otherwise: people rich with potential who can’t grow, precisely because the spaces that they inhabit are too small for them. Oxhide sections and distorts the outsized figure of the father, recapturing him in claustrophobic framings that can’t contain the grandeur of his wounded dignity. At the same time, it gently mocks the figure of the daughter, who seems to submit to such a limited space and refuses to grow.
Liu’s restrictive apparatus is paradoxically liberating. We feel these characters vibrating outside of the frame: their existence—and Liu has surely made a film communicating an existential urgency—is made palpable by our experience of seeing them partial, and inferring the rest. The film not only affirms its characters’ vitality, it also calls an activated, participatory viewer into being by exercising our creativity as well. O ne of the last lines the father has—“I have a lot of things waiting to be fulfilled”—is followed by his plaintive calling out, in the dark, to his wife and daughter, who don’t answer. But the palpable vitality with which the film imbues its family assures us that they are anything but defeated. With films as confidently and stunningly radical as Oxhide, Chinese cinema’s future looks no less bright.
Livingston, Jennie
PARIS
Metro Pulse (Adrienne Martini) review
Jennie Livingston's Paris
Is Burning (1991, R) was the documentary that broke the closed circle
of the New York City drag circuit and brought all of its color and drama (if
you'll pardon the expression) out of the closet. Paris focuses on the
transvestite balls, their many permutations and participants, and Livingston
captures some pretty raw moments before her subjects slip back behind their
beautiful facades. She won the Sundance Award for Best Documentary and had the
dubious distinction of having Madonna rip off all of the drag contestants'
vogue moves.
Paris is Burning Fernando F. Croce from Slant magazine
In Jeannie Livingston's celebrated snapshot of
the late-'80s New York drag-ball scene, such terms as "beauty" and
"reality" become loose mercury, blurred like the identities of the
black and Hispanic gay men hitting the drag houses every night. The documentary,
a hit back when distributor Miramax had some kind of edge, is right away
upfront about the racial, social, and sexual politics of tucking in cocks and
putting on dresses—"You're black, you're male, and you're gay," one
queen says early on, recounting the three-strikes-you're-out fringe status
pressed on him since birth. The world of flaming, cross-dressing theatre, then,
can stand for an enclosed universe not just of communal acceptance, but also of
mockery of the gender-rigidity of "normal" society (Schoolgirl, Butch
Queen, and Town and Country are a few of the categories in a beauty-pageant
burlesque). Where, however, does parody end and yearning begin? To white,
middle-aged queen Dorian Corey, the film's weary drag-historian, looking like a
less manic Divine while daintily putting on makeup, the events' obsession with
"realness" (that is, with convincingly "passing" as
straight men or actual women, instead of gay men) basically amounts to
strutting back into the closet. Yet, to Pepper LaBeija or Angie Xtravaganza,
the performativity inherent in drag-balls works as pipeline from inner psyche
out into the world, transformative rather than delusional. The beauty of Paris
Is Burning is the way Livingston's nonjudgmental camera is able to
accommodate both views, among others, while depicting a familial world apart
from White America, with its own sets of rules, rituals, even idioms—notably
voguing, the art of pantomime dissing, taken by Willi Ninja into the mainstream
via Madonna. (On another level, the creative energy of the balls is explicitly
evoked as an alternative to street violence, with the face-offs between queens
often acquiring the intensity of gang duels.) Seemingly amorphous, the film is
actually structured as a series of contrasts between dreams and reality, pretending
and being, the hopeful youth of Venus Xtravaganza lying on a mattress and the
disillusioned middle-age of Corey in front of a pitiless mirror. The quota,
with the sudden deaths of various participants, leaves a sad aftertaste, though
even while leaving the dry final word to Corey,
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
"Paris Is Burning," Jennie Livingston's brilliantly entertaining documentary look into the New York subculture of drag queens and transsexuals, is a rapturous, desperate ode to self-invention. Its protagonists are society's fringe-dwellers; mostly poor and gay and disenfranchised, they live their lives in search of some thread of glamour, dreaming of wealth and stardom -- hoping and plotting for the moment of their transformation.
The universe that Livingston shows us here is a completely formed world unto itself, with its own rigid hierarchy, its own language, its own strict rules of decorum. Yet it exists as a kind of freaky, sometimes dark parallel planet to the so-called "normal" world. "Realness" is their primary criterion for greatness; it means they can "pass," they can walk the streets looking so much like the real thing that they can almost become their dream.
In the tight little cosmos of "Paris Is Burning," the look is everything. It is a society constructed entirely out of fantasies, more specifically show biz fantasies drawn from the movies, television and the pages of fashion magazines. Its center is "The Ball," a regularly held event -- part competition, part performance, part ritual -- during which members of the various "houses," or clubs, vie for trophies in their particular specialties.
It's at these balls that the "girls" get to walk the runway (usually in Harlem in some ramshackle Elks Club hall) and strut their funkiest stuff. But even though the balls are flaming, outrageous extravaganzas, there's an element of dead seriousness to them. As one participant explains, each of the houses is like a street gang, and the balls are their gang wars. The balls are where reputations are made, where "Legends" are born. To be a Legend is to be at the top of the queen food chain; it's around Legends that the houses grow up, makeshift families named after the Legend with all the members of the house taking the Legend's name as their own last name.
Livingston introduces us to several of the Legends, and though each has her own style, they all carry themselves with the imperiousness of crowned heads. Some, like Pepper Labeija, seem to be living out an outlandish parody of a star's life. If they're nobodies, they're the last ones to know it. Some of the younger performers have serious dreams of making it in the big time. And some, like Willi Ninja, who took his talent for "voguing" into the mainstream, have bona fide careers. Mostly, though, these upcoming Legends indulge themselves in pipe dreams. Sitting in a squalid apartment, one performer points at the pictures of the fashion models taped to the wall and dreams out loud about one day working with them, being like them, a beautiful model living a beautiful life.
The movie is a mixture of hilarious high spirits and pathos. It shows us the release the balls provide as all the participants get a chance to camp it up, throw off their inhibitions and live out their fantasies. There is a genuine sense of community here, a sense of belonging and family for those who have never belonged, or whose real families have tossed them aside. But there is also sadness in their determination to transform themselves, to be someone else, and beneath that the unspoken reality that at least in the eyes of the audience, outside their fantasy province, they are nowhere close to their star models. Listening to them talk, you feel the heartbreaking gap between their dreams and their ability to realize them.
One longtime pro, Dorian Corey, is a female impersonator from the old school, and she allows herself very few illusions. Putting on her makeup in front of her dressing-room mirror, she is the movie's cynical historian and voice of common sense. Most of these kids, she says, wouldn't know a real ball if it "knocked them in the head." She thinks that much of the glamour has gone out of the balls these days; she's nostalgic for the days before the kids wanted to look like stars on TV. When she was coming up, everyone wanted to look like Marlene Dietrich; now nobody even knows who Marlene Dietrich is.
Listening to Dorian, you hear a voice like that of a veteran hoofer, lamenting the good old days before the demise of vaudeville. Through her eyes you can see how her world has changed, how what was once a legitimate, though low, rung of show business has become something else. This new world, Livingston has discovered, has less to do with show business and more to do with dreaming and belonging. For the people in "Paris Is Burning," dreaming is a refuge, their true home. Livingston's movie is a map of their private geography, a moving topography of dreams.
Truth or Dare and Paris Is Burning Truth or “Realness,” by Jack Walters from Jump Cut, July 1992
Movieline Magazine dvd review F.X. Feeney
PopcornQ review Michael Lumpkin
CHUD.com (Ian Arbuckle) dvd review
The Onion A.V. Club dvd review Noel Murray
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman
Time Out London (Ben Walters) review
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Washington Post (Joe Brown) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [4/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Llobet Gracia, Lorenzo
VIDA EN SOMBRAS (Life in Shadows)
Spain (90 mi) 1948
User reviews from imdb Author: David Carbajales
(carbajander@hotmail.com) from Gijón, Asturies, Spain
This is the one and only movie directed by the catalonian Lorenzo Llobet Gracia. The plot is about the absolutely demential story of Carlos, a fervent cinema lover whose mind is seriously affected by a complex of guilt: while he is out filming the street riots during the 18 th of July (the beginnig of the Spanish Civil War) his wife is killed by the republicans (that means the comunists). The remorse only goes away when some years later Carlos watch "Rebecca" by Alfred Hitchcock, and becoming a new regenerated man, he decides to become a cinema director.
User reviews from imdb Author: rcolomam from United
Kingdom
This is one of the most astonishing films ever made. It has some scenes that it should be in the history of cinema. Like the filming by Fernando Fernan Gomez of the militias using a big roll of paper to win a positions. Or the begging of the film based on real events. The birth of the director inside the carp where the first cinematographer was showing "the train arriving to the station". Being shoot in really simple way it's amazing the proper use of the audiovisual language. The late Guillermo Cabrera Infante showed this film in a Canadian film festival in Spanish without subtitles when the projection finish the audience didn't move and they ask for seen the film again. The effect of this film in the audience is unbelievable. None a single person that has seen this rare Spanish movie could forget it. Except the main actor Fernando Fernan Gomez who never remember work on it.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Born in a fairground tent during a screening of films by the Lumière brothers, Carlos spends his childhood watching Chaplin, falls in love with his bride-to-be during Thalberg's Romeo and Juliet, abandons his job as critic and documentary-maker when she's killed while he's out filming political riots, and finally finds his faith again after seeing Hitchcock's Rebecca. This semi-autobiographical film, produced on a small budget as part of Spain's 'amateur cinema' movement (yet looking totally professional in execution), deals with a man whose entire life is shaped by and dedicated to the movies... for better and for worse. As it examines the twisted relationship between life and art, it includes enough references to movies to make the likes of Godard, Wenders and De Palma seem relatively uninterested in the history of their chosen medium. But this is no clever academic work: in evoking its hero's obsession for both film and his wife, it predates (appropriately) the Hitchcock of, say, Vertigo, and achieves its emotional power through a fine performance from Fernán Gómez, later to become one of Spain's most impressive actors.
Lloyd, Phyllida
THE IRON LADY C 74
Great Britain (105 mi) 2011 ‘Scope Official site
First we have a biopic on FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, J. EDGAR (2011), that suffers from selective amnesia, now followed closely on its heels comes a biopic on Britain’s first female Prime Minister (1979 – 1990), Margaret Thatcher, who herself is suffering from dementia throughout most of the film. Both are iconic figures of the political right and both are despised by their opposition who they attacked ruthlessly during their autocratic rule. Starring Meryl Streep and a good deal of make up allowing her to play Thatcher in her waning years as well as in her prime, it is a showy performance intended to shine the spotlight on Streep as a female King Lear figure, where the light is less flattering when shone upon Ms. Thatcher, who like Ronald Reagan in America, rode a populist trend towards nationalism, reaffirming people’s belief in being British, while refusing to negotiate or compromise with antagonistic opposing views, calling it a moral choice, such as trade unions (resulting in rampant unemployment) or the IRA (resulting in a flat out war with Northern Ireland, with Thatcher allowing the imprisoned Irish hunger strikers to die senseless deaths rather than be considered political prisoners), where perhaps the finest moment in the entire film shows Reagan and Thatcher dancing to the music of the Sex Pistols (like Nero as Rome burns) as the streets are bloody with endless demonstrations. Like Thatcher, Reagan suffered a similar fate with Alzheimers, where both went gently into the good night. Thatcher seemed to have sacrificed everything in her rise to power, as her family life was all but destroyed in the process, finding herself alone in her twilight years flooded by memories and hallucinations swirling around her, often indistinguishable from reality, where she is constantly visited by the ghost of her deceased husband played by Jim Broadbent.
While it adds a certain theatrical heft for Streep, too many scenes of Thatcher as a doddering old woman ruin the film, as they distract from what makes Thatcher unique in history, a woman breaking into an all-boys political network, which is nothing less than fascinating. Irrespective of her political views, that’s an outstanding achievement of historical precedent and it’s easily the most exciting part of the film. The bombastic music by Thomas Newman adds to a series of riveting moments when she stands up to the men in Parliament who attempt to heap scorn and ridicule upon her and brilliantly argues the Conservative side’s point of view, becoming the best spokesperson for her party because she passionately defends her positions. The problem with the film is in the screenplay, which would probably work best accentuating the performance of the actress in a theater, who may hold the audience spellbound, but on film it spends too little time during the period when Thatcher was actually making history, brushing over those moments all too quickly with broad strokes, barely cracking the surface in terms of adding any psychological dimension. Instead the movie recounts a few pertinent moments, offers a few self-righteous and indignant Thatcher speeches, shows a rumble on the streets happening outside as the population explodes against her austere business measures that put so many out of jobs and subsequently lose their homes. It is a period where the rich get richer, while the poor suffer terribly. Thatcher and the Conservatives have little sympathy for the poor, claiming each individual needs to climb out of poverty on their own without clinging to government for a handout, sounding more like class contempt than statesmanship.
The British theater director Phyllida Lloyd is known for her work in opera, also the feelgood Streep musical MOMMA MIA! (2008), but makes exquisite use of a Maria Callas aria “Casta Diva (Chaste Goddess)” from Bellini’s Norma Casta Diva -- Maria Callas (Best) - YouTube, which is closer to the film version (5:44), or seen here in a live performance in Paris, 1958, also adding the follow up aria “Ah! bello a me ritorna (Beloved Return Unto Me): Casta Diva (Maria Callas) - YouTube (9:25), shown during Thatcher’s dramatic, rose draped, exit from power, accentuating the precise moment when her reign is over. Interestingly, during her elderly years, she’s more fascinated with Yul Brynner singing showtunes from The King and I, where she can recite how many performances played in New York and London. One nice touch Lloyd brings to the screen is her initial obsession with feet, much like Bresson, where all are wearing men’s shoes except one pair of feet, which is a beautifully cinematic expression of making her entrance into the exclusive, all-male fraternity of British Parliament, where the “male members only” private chambers is a spacious, immaculately designed library and bar, while a glimpse into the “women members only” chambers is a chair and an ironing board set in the tiny quarters resembling a closet. Compared to the era when Thatcher was remarkably making history, included among peers of international leaders where it was the Russians who coined the phrase “The Iron Lady,” the retreat to watching her feebly sitting at home in a darkened room watching home movies seems anticlimactic. Too much time is spent watching her babbling to ghosts or fuss about what to wear, which diminishes her stature and makes her feel downright ordinary, missing an opportunity to become intimately familiar with what drove a woman of such unique stature. Unfortunately, the film pales in comparison to the excellent, behind-the-scenes portrait of THE QUEEN (2006), which shows a woman struggling with her own place in history.
ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]
Between Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar Hoover biopic and director Phyllida Lloyd's Margaret Thatcher life story, it may be that there's a concerted effort to lionize two of the political Right's most reprehensible examples of absolute power corrupting absolutely. On closer inspection however, each film unmasks the latent hypocrisies of their subjects. Both films feature iconic performances from enormously talented actors giving their all to embody tragically flawed characters. Meryl Streep makes somewhat bigger splash, perhaps because that Margaret Thatcher was a higher-profile public figure. Her every gesture and facial expression comes across with an astounding degree of authenticity.
Suspended within its retired subject's senile backward-looking vantage point—sheconstantly sees hallucinations of her deceased husband—"The Iron Lady" quietly equates Margaret Thatcher's distorted mental state with that of Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's disease. The film gives a powerful sense of how despised Thatcher was by ordinary British citizens and by the IRA ,who repeatedly attempted to assassinate her. The film's emphasis on Thatcher's heavy-handed military response in the Falkland Islands rightly paints her as a desperate warmonger. One concludes that Margaret Thatcher was at best a penny-wise-and-pound foolish leader guilty of class treason; she was the daughter to a family of grocers. At worst, Thatcher set the stage for current global economic collapse with a cunning stupidity that defies logic and reason. Not even Meryl Streep is capable of making Margaret Thatcher a likeable human being. While "The Iron Lady" doesn't give the ex-prime minister anywhere the historical justice of Elvis Costello's contemptuous ode "Tramp the Dirt Down," it goes a long way toward establishing a verdict. History will not be kind to Margaret Thatcher.
Not even Meryl Streep is capable of making Margaret Thatcher a likeable human being. While "The Iron Lady" doesn't give Britain’s former Prime Minister anywhere the historical justice of Elvis Costello's contemptuous ode "Tramp the Dirt Down," it does remind us of one of the primary contributors to the world's economic crisis.
History will not be kind to Margaret Thatcher.
Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]
The wonder and terror of Meryl Streep's performance in The Iron Lady is her formidable ability to nail the disheartening talents of not just Margaret Thatcher, but so many conservative politicians like her, who have a tremendous knack for changing minds and beckoning cheers while underlining their own rigid ignorance. As riveting to watch as ever, Streep is scarily convincing, just as Thatcher was, when offering growling, idealistic justifications for aggressive, divisive actions, like continuing to slash public spending and sending troops to die in the Falklands War on the apparent basis of bitter principle (her proud utterance of "I want [the Falklands] back" is followed by the revelation that it was Thatcher who arrogantly reduced the Islands' naval defenses in the first place). In private meetings with concerned top advisors, who corner her to address such things as the devastating recession and unemployment rate that would stain her 11-year stint as Great Britain's prime minister, Streep's Thatcher still impresses while adamantly blocking out any voice but her own, giving a simple phrase of "right prevailing over wrong" a ring of gross narrow-mindedness, and redirecting attention to petty, irrelevant points. (Her assurance that her finger's on the pulse of society and commerce? She knows how much butter costs.)
The Iron Lady is a fair and fascinating portrait, depicting Thatcher as determined rock star and out-of-touch monster in just about equal measure. Less flattering declarations are offered alongside undeniably virtuous ones, like a show-stopping monologue in a doctor's office, where an elderly, dementia-battling Thatcher schools her physician on the excess of emotion in modern government, and Streep, positively nailing you to your seat, gives her own brand of authoritative evidence that in no way is this woman without quality of character. The film essentially kicks off in full Oscar-campaign mode, with roaring applause accompanying the logos for the scads of production companies that teamed with Harvey Weinstein, and Streep first appearing in baity old-age makeup. Not to be outdone by rival Michelle Williams, who captures three shades of Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, the Oscar queen clinches her own actorly trifecta, playing Thatcher as an aged and reminiscent homebody, an emerging and ambitious political player, and a malleable top-spot candidate who must trade her hats and Julia Child-like vocal crests for the stern persona that would become her trademark (the transformation, which boasts the fun of watching Streep get into character, is cut from the same find-your-voice cloth as The King's Speech). As a performance vehicle, The Iron Lady is unmissable, with Streep delivering multiple scenes of fierce, brilliantly overacted mimicry capable of reducing the whole theater to a wowed hush.
As a piece of filmmaking, though, it's a kitschy bag of biopic tricks, with oodles of exposition unfurled in every diegetic way imaginable. The present-day flashback device is accompanied by Thatcher's hallucinatory interactions with her late husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent); ghostly visions of her children running around the home to which her assistants strive to confine her; screenings of home movies whose presence serves gaps that didn't even need filling; and visits from Thatcher's daughter, Carol (Tyrannosaur's marvelously gifted Olivia Colman, who continues to summon crushing tears without a hint of effort). Showing only spurts of improvement over her unholy debut, Mamma Mia!, British director Phyllida Lloyd steers Shame co-screenwriter Abi Morgan's script like a chronic hoarder cum tenderfoot feminist, adding newsreel footage and radio broadcasts to the pile while visualizing Thatcher's penetration of the man's world of Parliament with a mess of archaic, overly sarcastic shots ("Men Only" signs, a pair of heels amid countless wingtips, the perpetually blue-clad Thatcher shuffled through the crowd like a Smurf among ants). Handed the worst of the movie's theme-spewing is 23-year-old Alexandra Roach, whose campaign-slogan dialogue as young Thatcher is just about as hokey as a postwar, ABBA-esque montage that sees Streep dance with bad lookalikes of Ronald Reagan and Nelson Mandela—the point at which you might say The Iron Lady jumps the shark.
Surely no one expected this movie to be masterful, as Streep has
made it rather clear that she's not much interested in working with filmmakers
whose talents might outshine her own. Thus, to employ two words that seem to
have habitually introduced Thatcher's philosophies, one must look past
Lloyd's piecemeal technique and Morgan's explanatory shortcomings to appreciate
the material, digging instead into the implied motivations of the subject. The
Iron Lady presents Thatcher's humble upbringing as the daughter of a
conservative, politically active grocer as the source of both noble pride and
damaging obtuseness, with her father (Iain Glen) instilling a dogged work
ethic, but also a survival-of-the-fittest insensitivity toward socioeconomic
inequality (in the film's most heated scene, which forecasts Thatcher's
political downfall, the PM is possessed by her father's because-I-said-so
worldview, scrambling to pick up the pieces of a crumbling rant about basically
hating her poor detractors). Political films have a way of always finding
relevance, and surely the folks behind this one knew they were sitting on
something with recessionary gravity. But given the recent uprisings that may
just as well have been pulled from this movie's mob footage, The Iron Lady
is surprisingly inflammatory, amplifying concerns that the power elite believe
the world is balanced simply because they know the price of butter.
The Iron Lady – review Philip French from The Observer, January 7, 2012
In his mid-19th-century poem "A Psalm of Life", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote: "Lives of great men all remind us/ We can make our lives sublime/ And departing leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time." This was the kind of thinking that underlay the inspirational movies produced by Warner Brothers in the 1930s for which Variety coined the term "biopic" – films about medical pioneers, democratic revolutionaries and other movers and shakers who changed the world, invariably men (MGM's Madame Curie was a rare exception).
But suddenly, in 1941, Orson Welles entered the scene with Citizen Kane, a picture that fractured chronological narrative and constantly changed points of view while presenting a lightly fictionalised, highly critical life of the press tycoon William Randolph Hearst. The biopic was never the same again, and even in commonplace films about pop stars it became necessary to expose flaws and epiphanic Rosebud moments. In The Iron Lady, the director Phyllida Lloyd and the screenwriter Abi Morgan submit Margaret Thatcher to the Citizen Kane treatment, though the approach now seems as conventional as the Warner Brothers straitjacket.
Citizen Kane purported to be about the recently deceased Charles Foster Kane, though this did not prevent the very-much-alive Hearst and his powerful friends from taking against the film and seeking, with a certain temporary success, to suppress it. Welles included scenes of a demented, senile Kane, alone and lamenting his lost power in his remote castle of Xanadu, but he also showed his hero through the eyes of a variety of people, some hostile, some openly admiring.
In The Iron Lady the central figure is no fiction. She's the most famous, most controversial living Englishwoman, a reclusive widow now known to be in poor health and not entirely in command of her mental faculties, but who still hovers over all our lives. Virtually everything and everybody in the movie is shown through her distorted vision as her faulty memory calls up her past during a period of 24 hours or so in the past couple of years (it's not clear precisely which year).
We first see her in a small, cluttered convenience store, an image of a decaying Britain. Frail and doddering, she's given her carers the slip and nipped down the street to buy a carton of milk for her husband, Denis (a somewhat misdirected Jim Broadbent). Though some eight years dead, he's haunting her day and night. The purchase of milk (which she notes as overpriced) will remind most older viewers of her cancelling school milk when secretary of state for education in Edward Heath's cabinet in the early 1970s. Thus from the opening moment the movie slyly throws little darts at what emerges generally as an admiring portrait.
The octogenarian Thatcher is being visited by her daughter, Carol (Olivia Colman), a brisk, lisping, confident presence, both loving and somewhat resentful. She's come to help her dispose of Denis's clothes which have been cluttering Margaret's central London home. The first flashbacks (triggered by the Freudian slip of signing her memoirs "Margaret Roberts") deal with her teenage life in Grantham, daughter of the thrifty, self-sufficient grocer alderman Roberts. The second set (touched off by confusing a present-day dinner party with a 1950 meeting with the patronising, upper-crust Conservative constituency committee in Dartford) concern her entry into politics and meeting the successful businessman Denis Thatcher, who was to offer her security, enabling her to switch from scientific research to the law and eventually fathering her twins. In these early scenes Thatcher is played convincingly by Alexandra Roach as a gauche, aggressive, lower-middle-class provincial girl. Here we encounter the two key figures in her life: the influential father and the supportive husband. "I've always preferred the company of men," she says (women friends are notably absent), but these are the only two she doesn't dominate.
Then there's a sudden switch in the 1970s when the two parts of Meryl Streep's altogether remarkable impersonation come together – Thatcher in pathetically touching old age and Thatcher in her political prime as party leader and world stateswoman. It's at this point that the best sequences occur when her admirer, the Tory MP Airey Neave (Nicholas Farrell), and her svengali, the TV guru Gordon Reece (Roger Allam), take her in hand.They give her a makeover in The King's Speech manner, creating the Iron Lady who over the next 15 years will dominate Britain in a familiar divisive way. Eventually, the film-makers suggest, Thatcher's increasing isolation, brought about by her rigidity, singlemindedness, inability to accept advice and contempt for most of her colleagues, brings about a form of madness that foreshadows the Lear-like dementia ("I will not go mad") that infects her dotage.
Subsequently the script packs too much in, briefly touching every possible base from Brixton and Brighton to Goose Green and the miners' strike. Nothing is examined or analysed, little is illuminated in any revealing way, and because everything is seen from her distorted perspective there is no countervailing moral, political, historical force or argument. But what we do have is a study of the process of ageing, fading powers, doubt, disappointment and loss that will come to most of us if we stay the course, and a stunning performance from Meryl Streep to set alongside her Isak Dinesen and Julia Child. Breathtaking in its detail and nuance, its subtle gestures and inflections, this multifaceted jewel of a portrait is altogether grander than the commonplace setting of the film.
Sight & Sound [Philip Kemp] February 2012
World Socialist Web Site [Chris Marsden]
Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]
I Don't Know How She Did It: Thatcher as Victim in ... - Village Voice Karina Longworth
The L Magazine [Benjamin Sutton & Henry Stewart]
The DNA of a generation | Prospect Magazine John Campbell, December 14, 2011
An Iron Lady ’s Vindication Pt. 1, Conrad Black from The National Post, January 7, 2012
No,
Prime Minister: Pop culture could be ferocious in opposing Margaret Thatcher
and her legacy Pt. 2, Jamie Portman from The
National Post, January 9, 2012
Inventing
Margaret Thatcher Pt. 3, John
O’Sullivan from The National Post, January 10, 2012
She let the outsiders in Pt. 4, David Frum from The National Post, January 10, 2012
Thatcher’s
fearlessness made her an iconic figure both loved and loathed The
National Post, January 3, 2012, also including: Exclusive Photo Gallery: The Iron Lady
Review:
Meryl Streep steamrolls and shines in The Iron Lady Katherine Monk from The National Post, January 12, 2012
Power
Dressing: The Iron Lady and the style of Margaret Thatcher Nathalie Atkinson from The National Post, January 12, 2012
Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady - Entertainment - Time Magazine Richard Corliss
The Iron Lady: Meryl Streep is a convincing ... - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens
The Iron Lady | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
THE IRON LADY - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
The Iron Lady (2011) - Filmcritic.com Movie Review Bill Gibron
the m0vie blog [Darren Mooney]
Review: 'The Iron Lady' Is A Shabby & Tin-Eared Standard-Issue ... Kevin Jagernauth from the indieWIRE Playlist
Sound On Sight Robert Simpson
Paste Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]
Little White Lies Magazine [Kevin Maher]
The Iron Lady : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jason Bailey
A Separation | War Horse | Iron Lady | A ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
www.screenspotlight.com [Jonathan Jacobs] doing an excellent job explaining his view on conservatism
Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]
The Iron Lady | Review | Screen - Screen International Mark Adams
Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
The Iron Lady Review | Backwards and In High Heels - Pajiba Brian Prisco
The Iron Lady — Inside Movies Since 1920 - BOXOFFICE Magazine Kate Erbland
Lamar's Movie Palace [Lamar Kukuk]
FILM REVIEW: The Iron Lady - Things That Go Pop! - CBC.ca Eli Glasner
"The Iron Lady" — From grocer's daughter to Prime ... - AfterEllen.com Dara Nai
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]
LondonFilmFanatiq.com [Jeff Galasso]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Political Film Review Michael Haas
Front Row Films Philip Raby
The Iron Lady : The New Yorker David Denby (capsule review), longer review for subscribers only seen here: Battle Stations
The Iron Lady - Film School Rejects Rob Hunter
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Screenjabber.com [Doug Cooper]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Iron Lady Movie Review (2011) review by Eye for Film Amber Wilkinson
Film Review Online [James Dawson}
FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [Kathryn Schroeder]
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
Unsung Films [Eleni Antonaropoulou]
Shalit's 'Stache [Matthew Schuchman]
Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]
The Iron Lady / Film Review / Matt's Movie Reviews Matt Pejkovic
The Ms-fits Nick James reviews the Best Actress race from Sight and Sound, November 28, 2011
Streep was 'amazed' by Thatcher John Hiscock interviews actress Meryl Streep from The Daily Telegraph, December 8, 2011
Meryl Streep: Thatcher would be appalled by 'hijacking of conservatism' Rebecca Keegan interviews actress Meryl Streep from The LA Times, December 21, 2011
Streep Dons Thatcher's Armor - New York Times Charles McGrath interviews actress Meryl Streep from The New York Times, December 23, 2011
Phyllida Lloyd: how to humanise Margaret Thatcher Kira Cochrane interview with the director from The Guardian, January 5, 2012
Streep senses something Shakespearian in the rise and fall of the Iron Lady Jamie Portman interviews actress Meryl Streep from The National Post, January 7, 2012
‘I think family was everything to her’: The Iron Lady director considers the private Margaret Thatcher Jamie Portman interviews the director from The National Post, January 11, 2012
Entertainment Weekly [Lisa Schwarzbaum]
The Iron Lady: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
The Iron Lady Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Trevor Johnson
Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]
Thatcher role puts 'troublemaker from the valleys' on road to stardom Dalya Alberge from The Observer, November 5, 2011
Is The Iron Lady a whitewash? Liz Hoggard and Peter Lilley from The Observer, December 31, 2011
Tory feminists: the true blue sisterhood Gaby Hinsliff from The Observer, January 7, 2012
Breakfast to celebrate victory The Guardian, July 16, 1928
First Lady will put the Tories Right Ian Aitkin from The Guardian, February 12, 1975
Thatcher takes over No.10 David McKie from The Guardian, May 4, 1979
Thatcher's
politics Jeanette Winterson from The Guardian, May 28, 2001
Tories ban sexist queries Nicholas Watt from The Guardian, January 23, 2003
How
Thatcher took politics by storm (but very nearly quit before she got there) David Hencke from The Guardian, November 14, 2003
A
belief born out of her father's sermons
David Hencke from The Guardian,
November 14, 2003
The
accidental feminist Zoe Williams
from The Guardian, October 20, 2004
Wake
up. Feminism is more than just capitalism with tits Zoe Williams from The Guardian, July 3, 2007
In
this age of the political 'man-beast', what has become of our dreams of more
women in power? Catherine Bennett
from The Guardian, December 5, 2007
Off-message
voters elect Thatcher top Tory
Martin Ketle from The Guardian,
September 29, 2008
Who is the Conservatives' greatest hero? Allegra Stratton from The Guardian, September 29, 2008, also seen here: Maggie is the Tories' greatest hero
Margaret
Thatcher tops list of most influential women Haroon Siddique from The
Guardian, October 31, 2010
Meryl
Streep's Margaret Thatcher revealed in first still from The Iron Lady Catherine Shoard from The
Guardian, February 8, 2011
Stuart
Jefferies: what's not to like?
Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian, February 8, 2011
How
will Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher compare to past portrayals of the Iron
Lady? Ben Walters from The
Guardian, February 10, 2011
Shooting
the Iron Lady Ben Walters from The
Guardian, February 10, 2011
Meryl
Streep's Margaret Thatcher reveals a modern icon Alison Jackson from The Guardian, February 11, 2011
They're
angry and unafraid – and terrify middle England Nina Power from The Guardian, March 7, 2011
Does
Meryl Streep shine as the Iron Lady? Michael White from The
Guardian, July 7, 2011
The Iron Lady poster: weirder than Westminster? Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, September 23, 2011
The
Iron Lady: first screening Xan
Brooks from The Guardian, November
14, 2011
Meryl
Streep's Iron Lady dismantled by Norman Tebbit Ben Child from
The Guardian, November 16, 2011
Where
was the mention of Margaret Thatcher's victims? Suzanne Moore from The Guardian, November 16, 2011
Will
The Iron Lady make women want to dress like Margaret Thatcher? Hadley Freeman from The
Guardian, November 20, 2011
Thatcher biographer says The Iron Lady is inaccurate Ben Child from The Guardian, December 16, 2011
The
Iron Lady returns to Commons – in possible debate over film's 'good taste' Ben Child from The Guardian, December 19, 2011
The
Iron Lady was more than just a fabulous blowdry Alex von Tunzelman from The Guardian, December 29, 2011
The
Iron Lady is a strange tribute to Margaret Thatcher Michael White from The Guardian, January 3, 2012
A Thatcher state funeral would be bound to lead to protests Seumas Milne from The Guardian, January 4, 2012
The Iron Lady – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw, January 5, 2012
Margaret Thatcher: a feminist icon? Jane Martinson blog offers the take of various women from The Guardian, January 5, 2012
The Iron Lady: how Britain changed under Margaret Thatcher Simon Rogers from The Guardian, January 6, 2012
What Borgen and The Iron Lady tell us about women in power Kira Cochrane from The Guardian, January 9, 2012
Streep: 'Thatcher was a feminist' Ben Child from The Guardian, February 15, 2012
Margaret Thatcher's life and times Slide show of pictures from The Daily Telegraph
People who have played Margaret Thatcher Martin Chilton from The Daily Telegraph, February 8, 2011
Streep is up to the Thatcher challenge Robbie Collin from The Daily Telegraph, November 14, 2011
The Iron Lady: review David Gritten from The Daily Telegraph, November 15, 2011
Norman Tebbit: 'This is not the Margaret Thatcher I knew' - Telegraph Norman Tebbitt from The Daily Telegraph, November 15, 2011
Meryl Streep attends premiere of The Iron Lady at the British Film Institute in London The Daily Telegraph, January 4, 2012
The Iron Lady, review Robbie Collin from The Daily Telegraph, January 5, 2012
David Cameron: The Iron Lady should have been delayed James Kirkup and Matthew Holehouse from The Daily Telegraph, January 6, 2012
The Iron Lady is entertaining, but roll on the documentary Alan Cochrane from The Daily Telegraph, January 6, 2012
The Iron Lady, Seven Magazine review Jenny McCartney from
The Daily Telegraph, January 8, 2012
How Maggie Thatcher was remade Patrick Sawyer from The Daily Telegraph, January 8, 2012
Maggie's magic came from her contempt for complacent men Boris Johnson from The Daily Telegraph, January 9, 2012
'The Iron Lady' shows us what we're missing Allison Pearson from The Daily Telegraph, January 11, 2012
The Iron Lady and Margaret Thatcher's dementia: Why this
despicable film makes voyeurs of us all Max Pemberton from The Daily Telegraph, January 14, 2012
The Iron Lady: Thatcher's men deliver verdict on film Roya Nikkhah from The Daily Telegraph, January 14, 2012
Montreal
Mirror [Matthew Hays]
Movie
review: Maggie Thatcher meets Meryl Streep in ‘The Iron Lady’ Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe
Cleaning 'Lady' - BostonHerald.com James Verniere
Review: The Iron Lady - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Critic Review for The Iron Lady on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday
The Iron Lady - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
'The Iron Lady' review: Streep great, script isn't Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle
Cannes 2011: Spirit of Margaret Thatcher (and Meryl Streep) hovers over festival Steven Zeitchick at Cannes from The LA Times, May 12, 2011
'Iron Lady': Meryl Streep's Thatcher biopic draws ire in Britain Rebecca Keegan from The LA Times, August 23, 2011
Meryl Streep walks in Margaret Thatcher's shoes Rebecca Keegan from The LA Times, December 25, 2011
Meryl Streep's next project: A national women's history museum Rebecca Keegan from The LA Times, December 28, 2011
Meryl Streep wins over critics as 'Iron Lady' Margaret Thatcher ... Oliver Gettell from The LA Times, December 30, 2011
'The Iron Lady': Movie review - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times, December 30, 2011
The Iron Lady - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times
The Iron Lady - Movies - New York Times A.O. Scott
Margaret Thatcher British Prime Minister’s Office official website
Lo Wei
FISTS OF FURY (Tang shan da xiong)
aka: The Big Boss
Hong Kong
(100 mi) 1971 ‘Scope co-director: Wu Jiaxiang
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Lee had been a child star in Hong Kong
movies of the 1950s; this crudely made but highly enjoyable revenge drama
marked his return to Hong Kong (after his failure to escape stereotyped
bit-parts in the US) and launched a worldwide fashion for 'kung fu' movies.
Cheng (Lee) arrives in Thailand to join relatives working in an ice-packing
plant. When he learns that the place is a front for heroin smuggling, he
reveals his martial prowess and takes on the villainous boss (Han Yingjie,
also the film's martial arts choreographer) in a frighteningly intense duel to
the death. The mix of authentic martial arts skills, cartoon-like violence,
righteous anger and filial piety (Cheng never forgets his promises to dear old
mum, back in Hong Kong) struck a chord with audiences everywhere in a way
rarely seen since the heyday of the James Dean cult, making Lee a global star
overnight.
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
In a crudely ingenious tease-opening, Bruce Lee finds a
brawl waiting as soon as he reaches town yet a promise of nonviolence makes him
pass on it. Until he at last snaps into action midway through, ass-kicking
duties fall to his cousin (James Tien), who works at an ice factory with the
rest of the family. Gelid blocks reveal bags of contraband, then body parts
from the workers who tried to intervene. The boss (Han Ying-Chieh) holds
martial-arts practices in his garden, he emerges from a bevy of masseuses to
show his henchmen how it’s done. (The dubbing has just the right deflating
hint: "Speed and keen senses. Nothing comes easy in life, my boy."
"Great. Hey dad, could you let me have 2,000 yen?") "Industrial
unrest" yields to brawls, Lee is made foreman to quell blue-collar turmoil;
the hero promises to uncover the truth about the disappearances, but finds
himself susceptible to booze and gals. Lo Wei keeps the action in medium-shot,
although the camera will become an opponent’s face receiving the hero’s flying
feet if the occasion calls for it, plus there’s the occasional ACME effect (one
villain is punched through a wall, leaving his arms-outstretched outline on
it). The Donen of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is the key stylistic
influence, Petri's The Working Class Goes to Heaven comes in for the
cogent Marxist joke, the prole’s ultimate nightmare of going into the boss’s
office and not coming out alive. With Maria Yi, Tony Liu, Li Kun, and Nora
Miao.
eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Slyder
After disappointing stints in the United States, mostly due
to racism even though he was born the United States, Bruce Lee, a native of
China born in San Francisco, went back to Hong Kong (where he had lived at an
early age until 18) to try and establish himself as a martial arts star. He
landed a contract with Golden Harvest studios, and Raymond Chow, the studio
head, would go on and produce his first film (he would eventually produce all
of Lee’s films) called The Big Boss. It was released in the US as Fists Of
Fury. The result was a commercial blockbuster in China that generated a buzz in
the US. Lee’s first film is really a stepping stone in his later films to come,
and despite the somewhat weak plot and wooden acting, the martial arts
sequences are first rate, and really makes this film worth a look.
The film is the story of Chen Chao-An (Lee), a Chinese city
boy that moves to Thailand with his cousins to work in an ice factory. He has
sworn to his uncle (Chia Ching Tu) not to get into any violent fights, a trace
that probably he has had a violent past in he city. During Chen’s first stint
at the factory, an accident occurs as one of the ice cubes falls and breaks.
Two of Chen’s cousins discover the bag amongst the ice shreds, and thanks to
it, later they would disappear. Another one of Chen’s cousins, Hsiu Chen (James
Tien), whose a dear friend of Chen, goes with another relative to the boss’s
house, but never returns. As the mysteries turn even more and more darker, Chen
must find out the reasons why his cousins have disappeared without the trace, a
mystery that the boss (Yin-Chieh Han) and his associates in the factory would
kill for.
The plot is basically formulaic; the film contains several plotholes that
hamper the film in many aspects, since the film tries a bit too much to hold
the weak storyline between good guys and bad guys. The storyline is weak since
the film makes the disappearance case look dumb. One would go to the Chinese
Consulate in Thailand and present a demand, but the film never does that so
that the actual plot doesn’t derail from where it’s originally intending to go.
Thanks to this, the suspense never really fills up well, and sometimes ends up
with a few groaners, especially in the very end.
Thanks to those flaws, the film gets hampered substantially but keeps itself
alive thanks to two factors, the cinematography and the martial arts sequences.
The cinematography of the film, which was shot on Thailand helps a lot and
gives the film credibility, in fact, it was one of the first films to be shot
on a real-life scenario and not a studio set, and some shots were breathtaking.
Lee’s trademark of a man stepping foot on a strange land was shot perfectly,
and gives the film a warm feeling, along with a few comedic antics. But the
movie’s true kicker is the martial arts scenes choreographed by Lee himself.
Though this is not the first time we see Lee in action (The Green Hornet was
the first), it certainly is the first of really riveting fight scenes that
would later on define the martial arts genre. Whereas in the Green Hornet,
Lee’s style wasn’t as well appreciated, here we see him in his full splendor.
The sequences are riveting all the way until the last punch; the fights in the
factory and the face off between Lee and The Boss (Han is a real-life martial
artist) are classics. What gives the last fight a big boost is the trademark of
all of Lee’s films, which is that he always liked to fight with real-life
martial artists. Thanks to this the fights are even more interesting to watch
and you feel the true awe of the fight seeing a master fighting another master.
That was fucking great.
The performances were all right. Lee’s acting is at times wooden but the fight
scenes really make up for it. The rest of the supporting cast is also up to the
standards. Lo Wei’s direction sometimes stiffs up at certain times, but manages
to keep the film under control despite his shaky script.
In the end, Fists of Fury is not one of Lee’s greatest, but
it damn sure is one of his most important, since we see here The Dragon finally
starting to establish his reign in the martial arts scene, a reign that may
have not lasted long, but that left a deep and profound impact in the movie
industry and in the martial arts genre. This film still remains a minor
classic, but Lee would outdo himself with his next film.
Kung Fu Cinema review [8/10] Mark Pollard
LoveHKFilm.com
(Calvin McMillin) review
DVD Outsider Slarek
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [3/5]
CultureCartel.com
(Travis Lowell) review [2.5/5]
VideoVista
review Jeff
Young
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Todd Doogan reviews Bruce Lee: The Master Collection
DVD Times Michael Sunda, Bruce Lee: The Ultimate Collection
DVD Clinic [Scott Weinberg] Bruce Lee:
The Ultimate Collection
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
FIST OF FURY (Jing wu men)
aka: Chinese Connection
Hong Kong (108 mi) 1972
One of the best of the Chinese chop
sock dramas. It has a basically serious story: the inmates of one kung-fu
school have poisoned the teacher of a rival school, and our devoted hero sets
out on a course of revenge. But a potential revenge tragedy turns into a film
of comic strip outrageousness as Bruce Lee
tries, but fails, to reconcile his natural thirst for revenge with his desire
to keep the name of his school clean. The result is a patently absurd and funny
movie, involving a series of spectacular fight routines, often filmed in slow
motion, which are highly acrobatic and exciting.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The death of legendary martial-artist Huo Yuanjia is still
shrouded in mystery, Lo Wei's film offers itself as a "popular
interpretation" keyed to nationalist pride and Bruce Lee at his fiercest.
The barely suppressed hysteria is unveiled in an extravagant précis: Lee as the
prodigal disciple comes back to the academy to find his master dead, the funeral
is held under forlorn stage snow and disrupted by the bereft hero, who hugs the
coffin, sobbing. Pneumonia is the official diagnosis, Lee smells foul play but
muzzles his rage in honor of the teacher's peaceful lessons. Such restraint
can't last long in Japanese-ruled Shanghai, however, and his proud fury finally
erupts against taunting plaques, a gag repeated twice -- Lee dismantles a sign
reading "Sick Man of Asia" and force-feeds it to the Bushido students
he's just quelled, then splinters a "No Dogs and Chinese Allowed"
sign in iconic slow-motion. The main conflict is between Chinese fists and
samurai swords, the villains are a Mifune stand-in with painted-on Snidely
Whiplash mustache (Riki Hashimoto) and a thick Russian warrior (Robert Baker)
"on holiday." The action sequences are appreciatively filmed with a
quick, alert eye (a melee early on has the hero grabbing two foes and spinning
the mannequins like a dervish, Lo cuts to a higher angle to catch the absurd
sight), and then there's Lee. One moment achingly tender with Nora Miao, the
next shattering the ankles of a horde of opponents with a pair of nunchaku, the
superstar is already poised as a mythical figure -- he picks up the rickshaw
containing a traitorous ferret (Wei Ping-Ao) and smashes it against a nearby
wall like Paul Bunyan, his doomed-rebel capper is freeze-framed right out of Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. With James Tien, Chen Fu Ching, Chin San, and
Han Ying-Chieh.
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
After generating a huge buzz with his major film debut
“Fists of Fury,” Bruce Lee wasted no time in following up his commercial
success, and he did it with style. Thanks to a tighter script, great acting,
and last but far from least, ass kicking fight scenes, the Chinese Connection
(original title: Fist Of Fury) stands out as one of Bruce Lee’s finest films to
date, and an undisputed martial arts classic. I was just blown away even more
with this film when I saw it; it’s really a riveting ride. Ok, Fists Of Fury
started the ball rolling, but it was this film that catapulted Lee into
superstardom.
Lee is superb as Chen Zhen, a former student that returns
to his once martial arts school in Shanghai in the 1930s, back then an
international compound for Japan, only to find out that his beloved teacher and
master Ho-Jun Chia has died under mysterious circumstances. Then in the
honorary services, a Japanese School committee shows up and blatantly
discriminates the Chinese challenging them to a fight and even gives them a
banner as a present that reads “Sick Asian People.” The rest of the school
members back down, but Chen doesn’t, and infuriated by the insult he secretly
takes the gift back to the Japanese school and beats the shit out of them. The
Japanese head Suzuki (Riki Hoshimoto) decides to sweep revenge and try to use
his power to pressure the school to turn over Chen if not, they’ll close the
school and arrest them instead. Chen goes into hiding as he investigates and tries
to find out who were the ones responsible for his master’s death.
The script, based on actual events, is tighter, and very well developed, and
hits on the touchy subject of racism. The film isn’t pro-Chinese or
anti-Japanese; it’s more of an outcry against the racism that at many times is
present in those countries (climaxing with Chen smashing a sign that read: No
dogs or Chinese allowed), and also reflects pretty much on Lee’s own
discrimination problems he had back in the States.
The martial arts sequences have never been more riveting and more powerful. Lee
uses the power of revenge with his kung fu skills, and the resulting
combination is deadly and all around brutal. Every kick and every punch is so
powerful that you can even feel the anger hit your nerves. It’s that powerful.
Lee also manages to put his acting skills to the test, and pulls it off with
style, coming up with interesting espionage tactics as showing himself like an
old newspaperman, or a geek telephone repairman. In theses cases, especially in
the last one, it kind of forces the issue, and the graveyard scene where Chen
is with his girlfriend Yuan (Nora Mia) borders on the childish. But other than
that, his vengeful performance is top notch. Again the cinematography is well
used, every fight scene is well coordinated, and the camera shots are perfect.
The rest of the cast was great, hell, what else is there to talk about? The
film is fucking great.
In the end, Lee’s second film shows even more improvement
over the first, and manages to pull out a genre-defining film. This film is a
martial arts classic, fucking hell, just go out and rent it.
Kung Fu Cinema review [10/10] Mark Pollard
LoveHKFilm.com
(Calvin McMillin) review
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]
DVD Talk
(John Wallis) dvd review [2/5]
VideoVista
review
Christopher Geary
And You Thought It Was Safe [David DeMoss]
Needcoffee.com - "Bruce Lee and the
Masters" DVD Review Doc Ezra
Love and Bullets
dvd review [Goodtimes Release]
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Todd Doogan reviews Bruce Lee: The Master Collection
DVD Clinic [Scott Weinberg] Bruce Lee:
The Ultimate Collection
The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review
DVDBeaver
dvd review
Henrik Sylow
Loach, Ken
Ken Loach Alan Morrison from BFI
"Loach's work is emotionally
direct and bitingly relevant"
The fact that this most British
of directors has brought an international dimension to his work in the last
decade isn't simply an indication that his impact and techniques haven't always
been best appreciated on home turf. It's proof that his humanitarian heart
transcends local definitions of politics - with a big or small 'p' - and
extends to people in every corner of the world.
Loach was born in Nuneaton on 17
June 1936. His first contact with drama came at Oxford University, where he
studied law after completing two years National Service in the Royal Air Force.
It was in 1963, however, that his learning experience began for real, when he
became a trainee director with the BBC. After a stint on TV police series Z
Cars, he directed the first of ten Wednesday Plays. Inspired by cinéma
verité, Loach took his cameras out of the studio and onto the streets. The
effect of his BBC work, both artistically and socially, was immense.
Poor Cow (1967) and Kes (1969) marked
Loach's first forays into the cinema. Since then, he has returned
intermittently to television - most notably with Days Of Hope
(1975) and Questions Of Leadership (1983) - although it is as a
feature film director that he is now best known internationally. Loach's work
is emotionally direct and bitingly relevant. His films acknowledge the social
and economic realities of the day, but his characters refuse to bow down even
when life throws its worst at them. Loach is always able to reveal the human
spirit that burns within them. This, not politics, is the true lifeblood that
runs through his work.
All-Movie Guide bio from Rebecca Flint Marx
Often labeled a "social realist" but averse to pigeonholing himself as such, Ken Loach is renowned for his reverent depictions of the politics of everyday life. Studiously avoiding Hollywood's siren call, the British director has etched out a reputation for himself in his native country, as one of the film industry's more respected and idealistic figures.
Born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, on June 17, 1936, Loach attended Oxford, where he planned on studying law. Instead, he gravitated toward acting with the university's Experimental Theatre Club and following a stint with the RAF, began his career acting in regional repertory theatre. Loach became a director for the BBC in 1961, where an alliance with producer Tony Garnett led to a series of docudramas. One of these, the 1965 Cathy Come Home, was a searing exposé of the problem of urban homelessness and the welfare state in Britain. One of the most controversial films ever produced by the BBC, it led directly to changes in the country's homeless laws.
Loach made his feature-length directorial debut in 1968 with Poor Cow. Featuring a very young Terence Stamp as a working-class thief who is thrown in jail, the film blended kitchen-sink realism with New Wave-like stylization, and in focusing on the hardships faced by the wife of the jailed man, provided a glimpse of things to come in the director's future work. His subsequent effort, Kes (1970), went on to be widely recognized as one of the best films ever to be made in Britain. The poignant story of a young boy whose alienation at school and troubles with his family are temporarily allayed when he finds and trains a young kestrel, Kes was a captivating, uncomprimising exercise in grim reality.
Unfortunately, following the success of Kes, Loach's career suffered a number of blows, mainly due to poor distribution of his films and the refusal to broadcast some of his TV work, most notoriously his documentaries covering a 1984 miners' strike. However, the 1990s brought with them a revival of Loach's career and he spent much of the decade turning out one critically acclaimed film after another. Hidden Agenda (1990), a political thriller set in Northern Ireland, was condemned by conservatives for its strongly leftist stance but won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was unique in being one of the few true examples of anti-Stalinist leftism to reach a mainstream audience. Riff Raff (1991) and Raining Stones (1993) were more humorous treatments of working-class politics and struggles, and both won a number of honors at Cannes.
Loach's next film, Ladybird Ladybird (1994), was one of his most acclaimed. The harrowing account of a single mother's struggles against the British social service system to get custody of her children, it featured both a brilliant turn by Crissy Rock in the role of the mother and an eloquent, devastating critique of the government's treatment of the poor. The film won a number of international honors, including top prizes at the Berlin Film Festival.
Land and Freedom (1995) and Carla's Song (1996) were two of Loach's more poorly received films, although both — the first an account of the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s and the second a love story set against the backdrop of the Nicaraguan Revolution — offered clear-eyed vibrancy and strong performances from their leads (Ian Hart and Robert Carlyle, respectively). A similarly strong lead performance was one of the selling points of Loach's next feature, My Name Is Joe (1998). As the film's title character, an unemployed, recovering alcoholic trying to make a living in one of Glasgow's worst neighborhoods, Peter Mullan won the Cannes Festival's Best Actor award. A romance between Mullan's Joe and a social worker (Louise Goodall), set against the turmoil of the neighborhood, the film was inspired by the first half of Carla's Song.
Loach, Ken Art and Culture
If Britain had a blacklist during
the Thatcher era, Ken Loach was on it. Pound the pavement though he might, he
couldn’t persuade anyone to fund his films. His made-for-TV documentaries met
with steep resistance -- in fact, his depiction of the 1984 coal miners’ strike
was banned outright. Why? Loach had a reputation for "social-conscience
realism" that made the "regime" pretty uncomfortable.
Loach, who often collaborated
with Tony Garnett, made a series of films in the ‘60s that spoke to the
real-life problems of Britain’s underclass. For example, his "Cathy Come
Home" galvanized support for new legislation on homelessness. When he
crossed over from documentary to drama, the same issues continued to occupy
him. His break-out fictional work is "Kes" (1969), a story of an
abused, working-class boy whose only ally is a wild bird that he gradually
tames. Some view it as the best-ever depiction of the social reality of
industrialized Northern England.
Then the drought struck -- in the
'70s and '80s, a denial of funding almost silenced Loach. Only through dogged
persistence did he manage to reemerge in the ‘90s with a series of new projects
that would match the quality of his earlier works. Could it be sweeter that his
1990 comeback (though the word seems trite in his case) won the Jury Prize at
Cannes? "Hidden Agenda" is a murder mystery set in Belfast: the dead
man’s girlfriend and a local detective uncover a conspiracy that underscores
Thatcher’s rise to power and its devastating effects on Northern Ireland.
In the spate of films that
followed in the ‘90s -- "Riff-Raff," "Raining Stones,"
"Ladybird Ladybird," "Land and Freedom," and "Carla’s
Song" -- Loach continued to hammer home his political message with
subjects ranging from Thatcher-era construction workers to the Spanish Civil
War. The high point of this outpouring is "My Name is Joe" (1998), a
painful love story between a recovering alcoholic and a health worker set in
the Glasgow slums. Its intensity can leave viewers breathless.
As Loach takes social realism
into the new millennium, it’s worth recalling that his documentary approach was
never without its detractors: he has sparked heated debate over the blurring of
fact and fiction that progressive realism sometimes entails. If Loach treats
real-life subjects, is he obliged to stick to the truth in every detail? On the
other hand, if film is an artistic medium, does an auteur have a right to
imaginative invention?
Loach’s method attempts to answer
these doubts. He shoots all his films in sequence, providing the cast with one
page of script a day so that their response is immediate and spontaneous.
Minimal use of music and employment of natural light give his scenes an artless
feel. Editing is also kept to a minimum. (Characters have been known to walk
through the woods for minutes on end.) The effect is so intimate that the
audience may feel as if it is crouched in a van watching the characters through
binoculars.
Mixing the roles of artist and
social critic, director with documenter, Loach is a master at locking disparate
elements into a coherent whole. Clearly he presents reality, but though his own
lens: "Of course, everybody is against unemployment, against poverty,
against brutality in relationships. The difficulty is to have some indication,
within the infrastructure of the film, about why that happens. Otherwise
anybody can claim the film as their own. And you can make any kind of political
theory." After 20 years of silence, Loach isn’t about to leave his work
open to just anybody’s interpretation.
BFI
Screenonline: Loach, Ken (1936-) Biography
Lez Cooke, Reference Guide
to British and Irish Film Directors
Ken Loach Profile Tony Pearson from Museum of Broadcast Communications
Ken Loach | British
director | Britannica.com
biography
TCMDB biography
Ken Loach -
Director - Films as Director:, Films for Television ... profile by
Julian Petley, updated by Rob Edelman, from Film
Reference
Ken Loach • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Mike Robins from Senses of Cinema, December 2, 2003
BFI
Screenonline: Ken Loach: The Controversies
Michael Brooke
Versus:
The Life and Films of Ken Loach - Espoo Ciné 93-min documentary film on the director
World Festival of Foreign Films: Ken Loach an overview of Loach films, including bio info
BFI | Sight & Sound | Top Ten Poll 2002 - How the directors and ... Ken Loach Top Ten
Contents BFI Gallery of Loach Film Images
Sixteen Films Loach’s production company
Ken Loach - Movies, Bio and Lists on
MUBI
Films of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett Richard Fudge from Jump Cut (1976)
Paper given on Ken Loach's film "Land and Freedom", KFLC, 1996 Ian Davies, Edgewood College, Madison
Locating Loach Within The History And Theory Of The Realist Text, by David Nicholls, 1999
village voice > film > Truth and Consequences by Jessica Winter Loach profile, July 30, 2002
Filmmakers on film: Ken Loach - Telegraph August 6, 2002
Kes • Senses of Cinema Mike Robins from Senses of Cinema, October 2003
Hidden Agenda • Senses of Cinema Bob Carroll, October 5, 2003
BFI | Sight & Sound |
In The Mood For Love James Mottram reviews Ae
Fond Kiss… from Sight and
Sound, March 2004
Days of Hope • Senses
of Cinema Tony Williams, April 2004
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Film of the Month: Tickets (2005) Roger Clarke from Sight
and Sound, December 2005
Our Time of Troubles: Ken Loach on War, Irish History, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley Damon Smith from Bright Lights Film Journal, May 1, 2007
Ken Loach David Archibald from The Financial Times, at Slate August 27, 2011
Ken Loach: 'The ruling class are cracking the whip' Kira Cochrane from The Guardian, August 28, 2011
From
Kes to benefit sanctions: Ken Loach on why he is still making ... Anoosh Chakelian from The New Statesmen, October 20, 2016
Director
Ken Loach on why he felt compelled to 'come out of retirement ... Jason Solomons from The Sun, October 22, 2016
How Ken Loach's Cannes winner 'I, Daniel Blake' sparked a Political ... Alex Ritman from The Hollywood Reporter, December 13, 2016
Ken
Loach sends support to EHRC strikers | Public and Commercial ... Public and Commercial Services Union, June
5, 2017
Brexit
Will Prove Troublesome for Filmmakers, Predicts Ken Loach ... Nick Holdsworth from The Hollywood Reporter, July 4, 2017
TSPDT - Ken Loach They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Ken Loach and Tony Garnett interviewed by Anthony Barnett, John McGrath, John Matthews, and Peter Wollen from Jump Cut, January 12, 1972
EuroScreenwriters
- Interviews with European Film Directors - Ken ... Simon Hattenstone interview from The Guardian, October 28, 1998
EuroScreenwriters
- Interviews with European Film ... - Zakka.dk Susan Ryan and Richard Porton from Cineaste magazine, Winter 1998
Come out fighting | Film | The Guardian Stuart Jeffries interview from The Guardian, June 15, 2006
Ken Loach
interview - Features - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun interview, August 2007
Ken
Loach: The film that changed my life | Film | The Guardian The
Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio De Sica (1948), interview by Tom Lamont from The Observer, May 16, 2010
Cannes film festival: the route in to Route Irish Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2010, also seen here: Peter Bradshaw, also an interview by Mark Brown at Cannes, May 19, 2010: Mark Brown
Ken Loach's advice for young filmmakers - Huck Magazine Cian Traynor interview, April 12, 2017
Ken
Loach, 'I, Daniel Blake' director, says England has undermined ... Eric Althoff from The Washington Times, April 30, 2017
Ken
Loach Interview: At 80, the Director Is Still Fighting the System ... Bilge Ebiri interview from The Miami New Times, June 7, 2017
Telegraph's Top 21 British Directors of All Time
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
POOR COW
Great Britain (101 mi) 1967
Poor Cow (2016), directed by Ken Loach | Film review - Time Out Tom Huddleston
Ken Loach's heartfelt drama explores the harsh reality of 1960s Britain.
British filmmaking icon Ken Loach was still calling himself
Kenneth when he shot this heartbreaking drama depicting the tough flipside of
swinging ’60s London. Carol White is Joy, a battered wife and mother who gets a
new lease of life when her husband is banged up for armed robbery. Shacking up
with guitar-strumming good-time-boy Dave (Terence Stamp), Joy struggles to find
her feet in a world where society’s sands are shifting and the role of women is
becoming increasingly uncertain.
Taking his cues from the French New Wave but adding an intimate, non-judgmental
empathy all his own, Loach immerses us in the character of Joy – her loves,
fears and failings. But ‘Poor Cow’ also offers a microcosm of working-class
life, with Chris Menges’s restless camera winding through bustling streets and
bombsites, smoky pubs and poky flats. It may not have the emotional intensity
of Loach’s very finest work – that would come with ‘Kes’, two years later. But
‘Poor Cow’ is a remarkable film, a time-capsule character study of great warmth
and compassion.
BFI
Screenonline: Poor Cow (1967) Ros
Cranston
Poor Cow was Ken Loach's first feature film, and was based on the novel by Nell Dunn, who also wrote Loach's earlier Wednesday Play, Up The Junction (BBC, tx.3/11/1965). Throughout his career, Loach has been a collaborative filmmaker, often working with the same team. Carol White, Poor Cow's star, was already well-known as a result of her starring roles in Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home (BBC, tx. 16/11/1966). Uncharacteristically, Loach - who has generally preferred lesser-known actors - also used other 'names', notably Terence Stamp, in Poor Cow.
White plays the appropriately named Joy, free-spirited, resilient and flirtatious, despite being caught in a web of circumstances largely outside her control, relating to her gender and class. Loach shows characteristic sympathy for the characters and their situation. The opening song, written for the film and sung by Donovan, urges the audience "Be not too hard, for life is short, and nothing is given to man".
Loach has acknowledged the influence of Italian neo-realist film-making, of which probably the best-known example is Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, Italy, d. Vittorio de Sica, 1948): "Those classic post-war Italian films just seem to have an immense respect for people. They give people space and they're concerned with their concerns." This could be a motto for Loach's own film-making, with his compassionate observation of the ways in which ordinary people deal with difficult social circumstances. Poor Cow shares this socio-political concern with the effects of poverty and poor housing on the lives of its characters.
As with Loach's earlier work, the stylistic techniques are inventive. The use of Joy as a narrator on the soundtrack reflects the first-person narration of the original novel. The film also makes occasional use of intertitles, more commonly associated with silent films. This risks distancing the viewer from their involvement in the story, but is effective in adding an ironic note, exemplified by "The world was our oyster... And we chose Ruislip".
The continuity of the story is sometimes broken: Loach uses montage techniques, juxtaposing observational shots of characters not connected with the main story, for example in the pub where Joy works. As is common in Loach's work, the film is at the same time the story of an individual and a demonstration of the way everyone is connected with the wider community.
Poor Cow (1967) - Little White Lies David Jenkins
Poor Cow Blu-ray (United Kingdom) - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov
Poor Cow (1967) Movie Review from Eye for Film Amber Wilkinson
Poor Cow review – Ken Loach's debut masterpiece, still so fresh and ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
Poor Cow Movie Review & Film Summary (1968) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - Screen: Suzy Kendall Seeks the Sweet Life in a ... The
New York Times
KES
Cine-File
Chicago: Harrison Sherrod
Ken Loach's KES perfectly illustrates the alienation, forlornness, and disillusionment of childhood. Tormented by his older brother, abused by his teachers, and harassed by his schoolmates, a young working-class Yorkshire boy named Billy (David Bradley) finds solace in caring for a wild kestrel. Loach contrasts shots of the hawk flying freely with a grim industrial landscape of factories and mines. Despite the overt symbolism of the bird, the film never feels contrived or hackneyed. Loach's great accomplishment is that he manages to illicit pathos without relying on cheap sentimentality. Though the film is relentlessly bleak, there are moments of comic relief (most notably the football scene), and Billy retains some glimmer of resilience until the very end. The influence of KES can be seen in more recent UK coming-of-age films like RATCATCHER and FISH TANK. Antoine Doinel, eat your heart out.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen
Townsend]
Kes is Ken Loach's most acclaimed film. Shot in Barnsley with a largely unknown cast, it's a highly engaging tale about Billy Casper (David Bradley), a fifteen year-old boy whose independent nature doesn't gel with the rigid authoritarianism and conformity that characterise his wasted school life. It is only through the acquisition and training of a young kestrel hawk that his existence is given meaning. It allows him the kind of fulfillment and liberation that his family or school life could never provide. For once his life has a focus - he glimpses the fact that it is possible to escape from his depressing working class environment.
Using real settings with real people, Kes is a film that speaks directly to the viewer. It's a warmly humanist work that avoids the temptation to lapse into sentimentality. The script by Barry Hines' adapted from his novel, is very honest and Chris Menges' cinematography is striking. The acting is generally excellent Bradley is a revelation as the boy and the casting of Colin Welland as the one sympathetic schoolteacher works well.
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]
Bradford Film Festival
Is there a more popular British film among British
audiences than Kes - which remains, all these years later, the only
Ken Loach picture that everybody seems to like? Strangely, the film
isn't that well known overseas - even though Loach himself is now rather more
venerated abroad than at home, and the story is a simple, universal, timeless
one. This may well be down to the broad
The only viable economic choice for the area's young men is to go "down
the pit" - a prospect which fills scrawny, undernourished teenager Billy
Casper (David Bradley) with horror. His loutish older half-brother Jud (Freddie
Fletcher) has been a miner for several years, but still lives at home with
Billy and their mother (Lynne Perrie) - both boys' fathers having long since
vacated the scene. Hassled at home and a misfit at school, Billy prefers to
spend his time wandering the nearby countryside - where one day he chances upon
a kestrel's nest.
He (illegally) purloins a young bird and, with help from a book stolen from the
town library, learns the rudiments of falconry - to the delight of his kindly
English teacher Mr Farthing (Colin Welland), and the bemused contempt of Jud,
who prefers to spend his free time drinking and gambling. Short of
time one morning, Jud gets his brother to place a bet (a double on the
fictional, ominously-named 'Crackpot' and 'Tell Him He's Dead') for him at the
local bookies. Taking advice that a successful outcome on the wager is a remote
possibility, Billy instead pockets the money - and when both animals oblige,
Jud's anger spells big trouble for the young lad and his beloved 'Kes.'
Part of Kes's status as beloved perennial is the fact that it's (very
closely) based on Barry Hines' 1968 novel A Kestrel For A Knave - for
decades a staple on British school syllabuses, and thus never out of print.
Hines, Loach and producer Tony Garnett collaborated on the script, which
strikes an engaging combination of grit and humour - the comic highlight
arriving around half-way when Billy plays hapless goalkeeper during a PE lesson
football-game run by martinet-like teacher Mr Sugden (Brian Glover).
Glover, like
Ken Loach: Kes | Culture | The Guardian Derek Malcolm, June 22, 2000
Ken Loach, the most
modest of directors, would probably say he had a lot to be modest about - that
his team deserves as much praise as he does. And it is certainly true that you
don't look for visually imaginative work from Loach - though a writer in Sight
and Sound who suggested not long ago that Loach couldn't even frame a shot
properly was talking through the wrong hole. In fact, Loach has always said
that if you notice the camerawork, there's something wrong with the story.
What he struggles to
find is the truth of any given situation through good casting, scripts that
often seem improvised but are not, and the courage of his strong and unwavering
left-leaning convictions. In his best movies, Loach is able to turn the
particular into the universal and to appeal to audiences the world over. Kes
was such a film, as were Riff-Raff and Raining Stones.
Kes is undoubtedly one
of the most remarkable films about education, or the lack of it, ever made. Its
main theme is perhaps naive - that if you give a so-called dunce some kind of
chance, the result can surprise him and certainly his teachers. The film's
incidentals are as good as its main thrust, which is never sentimentalised and
maintains the right to be angry as well as touching and funny.
Kes is the kestrel
found and trained by a young Barnsley boy from a broken home. The boy,
marvellously played by David Bradley, virtually refuses education at the local
school, which, though inadequate, is never shown as wholly awful. Encouraged by
a sympathetic teacher, he finds some sort of hope in his new interest, even
though social deprivation is always likely to stamp it out.
What adds immeasurably
to the film's power are the incidental scenes of school life. There are two
I'll never forget. One has a tiny boy lining up outside the head's study,
probably for a beating, and crying his excuses. The tenderness displayed here
mixes with hilarity in a way very few directors could even begin to achieve.
The other has the ex-wrestler Brian Glover as sports master taking his boys out
on to the field and, to the strains of the BBC's old Sports Night signature
tune, acting out a football fantasy that has him behaving more like a child
than his charges.
It's this sort of
thing that proclaims Loach a nearly great and certainly cherishable director,
since it does so much more than merely leaven his political points with humour.
Who, for instance, can forget Ricky Tomlinson as a building worker in
Riff-Raff, climbing naked from a bath in a new building to face a posse of
surprised clients brought in by one of the besuited developers?
This is not to
downgrade the serious - some say over-earnest - side of Loach's work, which
invariably deals with the injustice of uncaring capitalism and invokes a
properly socialist alternative. It's just to emphasise what a very good
film-maker he is when encouraged by good writers such as Barry Hines (Kes) or
Bill Jesse (Riff-Raff).
He is a director
admired, and often loved, all over the world. I remember once presiding over
the International Critics' Jury at Cannes and, as the British representative,
gingerly suggesting that one of Loach's films should at least be on the
shortlist. "What?" said several members of the jury in unison.
"On the shortlist? He's got to win!" One of them, a Latin American,
added, "Who else can make you laugh and then cry in the space of two
minutes?
Sweet Bird of Youth: Ken Loach's Kes - Film Comment Chris Darke, July/August, 2007
The British are weird when it comes to children, and never more so than now. On the one hand, the little treasures must be plied with the latest consumer goodies while being kept safe from the current bogeyman, the pedophile, who, judging from recent media panics, lurks around every street corner. On the other hand, the child is also a feral little thug good only to be served with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order or banged up in a Young Offenders Institution. It’s not hard to see how my (barely exaggerated) sketch might fit with the long-standing class divisions of British society. Today, a character like Billy Casper in Ken Loach’s Kes would fit the latter characterization—broken home, no educational achievements, 14 years old, and not a hope in hell.
Except one, perhaps. In the woods near his deprived northern mining-town home, Billy (David Bradley) finds a kestrel chick that he names “Kes” and lovingly rears and trains. The bird is all the boy’s got, the only thing offering the vision of a horizon beyond a tough home life with his uncaring miner brother Jud and their old-before-her-years mother and the institutionalized brutality of school. “He’s a hopeless case,” says his mother of her youngest, and she’s not wrong. A malnourished shrimp in his brother’s cast-offs, Billy’s a misfit among his classmates, the butt of jokes and bullying. The character could so easily have become the focus of sentimentalized pathos, but Loach, in his faithful adaptation of Barry Hines’s perennially popular novel A Kestrel for a Knave, avoids this completely.
Made in 1969, Kes was shot on location in the Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley with a cast largely made up of locals and nonprofessional actors. Kes remains one of Loach’s best-loved films—it was his second foray into feature filmmaking after his debut collaboration with producer-writer Tony Garnett on Poor Cow in 1967, which followed a period in which he made agenda-setting dramas for the BBC such as Cathy Come Home (66). His hallmark traits of effortless naturalism and unpatronizing attention to working-class lives are on show here, fully formed and deeply affecting. The extraordinary performance of the nonprofessional Bradley as Billy is the film’s heart: he’s simultaneously as earnest, lively, and distracted as any 14-year-old but also resourceful and completely aware of his hopeless circumstances. There’s a beautiful scene near the end of the film when Mr. Farthing (Colin Welland), the only teacher who shows any faith in the boy, visits him in the shed where Billy keeps the kestrel. Observing the bird, Billy says, “I think she’s doing me a favor just letting me sit here and watch her,” revealing a mature respect for the creature that impresses his teacher.
One of the film’s most striking features is its pastoral moments, especially when Billy ventures into the countryside and first spies the kestrel. Abetted by a very late-Sixties soundtrack of strings and trilling flute, the natural light and dappled textures of Chris Menges’s cinematography provide a blessed tonal contrast to the grimly rundown backdrops of the rest of the film. With his abiding interest in social institutions and the ways in which they crush individuals, Loach isn’t usually associated with bucolic poetry, but I defy anyone to watch the kestrel-training sequences in Kes and not be impressed by the way the director conveys the uplift of Billy’s communion with nature. They can’t help but remind one, too, of British cinema’s perennial lack of imagination in the face of its most criminally underexplored resource, the varied beauty of the island’s natural landscapes.
Of course, Kes is more than simply a pet for Billy; the creature is also a symbol of hope. Billy’s increasingly obsessive attention to the bird leads him first to educate himself in the techniques of falconry, albeit with recourse to petty theft. After the local library proves predictably obstructive, Billy—adroit half-pint that he is—liberates a volume about training birds from a secondhand bookstore. Throughout the film, others make much of Billy’s barely literate state, but Loach offers us evidence to the contrary. Over footage of the boy’s patient coaching of Kes, we hear Billy narrating the process from his book, and we realize that this is no dullard but a misjudged child with a rich interior life. This becomes clear in a central scene when the sympathetic English teacher Mr. Farthing encourages Billy to talk about Kes in class and the boy opens up with expert enthusiasm. The bird has led him from books to public articulacy. It’s a triumphant moment and, to emphasize this, the camera homes in close on Billy and his classmates, who listen with rapt attention. But Loach leaves us in little doubt just how short-lived this epiphany of hope will be in the larger scheme of things. In the following scene, Billy is once again being bullied in the playground by one of those same classmates, the ensuing fight tellingly set atop a slag heap of coal.
Kes • Senses of Cinema Mike Robins from Senses of Cinema, October 2003
BFI Screenonline: Kes (1969) Ros Cranston
Tuesday Editor's Pick: Kes (1970) - Alt Screen
Little White Lies: David Jenkins
DVD Times Raphael Pour-Hashemi
Movie Gazette review [Gary Panton]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
The Chicago Reader: Andrea Gronvall
Kes – review Philip French from The Observer, September 10, 2011
Kes – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, September 8, 2011
My favourite film: Kes Simon Hattenstone from The Guardian, December 1, 2011
Kes's David Bradley: 'I can't watch the end of the film. It's just too much ... Alex Godfrey from The Guardian, October 27, 2016
Kes (1969), review - Telegraph Sukhdev Sandhu
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
FAMILY LIFE
aka: Wednesday’s Child
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen
Townsend]
Scripted by David Mercer, Family
Life concentrates on the tragic plight of Janice (Sandy Ratcliffe), a suicidal
19 year-old girl sent into a nervous breakdown by the her oppressive family
situation. Forced to live in an impersonal society, there is little hope for
her. Her sense of individual identity has been all but destroyed by the her
uncomprehending relatives. To make matters worse, she is also faced with a
mechanistic medical establishment which sees pills as being the only way to a
cure.
Incorporating R.D. Laing's
theories, the whole drama takes the form of a full frontal attack on the two of
Britain's most sacred institutions, the family unit and the NHS. Janice's
illness is presented as an inevitable response to a hostile environment. The
naturalistic acting of the cast very much aids in the process of getting the
film's message across. All in all, it is a remarkable piece of work that
positively cries out to be watched. Don't ignore its plea!
DAYS OF HOPE – made for TV
Great Britain (411 mi) 1975
Days of Hope • Senses
of Cinema Tony Williams, April 2004
Originally televised on BBC 1 during September-October 1975 and repeated during April 1978, a year before the election of Margaret Thatcher's right-wing Conservative Party, Days of Hope still remains an enduring legacy of that lost world of radical BBC television drama that no longer exists in today's “dumbed-down” Corporation. Stylistically, it forms a link between the working-class naturalist techniques employed by Loach and his collaborators in television dramas such as Up the Junction (1965), Cathy Come Home (1966), and The Big Flame (1969) and later adventurous cinematic techniques seen in Hidden Agenda (1990), Land and Freedom (1995), and Carla's Song (1996), uniting narrative form and political discourse. Although criticised at the time by Screen theorists slavishly adhering to the now defunct ideological/theoretical agenda of Colin McCabe's “classical realist text”, Days of Hope actually adheres more to the conflicting discursive techniques associated with later more flexible theories of realist narrative, as well as providing an investigative arena to interrogate past, present, and future British politics. While Jacob Leigh's (1) study of this four-part mini-series covering British working class history from 1916 to the 1926 General Strike succinctly notes the associations of the political past with the changing landscape of the mid-1970s, the series also intuitively foreshadows a later era when Tony Blair's neo-conservative New Labour government has achieved a far more devastating betrayal of working-class hopes than Old Labour politicians and trade union officials did in the 1920s.
Produced by Tony Garnett and written by socialist Jim Allen, Days of Hope was one of the landmarks of British television drama. It is not surprising that it has never been repeated since 1978, nor made available by the BBC on DVD/VHS formats while complete series of Are you Being Served? and upper-class costume dramas are. The series was political dynamite both then and now even though Allen engaged in meticulous historical research. After the first episode, a storm of protest erupted over the depiction of conscientious objectors being tied up to stakes erected outside World War I trenches in full view of enemy fire. However, a letter by an ex-serviceman subsequently appeared in The Times (then, thankfully, free from Rupert Murdoch's control!) not only supporting Allen's facts but also supplying an illustration of one of these stakes. Although Days of Hope employed the family narrative structure that also characterised other contemporary series such as Roots, it politicised its content and operated in a much more honest manner than the covert conservatism of other series such as Upstairs, Downstairs and Edward the Seventh.
“Episode One: 1916” introduces viewers to the four main family protagonists. Pacifist Christian socialist Philip Hargreaves (Nikolas Simmonds) has married into a Yorkshire farming family. While his wife Sarah (Pam Brighton) supports him, other members of the Matthews family are either hostile or apathetic. Despite being warned about the realities of war by a soldier on leave, Ben Matthews (Paul Copley) enlists while Philip is arrested as a conscientious objector and condemned to death on the front-line after other coercive measures (mentioned above) fail. Only a last minute reprieve saves him from execution. The episode concludes with Ben in Ireland witnessing national resilience against the British invaders.
“Episode Two: 1921” begins with Ben's desertion from the Army. He joins the Durham Miners in their resistance against oppressive measures introduced by a Government fearing another Bolshevik Revolution. He befriends striking miner Joel Barrett (Gary Roberts) and experiences the lying promises of a mine owner. One scene where the gentlemanly owner offers some miners refreshments is ironically modelled on 1960s Labour Prime-Minister Harold Wilsons “beer and sandwiches” invitations to trade unionists at Number 10, Downing Street. The episode concludes with the betrayal of an agreement and the arrest of Ben and other miners at dawn.
“Episode Three: 1924” begins with Ben's imminent release from prison. He has now become radicalised and joins the Communist Party along with Joel. Ben stays at the London home of Philip who is now a Labour M.P. During this episode the Durham miners meet a Soviet delegation at the House of Commons and express reservations over the change from “war communism” to the New Economic Policy. The episode concludes with Philip's interview with Labour Minister Josiah Wedgewood (John Philips) concerning charges that Lloyd George's strikebreaking plans were secretly passed on to the Labour Party now in power. Although Wedgewood dismisses the charge, a concluding caption shows that this information was indeed true. The plans were used by Stanley Baldwin's Conservative Government to break the 1926 General Strike.
The final episode, “General Strike”, is the longest (135 minutes) of the series. It presents a damning indictment of the betrayal of the miners by treacherous trade union leaders at a time when the Strike could have brought down the Government and led to a radical change in British society following a Trotskyite rather than Stalinist model. Scrupulously researched and historically accurate, despite contemporary charges of bias, Allen and Loach's series used discursive models of political discussion adopted later in Land of Freedom to avoid the dangerously monological approach of most political dramas such as the pro-Israel US mini-series Holocaust and War and Remembrance. It also illustrates the political and personal tensions within the Hargreaves and Matthews families. While Ben and Sarah condemn the Labour Party and trade union leadership's betrayal of the working-class, Philip pompously follows a right-wing revisionist line. This line would later characterise future Labour politicians who left their Party to found the Social Democrats in the 1980s, to say nothing of Thatcher's real heir, Tony Blair. This episode also reveals that the BBC under John Reith (the founding director general) was also a tool of government.
Days of Hope is neither family melodrama not didactic agit-prop. It creatively merges the personal and the political in the best traditions of Loach's television and cinema work. It also represents the lost opportunity of British television drama, brutally crushed by Thatcher and Blair in the same manner that McCarthyism destroyed oppositional movements in post-war American cinema.
THE GAMEKEEPER
User reviews from imdb Author John Simpson (post@jandesimpson.wanadoo.co.uk) from Hastings, England
It would be easy to dismiss
"The Gamekeeper" as a minor Ken Loach film. It does not generate
quite so intensely the anger and frustration that are the hallmarks of this
most politically conscious director's finest works such as "Ladybird,
Ladybird" and "My name is Joe". Its canvas is small. It
concentrates on a single character whose interactions with others, including
his family, are usually treated as brief vignettes. There is almost a
documentary matter-of-factness about the way the gamekeeper's everyday work
patrolling the woods of a country estate, where nothing much happens apart from
encounters with trespassers, is recorded. And yet, perhaps because of its
austere and unswerving glimpse of a single character's attitude to his work and
those around him, the film is anything but smallscale. The character of George,
the gamekeeper, is complex and enigmatic. He has taken the job as a result of
industrial redundancy and, although not particularly happy with his lot, he sublimates
his dissatisfaction in an almost fanatical determination to keep the woods free
of intruders. He is not a man to be crossed as trespassers from small children
to adults discover to their cost. And yet he is a man with a certain degree of
moral ambivalance, not above a little bribery in kind when he wants his window
frame fixed at the estate's expense. The climax of his year comes at the big
autumn game bird shoot when lords and masters reappear from abroad. George,
dressed for the occasion with jacket and tie, stagemanages the event with
fruity language that earns the mild rebuke from the Duke of "not in the
presence of the ladies". We are in deepest "class" country here.
But perhaps the most telling moment in the film occurs much earlier when the gamekeeper's
wife complains of her lot, a townswoman trapped in the boredom of country life.
As this is something her husband is unprepared to face, he attempts to justify
everything. It is one of Loach's most chilling reminders of the plight of those
unable to escape from "the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his
gate" situation that continues to haunt Britain to this day.
RIFF-RAFF
Edinburgh U Film Society [Catherine
Thompson]
In today's world of slick, big-budget Hollywood movies full of glamorous Americans it's refeshing to see a British (naturally) film that tells of life as it really is. Riff Raff is the story of Stevie (Robert Carlyle), a young Scotsman just out of Barlinnie working on a London building site alongside other itinerant workers. In a rather improbable situation, he meets Susan, a would-be singer who is equally down on her luck.
The film explores the real truths of life at the lower end, a society which rarely gets exposure in the arts. While much of Britain in the eighties, especially the London area, was enjoying a boom, people such as these builders, drawn from less prosperous areas, formed part of a growing underclass. Nowhere is this better illustrated than by the luxury flats that Stevie and his colleagues are working on; flats which they could never afford themselves, living instead in squalor. Less subtle are the socialist sermons delivered by one of the workers during his tea-break.
Riff Raff, in common with many British films, has a definite low-budget feel to it (it was shot in only five weeks) and, it could be argued, has little cinematic merit. But it gives a voice to a whole class of people that get scant representation in the world and deserve to be seen.
Loach's socially
conscious cinema always seems original even if many are thematically fairly
similar (showing the unsatisfactory conditions many people outside of
Hollyplastic's world live under) because essentially no other feature film
director legitimately depicts these type of characters. In this case the
working class stiffs are a disparate group of migrants working under horrific
conditions at a non-union construction site in
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
"Riff-Raff" is a rabble-rousing satire of Thatcher's
A staunch friend of the working man, Loach has long decried the inequities of the British class system in dramas and documentaries hailed variously for their poignancy, their power and their realism. A few of the director's works, such as "Wednesday's Child" and "Hidden Agenda," have been released in this country, but most -- "Kes," "The Gamekeeper," "Poor Cow" etc. -- are left to festivals and retrospectives. Typically his films are about the common man but hardly accessible to him, especially if he is an American brought up on Horatio Alger.
Given Loach's involvement, there are political overtones and undertones and straight-out editorializing, which serve as scaffolding for Jesse's paean to the camaraderie that sustains the men. It's comedy with a good solid whack to it, raunchy and realistic, for Jesse, poor sod, knew a thing or two about sucking plaster dust and hauling rubble.
The film deals with all the daily grind, but its grander, by no means subtle
theme is an insanely ironic one. The workers, most of them homeless, are
providing residences for people who doubtless already have a manor house in
An itinerant polyglot crew hailing from
Although it has the feel of an ensemble piece, the film focuses on Stevie (Robert Carlyle), a Scottish ex-con who is befriended by Larry (Ricky Tomlinson), an outspoken advocate of workers' rights and the film's social conscience. The big-hearted bloke helps Stevie locate and fix up a "squat," an abandoned apartment that becomes a pleasant enough home with a bit of cleaning, cheap furniture and paint.
Stevie's life takes a surprisingly happy turn when he meets Susan (piquant Emer McCourt), an aspiring singer who couldn't carry a tune in a tea cozy. The emotionally troubled, rather lazy lass seems exotic to Stevie with her love of horoscopes and health food, and he soon invites her to live with him. They're given a helping hand by Stevie's jolly mates, who help move Susan's furnishings into his squat, but their dream of a new life together fades as her high spirits decay.
Stevie has little patience with her moods. "Depression is for the middle class. The rest of us get an early start in the morning," he observes. And that brings us back to the socialist crux of the film: the limited horizons of the proletariat, seen here as far savvier than their supervisors, who are most often found sitting on their bums wondering whatever happened to the working class anyway.
Loach, who sees the building site as a ramshackle metaphor for what ails the Sceptered Isle, overdoes the rat references, but he never quite clambers onto the soapbox. This is more of a riff than a rap, more in keeping with the Marx Brothers than the Marxists.
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
HIDDEN AGENDA
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen
Townsend]
Winner of the Special Jury Prize
at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, Hidden Agenda deals with British involvement
in Northern Ireland. Unapologetically critical of the occupation, the film's
bias is clear for all to see: Jim Allen's script pulls no punches. Among other
crimes, the British state is accused of high-scale corruption, treachery,
deceit and state-sanctioned murder.
A civil liberties group is in
Belfast to investigate the abuse of civil rights in Ulster. Soon after
presenting a press conference about the issue, the American male member of the team
is gunned down in a car. The police conveniently make it look like an accident.
Suspicions persist however and a senior mainland police officer (Brian Cox) is
brought over to investigate. Egged on by the deceased's partner (Frances
McDormand), he uncovers a web of corruption and lies. Nevertheless, a question
remains - what will this "career" man actually do when faced with the
truth?
Hidden Agenda makes a vigorous
attack on British policy in Ulster and in this respect it's a very pungent
piece of work It loses its urgency, however, when it seeks to broaden its scope
and link British involvement in the province with the whole history of colonial
occupation, and the security services with the fall of Wilson. Nevertheless,
the picture is always watchable. It has strong characters and Loach keeps the
whole thing moving at an exciting pace. This is essential viewing for anyone
interested in contemporary political debate.
Ken Loach's "Hidden Agenda" must be the most
buttoned-down movie about a conspiracy theory ever made. Set in
The tape was made by a former army officer named Harris (Maurice Roeves), who sets the events of the film in motion when he attempts to hand it over to an American lawyer named Paul Sullivan (Brad Dourif), who along with his fiancee, Ingrid (Frances McDormand), is a member of the International League of Civil Liberties. The league is in Belfast to gather information on reports of mistreatment by the British security forces, particularly allegations of the use of torture during interrogations of suspected IRA members and the implementation of a "shoot to kill" policy by the Ulster police.
Harris, who's on the run from British security and under the protection of the IRA, wants Paul to make the revelations on the tape known to the world. And Paul, who is scheduled to leave that day, is interested enough to arrange a meeting with Harris outside the city. However, on the way to the meeting he and a Catholic collaborator are run off the road and murdered, prompting the government to send in a special investigator -- a career cop named Kerrigan (Brian Cox) -- to piece together the facts.
Loach, whose background is in documentary filmmaking, gives the events a genuine air of up-to-the minute immediacy. The movie's agenda is anything but hidden: It wants to call attention to the situation in Northern Ireland and to British abuses of civil rights. In this, Loach and his screenwriter, Jim Allen, are ardently Republican in their sympathies; they present the British abuses as a forgone conclusion. But they don't fall into the trap of presenting the sentiments from either side in cheap melodramatic terms. They leave the issues complex, honest.
Most of the film involves the unlikely partnership between Kerrigan and Ingrid, who together begin to piece together the story. After discovering the importance of the tape, they manage to track down Harris, who leads them into the heart of the IRA. The movie's best scenes, though, are close-in confrontations between Kerrigan and Brodie (Jim Norton), the Ulster police chief. As Kerrigan, Cox is a no-frills, squared-away sort of guy; he's got integrity, but he doesn't make a big show of it. Kerrigan won't be muscled by either side, but neither will Brodie, and their scenes together are like bare-knuckle brawls between dinosaurs.
Cox's greatest talent is his ability to make quietness thrilling. He's a naturally realistic actor, and he does detailed, resonant work without the slightest trace of mechanism. McDormand, on the other hand, seems to strain for her emotions; there's too much labor in her outrage, and not enough natural feeling. Since there's no tension between her character and Kerrigan, no hint of romance, you can't help but wish that she and Dourif had changed places.
In general the movie promises more than it delivers. The story
hooks us, but just as Kerrigan begins to climb the rungs of the conspiracy to
the upper echelons of the British hierarchy -- just as the real stonewalling
and the real pressure begin -- the movie's energy dissipates. Part of the
difficulty is that apart from suggestions of a pervasive, system-wide corruption,
the script never makes a very clear connection between the contents of the tape
and the troubles in Northern Ireland. (Margaret Thatcher, of course, is the
movie's real target, and the filmmakers couldn't have been very happy that she
left office before the film was released here.) In effect, Northern Ireland
becomes less and less relevant as the story progresses. The movie spreads out
into a more generic political thriller, and in doing so, blunts what had made
it distinctive, its journalistic edge. Still, the film has intelligence and, as
agitprop thrillers go, a kind of reportorial integrity. It makes the unthinkable
seem all too plausible.
Hidden Agenda •
Senses of Cinema Bob Carroll,
October 5, 2003
Hidden
Agenda and JFK Jerry White from Jump Cut, June 1993
Apollo Movie Guide [Jamie Gillies]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Full Review Caryn James from the New York Times
RAINING STONES
Raining Stones, directed by Ken Loach | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew
Despite the unemployment, petty crime and crack that afflict their Lancashire housing estate, Bob (Jones) and wife Anne (Brown) remain staunch Catholics. Bob does odd jobs to put food on the table, but also because he's determined to buy their daughter her communion dress, rather than accept a loan from the priest. He's soon in hock to loan-sharks. Though the subject of Loach's film is as dark as ever, the movie is funnier than Riff-Raff, thanks to another delicious performance from Ricky Tomlinson as Bob's pal Tommy. The gags range from deadpan Northern banter to slapstick and scatology, but they don't overshadow the political acuity of Jim Allen's script , or the narrative's inexorable progress into the stuff of everyday nightmare. This is no rant, but a warm, unsentimental tribute to the working-class spirit. Superbly acted, as always, and a hugely enjoyable example of the cinema of commitment.
Classic
Film Club: 'Raining Stones' (1993) with Time Out Film - Time ... Tom Huddleson from Time Out
British critics have an odd relationship with Ken Loach:
while he's universally beloved on the continent, the home crowd seem to view
his films as a little too stark and uncinematic, a little too close to TV
(notwithstanding the occasional breakout hit like ‘The Wind That Shakes the
Barley’). Whereas the defiantly chirpy (and frankly inferior) Mike Leigh
is treated as a national treasure, Loach trundles on regardless, telling
stories both grim and heartfelt, personal and political, bleak and, on
occasion, brilliant. With his minuscule budgets, clockwork regularity,
particular obsessions and black-rimmed glasses, perhaps Loach should be viewed
as the closest thing we have to our own Woody Allen,
albeit informed by John
Grierson and Karl Marx rather than Ingmar
Bergman and Groucho. And if this is the case, ‘Raining
Stones’ is surely his ‘Crimes and Misdemeanours’: dark, witty, intensely
felt, bitterly nostalgic, frequently shocking and morally rigorous.
The film centres on Bob – played by Bruce Jones
(Les Battersby in 'Corrie’ ) – a browbeaten, working-class dad struggling to
raise money for his daughter’s communion dress, and taking part in various
quick-cash schemes cooked up by his sad-sack sidekick Tommy (Ricky
Tomlinson). The first act verges on comedy, as the pair attempt to steal a
sheep, then get involved in turf-robbing from the local Conservative Club
bowling green. But there’s a constant sense of impending threat, partly
engendered by the harsh industrial/suburban coldness of Loach’s landscape, and
partly by the deepening look of worry on Jones’s face as Bob's situation
becomes increasingly desperate.
Loach loads the film up with his customary political and sociological
preoccupations: the character of Jimmy (Mike Fallon),
Bob’s brother-in-law and a jobs counsellor down at the local advice bureau,
stands for the reliability of the old socialist left. He’s contrasted with Tom
Hickey’s Father Barry, a kindly, pragmatic priest whose clear affection for Bob
doesn’t prevent him from exploiting the younger man’s good nature. These two
men never speak – they barely share screen time – but it’s in the equal and
opposing pressures they exert on Bob (and, by extension, Loach) that their
conflict is made real. Its hard to say precisely whose side Loach is on: Father
Barry is the more sympathetic character, but he’s also very much the puppet of
an uncaring, money-making Catholic hierarchy; while Jimmy may have his
political patter down, but he can’t tend to Bob’s emotional or spiritual needs.
If this preoccupation with the struggle between earthly and spiritual concerns
already strongly echoes ‘Crimes and Misdemeanours’, the final act makes the
comparison unmistakable; though, ironically, Loach is much softer on his
characters than Allen is. Where Woody had his Judah intentionally hiring a man
to assassinate a woman he had, until recently, been in love with, Loach’s Bob
is forced into accidental homicide by the utterly unforgivable and devastating
actions of a local loan shark. But the conclusions each film reaches are
remarkably similar: each deals with criminal acts, and consequent acts of
self-forgiveness, filtered through ideas of religious guilt and moral certitude
versus hard reality and universal impassivity.
Fusing weighty themes with Loach’s usual hyperrealistic, almost soap-opera
aesthetic, ‘Raining
Stones’ is arguably the director’s strongest film. Witty and beautifully
observed, it’s also brave and psychologically challenging without ever
alienating its audience. As a portrait of man’s eternal struggle towards the
light, it manages to be simultaneously sympathetic, elegiac and inspirational;
as a portrait of British working-class life, it deserves to be shown in
schools.
In "Raining Stones," British director Kenneth Loach offers a description of his homeland so unremittingly bleak that the landscape itself appears to have given up hope.
The same social circumstances apply in this drably brilliant movie as they did in Loach's last film, "Riff-Raff": There's no work and little hope of any and barely enough money from the dole for the lucky ones to pay the rent. In "Riff-Raff," though, Loach's approach was overtly comic; in "Raining Stones," he plays it straight, following his characters from cramped flat to pub as if he were tracing the slow, plunging flight of a wounded bird.
Except that these poor souls have never even gotten off the ground. The central figure is a quick-tempered redhead named Bob (Bruce Jones), who despite every effort to the contrary -- including a brief, bungled attempt at pilfering sheep -- can't seem to catch a break. Not 10 minutes into the story, his van is stolen. And later, he can't make it through the first night of his gig as a bouncer without getting bounced himself and beaten up for good measure.
Remarkably, this grind of daily disappointments hasn't completely worn down Bob's spirit. Though Jim Allen's astoundingly authentic script emphasizes Bob's Catholicism as a source of inspiration for Bob and wife Anne (Julie Brown), their faith is also a source of problems.
The immediate difficulty is caused by the need to buy a dress for the first Holy Communion of their young daughter Coleen (Gemma Phoenix). While the film's first half is virtually plotless, the second half is driven almost completely by Bob's futile efforts to come up with the cash.
Loach's vision of
This may be the most impressive aspect of Loach's talent. His style is so low-key as to seem almost styleless. Yet, still, there is evidence of a subtle, designing hand.
"Raining Stones" doesn't follow the standard rules of storytelling or rise to any great resolution. A dedicated realist, Loach examines the lives of his characters with the meticulousness of a documentarian, and the results are so unforced that they almost look as if they had been happened upon -- found, rather than staged. Still, even near the end, when the film metamorphoses into a thriller, it continues to unfold according to its own logic.
The actors, too, play their parts without ever coming across like actors. And though everyone in the cast is superb -- the women are particularly remarkable -- it feels forced and artificial to judge their work in terms of performance or effect.
This sense of natural urgency is what allows the movie to engage us despite the desolation of its subject. The picture doesn't break new ground -- this sort of kitchen-sink realism has been a British specialty since the '50s. Yet Loach creates a story that is so gripping and sadly true to life that the need to stretch the genre or transcend it seems beside the point.
Raining Stones |
Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Review:
'Raining Stones' - Variety
Raining Stones
Movie Review & Film Summary (1994) | Roger Ebert
FILM
FESTIVAL REVIEW - The New York Times Vincent Canby from the New York Times
LADYBIRD LADYBIRD
Ladybird Ladybird, directed by Ken Loach | Film review - Time Out Geoff Andrew
Matters start promisingly: in a pub, Maggie (Rock) belts out a ballad and transfixes Jorge (Vega), a Paraguayan exile settled in London. He's gentle and supportive, just as well, given her foul-mouthed temper and troubled life. A mother of four living in a refuge, she's persistently hounded as an unfit parent by social workers who threaten to remove her children, because of her tendency to involve herself with violent, drunken louts. Truth to tell, she's a walking disaster area, though Jorge's love and understanding finally break through her defences, encouraging her to move in with him and start their own family. But modern Britain's an unjust place: can their fragile happiness last? Ken Loach sledgehammers his points. As social critique, the film provokes pity and anger, not thought: understandable, since it's never quite clear exactly what Loach is attacking. The methods of the social services? The bureaucracy of Tory Britain? Life itself?
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen
Cox]
Riff Raff told the story of a group of Scouse builders on a
London building site being exploited by their employers; Raining Stones
concerned a father on a low income trying to earn enough money for his
daughter's communion dress. Ladybird, Ladybird completes the trilogy and
is the most hard-hitting and harrowing of the three. Its central character is
Maggie (Crissy Rock), a Liverpudlian single parent with four children. Her
ex-boyfriend Simon was incredibly violent so she ran away; but the social
services, anxious about her children, took them away from her and put them in
care. She meets Jorge, a political exile from Paraguay, and has a child by him,
but it is snatched instantly by the social workers.
Ladybird, Ladybird is not as cleady socialist as the trilogy's other
films. Maggie's character seems at times to add fuel to some of the Tory
propaganda about single mothers who breed. Certainly she is a difficult
character to sympathise with. The Social Services make her life hell, true, but
she isn't exactly reasonable with them. It is Maggie as well as the state who
is Maggie's worst enemy.
More interesting however is
Loach's use of Jorge, and his equation of Britain's (i.e. the Conservative
party's) ideology with that of certain South American countries. That Jorge's
skill at dealing with dictatorial authorities should have to be used with the
British Social Services is the most sinister aspect of this film.
Review for Ladybird Ladybird
(1994) - IMDb Scott Renshaw
Arriving as it does in the middle of the Newt Gingrich-generated national discussion on the benefits of removing children from unstable homes, LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD could not be more timely. Although set in England rather than the U.S., it presents a fact-based, textbook case for the esteemed speaker's social services plan. And while director Ken Loach could not possibly have realized it, he has made a film which should inspire both sides in this debate to consider their points of view more carefully. Harrowing, challenging yet never pedantic, LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD is about as balanced a presentation of a difficult issue as one could hope for, a portrait of a self-destructive woman colliding with a by-the-book system, and brought to breathtaking life by a knockout debut performance from Crissy Rock.
Rock plays Maggie Conlon, a working-class lounge singer who seems never to have had a break in her life. The child of an abusive father, she has gone on to a series of relationships which has produced four children, all by different fathers. Early in the film, she meets Jorge (Vladimir Vega), a Paraguayan political activist and a refugee from his home country, and describes in flashback how she came to lose custody of her children to social services. Maggie and Jorge grow closer, and soon decide to begin a family of their own. However, Maggie finds it impossible to escape from her past, and as the government continues to follow her every move she finds her own abrasive personality making matters worse at every turn.
Director Loach, the poet laureate of the contemporary English working class (RIFF RAFF, RAINING STONES) has delivered perhaps his most powerful film yet with LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD. He tells Maggie's story in a straight-ahead fashion, eschewing cinematic hyperbole or heavy musical cues. It is a dramatic enough story in its own right, and Loach knows it. A pair of scenes in the film show two children, one the young Maggie and the other one of Maggie's own children, responding to witnessing an abusive father, and there is little else Loach needs to do to demonstrate the self-perpetuating cycle domestic violence creates. He also trusts the audience to draw its own conclusions from Maggie's story, and presents both Maggie and the government social workers alternately as the solution and the problem. This is a story in which, ultimately, there are no winners, and Loach refuses to let us off the hook by giving us a convenient villain.
What really makes the ambiguity work is the incendiary performance by Crissy Rock, who had never acted before LADYBIRD. Hard-edged and painfully low on self-esteem, Maggie repeatedly torpedoes her own chances for happiness by refusing to believe that she deserves any, and Rock plays this out in several incredibly emotional scenes, every one of which feels completely honest. She layers Maggie's character so expertly that at times it truly does appear that she is an unfit mother, making it hard to fault the government's intentions. It's powerful work by a performer who understands instinctively that a character like this has to be real, and Rock truly becomes Maggie. In fact, she's so powerful that she completely eclipses Vladimir Vega's Jorge, whose character is never developed quite as fully as Maggie's. There's a reason that he sticks by her through so much hardship, but I, like Maggie, wasn't always sure what that reason was.
The screenplay by Rona Munro, though based on a true story, is dramatically unwieldy towards the end; scenes begin to repeat themselves, and I started to feel that I was being put through an emotional wringer. It's one of those cases where a bit of license with fact might have made for a tighter and even more effective story. But it amounts to quibbling to fault LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD for being too true to a gripping story. It's a film that makes demands of its audience, specifically to look at this story and to reach its own conclusions about whether or not Maggie was treated fairly. Her story is so riveting, and so spectacularly re-created by Crissy Rock, that any audience should be up to that challenge.
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Still worried about Maggie's children | Screen | The Observer Ronan Bennett
MOVIE
REVIEW : Loach's 'Ladybird': An Unrelenting View of Misery ... Peter Rainer from The LA Times
Ladybird,
Ladybird Movie Review (1995) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; A Troubled Mother Against ... Janet Maslin from the New York Times
Ladybird,
Ladybird (film) - Wikipedia
LAND AND FREEDOM
Edinburgh U Film Society [Marcus
Whitfield]
Ken Loach collaborates once again with Jim Allen, his partner for Days of Hope and Hidden Agenda, on this moving story about the struggle between a group of young political idealists fighting against the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War. The film received international acclaim not only for the outside perception of the British writer and diretor but also for an undocumented part of Spanish history that dealt with the ordinary men and women that took up the struggle.
In present-day Liverpool a teenager reads the journals of her dead grandad, and is thrust into the past recalling his involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
Disillusioned by the lack of willingness shown by Eupopean governments towards the upris- ing of Franco's Fascists, a young working-class idealist David (convincingly played by Ian Hart) decides to leave England for Spain to join POUM (a Marxist separatist group made up of League of Nation freedom fighters). Given very little military training he is thrown into the deep end of tête-à-tête offensives with the Fascists in and around rural countryside. Soon David realises that the enthusiasm which brought him to Spain is paling away. The naïvety he shows is quickly exposed, he is incapable of the harsh decisions and extreme measures that have to be administered in war. One of these extreme measures shows a village priest dragged away and executed for collaborating with the Fascists. The POUM believe that if freedom is to be achieved (a quite remarkable scene by Loach allows the camera to wander from villager to freedom fighter each expressing their reasons for the plight in which their beliefs lie) then it's most effective weapon has to be that the Land liberated from the fascists, is in the people's hands to govern. This is the essence of the collective struggle. Yet the POUM leader is shot and killed because Hart refuses to bomb a group of Fascists who have taken up refuge with civilians and this causes a rift within the movement. Hart, ashamed for not preventing the death, leaves even though he has become close with the deceased man's Spanish girlfriend, he wanders the countryside, dazed and confused by the changes of events.
After a stint fighting for another anti-Franco group (a sardonic scene appears where two groups, who ironically are fighting the same battle, shell each other from the roof tops) Hart returns to the POUM who have refused to capitulate to either the Fascists or the Communists. This in turn leads Hart to look deeper into his own convictions which consequently could lose him all which he has formally stood for.
With Land and Freedom Ken Loach has given us a personal journey, as this project first took shape in the early seventies it may yet prove to be his most audacious. The arid Spanish landscape is brutally depicted and its war scenes are never romantically dewelled upon, leaving the viewer more room to get underneath the characters, characters that come from all points of the world to fight for freedom.
BFI Screen Online Ros Cranston
Throughout his career, Ken Loach's socialist beliefs have
coloured his work. The Spanish Civil War was the first major war against
fascism and a vital struggle for the international Left of the 1930s. As David
Carne (Ian Hart) says at the end of the film, "had we succeeded here - and
we could have done - we would have changed the world." This conclusion
reflects Loach's view that for a time there was a real possibility of social
revolution, which could have spread to other countries from
Like most films dealing with historical events, Land and
Freedom (1995) has not escaped accusations of inaccuracy, particularly in
relation to the chronology of events. Strict accuracy is sacrificed to focus on
David's moral growth and his increasing understanding of the revolutionary
ideals at stake. His simple idealism when he first goes to
The framing device - after his death in 1990s
Like other Loach films, Land and Freedom shows some
of the complexities of the class struggle, in particular the compromises made
by the leaders, often at the expense of those people the organisation is
intended to protect. The divisions between the revolutionary groups opposing
Franco are shown to be pivotal in their downfall. Blanca (Rosana Pastor) is
shot by a member of the Popular Army and, as Loach has said, "When she is
killed you know that the revolution has died with her."
Land and Freedom Noel Megahey from DVD Times
Ken Loach’s "Land and Freedom": The Spanish Revolution Betrayed World Socialist website
Land and Freedom Mike D’Angelo
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Full Review Kenneth Turan from the LA Times
Full Review Caryn James from the New York Times
CARLA’S SONG
It used to be that for those who found the prickly social
criticism of Mike Leigh's movies too chirpy, there was always Ken Loach. With
such uncompromising films as Riff-Raff, Raining Stones, and Ladybird,
Ladybird, Loach confronted the injustice and pathos of British lower-class
life with compassion, complexity, and not much in the way of happy endings.
Lately, though, he's expanded his territory beyond the dismay and brimming
humanity of the grim burgs of the
Such was the case in his foray into
the Spanish Civil War, Land and Freedom, and it's a weakness in his
charming but ultimately misconceived Carla's Song. Robert Carlyle, in
between roles in Trainspotting
and The Full Monty, plays George, a
Although he loves Carla, George magnaminously urges her to go back and find
Antonio -- he even accompanies her. Released from the gritty accents and gray
details of
BFI Screen Online Ros Cranston
The screenplay for Carla's Song was written by Paul
Laverty, a lawyer who had worked with human rights organisations in
Some critics argued that Carla's Song's dual focus on the personal and the political weakens it, and that the film loses momentum when the location switches from Glasgow to Nicaragua. However, this reaction may in part be due to conventional expectations of the love story genre, in which the intrusion of political factors could be seen as interrupting the focus of the story. Here, the political message is integral to the characters' experiences.
Loach has said of Laverty, "I guess we see the world in the same way. Paul has a very good sense of humour. His script makes you smile, but it's also very sharp politically. It isn't just out of books. He's lived it and that's very important." As well as the harrowing events depicted, humour is used, as is common in Loach's films, as an expression of the common humanity of his working-class characters. This is exemplified in the scene on the top of the bus in Nicaragua, which begins with the Nicaraguans' curiosity about what the workers produce in Scotland and leads to them sharing a bottle of whisky.
Robert Carlyle, as George, gives a witty performance, at once down to earth and charismatic, reminiscent of his role as Stevie in Riff Raff (1991). Oyenka Cabezas, who plays Carla, is a newcomer to acting. She was discovered during an extensive casting process in Nicaragua, and spoke no English when she was offered the part.
Like other Loach films, Carla's Song demonstrates a keen sense of location. Both in Glasgow and in Nicaragua, a vivid texture of daily life is presented. Everyday existence - on crowded buses or at home - is shown as neither picturesque poverty nor exaggerated hardship. People are rarely seen on their own - Loach's world, unusually for filmmakers, is one in which communities, as much as individuals, are in focus.
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
THE FLICKERING FLAME
User reviews from imdb Author: CousinK from Schiltigheim, France
For those of us who might have
been disappointed by some of the most recent Loach movies (Land and Freedom,
Carla's song...), "The flickering flame", a TV documentary, shows
Loach at his most powerful. The film documents the recent Liverpool docker's
strike, where many workers lost their jobs for refusing to go against their own
beliefs by crossing a picket line. The film is a great example of a successful
political documentary. Loach manages to put across many political points
without once being overly demonstrative or heavy. On the contrary, issues such
as the betrayal of the workers by their bureaucratic union bosses are plainly
and forcefully shown.
As well as being a great political film, publicizing the struggle of the
Liverpool dockers, "The flickering flame" can be seen as a comment on
the condition of the working-class in Britain, or even throughout
"liberal" Europe. The film shows British society's shift to the right
and documents the taking away of rights that had been bitterly fought for in
the past. Above all, the film shows the dignity of the Liverpool dockers and of
their wives. It's a deeply human film that shows how workers who had given
their lives to their jobs were unfairly dismissed simply for sticking to their
beliefs. One of the best "militant" films of all time.
MY NAME IS JOE A 96
Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown]
Ken Loach has never been very fashionable. The cinematic equivalent of E P Thompson, his determination to give a cinematic space for people and subjects that the rest of Britain's industry ignores has long been criticised from both right and left. To the Daily Mail types he can be simply dismissed as a left wing propagandist, a man who refuses to accept the ‘reality' of capitalist triumph and socialist failure. More seriously, academic Marxists accuse Loach of being unable to mount an effective social critique since his use of mainstream film making practices negates anything revolutionary in his content.
My Name is Joe is unlikely to change anyone's opinion. Scripted by Paul Laverty (who previously collaborated with Loach on Carla's Song) and set in Glasgow, it's the story of Joe (Peter Mullan). Joe's a recovering alcoholic - the film takes its title from the first part of his Alcoholics Anonymous mantra "My name is Joe and I'm an alcoholic" - who ekes out a living as an odd-job man and manages "the worst football team in Glasgow".
While picking up one of his players, Liam, Joe bumps into health visitor Sarah (Louise Goodall) who is checking on Liam's baby. Initially Joe regards Sarah with contempt,as just another middle class authority figure, but a tentative romance starts to develop when both find some common interest in helping Liam, who is in trouble with loan shark and drug dealer McGowan. Although the film is often heavy going it also displays moments of tenderness and humour that might surprise - such as when Joe's football team, who have long worn a motley assortment of strips, steal a set of Brasil kits.
Amid uniformly excellent performances, the chief weaknesses of My Name is Joe are those common to all Loach's social realist output: The line between being realistic about the plight of the underclass and of making films that are so depressing and despairing that no-one, except a few masochists, will bother seeing them is an incredibly fine one. That Loach should sometimes fall off this tightrope is, then, unsurprising; that he should walk it so successfully most of the time is a miracle.
The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]
Nothing could be further from Jordan's lyrical hyperrealism and his sense of how the unconscious floods daily life than Ken Loach's character-driven social dramas. Returning from the romantic epic sweep of his Spanish Civil War film, Land and Freedom, and his semi-disastrous attempt to depict Latin American political struggle, Carla's Song, Loach zeros in on an ordinary Joe named Joe, a recovering alcoholic from Glasgow with few economic options and too many old connections to a heroin-drenched underworld.
As played by the vibrant Peter Mullan, who's as cocky and tender as the young- ish Paul Newman, Joe is a character who commands your attention and your heart. He wants nothing so much as to live a clean, productive life, but, like everyone he knows, he's on the dole, with no prospects of extricating himself from a poverty-based economy. (It seems as if the only legitimate jobs in Glasgow are providing social services for the poor.) He falls in love with a family counselor who's wary of committing to him because of his violent past. He feels responsible for a hapless kid on his soccer team who's in debt to the local mob boss. If Joe tries to save him, he risks losing himself, not to mention his girlfriend, in the process.
Mullan has an amazing energy and range. He lets you understand that Joe's optimism is an act of will, his only defense against his terrible anger. Without being mushy, the film raises difficult questions about forgiving oneself, forgiving others, and the irreparable damage a word or an action can do to a relationship.
The last uncompromising leftist filmmaker, Loach shows how the economic and political system leaves basically good guys like Joe, trying to live one day at a time without hurting themselves or anyone else, little room for anything except bad choices. This is Loach's best film since Riff-Raff and, like Riff-Raff, it's being released in the U.S. with subtitles. Loach's commitment to the Glasgow dialect makes it difficult, even for most British audiences, to understand the dialogue. It's regional filmmaking at its radical best.
Maybe the beer-soaked neorealism of
so much recent
If there is any justice in the world
-- and as Loach well knows, there probably isn't -- "My Name Is Joe"
will finally make clear that Loach is his own man, not merely a more strident
(and less comic) companion to Leigh. A masterpiece in a minor key, "My
Name Is Joe" captures its
For all its clarity of detail, this
is also a universal yarn about poverty and the ways it imprisons people both
strong and weak, good and bad -- a story that could take place anywhere in the
urbanized world, from India to Indianapolis. Even more fundamentally, "My
Name Is Joe" is a stirringly acted, deeply compassionate love story about
two battered people who believe they've already blown their chance at happiness
in life.
Loach's previous movie, the ambitious
if flawed "Carla's Song," was divided between '80s
As vividly portrayed by Peter Mullan
(a well-known Scottish actor who has previously appeared in "Trainspotting"
and "Braveheart" as well as Loach's "Riff-Raff"), Joe has
the gravity and self-containment of a compact, athletic man's man who has
learned the hard way that he can't trust himself. He has seen both sides of his
own nature -- beloved father figure to his dead-end kids and vicious, abusive
drunk -- and understands that the line separating them is so fine it almost
doesn't exist. When Joe meets Sarah (Louise Goodall), the careworn nurse who
teaches infant-care classes at the local health clinic, he can flirt with her
with a practiced roguishness and even scam her for a job hanging wallpaper
(which he's never done before). But when it comes to asking her out, he's as
shy as a 12-year-old; Joe is tangibly unsure that letting someone get close to
him is a good idea for either of them.
If Sarah's prior history remains
more than a little shadowy, that's the script's fault, not Goodall's. Wearing
the air of a woman who has sacrificed too much of herself for too little
reward, Sarah can't help responding to Joe's attentions with an almost girlish
eagerness, despite the understandable wariness that comes from daily exposure
to the grimmer varieties of male behavior. Perhaps only Loach would try to
elicit humor from a public-health nurse's struggle to communicate with her
clientele -- when Sarah visits a young mother to inquire whether her infant
son's testicles have descended properly, the woman is mystified. Patiently,
Sarah tries again: "Are his wee balls hanging down all right?"
All I can say about the tender,
passionate and all-too-fragile love affair that blossoms between Joe and Sarah
is that if you don't weep over this damaged pair as they go bowling, trade
early-punk trivia questions and do their damnedest to accommodate their
awkward, loner lives to each other, you have no heart. There has always been an
emotional core to Loach's best work, a belief in personal and even romantic
redemption, but it has never been so compellingly delivered, so free of the
dutiful dogma that sometimes congests his films (see, for instance, the lengthy
political debate that bogs down the middle of "Land and Freedom," his
attempt at a Spanish Civil War epic). When Joe's efforts to rescue the most
pathetic member on his soccer team from an evil fate lead to his own criminal
involvement and threaten to pull him and Sarah apart, what's at stake isn't
some political abstraction, but the death of the precious and improbable hope
growing at this movie's center.
In a chilling scene where Joe
blithely lies to Sarah about his criminal exploits, Mullan makes it clear that
the arrogant, delusional personality of the hardcore drunk remains
uncomfortably close to Joe's surface. Loach and Laverty, in fact, refuse to
make easy excuses for Joe's decisions. Their point is more that life in places
like working-class
Joe's rapid downward spiral into
violence and disaster, and its startling resolution, may strike some viewers as
overly melodramatic. But the intense naturalism of Loach's filmmaking -- as
always, he uses natural light and actual settings, shoots in sequence and packs
as many local non-actors into the cast as he can -- allows him to take
extraordinary liberties with his narrative universe without destroying it. Like
all successful tragedy, "My Name Is Joe" ends in profound sadness but
not in despair. We can just barely believe, at the end of this resonant and
moving film, that Joe and Sarah might have a future -- and we know how terribly
high its price has been.
Nitrate Online Sean Axmaker
The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]
Philadelphia City Paper Sam Adams
iF Magazine Review Johnny Clay
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
10 great films set in Glasgow | BFI Pasquale Iannone, February 17, 2015
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Full Review Janet Maslin from the New York Times
BREAD AND ROSES B 86
Great Britain Germany Spain France Italy
As
we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand million lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses;
For the people hear us singing: Bread & Roses, Bread and Roses!
As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men
For they are women's children, and we mother them again
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread but give us roses to
As we go marching, marching unumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too
As we go marching, marching we bring the greater days
The rising of the women means the rising of the race
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes
But a sharing of life's glories; Bread and Roses, bread and roses.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies, bread and roses, bread and roses!
—Bread
and Roses, by James Oppenheim from American
Magazine, December, 1911, commonly associated with the textile strike in
Lawrence, Massachusetts during January – March, 1912, often known as the “Bread
and Roses strike,” uniting dozens of immigrant communities, led to a large
extent by women, vocals and watercolors by Kate Vikstrom, Bread and Roses - YouTube (3:19), also a simply ecstatic rendition by
Joan Baez and her little sister Mimi Fariña, Joan Baez- Bread and roses -
YouTube (2:40).
Women were fighting for fair wages, child labor laws,
overtime pay, and fair working conditions, where part of their strike
proclamation read:
We, the 20,000 textile workers of Lawrence, are out on strike for the right to
live free from slavery and starvation; free from overwork and underpay; free
from a state of affairs that had become so unbearable and beyond our control,
that we were compelled to march out of the slave pens of Lawrence in united
resistance against the wrongs and injustice of years and years of wage slavery.
To socialist director Ken Loach, one might say he’s an activist filmmaker, becoming in international cinema perhaps the lone voice of the left, an ardent believer that working people’s struggles are inherently dramatic, where he’s made a living striving for social realism, repeatedly championing the underdog by revealing the hardships and struggles of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, including Jury prize winner at Cannes, HIDDEN AGENDA (1990), an anti-Stalinest political thriller (when have you ever been able to make that claim?) about British repression in Northern Ireland, LAND AND FREEDOM (1995), the Cannes FIPRESCI award winner about the Spanish Civil War of the 30’s, or the Palme d’Or winning film at Cannes, THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (2006), about the Irish war of independence, a film that attempts to explore the extent that the Irish revolution was a social revolution as opposed to a nationalist revolution. A huge believer that Margaret Thatcher destroyed a generation’s future with an economic structure that “consciously destroyed the workforces in places like the railways, for example, and the mines, and the steelworks … so that transition from adolescence to adulthood was destroyed, consciously, and knowingly.” When Thatcher died in April 2013, in memory of her economic policies, Loach sarcastically called for her funeral to be privatized and handled by the lowest bidder. To his credit, the man has remained surprisingly consistent as an artist through the years, maintaining a near documentary approach, shooting all his films in sequence, providing the cast with a page of script per day, hoping to create genuine interplay between the actors onscreen, allowing some improvisation to occur, with minimal use of music and the employment of natural lighting, with editing also kept to a minimum. With a career approaching six decades, it’s fair to say he’s one of a kind, where his films offer an unpretentious honesty not seen anywhere else, and that his films, old and new, are always relevant.
Coming on the heels of MY NAME IS JOE (1998), arguably
Loach’s most critically praised film, this is the first (and only) time the
director has ventured to America to make a film, focusing on the immigrant
struggle to make a living, opening with a harrowing scene of a young woman
making a risky border crossing into America from Mexico, where you’d think
there would be relief once on the other side, but often the criminal element
feeds off the insecurities of those most at risk, where their precarious
position can lead to nightmarish experiences, where they can be subject to
sexual predators, kidnappings, and slave labor.
But here thankfully, after a brief glimpse of how things could go
terribly wrong, Pilar Padilla as Maya makes her circuitous way to her older
sister’s house, Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo), in Los Angeles. While it’s a happy reunion, where Rosa has
been sending money all along to the family in Mexico, part of Maya’s interest
now is in finding work, pressuring Rosa to help get her a job working with her
as non-union janitors cleaning a swank high rise professional building filled
with lawyers, financiers, and other high-priced clientele. From the outset, Maya’s corrupt boss Perez,
the malicious and irrepressibly ill-intentioned George Lopez, lays down the
guidelines that he’ll only offer her the job if she’s willing to pay him her
first two month’s wages. On her first
day of work, she meets a helpful friend, Ruben (Alonso Chavez), but also
witnesses Adrien Brody as Sam, a union organizer, in the building attempting to
evade her boss and a couple of security goons, comically resorting to silent
comedy mischief, along with her help, to make his escape. When Sam shows up at Rosa’s door to explain
how wages remain stagnant literally over several decades without the power of a
union, she gives him an impassioned speech about how anyone seen even talking
to a union worker risks their job, how most workers are undocumented and have
extended families back home to support, and how they could never risk
deportation or survive without this job, deriding his talk as just talk, “We, we, when was
the last time you got a cleaning job?,” quickly showing him the
door. While
Some of the better sequences show a behind-the-scenes look at workers talking among themselves about what the union has to offer, where most don’t trust Sam at first, maybe ever, as he is a college educated white guy that doesn’t share common values with them, and more importantly, has nothing at stake, while their lives are constantly at risk, something that is an everyday experience for these workers. While there is clever use of ethnic music throughout, many of the hired extras were Latino immigrant cleaners, including several grassroots union activists as well, often blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, where realism can be indistinguishable from melodrama. Berta (Maria Orellana) a loyal employee for seventeen years is offered the supervisor position, with a raise and health benefits for her family, provided she identify the names of those attending a union meeting, something she refuses to do, so she is ruthlessly fired on the spot by Perez, an act that stirs up the workers, but also brings Maya closer to Sam in what feels like an unnecessary romantic interlude. This pits sister against sister in a search for moral responsibility, where their scenes together are powerful, plumbing the murkier depths of hard work and personal sacrifice, especially when everything goes to hell anyway, where key to the film are Rosa’s impassioned revelations expressed in an unforgettably gripping scene that grabs you by the throat, yet takes place around an ironing board, exasperated by the toll work has taken on her life, as she’s had to support everyone, no questions asked, no days off, having to work unpaid overtime routinely for years, where in a state of furious wrath she exclaims “I hate the whole fucking world! I hate it! I’ve put up with it all my fucking life.” Loach is clear about an imperfect dynamic in play, where the choices are complex, and there are no glorified heroes, but he’s a believer that people working together can solve what are inevitably human problems. Despite that, some of the best scenes in the film reveal the infighting, where the tensions of the underclass are already at a breaking point, but sheer desperation drives some to turn against one another. What’s also interesting is how Loach goes against the grain of common organizing perceptions, where in a struggle for worker’s rights the tactic used by Sam is not to mobilize a strike, which would get the workers fired, but instead the class struggle is advanced by a smart aleck organizer using pranks to personally embarrass the powerful tenants in the building into shaming the cleaning company to pay the janitors a decent wage. We never see workers deciding among themselves the best strategy, as it’s Sam who decides their every move, often contradicting his instructions from union higher ups. It’s not the Eisensteinian ideal, but it’s movingly effective.
Bread and Roses | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out
Loach's first North American film assumes a seriously unironic Latino perspective on the great economic divide. Maya (Padilla) has no sooner been ferreted across the border than the traffickers are seeking to exact their pound of flesh. She escapes and hooks up with sister Rosa (Carrillo), who reluctantly gets her a job as an office cleaner. Intelligent and forthright, Maya becomes involved first with Ruben, a colleague saving for college, then with Sam (Brody), a union activist. Loach's committed progressive agenda commands respect, and the film reminds us how unskilled workers in the States are routinely exploited - and of the extent to which they're ignored by the media in general and Hollywood in particular. Padilla makes a good fist of her first film role; Maya's idealism has an irrepressible flirty, impetuous side. It's a pity, though, that Loach and screenwriter Laverty are less interested in the character's emotional life than in her political education. For the one genuinely gripping dramatic confrontation comes between the two sisters, a searingly intimate argument which overshadows everything else in the movie.
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Over the course of his 30-plus-years-long career, British
film director Ken Loach has carved out a unique and brutally consistent style
of socially committed filmmaking. His protagonists are always society's
outsiders and underdogs; his films are testimonials to the ongoing economic,
class, and cultural struggles. Using his camera a bit like a soapbox, Loach's
films tend to wear their politics on their sleeves. Yet, within his
circumscribed social realism, Loach's films nevertheless locate wonderfully
real characters and heartfelt storylines that create rich narrative universes.
His stories feel honest and his characters' predicaments are always absorbing.
And at all times he keeps the emphasis on the characters by downplaying camera
technique, eschewing showy directorial moves in favor of keeping our attention
focused on the characters and their situations. Bread and Roses is Loach's
first movie set in the
Bread and Roses Zinn Education Project
This is the fictionalized account of episodes in the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles. The film opens with Maya’s harrowing illegal entrance into the United States from Mexico and follows her travails as she secures a cleaning job in a large downtown office building. Perez, the on-site manager for the cleaning contractor, keeps workers in line through incessant haranguing. Maya bristles at this treatment, and is receptive to overtures from the cocky white union organizer, Sam, but her sister Rosa has learned hard lessons in self-preservation and wants no part of a risky union struggle, especially one led by this guy. “‘We, we,’ when was the last time you got a cleaning job?” she demands of Sam early in the film.
The best scenes in Bread and Roses are the tense conversations between workers about whether organizing is worth the risk. Maya’s would-be boyfriend, Ruben, has a law school scholarship waiting, if only he plays it safe and keeps his job. Why would Maya want to endanger her job, Ruben wants to know. She snaps back:
What was it that you said when they fired Teresa [an older woman who worked with them cleaning the office building]? “She looks like my mother.” That’s why I’m doing it. I’m doing it because my sister has been working 16 hours a day since she got here. Because her husband can’t pay for the hospital bills. He doesn’t have medical insurance. …. I’m doing it because I have to give Perez two months of my salary and I have to beg him for a job. I’m doing it because we feed those bastards, we wipe their asses, we do everything for them. We raise their children, and they still look right through us.
Bread and Roses is engaging start to finish and can generate lots of excellent writing and discussion — about treatment of immigrant workers, tensions between immigrant and nonimmigrant workers, risks and benefits of organizing, and many others. But it’s not without its flaws. This is supposed to be a struggle to reclaim workers’ lost dignity, but the organizer, not the workers, decides every union tactic. They may be in meetings together, but Sam does virtually all the talking — deciding every move, making pronouncements about how he is going to “personally embarrass” the new part-owners of the office building. (Someone in Bread and Roses should have criticized him the way the Ramon criticized the organizer in Salt of the Earth.) And the romance between Sam and Maya was a needless and inappropriate — if predictable — insertion by writer/director Ken Loach. But these are not fatal flaws, and this is a valuable film.
By the way, Loach is a prolific filmmaker, under-appreciated in the United States. Two of his films that would make valuable additions to a global studies curriculum are Hidden Agenda, about British repression in Northern Ireland, and Land and Freedom, about the Spanish Civil War.
Bread and Roses Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, April 26, 2001
At its premiere at Cannes last summer, Ken Loach's first American-set movie looked to me like megaphone cinema: a blazing rhetorical assault on the iniquities of white corporate America and its urban peasant class of blacks and Latinos - powerful, but without some of the nuances of humour he was able to contrive in cultures and locations in which he was more at home. I can only say that on a second viewing, Bread and Roses has bloomed into an intensely watchable, deeply felt, terrifically actedÉ and very exciting story of love and politics.
Some may find this last element a little black and white - but from the point of view of the exploited underclass in LA, that teeming capital of the third world, that's probably exactly how politics looks. And Bread and Roses is a virile rebuke to those modernisers and progressivists under the impression that trade unionism is an irrelevance in the new century.
Pilar Padilla plays Maya, a young Mexican woman who is smuggled over the border with a bus full of cowering "wetbacks", her passage paid for by her older sister Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo), who she joins working for a contract cleaning firm in a gleaming office-block in downtown LA. Terrified of being reported to immigration, they and the other illegals submit to exploitation and sexual harassment until they are galvanised by Sam (Adrien Brody), a middle-class Anglo union organiser who co-opts them all into his "Justice for Janitors" campaign. Gradually, Maya falls for the cute, dishevelled Sam.
Loach's movie shows a Los Angeles utterly absent from mainstream Hollywood movie-making: a Los Angeles that does not show up on the conventional cinema radar. It is neither the glamorous world of fictional sex and money, nor the obviously exoticised "criminal" world of the wrong side of the tracks: it is the quotidian world of corporate LA, and Loach shows us how this universe looks if you are part of the service economy.
Loach, and his long-time colleagues, cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, and production designer Martin Johnson, brilliantly show how unsexy the corporate environment is for those without money. The iridescent marble forecourts, the dazzling glass architecture, the burnished steel of the handrails: they are all deeply alienating when you are being paid very little to clean them, or if, as a supplicant hoping for just this sort of job, you are being curtly told to move off the property by a uniformed security guard one millimetre further up this food chain.
As one says to Maya, their uniforms announce them as the Untouchables of whitecollar America, they are the Invisibles. As they hunch by the lifts, gouging irritants and bits of grit out of the elevator door tracks, all the lawyers and accountants simply step over them and look through them, schooled in the taboos of the unacknowledged caste system.
Below stairs, the story is very different. The cleaners are only too visible, terrorised by their watchful supervisor, Perez, a horribly convincing study in bullying from George Lopez, a stand-up comic making a superb debut in a serious role. Writer Paul Laverty gives him a scene of almost unwatchable nastiness in which Perez fires an elderly cleaning woman for being two minutes late for her shift, and refuses to listen to her tearful pleas for mercy - while all the other cleaners look away, ashamed of their failure to intervene. It is a moment of towering, almost Dickensian cruelty. Loach is not afraid to pull the throttle out all the way for moments like these, and the scene works.
Contrary to first impressions, there are subtle moments in Loach's film, genial moments of wit, and tenderness: some looks and smiles. But this is a film with a mission, and its emotional and political register often gets turned up awfully high. Maya rages that the USA is the richest country in the world, and yet won't pay its humblest workers a decent wage. It reminded me of the smug plutocrat in a late 60s New Yorker cartoon: "I feel very proud to live in a country rich enough to have war and peace at the same time." Now in 2001, there's a new spin. It's a corporate culture belligerent enough to have wealth and poverty at the same time.
And could there be a more pertinent, contemporary subject than this? Globalisation is an issue that now exercises the political classes of both left and right: there is hand-wringing across the board at the prospect of a decreasing number of inexorably growing, merging corporations effortlessly pricing local firms out of each and every market and using the mendicant populations from developing nations for a lower wage bill. But if something is seriously to be done about it, is there an alternative to the unsophisticated, démodé business of trade union organisation?
Whatever the answer, Loach has made an engaging, enjoyable and provocative movie about the human injustices of race, sex and class accumulating in the new 21st century order. It's a film with red blood in its veins.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Bread and Roses (2000) Peter Matthews from Sight and Sound, May 2001
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Bread and Roses (2000) | PopMatters Jonathan Beebe
Not
for Ourselves Alone - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Jessica Winter from the Village Voice
Bread and Roses David Perry from Xibaro reviews
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
BREAD AND ROSES - Film Journal International Maria Garcia
Combustible Celluloid Review - Bread and Roses (2001), Paul ... Jeffrey Anderson
Bread and Roses - Movie Martyr Jeremy Heilman
EyeForFilm.co.uk Anhus Wolfe Murray
eFilmCritic Reviews Greg Muskewitz
"Ken
Loach: 'the ruling class are cracking the whip'" Kira Cochrane interview from The Guardian,
BBCi - Films David Wood
'Bread's' message rises above characters - seattlepi.com Sean Axmaker
San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
New York Times A.O. Scott, also seen here: New York Times (registration req'd)
Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 Exhibition Zinn Education Project
SWEET SIXTEEN
Great Britain Germany Spain
The Village Voice [Jessica Winter]
Not another teen movie, though its title might imply it, Sweet Sixteen has the weight of history on its shoulders—not just the millstone of socioeconomic barriers or the noose of cyclical poverty and abuse that Ken Loach so tirelessly explores, but the legacy of the director's own body of work. Plotted as a cemetery, Loach's latest adheres so closely to his long-established narrative pattern—overdetermined case study crowned with a morbid jolt—that viewers might underestimate its wit, empathy, and careful characterizations.
In Greenock, a bleak former shipbuilding village in west Scotland, crime pays—but just enough to, say, buy a trailer for your mom once she's sprung from prison on the eve of your 16th birthday. Impulsive, wary-eyed Liam (Martin Compston) knows his mother took the rap for her boyfriend, Stan (Gary McCormack), a menacing drug dealer. So the kid exacts a rough justice when he pinches Stan's heroin stash and hawks it around town. He breaches the territorial pissings of the local don, who absorbs Liam into his minions but not his mate Pinball (William Ruane), whose insanely enacted jealousy forces Liam into an impossible decision between loyalty and self-interest.
In a remarkably subtle, assured debut performance, Compston
evokes Billy in Loach's Kes and, in the heartbreaking final seaside
shot, Antoine in Truffaut's 400 Blows. The path from youth to adulthood
hardens into a vise for Liam, gripped by an oedipal crisis beyond his
understanding or control, as Loach plumbs the consequences of personal choice
in a context where most choices are already foreclosed, and people's well-earned
anger only turns upon themselves.
Flipside Movie Emporium [Eric
Beltmann]
If Ken Loach's kitchen-sink
characters often feel overly familiar to us -- from Italian neo-realism, from Britain
Nevertheless, I've always been
rather uncomfortable with the clout that Loach ascribes to social determinism,
and his latest slice-of-grim-life, Sweet Sixteen, marks a return to his
gloomy philosophical conviction that our choice of actions are dictated largely
by our class position. Loach here gazes at Liam, a 15-year-old Scottish tough
living in Greenock , a once-prosperous river
town now plagued by population out-migration. Confident, resourceful, and
unexpectedly sensitive, Liam resolves to earn enough money to buy a trailer
home for his mother, as a surprise gift upon her release from prison. Dreaming
that his Mum, his sister Chantelle, and her little son Calum will all live
happily on the riverbank, Liam decides to slink under the wing of a local drug
kingpin, and we follow the consequences of that desperate yet comprehensible
choice. If I admit certain qualms about the way Loach allows Liam to harbor
hopes about better tomorrows only to squash them as illusory, I also hasten to
add that he never resorts to class bias or condescension in order to make his
points. In fact, I'm relieved to say that his characters lack the squealing,
lilting stupidity that has begun to regularly poison those in Leigh's most
recent pictures.
Still, what's great about Sweet
Sixteen isn't its politics but the way everything feels simultaneously
inevitable and spontaneous, especially in terms of the acting and mood. The
plot trajectory relies on a classic template, but Loach treats the genre
elements as if they were fresh -- and in a way, they are, since I can't think
of another film that realistically probes the motivational, emotional, and
psychological dynamics involved with an apprentice mobster and his initiations.
Much of the credit also belongs to the young, scruffy newcomer Martin Compston,
who was 17 when discovered at a school audition. Compston gets inside the
vulnerability and naïve logic that propel every one of Liam's unwise choices,
and we grasp how despair can mutate into resentment, and then into
self-destruction. As Liam nears his 16th birthday, the milestone is more like a
millstone, a reminder that his sweet dreams aren't likely to manifest
themselves in adulthood, especially since society doesn't expect a guy like him
to have any aspirations.
Nitrate Online [Carrie Gorringe]
Slant Magazine Jeremiah Kipp
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
DVD Verdict Erik Harper
Reel.com DVD review [Sarah Chauncey]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Sweet Sixteen Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, October 3, 2002
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
AE FOND KISS…
Ae Fond Kiss . . . Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
I've been remiss in keeping up with Loach, since he's never really been my kind of filmmaker. But his recent Palme d'Or win sort of reminded me that no, I can't ignore the man or his films. Although Ae Fond Kiss . . . features some sharp acting and admirably frank sex scenes (you dirty ol' Trotskyite!), it underscored just why Loach ain't my man. This film could, in fact, be framed as the greatest afterschool special ever made, a flatly declarative social drama about a Pakistani-Brit man and an Irish-Brit woman who defy convention by falling in love. Loach makes sly observations in the details, but most of it is broad strokes, and love triumphs just enough to stave off liberal defeatism (keep fighting the good fight, lads!) while continuing to face enough obstacles to maintain the vital "realism" that's Loach's stock in trade. A film well-suited for glancing half-attention while folding the laundry or picking up around the apartment, which is precisely how I watched it.
Time Out London review Geoff Andrew
When Casim Khan
(Atta Yaqub), a second-generation Pakistani DJ with plans to open his own club,
collects his sister Tahara from school and meets her music teacher, he’s
smitten. Roisin (Eva
Birthistle) is Irish, pretty, bright and – crucially – also interested when
he offers to help move her piano. Things develop apace, and soon Casim’s lying
to his mum to conceal a trip with his lover to Spain; but there he finds he can
no longer hide from Roisin the fact that he’s expected to marry his cousin in
nine weeks’ time, and that, as Muslims, his folks would never accept a ‘goree’
into the family…
Written by regular collaborator Paul Laverty, Loach’s Glaswegian update of the
‘Romeo and Juliet’ theme offers a typically astute analysis of how an otherwise
healthy relationship can be torn, twisted and threatened by all kinds of
external and internal pressures. Clashes arise between individual desire and
family duty, tradition and modernity, young and old, male and female, religion
and rationality, prejudice and pride. The pitfalls of schematism are avoided,
as in all the director’s best work, by the vivid naturalism of the acting, and
while the first half hour or so may provoke feelings of déjà vu (despite a
sexual frankness rare in Loach), the film really takes off when Tahara (Shabana
Bakhsh) rows with her dad (Ahmad Riaz) about her own plans: here, despite
tears of rage, resentment and regret, the clear-eyed assessment of just how
much happiness is at stake ensures that the rest of the movie never loses its
grip.
New
York Movies - Scottish bigots come out in Loach's cross ... Dennis Lim from the Village Voice
Unsubtle from the get-go, Ken Loach's interracial love story opens with sixth-former Tahara (Shabana Bakhsh) defiantly embracing her multiple identities before her entire class: "I'm a Glaswegian Pakistani teenage woman of Muslim descent who supports Glasgow Rangers in a Catholic school." When bullies give her hell for her mouthiness, Yasmin's dreamy brother, DJ and aspiring club owner Casim (Atta Yaqub), steps in—and locks eyes with his sister's pretty music teacher Roisin (Eva Birthistle). This romance between a Scottish Muslim and an Irish Catholic ignites slowly, sweetly, and with rather more exposed skin than you'd expect from Loach.
But once Roisin and Casim go public, almost everyone else is
revealed as a bigot: Disowned for his traitorous relationship with a white
non-Muslim, Casim scraps an arranged marriage with a cousin who's being
imported from Pakistan. A Fond Kiss (named for a Robert Burns ballad)
assigns complementary prejudices to Roisin's side—and Loach plainly relishes
the effortless task of attacking the Catholic establishment for its bonkers
hypocrisy. Roisin is chastised for playing Burns during Mass ("a song
written by a well-known drunken fornicator!"), and her priest refuses to
renew her teaching certificate because of her apparent willingness to shack up
with "any Tom, Dick, or Mohammed." Despite the agreeable lead
performances, it's one of Loach's more forgettable films. Screenwriter Paul
Laverty, a regular Loach collaborator, says he was inspired to write the film
after September 11, but the political dimension is perfunctory and muted.
Still, even at its most rigged, there's always just enough to admire in the
Loach model—a stacked-deck schema mitigated with assiduous empathy, a touch of
humor, and much recognizable human behavior.
Among the many admirers of Robert Burns' mournful 1791 love-song 'Ae
Fond Kiss And Then We Sever' down the centuries was Sir Walter Scott, who
reckoned one section - "Had we never lov'd sae kindly / Had we never lov'd
sae blindly / Never met or never parted / We had ne'er been
broken-hearted" - was "worth a thousand romances." This
sixth collaboration between Loach and scriptwriter Paul Laverty - concluding
their unofficial '
Because their story is a romance that crosses perceived as racial and cultural 'boundaries': Roisin (Eva Birthistle) is a Northern Irish Catholic teaching at a 'faith-based' (i.e. Catholic) school; Casim (Atta Yaqub) is the Scots-born son of Punjabi immigrants. Their relationship faces some daunting obstacles: he's destined for an arranged wedding, while her private life spells trouble when she realises her job depends on obtaining a church certificate attesting to her 'morals.'
Revered as he is around the world as
Laverty's tendency towards melodramatic excess, while not as distracting as in Sweet Sixteen, is more of a problem, however, and in Ae Fond Kiss he stacks the deck a little too firmly against the various forces who are so keen to see the couple 'sever'. On the technical level, it's naggingly paradoxical that a film which so relentlessly encourages us to cheer those who defy expectation and convention should itself adhere so closely to staid, established movie-making styles. Laverty and Loach could perhaps have learned a thing or two from their audaciously transgressive heroine and hero.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
In The Mood For Love James Mottram reviews Ae
Fond Kiss… from Sight and
Sound, March 2004
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
filmcritic.com (Jules Brenner) review [2.5/5]
Kinocite The Wolf
PopMatters (Lester Pimentel) review
Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann, also seen here: MovieFreak [Howard Schumann]
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [3.5/5]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4.5/5]
DVD Talk (Don Houston) dvd review [1/5]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
TICKETS
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Most
anthology films present a handful of directors doing less than their best work,
but Tickets—a three-way collaboration between Ermanno Olmi, Abbas
Kiarostami, and Ken Loach—not only contains some fine filmmaking, it works as a
unified piece. Tickets' three parts take place on the same train on the
same day. Veteran Italian neo-realist Olmi tracks a professor who's having
trouble enjoying the meal in his first-class dining car because he's
preoccupied by thoughts of his beautiful personal assistant, and by a poor
refugee family he can see just beyond the glass coach door. Kiarostami follows
Olmi with a sketch of the strange relationship between a domineering older
woman and the handsome young man who reluctantly looks after her. And Loach
brings up the rear with the most plot-driven film, about three Scottish soccer
fans who encounter Olmi's refugee family and have to make a decision about
whether they can help.
All three
films focus on how small gestures get magnified in a cramped, noisy space. If
someone loses a ticket or won't stop crying, the hassle grows exponentially.
Taken as a complete film, Tickets uses a traveler's discomfort as a
metaphor for how Europe is dealing with its immigration problem. To refugees,
their plight is the single most important thing happening. To everyone else,
they're an inconvenience, spoiling an otherwise pleasant trip.
More vital
than Tickets' theme is how each filmmaker approaches it. Loach goes
after it head-on, dropping his trio of well-meaning working-class knuckleheads
into a naturalistic film heavy on improvised dialogue and tense yelling
matches. Olmi tackles the theme more artfully, in a beautifully lit, elegantly
structured film that flashes backward and forward to show how one man's consciousness
wanders, unable to hold one thought. But Kiarostami's film is the most
remarkable, mainly for how it breaks free of the fixed-camera experiments he's
been dabbling with lately, and uses a style that could almost pass for
conventional, if not for the long, hypnotic shots of clouds and rolling
countryside reflected off multiple windows. As for Kiarostami's story, it's
about an obnoxious, overweight woman who sits where she wants and bickers with
everyone, and the wonder of the film is that she equally represents old-world
Europe and its changing face.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Tickets (2005) Roger Clarke from Sight and Sound, December 2005
Abbas Kiarostami, Ken
Loach and Ermanno Olmi chart the emotional odyssey of six characters over the
course of a railway journey from Austria to Rome.
The idea for Tickets
originated in an informal conversation between producers Carlo Cresto-Dina and
Babak Karimi. But it wasn't until Abbas Kiarostami met his chosen collaborators
Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi that the film's form and narrative premise fell into
place. Though it's tempting to see Loach and Olmi's contributions as mere wings
to the triptych's central piece (indeed, one famous critic ostentatiously left
the screening I attended the minute Kiarostami's section finished), it was Olmi
who came up with the conceit of the train journey, and it's his lustrous and
extraordinarily textured first section that opens the film.
Carlo Delle Piane, a regular in
the films of Olmi's compatriot Pupi Avati, plays an elderly pharmacist
(anonymously dubbed "the professor") experiencing travel chaos in
Austria. He's been away on business but is expected back home in Rome for the
birthday party of his grandson. His scheduled flight has run into problems, but
Valéria Bruni Tedeschi's angel of an Austrian PA (she has golden hair and
appears almost to be floating) has found him a ticket for an intercity train.
He's impressed that she has booked him for two meal sittings in the dining car
so he will be assured a seat for the duration of the journey. Yet some kind of
security crisis seems to be affecting the train. In a scene chillingly
reminiscent of countless World War II-set scenarios, before the journey begins
soldiers and police patrol the station concourse as Tannoys bark German and
German Shepherd dogs nose around. The passengers look confused, intimidated and
a little frightened. There's a scent of madness in the air.
Delle Piane's character bears
precious little resemblance to that other Italian chemist, Primo Levi. With his
fashionable flat cap, neat white beard, rimless spectacles and indignation at
being asked for identity papers by a passing policeman, there's something
absurd about him. And there's a whisper of Visconti's late movies about ageing
and memory in the way he descends into reveries about ethereal blondes. As
Chopin is played in the carriage (a fellow passenger cannot get his CD player
earpiece to operate) the professor tries to write a letter of thanks to Bruni
Tedeschi's PA, which elides, via memories of childhood experiences of music,
into fantastical confessions of romantic attraction. The more he dreams of
girls playing pianos and candlelit dinners with his angel, the more he is given
to little whimsical skips and euphoric gambols. His dainty rejection and then
acceptance of an aperitif is in some sense the 'strawberry moment' of Death
in Venice. The professor confesses in voiceover, to be "daydreaming
like a teenager". Yet here is a man facing old age who cannot even decide
on the way to address his correspondent, relentlessly writing and rewriting his
opening sentence.
What's especially noticeable
about this first section is how Olmi uses sound - the boom of station noise,
overheard music and conversations, babies squalling in corridors, the sometimes
deafening rattle of the train fading in and out of muffled private moments - to
get around the restrictions of space imposed by the train location. But try as
he might, the professor can't help but be drawn back to the reality of the
carriage's night-mirrored window and the army officer (who looks oddly like
Jean-Claude Van Damme, but isn't) sitting scowling opposite him. The soldier
speaks only accented English - the new voice of international imperialism, we
must understand - but his greatest crime is causing a mother to spill her
baby's milk as she hunkers down to feed the child in the crowded corridor
between carriages. As the professor asks the waiter to bring him some warm milk
so he can take it to the mother, and the train staff mop up the spillage, which
looks so much like a puddle of blood, the moment of final resignation comes:
the sleep of old age and the old grown helpless like babies again.
From St. Jerome to the rampaging
rhinocerine Madonna of Kiarostami's central section, which is shot in daylight.
A woman in late middle-age, with white hair and a string of pearls, boards the
train with a host of suitcases gamely carried by a young assistant. She treats
him as a lover, a toyboy, a kept man; but it later transpires that he appears
to be on some form of national service, and that she is a widow on the way to a
memorial service for her army-general husband. Silvana De Santis plays the
woman with sweaty, angry energy; nothing will stand in her way and she will
co-operate with no one she considers beneath her. The young man, played by
Filippo Trojano, has a sad expression and beautiful eyes, which are later
accentuated by the flat lighting Kiarostami deploys when the man is talking to
a young friend of his sister whom he meets in the corridor (and of whom De
Santis' character is jealous). This frontality, this sense of painted
iconography, is homage enough to Kiarostami's late friend Pier Paolo Pasolini
(Kiarostami's charcoal sketch of Pasolini hung in the bedroom of the Rome flat
of the Italian director's muse, Laura Betti, until her death last year).
By the conclusion of this second
segment De Santis and Trojano's characters have rowed and separated. She leaves
the train alone and unaided, but not before one of the best sequences in the
film, which harks back to one of the Iranian director's longstanding obsessions
and involves an argument over mobile phones (Kiarostami considers them a curse
of modernity). The performances in this section are generally the best in the
movie, and the final bust-up between Kiarostami's characters, shot through
Venetian blinds with the reflection of the countryside rushing past, is quite
beautiful.
And so to Ken Loach. His section
does little with the space or the noise of the environment, and concentrates
squarely on character - with a touch of comedy thrown in. His protagonists are
fans of Celtic Football Club: three of them, all young men, travelling to Rome,
like Chaucerian pilgrims, for a Champions League match. They've brought a huge
bag of sandwiches from their Asda workplace to feed themselves along the way.
After one of them gives a sandwich to a young Albanian boy they discover the
lad has stolen a train ticket from them. There is then a moral struggle as the
Scots talk to the family of the boy and have to make a quick decision about
letting them keep the ticket. Is the family genuinely in need, or are they
crooks? With Loach we always know the wisdom of the working man will shine
through, and so it does. The Celtic fans make the right call, and the
fraternity of football fandom gathered at the station in Rome helps the
seemingly fare-dodging trio to evade the police. If Loach delivers easily the
least rich and imaginative section of the film, it's a satisfyingly light
conclusion to Olmi's frightening opening gambit and a welcome return to
normality.
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DVDBeaver.com
[Per-olaf Strandberg]
THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE
BARLEY A- 94
Ireland Great Britain Germany Italy Spain (124 mi)
Twas
hard for mournful words to frame
To break the ties that bound us,
Ah but harder still to bear the shame
Of foreign chains around us.
And so I said: the mountain glen
I’ll seek at morning early
And join the brave united men
While soft winds shake the barley.
—Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830-1883)
A film that’s bound to draw attention to
itself, as it’s a film of ideas wrapped in the blood of brothers-in-arms and
history, as well as a lump in your throat story by Paul Laverty that grabs the
audience from the haunting opening moments and relentlessly never lets go. Following on the trail of John Ford’s The
Informer (1935) and Italian neorealists like Rossellini’s OPEN CITY (1945)
or de Sica’s BICYCLE THIEF (1948), Loach is so superb at painting compassionate
portraits of progressive realism, a wrenching view of ordinary people caught up
in the turmoil of the times, using a fictionalized recreation of a moment in
history that has profound implications on the world we live in today, creating a
style of film that defines intensity.
Set in Ireland in 1920, we see the armed to the teeth British Black and
Tan soldiers not only harassing Irish youth, which might have been tolerated, but
the mainstream professional class as well, bloodying a few noses, using a
bullying style of thuggery that eventually leads to murder. At a local farmhouse that becomes a focal
point of the film, Damien, Cillian Murphy, witnesses the murder of one of his
friends for saying his name in Gaelic instead of English, and after watching
the Black and Tans knock a train conductor senseless for refusing to allow
soldiers to bring their weapons on the trains, he changes his plans from
attending medical school in London and joins up with the Irish Republican Army
where his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) is
already active as a soldier. The story
follows Damien’s path as he and his brother undergo the painful transition from
civilian to soldier, where violence becomes their trademark, which leaves more
than a scar in their anguished souls.
Much like Melville’s portrait of the French
resistance in ARMY OF SHADOWS (1969), these Republicans face an impossible
dilemma, as they’re being rounded up, tortured and killed, all graphically
realized in a few short moments of the film, they’re left with a huge burden on
their shoulders, where the freedom of the country lies in the hands of a bunch
of poor, working class kids, an underfunded rag tag few, or they can face the humiliating
alternative of living the rest of their lives under the brutal dictates of a British
occupation. Loach has already shown us
what the British can do, so what alternative do they have? In one of the more wrenching scenes of the
film, they have to decide what to do when they discover the identity of an
informer, a young kid they’ve known all their lives, as well as his family,
whose real sin is he couldn’t endure the kind of torture the IRA was used to. What to do?
Through a series of raids and ambushes, Damien develops the friendship
of Dan (Liam Cunningham) and Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald), whose brother was killed
earlier at her grandmother’s farmhouse, which comes into play again in another
unforgettable scene when it is burned down by the Black and Tans, leaving
Sinead beaten and bloodied. As we’re being
drawn into this life or death intensity of an unstoppable mayhem and
neverending revenge, a truce is declared.
The Treaty of 1921 is signed by both the Irish and British, which leads
to the withdrawal of the Black and Tan troops, a police force in the hands of
the Irish, but the country will remain under the power of the British – the
terms of peace.
Suddenly the film changes from the fight for
freedom set in the vast green landscapes of the cloudy outdoors, beautifully
captured by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, to the cramped back rooms of a dingy
building where a progressive political discussion ensues, the heart and soul of
the picture, guys in caps and vests arguing vehemently with one another over
the terms of the agreement, exploring questions of history and political
experiences of the working class as if
their lives depended on it, as some feel they are so close to driving the
British out that they’d never forgive themselves if they stopped now, while
others, overwhelmed by the rising body count, welcome the prospects of peace,
believing there are no circumstances under which the British would actually
leave, so withdrawing their troops is a good compromise. Damien and Teddy end up on opposite sides of
the argument and both end up pursuing their goals in their own way, which only leads
to disastrous results. The final shot at
that same farmhouse, the setting where so much of the pain and violence occurs
and a fitting metaphor for Ireland itself, is an extraordinary picture of hurt
and sorrow, as one wonders how much more anguish that farmhouse can endure? The language of the film is in a thick Irish
brogue, a good third of which is incomprehensible, and unlike a few other
working class British films, there are no subtitles, which makes for a
frustrating viewing, as what we can decipher is bold, brash, and at times
poetic, so it might have helped, but this is one of Loach’s most powerful
films, where the initial intensity never lags due to such a strong undercurrent
of staggering realism.
Let me call your attention briefly to Ken Loach's lovely and haunting picture "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," last year's Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, which opens commercially this week in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities. Starring Cillian Murphy as a young Irish medical student drawn into the revolutionary "Troubles" of the early 1920s, "Wind" depicts the brutal backcountry guerrilla warfare that drove the British from Ireland (or most of it, anyway) and then the fratricidal civil war that followed, whose baleful influence on subsequent Irish politics and history remains unresolved.
This is a classic example of Loach's work with his longtime screenwriting
partner Paul Laverty, meaning that it blends colorful scenery -- in this case,
the damp, green lushness of
Click
here to hear my interview with Loach in Salon Conversations,
which may help illuminate the film's appeal, along with its contradictions, in
more depth than I can offer here. He denies any conscious attempt to remind
viewers of the
In 1920 Ireland, Damien O'Donovan (Cillian
Murphy) wants nothing to do with the troubles besetting his homeland, not
even after witnessing the British murder a friend, all because he insisted on
giving them his name in Irish. Damien is a doctor; he can do more good in
From The Informer and Michael Collins to
contemporary tales like Bloody
Sunday, In the Name of the
Father, and Omagh,
there are nearly enough Irish-rebellion movies to make up a film genre.
Certainly the story is familiar in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, as
Damien, Teddy, and the rest of their Irish Republican Army brothers, known as a
Flying Column, wage a guerrilla war against the Brits. But eventually
It is in the reaction to the peace proposal that the film sets itself apart from the many that have come before it. It ceases to be a tale of rebellion against a foreign occupier, becoming instead one of families torn apart. Those who feel that the treaty has sold out the Irish people refuse to give up their weapons, and the story becomes one of broken loyalties, shattered hearts, and civil war that pits neighbor against neighbor, and brother against brother.
Loach famously works chronologically, the story written as he goes along. It's an approach that suits the material exactly. The violence does not have the choreographed look of movie staging, but instead comes across as messy, chaotic, and savage, more realistic than the gloss of typical film warfare. The naturalistic performances add to the verisimilitude, and scenes between Damien and his love, Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald), where they try to catch a stolen moment or two, add to the drama's poignancy.
The large ensemble cast acquits itself well, but the main focus of the drama
is on Damien. Murphy, who broke through in 28 Days Later, and has
lately made noise in Hollywood with roles in Batman Begins and Red Eye, is terrific,
emphasizing Damien's sensitivity, an apparent softness that gives way to steel
once he's made up his mind on an issue. Damien is not a hero in any traditional
sense; certain actions he takes haunt him, but his eyes are the prisms through
which
Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune (link lost)
CANNES, France -- English
director Ken Loach is a leftist filmmaker whose visual and narrative techniques
tend toward the conservative, which makes his film's selection as this year's
Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes film festival an interesting paradox. "The
Wind That Shakes the Barley," directed by Loach from a screenplay by his
frequent collaborator, screenwriter Paul Laverty, personalizes Ireland's war of
independence in its tale of two brothers joined, and then riven, by
revolutionary struggle.
The story begins in 1920. Damien, played by Cillian Murphy, is a young doctor
in training about to head off to London. His older brother, Teddy, played by
Padraic Delaney, helps persuade Damien to join the Irish Republican Army
striking back at the British Black and Tan occupational forces. Civil war,
however, breaks out in the wake of the 1921 treaty that failed to satisfy many
Irish nationalists' idea of self-government. Loach's film, which instills a
sense of dread in the audience as Black and Tan brutalities -- including a
squirm-inducing scene of a man's fingernails being pulled out during interrogation
-- mount against the Irish, eventually finds brother turning against brother.
Last Sunday's selection of "Barley" for the top prize at Cannes
surprised many, even though Loach, 69, has won other Cannes festival prizes
over the years. Critical response to the film, which takes its title from a
Robert Dwyer Joyce ballad, had been mixed. "Were the Brits really quite so
evil and the IRA quite such paragons of political virtue?" wondered Derek
Malcolm of the Evening Standard, summing up many writers' issues with the
picture.
To the kindly, civil-toned Loach, who talked with journalists one sunny day on
a Cannes hotel patio the week before he won the Palme d'Or, such a question
reveals the depth of the "lies" the British have promulgated about
Ireland, as well as its own imperialist abuses.
"Challenge the received wisdom that terrorism was all on one side,"
he says of his film, "and you challenge not only the British state but its
interpretation of history and the idea of the British being the good guys
keeping the wild Irish from fighting each other. You challenge how news is
managed and manipulated. And you challenge the idea the British empire was a
force for good. In England, the man who wants to be the next prime minister,
[chancellor of the exchequer] Gordon Brown, makes speeches where he says we
must not apologize for the British Empire. Well, (a) no one has apologized for
the British Empire. But (b) he should start. When you think of the slavery,
when you think of the massacres, you think of the exploitation across Africa
and India -- the point of the Empire was to get rich off other people's wealth
and other people's labor."
A longtime socialist, Loach doesn't deliver speeches like a firebrand; he's
more like your friendly neighborhood cheese-shop proprietor. But he sees the
Irish nationalist struggle against the British as a universal fight, symbolized
today by the American-led war in Iraq.
"It's one of those stories that's always relevant," he says of
"Barley." The film is "about a colony gaining independence,
which is always relevant. It's about the possibility of creating a socially
just society, which is always relevant. And it's about an illegal army of
occupation, an army sent to terrorize a civilian population with
state-sanctioned terrorism, which could not be more relevant today."
The film was shot in sequence. Loach kept the actors in the dark regarding
their characters' fates. "We'd give them the script in sections, not
necessarily one day at a time but in sections," he says. That way,
"we discover things as we go. It makes it a real adventure when you're
shooting, you know, because nobody knows if they're going to get a bullet!
Which gives an added tension to the battle scenes."
In a climactic confrontation, the love of Damien's life receives a letter
telling her of Damien's execution at the hands of his brother. "The
actress didn't know what was in the letter," Loach says of Orla
Fitzgerald, who plays Sinead. "She knew there was going to be a scene, but
she didn't know what was going to be said. The idea is to enable people to be
as good as they can be.
"But it's not a question of playing tricks on the actors at all. It's just
giving them the freedom to be creative. In the end," Loach says, "the
only test is what's on the screen."
Making waves on the Riviera Sean O’Hagan from the Guardian
Ken Loach's last 'Irish' film, Hidden Agenda
, was the controversial winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1990 . It looked
at the murky world of British intelligence operatives in Northern Ireland, and
incensed, among others, Alexander Walker, the Evening Standard's notoriously
thorny hardline Unionist film critic. Loach's new 'Irish' film is called The
Wind that Shakes the Barley and premieres at Cannes this week; it tackles the
years leading up to the Irish Civil War of 1922, and the fledgling state's
struggle for independence from Britain. The main protagonists are an IRA flying
column who wage a sporadic guerrilla war on the British forces in the shape of
the notorious 'Black and Tans' and 'Auxies' - semi-mercenary soldiers who were
feared and hated in equal measure by the population they terrorised.
Somewhere, one suspects, the late Alexander Walker
must be spinning in his grave. 'In a way, I'm genuinely sorry that Alexander
isn't around,' says scriptwriter Paul Laverty, a soft spoken Scot now domiciled
in Madrid, who has become Loach's main collaborator over the last decade. 'He
loved our previous film, Sweet Sixteen, but, that said, I doubt he would have
approved of this one. I'm sure some sections of the British press will be
lining up to call it an IRA recruitment film but, of course, it's nothing of
the sort.'
In characteristic fashion, Loach and Laverty merge the political and the
personal to highlight the dilemmas ordinary people face when they take up arms.
Cillian Murphy shines as a reluctant recruit who forsakes a medical career to
join the local flying column, and one of the film's subtexts is what happens to
a person's humanity when he commits himself to a violent political struggle.
'I wanted to show that people who have killed, even in the name of a cause
they believe to be honourable like a country's right to self-determination, are
somehow altered,' elaborates Laverty, who before he took up screenwriting,
travelled to war zones and interviewed combatants while working as a human
rights lawyer in Nicaragua in the Eighties. 'Cillian's character, Damien, has
not only to shoot a local spy, but also a young lad for informing, someone he
has grown up with, whose family he knows well. There's a pivotal moment in the
film just before he executes the spy, when he says: "I studied anatomy for
five years and now I'm going to shoot an old man in the head." Those are
the sort of dilemmas these kind of citizen armies faced all the time.'
The Wind that Shakes the Barley is Loach's most epic flm since Land and
Freedom, his Spanish Civil War drama, and, like it, occasionally becomes bogged
down in political rhetoric. If the first half shows the human cost of violent
revolution, the second highlights the schisms within the Irish republican
movement after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. This is where the
narrative loses pace, and there are one too many debates about the political
nature of the new republic, and just how socialist it should be.
Laverty insists that these scenes are crucial, and, indeed, admits that
there were many more of them before Loach edited his original script. 'The
biggest challenge is always how to merge the political and historical with the
intimately personal, but I believe you can't shy away from the bigger issues
here. The one big issue that runs through the film is the question that all
these guys are asking themselves continuously : "What are we fighting for,
and is it worth the cost?" They have killed, and risked their own lives,
for this ideal, and you have to illustrate in their words what it means to
them.'
For all these reasons and more, The Wind that Shakes the Barley will almost
certainly be another Ken Loach film dogged by controversy, both here and in
Ireland, where the 1916 Easter Rising against Britain has just been celebrated
for the first time in 40-odd years - an attempt to reclaim the Republican ideal
from Sinn Féin and the current IRA. 'It will raise passions, that's for sure,'
says Laverty in conclusion, 'but anything that confronts
If we
knew more about Ireland, we might never have invaded Iraq George Monbiot in the Guardian
Loach's film about the Irish independence war is being rubbished
because it tells the other side of the occupation story.
That they have not seen his film is no impediment. That it
has won the Palme d'Or at
In the Times, Tim Luckhurst compares him - unfavourably - to Leni Riefenstahl. His new film is a "poisonously anti-British corruption of the history of the war of Irish independence ... The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not just wrong. It infantilises its subject matter and reawakens ancient feuds." I checked with the production company. The film has not yet been released. They can find no record that Luckhurst has attended a screening - and last night he refused to discuss the matter.
At least Simon Heffer, writing in the Telegraph, admits he doesn't know what he's talking about. Loach, he says, "hates this country, yet leeches off it, using public funds to make his repulsive films. And no, I haven't seen it, any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was." The Sun says it's "a brutally anti-British film ... designed to drag the reputation of our nation through the mud". Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Mail pronounced it "old-fashioned propaganda" and "a melange of half-truths". She hasn't seen the film either. Nor, it seems, has Michael Gove, who told his readers in the Times that it helps to "legitimise the actions of gangsters".
Are these people claiming that events of the kind Loach
portrays did not happen? Reprisals by members of the Royal Irish Constabulary
and the Auxiliary division are documented by historians of all political
stripes. During the period the film covers (1920-21), policemen visited homes
in places such as Thurles,
It is also clear that some of these attacks were sanctioned
by senior officers and politicians. In June 1920, in the presence of the
commander of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the force's divisional commissioner
in Munster (Colonel GB Smyth) told his men: "You may make mistakes
occasionally and innocent people may be shot but that cannot be helped ... The
more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you no policeman will
get in trouble for shooting any man." He advised that "when civilians
are seen approaching, shout "Hands up!" Should the order be not
immediately obeyed, shoot and shoot with effect. If the persons approaching
carry their hands in their pockets, or are in any way suspicious looking, shoot
them down." Sir Henry Wilson, the director of operations in the War
Office, complained that he had warned his minister - Winston Churchill - that
"indiscriminate reprisals will play the devil in
Loach's hero, Damien, as many Irishmen were, is radicalised
by a raid by the Black and Tans, who were members of the constabulary recruited
from outside
There is no question that the IRA also killed ruthlessly - not just police and soldiers but also people they deemed to be informers and collaborators. But Loach shows this too. (I have seen the film.) The press hates him because he admits that the people who committed these acts were not evil automata, but human beings capable of grief, anger, love and pity. So too, of course, were the British forces, whose humanity is always emphasised by the newspapers. Ken's crime is to have told the other side of the story.
The other side - whether it concerns
Does it matter what people say about a conflict that took
place 85 years ago? It does. For the same one-sided story is being told about
the occupation of
In March Jody Casey, a US veteran of the war in Iraq, told
Newsnight that when insurgents have let off a bomb, "you just zap any
farmer that is close to you ... when we first got down there, you could
basically kill whoever you wanted, it was that easy". On Sunday another
veteran told the Observer that cold-blooded killings by US forces "are
widespread. This is the norm. These are not the exceptions." There is
powerful evidence to suggest that US soldiers tied up and executed 11 people -
again including small children - in Ishaqi in March. Iraqi officers say that US
troops executed two women and a mentally handicapped man in a house in
Even the Iraqi prime minister, who depends on coalition
troops for his protection, complained last week that their attacks on civilians
are a "regular occurrence ... They crush them with their vehicles and kill
them just on suspicion." But like the Black and Tans the
Why should we be surprised by these events? This is what
happens when one country occupies another. When troops are far away from home,
exercising power over people that they don't understand, knowing that the
population harbours those who would kill them if they could, their anger and
fear and frustration turns into a hatred of all "micks" or
"gooks" or "hajjis". Occupations brutalise both the
occupiers and the occupied. It is our refusal to learn that lesson which allows
new colonial adventures to take place. If we knew more about
Ken
Loach: Cinema's own Red Ken Cahal
Milmo from The Independent May 30, 2006
The
factory worker's son from Nuneaton has crowned
a 40-year career by winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes
There is a scene in Ken Loach's latest film, The Wind That Shakes the
Barley, in which two brothers fighting for the IRA discuss the overwhelming
numerical superiority of the British Army. One says to the other: "So what
are you going to do? Take on the
One by one, the factory worker's son from
It was therefore unsurprising that when the left-wing firebrand - a mild,
bespectacled figure - stood before a glittering audience of the film world's
great and good on Saturday night to receive the Palme d'Or at
Gripping his prize for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which takes its title from an Irish folk song, Loach said: "Our film is about a little step, a very little step, in the British confronting their imperialist history, and if we tell the truth about the past, maybe we [can] tell the truth about the present."
It was the eighth time that Loach had been nominated for the Cannes Film Festival's top award but the first time he had won it, beating 19 other contenders in a shortlist dominated by films about war.
Cinephiles pointed out yesterday that the most high-profile award of Loach's
career (he has never been nominated for an Oscar or won a Bafta) came from a
festival on mainland
The nine-strong celebrity jury, including Samuel L Jackson, Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Roth, were unanimous in their decision about the film, which tells the tale of two brothers who join the IRA in the fight against the brutal militia of the Black and Tans in 1920. Bonham Carter said: "It was absolutely shattering. It hit us all profoundly. It was one of five films about war and it was a fantastic education about the Irish problem. There was a tremendous humanity."
It is not an uncommon reaction to a film by Loach, who regularly has to put up with his work being mistaken for that of fellow British master of realism, Mike Leigh. Strangers approach Loach to congratulate him on making Abigail's Party (while apparently Leigh grins politely when thanked for making Kes).
All of which makes the sight of Loach at Cannes, walking along the Croisette amid the cast of The Da Vinci Code or being photographed on a beach scattered with pneumatic blondes, if not downright incongruous, then at least an elegant contrast.
As if to prove the point, the grandfather who operates from a cramped office
in
Which is precisely where Loach believes it should be, with all the tender humour and grimy suffering he can physically muster. From the exploitation of the Latino population by rich Los Angeleans (Bread and Roses, 2000), to the economic struggle of working-class British families (Raining Stones, 1993), to the hitherto unnoticed plight of homeless runaways (Cathy Come Home), the director has developed a modus operandi for telling the stories of those he believes have no voice. As one prominent producer put it: "Most directors make films they think people will want to see. Ken makes films that he thinks people should see and damn the consequences."
Critics argue, with some justification, that there is a pedagogical element to Loach's films that can be wearing for those not as engrossed in the subject matter as the director.
Anthony Quinn, film critic of The Independent, comments: "Loach is a
film-maker whose success one is pleased for without necessarily feeling a
passionate admiration of his work. His cinema of parable and polemic can
sometimes be heavy going, and certain ventures outside
Such an earnest oeuvre is also at odds with Loach's first brush with showbiz. His first job was as an understudy in a cabaret show starring Kenneth Williams and he appeared on stage at university with Dudley Moore.
Born in 1936, Loach does not shy from underlining his working-class lineage.
His father was an electrician at a factory in
It was while he was at
After a 20-year hiatus in the 1970s and 1980s, during which he was reduced to making beer adverts for Saatchi and Saatchi, Loach suddenly found himself back in vogue in the 1990s and produced a string of low-budget films which have not made him rich but at least won him plaudits. In the process, he has ditched Labour and Tony Blair ("he's destroyed the party") and lent his support to the Socialist Workers' Party.
But experience shows that efforts to paint Loach as a dour realist with a messianic zeal to raise the portrayal of proletarian toil to an art form often fall on stony ground. For a start, his films are more free-form than many would imagine. He does not tell his actors how their characters will develop, or indeed what happens in the end until the denouement is filmed itself.
In Kes, probably Loach's best-known film, which tells the tale of a boy who befriends a falcon, the actor playing the boy believed the bird used in the filming had been killed for the final scene in which he discovers its death. In fact, a dead kestrel had been substituted for the live bird.
Similarly in Raining Stones, the actress playing a mother visited by a pair of particularly unpleasant loan sharks was not told her wedding ring would be ripped off her hand as part payment for her character's debts.
Surprise and integrity are thus at the core of Loach's purpose in life - as well as having a poke at authority whenever the opportunity arises. When asked whether he considers The Wind That Shakes the Barley to be "anti-British", he said: "This isn't a film about the Brits bashing the Irish. You can argue that we have a responsibility to attack the mistakes and brutalities of our leaders, past and present. Far from being unpatriotic, it is a duty we cannot ignore."
In other words do not expect the words "directed by Ken Loach" to appear at a multiplex on the poster for a blockbuster romantic comedy any time soon.
The title of Ken Loach's latest movie, The Wind That
Shakes the Barley, could make you think he'd shot a landscape film; and so
he did, in a sense, since the most common image in the picture is a spacious
view of the rolling green Irish countryside around Cork, with armed men
sneaking through its folds. The setting is rural, except for brief forays into
town. The period is 1920-22: years when the Irish Republican Army fought
against British forces and then against its former comrades, who had accepted
the compromise of the
This being a Loach film, written by his frequent collaborator
Paul Laverty, you can expect real historical debate from it, if not a full
historical synopsis. When the treaty of 1921 is signed with
But even during this talky climax, The Wind That Shakes the Barley has the rhythm peculiar to landscape films. The seasons go through their cycle; violence recurs (sometimes in exactly the place where you saw it before); and, in the debate scene, a line of reasoning you'd heard early in the film comes back again, this time used against the man who had first advanced it.
He is Damien O'Donovan (Cillian Murphy), a medical student
who had intended to turn his back on the Republican cause and go to
In outline his story is simple, and awful too. Damien joins a
band of Republicans (having seen no alternative) and so is drawn into actions
that may be necessary but tear at his soul. "I studied anatomy for five
years, to shoot a man in the head. I hope this
In fact, he loses everything. And Loach persuades you that Damien was right.
You see how The Wind That Shakes the Barley might have oppressed you. Or it might have made you groan at melodramatic complications, since the milieu is tiny and most of its characters have known one another forever. (You sense their intimacy in every scene, even though the back stories are scrupulously unrecounted.) That's why the landscape feels so important. The film needs an element that's lovely, abiding and indifferent to lend it a higher sort of fatalism. The merely human kind is represented by a bonneted grandmother who won't leave her native cottage even after the British have burned it. "I'll clean the chicken coop," she insists, prompting Sinead (and perhaps you) to wail, "I don't want to end up like her! I want to have somethin' in my life!"
The film also needs an actor who can seem as natural and open as the landscape. So it has Murphy--a brilliant performer, but indelibly odd. In long shot, with his big round head overhanging a skinny frame, he seems like the live-world equivalent of Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas. In close-up (which Loach avoids), he arrests you with his icy eyes, carved cheeks and pushed-out baby lips. Just through his physical presence, Murphy will stand out in any role he's given: a mad psychiatrist in Batman Begins, a hit man in Red Eye, a heroic transvestite in Breakfast on Pluto. But here, despite appearing in almost every scene, he somehow blends in with the surroundings. Murphy leads the cast while being completely one with it. He plays Damien to the core without indulging in a single moment of acting. I think he's beyond praise.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley won the Palme d'Or at
last year's
Our Time of Troubles: Ken Loach on War, Irish History, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley Damon Smith from Bright Lights Film Journal, May 1, 2007
'I have my sleeves rolled up and I'm ready' | Film | The Guardian Fiachra Gibbons interviews Loach from the Guardian, May 17, 2006
Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Between Productions [Robert Cashill]
World Socialist Web Site Paul Bond
The Wind that Shakes the Barley Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
The Wind That Shakes The Barley Geoffrey Macnab at Cannes
DVD Outsider Slarek
Film Journal International (Maria Garcia)
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
Slant Magazine [Jeremiah Kipp]
Flipside Movie Emporium [Rob Vaux]
The
Wind That Shakes the Barley | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule)
ReelTalk [Donald Levit] one of the more defiantly negative reviews out there
Chicago Tribune review Michael Wilmington
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert)
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
IT’S A FREE WORLD…
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
British filmmaker Ken Loach might have won the Palme d’Or
for a historical war drama (and one in which the Brits were on the loosing
side, too), but he will most likely be remembered years from now for his
socially committed films. With his latest, the Venice Competition entry It’s
a Free World…, the director again collaborates with screenwriter Paul
Laverty and revisits several themes of his organic oeuvre for his story of illegal
immigrant workers in
Laverty starts off strong with a sequence that introduces
us to feisty Londoner Angie (newcomer Kierston Wareing), just days before she
is fired from the recruitment agency where she works, an ironic twist of fate
that drives Angie to set up her own agency for foreign labourers with her best
friend and flatmate Rose (Juliet Ellis). Though swearing to do everything
legally as soon as they have made some money, things quickly go from bad to
worse as Angie slips into exploiting the very people she initially wanted to
help, with Rose relegated to the Jimminy Cricket role of her conscience.
Laverty and Loach’s decision to approach the lives of immigrant workers in the
English capital through the eyes of a London native who gives them work seems
like a fresh take on the familiar tales of difficult or even desperate
conditions of immigrant workers both legal and illegal, but their choice of
Angie, a bike-riding blonde bombshell, for a protagonist seems misguided and miscast.
Wareing is certainly an attention-grabber and lights up the
screen with her presence, but her range extends little beyond being a spunky
eye-catcher. Angie’s transformation from laid-off worker to entrepreneur and
do-gooder to ruthless exploiter of immigrants is difficult to swallow, and she
is not aided in this respect by Laverty’s script, which seems to take the fact
that she will be blinded by the money once she has it in her pocket for
granted, without any second thoughts and no further trace of her compassion.
The various themes treated here have surfaced in some of
Loach’s previous works, including Bread and Roses about Mexican
immigrants in the US; Ae Fond Kiss about second-generation immigrants in
Scotland and The Navigators, about railway workers fighting against
privatisation. In this sense, the film deepens the organic Loach oeuvre with a
new entry that crystallises some of the ideas that have floated around in his
previous work, though It’s a Free World… (note the three punctuation
marks of hesitation at the end) is not as nuanced as any of these films, using
Angie not so much as the emotional anchor of the film but rather as a -- in
this case rather good-looking -- example of how rotten society is. Because of
this, the film lacks the emotional involvement that allowed the messages of
films like The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Ae Fond Kiss to
register not only in the brain but also in the heart.
It’s a Free World… was shot on location
in Poland, Ukraine and the UK, though the foreign locations add little spice
and the use of local actors (including the affable Polish actor Leslaw Zurek as
a one-night stand of Angie’s) feels equally unexploited. Cinematography by
Nigel Willoughby is unusually luminous without resorting to artificial lighting,
echoing his work on the French comedy Comme t'y es belle! In this free
world things might be ugly, but at least it’s sunny.
It's a Free World . . . Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Moving Pictures Magazine [Elliot V. Kotek]
Screen International Geoffrey Macnab
LOOKING FOR ERIC B 85
Great Britain France Italy Spain Belgium (116 mi) 2009
“I am not a man.
I am Cantona.” —Eric Cantona
The expression “What the fuck” had to have been used hundreds of times
in this film, giving you an idea what to expect going in, as this is another
example of Loach social realism with a comic twist. Certainly one of his more entertaining and
accessible films, this has a mix of suicide, self loathing, camaraderie,
pronounced drug use, a strange and mysterious love story, one of the more
dysfunctional family dramas around, and some clever use of fantasy that
actually turns this into an optimistic sweet natured weepie. Hard to fathom, as the film, like Loach’s
others, is centered with the same kitchen sink miserablism among the lower classes,
where nothing ever seems to go right, as when you’re living in tenement housing
at the bottom of the barrel, you never seem to catch a break. Steve Evets as Eric Bishop is one of the
least likely movie leads in history, as he’s not so good looking, swears like a
sailor who hasn’t been house broken, and smokes marijuana on a regular basis,
usually when he talks to himself and his fantasy friend, soccer legend Eric
Cantona who plays himself in the film, using a mix of untranslated French and
broken English. Their conversations
become a humorous crisis of consciousness theme, where Cantona becomes the
voice of his alter ego, a bit like a comedy act with a man on the telephone
doing both parts. Bishop becomes mired
in the absolute completeness of his own ineptitude, continually suffering from
crisis after crisis, breaking into his best John Cleese “losing it” routine,
muttering profanities at anyone in the vicinity.
Initially one thinks Eric is running a home for wayward youth, as his
home appears to be filled with idle boys sleeping well past noon while hidden
under blankets, where Eric wonders where it all went wrong for him, quizzically
engaging a life-sized Eric Cantona poster on his wall in conversation while
puffing on a homemade joint. Miraculously,
Cantona appears like an apparition (“Say something in French then”), offering a
few candid suggestions to start getting his life in order, where Bishop’s real
life surprisingly improves almost immediately, gaining a little backbone,
standing up for himself for a change.
Over time, we hear the sad story of his life which started as the
happiest day of his life, when he (Matthew McNulty as a young lad) and a girl
named Lily (Laura Ainsworth as a young girl) won a rock n roll dance contest,
falling in love, but losing her quickly after marriage, falling deeply in a
quagmire of panic attacks and depression that felt like an open sinkhole
falling ever deeper. Opening a chest of
memories that hasn’t been open for years, with the help of Eric Cantona, Bishop
slowly realizes he can face his fears.
Of course, in the process, we get all that hero worship stuff out there
where Bishop enthusiastically describes a series of Cantona’s greatest shots,
followed by blown up replays of him scoring goals, but Cantona’s greatest
memory is of a pass, which is a magnificent set up for a teammate (“You must trust your teammates, always.”).
This
may as well be the theme of the movie, that teammates matter, and in the
darkest hours when faced with the enormity of what feels like insurmountable
problems, it’s important to remember there are others that can help you find
your way. This is a fairly old-fashioned
social context, that people matter, that humans can help other humans, and that
it’s part of our calling in life.
It turns out Bishop’s second wife left him and he’s living with two
insolent stepsons, one still a teenager while the other has gotten himself into
a jam holding a gun for a “friend” that we later see punching him around on the
street, a guy who turns out to be a gangster ex-con who uses that gun on people
who happen to disagree with him.
Interesting that both father and son are using illegal means to survive,
where each has to find their own way out.
Bishop continues to be plagued by his own abandonment of the love of his
life, a woman (Stephanie Bishop) whose name he can’t even say out loud, as he’s
a walking testament to his own shame.
But they share a grown daughter together who needs babysitting help from
each parent for their grandchild, bringing them unexpectedly together after the
passage of nearly twenty years. Needless
to say, the film is fraught with personal difficulties that consume the lives
of nearly everyone we see, where people eventually lose sight of taking
responsibility, which may as well be a foreign concept when one is overwhelmed
by it all. But what saves this film from
being maudlin or like any other is the brilliance of the working class humor,
which finds its way into every inconceivable situation, where utter absurdities
reveal themselves to be a constant reminder of just how hopeless we are as a
human species, yet somehow we survive, and with a little luck, have a few
friends to share some of our memories with.
While not exactly a picture post card walk down memory lane, this film
is not ashamed to highlight human misery and the havoc it plays in people’s
lives, but it refuses to leave it there.
Somewhat unorthodox in its use of Eric Cantona, but his legendary no
nonsense personality has an infectious way of creeping into what matters
onscreen, as he’s a guy that evokes utter sincerity. Hardly bashful, this is a hard won charmer
that struggles through its relationships and earns its final tears of warmth
and humanity, a glimpse of a world where the people in it finally matter.
LOOKING FOR ERIC is one of the best films I
have seen this year. It has everything - by turns laugh-out-loud funny and
desperately sad - beautifully acted - utterly authentic - a middle-aged rom-com
and a telling depiction of life in modern
The core of the film is a brilliant performance
by Steve Evets as Eric Bishop, a middle-aged post-man on the edge of a nervous
breakdown. He abandoned his beloved first wife, Lily, thirty years ago and is
still riddled by shame. His second wife has abandoned him, leaving him with two
surly teenage stepsons, entangled in gun-crime. In desperation, his
sub-conscious summons up Eric Cantona - an inspirational leader who will give
him the courage to re-connect with Lily and save his sons, chiefly by holding
onto his friends and "trusting his team-mates".
The resulting film is a marvel of tight and
courageous scripting. Writer Paul Laverty doesn't shy away from grief, or from
bawdy British working-class humour. Somehow, the sentimental scenes never seem
schmaltzy, the dramatic scenes never seem unrealistic or forced and the
political commentary is handled lightly. Most impressively, Ken Loach had so
carefully entwined the peril and the fantasy elements that I utterly bought
into the rather fantastic and cathartic denouement.
Overall, LOOKING FOR ERIC is a wonderful and
memorable film. People who don't know about soccer, or about Cantona, need not
shy away from it. It's a deeply human, warm, dark, film. If I see a better
movie this year, I'll be very surprised.
Whisper
Mag Review [Philippa Wheeler]
Looking for Eric kicks off with the sad story of postman Eric,
played by Steve Evets, watching his life slip away bit by bit. He turns to his
ultimate hero, football legend Eric Catona - who appears mysteriously in the
postie's life offering inspiration, life tips and plenty of touching yet blokey
shoulder to cry on. After a spliff and a beer Cantona offers good natured,
enthusiastic, but slightly bold advice on how to turn his life around one step
at a time.
Struggling to keep his sanity whilst looking after his two stepsons, Eric battles
to keep his job and must also face Lily (Stephanie Bishop), the love of his
life and mother of his daughter - the woman his walked out on years ago,
too scared to face up to his responsibilities.
Cantona helps Eric to face his demons and stand up to his ungrateful children.
The eldest, involved with a wannabe gangster, turns to Eric for help. Unable to
turn to the police, he does the next best thing in British football culture,
and turns to his buddies, most of whom are fellow postmen. Without revealing
the climax, it involves a vast amount of Eric Cantonas and a threat unlike any
other: "I’ll find you - because I am a postman".
The movie's based and shot entirely in
Original and quirky - and bubbling over with the heartwarming nostalgia that a
recession demands - it's not surprising that Looking for Eric won much critical
acclaim in Cannes, And even better, it's exactly the kind of film your dad
would absolutely love, and most likely declare: ‘I must buy this on video
immediately’!
Art-house
Crowd Pleaser: Loach Lightens Up with “Looking for Eric” Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 18, 2009
In 2006, British director Ken
Loach won Cannes’ top prize with a bracing chronicle of the Irish Republican
Army’s struggles against the British in the 1920s. Three years later, he’s come
up with a film that couldn’t be more different in tone and subject matter - a
lighthearted dramatic comedy about a distraught middle-aged postal worker, Eric
Bishop, who gets his groove back by channeling his favorite soccer hero, Eric
Cantona, the legendary French star of UK team Manchester United.
Comparisons to Woody Allen’s
“Play it Again, Sam” are inevitable, as Cantona magically appears in the
postman’s bedroom one day, offering advice along with his trademark aphorisms.
Cantona isn’t Bogart, of course, but knowledge of the famous footballer isn’t
necessary to enjoy the conceit or the version of himself he plays on screen: A
suave macho man who serves a similar spirit-boosting purpose.
Still, Loach and screenwriting
partner Paul Laverty continue to work in their familiar social
realistic-kitchen sink mode. Bishop lives in a cramped, cluttered multi-level
flat, with his step-sons, bad-seed Ryan and the younger black Jess, both of
whom appear out of control. His second-wife left him seven years before and
he’s never dealt with the fact that he abandoned the first love of his life, Lily,
shortly after the birth of their daughter Sam.
But Loach and Laverty choose to
depict Bishop’s depression in mostly comic terms: A couple of hilarious early
sequences show Bishop’s friends at the post office trying to cheer him up. In
an excellent bit, the working class lads - with names like Spleen and Meatballs
- turn to corny self-help exercises in order to raise Bishop’s self-esteem. One
in which they envision someone they respect - in Bishop’s case, Cantona - is
what brings the soccer player into Bishop’s reality.
The film’s heart belongs to the
tentative reconciliation between Bishop and Lily, former rock n’ roll dancing
partners in their younger years. To the script’s discredit, this emotional
resolution happens too easily. On the other hand, an unexpected plot twist
involving a handgun and a hundred guys wearing Eric Cantona masks suggests that
Loach and Laverty may be just as much interested in the joys of comedy and
vindication than the struggles of overcoming past misdeeds.
It’s a refreshing shift from the
sometimes overt class-conscious sermonizing found in previous Loach outings;
the only scenes that come close to such politics are a debate about a
corporate-sponsored soccer team that’s sold out to the highest bidder - still
handled humorously - and the fact that poor Bishop is too poor to get tickets
to his beloved soccer matches, the one place, he says, where you could “forget
all the shit in your life for just a few hours.” It’s a defter handling of
social issues than we’ve seen from Loach in a long time.
Indeed, “Looking for Eric”
belongs less to the tradition of hard-hitting British dramas that frequent
Cannes and increasingly more along the lines of the sort of slight
crowd-pleasing fare that does well in U.S. art-houses. And although Cantona may
be less known in America than overseas, there’s no denying the comic fun of
seeing a burly sportsman put on some rock n’ roll and cut a rug with another
man.
The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sukhdev Sandhu, June 11, 2009
For five decades
now Ken Loach has been such a brilliant scourge of class oppression that’s he
almost become a victim of his success. For unsympathetic critics, he’s “Red
Ken”, an earnest worry-wart more committed to socialism than to entertainment.
That ignores the
ribald humour that gives grit to all his dramas. It also ignores a film like
Kes (1969) whose soccer-pitch sequence, in which Brian Glover’s pompous PE
teacher is so obsessed with living out his dreams of being Bobby Charlton that
he clobbers any pupil in his way, ranks among the funniest in all of British
cinema.
Looking For Eric
is also a film about football and about obsession. Written by long-time
collaborator Paul Laverty, it follows postal worker Eric Bishop (Steve Evets)
as his life spirals out of control. His second wife has left him, and his
teenage stepsons (one of whom, interestingly uncommented on, is black) are both
sullen and wild.
He’s always knackered,
has taken to hiding undelivered mail in a cupboard, and now desperate to get
back with first wife Lily (Stephanie Bishop) who he hasn’t seen in the twenty
years since he inexplicably ditched her.
Eric needs help.
He gets it partly from his mates at work, among them the terrifically named
Spleen (Justin Moorhouse), Smug (Smug Roberts) and Meatballs (John Henshaw).
Partly from a spliff (unexpectedly for a director whose values were defined
long before the 1960s, the drugs definitely do work in this film). Most of all,
his shot at redemption comes from Eric Cantona.
Yes, in a move as
playful as any he’s ever pulled, Loach has entered Fantasy Football terrain,
drawing on the philosophically-inclined French midfielder and occasional
kung-fu maestro to act as little Eric’s life coach. He dispenses advice. Goes
jogging with him so that he can get into shape before re-wooing Lily. Blows a
trumpet. Is he real, or just a weed-enhanced chimaera? And will he succeed in
helping the father turned fan-boy make up for all his lost years?
The film was
originally conceived by Cantona and his brothers. The storyline has been
considerably rejigged and recrafted by Loach and Laverty so that, though it
doesn’t dwell on the Crystal Palace incident and short-shrifts the Frenchman’s
run-ins with various coaches, it doesn’t feel at all like a vanity project.
Cantona may be
legendary, but this isn’t a film about celebrity. Rather, in an era of WAGS and
roasting scandals, of Premier League players earning more money in a week than
their predecessors did during their careers, Loach (a long-time Bath FC fan) a
wants to stick up for the idea that football is as much a social relationship
between those on the pitch and those in the stands as it is a spectacle.
Near the end of a
glorious montage scene showing many of Cantona’s most spectacular goals, he
tells the postman that his proudest moment was actually an impossibly daring
pass allowing Denis Irwin to score. Whether he truly believes that is beside
the point: the very notion that a pass could be as career-defining and valuable
as a goal may well be the most casually forceful illustration of Loach’s belief
in the importance of collectivity as any he has produced in his career.
Cantona, placed in
the tricky position of playing a version of himself, is perfectly fine.
Inevitably, he’s bulkier than in his prime. His accent is a little thicker
perhaps. But, a decade after he retired, he’s lost none of his presence. It’s
hard to imagine any English midfielders around whom future British directors
will want to create film projects. Joey Barton? Robbie Savage?
Evets is an
endearing lead, a rumpled and less gangly version of John Cooper Clarke. It’s
easier to identify with him than most men in romantic comedies these days, and
Bishop too is grounded and personable.
The film falters
in the home stretch, as it tries to mesh its whimsical premise to a more
conventional dramatic sub-plot involving a local gangster who has been
victimizing little Eric’s stepson. Loach has always been better at depicting
the wickedness of economic systems than of individuals.
Still, this is
Loach and Laverty’s sunniest film to date, a knees-up weekender after the
solemnity of The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006) and It’s A Free World
(2007). And no, it doesn’t explain the sardines quote.
Digital
Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Critic's
Notebook [Alex Beattie]
Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) review [3.5/5]
Eye for
Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4.5/5]
Global
Comment [Mark Farnsworth]
FilmExposed
review Robert
Monk
Looking
For Eric Fionnuala Halligan at Cannes from Screendaily
Little White
Lies magazine Ellen E. Jones
Urban
Cinefile (Australia) Andrew L. Urban
and Louise Keller
Cannes
'09: Day Six Mike D’Angelo at
Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club
Shadows on the Wall (Rich Cline) review
Movie Vortex [Michael Edwards]
ScreenComment [Saideh Pakravan]
Cannes
'09: Day Six Mike D’Angelo from
The Onion A.V. Club, May 19, 2009
James Rocchi Cannes Diary Two from MSN, May 18, 2009
Cannes.
"Looking for Eric" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC
Blog, May 18, 2009
Robert Chalmers
The big match: What happened when 'good socialist'
Ken Loach met Eric Cantona, a legend of one of the world's richest football
clubs? The Robert Chalmers interview of Ken Loach
and Eric Cantona from The Independent,
April 19, 2009 (
More
pictures)
Eric
Cantona's new Cannes-do attitude
Paul Kendall interviews Eric Cantona from The Telegraph U.K., May 14, 2009
Hollywood Reporter Stuart Kemp interviews director Ken Loach, May 17, 2009
Fabien Lemercier interviews
Loach at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 18, 2009
Ray Bennett at Cannes
from The Hollywood Reporter, May 18,
2009
Derek Elley at Cannes from
Variety, May 18, 2009
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [5/6] at Cannes
Peter Bradshaw Nice assist from Cantona but Loach's Looking for
Eric fails to lift the Cannes cup, at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2009
James Christopher
Looking for Eric at the Cannes Film Festival, from The Times Online, May 18, 2009
Derek Malcolm Cantona plays himself well in Looking For
Eric, from The London Evening Standard, May 18,
2009
Independent.co.uk
- First Night: Cannes [Geoffrey Macnab]
at Cannes, may 19, 2009
Independent.co.uk
[Jonathan Romney]
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5]
Eric
Cantona hails Ken Loach Anita Singh
from The Telegraph U.K., May 19,
2009
Cantona
takes centre stage Ed Smith from The Telegraph U.K., May 19, 2009
The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Mike McCahill
The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sukhdev Sandhu, May 18, 2009
The Irish Times review [3/5] Donald Clarke
Cannes
'09 Day 6: Ken Loach = hit? Wesley
Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe,
May 18, 2009
ROUTE IRISH
Great Britain France (109 mi) 2010
CANNES REVIEW | Baffling Biopic: Lodge Kerrigan’s “Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs)” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 21, 2010
Ken Loach’s “Route Irish” may suffer from flat performances and an overwrought, polemically-motivated plot, but there’s no denying its basic power as targeted polemic. The movie follows Fergus (Mark Womack), a disgruntled Iraq war veteran whose best pal Frankie dies overseas before the beginning of the movie. Grappling with the loss and seeking to figure out the details behind it, Fergus embarks on a one-man vigilante mission to bring down the people responsible. The set-up turns particularly dour when corporate suits enter the picture as the main targets, and Frankie virtually goes postal.
His face stuck in an incessant scowl, Womack delivers a one-note expression of anger, barking out line after line in an endless stream of rage and argumentation. The movie occasionally flashes back to Iraq, where a labyrinthian series of events led to Frankie’s death, allowing for explosions and gunfire that certainly wake up the mood, if not the plot. Other critics have compared “Route Irish” to “In the Valley of Elah” and “The Hurt Locker,” if for no other reason than all three movies deal with soldiers, Iraq, bombs and guilt. But at this point those props are beginning to look like the usual suspects.
Although “Route Irish” moves with fits of inspiration, the story never really takes off. Fergus’s madness reaches a fever pitch in the movie’s final third, particularly with an extended waterboarding sequence that demonstrates Loach’s ability to create genuine tension with one image and a little camera movement. It tells you something when the best scenes of the movie are not the ones involving bullets.
The lasting effect of “Route Irish” comes not from its anti-war perspective per se, but rather the craftsmanship with which Loach expresses it. If only he had chosen better material. Throughout the movie, several people attempt to mollify Fergus by telling him that Frankie was simply in the “wrong place at the wrong time,” a description likely applicable to the skillful 78-year-old Loach’s interest in this project.
Dave Calhoun at Cannes from Time Out London, May 19, 2010
It’s back to business for Ken Loach.
The veteran British director is back in competition at Cannes, just a year
after his crowd-pleasing ‘Looking for Eric’ screened at the festival, with
‘Route Irish’, a film that channels Loach’s righteous anger at the grotesque
carnival of the Iraq war into a Liverpool-set story about the murky world of
private contractors returning from war zones. The film brims over with insights
into a world little explored by dramas about the Iraq conflict, offering a
powerful view on the topic by setting its intrigue almost entirely on British
soil. The message is that the Iraq war and others like it might be foreign, but
their impact implicates us all. However, while the film’s fury is compelling,
its story sometimes feels a little wandering, and with many byroads and side
alleys, it lacks the simple fury and debate of Loach’s very best films.
‘Route Irish’ brings the war back home by following Fergus (Mark Womack),
a former soldier and private contractor in Liverpool who is trying to come to
terms with the death of childhood friend Frankie (John Bishop).
We meet Fergus on the Mersey ferry and then as he prises open Frankie’s coffin
in a deserted church at night, determined to see his friend one last time. It’s
a troubling, arresting scene. By the time of the funeral the next day, Fergus
is already becoming suspicious of how his friend came to be blown up on Route
Irish, the infamous and dangerous road that links Baghdad’s Green Zone with the
city’s airport. It’s this suspicion that drives the film: Fergus starts to
throw questions at representatives of the security firm for which he and
Frankie both worked, and his worries are fuelled further when a friend of
Frankie gives him a phone containing footage from Baghdad in the days before
Frankie’s death.
Although there’s a mystery at its core, and its unravelling propels the film
forward, ‘Route Irish’ is better at introducing and exploring the personalities
whose lives are affected by war than finding answers to a specific case.
There’s a conflict between the film’s thriller structure – with its fast flow
of Skype conversations with witnesses in Iraq, encounters with Iraqis living in
Liverpool and showdowns with wealthy private contractors – and its concern with
relationships and emotions. The strange rapport, part sexual, part familial,
between Fergus and Frankie’s girlfriend, Rachel (Andrea Lowe), is intriguing
but not fully explored, and it would have been good to know more about Fergus’s
friendships with his friends, such the one played by Craig Lundberg, himself a
blind ex-soldier who lost his sight in Iraq. As ever, such authentic touches as
the casting of Lundberg distance the film from the easy feel of quick
entertainment, though there is a certain awkwardness among the less experienced
or non-professional actors.
These reservations aside, the character of Fergus, played with desperate vigour
by Womack, is a triumph of the political made personal. The scenes in which he
bounces off the sterile walls of his luxury but soulless riverside apartment,
bought with the proceeds of his time as a contractor (earning £10,000 a day, he
says), speak volumes about the corrupt and unpredictable journeys of war. A
scene, too, in which Fergus water-boards Walker (Geoff Bell),
a former colleague, is claustrophobic and unsettling, managing to both convey
how psychologically beaten Fergus is and to remind us of one of the more
unpalatable instruments of conflicts abroad.
The mood is bleak and angry, a tone compounded by cold, direct photography from
Chris Menges (‘Kes’, ‘The Killing Fields’) and a script by Loach’s collaborator
Paul
Laverty that refuses to be distracted from the personal horror of war, both
here and in Iraq, where we witness bombings, shootings and beatings, mostly via
archive footage, although Loach did travel to Jordan to shoot some scenes. It’s
an uneven film, offering a gut punch in parts but failing to keep a strong and
clear focus in others – but it’s a necessary and energetic work, and one that brings
a foreign war right back home and refuses to treat it as a distant or academic
problem
Route
Irish Mike Goodridge at Cannes from
Screendaily
Ken Loach’s last minute addition to Cannes competition is a hard-edged
thriller - his first, in fact, since Hidden Agenda played competition here
in 1990 - covering dirty deeds by contractors in Iraq. Surprisingly
conventional in its plotting but distinguished by an intriguing moral
complexity, Route Irish could be Loach’s most commercially accessible film to
date and is no less gripping or damning of the conflict than Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone - although made at a
fraction of the budget and mostly set in Liverpool.
Shot by sometime Loach collaborator Chris Menges in gritty grey hues, the film looks like a Loach film but the story of stolen cellphones, corporate cover-ups and renegade revenge wouldn’t be out of place in a Hollywood action thriller. The filmmaker isn’t entirely comfortable with the genre and at times, with its low-intensity George Fenton score, it feels like an episode of a British TV series.
But the director’s choice of the thriller genre is ultimately a smart one. Essentially painting a portrait of men scarred by exposure to the kill-them-before-they-kill-you life of Bagdad, the film packs more of a punch in its characterisation of collateral damage than pious human dramas like In The Valley Of Elah, Stop-Loss or The Messenger.
Womack, an established UK TV actor, tackles his first feature role well. His character Fergus is a ticking time bomb of rage, violence, shame, sorrow and self-loathing who lives in Liverpool after several years in Iraq, first as a member of the SAS and more recently for a private security firm where he was making £10,000 a month.
The film opens in 2007 as he heads across the Mersey in a ferry to the funeral of his best friend Frankie whom he had persuaded to come to Iraq with him. Frankie has died in an attack on his vehicle on Route Irish, the road from the Green Zone to the airport in Bagdad that is dubbed the most dangerous road in the world. The funeral is attended by executives of the firm he worked for - Haynes (Fortune) and Walker (Bell) - as well as by Marisol (Najwa Nimri), a Spanish woman friend who hands Fergus a package she had received from Frankie in the post.
The package contains an Iraqi mobile phone which contains video footage of one of Haynes’ security vehicles massacring a taxi full of locals and two children bystanders and Frankie’s horror at the killing.
Unable to go to Baghdad because he is awaiting a UK court case for brawling, Fergus contacts some old friends in Iraq to help him uncover the truth behind Frankie’s death.
Meanwhile he shows the footage to Frankie’s widow Rachel (Lowe) to whom he has always been attracted; Fergus opens up to her and the two make love.
But both of their lives are put in danger when one of Haynes’ heavies Nelson (Trevor Williams) returns from Iraq to retrieve the phone. Both their houses are ransacked and the Iraqi musician (Rasool) who has been helping them interpret the phone messages is beaten in a military-style raid on his house. Determined to stop Nelson and take his revenge, Fergus takes the law into his own hands.
What sets the film apart from your run of the mill thriller is the deterioration of Fergus into violence and his realisation that he is a monster like all the others. The film’s most disturbing scene - in which he practices the torture technique of waterboarding on Nelson - shows a man deranged and numb to killing, anything but a conventional hero. Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty keep a strong moral compass when it comes to the condemnation of an Iraq awash with US and UK money but Fergus himself is far less black-and-white.
Loach uses extensive flashbacks to Iraq (shot in Jordan) and archive footage to illustrate the experiences that have hardened Fergus beyond redemption. If the script is guilty of heavy-handed preachiness at times, its exploration of the human price of warmongering and financial opportunism is necessary and vital.
Route Irish Patrick McGavin at Cannes from Emanuel Levy,
May 23, 2010
Cannes '10: Day
Nine Mike D’Angelo at Cannes May 21, 2010
Cannes
2010. Ken Loach's "Route Irish"
David Hudson at Cannes from The Auteurs, May 19, 2010
Kirk Honeycutt at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 19, 2010
'This isn't a major Loach film' Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 19, 2010
Route Irish – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, March 17, 2011
Cannes film festival: the route in to Route Irish Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2010, also seen here: Peter Bradshaw, also an interview by Mark Brown at Cannes, May 19, 2010: Mark Brown
Route Irish – review Philip French from The Observer, March 19, 2011
Wendy Ide at Cannes from The London Times, May 19, 2010
THE
ANGEL’S SHARE A- 94
Great Britain France Belgium
Italy (101 mi) 2012
And
I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door
—The
Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) - YouTube (3:39)
Loach took Cannes by surprise last year when he won the coveted Jury
Prize (3rd Place) for what was considered one of his more
lighthearted efforts, and while it may not carry the dramatic heft of
Shakespearean tragedy, this is one of the director’s most likeable films. Working with screenwriter Paul Laverty for
their 10th collaboration, the brilliance of his writing is telling,
as it’s exactly what’s missing in movies today, where the film’s special charm
and appeal is largely based upon the expertly defined Scottish characters,
showing themselves as the brainless twits they are in the opening scene where a
drunken man flirts precariously close to the edge of a railway platform, taking
offense with the frantic railway security microphone warnings, which causes a
drunken tumble onto the tracks, barely even noticing he nearly gets himself
killed The Angels Share
(Opening Scene) - YouTube
(1:44). The hilarious use of
profanity throughout the film (which is subtitled) is utterly priceless,
established early on, where the language itself becomes one of the central
features of the film. It’s nearly
impossible not to snicker upon hearing the meticulously detailed nature of criminal
charges committed by our movie heroes, read one after the other, where what
they’re really guilty of is finding joy in discovering an alternative path,
finding absurdity in the overcontrolled world around them, where conformity to
the established rules is simply not in these characters. Albert (Gary Maitland), the man on the
platform (a street cleaner in real life), has rocks in his head for brains,
where his act of inebriated idiocy gets him 100 hours of community service,
where the sentencing judge tells him “Your profound stupidity is matched only
by your good fortune.” In the case of
Robbie (first-time actor Paul Brannigan), a diminutive fellow with giant ears
poking out of his head, like a miniature Star
Trek Vulcan that gets lost in the mad drunken ravings of Scottie, his
history of near psychopathic violence would trouble any prospective prison
inmate, so he’s surprisingly not sent to jail, but is given 300 hours of
community service, largely because his girlfriend is 8-month’s pregnant, and
perhaps the fragility of a tender baby can help transform what amounts to a
career thug into a human being at last, or so hopes the court. Following the reading of his sentence, we
hear more, where Mo (Jasmine Riggins) was caught attempting to steal a macaw,
but was apprehended when the tail feathers were seen sticking out of her purse,
or Rhino (William Ruane) who has a penchant for destroying statues of any enemy
of Scotland, often heard quoting patriotic slogans while in the throes of a
drunken stupor.
When this rag tag group of social misfits all meet for community
service, they are under the assured guidance of John Henshaw as Harry, a
likeable enough guy, by no means a hard ass, and someone who has the
flexibility to display a little sense of humor every now and then. Receiving a call while on duty, his job is to
officially deliver Robbie to the hospital, as his wife Leone (Siobhan Reilly)
is delivering their firstborn. But what
he witnesses first hand is a colossal beating by a trio of Leone’s uncles
warning Robbie to stay away from the baby or they’d kill him, giving him acute
insight into just what Robbie’s up against in his struggle to turn his life
around. Having no place else to stay
that’s safe, Harry allows him to spend the night, celebrating the birth of his
“wee lad” named Luke, pulling out some special aged whisky for the
occasion. While the two enjoy a snort,
what they’re more fascinated by is learning the ritual surrounding taste
contests and developing the unique ability to determine origin just by the
smell and taste. Harry becomes such an
enthusiast that he takes them on a tour of a whisky distillery in the Scottish
Highlands, where Albert sees his first Scottish castle in Edinburgh and Robbie
learns he has a quality nose, meeting a whisky buyer (Loach veteran Roger Allam)
who’s quite impressed. It’s there they
learn that the giant wooden kegs used to cellar whisky, sometimes for decades,
lose nearly 2% every year to evaporation, what they call “the angel’s share,”
suggesting divine intervention. Once
Robbie returns home, however, there’s someone waiting to pulverize him, usually
in small groups carrying heavy weapons, where his life expectancy diminishes
day by day. Loach clearly understands
how working-class youth continually get themselves into trouble, but also how
they are stigmatized by housing project violence and rampant unemployment,
where no one lifts a finger to help alleviate the cause, yet the media rails
against these kids every day, blaming them for their own predicament, or for
failing to lift themselves out if it, as if by some miracle. While the British invented kitchen sink realism in the
50’s and 60’s, including Loach’s own POOR COW (1967), expressed with a near
documentary feel, here Loach gets under the skin of the working-class mentality
through their prolific talent for getting themselves into trouble, expressed so
perfectly with heavily satiric, profanity-charged language and absurd humor
which takes the edge off the blisteringly accurate portrayal of bleak social
realism in the tenement housing projects, where these kid’s hopeless futures
are the forgotten souls that have become about as meaningless to the world
around them as the deadend lives portrayed in most every Aki Kaurismäki
movie.
What Loach finds in this film through that humorous banter and dizzying
interaction between characters is a special, indefinable quality that separates
humans from other species—personality.
Instead of feeling down and out, as if their lives don’t count, they
have a natural affinity for defiance, to literally defy the odds, reflected in
the clever kinds of small criminal acts they specialize in, where Robbie gets
the idea to utilize the group’s talents to steal an extremely rare batch of
recently discovered whisky that is about to be auctioned for over a million
pounds. While the audience knows what
they’re up to, they have no idea how they intend to pull it off, turning this
into a thrilling road movie as they’re off on yet another misadventure, this
time wearing kilts, where the mood of optimism is enhanced by the surging
energy of an upbeat theme song about whisky drinking, The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna
Be (500 Miles) - YouTube (3:39), which never sounded more perfect. Witty, hilarious, given a realistic style and
a natural spontaneity in the key roles, Loach counteracts the neverending
societal drumbeat of dehumanization of working class youth by creating such
likeable and sympathetic characters.
It’s not what happens, but the beautifully orchestrated layers of
comical complexity written into how it happens that continues to surprise
throughout in an audaciously thrilling whisky heist, where the supposed dregs
of the earth walk right into the lair of the wealthy and the snobbishly
super-elite without attracting suspicion and steal the most precious commodity
right underneath their noses. While
poking fun at the pretentiousness of the aristocracy, featuring a real-life
“Master of the Quaich,” Charlie MacLean, Loach adds a bit of comic ingenuity by
continually exposing our working class heroes to their own special flair for
fucking things up, as after all, what they all have in common is getting caught. The enchanting intrigue of the story never
wavers and never resorts to hackneyed stereotype, where the unique dialogue is
just so head-splittingly funny throughout, one often forgets how rare it is to
experience such an intelligently crafted film as this. What it lacks in profundity, it makes up for
in originality, youthful vibrancy, and the utter joy of being alive, easily one
of the most delightful times to be had in a theater all year. While it is a bit of a fantasy, something of
a stretch for a known advocate of social realism, it does feature brilliant
writing, unforgettable characters, and the scintillating, profanity-laced
dialogue is simply sensational.
The
Film Emporium [Andy Buckle]
The tale of whiskey espionage from prolific British director Ken
Loach. The Angels' Share screened at the Cannes Film Festival (Loach's
eleventh film to screen) and picked up the Jury Prize. It is an edgy, though
heartfelt redemption story about a troubled/violent youth, Robbie (Paul
Brannigan), who has one chance, with a new bub on the way, to turn his life
around. Balancing the drama with a clever dose of comedy, in the vein of The
Full Monty, it is also uproariously funny. The only issue is that sometimes
the Scottish accents are so think that it is very difficult to understand what
is being said, and there are times I definitely missed the jokes. Unable to
escape his local tormentors and being forcibly told to keep away from the
mother of his child by her family, Robbie discovers a hidden talent - a nose
for whiskey - and enlists a few of his buddies he met on community service to
turn that talent to their advantage. Really strong comedy, and though Robbie is
a loser who is hard to sympathise with initially, he eventually wins us over.
Should be a feel-good hit that thrives on positive word-of-mouth, but viewers
should be aware it contains plenty of C-bombs and some grisly violence.
Dave Calhoun at Cannes from Time Out London, May 23, 2012, also seen here: Time Out
London [Dave Calhoun]
Ken Loach is back in the territory of the lighter, more prankish realism he explored in 2009’s ‘Looking For Eric’ with his latest film ‘The Angels’ Share’. It finds the director and his scriptwriter, Paul Laverty, in Scotland and Glasgow again for the first time since 2004’s ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ (the pair made a run of Scottish stories in the late 1990s and early 2000s) for a larky crime story about unemployment and opportunity.
It’s a film that begins with a grimace on its face and ends up wearing a strained smile. While the hero of ‘Looking For Eric’ was a likeable, depressed postie in need of a hug and a kick up the backside, here we’re presented with a more difficult, more conflicted and potentially more interesting figure. Robbie (Paul Brannigan) is a young lad who’s done a stretch in jail for a nasty assault – seen in flashback – and, after another fight, narrowly avoids more time in prison by accepting 300 hours of community service. This coincides with the birth of his first child, and Robbie is determined to straighten out his life and settle down with his girlfriend, Leonie (Siobhan Reilly) – even if her dad and his thuggish mates would prefer that he did no such thing.
Loach and Laverty suggest extreme social pressures are the underlying causes of the mess in which Robbie and the three others serving community sentences with him, Albert (Gary Maitland), Rhino (William Ruane) and Mo (Jasmin Riggins) find themselves: poverty, a lack of jobs and a cycle of macho violence and easy crime. But while other Loach films have turned their microscope on the realities of such lives, this one does so to a more limited extent, while allowing the upbeat storytelling to transport its characters to another, hopefully better place. The implication is that if the government and society won’t help, then filmmakers can, by sprinkling a little fantasy on their realism. So Robbie and his pals follow their noses and an avuncular community service leader, Harry (John Henshaw), to a whisky distillery in the Highlands where they spy an opportunity to siphon off some super-expensive, super-rare whisky and sell it to an ask-no-questions buyer, Thaddeus (Roger Allam).
And so we move from a world of court cases, dust-ups in stairwells, street chases and knife fights to a different universe of jokey neds in kilts and rarefied folk discussing single malts. It’s a jarring shift, and this isn’t the best paced or most focused of Loach films at the best of the times. Some of the side characters, presumably non-actors, such as a guide at a distillery and a fruity whisky expert, are distracting and there are fewer good jokes than there should be (although Henshaw’s accusing exclamation, ‘You Philippine!’ – he means philistine – is a great moment). That said, there’s a spiky camaraderie between the four young leads and a hands-over-the-eyes moment when someone downs a pint of spit.
‘The Angels’ Share’ is a hopeful caper that literally bursts out of its unhappy, urban beginnings with an explosion of The Proclaimers on the soundtrack and airy shots of open countryside. Loach and Laverty never fully resolve the yin and yang: the blood and the banter. But it’s still rewarding to see these filmmakers exploring a different tone with their usual compassion and eye for youthful characters, even if we’re sometimes left in a frustrating middle ground between the more comic and serious sides of their story.
Review:
The Angels' Share - Film Comment Max Nelson,
April 11, 2013
The angels' share is the percentage of a cask of whiskey lost to evaporation during its years of maturation, and a fitting title for Ken Loach’s 23rd theatrical feature: a lovely if slight comedy that moves like a breath, always threatening to dissolve into thin air but somehow continuing to demand our attention. With this shaggy-dog tale of four petty Glaswegian criminals and their improbably successful scheme to steal the world’s most valuable whiskey, Loach turns naïveté into a sort of moral philosophy.
Loach does not ignore the vices of lower-class urban life, but for the most part he attributes them either to causes outside the individual’s control (family feuds, blood ties, environmental pressures) or to faceless thugs without enough personality to truly earn our blame. His heroes are victims of environment and circumstance, but essentially good; they are kind, likeable, and, perhaps as a result, a little empty inside. They saunter through fields in backwards kilts, steal compulsively, make scatological cracks, and generally goof off. Though Loach might occasionally poke fun at their ignorance (one of them hasn’t heard of the Mona Lisa), he also gives them a sort of dignity, and, more importantly, clears their slates.
Hence the gradual tonal shift from The Angels' Share’s first half, with its beatings, threats, and abuse, to the film’s jollier second half, complete with sunny resolution. There is the odd flicker of tenderness before then, like the way Robbie, the film’s central figure, holds his son for the first time as if he’s afraid the newborn might shatter at a touch. But as the film’s heroes move from the grimy streets of Glasgow to the wide-open Scottish Highlands, the acts of violence and invective peter out completely—as if all along they had been external to the individuals who suffered and at times perpetuated them. The movie brightens, opens up, and to some degree, evaporates.
It’s a pleasant and gentle evaporation, the kind you feel in the closing minutes of a pop song when excitement has given way to comfort, but not yet to boredom. Late in the film an earlier scene comes to mind in which Robbie is forced to confront a young man he once thrashed half to death during a coke binge, or another in which he threatens to put out the eye of a potential assailant and fears for a second that he’s actually going to do it. It’s fair to ask whether any trace of that old inner struggle remains, and if Loach’s heroes still carry some baggage with them other than knapsacks and stolen spirits. Robbie’s complete transformation may feel a little too satisfying, but to Loach’s credit, it never feels false.
Loach’s camera is intimate but never intrusive; it gives us just enough distance from its subjects for comfort, and not much more. That’s also the function of the film’s humor, which is laced with just enough mockery (much of it directed at the pretensions of upper-class whiskey connoisseurship) to keep us at a safe distance, but which handles its targets with such evident care, respect, and even admiration that we rarely feel guilty over chuckling. The joke often seems to be that, for these experts, a sip of whiskey has the same gravity that Robbie might bring to visiting his infant son in the hospital at the risk of incurring yet another savage beating from his gangland enemies. The connoisseur comes off as somewhat ridiculous in the comparison; his pleasures are more modest than he could ever dream. What saves him is that they are also more valuable than many of Robbie’s peers could ever dream: they see his self-importance, but they fail to see that his lighter commitments and quieter joys might still have some weight. There is a place for modest pleasures.
Cannes
Review: 'The Angels' Share' Scores Another Success For ... Simon Gallagher from Film School Rejects
Just when the festival’s perpetual rain threatened to soak right through the
collected critics’ spirit, redemption came from the most unlikely of places,
the grey, wind-swept streets and hills of recession hit
The film follows Robbie (Paul Brannigan), a young Glaswegian with a violent past on community service and intent on changing the direction of his life for the benefit of his girlfriend Leonie (Siobhan Reilly) and newborn baby son Luke. Inspired by community service supervisor Harry (the always excellent John Henshaw), Robbie discovers a flair and passion for whiskey appreciation, and is invited into the alien world of whiskey collection thanks to his skills. With the considerable ominous shadow of his past hanging over his head, and worries that he is not good enough for his girlfriend (not aided by the violent reinforcement of her father, Psycho-Balls), Robbie hatches a plan to steal three bottles from a very rare cask of Malt Mill whiskey from a Highlands auction.
With his ragtag group of fellow community servicers in tow – Rhino (William Ruane), Mo (Jasmin Riggins), and Albert (Gary Maitland) – Robbie sets about his plan to siphon off the ultra-valuable booze and sell it to whisky dealer Thaddeus (Roger Allam), demanding that Thaddeus sorts him out a proper job in a distillery as part of the deal.
Throughout the film, Loach is keen to explore the contradictions that Robbie faces in trying to escape his past, and the ominous threat of relapsing into that kind of situation again. Just as he believes a corner has been turned, they pull him back in – not only in terms of self-destructive behavior, but also of how social preconceptions write characters like Robbie off as lost causes – a virulent symptom of the social identities that Robbie represents – and one that underpins the simple but enduring message that Loach intends in The Angels’ Share. Everyone deserves a chance, and like the whiskey which plays such an important part in the narrative, if you are willing to give someone the right kind of opportunity to show deeper layers, the rewards are infinitely greater.
Though the film feels extremely appropriate in terms of the global recession it will be released into, it is actually an anthem for a lost generation who have been around a lot longer than the current dip in the world’s markets – as the production notes state, some young people in parts of Scotland (and similar areas) are now third generation unemployed, and raising awareness of that situation, as well as ensuring that they, like Robbie, are still viewed as worthwhile people is a big part of the social commentary of the film.
Despite the fact that The Angels’ Share is so invested with a motivated message, its greatest success is in the understated way it sets about elucidating that message, focusing on authentic character development, and traditional simple filmic elements like strong story-telling and a high entertainment factor to push the point. There is no overt politicism anywhere; Loach’s traditional dedication to presenting as much truth as possible trumping any temptation for sentimentality or blatant protest, and captured in both the simple cinematography, and the way the director collected his cast.
Among the professionals like the brilliantly funny John Henshaw and Roger Allam, Loach has used non-professionals with experience of the communities the film focuses on, in the case of former community worker Paul Brannigan, or actors who haven’t starred in a great deal of things who know his methods, and what to expect on set – like Gary Maitland – to the advantage of the film. That brings an added level of authenticity to key roles, like Robbie, as the actors behind the characters are closer to the same experiences and don’t have to rely on artifice to convince.
Though some of Loach’s more famous films are serious socialist commentaries, his method of forging on-set dynamics between characters through unscripted interplay and improvisation means his comedies tend to be even better than the realist dramas. The Angels’ Share continues that trend, with some genuinely hilarious moments, mostly revolving around idiot savant-like Albert, whose inappropriate comments are only matched for impact by his disarming genius at other times.
The performance of Gary Maitland (who plays Albert) is just one fine performance in a strong cast, which can also count Paul Brannigan’s Robbie as a highlight, as well as John Henshaw’s Harry, the heart and soul of Loach’s message of possible redemption. Considering the specific requirements of Loach’s approach to film-making, that he can get so many good performances out of his cast, including the non-professionals says a lot about the director’s resounding quality.
And even when it seems that Loach has softened a little, offering a happy ending for Robbie, all is not quite as it seems. His redemption isn’t quite all-encompassing: Ken Loach is a socialist and a realist, but he is not a fantasist, and the ultimate tragic irony of The Angels’ Share is that the only opportunity available to Robbie to achieving his goal of a better life involves criminal activity, and just as the credits are about to roll, it becomes obvious that while he has found a way out, even the closest characters to him might well have difficulty changing the trajectory of their own lives.
World
Socialist Web Site [Richard Phillips]
DVDTalk.com
- theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
The
Angels' Share Allan Hunter at Cannes
from Screendaily, also seen here: Screen
International [Allan Hunter]
That Art
House Guy [Dave Rogers]
Paste
Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]
The
Playlist [Simon Abrams] at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 23,
2012, also seen here: Simon Abrams
Slant
Magazine [Glenn Heath Jr.]
Digital
Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Film-Forward.com
[Dionne King]
EricDSnider.com
[Eric D. Snider]
Cannes
2012: 'The Angels' Share' + 'Killing Them Softly' | PopMatters Elena Razlogova
Angeliki
Coconi's Unsung Films [Theo Alexander]
theartsdesk.com
[Emma Simmonds]
Sound
On Sight [Josh Slater-Williams]
The
Angels' Share Donald Munro from Eye
for Film UK
Lost
in Reviews [Jason Burleson]
THE
ANGELS' SHARE by Garfield Ellis | Kirkus Reviews
Political Film Review Michael Haas
Georgia
Straight [Mark Harris]
CultureCatch.com
[Brandon Judell]
FilmFracture
[Tom von Logue Newth]
Cannes
2012, Day Six: Alain Resnais does his Prairie Home Companion, and amateur
sleuths comb obsessively through The Shining. Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 22, 2012
Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa
Cannes
Champion Mike Goodridge comments on
Loach from Screendaily, May 10, 2012
10 great films set in Glasgow | BFI Pasquale Iannone, February 17, 2015
DAILY
| Cannes 2012 | Ken Loach’s THE ANGELS’ SHARE » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 23,
2012
Hollywood
Reporter [Stephen Dalton]
Leslie Felperin at Cannes from Variety
Robbie Collin at Cannes from The London Telegraph, May 23, 2012
Anita Singh How Ken Loach's ex-young offender lead in
The Angels’ Share turned his life around, at Cannes from The London Telegraph, May 22, 2012
The
Telegraph [Jenny McCartney]
Cannes
2012: The Angels' Share – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 21, 2012, also seen here: Peter Bradshaw
From
binman to Cannes Catherine Shoard
from The Guardian, May 14, 2012
The
Angels' Share – review | Film | The Observer Philip French
Geoffrey Macnab at Cannes from The Independent, May 23, 2012
The
Japan Times [Kaori Shoji] also seen
here: 'The
Angels' Share' | The Japan Times
The
Star-Ledger [Stephen Whitty]
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Austin
Chronicle [Leah Churner]
Los
Angeles Times [Betsy Sharkey]
New
York Times [Stephen Holden] also
seen here: 'The
Angels' Share,' a Comedy by Ken Loach - The New York Times
I,
DANIEL BLAKE B 85
Great Britain France Belgium (100 mi) 2016 Official site
Despite winning the coveted Palme d’Or first prize award at Cannes, the second time for Loach after previously winning for The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), this holds surprisingly little clout in Chicago, as despite the recognition from the most prestigious film festival in the world, it was relegated to the small 100-seat theater at the Music Box, as the larger main theater (nearly 800 seats) was screening some unheard of film entitled Band Aid (2017) that took center stage. As incomprehensible as this sounds, this accurately describes how much these awards matter to theater owners, as they simply couldn’t care less. And to be honest, for this film to be chosen over Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016), which is not only more entertaining, but far more original in scope, easily making it one of the film experiences of the year, is not just a head-scratcher, but inexcusable, yet it’s not the first time a Cannes jury got it wrong. Despite making a powerful indictment of a dysfunctional British social system, this is not even among the upper echelon of Ken Loach films, lacking the artistry, but instead continually follows a conventional format of what might be called misery porn, like Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur (2011), where viewers are forced to endure a relentlessly downward trajectory that reaches gloomy and eventually tragic proportions. While this is basically a trip through the British welfare system that couldn’t be more exasperating, where the system has lost its ability to retain “human” values, the downward spiral is simply too convenient overall and doesn’t really get into the intricacies of the issues, but instead tells the story in black or white, were people are all good or all bad. Unlike the world’s perception, having worked in this field for more than three decades, my personal experience is that most bureaucratic workers are really more interested in “helping” others than is usually depicted on television or in movies, and do what they can, while the State’s repressive measures prevent them from doing so. Loach provides the stereotypical negative perception, where workers are the bogeyman instead of the State, which is a far cry from the truth and one major disappointment with the film, as it’s far more complex, though the State’s desired goal does seem to be to make things so harrowingly difficult that people simply give up out of human frustration. Yet the film doesn’t reveal anything that wasn’t already better expressed in Cristi Puiu’s starkly realistic Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), a scathing exposé of social injustice that reveals the futility of challenging an antiquated authoritarian system, where layer upon layer of corruption reveals a permanent state of laziness and apathy in workers that make the system so profoundly ineffective, breathing so much more life into a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare that is closer to a death spiral than a social service. Loach has created a gentler version of a journey through an absurd set of State rules that make little sense, where it immediately starts to resemble a road through hell paved with one Sisyphean obstacle after another, with no one either intelligent or wise enough to help people navigate their way through the system, while those that try get chastised for it by their superiors.
In comparison, Loach’s own film, MY NAME IS JOE (1998), is a fiery revelation, magnificently acted, far more original in creating a compassionate working class hero who is stifled by a social situation that seems dire and hopeless, where there is literally no outlet to a better world, yet the essential human decency emboldened in the troubled character of Joe (Peter Mullan) is unmistakable, while the Dardenne’s bleak and unredeeming ROSETTA (1999) is another example, featuring a remarkable performance by a non-professional (Émilie Dequenne), where she is a teenager determined and at wit’s end to find a job to emancipate herself from the abject poverty of living with her alcoholic mother in a trailer park, pacing back and forth like a caged animal during her agonizing search, bringing a ferocity of spirit that to this day is unforgettable. These films are on another level of authenticity and social realism, offering the barest glimmer of hope without any sentimentality, where nothing is exaggerated or abstract, but confined within the world in which they live, providing no wiggle room for the audience that feels just as constricted, as we so fully embrace the world of the characters onscreen. Loach’s new film feels underwritten, even incomplete by comparison, bordering on sentimentality, as the director doesn’t have a neutral bone in his body, where the characters aren’t nearly so fleshed out, feeling predetermined, with viewers easily able to predict the final outcome, so this is a conventionally told film that offers few surprises, where its subject matter of human decency, however, couldn’t be more timely, receiving a 15-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes. At the center of the picture is British standup comic Dave Johns as Daniel Blake, a working carpenter who suffers a heart attack early in the film, putting him out of work, forced to apply for sickness benefits, where his condition is evaluated not by a physician or medical team, but by a bureaucratic functionary who takes greater interest in checking the boxes than learning about the extent of his medical condition. It comes as no surprise that his application is denied, but then he’s not allowed to appeal until after he receives a mandatory phone call that should have preceded the written decision. While in the social services office, he witnesses the rude treatment to another family, Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother of two children who has been relocated nearly 300 miles from London to Newcastle for its cheaper cost of living, but is unfamiliar with the city and knows no one there, so took the wrong bus and arrived late for her appointment. Both are thrown out of the office, though they’ve hardly committed any offense except to be outraged at their inhumane treatment. Apparently the State wants their mistreated recipients to go quietly into the night. In the process of commiserating over their circumstances, Blake realizes Katie’s home is lacking many working amenities, where he’s more than willing to fix things that are either broken or not working, making their life a little more bearable. In the process, Katie’s family shares meals with Blake, but Katie goes hungry, making up some excuse about how she just ate.
Certainly the most upsetting scene of the film is a trip to the food bank, with Blake accompanying Katie and her children, where there is a line extending around the block waiting to get in. When they finally get inside, a woman helps pick out items and places them in plastic bags, but Katie is so worn out and hungry, she devours the first thing she sees before breaking down in tears, consumed by shame and humiliation, a shocking scene that is unbelievably moving, showing great restraint and far more sympathy than the subject usually receives, yet also providing a blunt reminder of the terrible things hunger drives people to do. Things only grow worse, as despite Blake’s help, Katie’s situation only becomes more desperate, where there are men that prey upon women in desperate straits, swooping in like vultures for the kill, where by that time, pride be damned, she’s willing to do nearly anything for money. Blake, meanwhile, is suffering his own setbacks, where his appeal must be entered online and he’s computer illiterate. Requiring the help of others, he slowly manages to make some progress, only to see the computer freeze or crash before he finishes, where he has to start all over again — a grim reminder of his uncertain fate, where his life is literally in the hands of others. As he waits endlessly for an appeal, he has no income coming in, selling all his belongings, where he’s caught in an absurd no man’s land where he also applies for unemployment benefits, where to receive benefits he’s required to look for work, even though he’s unable, but he dutifully makes the rounds, walking endlessly in circles, asking employers to kindly sign his resumé as proof he was looking, yet when he shows up for his mandatory appointment, he’s threatened with sanctions, where he’s reminded constantly of the negative consequences, losing benefits for up to 13 weeks, 26 weeks, or 3 years for failure to comply. Stuck in a Catch-22 situation where he’s still unable to work, while the Department for Work and Pensions never even contacted his doctor before rendering their decision, where the delay before he can receive an appeal hearing seems to take forever, sapping all the strength out of him, where both he and Katie find themselves in dangerous situations, more desperate than ever, with few, if any, options remaining. Predictably, Blake’s public protest, a showy scene writing graffiti on a public building demanding a hearing before he starves, is a last gasp of self-respect that creates some momentary street commotion, but is roundly condemned by authorities and only gets him arrested. Thwarted at every turn, life only becomes more and more unbearable, spiraling into an endless void, where viewers can sympathize with his inhumane mistreatment, stripped of his dignity in the process, or they can simply wash their hands of these kinds of problems and pretend they don’t exist. The two central characters are appealing, at least what we know of them, so the audience feels morally invested in what happens to them, but the film ends with a kind of muted emotion, where any number of outcomes are possible, but few bring even an ounce of happiness, where the entire experience is like a nightmarish wrong turn. Was this all a bad dream or does it really happen? And if so, how do we fix this kind of broken system? Enduring poverty and public humiliation is not enough, apparently, to move those who don’t have to experience these kinds of travails, so in this selfie-generation era an apathetic public simply looks away and walks on.
It must be said, by the way, that British films that resort
to all manner of colloquial speech should be subtitled, as nearly 50% of what
was spoken was never understood.
Actually far more is understood in a typical Shakespeare play than in a
film like this. Part of that is the poor
sound quality in an older theater, but more to the point is the viewer’s
unfamiliarity with the language itself.
Perhaps in this case, missing the subtleties inherent to the story was
not so important as experiencing the overall sense of impending doom, where the
State is literally toying with people’s lives, but language is a significant
part of any film, and in this case, viewers need assistance. By the way, the film was screened with
subtitles at Cannes, as were earlier Loach releases, SWEET SIXTEEN (2002) and The
Angel's Share (2012). Based
on thorough research in this area from earlier Loach films, Dialect
in Films: Examples of South Yorkshire., where the director in an obsessive
search for authenticity urges actors to speak in their natural accents, one
would think producers and/or distributors would get the message, but as the
film suggests, in a broken or uncaring system, helpful ideas like these are
quickly rejected out of hand.
Cinema Scope: Mark Peranson June 27, 2016
But it’s hard to consider Loach’s film—probably one of his best in the baker’s dozen for what it’s worth, thanks to a vital topic and an above-average script from Paul Laverty—in a vacuum, nor does he want it to be seen that way. Laverty has crafted an irresistible lead character in Daniel Blake, a 59-year-old widowed tradesman who, after suffering a heart attack, is, despite his doctor’s diagnosis, dumbfoundingly typed by a health-care professional as “fit to work,” and needs to attempt to find a job to continue to receive government benefits. (This involves learning to use a computer, leading to assorted old-man shenanigans that threaten to derail the good will Loach and Laverty earn.) An ideal Loachian working-class hero, Daniel possesses a good nature and generosity that extends to all around him, including Katie (Hayley Squires), a struggling single mother of two uprooted to Newcastle from London, whom he befriends after witnessing her screaming altercation with a government worker in a job centre who won’t seat her for an appointment as she’s arrived ten minutes late. The most excruciating, borderline horrific scene in I, Daniel Blake (and the best thing 2017 jury president Loach has staged in quite some time) finds Katie, distraught by hunger, breaking down in a food bank, opening a tin of sauce, and shovelling it into her mouth with her hands, with a plangent mixture of desperation and embarrassment.
Film Comment: Kent Jones July 03, 2016
Loach’s Palme d’Or–winning I, Daniel Blake, Léaud’s performance in Serra’s film, and Bertrand Tavernier’s glorious Journey Through French Cinema in Cannes Classics offered three touching reminders of the passing of time, and three different embodiments of durability. Tavernier’s journey is a deeply personal one, at once reverent and unapologetically honest about the limitations of his heroes, the kind of close criticism that can result only from respect and intimate knowledge. It is also a shining example of what appears to be a growing genre: the documentary examination and celebration of the art of narrative cinema in the shadow of its evolution into a specialty item within the broader landscape of audiovisual entertainment. Tavernier’s celebration is a reminder of the growing coarseness of movies, and Loach’s film is a melodramatic attack on the growing coarseness of “managed care”—in the end, two manifestations of the same misbegotten moment. At the April press conference in which the selections were announced, I, Daniel Blake was described as “very Ken Loach,” which is true enough, I suppose: this is a remarkably consistent filmmaker, so much so that the inevitable mechanical plot twists, deck-stacking, and rhetorical overriding of the action have become as familiar and even beloved as the rings on your kitchen table or the broken springs under your favorite chair. But a very Ken Loach movie within the context of the current moment is quite different from very Ken Loach movies of earlier eras. The director and his longtime scenarist Paul Laverty have zeroed in on a situation that should resonate in the United States almost as deeply as it will in the U.K.: the lone individual caught in the gears of an increasingly privatized support system that is maddeningly byzantine and, as a byproduct of its attempted efficiency, casually authoritarian. Like all of Loach’s films, I, Daniel Blake is scrupulously scaled to the modest appointments and everyday lives of people hanging on by a thread, and it gets its excitement from the idiosyncrasies and shared jokes and experiences and fears of its characters. Dave Johns’s Daniel is instantly winning, and his grandiloquent and exasperated arias of disgust with the social service system are pretty well tuned to the actual experience of sitting in a fluorescent-lit labyrinth of cubicles. The film’s most devastating scene, one of the single greatest moments in all the films I saw in Cannes, involves a young mother (Hayley Squires) befriended by Daniel and takes place in a food bank—again, to describe it would spoil the impact.
Daniel is caught in a typically modern catch-22: after suffering a massive heart attack, he has been told not to work by his doctor, but is forced to go through the motions of looking for a job in order to receive benefits. His late-’30s American analogue can be found in a 1939 short story called “The Paid Nurse,” published in the left-wing modernist magazine The New Anvil. A guy named George working in a bearings factory is instructed to clean some metal machine discs with Benzol and then dry them in a 200-degree oven. When his clothes and protective gloves catch fire, he is treated with tannic acid and told by the company nurse to get back to work or else. “The men work with worse things the matter with them than that every day, she said,” George tells the neighborhood doctor to whom he appeals for help. The story was written by the actual doctor who experienced this, and it is just as concerned with the rhythm of speech and what it reveals of the lives of those speaking it as it is with the outrage of closed company systems. There is, in a word, nothing generalized about the story, which is not about a theme but about These events happening in This place to These people Right Now.
Film Comment: Michael Koresky November 03, 2016
One would think the suffocating centralization of the movie industry today would have encouraged a robust political counter-cinema. But the homogenizing tyrannies of studio-backed commercial product and social media have become too powerful for alternate voices to get heard. A strange result is that, despite the preponderance of issue-driven documentaries and far-right religious parables, the kind of left-wing humanist agitprop that Ken Loach has specialized in for 50 years (since 1966’s Cathy Come Home, which shocked the British populace with its depictions of homelessness and systemic poverty) is largely nonexistent in this era of outrage.
So for those who are looking for more to get angry
about and are unfamiliar with Loach’s brand of social-realist soapboxing, I,
Daniel Blake may serve as a welcome reminder of narrative cinema’s ability
to rile us up and engender sympathy for society’s downtrodden. It makes sense
that I, Daniel Blake would find an audience in the year of Brexit.
Though swinging way left, Ken Loach’s broadside against the British state and
its bureaucratic dehumanization of those in need is brute, direct, and
singleminded, easily hitting a populist nerve. A frustrating watch on levels
intended and not, Loach’s film follows with excruciating detail the attempts of
the titular widowed, middle-aged carpenter (played by Dave Johns, a stand-up
comic) in the northeast England city of Newcastle to wend his way through the
bureaucratic state government’s Kafka-esque procedures and paperwork to secure
Employment & Support Allowance (welfare), which is only available to him if
he is working—or can prove he’s trying to find work—even though the heart
condition he’s trying to get coverage for is the very reason he cannot work.
The inhumane irony of the situation—and the automaton-like officials who block
his every move, wielding clipboards and pens like shields and daggers—is enough
to make one completely lose faith in the government to look after its citizens,
as it does Daniel, whose rising disillusionment and downward spiral are charted
throughout the film.
Johns, with his placid demeanor, makes for an
unexpected guide through this nightmare, his everyman directness and “Oh,
bollocks” anger mostly keeping easy sentiment at bay. Johns is never seen
retching over in pain or gasping for breath—his sickness is kept internal, a decision
on the part of Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty that is wise both for the
way it refuses to court overt sympathy and how it reminds viewers that ailments
need not be written on our faces to be dead serious. The camera doesn’t
naturally love Johns, nor does he invite its love the way a more seasoned actor
might, allowing for a measured, distanced portrayal of sadly common indignity
rather than victimhood (imagine Timothy Spall or Jim Broadbent in the role for
a much more ingratiating Daniel). The more traditionally charismatic Hayley
Squires plays Katie, a sort of parallel protagonist, a single mother of two
relocated to Newcastle from London after being kicked out of her flat. Daniel
and Katie meet amid the inhuman environs of the social security office, where
she is summarily ejected for “causing a scene” after being refused service for
showing up late to her appointment. The two become friendly, and Daniel takes a
shine to her endearing kids, finding some purpose in lending a hand with their
plumbing and providing consolation for the increasingly desperate mother; the
closest Daniel gets to adorable is giving little Daisy (Briana Shann) a
hand-carved fish mobile for her bedroom, a loving gesture that seems to imbue
him with the dignity the larger world deprives him of daily.
Katie’s story heads in a more conventionally
melodramatic direction, allowing Daniel to save her from herself in schematic
fashion. This is after all a film not above parading a three-legged dog in
front of the camera. Where I, Daniel Blake excels is in portraying the
incremental dehumanization of the state’s endless assessment process, which is
particularly unforgiving of older citizens who might not know how to even use a
computer (Daniel has apparently never wielded a mouse before), let alone send
electronic résumés or video CVs to “digital by default” companies. Being put on
hold for an hour and 48 minutes would drive anyone mad, let alone a man with no
pension or income being given the runaround by the very welfare assessors that
control his fate.
A climactic emotional explosion momentarily turns
Daniel into something of a working-class hero, although Loach could take up
that mantle himself. In October, the U.K. government announced changes in the
way it processes recipients of Employment and Support Allowances, saying they
would no longer have to go through multiple assessment tests to maintain their
benefits: a positive development, if only a first step. Loach’s film has been a
public talking point in the discussions that led to these reforms. For Loach,
who came out of apparent retirement because he felt so driven to tell this
story, such real-world results are a clear triumph. That plus a Palme d’Or, and
maybe the social-realist drama will be back in vogue.
Film
Comment: Jonathan Romney December
21, 2016
It’s giving nothing away to reveal that I, Daniel Blake ultimately involves the testament of an everyman. The film ends with a heartfelt letter from its hero: “I’m not a client, a customer or a service user… I’m not a National Insurance number or a blip on a screen. I, Daniel Blake, am a citizen—nothing more, nothing less.” Ken Loach’s latest, the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, is one of the most important films of 2016; there couldn’t be a more timely moment for a film about the value of citizenship, and to issue a protest against the increasingly powerful dehumanizing forces of what you might call “client culture,” the corporate logic that reduces human lives to economic statistics or blips on screens.
I, Daniel Blake is a simple film, as Loach’s best often are, and it’s a drama very precisely about the present moment in the U.K.; but its resonances are much broader, and it will strike a chord in any culture where people are experiencing economic hard times. Dan Blake (Dave Johns) is a late middle-aged carpenter from Newcastle, currently off work on his doctor’s recommendation, following a heart attack. He has been claiming benefits, but at the start of the film, he has a phone conversation with an official who mechanically runs him through a set of routine and apparently irrelevant questions. As a result, he has his benefits cut. He attempts to appeal, but ends up negotiating a maze of automated phone calls—long waits set to endlessly looped Vivaldi—and joyless conversations with hostile officials in his local unemployment office (it’s called JobCentrePlus: “Plus what?” you might well ask).
Dan has fallen into a trap. He wants to work, but can’t for now. Yet instead of getting the required rest, he’s obliged to traipse around town applying for jobs he is in no position to accept; otherwise he will lose his Job Seeker’s Allowance, the only benefit he is currently entitled to. To keep receiving it, he must bend to the logic of the system, which demands that he sell himself energetically on the job market. He is sent to attend a résumé workshop, where the bullish instructor tells the class, “You must stand out from the crowd.” In the end, Dan does indeed find a way of standing out from the crowd—but this isn’t what the instructor means. In reality, he means the exact opposite. He means: blend in, be compliant, above all use the required language—the language of “clientship,” not citizenship.
I, Daniel Blake deserves its Cannes win; it’s one of the most moving films of the year, and a politically urgent one. It’s also one of the director’s recent best. I speak as one who has sometimes grudgingly admired Loach’s films; who has sometimes felt bored by them or awkwardly preached at; and who has often been very much affected while wishing there just was a bit more cinema to them. Loach’s best since the early ’90s (including Ladybird, Ladybird, My Name is Joe and Sweet Sixteen) have shone above all because of his brilliant direction of actors, while in the recent film of his that feels most energetically cinematic, historical drama The Wind That Shakes The Barley, it’s the uncharacteristic aspiration to an epic register that overcomes a tendency to schematic narrative.
A key problem with late Loach—especially in his collaborations with screenwriter Paul Laverty—is the desire to gratify with triumphant outcomes. Loach and Laverty often find it hard to resist endings in which working-class characters teaming together in joyous solidarity prevail, sometimes comically, over the exploitative forces of conservatism and feral capitalism. In Looking for Eric, the hero and a coachload of his football-loving mates take up arms against a bunch of thugs (you know what they say: if it’s blokes on a coach, you’re watching Ken Loach).
But I, Daniel Blake doesn’t try and gratify with either easy triumph or facile tragedy. Loach and Laverty offer a considerably more complex drama than that, and one that doesn’t have obvious villains; its villain, rather, is the system. True, there are some unlikeable characters, notably some egregiously unempathetic JobCentre officials. But the film suggests that it’s in the nature of the system—and notably, its language—that bends people to its structures of thinking. I, Daniel Blake is, in this sense, a film about everyday inhumanity—or if you wanted to call it that, everyday bureaucratic fascism.
Dan is no saint, just an ordinary working stiff, who’s momentarily unable to work: another “Joe,” as in My Name Is Joe, plain “Daniel Bloke.” He’s sometimes affable, sometimes cantankerous and impatient: one seemingly throwaway scene has him exchanging insults with a man whose dog craps on his estate’s lawn, but it also shows him as public-spirited and railing against those who aren’t. In the Job Centre, he defends a young woman, Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother of two who has just moved up from London; she is given a rough deal by the center’s time-keeping, box-ticking jobsworths.* Dan befriends the family, helps them get their run-down flat inhabitable (some useful tips here about storing heat with bubble wrap, tea lights, and flowerpots). He becomes a father figure to Katie, and an adoptive uncle to the kids, not because he’s an exemplary Samaritan, just a decent man and a good neighbor (and besides, he has spare time on his hands).
There are other good neighbors in the film: like the people who, in the film’s most poignant scene, show friendliness and concern for starving Katie in the local food bank (food banks having become an alarmingly familiar element of modern British life). There’s also a shop manager who, when Katie is brought to his office having attempted to shoplift, discreetly lets her go without humiliating her. Conversely, the security man who apprehends her in the first place afterwards recruits this visibly needy woman for work as a prostitute. It’s suggested, in fact, that in hard-as-nails Austerity Britain, everyone is in danger of becoming a prostitute of one kind or another.
However, those who work for the system, notably for the benefits office, are not demonized by the film. They are often deeply unsympathetic, but the problem is that they speak a certain sort of language. The Job Centre manager tells him that Dan that he is obliged to do everything online, whether he likes it or not: “We’re digital by default.” Old-fashioned Dan replies, “I’m pencil by default.”
The most unpleasant character is an official (Sharon Percy) who never departs from the mode of automaton-speak: “I’m afraid I’m going to have to refer you to the decision maker for a possible sanction. Do—you—understand?” It’s the dehumanized language of a system which has its set script, its set menus, and tolerates no deviation: human interaction becomes instead formalized interface.
One of the reasons, in fact, that I, Daniel Blake is so eloquent is because it’s so much a film about language—about how imposed official codes dehumanize as they process people, fitting them into fixed, sanctioned slots. It’s notable that the Job Centre security guard—ushering Katie off the premises for protesting, and Dan for supporting her—says, “I need you to keep going for me.” It’s a false-sounding formulation that you can’t imagine anyone from Newcastle ever saying naturally, if they weren’t channeling the borrowed language of U.S. cop movies.
The most horrifying piece of managerial language we hear is the invocation of the mysterious “decision maker” from whom Dan is told to expect a letter. The letter never comes, and an official on the phone seems to hold Dan himself responsible for this failing of the system: “He should have called you first”—“Well, he didn’t,” says Dan—“Well, he should have done.” There’s no escape from this closed circuit. “Decision maker” sounds like an invented Kafkaesque term, but it turns out that it’s standard. Indeed, rather than being monstrous Oz-like figures, “decision makers” too are hapless cogs in the system: as witness this, about decision makers reportedly in tears as a result of the pressure on them to dissuade claimants from appealing their cases.
The nature of this pressure is shown in a scene where a sympathetic Job Centre official (Kate Rutter) is cautioned by her boss for taking the time to help Dan; she’s holding up the assembly line (her action is “not acceptable… You set a precedent”).
The dehumanizing effect of language, of imposed codes of behavior, is a key theme in some other recent political films. Loach’s film very much is of a piece with Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man; its French title, La Loi du marché means “The Law of the Market,” but the English title captures the way that the market forces governing “human resources” (another hideous cant term) function by quantifying humans, fitting them into predefined market categories. Brizé’s unemployed hero (Vincent Lindon) is, like Dan, obliged to learn the codes for selling himself as employable—promoting himself as a viable human product—in other words, to speak the approved language of the recruitment sector. In a different register is another outstanding film of 2016 that addresses similar themes: Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, in which a ’60s-generation leftie father launches a sort of performance-style guerrilla intervention to de-brainwash his daughter, who has whole-heartedly embraced the values and codes of corporate capitalism. Toni Erdmann is about reawakening empathy, with language as the battleground between emotion and cold protocol.
I, Daniel Blake is about a lot more than language, of course, and it would ill serve the film to reduce it to questions of abstraction. The film is a dramatic exposé of the way that the austerity measures of Britain’s Conservative government have had a disastrous, radically disempowering effect on the country’s unemployed and underprivileged. Superficially, I, Daniel Blake may seem to be about the very recent past: a bystander’s jeer at the Old Etonians in government pinpoints the drama as belonging to the era of the David Cameron administration, which exploded in its own face as a result of the Brexit referendum it ill-advisedly held (ill-advisedly for itself, and for the nation). The current Conservative government, under Theresa May, has made noises about compassion for “just-about-managing families,” but the rhetoric rings hollow; on the day I’m writing this, reports have appeared about the government’s decision to close the civil service’s child poverty unit.
In the U.K., I, Daniel Blake has struck a chord; it has grossed over $3,800,000 here, making it Loach’s second biggest domestic success, following The Wind That Shook the Barley. It has also stirred up genuine controversy, something rare these days for a British independent film. Sunday Times critic Camilla Long dismissively called it “condescending” and “patronizing” to benefits claimants: “misery porn for smug Londoners,” “a povvo safari for middle-class viewers.” In right-wing weekly The Spectator, Toby Young wrote a super-sneery review of this “relentlessly depressing” film (it’s not: Blake’s defiant humanity is hugely inspiring). Young also claims that Loach’s invocation of working-class solidarity and compassion is misplaced: “it may break Loach’s heart to learn that working class voters in the North of England are just as keen on cutting welfare as Conservatives in the South.”
Despite the undeniable turn to the right in Brexit-era Britain, these are pretty miserable grounds on to dismiss this emotionally and politically urgent movie. There are seemingly gauche flaws in the film: in 2016, it’s hard to believe in a late-middle-aged city dweller being quite so computer-illiterate and referring to “that Internet web thing.” And there’s a problem with the casting of Katie’s young daughter: Briana Shann sounds just a bit too genteel, and besides, the character is made, in Dan’s hour of despair, to carry the emotional can in a manner that’s too melodramatically obvious. But this is also Loach’s most achieved film as film for some time. Without over-emphasis, Robbie Ryan’s cinematography catches the beige drabness of the bureaucratic world, and in Jonathan Morris’s subtle editing, the acutely painful food bank scene discreetly fades to black without the point being pushed. Dave Johns, by profession a stand-up comic, is superb as Dan, by turns vulnerable, gruff, and (well, why the hell not?) a touch sentimental; and Hayley Squires, without too obviously incarnating Cockney resilience, mixes toughness with a clear, hard evocation of Katie’s desperation.
Toby Young may claim that the film doesn’t ring true as a depiction of the life of a benefits claimant; but as a metropolitan journalist well insulated from the struggles Dan faces, how the hell would he know? As one myself, I can’t claim to know any better, so I can only take it on trust that Loach and Laverty have done their research assiduously. For me, I, Daniel Blake certainly rings true as drama, enough to profoundly move this avowed Loach skeptic on two viewings (one in Cannes, one a revisit this week). In a year in which a resurgence of populism has had disastrous consequences on both sides of the Atlantic, one hesitates to invoke the P-word, but the direct, deeply affecting humanity of Loach’s film suggests that I, Daniel Blake could just as well, and just as nobly, be titled We, the People.
* British slang term meaning an obstructive petty official, often a security officer or clerk who’s more concerned to cover their own arse than with common decency: as in, “Sorry mate, it’s more than my job’s worth.”
Reverse Shot: Julien Allen October 02, 2016
Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake, reviewed. June Thomas from Slate, December 21, 2016
How "Sailing By," the theme from Britain's Shipping Forecast, explains ... June Thomas from Slate, January 10, 2017
Brooklyn Magazine: Michael Joshua Rowin December 12, 2016
Cannes Review: Ken Loach's Personal And Touching 'I, Daniel Blake' Nikola Grozdanovic from The Playlist
Brooklyn Magazine: Scout Tafoya September 27, 2016
Sight & Sound: Pamela Hutchinson October 21, 2016
Every Movie Has a Lesson [Don Shanahan]
'I, Daniel Blake' Satirizes Britain's Brutal Bureaucracy - The Atlantic David Sims
Cannes 2016: 'I, Daniel Blake' Review | Indiewire Eric Kohn, also seen here: Indiewire: Eric Kohn
[Cannes
Review] I, Daniel Blake Rory
O’Connor from The Film Stage
Ken
Loach Blasts Britain's Welfare System in 'I, Daniel Blake' Alex Ramon from Pop Matters
Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]
I,
Daniel Blake :: Movies :: Reviews :: i, daniel blake ... - Paste Magazine Brogan Morris
I, DANIEL BLAKE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Cannes
2016: 'Eshtebak' + 'I, Daniel Blake' | PopMatters Elena Razlogova
'I, Daniel Blake': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Wendy Ide from Screendaily
First-look
review: Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake (2016) | Sight & Sound ... Geoff Andrew, May 13, 2016, also seen
here: Sight & Sound: Geoff Andrew
I, Daniel
Blake – first look review - Little White Lies David Jenkins, also seen here: Little White Lies: David Jenkins
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri May 13, 2016, also seen here: First Dispatch: Cafe
Society; Staying Vertical; I, Daniel Blake
I, Daniel Blake · Film Review Ken Loach overdoes the misery in the ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club, December 19, 2016
Some Cannes regulars get weird, but only one of their ... - The AV Club Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 13, 2016
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Film
Review: I, Daniel Blake | Film Journal International Erica Abeel
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Hannah
McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie] also
seen here: Reel
Insights [Hannah McHaffie]
'I, Daniel Blake' Review: Director Ken Loach Skewers The System : NPR Bob Mondello
I, DANIEL
BLAKE – Hammer to Nail
Christopher Llewellyn Reed
Awards Circuit [Clayton Davis]
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Senses of Cinema: Daniel Fairfax July 10, 2016
BOMB: Elina Alter October 06, 2016
Frieze: Bert
Rebhandl October 14, 2016
Sight & Sound: Nick James May 18, 2016
n+1: A. S. Hamrah December 12, 2016
I, DANIEL BLAKE Ken Rudolph Movie Site
Filmmaker: Blake Williams May 23, 2016
Daily | Cannes 2016 | Ken Loach's I, DANIEL BLAKE - Fandor David Hudson
Ken Loach: 'If you're not angry, what kind of person are ... - The Guardian Simon Hattenstone interview, October 15, 2016
Ken Loach: I'm pro-EU, but it's 'not doing us any favours at the moment' Benjamin Lee interview with the director from The Guardian, May 13, 2016
'Conscious cruelty': Ken Loach's shock at benefit ... - The Guardian Diane Taylor interview with The Guardian, November 23, 2015
Ken
Loach's 'I, Daniel Blake': Cannes Review - Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
'I, Daniel Blake' Review: Cannes Film Festival 2016 | Variety Owen Gleiberman
I, Daniel Blake, directed by Ken Loach | Film review - Time Out Dave Calhoun
I, Daniel Blake review: Ken Loach's welfare state polemic is blunt, dignified and brutally moving Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
I, Daniel Blake: Ken Loach and the scandal of Britain's benefits system ... Yvonne Roberts, Jack Monroe, Daniel Mays, Agnès B, Gavin Turk, Mark Littlewood, Melanie McDonagh, and Alison Garnham from The Guardian, September 11, 2016
I, Daniel Blake review – a battle cry for the dispossessed | Film | The ... Mark Kermode from The Guardian, October 23, 2016
I,
Daniel Blake Cannes review: a deeply moving, darkly funny drama Donald Clarke from The Irish Times
Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake is melodramatic and intensely moving Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent
Of course Toby Young understands what life is like on benefits – he ... I’ve never reviewed a film and I’ve not seen it yet, so I’m highly qualified to tell you how miserable Ken Loach’s latest offering is, by Mark Steel from The Independent, October 27, 2016
Ken Loach is not exaggerating – as a carer to a ... - The Independent Ken Loach is not exaggerating – as a carer to a disabled child, I know this really is the truth about benefits, by Nicky Clark, October 19, 2016
Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake is a quietly fearsome piece of drama - review Robbie Collin from The Telegraph
Cannes 2016: I, Daniel Blake, film review – Ken Loach's agitprop ... David Sexton from The London Evening Standard
Irish
Cinephile [Eamonn Rafferty]
South
China Morning Post [James Mottram]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Cannes: Men on the verge in 'Staying Vertical' and 'I, Daniel Blake' Justin Chang from The LA Times
I, Daniel Blake
Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Christy Lemire
Cannes
2016: "Sieranevada," "Staying Vertical," "I, Daniel
Blake ... Barbara Scharres from The
Ebert blog
New
York Times [Stephen Holden]
Review:
'I, Daniel Blake,' Stuck on the Bureaucratic Hamster Wheel ... The
New York Times, December 22, 2016
I, Daniel Blake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Loden, Barbara
WANDA A- 93
She’s
trapped and she will never, ever get out of it, and there are millions like
her.
—Barbara Loden in an interview with The New York Times
If
you don't want anything you won't have anything, and if you don't have
anything, you're nothing. You may as well be dead. You’re not even a citizen of
the United States. —Norman
Dennis (Michael Higgins)
Released 6-months after Five
Easy Pieces (1970), this film flew completely under the radar, as it didn’t and
still doesn’t have the same kind of financing, made for a fraction of the
budget, without featuring any big name stars, and told in a much more
cinematically austere manner. In fact,
this style of film is reverentially slow and ultimately joyless, completely
differentiated from what mainstream audiences will ever see, as you’ll have to
look to find this one playing in art houses.
The film does seem to have something of a revival after forty years,
where filmmaker John Waters included it in his annual selection for the 2012
Winner of the Pasinetti Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1970, the film was critically recognized, but barely seen for decades, supposedly inspired by a story Loden read in the newspaper about a woman thanking a judge for sentencing her to twenty years in prison. It’s an uncompromising portrait of a woman with no ambition and low self-esteem, whose very character is personified by no personal drive whatsoever. Early on, she’s late for a court appearance, showing up with curlers in her hair, seemingly indifferent about the court taking her two children away from her, where she indicates they’re better off with their father. The rest of the film vindicates the wisdom of that decision, spending her time in bars getting picked up by people she knows nothing about and who definitely want to know nothing about her. It’s as unflattering a portrait of a woman as you’ll find, yet the film is told in a tender and sympathetic manner, often with long takes, hand-held camerawork, minimal editing, and the gritty authenticity of location shooting, where Wanda barely speaks, but has no harmful intentions, yet she’s routinely taken advantage of, something she’s evidently used to. After a series of pick ups, she happens to drift into a bar after closing, where the impatience of the bartender is revealed to be a stick up in progress, with the real bartender is tied up on the floor behind the bar. Without realizing the circumstances, seeing it as just another pick up, she tags along with this guy, identified as Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins), who brings her along in his car, which happens to be stolen. His volatile temper and tyrannical behavior is a contrast to Wanda’s quiet ambivalence, where she’s barely aware of life outside the coal mines. The film makes an abrupt turn and quickly veers into a road movie, where Wanda realizes the guy she’s hooked up with is a small-time crook, stealing from cars and robbing gas stations along the way. While he continually berates her and orders her around, she behaves like she’s finally connected to somebody, like this could amount to something.
The Wanda we see onscreen is the picture of oppression and
powerlessness, hardly anyone’s idea of a hero, a quiet and mousy character who
never raises her voice, who rarely speaks if not spoken to, the kind of person
who is largely ignored by society.
Coming from the coal belt, she’s uneducated, has no work skills, and is
not in a position to change her life on her own. When guys pick her up, they don’t want to
talk to her, just have sex and be done with her afterwards, usually leaving her
alone on the side of the road. For the
price of a few beers and maybe a cheap meal, that’s all she gets out of it,
certainly not money or love. Mr. Dennis
whisking her out of town for God knows where is probably the biggest adventure
in her life and she has no way of knowing how it will play out anymore than she
knows where he’s taking her. Apparently
as they were shooting a scene in an open field where Dennis is laying low
drinking whisky out of the bottle, some locals were flying their remote
controlled model airplanes, where Loden quickly had to integrate the planes
into the scene, adding a certain improvised poetry to the moment, as it’s the
first suggested expression of freedom or flying away from all her
troubles. One of the more peculiar
scenes is Mr. Dennis visiting his own father in a makeshift
Now considered a landmark in American independent filmmaking, what’s unique from this period is the scarcity of American films centered on a working class female character, especially one depicting such a grimy working class milieu. While the film is a cyclical story of a drifter who leaves her family, has meaningless one-night stands, becomes the hostage of a petty crook, ultimately becoming his mistress and accomplice in crime, only to find herself alone and drifting again at the end, perhaps none the wiser. Unlike Kerouac’s On the Road, for instance, a book where men took to the road as a means of liberation and transcendence from the dull factory jobs and boring routines of working class America in the postwar 40’s and 50’s, the price one had to pay for the American Dream, there is no joy or liberation whatsoever in Wanda’s dour journey. Rather than feature the exuberance of the road adventure, Loden’s portrait couldn’t be more poignantly understated and relentlessly downbeat. Designed to counteract the mythical Hollywood portrayal of a romantic outlaw couple on the run, as represented by the hugely successful Bonnie and Clyde (1967), this film undermines any hint of romanticism with a dull and unrelenting passivity from Wanda, a lead character that gets brutally slapped across the face, who has for years become numb to the surrounding world around her. This unflinching look into an unseen lower stratum of American women who find themselves similarly drifting through life, aimless and alone, is all the more tragically powerful by being told in such an everyday, matter of fact manner. At the end, standing alone outside a loud and boisterous bar, once again penniless and spiritually void, there’s a peculiar recognition of that sunken, crestfallen look that feels like a holdover from the Depression days, where another woman instinctively seems to understand and invites her inside. This subtle gesture acknowledges a sisterly kinship for what it means to be alone, on the outside looking in. According to Bérénice Reynaud, For Wanda, from Senses of Cinema, October 2002, a regular contributor to Cahiers du Cinéma magazine since the mid-1980’s, “Wanda's historical importance [is that] Loden wanted to suggest, from the vantage point of her own experience, what it meant to be a damaged, alienated woman – not to fashion a ‘new woman’ or a positive heroine.”
A remarkable one-off from Elia Kazan's wife. Shot in 16mm and blown up to 35, it's a subtly picaresque movie about the wanderings of a semi-destitute American woman. Directing herself, Barbara Loden manages to make the character at once completely convincing in her soggy and directionless amorality, yet gradually sympathetic and even heroic. After a desultory involvement with a bank robber, to whom she becomes attached despite his unpredictable temper, Wanda botches everything - having agreed to drive a getaway car for him - by getting lost in a traffic jam; and our last glimpse of her is back on the road, being picked up in a bar. The film is all the more impressive for its refusal to get embroiled in half-baked political attitudinising; it's good enough to make one regret that the director/star produced nothing else before her untimely death from cancer.
Last Week - CINE-FILE: Cine-List Candace Wirt
Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS, the little-known, but very talented actress Barbara Loden wrote and directed her first and only film, WANDA, in 1970. Although she cast mostly nonprofessional actors for other roles, Loden herself stars as Wanda Goronski, a coal miner's wife who leaves her husband and children because she's "just no good." Put down as "Lover" and "Blondie" by other men she meets afterward, Wanda eventually takes up with a married bank robber (Michael Higgins) who tells her to call him Mr. Dennis, and they kill time on the road, running from the law through a landscape colored by distinctly American poverty. From a distance, the often expressionless, yet beautiful Wanda may appear like one of the lifeless mannequins that cinematographer Nicolas Proferes shoots in a department store; but Wanda is aware that she is a lost soul. Loden later described her partly autobiographical character: "She's trapped and she will never, ever get out of it and there are millions like her." Throughout this slow film of long takes, Wanda is always with some man or another, believing that she cannot take care of herself, that she is not a self. She finds herself in the hands of a criminal who only tolerates obedience, the same demand made of her by society. Loden's Wanda is both an impenetrable cipher and a fully embodied human being. She tells Mr. Dennis, "I don't have anything. Never did have anything, never will have anything." He bitterly responds, "That's stupid. You don't want anything, you won't have anything. You don't have anything, you're nothing. May as well be dead. You're not even a citizen of the United States." But while Wanda means nothing, it's not because she doesn't try. Society never gave her a chance. WANDA is a masterpiece of independent filmmaking that portrays what is rarely found onscreen—the true experience of a woman's life. (1970, 102 min, 35mm)
You've never seen a character in American film quite like Barbara Loden's "Wanda Goransky".
Written and directed and starring Loden, an actress who was married to Elia Kazan and had small but interesting roles in his films "Wild River" and "Splendor in the Grass" as well as a well-regarded turn on Broadway in Arthur Miller's "After The Fall", Loden struck out on her own to make one of the seminal but little-seen independent films in American cinema with her 1970 feature "Wanda", which was restored and presented this past weekend at UCLA's festival of preservation.
As a portrait of a divorced and unemployed woman living a rootless life without meaning in and around Scranton and the coal country of Pennsylvania, Loden manages to subvert her natural beauty in a naked, uninflected portrayal of a woman on such a downward trajectory that by the final freeze frame of her, barely conscious in yet another roadside bar amongst strangers, the power of her vision is complete and unrelenting, yet somehow also tender and beautiful.
Photographed and edited by her collaborator and filmmaking parter Nick Proferes, a colleague of D.A. Pennebaker in the 60's cinema verite movement, it has been described as a film that has the faded look of "24 Polaroids a second". Shot in 16mm on Kodak Ektachrome stock, it also has a wonderful eye for composition and for finding the true moments and imagery to convey Wanda's external journey and inner state of mind.
Co-starring Michael Higgins as a hard man she meets while he is robbing the bar she has stumbled into to use the rest room and try to cadge a free drink and some bar food, Wanda and "Mr. Dennis" go on a local road trip of petty crime culminating in a poorly conceived and ultimately failed attempted bank robbery. Loden was apparently offered and turned down the Fay Dunaway role in "Bonnie and Clyde", and I read that she conceived of "Wanda' in some ways as a rebuke to what she felt was the romanticized approach that Arthur Penn and his cast took to the depiction of those characters and their world.
Wanda was inspired by Loden reading a newspaper article about a woman thanking a judge for sentencing her to twenty years in prison, and although Wanda Goransky never goes to jail in the movie, you can't help but wonder what kind of release is possible for her from her dour daily existence?
A must see!
Popshifter » Top Five 1970s Films Directed by Women Chelsea Spear
By the time she’d directed her only feature, Barbara Loden had left her working-class family in North Carolina to become an actress in New York. She worked as a pinup girl and appeared in plays with Ernie Kovacs before landing her big break, playing Maggie in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall. During the production, Loden fell in love with her director—an up-and-comer by the name of Elia Kazan—and appeared in his films Wild River and Splendor in the Grass.
In the late 1960s, Loden read a newspaper article about a woman who thanked a judge for sentencing her to life in prison. Wondering what kind of person would do such a thing, and thinking of her life in the Rust Belt, she wrote the script for Wanda. After several years, she was able to raise enough money for a quick 16mm shoot, with Connecticut and Pennsylvania playing the role of her North Carolina home.
Unlike Kazan’s theatrical pot-boilers, Loden’s film feels like real life. The feature follows the titular character (played by Loden) as she deserts her family, leaves home, and falls in with a petty thief (Michael Higgins) as he plans to rob a bank. However, the film eschews plot for a character study of a female drifter. Loden and her collaborator Nick Proferes use documentary techniques such as long takes, minimal editing, and location shooting that gives the film a quiet authenticity.
At the center of the picture is Loden’s heartbreaking, unassuming performance as the pre-feminist protagonist. The role of the blank-faced, guileless Wanda is one of a woman who’s barely aware of life outside the confines of home and family. While feminists rejected the film because Wanda was not a “strong woman character,” she was something more: she was real.
Because of the slow-moving, character-driven plot, Wanda didn’t have much of a theatrical run outside of New York City. Loden and Proferes had written several scripts that never got produced, so Loden turned her attention to directing plays, teaching acting, and shooting educational films for the Learning Corporation of America. In the late 1970s she began pre-production on a cinematic adaptation of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, but was unable to realize this film as she died in September of 1980.
While the film was barely a cult success on its initial stateside release, it met with some success in Europe. Loden was frequently invited to screen the film at women’s film festivals in France and Germany. Over a quarter-century after the film’s release, renowned French actress Isabelle Huppert financed a remastering and a DVD release—Wanda‘s first official home entertainment availability.
Erasing Clouds Eduardo Abrantes
Wanda is a bum. A presence of numbness and fading beauty steeped in full on white trash mythology. An absent-minded worker. A late sleeper. An unwanted guest. An occasional prostitute. An unfit mother of two. An uncaring wife. And in this film we learn all this even before her curlers come off. After they do, we find out she's also having a bad hair day.
It is a straight story. Wanda, a coal-mining wife sinking deep into oblivion and abandonment, without a home, a job, with a failed marriage and a neglected family, drifts through city streets and outskirts. She has little money, drinks (not enough to ever actually appear drunk) and with time to waste she proceeds to waste it.
Her less than fulfilling encounters with men eventually lead to her meeting a nerve wrecked, angry, neurotic man who looks like a salesman and is in fact a thief. They hit the road in stolen cars with stolen clothes, drift some more together and when he decides to rob a bank, she tags along. It turns out badly. She ends alone.
Wanda was filmed in 1970, over a period of ten weeks in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Written and directed by Barbara Loden (1932-1980), co-directed by Nicholas Proferes, assisted by Christopher Cromin, and with sound and lighting by Lars Hedman - a four people ensemble that operated pretty much as a self-contained documentary crew. It was shot in 16mm reversal, afterwards blown up to 35mm, using a hand-held camera without much additional lighting, ensuring an image at once heavy with grain and thick with saturation, assuming moments of under and over-exposure to ever changing light conditions, again in true grit social-conscious documentary style.
But Wanda is a work of fiction, a piece at once raw and delicate, depending greatly on the awkward chemistry between the two main characters, Wanda (Barbara Loden herself) and Mr. Dennis (the petty thief played by Michael Higgins). The dramatic interaction between the two actors was fuelled by improvisation and by the concise portrait of an uncaring world, a portrait essentially built on the absentee character of that same world.
And yet the two main characters had values of sort. Mr. Dennis loved his father and was ashamed before him of the criminal drifter he'd become, he also tried to instil in Wanda a sense of worth and ambition, even of aesthetic refinement - with him she'd wear no slacks, only dresses, and a hat covering her unkempt hair. Wanda herself seemed to resume her moral stand in the phrase "I'm no good", while trying her very mediocre best to please her strict companion.
At the time of Wanda's shooting Barbara Loden was the wife of the director and producer Elia Kazan. He had been impressed by her acting and took her as a protégé, giving her feature status in his 1961 Splendour in the Grass, playing Warren Beatty's alluring sister. Wanda was her only film, and biographers suggest her inability to develop further projects had quite something to do with Kazan's personal and artistic overbearing influence. Barbara Loden apparently had a real crave for accomplishment as a filmmaker, but even though Wanda was acclaimed by the critic, it was mostly ignored by the American public. It received some greater measure of recognition in Europe, where even ten years later it was screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival and in Paris-Deauville in 1980. Barbara Loden was invited to attend the event but died of liver cancer the day of her departure.
Is Wanda a road movie? A crime fable of two misfit lovers? A study on the precarious condition of the poor and powerless? A woman's descent into self abasement? Or hope? What revelation is offered to us after this film's viewing?
The comparison with Arthur Penn's 1967 successful Bonnie and Clyde was somehow unavoidable upon the release of Wanda. "People like that would never get into those situations or lead that kind of life - they were too beautiful… Wanda is anti-Bonnie and Clyde," said Barbara Loden at the time.
In Bonnie and Clyde violence was glorious, Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde (Warren Beatty) were glorious, united by fate in a glamorous death ballad. Wanda's partner in crime is no fervent Clyde but a brute, whose first signs of budding affection towards her are swiftly followed by his not too violent demise in an idiotic bank robbery. It is through reflection, while the camera pans on her convoluted facial expression, that we picture the bloody body being carried off towards the ambulance, and have his death confirmed later, on a TV newscast, in a bar where she sits at the counter. No mention of her as an accomplice. Her Clyde died without a Bonnie.
In this film there are key moments, which could sum it up but do not. Moments like the faraway panoramic shot of Wanda as a white speck moving slowly by foot across a dark valley, a coal excavation site with its geography of black hills and sparse machinery; or the roadside drunken interlude of Wanda and Mr. Dennis, where the remote control airplane comes like some weird noisy eagle of desert lore, a pointless totem bird of unattainable freedom.
The sheer cohesion obtained by the editing rhythm, which is slow but tight, keeps this film on track. Some scenes are dragged into embarrassment, shared with the main character, but suddenly sharp, abrupt, cinema vérité-style cutting releases the tension that is soon regained. A strangle-release cinematic approach.
There is no light at the end, for strangely Wanda is not a tunnel. It is an increasingly dramatic funnelling of possibilities for one woman, a successive cancellation of hope, yet it never goes for full choke, albeit a lingering increase of pressure. There's some strange sense of beauty and meaningfulness present throughout it. A pervading sense which nonetheless is contradicted by the factual presentation of events which this film consists of.
Doom never comes, if we choose to withstand the heart-shattering last scene, one of dead spirit amidst folly - late at night, Wanda silently eating and drinking on a crowded bar with a loud and intoxicated mob that took a liking to her. What brought her there? The silent recognition of need from another woman.
For Wanda • Senses of Cinema Bérénice Reynaud from Senses of Cinema, October 2002
Nothing of the Sort: Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
from Comparative Cinema
Wanda Tom Sutpen from Flickhead
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]
"Wanda and Marilyn Times Five" by Chuck Kleinhans Jump Cut, 1974
goatdog's movies - Wanda, 1970 Michael W. Phillips
Movie Martyr Jeremy Heilman
Hammer to Nail [Mary Bronstein]
Wanda/Loden | chained and perfumed
Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970) | Journey by Frame Trevor Link
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
DVD Journal DSH
Wanda (1971, Barbara Loden) - Also Like Life
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival
floatationsuite [Sheila Seacroft]
The Evening Class: Frako Loden Explores Lost and Found Women ... Michael Guillen
2011 UCLA Festival of Preservation | siskelfilmcenter.org Marty Rubin
London
film festival puts a trailblazing film called Wanda back on the road Tony Paley from The Guardian, October 17,
2011
Cleveland Press [Tony Mastroianni]
New York Times (registration req'd) Roger Greenspun
Driven by Fierce Visions of Independence Kate Taylor from The New York Times, August 27, 2010
Wanda (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Loktev, Julia
DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT B 83
USA
If you’ve seen A SINGLE GIRL or ROSETTA, both shot in real time with cameras placed over the shoulder capturing a visceral feel for the physical, where the camera all but consumes the entire presence of the female subject, then you’ve seen this film, only with a different subject matter. Of interest, this female subject, Luisa Williams, had never acted before, but was instead discovered working as a nanny, and who now, I’m told, works in a video store. Here she portrays an unnamed 19-year old girl shown in the first half of the film getting prepped for her suicide bomb mission by people wearing black hoods over their heads with little holes for the eyes and mouth, living in a hermetically sealed motel room environment, shot with exact precision and repetition using monaural sound, while in the second half, she’s released into the world of her mission, Times Square of New York City, which instantly comes alive in stereo sound, capturing a city teeming with activity and life, as she slowly moves into position to detonate the bomb she’s carrying in her backpack.
What’s surprising is the automatic tone of politeness from
her instructors, which becomes nauseatingly artificial, but doesn’t seem to bother
the girl at all, who remains calm and thanks them back in the same excessive
proportion. This reaches a point of
comic absurdity when she performs what amounts to a fashion show for the
organizers who have her try on various attire, getting the thumbs up or down on
several choices before deciding on her “correct” wardrobe. She has an interesting quality to her, with
no background information as to who she is or why she’s chosen this course of
action, but besides her obvious intention to do a good job, she’s also just a
kid, with childlike interests and mannerisms.
This becomes evident as the film progresses, as does her mission, which
is only mentioned in the second half of the film, which comes out of hibernation
once she enters
The smells, the sounds, the feel of being squashed in the
crowded streets and sidewalks, all of this becomes suddenly overwhelming to the
girl. At times, all we hear is the sound
of her intense breathing, where the oppressive outside noise moves in and out of
her awareness, also emphasized is the sound of her eating on the streets, which
becomes a constant pacifier as she enters this realm of death. As we get closer to the moment of detonation,
the tension is equally overwhelming, as the filmmaker chooses to wordlessly
capture small personal moments of people who are standing nearby waiting for
the light to change, the movement of their fingers, the look in their eyes,
their faces, as their very human presence becomes the focus of the camera. Supposedly inspired by real stories of
Chechen women bombers that left letters behind, this technique of rigorous
minimalism is effective, but only in brief flourishes, as otherwise the slow
buildup of banal detail and repetition allows the eyes to wander off the screen
from time to time, waiting for the inevitable to happen. Winner of the FIPRESCI Award for Best First
or Second-Time Filmmaker at the 2006
Day Night Day Night Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
THE
LONELIEST PLANET B 84
USA Germany (113 mi)
2011
The
rise of the road increases, the mountains close in more and more tightly,
and it seems as though there is no longer any hope; only a bit of sky is
visible above our heads. It has a disheartening effect on us; we are
overwhelmed and keep silent. Suddenly, at a sharp turn in the road, a huge
chasm opens up on our right…
—In
Wonderland, on his visit to the Russian Caucasus in 1899 by Knut Hamsun,1903
Julia Loktev emigrated to America from Russia at age 9, so she s
intimately familiar with the immigrant experience, which she uses here as a
kind of minimalist existential travelogue through the Caucasus Mountains
of Georgia, one of the former Soviet satellite countries bordering Russia, now
an independent nation since 1991. This
foreign sensibility is at the heart of the film, though it’s transposed into the
midst of an immense mountainous landscape where Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg)
are a young couple in love and about to be married spending the summer
backpacking across Georgia, hiring a local guide, Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze), a
non-professional actor who is in real life a professional mountaineer. This is about as bare bones a story as you’re
going to find, offering little to no backstory, most all of it untranslated at
the beginning, as people communicate in mixed languages (where the director’s
knowledge of Russian helped her with the older generation in Georgia), where
the three of them simply set off into the mountainous back country, where the
presence of humans barely registers in this otherwise pristine wilderness. Adapted by the director from a Tom Bissell story Expensive Trips
Nowhere, the film continually draws upon other sources, perhaps most
centrally the Georgian/Russian film director Mikhail Kalatozov’s LETTER NEVER
SENT (1960) and his legendary WWII cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky whose camera mobility is
renowned, following a psychological shift from professionalism to the
deteriorating mental breakdown of a small scientific team dropped off in the
vast Siberian forest. The only female in
the group, Tatyana Samojlova from The
Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli) (1957), creates sexual tension between
her physically timid and intellectually reserved husband and the more virile,
masculine outdoorsman of the group, set against the remote Siberian wilderness, pitting the forces of human nature against
what eventually becomes the strongest force in the film, the dominating
primeval landscape.
In this film we have two cultural sensibilities pitted against one
another, an attractive, free spirited woman in the company of a Western and
Eastern European male companion, where she’s having a sexual affair with Alex
under the watchful eye of their semi-educated guide and the silent presence of
the great outdoors. Using hand held
cameras from cinematographer Inti Briones, the entire film is a walking
expedition through an immensely beautiful region with little more to hold our
attention than the region itself. The
insipid dialogue or barely communicated thoughts reveal little interior depth
of character, where all remain a stranger to one another, spending most of
their time walking separately, lost in their own thoughts, though at the end of
the day after pitching their tents they make feeble efforts to talk, drink,
sing, or socialize, but the film never penetrates the exterior façade of any of
them. If anything, the couple remains in
a lighthearted and playful mood, where they can barely take their hands off
each other until a single event challenges their carefree nonchalance, an event
that is never discussed but is allowed to fester, like an open wound. Like two separate halves of a film, the
second half becomes more brooding and introspective, especially as seen through
Western eyes, as Nica spends most all of the first half with Alex, but the two
barely speak afterwards, where their continual walking becomes an exercise of
drudgery, even through such a magnificent landscape. Nonetheless, the camera holds tight with the visceral
feel for extended hiking, walking until nearly exhausted, where Alex collapses
into bed while Nica has a prolonged scene sharing drinks over a night fire with Dato, who
attempts to open up about his life, bringing an Eastern sensibility into the
picture, where what is expected of him is completely different.
What’s missing in this film is the overwhelming force unleashed by the
Siberian forest in Kalatozov’s film, where any human presence was
quickly placed in peril, with all previous psychological mind games and
personal motivations rendered moot, as survival was at stake. Here the effect is much too subtle, where
there is a major behavior difference, but most all of it interior, used to
little overall dramatic effect. Instead,
the focus of the film remains on the physical movement of hiking itself,
similar to mechanized feet in a Bresson film, but much more of it, becoming a
dreary and overwhelmingly monotonous exercise without human interaction, where
the pace of the film slows to a crawl, resembling the treacherous pace
of GERRY (2002). Often seen in long
shots where humans are mere specks dotting the landscape, where the director once backpacked alone across Central Asia from Turkmenistan to
Kazakhstan for six months at age 22, bringing that same feeling of isolation into
what starts to feel like a misadventure, as if something terribly wrong is
contaminating the souls of each one of them, where their mood grows darker and
more bleak, holding out little hope of repairing whatever’s broken. The film recalls the interior structure of
Atom Egoyan’s CALENDAR (1993), where a Canadian-Armenian couple drift apart
while visiting ancient ruins in their European homeland, where the girl is
inevitably drawn to their handsome guide, leaving the narrator to fend for
himself in what amounts to a strange land.
Unfortunately, while there is a hint of major psychological
repression from suffocating interior claustrophobia, Loktev fails to bring any element of
suspense or mystery into the long and arduous journey, becoming painstakingly empty
after awhile, where the significant drama is all taking place
under the surface, expressed through the rigorous minimalism of her earlier film, DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT
(2006), constructing a film through the meticulous accumulation of
minutiae.
Contempt Goes Backpacking. We spend a long while watching
the well-scrubbed couple (Hani Furstenberg and Gael Garcia Bernal) have
well-scrubbed sex, in between trekking the wild spaces of the Republic of
Georgia, and we await an Event. Then the Event happens and…All right, no
spoilers here, so the Siren puts it this way. Martin Amis, in his 1984 article
on Brian De Palma, remarks that Body Double (which the Siren loves)
"could be exploded by a telephone call." This movie explodes if one
character turns to the other on one of many arduous hikes and says, "What
the hell…?" Has definite rewards, like the lovely score by Richard Skelton,
and some enthralling moments, like a long-distance look at the couple and their
guide walking along a riverbank after the Event, and a graceful, deeply
emotional shot that zooms in on Furstenberg's hair coiled at her neck. But
overall, a frustrating travelogue.
The Loneliest Planet | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias
At almost precisely the midpoint of The Loneliest Planet, Julia Loktev’s gorgeous meditation on trust, masculinity, and the subtle dynamics of relationships, something happens. It only lasts about three seconds and represents the only major plot point in a film that has no interest in providing any more of them. Spoiling it here would diminish its power and surprise, but suffice to say, this pivotal event completely alters the characters’ understanding of each other and themselves, and turns the entire movie on a dime. There are times in everyone’s life that test their resolve and reveal who they are, and Loktev (Day Night Day Night) focuses with extraordinary acuity on the lead-up to and fallout from one such moment and where it leaves a couple in love.
Based on Tom Bissell’s equally evocative short story “Expensive Trips Nowhere,” The Loneliest Planet follows two young adventurers, Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg, on a fateful trip through the stunning Caucasus Mountain range in Georgia. Bissell’s story had them as a married couple trudging through Kazakhstan, but Loktev discards any such emotional baggage: When they set off on their backpacking tour, Bernal and Furstenberg are utterly compatible and passionate about each other, and merely engaged to be married. Leading them through the uncertain terrain is Bidzina Gujabidze, an amiable but mysterious and troubled guide who has some military background, but like a lot of things about him, the details of his experience are vague. After they spend a day trudging through magnificent scenery—a travelogue-pretty mix of lush hillsides, arid mountain faces, and glistening streams—three men approach. One of them has a gun.
In extending a short story to feature length without embellishing it—at least in the plotting—Loktev suffuses the film with the kind of intimate, microscopic detail and observation that’s more common to literature than cinema. Much of the real story in The Loneliest Planet is told nonverbally, in the physical distance between the characters or the palpable tension that develops between Bernal and Furstenberg when they lose that ease of communication. Loktev builds tension masterfully in the first half, but with small moments of danger and discord that trouble what is otherwise a pleasant outing. And when the thing happens, Gujabidze, a fascinating and sometimes tremendously funny presence, complicates the relationships all the more. Though it heavily reworks Bissell’s story, the film feels as beautifully calibrated as a great piece of short fiction, only with visual accents and emphases filling in for the prose. It’s a relationship movie where the most important exchanges remain unspoken.
THE LONELIEST PLANET Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Like Abbas Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy,” Julia Loktev’s “The Loneliest Planet,” made in the republic of Georgia by an American director, feels like a 1950s or ‘60s European art film that just happened to be taking place now. In its use of landscape to express the psychological makeup of a relationship, “The Loneliest Planet” recalls Roberto Rossellini’s “Stromboli” and “Voyage To Italy.” However, there’s something very modern about it as well –– a casual, unexplained globalism.
Her protagonists are an American woman (played by an actress whose career has mostly taken place in Israel), a Mexican man, and their Georgian tour guide. The guide has a monologue where he complains about his wife leaving him for a Turk. “Not a European!,” he complains.
The film includes very brief scenes of untranslated Georgian dialogue, as well as bits of Spanish. To some extent, relying on this device may stem from Loktev’s own background as an immigrant; her family moved from Russia to Colorado when she was nine. At the same time, “The Loneliest Planet,” adapted from a short story by Tom Bissell, suggests that one can’t understand how Europe has changed without an appreciation for its cultural past.
Alex (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) are a young couple, spending the summer before their marriage backpacking across Georgia, with the hired help of local guide Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze). As they walk, Alex and Nica practice Spanish verbs and listen to Dato tell jokes about the Chinese. Almost nothing dramatic happens for the first half of “The Loneliest Planet,” but then the threat of violence suddenly erupts, and one of the characters makes a questionable decision. This upends Alex and Nica’s relationship, a situation complicated further by the fact that Dato is always watching them.
There are a number of ways Loktev could have shot the Georgian landscape. She picked two. First, she often uses a handheld camera, carried close to the actors’ bodies. In intimate surroundings, it almost becomes a fourth character. She also relies on extreme long shots as punctuation; sometimes, the characters are reduced to dots against a backdrop of green mountains. These images are generally accompanied by folk music, presumably from the region. As the characters pass through the Georgian countryside, the landscape seems to change to reflect their mood, growing strangely lunar and bleak at times.
“The Loneliest Planet” draws on Loktev’s experience as a backpacker. “I traveled alone across Central Asia from Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan for half a year when I was 22, and I’ve spent a lot of time accidentally making a fool of myself in various parts of the world since,” she has said.
It is also influenced by other films. Both the plot and setting of Atom Egoyan’s “Calendar,” in which an Armenian-Canadian couple’s relationship comes apart during a trip to their ancestral homeland, come to mind. Kiarostami’s use of long shots in “And Life Goes On” and “Through The Olive Trees” is also evoked by Loktev. “The Loneliest Planet,” “And Life Goes On,” and “Calendar” are all road movies of a kind.
If there’s a major flaw to “The Loneliest Planet,” it’s that the structure is lopsided. The first half of the film is a placid travelogue. The second half is far more dramatic, but even there, the structure is essentially a setup for a handful of key scenes. The film demands close attention. The changes Alex and Nica go through, on a scene-by-scene basis, are fairly subtle. That said, Nica is put in danger twice, and the decisions Alex and Dato make about how to protect her resonate throughout the rest of the film.
Loktev’s first narrative feature, “Day Night Day Night,” followed a would-be suicide bomber around Times Square. It’s one of the definitive examinations of post-9/11 paranoia, yet it made little dent at the box office, which is undoubtedly one of the reasons it took Loktev five years to make a follow-up. She seems to have benefited from a larger budget –– as well as the presence of a movie star in Garcia Bernal –– this time around, but “The Loneliest Planet” is not at all compromised. It allows a story to emerge from its setting and characters on its own terms. As with all films, there’s a degree of artifice here, but Loktev makes her achievement look almost effortless.
Hardy and sophisticated offbeat travelers both, Nica (Hani
Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal), who are to be married in a few
months, take a camping trip through the Caucasus with a Georgian mountain
guide, Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze). Along the way -- at the film's midpoint -- an
incident happens that breaks the cozy mood between them, possibly forever.
After Alec makes a split decision that shocks Nica, the two become distant. The
title is perhaps a mocking reference to the rough tour guide series,
"Lonely Planet." Nica and Alex seem to be intimate and perfectly
matched and the trip is gong pretty smoothly, but it all seems to turn into a
subtle psychological hell.
This is the sophomore feature of Julia Loktev, who was born in St. Petersburg,
Russia, and grew up in the US, studying film at NYU. Her first film was a
documentary, Moment of Impact, which focused on the consequences of a
near-fatal car accident that her father suffered. Her first fiction feature, Day
Night Day Night (shown at Lincoln Center's New Directors/New Films series
in 2007), was about a would-be suicide bomber in Times Square. The director has
also exhibited art pieces at Tate Modern and P.S.1, and recently received a
Guggenheim Fellowship.
Loktev achieves great immediacy in the way she shoots the pair early on
bathing, cuddling, and making love in rough surroundings, seemingly in perfect
tune with each other. Israel-based, NY-born Furstenburg has luminous skin and
flaming red hair; García Bernal has his usual charisma and charm. The pair are
almost too clearly cast for each having both playful and melancholy sides: it's
almost as if they play only in those two keys. Gujabidze has no particular
charm, and his English is a bit rough. But that's the point. He's a real
mountaineer and guide, not an actor, and his presence adds to the documentary
feel. The other player is the grass-covered, beautiful Khevi region of the
Caucasus, which helps mitigate the monotony of an adventure that for the viewer
is lacking in much of interest, unless reviewing Spanish verbs, crossing a
stream, or doing tricks with a string fascinate you.
The film uses much more limited material and more rudimentary dialogue, but
plays with space and time in ways that might suggest the Antonioni of L'Avventura.
And in both films events lead up to an event that changes things and that's
never fully understood. Whatever the mid-point event in Loneliest Planet
means to the characters, they don't discuss it.
Loktev works well in her harsh style. For me, a richer and more nuanced study
of the decline of a seemingly perfect relationship between two young people can
be found in Maren Ade's Everyone Else, which was part of the 2009 NYFF,
and got a limited US theatrical release in 2010. I reviewed it as part of the NYFF. For some, The Loneliest
Planet is a maddening snooze-fest, yet another example of how an art film
can be like watching paint dry. But for the attentive, adventurous festival
viewer, its fresh, raw approach offers stimulation and food for thought.
The Loneliest Planet is a an exhausting, intense watching experience,
all the more focused for its vivid immediacy and lack of many plot or dialogue
guidelines. It's a taut, effective film, with some pure landscape moments
enhanced by Richard Skelton's spare, shimmering music. But Loktev doesn't make
as good use as she might of the rearrangement of sensibility. She tends to rely
too much toward the end on randomly accumulated material, and the last two
sequences are weak. The way Nika and Alex are thrust upon us without
backstories, along with the lack of discussion of events, contributes to a
mystery that makes this a movie audiences will want to debate. For me the
situation suggests a failure of nerve, the kind of thing you might find in a
Hemingway short story about a couple game hunting, though his famous "The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomer" is almost the reverse of this tale,
which is freely adapted from the story, "Expensive Trips Nowhere," by
Tom Bissell. In the wild, with a guide, an urban civilized man's courage may be
more sorely and starkly tested. Maybe this story could take place anywhere.
Loktev has tried to eschew pretty-pretty effects, but the lush, wide-open
Georgian landscape is still a bit too distracting. However she is true to the
original story: Bissell's fiction generally transpires in Central Asian
settings.
Keyframe: the Fandor Blog [Phil Coldiron]
'The Loneliest Planet': A Stark Landscape Reveals ... - PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
The House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima]
Sound On Sight Temitope Ugundare
Review: All Is Not What It Seems In The Beautifully Shot 'The ...
'The Loneliest Planet' - Masculinity Crisis In - National Public Radio Mark Jenkins from NPR
'The Loneliest Planet' Review — One of the Year's Best ... - Movieline Alison Willmore
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Spectrum Culture [Trevor Link]
The Loneliest Planet | Review | Screen Mike Goodridge from Screendaily
The Lumière Reader [Jacob Powell]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Minimalism du jour: Julia Loktev's THE LONELIEST PLANET opens in New York James van Maanen from Trust Movies
Loneliest Planet, The - ReelTalk Movie Reviews Donald Levit
The Loneliest Planet Movie Review | Film School Rejects Rob Hunter
Cloud Atlas - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Way Too Indie [Dustin Jansick]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Screen Fanatic [David O'Connell]
The Loneliest Planet Movie Review 3 : Shockya.com Brent Simon
The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
CONEVMOVIES.com [Nathaniel Rogers]
ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Julia Loktev interview Steve Erickson from The L-Magazine, October 24, 2012
The Hollywood Reporter [Neil Young]
The Loneliest Planet | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Joshua Rothkopf
The Loneliest Planet | Movie review - Film - Time Out Chicago A.A. Dowd
The Loneliest Planet Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Ben Kenigsberg
Critic Review for The Loneliest Planet on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Joseph Anthony]
'Loneliest Planet' review: Aimless trek - San Francisco Chronicle Walter Addiego
Review: 'The Loneliest Planet' is a revealing ... - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey
Gender dynamics on 'The Loneliest Planet ... - Los Angeles Times Mark Olsen
Los Angeles : The Loneliest Planet Karina Longworth from LA Weekly
The Loneliest Planet - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times
The Loneliest Planet - Movies - The New York Times A.O. Scott
Lombardi,
Francisco J.
THE
LION’S DEN (La Boca del Lobo)
Peru Spain (128 mi)
1988
User comments from imdb Author: Alien_Latino
from Toronto,Canada
I just saw this movie and let me
say that it's as realistic as it can get, in some scenes it's hard to
distinguish if it's a movie or a documentary. The movie not only documents the
reality of the peruvian civil war but also what exactly goes on in villages
afflicted by war, the movie also depicts the racism against indian peoples in
latin nations. This movie is the epitome of realism. I know this because I have
been myself in the middle of a Latin American civil war and there's nothing you
can subtract from this movie as being unrealistic. The "Sendero
Luminoso" (Shinning Path) guerrillas were the most strange guerrilla
movement in the American continent, it was refreshing to see this movie and see
their modus operandi in the battlefield.
Lombardi's anti-war film is set high
in the remote mountains of Peru, where the communists are in revolt against the
government. A small platoon of soldiers establish a post in an Indian village.
Their indecisive officer is ambushed and butchered, but none of the citizenry
will admit to any knowledge of the guerillas. Career soldier Luna (Vega) is
initially reassured by the arrival of tough Lieutenant Roca (Bueno), but
increasingly alienated by the behaviour of his friend Gallardo (Tejada), who
treats the Indians as sub-human. The enemy never surfaces, though the
decimation of the army post continues, and it is this sense of impotence that
finally sparks off a massacre of the villagers. Platoon, The Deer
Hunter, and in particular, Philip Caputo's Rumours of War, tap
into similar psychological terrain, though continents removed. A bit more heat
under the pressure cooker and a bit more characterisation would have been
welcome, but the film works steadily towards its final impact.
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
''La Boca del Lobo'' (''The Mouth of the Wolf''), Francisco J. Lombardi's Peruvian film opening today at the Public, dramatizes the no-win situation of the Peruvian Indian caught in a war in which he has no part to play except as the victim.
On one side is the Maoist rebel group Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), which has control over what the Government calls the Emergency Zone in the Andean highlands. On the other side is the Peruvian Army, which has been unsuccessfully pursuing Shining Path for some years.
Shining Path attempts to coerce peasant support through brutality and terrorism. The army uses the same tactics against the Indians who they think may be supporting the rebels.
''La Boca del Lobo'' is fiction inspired by the army's November 1983 massacre of 47 men, women and children suspected of terrorism. When the news of the massacre came out, the army blamed Shining Path for the atrocities, but one eyewitness testified to the contrary.
The movie makes no attempt to describe the conditions in which the Andean Indians live, nor do any rebels appear. They remain a sinister off-screen presence, their political goals undefined.
''La Boca del Lobo'' seems to have been conceived in the same spirit as Brian De Palma's ''Casualties of War.''
It chooses to dramatize the moral and emotional disintegration of the members of a small army detachment, sent away from any world they know to root out Shining Path in a remote mountain village. The focus of the story is a young recruit who has volunteered for the assignment in hopes of winning an appointment to officers' training school. His adversary is the detachment's leader, an urbane career officer who goes to pieces fighting an unseen enemy.
''La Boca del Lobo'' is technically accomplished but not very sophisticated. The Andean scenery is magnificent, the drama primitive. The director's humanism is apparent, but when the story boils down to a game of Russian roulette played by the officer and the recruit, melodrama upstages humanism. There is also the suspicion that someone connected with the movie was somewhat too impressed by ''The Deer Hunter.''
Filming the war with Sendero Francisca da Gama from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
Variety (Jay Weissberg) review
BLACK
BUTTERFLY B- 80
Set during the historical period of Lima, Peru in the year 2000, at the end of Alberto Fujimori’s reign, a leader who suspended civil rights in the interest of combating the Shining Path, a radical communist guerilla group that was labeled by the government as a terrorist group, heightening Fujimori’s popularity when, with the aid of American CIA logistics, equipment and interrogation techniques, they captured several of the guerilla leaders, actually parading them in their underwear meekly confessing to their crimes while wearing chains on national television. Fujimori protected himself using a dirty tricks operator, chief of security strongman Vladimiro Montesinos, known to keep secret staches of money, lining his pockets from shady business deals, drug trafficking, and murders for hire. Eventually his own penchant for taping the actions of everyone around him worked against him, as he was caught on tape taking bribes. Both Montesinos and Fujimori fled the country, the latter living in Japan for at least a decade, but both were eventually caught and are now languishing in Peruvian prisons awaiting their trials.
Using romanticized, somewhat fictitious liberties, this film re-imagines real events, a young woman’s response to the brutal murder in his bed of her fiancé, one of the few honest judges who vowed to fight against the rampant corruption in Lima. When a tabloid newspaper headlined a trumped up scenario that the murder was based on a gay lover’s quarrel, his fiancé, Gabriella (Melania Urbina) is incensed and furiously seeks to clear his name, in the process discovering Angela (Magdyel Ugaz), the apathetic writer of the story who was handed the version to write by her editor, who she also dates. Eventually the starkly contrasted lives of Gabriella and Angela combine forces, where Gabriella uses her stunning beauty to climb her way up the food chain to whoever ordered the hit on her husband, giving Angela the story she should have written.
While Urbina is spectacularly beautiful, where the quiet grace of a recurring chamber music refrain from Roberto Benavides adds an additional sense of stylized elegance, along with the sumptuous photography by Paco Belda, it is preposterous to take this story seriously as it becomes ever more ludicrous and less about the layers of murder and corruption they are supposedly uncovering, a sort of beauty and the beast story that becomes less believable and more exaggerated the closer she gets to Montesinos as her eventual target, sleeping with a power mad old lesbian hag in the process who just blurts out whatever she needs. Despite paying large sums of money, it’s amazing how information simply drops into her lap whenever she needs it, with no one questioning her own motives, which would also be worth money in someone else’s hands. Opposites attract and the developing relationsip between the two leads can be intriguing, especially viewing events from differing class perspectives, but the single-minded focus to accentuate only Gabriella’s cockamamie point of view eventually derails the movie, as she’s clearly out of her element.
A schoolteacher of privilege and a
cynical tabloid journalist join forces to avenge the politically-motivated
murder of the teacher's jurist fiance during Peru's corrupt Fujimori regime in
the taut character study-cum-political thriller "Black Butterfly." With
a galvanizing perf by Melania Urbina as the avenging educator and the palpable
spell of urgency and dread cast by vet Peruvian helmer Francisco J. Lombardi,
pic transcends regional politics to emerge a satisfying drama that will grace
fests, flutter into arthouse play and perform strongly in ancillary.
The "free interpretation" of
an apparent actual event, pic unfolds in 2000, at the tail end of Alberto
Fujimori's "civil dictatorship." Specific true-to-life engine
that powers plot is Vladimiro
Montesinos, honcho of Peru's intelligence service, who by this time had
built a vast network of illegal activities involving business, media and
politics.
While taking her young charges on a
field trip outside Lima, Gabriela (Urbina) learns that her honest judge b.f.
Guido Pazos (Dario Abad) has been brutally murdered in his bed. Meanwhile,
weary tabloid journo Angela (newcomer Magdyel Ugaz) is forced by the craven
boss she's half-heartedly dating, Osman (Gustavo Bueno), to write up the story
as a gay liaison gone wrong.
Furious, Gabriela confronts Osman, who
has her dragged from the paper's offices. Yet something about the ferocity of
her outrage kindles a latent compassion in Angela, who professes to "hate
politics" but is secretly appalled at the direction her society has taken.
As the two women hesitantly reach out
to each other, Gabriela becomes determined to murder Montesinos, the shadowy
figure of power behind Guido's death.
To that end, false documents are
procured, and Gabriela begins a romance with the connected Dotty (Yvonne
Frayssinet). This leads to Gabriela's hiring in the hotel that caters to
military and government officials -- and a private audience with her prey.
Most of helmer Lombardi's dozen
previous films address government corruption and the challenges of media under
trying circumstances. In adapting Alonso Cueto's novel, he's wisely kept the
relationship between these very different women front and center.
As good as Urbina is, it's the
chemistry between her and Ugaz that makes the pic work -- and softens the
slightly overlong running time. Other thesps are fine, led by Frayssinet's
deeply conflicted Dotty.
Lonergan, Kenneth
Kenneth Lonergan: Information from Answers.com Jason Buchanan bio at Rovi
Some may say that Kenneth Lonergan is carrying on the tradition
of such directors as John Cassavetes with his affection for small,
character-driven dramas. With a successful career as a playwright preceding his
turn as a screenwriter and director, Lonergan seems to have come from the
perfect background in creating sympathetic characters in universal,
recognizable situations, a key component in what he terms the "salvation
of the ordinary."
A native of the Bronx, Lonergan began to develop his writing skills in high
school, later graduating from the NYU Playwriting Program and penning stories
that, though not necessarily autobiographical, reflected situations he had
experienced that affected his life. Lonergan was inspired early on to pen Waverly
Gallery, based on his grandmother's Greenwich Village Gallery. More success
came with his next youth-inspired off-Broadway play This is Your Youth.
Lonergan's film career began with his screenplay for the gangland comedy Analyze This
(1999). He was subsequently offered a job writing The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000), a script that
he enjoyed writing but wasn't quite what he had in mind as a career direction.
Stepping into the director's chair, Lonergan brought his screenplay for You Can
Count on Me to celluloid with much acclaim, earning him the Grand Jury
Prize at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for
Best Original Screenplay. You Can
Count on Me was produced in part by Martin
Scorsese, and Lonergan continued his relationship with the director by
contributing a rewrite to the screenplay for the director's Gangs of
New York, a task for which Lonergan found himself Oscar nominated.
While fans of You Can Count on Me were undoubtedly curious to see how
Longergan would follow-up that film, their patience would be severely tested
when they were forced to wait six years for his sophomore directorial effort;
the intensely emotional drama Margaret.
A harrowing look at the manner in which one teenager's idealistic outlook in
life is challenged by the unforgiving realities of the real world, Margaret
told the tale of a New York City high school student (Anna Paquin)
who becomes convinced that she caused a bus accident that ultimately claimed
the life of an innocent woman.
Kenneth Lonergan - overview Jason Buchanan, bio at Rovi from AMC Movie Guide
Kenneth Lonergan Biography from Mubi
Kenneth Lonergan | Movies and Biography - Yahoo! Movies brief bio
Kenneth Lonergan — TMDb brief bio
Kenneth Lonergan Theatre Credits
Playscripts, Inc. - Kenneth Lonergan
Signature Theatre - Kenneth Lonergan
The Playlist: Has Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' Been Buried? Gabe Toro from the indieWIRE Playlist, April 26, 2009
KENNETH LONERGAN'S MARGARET: A PORTRAIT OF A ... Kevin Faraci from CHUD, April 27, 2009
Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret': post-production in a courtroom - Los ... John Horn from The LA Times, August 26, 2009
Margaret Carson Reeves at ScriptShadow, July 8, 2010
The Playlist: Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' Is Finally Finished, Will ... Kevin Jagernauth from the indieWIRE Playlist, July 23, 2010
Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret to be released in 2011 - Imitation of ... Imitation of Life, September 14, 2010
Kenneth Lonergan To Write HBO's 'Taxi-22' - Deadline.com Nellie Andreeva from Deadline, December 15, 2010
Martin Scorsese Trying to Edit Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' Out of ... Jack Giroux from Film School Rejects, May 7, 2011
Will Martin Scorsese Help Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' Finally ... Nick Newman from The Film Stage, May 9, 2011
Martin Scorsese To Edit Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' In Hopes Of ... Kevin Jagernauth from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 9, 2011
• View topic - Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011) Criterion Forum, a film discussion group, August 3, 2011
Opera Fresh: Kenneth Lonergan's Film "Margaret" Will Feature Opera August 5, 2011
Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' Just Makes The Cut Dan Mecca from The Film Stage, September 5, 2011
After six years, 'Margaret' finally arrives in theaters John Horn and Nicole Sperling from The LA Times, September 30, 2011
Kevin Jagernauth Martin Scorsese’s Cut Of ‘Margaret’ Longer Than Current Version; Producer Turned Down TIFF Premiere, from the indieWIRE Playlist, October 3, 2011
Six years in the making, "Margaret" is worth the wait Matt Singer from IFC News, October 6, 2011
Are you there, Fox? It's me, 'Margaret' Guy Lodge from HitFix, November 6, 2011
Critics Demand to See Margaret Forrest Wickman from Slate, December 1, 2011
Why is Fox trying to bury Margaret? Tony Palin from The Guardian, December 2, 2011
Kenneth Lonergan reveals just which cut of “Margaret” got released ... Matt Singer from IFC, December 2, 2011
Kenneth Lonergan Hopes The Longer Cut Of 'Margaret' Edited By ... Kevin Jagernauth from the indieWIRE Playlist, December 3, 2011
Team 'Margaret' makes headway Guy Lodge from HitFix, December 6, 2011
Kenneth Lonergan | The Reel Bits Richard Gray from The Reel Bits, February 8, 2012
Medieval Play Is Kenneth Lonergan's Next Work, Under His Own ... Kenneth Jones from Playbill, February 9, 2012
Bright
Wall/Dark Room November 2016: "This Mass of Conflicting ... This
Mass of Conflicing Impulses: A Former Teen Narcissist Watches “Margaret,” by
Lauren Wilford from the Ebert site, November 2016
This
Is Her Youth: The Unspoken Language of Margaret — Bright Wall ... Sean Nelson from Bright Wall Dark Room, November 2016
Issue 41: Margaret — Bright Wall/Dark Room November 2016
The
Cinematic Traumas of Kenneth Lonergan - The New Yorker Rebecca Mead from The New Yorker, November 7, 2016
This Is His Moment Andrew Goldman interview with the director from The New York Observer, March 1, 2001
BOMB Magazine: Kenneth Lonergan by Rachel Kushner Interview from Bomb Magazine, Summer 2001
Director Kenneth Lonergan Emerges to Tell Us He's Mary Pols interview from Time magazine, December 2, 2011
Q&A with Kenneth Lonergan - Entertainment News, Film News ... Interview from Variety, January 10, 2012
Kenneth Lonergan on Margaret | Film interview - Film - Time Out ... Ben Kenigsberg interview from Time Out Chicago, February 15, 2012
Kenneth Lonergan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
YOU CAN COUNT ON ME A 95
USA (111 mi) 2000
I’m
not the kind of guy that everyone says I am. —Terry Prescott (Mark Ruffalo)
A small, independent gem of a film showing a glimpse of life and family strife in a rural upstate New York community, where trees and rolling hills are prevalent, and the idyllic Main Street is the picture of any one-street small American town, which is the setting of a brother and sister reunion. Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney are Terry and Sammy Prescott, young adults now after being orphaned at an early age when their parents died in a senseless car accident. Sammy has an 8-year old son Rudy (Rory Culkin), whose absent father stays out of the picture, leaving unanswered questions and a certain curiosity from the child. Sammy is the kind of responsible, overcontrolling perfectionist that never has a hair out of place while Terry has always been a more aimless drifter that never worries about how things are supposed to be, as he’d never do things that way anyway. Sammy still lives in their parent’s house, has a respectable job at the bank, and feels connected to the small town community through church and her son’s school affairs, while Terry never allows himself to feel tied down, comes and goes whenever he pleases, and worries his sister sick about being the kind of guy that continually screws up his life. But Terry is not a bad guy, just a continual fuck-up, still filled with the rebellious, teenage angst from the trouble he likely got into as a child, where he just doesn’t fit in anywhere and doesn’t stick around long enough to find out why. People tend to like Terry for his friendly affability and offbeat sense of humor, while Sammy has a way of always making other people feel small by continually proving that she is better than they are. While she’s smart and reliable, she can behave inappropriately, as she takes advantage of others by extending the range of acceptable behavior because she’s usually so good at what she does. In this way, really, she can be smug and morally superior, answerable to no one, feeling above it all, as if her life matters more than anyone else’s, though she’s loath to admit it.
Feeling much like a road movie, where life is an isolated journey, oftentimes sad and lonely, this is a toned down, understated search for truth, where there aren’t any real answers, just difficult questions making our lives feel smaller and our friends and family more disconnected, where here the fragmented pieces of people’s lives are connected by a truly sublime unaccompanied Bach cello piece, the Prelude to the Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007 Rostropovich plays the Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 ... YouTube (1:59) that adds a sacred element to our ordinary lives. Initially written as a one act play, featuring a conversation between a brother and sister in a restaurant, where the intensity of their outbursts draws the staring attention of others, remaining oblivious to the rules of public decorum, as they’re simply lost in the drama that is their lives. Both characters couldn’t be more different, but are highly appealing and become fully developed through the clarity of the dialog which is filled with a rich description of their inner complexities, not always what they appear, more often revealing a wounded reaction to the troubling world outside that has never given either one of them a break. It’s a soul searching, heartbreaking drama filled with wrenching truths about honesty and feeling connected to someone. The truth often hurts, as people’s lives aren’t something you can control, as they easily veer off track in unimaginable ways that aren’t always apparent, becoming evident at the most inopportune times and often in the most embarrassing of ways. The film is always changing moods and shifting directions, very much in the moody and irrepressible manner of Terry, whose inner fury simply will not be contained, yet is framed in the luxuriant color of reds and greens, immersed in the woods which are always nearby, told with an exactitude of detail and formal precision that feels meticulously accurate. The relaxed authenticity of character just feels so naturalistic and comfortable most of the time, where there isn’t an ounce of pretension, gently and intelligently told as if this were our own lives unfolding onscreen.
Linney and Ruffalo give arguably the best performances of their careers, largely because they each so confoundingly do the unexpected, which is what likely endures us to the characters, Ruffalo as the lovable loser who continually wanders astray and Linney as the maternal anchor of both her boys, who surprises us by needing to break the chains of confinement. Lonergan himself plays an unflappable small-town minister who remains grounded and personally connected to the lives in this community through the troubles they experience, where he’s constantly confronted by the dark side of human woe, offering human support and encouragement without always resorting to Biblical scripture as lofty ivory tower sentiment, as he understands the fragility of the human soul and how easily it breaks down. His job is to help repair the broken parts, which often takes a lifetime. Caught between the love of her brother and the need to protect her son, Sammy can be a force to reckon with, driving everyone around her batty, but what works in this film is how the lines of communication remain open, damaged and flawed as that may be, it’s also equally impressive how she willfully remains a connected force in people’s lives, exerting herself in a place of need, someone to look after broken parts and wandering souls, offering that needed touch with reality from time to time. Ruffalo beautifully expresses that kind of character that has no real affinity for anyplace, that’s hard to pin down, that refuses to be defined, that will spend the rest of his life searching for something just outside his reach, never settling for the middle ground. He’s a scarred and wounded character that is achingly real, the kind of guy who disappears and gets lost for large periods of time only to resurface later a bit older, wearier, but still open and vulnerable, and still the same guy you love and always hope he will be. This is as refreshing a portrait of humanity as you’re going to find, driven by the strong performances, always touching and humorous, filled with near reverential small moments that eloquently speak to us long after the movie has ended.
Top 100 Movies of the Aughts, Part IV Culturish
When Broadway playwright Kenneth
Lonergan first conceived of the idea for You Can Count on Me, he envisioned it
as a single setting play taking place at a restaurant where two siblings
reunite and ride a rollercoaster of joy, exasperation, adoration,
disappointment, and love. Lucky for us, Lonergan took the original germ of his
idea and fleshed it out into a fully realized character study of two siblings
who love each other and can’t stand one another. It may not seem like a very
original idea: an uptight sister and her stoner screwup of a brother fight and
make up ad nauseam. Well for one thing you have the match made-in-heaven
pairing of Laura Linney (Sammy) and Mark Ruffalo (Terry), both in their
breakout roles and one of the best duos I’ve had the pleasure of seeing on
film. Their pendulous performances perfectly match the realism of Lonergan’s
screenplay, which eschews any pretense in exchange for a grounded realism that
you, unfortunately, rarely find anymore in most independent films today. I once
read a review of the film and there’s one line that I feel perfectly describes
the characters of Sammy and Terry: they are “locked together by gravity but
doomed to meet and drift apart forever”. I’m glad we were able to experience a
brief glimpse of their beautifully tumultuous relationship.
On a rainy, but otherwise ordinary evening, adolescent siblings Samantha and Terry Prescott find out that their parents have died in a car accident. This happens in a brief pre-credit sequence in Kenneth Lonergan's film, You Can Count on Me, and although this event isn't really discussed for the rest of the film, it looms in the background, informing every scene like an overcast sky. When we first encounter Sammy (Laura Linney) and Terry (Mark Ruffalo) as adults, it's clear how this trauma has affected them. As the older sibling, she shouldered the burden of her parent's death and cast off her teenage rebellious streak in favor of a controlled, passionless existence as a single mother. Terry, on the other hand, became an aimless drifter. He's a likable guy but his consistent irresponsibility places him just barely on the nice side of being a total prick. When Sammy gets a letter from Terry announcing his return to their hometown of Scottsville, New York for a visit, she gushes with joy that her brother is returning to the roost, and she cleans the house and gets herself gussied up in anticipation. Terry arrives, looking like he just rolled out of bed, and over dinner, sheepishly steers the conversation toward asking his sister for money to pay for his girlfriend's abortion. This awkward dinner scene is a note-perfect combination of embarrassment and quiet heartbreak. Despite everything, Sammy considers Terry to be the closest person in her life, and you can palpably feel her heart sinking when she realizes that this visit might be as brief and impersonal as a visit to the bank machine. You Can Count on Me is an astonishing film. It's a subtle-as-a-feather comedy and an affecting drama in which the laughter often morphs into wince-inducing empathy. As human beings, Sammy and Terry are both incomplete projects who, in surprising ways, eventually complete each other. When Terry starts to shake up Sammy's cloistered lifestyle (he surreptitiously takes her little son to the pool hall one night), she lays down the law, forcing him to understand that he has to look out for people other than himself. On her end of things, Sammy finally breaks out of a suffocating relationship with her mediocre "nice guy" boyfriend, and initiates a liberating, but ill-advised affair with her passive-aggressive boss (Matthew Broderick). In its own honest, understated manner, You Can Count on Me, raises the bar for American comedies. The ironic thing is that this is coming from the unlikeliest of sources. Kenneth Lonergan's previous screenplays were Analyze This and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but he's actually a playwright by trade and that's what shows through in this, his first film as a writer-director. It's the kind of startling debut that makes you wonder why we tolerate all the phonied-up Hollywood bunk that gets marketed down our throats year after year.
The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]
Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me, the winner of two of
Sundance's biggest prizes, seems like a TV movie. A well-written,
sympathetically acted TV movie, to be sure, but so timid and clumsy in its
deployment of picture, sound, and editing that you have to wonder if executive
producer Martin Scorsese bothered to give notes.
Orphaned when their parents were killed in a car crash, Sammy (Laura Linney) and Terry (Mark Ruffalo) have reacted differently to their childhood trauma. Sammy, a bank-loan officer, is still living in the house where they were born, raising her son, Rudy (Rory Culkin), on her own. Terry, the younger and wilder of the two, has spent his post-high school life on the road, returning home only when he needs to borrow money. His latest visit, precipitated by a three-month jail stint and his girlfriend's pregnancy, coincides with several crises in Sammy's carefully ordered life: Brian (Matthew Broderick), her nitpicking new manager, refuses to allow her the afternoon break she needs to drive Rudy from school to his baby-sitter's house; Rudy has become curious about his dad's identity and whereabouts; and Bob (Jon Tenney), her longtime beau, is pressuring her to marry him. While Terry's reappearance at first seems to solve the child-care problem, Sammy quickly becomes concerned that Terry is not the best role model for Rudy.
You Can Count on Meis set in Scottsboro, a small town in upstate New York so generic and underpopulated that the film could have been shot on a studio back lot. Lonergan plunks his characters down in various locations—the bank, the porch, the motel room—that might as well be stage sets, and he has no sense of how to create an expressive film space. Perhaps to compensate, he lays on the music with a heavy hand: a Bach cello piece to indicate introspection and a dozen country songs that spell out exactly what the characters are doing or feeling. When Sammy is driving to an assignation with the married bank manager, she flicks on the radio to Loretta Lynn singing, "I'm the other woman in your life."
Lonergan does get excellent performances from his actors. Broderick is even more smug and smarmy here than he was in Election (at one point he hurls himself on Linney like a bear cub who doesn't care if he's caught in the honey pot), and the grave-faced Culkin is so alive and direct he barely seems to be acting. Always an exciting actor, Ruffalo makes Terry the quick-fisted prodigal son who returns to a town that's too confining for his discordant impulses, but his pouting lips betray the abandoned, frightened five-year-old inside. Linney, who has to carry the film, finds the vulnerability beneath Sammy's capable, controlled exterior. Sammy's problem, as she explains to her minister (played by Lonergan as a bumbling wise man), is that she's drawn to men she feels sorry for—in other words, men she can mother as she wishes she'd been mothered herself.
It's not just the invocation of faith and family that marks You Can Count on Meas a conservative film. Its gender politics are thoroughly retrograde. When the inexperienced new manager imposes his absurd rules on the women in his office, they don't even get together to strategize, let alone confront him outright. Not just aesthetically unadventurous, You Can Count on Meis, in every way, a throwback to the Eisenhower age.
Don’t be put off by the bland title, trailer and poster – You Can Count On Me is one of the year’s best, most enjoyable movies. It’s a strikingly promising debut from writer-director Lonergan, who himself appears in two scenes as a priest. He acts exactly the same way he writes and directs: with a measured, mature intelligence, and no fuss, hurry or flashiness whatsoever. Very rare in US cinema these days. He’s so resolutely low-key, in fact, that in the opening credits’ list of performers he places himself right at the bottom of the list, below two characters who die before the titles actually start.
They’re the Prescotts (Amy Ryan, Michael Countryman), whose car-crash death orphans young Sammy and Terry. The siblings grow up as apparently dissimilar in characters as they are in looks. Blonde, straight-haired, porcelain-skinned Sammy (Linney) has never left home – she’s still in Scottsville, upstate New York, raising her eight-year-old son Rudy (Culkin) on her own after being abandoned by her husband. She’s a church-goer, mildly conservative in her habits and appearance, drifting in and out of a relationship with nice, inoffensive, slightly dull Bob (Jon Tenney). Swarthy, dark-haired Terry (Ruffalo), meanwhile, got out of town as soon as he could, restlessly travelling the length and breadth of America, a moody tearaway who’s never wanted to settle down. His unexpected return to Scottsville coincides with Sammy struggling to cope with a tricky new boss (Broderick) at the bank where she works, and over the course of a few days all the old family wounds will be well and truly aired.
You Can Count On Me isn’t easy to synopsise (or to review) without making the ‘plot’ sound trivial and hackneyed. It’s Lonergan’s achievement to take apparently well-worn characters and situations, and make them so compulsively watchable. Many movies aim for this blend of comedy and drama, but very few pull it off – it’s refreshing to stumble across a ‘family’ movie that avoids succumbing to sentiment, melodrama or predictability. Lonergan trusts his actors, gives them space to really inhabit these characters, and his faith is amply rewarded – Linney and Ruffalo are terrific, and there’s not a single weak link in the small supporting cast. It’s a movie of moments and nuances that gradually build into something special, so by the end it’s hard not to feel a real emotional connection to these flawed, fascinating characters – it’s a masterstroke to have them never actually say the film’s title, even though they, and the audience, are obviously thinking it.
Lonergan is well-established as a writer of plays, and scripts, including Analyze This. And while the screenplay is the strong suit here, he’s perhaps a little less assured as a director – the film could do without the prologue showing the parents’ death (we’re also never told who actually raises Sammy and Terry), and the one scene set outside Scottsville (a brief two-hander between Terry and his girlfriend in their flat in Worcester, Massachusetts) is equally superfluous. It would perhaps have been more effective to set the whole movie in the present, in this (fictional) town nestling in the greenery of the Catskill mountains: for Sammy, a cosy, orderly home; for Terry, a stifling trap. Lonergan’s control is so assured – he tends towards short scenes and functional compositions – that the occasional lapse seems all the more jarring, such as the odd moments where the strings score is laid on too loud over dialogue, and the ill-advised switch to hand-held during the scene where Terry impulsively takes Rudy to meet his father.
These are very minor quibbles, however. You Can Count On Me is occasionally reminiscent of both American Beauty and Boys Don’t Cry, in its intimate probing of family strife, and its powerful evocation of small-town inertia. Strong company, but Lonergan’s debut is perhaps an even more impressive achievement. While those dramas tend toward the sensational, climaxing with shocking murders, You Can Count On Me manages to be just as engaging, just as powerfully convincing, while pivoting on a supposedly innocuous events – the highlight is a sensational sequence in which Terry, babysitting Rudy while Sammy goes out on a date, sneaks him out to the local bar for a game of pool, then must deal with the repercussions. Later, as Sammy herself sneaks out for an illicit tryst with a married man, we see Terry in the background giving her a you’re-up-to-something look that says everything about their relationship. A look that’s made all the more convincing, funny and authentic by Terry being just a little bit out of focus.
To make a splash as a playwright nowadays, you need a welter of glittering epigrams, a fancy theatrical metaphor for class (or racial or gender) struggle, and a surly disdain for naturalism. Kenneth Lonergan's work has none of these things, yet he has somehow emerged as the most potent dramatic voice of his generation—the real deal. The reason that his plays (the best known is This Is Our Youth) are at once so understated and so vivid can be discerned in his first film as a director, YouCan Count on Me—which also happens to be the best American movie of the year.
What the film is "about" can't be summed up in a line: Its themes remain just out of reach, its major conflicts sadly unresolved. But Lonergan writes bottomless dialogue. When his people open their mouths, what comes out is never a definitive expression of character: It's an awkward compromise between how they feel and what they're able to say; or how they feel and what they think they should say; or how they feel and what will best conceal how they feel. The common term for this is "subtext," and You Can Count on Me has a subtext so powerful that it reaches out and pulls you under. Even when the surface is tranquil, you know in your guts what's at stake.
Almost from the start the movie is numbed by loss. It opens with a man and a woman at night, driving. The woman comments grimly that it's ironic how adolescents get braces at the exact moment that they're most self-conscious. The man shrugs. Then they swerve to avoid a pickup truck, and a policeman knocks at the door of a house where an adolescent girl (with braces) and her younger brother are watching television. The cop, who knows the girl, opens his mouth but can't bring himself to speak. He could be the movie's mascot.
Then we meet that girl, Sammy (Laura Linney), as a grown-up, putting flowers on her parents' grave. She has a smooth, autopilot sort of life in that same family house, where she's raising her 8-year-old son, Rudy (Rory Culkin), by herself. Sammy has no contact with her ex-husband, which has allowed the boy to spin out all sorts of fantasies about the father he has never met. Lonergan is such a brilliantly offhand writer that an early, seemingly inconsequential remark of Rudy's—that he resents a homework assignment because it's too "unstructured"—provides a clue to his melancholy. Sammy is a devout churchgoer: She thinks her foundation is solid. But her faith can't keep the structure of her and Rudy's life from sagging.
What sets the narrative in motion is the arrival of Sammy's younger brother, Terry (Mark Ruffalo), a stoner and a drifter who works odd construction jobs and anxiously dodges connections. He has been out of touch for six months, and he only shows up now because he's running away from a woman whom he has impregnated. The first scene between sister and brother is indelible. Ruffalo's Terry, with his thick, snarled hair and glazed eyes, sits opposite Linney's Sammy in a restaurant but doesn't want to meet her gaze. He fidgets, looks around, frowns over his salad, speaks as if from a great distance. He wants to stay inside himself, to keep his anger and confusion under wraps, but Linney is so present, so up front in her effort to reach out and engage him, that he loses his cool and screams at her how terrible it is to be "back in this f—ing hole getting lectured again."
For lack of a better plan, Terry sticks around and, almost without meaning to, bonds with Sammy's son. In some ways he's a healthy presence—he's rather fatherly. In others he's like one of Ibsen's dementedly misanthropic idealists, filling the boy's head with weirdly acid denunciations of the town and contriving a nightmarish encounter with the absent father. Sammy wants him to stay on, wants to change him and restore his faith. But can she risk living side by side with such despair, such chaos?
I could watch You Can Count on Me again and again just to savor the ways in which the characters try to communicate. Out of context, the lines aren't especially memorable, but beat by beat there's more going on than in movies 10 times more explicit. Watch how Sammy and her occasional lover (Jon Tenney) make small talk and then attempt to hug after sex: Their hands bump and their arms move at different speeds, and you know in that instant that they're not and never will be in sync. Watch how the hilariously unlikable new boss (Matthew Broderick) at the bank in which Sammy works attempts to project authority through bullying corporate-speak and ends up looking like a lost little boy, and how this unexpectedly touches her, so that she ends up having passionate sex with him.
On her way to meet Broderick at a hotel, Linney listens on the radio to Loretta Lynn singing, "(I'm) the Other Woman (in Your Husband's Life)." She shakes her head, abashed, as if to say, "Oh, how sordid I am"; then a cackle of pure, what-the-hell defiance bursts out of her; then she shakes her head again, abashed. Lonergan is a genius at showing you the somersaults and back flips and triple-gainers of the average mind in the course of about 10 seconds; and Linney is marvelous at bringing out the tensions between this woman's firm mask and quivering soul. Her plainness is utterly gorgeous.
Lonergan himself puts in an appearance as Sammy's laid-back minister, to whom she turns in the hope that he can reach her wayward brother. The minister/playwright poses an earnest question: "Do you feel your life is important?"; and it's Terry's inability to answer it that gives us our fullest glimpse into his heart. As a director, Lonergan is similarly unimposing and yet penetrating. Two shots from inside Sammy's car as she drives through the town (the film is set in upstate New York) defines her universe, but beyond that there's not much flash. Lonergan doesn't yet know how to make the camera show us things that his dialogue doesn't, but when you write dialogue like he does, you can take your time to learn. Hell, he can take another 20 movies to learn.
Not so distant, but still distant - World Socialist Web Site David Walsh
Nick's Flick Picks review of You Can Count on Me Nick Davis
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
He’s Her Brother; She’s
His Mother Andrew Sarris from The New York Observer
My 2000 Picks: Douglas, Zellweger, Count on Me Andrew Sarris #1 Film of the Year from The New York Observer
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Erich Schulte
Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz
'You Can Count on Me' Reunites Sibling Rivals ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
You Can Count on Me David Perry
Looking Closer » Blog Archive » You Can Count On Me (2000) Jeffrey Overstreet
Fashioned with ... remarkable economy and restraint. Bob Aulert from culturevulture
PopMatters Dale Leech
Images - You Can Count On Me David Ng
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw] DVD Review
DVD Review - You Can Count on Me - The Digital Bits Dan Kelly
DVD Verdict Harold Gervais
You Can Count On Me 2000 - digitallyOBSESSED! Joel Cunningham
About.com Home Video/DVD [Ivana Redwine]
You Can Count on Me (2000): Laura Linney, Laura+ ... - Movielocity Blake Kunitsch
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Keith Phipps
Flak Magazine Eric Wittmershaus
Epinions.com review by Christopher J. Jarmick co-author of The Glass Cocoon
BANGITOUT.com: Jordan Hiller on Film
Jill Cozzi Mixed Reviews
John Nesbit: MovieGeek review also seen here: CultureCartel.com - Kenneth Lonergan - 2000 - You Can Count on Me ...
kamera.co.uk - film review - You Can Count on Me directed by ... James Clarke
You Can Count On Me - CineScene Sasha Stone
eFilmCritic Reviews Collin Souter
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.] also seen here: Movie Vault [Goatdog]
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
By all means, seek out this jewel of a movie. Frank Swietek from One Man’s Opinion
Sibling love, faith explored in 'You Can Count on Me' - CNN.com Paul Clinton
HYBRIDMAGAZINE.COM
- FILM REVIEWS - YOU CAN COUNT ON ME
Jonpaul Guinn
Urban Cinefile (Australia) Andrew L. Urban, Louise Keller, and Shannon J. Harvey
Hollywood Jesus Visual Reviews Simon Remark
Kenneth Lonegran brings such authentic humanity to this relationship it would be hard to not feel... Rob Blackwelder from SPLICEDwire
It is a rarity to find a film willing to tell a story through an exploration of the relationship,... Jordan Hiller on Bang it Out
Norm Schrager also seen here: filmcritic.com can be counted on, too
The Tech (MIT) [Erik Blankinship and Pilapa Esara]
Mike Legeros Movie Review - You Can Count on Me (2000)
You Can Count on Me | Film Blather Eugene Novikov
Exploded Goat review [Kent Conrad]
You Can Count on Me - FilmHead.com
MovieMartyr.com - You Can Count on Me Jeremy Heilman
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Angus Wolfe Murray]
You Can Count On Me Film Review 09.10.2007 Matt's Movie Reviews Matt Pejkovic
You Can Count On Me — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Annlee Ellingson
Berge Garabedian also seen here: JoBlo's Movie Emporium reviews "You Can Count on Me"
A smart movie with a lot of love behind it. Eric D. Snider
Jon Popick also seen here: Planet Sick-Boy
Gabriel Shanks Mixed Reviews
You Can Count On Me Chris Dashiell from CineScene
Shadows on the Wall by Rich Cline
Andy's Film Blog [Andy Kaiser]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
This Is His Moment Andrew Goldman interview with the director from The New York Observer, March 1, 2001
Beautifully acted. TV Guide
You Can Count on Me Time Out London
BBCi - Films Ali Barclay
You Can Count On Me - Boston Phoenix Tom Meek
Baltimore City Paper: You Can Count on Me | Movie Review Adele Marley
Keeping the Faith Rob Nelson from Minneapolis City Pages
You Can
Count On Me Kimberley Jones from The Austin Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle [Carla Meyer]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
MARGARET A 97
USA Theatrical release (149 mi) 2011
Márgarét,
are you gríeving
Over
Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves,
líke the things of man, you
With
your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah!
ás the heart grows older
It
will come to such sights colder
By
and by, nor spare a sigh
Though
worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And
yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now
no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's
spríngs áre the same.
Nor
mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What
heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It
ís the blight man was born for,
It
is Margaret you mourn for.
—Spring and Fall: To a Young
Child (September 7, 1880) by Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844 – 1889)
A hugely ambitious work, something along the lines of Charlie Kaufman’s SYNECDOCHE NEW YORK (2008), not in subject matter but as it similarly covers such a broad canvas, released a decade after his last work YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000), originally shot in 2005, where despite the 6-year history of lawsuits it was considered by the studio Fox Searchlight as unreleasable, requiring that it be under 150 minutes and refusing to pay for a film they thought would never be released, but with the help of additional money from actor Matthew Broderick and a final editing by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, Lonergan approved their edit for this theatrical release. Considering the circumstances, the pace of the film is brisk and fluid, the subject dense and complex, and is surprisingly well constructed, where there may be a few odd dangling moments that could have been left out, or more likely expanded, but this film offers more sensational sequences that stand alone on their own artistic merit than any other film in recent memory, as there are at least a dozen or so such scenes, each wonderfully realized and well incorporated into the film. Most all include the brilliantly sensational dialogue, perhaps the best written film in the past decade, along with so many impressive performances both large and small, where so much spins off the interpretation of a single word, where this is a film replete with misunderstanding, with a near obsessive drive to be understood, yet a single word may be picked out of one’s comments which in the eyes of others refutes everything else said. This misunderstanding, then, is not accidental, but willfully misunderstood, where there is an equally obsessive drive to hurt and belittle others with chaotic and embarrassing insults. The language here is so combative that it often resembles the theatrical fireworks of a play, hurled with the ferocious invectives of Edward Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966), and, reinforcing a theme, there are several stage performances witnessed before a live audience, where the reaction to them changes and evolves over time, revealing the significance of personal transformation.
The film is a bold and brutally honest exposé of a post 9/11 New York, which most
importantly unveils the complexity of one’s own evolving personal reaction to a
horrific accident, a film experience that thrives on combustible force, such as
the friction and combative language between two people, the unpredictability of
the theatrical experience, the boredom of an overly structured classroom
setting, the hotly contested courtroom litigation, the chaotic dynamics of multiple
parties on a speaker phone, several unannounced visits to perfect strangers, or
even the improbable dynamics in initiating sexual interest. Anna Paquin, now 29, was only 23 when she
played this 17-year old student (Lisa Cohen) at a privileged
Often using a slowed down change of camera speed, especially in the streets of New York, this reflects the change of pace going on inside people’s heads as they’re walking down the street, often daydreaming or easily distracted by window displays, food vendors, or their own cellphone conversations, where a part of their brain is operating at a different speed than the rapidly passing traffic. This also expresses a kind of compartmentalization, where people’s focus is broken down into separate and different parts, which may operate in school classrooms where your thoughts may lie elsewhere, or a teenager’s conversation with their parents, or a disrupted phone call, or even a conversation with one friend when you’re actually thinking of someone else. Lonergan figures all of these fractured and imbalanced moments into his film, where they come into play in ways people least suspect, as they have no idea the significant impact that seemingly throwaway lines have on other people who are intensely interested in what they have to say, where the indifference of one hurts and overrides the acute curiosity of the other, where emotions are existing simultaneously on so many different levels, like an architecturally designed playing field of human drama. Paquin is near brilliant in conveying all these mixed and conflicting emotions, not as a particularly appealing character, but a rich and pampered prima donna who’s used to being the center of attention whenever she feels like it, who selfishly indulges in whatever she likes, showing little to no regard for others, but who also craves the attention and adoration of adults she admires or needs. She willingly bullies and manipulates others to get what she needs, pretending she cares, but never for a minute does she take responsibility on any level. Frankly, she’s a thoroughly despicable character throughout most of the film, but also completely captivating, a whirlwind of mixed emotions, where there’s an authentic adult person hidden underneath fighting to get through the adolescent cloud of confusion.
Lisa has a change of heart about the accident, plagued by the idea that there’s no justice if the driver is not held accountable, reconnecting on her own, with varying degrees of success, with the bus driver, police, and even the family of the deceased, where she meets Jeannie Berlin (Elaine May’s daughter) as Emily, the person closest to the woman who died in Lisa’s arms, whose achingly real remarks at the memorial service are among the highpoints of the film, where Berlin delivers the performance of her career, whose grace under pressure offers Lisa a new friend and role model. Emily is also an entryway to taking relevant action, finding an attorney who will sue the bus company for negligence. Lisa’s mother finds this attention discomfiting, proud that her daughter is following up in a socially relevant manner, but also a bit disconcerted that her daughter’s personal obsession has relegated her own mother to the sidelines, as it’s been an issue Lisa refuses to even discuss with her mother, instead placing her at arms length. Again, the imbalance of emotions between the doers and the watchers are swinging on significantly different levels, where the interplay between Lisa and Emily only grows more intense, reaching a climax with a proposed settlement offer, a compromise offering monetary rewards that refuses to hold the driver accountable, as this would admit liability, the sole objective of Lisa coming forward, which evolves into a blitzkrieg of conflicting emotions, one of the superb moments of the film. Afterwards Emily starts questioning Lisa’s need for drama, to always be the center of attention, and refuses to allow her lifelong friendship with the deceased to be jeopardized or defined by a teenager who won’t even speak to her own mother. Incredulously, this is another one of those sequences of the film, all set in motion with the use of the word “strident,” as Lisa goes absolutely berserk with this rejection, as if her entire world is crumbling and she has nowhere else to turn. Where she does turn is to sexually inappropriate behavior, perhaps one of those regrettable sequences that if it can’t be expanded deserve to be cut.
The canvas of the film is an emotional battleground, where
blood gouging and unhealed scars are evident everywhere, where characters are
defined by their emotional limitations, but also their willingness to keep at
it, to persevere through what can only be considered the unknown. There’s a novelistic complexity to the
overall sweep of the film, which takes the viewer through a breathtaking
panoply of emotional conflict on an unprecedented scale. This is accompanied by luminous photography of
the streets of
MARGARET – Extended Cut A 95
USA Extended cut (178 mi) 2011
First of all, this is not a Director’s Cut, or a definitive cut, but
simply an extended cut, including a different way of telling the same story
using more footage and a different musical soundtrack, adding more operatic
elements, also repeated occasions where the director uses overlapping dialogue
that occurs somewhere away from the center of the action, giving the viewer a
sense of misdirection, showing how easily one can get distracted or
misunderstand, but it also interferes with some of the dialogue. Also, in the latest Blu-Ray version of the
film, the theatrical version is Blu-Ray, but the Extended Cut is not, a
troubling aspect of the packaging of the film, where the Fox Searchlight Studio
has had adverse interests from the beginning, refusing to get behind a project
they didn’t believe was workable from the outset. One might think after the film received such
critical theatrical acclaim, the studio might attempt a different course, but
it appears they remain wholeheartedly *against* the film. As a result, the
Extended Cut is less polished than the original, assembled from rough work
cuts, where both the sound and image leave something to be desired, where
conversation, such as the initial lunch with Lisa and Emily with her lawyer
friend Dave (Michael Ealy), is often drowned out by street sounds, such as
nearby jackhammers or traffic noise.
Nearly a half hour longer, the film is no better for the extra
sequences, and in fact suffers from some of the added elements which actually
detract from the dramatic intensity of the film, while the core drama remains
intact. The extended scenes do serve
actress J. Smith-Cameron well as Joan, Lisa’s (Anna Paquin) mother, who is more
fully developed here, but this is at heart Lisa’s story, a novelistic
examination of her transformation as she carries the weight upon her shoulders,
expressing the evolving aspects of personal trauma, where one often does or says
things they may not mean, where the internalized nightmare has a way of playing
out in inappropriate ways. It’s almost
as if people are not in control of themselves, as there’s another internalized
voice speaking and making decisions for them as if they’re not even there, as
the real person may be temporarily lost or simply disappear altogether.
As it turns out, You
Can Count On Me (2000) took only 20 days to shoot, while for Margaret
(2011), actually shot in 2005, they only had 50 days to shoot when the director
felt he needed more like 100. The choice
to change the musical score meant deleting the original soundtrack written by
Nico Muhly, which is actually much more effective, as the classical and
operatic moods in the Extended Cuts don’t offer the variance of the original,
where the film is constantly repeating musical styles and themes the audience
is familiar with and has already heard, which is quite different than an
original soundtrack that has never been heard before, which often adds a
certain freshness, particularly to a story as convoluted as this one. Despite the extension of Joan’s character,
the only real positive in the director’s cut are more shots of New York, which
are all sensational, where the city becomes a prominently featured character in
the film, often beautifully represented by its energetic street activity, a glorious
skyline, the luminous look at night, and such uniquely original
architecture. Lisa does an excellent job
standing in for the post 9/11 grief and trauma victims from New York, as she’s
incredibly articulate, extremely smart, and even though she’s bewildered
somewhat by her own self-absorbed teenage life, a drama queen always needing to
be the center of attention, even to the detriment of others, she continues to
evolve throughout the film in strange and mysterious ways. The big, dramatic scenes remain the same,
though minor alterations in length may play differently with viewers, where the
most major change in context is the use of sound, where Lisa is already so
operatic, the audience doesn’t need to be reminded by adding emphasis from the
soundtrack. There are a few additional
scenes that stand out, such as a group therapy session in her high school
theater group where they’re putting on a play, suggesting Lisa may have an
interest in acting after all, something that might surprise her mother (an actress)
who tells Ramon (Jean Reno) her daughter has a “contemptuous” view of her
profession. There are plenty of group
cries and hugs, where under the surface emotional volatility rises to the
surface in tears and heartfelt apologies, where in the original the audience
has more than enough clues into Lisa’s interior world.
Lisa’s bedroom scene with Paul (Kieran Culkin) lingers on just a bit
longer, where Lisa’s actually upset about what just happened, as neither one
takes any personal responsibility, where she embarrassingly confesses her anger
before awkwardly asking him to go. In a similar manner, there’s another
extended scene between Joan and Ramon as they sip cocktails on a beautiful
terrace overlooking the city’s skyline, where after Joan complains how high
critical praise actually changes her audience’s reactions, as afterwards people
come into the theater with inflated expectations, she expresses her trepidation
about how different she and Ramon are, wondering how they can succeed together
if there is so much they don’t understand about each other. Both are awkward moments in a relationship
where it’s hard to express your feelings to someone who feels like a total
stranger. While there is another awkward
moment when Lisa confronts her teacher Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon) about having a
recent abortion, which in the original feels like it may or may not be true, as
perhaps her intent was simply to embarrass the guy in public, here there are
extended background scenes at the clinic, but every scene she has with this
teacher is still staggeringly inappropriate.
There's an unusual outside shot that pans across the apartment windows
of Lisa’s neighbors, where random conversations are taking place inside each
window, where a conversation with a friend in Lisa’s room is actually
interrupted by those incidental voices.
Similarly, Lisa has a scene in a coffee shop with her high school friend
Darren (John Gallagher Jr.), where instead of hearing them, we hear a
conversation of two elderly women sitting in the booth next to them. Perhaps
the impression Lonergan was attempting to convey was how invisible Lisa felt
from the trauma, as if no one was listening or paying attention to her, despite
her desperate outward pleas. Nonetheless, this is the same, slightly altered
film with some of the most gorgeously crafted scenes as anything in recent
American cinema, featuring terrific performances, using headstrong characters,
often deeply immature, where the director typically cuts or fades to black at a
particularly impactful moment, where rather than let entire scenes play out,
the film is replete with these small bursts of energy that consistently express
more than enough to hold the viewer in awe, where this is surprisingly
original, combustible theater at its best.
Margaret: Extended Cut review - Time Out Chicago Ben Kenigsberg on the Extended Cut
Before I get into details about the extended cut of Margaret (which, starting today, is available on DVD exclusively through Amazon), I should note that—at the cut's theatrical premiere in New York last night—I was one of four critics writer-director Kenneth Lonergan thanked by name for our persistent support of the film. As such, consider me hopelessly flattered, grateful, biased and guilty of any other charges of partisanship you'd care to throw my way.
The packed event was something. Apart from having possibly the largest reunion of the cast yet assembled—with even Jeannie Berlin turning up and dressing down Q&A moderator Tony Kushner for an overreaching question—the evening seemed to bring some degree of closure to a project the director had labored on for more than a decade. (It was held in limbo for years by lawsuits.) Lonergan began the evening with a lengthy list of thank-yous, citing, among others, the Twitter movement #TeamMargaret; his lawyer Matt Rosengart; "the entire British nation, who gave the film a real boost when we really needed it"; and the late Sydney Pollack, who was one of the film's producers. "It doesn't matter if I thank him," Lonergan said, noting that he doesn't believe in an afterlife, "but I would like to acknowledge him."
Admirers of the movie always assumed that Lonergan's grand vision had been truncated in the editing room, and that a longer cut would be almost universally received as a masterpiece. Even the greatest movie ever made probably wouldn't have satisfied my expectations. But the most striking thing about the new Margaret is that it's not simply longer; it's different—a remix that uses alternate takes, completely overhauls the sound design and to some degree dilutes the movie's focus even further. J. Smith-Cameron's Joan has an increased presence, for instance, while Berlin's Emily registers with considerably less force, at least for me. (I've seen the theatrical edition five times, each viewing as exhilarating as the last.)
Lonergan is careful to use the phrase "extended cut" to describe this version, as the theatrical cut was also his "director's cut," per se; it's just that he was limited to 150 minutes. Last night's 188-minute epic actually has a lot in common with Apocalypse Now Redux: It shows you a fuller version of what the filmmaker intended while at the same time adding a few awkward scenes and transitions that dilute the movie's overall impact. I can now picture a perfect version of Margaret, restoring crucial plot elements and Lonergan's experiments with sound design. But Margaret, the extended cut, is not that version.
As part of the introduction, Indiewire critic Eric Kohn warned us that the new Margaret was assembled from rough dailies and workprints; from the opening minutes, it was clear that both the image quality and the sound were far from polished. In the scene when Lisa (Anna Paquin) and Emily (Berlin) have lunch with lawyer Dave (Michael Ealy), I was particularly distracted by background noise. It's clear that some of that is intentional: Lonergan has said he wanted to create the impression that Lisa, who's been traumatized, feels as though life has taken no notice of her. The new version of the film enhances that element in a radical way: There are now lengthy sequences in which bystanders' dialogue—or jackhammers or traffic noise—drowns out the main characters. Much of Nico Muhly's score has been replaced with opera selections, a choice that's thematically consistent but drastically alters the emotional pitch of several scenes.
If you've seen no version of Margaret at all, I'd recommend starting with the smoother theatrical cut and then seeing this one; together, they enhance each other, and provide a more complete view of the Margaret that might have been. But I'm not sure if I'd have recognized the movie as one of the great contemporary films if I'd seen only the longer version. It's a rougher, less structured, more alienating movie—in some ways closer to the Cassavetes comparison that many critics made.
Critical plot points have been restored. (For those who haven't seen the film, spoilers abound from now on.) There's much more of Lisa's friend and would-be boyfriend Darren (John Gallagher Jr.), including a supremely disorienting scene in a diner and a school-play subplot that snaps her relationship with him—and implicitly her actress mother—into greater focus. There is now a brief thread clarifying that Monica (Allison Janney), the woman killed in the accident, had a fraught financial relationship with her cousin Abigail (Betsy Aidem), who stands to benefit from the lawsuit. And yes, it's confirmed that Lisa does indeed have an abortion, which she claims to have had—but might be lying about—in the theatrical cut.
There are also cases in which alternate takes complicate our perception of the characters. The scene of a stoned Lisa kissing Darren at party ("You know I really love you, right?") is now shown in a tighter closeup; it's more intimate, more threatening and serves a clearer purpose now that Darren's role in the film has been enhanced. On the other hand, one of the film's funniest scenes, in which Karl (Lonergan himself) complains that Annette (Kelly Wolf) must be facing "intolerable pressure" to make meal choices for a camping trip a month away, is edited in such a way that Karl comes across as more embittered than wry. One of the more overlooked plot elements in the film—the camping trip is canceled, which means that Lisa's quest to find her cowboy hat, which inadvertently leads to the accident, was for naught—isn't punctuated as clearly here.
For #TeamMargaret superfans, I've made a list of some of the other more noticeable changes.
-There's a different, more temporary-looking font over the opening credits.
-In the bus accident scene, as the bus stops, the camera now comes to rest and lingers on the upscale grocery stores Fairway and Citarella. It's a moment that increases the sense of eerie calm after the trauma.
-There's a new scene of Lisa removing her bloody clothes; while she does this, we hear pigeons in the background. It's another moment that heightens the sense that the world is just continuing its business around her. Lisa also gets blood on her bed.
-Joan insists on helping Lisa scrub the blood off her boots.
-It's now made explicit that Lisa has walked out of the movie she goes to see with Darren.
-In the film's most experimental scene, we watch a slow zoom on Lisa and Darren having lunch in a diner, but we hear two yentas chatting at the booth next door (along with a bit of Lonergan's voice)—an element any other movie would reduce to background noise. We don't hear Lisa's words ("I guess I don't feel that way about you") until the zoom is almost complete. You can't watch this scene and not realize that the "messiness" many critics of the original complained about is absolutely intentional. As Lonergan told me in February, he wanted to shoot the film as if Lisa was no more important than anyone else in the frame.
-Just before Lisa confesses to Joan about lying to the police, we see a pan of several neighboring apartment windows and hear dialogue from them ("I really don't want to shout from room to room!" someone says, in a bit of a joke)—creating the impression that Lisa and Joan's conversation is just one of many stories in the naked city.
-At least one moment has been cut entirely: When Lisa calls Paul (Kieran Culkin) to ask whether he's available to take away her virginity, there's no longer that funny bit in which Paul writes Lisa's address on his wall (among many others, one presumes).
-There are two restored scenes with Paul, both good, in which Lisa interrogates him about why everything he says sounds ironic ("It's just a gift," he replies), and another in which, justifying his failure to use a condom, he fatuously declares, "I'm pretty sure I don't have AIDS because of my demographic."
-There's the school play scene, discussed above, in which Paul and Darren are both present.
-At Monica's memorial service, Emily gives a longer speech.
-The camera lingers on an American flag blowing outside the bus driver's home in Bay Ridge, adding to the movie's post-9/11 subtext. (There's also another very long shot of a low-flying plane.)
-We now clearly hear radio noise of a news report about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over a moment of Joan talking about her reviews.
-When Lisa tells Detective Mitchell (Stephen Adly Guirgis) she lied, and requests that he arrest the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), Mitchell gives a longer, more intimidating response, asking, "And whaddya think I should do with you?" He's now compounding rather than simply assuaging Lisa's guilt.
-In a crucial addition, nearly all of the scenes with Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon) are slightly longer. The interlude when Lisa confronts him on Central Park West and asks about horseback riding now includes her asking him, "How is it possible that I am totally in love with you?" Just a few new lines of dialogue give a scene that seemed superfluous in the theatrical cut a clear dramatic function.
-When Mitchell tells Lisa that the driver won't be prosecuted, his words are now drowned out by fellow cop Kevin Geer's discussion in the background. This is a pretty destructive change, as it distracts from one of Adly Guirgis's best moments and mutes some of the film's most memorable lines.
-There's now a rooftop scene between Joan and Ramon (Jean Reno), just before he shows her pictures of his kids. You can understand why the scene was written—Joan wants to discuss their relationship, and he shushes her—but apart from some stunning views of the skyline, it plays as pretty flat.
-There's an added line indicating that Mark Ruffalo's bus driver's brother-in-law is "some very big union muckety muck," increasing the sense that the deck is stacked against Lisa.
-It's not an addition, but those weird cutaways to boats during the scene when Abigail first meets with Russell (Jonathan Hadary) are still there. I'd always assumed they were inserted to suture a shortened scene.
-There are a few slightly different takes of Emily in the "strident" scene. This screening was the only time, in six total viewings, that the moment failed to send a chill down my spine.
-There's now a disruption in the scene when Ramon talks about "the Jewish response"—we briefly hear dialogue from a neighboring table. As in Mitchell's final scene, the change distracts from some of the best lines in the film.
-Lisa informs Joan that she's pregnant, and Joan asks her what she wants to do about her baby—a word that catches Lisa off-guard. The abortion scene casts Lisa's relationship with her mother in a different light, although, strangely, it also diminishes the impact of her final confrontation with Mr. Aaron—a moment that indicated to many viewers that something had been cut.
-There's none of Nico Muhly's heartbreaking score over the final conference call, which has the effect of distancing us from Lisa's anger. "Having used so much of it in the other [theatrical] version," Lonergan said last night, "I could simply go the other way with this version."
Indeed, seeing the movie both ways is fascinating. Margaret was always an outsize vision—a vision too big, it turns out, to fit within one film.
Bright
Wall/Dark Room November 2016: "This Mass of Conflicting ... This
Mass of Conflicing Impulses: A Former Teen Narcissist Watches “Margaret,”
by Lauren Wilford from the Ebert site, November 2016
The first time I sat down to watch writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (the extended cut, which is the cut I’ll be referring to), I thought I knew what I was in for. I had gathered that it had the look and feel of a mid-2000’s indie drama, but that it must have some kind of special depth and insight to warrant its length (and the legal battles over that length). I knew Anna Paquin’s character was somehow going to come of age while entangled in a legal battle over a bus accident. I was aware of its cult status and critical reputation. I was ready to think thoughts about the human condition; I was ready to be moved.
It turns out I wasn’t actually ready for Margaret; maybe there’s no way to be. I’ve watched my fair share of mid-budget realist dramas from the last 20 years, and I went in with the expectation that Margaret would slot in neatly alongside them. And in the first 20 minutes, it seemed as if it might—but as the film wound its way forward and sideways through this teenage girl’s year, it started to elude categorization. A plot summary of Margaret might go something like this: 17-year-old Lisa Cohen’s life is upended when she plays a role in distracting a bus driver who proceeds to hit and kill a woman. She then learns hard lessons about life’s unfairness when she mounts a campaign to try to get the bus driver fired. But the film shows us much more than this story—we also see Lisa pursue various relationships with men, and watch her participate in classroom discussions about the war in Iraq, and we follow her mother’s acting career and the tensions that arise between her and Lisa. Lisa is hard to like, and a lot of that seems to do with the fact that she’s all over the place, different from one scene to the next. Margaret was either a particularly meandering coming-of-age drama, or a quiet epic poem about life in New York in the ‘00’s, or some indeterminate third thing. Whatever it was, it left me a little frustrated. Margaret certainly was an experience, but for some reason it didn’t feel like a movie to me—I had some itch that had gone unscratched.
I had spent that first viewing waiting for Lisa (played by Anna Paquin) to hit her Screenwriting 101 marks. I wanted to be told, clearly and early on, who she was and what she wanted; I wanted to watch her go on a Journey and pursue an Objective, to follow a throughline to Climax and Catharsis. I don’t usually prioritize adherence to story structure principles when I’m watching a film, so it was strange to find myself feeling this way— and, if I were to really look at it, Margaret was in fact adhering to a kind of three act structure, albeit loosely. But there was something about the film that felt unruly and prickly and somehow against the rules.
On my second viewing, I realized what it was. It was the fact that Lisa was moving through the world, and through the film, like an honest-to-god adolescent—not like a teenager from movie-world, but like a teenager from this world. Lisa’s identity had seemed so unstable that it had registered to my brain as bad writing—as Lonergan having committed the screenwriting sin of creating an “inconsistent character.” I had been waiting for the film to sell me on its protagonist—to make me like her and root for her and identify with her—but Margaret provides the viewer with few emotional guide rails. To watch Margaret is to spend three hours in the nearly uninterrupted company of a caustic, bright, naive, and passionate 17-year-old girl as she navigates a difficult passage of her life. Lonergan’s radical gambit is to let us see Lisa shifting her persona as she moves through different social situations, the way we all do, but particularly the way that adolescents do. In violating the screenwriting principle of “character consistency,” he blows the lid off the concept of the lovable teen protagonist and shows us what an actual adolescent so often looks like—and much like what I must have looked like.
I recoiled from Margaret the first time because watching Anna Paquin’s performance as Lisa was like watching my past self live through a year of high school—and not the charming memory of that self that I’ve constructed, but the real, half-formed human being that I was, in all her inconsistencies, in her arrogance and insecurity and runaway emotionality. Lisa Cohen sees herself as an impassioned crusader, but the reality is that she’s also kind of a narcissist and an asshole, and watching Margaret led me to a painful confrontation with the asshole that I used to be—and in many ways still must be. After all, I’m sitting down to write a personal essay about a time that I watched a movie and had the revelation that that movie was, in fact, really about me. This seems like the kind of thing that a former teenage asshole might be warned off doing, but here we are.
So Lisa is often unlikable—but so are other protagonists in more conventional stories. We have a category for a protagonist with unlikeable qualities: the anti-hero. But the anti-hero is, for all his faults, ultimately a hero. He (it’s almost always a he) may be lazy, or have a mean streak or a drug problem or a criminal bent, but through charm, exceptional competence, or some combination of the two, he always manages to capture the admiration of audiences. Anti-hero narratives give viewers something to root for, usually in one of two directions: either that the anti-hero will succeed in his unscrupulous schemes, or that the he will overcome his demons to become a better man. Even if we don’t like everything an anti-hero does, we like him in spite of ourselves; we never lose sight of his essential magnetism.
I can picture a version of Margaret that might have been more of an anti-hero story—one in which Lisa’s razor-sharp wit and dogged pursuit of justice formed the kind of charm and exceptional competence that made us excuse her for being abrasive. But Margaret isn’t that simple. Lisa does have a lot going for her—she’s observant, articulate, thoughtful, and self-aware—but Lonergan doesn’t bless her with any exceptional genius. And her flaws are manifold and unsexy—she can be, by turns, judgmental and petulant, theatrical and manipulative. “By turns” is, perhaps, the key here. Margaret would have been a more straightforward (and perhaps more commercial) film if Lisa had been flattened and streamlined, if she had been given a core personality made up of a few sympathetic traits and a single tragic flaw.
But the frustrating, subversive, brilliant thing about Lisa is that she’s different from moment to moment.
In the first fifteen minutes of Margaret, we meet several permutations of Lisa. We first see her interact with her geometry teacher, Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon). With Mr. Aaron, she flirts, with plausible deniability. When she goes to claim a test from him, she holds eye contact a little too long, and saunters back to her desk with a little swing in her hips. When they have a post-class conference, she slouches in a chair across from him, crossing and uncrossing her legs; in the long shot, we can feel her awareness of just how short her skirt is. She speaks in a slightly higher register with him, trying to project poise. When he agrees to let her cheating slide this time, Lisa breathes, “You are so fair.” We cut immediately to Lisa swaggering down the hallway, beaming at her success. The next shot finds her smoking with a group of friends, when one asks what Mr. Aaron said to her. “Nothing,” she says, her tone flat and acerbic. “Mr. Aaron and I have an understanding.” We get a scene of Lisa in a classroom discussion on current events, where she shows off her rhetorical chops; she raises her hand confidently and speaks with conviction and complex, attorney-like sentence structure. And then we see her with her friend Darren, who clearly has feelings for her. With him, she walks with an extra spring in her step, gushing, feeding off the energy of his attraction. When it seems he might be asking her out on a date, she laughs, and then feigns shock: “Oh my god.” She then prods him with questions that don’t really mean anything, shrugging and scoffing: “What? Why do you look like that?” It’s a perfect bit of acting from Paquin, this moment of getting high on flattery and not knowing exactly what to do with it.
And all this amiable high school minutiae just serves to set up the heights from which Lisa must fall when her flirtatious waving distracts a bus driver who goes on to kill a woman. That woman bleeds to death, furious and confused, in Lisa’s arms, and from then on Lisa finds herself lost. She spends the rest of the film vacillating wildly—sometimes seized with righteous passion, and other times seducing her crushes; sometimes trying to spread kindness to the victim’s friends and family, and other times verbally assaulting her mother.
It might seem, from this description of her behavior, that Lisa’s character throughline is a kind of artifice or calculation. If we see her in so many subtly different modes, we might conclude that Lisa must be a false or manipulative person. But we only notice these differing inflections because we follow her everywhere, and we see the shifts that she makes in her carriage and her voice and her word choice based on her surroundings. We rarely get to experience characters in this way. In a typical movie, we follow our protagonist moving through a plot, a series of connected actions—we only see what’s relevant. In Margaret, we get a picture of Lisa’s whole life, not just her life as it relates to one story. When it comes to Aristotle’s “three unities,” the limitations that he believed made for effective drama (unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action), perhaps the one that we talk about least often is “unity of action.” That’s because most stories play fast and loose with time and place. We usually invoke the three unities when we want to talk about a movie that’s remarkable for using a single location or playing out in real time, because “unity of time” and “unity of place” have become novelties since the time of Greek drama. “Unity of action,” however, has not. We expect our movies to be about a character pursuing one goal, doing one central thing.
This leads me to consider whether I might look like a consistent character if someone were to follow me through one “action”—a relationship, or an issue at work or school. There are versions of the character Lauren Wilford that could read as likable or admirable or heroic if you saw them in a limited context. But it’s uncomfortable to imagine what a few random days in my life might look like if someone were to shoot them and cut the footage into a film. I’d get to see how I acted alone, and then with my husband, and then with coworkers, and family, and strangers. I don’t know exactly what total picture would emerge, but I know there would be contrasts and inconsistencies. I don’t know how viewers of that film would go on to describe the character that they saw—or if they would even feel like they could.
Lisa Cohen is a difficult character to pin down or describe in a sentence, but so many of our great characters are—they just usually happen to be in literature rather than movies. Lisa is just as difficult to describe as Jane Eyre or Anna Karenina or Leopold Bloom or Hamlet. Lisa and Hamlet actually have a good deal in common. Many people, working from faint memories of high school English class, might summarize Hamlet the character as being “melancholic” or “hesitant” or “crazy.” But if you actually go to the text, you’ll find Hamlet oscillating between different versions of himself just as freely as Lisa does. Both Hamlet and Margaret take place in the wake of a shocking death, and both are stories of a bright young person working fitfully towards justice while processing feelings about an indifferent world.
Many critics have argued that Hamlet is an atypical revenge story protagonist because of his circuitous route to vengeance—his “hesitancy,” his “madness.” But Hamlet is just a profoundly astute portrait of a human being trying to act while grieving. Lisa “hesitates” to pursue justice in Margaret for similar reasons: she’s trying to figure out the right thing to do, and to separate the facts from her feelings. And those feelings often cause her to hurt her own cause, just as Hamlet’s do. Hamlet doesn’t eviscerate Ophelia in the “get thee to a nunnery” scene because he’s mad, or performing madness. He tears into Ophelia because his pain has made him into his worst self in that moment, his latent mean streak and misogyny going unchecked. He’s also unfairly cruel to his mother, much like Lisa is unfairly cruel to hers. Sometimes Hamlet thinks big, beautiful thoughts about the world, and sometimes he makes cracks about sex. But he’s always passionate. He’s always, ultimately, trying to right his world’s wrongs. He’s one of the most psychologically realistic characters ever written, and for that, he evades easy characterization. Because he is more than one thing, he feels like the real thing.
I think Hamlet always makes more sense with a younger actor playing Hamlet, because youth effectively dissolves the questions about his “inconsistency.” If he’s 35, it’s harder to reconcile his introspection and seriousness with his raging and wisecracking; you almost have to make up theories about his madness or his calculating nature. It’s so much simpler, and more dramatically effective, to see him as a young person thrashing in the wake of an extreme circumstance, the way that Lisa thrashes.
Lisa’s multiple iterations are a direct result of her youth. Much like I was, she’s painfully self-aware; you can almost see her watching herself from outside her body, horrified but helpless to stop herself. She’s quick to comment on her own behavior and admit embarrassment or regret. She’s a person in search of an identity to call home, surprising herself moment to moment by the things that come out of her mouth. Adults modulate their behavior situationally, but they’ve accumulated enough experience with themselves that they have a kind of core, a center from which they can pivot. Teenagers lack this core, and the experience can lead to a nausea about their identity, a kind of seasickness.
It’s hard to get a read on Lisa because she doesn’t have a read on herself. We don’t know exactly what to root for because we don’t know exactly what she wants. Watching her story unfold is destabilizing and uncomfortable in a way that mimics the discomfort of adolescence itself. The only thing that Lisa really knows about herself is how she feels, which is hardly a stable foundation for action. Watching Margaret puts an ache in the pit of my stomach, because I remember what it was like to yearn to be a whole person, to hope against hope that I was somehow coming across as good, as making sense.
There is a scene in Margaret where a woman calls out Lisa for “dramatizing” her situation; in response Lisa essentially has a panic attack. Hot tears shoot from Anna Paquin’s face and her voice is strained and squeaking and uncontrolled. She pushes words out with all the strength of her lungs, desperate, unhinged.
“I feel so bad about what happened, and I’m trying so hard to do something about it, and I don’t understand why if I say something wrong, you can’t just give me a break.” Then she gets softer, sadder, broken: “But I’m not trying to dramatize anything, I really didn’t know about that trend and I really don’t think I’ve been doing that.” And she really, really doesn’t. Anna Paquin is astonishing here—she is absolutely lost inside herself, sorry and confused and hysterical. Lisa is free falling in that vast space between her idea of herself and the way she has actually acted. I’ve gotten lost in that gap, and I know I must look something like Lisa does here when I find myself there.
It’s hard for me to even watch Margaret because it is so sharp and so unromantic about exactly what it looks like to be passionate but not yet fully formed. When I was putting together this piece, I went flipping through old diaries to try to find a relevant quote, and I was surprised to find that I was actually repulsed by much of what I read. I have always tried to cultivate a generosity toward my younger self, an appreciation for my nascent ideals tempered by an understanding of my developmental limits. But I was shocked to see, in my own writing, how often I was self-centered and mean, and how oblivious I was about it. In the New Yorker recently, Lonergan said, “In some way, a teenager can be—at least in a play or a movie—a metaphor for a grownup, which is a half-formed person coping with the world.” In those diaries, I saw my teenage self as a metaphor for my current self—so passionate, so thoughtful, and so powerless to see her own selfishness, so worried that she’s doing it wrong because she actually is, so often, doing it wrong.
I also wrote a lot of songs in junior high and high school, most of which are equally embarrassing. The lyrics read as me genuinely trying to work some things out about myself, but also inevitably as showing off a little bit. They remind me of the way Lisa drops sentences like, “Not that I want to use this woman’s death as my own personal moral gymnasium.” Because, of course, that’s exactly what Lisa is doing, but she’s simultaneously aware and unaware of it, in a way that is almost as frustrating to her as it is to us as viewers.
One of the songs I wrote as a teenager tried to get at this cognitive dissonance. I knew that I cared about things, and that I had big ideas about the kind of life I wanted to live. But none of that was matching up with the experience I was really having in my day-to-day life, where I knew I was coming off as a bit of a melodramatic smartass.
When it’s midnight, I can
write life,
and a notebook holds plan A and B
By the lamplight I can see right
But the daybreak scatters most of me
I hope I am who I am at midnight
In another song, called “Tumble,” I called myself “a cynical, capricious dramatist,” which sounds a lot like Lisa, and also sounds totally insufferable. But that song did come from a place of genuine confusion and pain:
I’m spinning in gravel
And still I can’t stop
I’m coming unraveled
and still I just babble.
At one point, Lisa describes herself as “just this mass of conflicting impulses.” When I was a teenager, I knew this about myself, and I actively longed for the day when I could feel myself moving from any kind of a center, when the waves inside me would die down. And, from the perspective of a decade later, they have, in a relative sense. I do feel a little more stable, a little more whole. But watching Margaret reminds me of how fragile and inaccurate our self-concepts have been and can be. If Lisa is seventeen in Margaret, and the story is meant to take place in 2006, then Lisa would be in her mid-twenties now, just as I am. This thought feels silly to think about a fictional character, but I can’t help but think it, if only for my own sake: I hope she’s found a little more peace. I hope she can see a little more clearly. I hope she’s not done trying to fight for a better world and a better self.
Three faces of Margaret - scanners Jim Emerson on the Extended Cut
A
critical movement saved Margaret from burial; here's why it ... Scott Tobias on the Extended Cut from The Onion A.V. Club
How the Extended Cut of Margaret restores its scope and ambition ... C.J. Prince on the Extended Cut from Way Too Indie
Finally, the Definitive Cut of Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret Sam Adams on the Extended Cut from Slate
'Margaret': Extended Cut Vs. Theatrical Cut - What's Different, New ... Drew Taylor on the Extended Cut from indieWIRE
DVD review: Margaret | British Film Institute Michael Brooke on the Extended Cut
What To Expect from the Extended Cut of "Margaret" | The Lost Boys Austin Dale on the Extended Cut from indieWIRE
"Margaret" Extended Cut on DVD : The New Yorker Richard Brody on the Extended Cut, still unseen by the reviewer
Review: Margaret - Film - Time Out New York Keith Uhlich on the Theatrical release
What a glorious mess! Kenneth Lonergan’s long-delayed follow-up to 2000’s revered brother-sister drama You Can Count On Me finally arrives in theaters with little fanfare and the bitter air of failure around it. Don’t believe the scuttlebutt: The writer-director’s sprawling look at the effect a gruesome accident has on Manhattan teen Lisa Cohen (Paquin) bursts with ambition and specificity in its novelistic, social-drama narrative. Our attention is grabbed right from the gorgeous slo-mo credits sequence of numerous Gothamites going about their day—not obliviously, but more in a state of expectantly suspended animation. There’s palpable unease in the air (very potently post-9/11), and even as Lonergan sets the stage in a few mundane subsequent scenes—Lisa discussing grades with an instructor (Damon) and flirting bashfully with a classmate—this strange sense of tension never dissipates.
Then the accident occurs—a woman, played with one-scene wonder by Allison Janney, gets hit by a bus—and Lisa’s life, as well as the movie containing her, goes disturbingly, brilliantly off the rails. The next two hours are the sort of no-holds-barred psychodrama that John Cassavetes specialized in: Lisa pinballs between raw emotional states while a number of vivid supporting characters, from Damon’s pushover schoolteacher to a brash Upper West Sider superbly played by Elaine May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin, circle her like moths to a frenzied flame. Paquin deserves the highest accolades for her ferociously committed performance, turning what could have been a privileged prep-school archetype into a scorching depiction of adolescent grief. And though not all of Lonergan’s conceits work on a scene-by-scene basis (an upper-crust womanizer played by Jean Reno skews a bit too close to caricature), the film has a cumulative power—solidified by a devastating opera-house finale—that’s staggering. This is frayed-edges filmmaking at its finest.
exclaim! [Robert Bell] Theatrical release
The title, Margaret, much like everything else in Kenneth
Lonergan's long-awaited follow-up to You Can Count on Me, isn't a direct
reference to a character or surface element. Rather it refers to the Gerard
Manley Hopkins poem Spring and Fall, wherein Margaret represents an
initial loss of innocence and grief. And since this is the sort of film where
everything is representative of something else, boiling a specified incident
down to universal humanist indicators, it's limited to a very specific
audience: hated or arbitrarily reduced by those that disagree with the
ideologue and dismissed by those unable to read basic allegorical text.
Said incident is a bus accident, wherein half-Jewish 17-year-old Lisa Cohen
(Anna Paquin) playfully distracts bus driver Maretti (Mark Ruffalo),
inadvertently leading him to run over stray pedestrian Monica Patterson
(Allison Janney). Brushed with her first experience with worldly horror ―
much like the contextually youthful United States after 9/11 ― she
responds with shock and confusion, initially lying to the police about what
happened then changing her tune to vengeance once the bus driver proves to be a
dick.
Amidst this are an abundance of discussions about the Israel-Palestine
conflict, as mirrored by the bus tragedy, along with an endless array of
examples of human solipsism. It boils down to the inherent selfishness of
people and limitations in consciousness that make it impossible for anyone to
truly take into account the various signifiers and triggers that go into the
actions of others. Characters express feigned empathy towards each other to get
what they want, but respond with hostility when they don't get exactly what
they want.
Many of the dialogue exchanges and impassioned performances are just short of
brilliant, capturing the basic arbitrary vulgarity of human conflict and the
absurd redundancy of debate. Constant classroom and household arguments ―
in particular those between Lisa and mother Joan (J. Smith Cameron) ―
reveal the petty and pointless nature of such endeavours, with people latching
onto any possible word choice error or illogical reduction just for the sake of
being "right."
As Lisa searches for closure to the injustice and unreasonable bus accident and
aftermath, she learns mainly of a world where everyone has their own narrow
agenda. She fights and screeches for things to be different, hoping desperately
for some sort of compassion and reason, but continually comes up short.
Lonergan's film is a disturbingly astute depiction of the loss of innocence, as
transposed onto an entire nation. It ropes in all avenues of human myopia,
commenting on the nature of art criticism and our collective tendency to
dismiss anything we don't understand, such as the yelling of "Brava"
at an opera, which Joan suggests is pretentious. In doing so, it partially
succumbs to its ambition, clearly suffering from the many edits and cuts
necessary to trim it down to a two-hour-and-40-minute runtime.
And in the absence of seeing the original extended cut, which will surely fill
in some blanks and flow better, from an editing standpoint, there is something
profound and deeply affecting within this product that will stick with those
willing to embrace the allegorical nature, ignoring the proposed histrionics
about a mere bus accident
Slant Magazine [Kalvin Henely] Theatrical release
Margaret's core story is about a bratty high schooler, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), increasingly troubled by her feelings of responsibility in the death of a woman (Allison Janney) who's hit by a bus because its driver (Mark Ruffalo) is distracted by Lisa waving to him. The setup is similar to that of Kenneth Longergan's prior You Can Count on Me, which also begins with an accidental death and explores the way it affects those close to it. But with Margaret, Lonergan breaks away from his debut film's neat and balanced approach, employing a formal style that seems to mirror its characters' zig-zagging emotions, unafraid to let his narrative grow sideways, leaving in scenes that feel broken off, subplots that could have been cut, and numerous punctuating shots of random buildings and streets. This is a film that's more interested in the emotions its characters' seem subordinate to—the exposed nerves that John Cassavetes was so brilliant at finding in his characters. Unlike Cassavetes, who could direct a movie without a screenplay, Lonergan relies on his writing to carry his direction through, so Paquin should be lauded for the way her brazen performance—such as the manner in which she throws herself into every scene, even those that make Lisa a strident and difficult character to like—rounds out Lonergan's efforts, bringing depth to his words.
Many have complained that Margaret feels unfinished (Longergan's preferred cut ran three hours) and shapeless (the film had been mired by years of lawsuits regarding a final edit). But these imperfections work in the sense that they rhyme with the agitation and sense of dislocation the characters feel; they allow unbounded emotions—which at times flow through the characters' world as strongly as the electricity that powers the film's New York City setting—to feel recognizably human, alive, and free-forming instead of sculpted and practiced. In all its nakedness and ugliness, Lisa's evolving self-awareness throughout the film's 149-minute running time, from the losing of her virginity to the way her guilt for lying to the police about the accident eats away at her and propels her to clumsily try to reconcile the situation, is conveyed with striking keenness.
Margaret novelistically accumulates brief interactions between characters, their moment-to-moment emotions, and other small details that fill out and color Lisa's world to a degree that's unwieldy but far-reaching, covering the ripples as they spread outward from the day Lisa held the bloody, dying woman in the street. Although they all must share the same space, it often seems as if the characters in the film aren't capable of mutual understanding—and so they become a kind of microcosm for how Lonergan sees America in the larger world. Lisa nearly finds a connection with the dead woman's best friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin), a surrogate of sorts for her own tired and busy single mother (J. Smith-Cameron), but soon realizes that even their shared interest in seeking punishment for the bus driver ends where the lawsuit they filed can only guarantee monetary compensation for a distant relative. If Margaret focuses on how the repercussions of one accidental death spread through Lisa to those only connected to it by degrees, it's also pointing to the way the city's post-9/11 psyche has affected everyone, which makes the film's sudden release seem appropriately timed to coincide with 9/11's 10-year anniversary.
Margaret: From the Hudson to the Pacific - The New Yorker Richard Brody on the Theatrical release, October 7, 2011
The relatively quiet arrival of Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited, long-delayed second feature, “Margaret”—which was shot in 2005—contrasts poignantly with the movie’s mighty impact. (Lonergan’s pace of editing seems to have caused some of the delays, lawsuits relating to those delays compounded them.) It has been playing in New York for a a week and is opening in cities nationwide today. I’ll leave the plot recap to my capsule review; here I’ll tease out some more of the elements that make the movie such an extraordinary experience.
Though most of the action takes place in closed or tight spaces and on an intimate scale, Lonergan is aiming at—and achieves—a rhapsodically panoramic view of life in New York. He doesn’t aim at a comprehensive view or a representative cross-section of the city’s neighborhoods, populations, or mores; he anchors the film on the Upper West Side (the physical and geographical particulars of which come touchingly—and, as far as I can tell, accurately—into play) and draws on a specific little niche of city life, the upper-middle-class milieu, significantly but far from solely Jewish, that’s defined by the liberal professions (law, medicine) and cultural sophistication with a traditional bent (Lincoln Center). In short, he takes on a stereotype—and he extracts the substance from it, showing what’s progressive about the professions, what’s emotionally redemptive about the classical arts, how a liberal upbringing inspires young people to pursue adventure (whether private or public, erotic or political) and gives them the spectrum of thought and openness of response to help them through its dangers.
It’s a movie of a vast ambition; it’s also an impulsive, imperfect film. But its core is so sure, its efforts so daring, and its heights so sublime as to render its flaws (and they’re easy enough to enumerate; I run through them in the capsule) insignificant. One of the virtues I didn’t mention there is Lonergan’s attention to the city’s physical allure: the bricks of the older apartment buildings where much of the action takes place; the nocturnal ballet of Broadway’s traffic lights, headlights, and taillights; the domineering yet vertiginous perch of offices in skyscrapers; the endless awe of the skyline; and even the post-9/11 shock of seeing an airplane flying low behind it.
The attacks and their political aftershocks come into play, in a few on-the-nose debate-style scenes (what goes on among smart kids and teachers in a good private school plays a big part in the movie, and Matt Damon, Matthew Broderick, and Jerry Matz do admirable work in the roles of teachers), and, even more, in the film’s overall ethos. Lonergan challenges the naturalism of the film’s settings and performances with scenes of a somewhat forced symbolic import, but he’s after big prey, and he catches it; his big idea—a post-9/11 idea that he pursues, methodically, intelligently, passionately (and that, as the physicists say, may even have the additional virtue of being true)—is that New York is not an exception to the rest of the United States but the very exemplar and essence of American ideas and ideals. It’s singularly apt that, today of all days, the movie is making its way across the country into national release.
P.S. There’s also the matter of performances, and there are many
fine ones, starting with that of Anna Paquin, as the teen-age protagonist, Lisa
Cohen, to whom she brings a surprising combination of awkwardness and
determination, with nothing of the golden girl. J. Smith-Cameron (who, I only
just now learned, is Lonergan’s wife) is well cast as Lisa’s mother, an
actress; she carries the character’s theatricality—her sometimes maudlin
sentimentality and her short fuse—into private life. They do honor to the parts
as written; one performer, however, bursts through the script and the screen to
emerge as a singular presence, on her own, respecting but transcending all
dramatic considerations: Jeannie Berlin, who, in a supporting role, brings both
a sort of Old Testament fury and a modern comic incisiveness to a relatively
undefined character, one that could easily have veered into cliché but here
distills a whole, teeming, turbulent inner and outer life. It’s the kind of
tip-of-the-iceberg performance, both precise and spontaneous, nuanced and
furious, that deserves the widest acclaim. More, please: where’s
This
Is Her Youth: The Unspoken Language of Margaret — Bright Wall ... Sean Nelson from Bright Wall Dark Room, November 2016
There’s a case to be made that the social milieu of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, a Manhattan of private schools, off-Broadway opening nights, and cathartic trips to the Metropolitan Opera, represents a poor lens through which to examine the rise of Donald Trump. In the days immediately following the election, however, it became clear that the film’s chief area of thematic concern—the human cost of our failure to communicate with each other, regardless of class disparity or similarity—was a painfully resonant one.
Another way in which Margaret, despite being set in the PTSD-riddled New York of 2002, feels very current: Though this assessment may one day seem retroactively hyperbolic (“that’s just the way I talk”), at this moment, less than a week later, Trump’s victory feels far more akin to 9/11 than it does a mere staggering political upset. Like the “overprivileged liberal Jews” of the film struggling to articulate the vastness of their conflicted inner lives in the long shadow of the attacks on their city, many millions of people are even now striving to give voice to the fear that domestic fascism has just taken root in their country.
And just as in the film, out here in the West Coast bubble nobody can quite agree how we’re meant to proceed, how to talk about it, and more to the point, how it could be possible that half the country is so radically, unknowably different from the other half. These conditions generate passionate conflict, side-taking, and self-justification—rage follows scorn follows spite. But they can also result in a degree of dislocation that makes you question your own perception—not only of the world around you, but of the world within.
That kind of dislocation both propels and impedes Lisa Cohen’s tumultuous coming-of-age, a series of events that includes commonplace adolescent events (sexual dalliances with classmates) alongside more complicated ones (a sexual dalliance with a teacher) that are all within the normal range of her semi-elite, uptown latchkey class. But her world of adolescent self-regard is concussed when she witnesses, and to some extent causes, a legitimate catastrophe: a bus accident whose victim dies horribly and gorily in Lisa’s arms.
This upends an already fraught consciousness, in which adult responsibilities and expectations have been loaded onto a girl who can’t quite all-the-way shoulder them, but who excels at seeming like they are no big deal. Her talent for this kind of dissimulation—almost a prerequisite among her overprivileged peer group—leads Lisa down a path of emotional entanglements she is both ill-equipped to handle and irresistibly drawn to, driven by the contradictory desires to seem mature enough to handle anything and to be revealed as an utterly lost girl.
It’s in the nature of youth, and of her worldly cosmopolitan context, and of the trauma she is only semi-consciously concealing, that Lisa can’t ask for the help she requires. It’s in the nature of the character that she might not even know she requires it. From a viewer’s perspective, enabled by Anna Paquin’s stunningly complex, anti-ingratiating performance, it’s easy to read every word Lisa utters as a wail of longing to be seen plain, even when she’s at her most armored.
What she says, a hyperintentional, performed argot that changes with every new person she talks to, is never as revealing as how she says it—halting, interruptive gulps, sardonic asides, knowing flirtations, fiery tirades. But she shares this strangely evasive lingua franca with everyone in her world: teachers, friends, parents. Only when she ventures outside her discomfort zone, into the truly vast world of the real other does she begin to realize that her arsenal of words is a poor method for conveying the vastness of her reality.
The paltriness of language, or at least its insufficiency, is an unusual subject for a film written and directed by a playwright as verbally dexterous as Lonergan, but it enables a startling feat of expression. The dialogue is a masterful vehicle to portray people whose fine vocabularies seem to prevent them from being understood.
They resort to clichés (“what it would feel like to feel a real feeling”), me-statement circumlocutions (“If you’re really saying you’re not aware that you’ve been really annoyed with me, or really irritable with me, and it doesn’t matter if I express it accurately—you know what I’m trying to say”), self-conscious rhetorical peacocking (“appropriate equestrian paraphernalia”), and equally intentional self-deprecation (“I realize I’m incredibly enthralling”), seemingly unable to find words that aren’t pre-emptively surrounded by quotation marks.
When the kids in the fancy private school bicker about the causes and effects of America’s foreign wars, the phrases they use—“They want to establish a medieval Islamic Caliphate” ; “drop bombs on innocent people”; “a bunch of sick monsters”—are similarly well-rehearsed, as if the quest for convictions has led them only to a warehouse of things people say on the news.
Likewise, when they address their teachers, in school and out, they do so with a combination of cocky, class-based insouciance, and a genuine effort to seem impressive. For Lisa, this plays out as a graceless, ultimately successful seduction of one teacher, and a cruel, humiliating interlude with another.
It’s not surprising that when the characters corner themselves with all this non-communication, they pounce on each other ferociously. In the heat of an already petulant mother-daughter argument, Joan calls Lisa a cunt. Lisa’s announcement of “general discussions” about going to live with her father results in Joan throwing a proper actress tantrum, swiping the just-laid dinner plates, full of food, off the table and onto the floor, and calls her a “heartless little fucking bitch.”
In both scenes, her ire is both justifiable and uncalled for—she’s the mother, after all. But the classic dynamics of their parent-child relationship have eroded, leaving only a framework. Joan’s life in the theater and the putative independence of Lisa’s worldly prep school element make them more like roommates who observe certain old formalities, while ignoring others. In this case, it’s the daughter who does the most conspicuous withholding of the love and vulnerability the relationship requires. But as their conflict intensifies, it becomes painfully clear that they are both suffering, equally and differently, from its absence.
The most ferocious verbal thrashing comes from Emily, the “friend” of the woman killed in the bus accident. She is one of a vanishing subspecies of New Yorker—the refined Jewish intellectual who appears to be utterly incapable of pretending she has time for social niceties, and who has no qualms about being, or seeming unpleasant. When she detects what she thinks is a low, cheap motive in Lisa’s effort to help her pursue a lawsuit against the city, Emily lays into the younger woman with the kind of severity that surely no one has ever spoken to her before. Lisa counters with a wall of indignation and shock, every word of which rings increasingly false in the light of Emily’s unalloyed, pitiless wisdom. Shattering one illusion after another, she finally delivers the film’s crucial line—“You have every right to falsify your own life, but you have no right to falsify anybody else’s,” by which time Lisa’s face is a gnarled puddle of tears and confusion. She has been found out, in exactly the way she wanted to be, but the revelation is greeted not by sympathetic nurturing, but by scorn. It’s the kind of moment that could make an adult out of anyone.
Interestingly, that rebuke is followed by a slightly over-reaching post-script: “It’s what makes people into Nazis,” words that tell us that Emily is not only dispensing a much needed reality check to her young counterpart, but that she might also be ever-so-slightly relishing it. (This isn’t to suggest her insight isn’t keen—or, again in light of Trump, instructive—but a half-Jewish NYC teenager is an unlikely candidate for the Wehrmacht.) Her diatribe is cathartic for her and for us. The experience of watching Lisa careen off one reasonably well-meaning person after another, never revealing her true self, but still causing harm as she bounces, is frustrating. And when she tries to confront the bus driver and the police department with scathingly bad results, it becomes clear that we’re in the company of that rarest of specimens: an almost entirely unsympathetic lead character in a major motion picture.
Her propensity for saying stunningly inconsiderate things (she finally gets kicked out of Emily’s house—though not her life, oddly enough—when she employs the word “strident”) and treating people cruelly because she doesn’t believe herself significant enough to leave a mark on anyone only emphasizes the film’s ambition to reveal the cost of careless words and actions as a means of conveying a passionate frustration.
It makes the project of empathizing with her all the more challenging, and all the more essential. The astonished tears on her face as she resists the well-earned dressing down from Emily remind us that in spite of everything, Lisa remains a child, less in search of a parent or a lover than a self she can confidently, consistently be.
That quest is indicated in the film’s opening shots, of New York streets we’ve seen in a million other movies, slowed down to a glacial tempo that forces us to really notice all these faceless people—the smoking lady throwing away a small scrap of paper, the dumpy businessman in the uncomfortable suit, the bicycle delivery man laden with plastic bags, all those strollers, all those canes and wheelchairs. We’re invited to consider the lives behind their ordinary, forgettable presentation. It might seem like a facile point until you realize you’re one of them.
About midway through the film, we follow Lisa as she disappears into this same proliferation of quotidian reality. It’s a quiet moment, but it evokes an essential moment of surrender that Lisa might not know she’s having, shedding her specialness, entering the million. It’s also the moment where the film’s elusive purpose begins to come into focus. She will weep, but unlike the young child in the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem who gives the film its name, Lisa doesn’t yet know why. But we do.
Issue 41: Margaret — Bright Wall/Dark Room November 2016
“MARGARET” — A HAMMER TO NAIL REVIEW | The Filmmaker ... Michael Tully on the Theatrical release
Hell On Frisco Bay: Sorrow's Springs Brian
Battleship Pretension [Scott Nye]
Review:
Margaret is a Beautiful, Honest, and ... - Film School Rejects Jack Giroux,
Margaret - Movieline Allison Willmore
“Margaret”: The great NYC post-9/11 movie that crashed and burned Andrew O’Hehir from Salon
The Playlist Drew Taylor and Kevin Jagernauth both offer differing views
"Margaret" Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running October 8, 2011, also seen here: Glenn Kenny
Margaret Mike D’Angelo, also more here: [additional
thoughts]
Kenneth
Lonergan's 'Margaret,' - HitFix Roth
Cornet from HitFix,
They Live by Night [Bilge Ebiri]
Not
in theaters: Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret | Bleader Ben Sachs from The Chicago Reader
Margaret, Are You Grieving? - By Michael Potemra - The Corner ... January 10, 2012
PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]
Criticize This! [Andrew Parker]
Reeling Reviews [Laura Clifford]
Sound On Sight Ila Tyagi
Slant Magazine [Kalvin Henely]
Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]
Kenneth Lonergan The Awards Circuit – By Clayton Davis ... Joey Magidson
Movie Review - Margaret - eFilmCritic Peter Sobczynski
A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe
Margaret's Upper West Side Story | The New York Observer Rex Reed
Anna Paquin
shines in Margaret - TIME Mary Pols,
also seen here: Mary Pols
Margaret | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps
Margaret Movie Review (2011) review by Eye for Film Anton BItel
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Film Review: Margaret Sarah Sluis from Film Journal
Margaret Review | We Got This Covered Amy Curtis
Dossier Journal: Read » Kenneth Lonergan Eric Rosenblum
King Of The Hill – Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret « Adam Batty from Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second
Ray Carney and Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret : Nor'easter Blog Andrew
Kenneth Lonergan's new film Margaret misses the mark | Reuters Alonso Duralde, also seen here: The Wrap [Alonso Duralde]
Margaret — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Mark Olsen
Is She Crazy, Traumatized, or Just a Teenager ... - Village Voice Karina Longworth, also from The Seattle Weekly seen here: Margaret: Kenneth Lonergan's Long-Delayed Teen Drama - Page 1 ...
David
Edelstein on 'Take Shelter,' '50/50,' and 'Margaret' -- New York ...
The Wonder That
Is Margaret Critic Quality
Feed,
I Owe You This Much Critic Quality Feed,
Kenneth Lonergan « popcornaddict
Margaret : The New Yorker Richard Brody (capsule)
Film Review: Kenneth Lonergan's long-awaited 'Margaret,' starring ... Jack Coyle from The Republic
Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson provides the links on the film
Critical Movie Critics (Howard Schumann)
Movie-Report.com/Mr. Brown's Movies [Michael Dequina] pretentious and ultimately unfocused
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair] hopelessly cluttered mess of epic proportions
Anna
Paquin, Matt Damon star in 'Margaret': movie review ... mostly a mess by Peter Rainer from The Christian Science Monitor
Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
Bigfanboy.com [Gary Murray] claiming MARGARET and THE TREE OF LIFE are the worst movies of the year
The Playlist: Has Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' Been Buried? Gabe Toro from the indieWIRE Playlist, April 26, 2009
KENNETH LONERGAN'S MARGARET: A PORTRAIT OF A ... Kevin Faraci from CHUD, April 27, 2009
Margaret Carson Reeves at ScriptShadow, July 8, 2010
The Playlist: Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' Is Finally Finished, Will ... Kevin Jagernauth from the indieWIRE Playlist, July 23, 2010
Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret to be released in 2011 - Imitation of ... Imitation of Life, September 14, 2010
Martin Scorsese Trying to Edit Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' Out of ... Jack Giroux from Film School Rejects, May 7, 2011
Will Martin Scorsese Help Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' Finally ... Nick Newman from The Film Stage, May 9, 2011
Martin Scorsese To Edit Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' In Hopes Of ... Kevin Jagernauth from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 9, 2011
Opera Fresh: Kenneth Lonergan's Film "Margaret" Will Feature Opera August 5, 2011
Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret' Just Makes The Cut Dan Mecca from The Film Stage
Kevin Jagernauth Martin Scorsese’s Cut Of ‘Margaret’ Longer Than Current Version; Producer Turned Down TIFF Premiere, from the indieWIRE Playlist, October 3, 2011
Six years in the making, "Margaret" is worth the wait Matt Singer from IFC News, October 6, 2011
Are you there, Fox? It's me, 'Margaret' Guy Lodge from HitFix, November 6, 2011
Critics Demand to See Margaret Forrest Wickman from Slate, December 1, 2011
Kenneth Lonergan reveals just which cut of “Margaret” got released ... Matt Singer from IFC, December 2, 2011
Kenneth Lonergan Hopes The Longer Cut Of 'Margaret' Edited By ... Kevin Jagernauth from the indieWIRE Playlist, December 3, 2011
Team 'Margaret' makes headway Guy Lodge from HitFix, December 6, 2011
BOMB Magazine: Kenneth Lonergan by Rachel Kushner Interview from Bomb Magazine, Summer 2001
Kenneth Lonergan on Margaret | Film interview - Film - Time Out ... Ben Kenigsberg interview from Time Out Chicago, February 15, 2012
Review: 'Margaret' - CNN.com Owen Gleiberman
Margaret: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden
Variety Reviews - Margaret - Film Reviews - New U.S. Release ...
Margaret | Film review Ben Kenigsberg from Time Out Chicago, October 5, 2011
Ben Kenisberg writing in the city's Time Out magazine Time Out Chicago, November 20, 2011, also seen here: For your consideration: Margaret
Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan, 150 mins (15) - Reviews - Films - The ... Nicholas Barber from The Independent, December 4, 2011
Margaret – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, December 1, 2011
Margaret – review | Film | The Observer Philip French from The Observer, December 3, 2011
Why is Fox trying to bury Margaret? Tony Palin from The Guardian, December 2, 2011
Margaret: 'In a sane world it would be in line for Oscars' - video review Xan Brooks video review from The Guardian, December 2, 2011 (2:35)
Telegraph Tim Robey from The Daily Telegraph, December 1, 2011
Margaret: A grief study that wasn't worth the wait - The Globe and Mail Liam Lacey from The Globe and the Mail
Margaret
- Boston.com Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe
Review:
Lonergan’s long-awaited `Margaret’
Jake Coyle from The Boston Globe
Margaret - Outside The Frame - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
'Margaret' on crash course - BostonHerald.com Brett Michel
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Kenneth Lonergan's ambitious 'Margaret' reappears in theaters | The ... Ryan Lattanzio from The Daily Californian, February 15, 2012
'Margaret' review: You'll love it or hate it Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle
Movie review: 'Margaret' - Collections - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey, September 30, 2011
After six years, 'Margaret' finally arrives in theaters John Horn and Nicole Sperling from The LA Times, September 30, 2011
Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret': post-production in a courtroom - Los ... John Horn from The LA Times, April 26, 2009, also seen here: Los Angeles Times
Movie Review - 'Margaret' - 'Margaret,' Directed by Kenneth ... A.O. Scott, September 29, 2011
Margaret (2011 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MANCHESTER
BY THE SEA A- 94
USA (137 mi) 2016
For the most part,
the story concerns a morose, self-absorbed loner that spends so much time
drinking, brooding, and being down in the proverbial dumps that he just seems
like the kind of guy that prefers to wallow in his own misery. Not your typical protagonist, but a guy on
the edge who if he isn’t careful, may end up all alone late in life talking to
the walls where he might resemble Al Pacino in David Gordon Green’s miserablist
indie film Manglehorn
(2014), a guy that’s simply too screwed up for his own good. Not
the blockbuster powerhouse of his previous film, 2011
Top Ten Films of the Year #2 Margaret, which is so ridiculously awesome in
so many respects, a bold and brutally honest exposé of a post 9/11 New York, or
his masterpiece in miniature, You
Can Count On Me (2000), a portrait of an orphaned brother and sister,
following their lives as the years progress, an understated poetic gem, where
Lonergan’s particular skill is finding the inner truth of his
characters. Both feature extraordinarily well-written
dialogue and some of the best acting performances on record. This one examines another uncomfortable
reality that plays out in a different fashion if only because of its
predictable yet steadfast refusal not to lose sight of what’s eating at the
central character, the extent of his personal loss, the source of his unending
despair, as his heart has been ripped from his chest and he’s doomed to spend
the rest of his life without it, isolated and completely shut down emotionally,
where a Greek chorus of whispers heard throughout considers him damaged
goods. If it feels like a ghost story,
it is, as the man is a walking ghost.
But it doesn’t start out that way.
It opens with two brothers out on a fishing boat, with older brother Joe
Chandler (Kyle Chandler) at the helm while his kid brother Lee (Casey Affleck)
is horsing around with Joe’s young son Patrick (Ben O’Brien), telling him
exaggerated shark stories that are meant to scare him out of his wits, but the
kid isn’t buying it. It turns out to be
the happiest moment in the film, and it’s all a memory, backed by a melancholy
choral score and lovely recurring orchestral touches from Handel’s Messiah, Handel: Messiah / Part 1 -
13. Pifa (Pastoral Symphony) - YouTube (3:04), adding an underlying layer
of stark beauty mixed with profound sadness.
The film, often
given a literary feel as it’s filled with introspection, introduces us to Lee,
seen shoveling snow for an apartment complex, living in Quincy, a neighborhood
near Boston living the life of a hermit, performing janitorial duties, where he
spends his life getting drunk in bars and getting into brawls, with an opening
montage showing him performing the dirty work, fixing toilets, light fixtures,
leaky faucets and showers, performing these hands-on duties in the intimacies
of other people’s apartments where he hears a constant stream of complaints as
they see his presence as an unnecessary intrusion in their all-too busy
lives. It’s while clearing the sidewalks
that he receives a phone call from George (C.J. Wilson), a family friend,
notifying him that his brother suffered cardiac arrest and is heading for
surgery. By the time he gets there, he’s
already dead. The scene at the hospital
is respectful but awkwardly reserved, where George is the grown-up in the room
while Lee remains overwhelmed by it all, breaking down momentarily when he
views the body, a scene filled with emotion and one of the surprises of the
film, as he keeps his feelings so tightly wound and close to the vest. Lee holds in the past, trying to contain the
effects by compressing it while living in the present, where two trajectories
are happening simultaneously. This
series of flashbacks allows viewers a broader view of the family history, where
Joe was personable and affable, well-liked by others and viewed as the
steadying influence, where his absence is immediately noticeable, while Lee is
viewed as the black sheep, more temperamental and hard to get along with due to
his changeable moods, where we learn that Joe had a history of heart
congestion, a source of irritation to his wife Elise (Gretchen Mol), who left
him shortly afterwards with a drinking problem and hasn’t been seen since. All this is going through Lee’s mind as he
heads to the town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, a small historic and picturesque
community on the state’s northeast edge where Joe lived and kept a boat, as he
needs to inform Patrick (Lucas Hedges), now a 16-year old kid in high school,
seen having a particular physical moment at practice on the hockey rink when
Lee arrives, arousing the curiosity of his teammates who identify Lee as an
infamous figure from the past, where the point of view remains with the
teammates staring silently across the ice, where something out of the ordinary
must have drawn him here.
At the opening of
the will in the lawyer’s office, Lee is surprised to learn he has been named
guardian for Patrick, something that was never previously discussed with his
brother, yet as he’s called upon to be there in a moment of crisis, he falls
into a profound silence, opening the floodgates to the past, where flashbacks
are woven into the storyline as seamlessly as the present, often
indistinguishable, yet they have the effect of peeling away the layers of Lee’s
tortured soul. Set to the fatalistic
music of Albinoni’s sorrowful “Adagio,” Adagio in G Minor for
Strings and Organ, "Albinoni's Adagio" - YouTube (8:38), a dramatic piece also used in Peter Weir’s
GALLIPOLI (1981), we discover he was once happily married to Randi (Michelle
Williams), leading a surprisingly normal life until an emotionally devastating
event occurs, a random freak accident that he feels responsible for and could
never ignore, a catastrophic moment that ruined his marriage and drove him out
of his hometown for good. Now another
traumatic event is luring him back. As
they leave the office, Lee is in a state of bewilderment, suggesting they may
have to move for Boston, which only inflames Patrick, a popular guy who has a
good thing going here, who doesn’t want to be uprooted, when Lonergan appears
as a bystander, interjecting his own sardonic message into the mix of family
turmoil, criticizing the authoritative behavior of Lee as he shuts up Patrick,
yelling out “Great parenting,” which only inflames Lee more, wanting to smack
him right there on the street. With both
talking over the other, it’s an example of overlapping dialogue occurring
simultaneously, a Lonergan trademark, though it feels loose and
improvisatory. Patrick notices a change
in Lee’s demeanor from when he was younger, where he’s turned into an
obnoxiously downbeat guy who probably drinks too much, while Patrick is smart
and extremely likeable, playing in an amusingly terrible garage band, on the
hockey team, and is balancing two girlfriends.
When asked if he’s having sex with them both, he claims with one it is
“strictly basement business,” where he’s stuck in the basement avoiding parental
interruptions, but “It means I’m working on it.” Patrick is a terrific kid who’s probably
already more mature than Lee, but he’s also a troubled teen mourning the loss
of his father, keeping secret the whereabouts of his mother who disappeared
years ago, but recently reached out to him over the Internet. Lonergan has a way of capturing teen chatter,
a cryptic way of aggressively using words in short bursts, understanding it’s a
time for intense fascination with things, yet you’re stuck in an isolated and
socially awkward stage in life, as kids need to be driven everywhere by their
parents, a task Lee is not altogether ready to handle. Patrick’s thriving social activity is a
contrast to his brooding solitude.
Lee is so caught up
in a cycle of grief that he’s left feeling as if time is standing still, where
nearly every scene takes place in the crisp chill of wintry air, with
cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes beautifully capturing the harsh winters of a
remote seaside town that seem perpetually overcast, with boats regularly seen
going out and coming in, where the use of classical music, especially
the pieces from Handel’s Messiah,
including a brilliant alto and soprano duet in “He Shall Feed His Flock,” Manchester By The
Sea (Original Soundtrack Album) - Spotify, an incredibly sad and melancholy lament filled with an expression of hope
that God will unburden our sorrow, that recall familiar sounds
associated with Christmas. In this film,
when everything else is stripped away, we are left to enter a sort of sacred
interior reverie, a hallowed ground of emptiness that is left unfilled, an
inner sanctity of unendurable pain for which there is no outlet. The depth of the story is a man living with
unbearable grief, someone unable to be comforted by anything, standing alone at
his brother’s funeral service avoiding eye contact, watching others hugging and kissing while he stands separate and apart,
where people try to interact with him, but he doesn’t respond to their
attempts, ignoring them, as if waiting for them to go away. He’s not
so much depressed, but grieving, unable to forgive himself for what he is
ultimately responsible for, carrying all the tragedies that occurred on his
back every waking minute of his life, unable to move on from his loss,
remaining emotionally crippled. Perhaps
surprising is the degree of humor found in this film, often in awkward moments,
where it can be insanely funny the way normally reserved New England men
express their love and admiration for one another, usually fueled by alcohol,
excessively poor taste, bitter sarcasm, and foul language.
Patrick is really sarcastic, for instance, offering wry jokes leading to
an amazing resilience, capable of instantly changing the dire mood, while Lee
has an undercutting wit, where humor softens the harsher edges of tragedy. Without the humor, the film would be an
unending dirge, but the film more accurately captures a rhythm of life complete
with ordinary missteps, where attention to detail is essential, depicting a New
England, working-class family with Irish Catholic roots, who are loyal to a
fault, but in the case of Lee, easily provoked to violence. One of the scenes of the film comes near the
end when Lee encounters his ex-wife Randi on the street, the only operatic
moment, where she reaches out for him, literally offering her heart,
acknowledging her share of the blame in a magnanimous gesture that catches him
off-guard, as he’s obviously moved by the emotional sincerity of her efforts,
letting himself go just for a moment before stopping himself and shutting down
again, regaining his self-control, where he’s not yet ready to commit, or even
forgive himself, as he’s still in the midst of figuring out how to survive the
years of pent-up emotions, but while there’s not an ounce of healing or
redemption to be found anywhere, it’s a huge dramatic undertaking to even
recognize that love is still in the air.
November/December 2016 - Film Comment Michael Koresky
Upon a second viewing, it becomes clearer just how subtly, almost subliminally, Lonergan has created a pervasive cloud of shame, sadness, and guilt that follows Lee everywhere... An elegant and economical writer, Lonergan is telling us that Lee's grief cannot be contained or subdued because his past lives on wherever he goes, not least in the town he's running from and the nephew he feels insufficient to watch and protect.
Manchester by the
Sea | NYFF54 - Film Society of Lincoln Center
Casey Affleck is formidable as the volatile, deeply troubled Lee Chandler, a Boston-based handyman called back to his hometown on the Massachusetts North Shore after the sudden death of his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), who has left behind a teenage son (Lucas Hedges). This loss and the return to his old stomping grounds summon Lee’s memories of an earlier, even more devastating tragedy. In his third film as a director, following You Can Count on Me (2000) and Margaret (2011), Kenneth Lonergan, with the help of a remarkable cast, unflinchingly explores grief, hope, and love, giving us a film that is funny, sharply observed, intimately detailed yet grand in emotional scale.
Sundance 2016 | Amy Taubin - Film Comment
Searchlight’s victory notwithstanding, Sundance 2016 may be remembered as evidencing a radical transformation of independent distribution and exhibition. The aggressive purchasing strategy of Amazon and Netflix put a damper on such familiar players as Sony Pictures Classics, The Weinstein Company, Magnolia, and IFC. Amazon acquired at least half a dozen titles, among them Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, for which it paid $10 million, the second-largest deal at this year’s festival. By far Lonergan’s strongest movie, it is a New England family saga closer to tragedy than melodrama, devastating in its segues between past and present. Casey Affleck submerges himself in his character—a man who cannot forgive himself for something best not revealed to viewers in advance—and, admirably, Lonergan refuses to sell out the character or the actor by allowing even a trace of uplift or redemption at the end.
Manchester by the Sea was acclaimed as a great classical movie, and while that may be the case, I personally prefer films that show me through their form and/or content something I’ve not seen before.
Cinema Scope: Blake Williams March 21, 2016
Kenneth Lonergan has spent his entire film career luxuriating in the aftermaths of tragedies, and Manchester by the Sea—arriving a cool 11 years after his high masterpiece, Margaret (2011), wrapped its shoot—is no different. In fact, put Margaret and his Sundance-winning debut, You Can Count On Me (2000), together in one of The Fly’s (1986) teleportation pods and you’d get something awfully close to Manchester walking out of it. Which is to say, the movie is as operatic as it is quaint, sprawling and scattershot in scope, and very, very good (not to mention unbearably sad). It also unfolds and reveals itself in such a deliberate fashion that I probably shouldn’t say too much about it. So instead a few words about Nicolas Pesce’s much-talked-about The Eyes of My Mother, which also arrived from the womb of Borderline Films and is also something of a hybrid, grabbing from the playbooks of Pascal Laugier (of Martyrs [2008] infamy) and Philippe Grandrieux alike. Here, a Portuguese girl named Francesca (played at different ages by Olivia Bond and Kika Magalhaes) spends her life coping with the brutal murder of her mother by keeping the killer captive in her family barn as a kind of monstrous, blinded plaything. Thankfully explicitly visual in his approach, Nesce prefers to revel in the sensory flavours of, e.g., elderly bodies in murky bath water, the excreted mucus from emptied eye sockets, and scarred figures emerging from opaque clouds of darkness. It’s probably too ridiculous to truly “work,” but it’s haptic and assertive in a way I found welcoming rather than alienating, which is something (if nothing more).
Cinema Scope: Angelo Muredda September 06, 2016
The elegant swan to Margaret’s (2011) ugly duckling, Manchester by the Sea is a moving but less arresting follow-up to Kenneth Lonergan’s career best. At his strongest when he is least governed by discipline and good taste, Lonergan seems a bit too tentative in this unmistakably well-crafted study of the way grief ripples through a contained community. Where Margaret turned outward to the New York City skyline, the West Bank, and Victorian poetic elegies to follow its precocious schoolgirl’s equally reckless mourning of a stranger, Manchester by the Sea, like Lonergan’s first film You Can Count On Me (2000), stays small, tracking the way a family in the eponymous coastal town has to reorient itself after the sudden death of good brother and father Joe (Kyle Chandler).
Modest as this scope seems, the gently overlapping timelines and detached, classical-scored views of the family fishing boat on the water evoke a universal register that takes us beyond the thick regionalism of the Boston-adjacent accents and Bruins t-shirts to consider how death forcibly inscribes itself on people’s lives. Lonergan strikes that balance well. Mostly, that’s thanks to the sturdy masculine gravitas of leading man and mourner-in-chief Casey Affleck, who’s equally good at conveying rumpled human dignity and drunken aggression as Joe’s tragedy-afflicted brother Lee, suddenly named the guardian of his teenaged nephew (Lucas Hedges).
It’s only when the film buckles down to explain what’s eating Lee and why he left town in the first place—about as foregone a reveal as might be expected—that Lonergan seems to be straining for melodramatic notes that aren’t in his story’s range. The prickly warmth, specificity, and gallows humour that is his stock in trade is gradually diluted by the generic mechanics of an important prestige picture, complete with dramatic show-stopping cameo by Oscar darling Michelle Williams as Lee’s ex-wife and co-sufferer. The result is something perfectly fine, and all the more disappointing for it.
Manchester by the Sea | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Snacks Kyburz
From Daniel Eagan’s interview with Lonergan for Film Comment, November 11, 2016:
“What I’m really interested in is people struggling with situations that are bigger than they are, that are overwhelming to them. Also the disparity of experience, the variety of human experience, how one person can have one kind of life and his neighbor will have a completely different kind in every respect. That never ceases to fascinate and confound me and also impress me.”
Q: Is there any solution to grief?
“I don’t think there is, except for time and finding other emotional content in your life as you get older and grow and more time passes between your loss and the present.”
- - - - -
We viewers mustn’t look to the films of Kenneth Lonergan — You Can Count On Me, Margaret, now Manchester by the Sea — for solutions, and yet, we find them anyway. Lonergan is an artist, one of the most gifted and moving in contemporary American cinema, but he is also a person. More importantly, he’s a humanist — a non-judge of faults and contradictions, one who seeks to resolve the momentary conflicts before the larger ones. The strained bond between a brother and a sister in You Can Count on Me, for example: in many other directors’ hands, forgetting to pick up a young nephew from school or kicking that same nephew out of a car in retaliation would be exploited and dragged. But not when at the mercy of a phlegmatic vision. We sense the hurt in the subtle motions or brief bursts of rage from Lonergan’s immensely qualified ensembles that fill out each film. We hear it in the unfinished sentences and subliminal wordings. Nothing is simple. Nobody is right. Nobody can match each other’s level of experience. Nobody knows just what the fuck to do. How can we live like that?
Manchester by the Sea feels like a film affected by time and the wisdom accrued therein. Though it’s been five years since 2011’s Margaret, it’s really been ten years since Lonergan finished a film (I won’t bore you with the details of that film’s nightmare backstory, but I invite you to indulge it for yourself). Margaret towers with ambition and tragedy, the enormous bound a director might take once he’s moved audience with the quaintness of You Can Count On Me. If that film focused on the conflicting voices of a few people with in a town, then Margaret takes those same voices and tells them how easily they get lost in a flood. There’s a little bit of that happening in Manchester by the Sea, as Casey Affleck’s character bears direct responsibility for his failure as a guardian and provider and demands somebody punish him for it. In the grand scheme of the surrounding world, what he’s done to deserve his collapsed family, his irreversible misery, and worsening alcohol abuse matters little. He’s too easily left off the hook. For himself, and for his family, he’ll never be forgiven, and maybe that’s for the best. He has to live with what he’s done, and attempt to salvage what comes his way. Like Lisa in Margaret, he’s haunted by memory, but he feels less willing to singlehandedly save the world.
We begin by stretching across the water. Our toes can feel the cool touch of New England’s water as we pull towards the boats. This is sweet, calming, comforting — a place to nurture and grow with another. Such is the case for Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) goofing around with nephew Patrick (Ben O’Brien) aboard a boat. “If you could choose to live with me or your dad on an island,” Lee posits, “who would it be?” No hesitance: “My dad,” says Patrick. There’s no hurt feelings. As Lee will begin to realize, there’s no replacing a father. This is a happy memory. Flash forward to the present: now it’s winter, and Lee deals with clients as a handyman in an apartment complex. Gone is the playfulness with his voice as he struggles with these purely transactional meetings. Check out a problem, resist the urge to tell somebody off, toss the garbage, repeat. Go to a bar, punch a dude. Whatever. Then a call is received: his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) suffered a fatal heart attack. Patrick travels to his hometown of Manchester to tend to the proceedings, and to break the news to Patrick (as a teenager by Lucas Hedges). Like his uncle, Patrick has violent urges, too — but he’s a kid, and there’s an understanding to his irrationality. With Lee, the very appearance of him inspires whispers: “Didn’t he…” “No, it’s not true.” What happened that was so terrible that people walk on egg shells around him?
I won’t say, but know that his ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams) is a part. The very notion of seeing her again after a horrible tragedy compounds Lee’s anxieties, the most recurring being just how he watches over Patrick? What can he let him do? What’s left of the ten year old? Can he contend with the confidence of a popular young man who’s still not figured out women yet? Where can he commiserate in both of their losses? In her piece on Margaret for Film Comment, Violet Lucca points out the recurrence of performance in Lonergan’s films. As a writer with a theater discipline, Lonergan keeps the stage onscreen: many scenes, like the very first, give the actors plenty of room. There’s room for flaws, for input. He keeps a distance. Even in his cameos, he is a calm presence, even if his words don’t offer any help whatsoever. He recognizes the recurrence and pressure of performance in our daily lives — Lee can’t keep a happy face anymore. Patrick sees a freezer and loses it. When should niceties split apart, and how do we reform them once fractured? How important is it that we keep the illusion of a bond and a shared peace, even when more complexities lurk underneath? Again, Lonergan has no solutions; all he offers is a recognition of those struggles.
The descriptor “confrontational” is synonymous with provocative and abrasive. Kenneth Lonergan confronts us in how complex we can get in just the mundane parts of the day. He confronts what we expect from actions and reactions. For one of the film’s examples: if a brother outright rejects charity, is it better wait or reject them right back? It’s important, Manchester demonstrates, to step back for a moment. To establish where the other person is coming from. Even if they don’t, it’s not the end of their relationship. In one case, there’s a fight, then a friendly game of catch. It’s like they’re back on the boat in happier days. It recalls the relationship between Rory Culkin and uncle Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count on Me. Patrick and Lee could very well be those same two people. Lucas, with the pressures of life and death rushing toward him, has a little bit of Margaret’s Lisa in him too. It’s as though with each film, Lonergan checks back with these characters in different guises and names. As he learns and grows, he finds new ways for them to see life, love, grief, confusion, etc. They clash and contradict, but the embrace of the experience is where the value is. Even if failure is imminent, the struggle matters because it was a struggle. That’s a valuable lesson that makes Manchester by the Sea required viewing.
Interview:
Kenneth Lonergan | Manchester by the Sea - Film Comment Daniel Eagan interview from Film Comment, November 11, 2016
After festival screenings at Sundance and in Telluride, Toronto, New York, and London, Manchester by the Sea reaches select theaters on November 18 wrapped in praise. Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, the drama focuses on Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a handyman suddenly named guardian of his orphaned nephew Patrick (played by Ben O’Brien as a young boy and Lucas Hedges as a teenager).
Set mostly in a blue-collar seaside community in Massachusetts, Manchester by the Sea explores the wary relationship between an underachiever trying to piece his life back together and a typically self-absorbed teenager already familiar with loss. Dragged back to a home he abandoned, Lee is forced to deal with the banality of death—morgues, personal effects, wills, upkeep on a house and boat—while confronting a past he has tried to avoid. Patrick approaches grief by focusing on sports, his rock band, and girls.
Manchester by the Sea has been mentioned so frequently as an awards contender that it risks being overwhelmed by hype. But no matter what you read about it, the movie will still surprise you, in part because of Lonergan’s uncanny knack for finding the inner truth of his characters. His humor and insight are a striking corrective to the cookie-cutter creations and contrived storylines found in many films.
Fighting a cold and admittedly worn-out from talking for months about the project, Lonergan spoke by phone about this and his two previous movies, You Can Count on Me (2000) and Margaret (2011).
Let’s talk about the scene in which Lee and his estranged wife
Randi [Michelle Williams] reconnect on a sidewalk. It’s one of the key moments
in the story.
Yeah, it’s the pivotal scene. It’s the first time they really talk about anything since they split up years ago, and it’s the end of his somewhat halting attempts to possibly work himself back into the life there, and it’s the beginning of the end of his attempt to explore the idea of being his nephew’s guardian.
It’s a really important scene. The worry for me was that I was aware it was important, that without that scene working as best it possibly could we wouldn’t have as good of a movie. It’s a very emotional scene, very sad. But it’s also very loving.
We knew we wanted to give it a full half-day, so we had to reschedule it a couple of times. It came near the end of the shoot, which really worked out nicely for all of us. Because I think by that time Casey and Michelle had both been inhabiting the characters for a while and were comfortable with them.
We talked through it as we did with all the scenes, while we were there as well as the night before. So it was pretty easy to do in terms of getting it done. They were both very emotionally available and ready to go. We had two cameras that day, so we just shot it.
You make it sound easy, but it must have been hard for them to
sustain those emotions take after take.
It’s a lot easier for me than for them, that’s for sure. I don’t know how they do it, truthfully. I don’t mean to make it sound easy because I think what they have to do is enormously difficult. I have to understand what’s happening in the scene and hope that my thoughts about it will be helpful for them. But they have to live through that and be those people and have those feelings for real even though the circumstances are pretend. But because the two of them are so exceptionally not just talented but professional and skillful, I wasn’t really worried that it wasn’t going to turn out well. I just really wanted it to.
How did you and Casey Affleck reach a consensus about Lee?
I think we had very similar opinions because we went through everything together. We had a really interesting time working everything out. It was somewhat of a unique experience for me and I think for him. He has a million questions, he’s like a relentless detective and wants to know everything he possibly could so that he has a foundation from which to perform a scene. You know he’s bringing everything he has to it by being the guy, and I’m bringing everything I can think of to help him from when I was pretending to be the guy when I was writing it. So I think I have at least one version of the character that is useful for the actor to hear about. But at some point I step back and he has to become the person. And at that point, there’s a whole gang of other things that are Casey’s and Casey’s alone that come into play.
Did Affleck change the character in ways you didn’t expect?
Well all actors do, because they’re all different. They’re never what you imagine because what you imagine is imaginary. I mean if I imagined Casey playing that part… you don’t want that, you want the actors to come in and do things you didn’t expect and say things that you didn’t know.
It’s great when their boundaries and your boundaries of what fits within the story and the circumstances overlap. And it’s really great when you see someone inhabiting that role so fully and still retain all the points that are important to me as well. It’s one thing to write a story, it’s another to act it. That’s why it’s so much fun to work with great actors. They literally bring it to life.
Does Lee expect to be punished for the tragic event that
occurs in the story?
I think so, yes.
That happens with characters in your other works as well.
I hadn’t noticed that, but I see what you’re getting at. When Sam in You Can Count on Me asks a minister if she should be punished for having an affair with a married man, she literally says, “Don’t you think it would be better if you told me I was going to burn in hell?” And he says no.
It’s absolutely true that Lisa in Margaret is looking for someone to punish her for what she did. But she’s also looking for some justice for what happened on the bus, for the bus driver. And I think that Casey’s character, Lee, feels responsible in the police station, at least expecting to be put in jail. He definitely blames himself for what happened.
Is it significant that you identify Lee and Patrick as
Catholics?
Well, they’re Catholics because that’s what they would be if they lived there. But, I don’t know, if guilt’s a theme, it’s a psychological one, not a religious one. It’s not one that I’m super consciously aware of. I’m not religious at all. I mean I’m interested in religion as a human phenomenon, but I don’t personally ascribe to it. So it’s unlikely that there’s a big element of that behind the film.
Do you feel guilt drives Manchester by the Sea?
It’s not the prime factor. Lee’s also lost his children and his wife. It’s not just that he did something that he feels guilty about, it’s that he has this loss and it’s his fault. You could have a very similar story with someone who was not responsible.
I wouldn’t necessarily assert that guilt in You Can Count on Me was a primary factor either. I think Sam was feeling a little guilty about this and that, but everyone feels guilty about something. I think the main idea of that story is that she’s caught in a quandary of trying to save her brother and protect her son at the same time.
And if you asked me what Margaret is about, guilt would not be anywhere near the top 10 things. Certainly it’s a driving psychological factor, but I wouldn’t say that’s what it’s about. I think it’s about the size of the world and how many different points of view there are. How lost one person’s voice and wishes and feelings can get in such a symphony of voices, thoughts, and feelings, and other people just trying to live their lives.
Now, these stories may all be about my guilt about something, but that’s not what I’m trying to write about. Manchester by the Sea is a little bit more directly about that, certainly. But I could also say it’s just as equally about grief and loyalty and coping and love.
But I definitely tend to write about people who feel guilty. I’ve written a lot of things that tend to circle around the idea of survivor guilt. But that’s completely accidental or completely psychologically driven. You don’t always know what’s behind what you’re writing about, and what’s behind it isn’t always the most interesting thing in it. But those elements are certainly there and common to my work.
For all I know, the psychological wellspring of what makes you write something is not always the same as the content. I think the content’s hopefully just as interesting. I think the psychology has to be consistent with the content, otherwise the piece will have a false ring to it. That’s why I don’t discount the presence and the weight of the guilty feelings the characters have or whatever guilt I may have in describing the films, because it’s obviously a big part of it. But I think it’s one part and I don’t even think it’s the most interesting part.
What I’m really interested in is people struggling with situations that are bigger than they are, that are overwhelming to them. Also the disparity of experience, the variety of human experience, how one person can have one kind of life and his neighbor will have a completely different kind in every respect. That never ceases to fascinate and confound me and also impress me.
Is there any solution to grief?
I don’t think there is, except for time and finding other emotional content in your life as you get older and grow and more time passes between your loss and the present.
You’ve used opera, with its outsized emotions, in your work,
and in Manchester by the Sea pieces like the “Pastoral Symphony” from
Handel’s Messiah. Can you talk about how music functions in your work?
There’s no opera in this film, but there’s plenty of opera in the extended edition of Margaret, which is the one that counts. For that film particularly, I think the outsized emotions have some correlation with the teenage experience of life, which is a bit outsized.
Also, life does mean that much to people who are living it. When your boyfriend leaves you or your husband leaves you or you die of tuberculosis, it is an opera-sized tragedy. At the same time, it’s a fairly accurate reflection of the human experience. While also being a bit silly.
There’s also a sort of opera theme running through a play I wrote called The Starry Messenger, which touches on the same idea that it’s not wrong to think of your life as a bigger story than it otherwise sometimes feels.
In Manchester by the Sea there’s music from the Messiah, a sonata for oboe and piano, some choral music by Massenet. As well as Lesley Barber’s score. The music pieces are not so much about the human element in the story, but just about the presence of beauty in the world that continues on above us and around us no matter what’s going on. Sometimes in a way that feels indifferent, and sometimes in a way that feels very sustaining and warming.
Was this a difficult shoot overall?
Just the usual pressure. Any film shoot is pressurized because there’s a lot to do in a limited amount of time and with a limited amount of money. We were under-scheduled from the beginning—it probably would have been better if we’d gotten that all figured out before we started. It became a sort of day-by-day process, but it ended up working out all right. We ended up extending I think four days. It’s not like we were doing a million setups per scene. We were doing one or two, we’re not very extravagant.
What the pressure does is make you concentrate despite the swarm of activity and despite whatever the problems of the day happen to be. It’s very difficult. Fortunately the creative problems of the day are front and center, so they draw your attention away from all the other stuff. And then you go home and worry, oh my God, we don’t have enough time, we’ll never make it, etc.
At this stage I tend to see all the things that I don’t like, that I wish I could have done a little better. But we worked very hard and I’m very happy with it.
The Cinematic Traumas of Kenneth Lonergan - The New Yorker Rebecca Mead from The New Yorker, November 7, 2016
The
Limits of Forgiveness Francine Prose
from The New York Review of Books,
December 15, 2016
Fandor:
Chuck Bowen The Shape of Grief, Nonlinear time and narrative structure in Arrival
and Manchester by the Sea, December 02, 2016
Manchester
By The Sea · Film Review Casey Affleck has a hard ... A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club
Reverse
Shot: Jackson Arn October 06, 2016
Sundance
Review: Kenneth Lonergan's 'Manchester By The Sea ... Noel Murray from indieWIRE
Review:
Casey Affleck's amazing work anchors fest best 'Manchester ... Drew McWeeny from Uproxx
Manchester
by the Sea :: Movies :: Reviews :: Manchester By The Sea ... Tim Grierson from Paste magazine
Review: Casey Affleck Is the Anchor and Soul of Manchester by the ... Stephanie Zacharek from Time magazine
Vulture: Bilge Ebiri January 24, 2016
Manchester
by the Sea, directed by Kenneth Lonergan, reviewed. - Slate Dana Stevens
“Manchester
by the Sea” and “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find ... Anthony Lane from The New Yorker
Manchester by the Sea Is a Stunning Meditation on Grief David Sims from The Atlantic
Indiewire: Eric Kohn January 25, 2016
'Manchester
By The Sea': Sundance Review | Reviews | Screen Fionnuala Halligan from Screendaily
In
Lonergan's 'Manchester By The Sea,' Submerged Emotions Bubble ... Andrew Lapin from NPR
'Manchester By the Sea' Is a Tragedy Bursting With Life | PopMatters Chris Barsanti
Movie Review: Manchester by the Sea David Edelstein from Vulture, November 16,
2016
Filmmaker: Vadim Rizov January 24, 2016
Review: MANCHESTER BY THE SEA, Lonergan's Latest is Earnest if ... Kenji Fujishima from Screen Anarchy
Manchester by the Sea is a beautiful tragedy, and Casey Affleck's ... Chris Plante from The Verge
Film Review: Manchester by the Sea | Film Journal International Daniel Eagan
Manchester by the Sea Review - Den of Geek David Crow
Movie Review: 'Manchester by the Sea' Danny Eisenberg from The Harvard Press
Manchester
by the Sea - Review (London Film Festival) | Flickreel Craig Skinner
Manchester
by the Sea Review: Casey Affleck Shines in the Most ... Richard Lawson from Vanity Fair
“Manchester
by the Sea”: cinematic authenticity at its finest - The Chimes Kyle Kohner
MUBI's Notebook: Daniel Kasman September 11, 2016
Movie Mezzanine: Tina Hassannia
Brooklyn Magazine: Eli Goldfarb October 04, 2016
Letterboxd:
Preston Wilder October 10, 2016
VIFF Blog: Adam Cook January 28, 2016
Brooklyn Magazine: John Oursler February 01, 2016
'Manchester By the Sea': How Editor Jennifer Lame Shaped Kenneth Longeran's Film — Consider This Kate Erbland interviews editor Jennifer Lame from indieWIRE, November 17, 2016
My interview with writer/director Kenneth Lonergan here. Nick Allen interview from the Ebert site, January 31, 2016
'Manchester by the Sea': Sundance Review | Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
'Manchester
by the Sea' Review: Casey Affleck Stars in Kenneth ... Justin Chang from Variety
'Manchester by the Sea' Named Best Film of the Year by National
Board of Review Brent Lang from Variety
Manchester by the
Sea (2016), directed by Kenneth Lonergan | Movie ... Joshua Rothkopf from Time Out New York
Manchester
by the Sea review: Kenneth Lonergan's morose echo of ... Lanre Bakare from The Guardian
In
'Manchester by the Sea,' Casey Affleck comes fully out of his brother's shadow Ty Burr from The Boston Globe
Movie review: 'Manchester by the Sea' is a film of astonishing
honesty, grief Moira Macdonald from The Knoxville News Sentinel
Movie review: Casey Affleck anchors compelling 'Manchester by
the Sea' Mark Meszoros from The News-Herald.com
Movie review: Magnificently sad 'Manchester by the Sea' doesn't
flinch from hard truths Rob Thomas
from The Capitol Times
'Fantastic
Beasts,' 'Manchester by the Sea,' and more new movie ... The LA
Times
'Manchester by the Sea' named best film by National Board of
Review The LA Times
Manchester by the Sea Movie Review (2016) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz
RogerEbert.com: Monica Castillo February 01, 2016
Review:
'Manchester by the Sea' and the Tides of Grief - The New York ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times, November 18, 2016
The New York Times: Manohla Dargis January 29, 2016
Casey Affleck Is Making Another Splash, Reluctantly Cara Buckley from The New York Times
Manchester by the Sea (film) - Wikipedia
Longinotto, Kim
By Jerry
White Kim Longinotto from Cinema
Scope
Speaking to a group of high school students at the 2005 Telluride Film Festival, where her new film Sisters In Law had its North American premiere, Kim Longinotto thought it pertinent to remind her audience that she uses “a big camera.” It was her way of gently contesting the idealism about tiny digital cameras as a means of achieving greater intimacy with your subjects. What matters is how you deal with people, how you work with them to build mutual trust, Longinotto insisted. If people are suspicious of your motives, it won’t matter how small your camera is.
Longinotto’s work encapsulates, then, the debates that emerged during the last technological revolution in documentary, the emergence of cinéma vérité in the ‘60s. Her films are, broadly speaking, part of this lineage: she more or less eschews voice-over and favours wandering long takes that appear to encapsulate complex, unpredictable situations. But she has also moved well beyond these sorts of debates, bringing the vérité documentary well and truly into the late-20th and early-21st century. Even though Longinotto, like D.A. Pennebaker, deals with both pop and politics, she has none of the fascination with power that characterizes so much of his work. Yet she’s also quite free of the piety which marks too much political cinema of the vérité variety, past and present: she’s a hard-headed progressive, but well aware of the contradictions that characterize every aspect of contemporary life.
Longinotto is a restless spirit, although far from flighty. She has made clusters of films in Japan (five films), Iran (two) and Africa (three), spending her career hopping back and forth among these places, never leaving any of them entirely behind (the African films, for instance, date from 1990, 2002 and 2005). While her work is clearly indebted to feminist documentary, there’s something slightly anarchic, slightly nutty about a lot of what fascinates Longinotto, an off-kilter quality which sets her apart from an earlier generation of feminist filmmakers.
This is especially true of the Japanese films, which began in a familiar vein with 1989’s hour-long Eat the Kimono (co-directed with Clare Hunt), a straightforward portrait of the Japanese performance artist Hanayagi Geshu. We are treated to some of Geshu’s performances and hear her thoughts on Japanese politics, culture and history: women are held back by much of Japanese culture, Hirohito was a war criminal who killed more people than Hitler and it’s shameful that his death is still mourned. So far, nothing too strange. Longinotto and Hunt followed with TheGood Wife of Tokyo (1992), which is similarly engaged with young, eccentric female performers, this time Kazuko Hohki’s “band” The Frank Chickens, who dress up in wacky costumes and perform ridiculous, parodic pop music. But the film soon settles on Hohki’s mother, who leads a quiet life comprised mostly of avoiding her husband (a retired engineer who just wants to be left alone to do his calligraphy) and leading a devotional group that, while greatly resembling a religious cult, is probably too goofy to deserve that label: at one point, Hohki’s mother sings the strangely catchy ditty “Spring is the time when cherry blossoms are in bloom / Let’s hand out the leaflets!”
At this point the eccentricity quotient starts to rise. Dream Girls (1993) is about the Takarazuka Revue, a “Pop Opera” company composed entirely of young women (who all leave by the age of 25) trained by their elderly male instructors with militaristic precision (literally: at one point the Japanese military comes in to teach the performers how to bow) and a manic-compulsive imperative for order and cleanliness: new recruits clean their live-in training facilities on all fours with tape on their fingertips. Yet despite the recruits’ suffering, and the blatantly patriarchal structure under which they live, Longinotto and collaborator Jano Williams (who would co-direct Longinotto’s next two Japanese films) nevertheless show the Revue to be a place where young women are given a very real sense of possibility, where they can rise to a kind of centrality in Japanese public life that would otherwise be out of their grasp.
A similar ambiguity lies at the core of Shinjuku Boys (1995), a
portrait of female escorts who live as men. They do not consider themselves
lesbians, nor do their girlfriends: they are, instead, the “ideal men” that
young Japanese women are thought to crave, sensitive souls who can still
express masculinity. On the surface, this might point up some rather unhappy
societal truths about the degree to which gender norms are hard-wired in
Gaea Girls (2000) brings us back to Dream Girls territory,
taking us inside the training facilities of an all-female pro wrestling team.
Apart from the physical toll of body slams, Longinotto and Williams also show
the emotional anguish of the trainees: a young woman is verbally abused for
fighting in an unprofessional way, even though her face and mouth are filled
with blood (an amazing shot: while the trainee’s injury is apparent from her
place at the edge of the frame, the camera’s slight move to capture a full view
of her face is quite startling), while others are constantly slapped around by
their young, bombastic, sadistic and blonde-dyed coach, herself a graduate of
the programme. As with the Takarazuku Revue, the Gaea facility is far from
being a utopic feminine escape from
Longinotto’s Japanese films are bracketed by her two about Iran, made in
collaboration with Ziba Mir-Hosseini: Runaway (2001), which deals with
a group of runaway girls who wind up in a women’s shelter in Tehran, and the
celebrated Divorce, Iranian Style (1999). The latter is rightly the
more famous of the two, as it deals with what seems to be a counter-intuitively
progressive aspect of Iranian life: the Imam-run divorce tribunals, which,
while certainly governed by a difficult-to-navigate bureaucracy, also seem to
offer a chance for genuine negotiation and the possibility of an equitable
outcome for their female appellants. “I’d wanted to make a film in
“The film is about how a society is struggling to impose an old system on a new developing society where women are changing,” continued Longinotto in the Teasley interview, though she might just as well be talking about her newest film Sisters in Law (2005), co-directed with Florence Ayisi. The film centres on the state prosecutor and judge in a small Cameroonian village, female officers who wear full British-style legal garb, are observant Moslems, and emerge as true feminist icons. Most of the cases which come before the court involve child abuse, wife beating, or both, and judge Beatrice Ntuba and state prosecutor Vera Ngassa are, to say the least, tough as nails with these violent offenders: at one point, Ntuba snaps at a woman who has beaten her niece that she’s not to call her “sister” but by her judicial title. This insistence on protocol and the maintenance of distance between court officers and the accused is perfectly consistent with Ntuba and Ngassa’s attempt to build a neutral state apparatus that knows neither prejudice nor favouritism. But as always, Longinotto shows more: at the end of the film, Ntuba visits the woman in her dormitory-style prison, is warm towards her, asks her how her time there has been, and tells her that everyone wants her to do better. It is a strikingly familial moment, a reminder that a democratic state is not meant to be cold, that it is bound to be advocate in some way for all of its citizens, even its worst offenders. The fact that the film shows women who are acting as judges and prosecutors and aggressively pursuing cases against abusive men has rightly been at the centre of discussion, but just as important is the way in which Longinotto and Ayisi present, as in Divorce, Iranian Style, a compelling view of the ways in which strong-willed individuals can contribute to the renewal of democracy in post-revolutionary or post-colonial societies, despite the formidable forces pushing towards autocratic rule by the powerful—and guess which gender they tend to be.
Even as Longinotto’s films become more explicitly political, they are not
thematically inconsistent with her films about female pro-wrestlers, or, for
that matter, with one of her earliest films with Clare Hunt, Hidden Faces
(1990). Ostensibly a portrait of the renowned feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi,
as seen through the eyes of Safaa Faye, a young Egyptian feminist now resident
in
Kim Longinotto’s films are distributed in
enemies of happiness - Women Make Movies May 5, 2009 (pdf)
Kim Longinotto: 'Film-making saved my life' | Life and style | The ... Kira Cochrane from The Guardian, February 12, 2010
'A lot of documentary makers look down on TV' | Media | The Guardian Maggie Brown, November 1, 2015
ROUGH AUNTIES
Great Britain South
Africa (103 mi) 2008 Official site
TimeOut Chicago Hank Sartin
The emotions are
raw and right on the surface in this doc about five women who work at a
child-welfare organization in South Africa. Longinotto puts us on notice in the
very first scene, when a girl who can’t be more than ten uses a stuffed bear to
show how she was raped. The camera never flinches, even when it feels as though
we should look away, because Longinotto wants to make sure we fully understand
the soul-crushing nature of the problem, the better to see how amazing this
community of activist women is.
Chicago Reader
Andrea Gronvall
British filmmaker
Kim Longinotto (Sisters in Law) follows five members of Operation Bobbi
Bear, a group dedicated to protecting sexually abused children in Durban, South
Africa. Given the horrors they’ve witnessed since the organization was founded
in 1992, these working-class women have bonded closer than many families,
despite the fact that two are white and three are black. Zulus disdain talking
about rape, so the resourceful advocates use toy bears to get the pitifully
young victims to describe and work through their pain. Despair gives way to
hope as these outspoken, pragmatic, and fiercely maternal women wage a fight
for justice along gender and age lines in their post-apartheid nation. In
English and subtitled Zulu and Afrikaans. 105 min.
ROUGH AUNTIES Facet’s Multi Media
Fearless, feisty
and resolute, the Rough Aunties are a remarkable group of women unwavering in
their stand to protect and care for the abused, neglected and forgotten
children of Durban, South Africa. This latest documentary by internationally
acclaimed director Kim Longinotto (Sisters in Law, Divorce Iranian
Style) follows the outspoken, multiracial cadre of Thuli, Mildred, Sdudla,
Eureka and Jackie, as they wage a daily battle against systemic apathy,
corruption, and greed to help the most vulnerable and disenfranchised of their
communities. Despite the harsh realities of violence, poverty, and racism in
the women's work at the Bobbi
Bear child welfare organization and in the heartaches of their personal lives,
the portraits that emerge on screen are filled with grace, wisdom, friendship,
and a deeply stirring conviction. Neither politics, nor social or racial
divisions stand a chance against the united force of the women. Once again
Longinotto has managed to bring us an intimate portrait of change from Africa,
this time from post-apartheid South Africa, a nation being transformed with
hope and energy into a new democracy. Directed by Kim Longinotto, South Africa,
2008, 103 mins.
NewCity Chicago Julie Gavlak
Veteran documentary-maker Kim Longinotto’s “Rough Aunties” follows a group of women who work as Child Safety Officers and counselors for raped and abused children in Durban, South Africa. The Organization is called “Bobbi Bear” and despite its cuteness, the name brings fear to anyone who has harmed a child in the community.
They work mostly with Zulu children, raised in a culture where sexuality is taboo, and even speaking of “private parts” is cause for shame. The women use stuffed bears to help to child feel safe and open up about abuse. Instead of asking the child to speak, they are simply handed a Teddy bear, Band-Aids and a magic marker. Band-Aids are placed over the bear’s mouth or eyes to show where they were covered during the assault, ink marked between the legs to show where they where violated.
These women have experienced horrors beyond anything most people can imagine. Toddlers being sodomized; a mentally handicapped girl was raped once by a neighbor, than again a few days later by her own grandfather. And this is just work. During the course of filming, one woman lost her only son to a drowning by her home. Rumors spread of a mining company illegally taking sand from the river, causing sinkholes, a reason for the increase in drowning deaths. Another had an extended family member die from a gunshot wound inflicted during a house robbery in a white suburban neighborhood. Her co-workers wasted no time aiding her in any way possible, including cleaning the pool of blood left behind after the crime. Despite all these events (and more we surely do not know) these women have not lost their capacity to feel joy in small victories. The hope, knowledge and strength they spread among the women in their community reaches past the bounderies of race and class. These Rough Aunties greet every day the best they know how, a swagger in their step, a cigarette in hand. 103m.
Toronto
Screen Shots [James McNally]
The line between work and home is very thin indeed for the women of Operation Bobbi Bear in Durban, South Africa. This multiracial group investigate the most horrific cases of child sexual and physical abuse, providing counseling and making sure the perpetrators are prosecuted, even in the face of bureaucratic indifference. Some of the testimony is extremely hard to listen to, but these women have heard it all, and continue to come to work, even when their own home lives become chaotic.
In fact, a good portion of the film is dedicated to some of the tragedies that befall two of the “rough aunties” and it drives home the fact that these women are just as vulnerable as the families they serve. Many of them have come out of situations where they were raped and beaten, and they bring their own pain to work every day. Though it’s not clear from the film, the organization’s founder Jackie Branfield, though white, did not grow up in the privileged environment that one might suspect. In fact, though the organization is made up of both blacks and whites, it’s a thoroughly blue-collar group, where the women have often had to struggle to raise their children by themselves.
If there is any weaknesss in the film itself, it’s that some of the details are left out. We’re sort of thrown in mid-story and there isn’t a lot of context around where the organization came from and the full scope of the work it does. While that makes the story emotionally involving, it leaves out a lot of information that might make the characters even more interesting. I think it would also have been helpful to place the seemingly common practice of child rape into a cultural context. In AIDS-ravaged South Africa, there is a rampant (if ludicrous) belief that having sex with a virgin (even a child or a baby) will cure the disease. Of course, you can see how this can create a horrific epidemic of sexual abuse; and yet, no mention of this is made in the film.
This lack of context also makes it appear that these women are fighting a losing battle. It would have been interesting to connect their work with some of the other work being done to address the AIDS crisis in South Africa. Also, Operation Bobbi Bear has achieved some remarkable legal victories, including the ability for rape victims to access post-exposure prophylaxis HIV medication that can cut the risk of infection by up to 80%. Some of this good news would have been welcome after seeing some of the things these courageous women face on a daily basis.
Variety (Robert Koehler) review
Chicago Sun-Times
Bill Stamets
YouTube filmmakers' interview (9:23)
YouTube clip 1 Police Raid (4:42)
YouTube clip 2
Jackie and Murder (4:53)
Longley, James
IRAQ
USA
A documentary in three parts, each highlighting a different
Iraqi religious, cultural, and geographical region, reflecting Sunni, Shiite,
and Kurdish perspectives. Following specifically
targeted Iraqi subjects in each section, they speak for themselves using their
own native language to explain their views on what’s happening in
In the opening segment, which shows a bustling Baghdad
before the post 9/11 American invasion, and then Baghdad now, with damaged and
demolished buildings and the relentless sounds of military helicopters flying
overhead, a fatherless 11-year old boy observes “It used to be beautiful...but
the world is so scary now.” He is forced to drop out of school early to find
work, but instead finds an abusive boss who goes on extended tirades about what
a worthless individual he is. Only in
the highly energized middle section does this appear to have anything
resembling unfiltered footage, where the anti-American spewings of Islamic
fundamentalist Moqtada Sadr are featured in Shiite rallies, speeches, prayer
services, even a neighborhood watch raid on a local market that was selling
alcohol. Seen rallying his hysterical
followers to string Americans up on light poles, a man is heard crying out “
Time Out London (Ben Walters) review
Although it was completed less
than two years ago, there’s something of a period quality to this beautifully
photographed documentary snapshot of Iraq in transition – certainly, it’s hard
now to imagine anyone maintaining, as one Kurd does here, that ‘nobody can
escape America’s reach’. But it’s an impressionistic rather than an
argumentative film, divided into three parts with the feel more of a video
diary than journalistic reportage. The first segment, set in Sunni Baghdad,
focuses on 11-year-old apprentice mechanic Mohammed, and achieves a
personalised portrait of a hopeful, troubled kid; the middle part, following a
young preacher in Moqtada Sadr’s militant Shiite movement in the south, is the
most politically, aesthetically and violently charged; the third section,
centring on the friendship of two boys in the Kurdish north, is almost pastoral
in comparison. True to its title, it’s a fractured vision of a fragmented
nation, full of remarkable moments – an alcohol raid on a market prompts
nostalgia for Saddam, US forces become alien through the filters of media and
street protocol – but a frustratingly disconnected viewing experience.
User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California
Longley's visually beautiful and emotionally saddening film in three parts,
shot during two years spent in Iraq between the immediate aftermath of the
invasion in 2003 and 2005, arouses tremendous hopes but ends by quite dashing
them. Longley is great with a camera and patient with children and his
documentary is full of lovely, yellow-filtered images. But the project to describe
post-invasion
Most memorable, because most integrated and most eloquently narrated (by the
wispy, childish voice of the boy himself), is the first segment about
eleven-year-old fatherless Mohammad (his father disappeared after speaking up
about Saddam at some time in the past), who lives and works in the Sheikh Omar
district of Baghdad. The camera is close up on Mohammad's sweet, expressive
young face; or his voice-over declares, "Baghdad used to be beautiful"
over shots of the city before the invasion (Longley made a short visit in 2002)
and then, "the world is so scary now" as we watch big brown
helicopters sputter threateningly overhead.
We never see Mohammad at home, but Longley hung out at the little auto repair
shop where Mohammad was working long enough to fade into the tool racks and,
astonishingly, to film uninterrupted Mohammad's encounters with his sometimes
affectionate but more often abusive boss -- who smacks him and calls him a son
of a whore for playing marbles with other boys; for not knowing how to spell
his father's name; and finally for even spending time at school, which he is
forced to give up to keep the job.
The boss also speechifies a bit about the occupation, which he considers far
inferior to the days of Saddam: we can't help seeing this fat bully as a little
Saddam lingering on in the Sheikh Omar district. Other voices are cut in
throughout the segment with Baghdadis, presumably Sunnis (since that's meant to
be the focus of this section), declaring the same things: the Americans just
came to set up a military base, they're here for the oil (Mohammad says that
too), they have not brought democracy, it's even worse now than under Saddam,
everything they say is a lie.
Desperate for a father, Mohammad murmurs repeatedly that his boss loves him but
in the end admits he has to escape the abuse. The rationalizing over, he leaves
to work at his uncle's larger shop. He may still have his dreams of becoming a
pilot and flying to more beautiful countries. Earlier, we watched him at school
looking bright and eager as the teacher drilled the children on the words
"dar" (house) and "dur" (houses) and how to use them.
Did Mohammad get to go back to school and learn how to write
"Haithem" (his father's name)? We don't know, nor do we see his new
workplace, or hear from relatives. Why did Longley focus so much time and
attention on this boy? There's something heartrending about his little story,
but he can't be seen as the future of the country. Alas, he has little future.
This picture of
Parts two and three focus on Moqtada Sadr, Najf, and the movement to empower
the Shiite majority and bring religious rule to the country; and on a
sheep-herding and brick-making family in
Things became so dangerous that by September 2004, Longley decided to go north
-- Koretan, south of
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review
As many critics have pointed out, Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers is both a World War II epic and a pressing, critical commentary on today's events. Soon, I hope, I will have something to add to the discussion of this picture. For now, though, I feel it's more urgent that I tell you about James Longley's Iraq in Fragments, a nonfiction film that addresses contemporary reality without metaphor and yet is every bit as artful as Eastwood's movie.
It is practically handmade: produced, researched and shot in
Part one, set in a poor Sunni quarter of
Part two looks at the Shiite south through the eyes of Sheik Aws al-Kafaji, a cleric in Muqtada al-Sadr's movement. But in this section, Iraq in Fragments also goes beyond the individual viewpoint and becomes a film of masses: flagellants in a procession, protesters at a rally, vigilantes carrying out a punitive raid against liquor sellers. The sporadic, personalized violence of part one gives way to something seething, generalized, apocalyptic.
Part three moves north into a Kurdish farming area, where you
again listen to a young boy. Unlike his counterpart in the first section, he
can dream of attending medical school; and his elders speak of independence. At
last you hear a note of hope--and yet the smoke billowing from nearby brick
kilns reminds you of smoke you saw earlier, rising from the explosions in
No truth about the war can be found in Iraq in Fragments. Longley discovers only truths--in individuals, in masses of people, in landscapes--that fit together provisionally, if at all. That is the heartbreaking lesson of Iraq in Fragments, and its indispensable art.
House Next Door [Steven Boone]
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Film Freak Central Review [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
The Village Voice [Nathan Lee]
Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]
indieWire (Michael Joshua Rowin)
Between Productions [Robert Cashill]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [4/5]
stylusmagazine.com (Jay Millikan) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Reel.com review [4/4] Tim Knight
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Time Out New York (Mark Holcomb) review [5/6]
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle [Marrit Ingman]
Seattle Post Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review [1/4]
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Lopes-Curval, Julie
SEASIDE
aka: PEBBLES
France
Finally, a film that “feels” like a festival film, which beautifully
examines the seasonal changes in a small resort town, following the daily
rituals of the inhabitants, their relationships with one another, never really
offering explanations, but as the seasons change, something is somehow
different. There is a strong performance
by Helene Fillieres, a worker at the stone processing plant, picking out pebbles
from a conveyor belt all day long, who remains indifferent to almost everything
this town has to offer, but she is the heart and soul of this film, as she
yearns for more. This is a film that
isn’t really about anything, nothing is ever explained, yet it’s filled with a
carefully constructed storyline, some truly inventive images by Stephan Massis,
some striking uses of color, particularly the color blue, with brief portraits
in time, eccentricities, and plenty of mood and atmosphere, enhanced by the
original music by Naked. All in all,
everything blends together beautifully in this film.
YOU AND ME (Toi et
Moi) C- 68
Based on admiration
for her earlier work, SEASIDE (2002), a gorgeous, near wordless examination of
the changing seasons in a small seaside town, featuring a dominant lead
performance of a disenchanted factory worker who wants more than what life has
to offer her there, this was a major disappointment, featuring a pastel, candy
colored universe of tepid romance stories that appear in the form of a repeating
series of photo spreads that appear in a popular tabloid-style magazine Toi et Moi, revealing such an adolescent
slant to this story. Once again, another
of the Depardieu children is the ruination of another motion picture, as Julie
Depardieu is dreadful as the ditzy blond who writes these cheesy romance love
stories that are a dime a dozen in terms of interchangeable content, relying on
day dreams and fantasies that reflect silly love connections. Her sister, the dark eyed beauty Marion
Cotillard, is more reflective and plays cello in the classical orchestra, but
is just as unhappy in the ways of love as her sister, as for some reason, her
professional technical prowess requires a certain manner of holding it all
inside, living a contained life instead of a full life, always accepting less
than what she needs in the form of a stable boyfriend (Eric Berger) who is kind
and considerate, but uninspiring. When a
stunning solo violinist rolls into town, Jonathan
Zaccaï, who is a whirlwind of emotions, the man literally sweeps her off her
feet, but she remains coy and aloof, never revealing her true feelings. Depardieu, on the other hand, has a dashing
leading man type (Tomer Sisley) who refuses to commit, as he may be a womanizer
on the side, who’ll only see her when he wants, promising her the world, but
always retreats back to the privacy of his own world. A Spanish construction worker (Sergio Peris
Menchetta) takes notice of her immediately, but she dismisses him without a
thought due to what she considers class difference, which is little more than
prejudice. So both have troubled
relationships tempted by fate, yearning for something more.
The problem here is
the film format, an attempt at an Almodóvar style comic farce without any layer
of social consciousness, repeatedly showing a simplistic, comic book picture
postcard version of love through various fantasies and possibilities, which has
a generic feel after awhile, losing any thought of freshness from overuse,
becoming more annoying than interesting.
Also, the clownish Depardieu character is so cartoonish in real life that her dull
thespian unattractiveness is equally annoying.
Add to this uninteresting characters filling the screen, where only
Cotillard holds any interest whatsoever, as she is internally perplexed by
what’s eating her inside, by what’s drawing her outside her protected skin for
the first time in her life, but as the soloist flies off to other international
concerts year round, he is hardly a stable life force. But he has an impact, more than she is
willing to admit, which is the only beautiful thing in this film, the
development of her character. Other than
that, the film is nothing more than second rate characters in a second or third
rate story, completely contrived by the end, with little or no redeeming
cinematic appeal. Welcome to
Festival of New French Cinema Charles Coleman from Facets
The
second film from 2002 Camera d'Or-winner Julie Lopes Curval (
"An effective romantic comedy, where Marion Cotillard
shines."
-Télérama
User reviews from imdb Author: rcashdan from Guanajuato, Mexico
The movie is based on an usual triangle or maybe an unusual polygon if the
male characters are included in the count. It is a straightforward telling of
what happens in the life of two sisters in their late twenties more or less
except... and the except is that along with real life, we see the fantasied
versions of events as the older sister, a romance writer, imagines them. The
use of a stage set background for the fantasies sets them apart from the real
events in the sisters' lives.
Although technically, the movie is very straightforward, the use of music --
the younger sister is a cellist -- heightens almost every scene. A male violin
soloist becomes part of the younger sister's real and imagined life (her
fantasies are not made visible) and in fact knowing him changes her life in a
way she doesn't expect. I keep thinking about the paradoxical but plausible
view of her situation. Maybe the older sister's destiny is less plausible but,
hey, the movie is billed as a comedy.
User reviews from imdb Author: bondgirl917 from United States
What a wonderful little movie! I would definitely consider this a chick
flick, but it transcends in its writing and humor. I saw this movie last night
and still can't get it out of my head. At times the dialogue was so truthful
and heartfelt that I cried. The movie juxtaposes real-life relationships with
those of fiction and shows us how and why we sometimes get confused. I found
one of the main characters,
Exclaim! Travis Mackenzie Hoover
This handsome but
fluffy effort proves that the French can make romantic comedies just like
Spirituality & Health (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat)
Ariane (Julie Depardieu) writes photo-novels for a magazine, using material from her own romantic adventures as well as those of people around her. She is dating Farid (Tomer Sisley), a self-obsessed businessman, who clearly is not willing to take their relationship to a deeper level, which is her fond desire. Meanwhile, Pablo (Sergio Peris Mencheta), a Spanish mason doing renovations in her building, cannot take his eyes off her. He wants to pursue a romance with her but she is oblivious to his overtures.
This French film written and directed by Julie Lopes Curval (Seaside) intermittently
uses spreads from illustrated magazines to poke fun at the clichés of romantic
love. Although both the spacey Ariane and the shy
An author of cheesy photo-novels (i.e.
magazines that tell modern fairy tales through photos embellished with
dialogue) and her demure musician sister both search for Mr. Right in Julie
Lopes-Curval's Toi et Moi, a brisk but one-note comedy that finds little
to say about love except that it's never as easy as it appears in melodramatic
fiction. Ariane (Julie Depardieu) uses her own life as inspiration for the
florid stories she concocts for the titular newsstand publication. Wishful
projections of her happily-ever-after dreams, Ariane's writing centers around
women finding paradise in the arms of a kind, wealthy stranger, though her
reality with commitment-phobic boyfriend Farid (Tomer Sisley) and Spanish
construction worker suitor Pablo (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) is a far cry from such
fantasies. Meanwhile, her sibling Lena (Marion Cotillard), a professional
cellist who plays with technical proficiency but little passion, is stuck in a
similar amorous rut, living with monotonous boyfriend François (Eric Berger)
while secretly pining for fiery violin soloist Mark (Jonathan Zaccaï).
Decorating her film with vibrant photo-novel tableaus that ironically comment
upon her depressed protagonists' less-than-ideal relationships, Lopes-Curval
never fully marries her romantic and comedic impulses, awkwardly flip-flopping
between somber lovers' quarrels and campy farce in a vain attempt to strike a
simultaneously adorable-yet-poignant tone. Too reserved to be funny and too
trivial to be moving, Toi et Moi plods along with stolid competence,
dutifully dotting its heart-shaped I's and crossing its too-cute T's while
failing to bestow on its shenanigans the full-bodied heat or self-reflexive
playfulness of Pedro Almodovar's thematically analogous The Flower of My
Secret. Depardieu and Cotillard's agile yin-yang performances are
significantly more modulated than their characters' up-and-down narrative arcs,
often providing a measure of sweet sincerity that's otherwise lacking from
Lopes-Curval's uneven screenplay. Yet from its counterfeit bittersweet finale
to its forcing Ariane to accidentally walk into a glass door (a gag that's by
now surely run its course), Toi et Moi's life-imitates-art-imitates-life
story only resembles every other middling Parisian rom-com.
You
& Me, the cheerfully self-assured second feature from French
director Julie Lopes-Curval,
is the story of two sisters, both of them looking for love. Ariane (Julie Depardieu - yes, she’s
Gerard’s kid), the oldest, is a hopeless romantic willfully entangled with a
man whose lack of long-term interest in her couldn’t be more clear. Her sister
Lena (well-played by the soulful Marion
Cotillard) is a respected cellist who lives with her bland, good-hearted
boyfriend, and approaches life with a deep seriousness. Ariane uses their
collective romantic struggles as inspiration for the candy-colored, comically
romantic photo-novellas she writes and, as Lopes-Curval’s film progresses,
Ariane’s work and real life overlap with increasing regularity.
On tour with her orchestra when the movie opens, Lena immediately seems
unhappy, and disconnected from her own life. She does her job and returns to
her hotel room to sleep, perhaps practice, and wait until the next day’s
performance. She is jarred out of her routine, however, by the presence of Mark
(played with Colin Firth-esque, scruffy charm by Jonathan Zaccaï), a cocky
soloist whose confidence and attention Lena find irresistible. When he takes
her to see a risque photography exhibit and talks about sexual positions during
what is virtually their first meaningful interaction, she is inexplicable
charmed, and they share an impulsive kiss when she drops him at the airport.
Needless to say - it is, after all, that sort of movie - Mark’s mere existence
shakes up Lena’s life. An idle compliment causes her to become completely
devoted to her music, and she begins to question her relationship with her
boring but sincere boyfriend who, conveniently, is being driven away by her
silence. When Mark sweeps into town and they have a brief affair (brief because
he leaves for a long-term job in Tokyo shortly after his arrival), things only
get worse. Eventually, Lena finds herself alone, jobless, and sleeping on her
mother’s couch.
Her sister, meanwhile, pursues her relationship with the rakishly handsome
Farid (Tomer Sisley) with the
same approach she brings to her work: In the photonovellas, every man is
wealthy and devoted to the woman who loves him, just as, in her mind, Farid is
to her. While he takes an obvious and undeniable joy in his moments with
Ariane, Farid is so elusive the existence of a wife wouldn’t be a surprise, and
he is clearly not interested in settling down. Nevertheless, Ariane is so
addicted to the idea of romance and the perfect man that she is unable to pry
herself away. Because of her hopeless obsession with Farid, she first ignores
and then rebuffs the advances of the smitten mason (Pablo, played by Sergio Peris-Mencheta) who is
working on her building, and represents the chance at the true romance to which
everyone in her photonovellas aspires. When, at long last he finally appears in
her work, it’s not hard to guess that real life will eventually follow suit.
Much of the lightness of You & Me stems from the periodic intrusions
of Ariane’s work, which comes to life on screen in fanciful, candy-color
vignettes. Her “characters” are represented by their real-life inspirations, so
Farid becomes a dapper airline pilot, and Mark a mysterious doctor. Ariane and
Lena appear as well, of course, always on the receiving end of heartsick
proclamations of devotion. The problem, however, is that these same magical
sequences are also the source of the film’s biggest problem, a problem so big
it ultimately overpowers the film.
Because the fantasy sequences effectively mock (in a gentle way - everything
about Lopes-Curval’s film is gentle) the idea of perfect romance and the
outdated assumption that women are only truly whole in the arms of men, they
also point out the absurdity of the film around them, and make it hard to
swallow the insecurities and neediness of its characters. For example, in
another romantic comedy, a woman calling herself “a grotty old hag” because
she’s single and unmarried might be funny, if only because the genre makes it
clear that she will, in the end find happiness. When this sort of attitude is
displayed in a film that is simultaneously calling it absurd, however, it is
off-putting at best, and pathetic at worst. No matter which attitude one
perfects - the romance or the cynicism - half of the film is constantly
discrediting the other half.
As a result of this uncomfortable duality, it’s awfully hard to be happy for
Ariane when, at the film’s end, she finds the happiness that has been staring
her - and us - in the face. Instead, we’re repulsed by her inability to stand
on her own, and let down by the film’s unwillingness to see its initial
cynicism through. If You & Me didn’t have the photonovella
sequences, it would be a light, pleasant romantic comedy. Those sequences,
however, lead the audience to expect more, and when the movie ultimately
decides that what it wants to be is precisely want it’s been mocking, the whole
thing falls to pieces in a way that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
You & Me is shown with a collage-based 10-minute American short called Phantom
Canyon. Direct by independent animator Stacey Steers, the film explores
memories of a relationship through the use of surreal images, including lots of
bugs, water, and sounds of surprise. It's the sort of thing that's fascinating
and a little creepy to watch, and that most of us leave feeling quite sure we
didn't really understand.
HIDDEN
DIARY (Mères et Filles) B 89
aka: La Cuisine
The French relish the idea of rubbing elbows with the affluent, as if in
movies they can live vicariously through the lives of rich people, who are
rarely ever seen doing any work. This
family is so wealthy that they have not one, but two homes set on an idyllic
seaside location, and one of them sits empty.
Returning to what resembles the seaside locale of her first movie
SEASIDE (2002), Lopes-Curval has carved out a little feminist niche in this
finely crafted film that features the brilliance of Catherine Deneuve (in her
106th screen appearance) and as if chiseled into 1950’s fashion
perfection, Marie-Josée Crozes in a peculiarly effective ghost appearance. Marina Hands as Audrey returns home from
Toronto to visit her parents in her small hometown in France, a cold,
ultra-repressed Deneuve and the usually charming Michel Duchaussoy, but
immediately old wounds between mother and daughter are established, so claiming
she needs more space and privacy to work on her latest job assignment, she
moves into the empty house next door that used to belong to her
grandparents. Don’t we all wish we had
such options? A little peeved by this
decision, her own parents are less than happy about this transition. Marina Hands carries the film, speaking in
both French and English, but she’s an odd choice, as she appears to be over six
feet tall and always feels a bit awkward and overwhelmed. While cleaning up to make space in the
kitchen, she discovers an old diary written by Deneuve’s mother Louise, who
unexpectedly abandoned her husband and two children and disappeared without a
trace many years ago, an act that still embarrasses the family and causes
internal friction of the worst kind.
Audrey develops an interest and special relationship with Louise
(Marie-Josée Crozes), who appears both in flashbacks and occasionally as a
present day ghost who appears for Audrey, as she was a woman ahead of her time,
ambitious and independent, not to mention multi-talented, but in those days, a
woman required her husband’s permission to act alone. Thwarted at every turn by her own husband,
Louise felt stifled by the marriage, which offers unique insight into her
family history which differs greatly from her family’s version, as according to
Audrey’s own mother, “She was a heartless woman.” It turns out Audrey is pregnant, unmarried,
and unsure about her future, as she doesn’t want to lose her career, doesn’t
really want to get married, and feels like she lacks the skills to be a good
mother. But in this diary, rather than
discover a disinterested or self-absorbed woman who would leave her children,
we find a thoughtful, well-caring, extremely conscientious mother instead. When Audrey calls overseas to inform the
father that she is pregnant, he doesn’t exactly embrace the news, but he turns
out to be more open about it than Audrey who is so stifled by her own worsening
relationship with her mother that she hasn’t even told her the reason for her
visit. All Audrey can discover is a
single photograph of her grandmother and two children standing with the sea in
the background, as everything else was destroyed by her grandfather, a
conservative man with rigid principles, whose actions are defended vociferously
by Deneuve, while younger brother Gérard (Jean-Philippe Écoffey) was too little
to remember much about him. Eléonore
Hirt as the fussy next door neighbor offers her own insight into Louise, as
Lopes-Curval does an excellent job interweaving the present with the past,
bringing out the effusive struggles in each era, but she constantly revisits the
past as a means to re-evaluate the present, continuously shifting an inner
dialogue between the three generations to challenge our perception of
truth. Deneuve in particular gets a
little room to breathe in this film, where the complexity of her life slowly
reveals itself, but to see her, something of a fashion icon, wearing a dress, a
gift from her daughter, with a vertically squeezed Eiffel Tower running
narrowly from top to bottom, hilariously reveals how receiving horrible gifts
has universally become part of every family’s history.
Variety (Ronnie Scheib) review
Women of three
generations, embodied by Marina Hands, Catherine Deneuve and Marie-Josee Croze,
struggle to understand each other in "Hidden Diary," yet another
Gallic family-with-a-deep-dark-secret movie. But helmer Julie Lopes-Curval
proves surprisingly subtle in orchestrating the familial Sturm und Drang in a
story that recalls "Julie and Julia," as a
rediscovered recipe binds women across time. Dynamite cast, assured direction
and an intriguingly far-fetched premise could spell respectable Francophone
B.O. Arthouse
distribution elsewhere is a longshot.
Pic combines the
setting of Lopes-Curval’s Camera d’Or-winning first film, "Seaside," with the
womanly concerns of the sisters in "You and Me,"
her second.
Audrey (Hands),
who has channeled her childhood obsession with toy ovens into a prestigious,
high-pressure job designing state-of-the-art kitchen appliances, is pregnant.
She heads home to France from Canada, and the lukewarm embrace of physician
mother Martine (Deneuve in matriarchal ice-queen mode). But after a particularly
vitriolic exchange, shocking in its sudden intensity, Audrey relocates to the
nearby ancestral digs vacated by her recently deceased fashion designer
grandfather.
There, she
stumbles upon the diary of her grandmother Louise (Marie-Josee Croze in
flashbacks), who left her husband and young children years before and was never
heard from again. This desertion seems to be at the root of Martine’s maternal
failings with Audrey.
As Audrey reads
from her grandmother’s diary, scenes from Louise’s repressed 1950s housewife
existence start to unfold before the younger woman’s eyes. Through Philippe Guilbert’s lens, this
time-shifting scene feels organic rather than gimmicky.
But rather than
sending the film spinning off into realms of Gallic whimsy or ghost-inhabited
madness, Louise’s apparition serves to anchor the three women in a concrete,
ocean-bordered locale. Croze looks so eerily natural in her 1950s setting that
it frees her characterization from the curse of feminist revisionism, and
Hands, as the reluctantly pregnant Audrey, projects a complex mixture of
strength and vulnerability that makes her time-spanning empathy palpable.
Lopes-Curval
wisely avoids any climactic feel-good hugs. Pic was originally titled "The
Kitchen."
López-Linares, José Luis and Javier Rioyo
STORM THE SKIES (Asalter los cielos)
Betrayals, confusions, ironies and disillusion aplenty run
through this compelling look at lives by turns shaping or adrift within the
political, cultural and social upheaval that was the '20th century'. The story
starts in Republican Spain, with the extraordinary progress of Caridad
Mercader, one time bourgeois housewife and then bohemian radical and KGB
organiser. It was her son Ramon who plunged the ice pick into Trotsky's skull
in
Movie Round-Up Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
A much better use of my and your time is the excellent
documentary Storm the Skies,
directed by Jose Luis Lopez-Linares and Javier Rioyo, on the subject of Leon
Trotsky's exile in Mexico and his eventual murder by Ramon Mercader, a
Catalonian who imbibed Stalinism with his mother's milk (quite literally; the
mother, Caridad Mercader, was a piece of work). Absolutely everything about
this content is completely fascinating, and the material is put across
exceptionally well; my only complaint is that the directors really needed to
run tags at the bottom of the screen for all the interviewees -- they're great,
but who are they? Sometimes you can figure out from context, sometimes you
can't. Names and descriptors would have helped. Still, that's a minor blemish
on a terrific film. The movie is readily available through Netflix.
I have a particular affection for the culturally and geographically vast world
of the Iberian-speaking peoples (Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Latin American,
User
comments from imdb Author: chendo
from Monterrey, Mexico
The film walks along the life of a dark (until this film)
character involved in some of the main historical movements of the XX century.
In the voice of the people who met him, we know the Spaniard communist who
murdered the exiled Soviet leader León Trotski. Mercader (his real last name)
was the son of a woman who was one of the main communist leaders in the Spanish
Civil War; grows as an immigrant child in the recent born URSS, becomes a
Communist warrior and plays as a peon in the confrontation of the ideological
(and real) wars of the world until his lonely death in Cuba. The film goes from
Loren, Sophia – actress
CRITICS
CHOICE; New DVDs: Deneuve and Loren Still Haunt the Screen Dave Kehr from The New York Times,
Losey, Joseph
Losey’s lofty artistic program was foiled by McCarthy and his anticommunist witch-hunters, who forced a bad hand and drove Losey into hiding in England, where he continued to churn out his cinematic epics undisturbed. After making films under a pseudonym for several years and releasing them in Britain and Italy, Losey finally felt confident enough to direct "Time Without Pity" (1956) under his own name. For his next projects, he brought Harold Pinter on board as scriptwriter. They produced a series of literate films about upper-class torments -- "The Servant" (1963), "Accident" (1967), and "The Go-Between" (1970). The collaborators’ preoccupation with the use and abuse of power in the calcified class system plays itself out in their minute examinations of aristocratic manners and mores.
Losey, like Pinter, scrutinizes the thin hierarchical line that separates emotional chaos from fine breeding, detailing the madness that percolates beneath the highly civilized façade. Losey’s relentless audit of the tightly buttoned-down English establishment revolves around subterranean power plays forced to the surface in highly volatile, intimate relationships. Experimental storytelling, psychologically complex characters, and intricate structural handling of time are all facets of Losey’s unique style, and earned him his seat in the pantheon of cinematic legends. To the eternal shame of McCarthy, Losey's stature as a director of lucid, compelling films of both moral relevance and dazzling formal complexity is assured.
Overview
for Joseph Losey - TCM.com biography
Joseph Losey, born to a family whose American roots predated the American Revolution, has been called the "most European of American directors." His influences include Bertolt Brecht and Harold Pinter as well as Italian neo-realism and German expressionism. In 1935, he even studied under Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow, where he also met Brecht. It was his blacklisting in 1951, however, that forced Losey to make Europe his home.
In 1930, after receiving his M.A. from Harvard, Losey moved to New York City to work in the theater; he directed his first play, "Little Ol' Boy", three years later. Directing for both political theater groups and the WPA's "Living Newspaper" productions, Losey combined an anti-realist aesthetic with radical political views. In 1947 he directed the world premiere of Brecht's "Galileo Galilei", a play he would film in 1975.
Losey began to work in film in 1938, making educational documentaries for the Rockefeller Foundation. He directed his first feature, "The Boy With Green Hair", ten years later, and by 1951 had directed five films, the last being a remake of Fritz Lang's "M". Although none of these films expressed Losey's radical views, recurrent themes such as manhunts and mass hysteria provided a timely commentary on the political paranoia of the day. Losey himself was blacklisted in 1951 when he refused to testify before the HUAC. Unable to work in Hollywood, he moved to England, where he worked under pseudonyms for several years.
In England, Losey's focus shifted from the public themes of his Hollywood films to private relationships within the rigid British class system. He brought a stern moral scrutiny to bear on the status quo, often using the figure of the disruptive intruder as a catalyst. Striving for an intellectual rather than an emotional engagement with his audience, he tended to contain the action of his films within tightly defined settings, and to pay minute attention to symbolic details of the mise-en-scene. All of these factors combined to give his work an allegorical quality which, together with Losey's didacticism and pessimistic world view, alienated popular audiences.
Losey's most successful films were his collaborations with playwright Harold Pinter: "The Servant" (1963), "Accident" (1967) and "The Go-Between" (1971). Losey and Pinter also attempted to film Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past", but while Pinter's screenplay was published, their film never got made. Like Orson Welles, Losey is almost as well known for his numerous uncompleted or aborted projects as for his finished ones. (He was, in fact, set to direct "High Noon" shortly before he was blacklisted.)
In 1976 Losey relocated to France--where he is considered one of the great auteurs of cinema--and directed three films in French. His last feature, "Steaming", released posthumously in 1985, was his first English-language film in almost a decade. In the early 1980s, Losey almost fulfilled his dream of making another film in the United States, but both of his planned projects fell through, one within days of shooting.
Losey resented his alienation from his country, but also acknowledged its positive aspects. Rather than end up a jaded Hollywood director, he was forced to be an outsider--a position that was to inspire, as well as frustrate, his work.
Double
Play: Joseph Losey - Film Comment Losey overview by Richard Combs (March/April 2004)
"To each his own Losey"
is how the critic Tom Milne began his 1967 interview book with Joseph Losey.
His tally of Loseys at that point was three: the
Crucially, the disruptions, the chopping and changing, don't just make up the
pattern of his career but are at work in individual films-certainly in the best
of them. Losey was never really a comfortable filmmaker in any of his national
habitats, and, in his films, along with a focus on clashes of ego and energy
goes an uneasy compacting of different styles and influences. In fact, the
different Losey "periods" are best followed not in sequence but in a
kind of crisscross through his work virtually from the word go - the word go
being The Boy with Green Hair (48), an apparently naive morality tale
with its own weird divergences of mood and style.
If the five Losey periods don't work as periods, then we can reconfigure them
on a different principle - as arenas, perhaps, for defining encounters of the
artist with his material, of characters with themselves and/or their
significant others. As the cop (Stanley Baker) says in Blind Date (58)
after the artist (Hardy Krüger) recounts how he met his lover, "That's not
a meeting you described. That's a collision."
1. The Assassination of Trotsky
With Losey it's not necessary to begin at the beginning, or even with the most
completely achieved films. The Assassination of Trotsky (72) comes from
the international period, when the consensus was that Losey had lost his way,
and it received some of the harshest reviews of his career. One scene attracted
particular opprobrium: the visit by the mysterious assassin-to-be (Alain Delon)
to a bullfight prior to his encounter with his victim (Richard Burton).
However, the film is not, as was assumed, offering the bullfight as a metaphor
for that encounter. The metaphor belongs to the assassin; he is trying to
internalize it to explain his action and as a stimulus to performing it. After
he and his girlfriend have fled the arena, the film remains to reveal the real
outcome of that show: the dragging away of the dead bull and its dismemberment
as meat. The bullfight has a double existence: as an assassin's metaphor and as
a separate violent event in a world of violent events that will include the
killing of Trotsky. This self-actualizing of a protagonist may seem a fairly
ordinary dramatic device, but in Losey it has a special play, leading,
variously, to autonomy, inaccessibility, isolation, to individual - even
Nietzschean - ambition that will touch off, paradoxically, an acute sense of
social networks, of systems within systems, plots behind plots, schemers behind
schemers. So many Losey films depend on the presence of these arch-schemers,
and a mystery - or fuzziness - about their designs. Does The Servant
conspire to take over his master? If so, when? If not, does it just happen out
of the dynamic between them? When does the upper-class lover of the poor artist
in Blind Date decide to implicate him in murder?
A striking example of the type appears in one of Losey's earliest films, The
Prowler (51), in which resentful cop Van Heflin bases his
self-actualization not on metaphor but on the complaint that the world depends
on "pull," on getting the right breaks, and manipulates his well-off
lover (Evelyn Keyes) into marriage after murdering her husband. Tracked to a
ghost town hideout, he is shot down by police as he scrabbles up a hill of rock
and shale - the most prosaic and concrete of climaxes and yet a metaphor for
that unscalable vertical world he had envisaged.
2. The Boy with Green Hair
Losey's actual beginning, of course, looks like nothing else in his career: a
parable, a children's story, a moral fable, a quasi-mystical message film,
which he found constricting to shoot (on the RKO backlot) and that was twisted
in the making when studio boss Howard Hughes tried to cross its pacifist
message with lines declaring the need for readiness for war with the Russians.
But even in its conception, The Boy with Green Hair isn't clear-cut,
with at least two messages intersecting each other: the plight of the boy (Dean
Stockwell), a war orphan whose hair turns green as a symbol of hope for life
renewed in the midst of war, and the social prejudice this (then) unusual
pigmentation excites. According to Losey, "It was not an antiwar picture
as a concept, as a device - it was anti-racist."
Actually, and fortunately, the film's resonances don't stop with these two
messages but extend into a realm of their own, which might be called
quasi-mystical, or romantic, or magical-religious-existential. The film's
opening image is one of the most stunning in all Losey's work: in a police
station at night, three cops are grouped in the center (a distinctly Edward
Hopper-ish image), firing questions - "All we want to know is your
name," "If you'll just tell us what town you're from" - at
someone we can't see. They then part to reveal the boy, his head now completely
shaved. A child psychologist (Robert Ryan) is introduced to him - "This is
Mr. Nobody, who lives no place" - and asks the boy to "begin at the
beginning" of his troubles. "Okay then," says the boy defiantly,
and echoing David Copperfield, "I was born."
Some of his dialogue turns up word for word (including the open sesame of
"Let's begin at the beginning") 14 years later, on the rocky coast of
"Who killed our children's hopes?" cries the gangland lawyer (Luther
Adler) forced to defend a child murderer in M (51). The fourth of
Losey's five
3. Eve
Eve (62) was Losey's watershed, or Waterloo, the film where he tried to
break with his past as a jobbing director in the U.S. and U.K. film industries
and produce both a personal testament ("It was a film in which I was not
only working out my sexual, personal relationships, but also working out my
exile") and his most elaborate exercise in style. The relationship between
callous, high-class prostitute Eve (Jeanne Moreau) and insecure Welsh writer
Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker) is wedded to the decor and architecture of
In the end, Losey's testament was severely cut in a highly publicized row with
the producers. But the very purity of statement and style that he was trying
for may have been the real misdirection. Impurity was the circumstance in which
Losey's art had flourished in the past: the hybrid genres, the melodramatic
plots, the pulp sources (Eve shares that much, being based on a James
Hadley Chase potboiler). Losey's camera drifting after his heroine through the
frozen stone landscape of the Piazza San Marco was seen as a bid to join the
modernist cinema of Antonioni (detached, ambiguous, alienated). But equally
dense, tactile, and disturbing (and perhaps even more alienating) is the
emphasis on decor, on stone, rock, and, of course, a myriad of mirrors, that
had already featured in films as diverse as The Prowler, The Criminal
(60), and The Damned.
Losey has said (in his interview book with Michel Ciment) that Eve also
sprang from his love of
There are the two proletarians of Blind Date, one who has become a
hardboiled cop and the other who's a naive artist (a miner's son, no less; an
unneurotic Tyvian Jones). And there's a strikingly double dramatic structure in
this film: the first part is anchored in the flat of the dead prostitute/lover,
with the cop probing the artist with questions about a crime that hasn't been
revealed yet in a style that can only be called Pinter-before-the-fact. Losey's
career in the theater is another important arena, both a specific period and a
background to everything he did in film. It also makes nonsense of the
assumption that the first collaboration with Pinter, on The Servant, was
a revolution for Losey, taming his excesses and indulgences, and that their
three films together consititute a special, elevated plateau in his work. In
fact, The Servant is so rich because it incorporates the Pinter idiom
with many of the tensions of pre-Sixties Losey, while Accident and The
Go-Between are more attenuated exercises in the idiom.
Part of the richness of The Servant is the indeterminability of its
subject (even Losey couldn't say what, exactly, it was about). Is the master-servant
reversal an incident in the class war, or something more spiritual, mystical,
ghostly? Durgnat says: "Thinking he has bought Barrett's soul, Tony loses
his own," and that in his overweening desire to please, "Barrett
gives his master his soul-and exchange is no robbery." The master (James
Fox) is Mr. Nobody, The Servant (Dirk Bogarde) is Mr. Know-It-All - a
relation of householder to intruder that The Assassination of Trotsky
reverses. In Accident, one might note the unexpected magic of the night
of the Accident: a white horse (not a unicorn) beneath a full moon and
the princess (Jacqueline Sassard) asleep amidst a froth of ostrich feathers in
the death car.
4. Figures in a Landscape
Far from the stones and gargoyles of Old Europe, the most visually ravishing
moment that Losey, the celebrated metteur en décor, ever put onscreen may be
the opalescent dawn of the first shot of Figures in a Landscape. The
distant speck of a helicopter hovers at the point where this wash deepens into
the blue of the sea; in the next shot, two silhouetted men are running, their
hands tied behind their backs, along the seashore. For a while, without
dialogue or explanation, the camera magnificently maps out this corrida. Close
tracking shots follow the men as they crash through a forest; seen from inside,
the helicopter sweeps down valleys and up cliff faces, scattering birds and
flushing out a herd of horses (the wildlife one would never associate with
Losey but that has a kind of underbrush presence throughout his films).
Michel Ciment suggested to Losey that many of his films are fables in the
American tradition, "Manichaean, Puritan-inspired · creating allegories
like Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter." Losey agreed but
found this "a weakness because it's a way of evading," compared to
realist psychological traditions. His three films between the Pinter bookends
of Accident and The Go-Between-Boom, Secret Ceremony
(68), and Figures in a Landscape - offer themselves most clearly as
fables. With its cycle of careless parenting/cursed childhood, Secret
Ceremony could belong with the "blighted hopes" dramas of M
and The Damned. Dealing the least in explanation, Figures is the
most fabulous.
And, again, perhaps, it is only Losey's theater background that makes all three
possible, because where language enters it must be hyperbolic, specifying
character while at the same time ridiculing it, rendering the notion of
self-sufficient, psychologically "real" characters absurd. Figures
is the riskiest proposition, with a Pinteresque screenplay by one of its stars,
Robert Shaw (also a dramatist and novelist). It plays out the conflict between
the older fugitive (Shaw) and the younger (Malcolm McDowell) in all the Pinter
registers of class, generational, and sexual paranoia, but completely detached
from his social landscape. It is Losey's most experimental film, and it
excitingly adumbrates an even more experimental one, made entirely in the style
of its opening sequences.
5. Mr. Klein
Mr. Klein (Alain Delon), the hero of Losey's greatest (and last great)
film after The Servant, is also a kind of repository of his career.
Klein is an art dealer; he brings together all those signs of status, icons of
identity, even clues to policier mysteries that have proliferated through the
preceding three decades. In Losey's first British film, The Sleeping Tiger
(54), a police inspector peers at a Miró on the wall of a psychiatrist's office
as if it were an ink-blot test of personality. Jan, the young artist of Blind
Date, identifies a small picture ("It's 17th century, a study for a
larger portrait, probably Van Dyck") that's plucked from the less
high-toned bric-a-brac of a murder scene and will point to the identity (or at
least the social milieu) of the real murderer.
A similar trail, or research with more psychic reverberations, is followed
through Mr. Klein. Klein is first seen haggling over "a portrait of
a Dutch gentleman" by Adriaen Van Ostade. It is 1942, and his client is a
Jew, desperate to leave
It's all significantly Catholic, perhaps a sublimation-within-repudiation of
Losey's Episcopalian upbringing. But Lenora (Elizabeth Taylor) in the
confessional box of Secret Ceremony also complains: "For three
years, I've been wandering from place to place like a Jew," which is
where, through the other Mr. Klein, she might meet the exiled Losey.
"Politically, I was persecuted, a Jew, so to speak," he told Michael
Ciment. Jew, Catholic, and Episcopalian - there's mirror vision and
left-handedness here, too, perhaps. More fragmentation in the water.
The author is indebted to David Thompson for invaluable assistance in the
preparation of this article.
Richard Combs is a regular contributor to Film Comment.
BFI
Screenonline: Losey, Joseph (1909-1984) Biography Wheeler Winston Dixon, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film
Directors
cineCollage :: Joseph Losey biography and extensive profile
Joseph Losey - Film Reference profile from Janet E. Lorenz
Joseph Losey • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Dan Callahan, March 2003
Joseph Losey |
American director | Britannica.com biography
All-Movie
Guide bio from Hal Erickson
Britmovie Biography very brief
Joseph
Losey - Movies, Bio and Lists on MUBI
Tom Sutpen
review
extensive essay on The Servant (Undated)
The
Village Voice: Andrew Sarris review
of The Servant, March 26, 1964
Losey
Revisited • Senses of Cinema James
Leahy from Senses of Cinema, July
2002, and Blind Date from The Cinema of Joseph Losey, again by
Leahy, 1967
Galileo Losey,
Brecht and Galileo, by Martin Walsh from Jump Cut, 1975
Joseph
Losey, Film Director Blacklisted in 1950's, Dies at 75 Obituary from The New York Times, June 23, 1984
Eve:
Sinfully Underrated • Senses of Cinema Megan
Ratner from Senses of Cinema,
December 29, 2001
Unkind
Cuts: Joseph Losey's Eve • Senses of Cinema Geoff Gardner from Senses of Cinema, December 29, 2001
Cold,
Cold Heart: Joseph Losey's The Damned and the ... David
Sanjek from Senses of Cinema, July
19, 2002
Bright Lights
Film Journal: Tom Sutpen Class Dismissed, Tom Sutpen on The Servant again with a different essay, May 2005
The Complete
Joseph Losey (July) - Harvard Film Archive
July/August 2008
Joseph
Losey - Blacklisted but unbowed | Film | The Guardian Philip French, May 23, 2009
BFI | Sight & Sound | Joseph Losey & Harold Pinter: In ... Joseph Losey & Harold Pinter: In search of poshlust times, by Nick James, June 2009
Joseph
Losey's rebirth in Britain | David Thomson | Film | The Guardian David Thomson, June 21, 2009
The
Quietus | Film | Film Features | The Political Joseph Losey ... Robert Barry, Decermber 10, 2009
Serge Daney in English: Daney on Losey Serge Daney from Libération, September 22 1983, translated and republished from Daney on Losey, March 16, 2011
Joseph Losey &
Harold Pinter: In search of poshlust times - BFI Nick James from BFI Screen Online, February 10, 2012
The film
collaborations of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter Robert Maras from The World Socialist Web Site, May 28, 2012, also seen here: Dissecting class
relations: The film collaborations of Joseph Losey ...
TSPDT - Joseph Losey They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR
USA (82 mi) 1948
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Imagine a cosy Disney feature crossed
with an allegory on war and racism, and you have some idea of the bizarre
flavour of Losey's first feature. A rather simplistic symbolic tale about a
war-orphan whose hair turns green in protest against his plight, only to be
rejected by friends and strangers alike, it's muddled, awkward, pretentious,
and often downright embarrassing. But the very fact that it is so ridiculous,
with absurd moments like the garrulous old grandfather (O'Brien) singing silly
songs, lends it a certain offbeat charm.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Celebrated director Joseph Losey (The Servant, The
Go-Between) made his debut with this 1948 war allegory, but his star, 12
year-old Dean Stockwell, was already a veteran actor, having made at least a
half-dozen pictures. A handsome boy with a sturdy face and dark, brooding eyes,
Stockwell would grow into a slightly offbeat character actor in pictures like Paris,
Texas, To Live and Die in L.A., Blue Velvet and The
Player, earning an Oscar nomination for Married to the Mob. In The
Boy with Green Hair, Stockwell plays Peter, a war orphan who suddenly wakes
up with a head of green. Everyone teases him until he realizes that that he's
become a symbol for war orphans everywhere. (The green represents spring and
rebirth.) Had the film been made today, Peter would have been interviewed on
Oprah and become an intolerable media darling. But through sheer determination,
honesty and an early smattering of his famous icy control, Losey avoids
sentimentality and crafts his tale into an oddly effective little film. It's
certainly the most bizarre anti-war film ever made, chiefly because of the
scene in which a group of ghostly poster children appear to Peter and explain
his purpose in life. The great, underrated Robert Ryan (The Set-Up, Caught)
also appears as a child psychologist who gets the bald Peter to tell his story
in flashback.
The
Boy With Green Hair - TCM.com Roger Fristoe
Joseph Losey, who attained cult status as a director in two
film collaborations with playwright Harold Pinter, The Servant (1963)
and Accident (1967), made his feature-film debut with The Boy With Green Hair
(1948). Dore Schary, then production chief of RKO, had befriended fellow
liberal Losey after the two had worked together on a memorial salute to
Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Hollywood Bowl.
Impressed by Losey's work in the New York stage, which included a 1947
production of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo Galilei starring Charles
Laughton, Schary entrusted Losey with the direction of The Boy With Green Hair
even though the director's only previous film experience had been in such
shorts as A Gun in His Hands (1945), an Oscar-nominated entry in MGM's
"Crime Does Not Pay" series.
The Boy With Green Hair
is a gentle anti-war fable in which a war orphan (Dean Stockwell) awakens one
day to find that his hair has turned green. This makes him an object of
ridicule in his small town, where the locals call for the boy's head to be
shaved. After running away, the child dreams of other war orphans who urge him
to return to the town and make its citizens aware of how simple differences can
escalate into armed conflict. Unfortunately, the film's themes remain all too
timely today.
Unfortunately for Losey, the eccentric, politically conservative Howard Hughes
took over RKO while The Boy With Green Hair
was being made and, hating the film's pacifist message, did his best to
sabotage it. Losey, however, managed to protect the integrity of his project.
Screenwriter Ben Barzman would later recall that "Joe shot the picture in
such a way that there wasn't much possibility for change. A few lines were
stuck in here and there to soften the message, but that was about it."
Barzman also remembered that 12-year-old Stockwell was called into Hughes'
office and told that when the other children spoke of the horror of war, he
should say, "And that's why America has gotta have the biggest army, and
the biggest navy, and biggest air force in the world!" According to
Barzman, little Stockwell was in so in sympathy with the film's message that he
dared to respond, "No, sir!" Even after Hughes started to scream at
him, the boy held his ground.
Although Stockwell would recall much of his career as a child actor in negative
terms, he genuinely liked and admired Losey -- even after the director was
deliberately "cruel" to get the boy to cry on cue. Losey said later
that he had "adored" Stockwell and regretted having to reduce him to
tears by talking about the death of a pet kitten. "It's interesting that
Joe felt he was being cruel," Stockwell later said. "It shows the
warmth, the sensitivity of the man."
Blacklisted in Hollywood after being summoned by the House Un-American
Activities Committee in 1951, Losey moved to Great Britain, where he created
some of his most highly praised films including The Damned (1963) and
Pinter's The Go-Between (1971). Relocating to France in 1976, Losey
remained active in films until his death in 1984.
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2/5] Richard Scheib
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
THE LAWLESS
USA (83 mi) 1949
Time Out review Tom Milne (who collaborated with Losey in
1967 for an interview book)
Losey's second feature, a lynching
drama set in a small Southern Californian town beset by racial tensions: local
newspaper reporter (Carey), after conquering self-interest under pressure from
the girl he loves (Russell), crusades on behalf of a Mexican youth (Rios)
falsely accused of having raped a 'white' girl. So far, so conventional, but what
gives it an edge of brilliance is Losey's eye for the smalltown locations: the
shabby dance hall in the Mexican quarter, the sleepy high street, the one-horse
newspaper office, the cosy front porches and the churchgoers, all swept away in
sudden primitive starkness as the fugitive is relentlessly hunted over a
fantastic wasteland of rocks and rubble. The film also fairly reeks of fear,
doubtless a testament to the HUAC witch-hunts, but beautifully woven into
Daniel Mainwaring's script in a complex pattern (not just the racial divide,
suspicion of the outsider or of anyone challenging the status quo, but the
sexual anxieties that drive the 'white' youths to macho bravado in invading the
Mexican dance-hall, the fear of losing his job that makes the reporter try to
turn a blind eye, and so on).
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
M B 84
USA (88 mi)
1951
[Lang's
M,] is and remains a classic, which one doesn't want to compete with, so for a
variety of reasons I somewhat reluctantly undertook my version. One was that there was a considerable
Hollywood pinch because of political pressures, and I didn't want to go a long
time without work. Another was that I
was very much interested in David Wayne, whom I thought brilliant and
extraordinarily right for the part. And
I undertook it with a restriction on the structure and basic story line,
because the censorship office wouldn't pass it as a new script, only as a
remake of a classic. Therefore my
treatment of the central figure came into direct conflict with the whole
structure.... All that emerges from the film, really, is a couple of--I
think--remarkable sequences, some previously unseen aspects of Los Angeles, and
a fantastic performance from Wayne.
—Joseph Losey, from Losey
on Losey, by Tom Milne, 1967
Born in Wisconsin,
the American heartland, where he was friends with Nicholas Ray in high school,
Losey studied at Dartmouth and Harvard Universities, moved to New York to work
in theater, directing WPA political theater groups combining an anti-realist
aesthetic with radical political views.
Losey studied with Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow and Bertolt Brecht in
Germany, directing the world premiere of the American version of Brecht’s play Life
of Galileo in 1947, which he
would later film in 1975. By 1951, he
had directed five films, none of which expressed his political views, however
they do contain common themes of manhunts and mass hysteria, reflective of the
political paranoia of the era. After
making his first film in Technicolor, THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (1948), Losey’s
subsequent American films are all classified as film noir, where location
shooting was an important element in all of them while also exhibiting an
artistic visual aesthetic that would become the hallmark of his later more
modernist studies of power and class, exploring personal relationships within
the rigid British class system. Losey
had briefly joined the Communist Party in 1946 and was subpoenaed to testify
before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC) shortly after completing this film, but was blacklisted
when he refused to cooperate, leaving for Europe, never to return. What followed was a difficult career of an
artist in exile, where according to Video Curator Steve Seid from BAM/PFA (Joseph Losey:
Pictures of Provocation - BAM/PFA - Film ...), “Throughout his forty-year
career, Losey seemed preoccupied with the limits of personal awareness and the
freedom that arises from it. His fully faceted characters confront ethical
dilemmas—hypocrisy, personal weakness, moral fallibility—and more often than
not fail to retain their integrity. Losey’s characters lack the very freedom he
sought throughout his own life,” remaining deeply contemptuous of the American
film industry, where outsiders become a recurring motif in his films. In
remaking M (1931) in 1951 for
Losey’s earlier film
THE LAWLESS (1949) reflected a similar mob mentality, introduced in voiceover,
“This is the story of a town and some of its people who, in the grip of blind
anger, forget their American heritage of tolerance and decency, and become the
lawless.” This overriding sense of anger
and injustice was an oblique reference to contemporary politics, especially the
liberals’ collective failure of nerve in abandoning the cause of the Hollywood
Ten after the 1947 HUAC hearings. Striving for an intellectual rather than an
emotional connection with his audience, Losey’s pessimistic world view often
alienated audiences, depicting a world ruled by coldness, greed, and
hypocrisy. After the original HUAC
hearings in October 1947, there was a period of calm before the storm, as the
hearings started up again in March 1951.
Nebenzal and Losey were certainly aware of the deteriorating conditions
for leftists in the movie industry, making the film at the height of McCarthyism
and the Red hysteria, so
the cast and crew are comprised of leftists and communists that would soon be
subject to the Hollywood blacklisting. In 1950, having exhausting their appeals, the
Hollywood
Ten began serving their prison sentences.
Within a year, no one worked in
A fundamental difference between the two versions is the
shift from newspapers in the 30’s to television in the 50’s, where the citizens
of Berlin learned about the child murders from newspapers and from posters
plastered around the walls of the city, while the residents of Bunker Hill in Los Angeles
obtain their information from watching television. In Losey’s film, the murderer never writes to
the newspapers, instead late in the film it’s the underground mob that attempts
to coerce favors from newspaper publishers in exchange for an exclusive story
turning the child killer over to the authorities. While Losey’s film, at times virtually shot
for shot, pales in comparison to the formal beauty of Lang’s shadowy
expressionism, which was a breakthrough in sound recording and way ahead of its
time in its methodical, perfectly synchronized, psychological storytelling,
Losey’s version is especially noteworthy for moving the camera into the shoddy
downtown streets of Los Angeles into the now demolished slum neighborhood of Bunker Hill, with its
irregularly shaped streets, shabby rooming houses, and Victorian-era mansions
memorialized by pulp writers such as Raymond Chandler, providing something
essential that Lang’s studio-based film lacks, namely a time capsule recording
of the historical architectural and urban fragments seen before their imminent
demise. Sixteen months after the end of
the shoot,
Despite a laudable cast, there’s very little connection to
any of the characters with Losey, as he’s prone to do, using an overly
theatrical style that distorts and exaggerates the effect of the stark realism
of the streets, which has the effect of distancing the audience from the story,
becoming an increasingly empty experience where women are all but absent and
there’s simply no emotional connection to anyone except the lone figure of
Karen Morley. Instead, with a script
that fails to live up to expectations, they all play stock characters, as Jim
Backus plays the overwrought Mayor that wants action, Howard Da Silva plays a
chain-smoking homicide cop that can’t give him any answers, Roy Engel is the
overly paranoid police chief making apocalyptic pronouncements of doom on TV,
Martin Gabel is the abrasive, tough-talking crime boss used to having his way,
Raymond Burr is his stalwart henchman following orders while Glenn Anders, so
familiar “taking a little tarrrr-get practice” in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI
(1947), psychoanalyzes his boss’s every move, Luther Adler plays a washed up
lawyer, the mob mouthpiece who can’t stay off the booze, and John Miljan is the
blind balloonist with floating fat lady balloons that recognizes the serial
killer’s ominous whistling, who previously worked in silent films as well as
Buster Keaton’s first talkie in FREE AND EASY (1930). Lang’s objection to the remake was the
setting in bright and sunny Southern California, the exact opposite of Lang’s
carefully constructed cloistered madness, a link between silent and sound, but
also German Expressionism predating Film Noir.
Berlin in the 20’s and 30’s was filled with poverty-stricken beggars and
panhandlers on the streets, comprising the underground network, while Los
Angeles had no such culture in the 50’s, where Losey acknowledged, “I couldn’t believe
myself in the idea of the whole underworld ganging up against the killer.” Nebenzal, however, felt the story could still
work as Los Angeles, and America in general, had all kinds of random psychotics
running around the streets, often seen creating a disturbing presence, but this
rationalization never expresses itself onscreen, instead doing a poor job
duplicating an underworld gang of thieves, where this is actually the weakest
part of the entire picture. Peter Lorre
is so compelling in the original, evoking great sympathy in his speech to his
accusers, not just because he is helpless to his sick condition, but because
after performing such hideous acts he persuades the audience to care about what
happens to him. Wayne on the other hand,
is not a sympathetic figure, where his weeping pleas about his wretched
childhood dominated by his mother’s tyrannical hold on him fall short
with the audience, where in the same breath his twisted mind resolutely calls her “a good
woman.”
For Lang, the film was really an anti-death-penalty statement, a reminder
that no matter how grotesque the crime, criminals often tend to be victims of
abuse in some strange and perverted way, where state sanctioned killing is an
inappropriate response for what in large part are society’s ills, often stirred
up by the voices of moral authority. For
Losey, it’s a more personally haunting psychosexual thriller with an
allegorical subtext of McCarthyism, rabid anti-communism, and a lynch mob
mentality that would eventually drive the director out of the country for the
rest of his career. The film is not
without humor, where especially notable is a discussion between two witnesses,
with a man seeing a blue dress, while a woman insisted it is red, so the man
turns angrily and shouts at the woman, “What are you, a communist?” While Losey’s film loses its way at the end,
the first half is much more compelling with its excellent use of Los Angeles
locations, including the infamous chase sequence that takes place inside the
ornate Bradbury Building downtown on the southeast
corner of Broadway and Third (just a block east of Angels Flight), with its
interior courtyard, exposed elevators, and wrought-iron railings, turning into
an architectural web of intrigue. With
its distinctive stairways and balconies, not to mention spatial enormity, where
the killer hides in a cramped storage room of mannequin parts, Losey even
filmed the roof of the building, using a notable shot through the roof’s
skylight. The army of beggars mobilized
by the underworld in
These last fifteen
years or so make for a melancholy afterthought to such auspicious beginnings,
and these poor films have permanently marked Losey’s reputation. Far more
damning in its way, Caute’s voluminous biography lists, in tedious detail, his
many shortcomings as a man. “A bit of an old misery, an unhappy person,” said
cinematographer Freddie Francis (quote from Joseph
Losey: A Revenge on Life, by David Caute).
Most accounts paint
Joseph Losey as almost always rude and ungenerous, a man who made many enemies
and, worst of all, a man who badmouthed almost all of his actors. Perhaps he
was not as smart as he thought he was. The psychological notes he kept on his
characters reveal a somewhat shallow mind. In the interviews he gave, there is
a strong whiff of the charlatan. Looking at the evidence, one can only assume
that too much critical acclaim crippled his instincts and made his talent
self-conscious. He seems so bored with the films of his last years, so
passionately committed to the movies up to and including The Servant. “Do you really think he is a great director?” asked a
colleague of mine, when I was starting on this piece. After a hesitation, I
replied, “Yes.” We might hesitate over Joseph Losey, but we cannot deny that
his best work, so wounded, so angry, so filled with crazed brio, so bold,
emotional and unashamed, places him securely in the pantheon of great film
directors.
Time
Out Tom Milne
Losey's remake of Lang's most famous film was inevitably subjected to invidious comparisons when it was first released. The main problem, as Losey admitted ('I couldn't believe myself in the idea of the whole underworld ganging up against the killer') is the weak ending. Where Lang achieved a double knockout with Lorre's great speech in which he turns the accusation against his accusers - effecting a complete turnabout in sympathies, not just because we understand that he is helpless to combat his sickness, but because he has turned into a victim of persecution - Losey manages only a sucker punch because the setting is no longer Nazi Germany. This said, the first half of the film is excellent, with the Los Angeles locations wonderfully used as a strange and terrifying concrete jungle, and a remarkable performance from David Wayne that bears comparison with Lorre.
Joseph Losey's Ultra-Rare Remake of M – Tom Gunning ... Kyle Westphal
Long before Gus Van Sant reinterpreted Psycho and Chris Rock revamped Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon, Wisconsinite neophyte Joe Losey embarked on the unenviable task of remaking Fritz Lang’s 1931 Weimar masterpiece M in postwar Los Angeles. With two defiantly liberal feature films and a handful of “Crime Does Not Pay” shorts to his name, Losey received the commission after Lang turned down the remake offer from fellow Hollywood émigré Seymour Nebenzal, who had also produced the original. (If anything, M reminds us that it’s the producer, not the director, who holds the lion’s share of power in Hollywood.) This version follows the plot of the original fairly closely, with David Wayne taking over Peter Lorre’s child-killer role and investing the character with a seething air of pathetic repression. When LA’s top cop (Howard Da Silva) initiates a dragnet to catch the killer, the underworld takes matters into its own hands. With noir-tinged paranoia and beautiful location photography in now-vanished working class neighborhoods, Losey’s M easily holds it own. Ironically oblivious to the movie’s anti-mob mentality message, morality crusaders managed to ban M in eight states on account of its salacious content and the Communist sympathies of several key contributors. Long out of circulation after the producer’s short-term distribution deal with Columbia Pictures lapsed, M has been meticulously restored by the Library of Congress
The King Bulletin [Danny King]
This rare, little-seen remake of Fritz Lang’s 1931 masterpiece
hasn’t been written about enough, and it’s not difficult to understand why when
you combine our current skepticism regarding remakes (especially those of
stone-cold classics) with the fact that the film was released right around the
time of Joseph Losey’s exile from the United States. But it’s a pretty terrific
film, not to mention a pressing social document: shifting the action from Lang’s
Berlin to grubby Los Angeles, Losey’s take percolates with the rhythms of
America during the early 1950s. In the original film, the city’s inhabitants
were warned about an on-the-loose child-killer through billboards, while
Losey’s film prepares the Los Angeles residents via television: a clever early
sequence has a group of people watching a TV report that instructs parents and
children of the five things they should never do (accept candy from strangers,
and so on). The serial-killer psychology is updated, too: if the diagnosis of
Peter Lorre was already ahead of its time in the 1931 film, Losey and his
screenwriters compensate by giving their version of the character (played by
David Wayne) an intensely Freudian make-up. This psychoanalytic bent is
reflected in the film’s procedural elements, too, where potential looney-bin
suspects are questioned with Rorschach tests rather than basic interrogations.
Another departure from the Lang film involves the destructively drunk lawyer
played by Luther Adler: his role in the climax is essentially as crucial as
Wayne’s, who himself manages the great feat of delivering that critical speech
without seeming second-rate in comparison to Lorre. Above all, though, the film
is defined by Los Angeles itself: from an opening shot of Wayne in a trolley
car, his body framed against the city at night, Ernest Laszlo’s cinematography
interprets the landscape with deep resourcefulness and attention to character. [Tentative Rating: ***1/2]
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
Joseph Losey on Lang like Dalí on Millet, a painter’s copy. The "Baby Killer" is promptly identified under the credits, he’s the shabby figure riding in the back of the trolley, the silhouette getting a shoeshine who tenses up at the sight of a little girl. Whole sequences from the original are dutifully reproduced, the compulsive whistling, the sightless balloon merchant at the fairgrounds, the mother growing desperate by the empty table. But then the insinuating hysteria from The Lawless starts to permeate the tale, and by the time arrested suspects are framed squabbling over a red dress ("What are ya, a Communist?"), the vision is Losey’s. The Mayor (Jim Backus) is a vaudevillian after Rorschach results, the police chief (Howard Da Silva) has his hands full with bloodthirsty cops. The underworld kingpin (Martin Gabel) keeps his henchman (Raymond Burr) armed with street informers and his attorney (Luther Adler) hooked on booze and self-loathing, "that’s the value of organization." At the center is a psychopath (David Wayne) so choked with Freudian anguish that he strangulates clay dolls while a portrait of Mother judges in silence. (Later, he slouches on a park bench and plays a tin flute while vertiginous cityscapes surge behind him, a bent mental horizon.) Less geometric trap than floating crap game, filtered through pale sunlight rather than engulfing shadows, this is as much a document about Los Angeles in the McCarthy years as Lang's film was a snapshot of Weimar Berlin. It builds to a remarkable search of the Bradbury Building’s echoing, zigzagging innards, with Wayne dragged from a room full of disembodied mannequins to an impromptu tribunal in a cavernous garage. "You have to be hurt to be good," moans the culprit under a harsh spotlight, quoting maternal advice in a sort of woozy beatnik incantation until Adler’s disgraced lawyer roars back to outraged life. "Who's killed our children’s hopes?" A society of persecution laid jaggedly bare, from one poet of paranoia to another. (Kurosawa in High and Low has the unofficial third panel.) With Steve Brodie, Glenn Anders, Norman Lloyd, Walter Burke, John Miljan, and Karen Morley. In black and white.
Big House Film Roger Westcombe, also seen here: M - Crimeculture
M, when you think about it, is just made for hardboiled postwar U.S. paranoia. Seymour Nebenzal thought about it, and as the producer of the 1931 original, convinced a reluctant Joseph Losey to take on this American remake. The director’s leftish sympathies had already brought him under HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) scrutiny, and to minimize the risk of any new project appearing subversive in this overheated environment, an established classic seemed a safe bet.
What were they thinking?!? Fritz Lang’s German original brilliantly captured a society at war with itself, with suspicion permeating the very air people breathe and everyone guilty until proven innocent. This early nuclear-age remake then did for Cold War America what the original did for Nazi Germany, capturing the paranoia of the times with a ferocity equal to its forebear.
Much of the new version is so close to the first it could have come off Fritz Lang’s storyboards. But the differences are crucial. The climactic ‘trial’ is distinct to this version in representing the ‘voice of the people’, whose sympathetic visual framing and pleas for ‘family’ distance these foot soldiers of urban America from the criminal class which constituted Lang’s underworld jury. Losey’s M clearly portrays the HUAC Senate hearings as the kangaroo court they would eventually be exposed as. "My client only wants a fair trial, but we’ll settle for this", says the murderer’s bent lawyer.
Another key distinction with the portrayal of twenty years earlier is the lack here of intercutting between the executive levels of cops, crims and press grappling with ways to solve the problems (for their business) of this stray murderer. Yet when the press are called in late in Losey’s M it is more insidious as we see the underworld boss offer a star reporter the scoop on the story in return for a lighter run by the paper on an upcoming grand jury investigation. Not even the media get off lightly in Losey’s universe.
Some of the transposition across versions doesn’t work two decades on. The ‘branding’ of the hunted murderer with an ‘M’ over his shoulder blades stands revealed in a modern take as ludicrous, while in subterranean 30s Germany it seemed no more bizarre than anything else.
An important, and quite confronting, new scene is when the killer garrotes a clay doll in his apartment – this being our first clear view of the murderer out of the shadows in which he is introduced. These opening scenes brilliantly evoke the Cold War paranoia of a faceless evil stalking among us, as he is seen repeatedly with his face only in total blackness like a shadow cut-out. Throughout M the compressed blacks and whites of the stunning cinematography by Ernest Lazlo (Kiss Me Deadly, D.O.A.) brilliantly conspire to link all the members of this environment into one milieu, achieving the sense of communal sickness which Lang achieved more through juxtaposition.
Typical of the decidedly ambiguous sexual politics of prime Losey (see his The Servant [1963], The Go-Between [1971], even Concrete Jungle to some extent), much here turns on gender. When the child-killer is spotted leaving with a new victim a pursuer turns the corner only to see (in a point of view shared by we, the audience) numerous mothers holding hands with a daughter, their eerie normalcy redolent of alien invasion pod-flicks like Invasion of the Body Snatchers; trapped like a rat in the warehouse, the killer’s mobility is impeded as he continually bumps into the disembodied legs (only) of curvaceous female mannequin body parts (compare the similar scene in Kubrick’s The Killing [1956]); before finally, getting literal, his ‘trial’ speech explicitly singles out the male of the species for blame.
Speaking of body parts, it’s interesting also how many disabled people are cast in pursuit roles. The blind balloon-seller of the original is augmented here by a cane-dependent shoeshine boy (a WWII allusion?) who pursues the killer as he descends down the Bunker Hill steps into the symbolic hell of the lower roadway. This leads to his doom in the famed Bradbury Building, whose internal staircases made it a noir icon in Double Indemnity.
Wonderful (and welcome!) comic relief is provided by Luther Adler as the elegantly marinated lawyer who pops up repeatedly as a foil to the grim earnestness of his criminal surroundings. He has a droll early scene of launching, on auto-pilot, into the lawyer-speak of high moral values in defending the indefensible that makes a pointed mockery of the hired gun legal system of which HUAC was a grotesque extension. That he concludes this with a satiric nod to raspy-throated thug Raymond Burr as "an upstanding and honest member of the jury" brilliantly combines the contemporary McCarthyist metaphor with an homage to the trial-by-criminals climax of the Fritz Lang original.
It has to be said that the thugs here are a collection that’s never been bettered, and provide oblique comment on Jim Backus’ cynical mayor, too busy opening a supermarket in suburbia to roll up his sleeves and address the fear paralyzing his city when he can delegate the work to subordinates.
Losey’s M is a truly lost classic, unjustly burdened with the stigma of ‘Hollywood remake’ and prevented from enjoying the retrospective gloss of cult rebirth due to its enduringly creepy subject matter, so starkly and powerfully is it rendered. Fusing the unspeakable and the familiar, M remains a confronting indictment of systemic mass hysteria.
Edward
Dimendberg - From Berlin to Bunker Hill: Urban ... From
Berlin to Bunker Hill: Urban Space, Late Modernity, and Film Noir in Fritz
Lang's and Joseph Losey's M, from
Wide Angle, 1997
Spare me the bunk: Jim Dawson’s LOS ANGELES’S BUNKER HILL reviewed! Richard Harlan Smith from Movie Morlocks, January 24, 2014
The long shadow of M / The Dissolve Keith Phipps, February 5, 2015
Issue 4: Ridley's Key - The Forgotten Influence of Joseph ... Ridley's Key: The Forgotten Influence of Joseph Losey in Blade Runner, by Vincent Joseph Noto from The Luminary
M (1951) - Joseph Losey - film review - Films de France James Travers
Sunset Gun: Ten First Times: Older Movies from 2011 Kim Morgan from Sunset Gun, February 7, 2012
Sunset Gun: Telluride 2014: Joseph Losey's M Kim Morgan, August 2014
Antti Alanen: Film Diary: M (1951)
Ed Gorman's blog: The Joseph Losey version of "M" by John ... John M. Whalen
M (1951, Joseph Losey) Brandon’s Movie Memory
Tonight's Movie: M (1951) at the Noir City Film Festival Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
derekwinnert.com [Derek Winnert] also seen here: M (1951) – Classic Film Review 772 | Derek Winnert
"Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the ... Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, by Frank Krutnik, page 266 (pdf)
B Noir: M and The Big Night - Slant Magazine Sean Howe
Joseph Losey - Senses of Cinema Dan Callahan, March 2003
Joseph Losey - Film Reference Janet E. Lorenz
Daily | Telluride 2014 | Keyframe - Explore the world of film. David Hudson from Fandor
JOSEPH LOSEY: PICTURES OF PROVOCATION: A Few ... Joseph Losey: Pictures of Provocation: A Few Questions For Peter Conheim, by Michael Guillen from Twitch, April 2010
Susan Gerhard Interview with Guy Maddin and Kim Morgan as guest directors at Telluride from Fandor, August 29, 2014
Doubling Down : the Watch Todd McCarthy interviews Guy Maddin and Kim Morgan as guest directors at Telluride, September 11, 2014
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
M: Two Versions of 'The Monster Explains' (with images ... J.M. Robertson from Roger Ebert site
DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]
M (1951 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dramatic Monologues - WHERE'S THE DRAMA? Serial killer’s confession, from YouTube (2:51)
M (1951) Film Noir - Joseph Losey YouTube (3:47)
THE PROWLER
USA (92 mi) 1951
A powerful
thriller from Losey before he fell foul of Hollywood's infamous blacklist. A
meaty role goes to Van Heflin as the clean-cut, milk-drinking policeman whose
smooth exterior hides his not-so-nice inner self. He answers the call when a
prowler is spotted by wealthy Keyes. Soon adultery, duplicity and ultimately
murder are on the cards. A corrosive picture of suburban life is painted by
director Losey (The Servant), and jolly nasty it is too.
Time Out review Tom Milne
A rivetingly cool, clean thriller
about the trap which inexorably closes on a woman unhappily married to a rich
husband, and the cop on the make for the better things in life who, summoned to
deal with a prowler, lingers to get rid of the husband and take both wife and
money for himself. Superb performances from Evelyn Keyes
and Van
Heflin, equally superb art direction (with the white Spanish house, a
symbol of affluence and its emptiness, surrounded by the night of the hunter),
and direction which grips like a steel claw, loosening only in the rather
melodramatic final sequences. Even here, with the lovers guiltily holed up in a
derelict shack to keep her pregnancy secret from awkward questioning, and their
relationship boiling to a fraught climax over the difficult birth, Losey rises
magnificently to the occasion in his use of the Mojave Desert ghost town
location.
Film
Noir of the Week David
As harsh and gut-wrenching as it is bold and satisfying - Joseph Losey's Bourgeois noir 'The Prowler'
lingers long in the memory - and remains one of the genre's most emotionally
powerful installments.
When officer Webb Garwood (Van Heflin)
investigates a wee-hours peeping-Tom
call with his veteran partner Bud (John Maxwell),
he finds himself drawn to the victim - attractive and vulnerable housewife
Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes).
Dutiful and quietly desperate, Mrs. Gilvray spends evenings listening to her DJ
husband John's late-night radio show - which he ends every night by cooing
"I'll be seeing you Susan...”
Though no clues are found, she seems relieved and sees the men off – but Webb
returns after his shift under the premise that he's "following up".
Signals are sent, misread, rejected, and returned - and soon the uncouth cop
has insinuated himself into her sad little life - the groundwork laid when they
determine that they hail from the same state. An affair begins - and with
Webb's virile presence and attentiveness Susan temporarily forgets her
passionless, childless marriage. But unbeknownst to her, Webb's motives aren't
pure - as he deftly manipulates her emotions by pretending to break things off
- drawing his fragile lover and her husband's insurance policy ever-closer. The
way Webb sees it - life owes him. This was its chance to make good.
Wanting to amp-up the relationship - and his socioeconomic status – Webb takes
things to the next level by staging a fake late-night burglary at Casa de
Gilvray. Drawing an armed John out - Webb shoots him dead – then wings himself
to make it look like a tragic exchange between two men deceived by darkness.
Susan, kept oblivious of the scheme, reacts with understandable suspicion when
she finds Webb on the lawn - John splayed at his feet.
When asked at the subsequent inquest if she's familiar with
the officer in question, Susan lies and answers no - but the event has rocked
her and she severs ties with him. Attempting a reconciliation - he offers her
his paltry life savings through her easy-going brother William (Emerson Treacy). The gesture, and some world-class
lying do the trick - the two get together, tie the knot, and as newlyweds begin
their new life as motor lodge managers in Vegas - the life Webb has longed
dreamed of.
Before long, Susan announces that she's four months pregnant - which would mean
having known Webb in the biblical sense before their marriage - the fact that
John was sterile not helping their case. Fearing he'll be charged with murder,
Webb talks Susan into having the baby at a dilapidated shelter out in a desert
ghost-town. There, while happily awaiting the arrival and listening to records
outside, they accidentally hear a recording of John's DJ show - the ghostly
voice echoing across the landscape - seemingly from beyond - shattering their
morale.
Pregnancy complications arise - and when Susan watches Webb
race into town to find a doctor, she suspects Webb will silence him following
the treatment - having discovered that her ex-cop brought his revolver on the
trip. A baby girl is born - and with Susan's warning rushed by the doctor back
to town and away from Webb who before chasing him hastily explains to Susan
that he did whatever he did for her. Backtracking from the police, and Bud and
his wife who are all converging on the windswept hideaway - Webb exits his car
and scrambles up a dune where he's shot in the back - and killed.
Webb Garwood's Norman
Rockwell knock-off is painted with blood - but being a sociopath
it's not likely to keep him up at night. As portrayed by Oscar-winner Van
Heflin in a nuanced, restrained performance that never evolves into a moustache-twirling
stereotype - the character is a blue-collar furnace - seething with resentment,
and primed to balance the scales by any means necessary. Unfortunately for him
his lunge at middle-class respectability lands him face-first in a pile of rocky
earth.
Losey, fond of highlighting class differences and sexual power-plays throughout
his career ('The Lawless',
'The Servant') blended, with uncredited
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo - those themes, with traditional noir motifs to
create a particularly mournful effort - which succeeds on all levels.
Film Monthly.com – The Prowler (1951) Alan Rode from Film Monthly
The Prowler (1951) Joseph Losey « Twenty Four Frames John Greco
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B+]
Joseph Losey Film Series at the bfi
The Prowler - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Mimi Brody from the Pacific Film Archives
The Complete Joseph Losey (July) - Harvard Film Archive, also here: The Complete Joseph Losey - Moving Image Source
Joseph Losey's rebirth in Britain | David Thomson | Film | The ... David Thomson from The Guardian, June 21, 2009
Los Angeles Film+TV - Lower Depths: The Prowler - page 1 Philippe Garnier from The LA Weekly, March 18, 2009
The Prowler (1951 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
YouTube - Joseph Losey - The Prowler (1951) on YouTube (7:07)
BIG NIGHT
USA (75 mi) 1951
Time Out review Tom Milne
Losey's last American film before his
European exile opens on a note strikingly reminiscent of The Killers: a
sensitive 17-year-old boy (Barrymore) watches in shattered disbelief as the
father he hero-worships (Foster) tamely submits to a brutal thrashing at the
hands of a crippled sports reporter (St John). Then, wandering with vengeful
gun through a seedy nighttown inferno of bars, boxing-rings and nightclubs, he
gradually discovers why in a process of growing up. Intense, sharply
characterised, brilliantly shot by Hal Mohr, it
works extremely well even though Losey subsequently objected to the
chronological narrative imposed by producer Philip Waxman: 'It had been planned
in a frame of flashback.'
Ozus' World Movie
Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
THE SLEEPING TIGER
Great Britain (89 mi) 1954
Shrink Knox makes
a bad mistake putting up one of his patients (Bogarde) in his home, for the
newcomer soon strikes up a rapport with his wife (Smith). The inevitable love
affair looks like ending tragically, and the psychologist seems unable to deal
with his patient off the couch. Losey spins this dark tale with his customary
control of suspense. Top-notch performances and a tight script make this a
superior psychological suspense movie.
Time Out review Tom Milne
Forget the plot, which errs on the
wild side as a psychoanalyst (Knox) experimentally instals a handsome young
gunman (Bogarde) in his home, only to discover - to no one's surprise but his
own - that the sleeping tiger of his wife's id easily outbids his patient's.
Enjoy the high-wire tension of Losey's direction, the lurking paranoia that
charges his images with electricity. Losey's first British feature, made under
a pseudonym in the shadow of the blacklist, it sheds the classic modulations of
The Prowler. Instead, you see the birth pangs of what came to be known
as Losey baroque, erupting grandiosely in the closing sequence, with the
lovers' car crashing through a hoarding to founder beneath the rampant paws of
the Esso tiger.
The New York Times review H.H.T.
TIME WITHOUT PITY
Great Britain (85 mi) 1957
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Made in England by Joseph Losey
in 1956--the first film he was able to sign with his own name after his
Hollywood blacklisting in 1951. Losey turns a stage thriller by Emlyn Williams,
about an alcoholic patriarch whose son is unjustly accused of murder, into a
study of power relationships and a statement against capital punishment, all of
which is rather more than the slim screenplay can bear. With Michael Redgrave,
Ann Todd, Leo McKern, Peter Cushing, and Alec McCowan.
Time Out review Tom Milne
An adaptation of Emlyn Williams'
potboiling play Someone Waiting, about a young man wrongly convicted of
murder (McCowen), and the last-minute hunt for the real killer by his
dipsomaniac father (Redgrave). This was the first time Losey had filmed under
his own name since the trauma of the blacklist, and it shows in the
overstatement: the persistent play with clocks, for instance, indicating not
just that Redgrave is racing against a 24-hour deadline to uncover the truth,
but that his alcoholism was a way of making time stand still by shutting out
his responsibilities (to his son, to society). By shifting the emphasis from
thriller to anti-capital punishment pleading, Losey also strains the structure
almost to breaking point. An undeniably powerful film, all the same, superbly
shot by Freddie
Francis and conceived with a raw-edged brilliance, right from the brutal
opening murder, that accommodates even the symbolism of a Goya bull, with the
real killer (McKern) finally cornered and goaded into a murderous/suicidal
charge.
Time
Without Pity (1957) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Pablo
Kjolseth
The new release by Home Vision Entertainment of Time Without Pity (1957), directed by
Joseph Losey (1909-1984), represents two "firsts" in his career.
Since Losey had to flee the U.S. in 1952 due to the House Un-American
Activities Committee issuing him a subpoena as a "hostile" witness
(ensuring his place on the Hollywood's infamous blacklist), Time Without Pity was the first British
film that he directed that skipped previous pseudonyms (ie: "Victor
Hanbury" or "Joseph Walton") to be released under his own name.
The other "first" included on this dvd is Losey's directorial debut,
an animated short film called Pete Roleum and his Cousins (1939),
commissioned for the 1939 New York World's Fair.
Time Without Pity
is a crime thriller based on actor/playwright Emlyn William's stage hit, Someone
Waiting. The film begins with the murder of a young woman at the hands of a
wealthy industrialist (Leo McKern) and then puts the wrong man (Alec McCowen)
on the execution stand. The father of the accused (Michael Redgrave) flies to
London in an effort to save him, but as an alcoholic recently released from a
Canadian hospital after an epic-drinking binge, his nerves are still shot and
it doesn't help that everyone around him enjoys slogging the sauce and offering
him glasses of the stuff. Whereas the play had the structure of a
straightforward thriller that takes place after the execution and whose focus
was on figuring out who the real murderer was, Losey and his producers
significantly altered this in the film by revealing who the murderer is before
the opening titles and leaving the audience with 24 hours before the execution,
thus shifting the audiences attention from the "whodunit" angle to
the more complex and swirling machinations behind the characters themselves. In
part, this is a study on how different men react to the loss of power, the loss
of a wife, the loss of virility and, ultimately, the loss of a son. Despite
these grim scenarios, at the heart of Time Without Pity there is a hopeful and humanitarian message aided by the
fact that Losey was staunchly against capital punishment under any
circumstances. Adding to the suspense of fighting his son's impending execution
is the constant fight Redgrave's character has against his alcoholic thirst -
and, interestingly, Redgrave had real-life problems with alcohol but Losey
credits him for never drinking while playing a drunk.
Pete Roleium and his Cousins is a stop-motion animation film featuring a
collection of dancing and singing drops of oil meant to educate viewers on the
many products that petroleum makes, like insecticide, suntain oil, nail polish,
gum, and more. In Michel Ciment's Conversations with Losey book, the
director says that it "was a half-hour film for the Petroleum World Fair
Exhibition of 1939. That oil drop figure has remained a symbol of one of the
oil companies - I think Shell - ever since... It starts on a bleak world,
completely destroyed by war, and also destroyed by the removal of oil. The idea
was to show that practically every product we live by these days has some
element of oil in it. And the drops were so badly treated they vanished from
the Earth. Then slowly they came up over the bleakness of the destroyed world
singing a song `We are coming back if - you want us to come back!"
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Matt Peterson) dvd review
DVD
Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review
[3/5]
Images
Journal DVD Reviews David Gurevich,
also reviewing MR. KLEIN and LA TRUITE
KQEK
(Mark R. Hasan) dvd review
THE CRIMINAL
Great Britian (97 mi) 1960
This exceptional
British crime drama opens itself up to influences from other shores, to America
for its attempt at noirish morality tale, and Europe to paint its hero as an
existential loner. Baker is wonderfully intense in the lead role, a man in
prison, harassed by Magee's head warder, while crime boss Wanamaker waits for
him to come out in order to settle a score and nab his stashed loot. Baker is
hung out to dry between crime and punishment, and two systems that feed off
each other. Losey was reaching the most consistent period of his career, and
the direction is brilliant and assured.
Time Out review Tom Milne
Terrific performance from Baker as the
criminal, an existential loner whose violence is essentially self-destructive
as, literally trapped within the bars of a prison, he finds himself
metaphorically caught between two complementary systems: one represented by the
sadistic chief warder (Magee), who feeds his sense of power by fomenting a
dog-eat-dog code in the cells, the other by the underworld kingpin (Wanamaker)
waiting outside to kill Baker and hijack his stashed loot. Losey's American eye
and expertise make it jaggedly explosive and visually brilliant, a million miles
beyond other British crime movies.
Big
House Film (Roger Westcombe) review
When criminals systematically
target bigtime robber Johnny Bannion (Baker) in the second half of The Concrete
Jungle, their campaign is a clear parallel to the penal system that tried
to control him in the first. "There’s no place for someone like you in an organisation",
Bannion’s betrayer and former confederate Mike Carter (Wanamaker) tells him.
Two systems, one criminal and one society’s, treat the individual remarkably
similarly in The Concrete Jungle. Ironically one crim admonishes another
later in the film, amidst the chaos of a prison riot, "you need a system
or it’ll go amok".
Losey’s theme emerges gradually
and its impact derives substantially from the impact of Stanley Baker at its
center. Bannion is a star, treated with deference both by the
authorities (inside and out) and idolatry by the underling hoods. Baker’s
muscular charisma (lacking the feminine side of Sean Connery, he never made the
Atlantic crossing to bigger things), and Losey’s empathetic positioning of
audience point of view, puts us onside with Johnny even as we register the
danger of his brutal smarts. It all adds to the vicarious thrill of this ride
through a very Anglo underworld (but why is it that moviemakers always
associate crims’ parties with wild be-bop jazz?!?).
Director Joseph Losey was in fact
American and a victim of the McCarthyist black list. So much black list energy surrounds
The Concrete Jungle it suggests a heretofore undisclosed network of
blacklistees in Europe. Mike Carter’s key role is played by the exiled American
liberal filmmaker Sam Wanamaker, while the Bannion role recalls Baker’s
memorable turn in the thrilling Hell Drivers (1957 - a superior flick to
the comparable truckin’ thriller Wages of Fear [1953]), directed by
blacklistee Cy Endfield, with whom Baker would work again on Zulu
(1964). The Concrete Jungle’s hybrid Euro/Hollywood feel recalls the mix
of U.S. filmmaking language and Continental sexual frankness of Riffifi
(1955), directed by another blacklistee, Jules Dassin. Certainly it’s easy to
see why The Concrete Jungle’s story of a marked man would appeal to
Losey.
As it moves from prison to wild
parties and a racetrack heist (honoring Kubrick’s 1956 The Killing in
the breach, this portrayal is far less detailed), the entire film is not just
ultra-tough but cacophonous, subtly underlining just how trapped in this
unaesthetic world Bannion really is.
Prison as a corrupt quasi-society
is really captured by The Concrete Jungle – there is little pretense the
inmates aren’t substantially running their own show, a world-within-a-world
that is frankly acknowledged by prison staff.
Government through criminality
has never been better captured than in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), which
climaxes with the underworld convening its own court - a vision that is
chilling today as an explicit portent of the Nazi rule. That only one attempt
to update M via a remake is less surprising than the identity of that
1951 remake’s director: Joseph Losey. Fritz Lang’s legacy both foreshadows and
underpins the stunning impact of The Concrete Jungle.
VideoVista
review Richard
Bowden
DVD
Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review
KQEK
(Mark R. Hasan) dvd review
15 Great British Prison Films That Are Worth Your Time ... Listed as #1, by Gareth Lloyd from Taste of Cinema
Five great British prison films | Screen Robot Matt Lee
EVE A- 93
aka: Eva
Losey's grim drama
was badly cut by the distributor, and what remains is a fascinating, if
overwrought, study of an amour fou. Set against the decadent background of a
cold, off-season Venice, and punctuated by Billie Holiday's voice, it tells of
ex-patriate writer Baker's obsession with high-class prostitute Moreau. Even
when he marries Lisi, he cannot get her out of his mind, and tries to kill her,
before sliding into destitution. Lisi (dubbed into English) is exquisite and
tragic, while Baker emotes passionately, and Moreau revels in her femme fatale
role. There are cameos by Peggy Guggenheim and Losey himself.
Eve Gerald Peary
Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker), a Welshman in Venetian exile, has become a howling drunk in residence at Harry's Bar, and, in flashback, we see the story of his descent.
Once a celebrated literary figure, toasted because of an
autobiographical novel about his coal-miner earlier life, Tyvian reigns at the
Venice Film Festival; and he's engaged to Francesca (Virna Lisi), the glamorous
editorial asistant of his Italian publisher. But one night, he meets Eve (Jean
Moreau), a high-priced courtesan who has broken into his apartment, and it's all
over. She's the ultimate femme fatale, and he bites deep into Eve's apple.
Though she kicks him out of bed, or makes him pay for sex, he can't resist her,
and he goes down, down, down. Eve is a semi-victory of style over content.
Michel Legrand's jazzy score, Gianni di Venanzo and Henri Decae's free-flowing,
Nouvelle Vague cinematography, Jeanne Moreau's many moods before the camera are
all plusses, but the main characters are both so off-putting and narcissistic
that there tryst becomes extremely tiresome. A rediscovered film directed by
Joseph Losey (Accident, The Servant) is certainly welcome, but this one, from a
potboiler novel by James Hadley Chase, proves a minor work.
Eva
(1964) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
In 1962, after toiling in the British B-movie industry for
years, blacklisted director Joseph Losey was finally offered a promising
project and a lucrative contract from the producing team of Robert and Raymond
Hakim (Belle de Jour, 1967). With a pulp fiction novel by James Hadley
Chase as his source material and
Eva was originally intended as a
three hour drama but Losey was forced to cut it down to a two and a half hour
running time by his producers. In that form, the film enjoyed several acclaimed
press screenings but censorship fears resulted in further editing on Eva and by the time it was released
theatrically, it ran a mere 103 minutes. Needless to say, Losey was terribly
disappointed with the final cut (he disowned it) and moved on to The Servant
(1963) which was a unanimous success with critics and the film that elevated
his status as a director.
Thanks to Kino International, we can finally see an alternate director's cut of
Eva (titled Eve in the
credits) and the original release version of the film on the same DVD! The
director's cut runs 119 minutes and, though shorter than Losey's 140 minute
cut, is much closer to his original conception. This version was taken from the
only surviving print of a Swedish/Finnish release print that was housed in the
British Film Institute. Although the visual quality is often on a par with VHS
public domain titles and there are two sets of Scandinavian subtitles, Eve
still affords Losey fans the opportunity to view several previously unseen
sequences that flesh out Eva and Tyvian's self-destructive relationship. Much
more pleasing to the eye is the shorter theatrical release version of Eva which perfectly captures the
decadent romantic allure of
Both Eva and Eve are presented in the 1:85:1
letterboxed format though, as noted, Eve
comes with a dual set of on-screen subtitles which are not optional. Otherwise,
the disk has no extra features other than an attractive snapcase and the liner
notes by Bret Wood.
Il
Grido - Bright Lights Film Journal Gary
Morris, January 1, 2001
Les Bonnes Femmes was produced by the famous — or infamous, depending on who’s talking — Hakim brothers, Raymond and Robert. They were also responsible for such international classics as Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, Bunuel’s Belle de Jour, Renoir’s La Bete Humaine, Duvivier’s Pepe le Moko — and Joseph Losey’s Eva (1962). The latter was a cause celebre for years in film circles, unavailable except in truncated, splicy, incomprehensible prints and discussed in those hushed tones reserved for masterpieces butchered by callous producers. The release of the DVD of Eva will change some of the terms of this discussion. It contains two versions of the film, one the Hakim brothers’ cut (103 minutes) and another, Swedish cut with an extra 12 minutes restored. Losey’s original version ran 155 minutes, leaving at minimum 40 minutes out of either cut. Both versions tell the same general story, with the few extra scenes in the longer one less revelation than compounding a problem. The result in either case is a problematic film indeed. It’s doubtful that adding any amount of footage could entirely salvage this curio, which, while fascinating in some respects, sinks under Losey’s obvious desperation to move from the respectable ranks of B-filmmakers into the rarefied sphere of the international cinema scene.
The Hakims brought James Hadley Chase’s pulpish novel to
Losey, and with its exotic locales, tormented male, femme fatale, and operatic
storyline, it seemed an ideal property for pushing Losey into the spotlight.
Most of the film was shot in and around
Eva follows the misadventures of a writer,
working-class Welshman Tyvian (Baker), who has written a bestseller allegedly
based on his life as a coal miner. The problem is that Tyvian, like many a
Losey hero, is assailed by doubts, and for good reason: he’s a phony who stole
the book from his dead brother. At the famed Harry’s Bar, he’s confronted by
film producer Sergio (Giorgio Albertazzi), whose wife Francesca (Lisi) was
Tyvian’s mistress before her death. The film then switches to flashback, and
introduces us to Eva (Moreau), a classy courtesan who breaks into Tyvian’s
house with the help of a wealthy trick. She spends what seem like hours
bathing, listening to Billie Holiday records, chain-smoking, and smiling to
herself. When Tyvian arrives, he tosses out the trick and is hit over the head
with an ashtray by Eva. This only encourages him, of course, and he spends the
rest of the film chasing her from
The film — both versions — is awash in pretentious existential angst of the kind that flows authentically through the films of, say, Antonioni but here simply looks foolish. No doubt Losey felt it was crucial to make this film larger than life in the acting, which is full of sturm und drang; in tricks of time, of which there are plenty; in theme — and in running time. But the film is doomed from the opening, a stentorian Biblical voiceover that’s more laughable than tantalizing: "And the man and the woman were naked together, and they were unashamed." They should have been. Tyvian’s masochism is ultimately self-defeating; he’s too wretched for too long to be of lasting interest. His pursuit of Eva begins to take on an unintended comic overtone as he endures endless physical and psychological assaults. And Eva is simply not an interesting character. Losey’s forte was always men, intelligent miserable men, no doubt a reflection of his own apparently constant anxieties. (Losey favorite Dirk Bogarde has written of the director’s crying jags that got so bad on one film that the actor had to take over directorial duties for ten days.) Losey’s major works — Accident, The Servant — are unconvincing in their portrayal of women, and Eva, true to form, never rises above her origins as a cardboard harpy from a potboiler novel. Her extreme self-involvement and tedious cruelties border on the grotesque, and even Losey’s visual legerdemain — classy mirror shots, stark high-angle compositions, gliding camerawork — can’t force her to live onscreen. She’s predictable and in the end, boring.
Losey’s collaborators are a mixed lot here. Michel LeGrand’s score gives the film a whimsical feel that’s annoying and inappropriate, but the photography (Gianni di Venanzo and Henri Decae) lends constant visual interest where the story flags. The mostly sharp transfer of both versions helps put this aspect over. As for the cuts, perverse as it sounds, the film might have benefited from more, not less. Endless footage of Moreau sponging her glistening flesh and the repeated-ad-nauseam refrain of a Billie Holiday tune are evidence that the Hakims, for all their ham-handedness, may not have been on the wrong track after all.
Eve:
Sinfully Underrated • Senses of Cinema Megan
Ratner from Senses of Cinema,
December 29, 2001
Unkind Cuts: Joseph Losey's Eve • Senses of Cinema Geoff Gardner from Senses of Cinema, December 29, 2001
Joseph Losey &
Harold Pinter: In search of poshlust times - BFI Nick James from BFI Screen Online, February 10, 2012
Eva
– the director's cut – 1962, Joseph Losey | Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson)
KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) also seen here: Movie
Review - - The Screen: Jeanne Moreau as Eva:Romantic ...
THE SERVANT
Great Britain (115 mi) 1963
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Losey's first bid for success as a
'prestige' director now looks embarrassingly contrived: an allegory on class
conflict (derived from Robin Maugham's novel) in which Bogarde's crafty
manservant achieves a sinister, game-playing role-reversal in the home of his
wealthy, decadent, upper class master (Fox). Neither Pinter's pregnant dialogue
nor the generally svelte performances can disguise the fact that there's less
here than meets the eye and ear.
Edinburgh U
Film Society (Spiros Gangas) review
An extraordinary film which works
successfully on several levels, The Servant is essentially a study of servility
set in the context of a class-bound Britain.
Tony (James Fox) is a rich young
man from the upper class. After buying a large house in Chelsea in which to
eventually live with his wife-to-be Susan (Wendy Craig), he hires a deferential
man called Barrett (Dick Bogarde) to be his manservant. Tony is well pleased
with his purchases, christening the latter a "treasure". It all just
seems to good to be true and it is. It soon transpires that this won't be a
conventional master-servant relationship. Throughout the film we witness a
gradual power shift between Tony and Barrett as the former falls more and more
under the latter's spell. All the time, homosexual undertones are never far
from the surface.
When released in 1964, The
Servant was both an artistic and commercial success. Scripted by Harold Pinter,
it's a very revealing film. It questions our assumptions about relationships
and in the process reveals the hypocrisy that abounds throughout society. The
whole thing is perfectly pulled off. Joseph Losey's direction is exciting and
the acting by the whole cast is great. However, it's Dirk Bogarde, by virtue of
his haunting presence and pointed glances, that dominates the film.
Joseph Losey &
Harold Pinter: In search of poshlust times - BFI Nick James from BFI Screen Online, February 10, 2012 (excerpt)
The hallway of a house
in Chelsea's Royal Avenue; the unlocked front door opens at the push of a
finger. In comes a neat man wearing a pork pie hat and a dark raincoat. This is
Barrett. The camera backtracks away, around a corner into a room from which we
can see a side-on view of the bottom of the stairs. Barrett comes back into
view. He goes to the stairs, puts his hand on the banister and peers upwards,
seemingly about to ascend.
The Servant is about the obsequious Barrett's slow takeover of his upper-class master, Tony, and his well-appointed home. Barrett's tactics are simple but effective: undermining Tony's girlfriend by bringing in housemaid Vera, a seductive young slut, and making his indolent master increasingly dependent on his ministrations, eventually including booze and drugs. Pinter's claustrophobic scenario enabled Losey to employ all his European art-cinema riffs at the service of a very English interior made sinister - the London house as a kind of nightclub cum prison - and a very English problem: the class system.
In their creative relationship, neither Losey nor Harold Pinter was master or servant. "I'm not accustomed to writing from notes and I don't like this," Losey reported Pinter saying at their drink-fuelled first script meeting. Pinter's version was as follows: "I went to see [Losey] at his house in Chelsea. 'I like the script,' he said. 'Thanks,' I said. 'But there are a number of things I don't like.' 'What things?' I asked. He told me. 'Well why don't you make another movie?' I said, and left the house." Two days later they patched it up and, as Pinter says, "over the next 25 years we worked on three more screenplays and never had another cross word."
Insomniac Losey could be prickly, a burly man whose emotions often ran to tears. Harold Pinter was the self-contained truth tester, a precise and correct writer at the top of his game; an actor too, who knew what actors could do with cadence and diction. It was another actor who brought them together, Dirk Bogarde, instrumental in so many ways in The Servant's groundbreaking - standing in for Losey when he had pneumonia (only to see most of his scenes reshot), bringing James Fox in as Tony. Bogarde used The Servant to trade in his matinee idol image - already made questionable by his brave turn as the homosexual barrister in Victim. Following his scheming turn as Barrett, he instead became the weather-changeable face in semi-decadent art films such as Darling (1965), Accident (1967), Justine (1969), Visconti's The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), The Serpent (1973), The Night Porter (1974), Providence (1977) and Despair (1978).
It was Losey who first showed Robin Maugham's novelette The Servant to Bogarde in 1954. Originally separately commissioned by director Michael Anderson, Pinter stripped it of its first-person narrator, its yellow book snobbery and the arguably anti-Semitic characterisation of Barrett - oiliness, heavy lids - replacing them with an economical language that implied rather than stated the slippage of power relations away from Tony towards Barrett. In 1962 Bogarde read Pinter's script and rang Losey, who was shooting Eve. By the time director and writer were brought together, Losey was seething with fury at the Hakim brothers' mutilation of his beloved Eve. But that's another story.
To focus instead on Losey's pretentious leanings, the standard view is that Pinter saved Losey from his excessive tendencies. Losey himself felt differently. "It took me many, many years to get over the feeling that The Servant was inferior to Eve," he said to Michel Ciment. "It cost a lot less, of course; it was less elaborated, less personal, and in many ways it's a kind of remake." As in Eve, degradation and sexual revenge are present, but here they're not so heavily signalled. The restraint that Pinter's disciplined dialogue imposes - along with the lower budget and the one-house set - reined Losey in to powerful effect; he is quite mistaken about The Servant's inferiority.
The Servant's fusion of Losey's sensitivity to spaces and objects with Pinter's stark approach to image and language - seen through cinematographer Douglas Slocombe's magnificent black-and-white photography - initiated a new kind of cinema in the UK, one distinctly more ambitious than the social realism of the Woodfall films. The Servant transformed Bogarde's image, cemented Losey's fruitful partnership with Pinter and launched the cinema careers of James Fox and Sarah Miles (who played Vera). A few years later Fox would play a lost young thug opposite Mick Jagger's reclusive rock star in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's Performance (1970), the quintessence of the kind of cinema under discussion here.
Tom Sutpen
review
extensive essay on The Servant
Bright Lights
Film Journal: Tom Sutpen Class Dismissed, Tom Sutpen again with a different essay,
May 2005
The
Village Voice: Andrew Sarris March
26, 1964
The
Village Voice: Zachary Wigon July
17, 2013
The
Damned (Joseph Losey 1963) - Britmovie
Artforum: Melissa
Anderson July 23, 2013
Little White Lies: David Jenkins
CinePassion:
Fernando F. Croce
arts•meme: Robert Koehler August 29, 201
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
DVD Verdict
(Dezhda Mountz) dvd review
Cinema Scope: Jonathan Rosenbaum March 21, 2016
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Chicago Reader: Dave Kehr capsule
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
ACCIDENT
Great Britain (105 mi) 1967
Time Out review Tom Milne
A stunningly confident, oblique study
of six people (three men, two wives, one girl) and the way they tear each other
to pieces emotionally amid the droning calm of an Oxford summer, as urbanity is
ruffled by an accident that begins to send out lazy tendrils of hostility and
suspicion. The performances are superb all round. With Losey's camera taking
its cue for reticence from Pinter's script (adapted from the novel by Nicholas
Mosley), Accident is an eminently civilised film, sometimes criticised
for distilling a bland classicism out of the baroque provocations that made
Losey's work from The Criminal to The Servant so excitingly
unpredictable to watch. But what surprises is the extent to which, in
discovering the real pain and the areas of darkness lurking beneath the surface
of these donnish lives, Losey in fact reverts to the mood and methods of his
early American masterpiece, The Prowler.
Edinburgh U
Film Society (Spiros Gangas) review
Based on the novel by Nicholas
Mosley, this is a sample from Losey's finest work. It marks the end of the
fruitful collaboration with Bogarde (King and Country, The Servant, Modesty
Blaise) , whom the director rightly used despite the initial pressures from the
producers who insisted in using Richard Burton. With a refined and rich script
written by Harold Pinter, Accident provides a stunning examination of various
aspects of English life to such an extent that it is not surprising that Losey,
although an American, is commonly thought to be English.
As a car accident agitates the
relationship between six people (three men, two women and a girl) in Oxford,
implicit waves of suspicion emerge, drawing the whole group into a complex web
of self-destructive tendencies. The circular structure of the film is
determined by the accident which, although unimportant in itself, is a
beginning and an end of the emotional turmoil which permeates the lives of all
six of them. This psychological turbulence is skillfully veiled by the
aristocratic climate of Oxford, portrayed with microscopic accuracy by Gerry
Fisher's camerawork. The formalism of Losey's film culminates in the scene of
the picnic in the garden and the scene on the river, in both of which the
demonstration of camera virtuosity reveals an amazing grasp of the detail.
Dirk Bogarde who comes up with
lines such as: "All aristocrats are born to be killed... I am immortal
!", leads the eclectic cast ( Stanley Baker, Jacqueline Sassard, Michael
York etc) in splendid performances. Aesthetically impressive, structurally complex
- especially due to the excessive use of flashbacks - Accident is ultimately a
film of enormous resonance. Watch out for Harold Pinter himself as Mr. Bell !
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal
"It's about how characters in their lives settle down,
and they stay settled all their lives," said Joseph Losey of his 1967
film ACCIDENT, "then something may happen that suddenly jumps them
out of it, and they leap ahead or leap backwards, suddenly and without any
warning." Losey is describing the formal structure of ACCIDENT here
as much as its characters—a calm surface, a meticulous sense of
place, interrupted now and then by flashbacks, flashforwards, and a
general kind of disorientation accomplished through the disjuncture of
sound and image. This is a drama of displacement, with important events
pushed offscreen and the nature of key relationships left tantalizingly
unclarified. This being a Pinter script, silence is the predominant
rhythmic instrument and driver of character development. (Happily, there
are a few acid lines, too. One imagines LaCrosse-born Losey nodded
approvingly when the Oxford provost declares that he's "surprised to
hear that Aristotle is on the syllabus in the State of Wisconsin.")
As a followup to Pinter and Losey's art house hit THE SERVANT, ACCIDENT
is curiously withholding, almost punishing in its singular focus
on middle-aged malaise. Despite its skillfully preserved narrative
ambiguities, it's not a hip show; ACCIDENT is, in some sense, the anti-BLOWUP,
acutely charting the gap between the encrusted primness of Oxford and a
sexual revolution whose distant echoes are so faint that they probably
register as a nasty rumor at best. (It's a very chaste work overall, but
that hasn't stopped the democratic horndogs of IMDb from elevating
"nude pantyhose," "foot closeup," and "female
stockinged legs" to the fetishistic forefront of ACCIDENT's keyword
summary.) ACCIDENT is ultimately closer to the time-shifting traumas of Resnais,
described by Losey as "virtually the only director I can learn
from"; the cameo from Delphine Seyrig seals the comparison, though
the violence cuts closer to home than it does in MURIEL... all the way to
the front lawn, in fact. We're left, in the end, with utterly banal
crises—an older professor lusting after a younger student, a man sleeping
with his colleague's wife, a car accident, and a fight over who's supposed
to cook supper—that conveniently leave the real lusts and desires unspoken.
Armond White has praised ACCIDENT as "catnip to gay filmgoers
precisely for Losey and Bogarde’s sly and intense exploration of sexual
undercurrents in masculine relationships" and he's not wrong: the
film is even more interesting if you read the Dirk Bogarde-Michael York-Jacqueline
Sassard triangle as one threatened less by Bogarde and York's mutual
attraction to Sassard than by Bogarde's jealous recognition that Sassard
might be stealing York from him. Either way, the performances are
magnificent, especially Bogarde and Stanley Baker as the hunky embodiment
of academic rot in a three-piece suit.
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
Joseph
Losey's "Accident,"
with screenplay by Harold
Pinter, has crept into four neighborhood theaters for a week's run. No
wonder we have waited so long for the 1967 British winner at Cannes; this
quiet, brilliant film, which seems to consist of dialog and in fact consists of
emotion, must have worried the exhibitors. By sneaking it in for a week with a
minimum of advertising, they will no doubt make their fears come true.
No matter; "Accident"
will find its own audience, this week or next year, because it's a good film.
It involves a group of teachers, students and wives at Oxford: Bred to an
intellectual tradition, raised on ideas and hypotheses, they are unexpectedly
caught in a sexual competition. They're too "civilized" to settle
their differences by pounding each other (although no doubt they admired Brando
in " A Streetcar Named Desire"). But they play emotional games using
words instead of fists, and in the end they are more brutal than an early Brando
character because they know how to hurt people more.
Losey establishes the mood by a series of low-key performances and a very quiet
camera style. His camera tends to linger on scenes after the characters have
left, suggesting that their intrigues run counter to the passive nature of
their world. The subtle, controlled performances of the principal actors make
this work.
The story involves two Oxford professors, an extrovert separated from his wife
(Stanley
Baker) and a quiet, repressed married man (Dirk
Bogarde) whose wife is pregnant again. Both men are attracted to a young
Austrian student (Jacqueline
Sassard). She is engaged to Bogarde's student (Michael
York). Bogarde would like to approach her, but holds back (as he tells
himself) in deference to York. Baker lacks such qualms, seduces the girl, and
even takes her to Bogarde's home one evening for a rendezvous.
This is the outline of the story; its fascination comes from Bogarde's
perfectly calculated moves to seduce the girl himself and, incidentally, win
his undeclared war with Baker. His victory comes only after the
"accident" of the title.
The film is put together as carefully as a Hitchcock. The plot depends on
coincidences, timing and the resources available in the limited Oxford world.
But it is also recognizably a work of Pinter in the way the story is revealed
backwards, in scenes that are jigsawed together to make an emotional continuity
instead of a straightforward story line.
Joseph Losey &
Harold Pinter: In search of poshlust times - BFI Nick James from BFI Screen Online, February 10, 2012
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
THE GO BETWEEN
Great Britain (116 mi) 1971
An exquisitely
nuanced drama of love and class prejudice seen through the eyes of a
13-year-old boy. Guard is the young teenager in 1900 England who's invited to
stay with a wealthy school-friend for a long, hot summer. He develops a crush
on his friend's older sister, Christie, who's engaged to a viscount. However,
she's having a secret affair with local tenant farmer Bates and the two adults
use the child to ferry messages between them. Pinter's script gently dissects
the class issues while never forgetting the love story or the pain of the
child, and Losey directs with an eye to the subtleties of the drama.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Losey's adaptation of LP Hartley's
novel is one of his more impressive later works. Together with screenwriter Harold
Pinter, he creates another of his depictions of the destructive side of the
English class system, as a love affair between the daughter of an affluent
country family and a local farmer is tragically thwarted by prejudice and convention.
Seen through the eyes of a young boy who acts as the instrument for the
couple's assignations, the affair becomes the nexus for all the repression and
unspoken manipulations brewing under the polite facade of an apparently
civilised society; battle becomes personal on the cricket field, and the chink
of teacups hides vicious whispers and plotting. It occasionally becomes a bit
too precious, especially with the inserts of the grown-up go-between visiting
his past haunts, but it's strong on atmosphere (the Norfolk locations are
beautifully shot by Gerry Fisher),
performance and moral nuance.
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This review contains spoilers.]
There was a time, fairly recent, when the British upper
classes thought it was a shade embarrassing to have to work for a living. Boys
from middle-class families might attend the same school as upper-class boys,
but they were tarnished, somehow, by their parents' direct contact with money.
Money was something that needed to pass through a few sets of intervening
hands, to let the sweat dry, before it could be spent by the aristocracy.
In a famous essay about English boarding schools, George Orwell delineated this
delicate, cruel class distinction. He came from a white-collar family that made
less than many blue-collar families, and yet had to present certain
"standards" to the world. One of these was the necessity to send its
children away to schools which, although they were shabby by Eton standards,
were at least private. The children were the ones who suffered directly at the
hands of class snobbism, of course, and sometimes their personalities were
marked for life.
Joseph
Losey's "The
Go-Between" is about class distinction and its warping effect upon the
life of one small boy. The story is set in the days before World War I,
privileged days that seemed to stretch endlessly before the British upper
class. The boy, Leo, comes to spend a summer holiday at the home of a rich
friend. And he falls in hopeless schoolboy love with the friend's older sister
(Julie
Christie).
The sister is engaged to marry well, but she is in love with a roughshod tenant
farmer (Alan
Bates), and she enlists the boy to carry messages back and forth between
them. The boy has only a shadowy notion at first about the significance of the
messages, but during the summer he is sharply disillusioned about love,
fidelity, and his own place in the great scheme of things.
Losey and his screenwriter, Harold
Pinter, are terribly observant about small nuances of class. In the
family's matriarch (Margaret
Leighton) they give us a woman who seems to support the British class
system all by herself, simply through her belief in it. They show a father and
a fiancé who are aware of the girl's affair with the farmer, but do nothing
about it. They are confident she will do the "right thing" in the
end, and she does.
"Why don't you marry Ted," the boy asks the young woman.
"Because I can't," she replies. "Then why are you marrying
Trimmington?" "Because I must." She understands, and she is
tough enough to endure. Indeed, at the end of the film she turns up years later
as an old lady very much in the image of her mother. The victim is the boy, who
is scarred sexually and emotionally by his summer experience. When we see him
at the film's end, he is a sort of bloodless eunuch, called in to perform one
last errand for the woman.
Losey's production is elegantly costumed and mounted and has the same eye for
details of character that distinguished his two previous films with Pinter
("The Servant" and "Accident").
One visual device is distracting, however; he keeps giving us short
flash-forwards to the end of the film. On the one hand, this eventually gives
the ending away. On the other, it imposes a ponderous significance on the events
that go before, diluting their freshness.
If the film had been told in straight chronology followed by an epilogue, it
would have been more effective. In fact, the epilogue could have been lost
altogether with no trouble; everything that will become of this boy in his
adult life is already there, by implication, at the end of his summer holiday.
Joseph Losey & Harold Pinter: In search of poshlust times - BFI Nick James from BFI Screen Online, February 10, 2012
CultureCartel.com
(Stephen Murray) review [4.5/5]
Cleveland
Press (Tony Mastroianni) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Per-Olof Strandberg
GALILEO
Losey had been
longing to film Brecht's celebrated stage play for decades and he finally got
the chance when the American Theatre agreed to finance it. Its backing helped
to secure an illustrious cast, although Topol was revealed to lack depth in the
title role. Brecht envisaged Galileo as a traitor to his own principles, but
Topol plays him as a much maligned, misunderstood genius and the play
consequently becomes no more than a protracted biographical sketch. The other
problem is that he spends much of the movie procuring funds, but isn't seen to
do much of significance once he has them.
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
Last year the American Film Theater seemed hellbent on bringing us culture even at the risk of boring us to death, which it almost did with the exceptions of "The Homecoming," Alan Bates's performance in "Butley" and its pick-up of the National Theater Company's production of "Three Sisters." Things look a lot better this year on the basis of the initial presentation of the film theater's second season here.
The opening attraction is one of Bertolt Brecht's most fascinating, most abrasive, most accessible plays, "Galileo," directed by Joseph Losey, a man who knows more about film and more about Brecht than possibly any other film director at work today. "Galileo," which was shown at selected theaters yesterday, will be repeated today at matinees and evening performances.
It's apparent from the opening credits of the film—a view of
the movie set as seen from the rafters of the soundstage—that Mr. Losey knows
exactly what kind of "filmed theater" he wants to achieve, and how to
achieve it. There's no nonsense about "opening up" the Brecht play to
make it look like a movie. The sets—stylized, glossy, new, with perspectives
foreshortened—are always sets, not some bleary-eyed set-decorator's attempts to
recreate realistically the look of 17th-century
One never for a moment forgets that this "Galileo" is a stage piece, yet the awareness has the effect of enhancing our perceptions of what is being said and done. Everything takes place in a world where the sun is subject to man's laws, where the wind has been turned off and where every sound that is heard is important. Nothing is by chance. The laws that govern this world are as much anathema to the realist cinema as Galileo's were to the Roman Catholic Church.
Mr. Losey has experimented with this style before, in
"King and Country" in 1967, but it is more fully and beautifully
realized in "Galileo," whose first American theatrical productions he
staged in
There is one problem with the film, and it is a major one; the casting of Topol in the title role as the contradictory physicist who first challenged the church through his discoveries, recanted when faced with torture by the Inquisition, then lived out his days engaged in surreptitious research that finally became his most monumental work.
In spite of Brecht's impatience with the theater of emotion, and with identification by the audience with a character in ways that confuse dialectics, his Galileo is a marvelously complicated, fallible, identifiable character, so much so that to attempt to play him in a fashion that might be described as winning is to put frosting atop frosting.
Topol remains the kind of actor I thought he was in "Fiddler on the Roof"—all resonant voice, calculated gestures, surface mannerisms, most of which seem designed to convince the audience that he's a lovable fellow who, at worst, has moments of being crotchety. What's worse is that although he's a big man he imparts no sense of intellectual heft.
In a key scene in which Galileo debates his discoveries with
the cardinals in
Thus much of the toughness and wit of the Brecht script are lost when Topol is on screen. Just how good the production might have been with another actor is seen in two magnificent scenes in which Topol doesn't appear. The first is that hugely theatrical scene in which the Pope (Michael Lonsdale) is being robed for an audience and trying not to give in to the Inquisitor's arguments to do something about Galileo. The other—Mr. Losey's boldest cinematic conception—is set on what could be a theater stage, when Galileo's followers nervously await word whether the master has recanted.
With the exception of Topol, the cast is superb, full of actors who really do appear to be able to think. It includes John Gielgud and Margaret Leighton in what are virtually walk-ons and, in the larger roles, Mr. Lonsdale, Edward Fox (the Inquisitor), and John McEnery and Tom Conti as two of Galileo's most loyal associates.
Topol is not easily acceptable but the rest of the production has exceptional style and intelligence, the sort of things one should be able to expect from the American Film Theater.
Galileo Losey,
Brecht and Galileo, by Martin Walsh from Jump Cut, 1975
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
MR. KLEIN
Great Britain (123 mi) 1976
The action of Losey's film takes place
against the Nazi deportation of French Jews - a set of circumstances which the
film doesn't so much explore as get lost in. Klein (Delon), a Parisian art
dealer, is delivered a copy of a Jewish newspaper. Investigating this, he
becomes aware of a mysterious Jewish alter-ego bearing the same name. Though
they do not meet, Klein finds the other impinging increasingly on his life,
even living in his flat when he's not there. The confusion of identities forces
Klein to defend himself against a charge of being Jewish. Predictably, the film
ends with his deportation; quite unaccountably, Losey makes this a deliberate
choice, as Klein purposely avoids the lawyers bringing the evidence which can
release him, a piece of fatalism which resolves nothing whatsoever. Sadly,
Losey's determinedly enigmatic treatment turns a potentially very interesting
theme into cheap mystification.
Mr.
Klein (1976) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Pablo Kjolseth
At one point in the film, our protagonist Mr. Klein yells
out in frustration: "This has nothing to do with me!" Ironically,
"this" Mr. Klein
(1976) has everything to do with the man who plays Monseur Klein, the enigmatic
French actor, Alain Delon. As co-producer, he receives a full-screen credit
alongside the director, Joseph Losey (1909-1984), so that just the words
"Losey-Delon" fill the frame at the end of the film, which is perhaps
fitting given that Delon claims this his favorite performance. (Losey himself
quotes the actor, in Michel Ciment's book Conversations with Losey, as
having said, during the shooting of the film, "This is going to be the
best performance I ever gave in my life. It's going to be the best picture you
ever made in your life.") Even within the context of the story itself,
while Mr. Klein may be the subject of a mistaken identity in Nazi occupied
France, it is undoubtedly his story. No matter how you cut it, this definitely
has everything to do with Mr. Klein. But, of course, the question remains: who
is Mr. Klein?
The combination of Nazi politics and identity issues are made clear from the
very beginning when a frightened and naked woman is given a callous physical inspection
by a doctor who quickly ascertains various "Semitic" features, and
from here we venture out into the streets where signs state "No Jews
Allowed." We're in Paris during the Occupation, year 1942, and when we
first see Mr. Klein he is ruthlessly buying art from a desperate Jew that he
knows has no time to haggle over price. Mr. Klein lives the good life, with a
beautiful girlfriend, nice clothes, a luxurious house, and everything seems to
be going his way until....a Jewish newspaper addressed to Mr. Klein arrives at
his doorstep. As our Mr. Klein goes out of his way to redress this error, he
finds himself getting deeper into trouble as his personal life crumbles away so
that a face-to-face confrontation with the other Mr. Klein becomes a grand obsession.
Annette Insdorf, in her book about films and the Holocaust, INDELIBLE
SHADOWS, writes that "Although Pauline Kael dismissed Mr. Klein by claiming "the
atmosphere is heavily pregnant, with no delivery," the film's richness can
be discovered through close analysis. For example, the credits unfold over a
tapestry of a vulture with an arrow through its heart - an image whose meaning
will be revealed at an auction a few scenes later, and whose import permeates
the film. The auctioneer interprets the canvas as representing indifference,
followed by cruelty, arrogance, greed, and finally remorse, and he points out
the Cabalistic origin of the signs. By invoking Jewish mysticism, the film
suggests not only the concrete aesthetic significance of the tapestry, but the
symbolic component of these attributes: they describe France - incarnated at
the outset by Klein - in its movement from indifference to remorse vis-a-vis
the Jews."
Stylistically, viewers should also look at how Losey, while shooting in color,
manages an aesthetic that hews closely to the stark contrast one normally sees
in a film that is shot in black-and-white (the medium he originally preferred
for Mr. Klein ).
Also, Losey's personal experience on McCarthy's black-list certainly informed
his ability to create an atmosphere where fear governs the streets with healthy
portions of the Kafkaesque. In Ciment's book the director says that, in regards
to one pivotal scene, in reality, "all the people packed into the stadium
were wearing yellow stars. But in my film only about 25 per cent are, as I
wanted people to also think of the stadiums in Chile and elsewhere. There was
an incident in the stadium at Santiago which I tried to transfer to 1942: a
Chilean musician had his guitar taken away from him and his hands were cut off
and he continued, with the blood pouring from him, to sing a revolutionary
song. I shot a similar scene with a Jew whose violin was snatched from him and
smashed and whose hands were trampled on - But it jarred with the rest of the film.
The emotion it produced was too strong in the context."
Despite Losey's best attempts at making Mr. Klein a subtle examination of class identity, it still made many
people uncomfortable. And, as Edwin Jahiel writes in his liner notes,
"when Mr. Klein was
released in France, it met with indifference or hostility, no doubt because
viewers felt touchy about certain aspects of how the French were depicted
during the German occupation. This touchiness may explain why the Cesar
nominations it did garner ignored Italian scriptwriter Franco Solinas (THE
BATTLE OF ALGIERS), who was responsible for the "anti-French"
story."
DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review
DVD Savant Review: Mr.
Klein - DVD Talk Glenn
Erickson
dOc DVD Review:
Mr. Klein (1976) - Digitally Obsessed Matt Peterson
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]
DVD
of the Week: Joseph Losey's “Mr. Klein” | The New Yorker Richard Brody
Images Journal DVD Reviews David Gurevich, also reviewing TIME WITHOUT PITY and LA TRUITE
Cool, Elegant 'Mr. Klein' Is a Metaphorical Movie - The New York Times
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
LA TRUITE
Huppert is the trout, a cold fish who
swims by herself, not needing much from anyone, tending to attract predators
but equipped with very sharp teeth. She wears a T-shirt which has 'Maybe' on
the front, but has 'Never' on the back, and 'It's all the same to me' is her
key (indeed her exit) line. The film recounts the fate of several mostly
disagreeable characters who fail to read the warning signs. Losey's penultimate
film is one of his most assured, depicting with unusual objectivity the impact
of a type of personality met with in life from time to time, but not often in
the movies. From the novel by Roger Vailland.
La
Truite (1982) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Pablo Kjolseth
La Truite
(1982, and a.k.a. The Trout)
was the penultimate film directed by
On its simplest level, La Truite
follows the life of Frédérique (Huppert), a farm girl of modest origins working
on a trout farm in the Jura mountain region that straddles
What La Truite
has to say about gender politics and multi-national corporations are subtle
when compared to its overt character clashes but ultimately more interesting
and also what really help to achieve the director's goal of an enterprise that
feels relatively timeless. In fact, Losey's use of
Home Vision Entertainment's dvd release of La Truite presents the color film in its widescreen ratio and also
includes a filmography for Joseph Losey, and selected filmographies for both
Huppert and Moreau.
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Matt Peterson) dvd review (Grade D+) Prepare for the downfall of Joseph Losey
DVD Town
(William David Lee) dvd review
DVD Talk
(Matt Langdon) dvd review [3/5]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2.5/5]
KQEK
(Mark R. Hasan) dvd review
Images
Journal DVD Reviews David Gurevich,
also reviewing TIME WITHOUT PITY and MR. KLEIN
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Lou Ye
SUZHOU RIVER
China Germany Netherlands Japan
Suzhou River Shelly
Kraicer from a Chinese Cinema Page
The outstanding Chinese language film of the 2000 Hong Kong
International Film Festival was
With its fractured, dissolving, indeterminate and unreliable narrators and a
narrative marked by self-reflexive mise-en-abîme,
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Suzhou River (2000) Lizzie Francke from Sight and Sound, December 2000
Suzhou River's doubles and drifters create a watery take
on Vertigo.
On release, he hangs out in the Happy Tavern. Glimpsing Meimei he is convinced that she is his lost love Moudan and begins to court her. After the jealous videographer arranges for Mardar to be beaten up, Mardar decides to leave town. Later the videographer receives a note from Mardar, stating that he has found the real Moudan working in a shop in the suburbs. Later still, the videographer is summoned to identify Mardar and Moudan's bodies, dragged from the river. The videographer informs Meimei who rushes to the scene. After asking the videographer whether he loves her in the same way that Mardar loved Moudan, Meimei disappears.
Review
Writer-director Lou Ye's second
film, a tale of amour fou set in modern-day Shanghai, opens with
shots of the swirling Suzhou river from which it takes its name. As we float
past the cluttered banks of the city, the unnamed - and unseen - videographer
who narrates the film ponders the many secrets the river holds. As with the
muddied waterways of Taipei in Tsai Ming-Liang's The River/Heliu,
the polluted estuary here is the powerful symbol at the film's core. A site of
flux, it suggests the transient nature of the lives in the story that unfolds:
the anonymous videographer, through whose lens we see much of the story; his
elusive girlfriend Meimei (Zhou Xun), a nightclub performer who dresses up as a
mermaid as part of her act; Mardar (Jia Hongsheng), a small-time crook and
motorcycle courier; and finally Moudan (also played by Zhou Xun), the daughter
of a rich businessman, whom Mardar is hired to ferry around town. The
videographer tells of how Mardar and Moudan fall in love but when Mardar gets
involved in a botched attempt to kidnap her, Moudan disappears. Bereft, Mardar
catches sight of Meimei's act, becomes convinced she's his lost love and
attempts to seduce her.
Despite the gritty, almost
documentary feel Lou Ye gives these opening moments, his film steers a
different course from the downbeat realism that characterises the work of his
Beijing Film Academy contemporaries Zhang Yuan (Beijing Bastards/Beijing
Zazhong, 1993) and Wang Xiaoshuai (The Days/Dong-Chun
De Rizi, 1993). Building the narrative from chance encounters and
interconnected lives, Lou makes obvious nods to Wong Kai-Wai's Chungking
Express/Chongqing Senlin. Stylistically the film also owes
something to Wong's restless visual sensibility: jump cuts abound and director
of photography Wang Yu's dextrous handheld camerawork snakes like the river itself.
One of the most memorable images adroitly captures the mix of observational
realism and lush romanticism: as the videographer tells of how the locals
explain the disappearance of Moudan, we catch a glimpse of her, dressed as a
mermaid, bathed in a pool of warm golden light, her tail sunk in the murky
waters of the Suzhou. Meimei's mermaid - the persona she adopts for her
nightclub act, complete with a long blonde wig and emerald-scaled tail - exists
in an equally incongruous environment, the dingy drinking dive the Happy
Tavern. At the beginning the videographer catches only a glimpse of the
coquettish Meimei as she prepares for her act, but it's clear she has beguiled
him, much as her mythical counterparts were said to drive men to distraction -
and to their doom.
Lou's decision to use the figure
of the mermaid - which isn't part of Chinese folklore - is characteristic of
the global outlook of his sixth-generation film-making contemporaries.
Similarly he markedly embraces what was presumably illicit cinema history by
paying a clear stylistic debt to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, the
perennial favourite of cinéphile directors worldwide. The river, the bridge,
the obsessive, haunted protagonist and the girl who might not be quite who she
seems: this drifting reverie of a film shares elements that have figured in
countless movies inspired by Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece from Chris Marker's
arthouse sci-fi La Jetée (1962) to Paul Verhoeven's glossy
thriller Basic Instinct (1992). But Suzhou River is
less a radically new spin on Hitchcock's film than a free-fall replay that
revels in its lachrymose love story, as Mardar, like Vertigo's
hero Scottie, falls for a woman who's seemingly the double of his lost love.
Much of the film is seen through
the lens of the videographer - who admits to spending more time
"observing" than working - and is accompanied by his pensive musings.
The device brings to mind the first-person camerawork of Robert Montgomery's
1946 thriller Lady in the Lake, but whereas the subjective visual
strategy in that movie was really only a noir novelty, here it
deepens the dreamlike intensity and haunting, slippery sense of unreality.
Narrating Mardar and Moudan's story, the videographer's voiceover often assumes
a tentative, improvisory quality: against a reflection of Mardar lit by a
flickering bulb, he hesitates before letting us into his backstory as if he's
making it up; later, as Mardar and Moudan get to know one another, the
narrative seems to stall, and the videographer asks: "What happens
next?" ("Love, of course," is his answer, but he could just as
honestly have added betrayal and death.)
So much of what we see is
filtered through the videographer's lens that it's difficult to take things at
face value. Mardar and Moudan's love story isn't exactly idealised - he betrays
and kidnaps her - but it's more deeply felt and richly realised than the
videographer's obsessive crush on Meimei. The videographer's relationship with
Meimei might be effervescent, but the message underlying the narrative drift
that carries Mardar and Moudan to their watery ends is hardly comforting: that
true love is ever allusive and can at any point disappear into the darkness.
Ironically, given the hold they
have over the videographer and Mardar, Meimei and Moudan are the least alluring
aspects of Suzhou River. Neither is a true-blooded femme fatale
in the noir tradition the film evokes; they're both a
little too ditzy and prone to flighty behaviour, if not childlike. At various
moments Moudan is seen toying with a mermaid doll as if to emphasise her
girlish qualities. (At least Vertigo's Scottie fell for a grown-up
woman.) But while the film is at its most irritating when we follow the
lovelorn videographer's record of the pouting Meimei, the unsteady first-person
point of view at least foregrounds the inherent voyeurism at play.
In the end, it's hard not to be
swept up by the strong current of Suzhou River: a seductive and
atmospheric conundrum that works pleasingly as an exercise in storytelling. The
Chinese-box structure allows for multiple parallels, most obviously with the
doubling of Meimei and Moudan, as the videographer latches on to - or for that
matter invents - Madar's tale. Meanwhile these loved ones may be only echoes of
another unseen desire: with this fresh piece of film-making from mainland
China, Lou Ye swoons to the memory of Hitchcock.
At 24fps: Suzhou River by Lou Ye (2000) *China Ng Suat May
MCLC Resource Center review
by Robert Chi Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic
Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China's Moral Voice, by Jerome
Sibergeld Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004
Suzhou River (film) - Wikipedia
SUMMER PALACE B+ 92
China France
Fuck those bastards
An existentialist Chinese historical drama? Bordering on a similar subject in Bertolucci’s THE DREAMERS, this is actually a much better film. In fact it’s a superb film for the opening 90 minutes, one of the best seen all year, with dazzling camera virtuosity that creates a pulsating tempo of the moment utilizing tracking shots encircling a boat moving slowly down a river, or following passengers on a train, bicycle riders, and even pedestrians walking down the street. A beautiful young girl, Yu Hong (Hao Lei), leaves her boy friend and her small town of Tumen near the Korean border after she is accepted at Beijing University in 1987, where the mood of the arriving students is brilliantly depicted, especially the frantic emotional whirlwind that takes place in the cramped living quarters, as well as the extreme innocence of American dance music, which effectively broadens the age group of similarly depicted disaffected Taiwanese high school students in Edward Yang’s A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY. Yu Hong narrates her internal thoughts which she writes in her diary, which are filled with a jumble of emotions as she begins to fall in love with another student, Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), who becomes the love of her life, an affair that takes a turn for the worse when adolescent jealousy sets in.
Student life is no different in Beijing than anywhere else in the world, as
for the first time, kids have a greater sense of freedom, a chance to make
personal choices, to explore their own curiosity, and to share these new
thoughts and feelings with other kids their same age. Yu Hong and Zhou Wei are much talked about on
campus, as they are so open about their torrid affair, exposing their love and
their travails for all to see, which results in a turbulent separation where Yu
Hong jumps in the sack with others while still thinking of Zhou Wei, who, more
behind the scenes, does the same. By
1989, Yu Hong’s best friend is Li Ti (Hu Ling), an outspoken, independent
minded woman with a stable, older boy friend, both of whom could be likely
instigators behind the student rebellion movement. At this time, students are rallying in the
streets pleading for a more democratic society, jumping onto trucks that take
them to demonstrations, leading to the disaster of Tiananmen Square, which is
only abstractly revealed by the students anger upon their return to campus,
their noticeable frustration (“Fuck those bastards!”), and their incendiary
mood swings, which follow many of them for the rest of their lives. The hand held camera getting jostled around
in the street mayhem perfectly depicts the frenzy of the moment, where in the
blink of an eye circumstances spin out of control and friends are instantly
separated by an engulfing chaos, but they continually search in the crowd for
someone they know, yet find themselves alone against army tanks. In this muddled disorientation, the camera
follows Yu Hong in a MEDIUM COOL moment, caught in the confusion of an army and
police overreaction that is merely hinted at.
The authenticity of this sequence is startlingly realistic and superbly
shot by Hua Qing. One might mention that
director Lou Ye graduated from Beijing
University
At this point, I’m thinking this is one of the best films I’ve seen all year. The actors are stretching the material with explicit sexuality, with an internalized emotional dissatisfaction with their own lives that leads them to question the prevailing social order around them, introducing the possibility of thoughts and behavior that are completely fresh and new. The direction is superb, the editing and pacing excellent, and the music integration by Iranian composer Peyman Yazdanian is so perfectly in synch that it felt like being in the middle of an early Olivier Assayas film. What happens next usually happens at the end of films, as written titles are placed on images of various students explaining where they are several years later. Yu Hong returns to the safe haven of Tumen where she finds work, just enough to consider herself impoverished, a shell of her former self still bemoaning her lost love, while Li Ti and her boyfriend have moved into Berlin’s intellectual elite, where Zhou Wei visits them later, which is instantly placed in the context of the fall of Soviet Communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, then the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997. These events flash by so quickly that our own recollection of these events that we’re already familiar with must provide the pertinent details, as only brief news clips are shown.
But what becomes evident is that tragedy of Shakespearean proportions awaits the fate of each of the main characters that participated in the events of Tiananmen Square. Unfortunately, the brilliance of the direction deteriorates badly in an overlong depiction of the devastating aftereffects of this singular event, and what had been superbly chosen musical passages from Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov has been reduced to oft-repeated saccharine-sweet piano interludes that might play well in a televised perfume ad. Despite losing some of the focused, searing intensity from the opening, this is still a fascinating mix of sexual liberation and social upheaval that dramatically lifts the lid off of the most politically charged moment in recent Chinese history. Now there are reportings that the director has been banned from making films for the next 5 years, claiming he premiered the film at Cannes without prior approval by the mandatory Chinese censors, which had twice before refused to see the film, claiming audio and visual technical problems. If that is so, then Lou Ye’s intimate familiarity with the events of 1989 might well affect his own fate, becoming a tortured character in his own still evolving movie, as the fallout from Tiananmen continues.
Give Pedro the prize Jason Solomon at Cannes from The Observer (excerpt)
Combining epic sweep with intimate drama, Ye Lou's
Cannes
'06 Critics Notebook: Almodovar and Actresses Out in Front ... Anthony Kaufman at
Shanghai-born director Lou Ye offers another depiction of an anguished young woman. Somewhere between X-rated teen melodrama and brave political statement lies the director's latest "Summer Palace," which traces several years in the life of a lovesick young woman across recent shifts in China's history, from 1989's Tiananmen Square student revolt to 1997's repatriation of Hong Kong and beyond. Like his steamy, sumptuous previous features "Suzhou River" and "Purple Butterfly," Lou Ye lavishes the same sort of obsessive attention on his alluring lead, the college-aged Yu Hong (relative newcomer Hao Lei, who acts her guts out).
The movie's first half is its strongest. After a gorgeous under-lit
pre-credit sex scene between Yu Hong and her young boyfriend, she ventures to
Distributor Wanted: Summer Palace Chris Chang from Film Comment
Readers of the Angry Chinese Blogger website, among other sinophilic
cine-types, are well aware of the unsettling situation surrounding Lou Ye’s Summer
Palace, a sprawling, deeply moving epic that spans the period from just
prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre to a little before the present. The
movie has basically been accused of treason by the Chinese government. Although
its pro-democracy, pro-reform stance is the obvious reason it’s been targeted,
some of the charges regime bubbleheads have leveled at it are just plain
laughable. The best, i.e. most ridiculous, is that the director’s treachery
resides in the fact that on a few occasions “Lou used an experimental
soft-focus lens technique which
The story follows country girl Yu Hong (played in what appears to be a
continuous ideological swoon by the marvelous Lei Hao) as she moves to
New York Movies - Code Unknown - J. Hoberman at Cannes from the Village Voice (excerpt)
University militants figure even more heavily in Summer Palace, a
fascinating mess by Chinese director Lou Ye, the romantic whose previous
features include the vertiginous
At once leisurely and hectic,
Given that one of Lou's major influences—Wong Kar-wai—is jury president and that a former leading lady—Zhang Ziyi—is also on the jury, as well as Lou's political boldness in making the first Chinese movie to depict Tiananmen '89, Summer Palace seems destined for some sort of award.
CANNES
NOTEBOOK; Movies About, and Beyond, Nations Manohla Dargis at Cannes from the New York Times
Sex and politics are on full boil in Lou Ye's "
The trade papers have been running contradictory dispatches about "
The French touch is further evident in "
Summer
Palace Allan Hunter at
Social upheaval and sexual liberation make for a reasonably
potent cocktail in
The politics of the piece and the comparatively graphic sex
scenes will make the film controversial in
On one level,
The girl at the centre of the story is Yu Hong (Hao Lei). In
1987, she leaves Tumen on the North Korean/Chinese border to study at
The slightly chaotic feel of university life and a giddy new romance evoke the spirit of the nouvelle vague and the cinema of Leos Carax. There are also times when the film feels very close to a western narrative. There is something of The Group (1966) or Carnal Knowledge (1971) in the way that the power of sex defines a generation and its politics. American music is also widely used on the soundtrack as students meet and dance to the sounds of an Andy Williams classic.
The film starts to lose its focus as Yu Hong returns to Tumen
and Zhou Wei later relocates to
The story feels increasingly condensed as we learn of a
marriage, witness a suicide and plod on through the great soap opera of life
gradually losing the intensity that bound us to the fate of the central couple
in the first place. There are clearly parallels to be drawn from the notion
that something died, some special spirit was crushed at
That is satisfying on an intellectual level but it still leaves the viewer with a film that seems to have more plot here than The Da Vinci Code and an ending that can’t fail to feel anything other than desultory.
Hao Lei and Guo Xiaodong both work effectively to convey the emotional wear and tear on the characters over the fifteen years of the story without resorting to the obvious extremes of hair and make-up to suggest the passage of time. There is also a notable supporting performance from Hu Ling as Li Ti, a friend and matchmaker who becomes caught in the crossfire of the dangerous love that ultimately proves to be the most defined and memorable element in this over extended fresco.
SPRING FEVER (Chun Feng Chen
Zui de Ye Wan)
China Hong Kong France (119 mi) 2009
Cannes '09 Day 1: No Smoking, No Entrance Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe, May 13, 2009
Meanwhile, the
movie, Lou Ye's "Spring Fever," was a more-than-fair trade for the
other disappointment. An explicit, emotionally volatile Shanghai love pentagon
(five people, endless entanglements), it's exactly the opposite of
"Up." A wife hires a man to spy on her husband, whom she suspects is
having an affair with a man. The spy and girlfriend get caught up with them.
But this doesn't really capture how strange and intoxicating a movie this is --
all the repression of Wong Kar-wai's movie brought, more or less, into the
psychologically unstable territory of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Lou's previous
movie, the scandalously
little-seen "Summer Palace," was an erotic discourse story set
against 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests. This movie feels as epic, if smaller
and less overtly political in scope. “Spring Fever” is like a series of
emotional firecrackers going off, not sex bombs. But Lou does solidify his
reputation as one of the most arresting directors of normal, life-size
intercourse. In other words: the kind of love you or I might make -- sloppy,
intense, seemingly real. These are jacked up with the prurience that a shallow
stylist would try. There’s a charge to the way bodies touch in this. The film
is the work of a pop dramatist, traversing Shanghai's streets, nightclubs, and
karaoke parlors breaking away the banalities of love poems and songs until the
vividness of their underlying ache is undeniable. The bounds of gender and
sexual orientation are movable constructs. Imagine that Blur chestnut “Girls
and Boys” with violent outbursts, unexplained roadkill, and busted hearts, and
you're halfway there. I, meanwhile, am halfway to bed.
Missives from Cannes:
"Spring Fever" (Lou)
Daniel Kasman from The Auteur’s Notebook
Impressionism in the cinema is a volatile, tricky technique, as it strives to give a sense of something rather than the thing itself. To pull off something like Mann’s Miami Vice, Malick’s The New World, and Denis’ 35 rhums—where the object escapes the grasp of the camera—one needs a sure hand and an even surer sensibility. Lou Ye’s Spring Fever has neither, and confirms, after Summer Palace, that we should be looking elsewhere for interesting Chinese cinema. Where that film’s hackneyed look at revolution recalled Bertolucci’s regrettable The Dreamers, Spring Fever’s contrived, mobile ménage a trois melodrama steps on the spurned romantic toes of Happy Together, and is but another pale imitation, this time of a far better film.
It is a relief, actually, to see international cinema beset by the same problems that plague trendy American “indie” films—inexcusable handheld camerawork, plastic use of digital photography, jump cuts as artless cover-ups, all resulting in terrible decoupage. Just because your fancy camera can shoot scenes in natural light doesn’t mean your shot looks good, or natural. And—another tip—avoiding dialog, in inexperienced hands, doesn’t lend sensuality or pregnancy to scenes but instead showcases an inability to characterize people and dramatic situations.
Spring Fever, from a torrid, trite script about how gay men wreck heterosexual relationships and are left miserable, looks drab, feels drab, and is drab. Actually, at its best moments Spring Fever has a remarkable drabness that does seem natural; a wandering walk home at the end of the movie is so regular and plain as to break through Lou’s attempt at realism and show us a moment between the calculated tragedy and mourning of the drama. Happenstance, it seems, as the rest of the movie yawns at its contrived melancholy, its undistinguished—and indistinguishable—images. Thankfully, instead of talking, characters read poetry out loud and sing karaoke whose lyrics express inner conflict so we don’t need to actually watch the film at all.
Geoff Andrew at
Cannes from Time Out London
Almost a decade
ago, ‘Suzhou River’, a highly imaginative revamping of Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’
set in Shanghai that was Lou Ye’s
second feature, won a major prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival, found a
British distributor, and suggested the Chinese director was someone to watch.
He must have been, at least if the Cannes Film Festival is to be believed; all
his subsequent features – ‘Purple Butterfly’, ‘Summer Palace’ (greetedy
disapproval from China’s Film Bureau for its brief depiction of the events in
Tiananmen Square in 1989) – have premiered here. And all three, while far from
uninteresting, have proved, if we’re to be frank, a bit disappointing.
‘Butterfly’ mystified many; ‘Summer Palace’ felt unbalanced in its weighing of
personal experience against historical momentum; and the new movie is likewise
flawed in terms of narrative clarity, focus and structure. As with its
immediate predecessor – which besides the Tiananmen elements was fairly robust
in its treatment of sexual activity – there’s no denying a certain readiness to
court controversy, even to face censorship: it begins with two men driving into
the country, breaking for a pee during which they peer playfully at each other,
and then arriving at a secret love-nest where they fuck as if there’s no
tomorrow. Perhaps there isn’t (this all takes place in the first ten minutes or
so); almost at once we discover the wife of one of the men has been having him
shadowed by a young man whose own tentative relationship with a young woman is
soon undermined when he too begins to fall for the seeming heartbreaker and
reluctant marriage-wrecker.
Other characters (too many and too briefly seen by far) intrude into the
proceedings, many of them conveyed through ‘moody’ set-to-pleasant-music scenes
where the dearth of dialogue and significant action is insufficiently
counterbalanced by the somewhat monotonously blank performances pf
uncharismatic actors. As one eminent critic whispered towards the end of the
film, ‘Leslie Cheung, where are you?’
It’s not as if the increasingly complicated and contrived plotting is helped by
the poetic and philosophical theme: namely, that we all come to fruition,
emotionally, at different times, and move in different directions. There’s an
awful lot of bad timing going on in this rather humourless movie. There’s a
suggestion, towards the end, that we’re supposed to feel some kind of infinite
sadness about our existential loneliness and vulnerability; but what I felt,
despite a scattering of strong scenes, was a growing impatience both with the
characters and the trite message.
Chinese director defies ban to premiere film at Cannes Ben Child from The Guardian, May 12, 2009
Chinese director Lou Ye will defy his
country's authorities by debuting a new feature in competition at the Cannes film festival
despite a five-year state ban on film-making.
Spring Fever, which centres on a
woman's efforts to spy on her husband's affair with another man, is likely to
cause controversy in China
with its depiction of a homosexual relationship – still a taboo subject in the
country. It was shot on the fly in Nanjing, eastern China, using a handheld
camera and a small cast of five actors in spring 2008. The film is one of 20
features competing for the coveted Palme d'Or, up against new movies from
such festival favourites as Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), Ken Loach
(Looking for Eric), Pedro Almodóvar (Broken Embraces) and Ang Lee (Taking Woodstock).
Lou, 44, was banned from making films in 2006 by China's State Administration
of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) after bringing his film Summer
Palace, a love story set against the backdrop of the 1989 pro-democracy
protests in Tiananmen Square, to Cannes. Censors had refused permission for the
film to screen on the basis that it was technically not up to standard, though
it was likely that a number of sex scenes and the mention of Tiananmen, which
saw hundreds of protesters crushed by the army, also created sensitivity.
Spring Fever will be Lou's third effort to take home the festival's top prize.
Lou's regular producer, Nai An,
told the AFP news agency she had agreed to work on the new film despite fears
it would anger the authorities. "But all we want to do is make films, we
don't want to cause any problems," she said. "China's film censorship
system must change – it must at least get rid of this provision of banning
filming."
Actor Chen Sicheng, 31, who stars
in Spring Fever as one of the three characters caught up in an erotic love
triangle, told AFP about his fears of getting in trouble with the state for his
part in the film. Two actors who starred in Summer Palace were issued with
warnings by the authorities, he said, but the chance to work with Lou had been
too tempting to turn down.
"He is a pioneer, and he has
the courage not to give way to society," he said. "The film industry
is becoming more and more commercialised, but there is no one that wants to
change this, to experiment."
Lou has a track record in running
afoul of the Chinese authorities. His 1995 feature, Weekend Lover, was banned
for two years, and his 2000 film noir Suzhou River has still not been screened
in China. It also saw Lou pick up his first (two-year) work ban after he
brought it to the Rotterdam international film festival without official
permission.
Spring Fever has been financed by
investors in France and Hong Kong, and submitted to Cannes as a joint
production from the two territories. Lou has previously called for a more open
system of censorship in China, with film-makers allowed to attend sessions and
minutes made public. "These are all very reasonable demands from a
director or producer who invests so much money and turns over the fate of his
or her movie," he said.
Review: Spring Fever - Film Comment Andrew Chan from Film Comment, July/August 2010
When a movie takes it upon itself to exorcise
a society’s moral and sexual hang-ups, the process can be both exhilarating and
exhausting to watch. If the filmmaker’s attempt to play cultural crusader
elicits something less than the intended shock and awe, we are left wondering
what all the fuss is about, and whether the taboos at hand have not already
become old news. Following in the footsteps of such recent hot-blooded provocations
as the New French Extremity and the marathon sex in Ang Lee’s PRC-censored Lust,
Caution, Lou Ye’s Spring Fever opens with two men, Jiang Cheng (Qin
Hao) and Wang Ping (Wu Wei), making their way to a secluded shack in the woods
for an afternoon fuck. Cloaked in heavy shadows, their tryst becomes an act of
disappearance. “I love you,” one whispers, his wedding ring gleaming in the
dark.
Steadfastly flesh-focused, Spring Fever
drifts from one sweaty, murkily lit encounter to the next, manufacturing enough
drama along the way for a pair of overlapping love triangles. The first quickly
disintegrates when Wang’s wife enlists a private investigator (Chen Sicheng) to
follow the two lovers and, upon obtaining evidence of their affair, stomps into
Jiang’s office to scold and out him in front of his colleagues. After cutting
ties with the emotionally unstable Wang, Jiang returns to the safe bosom of
Nanjing’s gay nightlife, where he is embraced as a charismatic drag starlet.
Soon enough he finds himself inconveniently smitten with the spy who’s been
trailing him, a puppy-eyed heartthrob who also happens to be romantically
involved with a woman.
Sex is so sanitized in most films that it’s
understandable why its deglamorized depiction is still considered some sort of
artistic victory. But Lou isn’t merely interested in coital verisimilitude. His
two most recent films may remind American viewers of the late Sixties and early
Seventies, when X-rated fare was elevated as edgy, serious art redefining the
zeitgeist. Lou uses the emotional undercurrents of intercourse as an entry
point for exploring a wider social malaise, so that sex is never just sex—it’s
a catharsis of an entire generation’s existential suffering and political
anxiety. By weighing his characters’ libidos down with all the dashed hopes of
the youths who lived through the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, Lou may have marred Summer
Palace (06) with a tone of shrill hysteria, but this also gave that film
its unmistakable passion. Spring Fever, on the other hand, employs the
messiness of down-low gay life as a stand-in for shiftless, apathetic young
adulthood in urban China—a metaphor that makes all the male-on-male action on
screen look like an endless cycle of boredom and self-annihilation.
Chinese cinema has offered its fair share of
anguished material over the years, but what sets Lou apart from his Sixth
Generation peers is his unwavering commitment to personal, subjective
experience. You won’t find very many Jia-like long shots in his work; instead,
there’s jittery handheld cinematography and dreamlike editing that emphasizes
the myriad sensations of the body moving within a disorienting cityscape.
Perhaps even more distinctive is that, where the history of Chinese melodrama
has tended to depict romances that entail painful compromise or self-denial,
Lou consistently envisions love as an all-consuming, destructive force to which
his characters have no choice but to submit.
By the end, Spring Fever has taken
this notion to new sadistic extremes, leaving in its wake a suicide and a
gruesome attempted murder. Wallowing in unmitigated bleakness, Mei Feng’s
Cannes-feted screenplay misses the chance to explore thematic angles that might
have distinguished it from being a dreary Happy Together wannabe.
Nanjing is buried underneath layers of dark blues and grays, preventing Spring
Fever from redeeming itself as a rare contemporary portrait of this vital
city. In his determination to position the film as a universal love story, Lou
sacrifices the political engagement and specificity that makes the work of
queer auteurs like Cui Zi’en so valuable. When Spring Fever finally ends
with an achingly meditative quote from Yu Dafu, it reframes itself as a tribute
to this modern Chinese author’s pioneering exploration of sexuality, but also
highlights how miserably Lou has failed to learn from his predecessor’s richly
emotional, humanistic worldview.
Howard Feinstein at Cannes from Screendaily
Cannes '09: Day One Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 13, 2009
Melissa Anderson Cannes Report: Day 2, from Artforum, May 14, 2009
Cannes. "Spring Fever" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 14, 2009
Alison Willmore at Cannes from The IFC Independent Eye Blog, May 15, 2009
Graphic, Controversial, Yucky: Lars von Trier's Antichrist Can't Save This Year's Cannes J. Hoberman at Cannes from The Village Voice, May 18, 2009
Derek Elley at Cannes from Variety, May 13, 2009
'Chinese Brokeback Mountain' filmed in secret to beat ban Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian Blog, May 15, 2009
MYSTERY
China France (98 mi) 2012
Cannes 2012: Mystery – review Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2012
Lou Ye has marked himself out as a film-maker who is ready to put sex on screen in a way few or none of his fellow Chinese film-makers are willing or able to do. This intriguing if overcooked noir-melodrama is another case in point: a sexually intense thriller set in the colossal city of Wuhan in eastern China, which the director portrays as an unimaginably gigantic forest of featureless skyscrapers, their summits lost in the smog. The film has touches of Chabrol – and even a weird hint of Fatal Attraction – and also offers a sly satirical perspective on modern China's new rush to capitalist riches and bourgeois prosperity.
The title is apt: it is very mysterious. The director baffles us with what appear to be two separate plot strands: a woman is hit by a car on a rainy freeway, driven by crazily irresponsible youths whose first, horribly callous thought is that she was trying an insurance scam. Then we shift to the comfortable, placid domestic world of Yongzhao (Qin Hao), a businessman, married with a daughter, who is well on the way to wealth.
Yongzhao's story is complicated by the strange situation engulfing his wife Lu Jie, played by Hao Lei, who was in Lou Ye's 2006 film Summer Palace. Out of the blue, Lu Jie has been befriended by Sang Qi (Qi Xi), the mother of one of her daughter's classmates; she seems weirdly intent on striking up an acquaintance. Sang Qi asks to meet Lu Jie for coffee one day and makes a startling confession. It is to be the beginning of a bizarre and unsettling duel between the two women.
The director gets you off balance from the outset, keeping you guessing not merely as to the connection between the two strands but as to who the drama is centrally about. When the answers are revealed and the penny drops, this twisted story becomes a little preposterous, but intriguing nonetheless. I wasn't entirely sure that the director knew how or where to end the movie, and the denouement is arguably unconvincing. Its toughly realist tone is at odds with the final flourish of supernatural imagery, but this is a distinctive and confident film.
Mystery Mike Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily
Lou Ye’s return to sanctioned film-making in China is anything but an
artistic or thematic compromise. A twisted and dark portrait of the amoral
rich, corrupt police and sexually promiscuous in the country today, it is based
on a selection of stories culled from the Internet that reflect contemporary
society. Although the central story leans towards the melodramatic, Lou’s
confident blend of realism and poetry keeps it on track.
It’s rare to see an official Chinese movie that takes such a stark look at life today. Set in the rain-drenched city of Wuhan, Lou shows us an urban world of web and text-obsessed people, fast cars, designer fashions and Starbucks that could be any western city. Whether it will score a Chinese release is yet to be determined, but sales agent Wild Bunch should make more robust international sales on Mystery than the two films he made in exile – Spring Fever and Love & Bruises.
The film opens with a dramatic prologue in which two arrogant young rich kids race each other in cars through a tunnel just outside the city. Coming out of the tunnel, one of the cars mows down and kills a young woman walking in the driving rain and ploughs into a truck.
The story subsequently calms somewhat, as Lu Jie (Hao Lei) is befriended in her daughter’s playground by Sang Qi (Qi Xi) and her son and the two decide to have playdates in the future. Over coffee one day, Sang Qi confides in Lu Jie that she believes that her husband is cheating on her, the very same moment that Lu Jie looks out of the window and sees her own husband Yongzhao (Qin Hao) walking into the hotel opposite with a young girl. A distraught Lu Jie waits for them to finish their assignation and follows the young girl. This young girl, it emerges, is the girl killed in the pre-title sequence.
As Lu Jie faces up to her husband’s apparently rampant infidelity, the police are persuaded by the rich parents of the young men not to press criminal charges over the death of the girl. Her mother is paid off and only one cop who coincidentally used to date the dead girl presses for further investigation.
There’s sexual deceit, revenge, blackmail, and more murder before the film finishes, and along the way, virtually all the characters have sacrificed any sense of decency in the quest for material riches and sexual fulfillment.
Lou uses handheld camera to visceral effect but he is not beyond striking visual effects and a penchant for hard rain to heighten the drama.
Neil Young at Cannes
from The Hollywood Reporter, May 17,
2012
A wife's discovery of her husband's affairs yields some bloodily violent consequences in Lou Ye's film.
Chinese writer-director Lou Ye makes a fitfully engaging return to "official" filmmaking after a half-decade ban with Mystery, in which a wife's discovery of her husband's affairs yields some bloodily violent consequences. Lou has long been supported by French financiers, critics and programmers, and his seventh feature's selection as opener for Un Certain Regard guarantees further festival bookings. But at home and overseas alike -- French release is scheduled for early 2013 -- it's hard to see this blandly-titled, rain-soaked romantic melodrama gaining much commercial traction, despite two strong performances by the female leads.
Lou received a five-year sanction from China's official film body thanks to 2006's politically-charged Summer Palace, and responded by smuggling out 2009's gay-themed Spring Fever -- a surprise winner of Cannes' Screenplay award -- then going to France to make Love and Bruises. That steamy affair premiered at Venice last September but has made little subsequent impact on the festival circuit despite starring A Prophet's Tahar Rahim. For his speedy follow-up he goes back to China and unites the stars of Summer Palace and Spring Fever, Hao Lei and Qin Hao as Lu Jie and Yongzhao, a photogenic thirtyish couple with a cute young daughter.
In a public playground, Lu Jie becomes friendly with another young mother, Sang Qi (Qi Xi), who one day confides that she suspects her husband of having an affair. It emerges that the "husband" is none other than Yongzhao, and that Sang Qi is just one of a string of mistresses -- including twentyish Xiaomin (Chang Fangyan), whose car-smash death begins proceedings on an arrestingly spectacular note. The exact circumstances of Xiaomin's demise constitute the chief "mystery" of the title, though Lou and co-screenwriters Mei Feng (who also worked on Summer Palace and Spring Fever) and Yu Fan haven't exactly concocted a brain-teasing conundrum with a script apparently based, according to the opening titles, on an "online diary."
Of course, the real "mystery" which concerns Lou and company is the essential unknowability of other people, even our nearest and dearest, as the meek Lu Jie discovers to her shock and dismay. Hao is sympathetic and believable in a demanding role, and her scenes with the livelier Qi takes us right into the heart of what turns out to be a decidedly unusual relationship between two women who love the same man. Not that Yongzhao is such a prize catch on this evidence: good-looking and professionally successful as he may be, he's a duplicitous hot-head capable of repellently extreme violence (including violence of a sexual nature) -- in a picture which, from the very first scene, can't be accused of flinching from depicting the worst of human behaviour.
Zeng Jian's camera work -- often hand-held or Steadicam -- makes the most of a variety of mostly unappetizing urban settings in China's fourth city, Wuhan, an industrial metropolis that's been underused as a film-location in comparison with Shanghi and Beijing. Peyman Yazadian's score, meanwhile, ladles on tinkling piano for poignant interludes and sonorous strings for the more dramatic sequences -- many of which take place in drenching downpours of biblical proportions -- underlining the conventional nature of this competently-made but ultimately underwhelming enterprise.
Cannes
2012 Review: Lou Ye's MYSTERY Should be Retitled MELODRAMA Brian Clark at Cannes from Twitch, May 21,
2012
Melissa Anderson at Cannes from ArtForum, May 17, 2012
DAILY | Cannes 2012 | Lou Ye’s MYSTERY David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 21, 2012
Justin Chang at Cannes from Variety
Louhimies, Aku
LEVOTTOMAT A- 94
aka: THE RESTLESS
Finland
The subject of this film is "ambivalence" to the core - exquisitely photographed by Mac Ahlberg, excellent ensemble acting led by Mikko Nousiainen as Ari, well written, witty, and deceptively clever on multiple levels, sexy, but not exploitive, featuring a kind of existential numbness to the beauty and meaning of the world spinning around Ari, who, while extremely attractive and intelligent, just doesn't have a clue about any sense of values or distinguishing importance about the people in his life, professionally or personally, whose lives are nearly destroyed by his self-centered, personally indulgent, yet unsatisfied life style, which freely allows him to pick up and screw other friend's girl friends without regard for the disastrous consequences, who lives in a perpetual state of lovelessness, sex for the sake of sex, so to speak, knowing virtually nothing about his partners, the less the better, such is the state of his emotional uninvolvement. The film links his sexual exploration with his quest for spiritual redemption, which, personally, I found a bit premature, as a guy like Ari will always be a wandering soul, an existential nomad, especially when his needs are strangled by so-called mainstream relationships. This is kind of a MAD MAX with sex rather than cars, as Ari is wandering through the same wastelands... I loved the music, and if anyone can turn me on to a soundtrack CD, I found none available in the states.
An old dog has a hard time learning new tricks in this drama set in Turku. Ari (Mikko Nousiainen), a paramedic, is a chronic womanizer; he makes it a point of pride to never sleep with the same woman twice, and his nights are a long series of brazen one-night stands. But when Ari meets Tiina (Laura Malmivaara), something unexpected happens -- he falls in love. For the first time, Ari finds himself pursuing a long-term relationship, and he makes a genuine effort to remain faithful to her. But old habits die hard; Tiina introduces Ari to her circle of friends and temptation arises as he encounters Hanna-Riikka (Irina Bjorklund), a theology student, and Ilona (Matleena Kuusniemi), who is soon to be married. Despite Ari's feelings for Tiina, he begins having affairs with both Hanna-Riikka and Ilona, leading to an unpleasant revelation on the day of Ilona's nuptials. Featuring non-gratuitious nudity and erotically charged encounters, Levottomat was a major box-office success in its native Finland. (see also Lenka Hellstedt, LEVOTTOMAT 2 – ME AND MORRISON)
"Levottomat"
(title song)
Performed by Samuli Edelmann
& Cata Mansikka-Aho
"Heikko Valo"
Ultra Bra
"Yhtä en saa"
Performed by Jonna Tervomaa
"Heikko Valo"
Performed by Ultra Bra
"Hiuksissa hiekkaa"
Performed by Maija Vilkkumaa
"Lupaus"
Performed by Terhi Kokkonen & Mikko von Herzen
"Hei älä luule"
Performed by Disco
"Koivuniemen herra"
Performed by Egotrippi
"Razorblade Kiss"
Performed by HIM
"Musik non stop"
Performed by Kent
"'Til You're Numb"
Performed by Lab
"Sugared"
Performed by Crash
"California"
Performed by Lemonator
"Coffee Girl"
Performed by Supperheads
"Check Me Out"
Performed by Jo Hope
"The Broken Girls"
Performed by Super
"Child is my name"
Performed by Kemopetrol
"Love Supreme"
Performed by JS16
"Sandstorm"
Performed by Darude
Love, Nick
GOODBYE CHARLIE BRIGHT B 87
Great Britain 2001
Opens with a somewhat preposterous scene of 4
naked teenagers running thru their tenement neighborhood to the music of loud
bubble gum rock music, high on their own exuberance, their fates soon to be
restored by the rude awakening of living in a world with no possibilities. One boy goes off to the army, another is
about to get married until he discovers his girl friend has been making it with
a local gangster, which leads to disastrous results when the younger boy takes
on this war weary thug, the other friendship falls apart as well, one believes
in something better, Charlie Bright, while the other is simply mired in the
criminal mentality of – take advantage of others before they take advantage of
you. There are some Douglas Sirkian
color schemes here, with brightly lit clothes and backdrops set against a more
naturalistic, bleak and dreary tenement world, the attempt being to show how
the over-anxious emotional worlds of the teenage youths collide against the
harsher realities of the adults who long ago detached themselves from having
any real meaning in these young, disaffected lives – too uneven to work, but
there is some interesting intensity between the characters
Loxton, David and Fred Barzyk
THE LATHE OF HEAVEN – made for TV A- 93
Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do
not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason
it by using reason. To let understanding stop at
what cannot be understood is high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be
destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
A film I was fortunate enough to see when it came out in the
early 1980’s on TV, where I was overcome by the brilliance of the writing, Diane
English and Roger Swaybill’s vision of Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel, Robbie
Greenberg’s futuristic cinematography which amounts to a soaring expanse of
imaginative suggestion, the intriguing art direction of John Wright Stevens,
and Michael Small’s avant garde music which was unlike anything else heard at
that time, which is especially effective at the ending. While it’s a sci-fi story, it’s also an
interracial love story with peaceful intergalactic implications. George Orr (Bruce Davison) inexplicably
discovers he has the power to dream so effectively that he completely changes
reality, where the entire world becomes what he was dreaming about. Initially, it is a dying apocalyptic world in
Using a dream machine called an Augmentor, which transmits brain wave signals generated by the patient back into his own brain to stimulate the dream state, a device which allows a patient to dream almost at will under the doctor’s hypnotic suggestion, the sessions cause George considerable anxiety, as it places too much power in the hands of his therapist. Unfortunately, the scientist in Dr. Haber prevents him from seeing the calamity that lies ahead in his world treatment, as his own illusions of grandeur to play God and build a better world cause him to exploit George’s remarkable condition, not realizing that the subconscious is not always such a willing partner, that it’s instead likely to respond in its own unique manner which results in plenty of unexpected surprises. George calls upon the aid of a human rights lawyer, Heathe Lelache (Margaret Avery), to protect him, as he fears he’s being used, but despite his growing affection for her, where they are actually man and wife at one point, George eventually dreams her out of existence, leaving him alone in a universe that may be filled with multiple illusions of itself, where it’s impossible to tell what’s real and what’s imagined.
The film version has a much darker Dr. Haber than the book, creating a maniacal egomaniac hell-bent on exploiting his patient’s abilities, paying little regard to George’s humanistic nature or concerns, basically steamrolling right over him for his own deluded aims. George is aware of his doctor’s dominant tendencies, which is why he continually searches for Lelache, who provides him needed balance and stability as his love interest, along with some curious aliens in giant turtle shells who become his friends and offer him surprisingly effective suggestions. While the book has a much easier narrative to follow and creates vividly imaginative scenarios which the movie simply can’t match, due to a limited low budget, the made for TV PBS film nevertheless transcends typical television limitations, where after a dreadfully slow and occasionally overly rational, over-analytic first half, the second half showcases spectacular visualizations that despite feeling dated, remain constantly inventive. It’s a shame the original master print has been lost, as there’s a grainy, archival look to the print of the DVD, nonetheless, the surviving film remains as powerful and provocative as ever, and is one of the best offerings ever aired on TV.
Nitrate Online (capsule)
Gregory Avery
When this adaptation of Ursula K.
LeGuin's novel aired, for only a few times, around 1979 - 80, word-of-mouth
rapidly spread and it soon came to be regarded as one of the best
science-fiction films ever made. I would not go quite so far in categorizing it
in those terms (I think the unavailability of the film, after it was broadcast,
had more than something to do with its building a mystique), but it is rather
good and it effectively uses the science-fiction genre to explore ideas about
existence and reality in ways that could not be dramatized just as well in
other genres (the film's popularity also probably had something to do with the Star
Wars phenomenon, at the time). Bruce Davison plays a menial worker in a
devastated-looking Portland, Oregon of the near-future who is deeply troubled
by the possibilities that his nightly dreams are, in spite of himself, altering
daily reality; Kevin Conway is the psychiatrist who initially tries to
straighten him out, then sees the potentiality of exploiting his ability;
Margaret Avery (who would later appear in The Color Purple) plays
a social worker who tries to intervene on Davison's behalf. Directed by Fred
Barzyk and David E. Lonton, from a screenplay by Robert E. Swayhill and Diane
English, and they pull off some wonderful surprises by the time the story's
conclusion arrives. The DVD includes a Bill Moyers interview with LeGuin.
Cinescape [Frederick C. Szebin]
Some movies gather a
legend on the very basis that no one ever gets to see them. This happened to The
Lathe of Heaven, the PBS adaptation to Ursula K. Le Guin's very fine novel
about George Orr, a man who had the ability to 'dream effectively'that is, to
dream of an incident that would become a new reality for everyone else on the
planet. In the story, only George (Bruce Davison) could
remember what the world was like before his dream, but Dr. Haber (Kevin
Conway), thanks to his dream-enhancing machine, began to believe George, and
use his dreaming ability to remake the world in his own image.
Produced in 1979, The Lathe of Heaven became the most requested
production of Public Television's library, but it stayed on a shelf for nearly
20 years because no one at WNET was interested in dealing with the legal
hurdles. Now that those are out of the way, New Video has released this highly
anticipated film, digitally remastered for DVD. But there is a problem. The original
film materials have been lost. A surviving 2-inch tape was color corrected
using the best in technology, but that doesn't guarantee a superior image.
Ghosting, a latent image or color trail left by a moving person or object on
screen, could not be corrected. Fortunately, this ghosting does not get in the
way of one of the best SF adaptations ever made.
Even with its low budget (around a quarter of a million dollars), directors
David Loxton and Fred Barzyk made an instant classic out of Roger E. Swaybill's
and Diane English's script. And the fact that the production company kept in
nearly constant contact with author Le Guin insured that nothing from the novel
was taken for granted. The result is a film of ideas rather than action, as
Barzyk said in the retrospective article on the making of The Lathe of
Heaven (see editorial link at bottom). While the minuscule budget didn't
grant the filmmakers the grandeur of some of Le Guin's set pieces in the novel,
such as the alien invasion or the melting of Portland,
the film's strength comes from its performers and the suspenseful concepts in
the writing.
There is not much on the DVD in the way of extras, except for a very nice
interview with Le Guin, conducted by Bill Moyers, who is obviously a fan. The
talk with the author is a treat since Le Guin is notoriously shy and private.
She discusses the beginnings of the film project; she admits didn't believe the
novel would make a good movie since 'nothing happens in it; things un-happen.'
She would have preferred The Left Hand of Darkness, which is much more
visually-oriented and she adds with a laugh' much more expensive!' Le Guin was
on the set and marveled at 'the choreography of film making, which she saw as a beautiful
example of total cooperation between people of different specialties.
The interview is insightful and amusing. Le Guin analyzes her own work, and
warns that her interpretation of her writing may not be the right one. One of
the most interesting moments of the interview is when she tries to describe the
almost mystical process of writing. She doesn't create characters, she says;
they find her and tell her what they have to do, even when it
contradicts the author's intentions.
Le Guin is genuinely charming in the interview, sometimes self-effacing, other
times very sure of what she has done. The rest of the extras are simple: scene
access, a biography of Le Guin, but not of anyone in the film, which is a
shame. Stars Bruce Davison, Kevin Conway and Margaret Avery are all quite good
here; it would have been nice to hear from them and from director Barzyk, as
well. There is also a slight bit of information on New Video, the company that
rescued The Lathe of Heaven from obscurity and probable destruction.
This is possibly the first in a series of such DVD's that bring forth other
such productions. More power to them.
Don't let the technical problems scare you away from this disc. The ghosting is
something you can get used to. It shouldn't be enough to stop you from viewing
this most important and entertaining SF work, made by people who knew how to
adapt an excellent novel and do it right, when productions with more money than
has ever been seen at PBS still don't know how to tell a good story.
Cyberpunk Review SFAM
DVD Authority Fusion 3600
The Sci-Fi Movie Page - DVD Review James O’Ehley
Loznitsa, Sergei
MY JOY (Schastye moe) B 88
What starts out with
huge amounts of style and promise, where Loznitsa envisions a Russian SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994) after the cinematic style of Béla
Tarr, creating a lengthy road movie told in extended segments of real time, but
it’s a film that does not have the humor, depth, or complexity of Tarr’s
original, and cannot sustain its initial artistic heights. It’s also worth noting that while the
composition of many of the shots is breathtaking, the use of a digital camera
limits one’s appreciation for the subject, as it simply doesn’t have the depth
of image and feels even more flattened out over time. The narrative itself is a little puzzling, as
characters can get lost in the storyline, but in this film, the overall mood is
paramount to character. The story itself
isn’t nearly as important as the way that it’s told, in long takes with near
documentary precision and with no musical score.
Russia’s open road
is fraught with potential dangers, creating a bleak underbelly of criminality
lurking behind every hardened face, including the faces of children, where
young teenage girls parade in front of cars and trucks that are stopped due to
a truck overturning up ahead and offer their sexual services. When one truck
driver Georgy (Viktor Nemets) befriends one of the girls, eventually asking for
alternate directions out of the area, she turns on him in a wrath of fury,
offended that he didn’t take her sexual offer seriously, as this is indeed how
she makes her underage living. Georgy
ends up walking through the village streets and through a crowd, where the
camera pans up into the faces of villagers, none of whom look happy or relaxed,
as people of all ages seem to have that dead look in their eyes, but the camera
moves and explores, finding an object of interest and becomes fixated on that
subject for awhile until it moves out of sight.
Later the truck’s headlights are seen in the blackness of the night,
moving in what appears to be circles in the middle of a forest until it comes
to rest with the motor stopped. Two men
in the night hear the sounds and converge towards it, where human kindness is
seen as a sign of weakness and an opportunity that presents itself on this road
that suddenly goes nowhere.
Occasionally the
film introduces a character who opens the floodgates to a flashback, where time
jumps backwards, creating a journey into a seemingly timeless exploration of
memory and our knowledge of certain familiar landmarks, where the same house is
seen inhabited by different sets of people over time, all lending itself to a
differing perception of history, while also creating memory gaps that not
everyone may be familiar with. The
viewer is given knowledge that the characters onscreen may not have, as we’ve
witnessed certain incidents that took place in a different time. This seamless movement back and forth in time
is barely discernable, but the audience is fed new characters which bring us up
to date on the changing times, just as brutal and horrific as the olden
times. While the specifics aren’t that
important, what remains imprinted into the viewer’s minds is the vision of a
nightmarish hell on earth where no one can be trusted, where scoundrels move
into positions of authority, and where the landscape moves ever darker into a lawless,
apocalyptic nightmare, where only the briefest hint of light protects
humans from gradually creeping back into the dark ages.
The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) capsule review [3/4]
The first
film from Ukraine ever to get into the Cannes official selection, My Joy
is a challenge to watch but hard to forget. This Twilight Zone-like tale
follows an unfortunate truck driver travelling through provincial Russia who
makes a detour off the highway straight into the nightmare of history, in
disjointed episodes of predatory cruelty, corrupt officials and flashbacks to
the Second World War. Belarus-born director Sergei Loznitsa, now living in
Germany, pulls no punches in portraying a bleak post-communist malaise. Grimly
poetic cinematography is provided by Romania’s Oleg Mutu, who shot The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
Time Out Online (Dave Calhoun) review
This bold
first feature from Ukrainian documentary-maker Loznitsa (the only debut in the
Cannes competition) revolves around a nightmarish road trip and combines a
realist visual style with a mode of storytelling that moves disconcertingly
between past and present and invites us to get lost in a maze of cause and
effect. Georgy (Nemets) is a truckdriver on a job in rural Russia. He
encounters a Kafka-esque police road block, a prostitute who reacts badly to
his kindness and a war veteran who appears in his cab and whose anecdotes take
us back to his return from the German front as a young soldier in 1946. When
Georgy takes a turning off the road and shares a meal with tramps, he finds himself
stuck in a brutal, lawless village, a place we see both now and in some
unspecified time in the past. There are hints of Tarkovsky in the poetic
exploration of place and memory and the film is a demanding, difficult work.
But the sense of a Dantean journey and a vision of utter hell are powerfully
conveyed.
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
And the
prize for most ironic title at the New York Film Festival goes to…My Joy,
a wrist-slittingly morose Ukraine/German/Dutch coproduction set in Russia. An
art-house variation on the post-apocalyptic road movies that are so popular
these days (The Road,
The Book of Eli,
Children of Men),
this relentlessly pessimistic parable gave me a new appreciation for its
mainstream cousins' visual flair and narrative clarity. The city life Georgy
(Viktor Nemets) leaves in order to deliver a truckload of flour to the boonies
looks pretty bleak, but it's a paradise compared to the predatory world he
blunders into, where the scars inflicted by WWII are still raw and there's
barely a hint of kindness or love to be found. Georgy literally loses his way,
then loses his innocence and all sense of hope as he is abused, misused, and
left for dead by his glassy-eyed countrymen. Deliberately paced and full of
weighty silences, the film lurches from scene to scene with the abrupt illogic
of a nightmare. Dogs howl, goats bleat, sadistic traffic cops bludgeon citizens
pulled over at random, and then it all repeats until we watch him plod from a
pool of light into the murk of a deserted nighttime street, his figure
eventually disappearing into darkness. In one of those coincidences that hit
you when you watch a string of movies at a film festival, it's the same device
that closes Of Gods and Men,
whose doomed monks' fade into the white of a snowy hillside—and it feels
equally heavyhanded in both films. By the time Georgy fades to black, I felt as
hollowed out and stonyhearted as he looks.
Plume Noire review Moland Fengkov
My Joy is
the first feature film from Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, previously
known for his documentary work. Supported by a poetic writing style that is
equally morbid and humorous, the story does not cease to diverge, to take back
roads, threatening to leave the viewer on the side of the road, but continually
nourishing the idea that he needs to be chasing after it.
From the first shots of the enigmatic opening scene, Loznitsa captures our
attention and never lets go of it. His narrative takes the viewer into a
downward spiral. A spiral represented by liquid concrete in which two thugs
will lay and bury a victim. The rest of the film follows the journey of a truck
driver who, through different encounters, drives across an abandoned
country-police abuse, child prostitution, rural crime and murder. As he follows
his road, the allegory of the country's instability is expressed through
unforeseen divides, all equally unexpected as one another. We get lost in his
wake as we go along into an existential unknown. Along the way he meets as many
ghosts from the past and present, and is gradually contaminated by them,
turning him into one of them, a mute figure (in the literal sense) wandering,
lost in a nameless village, one of Hell's circles, going in circles to finally
land at the beginning and to once again disappear into the night.
Interspersed with scenes set during the Second World War, the film examines the
historical legacy of these people who fought and whose glory was stolen by
cruel and corrupted bureaucrats and leaders. Somewhat intentionally avoiding to
be understood, My Joy derives its strength from this resistance, this refusal
to engage easily. The film possesses you, haunts you, and ensnares you. Without
yielding into the temptation to take the viewer by the hand, it does not
however ignore you. Its breathtaking direction is supported by masterfully
controlled sequence shots (like the scene in a market where the lens goes from
one face to another, before this wandering is brutally interrupted by a man
knocking over the truck driver before disappearing into the forest) as well as
some morbid and slightly comedic poetry. Strung along by the unexpected, the
viewer can only wade to follow the circular path the trucker is on without ever
letting go. The film traces a journey without leaving any other trace than that
of the ghosts it meets, before leading itself back to its starting point. And
at the end of the road: very great cinema; An uncompromising shock.
My
Joy (Schastye Moye) Allan Hunter at
Cannes from Screendaily
No good deed goes unpunished in the ironically titled My Joy, an intriguing but often
messily impenetrable dramatic debut from award-winning documentary filmmaker
Sergei Loznitsa. There are echoes of Michael Haneke’s work in this rambling,
nightmare journey through the dark soul of Russia.
The film demands a considerable effort from the viewer to discern a bigger picture in the fragmentary narrative strands that Loznitsa attempts to weave together in his Kafkaesque parable. It’s hard to imagine that many viewers will consider their patience sufficiently rewarded making the film a tough proposition for any potential arthouse distributor. Further Festival slots will undoubtedly follow the high profile Cannes Competition selection.
Loznitsa travelled extensively throughout the Russian provinces when he was making his documentaries. The accumulated anecdotes and life histories he gathered along the way have provided the inspiration for My Joy that was filmed in the Ukraine. Cinematographer Oleg Mutu (The Death of Mr Lazarescu, 4 Months 3 Weeks And Two Days etc) expertly captures the natural beauty of lush countryside, snow-dusted wintry landscapes and the shadowy, noirish tone of the film’s darker moments.
Arresting opening images show a cement mixer in action as a body is dumped and quickly concealed on a building site. We then meet truck driver Georgy (Viktor Nemets) as he heads down the motorway on a routine delivery.
The first glimmer of unease comes from a random roadside check at the hands of sadistic police guards. He is then joined by a mysterious old man (Vlad Ivanov) who relates an incident from the immediate post-War period that illustrates a casual brutality among the forces of law and order. Caught in a traffic jam, Georgy then meets teenage prostitute (Olga Shuvalova).
He refuses her services but gives her food and money; acts of kindness that she finds offensive. Following what he believes to be a short cut, Georgy winds up lost in the dark of night in the middle of nowhere and his troubles are only just beginning.
My Joy unfolds in a maze-like succession of stories that can shoot off in completely different directions or occasionally fold back on themselves to reveal unexpected connections. There are recurring motifs and locations with the old man and the vicious policemen both re-appear in a film that depicts Russia as a lawless frontier where everyone is fair game, corruption is rife and integrity is a luxury that nobody can afford.
Individual sequences within My Joy are gripping. The old man’s tale of what happened to him on his way home from war is almost a perfect short story in the way it is it intrigues, astonishes and delivers a haunting punchline. The closing sequence back at the police roadblock grows increasingly tense and threatening, while other scenes are much less coherent or obviously. Ultimately, is a film that shines intermittently but is likely to leave the viewer more perplexed than satisfied.
A man drags a body through snow, then dumps mud over it. We see a close-up of a shovel truck's mouth churning forward. Another man exits his car to show his documents to a border cop, while in front of them another cop demands a woman bend over so he can ogle her ass.
These are some of the early images in My Joy, former documentarian
Sergei Loznitsa's debut fiction feature. Its protagonist is a trucker making a
sort of pilgrim's progress through
The handheld camera often sticks close to the back of the trucker's neck. Cinematographer Oleg Mutu, who shot the great Romanian journey-through-medical establishment-hell drama The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, stays tight and close to people, as though doing so might reveal documentary truths.
The film is willing to—and very often does—shoot off into tangents to reveal these truths. The trucker quickly becomes a pretense for the movie, rather than its focus, as Loznitsa abandons him for long stretches in order to follow underage whores down a highway as they patrol for clients, or soldiers dragging a farmer off so that they can shoot him and ransack his house. The film eventually gives its leading man up altogether, and ends with a horrific massacre (captured in one tremendous long take) of people we've barely just met.
Many of these segments are powerful, but they don't do much to enrich each other. It's useful to think of some of the best pan-societal critiques from the past decade, dazzling films like Code Unknown, The Circle, and even Lazarescu, in which we roam across a culture with a small group of recurring characters. Each sequence in these films illustrates a point about a central theme (respectively, a society's treatment of racial and ethnic minorities, of women, and of the sick). By contrast, Loznitsa's film seems to be trying to attack everyone and everything it can look at, which proves too much for one movie. If the aforementioned films are arguments, then My Joy is a list. Loznitsa's documentaries are mainly compilations of archival footage, so it makes sense that his first fiction film is also essentially a compilation, an array of dynamic, aggressive bits rather than one coherent text.
If the film does have a central point or message, though, it likely has to do with a deep distrust of the Soviet government, and perhaps of all governments (Loznitsa reportedly believes that 9/11 was an inside job). But the film's world may also be beyond salvation. One character tells another, "Your store is burning. It needs rebuilding. Then again, the fuck with it."
My Joy Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
The Daily
Notebook [Daniel Kasman] Daniel Kasman at
"My Joy": Nightmare voyage into the Russian heartland Andrew O’Hehir from Salon
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
The House Next Door [Matt Noller]
Cannes '10:
Day Seven Mike D’Angelo at Cannes
from The Onion A.V. Club, May 19,
2010
Fabien Lemercier at Cannes May 19, 2010
Cannes
Film Festival 2010: Day Seven – Of Gods and Men, My Joy, and Blue Valentine Matt Noller at
Cannes
2010. Sergei Loznitsa's "My Joy"
David Hudson at Cannes May 19,
2010
Xan Brooks Cannes film festival diary: no joy in
Godard, at Cannes from The Guardian,
May 19, 2010
IN
THE FOG (V Tumane) B 87
Russia Belarus Latvia
Germany Netherlands (127 mi)
2012 ‘Scope Official site
Eyes
and ears are poor witnesses for those men, whose souls are of barbarian nature.
—Sergei Loznitsna, film director quoting pre-Socratic
Greek philosopher Heraclitus
Not sure how this film qualifies to play in the European Union Fest, as
this is a decisively Russian-Belarus filmmaker, neither country members of the
EU, though much of the film was shot in Latvia, the supposed country of EU
origin. Ironically the filmmaker has
moved to Germany, a country with one of the best run and most efficient
state-assisted cinema programs in all of Europe, allowing him to make films
that would be impossible to make in Russia, also helping to produce the
financing for his films. It’s the
Russians, however, that have a fondness for their own history and that of the
former Soviet territories, where they never forget the terrible price paid in
human lives to keep the Germans from overrunning Moscow and Stalingrad in World
War II, coming within 20 miles of Moscow before the Russian lines finally
held. Over the course of the war they
eventually lost anywhere from 22 to 26 million dead, 15 – 20 % of their entire
population defending their nation.
Nearly every family was affected by this kind of dramatic impact,
leaving behind for generations to come the terrible scars of history, where no
one makes films about this era with more wretched misery than the Russians, who
suffered tremendously through this unimaginable horror, perhaps best
represented by The
Five Best Soviet Era War Films. Like
Trial
On the Road (Proverka na dorogakh) (1971), The
Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) (1976), and Come
and See (Idi i smotri) (1985), all set in Belarus and all steeped in the
psychological horrors of World War II when the occupying Nazi forces applied a
scorched earth policy, burning Belarusian villages to the ground, slaughtering
all the inhabitants, literally attempting to wipe Russians off the face of the
earth, leaving whatever civilians that survived to starve or die of exposure to
the cold. Carrying the historical weight of Russian history, where more
than two million were killed defending the western territory of Belarus, this
is a slow moving, morally conflicted, bleak interior drama that takes place far
from the front lines, where in the masterful opening shot, out of stillness
heads rise out of the lower edge of a snowy forest, as we see German soldiers
on horseback marching Russian prisoners into a small Belarusian village to the
stare of onlookers. After a long
offscreen pronouncement, set to a slow 180 degree pan, suggesting anyone aiding
or abetting those defying the prevailing German order would be shot, the order
is given for the men to be publicly hanged.
IN THE FOG is an existential parable much like Malick’s THE THIN RED LINE (1998), an anguished requiem for the dead where the experience of watching the film subjectively involves the viewer in a partnership with history, becoming a transforming meeting of the minds that elevates one’s understanding of events. Told out of sequence, Loznitsa constructs a war film with no war action, a long, slow slog into the psychological descent into the madness of war, shot with cinematic depth by the same guy (Oleg Mutu) who filmed Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (După dealuri) (2012), supposedly only 72 shots in a little over two hours, where comrades turn against comrades, suspecting there is among them a collaborator for the other side, where there is slow pacing, no musical score, and an intense, interior moral dilemma about what to do. Its release comes at an interesting time in modern Russian history, where a film about Russian “morality” is an ironic choice during the reinstatement of the dictatorial, KGB-like police state reign of Vladimir Putin. Perhaps not as intricately constructed as Loznitza’s earlier brutal road movie MY JOY (2010), which allowed just the briefest sliver of light, in both mood is paramount to character, told in long takes with near documentary precision through mostly empty, snowy landscapes, an existential journey following two or three characters as they make their way behind enemy lines through the natural protection of the dense forests. The story concerns Sushenya (Vladimir Svirski), whose story remains a shrouded mystery lost in the fog, revealed only near the end in flashback for the audience’s benefit, where no one in the film ever hears it. This is the kind of history, personal, family, and national, that gets lost during wartime. Based on a novel by Belarusian writer Vasily Bykov, Sushenya is a local railroad worker for nearly thirty years, ordered by his boss to continue working for the Germans or he’d be killed, so what real choice does he have?
Sushenya could just as easily be anybody, as all fell victim to circumstances
beyond their control, and he is sympathetically portrayed throughout as he
makes his way through a hellish landscape that continually leaves him no
choice. Accused of being a German
collaborator, two Soviet partisans arrive out of the forest to execute him, one
a lifelong friend who takes no pleasure in his duty. Instead it’s his friend that is shot and
severely wounded in an unexpected ambush, where Sushenya is forced to carry him
on his back in an absurdist Sisyphus reference as they attempt to make their
way to safety. Despite their partisan
loyalties, each man is viewed traveling this isolated journey alone, as that is
how they will be judged by history, expressed through extended minimalist
sequences of long shots trekking through the wintry forest where man is nearly
inconsequential, a mere solitary speck, engulfed in the immense natural
landscape and of time immemorial.
Sushenya is continually judged by others, Nazi’s and partisans, even his
own family, where during wartime, a full accounting of the truth never comes
out until the distance of time passes and people can objectively investigate
facts, circumstances and allegations.
But during the imposition of unspeakable violence and the blurry events
of war, everything comes down to immediate perceptions, where Sushenya can’t
believe why his wife or his lifelong friends would choose to believe the German
accounts rather than his own, doubting his pleas of innocence, somehow
forgetting everything that they ever knew about him because of an accusation
from Nazi criminals and cutthroat murderers.
All that he knows about humanity quickly spins on its ear, where
everything that matters is suddenly gone forever, leaving him in a state of
abject misery and horror. This kind of
nightmarish journey takes us to the other side of darkness where the end of the
world is near, very similar to the coming apocalypse expressed in Béla Tarr’s
last film The Turin
Horse (2011). While Tarr visually
expresses the external reality, Loznitsa explores the last gasp, the
internalized personal anguish of all light going out of the world, and, if not
for Loznitsa and this film, all would be forgotten.
In
the Fog - Find a film - NZFF2012
Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time
Out London, May 25, 2012
Having made documentaries for more than a decade, in 2010 the Belarussian
director Sergei
Loznitsa attracted a lot of critical attention with his impressive first
feature, ‘My Joy’, an unremittingly bleak look at contemporary
Set in
What follows not only shows the respective destinies of the three men but sketches, in flashback, their characters and their different responses to the question of how best to deal with the occupying German forces. Loznitsa adopts a slow, stately pace, allowing a number of cruel ironies to emerge from the stark, simple storyline with steadily accumulating dramatic force. There’s almost no military action on view, and the dialogue is generally hushed, even ruminative, particularly when the man suspected of betrayal muses on the effects of war, both on individuals and their relationships with one another. But the film never feels excessively talky; its meaning may be found not only in the dialogue but also in the eloquent compositions (shot by the great Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu), filled with dark trees, snow and mist.
Not unlike Nicholas Ray’s likewise philosophical ‘Bitter Victory’, ‘In the Fog’ is a war movie that foregrounds the emotions of individuals over the spectacle of battle, and uses metaphor and a calm mood of ethical enquiry rather than simplistic polemics arguing for or against military engagement. Loznitsa knows that war exists and won’t go away; rather than indulging in patriotic or pacifistic platitudes, he tries to show what it might do to our souls. And, in this writer’s opinion, he succeeds.
Cannes
2012: Slow war cinema and Bollysploitation | BFI Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Sight and Sound, May 25, 2012
One Tweeter in
In the Fog is a simpler, substantially less strange film than My
Joy, which wove together several seemingly unrelated anecdotes into a
panorama of the chaos and violence that Loznitsa sees as the historical base
note in Russian society. The new film is a war drama, based on a novel by Vasil
Bykov, set on the western edges of the
The film begins with an extraordinary long-take tableau that culminates in the hangings of three men, and then follows three different men and shows how the causes and effects of those hangings in their lives. The three are partisans Burov (Vlad Abashin) and Voitik (Sergei Kolesov) and Sushenya, a disgraced railway worker (Vladimir Svirski), whom the partisans are going to kill on suspicion of having betrayed the dead men.
As the main drama develops, Loznitsa gives us extended flashback interludes, rather like self-contained short stories, one for each of the three characters. The bitter irony at the centre of the film is that it is Sushenya, who has taken part in an act of anti-German sabotage and then refused to betray his comrades, who is hanged. In an act of exquisite cruelty, German commandant Grossmeier (Vlad Ivanov, whom you may recognise as ‘Mr Bebe’ from Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) sets him free, knowing he’ll become a pariah, as well as bait for the partisans he wants to capture.
Possibly the slowest and most contemplative war film ever made, In the Fog is a delicately complex work of shifting perspectives, and like My Joy, a contemplation on narrative and the act of storytelling. The wonderfully bitter payoff of the Sushenya flashback is that he has at last stated the case for his defence – even if it’s not one that can possibly save him – but it’s only at the end that he realises he’s told it to a dead man.
The film’s consideration on justice, moral integrity and martyrdom unfolds in a way that’s all the more telling because it’s so simple – and I’ve just had a conversation with someone who regarded the film as mundane. Yet to me, the theme’s development felt lucid in a particularly deep way – it’s the lucidity and depth of Tolstoy’s short stories.
The film is extraordinarily acted, largely in a sotto voce style that expresses the dogged determination and patience of these characters. Actors and landscapes alike could have come out of nineteenth-century Russian paintings; as Sushenya, Svirksi’s looks and stillness make him the embodiment of an age-old Russian archetype – the wise peasant who embraces his fate against all promptings of worldly logic.
Yes, the film is slow – shot by Oleg Mutu, it’s edited with only 72 cuts – and I suppose you might call it bleak, although it shows an enormous faith in human capacities. But I’m not automatically praising it because of those qualities. It’s just among the handful of truly eloquent and moving films here.
In
The Fog | Reviews | Screen In
The Fog
Sight
& Sound [Hannah McGill] April
2013
East European Film
Bulletin [Konstanty Kuzma]
Electric
Sheep Magazine [Evrim Ersoy]
Domenico La Porta
Cineuropa
Glenn Heath Jr. L Magazine
Mike D’Angelo at Cannes, also seen here: Cannes
2012, Day Nine: The director of Precious drops another prestige stinkbomb and
an unfilmable novel gets filmed
Screen
Daily Wendy Mitchell
DAILY
| Cannes 2012 | Sergei Loznitsa's IN THE FOG – Keyframe ... David Hudson
Cinespect interview Ryan Wells interview January 19, 2012
Cannes
Review: In the Fog Stephen Dalton at
Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter,
May 25, 2012, also seen here: Cannes
Review: In the Fog - The Hollywood Reporter
Leslie Felperin at Cannes from Variety, May 25, 2012
In the Fog |
review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Cath Clarke
Cannes
2012: In the Fog – review Peter
Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian,
May 25, 2012, also seen here: Peter Bradshaw
In
the Fog – review | Film | The Observer - The Guardian Philip French
In
the Fog, review - Telegraph Robbie
Collin
TIFF
movie review: In the Fog - The Globe and Mail (capsule review)
Lu Chuan
KEKEXILI: MOUNTAIN PATROL
China Hong Kong (90 mi) 2004
“Tibetans always point knives toward
themselves,” says Ritai (Duobuji), the head of a volunteer organization that
hunts poachers in the Kekexili region of China, to a young reporter, Gayu
(Leigh Zhang), who's come to the area to investigate the disappearance of
mountain patrolmen. This summation, which Ritai says over dinner as Gayu cuts
into a piece of meat, encapsulates the film's stunning moral ambiguity—with it,
director Lu Chuan makes known that he recognizes a people's struggle to
maintain their sense of goodness. This conflict, as Kekexili: Mountain
Patrol will reveal, is one that is fraught with hypocrisy and compromise,
meaning the story understands how people truthfully negotiate life. Without
exaggeration, the film's visual beauty ranks alongside Werner Herzog's Lessons
of Darkness as one of the most succinct and distressing expressions of
landscape in crisis. It is across the Kekexili region's terrain that Ritai and
his patrolmen chase after the seemingly phantom-like poachers that hunt the
Himalayan antelope; that we see so little of these creatures not only suggests
their decimation but something more deeply profound: the landscape's own
spiritual weakening. Lu is a stunning visual storyteller—so good, in fact, that
we could probably do without the attention paid to repetitious plot and
dialogue, which offsets the mysticism of the images. Compromised, yes, but
still strong, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol works out its idea of man's
moral struggle by reflecting it in the very fabric of world. In the film's
single most shocking moment, Mother Nature protects herself by killing a man—a
stunning vision of transcendental harmonizing.
Lu Yue
THE FOLIAGE C 76
China
Mostly this film lies below the C level, as it has an atrociously mediocre script, just ordinary acting, and is really something of an embarrassment. I’m pretty dumfounded at how predictable this overly melodramatic storyline is set near the end of the failed Cultural revolution, sending workers and intellectuals alike into the hinterlands to discover the merits of Communism through forced labor camps, a film rescued only by the shooting locations in the extraordinarily luscious bamboo forests of southern China, the kind that house the last of the Giant Panda bears. I’m sure the bears would have been more interesting than watching this over-wrought tale of a jealousy in the jungle, starring Shu Qi as the beautiful babe in the woods that everyone wants to play with. Imagine this same story shot in an urban environment: would it be of much interest to anyone? Lu Yue is a renown cinematographer who shot Zhang Yimou’s SHANGHAI TRIAD as well as the gorgeously photographed film across the Tibetan border, XIU XIU: THE SENT DOWN GIRL, and his photographic artistry is the notable beauty of this film.
The Foliage Not so, according to Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
This is the second film by Lu Yue, a former DP for Zhang
Yimou, and his first film, Mr. Zhao, was a smashing success on the
festival circuit, winning plaudits from the likes of Jonathan Rosenbaum and Scott Tobias and earning
comparisons to Cassavetes. I myself never saw Mr. Zhao, but I heard
quite a but about it, so I filed Lu's name away for future reference. Seems
like I was alone. Aside from being selected for the Vancouver International
Film Festival, The Foliage has been mostly ignored by programmers,
which is odd. A film this sumptuous and well-crafted has no business falling
through the cracks, especially when U.S. arthouses are overrun with mediocre Sino-Product-Crud. Chinese cinema expert Shelly
Kraicer confirmed what I suspected, that this film represents Lu's
entry into "official" Chinese filmmaking. While compromises are
inevitable in such a situation, I found myself thinking that yes, by some
critical standards for the "art film," The Foliage is rather
middlebrow. It is a period piece, centered on a specific charged moment in
Chinese history (Mao's "sending down" of young intellectuals into the
countryside for hard labor), and as was the case with a film featuring a
certain recent Best Actress winner, The Foliage exacts a rather
pointed glamming-down from its star, Shu Qi. But both of these arguably dubious
moves are so deftly handled by Lu that The Foliage redeems any
lingering aroma of mega-production blandness. Shu delivers the most measured,
carefully modulated performance I've seen from her so far, as a determined
young woman torn between duty to her family and her nation, whose frazzled
existence is further complicated by a Communist love triangle. (Even this
inescapably clichéd construct -- having to choose between the straight-edge
party-line Cultural Revolutionary and the punkish loose cannon -- is hewn with
such subtlety that you'll forget what a hoary chestnut it is.) There's a focus
on the physical toll that emotions take in this context, with Shu rushing
about, struggling to stay appropriately stoic and dedicated as she's coming
apart inside. (It's as if Lu is placing melodrama alongside socialist public
works in order to show that private turmoil is just another form of work.) But
what's really unique about The Foliage isn't its plot. Lu's formal
construction is epic in its own way, but eschews the typical shorthand, the
usual insistence on reminding us that we're watching Grand Historical Events
from a worm's-eye view. Most daring in this regard is his refusal to code the
Cultural Revolution as a sick pervasive menace. Rather, he chooses to simply
show it as a set of banal historical realities, an everyday set of tasks and
obstacles. By adopting this approach, I suppose Lu risks alienating some
viewers, coming off like he's too in hock to the Communist authorities to lay
it all on the line. But the resulting film bears no hint of prevarication or
soft-pedaling. Rather, it shows ordinary people dealing with trying but quotidian
circumstances, muddling through and making the best. This strategy rhymes
perfectly with Lu's other major achievement, his use of space and color.
Thankfully, no one in this film ever makes reference to the title, but that
title underscores just what this film is about and how it works. These young
scholars are sent to clear out the thicket so roads can be built. Lu's every
shot teems with this dense plant life, saturating each frame with a vibrating
emerald green. Even better, The Foliage's use of medium-long shots and
long master shots, while never overbearing and overly demonstrative, reminds us
of how all of the seemingly unrelated romantic and interpersonal intrigue is in
large part constrained and generated by this unfamiliar backwater and the challenge
it poses. Mao sent these young urban men and women into the underdeveloped
heart of
Lubitsch, Ernst
The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch: Biography Ephraim Katz from the Film Encyclopedia
b.
In 1911 he joined Max Reinhardt's famous Deutsches Theater, where he rapidly
advanced from bit parts to character leads. To supplement his income, he
took a job in 1912 as an apprentice and general-purpose handyman at
For the first time he demonstrated the subtle humor and the virtuoso visual wit
that would in time become known as "the Lubitsch Touch.'' The style
was characterized by a parsimonious compression of ideas and situations into
single shots or brief scenes that provided an ironic key to the characters and
to the meaning of the entire film. Lubitsch subsequently alternated
between escapist comedies and grand-scale historical dramas; he enjoyed great
international success with both. His reputation as a grand master of
world cinema reached a new peak after the release of his spectacles Madame
Du Barry (Passion, 1919) and Anna Boleyn (Deception, 1920). In
December of 1921, Lubitsch made his first trip to
Late the following year he arrived in the
His chain of triumphs during the silent period -- Forbidden
In 1939, Lubitsch scored, at MGM, one of the greatest triumphs of his career
with Ninotchka, a scintillating political-sexual romp starring Greta
Garbo. In 1942 he caused some controversy with his anti-Nazi comedy To
Be or Not to Be. The following year he signed a producer-director's
contract with 20th Century-Fox, but his work was curtailed by failing
health. In late 1944 he had to hand over the direction of A Royal
Scandal to Otto Preminger although remaining on the project as the nominal
producer. In March of 1947 he was awarded a special Academy Award for his
"25-year contribution to motion pictures.'' He died later that
year of a heart attack, his sixth. His last film, That Lady in Ermine,
was completed by Otto Preminger and released posthumously in 1948. At
Lubitsch's funeral, Billy Wilder is said to have pined, "No more
Lubitsch,'' William Wyler responded, "Worse than that -- no more Lubitsch
films.
The
Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch
The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch:
Biography
Bibliography - The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch |
American director | Britannica.com biography
Overview
for Ernst Lubitsch - TCM.com biography
by Shawn Dwyer
Film Reference profile by Greg S. Faller, also seen here: Ernst Lubitsch facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles ...
Ernst Lubitsch -
Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia biography
Ernst Lubitsch -
TheBiography.us biography
Ernst Lubitsch | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie bio from Jason Ankeny
Close-Up Retrospective biography and filmography
Ernst
Lubitsch - Cinema and Media Studies - Oxford Bibliographies biography
Ernst Lubitsch bio from Grapevine Video
Ernst Lubitsch Facts
- Biography - YourDictionary
brief bio
Film Forum: The Lubitsch Touch film comments and references from a Retrospective
Photographs and bibliography from Virtual History Film
The German-Hollywood Connection: Lubitsch Page
Ernst Lubitsch - Movies, Bio and
Lists on MUBI
Lubitsch in Berlin 5-DVD Box DVD - Kino on Video
The History of Cinema.
Ernst Lubitsch: biography, reviews, links Piero Scaruffi
Lubitsch Touch from German Culture
German Culture Article Lubitsch: A German Who Conquered Hollywood, an essay from German Culture (Undated)
Introducing
Ernst Lubitsch: The Director With The Golden Touch Stephanie Carwin from The Culture Trip (Undated)
Film Sound: Theory and Practice - Google Books Result from the 1985 book by Elisabeth Weis (462 pages), a chapter by Arthur Knight, The Movies Learn to Talk: Ernst Lubitsch, René Clair, and Rouben Mamoulian, subchapter may be viewed online entitled: Liberating the Camera: Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch:
Laughter in Paradise by Scott Eyman | PopMatters Wayne Brown book review, January 1, 1995
Ernst Lubitsch: The Actor vs. the Character essay by Dan Sallitt from The Film Comedy Reader, February 2002
FILM; What Would Ernst Lubitsch Have Done? - New York Times A.O. Scott, June 15, 2003
Lady
Windermere's Fan • Senses of Cinema
Darragh O’Donoghue, April 22, 2004
The Love Parade •
Senses of Cinema David
Cairns, April 2005
german films - Film Archive On the making of a documentary film Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin (110 mi in 2006, dir: Robert Fischer)
King of Comedy. King of Comedy, by Edouard Waintrop from FIPRESCI (2006)
» Ernst Lubitsch from Berlin - Alternative Film Guide Andre Soares on an extensive retrospective, March 6, 2007
Making the musical glorious - Los Angeles Times Susan King, February 10, 2008
The Importance of Seeing Ernst | The New York Observer Peter Bogdanovich, April 8, 2008
Washington Times - A playful sophistication Gary Arnold, May 25, 2008
clydefro » Ernst Lubitsch Of Lubitsch, Sturges, and Wilder, followed by 4 film reviews from clydefro June 12, 2008
Biography:
Ernst Lubitsch | Cinema's Exiles | PBS : Cinema's Exiles December 2, 2008
News Locarno 2010: Retrospective Ernst Lubitsch, March 9, 2009
Transatlantic
Auteur: Ernst Lubitsch's Self ... - Senses of Cinema Michael J. Anderson, March 13, 2011
Ernst Lubitsch and Nancy Meyers: A Study on ... - Senses of Cinema Robert Alpert, March 18, 2012
The
Essentials: 5 Great Ernst Lubitsch Films | IndieWire Oliver
Lyttelton and Kevin Jagernauth, November 30, 2012, also seen
here: The
Essentials: 5 Great Ernst Lubitsch Films - The Playlist
Three Takes #1: Ernst Lubitsch's "Design for Living" on Notebook | MUBI Calum Marsh, March 5, 2013
Ernst
Lubitsch's charming pre-Code transgressions / The Dissolve Kim Morgan, October 23, 2013
Nicola Lubitsch « First
Impressions Jewish Culture as Context for Lubitsch, May 6, 2014
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, 1943) • Senses of Cinema Eloise Ross,January 29, 2016
At the
Stanford: Ernst Lubitsch's 'Broken Lullaby' restores faith in ... Carlos Valladares from The Stanford Daily, February 17, 2017
The Lubitsch Legacy: “How Would Lubitsch Do It?” – The Cinegogue Shane Scott-Travis, March 12, 2017
Film
Review: The Sublimely Refined Touch of Ernst Lubitsch » The ... Betsy Sherman from The Arts Fuse, June 15, 2017
The Oyster
Princess (1919) • Ernst Lubitsch • Senses of Cinema Michael
Ewins, June 22, 2017
The Marriage
Circle (1924) • Ernst Lubitsch • Senses of Cinema Isabella McNeill, June 22, 2017
That Certain
Feeling... The Touch of Ernst Lubitsch - Harvard Film ... Harvard Film Archives, June – August, 2017
TSPDT - Ernst Lubitsch They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Ernst Lubitsch (Interview with Louella Parsons) in New York Telegraph, January 1, 1922 from The New York Telegraph, January 1, 1922
The 25th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)
Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)
Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Ernst Lubitsch's Gravesite biography from Find a Grave
Ernst Lubitsch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ernst Lubitsch Film Clips (posted on YouTube)
THE OYSTER PRINCESS
Germany (60 mi) 1919
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
Ernst Lubitsch's first
feature-length comedy (1919), about an American millionaire trying to acquire a
noble title for his daughter by marrying her off to a Prussian prince, is an
unalloyed delight--a perfect rejoinder to those critics who maintain that the
director only found "the Lubitsch touch" after moving to Hollywood in
the 1920s. The satire is sharp, and the visual settings are sumptuous and
gracefully handled. With Ossi Owalda, Harry Liedtke, and Victor Janson. 60 min.
User
comments from imdb Author: Gerald
Lenz (a8101909@unet.univie.ac.at) from Austria
Saw this yesterday at the "Konzerthaus", Vienna, with live music provided by a jazzy Belgian group called "Flat Earth Society". Without a doubt the best movie I've seen in quite a while. Highlights in this quasi-surrealistic romp (running a mere 63') include a meticulously choreographed "foxtrott epidemic" and a mass boxing-match amongst a benevolent society of billionaire's daughters. Ossi Oswalda (great name by the way), as the daughter of the titular "Oyster King", somehow manages to be tempestuous, spiteful, spoiled, endearing, lovable and sexy at the same time. A miracle of screen acting and directing. Stemming from 1919, the film reflects the coming of a new age of relative sexual freedom, female self-determination and the resignation of the aristocracy as the determining force of Central European society after the defeat of the World War ("Prinz Nucki", Ossi's intended, has fallen into the squalor of a one-room apartment). Lubitsch, at 27, reaching the pinnacle of his art from which he would not descend for the rest of his unique career.
User
comments from imdb Author: Cineanalyst
Ernst Lubitsch helped take German cinéma to America with
'Madame DuBarry,' re-titled 'Passion' in the states. The film itself
demonstrated an influence of American filmmakers. The story of 'The Oyster
Princess' makes fun of the opulence of American capitalism, which is not to say
it's satirical; rather, it's intentionally absurd. There's the absurdity of the
luxuries of the American rich, and then the absurdity that Lubitsch adds on top
of that to remove the film from reality. This is escapism for a public facing
an unstable economy.
As with the other early comedy by Lubitsch that I've seen ('The Merry Jail'),
one can see many themes and preferences that the director would continue to
turn to in his more celebrated, American work. There's the plot device of
mistaken identity. Generally common is the humour of drunkenness. Additionally,
Lubitsch again features scenes of dancing and celebration despite this being a
silent film. Characters turn to the camera and address the audience directly,
via inter titles, despite it. Of course, silent films weren't actually silent,
with orchestral or piano scores and sound effects provided during showings. In
the US, Lubitsch would go on to be one of the more respected auteur's of early
film musicals. Anyhow, for modern viewers, this film is not very funny or
entertaining, but it is historically interesting.
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Mouchette, Siberiade, 1900, The Oyster ... Gordon Thomas reviews a handful of DVD’s from Bright Lights Film Journal, May 1, 2007
Ernst Lubitsch's 1919 comedy feature The Oyster Princess has all the subversive rambunctiousness of a Tex Avery cartoon. The nonstop buffoonery starts right away as we're introduced to the Oyster King puffing on a cigar the size of a baby dirigible. This enormously successful seafood magnate — nearly catatonic with ennui, and remotely controlled by a legion of servants — greets every turn of events with, "I'm not impressed." Neither is he impressed with the violent, hormone-driven frenzy of his young daughter, who ends up reducing entire rooms to shards of ceramic and torn fabric. By making extravagant messes, she's telling her father: I want to marry a prince — and a real one — or else.
The resulting farce is several light years from the suave wit of the later Lubitsch, but there's no reason to complain — this is the most joyfully hilarious 60 minutes I've spent in years. Although the show ends sweetly romantic, its steady parade of shameless sight gags is in some ways a prototype of the "throw everything at 'em" method found in comedies like 1980's Airplane! — and Lubitsch sustains his laughs better than Zucker/Abrahams.
An outstanding sequence featuring a "fox trot epidemic" has an entire wedding party — and the cooking staff and the servants — feverishly prancing and jumping to the dotted rhythms of this latest dance craze. They're accompanied not by a dance band but by an entire symphony orchestra led by an over-enthusiastic conductor who bumps and grinds while keeping time. On the newly recorded soundtrack, a small ensemble led by Alijoscha Zimmermann, really shines here, but they lend the entire film a delicate buoyancy that never second guesses the jokes.
A slightly pudgy blonde phenomenon named Ossie Oswald plays the Princess with a stilted aplomb that allows for plenty of strange behavior. Although dubbed the German Mary Pickford in the twenties, Oswald is adorable in a perverse, disquieting manner that would belie the wholesomeness of a Pickford. Ossie, in other words, is just a little bit out of her mind.
The Oyster
Princess (1919) • Ernst Lubitsch • Senses of Cinema Michael
Ewins, June 22, 2017
Transatlantic
Auteur: Ernst Lubitsch's Self ... - Senses of Cinema Michael J. Anderson, March 13, 2011
not
coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Slant Magazine [Dan Callahan] also reviewing I DON’T WANT TO BE A MAN
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] reviewing 5-disc LUBITSCH IN BERLIN (1919-1921)
Die Austernprinzes sin - Ernst Lubitsch 1919 On YouTube (1:15)
THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE
USA (85 mi) 1924
Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule
review
Ernst Lubitsch's second American
film (1924) and his first major American success, an elegant comedy of marital
complications adapted from Lothar Goldschmidt's Only a Dream (a fitting
title for a Lubitsch inspiration). Adolph Menjou and Florence Vidor star in a
tale of infidelity and flirtation that gave new meaning to film satire and
introduced a note of subtle wit and movement into an industry reared on
slapstick. Even more innovative than it seems, and well worth seeing. About 110
min.
User
comments from imdb Author: kyvetti
from Finland
A major reason to watch silent films is appreciation for
purely visual storytelling. Murnau is of course a master of that, using little
to no text cards in his films, but this movie, first silent one by Lubitsch I
have seen, shows some skill. Storyline is complicated, various people are
pursuing each other or suspecting each other of adultery or...and yes, it gets
a good treatment with quite little dialogue. We, the viewers, don't need to
hear what the people are actually saying (except where absolutely necessary),
handling of common household objects or lines of sight already tell volumes.
Especially Charlotte's roses were treated superbly, as was that scene where Dr
Muller opens the door to reveal Charlotte in waiting-room... Actors do their
work well, especially Adolphe Menjou and Marie Prevost steal their scenes while
Monte Blue does nice suffering romantic lead.
This movie is simply extremely well done. All those who have aspirations in
making movies of their own should check this one (likes of Kurosawa and
Hitchcock have been praising this movie, and influence on Hitchcock was very
obvious), but even for a layman it is an enjoyable light romantic comedy (while
still, like Lubitsch films always do, has bit of an edge in there...).
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
Lubitsch's second American film tells the story of two couples in Vienna one of them happy, the other not. The vain and flighty Mizzi (Marie Prevost) bickers with her cold, suave husband Josef (Adolphe Menjou) who puts a detective on her trail in order to find grounds for divorce. Mizzi visits her friend Charlotte (Florence Vidor) who is blissfully in love with her new husband Franz (Monte Blue). The lonely Mizzi then feigns sickness so that Franz, who is a doctor, will visit. She then attempts to seduce him. Franz resists, but appearances make him look guilty to Charlotte, and meanwhile Franz's friend Gustav (Creighton Hale) tries to lure Charlotte into his arms.
Although the movies had excelled in comedy, taking the forms of slapstick and farce, true wit was a rare thing in film before Lubitsch. The first thing you notice in The Marriage Circle is that none of the acting is exaggerated. Lubitsch knew that you could portray emotion most effectively with subtle expressions and underplaying, aided by the use of close-ups. The film doesn't rely on title cards very much; the dialogue is there to push things forward a bit when necessary, but otherwise everything is achieved by editing and gesture. One scene conveys seductiveness just by showing two pairs of hands preparing and drinking coffee. And although the plot involves numerous misunderstandings, deceptions, and mistaken identities, Lubitsch keeps everything clear and precise, maximizing the audience's enjoyment in following the story's convoluted path. The pacing is perfect -- there's none of that long, drawn-out feeling one sometimes gets watching silent films.
The performers are uniformly good, with Menjou a standout as the amusingly diffident husband looking for a divorce. The only slightly dissonant note is from Monte Blue, playing a man so soft and spineless that you wonder what either woman sees in him. He's not a particularly appealing actor, but under Lubitsch's direction he is restrained and credible within the premises of the story, which was based on a play by Lothar Schmidt.
The Marriage Circle was clearly influenced by Chaplin's A Woman of Paris, and although that groundbreaking film had more of a sense of gravity, Lubitsch understands the milieu, and how to present it, better than Chaplin. Here we can see the beginnings of a sophisticated trend in film that would come to fruition in the early sound era. The director's style came to be known as "the Lubitsch touch," a visual poetry of lightness and gentle wit. This film is perhaps the best introduction to the Lubitsch touch, because it displays the style in its most elementary form. You chuckle at the way the people in this film carry themselves, and their illusions about one another, and the film doesn't go out of its way to make you laugh, content to just display the action and let you find the humor yourself. We are not burdened with the ponderous moralism that has plagued American films with themes of romance and infidelity. It is taken for granted that married people have problems, and that sometimes people cheat on their spouses. In short, we are treated like adults, while the film breezes by in a whirl of pleasure.
Bright Lights Film Journal | The Marriage Circle Alan Jacobson, May 2004
The Marriage Circle (1924) • Ernst Lubitsch • Senses of Cinema Isabella McNeill, June 22, 2017
Movie of the Week: “The Marriage Circle” | The New Yorker Richard Brody
silentsaregolden.com - A collection of vintage reviews from the 20s
ONE HOUR WITH YOU
USA (80 mi) 1932 uncredited co-director: George Cukor
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
Many consider Ernst Lubitsch's
1932 musical remake of his groundbreaking silent The Marriage Circle
(1924) inferior to the original, but I find it funnier and in some ways more
sophisticated. Maurice Chevalier, who plays a doctor married to Jeanette
MacDonald, becomes attracted to Genevieve Tobin (while Charlie Ruggles, as his
best friend, goes after MacDonald) and periodically turns to the audience for
advice. George Cukor was hired by Lubitsch to direct but almost had his name
removed from the credits because Lubitsch did so many retakes; stylistically
there's never any question that Lubitsch, working with his favorite
screenwriter, Samson Raphaelson, is the one in charge. 80 min.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Directed first by Cukor under Lubitsch's
supervision, and then largely re-shot by the latter, this is in many ways a
typical piece of sophisticated, smug fluff from Lubitsch and his regular
screenwriter Samson
Raphaelson. A remake of the 1924 The Marriage Circle, it presents
Chevalier as a philandering Paris doctor, flaunting his thick-accented charm at
MacDonald. Songs, verse, snappy dialogue, and asides to the audience make it
likeable and clever. But Cukor, interviewed about the film's authorship, put
his finger on its problem: 'It's really a Lubitsch picture, and if you think
you can detect what I did in it, you're imagining things. Lubitsch's pictures
were brilliant, even if they lacked feeling. He didn't want his comedies to
have any feeling. Now, my idea of comedy is that they should always touch you
unexpectedly.'
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
A very dapper case for matrimonial elasticity, argued in
sleighs and insinuations. Maurice Chevalier pauses outside a bedroom to address
viewers: "I am married, and I like it. Sorry to disappoint you." The
wife (Jeanette MacDonald) is in bed, and the couple's friskiness is undiminished
by the wedding ring. Their bliss is contrasted with another couple's fabricated
formalities, as Roland Young and his divorce detective gravely consider a
painting of the tawny wife (Genevieve Tobin): "When I married her, she was
a brunette. Now you can't believe anything she says." The structural sense
from The Marriage Circle and The Merry Jail is brought into play
after Chevalier and Tobin share a flirtatious cab ride, Charles Ruggles as
MacDonald's would-be Romeo rounds out the farcical geometry. The story goes
that George Cukor simply filmed Ernst Lubitsch's setups the way five decades
later Tobe Hooper supposedly just had to train his camera on Spielberg's Poltergeist
ideas, but a case for mere authorial ventriloquism crumbles as soon as one
recognizes the airiness of Girls About Town and Holiday in the
close-up of Tobin's shoes doffed in randy anticipation. The snap is Cukor's
own, yet the setting is still Lubitsch's universe of seduction, discretion and
manners -- rearranging the seats at the dinner table trembles a relationship,
being caught with your tie undone in the garden terrace is no different from
getting caught with your pants around your ankles. Smitten underneath the moon
glow, Ruggles voices the Lubitsch dilemma with ardent awkwardness: "If I
didn't have such a splendid education, I'd yield to the animal in me." It
all leads back to the drawing room, with the fourth wall broken along with
marriage conventions. With Josephine Dunn, Richard Carle, and Barbara Leonard.
In black and white.
Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals Criterion essay from Michael Koresky
One Hour with You (1932) - The Criterion Collection
Eclipse Series 8:Lubitsch Musicals - The Criterion Collection
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3/5]
The IFC Blog {Michael Atkinson]
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The Criterion Collection Database - Eclipse
Series 8 [Dan Callahan] 4-DVD LUBITSCH MUSICALS, also seen
here: The House Next Door [Dan Callahan]
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review 4-DVD LUBITSCH MUSICALS, also seen here: Turner Classic Movies dvd review
DVD Verdict [Gordon Sullivan] 4-DVD LUBITSCH MUSICALS
Entertainment
Weekly capsule dvd review [A-] Gregory Kirschling, 4-DVD LUBITSCH MUSICALS
The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
Germany (83 mi) 1932
Right from its opening joke - a
Venetian romantically serenading a gondola full of garbage - Trouble in
Paradise spins a wonderful, sophisticated tale in praise of immorality,
money and sex, with two aristocratic impostors (Marshall and Hopkins) battling
over their plans to rob a rich widow (the languorous Kay Francis).
Lubitsch's regular script collaborator Samson
Raphaelson never bettered the lethal irony of his dialogue here, as the
thieves pass insinuations to and fro with the same lightning grace they give to
pickpocketing. And the director's famed 'touch', which can on occasion seem
like a thump, remains featherweight and incisive throughout, matching the
performances of his charmingly bogus lead players. If ever a film slipped down
a treat, this one does.
Movie-Vault.com
(Vadim Rizov) review
Endlessly stylish, especially for an early talkie. Lubitsch
himself noted it as a peak - "As for pure style, I have done nothing
better or as good." To avoid being tied down by the limitations of early
sound equipment, many of the most memorable scenes feature sound dubbed in
later, allowing the camera free range, and sometimes forcing memorably
innovative shots on Lubitsch. Trouble In Paradise is equally sharp when it
comes to dialogue, and between the cast and the camera a kinder, gentler
screwball comedy emerges, one far removed from the bitter-edged anarchy of
Lubitsch's contemporaries.
Two married thieves (Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall) are moving in for
robbery on Kay Francis. Francis falls in love with Marshall, he reciprocates,
and both his marriage and the heist are threatened. A simple story, and though
admittedly a great many frills are added, it's just a tricked-up love triangle.
The reason it works, as opposed to getting bogged down in its own cliches, is
because the whole cast is attuned and generally perfect. Moreover, unlike some
of his champions, Lubitsch never gets bogged down in prurience - it's an
unabashadly sexual tale, but not single-mindedly so.
But probably what makes Trouble In Paradise so refreshingly gentle and
mild-mannered compared with other screwball comedies is that it traffics in
actual human beings, not shrill caricatures. Lubitsch's thematic focus is clear
- objects only have meaning in relation to their associations, not their
monetary wealth. Early on, when Francis loses her handbag and offers an
absurdly large reward for its return, Leonid Kinskey, in one of his first
roles, gives her a hilarious chewing out in English and Russian (quoting
Trotsky!), chiding her for spending so much money on a bag when so many are
starving. Yet Lubitsch condemns no one - if the couple steals, the objects they
steal only are rich to them in associations and memories. Don't confuse this
with soft - the film is sharply comic, and fast off the mark, and yet humane. An
early peak.
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - Cine-File.info Kathleen Sachs
Wes Anderson has made no secret of the influence Ernst Lubitsch's
films had on his most recent release, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL. He's openly cited
several of the German-born director's films as direct inspiration, including
one of Lubitsch's first feature-length non-musical pre-Code comedies, TROUBLE
IN PARADISE. Upon seeing THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, Lubitsch's influence is
obvious--in one scene, Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes) advises his elderly
lady love, Madame D. (Tilda Swinton), on her choice of nail color. In another,
as Madame D. lays in her coffin, Gustave sees that she changed it just before
her death. Both are reminiscent of similar scenes from TROUBLE IN PARADISE, in
which the lovable crook Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) critiques Madame
Mariette Colet's (Kay Francis) choice of lipstick and powder; in another scene,
he notices that she's taken his suggestions to heart. In Anderson's film, other
characters speculate as to Gustave's sexuality, oftentimes in an accusatory way
that is more derogatory than humorous. In Lubitsch's film there's no doubt that
Gaston is heterosexual, but the important distinction between the films isn't one's
perception of a character's sexuality--it's that, in Lubitsch's world, those
very qualities are synonymous with refinement, the essence of a sophistication
that largely comprises what is known as "The Lubitsch Touch,"
something that is now largely absent from American cinema. His fourth
collaboration with screenwriter Sam Raphaelson and derived as usual from
underwhelming source material, it's the story of two love-struck crooks and the
target who comes between them. At the beginning of the film, in the midst of
another robbery, Gaston meets and falls in love with Lily (Miriam Hopkins),
another thief from his side of the tracks. Together they leave Venice and
travel to Paris, where they become entangled with Madame Colet, a widowed
perfume manufacturer. The film's title refers to the disruption brought to
their relationship by Gaston and Mariette's newfound infatuation, a riff on the
phrase often used to described marital discord, though it could also be applied
to the tenuous economic times in which the characters are operating. Though
hardly a political director, Lubitsch includes one scene in which a disheveled
Communist berates Madame Colet for her exorbitance, which acts, in addition to
Gaston and Lily's low social class, as an acknowledgment of the financial
depression that was then affecting the Western world. Such inclusions don't
detract from one's enjoyment of the luxury and frivolity for which Lubitsch is
primarily known, but instead act as a metaphor for moviegoing itself. It's not
necessarily escapism, but a divorce from realism that makes this untraditional
romcom a shining example of "The Lubitsch Touch," and definitely one
from which any contemporary director can learn a thing or two.
Trouble
in Paradise (1932) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Rob Nixon
One of the pure gems of 1930s cinema, Trouble in Paradise (1932) was
described around the time of its release as being "like caviar, only
tastier." Although Ernst Lubitsch's earlier musicals with Maurice
Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald displayed a characteristic continental flair
and sophistication, Trouble in Paradise
was really what started people talking about "the Lubitsch touch."
For many film critics and movie historians, this meant a combination of things;
the director's distinctive style which, in the case of comedies and farces,
treated even the most scandalous manners and behavior in a light, humorous
manner; his pushing the limits of what was deemed sexually risquΘ for the
period; Lubitsch's sparkling, sometimes cynical wit, and his cinematic fluency.
Trouble in Paradise
delivered it in spades, causing critic Dwight McDonald in 1933 to comment on
its "endless" list of virtues and deem it "as close to
perfection as anything I have ever seen in the movies." Certainly,
Lubitsch himself shared that high opinion, writing shortly before his death in
1947, "As for pure style, I think I have done nothing better or as
good." Maybe it would be best simply to take the word of Miriam Hopkins,
who said working with Lubitsch was like attending a great drama school, calling
him "the master craftsman that people learned comedy and everything
from."
In Trouble in Paradise,
Miriam Hopkins plays a professional thief on the loose in Europe who, while
posing as a countess, comes upon another master crook, Herbert Marshall,
himself posing as a baron. They rendezvous with the intention of stealing from
each other, and in a hilarious scene of one-upmanship (she takes his wallet, he
steals her watch, etc.), they fall madly and instantly in love and lust.
Fleeing Venice (where Marshall has fleeced a wealthy Frenchman by pretending to
be a doctor called to examine his tonsils), they end up in Paris and set their
sights on a rich widow, Madame Colet (Kay Francis). Soon they're in her employ,
but as they're closing in for the kill, Marshall finds himself falling in love
with his prey. Will he give up his wicked ways and remain with the glamorous
Francis or return to Hopkins and the carefree life of thievery? This being
Lubitsch, it's not hard to figure out.
There's certainly no shortage of wit in the screenplay, which Lubitsch adapted
(he didn't receive screen credit) with his frequent collaborator Samson
Raphaelson. (A third writer, Grover Jones, was credited, but by most accounts,
all he did was sit in the same room, drink, and tell personal anecdotes.) The
story was based, like so many of his films, on a play of Hungarian origin.
However, the play was jettisoned early in the process (at the director╒s
suggestion, Raphaelson never even bothered to read it), and Lubitsch modeled
his central character on the famous Hungarian swindler and thief Georges
Manolescu, whose 1907 memoirs were turned into at least two silent films. What
the play and memoirs gave him were a central situation and romantic characters,
which he used to create his own unique concoction. (In the 15 films he made
during the remaining 15 years of his career, Lubitsch produced only one
original script - To Be or Not to Be, 1942.)
But the sophisticated humor of Trouble
in Paradise is not just a matter of sparkling, witty dialogue,
cleverly plotted situations and sexual gamesmanship. Here, the comedy is
brilliantly visual too. An entire love-triangle scene of
seduction/resistance/suspicion/betrayal/conquest is played out with nothing
more on screen than a series of clocks. Likewise, sex is cued by shadows cast
onto a bed and by the opening and closing of doors (and the mystery of who will
enter or exit from which one) in a way that goes beyond the antics of French
farce. There is the aforementioned escalating foreplay of theft, played out
again at the end of the movie, and conversations observed from behind glass
that are no less understood for being unheard. As James Harvey observes in Romantic
Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges (Da Capo, 1998), "It's
less that the people on the screen illustrate comic and surprising ways of
seeing things than that we ourselves do. Lubitsch makes us more conscious than
ever of how we understand, of how we get the point of a joke, the sort of
things we know without having to be told."
In addition to Raphaelson, other collaborators brought a great deal to the
final look and feel of Trouble in Paradise.
The stunning art deco sets of Hans Dreier, head of the Paramount art
department, are used not just as surface polish or background glamour, but to
define the world of the characters and their drive to possess beauty and
luxury. Studio costume designer Travis Banton, who worked so closely with Marlene
Dietrich on her classic look from this period, made the most of Hopkins' and
Francis' glamour and terrific ability to wear great clothes. And as he would
later in such films as Ninotchka (1939) and To Be or Not to Be,
Lubitsch pulled together a supporting cast of such peerless comic character
actors as Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles. He got from his three
principal players probably the best performances of their careers, including
the often overly formal Marshall and the frequently suffering clotheshorse
Francis. In this film, the latter's charming lisp (like Elmer Fudd, she had a
problem saying rs) perfectly meshed for once with her character's
nationality. Trouble in Paradise
also proves Hopkins was a much better actress and screen presence than she was
generally given credit for. Nevertheless, she was already up to her legendary
screen-stealing tricks. Determined to upstage Francis in their major scene
together, Hopkins kept turning her chair on the set until what was to have been
a profile shot ended up revealing her full face. The furious Francis complained
to Lubitsch, and he took care of the problem by nailing Hopkins's chair to the
floor for future takes.
Trouble in Paradise: Lubitsch Before
the Touch Criterion essay by
Enno Patalas, January 06, 2003
Trouble in Paradise: Lovers, On the
Money Criterion essay by
Armond White, January 06, 2003
Trouble in Paradise (1932) - The Criterion Collection
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Ernst Lubitsch: Sweet Smell of Excess | L.A. Weekly J. Hoberman, July 8, 2010
“Trouble in Paradise” - Salon.com Charles Taylor, June 13, 2003
Trouble
in Paradise (1932) - #170 | Criterion Reflections David Blakeslee
DVD Journal Damon Houx
Images Movie Journal Kendahl Kruver
Trouble in
Paradise (1932) | PopMatters
Michael S. Smith
Trouble in Paradise (1932) | The
Film Spectrum Jason Fraley
Scott Reviews Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise [Masters of ... Scott Nye from Criterion Cast
Trouble
in Paradise (1932) | Journeys in Classic Film Kristen Lopez
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
GreenCine Jonathan Marlow
Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review
homevideo.about.com (Ivana Redwine) dvd recommendation
Trouble In Paradise (1932) Film Review & Synopsis Obscure Hollywood
Edinburgh U Film Society (Martin Hunt) review
The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch: Trouble in Paradise Hal Erickson
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
Trouble in
Paradise (film) - Wikipedia
Ernst Lubitsch -Contro la guerra - No war (1:45)
YouTube - :: Trouble In Paradise : Ernst Lubitsch (1932) :: (5:35)
Trouble in Paradise III: Director's Cut PART 1 (8:14)
Trouble in Paradise III: Director's Cut PART 2 (7:14)
Trouble in Paradise III: Director's Cut PART 3 (6:36)
DESIGN FOR LIVING
USA (91 mi) 1933
Noël Coward's teacup wit and elegance
hardly suits the beer glass temperament of his screen adaptor Ben Hecht,
who later complained of the author's 'vaudeville patter with an English
accent', not to mention a 'superiority complex that went over big with
sofa-cushion menders'. The script galumphs when it should glide, and neither
the director nor the stellar cast can bring this would-be soufflé about a
bohemian ménage-à-trois (Cooper paints, March writers, Hopkins flits between
them) to the right fluffy consistency.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
When Ernst Lubitsch's film of
Noel Coward's famous farce was released in 1933, Ben Hecht's screenplay was
attacked for coarsening Coward, and Lubitsch was ridiculed for casting Gary
Cooper, Fredric March, and Miriam Hopkins in the parts played onstage by Alfred
Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, and Coward himself. Well, maybe it is a little lumpy for
Lubitsch, but I think the film more than holds its own. Cooper is a problem,
but the bubbles rise in spite of him. Very glossy, very continental, and
sometimes very funny. 90 min.
User
comments from imdb Author: Capel
Cleggs (capelcleggs@my-dejanews.com) from Nepean, Ontario, Canada
Few films have had as much nonsense written about them as
Ernst Lubitsch's "Design For Living." From the moment it was
released, it was criticized for rewriting Noel Coward's then-daring play (Ben
Hecht, the screenwriter, said: "There's only one line of Coward's left in
the picture--see if you can find it!"); for casting Americans in parts
that had originally been played by Coward, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne; for
toning down the gay subtexts of Coward's play. All that is, of course,
completely irrelevant; the question is not whether the play is faithful to the
source material, but whether it's good. And it is, it is.
There are flaws in the film. This was one of the first times Lubitsch had made
a movie with little or no music on the soundtrack; previously, in his musicals
and his sublime "Trouble In Paradise," he had used background music
to cover up potential dead spots and carry the film along. Here there is none
of that, with the result that some of the early scenes seem oddly paced. But
the wit of the script (written by Hecht but, as always with Lubitsch, carefully
supervised and contributed to by the director himself) and the appeal of the
performers (more about them later) pull the film through the occasional rough
spots, and the second half of the movie is just about perfect.
Another idiotic thing that is often said about "Design For Living" is
that Lubitsch and Hecht rewrote Coward due to fear of the censors. In fact, the
censors must have had a heart attack when they saw "Design," for this
is one of the most sexually frank of the pre-Code Hollywood movies; premarital
sex, cohabitation, adultery and frigidity are all clearly portrayed-- but, as
always with Lubitsch, they are implied rather than shown. Lubitsch's trademark
door and blackout gags are here, and they are hilarious; again, it's not Noel
Coward--it's Lubitsch, the cinema's greatest comic filmmaker at the peak of his
powers.
But there's something else here that isn't found in most Lubitsch films, and it
comes from Ben Hecht, whose cynical, fast-talking, very American style of
writing gives the characters a flavor quite unlike the more Continental wit of
Lubitsch's usual heroes. (This is also one of the few Lubitsch films where the
lead characters are American rather than European.) Critics have sometimes
complained that Hecht's somewhat inelegant style was unworthy of either Coward
or Lubitsch. Again, I disagree; the moments of Hechtian farce (like the
hilarious party scene) are beautifully handled by Lubitsch and turn the film
into a forerunner of screwball comedy, the place where Continental charm and hard-driving
Americanism meet.
Now to the actors. The "British is Better" attitude of many critics
made it inevitable that Lubitsch's American cast would be pilloried. Again,
this is not Noel Coward and a Noel Coward style of acting wouldn't work in this
context. All the leading players are actually quite wonderful: Miriam Hopkins,
one of Lubitsch's favorite actresses, has the best role and gives a marvelously
energetic performance as the flighty, pretentious free spirit who tries to
substitute art for sex; Gary Cooper is at the height of his youthful charm,
with a surprisingly light comic touch and great teamwork with Fredric March.
March, who can often be heavy-handed in film comedy, is here charming and
funny; it's a tribute to Lubitsch that he got such a genial performance out of
him. And, of course, there's Edward Everett Horton, one of Hollywood's finest
character actors in one of his finest roles.
If you know and love the Noel Coward play, don't expect this movie to be a
faithful adaptation. Think of it as an original work of comedic art that
happens to utilize some of the story elements of Coward's play. It's not Noel
Coward; it's a splendid romantic farce that, like all great comedies, has
serious themes underneath the fun: Sexual freedom, male vs. female roles in
society, art, love, friendship. So see it (if you can; it's not on video,
alas). It's not Noel Coward, it's Ernst Lubitsch, and despite the occasional
flaws, it's Lubitsch at his best.
Design
for Living - TCM.com Margarita
Landazuri
Noel Coward's 1932 play, Design for Living, about a
menage a trois among British upper-class bohemians, had been a huge hit on the
New York and London stage, starring Coward, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne as
the unconventional trio. The myth is that when Paramount bought the film rights
that same year, Hollywood censorship demanded that Coward's play be changed
completely to take out the sexual innuendo; the result was a desecration of the
Coward original, and a total failure. The truth is rather more complex.
German producer-director Ernst Lubitsch had been working in America for a
decade, and was one of the most respected and powerful talents in Hollywood.
His witty and ironic style of visual storytelling had come to be known as
"the Lubitsch Touch." While his style was considered the ultimate in
European sophistication, he had, in fact, a very shrewd understanding of the
American character...something that Noel Coward, whose plays are peopled with
posh upper-class Brits, lacked. Lubitsch couldn't relate to the rarefied wit of
Coward, and realized that American audiences wouldn't either. And he knew the
play's structure and talkiness wouldn't work on film. So he was eager to take
the basic situation of one woman in love with two men, and make it his
own...without losing the sexual suggestiveness. Censorship didn't really have
much to do with it. In fact, although a production code of what could and could
not be done in films existed in theory, in practice it was not yet being
enforced in 1933.
Lubitsch first asked his favorite screenwriter Samson Raphaelson (Trouble in
Paradise, 1932) to write the script for Design for Living (1933), but Raphaelson wasn't interested in revising
Coward. So Lubitsch asked the playwright of The Front Page (1928) and
the screenwriter for Scarface (1932) -- Ben Hecht -- to take on the
task. Thus Paramount, which had paid $50,000 to Coward for the rights, had to
also pay the same amount to Hecht for a screenplay. The result turned out to be
just as racy as Coward's, but in a totally different way, a combination of
Lubitsch's European subtlety and Hecht's slam-bang American earthiness. Hecht
proudly proclaimed that he used only one line from Coward's play in his script:
"for the good of our immortal souls." But ever the prankster, Hecht
did throw in some lines from other Coward plays into his Design for Living screenplay.
Miriam Hopkins, who had been brilliant in Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise,
was the director's one and only choice to play the woman in Design for Living's triangle. Lubitsch
had hoped to cast Ronald Colman and Leslie Howard in the male leads. But Colman
was too expensive, and Howard didn't want to risk comparisons to Lunt or
Coward. Then Lubitsch chose Fredric March and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., but at
the last minute Fairbanks came down with pneumonia. According to Lubitsch
biographer Scott Eyman, the director then "stunned everybody" by
casting action star Gary Cooper. As the production of Design for Living got underway, Lubitsch
gathered the company for a pep talk. He warned them that critics wouldn't like
the film, and would say they had ruined Coward's play. But he assured them that
the public would like it. "Noel Coward means nothing to most of them. Gary
Cooper means something to them, and they will be happy to see that he is an
accomplished light comedian." The latter prediction, at least, came true.
Thanks to Lubitsch's help and encouragement Cooper did, indeed, prove to be an
adept comic actor. They would work together again, in Desire (1936) and Bluebeard's
Eighth Wife (1938).
Unfortunately, Lubitsch's prediction that the critics would lambaste the film
also came true. The New York Herald Tribune's Richard Watts, Jr., who
called Design for Living
"even more superficial than the original," was typical. And audiences
seemed to agree with the critics. The film did not do well at the box office.
But it's a film that has aged well, and has become more highly regarded as the
years go by. Design for Living's
moral attitudes, offbeat casting, witty dialogue, and Deco sleekness seem
surprisingly contemporary today. And while other styles of comedy have dated,
the Lubitsch Touch still works.
Three Takes #1: Ernst Lubitsch's "Design for Living" on Notebook | MUBI Calum Marsh, March 5, 2013
Design for Living (1933) Review – Pre-Code.Com Danny
albany.edu Film notes from the New York State Writer’s Institute
Design for Living (1933) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Glenn Erickson
David Reviews Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living [Blu-ray Review] David Blakeslee
Movie Mirror Sanderson Beck
The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch: Design for Living Hal Erickson
The Boston Phoenix review Steve Vineberg
The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review
Design for Living (film) - Wikipedia
Design for Living: Opening Scene on YouTube (4:06)
NINOTCHKA
USA (110 mi) 1939
This was the first time since 1934
that Garbo had been seen in the 20th century, and the first time ever that her
material was predominantly comic (though it was hardly the first time she'd
laughed, as the ads insisted). But her character still had an icy aura, at
least at the outset - she plays a Russian comrade staying in Paris on
government business, a situation providing writers Wilder, Brackett and Walter
Reisch with rich material for impish political jokes ('The last mass trials
were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians'). Then
she meets the acceptable face of Capitalism in the form of Melvyn
Douglas, and like many a lesser MGM star before her, succumbs completely to
his suave looks and honeyed voice. The film's not quite the delight history
says it is - by the late '30s, the famed Lubitsch touch was resembling a heavy
blow, the elegant sophistication turning crude and cynical. Yet it's still
consistently amusing, and Garbo throws herself into the fray with engaging
vigour.
Brilliant
Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
"Comrades, I'm out of the omelette." Felix Bressart is
one of the great presences of all time. You just automatically like the guy the
minute he shows his mustachio'd face, you trust him, and you know that he can
be moved around for the right reasons. Of course then there's the leading
actress: Greta Garbo could have had a career of nothing but high comedy if
she'd wanted, could have invented new careers and arts-did that, come to think
of it; could have been an icy doctrinaire zealot to scare the pants off of
anyone, or an oversmoked temptress to charm them the same direction. Billy
Wilder, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch provide the opening 40 minutes or so
with snappy lines to hold up against anything for blinding clarity, and the
final scenes regain nearly the same standard. In between Ernst Lubitsch invokes
his magic schmaltz in milkshake grade density, which isn't bad but I was
delighted when Bela Lugosi appears to (no really, I swear) break that spell and
send the entire thing spinning off into Constantinople with talk of magic
carpets, borscht and too much champagne. The remaining cast waxes between being
supporting and brilliant when given the shot: co-star Melvyn Douglas (suavely
pulling off lines both great and cliche' with a common slickness and nearly
inspiring pre-installed charm) and co-supporting comrade Alexander Granach
stand out (especially in the three comrades and a party in the royal suite
scene). At its heart this comedy is a straightforward compare and contrast of
Stalinist communism and old world Euro-capitalism. How much either have changed
is open to interpretation, but if this was an early salvo in the Cold War it's
no wonder that the commies were behind early and, deservedly, trying to play
catch-up. "The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to
be fewer but better Russians." Sadly, the same way that it's still done in
both Russia and the USA, we've just progressed to the point that we add
"on the street" at the end.
Ninotchka Charles Affron from Film Reference
The
advertising campaign for Ninotchka is proof of a publicist's faith in
the collective amnesia of the American public. "Garbo Laughs" was
treated as momentously as was "Garbo Talks," the slogan that
announced her first sound film, Anna Christie. The marketing of Ninotchka
takes no account of Greta Garbo's frequent laughter, her smile and the
lightness of her touch throughout her 1930s films. Just three years before, in Camille,
playfulness and humor inflect her doomed "lady of the camellias." Ninotchka
is, however, her first comedy. Its principal comic ploy is a paradoxial
reflection on Garbo as actress. Here she is made to play, through the first
part of the film, a woman who apparently has no emotions. Audiences must read
this as they would a scene that suggests that Fred Astaire is clumsy or that
John Wayne is a coward. Ninotchka extracts much of its humor from the
deadpan expression of an actress whose presence is a sign of deep emotional
resonance.
The
story of the rigid, businesslike commissar who awakens to luxury and love in
Paris is coherent with director Ernst Lubitsch's stylistics. His major films
demonstrate the connections between an elegance of decor, elegance of manner,
and elegance of the heart. The film's narrative pretext is the sale of jewels;
Ninotchka falls in love with an absurd hat just as she falls in love with Léon.
Much humor is drawn from the contrast between a lush Parisian hotel and the
austere Moscow room Ninotchka shares with a cello player and a streetcar
conductor.
As is
usually the case in the films of Lubitsch, the comedy reflects back upon the
characters. The director uses the comedy of manners to authenticate and
dramatize the feelings of the protagonists, and in this, he is at odds with the
hard-edged, satirical bent that is characteristic of the writers of Ninotchka,
Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, a mode that becomes
particularly apparent when Wilder turns to directing their scripts. The appeal
of Ninotchka is in the mix of talents, from Garbo's emotional
complexity, to Lubitsch's wry sentiment, to the writer's acerbic wit. The range
of the performances includes the broadness of the three bumbling commissars and
the drawing-room bitchery of the Grand Duchess Swana (to which Ina Claire
brings her distinctively brittle sophistication). Melvyn Douglas provides the pratfall
that inspires Garbo's celebrated laugh, and the warm charm that inspires her
love.
Very
successful at its release, it seemed to promise a new direction in Garbo's
faltering career. Her next and final film, Two Faced Woman, also
co-starring Melvyn Douglas, proved that considerable comic talents also require
a comic script. But Ninotchka was reborn, first as a Cole Porter's
Broadway musical, Silk Stockings, with film stars Hildegarde Knef and
Don Ameche, and then as a musical film with Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Kathleen Sachs
In his interpretation of the phrase "The Lubitsch Touch," critic Jonathan Rosenbaum opined that this so-called touch is made up of three distinct qualities that both set German-born Ernst Lubitsch apart from his contemporaries and account for his being a significant source of inspiration to his successors. The first two parts of his definition refer to Lubitsch's "specifically Eastern European capacity to represent the cosmopolitan sophistication of continental Europeans to Americans" and "[his] way of regarding his characters that could be described as a critical affection for flawed individuals who operate according to double standards"; the third part refers to Lubitsch's incorporation of music in his films, but while Werner R. Heymann's score is certainly a compliment to the wonderfully funny and romantic story in NINOTCHKA, it is not as necessary to his distinct style in this film as it was in his acclaimed musicals from the late 20s and early 30s. Though Rosenbaum acknowledges that all three elements are not present in every one of Lubitsch's films, the first two most definitely account for the winning effect of "The Lubitsch Touch" in this 1939 MGM production that is often overlooked in lieu of his earlier and later successes (the musicals and TROUBLE IN PARADISE before, THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER immediately thereafter). Similar to his 1942 film TO BE OR NOT TO BE, NINOTCHKA satirizes and even romanticizes a touchy but timely subject using Lubitsch's above-mentioned abilities. In the film, a typically steely Greta Garbo plays a Russian envoy sent by the Soviet Union to Paris in order to broker the sale of the dissolved aristocracy's opulent jewels. The jewels once belonged to the former Grand Duchess Swana, who now resides in Paris and has the charming Count Leon as her uncommitted romantic companion. Much to their own surprise, Ninotchka and Count Leon meet and fall in love; as a Communist from the Soviet Union and a capitalistic Count living lavishly in Paris, respectively, their coupledom is the base double-standard from which Lubitsch's ‘touch' emanates. As with couples from other Lubitsch films, their romance is seemingly ill-fated, not so much against the odds as just odd, and insurmountable only in that, in a film by anyone else but Lubitsch, it wouldn't work at all. But above their romantic dynamic in terms of a double-standard is their political and cultural dynamic, which calls back to Rosenbaum's ideas about Lubitsch's sophistication. Film historian Jeremy Mindich declared NINOTCHKA "arguably the most complex American movie ever made about the Soviet Union," and while that is definitely arguable, it says a lot about Lubitsch's own cosmopolitan sophistication that his film both satirizes and humanizes Communist characters. Billy Wilder, who also co-wrote the script, once described the Lubitsch Touch as being the "elegant use of the Superjoke. You had a joke, and you felt satisfied, and then there was one more big joke on top of it. The joke you didn't expect." When asked by the three envoy-stooges who preceded her to Paris about the mass trials happening in their home country, Ninotchka replies that they were a great success, declaring, "There will be fewer but better Russians." In NINOTCHKA, political humor one-ups sexual humor in terms of salaciousness, so such an off-color joke is satisfying to the viewer who expects as much from Lubitsch. But the big joke no one is expecting is Count Leon's response to Ninotchka's communist ideals. He reads Marx and even tries to convince his personal attendant that their professional dynamic is unfair. From there, the jokes get bigger and bigger until even Lenin is cracking a smile. In his essay for the Criterion Collection DVD release of TROUBLE IN PARADISE, critic Armond White observes that Lubitsch is "able to indulge carefree behavior because it is undergirded with his appreciation of life's hard facts." No less than such a sophisticated double standard is to be expected from Lubitsch, and NINOTCHKA is a prime, yet underrated, example from his canon. And the music is great, too.
Ninotchka
- TCM.com Andrea Foshee
Garbo Laughs!" was the famous catchphrase on which this film
was marketed during its release in 1939, recalling the "Garbo Talks!"
campaign for Greta Garbo's initiation into talking pictures with Anna
Christie in 1930. The Swedish screen legend's usual roles in films like Anna
Karenina (1935) and Camille (1937) had been heavy and dramatic.
Ninotchka represented a risky departure for Garbo into uncharted territory for
her: comedy.
When writer Melchior Lengyel heard that MGM was looking for a comedy vehicle
for Garbo, he made a three-sentence pitch that became the springboard for what
became her next smash hit. He said simply, "Russian girl saturated with
Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, Capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets
romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad after all."
Several titles were proposed including Give Us This Day, This Time
For Keeps and A Kiss From Moscow, which was deemed too political to
attract an audience. Eventually the studio settled on Ninotchka, the name of
Garbo's character, a Russian envoy sent to Paris to expedite the sale of some
jewels. Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch were tapped to
complete the script, and Ernst Lubitsch was hired to direct .
German born Lubitsch, noted for his "Lubitsch Touch" of
sophistication and wit, was a director that Garbo admired and wanted to work
with, though this film was their only collaboration. While Lubitsch respected
Garbo the actress, he also found her to be the most inhibited person he had ever
worked with. Her insecurity was noted by several people who recalled her habit
of barring most everyone from the set who wasn't directly involved with the
scene at hand. Billy Wilder recalled having to sneak onto the set and hide
whenever he wanted to see how his script was coming along. Garbo was also
embarrassed to perform a key scene in Ninotchka that called for her to be drunk
- a state she found unbecoming and difficult to play.
Cary Grant was the first choice to play opposite Garbo as her Parisian paramour
Count Leon d'Algout, but when he turned the part down the role went to dashing
Melvyn Douglas, who had starred with Garbo once before in As You Desire Me
(1932). Douglas claimed in his autobiography that despite the film's ad
"Garbo Laughs!" the actress "was unable to articulate so much as
a titter during the shooting of the restaurant scene." Though her laugh
comes across heartily in the film, Douglas was never certain if it was really
her voice or if it had been dubbed later. As the Grand Duchess Swana and
Garbo's adversary in the film, Ina Claire made for an intriguing casting
choice. Garbo had had a very publicized affair with Claire's former husband,
actor John Gilbert, some years earlier during the filming of the 1926 silent
classic Flesh and the Devil. Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi of Dracula
(1931) fame also has an amusing if small role in Ninotchka as Commissar
Razinin.
It was a delicate matter to actively criticize the politics of the Soviet Union
and Communism in 1939, but Ninotchka pulls it off through its use of satire to
demonstrate the draw of Western culture and Capitalism. Upon its release it was
banned in Soviet satellite countries. Garbo's role as a woman in a position of
power - a serious, intelligent and dedicated party member - was also bold for
its time, even if the hard-nosed Ninotchka is susceptible to the pleasures of
Paris in the spring.
Garbo's first foray into comedy was a triumph. Howard Barnes of The New York
Herald Tribune said, "Now that she has done it, it seems incredible that
Greta Garbo never appeared in a comedy before Ninotchka; the great actress
reveals a command of comic inflection which fully matches the emotional depth
or tragic power of her earlier triumphs." Though it was nominated for four
Academy Awards that year including Best Actress and Best Picture, it lost to
the momentous Gone With the Wind. Ninotchka has remained a classic, however,
and in 1990 it was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry.
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
filmcritic.com (David Bezanson) review [4/5]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Jay S. Steinberg
DVD Verdict (Amanda DeWees) dvd review
DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [5/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent) review
Greta Garbo laughs in "Ninotchka" (1939) on YouTube (2:39)
THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER
USA (99 mi) 1940
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Teaming Stewart, Sullavan and Morgan,
just as in Borzage's The Mortal Storm (made the same year), this also
deals with troubled romance in Central Europe, though here the threat is not
Nazism but pride and the interference of others, as Stewart and Sullavan, shop
staff at loggerheads in Morgan's gossip-ridden emporium in Budapest, only
slowly realise that they have been carrying on an anonymous romance by letter.
It's a marvellously delicate romantic comedy, finally very moving, with the
twisted intrigues among the staff also carrying narrative weight, Morgan's
cuckolded proprietor being especially affecting. Thoroughly different from To
Be or Not To Be but just as exhilarating, it's one of the few films truly
justifying Lubitsch's reputation for a 'touch'. It was later turned into a
musical as In the Good Old Summertime.
The
Shop Around The Corner - TCM.com Roger Fristoe
Ernst Lubitsch, Hollywood's master of sophisticated comedy
in the continental manner, surprised movie audiences with The Shop Around the Corner
(1940), a sentimental, homespun story of combative coworkers in a Budapest
leather-goods store who do not realize that each is the other's secret pen-pal
sweetheart. Responding to the famed "Lubitsch touch," James Stewart
as Alfred and Margaret Sullavan as Klara play the star-crossed pair with great
warmth and sensitivity. The romantic complications are ironed out touchingly on
Christmas Eve, with a heavy snow falling as the couple sits alone together in
the darkened store and Alfred at last tells Klara that he is her "Dear
Friend."
Lubitsch, who had signed with MGM to direct Ninotchka (1939) and one
other film, owned the rights to a Hungarian play called Parfumerie, by
Nikolaus Laszlo. (In the play, the secret lovers work in a perfume shop.)
Lubitsch sold the property to the studio for $62,500 as his second production.
In adapting the playas The Shop Around the Corner,
both Lubitsch and scenarist Samson Raphaelson drew upon their personal
histories. Lubtitsch had helped out in his father's tailor shop in Berlin as a
youth, and Raphaelson had worked in a shop during the World's Columbian
Exposition in Chicago just before the turn of the century. To make sure his
film was stripped of the glamour usually associated with him, Lubitsch went to
such lengths as ordering that a dress Sullavan had purchased off the rack for
$1.98 be left in the sun to bleach and altered to fit poorly.
Stewart, enjoying a professional peak during a period that also included You
Can't Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
and his Oscar-winning performance in The Philadelphia Story (1940),
would remember The Shop Around the Corner
as one of his favorite films. He had been great friends with Sullavan since
their early days in the theater in the 1920s, and some biographers have
speculated that unrequited love for the actress (who married Stewart's pal,
Henry Fonda, in 1931) was the reason Stewart remained a bachelor until 1949.
The modestly produced The Shop Around the Corner
was a surprise hit, earning international profits of $380,000 at a time when
Hollywood films were waning in the European market. Its influence has continued
to be felt in various reincarnations of the story, first as a Judy Garland film
musical called In the Good Old Summertime (1949), then as a 1963
Broadway musical entitled She Loves Me that was revived in 1993. In You've
Got Mail (1998), the story was updated to the electronic age by having the
secret lovers played by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan correspond through email.
Observations
on film art : Intensified continuity revisited - David Bordwell David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson make
comparisons to the updated version YOU’VE GOT MAIL, May 27, 2007
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
100 films Lucas McNelly
The
Shop Around the Corner (1940) - Articles - TCM.com A Look behind the camera, Scott McGee
Apollo Movie Guide [Derek Smith]
DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review
DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review
The Shop Around the
Corner (1940) - Decent Films
Steven D. Greydanus
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent) review
The Shop Around
the Corner - Wikipedia
The Siren's favorite scene on YouTube (6:53)
TO BE OR NOT TO BE
Like Ninotchka, Lubitsch's
comedy was developed from an idea by Melchior Lengyel: an anti-Nazi satire set
in World War II occupied Warsaw, centering on the resistance of a Polish
theatre company and the ham antics of its narcissistic husband-and-wife stars
(Benny and Lombard). It was criticised at the time for its alleged bad taste,
but Benny, Lombard and script are all hilarious; while Lubitsch gets much
mileage from the idea of role-playing, and his particular directorial tic of
timing every conceivable gag around entrances and exits through doorways. It's
certainly one of the finest comedies ever to come out of Paramount, the
allegations of dubious taste missing the point of Lubitsch's satire - not so
much the general nastiness of the Nazis as their unforgiveable bad manners.
Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton
Trapp]
Made quite some time before its release, apparently the
government found it too hardcore anti-Nazi, and so threw things into neutral
until it was sure. Oh, yeah, sure, by '41 it wasn't obvious. It was to Ernst
Lubitsch & co., anyway, and they are downright devastating. It's too honest
to be propaganda, and Lubitsch focuses on the mindless (and therefore
vulnerable to satire) Prussian conformity in subservience to authority, rather
than the horrifying, and obvious anyway, consequences (as he did in a similar,
but also accurate and unique, vein with Soviet subservience in Ninotchka). It's
also, not incidentally, a Jack Benny comedy. So they're trying to do way too
much, far more than mere mortals can carry, all at the same time. And pulling
it all off beautifully. Spy thriller, romance, comedy, theatrical satire,
political cartoon... It works for a lot of reasons, not least Lubitsch' treatment
of the time-honoured Jewish tradition of making your burden lighter by making
light of it. The dynamic and nearly telepathic timing between Benny and Carole
Lombard doesn't hurt either, and guys like Felix Bressart and Charles Halton
are somehow able to develop characters by merely standing in the corner of a
frame. The main reason the film works, though, is because everyone so obviously
believes in it. They aren't making fun of Nazis because they're being paid to,
and they're not making jokes about Der Führer just because he's ludicrous and
an easy target. They're making fun of entire philosophical constructs and
social behavioral models. Of course, the fact that such things are dismissed so
effortlessly, with a glance or a one-liner, doesn't make them any less
dangerous or appealing to those base or stupid enough to find them appealing in
the first place. Where's Ernst Lubitsch when you need him? He's in here, it's
an eternal call to arms.
I imagine that it's impossible to fully
understand the critical and public lambasting Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not
to Be received after its release unless you lived through WWII. Movies were
still relatively new back then and audiences were unaccustomed to them sorting
through the political rubble of people's lives, especially in ways that
fashioned comedy out of seemingly unfathomable tragedy. More than 60 years
later, To Be or Not to Be is considered one of the greatest comedies in
the history of cinema (compare Bosley Crowther's review of the film in The New York Times with Charles Taylor's Salon piece, published more than a half
century later, to see how the tide has changed), poetic justice that befits the
title of the film, a reference to a famous line from Shakespeare's Hamlet
that takes on multi-layered levels of existential meaning throughout the film.
Perhaps unjustly, To Be or Not to Be's wit continues to be overshadowed
by its touchy plot, which concerns a theatrical troupe in
There is a joke about men buying big cars in order to make up for their
shortcomings—a similar unconscious ritual of shame and self-validation seems to
motivate the constant barrage of "Heil, Hitler!" salutes throughout To
Be or Not to Be. It's shocking to think that people at one time actually
misconstrued the film's humor as anti-Polish considering its obvious ridicule
of the spectacle of Hitler's aestheticized political agenda. To Be or Not to
Be is largely about the interplay between art and reality and it uses modes
of performance to challenge the stiffness and authority of a preposterous
political regime. That the film's comedy is as rigorous as the behavior of the
Nazis in the film only makes sense—like they say, you have to fight fire with
fire, or in this case, artifice with artifice.
Lubitsch and his screenwriter Edwin Justus Meyer understood the political and
emotional resonance of the famous soliloquy from Hamlet. Just as
Shakespeare gave Hamlet's contemplation of suicide a political context,
Lubitsch similarly offers the actors in his film an existential challenge:
Frustrated by their inability to act (shortly before the Nazis invade Warsaw,
their anti-Hitler play Gestapo is shut down), the actors take arms
against a sea of troubles in order to live the life of the theatre vicariously
through their mockery of the Nazi movement that seeks to destroy them. Many of
the film's pleasures, then, derive from watching these characters successfully
use the tools of the stage (improvisation, sense memory, prosthetics) to
successfully subvert the Nazis.
Why are the actors in the film so good at understanding and predicting
human behavior? Perhaps it's because these rebels, namely Benny's ham, are in
touch with their insecurities in ways that elude the Nazi buffoons they target.
Jack is forced to frequently look like the fool throughout the film, a role
(and weakness) he accepts and sorts through, something that can't be said about
Sig Ruman's Col. "Concentration Camp" Ehrhardt, who repeatedly shifts
the blame for everything he does to one of his lackeys. Maybe that's what
pissed so many people off about To Be or Not to Be: Though it's
impossible to imagine governments using actors as spies (at least not in the
way the film employs them), it really does seem that the makers of the film
understood the psychosis that motivated Hitler's regime in ways that the Allies
did not.
I won't try to define the fabled "Lubitsch Touch" because I maintain
that it's an emotional and sensual sensation that's best experienced and left
undefined (in honor of its mystery, even if the term was really just a product
of marketing hype), but I have to say that To Be or Not to Be very much
exhibits the German-born director's signature aesthetic and spiritual approach,
despite what has been written to the contrary: If there is a difference between
To Be or Not to Be and The Shop Around the Corner it is only that
Lubitsch forgot to cut his nails before making the former.
Home Movies by Charles Taylor:
Camp classic - Salon.com November 2, 1998
To
Be or Not to Be (1942) - TCM.com Rob Nixon
To
Be or Not to Be (1942) - Articles - TCM.com
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [4/5]
Brazen City Margaret Hagan
Edinburgh
U Film Society (Martin Hunt) review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[5/5]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review To say it is
callous and macabre is understating the case, March 7, 1942
To Be or Not to Be on YouTube (1:43)
To Be or Not to Be (3:38)
HEAVEN CAN WAIT
USA (112 mi) 1943
Classic Lubitsch,
disarmingly light in tone but in fact quite astute in its social and sexual
satire. Ameche plays Henry Van Cleeve, a dandy who pitches up in Hell believing
his past sex life in the naughty Nineties qualifies him admirably for eternal
damnation; but as he recounts his story, he emerges as a kindly and sympathetic
man. Tierney plays the faultless wife, and Lubitsch handles the whole
delightful business with characteristic delicacy. The bonus is the brilliant
Technicolor photography which shows off Basevi and Fuller's marvellous decor
for Hell to memorable advantage.
Chicago Reader (capsule) Jonathan Rosenbaum
Ernst Lubitsch's only completed film in Technicolor (1943),
the greatest of his late films, offers a rosy, meditative, and often very funny
view of an irrepressible ladies' man (Don Ameche in his prime) presenting his
life in retrospect to the devil (Laird Cregar). Like a good deal of Lubitsch
from The Merry Widow on, it's about death as well as personal style, but
rarely has the subject been treated with such affection for the human
condition. Samson Raphaelson's script is very close to perfection, the
sumptuous period sets are a delight, and the secondary cast--Gene Tierney,
Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Eugene Pallette, and Spring Byington--is
wonderful. In many respects, this is Lubitsch's testament, full of grace,
wisdom, and romance. 112 min.
Heaven
Can Wait (1943) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com James Steffen
Genteel womanizer Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche) finds
himself in the afterlife having to account for his previous existence. At the
reception room for Hades he explains to Satan that his sins make him
unqualified for Heaven, and he proceeds to recount both his long marriage to
the forgiving Martha (Gene Tierny) and his lifetime of romantic adventures.
Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait
(1943) is one of the more unusual marriage comedies of the studio era,
depicting a couple's relationship across the decades. Indeed, the passing of
time and the effect it has on the film's characters is one of the main
underlying themes, and it connects nicely with Lubitsch's nostalgic vision of
the past. The photography and turn-of-the-century production design, though
lavish, never overwhelm the film's comedy but add a wholly appropriate burnish.
Don Ameche perfectly embodies the sly charms of Henry Van Cleve in what must
surely be his greatest role.
Being made in 1943, Heaven Can Wait
lacks some of the naughty innuendo of Lubitsch's pre-Code films such as Trouble
in Paradise (1932), but it moves far beyond that Art Deco fantasy world to
sketch out a gently mocking, yet complex character portrait. In its warmth and
humaneness it recalls The Shop Around the Corner (1940), which is to say
it's one of Lubitsch's richest and most moving films. I would argue that these
two films, together with To Be Or Not To Be (1942), represent the true
peak of Lubitsch's career, as much as I love his films from the silent era up
to the early Thirties.
Thankfully, however, Heaven Can Wait
is not entirely devoid of innuendo--perhaps the biggest laughs come from the
section detailing the young Henry's dalliance with the family's French maid,
Yvette Blanchard (Signe Hasso). At one point she says to Henry, "Your soul
is bigger than your pants." The film's comedy extends to the musical
quotations on the soundtrack, among them "By the Light of the Silvery
Moon," "The Merry Widow Waltz" and "Home on the
Range." The later represents the corn-fed, irascible Strables, and its use
is surely ironic given that one of the song's lines is "...and the skies
are not cloudy all day"--the Strables' ranch is under a constant deluge of
rain. Another highlight is a spirited performance by Charles Coburn as the
grandfather Hugo Van Cleve. Coburn has become one of my favorite character
actors of the studio era; in films such as this, The Devil and Miss Jones
(1941), and The More the Merrier (1943), Coburn was far more than just
one of so many Hollywood eccentrics, always waiting off camera to trot out his
carefully cultivated crazy routine. In his best films Coburn brought a sense of
humaneness and wisdom to his performances, thus adding not just to the film's
comedy, but also to its emotional resonance. A tip of the hat to Mr. Coburn.
The Criterion DVD has a resplendent color transfer that shows off the film's production
design to the best advantage. It's as clean and bright as possible with
extremely little color fringing, an artifact common on Technicolor prints due
to misalignment of the color layers. In a couple places the elements are
apparently dupes and thus not as sharp, but any such caveats run the risk of
making the transfer sound less stellar than it actually is. Extras include: a
conversation with critics Molly Haksell and Andrew Sarris; a Bill Moyers
interview with screenwriter Samson Raphaelson; an audio-only seminar with
Raphaelson conducted by Richard Corliss in 1977, recordings of Lubitsch at the
piano, and the theatrical trailer. For Eric Benchley fans, the trailer includes
clever voiceover commentary by him.
Heaven Can Wait
is a very special film; frankly, I can't imagine any one not liking it.
Criterion's DVD edition is a must-have.
Heaven Can
Wait Criterion essay by
William Paul, June 13, 2005
Heaven Can Wait (1943) - The Criterion Collection
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, 1943) • Senses of Cinema Eloise Ross,January 29, 2016
Self-Styled Siren: Heaven Can Wait (1943): The Lubitsch Touch of Crime
Heaven
Can Wait (1943) - TCM.com
David Kalat
Heaven
Can Wait (1943) - Articles - TCM.com
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review [Criterion Collection]
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Reel.com DVD review [James Plath]
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [2/5]
Being There Magazine [Nathan Williams]
CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Heaven Can
Wait (1943 film) - Wikipedia
Lucas, George
THX 1138
THX 1138 Movie Review
& Film Summary (2004) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - Lucas's 'THX1138':Love Is a Punishable Crime in ... The New
York Times
STAR WARS
aka: Star Wars IV:
A
Star Wars zunguzungu, February 14, 2009
A New Hope, via the netflix
It’s too easy to make fun of George Lucas, especially after the supremely awful “prequel” sequels. And what a pompous ass-basket that man manages to come off as sometimes. But the funny thing about the old Star Wars movies is how good they were when they were good despite also plumbing the depths of badness. I don’t imagine this happens very often; it’s hard to be both that good and that bad at the same time. I don’t really have a grand unified field theory for why this is, but I do have an idea I want to try out: that Star Wars is good at being bad because it thinks bad is, for an interesting reason, good.
To wit: Star Wars is totally cheesy, and Lucas always knew it was. It isn’t science fiction, and it definitely isn’t “speculative fiction,” sci-fi’s attempt to put on a tuxedo and play with the big kids. It’s space opera. In this sense, it’s easy to rag on him as a hack because, well, he is a hack. He wasn’t trying to make science fiction into high literature, since — all his Joseph Campbell-ism aside — he was actually trying to reproduce a version of the radio sci-fi he remembered listening to on the radio when he was a kid, a genre whose badness nicely lined up with the needs of its then-young audience. In this very particular sense, then, being “bad” wouldn’t be about failing to measure up to a particular standard of quality, but of approximating an experience which was good despite or even because of being “bad.” The whole point of transforming science fiction into space opera, in other words, is to turn back into a child (thus, Lucas becomes Luke?) who does not, cannot, observe the difference.
We therefore have a movie that celebrates exactly the kind of regression to youth that a youth culture obsessed with nostalgia toys requires. The fact that this might lend legitimacy to the way our consumer culture prostrates its values to the desires of its most purchasing of populations — children and those who buy for them — is of course worth noting (and Star Wars is still the classic example of film merchandising), but I’m more interesting in what it says about the movies themselves. After all, if Lucas is a hack who revels in being a hack, then the fact that he is an adult who doesn’t outgrow his toys but wants better and better ones is hardly something we can hold against him, right? It’s interesting to note, for example, that Lucas was himself much more interested in the whiz-bang of his movies than in stuff like character or dialogue. Putting the second movie in the hands of people that were (one of the writers of To Have and Have Not, for example, provides the Bogie and Bacall banter we all love so much) might make this less obvious, and Lucas’ own choice to hang out with the tech people at Skywalker ranch while leaving the actual directing in the hands of Irvin Kershner gives us a sense of his priorities. After writing and directing the first movie (and acquiring, as he has proudly noted, full control) he chose to hand off the actual duties of writing and directing to people much better at it than himself. He was simply more interested in toys.
This gets more interesting, I think, if we start to think about the kinds of ideologies that science fiction so often comes with. “Real” sci-fi comes out of a particular lineage within Western thinking, the idea that all our problems will be solved by grown ups with technology and knowledge. That’s one of the options we’re currently addressing, by the way, with respect to the current financial shit-fucking that’s happening out there: wait for the experts to figure it out. But this line of thinking dovetails with another, a desire to keep from having to become adults ourselves, a humility that looks a lot like trying to avoid the weighty responsibilities of adulthood if you squint at it a little. Why try to figure it out when we can just trust the adults to save us?
This is why Star Wars turns to childishness, I think, or why it makes a generational conflict into its narrative heart. Darth Vader thematizes a certain kind of fearful adult, the adult who has given up something precious in order to become socialized into a technological society, the gear who has accepted being part of a larger machine. And in adapting himself to the machine, Vader has become a machine. Thus, the drama of the Star Wars series is that Vader now wants to socialize his son, and that he doesn’t do it by lying or force: he holds it out as a temptation, because that’s what it is. And the fact that Luke has to become a cyborg just to survive is the perfect metaphor for the ambivalence which we share with him: after all, don’t we want both to be a part of society and to be apart from it, both to join the machine and to be distinctly human? “Sci-fi” is a language a name for that ambivalence, a discourse which is a balanced emulsion between a longing for a “pre-modern” and irrational anti-adulthood of childhood fantasy and the desire for scientific order and the harmony of everything in its right place. And for George Lucas, what better way to attack the problem of a post-Watergate America defined by adults who turned out to be criminal assholes than turning the tide towards childishness? He could reject the imperative to be a contributing adult member of society by transforming a technocratic discourse of “those who know better” into a platform for dreams, using space opera to turn science into a toy…
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) January 30, 1997, also seen here: Star Wars: Special Edition and here: Excessive Use of the Force
Star Wars Not so
long ago, not so far away, by Dan Rubey from
Jump Cut, August 1978, STAR
WARS reprinted with Afterward May 1997
Insiders
and "outcasts" in STAR TREK
Elspeth Kydd from Jump Cut,
December 1998
STAR WARS EPISODE 1: THE PHANTOM MENACE
USA
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Star Wars Episode 1 The ... Andrew O’Hehir from Sight and Sound, July 1999
Any film that begins with a seven-word title and then includes the words 'taxation' and 'debate' in its first five seconds is either a deadly historical epic about the American Revolution or is taking its audience for granted. I'm tempted to suggest Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace fits both of these criteria, but George Lucas' allegories are so muddled it's impossible to make sense of them. Start with a distinctive New World lust for ancient traditions of aristocracy and order, toss in a misguided effort at multiculturalism and season with the Aryan myth of racial purity, and you've got a murky, talky prequel that emphasises all the series' weakest elements rather than its strongest ones.
In the last year or two, film-makers have finally reached the point of diminishing returns with computer-generated effects. It's now possible for films to spend vast sums on effects and still look laughably cheap (see, for instance, The Mummy). The Phantom Menace doesn't have that problem precisely, but almost nothing in it is based on photographing actual human beings in their environments. Every shot is such a complex technical achievement, so full of droids, aliens, spacecraft or gargantuan structures, that the movie itself takes on the hazy, ugly look of software. Even if this is deliberate, it doesn't work – the excessively electric-blue skies and green fields of the planet Naboo may be meant to remind us that we are not on earth, but what they really make us aware of is that what we're seeing isn't real.
Lucas has never been much of a visual stylist (at least, not since the days
of THX 1138, 1970), but the characteristic cleanliness and contrast of
his compositions – the brilliant, antiseptic white of the stormtroopers'
uniforms, the lustrous blue-black of Darth Vader's helmet – have been abandoned
here in favour of meaningless clutter. Certainly some of this film's grand set
pieces are impressive. The great battle between the benevolent, amphibious
Gunga and the Federation's droids, lightly echoing the
In a laboured quest to recapture some of the first trilogy's (sorry, the second
trilogy's) humour, Lucas and his enormous team of collaborators have created
many cartoonish new species. The Gunga character Jar Jar Binks, with his rubbery
platypus face, joke-Caribbean accent and jive walk right out of a 70s
blaxploitation movie (with bell-bottom trousers to match) may amuse small
children, but many adults will find The Phantom Menace's quasi-racial
typing patronising at best. When you consider that the Trade Federation leaders
speak in hackneyed Fu Manchu accents and the elephant-insect character who owns
the slave Anakin Skywalker resembles a traditional caricature of the hook-nosed
Jewish trader, the whole picture becomes much more disturbing. Of course I
don't believe Lucas has any consciously racist agenda; what's involved here are
multiple failures of common sense, good taste and imagination. You have to
wonder whether he has spent so long in an alternative universe – both the one inside
his own head and the one in
But the biggest problem with The Phantom Menace is it that lacks narrative coherence. Lucas' intrusive use of diagonal and horizontal optical wipes only reinforces the sense that this movie is all stitches and no fabric. Logically, this wants to be the story of Obi-Wan Kenobi's early relationship with Anakin Skywalker (soon to become Darth Vader), but the two scarcely exchange a word until the movie's final scenes. Qui-Gon Jinn is arguably the central character, with Liam Neeson supplying the requisite combination of Zen gnosticism and kung-fu athleticism. But we learn nothing about his life, and his relationship with Obi-Wan adds up to little more than a lot of graceful tandem swordplay. As Obi-Wan Ewan McGregor is one of several outstanding actors given virtually nothing to do. Another is Pernilla August as Anakin's mother. We're told she and Anakin are passionately attached (and it's hinted that his love for his mother will be his downfall), but their scenes together are bland and generic and she surrenders him to Qui-Gon without a murmur.
Indeed, the film's extended sojourn on Tatooine mostly serves to set up Anakin's pod race, which may thrill younger viewers who haven't grown tired of Lucas' careening point-of-view shots, but doesn't really advance the story. Similar galactic-bazaar locations have been presented with equal vigour in earlier films, and we don't learn anything about Anakin's childhood we couldn't grasp quickly in a brief flashback. Beyond our general sympathy for David over Goliath, it's also not clear why we should care much about Naboo. As its Queen Amidala, Natalie Portman looks smashing in a series of Japanese-influenced getups and hairdos (did she escape with her hairdresser?) but neither she nor anyone else has anything like an adult emotional life. I understand the series' prepubescent asexuality is part of its appeal, but it might be nice to feel some sense of evolution or possibility. Lucas' narrative's mystical long arc – the conflict between the Jedi and the Sith, the Force and the Dark Side – isn't foregrounded until Qui-Gon brings Anakin before the Jedi Council. The whole Jedi concept – a eugenic warrior caste guided by pure spirit and shaped by elite training – is so troubling it calls the entire political dimension of Lucas' universe into question. His desire to combine a faith in democracy with idealised systems of royalty, nobility and knighthood is almost comically American. But the Star Wars notion of democracy is no better than a fuzzy abstraction, a cover story for the mystical Manichaeanism of the Jedi, who by all appearances are a masculine cult of chastity and purity straight out of Wagner's Parsifal. Like the great Teutonic composer, Lucas has tapped into a tremendously powerful Jungian current of pantheistic myth. However one interprets it, this is where the heart and soul of the Star Wars saga lies, and the tiny tastes of it we get in The Phantom Menace make the rest of the movie seem like didactic dithering at the edges of some incomprehensible Asimovian empire.
Things certainly pick up in the final half-hour or so, with the spectacular Gunga battle sequence and a three-way light-sabre duel that ranks among the series' best combat scenes. Anakin's half-accidental destruction of the Federation ship self-consciously echoes his son's later/earlier destruction of the Death Star, but this is a mistake – The Phantom Menace can only suffer by comparison with the feckless energy and enthusiasm of the original Star Wars. The whole saga has never felt more like a 12-year-old's efforts to emulate Tolkien; this instalment feels less like an opening chapter than a stammering, parenthetical preface.
Phantom
Menace Stefan Herrmann, May 2001
STAR WARS: EPISODE III REVENGE OF THE SITH
USA (140 mi) 2005
If he’s proven nothing else with his six Star Wars movies, writer-producer-director-uberlord George Lucas has demonstrated that he is one of the most persnickety filmmakers of all time. With the three most recent of the movies (prequels to the first three, as if you didn’t know), Lucas has nailed down every loose plot point from the first three with the finality of a mortician hammering shut a coffin. To keep the movies up to date technically, he has revised the effects in the first three not once, but twice.
It’s an irony of no little humor that all this artistic
control has been lavished on an enterprise that proclaims that our destinies
are written in the stars. Clearly, Lucas has left little to the stars –
either the universe’s or
For those of us who prefer a little spontaneity in art, though, there is a glimmer of an idea that may have slipped unobtrusively into the Star Wars movies, and particularly into the meticulously titled Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith.
First, though, what kind of movie is Revenge of the Sith? A lot better than its immediate predecessors, that’s for sure. Much of the “mythic” gobbledygook has been excised, leaving a relatively lean work in its wake. That’s “relatively” lean, though.
The plot, in its essence, marks the break between apprentice – more like a journeyman, actually – Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker (a truly terrible Hayden Christensen) and his mentor, Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi (light and lively Ewan McGregor). The break between the two is fomented by the head of the prevailing space federation, Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid, who deserves a great deal of credit for hitting the exact combination of emotional credibility and bigger-than-life villainy). Far from being defender of his democratic republic, though, Palpatine is a plotting, evil Sith Lord who plans to declare himself emperor. Sith Lords feed off the same mystical Force as the Jedi Knights, but from its dark side. Palpatine implements his seduction of Anakin by using this most powerful aspect of the Force as a lure, a strategy which, as we know from the other Star Wars movies, is successful, with young, innocent Anakin morphing into the more-evil-than-evil Darth Vader.
There’s a bit more, but that’s the gist of it and, in any case, if you’re reading this, you probably know the story in exhaustive detail anyway. This time out, it’s a good thing that the plot is so relatively simple, since Lucas has weighed down Revenge of the Sith with an enormous number of high-tech battles. Those who don’t make such razzle-dazzle their main cinematic meal probably have their appetites sated by the movie’s opening and closing set-tos. The first, which opens with a single shot that sings through space and from long-shot to close-up and what-have-you, is a surely brilliant display of modern pyrotechnics. Its cogent narratively too, depicting the exuberant friendliness between Anakin and Obi-wan as they rescue Palpatine from a rebellious army. The last – or nearly the last, aside from some brief action bits – is the climactic showdown between the two former comrades.
There’s a lot more where they came from, though, all of it excused by an ongoing rebellion against the Republic by the so-called Separatist Alliance and its android army. Lucas means for the rebellion to play a large part in Palpatine’s conniving and Anakin’s apostasy, but even so, this excess of action is justified by nothing so much as the excess itself. Lucas is displaying that he can do more better in this field than anyone else can.
Fun for its own sake shouldn’t need any justification, especially in a pop entertainment such as Star Wars. But the large-scale battles and duels in Star Wars are fun only up to a point. Beyond that, they feel insistent, compulsive. Their superficial pleasures begin to shrink next to the strained urge to excel that seems to underlie them.
In any case, Palpatine’s eagerness to defeat the
The young warrior is also worried about the children he expects to have with his beloved, Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman, better than in the earlier films), a queen on her home planet and a senator in the Republic’s assembly. The two have been secretly married and Anakin has been troubled by dream visions of her dying in childbirth. He becomes increasingly preoccupied with averting this personal disaster, a weakness Palpatine exploits with the promise that the dark side of the Force will avert it.
It’s the third motivation that, though it seems the most trivial, is the most intriguing. Anakin has resented the limits the Jedi knights have been putting on his power; he is, after all, supposed to be the Chosen One, an epochal personage who is going to balance the metaphysical powers of the universe (or whatever). Yet his superiors keep treating this adolescent as if he was just exactly that, a mere adolescent. This resentment finally boils over when Palpatine gets Anakin appointed to a reluctant Jedi Council but the sitting members refuse to grant him all the usual honors. This, as much as their wartime caution and careful rationing of their potentially great powers, marks them as morally suspect to Anakin. For these men won’t give him his due.
This is simple adolescent moral narcissism, an obnoxious period we all pass through. Simply (simplistically?) put, this phenomenon occurs at an age when a kid develops a distinct and necessary sense of morality. Unfortunately, this happens at an earlier age than that when we fully refine our sense of empathy. Our sense of morality and self-centeredness get all mixed up so, when as happens to Anakin, people don’t respond to our requirements, it’s not just a lack of perception on their part, but a failure of morality. To put it familiarly, they’re just not being fair.
Emotionally, this narcissism looms as Anakin’s primary resentment. It may be Christensen’s callow performance, but the potential death of his wife doesn’t seem to strike him with the same sense of grievance. It’s not that he doesn’t feel bad about Padmé’s risk. But – and this is where it simply may be a matter of bad acting – to all appearances, the boy reacts much more viscerally to the perceived insult of the council.
Once you become alert to this side of Revenge of the Sith, then the whole Star Wars project begins to seem like a study of adolescent narcissism. Luke Sywalker, after all, deeply resents how the aged Obi-Wan (in the first film) and Yoda (in the second) keep putting limits on how much of his innate power he’s allowed to exercise. Luke, though, manages to develop enough empathy to resist the temptation to go over to the Dark Side by the time Darth Vader makes his case.
This is where the spark of spontaneity lights up some of the murk surrounding Star Wars. The movies have always been vague on exactly what the Force is, aside from being a potentially unifying element of the universe. The lack of clarity wasn’t helped by the influence that the semi-scholarly Joseph Campbell, and his all-myths-are-the-same-myth theorizing, had on Lucas, at least when he was making the original three movies. Mystic vapors clouded the combination of facile psychology (“Luke, I am your father”) and heroic quest that loosely cohabitated at the Force’s core.
Teenaged self-centeredness and its antithesis, empathy, might sound like relatively puny particulars to represent the contending sides of the Force, but at least they’re something specific. Anyway, since when is empathy insignificant? Maybe the heroic quest isn’t a search for ultimate meaning, but simply for other people. Just because that’s a conclusion that the histrionic Lucas seems to have found in spite of himself doesn’t make it any less relevant to his grandiose opus.
Luchetti, Daniele
MY BROTHER’S AN ONLY CHILD
review: Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother is an Only Child) (Cannes 2007) Boyd van Hoeij from European-Films
The Italian Un certain regard title and local boxoffice hit Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother is An Only Child) is a fun panoramic snapshot of politically engaged Italian youngsters in the 1960s and 70s that is not only a portrait of its time but also, be it in diluted form, of the Italian youth of today. The fact that the film is also surprisingly funny, good-looking and showcases the talents of rising star Elio Germano (N - Io e Napoleone) should help it outside of Italy as well, though it is not as all-encompassing and engrossing as local recent-history melodramas La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) and Romanzo Criminale (Crime Novel), which were also written by the tandem Sandro Petraglia-Stefano Rulli.
Set in 1960s Latina -- a city not far from Rome created by
the Fascist government of Mussolini -- and based on the bestselling Antonio
Pennacchi novel Il fasciocomunista, Mio
fratello è figlio unico is the story of Accio (Germano), who enters
the novitiate at an early age to make space in the cramped quarters of the
family, though his older brother Manrico (Italian dreamboat du jour Riccardo
Scamarcio) tries to convince him to quit and he eventually does.
The relationship with his parents might be difficult and his older sister might
sometimes hassle him, but it is the bond with his older brother Manrico
(Riccardo Scamarcio), a communist, that is the focus of the film, though
Manrico lacks the complexity of Accio, and he is essentially presented as an
inverted mirror of his brother rather than a character by himself. Accio,
influenced by a the local seller of sheets and table covers (Luca Zingaretti, the
priest from Alla luce del sole/Into the Light),
defines himself a fascist, leading to a comical scene in which he wants to
register with the fascist party almost straight out of the novitiate.
Being a coming-of-age tale (and age in this case age includes a maturing
political conscience as much as a maturing body, mind and the awakening of
sexual desire), the tone is lighter than most of Petraglia and Rulli’s previous
screenplays -- and also a lot more humorous. Instead of interweaving historical
national events into the fabric of the story, as they did in Gioventù and Romanzo
Criminale, here small personal scuffles are used for a fictional
tale of personal growth that is essentially a character study of Accio as
refracted through the prism of his surroundings. As such it is a much more
intimate and lighter affair that is a pleasant change of gears for the duo but also
robs it of the solid weight of history that made their other sagas so
compelling. In this light, their decision to use an occasional voice-over seems
unnecessary. All other technical credits are first rate, and Mio fratello è figlio unico is a lust for the
eyes and ears.
The film’s greatest delight comes from the utterly compelling inside-out performance of Elio Germano, who was the best thing about N – Io e Napoleone (N – Napoleon and Me) and proves here he is not only an actor with an affable demeanour but also a range and presence that Italian and international filmmakers should kindle and treasure. He is supported by an able cast led by Angela Finocchiaro (La bestia nel cuore/Don’t Tell) as his mother and the two pretty faces that fall in love with each other: Riccardo Scamarcio as his brother and newcomer Diane Fleri as his girlfriend Francesca, who has also got communist leaningsand who has a special place in Accio’s fascist heart.
For all its political contents, however, Mio fratello è figlio unico is not nearly as
sharp a portrait of the politically engaged Italian youngsters as Paolo Virzì’s
contemporary Caterina va in città (Caterina in
the
Screen Daily - News Lee Marshall
The signature of screenwriting duo Rulli and Petraglia has
become a sort of appelation controllee quality mark for recent Italian cinema
products. They've even invented a sub-genre of films, which we might define
'retro-modern': period studies that repackage the tribes and the traumas of
With My Brother's
An Only Child, they return to one of the strands of Best Of Youth –
family conflict as a reflection of social fissures – put it under the
microscope, and probe it obsessively.
The result is an
engaging, energetic film that treats the ideological ingenuities of the 1960s
with a mixture of irony and nostalgia, but which really comes in to its own in
its close focus – literally so, in photographic terms – on the long-running
love-hate relationship between two brothers, one on the far left, the other a
neo-Fascist.
It also pulls off the
difficult act of maintaining some arthouse kudos while winking at a wider
market, at least in Italy, where the solid cast – from teen heartthrob Riccardo
Scamarcio (soon to be seen in Abel Ferrara's Go Go Tales) to one of Italy's
most respected actresses, Anna Bonaiuto (L'Amore Molesto, Il Caimano) –
will help distributor Warner to broaden the film's appeal.
Overseas, the film's
classy visuals, dramatic muscle and sense of humour will help to target it at
the same sort of audiences that lapped up Best Of Youth, boosted by its
selection at
Sabaudia was one of
Mussolini's new towns, built on reclaimed swampland south of
By 1961, though, when
the roughly ten-year dramatic arc of My Brother... begins, it had become
a dusty, depressed place, whose jerry-built housing was already falling apart.
In an apartment in one such crumbling block, Accio (Germano) lives with his
older brother Manrico (Scamarcio).
All elbows and acne,
Accio is an awkward rebel who picks fights just for the sake of it and joins
the neo-Fascist MSI party more to spite his parents and his brother Manrico
(Scamarcio) than out of any real conviction. A good-looking womaniser,
worshipped by his hassled, frustrated housewife mother (Finocchiaro), Manrico
channels his charisma into showy left-wing posturing, haranguing his fellow
workers and their families from the roof of the factory where he works.
The conflict between
the two brothers is grounded in the dull reality of provincial life in a town
that reaped few of the benefits of
It's also veined by
humour, and by dropping a girl between them – Manrico's long-suffering
girlfriend Francesca (Fleri), who acts both as a wedge (she is hopelessly in
love with Manrico, though the one she actually chats to is Accio) and a bridge
between the two.
There is a dramatic
lull around two-thirds of the way through, which even the snappy editing and
moody camerawork can't paper over (this coincides pretty much with the moment
when Accio turning on his former friends on the extreme right – thus removing
the main external conflict between him and his brother).
But things soon pick
up, and the neat, tragic final act reveals just how much we've been fooled by
our sympathy with Accio into seeing things from his not entirely reliable point
of view.
Claudio Collepiccolo's
camera stays tight on characters, channelling the nervous energy of Elio
Germano, whose headline role as a mixed-up, pugnacious activist who just wants
to be loved is the standout act in a film bulging with tasty performances
(others include Luca Zingaretti as a Fascist stallholder and Anna Bonaiuto as
his sexy, salt-of-the-earth wife).
Costumes and
production design are spot-on, evoking the sixties through haircuts, clothes
and cars without making this an arid exercise in period authenticity.
Music too is
well-gauged: the few 1960s numbers all have dramatic point, or counterpoint,
and Franco Piersanti's original score plays the same game, providing satirical
commentary with passages of tango or Tom-Waits-like barroom waltzes.
OUR LIFE (La Nostra Vita)
Italy France (98 mi) 2010
Our
Life (La Nostra Vita) Lee Marshall
at Cannes from Screendaily
One of this year’s smaller Cannes competition titles, Our Life certainly has merits:
it’s a gritty, closely observed slice of Roman proletarian life. And it’s
marked by a raw (though at times rather too full-on) performance by Elio
Germano in the lead role as a construction worker with two kids, who after the
sudden death of his wife tries to provide for his family by setting himself up
as a shady building contractor.
In ambience and theme, it comes on a lot like an Italian Ken Loach movie. Loach, though, is good at stories; whereas Luchetti and his co-scriptwriters are so enamoured of their characters that they forget to build a satisfying dramatic home for them.
Our Life’s focus on the family, and redemption through families real and alternative, will reach out to Italian audiences, but this is a less commercial prospect than Luchetti’s last, My Brother is an Only Child. That had a sixties retro setting and an epic Best-Of-Youth-style timeline.
This is a punishingly neo-neo-realist tale shot on a distractingly shaky handheld camera, leavened only with a few audience baits: heartthrob Raul Bova in a minor role, some cute kids, the music of Italian stadium rocker Vasco Rossi and an upbeat ending. All will work better at home than abroad, where Our Life looks unlikely to reach even the handful of territories that picked up My Brother… for theatrical distribution.
Initially, the film’s rambling tone and jagged scene structure come across as confident rather than dispersive. Claudio (Germano) is one of those risky heroes who is never entirely likeable: street smart but also street crass, he’s brimful of arrogance as a building site foreman, but is saved by a real affection for his young wife Elena (Ragonese) - who he turns on by whispering the names of IKEA furniture - and for his two young sons.
Elena is pregnant again, but she dies in childbirth, and Claudio is knocked sideways. He’s already had a shock when he finds the body of a Romanian illegal immigrant worker on the building site. There’s a kind of moral payback in Elena’s death after his failure to report this other death, and in the way the dead man’s wife Gabriela (Berzanteanu) and teenage son Andrei (Ignat) enter his life.
But at this point the film starts to dither and the dramatic lines begin to blur. Using the cover-up of the Romanian worker’s death as a blackmail chip, Claudio convinces construction king Porcari (Colangeli) to give him the contract on a new residential block in Rome’s northern suburbs, which needs to be finished in record time.
He raises the money from a bad bunch of loan sharks thanks to his wheelchair-bound drug-dealing neighbour Ari (Zingaretti), and sinks part of it into flashy toys for his kids - the neon message being that Claudio is using consumerism to assuage his grief and guilt. Things, of course, spiral before they get any better.
Keen to show the positive side of life in Italy’s new outer suburbs - the solidarity, the love, the animal energies - Luchetti lets observation carry him too far into explorations of minor characters, like Claudio’s siblings Piero (Bova) and Loredana (Montorsi), who in the end add little. Our Life has its heart in the right place. But it feels like an episode of a tough, cutting-edge TV drama with a film struggling to find a voice inside it.
Cannes '10:
Day Eight Mike D’Angelo at
Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May
20, 2010
Cannes
Film Festival 2010: Day Eight – Carlos, Poetry, and Our Life Matt Noller at Cannes from The House Next
Door, May 20, 2010
Guy
Lodge at Cannes from In Contention,
May 21, 2010
Cannes
2010. Daniele Luchetti's "Our Life" David Hudson at Cannes from The Auteurs, May
21, 2010
THOSE HAPPY YEARS (Anni felici) C+ 79
Italy France (106 mi) 2013
While this is obviously a personal autobiographical work, feeling a bit like Edward Yang’s YI YI (2000) in that it attempts to be a funny and somewhat unorthodox portrait of an ordinary family struggling with their own personal self doubts and alienation, their long, pent up frustrations, their exploration to find love and meaning in their lives, a film where Ting-Ting, a young teenage character in Yang’s film asks “Why is the world so different from what we thought it was?” But in this film there is a problem throughout in tone, often feeling absurdly stereotypical and over-the-top, and also at times disingenuous, particularly as it addresses the concerns of women, actually feeling make believe in an otherwise realistic setting, set in flashback mode to the summer of ’74, examining the fluctuating lives of the parents of two young boys, one of whom narrates the film and would eventually become the filmmaker. The strength of the film is well-crafted characters that feel authentic and their problems real, using naturalistic dialogue throughout, but the film also has the leering eye of male fantasy throughout, like the thrill of kids literally peeking through a keyhole to catch naked adults unawares and off guard. Since so much of the story is seen through a child’s eye, one troubling aspect is a lack of reflection, as children hear things or are exposed to adult activities that would normally be off limits for children, yet because they’re seen as cute kids these scenes are played for laughs, actually undermining the seriousness of the material and often delving into uncomfortable territory. The title itself exudes a certain amount of irony, as most of the film shows two unconventional parents embroiled in the turmoil of an unraveling marriage.
Set in the liberating post-60’s era, described as “the summer when everything changed,” the film initially has a whimsical, light-hearted style where Guido (Kim Rossi Stuart) and Serena (Micaela Ramazzotti) are happily in love with their two adoring boys, Dario (Samuel Garofalo), the director’s alter-ego, and younger Paolo (Niccolò Calvagna), where Guido is an art teacher with designs on becoming an avant-garde artist. As an aside, in real life, the director’s father was Luca Luchetti, a well known Italian sculptor whose artwork is actually used in the film. Guido is a live-wire, would-be-artist, spending his time making plaster body casts of beautiful naked women, while also splashing paint on their naked bodies, all presumably in the name of art, and on full display before the curiously interested eyes of his two young sons, sending them outside only when he wants to spend some personal time with the models, and then returns home to his alarmed wife, who has a right to be suspicious, as her husband tells her nothing, claims she’s overreacting, and ignores the impact of his own behavior. But he sees himself as a prominent person, a rising star in the artworld, where making provocatively bold and liberating statements is required in order to attract recognition, but Guido mixes up his own carnal desires with his art, often unable to tell the difference. What he desires is a devoted fantasy housewife, a sexually charged woman who cooks, takes care of the kids, pleases him in bed, and asks no questions, where he gets the best of all possible worlds, making no sacrifices himself, again on full display before his sons. This is a man’s world, where women are just supposed to accept it, where Guido constantly lies to protect himself and does nothing to alleviate his wife’s pronounced jealousy, despite outpourings of marital frustration and endless arguments in front of the kids, turning this into a bummer of a summer.
Guido, however, gets his comeuppance when the reviews of one of his savagely naked live art exhibitions turns into a full-fledged disaster, calling his art empty and fake, panning his artistic pretentions, an event that derails his career and sends Guido headfirst into a melancholic swoon. During his doldrums, he buys his son Dario the 8mm camera he’s always been begging for, which he brings with him when Serena (bringing the boys in tow) accepts an invite from a local art gallery owner, Helke (Martina Gedeck), to head off to a feminist camp in France. The biggest problem of the film is the director’s conception of a “feminist” camp, which couldn’t be a more pretentious expression from the leering gaze of a man, filled with women frolicking naked on the beach or running around naked, constantly displaying their bodies, playing sports, dancing, or listening to male bashing speeches, with Dario running around filming it all like it’s a boy’s summer fantasy, calling it “erotic dust.” Whether the exaggerated look at the 60’s art world or the feminist camp, the tone of satiric absurdity undermines any serious developments and prevents the transformative coming-of-age theme from being taken more seriously within Serena, who finally gains the courage to stand up to Guido’s backward view of women, but it also comes at a cost, especially when Helke becomes affectionate and has her own designs on Serena, making frequent passes, treating her with more respect than she’s ever received in her marriage. This internal crisis turns her world upside down, as she never sees her husband in the same way afterwards. He, in turn, is going through his own existential crisis, where he has to reach inside himself and determine if he is the artist he hoped he would one day become. An often delicate and nuanced film, there is, however, little sympathy generated towards either parent, both of whom are too self-absorbed and clueless, needlessly exposing their children to the harmful effects of their continual bickering, but also their wayward indulgences where they simply drift apart. These were, according to the narrator, somewhat tongue in cheek, the happy years.
THOSE HAPPY YEARS | siskelfilmcenter.org Marty Rubin
Director Luchetti’s 1960s-set MY BROTHER IS AN ONLY CHILD (2007) won acclaim for its deft integration of political history and family drama. Set in the 1970s, this autobiographical story is seen through the eyes (and sometimes the home-movie camera) of Luchetti’s boyhood alter-ego Dario, an aspiring filmmaker, but the focus is on his parents. His father Guido (Stuart) is a self-important but mediocre avant-garde artist whose dalliances with his models test the patience of his devoted wife Serena (Ramazzotti). The film’s high point is a disastrous performance-art opening in Milan, which galvanizes Serena to embark on her own road to self-realization, beginning with a trip to a feminist retreat with Guido’s lesbian art-dealer (Martina Gedeck).
White City Cinema [Michael Smith]
Director Daniele Luchetti returns to the subject matter of his acclaimed 2007 film My Brother Is an Only Child for another look back at the dynamics of an Italian family in the 1970s. Those Happy Years, however, is more personal than political: young Dario (Samuel Garofalo) is the director’s alter-ego, exploring his budding desire to make movies after he receives the gift of a Super-8 camera, a story that is juxtaposed against that of the marital troubles of his parents. Dario’s father, Guido (Kim Rossi Stuart), is a philandering artist dealing with a disastrously received exhibition while his mother, Serena (Micaela Ramazzotti), explores Italy’s burgeoning feminist movement as well as her own repressed lesbian desires. This modest and winning film offers a poignant reminder that we often realize our happiest moments only in hindsight; and the cutting satire of the art world on display is, for my money, far more effective than in Paolo Sorrentino’s overrated The Great Beauty — mainly because Luchetti doesn’t seem like he’s Zeus judging his artist-characters from on top of Mount Olympus. Those Happy Years screens on Sunday, March 30 and Wednesday, April 2.
Anni Felici (Those Happy Years) Movie Review : Shockya.com Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi
Director Daniele Luchetti brings an autobiographical urgency to the story, by a narrator who watched his parents’ marriage unravel when he was a child.
Guido Marchetti (Kim Rossi Stuart) is an ambitious avant-garde artist in 1974 (the year of the Italian divorce referendum). He sculpts female nudes in his Roman studio by pouring plaster over models’ naked bodies. His two sons, Dario (Samuel Garofalo) and little Paolo (Niccolò Calvagna), watch their father work as though it were the most normal profession in the world. Typical of the times, the boys call their parents by their first names. Their mother, Serena (Micaela Ramazzotti), is a pretty devoted housewife, until the feminist movement will stir in her the urge for emancipation and something more.
Given the fact that Luchetti’s father, sculptor Luca Luchetti, had a career similar to Guido’s, and that his artwork was used in the film, it’s hard not to associate Daniele Luchetti with the budding young filmmaker Dario Marchetti. As a matter of fact the original title of the movie should have been ‘Storia mitologica della mia famiglia’ (Mythological Story Of My Family), but in the making the title changed to ‘Anni Felici’ (Those Happy Years), making the bittersweet judgement prevail on the childhood remembrances.
Daniele Luchetti examines conventional and unconventional life choices of the freedom-seeking parents using ironic distance, accentuating the invisibility of the children when the couple discusses topics like betrayal, in their presence.
All in all, despite some moments of humour and great acting, the story doesn’t captivate nor create any empathy. It filters through as a concentration of wacky episodes that stereotypically represent the 70s. The moments during which the market and mechanism of art criticism are mocked are sourly amusing. But as they give way to a rhetorical happy ending, the tease gets nulled.
Regarding the technical aspects, it is worth praising the way Luchetti mixes 35mm lensing with the use of retro 16mm and Super 8 formats.
Daniele Luchetti's look at Those Happy Years - Cineuropa Camillo de Marco
Filmleaf
[Chris Knipp]
Those Happy Years (2013) Movie Review from Eye for Film Anne-Katrin Titze
Sound
On Sight Laura Holtebrinck
Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]
Eye For Film: Conversation with Daniele Luchetti about ... Anne-Katrin Titze interview, June 12, 2014
Those Happy Years (Anni Felici): Toronto Review - The Hollywo Deborah Young from The Hollywood Reporter
Ludin, Malte
2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HIM B 87
a
typical German story
The spelling of the letters in the last image of the film before it cuts
to the end credits tells you exactly what we’re dealing with here, as a typical
German family reluctantly attempts to tie the missing pieces of their family’s
past together with the knowledge that dad, Hanns Ludin, was a war criminal sentenced
to hang in Bratislava in 1947 as one of
the higher ranking Nazi collaborators who facilitated the transporation and
eventual extermination of Jews during the Holocaust. He was one of the guys that made it all
happen. As the Nazi Ambassador to
Slovakia chosen by Hitler himself to represent the Third Reich, one document
alone bearing his signature is evidence of over 8700 Jews and some 500 Slovaks
transported out of Slovakia for permanent liquidation in the death camps. Despite his role, the family squabbles over
how much he knew, how he couldn’t have knowingly sent all those people to their
deaths, as they were believed to be labor camps, trying to blame it all on that
weasel Adolf Hitler, how he was a pawn in someone else’s game, much like the
arguments played out at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals. A review of the collected evidence suggests
Herr Ludin never initiated a single act over the course of his entire career, that
he arrived at his position by steadfastly carrying out the Führer’s Final
Solution orders without so much as a blink.
But that’s not how everyone in the family sees it, as the filmmaker, the
youngest of his six children who was only 5 when his father was executed,
points his camera at his siblings, nieces and nephews, and even a few in-laws,
most all of whom have favorable recollections of his dad, the most vociferous
defender of which is his older sister Barbel who refuses to believe he commited
any crimes, much less atrocities, believing he was a victim of the madness of
war. Her unwavering support for him is
the centerpiece of the film, which also produces gorgeous never-before-seen
color photos of Hitler on parade with Hanns Ludin in dress uniform smiling at
his side, including a memorable photo of an infant Barbel proudly handing a
bouquet of flowers to the Führer, with a treasure chest of Nazi photos signed
by many of the luminaries, and with documents obtained from a Slovakian War
Crimes museum that verify much of Ludin’s activities during the war.
This project would never have taken place while their mother was alive,
and as the filmmaker notes, “she lived a long life.” We later learn through footage shot while she
was alive that his mother claimed she had never heard of
Of note, the richness of color in the film shot by Franz Lustig is
superb, especially for a documentary which usually features grainy or poor
quality digital video. Lustig was the
cinematographer in two of the more recent Wim Wenders films, DON’T COME
KNOCKING (2005) and
Chicago Reader
J.R. Jones
Malte Ludin tears the scab off a family
wound with this 2005 German documentary about his father, Hanns, who was
executed in 1947 as a Nazi war criminal. An early and enthusiastic storm
trooper, Hanns Ludin served as Hitler's ambassador to
2 or 3 Things I Know About
Him Charles Coleman from Facets MultiMedia
Who better to address the troublesome issue of being the
offspring of a Nazi war criminal than Malte Ludin himself? Ludin was just five
years old when his father, Hanns Ludin, was tried and executed in 1947 for
orchestrating the Final Solution in
The Village
Voice [Jim Ridley]
Hanns Ludin, as remembered by his children, was a bon vivant
and a lover of jokes, good food, and wine. And as Hitler's man in
Malte's film tells "a typical German story"—how the surviving Ludins deal with the storm trooper in the closet by denial (the filmmaker's nephew grew up convinced Hanns was some kind of resistance hero), avoidance (one sister testily deflects any talk of her father's guilt), or trampoline leaps of logic (think of the Jews that Daddy didn't kill!). Parallels between the whitewashing of personal and national histories are too obvious to state at a time when arguments still rage over how many Germans actually served as Hitler's willing executioners.
Malte's discomforting interviews with his siblings, supplemented by surreally matter-of-fact, Zelig-like photos of Hanns in Hitler's company, make for gripping and confrontational viewing. Yet the harder he persists, the less clear it is what he wants from his family. Confession? Renunciation of their father, whose presence the filmmaker was too young to feel as acutely as his siblings did? What keeps this from becoming the ultimate in voyeuristic family strip-mining—Tarnation in jackboots—are the scenes in which Malte punctures the self-righteousness of his crusade. Facing a poet who lost his family to Malte's father, the filmmaker instinctively resorts to the same semantic dodges and feeble justifications his siblings make to minimize the old man's culpability. His shame is palpable—as it might be for Americans who grew up sidestepping the question of what their ancestors did back in the days of slavery and Jim Crow.
Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel
The first memories writer/director Malte Ludin pulls from his sisters in his “typical German story” is how they learned in 1947 that their father had just been executed for war crimes. Playing on Godard’s faux documentary 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her about a woman’s double life, Malte plumbs the fascinating duality of Hanns Ludin’s life and legacy, as a beloved father and husband still enshrined in family memory versus the loyal Nazi leader.
Malte narrates that, in deference to his mother, he didn’t start this exploration until after she died in 1997 at age 94, though two of his older siblings, who were the most haunted by their revered father, had already passed away. The reluctant, raw family interviews with his surviving three older sisters are so intense that a psychologist attended to counsel them and the crew.
The filmmaker reconstructs his parents’ youth and marriage with reminiscences, letters, photographs, and documents, including his father’s final handwritten plea to the Czechoslovakian court refusing guilt but asking for leniency on behalf of his family. He implies that his father selected his mother for her gracefully athletic Aryan looks and their tow-headed brood looks just like the propaganda images of Goebbels’ cherubic and ideologically pure family.
While the context of his father’s career is confusing to follow without reference to William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, this is an intimate look into how a disgruntled middle-class teenager develops into an agitator for the National Socialists within the German army. In the “Trunk of Sorrows,” as the filmmaker labels the chapter delving into his mother’s souvenirs, is the family scrapbook with photos of Hanns standing close to Hitler at Nazi rallies and audio recordings of his father’s galvanizing speeches as an organizer for the thuggish SA (Sturmabteilung) troops, the notorious Brown Shirts who helped muscle Hitler to power. Malte particularly tries to understand the fanaticism of a father who sees almost 100 of his closest colleagues murdered on “The Night of Long Knives,” the brutal purge of 1934, and still does not question his leader, not then or later. His mother, in a 1987 television interview supplemented with conversations Malte taped the year before her death, still takes considerable pride in having stiffened her husband's spine to persevere against despair and resentment.
One of the most emotion-packed sequences begins when Malte
cajoles his sisters into recalling their charming, playful childhood when their
bon vivant father was rewarded with a foreign service position. According to
Malte, “The scene of my father’s crimes is where I was born” – the Ambassador’s
residence in
The director is understandably gentle in challenging his
mother’s wartime justifications, even as he pushes her about his father helping
a colleague cover up a murder or the first time she heard of
The subtitles are very frustrating for a non-German reader. Not only is there the usual white-on-white problem, but crucial documents are not translated, and the identifying labels of the speakers are not in English so one has to quickly infer the German words for nephew, sister, husband, etc. to keep the relationships straight.
The parallels to the fictional German family in the Israeli film Walk on Water are eerie, considering the ironies of who the filmmaker and a granddaughter marry, and we have seen before rationalizing interviews with elderly women Nazi supporters in films such as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s The Confessions of Winifred Wagner, Ray Müller’s The Wonderful, Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl, and André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer’s Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary. The closest a single family has dealt so immediately with a tainted legacy may be Ross McElwee’s contemplation of his tobacco-growing family in Bright Leaves or in the book, Slaves in the Family, by Edward Ball. But with this patriarch’s crimes echoing through history, his son’s clear-eyed evisceration of family– and by extension, societal – mythology is unique.
New
York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
The Nazis ruled
The filmmaker’s father, Hanns
Ludin, who served as the Third Reich’s ambassador to the Nazi vassal state of
Malte, the youngest (born in 1942), waited until his mother died before embarking on this film, though it includes earlier interviews he did with her. The title, apart from its distracting and irrelevant nod in the direction of Jean-Luc Godard, suggests that Hanns Ludin remains, in his son’s eyes, a mysterious, unknowable figure, and the younger Mr. Ludin’s interviews with other family members contribute to the blurriness of the picture.
Archival photographs and film clips of the father show a stout, smiling fellow, in and out of uniform, and Malte Ludin’s surviving sisters recall him with some fondness. One sister, Barbel, emerges as her father’s staunch defender, and the most wrenching scenes in the film show her and Malte Ludin on screen together, arguing doggedly about the nuances of guilt, responsibility and shame.
Barbel insists that she feels none herself, and furthermore tries to mitigate the portrait of her father as a heartless monster. She resorts to some familiar rationalizations — that he couldn’t have known the full truth about Auschwitz; that he tried to resist or subvert the most inhumane Nazi policies; that many slaughtered by the Nazis should be thought of as casualties of war who got what was coming to them — which all bolster her conviction that Hanns Ludin was, in the end, a victim.
This startling conclusion is not altogether unheard of in
postwar
Barbel’s loyalty to her father’s memory is both touching and appalling, but her refusal to admit the truth about his actions is something worse. Hanns Ludin joined the SA paramilitary organization in 1931; survived the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler’s potential political rivals were massacred; and openly celebrated his Führer’s birthday in April 1945, at a time when more than a few die-hard Nazis, glimpsing the Allies’ armies over the horizon, underwent an expedient change of heart.
All the evidence presented in “2 or 3 Things” suggests that Hanns Ludin served the National Socialist cause zealously, and the testimony of survivors — including a member of the Jewish family whose house in Slovakia the Ludins expropriated — leave no doubt regarding his central role in organized mass murder. To call him a victim is to strip all meaning from the word.
What is it like to have such a man as a father or a grandfather? Even those whose parents and grandparents died because of his actions approach this question, in Mr. Ludin’s presence, with something resembling pity. And while it is no real comfort, the victims and their descendants are able to regard the past with a moral clarity that eludes Mr. Ludin’s siblings.
His wife, Iva Svarcova, also the film’s producer, was born in
Mr. Ludin’s nieces and nephews — Hanns Ludin’s grandchildren — were all born after the war, and are the products of a sane, democratic and affluent society (apart from the ones who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa). They are thus less anguished by the family history, and their sensitive, sensible voices give “2 or 3 Things I Know About Him” a measure of earned and authentic optimism. It is possible for a nation to descend into evil, but over time, recovery is also possible.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg)
Luhrmann, Baz
Luhrmann, Baz Art and Culture
Australian director Baz Luhrmann
burst onto the international scene with his hit film, "Strictly
Ballroom," a funny, campy romantic fable set in the world of competitive
dance. Originally produced by Luhrmann as a 30-minute stage play,
"Strictly Ballroom" premiered at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, where
it won the Prix de Jeunesse, as well as a Special Mention for the Camera d'Or.
It was, however, Luhrmann's hip,
updated version of William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" -- renamed
"Romeo+Juliet" (1996) -- that really grabbed everyone's attention.
While some critics felt that the intense visual and aural overload and
unskilled acting eclipsed the venerable text, the flashy, violent, in-your-face
production, which featured a south-of-the-border gangland setting, vivid
Catholic iconography, and a drag queen Mercutio, struck a chord with the MTV
generation. The film grossed more than $11 million its first week, unusual for
a production of Shakespeare (albeit an ultra-modern one), and launched a
big-selling soundtrack.
Trained at the prestigious
National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney, Luhrmann has worked as an actor,
director, producer (as well as a guest editor for the Australian version of
Vogue magazine), and before making films, he was already a veteran of the
stage. He helped put on several operas, both classic and original, including a
version of "La Boheme" set in the 1950s. In 1989 Luhrmann produced
the innovative theater event "Dance Hall," in which participants celebrated
the end of World War II at a party in a 1940s dance hall.
Since "Romeo+Juliet,"
Luhrmann has even become, quite unexpectedly, a sensation in the music
industry. One of the songs on "Something for Everyone," his album of
remixed and reinterpreted music, became for a while the most requested song at
radio stations all over the United States. Originally a cyber hoax, the
spoken-word song, "Everyone's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)" begins,
"To the ladies and gentlemen of the Class of '99," and contains life
advice, in a commencement address format, that was misattributed to Kurt
Vonnegut and emailed around the world. As his album title suggests, Luhrmann
really does offer "something for everyone."
Bazmark Inq. Pty. Ltd. Luhrmann’s Production Company
The Cyber-Saga of the Sunscreen Song Frank Ahrens from the Washington Post
About.com Home Video/DVD - "Baz Luhrmann Roundtable Interview Transcripts" Luhrmann discussing DVD releases
STRICTLY BALLROOM
Austin Chronicle Adrienne Martini
Since Baz Lurhmann's Romeo & Juliet has received such critical acclaim for its magnetic camerawork and ability to breathe life into a 400-year-old script, it is worth checking out the earlier Strictly Ballroom, where it may be possible to see the seeds of his style starting to take root. Set in a variety of Australian ballroom dance competitions and practice halls, this film simply bubbles with romance and charm as it tells the story of Scott, a dancer who wants to dance his own crowd-pleasing steps despite the rigid rules of competition, and Fran, the dumpy woman turned paso doble queen after she finds the right partner. Like Romeo & Juliet, Scott and Fran must overcome familial and societal pressure to win acceptance for their need to dance together, and Luhrmann's visually quirky style fills the frame with whimsical shots that show the same old boy-meets-girl story in a fresh new way. The undercurrent of his contempt for the ballroom dance atmosphere, evidenced partially by his tight shots of the characters' sweaty and overly made-up faces, injects a streak of dark humor that is difficult to ignore. Still, the fierce chemistry between actors Mercurio and Morice makes you want to run right out, find a partner, and learn how to rhumba.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviews Romeo + Juliet
A few months after the
release of the magnificent two-disc set of his Oscar-nominated Moulin Rouge,
Australian director Baz Luhrmann revisits the first installments of his
"red curtain trilogy" on DVD. Both the zany romantic comedy of Strictly
Ballroom and the aggressive MTV-informed reworking of Shakespeare's Romeo
And Juliet show the over-the-top theatrical style and egalitarian artistic
ethos that have made Luhrmann so distinctive, and yet so aggravating. His 1992
debut film Strictly Ballroom remains the most simple and crowd-pleasing
of the trilogy. Paul Mercurio plays a promising ballroom dancer who can't catch
a break in competition because he favors inventive steps over the established
styles laid down by fuddy-duddy judges. But once he partners up with mousy
novice Tara Morice, he learns to dance for the thrill of movement alone, and in
the process, romance blooms. Luhrmann works aggressively for laughs early in
the picture, playing up the gaudiness and piggishness of the old-guard dancers
in camera angles as extreme and unflattering as a mid-'80s David Lee Roth
video. Later, Luhrmann softens as he reveals the motivations of his
quasi-villains, and as the delirium of the dance takes over in the film's
exuberant, climactic championship sequence. Strictly Ballroom's theme of
wresting art from the stifling environs of hidebound tradition has become
Luhrmann's guiding theory, one that he tests heavily in 1996's William
Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. The filmmaker keeps the original language of
the tale of star-crossed lovers, but updates the setting to a sweltering
contemporary coastal metropolis, where the players drive cars instead of riding
horses, and draw guns instead of swords. Luhrmann imposes an often-maddening
MTV editing style, creating a hectic swirl around Leonardo DiCaprio's
hormone-addled Romeo and Claire Danes' giddy Juliet. For all the hubbub, the
film succeeds in relating Shakespeare to modern times, thanks mainly to the use
of energetic pop music and the gameness of the performers. DiCaprio, Danes, and
company may be afflicted with the youthful notion that shouting equals great
acting, but they still hypnotize with their charisma more often than they
induce cringing. Though Luhrmann's first two films are being released to DVD by
two different companies, they're remarkably uniform regarding the special
features (though,in keeping with Miramax's general indifference to the
technology, Strictly Ballroom is both skimpier and more expensive). Both
contain stylishly assembled behind-the-scenes footage—the Romeo + Juliet
material is so copious that it could have almost been edited into a
feature-length making-of documentary—and commentaries by Luhrmann and his key
collaborators, including wife and production designer Catherine Martin,
choreographer John O'Connell, and co-writer Craig Pearce, all of whom have
worked on all three of Luhrmann's films. Their commentary tracks deflate some
of the apparent haughtiness behind the trilogy, with its overt staginess and
leveling of high and low culture. Luhrmann finds a transcendent commonality
among poetry, rock 'n' roll, Hollywood stardom, the musical theater, and the
turbulent emotions of rebellious youth. When he compares DiCaprio's Romeo to
"James Dean, Byron, and Kurt Cobain," his enthusiasm is difficult to
dismiss.
DVD Journal Dawn Taylor
Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady]
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Full Review Janet Maslin from the New York Times
ROMEO + JULIET
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
It’s one thing to be haunted by a movie you love: it's quite another to find yourself unable to shake one you abhor -- to find yourself thinking about it days afterward, despite your efforts to brush it away. On the whole, Baz Luhrmann's gaudy, choppy "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" is a travesty -- a film that turns the play's characters into broad caricatures, that demolishes most of its language in a hailstorm of fast cutting and swervy camera angles. It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes.
Danes -- only three years older than the character she plays, and completely unschooled in Shakespearean drama -- gives us a Juliet so open, so natural, and so fearless that she manages to claim the movie for herself and her costar, Leonardo DiCaprio, whose scenes with her are his only memorable ones. Luhrmann draws wide, garish circles around their exquisite performances; they slip his deadly noose without even trying and escape without looking back -- the ultimate lovers on the lam.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Melanie
J. Baker]
There have been many attempts in recent years to remake Shakespeare for a modern audience. These attempts have usually taken the route of simply transcribing a basic plot from a Shakespearean play to a modern American high school. Whilst Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is made for the same audience it is undoubtedly a cut above the rest. The film takes the bard’s most famous tragedy and sets it in a modern setting of Verona Beach, a fictional suburb of Mexico City. The most noticeable difference between this film and the other recent teen Shakespeare films is that Luhrmann has chosen to retain Shakespeare’s original words, though it is edited into a faster, clearer form. The result is a highly entertaining, visually stunning work that is a paragon of the creativity of Luhrmann, as well as demonstrating how different and creatively versatile Shakespeare can be in the right hands.
The most important single word to the success of this film is ‘cool’. This film is one of the coolest teen films ever made. With a hugely talented cast of young actors led by the hottest young stars of the time in Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, this film was a marketing executives dream. Add to this Luhrmann’s wonderful visual style and some of the best production design you will see and the initial gamble taken in retaining the original dialogue which certainly pays off in the dramatic scenes compared to what a modern teen would blurt out. Luhrmann, who went on to revitalise the Hollywood musical with Moulin Rouge, certainly revitalised Shakespeare with this film, even if no-one else has had the balls to follow it up with a Macbeth remake starring Sean William Scott.
Slant Magazine Sal Cinquemani
Though flamboyant Aussie director Baz Luhrmann
is now best known for "reviving" the movie-musical with Moulin Rouge (does no one remember the equally successful Evita?),
it's 1996's Romeo + Juliet that can be called his true masterpiece. It
is, in fact, the quintessential marker of a generation. It paired '90s pop
culture icons as the titular couple (Leonardo DiCaprio, who would go on to be
immortalized in Titanic a year later, and Claire Danes, hot off the cult
TV phenomenon My So-Called Life), and mixed rapid-fire MTV-style editing
with edgy pop music to lure a new generation into the world of Shakespeare. The
result is, as even Luhrmann admits, "rambunctious," yet five years
later the film's relevance is stronger than ever. Luhrmann's update of the
timeless tale of forbidden love resonates with the angst of a post-Cobain
generation armed to the teeth. DiCaprio's Romeo is the quintessential brooding
antihero (one part Cobain, one part James Dean) while Danes' Juliet is the
sheltered damsel with a delicate fury all her own. The script's preserved
Elizabethan language is at first hard to swallow amidst towering skyscrapers
and pill-popping gangs (see the film's opening sequence, a spaghetti
western-style gas station brawl), but is decoded via clever branding (guns are
named "Longsword") and the actors' guileless interpretations.
Similarly, the story's subtext is rendered on buildings and billboards as well
as in television advertisements, newscasts and fashions. Purists may scoff, but
the film is faithful to the Bard and its makers are thoroughly cognizant of the
story's many intricate layers. Perhaps the caliber of Luhrmann's rendition of
Shakespeare's classic can be measured by the extent to which one clings to hope
that the couple isn't really doomed.
William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet - The Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Park your preconceptions at the door before entering.
Overhyped as the newest thing in youth culture retro-vogue, Baz Luhrmann's new
film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet seems
positioned to slip one past the Shakespeare purists and art aesthetes while
building a base of support among the newbie MTV generation of star-crossed
teens in love. If so, what a self-limiting miscalculation. For Luhrmann's
rendition is not so much a reconceptualization as a recontextualization
of the 400-year-old play. To begin with, the film's language remains all
Shakespeare's, although it's spoken with decidedly American accents by actors
who, for the most part, are more schooled in the ways of
William Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet - Deep Focus Bryant
Frazer from Deep Focus
DVD Journal Dawn Taylor
DVD Verdict Nicholas Sylvain
filethirteen.com review
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
[safe]: Romeo + Juliet Review Terry Brogan
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Romeo + Juliet film website
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
MOULIN ROUGE A 95
USA Australia
If ever there were a movie that was created with Blu-ray in mind, this is it, as this is a kaleidoscope fusion of music and color that explodes off the screen, delighting viewers with the scandalous opulence of a tantalizingly seductive musical. This has all the magnificence of Broadway come to the screen, among the most extravagant visual spectacles ever made, yet it’s all underscored by an old-fashioned love story that also gets the small details right, especially the small snippets of lyrics from popular songs that elevate the dizzyingly emotional love scenes. Shot by John McAlpine using the brightest, near hallucinogenic use of colors, the Bollywood style stage presence of beautifully choreographed frenzied excess, luxurious costumes with exaggerated use of makeup and wigs, and a set design like none other that you’ve ever seen, so elaborately detailed and wildly expressive. Set in the bohemian district of Montmarte in Paris in 1900, we zoom into the city with the cutesy style of AMÉLIE (2001), hovering among the rooftops overlooking the Moulin Rouge nightclub where John Leguizamo as Toulouse-Lautrec is perched wondering what to present for his next show, but the narration is being described by a man seen inside a window with a typewriter, Ewan McGregor as Christian, a struggling writer who has moved there to be caught up in the spirit of revolution, where all that matters is “truth, beauty, freedom, and most of all, love.” When Christian stumbles upon Toulouse-Lautrec at a rehearsal session where they are conceptually stuck, he brilliantly resolves the writer’s block by singing “The hills are alive with the sound of music…” The tone is set, as immediately he is welcomed into the fraternity of fellow bohemians.
What he discovers is a scandalous burlesque and dance review featuring scantily clad women in neon colored costumes dancing the French Can Can that would rival the Roman Circus for decadence in a show called “Spectacular Spectacular.” Enter Nicole Kidman dressed only in lingerie and a hat lowered on a trapeze bar singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in her most breathy Marilyn Monroe imitation. Satine is the star of the show, the sexiest, most alluring woman known as the “sparkling diamond,” the highest paid courtesan in Paris. To save the show, as the club is going bankrupt, she is urged by the master of ceremony, Jim Broadbent from Mike Leigh’s TOPSY TURVY (1999), to use her feminine charms to get a pompously overdressed rich Duke (Richard Roxburgh) to invest in the show. But she mistakes the poor starving writer for the aristocratic Duke, which leads to a comedy of errors and misdirection. His mind grasping in desperation, knowing he’s about to lose the girl, Christian breaks into song, a quietly affecting rendition of Elton John’s “Your Song.” Like a deer in the headlights, she is struck by the emotional allure of the song, which leads to a spectacular rooftop romance fantasia where they do a tribute to the umbrella sequence from SINGIN IN THE RAIN (1952), only here they dance engulfed in a sea of fog cast in a blue light, which eventually turns animated, dancing under the moon next to the Eiffel Tower in a picture postcard image of Paris. Like magic, one song and they are in love. Once she discovers his real identity, confusion ensues as she then has to meet the real Duke, who she now has no interest in and must steal away all waking hours with her new love while lying and concealing this scandalous affair from the Duke. What follows are more enchanting love songs sung from the rooftop of Satine’s giant elephant shaped bedroom, each using a line from a popular love song to create a surge of emotional fascination with the idea of love, as it is beautifully explored through song lyrics. This technique would later be used in Julie Taymor’s ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (2007) where the lyrics from Beatles songs actually tell the narrative throughout the entire movie. Luhrmann brilliantly uses this device throughout the film, using a varied selection of lyrics from Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” to Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” from Madonna’s “Material Girl” to the Beatles “All You Need Is Love” to Dolly Parton’s heartfelt “I Will Always Love You,” all to wonderful effect, as he cleverly mixes the mood with the visual enchantment onscreen.
Once we see where this is heading, right out of French literature or opera, as Satine, like Camille or Mimi in La Bohème, is dying of consumption, so what becomes immediately apparent is not only can the Duke not have her, but no one can, as she’s covering up the fact she is near death. But the Duke grows fanatical and deliriously enraged when he realizes he’s been made a fool of and insists upon conditions that force the hand of the actors, using threats of violence as well as his insistence of taking over the theater. Still, making a fool of him is one of the more delicious aspects of the film, filled with humor and cleverness. Without it, the film drags near the end and runs into a more contrived finale that seems to go on forever, with Luhrmann never finding the right ending, so he keeps throwing more at the audience. Kidman is sensually vulnerable throughout, yet also a sexual force, so her strength of character is vital to this film, while McGregor is a wide-eyed idealist where love is literally sweeping him off his feet, where from one moment to the next, song lyrics just keep flying out of his head. The two are positively enchanting together, and with that core of authenticity, all that excessive Bollywood window dressing that’s meant to dazzle the senses with hyper-saturated colors, inventive set designs, and a wonderful neverending energy just leaves the audience overwhelmed yet yearning for more. This is the film NINE (2009) needed to be but wasn’t, falling flat with its own disinterest. Luhrmann’s film on the other hand is constantly reinventing itself, finding astonishing ways to continually find the emotional resonance of a simple love story, seemingly simplistic and overdone, but given an entirely new vision here that continually mixes moods from psychedelic to comedic farce to delirious spectacle to rock “n” roll, an unapologetically artificial dreamworld that holds up over time by remaining outrageously inventive and alluringly spectacular.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Another post-modern mix of myth, musical, comedy, romance and
unfettered pastiche from the impressively inventive Luhrmann, here ransacking
pop culture's iconographic archives - rather than the real Paris of 1900 - to
mount a hyperkinetic update of the Orpheus myth. Naive, lovelorn
writer/composer Christian (McGregor) is taken up by bohemians like
Toulouse-Lautrec to put on a show at the scandalous showplace of the title,
where courtesan/torch singer Satine (Kidman) will do anything - even sleep with
a dodgy Duke - to further her acting career, especially if pressed by the club
proprietor (Broadbent) - until, that is, she meets Christian, and her heart
melts. A Red Shoes-style fable of love and art in conflict with commerce
and power, it's luridly stunning to look at even if it's cut a little too
quickly and insistently for its own good. It's also jam-packed with allusions
and gags, and performed with enormous gusto. If it lacks the emotional punch of
Luhrmann's earlier films, and drags towards the end, it is still great fun.
Edinburgh U
Film Society (Lindsay MacDonald) review
Set in the famous Parisian nightclub, Moulin Rouge! is an extravagant vision of the glamorous underworld during the close of the nineteenth century. Innocent poet Christian (Ewan McGregor) finds himself drawn into a bohemian world of sex, entertainment and absinthe. With a gang of fellow bohemians, including Toulouse-Lautrec, and a narcoleptic Argentinean, he joins a world that mixes the power of the aristocracy with the seedy but glamorous world of courtesans and dancers. He quickly finds out that in anything goes except falling in love. Tragically, he makes this very mistake with the most famous dancer in the Moulin Rouge, Satine (Nicole Kidman). However, Satine is trapped by the obsession of another man and the rule that a courtesan never falls in love. While her health deteriorates, Satine and Christian's love affair grows, but can they continue it secretly under the jealous eyes of the Duke?
Although slightly cheesy, the love affair is convincingly portrayed by McGregor and Kidman with a real chemistry between them. Unlike other actors, they can actually sing, and do credit to Luhrmann's revamping of some old classics. The supporting characters, particularly John Leguizamo who plays Toulouse-Lautrec, give good performances, but are some what overshadowed by the two leads. Moulin Rouge! is the third film in a series (entitled the Red Curtain Trilogy) that began with Strictly Ballroom, followed by William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in 1996. Like these, this film is basically a tragedy and comedy, but Luhrmann adds another dimension by making Moulin Rouge! as a musical. This allows him to create some of the strangest but most engaging versions of songs by modern artists such as Madonna and Sting. What could have turned out embarrassing, actually comes across very well, particularly good are "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" and "Like a Virgin", which are cleverly worked into the story. In the words of Luhrmann himself "Moulin Rouge is fundamentally a musical, perhaps an opera, but finally a story told through song".
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rogue! is a frenzy of color, music, and emotion. The film isn't so much a reinvention of the musical genre as a reassertion of it. Its themes are no different than most old-school musicals. The film seizes the inherent camp and energy involved when characters break into song, but rarely stops to laugh at itself or point out its cleverness. The film isn't perfect, but there are some scenes that just work amazingly well. There are several sequences that are perfectly realized. The first twenty minute's initiation of our young hero, a poet named Christian (Ewan McGregor), into the band of bohemians and his subsequent introduction to the Moulin Rogue and its star attraction, a courtesan named Satine (Nicole Kidman), is particularly mind-blowing. The second half is solid, but doesn't reach those insane heights as consistently as the first half does. Despite that though, the film never really falters, it just hits home runs less frequently in the second half in which it attempts to graft a dramatic heft to the proceedings. A pleasures a film like this provide don't have much to do with plot, so when the film moves toward a more structured (if simplistic) format, it's a bit disappointing.
I read somewhere that Luhrman was inspired by Bollywood movies, and it definitely shows here. The film is an absolute celebration of excess. There is a juxtaposition of tragedy, comedy, suspense, and romance often in the same scene. The film is exceptionally, enthusiastically manipulative of its audience, but the film, surprisingly, never burnt me out with its gaudiness. The editing never really seemed to distract me either (though it surely was hyperactive). I really loved the set design. The four lead performances were all great, with special mention going to Kidman, who manages a comic sass that she hasn't really shown since To Die For. Chemistry between McGregor and her (an exceptionally attractive couple) is rarely strained. There are certainly sequences in the film that one simply would need to see again to appreciate them. So many images flash by so quickly that it is nearly impossible to absorb them all on one viewing. The film's single biggest highlight is an impromptu pitch of a play within the play to the Duke that feels like a live action Bugs Bunny bit (in the best sense), but this is a film that is filled with highlights.
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
Colourful vivid imagery permeates Moulin Rouge, one of the year's most visually appealling films, and also one of the cleverest for its use of contemporary pop music and lyrics set to a 1900 ambience.
The plot is a tried and tested one: Christian (Ewan McGregor) is a struggling writer in Paris at the turn of the 20th century. He wants to write about Love, but he has never experienced it. His colleagues therefore take him to the Moulin Rouge nightclub, where he, quite naturally, falls in love with the seductive courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman) who mistakes him for the Duke of Worcester (Richard Roxburgh). His feelings are reciprocated by Satine, but she doesn't have the luxury of giving her heart to whoever she chooses.
When the confusion is cleared up, the Duke ends up financing the play Christian is writing, which characterises the love between Christian (where he represents a Sitar player in India) and Satine (a Princess), with the Duke (a Maharajah) as the villain. The Duke doesn't get the joke until the very end, when he finally lays his claim to Satine's heart, resulting in tragic consequences.
Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor give stellar performances and the chemistry between them is excellent. John Leguziamo leading the pack of Christian's accomplices, and Jim Broadbent as Satine's godfather, do a good job of supplying the humour. Richard Roxburgh is a convincing villain.
The cleverness in this "pop opera" lies not only in using contemporary pop music, but also the lyrics in such a minimalist way that makes complete sense in the context of the plot. Considering that a focus of the film is about selling one self, songs like Roxanne, Material Girl, Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend, and Like A Virgin are particularly appropriate. The selection of songs is diverse and pretty interesting. There are notable absences like Prince and Michael Jackson, though Madonna is featured twice.
The atmosphere in the film is surreal and "trippy". Director Baz Luhrmann does a great job in combining the visual imagery with the music over the solid plot to create a frenzied atmosphere that showcases the urgency of the lovers' predicament. In my review of Romeo and Juliet (which he also directed), I mention that it's like watching a two hour MTV video. That comment is even more appropriate for Moulin Rouge!, which I'd say is akin to an extremely well-made MTV video that captivates your senses. Who knows? This might herald a new era of modern day musicals.
Jigsaw
Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10]
“I don’t give a damn about your ridiculous DOGMA!” splutters a character midway through the riot of excess that is Moulin Rouge, and presumably Baz Luhrmann feels exactly the same way. It’s as if he’s seen the rise of dogme-inspired, stripped-down, back-to-basics shaky-cam chamber pieces, and run screaming as far and fast as he can in the opposite direction. Diving headlong into an ocean of kitsch-camp aritificiality, he dares audiences to follow suit.
Chances are you’ll enjoy the ride – if, that is, you can endure the truly
woeful first ten minutes. In fact, it’s hard to remember any film this good
which starts off on such a spectacularly duff note: in chaotic fashion, we’re
introduced to idealistic young poet Christian (McGregor) as he recalls his
doomed romance with Satine (Kidman), the courtesan star of the 1899 Moulin
Rouge. In a desperate attempt to convey the heady bohemianism of fin-de-siecle
Luhrmann’s gimmick is to fill his picture with anachronistic, ‘modern’ pop songs – it sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it’s done with such brazen audacity it somehow all works, as the Moulin dancers and clients belt out the ‘Here we are now, entertain us!’ line from Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and their euphoria leaps straight off the screen. The film isn’t without dull spots, but these are few and fleeting, and for the most part Moulin Rouge surges along on a truly infectious jag of crazy, inventive wit. The attention to detail in costumes and sets is staggering – but underneath it all, this is really a pretty ramshackle kind of enterprise, and though he’s made a fine, entertaining film, I’m not even sure if Luhrmann is really a director at all.
As with his earlier Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, his skills seem to be more a matter of choreography and sheer brass neck than any particular use of celluloid as a medium in itself. He happens to use film, but these spectaculars might as well take place on stage – or, even better, on ice. Like the Moulin itself, his movie wallows in sham and bluster, dazzling the eye and ear and revelling in absurdity. Welcome to a world without blues, reds and greens: feast on cobalts! rubies!!!! sapphires!!!!!!!! Set piece follows set piece, and it works just fine – it would take a very hard critical heart to be able to sit through Jim Broadbent’s showstopping ‘Like a Virgin’ without cracking a wide smile.
The story itself is, of course, pretty non-existent – Satine dithers between
love, represented by Christian, and duty, personified by the dastardly foppish
Duke (Roxburgh) to whom she’s been promised by Moulin MC Zidler (Broadbent) –
and the picture does run out of steam a little in the protracted closing
stages, by which time we’ve become a little too familiar with Luhrmann’s
impressive but decidedly limited box of tricks. He’s much too heavy-handed to
achieve a genuine sense of magic – the kind of thing David Lynch pulled
off so effortlessly in The Elephant
CNN Showbiz review Paul Clinton
(CNN) -- "Moulin Rouge" is, quite simply, a spectacular reinvention of the movie musical.
The film is almost a living organism as it swirls, swoops, soars and sweeps across the screen in a kaleidoscope of color and movement, all framed in an operatic setting of sight and sound. It doesn't always work -- and at times things get too frantic and the editing becomes too fragmented -- but as a whole this ambitious project flies off the screen.
The director, Australian wunderkind Baz Luhrmann, is a visceral artist of the highest order. "Moulin Rouge" is the third of his so-called "Red Curtain" movies -- films that are highly theatrical with a reinterpretation of a familiar setting -- following "Strictly Ballroom" (1993), an allegorical look at the world of ballroom dance competition; and "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" (1996), an MTV-style version of the classic love story set in present-day Miami Beach, complete with warring gangs wielding automatic weapons.
Now, with "Moulin Rouge," Luhrmann has taken one of the 19th century's most infamous and decadent nightclubs, added a musical score featuring wildly reconfigured songs from throughout the 20th century, and thrown in a tragic love story. What emerges is a dazzling, electrifying event that transcends the screen. "Moulin Rouge" is a cinematic joyride that engages your eyes more than your heart, but it's one hell of a ride.
Luhrmann surrounds himself with the same creative team for all of his projects. His wife, production and costume designer Catherine Martin is intrinsic to his visual style. Donald McAlpine is his long-time director of photography, and Jill Bilcock is his editor.
His co-writer, Craig Pearce, also has a longstanding relationship with the Filmmaker. The two have loosely based this film's story on the myth of Orpheus, in which a young poet descends into the underworld in search of ideal love. You can also throw in a little "Camille" (1937) and a smidgen of "42nd Street" (1933) into the pot.
Ewan McGregor plays Christian, the Orphean hero, and Nicole Kidman is Satine, the lover he seeks in the "underworld" of the "Moulin Rouge." But Satine is a courtesan, physically available to only the lucky few, and emotionally unobtainable. At one point she says to Christian, "I can't fall in love with anyone, I make men believe what they want to believe."
But what Satine does desire is stardom as an actress, not a courtesan. Enter the Duke, played by Richard Roxburgh. As lecherous as he is wealthy, the Duke has promised to build a theater in the Moulin Rouge and finance an original musical production in return for Satine's affections.
The film now becomes a musical within a musical. Christian, with his friend, artist Toulouse-Lautrec, (played by John Leguizamo), are commissioned to create the theatrical production. The result is a love story that parallels the emotional triangle between Christian, the Duke and Satine.
As the play's rehearsals gather steam, so does the affair between Satine and Christian. As the inevitable showdown with the Duke looms, Luhrmann ratchets up the raw energy, sexual tension, and emotional ante to a fever pitch. The characters have no choice but to sing out their love, hopes and frustrations until they shake the rafters.
The music is eclectic to say the least. It includes Elton John's "Your Song," Sting's "Roxanne," Madonna's "Like A Virgin," and even an original composition, "Fool To Believe," by Luhrmann, Pierce and Marius De Vries and Craig Armstrong.
If a criticism is warranted, it's that Luhrmann rarely lets anyone sing a complete song. Melodies rule in this movie, with snatches of many songs interwoven together, and the frantic rhythms that work visually don't necessarily work emotionally with the music, since the quick pacing doesn't always allow the audience to connect with the emotions of a ballad.
Both Kidman and McGregor have excellent voices. The two also share a great chemistry, and McGregor, as a leading man, has never looked better. (For one thing, he manages to keep his clothes on in this film, a gesture for which we should all feel grateful.) From his work in several films, including "Trainspotting" (1996), he has also shown he is a talented actor; "Moulin Rouge" is no exception.
Kidman, in her best role since "To Die For" (1995), is smoldering and stunning as Satine. She moves with total confidence throughout the film. With her willowy figure and perfect posture, she also manages to wear Martin's stunning costumes instead of letting the clothes wear her -- no mean feat. Kidman seems to specialize in "ice queen" characters, but with Satine she allows herself to thaw, just a bit.
Jim Broadbent should also be singled out for his performance as the owner of the Moulin Rouge, Harold Zidler. Perhaps best known for his role in Mike Leigh's "Topsy-Turvy" (1999), Broadbent is the embodiment of decadence as he reigns over the nightly bedlam at the hottest place in the City of Lights.
"Moulin Rouge" stumbles, but it never falls. Luhrmann has bitten off a huge creative challenge, and for the most part succeeds.
Mostly AGAINST Camp:
Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe) review
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
World Socialist Web Site review Richard Phillips
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [2/5]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [D-]
Mostly FOR Camp:
The
Fourth Wall Returns: Moulin Rouge and the ... - Senses of Cinema Jonathan Dawson, June 2001
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [B]
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Gabriel Shanks) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [A]
The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review
Kamera.co.uk review Caroline Millar
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Terri Sutton) review
CineScene.com (Sasha Stone) review
MOULIN ROUGE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [4/4]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [B]
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Bob Aulert
Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover and Bill Chambers
Movie Shark Deblore [debbie lynn elias]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3.5/5]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [5/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
DVD Times Raphael Pour-Hashemi
DVD Verdict (Harold Gervais) dvd review
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/4]
VideoVista review Ellen Cheshire
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review
DVD Clinic ("Tony Pacemaker") dvd review [4.5/5]
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Ed Peters
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review 1-disc Special Edition
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson) dvd review 2-disc
Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean) dvd review [Special Edition] 2-disc
DVD Journal Dawn Taylor, 2-disc
DVD Talk (Loren Halek) dvd review [5/5] 2-disc
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Special Edition] 2-disc
DVDActive (Pete Roberts) dvd review [9/10] 2-disc
Film Monthly (E.T. Robbins) review
ninth symphony films review Kelsey Wyatt
Top 100 Directors: #57 - Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge! review)
Urban Cinefile (Australia) DVD Review Andrew L. Urban
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [5/5]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A]
CineScene.com (Nathaniel Rogers) review
IndependentCritics.com [TC Candler]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [C+]
Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner) review [3/4]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [5/5]
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [4/5]
Plume Noire review Anji Milanovic
Exclaim! dvd review Erin Oke
Laramie Movie Scope (Patrick Ivers) review
Movielocity Movie Reviews (Blake Kunisch) review [10/10]
Baz Luhrmann Baz Luhrmann’s website
Moulin Rouge Anthony’s Home Page
Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] cartoon
About.com Romantic Movies - "Baz Luhrmann Talks Awards and "Moulin Rouge" Interview with the director
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
AUSTRALIA B 84
Australia USA (165 mi) 2008 ‘Scope
A big, sprawling mess of a movie that despite falling effortlessly into
camp throughout is actually entertaining as hell and generally offers a
rollicking good time filled with stunning natural landscapes, madcap adventure,
and live wire camerawork, yet there are huge doses of cornball moviemaking
filled with insufferably obvious recurring musical riffs, horrendous political
cliché’s in the form of magically realized moments, insipid dialogue that can’t
stop with the WIZARD OF OZ references, and an overly tilted good guys versus
bad guys scenario that becomes overwhelmingly one-sided. In the middle of all this old-fashioned, epic
sweep is a swooning romance story that includes a wonderful performance by
Nicole Kidman who really lights up the screen, making the paucity of
believability hardly matter as we’re caught up in the stirring drama that is
her life. Fiercely independent,
defiantly against the establishment, yet always operating from within it, Lady
Sarah (Kidman) is forced to leave the comfort of England in 1939 to discover
what her galavanting, possibly good-for-nothing husband is up to in the Outback
of Australia, dead set in selling all remaining property rights there as
quickly as possible. Showing initial
determination that is both lovingly and comically displayed through her prim
and proper behavior, her introduction to Drover, Hugh Jackman, a crude and
ill-mannered ranch hand sent by her husband to meet her as he is otherwise
detained, turns hilarious and repulsive, as they are immediately at odds with
one another. When they finally arrive at
the million acre Faraway Down ranch in the remote Northern Territory, both are
in for an unexpected surprise.
Another surpise is the use of an 11-year old half-white Aborigine boy
named Nullah (Brandon Walters) to narrate the entire story in a kind of broken
English, a young kid who’s always hiding from the law. In fact, the depiction of Aborigine’s
throughout is both commendable and deplorable, commendable that within seconds
the audience is informed about the Stolen Generations, otherwise known as the
Rabbit-Proof Fence syndrome, where as a national policy aborigine’s with mixed
blood are removed from their families and transported to missionary camps where
they are raised as whites, a practice that existed in Australia until the early
1970’s, while it’s utterly deplorable that throughout this entire 2 and ½ hour
ordeal Nicole Kidman takes on the role of patron saint of aborigine’s, like
she’s some kind of white Mother Theresa, and still worse, where it is the
prevailing view in a movie outlandishly called AUSTRALIA that an entire
indigenous people needs white protection.
The patronization of race continues at the movies. But bear in mind the film means no harm, as the
ultimate hero of the story is Nullah’s grandfather King George, played by David
Gulpilil, the aboriginal star of Nicolas Roeg's WALKABOUT (1971), a mystic with
magical powers who follows the action throughout from afar and acts as an
unseen conscience and guide.
When we discover Lady Sarah needs to drive 1500 head of cattle into the
nearest town in order to save her ranch, as she is the lone holdout from a beef
monopoly owned by King Carney (Bryan Brown – BREAKER MORANT in 1980), the first
thing she does is fire the man in charge simply from hearing accusations that
Fletcher (David Wenham, a cutthroat who turns out to be Nullah’s father) is
accused of stealing from the herd and selling to Carney, which leaves only
Drover and a ragtag collection of aborigine’s to drive the herd. While out on the range, trouble ensues, but
romantic inclinations heat up, creating a whirlwind of activity happening all
at once. Cut to a cross between the
cattle drive in RED RIVER (1948) and the stampede from THE LION KING (1994), as
Fletcher vows to create as much havoc as he can to keep them from being
successful. This defines Luhrman’s style
of mixing action and fantasia together along with romance under the moonlight,
where the pace of the film is uneven, changing from one event to the next,
moving along briskly in one segment but growing unexpectedly lethargic in
others.
The use of CGI effects are noticeable throughout and at least in my view
cheapens the look of the film, but since heightened artificiality is among the
director’s known specialties, we accept it as part of the scenery, but it adds
to a feeling of overblown excess, which is especially pronounced in the
Japanese invasion sequence, which comes after the invasion of Pearl Harbor and
is a haven for special effects and explosions.
This entire town section feels overly long, most of which is even
unnecessary, as we don’t learn any more about any of the characters, it’s
simply an advancement of the story and it explains where a good deal of the
money from this bloated $130 million dollar blockbuster movie was spent. Apparently there were various endings tacked
onto this film as well, but the last 30 or 45 minutes all felt like the final
wrap up of a film that went on far too long.
There could easily be another shortened edit of this film that might
actually be preferable, as this feels like the lengthened DVD director’s cut
including scenes that should have been cut from the original release. The film resembles the wretched Hollywood
stereotype of GONE WITH THE WIND, another 1939 overblown melodrama that plays
fast and loose with the facts, but this isn’t a towering work or nearly as
memorable, it’s just zany fun with an appreciative eye and an imaginative zest
for Outback romance in the air.
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
How can one do justice to Baz Luhrmann’s overripe epic Australia? It’s several types of primitive melodrama—cattle-drive Western, war picture, anti- racist message movie—whirred together, burnished with state-of-the-art CGI, and blessed with dialogue that defies parody. In one scene, the transplanted Englishwoman (Nicole Kidman) gazes moist-eyed on the rough-and-ready cattleman (Hugh Jackman) as he caresses an edgy stallion, and you know her line will be a clever variation on “You really have a gift with horses.” Instead, she says, “You really have a gift with horses.” It’s like that all the way through, down to the Aboriginal sidekick who lectures the hero with “You’re scared a gettin’ your heart hurt like before … without love in your heart you got nothin’.” Jackman has musical-theater chops and knows how to sell material this ham-handed; Kidman isn’t quite as deft. I’ve always admired her gumption in working so hard to overcome a certain temperamental tightness—but that tightness has now spread to her skin. In one scene, she haltingly sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” to an orphaned half-caste; but watching that big immovable forehead, I thought of another bit from The Wizard of Oz: “Oiiil caaan.”
Slant
Magazine review [2/4] Dan Callahan
An unwieldy stab at an old-fashioned movie
epic, Baz Luhrmann's Australia is corny, implausible, well intentioned
and even somewhat enjoyable in its own way, at least for a while. A faultlessly
honorable, deliriously manly cattle driver named Drover (Hugh Jackman) strikes
conventional sparks with British noblewoman Lady Sarah Ashley (a bone-white
Nicole Kidman) in the flat-out campy first scenes; when the uptight Ashley
starts to coo over a kangaroo, it isn't long before the cute critter is shot
dead. This opening is frantically edited in the manner of Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge, butAustralia soon
settles down and drops its cheeky tone for a long cattle drive in which the
stars lead a pack of largely computer-generated cows across the dusty outback.
Meanwhile, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), the outsized, inexplicable villain of
the film, plots ceaselessly against our hero and heroine and his own half-caste
son (big-eyed, likable Brandon Walters, who narrates most of the movie). The
third act, which stages the attack on the city of Darwin by the Japanese in
1942, piles coincidence onto coincidence, so that even the game and highly
sincere Jackman seems totally lost toward the end. Kidman purveys her usual mix
of unnerving blank stares, hints of neuroticism and weirdly dehydrated glamour;
you could fit her emotional range on the head of a pin, but she functions as a
star here, as does Jackman. It isn't their fault that the massive film starts
to collapse around them long before the Walkabout-meets-Out of Africa
conclusion.
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
Baz Luhrmann’s Australia,
from his own original story, and a script written by Stuart Beattie, Ronald
Harwood and Richard Flanagan, frames its epic narrative at the outset with a
part-Aboriginal, part-Caucasian, Sabu-like little boy named Nullah (played by
11-year-old Brandon Walters, who battled leukemia when he was 6-years-old and
survived, and who has had no prior acting experience). It is through Nullah’s
bedazzled eyes that we get an impressionistic glimpse of British aristocrat
Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) as she arrives in Darwin, Australia, on her
way to her husband’s cattle ranch in the Faraway, an even more remote part of
the country, itself the Faraway of Faraways to the world.
Lady Sarah has
come from England because she suspects her husband is having an affair while
supposedly looking after his business holdings. What Sarah doesn’t know is that
her husband has already been murdered, and that Nullah has seen his corpse in a
river. It is no accident that Nullah plays such a large part in the picture.
Until 1973, we are told, half-caste children like Nullah were taken from their
families and placed in religious schools where they remained, forbidden to live
with either Aborigines or with the white population. These victims of
Australian racial discrimination came to be known as the “Stolen Generation.”
Somehow, Nullah has evaded the authorities, and together with his mother joins
with Lady Sarah and her “Drover,” played by Hugh Jackman as a gruff man of
action, who is in some ways as much an outcast as Nullah. It seems that the
Drover cut himself off from Australian society by first marrying an Aborigine,
and then watching her die from tuberculosis because no Australian hospital
would treat her.
I mention all
these belatedly enlightened elements in the narrative because they are always
lurking in the background of the initially uneasy romantic drama that
eventually bursts into the flames of a fully requited passion uniting Sarah and
her Drover. The cattle drives are almost as spectacular as those in Howard
Hawk’s Red River 60 years ago. Now, as then, there is a wild stampede,
but this time, Nullah is on hand with some mystical power he has absorbed from
his witch-doctor mentor, King George (David Gulpilil), to stare the cattle back
from going off a cliff. It is indeed a sight to behold, if not entirely to
believe.
For her part, Lady
Sarah has imperiously dismissed her foreman Neil Fletcher (David Wenhan) and
his entire crew for conspiring with her powerful cattle business rival, King
Carney (Bryan Brown). And Fletcher has sought revenge, first by torching her
cattle into stampeding, and later by trying unsuccessfully to get Carney’s
cattle to market before hers.
As fate would have
it, Lady Sarah, the Drover and Nullah are temporarily separated when the
Japanese Imperial Fleet that bombed Pearl Harbor makes an even more devastating
attack on Darwin, forcing the population to flee south. It is at this point
that I felt the narrative had become somewhat overloaded with too many
criss-crossing themes.
Indeed, for a time
I was under the impression that one of the major characters had perished amid
all the carnage. Not to worry. All three of the protagonists survive to share a
reasonably happy ending, far, Faraway from the tumult of Darwin.
There is much talk
in the film about Nullah having to go on “walkabout” with King George in order
for Nullah to become a man. All I could think of was a long-ago very pretty top
Aboriginal tennis player named Evonne Goolagong, whose only weakness was a
frequent loss of concentration attributed by sports writers to her “walkabout.”
It is, as the French say, if not to laugh, at least to smile.
Australia is clearly a labor of love, and a matter
of national pride. It is also a bit of a mess, and the product of many
last-minute decisions on the plot, as described in Peter Sanders’ fascinating
article on the making and marketing of the film in The Wall Street Journal
of Nov. 19, 2008. Finally, I must confess that I might have been harder on Mr.
Luhrmann’s film if I had not remained entranced by Ms. Kidman ever since I
first saw her in Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm in 1989; in my opinion, she
has lost none of her luster in the 20 years since.
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Australian
aboriginals believe that everyday reality co-exists with an infinite state of
being called the Dreamtime. Baz Luhrmann does his own version of that dualism
in "Australia," an epic adventure, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh
Jackman, with outsize ambitions and a 165-minute run time. The film's reality
is far from everyday, what with romance, murder, a cattle drive, a stampede,
the outbreak of World War II and a Japanese air raid on the city of Darwin. Yet
it's almost naturalistic in comparison to the magic realism reserved for
Nullah, a mixed-race aboriginal boy, and for the ancient culture that claims
him. Sometimes Luhrmann seems to be living in a Dreamtime of his own; his movie
is all over the map. But what a gorgeous map it is. The too-muchness, like the
too-longness, befits the Northern Territory's vastness. In its heart of hearts
"Australia" is an old-fashioned Western -- a Northern, if you will --
and all the more enjoyable for it.
The action begins
as a cross between a spaghetti Western and a comedy of manners. Nicole Kidman's
ultra-twee Lady Sarah Ashley flies from England to Australia, where her husband
has been running a remote cattle station; her purpose is to sell the property,
which has been hemorrhaging cash, and bring her husband home. Hugh Jackman is
the raffish Aussie cattle drover who meets her on her arrival, then joins
forces with her against his better judgment. (He's a drover named Drover. If
that isn't movie-mythic, what is?) Soon Sarah finds herself repurposed into an
apprentice drover, English-saddled and constantly addled by Drover's rough-hewn
ways. The mismatched lovers-to-be drive 2,000 head of cattle through lunar
landscapes (imagine a desiccated "Red River" with red dirt)
accompanied by Nullah, the story's narrator, sawed-off shaman and, in a very
real -- i.e., magical -- sense, its soul. (Mandy Walker did the spectacular
cinematography.)
Nullah calls Sarah
Mrs. Boss, "the strangest woman I ever seen." She is definitely
strange, insisting on good manners as if etiquette were the key to Outback
survival. Kidman also makes her very funny: I particularly enjoyed Sarah's
scrambled retelling, for Nullah's benefit, of "The Wizard of Oz," and
her halting rendition of "Over the Rainbow." (Both the story and the
song figure as importantly as "Pinocchio" did in Steven Spielberg's
"A.I.") Hugh Jackman can be amusing, too: Drover displays his
impressive musculature for Sarah's benefit while rinsing himself off on the
trail. Mostly, though, he's manly, attractive and not terrifically interesting.
Russell Crowe famously had first dibs on the role, so it's tempting to wonder
how he might have played it, but I would have settled for some of the
extravagance of Jackman's work as Wolverine in the "X-Men" series.
Or, come to think of it, the lustiness of Robert Mitchum's sheep drover in Fred
Zinnemann's grand Australian opus "The Sundowners."
In
"Australia's" scheme of things, young Nullah, descended from a tribal
elder called King George, becomes the child that neither Sarah nor Drover ever
had; Brandon Walters, in his film debut, plays him with an eerie proficiency
that made me wonder if Jackie Coogan had aboriginal blood. (King George is
played by David Gulpilil, the aboriginal star of Nicolas Roeg's 1971 classic
"Walkabout.") But Nullah can be a problem child, endearing and
insufferable in equal measure. He narrates in a studiously picturesque pidgin
English that may reflect the period accurately but still sounds ghastly to
modern ears: "Grandfather teach me most important lesson of all -- tellem
story." (Nullah is a passionate advocate of story in a film beset by
severe storytelling lapses; four credited writers, including Baz Luhrmann,
haven't created a coherent script.) He has superpowers when they're needed --
this kid could have been the greatest cowboy of all time -- but they are so
sweeping that you're surprised he has problems at all.
The film's
treatment of aboriginal culture is reverential, or earnest to the point of
self-parody. No Stone Age cliché goes unturned -- walkabout, boomerangs,
doodlings on the didgeridoo. No mountain or promontory -- no water tower, for
that matter -- goes unsurmounted by a silent, stork-legged aboriginal warrior
wielding a spear. Yet earnestness triumphs in the end, for
"Australia" has serious things on its mind and, like
"Hawaii" long before it, gets serious things said. Nullah belongs to
Australia's "stolen generation," mixed-race aboriginal children who
became victims of state-sanctioned kidnappings when they were torn from their
outback families to be trained as domestic servants. If there was ever a
seamless way to combine that somber theme with the entertaining -- and equally
earnest -- exploits of Sarah and Drover, Luhrmann and his colleagues didn't
find it. What they did find was a symbolic way for the heroine and her
reluctant hero to expiate the racist sins of a nation's past.
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
A good part of Baz Luhrmann’s
excruciating national epic, “Australia,” is set on an enormous cattle station,
Faraway Downs, in the Northern Territory. The landscape is vast and flat, with
distant, red rock monoliths rising out of the desert. Silence and a steady
camera, I think, could have produced in moviegoers an awe comparable to that
which David Lean evoked with “Lawrence of Arabia.” But Luhrmann imposes his own
restlessness on the unyielding terrain. In his previous movie, “Moulin Rouge!,”
his inability to stage anything clearly was disguised by spasmodic camera
movements and abrupt cutting; the fragments were glued together to form a bumpy
continuity of sorts. But in “Australia,” when not much is going on in the big
open spaces, Luhrmann is lost. His camera sweeps along the ground as if
searching for something, or, more frequently, it rises rapidly into the air
while gazing downward—the receding ground might have been photographed from the
space shuttle as it took off. But once Luhrmann is up in the air, where can he
go? He can only cut to the ground again. He has created an instant cliché: the
rise to nowhere. In such moments, you can feel the director’s frustration; he’s
like an infant wrestling with a king-size mattress. It’s a shame that Fox
entrusted Luhrmann with this project, because audiences were probably ready for
a big-boned realistic movie spectacle. We couldn’t rightly expect Lean’s stern
pictorial glory, or the vital dramatic imagination of a Fred Zinnemann (“From
Here to Eternity”). But, at this point, we would have gladly settled for the
routine competence of a George Roy Hill, whose national epic “Hawaii” (1966),
put up against “Australia,” is a model of narrative rectitude.
Luhrmann is drawn
to kitsch as inevitably as a bear to honey. The early scenes of this movie have
a ludicrous opéra-bouffe boisterousness. Nicole Kidman is Sarah Ashley, a rich,
highborn Englishwoman with clipped diction and jackets that fit as tightly as a
toreador’s. It’s 1939, and she arrives in a huff from England to retrieve her
husband, who she suspects has been dallying with Aboriginal women on the
family-owned cattle station. In Darwin, she looks for her lift to the interior,
in the person of a cattle driver known as the Drover (Hugh Jackman), and finds
him engaged in a meaningless bar brawl. (As if Australia weren’t raw enough,
Luhrmann is given to scenes of roistering and tumult.) Of course, the two take
an immediate dislike to each other, and, of course, we know exactly what will happen:
he will bring out the passionate woman beneath the starched riding clothes
(which she wears in the desert heat); she’s going to bring out the responsible
and caring man within the nihilistic free spirit. We’re quickly treated to such
delicate moments as a conversation, during their drive across the desert, in
which he’s talking about mating two horses, and she thinks he’s propositioning
her, and a scene in which she gapes at his naked torso as they make camp for
the night. Meanwhile, a neighboring cattle baron (Bryan Brown) is trying to
destroy Faraway Downs so that he can buy it on the cheap. He has an evil fellow
(David Wenham) working for him who has a disconcerting habit of stealthily
approaching people and whispering threats into their ears. Here and there,
Kidman has an enchanting scene, such as when she tries to sing “Over the
Rainbow” to Nullah (Brandon Walters), a half-caste boy who lives at Faraway
Downs, but can’t remember the tune or the lyrics, and makes them up as she goes
along. As for Jackman, he has adapted the Victor Mature approach to pectoral
mass, but his temperamental range is undeveloped. Mostly, he seems like a quiet
man who would prefer to be excused from all the overwrought goings on.
Luhrmann wants to
create huge, throbbing set pieces, but he never establishes an adequate ground
of normal reality from which those pieces would be an exultant relief. The
movie is all bitter partings and joyous reunions and nasty Japanese
dive-bombers who fly in and mess up everything. None of the big moments look
quite right—for example, the cattle drive in which the animals are stampeded to
the edge of a precipice is obviously a digital fake. The movie joins a 1939
plot to contemporary technology—old Hollywood cheesiness meets new Hollywood
cheesiness. In the midst of the spectacle, however, Luhrmann and his
screenwriters, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood, and Richard Flanagan, have
attempted to denounce racism (Nullah is despised by the whites) and then to
trace the beginnings of white respect for Aboriginal culture. Nullah’s
grandfather, a shaman known as King George (David Gulpilil), is a major figure
in the movie—well, in a way. Whenever the story gets stuck, he suddenly
appears, in a loincloth, perched atop a peak, or perhaps a water tower—in any
case, he’s up high. He then performs whatever magic is necessary to move the
film along. At the end, King George summons Nullah to a rite of passage, a
walkabout. Nullah’s disappearance into the desert, leaving the whites behind,
is framed as a triumphant anti-colonial moment, but Luhrmann confuses the issue
by accompanying the scene with, of all things, the stirring “Nimrod” passage
from “Enigma Variations,” by Edward Elgar, the composer perhaps most closely
associated with the glories of empire. With the same degree of appropriateness,
Luhrmann might celebrate Barack Obama’s Inauguration with a thundering
rendition of “Dixie.”
Village Voice (Ella Taylor) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [1/5]
PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review
Urban Cinefile review Louise Keller and Andrew L. Urban
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [C-]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
The Onion A.V. Club (Keith Phipps) review
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Screen International review Frank Hatherley in Sydney
DVD Talk Brian Orndorf, also seen here: OhmyNews [Brian Orndorf]
PopMatters (David Hiltbrand) review
Reel.com review [2.5/4] Sean O’Connell, also seen here: filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [2.5/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Cinematical [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Movie-Vault.com (LaRae Meadows) review
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Eye for Film (Ali Hazzah) review [1/5]
Entertainment Weekly review [C-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
Time Out Online (Angus Fontaine) review [4/6]
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [2/6]
The Times of London review Anne Barrowclough
The Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [2/4]
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [2.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [1/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | The agony of Australia's Stolen Generation August 9, 2007
Stolen Generations Anguish of the Stolen Generations, by Nick Bryant from BBC News, February 12, 2008
Australia's stolen generation: 'To the mothers and the fathers ... Andy McSmith and Christopher Finn from The Independent, February 13, 2008
February 2008 - PM Kevin Rudd says 'sorry' to the Stolen ... February 29, 2008
Australians fail to warm to Luhrmann's epic romance Ben Child from The Guardian, December 2, 2008
World premiere of Baz Luhrmann's Australia photo gallery from The Guardian, November 18, 2008
Stolen Generations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE GREAT GATSBY B 84
Australia USA (143 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Official site
No one makes movies of lavish extravagance like Baz Luhrmann, simply no one, which is one of the pleasures of seeing his films. Perhaps the reincarnate of Ken Russell’s dizzyingly flamboyant films of the 60’s and 70’s, where it often felt like the mad passionate style had overtaken any cinematic value and content, as the director showed less and less restraint, nonetheless he was always an original. In much the same way, Luhrmann can be counted on for dazzling visual imagery, which some find exaggeratedly overboard, simply too much, where Moulin Rouge (2001) remains the best creative expression of his unique style. While many find Gatsby unfilmable, as so much of the novel is a description of observances and inner reflections, recounted in narrative form, which may have been best served by the noirish Black and White era of 1949, where bleak lives and a hard-boiled, yet descriptive narration offers a literary feel, where the dark overall mood of criminal intrigue trumps individual character. That version accentuates the criminality of Gatsby’s underworld lifestyle, while also attractively featuring Shelly Winters as the wronged woman, an ill-fated femme fatale who throws herself in front of a fast-moving automobile with tragic results, all part of the spiraling downturn in Gatsby’s life. There is a 1926 Silent version, but one wonders how such a contemporary literary classic would hold up in exaggerated looks and gestures alone, lacking much of the description and complexity of the book. The 1974 version with Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy is simply too bland for most people’s tastes, never generating any heat, and never rising to the level of an American classic, while the made-for-TV 2000 version is already forgotten. One might think an outsider’s view in the form of a brash and exuberant Australian director Baz Luhrmann might do the trick, where he’s not so beholden to the literary material and could openly express his free-wheeling style, as the period reflected is the Roaring Twenties, an era of American jazz and a cultural renaissance, including writers, dancers, and musicians in Harlem, where women in America, Canada, India, and Europe received the right to vote, new abstract modern artforms flourished, like Art Deco and Surrealism, but also the contemporary literary elite were heralded with laudatory reviews while living and treated like royalty in Paris, including the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote the source novel for this film. But alas, it was not to be, and while entertaining throughout, this is yet another version that fails to connect the intricate power of the work to the movie audience.
Part of the problem with this version is the casting, as Leonardo DiCaprio is out of his element as Gatsby. Like Redford, another man with a pretty face, he fails to get underneath the mysterious man behind the mask, showing us nothing onscreen that he hasn’t already expressed before, using a really phony accent, as if trying to emulate the Boston inflection of the Kennedy’s, and the film even revives the tragedy of the Chappaquiddick incident, which forever derailed the Presidential ambitions of Ted Kennedy. Carey Mulligan exudes the pixieish flirtatiousness of Daisy, whose artificiality defines her, along with her reliance upon overcontrolling men, too afraid to ever express her inner self, becoming a tragic lost soul in the process. Unfortunately, Tobey Maguire as the narrator and writer Nick Carroway is well meaning, but too naïve and passive, not at all reflective of Fitzgerald’s own opulent lifestyle of extravagant wealth and lavish parties, where he and his wife Zelda were renowned New York celebrity socialites, making several excursions to Europe, mostly to Paris, where their faces were all over the magazines and newspapers. Maguire is simpy too meek of a character to exhibit much insight into the world he is drawn into, kind of blending into the wall for most of the picture, not really affecting much of the action, even though he is the observant eyes and ears of the movie, along with a giant billboard with spectacles seen at the entryway to the road to New York from Long Island, emblematic of the eyes of God watching over all who pass by, becoming an unseen moral conscience. Surprisingly, the performer who comes across the strongest is fellow Aussie Joel Edgarten in perhaps the most despicable role in the film, Daisy’s unfaithful, double-crossing husband Tom, a man of wealth and social prestige, who flaunts it whenever he can, openly speaking his mind, a man used to getting his way, kind of gruff and rough around the edges, a bit like Howard Duff, becoming domineering and callous to Daisy’s needs, ordering her about like one of the hired help, who are almost exclusively black. Tom is an East Egg blue blood, a borderline racist who believes people belong in their place, and that includes wives and the would-be nouveau rich living across the bay in the West Egg of Long Island where Gatsby’s mansion sits, people who accumulate wealth by illicit means that he believes are without culture and sophistication.
The actual story behind the story, unraveling the mystery of Gatsby, doesn’t become apparent until near the end, where prior to that he’s simply seen as an immensely wealthy man with some dubious underworld business connections, probably making his millions on bootleg liquor, much like Joseph Kennedy Sr, though that has always been speculation, as he also made his millions on stock market insider trading, which was not outlawed at the time, becoming one of the richest men in America. Gatsby is seen as a man who opens his home nightly to hoardes of party revelers, providing them food, drink, and musical entertainment, while he rarely shows himself, preferring his reclusive status until Nick moves in to a tiny cottage next door, quickly becoming fast friends, especially when he discovers Daisy is his cousin. You’d think these party sequences would be the film’s cinematic extravagance, interestingly pulsating with a hip hop soundtrack, but Luhrmann only shows what’s necessary, never extending the shots to give the viewer the full effect like he does in MOULIN ROUGE. Instead he accentuates the rekindled secret love affair between Gatsby and the scandalously married Daisy, where the best part of the film is the sudden shift to romantic feelings of optimism and hope, where Gatsby, who otherwise feels much like a weird stalker, building it all for her hoping one day she would walk inside his doors, and finally their lives suddenly come together and resemble his dream. It can all happen, but Daisy gets cold feet while at the same time Gatsby reveals a more desperately controlling nature, where it’s all so close that he can taste it, seen alone at night at the end of the pier reaching out towards the green light emanating from the end of her pier across the bay, a warning for boats in the dark. Nick is there to see it all, when in one stiflingly hot summer afternoon, they decide to get everything out in the open, so Gatsby begins to push Daisy into uncomfortable territory, forcing her to commit when she’s not yet ready, manipulating her in much the same way as that cad of a husband, where one’s no better than the other. While Fitzgerald’s own life story is about the corrosive effects of wealth and the emptiness of the decadent lifestyle, reflected in the waning egoism and dwindling male self-confidence, destroyed by the continuing effects of alcohol, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is a stark reminder that “All that glitters is not gold,” which comes from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, where in each, senseless tragedy awaits those that fail to heed that message.
Schulz: Why I Despise The Great Gatsby Kathryn Schulz from The Vulture
I have read The Great Gatsby five times. The first was in high school; the second, in college. The third was in my mid-twenties, stuck in a remote bus depot in Peru with someone’s left-behind copy. The fourth was last month, in advance of seeing the new film adaptation; the fifth, last week. There are a small number of novels I return to again and again: Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, Pride and Prejudice, maybe a half-dozen others. But Gatsby is in a class by itself. It is the only book I have read so often despite failing—in the face of real effort and sincere intentions—to derive almost any pleasure at all from the experience.
I know how I’m supposed to feel about Gatsby: In the words of the critic Jonathan Yardley, “that it is the American masterwork.” Malcolm Cowley admired its “moral permanence.” T. S. Eliot called it “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Lionel Trilling thought Fitzgerald had achieved in it “the ideal voice of the novelist.” That’s the received Gatsby: a linguistically elegant, intellectually bold, morally acute parable of our nation.
I am in thoroughgoing disagreement with all of this. I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct. Books being borderline irrelevant in America, one is generally free to dislike them—but not this book. So since we find ourselves, as we cyclically do here, in the middle of another massive Gatsby recrudescence, allow me to file a minority report.
The plot of The Great Gatsby, should you need a refresher, is easily told. Nick Carraway, an upstanding young man from the Midwest, moves to New York to seek his fortune in the bond business. He rents a cottage on Long Island, next to a mansion occupied by a man of mysterious origins but manifest wealth: Jay Gatsby, known far and wide for his extravagant parties. Gradually, we learn that Gatsby was born into poverty, and that everything he has acquired—fortune, mansion, entire persona—is designed to attract the attention of his first love: the beautiful Daisy, by chance Nick’s cousin. Daisy loved Gatsby but married Tom Buchanan, who is fabulously wealthy, fabulously unpleasant, and conducting an affair with a married working-class woman named Myrtle. Thanks to Nick, Gatsby and Daisy reunite, but she ultimately balks at the prospect of leaving Tom and, barreling back home in Gatsby’s car, kills Myrtle in a hit-and-run. Her husband, believing that Gatsby was both the driver and Myrtle’s lover, tracks him to his mansion and shoots him. Finis, give or take some final reflections from Nick.
When this tale was published, in 1925, very few people aside from its author thought it was or would ever become an American classic. Unlike his first book—This Side of Paradise, which was hailed as the definitive novel of its era—The Great Gatsby emerged to mixed reviews and mediocre sales. Fewer than 24,000 copies were printed in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, and some were still sitting in a warehouse when he died, in 1940, at the age of 44. Five years later, the U.S. military distributed 150,000 copies to service members, and the book has never been out of print since. Untold millions of copies have sold, including 405,000 in the first three months of this year.
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is manufactured in three dimensions of pure, unfiltered opulence. Taking its narrative cues from Fitzgerald’s novel, Luhrmann’s hyper-real universe is constructed by the storytelling devices of embellishment and exaggeration. Told entirely in flashback, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is a patient in a sanitarium as he begins to regurgitate his intoxicated recollections of the Summer of 1922. While telling his own story, Nick pieces together the personal history of his mysterious and eccentric neighbor, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). In conveying Gatsby’s story, Nick delves into the unreliable narrative of a man who created his entire life out of nothing. No one truly knows Gatsby because his history is all just an infinitely elaborate ruse. Luhrmann luxuriates in Gatsby’s knack for re-imagining and re-constructing the past — as Gatsby weaves unreal tales about himself, filtered for our consumption through the flowery verbosity of Nick’s prose, the film soaks in the artifice of the unbridled extravagance.
Showcasing the unreliability of Nick’s memories and Gatsby’s tall tales, Luhrmann interjects easily identifiable untruths into the film, such as mixing pop culture reference points of our present with the cultural counterparts of the 1920s. In doing so, Luhrmann establishes clear associations between the pop culture of the 1920s and the present. Hot jazz is mashed-up with hip hop and electronic music; the sexually provocative dancing of the 1920s is blended with modern dance; even the drunken debauchery of 1920s petting parties is modernized and amped up to near-Spring Breakers proportions. I found Luhrmann’s associations to be especially intriguing after having just recently watched Matt Wolf’s Teenage, which also finds the music, parties and attitudes of the young adults of the 1920s to be intrinsically tied with modern youth culture.
Of course, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby functions as a critique of its characters’ over-indulgence and gross decadence. It is a cautionary tale of becoming so engrossed in fantastical parties that reality all but fades away. Luhrmann, however, seems more interested in condemning the 1920s as the birth of the self-made man. Gatsby is very much a product of the Capitalist free enterprise system which professes the concept that anyone can become rich. The stock market made it easy to get rich quick; so did bootlegging and other illegal enterprises. Traditionally wealthy families of East Egg – such as Tom Buchanan’s (Joel Edgerton) – who “earned” their money looked down upon the nouvelle rich of West Egg, like Gatsby, who lied and cheated their way into wealth. This facade of wealth could only last for so long, and The Great Gatsby can be read as a warning call for the stock market crash of 1929.
The infinite levels of hyperactive falseness do not bode well for the dialogue and plot, which are mere afterthoughts for a man of style-over-substance such as Luhrmann. While most of Nick’s voiceover narrative does retain the literary fortitude of Fitzgerald’s poetic finesse, the dialogue seems overly-simplified and watered-down. The plot may hit most of the primary scenes of Fitzgerald’s novel, but Luhrmann seems much more comfortable conveying the themes of the story with visual allusions rather than words. This might have been a more interesting film if Luhrmann kept his actors silent, since they are often left spouting relatively pointless dialogue while having to rely upon pantomime to convey their character’s real emotions. On that note, Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan (who plays Daisy by way of flawlessly channeling Clara Bow) prove that they would have made fantastic silent film actors.
BeyondHollywood.com [Brent McKnight]
If you’re like me, then when you read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel “The Great Gatsby” your first reaction is, “Damn, this shit needs to be in 3D.” Lucky for us Baz Luhrmann heard our cries and is on the case. For just his fifth feature length motion picture, the Aussie director has, yet again, superimposed his frenetic, larger-than-life style on a beloved literary institution. While the onscreen effort is pretty to gawk at, when you take “The Great Gatsby” as a whole, this isn’t the best melding of styles. The story of a mysterious man who, at least initially, is all about appearances and the external, the film mirrors this sentiment. Only unlike the book, Luhrmann’s film never delves any deeper, and you’re left cold and empty.
Every time he makes a movie, Luhrmann feels like the aftermath of a hyperactive kid left overnight in an unattended candy store. He’s wired, jittery, full of sugar, and running all over the place. Fitzgerald is known for trimming away the excess in his prose, of stripping his narrative down to the bone, but this most recent adaptation of his work is anything but. The movie is all baubles and glitter, and you feel like it’s trying to distract you, like dangling a bit of brightly colored ribbon in front of a cat. Only in this instance the ribbon is a glut of elaborately choreographed party scenes, intricate costumes, and pyrotechnic visual trickery.
While juxtaposing the words of Shakespeare onto gang warfare in Southern California was an inspired choice for Luhrmann’s “Romeo and Juliet,” adding a heavily remixed hip-hop score to the roaring 20s, doesn’t work as well. Jay-Z rhymes as the camera soars over Manhattan, and ghost whispered strains of Alicia Keys from “Empire State of Mind” float among the skyscrapers, and it is forced beyond belief. There is, however, a cool swing version of “Crazy in Love,” so there’s that to hold onto.
In a sanitarium, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), who has been diagnosed as morbidly alcoholic and depressed, begins writing his story as a form of therapy. This is an awkward, obvious framing device—one not in Fitzgerald’s book—and a continual distraction that makes you feel like you’re listening to a book on tape because they can’t let you go too long without reminding you that you’re being told a story. In the novel, and this adaptation, Nick is a passive character, essentially a delivery system for the story of his neighbor in the new-money rich West Egg neighborhood of Long Island. This shadowy man remains hidden and anonymous, even as he throws extravagant parties that draw a who’s who of New York Society, high and low.
When Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) is finally introduced it is literally in a massive burst of fireworks at one of his debauched cartoon galas where he exists apart from the crowd. That’s a good indication of the level of subtlety going on in “The Great Gatsby.” For all of its other flaws, this is the biggest drawback to the movie. Luhrmann takes all of the implications, the cleverly hidden little bits, the undertones in the novel, and plasters them all right to the surface. At that moment, Nick’s infatuation with his charming neighbor takes hold and refuses to let go.
But it becomes clear soon enough, that Gatsby has an infatuation of his own, with Nick’s daffy cousin Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan). Too bad she’s married to philandering former polo player, and old-money heir, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). Everyone is obsessed with the surface, with appearances. Gatsby wants, no needs, to appear to be a somebody, a man of great import, and it is this insecurity that drives him. Gossipy and affected, Daisy is similarly motivated. He buys the mansion across the bay from Daisy, obsessing over the green light that burns through the night at the end of her pier. At one point he literally pelts her with the designer shirts he imports from Europe, and she acts as if he’s showering her with diamonds.
The entire production is over the top and melodramatic to distraction. It’s an approach that works to great effect in “Moulin Rouge.” Set, as it is, in the theatrical world of a Parisian cabaret, that makes sense and fits. In “The Great Gatsby,” unfortunately, this strategy is stilted and off-putting. Everyone does what is asked of them well enough, but it isn’t much more than going through the motions. DiCaprio is charming and fast talking, Nick fawns over his new pal as he falls down a hole of booze and pleasure, and Mulligan spends most of the movie staring into the middle distance with wet, dreamy eyes. Edgerton blusters around in every scene, and he alone seems to be having a pretty good time of it.
“Gatsby” works best when the focus remains on the story between Gatsby and Daisy, vapid and exaggerated as it is. All of the rest is window dressing that absorbs attention from the main narrative thrust and steers the story. Too much is made of guarding secrets within and without, dreams of grandeur, and reliving the past. So much time is spent on establishing the story that by the time all of the carefully constructed facades begin to unravel, as cracks form in their respectable veneers—just when the story is the most interesting—the film is on the downward slope.
As a movie, “The Great Gatsby” belongs much more to Baz Luhrmann than it does to Fitzgerald’s novel. The director’s fingerprint is on every frame of film. For all the visual gimmicks, the flamboyant celebrations, and intrusive modern flourishes, the film is loud and boisterous, but ultimately empty. Sitting in the theater, gazing at the spectacle, you can’t help but think it will eventually all add up to something, but it never does.
Sight & Sound [Nick Pinkerton] May 17, 2013
David Denby: “The Great Gatsby” Review : The New Yorker
“The Great Gatsby”: Debauchery in Disneyland - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]
The Great Gatsby Review: Spectacle, Spectacle - Pajiba Daniel Carlson
The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann, reviewed. - Slate ... Dana Stevens
'The Great Gatsby': Excess and Then Some | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Slant Magazine [Richard Larson]
Movie Review - 'The Great Gatsby' - Jazz-Age Excess, All ... - NPR Keith Phipps
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
What Gatsby Gets Wrong: Ten Ways the New Movie ... - Village Voice Amanda Lewis, which includes: 10 Shot Comparisons Between the 1974 and 2013 Gatsbys
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Meet In the Lobby [Norm Schrager]
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]
Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth]
Luhrmann's 'The Great Gatsby': From Jazz Age to Baz Age | TIME.com Richard Corliss
The Great Gatsby | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Ben Kenigsberg
Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Great Gatsby, The - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Review: Luhrmanns Great Gatsby is okay and nothing more - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Ruthless Reviews [Devon Pack] (Potentially Offensive)
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Screenjabber.com [Doug Cooper]
Celluloid Heroes [Heather Richardson]
Georgia Straight [Patty Jones]
A Very Thoughtful Tobey Maguire on The Great Gatsby, Mental Health, and On-Set Injuries Jennifer Vineyard interviews actor Leonard DiCaprio from The Vulture, May 6, 2013
The Great Gatsby: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Telegraph.co.uk [Charles Moore]
Ann Hornaday reviews 'The Great Gatsby' - WashingtonPost.com ...
Q&A: 'The Great Gatsby' and its great mania - Washington Post Haley Crum, May 6, 2013
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Dallas Film Now [Peter Martin]
Oregon Herald [Oktay Ege Kozak]
Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
Review:
'Gatsby's' substance overwhelmed by Luhrmann's style Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
'Gatsby,' 'Gatz' and the fallacy of adaptation David L. Ulin from The LA Times, December 9, 2012
'The Great Gatsby,' 'Big Shot' and the American Dream Steven Zeitchik from The LA Times, May 10, 2013
'The
Great Gatsby' is so right, and Leonardo DiCaprio is so wrong Chris Erskine from The LA Times, May 11, 2013
'The Great Gatsby' review (the book, that is, circa 1925) Carolyn Kellogg from The LA Times, May 6, 2013
Baz Luhrmann wants to 'reveal' more of 'The Great Gatsby' John Horn from The LA Times, April 26, 2013
The Great Gatsby Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz
'The Great Gatsby,' Interpreted by Baz Luhrmann A.O. Scott from The New York Times, May 9, 2013
An Orgiastic ‘Gatsby’? Of Course Charles McGrath from The New York Times, May 5, 2013
Lumet, Sidney
Film Reference Stephen E. Bowles, updated by John McCarty
Although Sidney Lumet has applied his talents to a variety of genres (drama, comedy, satire, caper, romance, and even a musical), he has proven himself most comfortable and effective as a director of serious psychodramas and was most vulnerable when attempting light entertainments. His Academy Award nominations, for example, have all been for character studies of men in crisis, from his first film, Twelve Angry Men , to The Verdict. Lumet was, literally, a child of the drama. At the age of four he was appearing in productions of the highly popular and acclaimed Yiddish Theatre in New York. He continued to act for the next two decades but increasingly gravitated toward directing. At twenty-six he was offered a position as an assistant director with CBS television. Along with John Frankenheimer, Robert Mulligan, Martin Ritt, Delbert Mann, George Roy Hill, Franklin Schaffner, and others, Lumet quickly won recognition as a competent and reliable director in a medium where many faltered under the pressures of producing live programs. It was in this environment that Lumet learned many of the skills that would serve him so well in his subsequent career in films: working closely with performers, rapid preparation for production, and working within tight schedules and budgets.
Because the quality of many of the television dramas was so impressive, several of them were adapted as motion pictures. Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men brought Lumet to the cinema. Although Lumet did not direct the television production, his expertise made him the ideal director for this low-budget film venture.
Twelve Angry Men was an auspicious beginning for Lumet. It was a critical and commercial success and established Lumet as a director skilled at adapting theatrical properties to motion pictures. Fully half of Lumet's complement of films have originated in the theater. Another precedent set by Twelve Angry Men was Lumet's career-long disdain for Hollywood.
Lumet prefers to work in contemporary urban settings, especially New York. Within this context, Lumet is consistently attracted to situations in which crime provides the occasion for a group of characters to come together. Typically these characters are caught in a vortex of events they can neither understand nor control but which they must work to resolve.
Twelve Angry Men explores the interaction of a group of jurors debating the innocence or guilt of a man being tried for murder; The Hill concerns a rough group of military men who have been sentenced to prison; The Deadly Affair involves espionage in Britain; The Anderson Tapes revolves around the robbery of a luxury apartment building; Child's Play , about murder at a boy's school, conveys an almost supernatural atmosphere of menace; Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day Afternoon , and The Verdict all involve attempts to find the solution to a crime, while Serpico and Prince of the City are probing examinations of men who have rejected graft practices as police officers.
Lumet's protagonists tend to be isolated, unexceptional men who oppose a group or institution. Whether the protagonist is a member of a jury or party to a bungled robbery, he follows his instincts and intuition in an effort to find solutions. Lumet's most important criterion is not whether the actions of these men are right or wrong but whether the actions are genuine. If these actions are justified by the individual's conscience, this gives his heroes uncommon strength and courage to endure the pressures, abuses, and injustices of others. Frank Serpico, for example, is the quintessential Lumet hero in his defiance of peer group authority and the assertion of his own code of moral values.
Nearly all the characters in Lumet's gallery are driven by obsessions or passions that range from the pursuit of justice, honesty, and truth to the clutches of jealousy, memory, or guilt. It is not so much the object of their fixations but the obsessive condition itself that intrigues Lumet. In films like The Fugitive Kind, A View from the Bridge, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Pawnbroker, The Seagull, The Appointment, The Offense, Lovin' Molly, Network, Just Tell Me What You Want , and many of the others, the protagonists, as a result of their complex fixations, are lonely, often disillusioned individuals. Consequently, most of Lumet's central characters are not likable or pleasant, and sometimes not admirable figures. And, typically, their fixations result in tragic or unhappy consequences.
Lumet's fortunes have been up and down at the box office. One explanation seems to be his own fixation with uncompromising studies of men in crisis. His most intense characters present a grim vision of idealists broken by realities. From Val in A View from the Bridge and Sol Nazerman in The Pawnbroker to Danny Ciello in Prince of the City , Lumet's introspective characters seek to penetrate the deepest regions of the psyche.
Lumet's recently published memoir about his life in film, Making Movies , is extremely lighthearted and infectious in its enthusiasm for the craft of moviemaking itself. This stands in marked contrast to the tone and style of most of his films. Perhaps Lumet's signature as a director is his work with actors—and his exceptional ability to draw high-quality, sometimes extraordinary performances from even the most unexpected quarters: Melanie Griffith's believable undercover policewoman in A Stranger among Us and Don Johnson's smooth-talking sociopath in Guilty as Sin. These two latest examples of the "Lumet touch" with actors demonstrate that he has not lost it.
All-Movie
Guide Hal Erickson
Sidney Lumet Overview from Turner Classic Movies
Sidney Lumet - Filmbug biography
Sidney Lumet brief bio from NNDB
Sidney Lumet Mubi
Featured
Filmmaker: Sidney Lumet - Movies Feature at IGN October 16, 2001, also seen here: FilmForce profile
WORTH
NOTING; Ready for Their Close-Ups: Festival Honors Directors Jeff Holtz from The New York Times, February 8, 2004
Arts,
Briefly; An Oscar for Sidney Lumet
Catherine Billey and Lawrence Van Gelder from The New York Times, December 17, 2004
White Socks, Cheap Suits and a Belief in the System Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, February 13, 2005
From The Post's archive: Back to the Scene of the Crime Stephen Hunter from The Washington Post, March 16, 2006
Sidney Lumet: In memory Roger Ebert obituary, April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet, 1924-2011: A Director of Classics, Focused on Conscience Robert Berkvist from The New York Times, April 9, 2011, including the slide show: The Films of Sidney Lumet
Prolific American film director Sidney Lumet dies | Reuters Reuters obituary, April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet 1924-2011 - Movie Nation - Boston.com Wesley Morris obituary from The Boston Globe, April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet, director of 'Serpico,' 'Network,' '12 Angry Men ... Matt Schudel obituary from The Washington Post, April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet, an appreciation: Great director of 'Fail-Safe ... Clint O’Connor from The Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 9, 2011
Prolific American film director Sidney Lumet dies - Yahoo! News Yahoo News, April 9, 2011
Film director Sidney Lumet dies at 86 - Entertainment - Movies ... MSNBC News, April 9, 2011
BBC News - Obituary: Sidney Lumet April 9, 2011
Acclaimed director Sidney Lumet dies - Arts & Entertainment - CBC News April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet, 1924-2011: He made movies for grownups - Film Salon ... Matt Zoller Seitz from Salon, April 9, 2011
R.I.P. Sidney Lumet | Film | Newswire | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias, April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet Dies: A Master Moviemaker's Final Scene - Speakeasy - WSJ Joe Morgenstern, April 9, 2011
The Front Row: In Memoriam: Sidney Lumet : The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker, April 9, 2011
Remembering Sidney Lumet and an era of New York filmmaking ... Joe Neumaier from The NY Daily News, April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet was the quintessential New York filmmaker, a prince ... Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly, April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet, prolific 'actor's director' steered clear of Hollywood All About Jazz, April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet, I Swear :: Hollywood Elsewhere Jeffrey Wells, April 9, 2011, also from 2007: Lumet interview
Sidney Lumet Dead: Director Passes at 86 Huffington Post, April 9, 2011
Director Sidney Lumet Dies at 86 - The Hollywood Reporter Gregg Kilday from The Hollywood Reporter, April 9, 2011, including photos: Sidney Lumet (1924-2011)
Director Sidney Lumet dies at 86 - Entertainment News, Obituary ... Pat Saperstein from Variety, April 9, 2011
Remembering Sidney Lumet - Photo Gallery - LIFE photo gallery from Life magazine, April 9, 2011
Legendary Director Sidney Lumet Dies at 86 | Little Gold Men ... John Lopez from Vanity Fair, April 9, 2011
Director Sidney Lumet Dead At 86: Gothamist The Gothamist, April 9, 2011
Political filmmaker Sidney Lumet dies - David Cohen - POLITICO.com David Cohen from Politico, April 9, 2011
Legendary Director Sidney Lumet Dies at 86 | The Wrap Movies Brent Lang from The Wrap, April 9, 2011
R.I.P, SIDNEY LUMET | The Filmmaker Magazine Blog Scott Macaulay, April 9, 2011
'Serpico' Director Sidney Lumet Dies At 86 : NPR including on air radio broadcasts, April 9, 2011
Remembering Sidney Lumet Kristen Coates from The Film Stage, April 9, 2011
Sidney Lumet Dies at 86 Joyce Eng from TV Guide, April 9, 2011
Obituary: Director Sidney Lumet dies at 86 - latimes.com Dennis McLellan from The LA Times, April 10, 2011, including: PHOTOS: Sidney Lumet and his films
Sidney Lumet obituary | Film | The Guardian Brian Baxter from The Guardian, April 10, 2011
Sidney Lumet Dies at 86; Director of "Network," "Dog Day Afternoon ... Kevin Dolak from ABC News, April 10, 2011
Lumet Matt Langdon from BuñueL, April 10, 2011
Sidney Lumet dies at 86 | Mail Online April 10, 2011
Sidney Lumet's Best Films - The Moviefone Blog Sharon Knolle from Cinematical, April 10, 2011
Sidney Lumet - Telegraph Obituary from The Daily Telegraph, April 10, 2011, including a tribute video (1:41) : Sidney Lumet's most famous films
Sidney Lumet: New York-based movie director behind '12 Angry Men ... Tom Vallance from The Independent, April 11, 2011
Sidney Lumet, R.I.P | NJ.com Stephen Whitty from The Star-Ledger, April 10, 2011
Lumet was drawn to the messy business of simply being human Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times, April 11, 2011
Experimental Conversations — Articles — Sidney Lumet ... Experimental Conversations, Winter, 2011
Lumet, Sidney from
They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
FilmStew
interview by Todd Gilchrist, February
28, 2005
Fresh Air
interview from 2006 (audio 20-minute
audio interview with Terry Gross on
“Fresh Air” from NPR, March 10, 2006
Jam! Interview (2007) Mark Daniell interview, September 16, 2007
New York Mag Interview (2007) Logan Hill interview from New York magazine, September 24, 2007
Sidney Lumet: A passion for films undimmed by age - Telegraph Sheila Johnston feature and interview from The Daily Telegraph, January 5, 2008
Brothers In Harm Geoffrey Macnab interview from Sight and Sound, February 2008
On the digital revolution NYFF07 a 4-minute video feature on YouTube
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Sidney Lumet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
12 ANGRY MEN
USA (96 mi) 1957
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Lumet's origins as a director of
teledrama may well be obvious here in his first film, but there is no denying
the suitability of his style - sweaty close-ups, gritty monochrome 'realism',
one-set claustrophobia - to his subject. Scripted by Reginald
Rose from his own teleplay, the story is pretty contrived - during a murder
trial, one man's doubts about the accused's guilt gradually overcome the rather
less-than-democratic prejudices of the other eleven members of the jury - but
the treatment is tense, lucid, and admirably economical. Fonda, though typecast
as the bastion of liberalism, gives a nicely underplayed performance, while
Cobb, Marshall and Begley in particular are highly effective in support. But
what really transforms the piece from a rather talky demonstration that a man
is innocent until proven guilty, is the consistently taut, sweltering
atmosphere, created largely by Boris
Kaufman's excellent camerawork. The result, however devoid of action, is a
strangely realistic thriller.
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [5/5]
Who would have thought that a movie which almost entirely
takes place in one room, consists of 12 men who do nothing but talk -- and who
don't even have names -- would be such a searing experience? 12 Angry Men
is a classic, and an undisputed one at that, a film that is as inspiring as it
is well-crafted behind the scenes.
The story is a simple one: 12 jurors are asked to decide the fate of a young
man who is accused of killing his father. If guilty, he will be sentenced to
the electric chair. Otherwise he goes free. The evidence is overwhelmingly
against him: Two eyewitnesses, a murder weapon known to be bought by the
killer, and an alibi that he couldn't remember during questioning. Open and
shut, but one juror stands alone against the other 11, who'd like to get home
in time for dinner. And with that single "not guilty" vote, Henry
Fonda's Juror #8 sets off the titular anger.
First, the other 11 pile on him, then slowly they turn. #11 brings up questions
about the evidence (is that knife so unique, really?). Re-enacts key events
(could that old man have gotten to his door in 15 seconds?). Prods the other
jurors into examining their own prejudices. Reasonable doubt? Could be... and
one by one, the other 11 join #8. But with each vote that turns, the anger in
the room becomes thicker and thicker as sides are chosen and lines are drawn in
the sand.
In the 50 years since 12 Angry Men was made, it's become almost a cliche
to hate jury duty. I'll do or say just about anything not to sit in a courtroom
for a trial every time my number comes up. (A friend of mine simply throws away
the summons when it shows up in the mail.) But 12 Angry Men offers a hopeful
look at the American justice system; it's really one of the most patriotic
drama/thrillers ever made. I'd suggest the movie ought to be shown in the
waiting room whenever juries are being selected, but if that was the case
virtually every criminal would probably get off scot free.
Sidney Lumet's technical work is unparalleled. The black and white
cinematography is sharp and the direction and editing never miss a step, all
despite the fact that the movie never wanders farther from the deliberation
chamber than the men's room. The movie is one which bears repeated viewings
well: It's every bit the classic it's been made out to be for all these years.
12
Angry Men - TCM.com Jay Steinberg
Henry Fonda only produced one major motion picture in the
course of his Hollywood career, with the stress of the experience leaving the
venerable performer certain that he didn't want to repeat it. It's a shame, as 12 Angry Men (1957) would be one of
the handful of films that he was most proud of being associated with, and
remains one of the most compelling dramas about American jurisprudence ever
lensed.
Fonda had been a fan of Reginald Rose's teleplay since its original broadcast
in 1954, and the two raised the $350,000 shooting budget for 12 Angry Men by themselves. To
direct the project, Fonda tapped a young television veteran who "had the
reputation of being wonderful with actors," and with those sentiments
launched the distinguished film career of Sidney Lumet. The producer and
director then turned to Broadway and culled some of the finest character talent
working in order to round out the cast.
12 Angry Men
opens in a New York courtroom, as a ghetto teenager's trial for the murder of
his father winds down, and the presiding judge charges the jury with their
obligations. The panel retires to a cramped, muggy jury room, where the
majority of them are prepared to deem the case open and shut, and return to
their lives. The sole holdout is a thoughtful architect (Fonda), who balks less
from any certainty of the boy's innocence than his perception that the
prosecution failed to meet its burden of establishing the defendant's guilt
beyond a reasonable doubt.
After the collective groan of his fellows, Fonda determinedly revisits the
state's evidence, and the progressing story lays bare previously unconsidered
flaws in the district attorney's case, as well as the strengths and weaknesses
of character of the furiously debating veniremen. Blowing hardest are a pair of
self-made entrepreneurs (Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley), each with a disturbing agenda
underlying their bullheadedness. Other tough nuts include a coldly rational
stockbroker (E.G. Marshall) and a blustering salesman (Jack Warden) whose overreaching
concern seems to be getting to that night's Yankees game.
All deliver strong efforts, as do Martin Balsam, as the amiable if feckless
jury foreman; Jack Klugman, as a man self-conscious of his own roots in the
slums; facile adman Robert Webber; George Voskovec, as an immigrant watchmaker
more conscious of his civic duties than some of his native peers; surprisingly
cagey retiree Joseph Sweeney; meek bank teller John Fiedler; and
dull-if-honorable day laborer Edward Binns.
During rehearsals, Lumet and cinematographer Boris Kaufman set up their shots
in an actual NYC jury room, blueprinting 365 separate takes from every aspect
of the claustrophobic set. The end result, after only 17 days of shooting, is a
masterful job of spare, lean black and white filmmaking, crafted in an era when
big screens, big locales and bold color were deemed an absolute necessity.
The first-time producer and first-time director had their share of tensions, as
Lumet recounted for Howard Teichmann, co-author of Fonda: My Life (New
American Library, 1981). Before the first day's shooting, Fonda blew up over
the quality of the painted backdrop that represented the room's view onto Foley
Square, and the first shot taken - an overhead through the blades of a ceiling
fan - turned out to be an all-day affair. "We went to the rushes the next
noon," Lumet recalled, "and he said, 'Sidney, what am I going to do?
I can't stand seeing myself on the screen. I never go to rushes, and sometimes
I wait two years to see a finished film I've made'...
"Hank steeled himself, walked into the projection room and sat down behind
me. He watched for a while, and then he put his hand on the back of my neck and
squeezed so hard I thought my eyes would pop out. He leaned forward and said
quietly, 'Sidney, it's magnificent.' Then he dashed out and never came to the
rushes again."
Fonda's ambition for 12 Angry Men
was to open the film small, and watch it build from art-house to popular
success in an arc similar to that of another acclaimed adapted TV play, Marty
(1955). The front office at United Artists, pleased as they were with the
quality of the finished project, opted instead for a wide release on Easter
Week. Fonda grimly recalled in his autobiography how New York's now-gone
Capitol Theatre "had over forty-six hundred seats. The opening day 12 Angry Men barely filled the
first four or five rows. They pulled it after a week."
While 12 Angry Men
didn't even recoup its modest production costs in its theatrical run, the film
went on to (fittingly) see some measure of justice in its uniform critical
praise, its capture of First Prize at the Berlin Film festival and other
international awards, its Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director and
Adapted Screenplay, and its enduring acknowledgment as a classic of cinema.
12 Angry Men Criterion essay by Peter
Heath Becker, February 08, 1988
12 Angry Men: Lumet’s Faces Criterion essay by Thane
Rosenbaum, November 22, 2011
12 Angry Men (1957) -
The Criterion Collection
Film Freak Central Review [Alex Jackson]
12 Angry Men: 50th
Anniversary Edition Mike Sutton from
DVD Times
Raging
Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review
[4/4]
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
The Greatest Films
(Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Movie Reviews UK review [5/5] Damian Cannon
Dragan Antulov
retrospective [9/10]
The UK Critic
(Ian Waldron-Mantgani) retrospective
The Onion A.V.
Club dvd review
Noel Murray
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Dale Dobson) dvd review
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd
review [4/5] [Collector's Edition]
DVD
Verdict (Norman Short) dvd review
DVD
Verdict (Jim Thomas) dvd review
[50th Anniversary Edition]
12 Angry Men
Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov
12 Angry Men (1957)
Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest David Krauss
12 Angry Men: The
Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of ... Jamie S. Rich
12 Angry Men |
Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine
Glenn Heath Jr.
Lars Lindahl
retrospective [A+]
CultureCartel.com
(John Nesbit) review [4.5/5]
The Projection Booth [Rob Humanick]
Cable
pick of the day (01/15/14): 12 Angry Men, on TCM / The Dissolve
Noel Murray
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]
Steve Rhodes
retrospective [4/4]
Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash) review [3.5/4]
Edinburgh U
Film Society (Katia Saint-Peron) review
MSN Entertainment [Sean Axmaker]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4/5]
14
April 2006[Arts]: Must-have movies: 12 Angry Men (1957) Marc Lee from The Daily Telegraph
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
12 Angry Men
(1957 film) - Wikipedia
THE ICEMAN COMETH – made for TV
USA (210 mi) 1960
The Iceman Cometh (1960) — Mr. Robards, meet Mr. L... Mark Bourne from Open the Pod Bay Doors, Hal, April 1, 2010
While I was putting together Tuesday's
post, I wrote that José Quintero had made his name directing Eugene
O'Neill's stage dramas, "notably the '56 production of The Iceman
Cometh that launched Jason Robards." For hours after I published the
post, that mention of the Robards' Iceman kept buzzing in my head. When
a song earworms through my brain, the only way to purge it is to actually
listen to the damn song. It's not often that I get a video earworm (a
videotapeworm?), but I had one now and there was only one way to deal with it.
As an ardent theater-lover with something of a DVD addiction, I went to the
span of shelf space dedicated to the Broadway Theatre Archive and reached for
the double-wide spine with the little picture of Robards at the bottom. (Doing
so, I noticed that I need to dust more often, but that's another day.
Deadlines, you know.)
So here I am now, raising a pint to Broadway Theatre Archive,
where five decades' worth of great stage performances and some of television's
hallowed events are preserved on modern video. And let's raise another to DVDs,
which let us watch them without fuss on home screens that — to the original
viewers of these productions — would seem ripped from vintage issues of Amazing
Wonder Stories magazine. And before we fall face-forward to the scarred
hardwood tabletop, raise one more to the Golden Age of televised dramatic
works, which in 1960 brought us a powerful adaptation, directed by Sidney
Lumet, of Quintero's seminal New York Circle in the Square stage production of The
Iceman Cometh, the one that made Robards a star.
Robards' virtuoso performance as the glad-handing, doom-ridden Hickey is the
role's gold standard, one Kevin Spacey aspired to reach in a strong 1999
revival of Eugene O'Neill's 1939 masterpiece.
Set in 1912 New York, The Iceman Cometh turns the spotlight on the
failed lives, empty hopes, and perpetual pipedreams barely propping up the
last-ditch community of stewbums, anarchists, and hookers of Harry Hope's seedy
saloon. Most gave up on their lives long ago, and the only guarantee they can
look forward to is the arrival of their old friend Hickey, a charismatic
traveling salesman and everyone's life-of-the-party drinking companion.
But when Hickey shows up for his semi-annual bender, this time he's a changed
man. He has sworn off liquor, yet instead of crusading temperance he is on a
higher mission — to convince these booze-soaked burnouts that guilt-cleansing
"truth" is the only deliverance from "the lie of the
pipedream."
On the other side of the argument is aging anarchist Larry Slade, who counters
that it's raw truth that beats down men, whose happiness hangs on their
desperate need for illusions and pipedreams.
The presence of the evangelical salesman affects everyone. As Hickey's
"generosity" painfully strips the masks from everyone he touches,
long-held guilts are aired and secrets unlocked, and not everyone is left alive
by the closing credits. (Death is the overshadowing "iceman" here.)
Naturally, Hickey's own truth is the most revealing unmasking of all, and his
30-minute confessional final soliloquy is still one of the great declamations
of modern theater.
The Iceman Cometh is heady stuff, alright, dissecting
wasted lives and failed dreams. Like the dive in William Saroyan's The Time
of Your Life, Harry's shabby saloon is the world in a bottle, its
inhabitants' dreams summing up the various forms humanity's illusions take —
political, racial, domestic, sexual, intellectual, and religious. And as
delivered here it's also funny and wise, compassionate and ruthless.
At the start of its 1960 broadcast to a national TV audience, someone added a
preamble by legendary New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, and that's
on this DVD. Looking more than a bit uncomfortable, Atkinson tells us that a
"mature, sensitive" audience might be prepared for this raw depiction
of "the dregs of society" and their "vulgarities." (Was Lumet
under pressure from the studio or sponsors to not give all those immature,
insensitive TV viewers a case of the fantods?)
In a word, it's riveting. There are more guts and humanity here than in a
summer's worth of Hollywood blockbusters. If nothing else, there's great
pleasure in just witnessing extraordinary actors at the top of their craft
bringing life to one of the great American plays. Robards is astonishing in his
career-making performance, and he went on to be hailed as the authoritative
interpreter of O'Neill's linchpin characters.
The Iceman Cometh's superior ensemble also showcases other
familiar faces as O'Neill's consciously colorful characters — Myron McCormick
(as Larry Slade), Tom Pedi, James Broderick (Matthew's dad), and there's no missing
boyish 24-year-old Robert Redford in an early major screen appearance as poor, pitiless Don Parritt, who gets the last word (even if it is a thump!
on the sidewalk outside his window). According to his IMDb.com filmography, 1960 was Redford's
screen debut year, and a big one with nearly a dozen appearances on shows such
as Perry Mason and Playhouse 90.
For TV, the production was sensitively directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry
Men, Fail-Safe, Network, and on and on). I can't tell while
watching it, of course, where Quintero's original stage directing ends and
where Lumet's TV directing begins, other than the movements (and close-ups,
etc.) of Lumet's television cameras. On some of the other Broadway Theatre
Archive DVDs, it's clear that experienced studio directors such as Kirk
Browning deftly respected a production's theatrical origins while
simultaneously making terrific television, and we can assume that Lumet
preserved Quintero's directorial instincts while also adding his own. Lumet
fully employed his simple but effective camera setup, floating within long
continuous takes that cut only for O'Neill's scene breaks. The long takes are
extra impressive nowadays: where else can as we observe actors on a screen, big
or small, displaying their art and craft to this extent and this vulnerably?
As Variety wrote at the time, this production was "a landmark for
the video medium, a reference point for greatness in TV drama." Even at
three-and-a-half hours spread across two discs, it reminds us of how good
theater faithfully restaged for television can be.
Boy, I sure wish we could see this kind of theater-for-TV presentation more
often, not just occasionally on PBS. (That said, when I was able to pick up the
2007 Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company on Blu-ray, that's
when I knew the new format had truly settled in and put its feet up to stay a
while.)
The Iceman Cometh (1960 TV production) - Wikipedia, the free ...
The Iceman Cometh: Information from Answers.com
Sidney Lumet The Iceman Cometh Video clips from the production
Play - Theatre in Video the entire film may be seen here in segments
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
USA (174 mi) 1962
Time Out Tom Milne
A straightforward transposition which captures much of the claustrophobic cannibalism of Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play about a family tearing itself to pieces in a chain of quarrels, with love and hatred describing vicious circles around the self-centred parsimony of the actor father, the nervy drug-addiction of the mother, the incipient alcoholism of the elder son, and the tubercular condition of the younger one. Described by him as 'a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood', it imposes itself by sheer weight of emotion. Terrific performance from Robards as the drunk, good ones from Hepburn (despite miscasting), Richardson (his mannerisms for once in character) and Stockwell (though a bit lightweight to represent O'Neill the future writer).
EFilmCritic [Jay Seaver] also seen here: eFilmCritic.com
There's no screenplay credit on "Long Day's Journey Into Night", not out of shame, but because director Sidney Lumet and his small cast basically shot Eugene O'Neill's play in its entirety, and apparently nobody felt that the details of staging it and adding what movements couldn't be done on stage merited being labeled a co-writer. Despite that, it doesn't feel like an early precursor to the stage productions digitally broadcast to theaters today. It's a genuine movie; just one that doesn't hide its origins.
It chronicles a day in the life of the Tyrone family, their first
together at the beach house one summer, which is fraught with more danger than
such things typically are. Mother Mary (Katharine Hepburn), you see, is just
back from another stay at the clinic to try and kick her morphine addiction,
which has her husband James (Ralph Richardson) keeping watch to make sure she
doesn't backslide. Their older son Jamie (Jason Robards) is a layabout,
occasionally making half-hearted attempts to follow his father onto the stage,
while younger son Edmund (Dean Stockwell) has health problems of his own. News
on those will come from a doctor's appointment scheduled for later in the
afternoon, but nobody wants to talk about it, keeping the whole family on edge.
Film and theater are quite different things, even if they are often made by the
same people from the same material. The scale of theater is fixed and the
boundaries on its reality are clearly visible enough that other forms of
artifice are not just forgiven but natural. Cameras and cuts, with their
ability to instantly change locations and perspectives, mean that film
directors don't have to compensate the way stage directors and actors do. For
most plays, the filmmaker faces either the prospect of losing someone's
favorite part or building something that just doesn't work as a movie.
Long Day's Journey mostly avoids these issues; while the dialogue is
clearly theatrical and delivered in a somewhat mannered fashion, it is seldom
if ever redundant, nor does it refer to things that are happening just
off-screen. Lumet and cinematographer Boris Kaufman shoot the picture like a
movie, getting in close enough to see the looks on the actors' faces, following
them as they move around the set, and letting what the audience see of the
neighborhood hint at both unavoidably physical isolation and deliberate
withdrawal from people nearby. It's still structured like a play, though, in that
individual scenes often feel like a sort of relay race - things will start with
two people, who chat a while, then a third will enter while one of the original
two leaves, and then maybe a fourth person will join them and that will go on a
while, until it's time to make a substantial jump in time.
That's a fair amount of work for the cast (though likely nothing compared to
performing on stage!), but it's a fine one. Katharine Hepburn gives one of the
very best performances in a storied career as Mary, making the mother feel
prematurely aged, but not because she's broken down; in fact, she seems more
hollowed out than anything else. Mary's pitiable and pathetic, but for all
that, she does seem to get pure blissful relief from her addiction. Ralph
Richardson meanwhile manages to make James Senior theatrical without playing to
the rafters. He's a small man of big gestures, but wonderful at telling a story
in-character. Interestingly, the younger actors both go for a more naturalistic
performances; where both Hepburn and Richardson tend to orate, Robards and
Stockwell converse. The pair complement each other nicely, with Stockwell able
to make fear, calm, and timidity different facets of the same attitude as the
scene calls for it, while Robards makes Jamie the possessor of what little
common sense this family has , which is saying something because he's also a
boor who frequently slips out of control. Every pairing or larger grouping
shows a family dysfunctional enough to be a complete mess but too devoted to each
other to properly rip itself apart.
As a theatrical/cinematic hybrid, "Long Day's Journey Into Night" can be an odd way to spend nearly three hour (more, if the place screening it gives a full intermission). It's interesting, though, a rare case of a production that works as a movie without giving up the feel of a play, thanks in large part to a tight cast.
When Eugene O'neill sold his play to the distributors, his condition was to not produce it during his lifetime. And while watching this film, you can only imagine the implications if it was.
Long Day's Journey into Night(1962) tells the story of a dysfunctional family. A family where mother is morphine addict and depressive, father is or rather once was a famous actor, older brother who tried to unsuccessfully follow the steps of his father and younger brother who is broke and is diagnosed with Consumption. Movie follows a day into their lives. But what a day it is !! There is a lot of bickering about many things of their life and it does bring a lot of skeletons out of the closet - Both the sons and mother think that their father is too stingy, they blame a lot of problems in their lives arose because of his unwillingness to spend like they would have controlled their mother's illness from going worse or younger son does not want to go to State Sanitarium just because it is cheap. Father thinks that the Younger son is too morbid for his own good and older son is loafer, drunken failure. Their mother thinks that the birth of second son is the reason of her deteriorating health and addiction and blames their father for her loneliness which arose from the house they are living in which she hates. Even two sons don't look straight into each others eyes.
Adaptation from O'neill's Pulitzer Prize winning play is quite apparent when you are watching actors play their parts. Whole setup is suitable for a play. Scenes are much longer than normal, it even has many lengthy monologues like you would have in a play. Most of the scenes have just a couple of characters. There are no special effects, no cut shots, no background music. Whole focus is on characters, their acting and dialogues. Well, considering Sidney Lumet directed it, it should not come as a surprise but this film has much more feel of a Play more than any of his other films. But then there comes the extra responsibility of fitting it to the screen, confining the whole action in one set and achieving the required momentum for the film with just the help of characters. It puts a lot more responsibility on actors and directors and under the able leadership of Sidney Lumet, they make it happen. Katherine Hepburn, as a morphine addict mother is just one shining example of it. She is AMAZING in it. She has a lot of - transformations as you can say when she comes and goes into her lucid moments. She is very bitter when she is out of her own but in the very next moment, she will apologize profusely for being so. And she does this with amazing clarity of character and unparallelled facial expressions. It's a treat to watch her play this character. Ralph Richardson does fine job himself as a patriarch of the family. His thick accent gives much more credibility to the old theater actor he is playing.
It is a kind of hard film to watch as whole script is sharp ups and downs of spirits and moods of all these volatile characters. This nature also makes it almost impossible for them to help each other out even if they want to. Every action starts with a good intention, but before it can reach its desired effect, their bitterness takes over. Sidney Lumet is clearly visible in many aspects of a film. Very much like 12 Angry Men(1957), whole movie takes place at a single location, their House. Very much like Fail-Safe(1964) and The Hill(1965), there is no background music and no special effects the whole time and whole focus is on characters. However, it does have a very slow pacing which can bore someone and whole feel of the movie does not help much either. But if you can sit through that, it definitely is an engaging story of how much explosive a day can be.
TCM
Diary: Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) - Film Comment Steven Mears, June 1, 2016
“There are many reasons for accepting a movie,” Sidney Lumet wrote in his indispensable guidebook-cum-memoir Making Movies. “What’s important is that the material involve me personally on some level. And the levels will vary.” But he hastens to add: “Long Day’s Journey Into Night is everything one can hope for. Four characters come together and leave no area of life unexplored.”
It’s a tribute to Lumet’s drive and stamina—and, frankly, to his courage—that five years into his big-screen career, the most exhaustively confessional work by America’s poet laureate of the shattered soul was everything he could have hoped for. It’s fair to surmise, given that Eugene O’Neill’s family tragedy has never been remade as a feature, that most of Lumet’s colleagues would be daunted by a four-act study of addiction and recrimination that the playwright claimed was written in tears and blood. But for Lumet, then best known for 12 Angry Men—which, like the director’s career, grew out of live TV—this “downward spiral of epic, tragic proportions” was the perfect vehicle for his near-telepathic rapport with actors and instinctive understanding of adaptation.
Published in 1956—posthumously, in keeping with O’Neill’s wishes—Long Day’s Journey charts a single harrowing day in the summer of 1912, as the Tyrone family, modeled closely on the playwright’s own, confront their bitter failings and long-held resentments. Patriarch James (played in Lumet’s 1962 film by Ralph Richardson) is a renowned stage actor who’s never forgotten his squalid Irish childhood. Believing himself one jump ahead of the poorhouse at all times, he has forsaken artistic ambition for commercial success and funneled all his earnings into worthless land, believing there to be security in acreage. His reliance on quack physicians and state-funded hospitals long ago instilled a morphine addiction in his wife Mary (Katharine Hepburn)—lately aggravated by a growing awareness that the “summer cold” of youngest son Edmund (the O’Neill surrogate, played by Dean Stockwell) is in fact tuberculosis. Elder son Jamie (Jason Robards), a stormy alcoholic and failed actor, begrudges the favored Edmund but still tries, with his last glimmer of nobility, to wrest his brother from the family vortex.
The four Tyrones and their Irish maid (a constant reminder of their lower-class origins, never far from James’s thoughts) cloister themselves in a coastal Connecticut home shrouded in fog. The thickening haze as dusk approaches and the unnerving foghorn that pierces the sepulchral night offer apt metaphors for the Tyrones’ retreat into somnolent denial and the wailing ghosts of conscience that won’t let them rest. It can hide the world from you and you from the world, Mary observes of the vapor that signifies her preferred state of mind, and later, adrift in morose rumination: “Why is it that fog makes everything sound so sad and lost, I wonder?”
Always game for recounting her courtship by the once-dashing James Tyrone, Mary is the member of the quartet most entrenched in what the denizens of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh would call “pipe dreams,” but at the same time she holds the fewest illusions about the family’s trajectory. Like Jamie, the son she scorns, Mary understands the cycles of justification and mutual enablement that animate the Tyrones like so many interlocking cogs. She torments her helpless men with trips to the drugstore and adjournments to the spare room upstairs, the known site of her morphine stockpile. The catalyst (or excuse, as the case may be) is Edmund’s illness, blamed at various points on James’s tightfistedness, Jamie’s alluringly hedonistic lifestyle, and Edmund’s renunciation of his faith. (Onetime convent girl Mary is so steeped in Catholic guilt she laments that she can no longer call her soul her own.)
“Though [Hepburn] had played great roles,” Lumet wrote, “nothing could compare with Mary Tyrone for psychological complexity, physical and emotional demand, and tragic dimension.” To be sure, her imperious agitation found its perfect match in what may be the most challenging role in American theater. Her quicksilver shifts from coltishly preening her hair and inviting compliments to tugging and scratching at her hands in dope-addled delirium are nearly as startling as her prodigious soliloquies, vanishing into her memories as though possessed of an opiate-powered time machine.
Lumet and cinematographer Boris Kaufman devised numerous visual strategies for segregating Hepburn’s Mary from the male characters, with each technique growing more distinct as the film progresses. In the final act, as the three men trade invective and face truths about themselves, Lumet employs harsher lighting and wider lenses. Conversely, as Mary Tyrone slips into oblivion he softens her light, and uses longer lenses to show her disconnect from reality. The camera which first stood at eye level descends to the floor for the men; for Hepburn it steadily rises until by the end of Act III it’s mounted on a crane. (No wonder Lumet resented critics’ dismissal of the film as a photographed stage play.)
The estimable revival now appearing on Broadway runs almost an hour longer than the film, suggesting that Lumet made judicious cuts to the text, but in fact he kept all but seven pages of the 177-page script. The edits, he explained, were for scenes reliant on close-ups, which he felt would bring them to the point faster than on stage, where everything is realized in long shot, as it were. Indeed Ralph Rosenblum’s editing cleaves to a faster tempo than other, more ponderous productions, which surely accounts for the runtime deficit.
It’s surprising, then, that Lumet’s second 1960s adaptation of a canonical play about a misery-prone theatrical family should feel tepid and sluggish. The Sea Gull (1968) suffers from the central miscasting of Simone Signoret, whose thick French accent obstructs the verbal dexterity needed for Chekhov’s heroine Irina Arkadina—and only the uniformity of the rest of the cast (entirely English) compensates for the strangeness of each character seeming to embody a U.K. stereotype (from Colonel Blimp to the Angry Young Man) while calling each other names like Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplyov. But performances are not the fatal flaw; some, in particular the gangly, tormented David Warner, are excellent.
In Making Movies, Lumet consents to offer a single-sentence (or sentence-fragment) theme for each of his films, declining only Long Day’s Journey in deference to its magnitude. His reading of The Sea Gull— “why is everyone in love with the wrong person?”—is undeniably correct, but in adhering to that question like a didactic doomsayer and using a literal-minded translation by Russian Baroness Moura Budberg, he omits the levity and irony so vital to the play. Adaptations as free as Claude Miller’s La Petite Lili (2003) and the recent off-Broadway deconstruction Stupid Fu**ing Bird embrace the absurdity of life as chronicled by Chekhov, who always regarded The Sea Gull as humorous. So perhaps new definitions are in order: a play that ends with “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time” is a tragedy; a show whose first spoken words are “I am in mourning for my life” couldn’t be anything else but a comedy.
TNR
Film Classic: 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' (1962) | New Republic Stanley Kauffman, September 23, 1962
FROM
STAGE TO SCREEN: THE LONG VOYAGE HOME AND ... FROM STAGE TO SCREEN: THE LONG VOYAGE HOME
AND LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, by William L. Sipple from The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, Spring 1983
A
Year with Kate: Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) - The Film ... Ann Marie from The Film Experience
not coming to a theater near you Marlin Tyree
Long
Day's Journey into Night - TCM.com Margarita
Landazuri
DVD Savant Glenn
Erickson
DVD Verdict Dan Mancini
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
filmcritic.com Christopher Null
filmsgraded.com
[Brian Koller]
Baltimore City Paper Jack Purdy
Long Day's Journey Into Night - Movies - The New York Times Bosley Crowther, also seen here: The New York Times
Long
Day's Journey into Night (1962 film) - Wikipedia
DOG DAY AFTERNOON A 96
I’m
a Catholic and I don’t want to hurt anybody.
I’m
flying to the tropics. Fuck the snow. —Sonny (Al
Pacino)
Opening with a gorgeous montage of New York City set to the music of Elton John’s “Amoreena,” seen here on YouTube (3:38): Dog Day Afternoon - Amoreena (Elton John), which may as well define the style of director Sidney Lumet, born and raised in New York City, using the city itself as the backdrop for so many of his films, where especially in this film the surging pulse of the people in the city is felt throughout. Also, as is typical in Lumet films, the director wastes no time getting into the heat of the action, which begins almost immediately, as the audience is pulled into the intrigue of a 3-man bank heist at closing time of a small neighborhood bank where one of the robbers (Gary Springer) immediately has second thoughts and pulls out, leaving behind two of the more memorable characters in movies, John Cazale as Sal, the rifle-toting, dimwitted, socially challenged side partner to the heist mastermind, Sonny, played by the volatile but constantly besieged Al Pacino in arguably the greatest performance in his entire career. Like no one else in memory, his believability in pulling off so many harrowing ups and downs throughout these few short hours is nothing less than masterful, as afterwards, his character remains unforgettable, more etched in our memories than many of our own relatives due to the frazzled and emotionally exposed nature of his performance. Despite being a fidgety and completely amateurish bank robber, Sonny is seen in purely sympathetic terms, pulling the audience and the people in the film to his side instead of the authority of the police, who are shown nothing but disrespect throughout once it results in a standoff with hundreds of armed police lined along the streets outside while Sonny and Sal hold about ten bank employees inside the bank as hostages.
Using an economy of means, the afternoon drags on much like a chess match where each side is hopeful to gain the upper hand, where the mood outside the bank is a wall of cops, sharpshooters and news reporters, with the public cordoned off just behind with highly demonstrative and swelling crowds, not to mention the presence of the ever-hovering helicopter, connected by a lone telephone that connects the beleaguered Sonny to New York Detective Sergeant Moretti, Charles Durning, who’s positioned across the street in a barbershop with a direct view of the bank. Durning has an utterly thankless role, as he’s continually portrayed by Sonny as the wretched arm of the police. Coming on the heels of major news headlines from the murderous Attica police raid to the Kent State massacre, the public in the Vietnam era was sick of hearing about the continuous misuse of authority. Sonny’s sense for the theatrics reaches its peak while bravely standing on the sidewalk in the midst of police negotiations where he starts rallying the public with cries of “Attica! Attica!” This sends the crowd into a frenzy of support while the police can only sheepishly look chagrined at getting embarrassingly upstaged by a two-bit criminal in public right on the streets they are assigned to preserve and protect. What’s truly remarkable here is the documentary style of social realism on display, which Pacino plays to the hilt through the ever changing moods that consist of high drama but also devastatingly quiet moments. Sal’s equally depressing mood, offering his partner little or no help at all, provides a feeling of hopelessness that pervades inside the bank, where Sonny has to continually offset that mood with his own optimism and initiative.
But this film is all Pacino, stripped of any sense of surface artificiality as we slowly learn more details about his personal life, which couldn’t be more compelling, especially since this entire event is based on a true story. When Sonny asks Moretti to bring his wife to the scene, the entire complexity of the mood shifts, largely due to the simply outstanding performance by a stunning Chris Sarandon as Leon, who is rushed from his bedside at Bellevue Hospital by the police, but because he’s so over medicated, he refuses to speak to Sonny, as the television reports begin announcing their mystifying marital relationship. Sarandon is so effective in the role that even the police become sympathetic, realizing that the only reason Sonny is robbing a bank is to get the money needed for Leon to have a sex change operation. The entire bank heist dove-tailing out of control parallels a melodramatic love story, each turning into an unmitigated disaster. The heartbreaking moments between Sonny and Leon who eventually talk on the phone, or between Sonny and some of the employees inside the bank who help him dictate his personal will, are quietly revelatory, providing a glimpse of a person under siege by a mounting distress that few could possibly comprehend. This is one of the few films that matches the tone of the era, where the public has survived the assassinations of the 60’s, the mounting evidence of rampant police brutality, the government overreach in Watergate along with more secret bombing missions in Vietnam, a President who resigns before a certain federal indictment, where the stress and anxiety about losing faith in your own government is at an all time high. All of this disheartened mistrust is wrapped into the character of Sonny, who courageously carries it all upon his shoulders, a man whose intentions couldn’t be more well-meaning but veers completely out of control in acts of exasperating desperation. Lumet is to be commended for bringing such a morally complex saga into our lives with such riveting intensity, where it’s impossible not to relate to someone who’s dreams are dashed before your eyes yet insists he can still make it better, as tragic a figure as has been seen in contemporary cinema.
At first sight, a film
with large, self-conscious ambitions where a bank siege (the film is based on a
real incident that occurred in the summer of '72) seems a metaphor for Attica
and other scenes of American overkill and victimisation. But it turns into
something smaller and less pretentious: a richly detailed, meandering portrait
of an incompetent, anxiety-ridden, homosexual bank robber (played with
ferocious and self-destructive energy by Pacino) who wants money to finance a
sex-change operation for his lover. The film's strength lies in its depiction
of surfaces, lacking the visual or intellectual imagination to go beyond its
shrewd social and psychological observations and its moments of absurdist
humour.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
In DOG DAY AFTERNOON, Lumet exploited his theatrical background to electrifying effect, building consistent dramatic tension from the essential mise-en-scene of a few stark locations and ramped-up performances. AFTERNOON has been justly canonized for Al Pacino's star turn, a product of genuine exhaustion and second-wind adrenaline. (Pacino nearly turned the film down because it began shooting immediately after the epic schedule for THE GODFATHER PART II had wrapped); yet it's only one of the bright sparks among a uniformly wired cast. Going against his usual loyalty to the written word, Lumet encouraged his actors to improvise after rehearsing Frank Pierson's script for seven weeks. The process yielded a unique performance style—which was, on the whole, perhaps Lumet's greatest contribution to movies—that combined the specific, spontaneous gestures of film acting with the internalized characterizations common to off-Broadway drama. The film depicts an infamous Brooklyn bank robbery of 1972, committed by a married man in hopes of paying for his male lover's sex change operation. The botched robbery devolved into a highly publicized hostage standoff, and under Lumet's direction, the events play out as a series of escalating, acutely realized crises. Thanks to the extended rehearsal period, everyone on screen seems confident in their daily business—be it running a bank or negotiating for the FBI—yet the demands of improvisation make everyone visibly, and convincingly, nervous. The film generates great suspense as well as comedy (Note the scene where John Cazale's ad lib about Wyoming nearly makes Pacino crack up), often at the same time, as in Pacino's impassioned and ultimately exhausting phone conversation with his lover (Chris Sarandon). It's also worth noting that the exterior shots present some exciting snapshots of New York in the mid-70s and that the film's sexual politics don't feel at all dated.
dOc DVD Review: Dog Day Afternoon (1975) - digitallyOBSESSED Jon Danziger, 2-disc Special Edition
What a cherry bomb of a movie this is. It's edgy and smart and
funny, it oozes New York from its pores, and it's got a handful of performances
that are indelible—all that, and it's probably the movie that cemented Al
Pacino's status as an A-list movie star. Most actors so want to be loved, and
most movies today are so safe and focus grouped to death, resulting in motion
pictures that are shot through with all the zest of a days-old Happy Meal. But
none of that applies to Dog Day Afternoon, one of the most spirited pictures
from what seems like the last great period in American filmmaking.
Any writer in a candid moment will tell you that the words "Based on a true
story" is professional code for "Completely made up, except for when
it isn't." (Wouldn't things have gone better for James Frey if he had just
copped to that from the jump?) But certainly some of the juice of this movie
comes from the fact that the kernel of it came from actual events, a bank heist
gone comically and horribly wrong in Brooklyn in the summer of 1972. But
director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Frank Pierson aren't offering just a
journalistic account of the story behind a particularly salacious set of
tabloid headlines—they've crafted a movie that's rich with character and
tension, frequently poignant, and very, very funny. The third guy in on the
heist chickens out only moments into the robbery, and so we're left with two:
Sonny, the talker, manic but cagey; and Sal, the quiet one, with sad eyes and
an itchy trigger finger. They overtake the laughable security measures at a
Brooklyn bank at closing time, and round up the hostages: the bank manager, the
security guard, and a handful of tellers. Bad news for our boys, though:
they've gotten some bad intelligence, and the armored truck that was by earlier
in the day didn't drop off sacks of cash, but rather picked them up, meaning
that the take from the crime is going to be a small one.
But that's the least of it—within minutes, the authorities are on to Sonny and
Sal, putting the kibosh on their clean getaway, and really putting the story in
motion. Soon local TV news helicopters are swarming the scene, as are a rash of
SWAT teams, FBI agents, local yahoos, and anybody else in the vicinity looking
for a little bit of street theater on a crazy hot summer day. Pierson's script
is especially smart in giving everyone their due—there's nuance in just about
every character, and they're all deeply human, especially as played by the
film's crackerjack cast. The name above the title is Pacino's, and as Sonny, he
really is pretty great. He's smart about some stuff, but hopelessly stupid
about other things—you get the sense that he's making it up as he goes, and
that Sonny is a disturbed man who's gotten to a bad place, but, even with guns
and violence, he somehow wants to do the right thing. John Cazale's Sal is the
perfect complement to Pacino's Sonny—Sal doesn't have the gift of words that
Sonny does, but Cazale is brilliant in showing us his troubled soul. (His
answer to Sonny's question at the top of this review is maybe the funniest and
most heartbreaking moment I can think of in any movie.) They're a great
on-screen team, and seem that much more spectacular as actors when you compare
their very different but equally fine work just two years earlier as Michael
and Fredo in The Godfather, Part II.
Charles Durning is terrific as a street-smart cop in over his head with Sonny;
about halfway through the story he's forced to hand over the reins to James
Broderick, all cool insinuating efficiency, as an FBI agent—Broderick isn't
playing for comedy, and his incredible cool is the necessary force driving the
movie to its conclusion. I don't want to spill too much of the story, but no
discussion of Dog Day Afternoon would be complete without a celebration of the
work of Chris Sarandon as Leon. He's a fragile, funny, crazy drama queen, and
in other hands, this could have been over the top, a caricature. But Sarandon's
every moment is genuinely felt, and he brings a tremendous sense of empathy and
caring to the troubled Leon.
Presiding over the proceedings is the inimitable Sidney Lumet, and this may
well be the director's finest hour. He's long been one of the great New York
filmmakers, and seems to have a particular affinity for cops and robbers—he and
Pacino worked the other side of the street with Serpico, and his filmmaking has
been stylish and efficient, whatever the subject matter. But he seems to
connect to this material particularly, giving the telling of the story a
passion and a streetwise sensibility that separate it from the pack, marking
this as one of the great ones.
Dog
Day Afternoon (1975) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Paul Sherman
Sidney Lumet's 1975 comedy-drama Dog Day Afternoon, which
screenwriter Frank Pierson based on a Life magazine article, isn't just
drawn from a real event. It also encapsulates the spirit of its times as few
movies do. In an unprecedented movie year in which One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest, Shampoo and Dog Day Afternoonwere all within the top five hits
of the year (and not a "Hollywood ending" among them), Lumet's movie,
just out in a 2-disc special edition DVD, may be the most emblematic of the
apex of the 1970s' golden era of American film.
In 1975, the bloom was most definitely off the American rose. The national
fatigue of 1975 (Vietnam, Watergate, economic woes) is all over Dog Day
Afternoon. It's in the desperate face and body language of Sonny (Al Pacino),
whose attempt to rob a bank is a last-ditch stab at turning his unhappy life
around. It's in the hang-dog presence of John Cazale (The Godfather, The
Conversation) as Sonny's partner in crime, Sal. It's in the reactions of
the bank employees they take hostage and of the gathering throngs lining the
block outside the bank, who identify more with Sonny than with the onslaught of
gun-toting cops aiming at him. It's in the harried detective (Charles Durning)
trying to negotiate with Sonny, increasingly frustrated that no one respects
his authority.
That national fatigue is also in the very style of Dog Day Afternoon. Starting
with its hot-time-summer-in-the-city montage during the opening credits, the
emphasis is on realism. Big eastern cities were not pretty places in the 1970s,
with the 1950s' and 1960s' flight to suburbia taking a lot of urban investment
money with it, and the opening captures the grime of 1970s New York. You can
feel the heat rising from the litter-strewn sidewalks as mid-afternoon
approaches. But the goal here isn't just realism, its unconventional realism.
Dog Day Afternoon upends just about every heist-movie convention you've come to
expect.
Most obviously, its robbers aren't movie tough guys. We see that right away
when one, Stevie (Gary Springer), chickens out and begs Sonny to let him leave
the bank (Sonny lets him go). Sonny and quiet Sal, however edgy they might be,
are amateurs. They're not mere crooks. For one thing, they're funny as hell,
Sonny answering the phone "WNEW plays all the hits," like a disc
jockey, and Sal, when asked what country he'd want to escape to, replying
"Wyoming." Sonny tries to look like a tough guy, barking to the cops
that he'll start throwing dead hostages out the front door if they don't meet
his demands, but he puts on no such airs with the bank employees, who he
pledges not to hurt. When we later learn Sonny is bisexual, having a male
"wife," Leon (Chris Sarandon), as well as his female wife Angie
(Susan Peretz), he becomes an even more uncommon character.
For all its contentious face-offs and threats of violence and for all of
Pacino's intensity in one of his most well-rounded performances, Dog Day
Afternoon is also full of still moments that deepen its drama. Like the humor
you wouldn't expect from a hostage story, the intimate phone conversation
between Sonny and Leon, whose expensive sex-change operation is the motivation
for the robbery, and the hushed scene in which Sonny dictates his will,
including equal affection for Angie and Leon in it, are touching contrasts to
the more boisterous action.
Leon and Sonny's phone conversation was originally written to be a face-to-face
conversation on the street, in front of the police and the onlookers. But
Pacino campaigned to change that and Pierson rewrote the scene as a quieter
phone call, incorporating Pacino's and Sarandon's rehearsal improvisations into
his final version of the scene. Such moments remind us that there are three
major elements to Dog Day Afternoon: the dark humor, the craziness happening
outside the bank (much of it instigated by Sonny during his visits to the
sidewalk) and the drama leading to the inevitable moment when the police and
FBI either meet Sonny and Sal's demands or make a move to stop them.
The amazing thing about Lumet's audio commentary and the new hour-long
documentary about the making of the movie on the DVD is that any effort to
capture the spirit of the times in the 1975 movie remains unmentioned. It
just happened. Sonny's famous "Attica! Attica!" line? It happened
on the spur of the moment, a suggestion quietly offered to Pacino by assistant
director Burtt Harris. The crowd didn't know it was coming, yet reacted with
fervor. The same crowd's preference of Sonny over the swarm of cops and its
distrust of authority? Not a big deal to the moviemakers. Sonny as a
disgruntled Vietnam vet? The service record of the real robber, John Wojtowicz,
was already part of the story, not something added for effect.
Both interesting extras concentrate on the storytelling more than the context
of the movie. On both, Lumet talks about how one way to pump up the desired
naturalism was to do away with some of the moviemaking artificiality: having
much of the cast, including anyone playing a character in the bank, wear his or
her own clothes; having everyone speak in their own voices (no accents); and
not using any sort of lighting beyond what would have been there in a real bank
robbery/hostage situation. For instance, the bank scenes are lit by fluorescent
lighting and the nighttime street scenes by police flood lights.
Although some reference sources list Dog Day Afternoon as being 130 minutes
long, it runs 124 minutes on the DVD. It's unclear whether anything was cut
between the movie's original theatrical release and its 1980s home video debut.
The disc contains no deleted scenes but the trailer offers a little interesting
snippet not in the finished film. Its very first images are of Sonny,
addressing his hostages before they leave the bank for the airport limo,
telling them "you're gonna be remembered the rest of your lives for the
day you got held up and kidnapped." The movie is certainly still
remembered, and for good reason.
DVD
Times Mike Sutton, Special Edition,
2-disc
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
Dog
Day Afternoon - TCM.com
Stephanie Zacharek
Dog
Day Afternoon (1975) - Articles - TCM.com
Real
Dog Day hero tells his story John Wojtowicz (actual bank
robber on whom the film was based) from Jump
Cut, 1977
Dog Day Afternoon Lumpen
Lumet, by Karyn Kay from Jump Cut, 1976
Dog Day Afternoon Dog Day
Aftertaste, by Eric Holm from Jump
Cut, 1976
Edward
Copeland on Film The Boys in the Bank
Commentary Track [Richard Winters]
The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1975 [Erik Beck]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Stephen Carty]
Dog Day Afternoon - 2 Disc Special Edition : DVD Talk Review of ... Gil Jawetz from DVD Talk
Two-Disc
Special Edition, DVD Town [John J. Puccio]
Monsters
and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]
Special Edition, 2-disc
DVD Verdict
[Dave Ryan] - Special Edition
Film Threat - Dog Day Afternoon: Two-disc Special Edition (dvd) Brad Cook from Film Threat
dOc DVD Review: Dog Day Afternoon HD-DVD (1975) - digitallyOBSESSED Mark Zimmer
DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) HD-DVD
DVDTown
- HD-DVD Edition [John J. Puccio]
DVD Verdict - HD DVD [Ryan Keefer]
Blogcritics.org HD DVD Review [Matt Paprocki]
Dog Day Afternoon (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Mitchell Hattaway from DVD Talk
Dog Day Afternoon - Blu-ray review (1 of 2) Dean Winkelspecht from DVD Town
DVD Verdict - Blu-Ray [Dennis Prince]
eFilmCritic
Reviews M.P. Bartley
Movie
Vault [Arturo Garcia Lasca]
Crazy for Cinema Lisa Skrzyniarz
filmcritic.com Christopher Null
Celluloid
Heroes [Paul McElligott]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Danny Carr]
20 October 2006[Arts]: Must-have movies: Dog Day Afternoon Tim Robey from The Daily Telegraph
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] Januaury 1, 1975
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] August 7, 2008
New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby
DVDBeaver.com Blu-ray Review [Gary W. Tooze]
John Wojtowicz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Salvatore Naturile - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"John Wojtowicz in the
Notable Names Database" biography
from NNDB
John Wojtowicz Summary | BookRags.com profile
Photos of Wojtowicz and the Robbery
Dog Day Afternoon: Information from Answers.com
Based On A True Story - Teddy Award - The official queer award at ... 75 minute documentary film on John Wojtowicz, from Films A to Z
DOG DAY AFTERNOON - Al Pacino's Loft a compilation of details, including the original P.F.Kluge and Thomas Moore Life magazine article, the inspiration for the film (Undated)
Real Dog Day Afternoon News Story from ABC News 1972 Harry Reasoner video news footage, August 23, 1972 (2:04)
Littlejohn & the mob: Saga of a heist Arthur Bell from The Village Voice, a reprint of the original article August 31, 1972
read the original article The Boys in the Bank, by P.F.Kluge and Thomas Moore, the inspiration for the film from Life magazine, September 22, 1972
Wojtowicz's comments on Dog Day Afternoon Jump Cut, 1977
"Elizabeth Eden, Transsexual Who Figured in 1975 Movie" Obituary from The New York Times, October 1, 1987
Ironic Sans: Dog Day Anniversary August 22, 2007
Flatbush Pigeon: Featured Brooklynite of the Week: John Wojtowicz ... May 30, 2008
A Gender Variance Who's Who: Liz Eden (1945 - 1986) and John ... August 22, 2008
Liz Eden - Dangerous Minds: Tagged Dangerous Minds, February 2, 2011
GAY OUTLAWZ Hello Weimar Republic, April 10, 2011
NETWORK A-
USA (121 mi) 1976 d: Sidney Lumet
We’ll wipe that fucking Disney right off the air.
—Max Schumaker (William Holden)
That Mao
Tse-Tung Hour is turning into one big pain
in the ass.
—Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway)
“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this
anymore!!”
—Howard Beale (Peter Finch)
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl
about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There
is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.
Those are the nations of the world today.
—Arthur Jensen, corporate owner of the Network (Ned Beatty)
Paddy Chayevsky is the story of this movie, as this film lives and
breathes every word he’s written in what is arguably one of the greatest
screenplays in movie history (See Tim Dirks’ web evaluation here: http://www.filmsite.org/101greatestscreenplays4.html),
although Billy Wilder was no slouch. Always smart and cleverly inventive,
this is a cynically demented yet highly entertaining bleak apocalyptic vision
that reveals how the television industry is destroying the human race.
This scathingly dark satire on the far-reaching global effects of television is
brilliantly prophetic, as true today as it was when it was written, perhaps
even more so because so much of what seemed like hare-brained economic
hypotheses at the time are more in evidence today. In short, this is a
film about wacko sidewalk preachers who for generations have stood on soapboxes
in the rain and cold, perhaps with a cheap microphone, passing out pamphlets,
trying to scream the apocalyptic truths from the mountaintops, usually assured
that no one would listen, until someone invented the perfect platform along
with a voicebox called television. Somehow, while the whole world
watches, what passes for the truth in the world is what happens to be seen on
TV, historic moments like the assassination and funeral service of President
Kennedy, the subsequent murder of his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald captured on
live TV, brutally violent photographic accounts bringing the war in Vietnam
home to people’s living rooms along with the mounting demonstrations and
protests against the war, the street clashes at the 1968 Democratic Convention
in Chicago which turned into a police riot, effectively ruining any Democrats
chance of winning the Presidency, or live feeds of the first man on the moon,
which many today still believe was concocted in a back room television studio
somewhere. This was the TV generation raised to see and hear the daily
reports of history unravel on the 5 o’clock news as reported by the network
confidant Walter Cronkite, who was as wise and likeable as a friendly
grandfather sharing the world’s pain with each passing day, perhaps making it a
little easier to bear. This is the unseen and untold backdrop to NETWORK,
which is simply one’s familiarity with television.
The cast of the film is impeccable, all with worthy resumé’s of note,
with 3 actors winning Academy Awards that year, a distinction it shares with
only one other film A
Streetcar Named Desire (1951), with a storyline that features a Billy
Wilder-like SUNSET BLVD. (1950) narrator, perhaps in tribute. The focus
is on aging news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a fellow of Edward R.
Murrow in the glory days of television, but now a man whose ratings have fallen
leaving the network no choice but to fire him. Going out in style, he
uses his last network appearance to announce his suicide on the air, suggesting
that would jettison the ratings before railing against the hypocrisy in the
world, like any good soapbox preacher, building up a healthy sense of righteous
indignation on the air before signing off. Behind the scenes, the
television personnel are quick to pull the plug with that old standard cop out:
“Please stand by, as we are experiencing technical difficulties.” William
Holden as Max Schumacher is Beale’s best friend and the head of the News
Division, who keeps Beale on the air for as long as possible, as every element
of his crying anguish rings with truth, perhaps thinking it’s about time some
of the network heads heard it head on. However, in typical corporate
fashion, heads will have to roll for this disastrous display of televising live
an unconscionable moment. Enter Faye Dunaway as Diana Christensen, a
corporate climber with a near delirious addiction to good ratings, the life
blood of the television industry, a behind-the-scenes Lady Macbeth wringing her
hands with gleeful delight as someone gladly willing to step on her own
grandmother in the pursuit of her own success. Dunaway truly steals
the movie with her manic joy at the chance to receive astounding ratings by
broadcasting the mad ramblings of a lunatic on the air prophesizing his own
gloom and doom, now himself the lead story on all the other networks and a
front page news item, building a following of adoring fans who find every word
he says filled with the unpredictable thrill of live television, staying tuned,
wondering what craziness he’ll do next. Diana’s mad hopes are realized
as Beale becomes an overnight sensation, lighting up the airwaves with his mad
rant “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!” urging viewers
to yell out their windows to spew their pent-up rage, becoming a modern day
Messiah.
Once more, Lumet has created a film with his pulse on the nation’s woes,
like his previous work Dog
Day Afternoon (1975), where one character carries upon his back the public
outrage over unending racial strife, poverty, financial woes, urban blight, a
crumbling government, a President resigning in disgrace, which subsequent
President Gerald Ford just sweeps under the rug as if it never happened.
Like Al Pacino’s Sonny, Howard Beale bears the weight of the world’s ills on
his shoulders. His outrage and anger are a metaphor for the growing
helplessness of those who see the world veering out of control, where even the
right to vote can be ignored by as many as half the nation’s discouraged
eligible voters. But Beale is only part of the story, as this film does
an excellent job stripping the veneer behind corporate excess, where behind the
curtain in closed door suites are well financed billionaires pulling the levers
of control not only of their giant tax-evading corporations, but also the
nation’s newspapers, radio broadcasts and television airwaves, exerting a major
political influence on their editorial content, shaping the view of the
audience by manipulating them as they see fit. In fact, this film itself
is much like a giant full-length editorial, filled with plenty of screaming
people who rant and rave over the deception of the truth through a neverending
charade of lies and deceit. The dialogue in this film is so rich with an
excoriating venom of disgust over the outrageous hypocrisy of human
deviousness, filled with a neverending stream of monologues that are not just
devastating, but a screenplay that is overwhelming ambitious in scope, using a
take no prisoners attitude while at the same time being presciently accurate,
seeing the shape of the future before it happens. Thirty or forty years
later, the world very much resembles this demented vision of poorly vented
outrage with steadily weakened, feeble-minded human beings who have lost all
sense of power and individualism in the world except the right to vent their
anger in a futile wrath of unending bitterness and disgust. Whether this
dark and scathing work is a cinema masterpiece is another story and still open
to question, where the ALPHAVILLE (1965) like love story in the middle feels
strangely out of place and has an eerily developing theatrical science fiction
feel to it. Despite being a work of fiction, this movie still plays like
a documentary exposé filled with the bitter truths of living in today’s
everchanging world.
Washed-up news anchorman (Finch) flips
on air, finds God, and is gleefully exploited by his TV company to boost the
ratings with his epileptic evangelic revivalism. Network gives a rather
old-fashioned plot the '70s treatment: the result is slick, 'adult',
self-congratulatory, and almost entirely hollow. Paddy
Chayefsky's entrenched but increasingly desperate script parades its
middle-aged symptoms to little effect: it's ulcerous, bilious, paranoid about
youth, and increasingly susceptible to fantasy. Above all, it's haunted by fear
of failing powers; presumably people telling each other what lousy lays they
were is to be taken as indication of the film's searing honesty. Lumet's
direction does nothing to contain the sprawl, and most of the interest comes in
watching such a lavishly mounted vehicle leaving the rails so spectacularly.
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Two decades later, this iconic American New Wave renegade text is even more startling than it once was—was Hollywood ever this cerebral, this caustic, this ethically apocalyptic? That 90 percent of Network's satire has become fulfilled prophecy by now doesn't take the shine off of its broadsword. Reality-show whoredom, death TV, New Globalistic anti-humanism, audience as robotic consumer—it's all here and all still hamburger in the teeth of this movie, written with hissing rage and in huge, thoughtful paragraphs by Paddy Chayefsky and directed with a vivid sense of '70s genuineness by Sidney Lumet. It feels in the watching like a hilarious organic nightmare, but Network is very much a carefully crafted object, its structure brilliantly hidden, its sardonic flourishes made with a wide variety of weapons, its absurdities riding coach with hardcore realism.
There's so much high-blooded speechifying going on, it's no
wonder the cast rose to the occasion like a battery of thoroughbreds, and
selecting standouts from William Holden's leathery old lion, Faye
Dunaway's babbling clockwork orange, Peter
Finch's exploded psychotic, and Robert Duvall's ferocious bullethead is a losers'
game. But the film, in retrospect, is something of a rueful dinosaur, as the
filmmakers must've known: It exemplifies exactly the dense, grown-up,
meaning-seeking culture that Chayefsky saw being replaced by amoral
bastardization. Look around, then look at the film: He was right. The DVD
supplements, taking up a second disc, are all making-of and looking-back docs,
from a contemporary TCM history of the film to an interview with Chayefsky on Dinah!
Also released: Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975), an even more
quintessential New Wave masterpiece and another kind of film altogether that no
one tries to make anymore.
filmcritic.com (David Bezanson) review [5/5]
This groundbreaking film is a rare example of a really god
satire that was popular with film critics and the public -- and even with
entertainment industry insiders, who might not be expected to get the joke or
appreciate the abuse. (I guess Hollywood has always had a condescending
attitude toward TV, which explains the Oscars that Network received.)
One evening, Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a network news anchor, becomes fed up
with the pablum of network news, decides he’s mad as hell, he can’t take it any
more, and he’s going to start telling the truth (or kill himself). Panicked
producers fire him, but not before his ratings soar; so he’s brought back as a
commentator. Over the next few weeks, Beale becomes increasingly unstable and
even delusional, but continues to tell the truth. The network’s ratings soar,
driving events forward to a tragic conclusion.
Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay attacks television from more angles than anyone
else ever thought of. Chayefsky’s maniacal, ruthless TV producers, led by Faye
Dunaway (whose character seems to be modeled after Lady Macbeth), stage fake
political revolutions for ratings and brainwash the public with psychics,
televangelists, etc. Even TV's psychological effects are explored (eg.
Dunaway's character is unable to make a relationship last longer than
soap-opera duration, and climaxes too soon during sex because TV has shortened
her attention span to one minute).
Of course, the movie’s nightmare vision of a TV network pandering to the lowest
common denominator with lesbian cops, psychics, and psychotic news commentators
does not seem like fiction now. It has become reality. But give the filmmakers
credit for being ahead of their time.
Having already made a great film, Chayefsky sends the last part of the film in
an unexpected direction as Finch’s mad newscaster starts proselytizing for a
vision of holistic, global capitalism that is uncannily similar to today’s
Internet and “New Economy” hype. But Americans aren’t ready to become atoms in
a vast network of global consumption and they start tuning out, leading the
show's producers to the logical, inevitable conclusion.
Given the media's chokehold on public opinion today, this movie begs to be
remade and updated. But don't expect Hollywood to do that anytime soon -- or to
release another political satire this penetrating and subversive, either.
The new two-disc Special Edition DVD includes a mega six-part making-of
documentary, commentary by Sidney Lumet, an interview with Chayefsky, and more.
Nothing written by Pauline Kael during her reign as America's
bitch supreme is more embarrassingly lacking of her usual perception and
foresight than her review of 1976's NETWORK entitled "Hot Air," which
can be found in her collections "When the Lights Go Down" and
"For Keeps." The expected salient observations are made: that the
movie has a crummy, hurried-up look, that the late Paddy Chayefsky's prophetic
screenplay is scatterbrained, and that William Holden's a marvellous camera
subject once he decided that he didn't need movie goddess tricks to cover up
his age. (Panicky Warren Beatty should follow suit.) You can't fault personal
taste either: if a movie doesn't appeal to her, it just doesn't appeal.
However, as readers of her criticism are well aware, Kael never let simplicity
get in the way of her "crow bar" examinations. "Hot Air" is
an excoriation of Chayefsky's supposed case of the N.Y. hates, with the boob
tube used as his central metaphor. As you read the first paragraph of this
lengthie, your radar is swirling: My God, how can she miss what's so obvious?
She discerns the author's rant on television, then blows it by using his
hatred-warning against him. Crashing blindly into her own rhetoric, she
berates, "Television, he says, is turning us into morons and
humanoids." Not buying what has come to fruition, she asks, thousands of
words later, what is inherently answered in her question: when Howard Beale
tells viewers to scream, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this
any longer," she reduns: "Is the viewers' obedience proof of their
sheeplike response to TV or is it evidence that the Prophet has struck a nerve
- that the public is as fed up as he is?" Kael somehow missed that it's
both. She commits her own coup de grace when foaming about this:
"Chayefsky, it seems, can be indignant about people becoming humanoids,
and then turn a somersault and say it's inevitable and only a fool wouldn't
recognize that. And he's wrong on both counts. There are a lot of changes in
the society that can be laid at television's door, but soullessness isn't one
of them. TV may have altered family life and social intercourse; it may have
turned children at school into entertainment seekers. But it hasn't taken our
souls, any more than movies did, or the theatre and novels before them."
Attacking Chayefsky for exactly what television has done -- for being the very
instrument that has robbed us of our collective soul. Movies, theatre and books
rarely alter a nation's psyche because they require discrimination of purchase
and effort in assimilating. If not the omnipresent box, what then could have
mugged us? Corrupt politics? Pervasive amorality and violence? The contemptible
phoniness and hate of God squads? Not without the power of television. Years
ago, in "Movies on Television," the second article she penned for The
New Yorker before becoming one of its critics, Kael enunciated the stunningly
false principle that all we get from the box is television. The piece a failure
for the same reason "Hot Air" is -- her love of movies (and books,
jazz, classical music and theatre in descending order) had, for too long,
prevented her from acknowledging what so many recognized even before NETWORK:
that television is IT. You can't reject or fight TV's promiscuous invasiveness
by denying its power, which is in devouring all. It's the black hole of Earth
-- nothing escapes. The sad fact is, we've all become little Dianas. Only our
hots aren't generated by ratings, like Diana's, but by trash, scandal and hate.
Psycho Dan Rather wrote years ago that "the camera never lies." In
spite of wanting to believe the truism as safeguard against ever lowering
thresholds of standards, today we ask: does the camera ever tell the truth?
Network -
TCM.com Rob Nixon
When Network
opened at theatres nationwide in November of 1976 it caused an instant
sensation. People were either crazy about it or thought the film was just plain
crazy. So when the film received ten Oscar nominations the following year and
won four of them, it was hard to tell if it was justly rewarded or simply a
case of Hollywood praising the total skewering of its longtime nemesis,
television. In any case, Network
still stands as one of the most potent, imaginative satires produced by a major
studio, and the line, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it
anymore!" became one of the key catch-phrases of the 1970s.
The line is delivered by Peter Finch as Howard Beale, a news anchor on the
verge of insanity. When executives of the fictional United Broadcasting System
tell him he is being fired after 25 years in the job, he goes on the air and
tells his audience he plans to commit suicide on his final broadcast. Ratings
go through the roof, and suddenly everyone is tuning in. On the night of his
promised suicide, he relents, telling the audience instead to rebel against the
insanities of modern life, to go to their windows and scream the famous line
into the streets. They do, and the nerve Beale has touched is soon turned into
a ratings bonanza by programming executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), a
ruthless child of the television age who cares only about her work and career.
She gives Beale a weekly show to do whatever he wants, and audiences are
mesmerized by his unpredictable, ranting behavior. The only voice against it is
Max Schumacher (William Holden), head of the news division, who is fired
because of his opposition. Nevertheless, Schumacher is drawn to the ambitious
Diana, and he leaves his wife to move in with her. Christensen pushes ahead
with her programming schemes and soon has a series starring a real-life group
of terrorists. Beale begins to believe his viewers are mindless masses whose
lives amount to very little, but when he expresses that on air, his superstar
status crumbles. With ratings plummeting, the network executives decide to
approve Diana's plan to end the show with a literal bang, using the terrorists
who have been turned from idealistic revolutionaries into ratings-hungry TV
stars to bring "The Howard Beale Show" to a bloody conclusion.
This scathing indictment of the television age was the brainchild of a writer
who made his mark in the medium two decades earlier. Paddy Chayevsky was one of
the leading lights of what came to be known as TV's Golden Age, a time in the
1950s when live drama was a broadcast staple and TV news had yet to totally
usurp the daily paper as the number one source for information. Although some
of Network's
most negative critics believed he was lashing out at the industry that had
launched his career, the truth was that Chayevsky actually had a very positive
experience writing for the small screen; in 1953 he debuted his teledrama, Marty,
which went on to become a quadruple Oscar-winner in its 1955 film version. But
he was always wary of the medium and its potentially negative influence; his
son later spoke of how Chayevsky restricted him from watching much TV and
constantly railed against the "junk" he felt was being shown. In
1955, he tried to sell NBC on a spoof of the medium about a host on a local
Ohio station who creates an outrageous variety show that ends up knocking Ed
Sullivan's weekly series off the air. And by the 1970s, the changes in
television had given him even more reason to lament its affects on society.
"It's all madness," he said. "People are instant now. Thanks to
TV we have all developed a ten-minute concentration span." He reserved his
harshest criticism for what he saw as a small corporate elite taking complete
cultural, political and social control of the medium and gaining the power to
"make or break presidents, popes, and prime ministers."
As expected, Network
was trashed by people in television, particularly in the news divisions. It was
called tasteless, distorted, heavy-handed and accused of playing into the hands
of "the incredible inferiority and hate complex on the part of the people
in the print media," according to Today show producer Paul
Friedman. TV journalist Barbara Walters feared the movie would harm the image
of TV and insisted there would never be "that kind of show-biz approach to
the news;because we will never let it happen."
Not every film critic was enchanted with the picture either. Many thought
Chayevsky had sacrificed dramatic integrity by peopling his script with
irredeemably vile caricatures and hollow shells who served only as mouthpieces
for the author's own political diatribes, as when he put into Beale's dialogue
a rant against the takeover of U.S. companies by Arabs and other foreign
nationals. But audiences ate it up (even if they happily returned to sitting in
front of the small screen for hours after seeing the movie). Had it not been
for the enormous underdog success of Rocky (1976), Network might have taken more
statuettes, including one for Best Picture. Still, it claimed four winning for
Chayevsky's screenplay, Peter Finch as Best Actor, Faye Dunaway as Best
Actress, and Beatrice Straight for her tiny role as Schumacher's jilted wife.
By the time of the ceremony's broadcast, Finch had died and his Oscar was
awarded posthumously. The awards show's producer insisted he wanted to keep it
upbeat and told Chayevsky to accept instead of Finch's widow, who might be
inclined to weep at the podium. But Chayevsky called her out of the audience
and she came onstage to read an acceptance speech Chayevsky had written for
her.
Dunaway was awarded for a role she was not sure she wanted to do in the first
place. The studio initially wanted Jane Fonda, but Chayevsky did not agree with
her politically. Jill Clayburgh, Marsha Mason, Diane Keaton, and Candice Bergen
were names also bandied about before Dunaway was chosen. She loved the script
but noted that it gave no vulnerability to Diana, no sense of what she might
have been before television turned her into a woman whose only dream in life
was "a 30 share and a 20 rating." But she went along with Chayevsky's
conception and director Sidney Lumet's warning that she would not be allowed to
sneak in any weeping or softness, and that it would remain on the cutting room
floor if she did. Dunaway's husband at the time, rock musician Peter Wolf, and
others close to her told her she should not do it. In her autobiography, she
said they were trying to protect her, worrying that people would confuse her
with the character and think badly of her. She never regretted her decision to
take the role, but she did slyly remark she wished she had people around her
later to talk her out of playing Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest (1981),
a film that had a negative effect on her career and image.
Philosophical Films (Dr. Jorn K. Bramann) essay also seen here: Philosophical Films
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Salon
(Cintra Wilson) recommendation
The Greatest Films
(Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Movie-Vault.com
(Oktay Ege Kozak) review
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale
Network (1976)
- Articles - TCM.com
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews also seen here: James Berardinelli
Long Che Chan
retrospective
Andrew Chan, also seen here: Long Che Chan
The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1976 [Erik Beck]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Brandon Stahl retrospective also seen here: Brandon Stahl
FT.com
/ FT Magazine / Defining Moment - Defining Moment: 'Network ... John Lloyd from The Financial Times,
Defining Moment: 'Network' predicts the rise of the shock-jock ... Sabrina Fairchild (uh, are these two related?) at Infamous Times, May 24, 2009
DVD Town
(John J. Puccio) dvd review
Reel.com dvd review [4/4] Betsy Bozdech
DVD Verdict
(Norman Short) dvd review
Network James Kendrick from Q Network
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Fred Hunter, 2-disc Special Edition
DVD
Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review
[Special Edition]
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd
review [4/5] [Special Edition]
DVD
Review e-zine dvd recommendation [Special
Edition] Guido Henkel
Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Tim Knight, 2-disc Special Edition
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Dan Heaton) dvd review 2-disc Special Edition
Two-Disc Special Edition, DVD Town [John J.
Puccio]
Monsters and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff
Swindoll] 2-disc Special Edition
DVD MovieGuide
dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson
iF Magazine dvd review [Special
Edition] Peter Brown
DVD
Authority.com (Christopher Bligh) dvd
review [Special Edition]
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Network Glenn Erickson from DVD Savant, Blu-Ray
High-Def Digest [M. Enois Duarte] Blu-Ray
Network (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Ryan Keefer from DVD Talk, Blu-Ray
Network - Blu-ray review (1 of 2) - DVD Town John Puccio from DVD Town, Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict Review - Network (Blu-ray) Darryl Loomis from DVD Verdict, Blu-Ray
Jason Overbeck retrospective [A+] also seen here: Jason Overbeck
Film Monthly (Jon Bastian) review
Film
Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice [Stuart Swineford]
Exclaim! dvd review James Keast
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
CineScene.com
(Michael Buck) review
Network Hal Erickson at Rovi
Reel
Bad Arabs: How
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] January 1, 1976
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] October 29, 2000
New York Times [Vincent Canby] (registration req'd)
Paddy Chayefsky's Notes for 'Network' - Film David Itzkoff from The New York Times, May 19, 2011
Stephen Colbert on 'Network': Great Film, or the Greatest Film ... David Itzkoff from The New York Times, May 19, 2011
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE VERDICT A- 93
The
weak have gotta have something to fight for.
Ain’t that the truth?
The
court doesn’t exist to give them justice.
The court exists to give them a chance at justice.
You know, so much of the time we're just lost. We say, "Please, God, tell us what is right; tell us what is true." And there is no justice: the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time, we become dead... a little dead. We think of ourselves as victims... and we become victims. We become... we become weak. We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law. But today you are the law. You are the law. Not some book... not the lawyers... not the, a marble statue... or the trappings of the court. See, those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are... they are, in fact, a prayer: a fervent and a frightened prayer. In my religion, they say, "Act as if ye had faith... and faith will be given to you." If... if we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves. And act with justice. See, I believe there is justice in our hearts.
—Frank Galvin (Paul Newman)
Once more, getting right into the teeth of the story, the film opens in a portrait of despair, with a man having bourbon and half-eaten doughnuts or a raw egg in his beer in a bar for breakfast before he attempts to solicit his attorney services through the obituary section by attending funerals—an ambulance chaser, a pathetic sight handing out his card, especially when seen through the darkened lens of Andrzej Bartkowiak’s cinematography, making it painfully difficult to watch, especially as time wears on. Set in the brown somber tones of old leather and wood, the audience bears witness to a thoroughly defeated man, humbled and humiliated into a crushing defeat at the hands of the world, groveling on his hands and knees, only seeing a blur through a dim alcoholic haze. This describes Frank Galvin, Paul Newman in perhaps his best role during his distinguished and mature years, a guy just getting by, barely even a part of the world anymore, hanging on by a thread at the fringe. Described as a lawyer with only three cases in four years, he’s a sorry sight, a demoralized man engulfed in a cloud of self pity. This is a rather extraordinary set up, and the film takes its time revealing the full extent of his fall from grace. Using a brilliant screenplay by David Mamet, adapted from a novel by Barry Reed, the old world Bostonian setting gives the film an intriguing historical reference point, a place where freedom was fought for and won, against heavy odds. The interior architecture is richly detailed and textured, from the interior of a bar to the space inside the law offices or a courtroom. Lumet’s virtuosity in filming architectural landscapes is as renowned and brilliantly conceived as his craftsmanship in creating interior landscapes. The granite steps leading into the courthouse serve a noble purpose, offering a distinctive element that represents the corridors of justice and power, where at times the two can become intertwined and inseparable, a place rarely even visited by the little guy. In Mamet’s eyes, the hallowed halls of justice serve the rich and powerful who can afford to pay for justice, while the rest are excluded in nearly every respect. Before these pillars of the court, Frank Galvin has joined the ranks of the excluded.
Jack Warden plays Mickie, Frank’s only friend left in the world, a bit gruff around the edges but a straight shooter, loyal and earnest, a guy who keeps throwing business Frank’s way during his drought, including a case coming up that has possibilities, one Frank isn’t the least bit prepared for, causing Mickie to walk out on him in disgust. But his luck changes when he meets a girl in a bar, Laura, a very serious looking Charlotte Rampling. In fact, the whole tone of the film shifts, becoming more animated and hopeful, where between bedroom affairs and dinner Frank spits out all this optimistic legalese that suggests the idealism of the law, not a perfect system, but one that at least offers the chance of justice. Here love and justice feel intertwined, as Laura’s presence seems to have resuscitated an otherwise extinct species. Pleading with Mickie to help him on the case, Frank’s life feels revitalized until he visits a young woman on life support that is the subject of his case, a girl in a coma since she was improperly anesthetized for a routine surgical procedure, the sight of which seems to both deflate and regalvanize his sinking spirits. Since that act took place in a Catholic hospital, the Bishop himself meets with Frank and offers him a cash settlement of $210,000 to make amends, an amount he’s all too eager to accept, but has a change of heart, knowing the truth of what happened would be covered up forever, where the rich, once more, pay to have their dirty work remain hidden from view. The obvious discrepancy between the two law firms is impossible not to notice, one is a staff of two men, while the other has literally dozens of people at the disposal of the lead attorney representing the Catholic Church, the smug, always overconfident picture of self-centered arrogance, James Mason as Ed Concannon, in another one of Mason’s slimy roles, playing a man the audience loves to hate. But he’s used to winning and he’s used to having his way. Unraveling slowly, the picture behind the scenes exposing just how he maintains that success rate is alarming to say the least.
The story turns on several plot twists, where the meticulous
nature of what lawyers do to prepare for a case is like a police procedural, as
they have to contact potential witnesses who may have moved or changed their
names, or chosen not to have anything to do with the case, or any number of
reasons why they don’t wish to be contacted by an attorney desperate to put
them on the stand. When Galvin’s lead
witness disappears in the dead of night, now off in an undisclosed location
somewhere in the
The Verdict Time
Out London
Newman as a washed-up lawyer, given one
last chance to prove himself with a rather squalid medical malpractice suit. David Mamet
has delivered a fast-paced, eloquent, and suspenseful screenplay which, like
all the best genre movies, plunges its hero so far into the abyss that it seems
impossible for him to climb out. And for once Lumet makes story rather than
performance his first priority, with the paradoxical result - so familiar in
American movies - that the acting sometimes reaches a near-invisible
perfection. Admittedly this is a legal Rocky, convincing rather than
realistic, witty rather than analytical, but it amounts to a far more effective
indictment of the US legal system than ...and justice for all, and is
the first courtroom drama in years to recapture the brilliance of the form.
Verdict, The (Collector's Edition) - DVD review (1 of 2) James Plath from DVD Town
In a way, Paul Newman's
emotional and wide-ranging performance in "The Verdict" earned him an
Oscar. Though he lost Best Actor that year to Ben Kingsley
("Gandhi"), his sixth Best Actor-nominated performance had to have
been good enough to make the Academy felt guilty. They decided to finally
bestow an Oscar on the venerable actor, albeit an honorary one, in 1986. Then,
as if they were still feeling a pang or two, they voted Newman a statue for the
most sub-par film and pedestrian performance of his stellar career. He finally
won an Oscar for "The Color of Money" (1986), rather than one of the
other films for which he was nominated: "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"
(1958), "The Hustler" (1961), "Hud" (1963), "Cool Hand
Luke" (1967), "Absence of Malice" (1981), "The
Verdict" (1982), or the much later "Nobody's Fool" (1994). But
that's the way it goes with institutions and ballots.
I personally think he ought to have won for "The Hustler," "Cool
Hand Luke," and, yes, "The Verdict." In this film, based on a
first novel by Boston attorney Barry Reed, Newman plays Frank Calvin, a
down-and-out attorney who's just about hit rock bottom. He's an alcoholic, his
wife is gone, he was almost disbarred, and his case load has come down to a
single one thrown his way by a good friend. All he has to do is handle an
out-of-court settlement for a personal injury case against a Catholic hospital
and two doctors--take the money and run. Though the Bishop (Edward Bins) wants
to settle for $210,000, once Frank actually sees the woman who went into the hospital
to have her third child and was given an anesthesia that it put her in a coma,
he can't do it. He's determined to take the case to court, despite the protests
of the woman's loved ones--his clients. But that's what makes this film
compelling. Fighting on behalf of a vegetative life is, ironically, what gives
Frank one final chance to rescue himself from a similar fate.
Written by one legend (David Mamet) and directed by another (Sidney Lumet), it
would have been hard for "The Verdict" to fail--which is why so many
Hollywood talents wanted to play the lead. Frank Sinatra even offered to do it
for free. In one of the copious bonus features we learn that Robert Redford
actually signed on to star, but insisted on so many revisions that it
completely sanitized the character and disillusioned both him and everyone
else. Enter Paul Newman, who liked the very things that Redford hated. He liked
the fact that this character starts out most unsympathetically. Frank Galvin is
so desperate that he reads the obituaries in the newspaper and goes to funerals
to hand out his business card to the bereaved. He's so down-and-out that he has
beer and raw egg for breakfast and plays the pinball machine each morning
hoping it will show that his luck has changed. He's sunk so low that he slumps
to the floor in an alcoholic stupor and has to be helped by his friend, Mickey
(Jack Warden).
But the lower the character, the greater the potential for that character to
grow and rise above it all, and the broad character arc that makes this film
interesting. Intelligent dialogue and economical yet information-saturated
scenes also make "The Verdict" one of the top courtroom dramas ever
made. (What are some others, you wonder? Lumet's "12 Angry Men,"
"Judgment at Nuremburg," "To Kill a Mockingbird," and
"Inherit the Wind," to name a few.) And while we're watching the
characters, Mamet works a nifty plot twist near the end which makes the film
come full-circle in an ironic (and satisfying) way.
There's also a killer supporting cast, with Charlotte Rampling convincingly
numb as a recent divorcee who becomes involved with Frank, and James Mason as
his courtroom rival. Typical of underdog films, Frank only has Laura (Rampling)
and Mickey to help him. The defense attorney has a team of 14 working on the
case. And as Frank quickly learns, the rich are the ones who have power. So
does the church, and so does Ed and his team. Frank's witnesses disappear, the
judge is openly biased, and his best evidence is struck from the record. You
think you've had a bad day?
"Your
honor," Frank says after the judge takes over (and sabotages) his
questioning of a witness, "if you're going to try my case for me, I wish
you wouldn't lose it." There are enough lines like this, and performances
to back them up, to make "The Verdict" a worthwhile and satisfying
film.
Though "The
Verdict" didn't win any Oscars, it was nominated for Best Picture,
Director, Screenplay, Actor, and Supporting Actor. Set in the '80s, it's still
highly relevant today, and Newman's performance is timeless. I can't think of
another down-and-out cinematic character that we come to care about as much as
this fellow and his crusade to save himself from himself.
Sound On Sight Louis Godfrey
Sidney Lumet, who passed away yesterday at age 86, was one of the great moral compasses in American cinema. His best films – 12 Angry Men, Network, Dog Day Afternoon – are challenges to consider our individual culpability and responsibility in the actions of our social institutions. Each of those films presented this challenge in a different way, and your favorite will likely be the one that inspired your personal consideration. I offer up my personal consideration…
There are people who drink and then there are people who drink. The line between the two may be fine, but the differences in the day-to-day are vast. For all that is written about alcoholism, what is often forgotten – what those who are or have lived with alcoholics know too well – is that drinking is a means of giving structure to your life. Drinking situates you in relation to your job, your family, and everything else in your life in a way that allows you to defer any responsibility and self-reflection. Drinkers, real drinkers, wallow in their pain and guilt, but also eek out assurances that nothing is their fault so that they never have to face the consequences of their actions. They move forward, going to work, going to church, coming home, but they have drown out that which is so central to being alive, the ability to take responsibility for themselves.
Frank Galvin is that kind of drinker. The opening shot of Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict (1982) shows everything you need to know about him. He stands alone, all but the barest of his profile hidden in shadows, at a pinball machine in a Boston bar. It’s midmorning, but you can tell that the glass of beer resting on the windowsill beside him is not his first of the day. Frank punches the buttons of machine, and we hear the clang of the ball rattling around the bumpers, then he pauses to take a sip from his mug, allowing the ball to slowly roll down the drain.
Lumet directed The Verdict from a screenplay by David Mamet, and on its surface it is a standard courtroom drama coupled with a familiar story of moral awakening. Frank, played by Paul Newman, is an ambulance-chasing attorney, and a pretty bad one at that, having been run out of more than a few funeral parlors while trying to solicit the bereaved. An old friend and former partner of Frank’s takes pity on him, and throws him a medical malpractice case: a young woman rendered permanently comatose when two doctors, at a hospital owned by the Archdiocese of Boston, gave her the wrong anesthetic during child birth. The message is clear, negotiate a settlement with the Church on behalf of the girl’s family, take your cut, and you will have enough money to drink yourself to death.
But when Frank goes to see the girl in the hospital, something washes over him, giving him his first jolt of true feeling in as long as he can remember. In the film’s most poignant shot, we watch two recently snapped Polaroids develop, showing the tubes running into the girl’s mouth, pumping food and oxygen into her body. What follows is fairly predictable – the refusal of the settlement, the back story of Frank’s decline, the nefarious trial judge, the opposition’s dirty tricks, the surprise witness that wins the case, and the double-crossing woman that almost breaks Frank’s spirit (a glaring example of Mamet’s propensity for misogyny). But it is not the ins and outs of that make The Verdict compelling; rather it is the depths to which the film probes the willingness of its main character to be accountable to himself and to others.
Lumet and Mamet present Frank’s conversion and crusade not as a noble act, but one of extreme selfishness. His decision not to settle the case before trial goes against the wishes of the people he represents – the girl’s sister and her husband, who need the money to start a new life in Arizona – and is not made in their best interests. “If I take the money, I’m lost,” Frank says, never mentioning the victim, who is already lost. The case becomes about his redemption, his recapturing of that spark of life he felt briefly in the hospital.
The brilliance of Newman’s performance is that there is actually little change in Frank’s character before and after his ‘moment of clarity.’ Newman plays Frank as drunk – a sad, tired drunk at first, and an energetic, hard-driven drunk later on, but always a drunk. There are moments of intense pain when Frank catches glimpses of the wreckage he leaves around him – as when a nurse calls him a whore and slams a door in his face – but Newman turns those famous blue eyes into glassy veneers with pinpoint pupils that betray Frank’s essential blindness to anything that is not straight ahead.
We see what Frank peripherally can’t, though, and ultimately the moral force of The Verdict is not in Mamet’s words but with Lumet’s camera. The main visual motif of the film is a long take that begins with the scene’s principle character loosely framed, and then a slow push into his face as the action unfolds, the effect of which is not only to anchor the character in specific space – Lumet may be unmatched in his filming of architecture – but to show that character’s relation to that space and to the institutions that dominate it. We see Frank dwarfed by the squalor of his apartment, and we see him belittled in a courtroom that wants to strip the last of his dignity away. But when the camera pushes in, we are reminded that he is an individual, and that he is not just a victim of these circumstances, but a participant in them as well. And as a man he is solely responsible for the fate of his own soul. (Conversely, when the camera pushes in on James Mason’s Ed Concannon, it is to show how comfortable and at ease one can be cloaked in corrupt power.)
The most famous of those long-take pushes comes near the end, when Frank delivers his summation to the jury, and implores them to embody the ideals of the law. He quotes Galatians – “Act as if you have faith,” the scriptural forbearer of the AA mantra, “Fake it ‘til you make it” – calling our desire for justice “a fervent and frightened prayer.” The plea is still selfish in origin, the “prayer” being as much for him as anyone, but it holds the hope of being able to reach out to another. To make amends, both litigious and personal.
The Verdict ends in Frank’s office. He has won the case, and he sits at his desk, sipping coffee. The phone rings, the deceitful lover on the other end, and the volume becomes almost deafening. Frank is not drinking at the moment, but he is still a drunk, and if he wants to go on living he first has to find a way to live with himself.
Filmworks - Robert McKee Robert McKee from Filmworks, BBC publications, 1993
Monthly Film Bulletin Richard Combs, February 1983
The Verdict Guilty as Charged, by Phyllis Deutsch
from Jump Cut, April 1983
Dialogue
on The Verdict Dave Linn and Phyllis Deutsch from Jump Cut, February 1984
The Parallax Review [Kyle Kogan]
The
Verdict (1982) - Articles - TCM.com
David Sterritt
Picturing Justice John Denvir, USF Law School
Film Freak Central Review [Jefferson Robbins]
Cinephile Magazine [Richard X] Richard Saad
The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1982 [Erik Beck]
The Verdict : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Earl Cressey from DVD Talk
DVD Savant Review: The Verdict (Collector's Edition) Glenn Erickson, 2-disc Collector’s Edition
dOc DVD Review: The Verdict (CE) (1982) Jon Danziger, 2-disc Collector’s Edition
UltimateDisney.com - 2-Disc Collector's Edition DVD Review with Pictures
DVD Verdict-Collector's Edition [Tom Becker] 2-disc Collector’s Edition
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] 2-disc Collector’s Edition
DVDTalk - Paul Newman Tribute Coll. [Paul Mavis]
DVD Verdict- Paul Newman: The Tribute Collection [Clark Douglas]
TheCinemaSource.com [Andrea Tuccillo]
Movie
Reviews UK Damian Cannon
George Chabot's Review of The Verdict
The Verdict Film Review 24.10.2007 Matt's Movie Reviews Matthew Pejkovic
Filmicability with Dean Treadway
Miscellaneous Round-Up Mark Harris from Frank Murtha’s Diary
The Verdict - Directed by Sidney Lumet • DVD Reviews • exclaim.ca James Keast
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (A.O. Scott)
BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD B+ 90
May
you be in heaven half an hour... before the devil knows you're dead
With a career that was spawned in Yiddish theater at the age of 4, working on Broadway both as an actor and director (productions listed here: Sidney Lumet), later finding work in television dramas, moving to feature films 50 years ago with the actor accentuated court drama 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), Lumet was married at one point to Lena Horne’s daughter and several years ago was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Academy Awards (2005), and up to the age of 83 continued to make terrific ensemble works that feature the breakdown of moral order as seen from the highly personalized vantage point of the individual.
A grim film that only grows grimmer, featuring ominous music from Carter Burwell that has a haunting funeral dirge feel, yet it’s a deliciously made heist gone wrong movie that tells the story through various character flashbacks revealing the circumstances that led up to the scene of the crime. Written by first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson, using an overlapping time chronology, these sequence fragments are fraught with details and clues that connect the characters together in ways they don’t even know themselves, giving the audience unique insight into the unraveling events. Something of a character study, events veer off the track from the opening nude scene where marital bliss turns sour, no explanation is offered, a dark omen that leads straight into the next sequence which is the heist itself, two back to back, in-your-face sequences that have an alarming level of intensity.
Calmly and methodically, Lumet showcases the men who planned the heist, two brothers who couldn’t be more opposite, real estate banker Philip Seymour Hoffman whose drug-addicted pulse barely registers and Ethan Hawke, a squirmy, always over-anxious kind of guy who is behind in his child support payments and spends his time drowning his sorrows in a corner lounge. Hoffman is so desperate for cash that he finds his mealy mouthed brother as just the right guy for the job, knocking off a tiny shopping mall jewelry store run by a lone, nearly blind, elderly employee. Hawke balks at the offer, but he’s so desperate for cash that he soon changes his mind, leading to disastrous consequences.
To ramp up the tension, Hoffman is married to Marisa Tomei, but she’s sleeping with Hawke, a dangerous double-edged sword that only begins to describe the kind of troubled world we’re entering. Through extremely deliberate direction, we’re smack dab in the middle of a family crisis where events are literally spiraling out of control, where the bonds between them were broken long ago, and this incident is only intensifying the severity of the rifts. It’s hard to believe that the most likable character in the film is a barely alive, creepy looking jewelry fence with criminal ties who relishes his opportunity to gain revenge through his understanding of the seedy world around him: “The world is an evil place. Some people make money from it, and some are destroyed by it.” With almost Shakespearean aplomb, Lumet leads his players to their inevitable fates, accentuating the sense of their isolated journeys along the way.
It’s great to see 83-year-old Sidney Lumet cranking out pictures, period (12 Angry Men was in theatres over half a century ago), let alone ones that are as enjoyable as Devil. Half the fun is watching a first-rate cast try to outdo each other without chewing up any scenery. The other half is in the disjointed, non-linear style screenwriter Kelly Masterson chooses to tell the story. Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman play siblings who, for various reasons, have fallen on hard times and decide to knock over a jewelry store that is, quite literally, a mom and pop operation – it’s owned by their parents (Albert Finney and Olympia Dukakis). Also, there’s a very naked Marisa Tomei. Devil droops a bit in the middle, but it’s a top-notch Hitchcockian thriller.
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Likewise on the comeback trail is Sidney Lumet, returning to the city and the subject of his greatest films. In its bare outlines, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a heist movie, with tapped-out brothers Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke conspiring to knock off the family jewelry store to pay down their debts. But Lumet calls it a melodrama, and with good reason, since once the crime goes horribly wrong, a lifetime worth of familial resentments comes surging to the surface. Shot in digital video as dingy as the deeds it depicts, the movie takes its time tightening the noose, giving Hoffman in particular the space to craft a masterfully sloppy performance that seems not only unstudied but unwritten, as if his strung-out bookkeeper were unraveling before our eyes.
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" is such a superb crime melodrama that I almost want to leave it at that. To just stop writing right now and advise you to go out and see it as soon as you can. I so much want to avoid revealing plot points that I don't even want to risk my usual strategy of oblique hints. You deserve to walk into this one cold.
Yet that would prevent my praise, and there is so much to praise about this film. Let me try to word this carefully. The movie stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers -- yes, brothers, because although they may not look related, they always feel as if they share a long and fraught history. Hoffman plays Andy, a payroll executive who dresses well and always has every hair slicked into place, but has a bad drug habit and an urgent need to raise some cash. Hawke plays Hank, much lower on the financial totem pole, with his own reasons for needing money; he can't face his little girl and admit he can't afford to pay for her class outing to attend "The Lion King." Hank looks more like the druggie, but you never can tell.
Andy suggests they solve their problems by robbing a jewelry store. And not just any jewelry store, but find out for yourself. He has it all mapped out as a victimless crime: They won't use guns, they'll hit early Saturday when the shopping mall doesn't have customers, the store's losses will be covered by insurance, and so on. Sounds good on paper, before everything goes wrong. And that's when the movie becomes intense and emotionally devastating.
These two brothers are capable of feeling emotions rare in modern crime films: grief and remorse. They cave in with regret. And they still need money; Andy learns that when you are heartbroken it is bad enough, but even worse when your legs may be broken, too. Meanwhile, their dozy father (Albert Finney) starts looking into the case himself, and that leads to a conversation with one son that Eugene O'Neill couldn't have written any better.
The movie fully establishes the families involved. Finney has
been married forever to Rosemary
Harris, and still loves her to pieces. Hoffman is married to Marisa
Tomei, who just keeps on getting sexier as she grows older so very slowly.
Hawke is divorced from Amy Ryan, who would happily see him in jail for
non-payment of child support. Although the film opens with Hoffman and Tomei
ecstatically making love in
The Japanese name some of their artists Living Treasures. Sidney Lumet is one of ours. He has made more great pictures than most directors have made pictures, and found time to make some clunkers on the side. Here he takes a story that is, after all, pretty straightforward, and tells it in an ingenious style we might call narrative interruptus. The brilliant debut screenplay by Kelly Masterson takes us up to a certain point, then flashes back to before that point, then catches us up again, then doubles back, so that it meticulously reconstructs how spectacularly and inevitably this perfect crime went wrong.
And it doesn't simply go wrong, it goes wrong with an aftermath we care about. This isn't a movie where the crime is only a plot, and dead bodies are only plot devices. Its story has deeply emotional consequences. That's why an actor with Albert Finney's depth is needed for an apparently supporting role. If he isn't there when he's needed, the whole film loses. As for Hoffman and Hawke, so seemingly different but such intelligent actors, they pull off that miracle that makes us stop thinking of anything we know about them, and start thinking only of Andy and Hank.
This is a movie, I promise you, that grabs you and won't let you think of anything else. It's wonderful when a director like Lumet wins a Lifetime Achievement Oscar at 80, and three years later makes one of his greatest achievements
Chicago
Tribune [Michael Phillips]
It sounds grandiose, comparing the greatest dramatic poet in
English to a defiantly unshowy film director. But just as Shakespeare started
screwing around with formulas and genres late in his career, resulting in what
are often classified as “problem comedies,” here we have 83-year-old Sidney
Lumet, the cinematic prince of his city (New York and environs), keeping his
audiences off-guard and on their toes in his latest picture, “Before the Devil
Knows You’re Dead.”
It is a crime story, very modest in scale, focusing on one
family’s misfortunes and recriminations. And like Lumet’s previous film, the
peculiar and underrated problem comedy “Find Me Guilty,” this one doesn’t
really fit any mold.
The writer is Kelly Masterson, a playwright making his
screenwriting debut. Lumet directs the script with the actor-centered
efficiency that has served him well over a surprising array of projects, from
“The Iceman Cometh” on television nearly a half-century ago, to his marvelous
streak in the ’70s and early ’80s that included “Serpico,” “Murder on the
Orient Express,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network,” “Prince of the City” and “The
Verdict.” In his latest, Lumet doesn’t so much play with your sympathies as
much as disregard them, paying attention to little things that add up to big
problems for the characters, things like robbery and drug abuse and murder.
“Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” begins and ends with
intimate moments of pillow talk, sensual at the start, murderous at the close.
Scene one finds Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei making love while on
vacation in Rio. It’s gratifying to see a film get right down to it,
introducing two of its key characters not through exposition and blah-blah, but
through hotel-room sex. Hoffman plays Andy, Tomei plays his wife, Gina. While
the nudity does not escape your notice, what’s remarkable about the scene is
the post-coital part, when this “old married couple” whom we’ve just met talk
about their lives in a roundabout way. The actors are terrific here, subtly
inferring that something is off between these two.
Scene two, labeled on-screen as “The Day of the Robbery,” is just
as good. Two men, one (Ethan Hawke) wearing a silly toupee and fake mustache,
drive up to a suburban strip-mall jewelry store in Westchester. Hawke’s
character, Hank, who we later learn is Andy’s brother, stays in the car while
the other man (Brian F. O’Byrne), carries a gun into the store, and the robbery
goes from bad to worse quickly.
The film fractures its chronology, shifting back and forth from
character to character, before and after the robbery. Andy knows his brother
Hank needs money. He needs it too: He is nursing a heroin addiction and playing
around with his employer’s funds in ways the law would not judge kindly. The
plan is to rob their own parents’ jewelry store, let them pocket the insurance
money and split the proceeds. A “victimless crime,” Andy purrs to Hank. Right
from the start we watch it unravel.
The cast is tiptop. Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris play the
wastrel brothers’ parents. In a small role, Amy Ryan (also in “Gone Baby Gone”)
plays Hank’s amusingly hostile ex-wife, constantly on the prowl for
child-support payments. Michael Shannon plays the vengeful brother of
the woman left a widow by the botched robbery. In a shakedown scene between
Shannon and Hawke, the former refers to the man’s sister becoming “quite all of
a sudden a widow,” which proves two things: Masterson has an ear, and Shannon
is a very witty actor.
Hawke is less so. In the Richard Linklater pictures “Before
Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” Hawke busted his butt trying to keep up with
Julie Delpy; here he busts his butt trying to keep up with Hoffman and Tomei.
(Hank’s having an affair with his brother’s wife.) Hawke is highly external and
tic-prone as a performer, and while he’s playing the sweatiest character in
this particular roster, you wish he weren’t so obvious.
There are other flaws. The film doesn’t so much build to a climax
as glide, zigzag-style, to its conclusion. Carter Burwell, who has done
wonderful, ironically charged music for the Coen brothers, contributes a score
that is oddly routine and overtly melodramatic. And in the end the script’s
elaborate flashbacks and flash-forwards are neither a help nor a hindrance to
our engagement.
For all that, the film is its own compelling entity. What you’re
left with, finally, is the pleasure of a wily director’s company. In much the
same way John Huston defied convention and predictability in the third act of
his directorial career, with films as odd and fresh as “Wise Blood” and
“Prizzi’s Honor,” Lumet is doing the same, right now.
World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The House Next Door [Steven Boone]
Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]
Reverse Shot [Brendon Bouzard]
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - Lars and ... - New York Magazine David Edelstein
Bad Relations : The New Yorker David Denby
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead reviewed. - By Dana Stevens - Slate
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Slant Magazine [Akiva Gottlieb]
REVIEW | Brothers in Lawlessness: Sidney Lumet's 'Before the Devil ... Elbert Ventura from indieWIRE
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead | Review - Screen International David D’Arcy
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - Filmcritic.com Movie Review Chris Cabin
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
eFilmCritic.com [Erik Childress]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Movie Review - Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - eFilmCritic Peter Sobczynski
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
Film-Forward.com
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Living in Cinema [Craig Kennedy]
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead Dan Lybarger from eFilmCritic
BeyondHollywood.com Movie Review Bodhi Grrl
Edward Copeland on Film (Odienator)
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
BBCi - Films Adam Smith
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead' sounds like Sidney Lumet's ... William Arnold from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
DVDBeaver Blu-ray DVD review [Gary Tooze]
Lumière Brothers – Auguste and Louis, founders of motion pictures
allmovie ((( The Lumière Brothers > Overview ))) Sandra Brennan
Though Thomas Edison
is often widely considered the father of "moving pictures," French
inventors Louis Lumière
and Auguste Lumière
were technologically and artistically of equal or greater importance to the
development of cinema. Born to Antoine Lumière, a noted portrait painter and
vendor of photographic supplies, Louis
and Auguste
attended a trade school, but Louis
suffered from chronic headaches and dropped out. He then began experimenting
with his father's photographic equipment and in so doing, developed a better
way to prepare photographic plates. Louis
subsequently built a factory to manufacture his innovation and by the
mid-1890s, he had become the primary maker of photographic products in
Their success encouraged Louis and Auguste to continue experimenting, and it was a demonstration of the Edison Kinetoscope in 1894 that inspired the brothers toward motion pictures. By the following year, Louis had created and patented the cinématographe, the device that changed the face of early cinema. A combination camera, projection device, and printer, the hand-cranked cinématographe differed from Edison's camera in that it was relatively compact and easy to transport while Edison's was cumbersome, noisy, and used 48 frames per second as opposed to Lumière's 16. With the cinématographe, the brothers were able to chronicle daily events outside the studio. Their first such film, La Sortie des Usines (1895), filmed workers leaving the Lumière factory at day's end. They made 19 more little films including the famed L'Arrivee d'un Train en Gare, and Les Repas de Bebe, as well as the early slapstick film L'Arroseur Arrosee (Watering the Gardener).
Such films and their invention were kept a secret and only
shown privately twice, until December 1895, when the brothers gave their first
public demonstration at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines.
Audiences were thrilled by the Lumières' invention and word of it spread like
wildfire. Soon, attending the cinema was all the rage and this led the brothers
to head to
Louis Lumière biography by Stephen Herbert from Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema
Auguste Lumière biography by Stephen Herbert from Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema
EarlyCinema.com biography
Film Heritage Part Four: The Lumière Brothers - sonandfoe.com biography
LUMIERE BROTHERS FILMS - HISTORY historical website
lumiere brothers historical website
The Lumière Brothers Pioneers of Cinema and Colour Photography, brochure from National Media Museum (pdf)
UCB Media Resources Center Exhibit: The Lumiere Brothers The Origins of Documentary Film
Institut Lumiere - English - Museum Lumière’s Autochromes
Adventures in CyberSound: Lumière, Auguste et Louis brief profile
Propaganda EARLY FILM HISTORY AND PROPAGANDA brief mention from film reference
Images - The Lumiere Brothers' First Films essay by Gary Johnson
The Oldest Movies essay by Chris Dashiell from CineScene (2000)
Auguste and Louis Lumière - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Autochrome Lumière - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale (in French)
Le musée Lumière (in French)
The films shown at the first public screening (Quicktime format) December 28, 1895, also featuring a program for the event
http://www.institut-lumiere.org/francais/films/1seance/accueil.html original films may be seen here
This is a Documentary about Louis Lumiere part 1 on YouTube (5:37)
This is a Documentary about Louis Lumiere part 2 (5:52)
Lumière Brothers and Early Motion Pictures 1890s (13 sec)
Lumière Brothers - Tracking Shot Of Lyon, France c.1898 (38 sec)
Lumière Brothers - The Little Girl And Her Cat (40 sec)
Louis Lumiere - New York,Broadway At Union Square(1896) (40 sec)
Lumière Bros-Panorama pendant l'ascension de la Tour Eiffel (42 sec)
Lumière Brothers - The Serpentine Dance (c.1899) (43 sec)
Louise & Auguste Lumière - L'arroseur arrose' - 1896 (43 sec)
Lumiere.Brothers-Chapeaux.a.Transformations.1895 (45 sec)
The first film ever "Exiting the Factory" (1895) (46 sec)
Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory by Andy Kwietniewski colorized (47 sec)
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1895) (48 sec)
Lumiere.Brothers-[The.Card.Game].(1896) (51 sec)
Lumière: L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895) (55 sec)
LUMIÈRE BROTHERS Circa 1895 www.LallouzInternational.com (1:04)
Lumiere.Brothers-Whole.Dam.Family.and.the.Dam ... (1:31)
Lumiere brothers : first film of the cinema! (2:45)
Lumiere.Brothers-Sky.Scrapers.of.New.York.City (2:54)
Freres Lumière:La France qui s'amuse (extract - mute,1898 ... (3:24)
Lyon - Freres Lumiere (3:56)
Early Lumiere Films (4:20)
Lumiere.Brothers-La.France.qui.travaille (5:45)
Liverpool Scenes -- Promio / Lumiere - 1896 / 1897 (6:00)
YouTube - The Lumiere Brothers' - First films (1895) (6:34)
Lumière Brothers - Fábio Pirajá (de 1895 a 1897) (6:35)
Lumiere Brothers - selection of silent shorts (7:29)
lumiere brothers (10:29)
Lunák,
Tomáš
ALOIS
NEBEL B 85
Czech Republic Germany (84 mi)
2011 Official site [cz]
Eastern European films often reflect a grim interior mood, especially
when rooted in history, where living under the boot of military occupation, an
imposed Soviet communist dictatorship and political repression only describes
the tip of the iceberg, where a closer examination often reveals scathingly
inhumane details. This film marks Tomás
Lunák's feature debut as a director and the first rotoscope animation done in
The Czech Republic, an interesting technique to use for such a realistic
historical overview. Just the opening
few shots set the tone for the film, where from out of total darkness comes the
first glimpses of light, soon recognized as a train heading down the tracks. Set in a small town located near the Polish
border in a peaceful area of Czechoslovakia’s Jesenik Mountains in 1989, just
days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are quickly introduced to Alois
Nebel, the stationmaster at a remote countryside railway station. Just as we think not much happens in this isolated
region, a stranger appears out of the darkness, seen earlier hanging around the
railway station, and he appears to be making a desperate attempt to cross the
border, though he may have had other intentions, without much luck apparently
as he is quickly captured. This incident
seems to trigger something in Nebel’s mind, where the German translation for
the word nebel is fog, as he inexplicably becomes withdrawn and
uncommunicative, as if retreating into a fog.
He is sent to an asylum where he witnesses the torture of the captured
man, who appears to be a mute, so it’s impossible for him to confess, which
triggers childhood flashbacks going back to the end of World War II.
Without offering any historical backdrop, the director assumes Czechs
are familiar with their own history, where the mountainous border regions of
Czechoslovakia were largely comprised of a German-speaking population, known as
the Sudetenland, where it was actually part of Germany until the end of World
War I when it became part of Czechoslovakia.
Germans continued to live in the region without incident, but with the
Nazi threat to invade Czechoslovakia, Hitler got Britain, France, and Italy to
sign the Munich Agreement in 1938 returning the Sudetenland
to Germany, a bone of contention with the Russians who occupied the Eastern
Czech territory at the end of the war, ruthlessly expelling all the Germans,
totalling a half million just from this region, including a young German girl
Dorothe, who befriended Nebel as a young boy, emblematic of a larger injustice
imposed by the Soviet Red Army, placing the Germans in concentration camps
where many died of starvation and disease.
It’s interesting to see the Germans portrayed in a sympathetic light
during World War II, especially since they occupied Czechoslovakia during the
war, but it’s the Russians that occupied the country militarily ever since and
are seen in the present still running corrupt black market businesses, cheating
the locals out of potential income, hoarding it all for themselves, seen as
drunken louts maintaining a monopoly on all incoming goods. The picture of state repression, seen by the
ruthlessly brutal way they run the asylum, is reminiscent of ONE FLEW OVER THE
CUCKOO’S NEST (1975), an Academy Award winning film and Best Director for Czech
compatriot Milos Forman, whose parents were both killed in Auschwitz.
The mute prisoner escapes, having his own traumatic war story, and
shortly afterwards Nebel is released, only to discover he’s lost his job at the
station, so he makes his way to Prague, which is undergoing a bureaucratic
restructuring under the newly elected democratic leadership of Vaclav Havel. But Nebel is homeless and destitute, sleeping
in railway stations until he’s befriended by the widow of a former railway man,
Kveta, who respects the work ethic and commitment of railway workers, always
standing up for them, including a few free meals for Nebel. It’s amusing to see the Russians moan about
being left out of the democratic picture, soon forced out of their jobs,
eventually forced to exit the country, which allows Nebel to have his former
job back in the countryside. The film is
told much like a historical fairytale with grim references to bleak times under
Soviet domination, which are never clearly explained and are simply woven
together into the multi-stranded narrative.
Nebel’s own mental disintegration reflects that of the nation which must
come to terms with their own dark history.
The film offers a quietly reflective tone throughout, featuring pensive
characters often seen staring out of windows, where an unusual guitar score
from Petr Kruzik is reminiscent of Neil Young’s haunting score of DEAD MAN
(1995). In a gorgeously designed storm
sequence where nature batters the mountainous region, what stands out is the
recurrent snow and rain continually pelting the countryside, expressing the
severity of existential alienation, a tone of Dostoyevskian angst, given a psychic
electro shock, where the audience may feel as discombobulated as Nebel. Lunák
attempts to combine many of the thematic elements reflective of the freedom and
optimism of the Velvet Revolution, where having finally gotten
rid of the Russians, people are given the opportunity to simply live their
lives.
Based on the graphic novel of the same name, the bleak and
strangely haunting Alois Nebel uses black and white rotoscopic animation
to capture both the aesthetic of the original text and the tone of a story that
links the modern
It's a complex work, connecting the history of the Central European region to
modern displacement and anarchic sensibilities, made simple by ethereal,
languid imagery that captures the essence of every lingering image of
snow-covered landscapes and stark environments.
Flashing back to a WWII conflict and the many border crossings in
Institutionalized when events from his past – and the geographic past, as
indicated metaphorically by the connecting railways and constant train imagery,
channelling Closely Watched Trains – drive him mad, he leaves years
later to find the world a very different place that no longer has a use for
him.
But this isn't just a despondent look at politics, as there is a sliver of hope
when Alois meets the widowed Kveta (Marie Ludvíková), which also adds an element
of peril and tension when their lives intersect with a Polish murderer with his
own link to the past.
Because there are many layers and themes peppered throughout these plot points
and storylines, we're left with more to consider than the compelling animation
and constant storms acknowledging the recent flood devastation in the area.
It could be problematic for some viewers that the greater appreciation for this
text requires some historical knowledge going in, but the humanistic element
and natural flow of the piece work well enough to compensate.
Sure to strike a chord with certain viewers and stand the test of time, Alois
Nebel is an impressive and thoughtful work from a new filmmaker to keep an
eye on.
User reviews from imdb Author: kyle-165-646561 from
I have been living in the area where this film takes place (today it is
called Jesenik, Czech Republic) for 15 years, A main theme in the film is the
deportation of millions of ethnic Sudeten Germans from the Sudeten Land (up to
95% of the original population in this area was German) and were replaced with
an assortment of peoples from various regions from Czechoslovakia, Romania, and
Greeks (who themselves were exiled from Greece after a civil war). This issue
is very sensitive even today, however this issue is present in many of today's
"civilized" societies and countries: the local population is forcibly
removed by a violent and armed population. The history of the world is about
conflict and forced migrations. The
How can one live with one's self having participated in the epitome of inhuman
behavior? How does one justify such behavior to their self in order to maintain
a facade of humanity? What about revenge by the people who have suffered the
maximum injustice? It is easy to demonize others, but how do people who engage
in demonic acts justify their behaviour as morally correct.
These themes are universal and take place in every culture and throughout
history. Alois Nebel is just 1 small story, just 1 little man trying to make
sense of the injustice and inhumane behaviour of fellow humans, he finds
comfort in reading the timetables of the train schedule, as if the times are
solid facts he can build his existence upon in a world of disguised brutality.
His story takes place in a small mountain valley in
Alios Nebel's tale is told within one milieu - post WWII expulsion of Sudeten Germans
from
Alois
Nebel Review (2011) - The Spinning Image
Graeme Clark
1989, and in this area of
According to the filmmakers, when adapting this graphic novel for the screen
their chief inspiration was Sin
City, but while that was aiming for a viscerally broad appeal to hip
audiences, Alois Nebel couldn't have been more different, an ominous example of
mistrust among the Eastern Europeans at the fall of Communism, and one man
caught up in it, yet remaining a marginalised character. Poor old Alois is
middle-aged now, and even throughout the rest of the film he's not giving
anything away if he can help it, making for a rather blank protagonist for whom
the viewer has to piece together the clues of what we see of his past and
present to understand what is going on in his troubled mind.
Naturally with such a specific rendering of a place and time, it helped to be
familiar with the politics and upheaval of the Czech region it depicted, for if
you were not the filmmakers refused to spoonfeed you the facts behind what has
provided such turmoil. What you can work out is that when Alois was a boy, and
the Nazis had lost World War II, the German population of his homeland were
carted out of the area, this in spite of them having lived there for some time.
This was excused because their countrymen in
Things have not much improved for him since, as we see when he tries to help
the mute but ends up in a mental asylum getting shock treatment; whether he
actually needs that is a contentious point, but the story moves on unafraid to
be confusing as Alois finally makes a connection with a bathroom attendant,
Kveta (Marie
Ludvíková), which may allow him some contentment, though not before his
assisting of the mute leads to the resolution of a revenge plotline. All the
way through we are told in passing about the state of the nation, as the
Russians leave and Vaclav Havel achieves the Presidency, with asides from the
characters around Alois about what they think about all this: seems nobody is
really satisfied with anything much.
But what was most arresting about the work was not so much its moral maze than
its visual style, every shot rotoscoped with actors and sets and rendered in
stark black and white (with a dose of grey for definition). It is this utter
lack of colour which could have been indicative of the cliché Eastern European
art movie with all the miserabilism that brings with it, and it was true they
didn't shy away from that, but that could have strengths as well as weaknesses.
The atmosphere of unease and grimness was so thick that many would find this
offputting, and it certainly was not an entertainment for fans of the kind of
cartoons which filled the planet's multiplexes, but this part of the world had
a rich history of challenging animation, and Alois Nebel could be seen as an
addition to that tradition. But this was going to mean so much more to those
who had experience of its issues, so if you did give it a go, you might be
appreciating its artistry if you had not. Music by Petr Kruzík.
Entertainment
Maven [Matthew Hodgson]
Tomás Lunák’s Alois Nebel was my final screening at TIFF 2011, a whole five days ago. I was maintaining a frantic pace of screening and reviewing, but it caught up with me in the end. I picked this film on a whim, because I am a fan of animation, especially foreign animation, and it looked dark enough to be up my alley. Alois Nebel was not the film noir murder mystery that I thought it would be, in fact it turned out to be something completely different. The film absorbed me from start to finish and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. It’s not that the film is disturbing or keeping me awake at night, it’s just a fine example of something different, executed almost flawlessly.
The story is set in 1989 and follows a middle-aged train dispatcher, named Alois
Nebel, who works in
The film is entirely in black-and-white and uses rotoscope animation, meaning that actual live-action footage was shot and drawn over top of using computer animation (rotoscope animation could also be done by hand). This unique process gives the film the fluidity of a live-action film, while allowing the director the almost limitless degree of artistic freedom that comes with animated projects; the scope of the artistic vision is only limited by the imagination and skill of the director and animators. Check out A Scanner Darkly for another example of rotoscope animation. The combination of black-and-white and rotoscope animation is stunning to watch, and immediately sets the sombre mood of the film.
None of the characters seem to be very joyous in the film, and the setting seems oppressive. These points are hammered home by the barrels of hard liquor and cartons of cigarettes that the characters consume throughout the film, and the numerous interactions with authority figures, such as soldiers, guards, sanitarium orderlies, doctors, etc. One does not immediately identify with Alois, but as we learn about his past, and the nature of his country in 1989, it is hard not to feel for the man.
I don’t feel comfortable commenting too deeply on the quality of the voice acting during the film, as it was in a foreign language, but I can say that the voice acting never detracted from the experience, and seemed convincingly emotional at the right times.
Alois Nebel is certainly a bit of a depressing film, but there are
fulfilling moments. I’m having a difficult time explaining why I am still
thinking about the film. The characters, story and visuals certainly possess a
sort of ‘je ne sais quoi’ that must be experienced rather than discussed. Alois
Nebel will inevitably be embraced by fans of art-house and foreign films,
but I urge adventurous viewers to check it out when they are feeling like a
totally different experience from mainstream North American cinema. I still
feel haunted by the pasts of the downtrodden characters in Alois Nebel,
but also stunned into silence by the otherworldly beauty of a lonely train,
rolling loyally down the track.
Ferdy
on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Fr.
Dennis at the Movies [Dennis Zdenek Kriz]
Glued
To The Seat [Alan Harris]
The
Film Emporium [Andy Buckle]
Bonjour
Tristesse (English) great photos
Tomás
Lunák Talks Alois Nebel | AWN | Animation World Network Bill Desowitz interviews the director,
January 20, 2012
The
Hollywood Reporter [Kirk Honeycutt]
Lungin, Pavel
TYCOON: A NEW RUSSIAN (Oligarkh) B 83
Russia Germany
France (123 mi) 2003
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Taking cues from Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America and GoodFellas, this Russian mob film is, frankly, not tall enough to get on the ride with the big boys. Charismatic Platon (Vladimir Mashkov) invents a scheme that will allow him to, so to speak, borrow from Peter to pay Paul and gain during the transaction. He invites his three best friends to join him, but as their wealth and power grow their youthful trust begins to break apart. The picture also includes that creaky subplot (also in Scarface) in which Platon woos the most beautiful girl in the world and quickly loses interest. As in Citizen Kane, everything occurs in flashback after Platon's death. Tycoon takes place during the Gorbachev years, and director Pavel Lungin no doubt hoped some of that political juice would enhance his carbon-copy story.
Film Journal International (Rex Roberts) review
The highest-grossing homegrown film in Russian history,
Tycoon: A New Russian obviously appealed to an audience eager to make sense of
the recent past. Director Pavel Lounguine (Taxi Blues, Luna Park, The Wedding)
helped write the script from the novel The Big Slice, a roman à clef based on
the life and times of billionaire Boris Berezovsky, the most powerful of the
so-called 'oligarchs' who profiteered from the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Berezovsky, once described by Forbes as 'the godfather of the Kremlin' (he sued
the magazine), is said to have been the richest man in Russia. A former
mathematics professor with a genius for quasi-legal business schemes, he
parlayed a share in an auto dealership into a worldwide financial empire. In
the '90s, a cunning capitalist willing to deal with corrupt bureaucrats,
ruthless mobsters and former KGB members could make money as long as he had the
stomach to cheat, steal and murder.
Tycoon, then, is Russia's Godfather (the director makes the comparison
himself), although at just over two hours, it can't do justice to its story.
Set between 1985 and 2000, the film portrays the rise and fall of Plato
Makovski (Vladimir Mashkov as the Berezovsky character), tracking his fantastic
transformation from punk economist (advocating Adam Smith in the land of Marx)
to fabulously wealthy and bitterly cynical entrepreneur. As a way to compress
the narrative, Lounguine employs a tried-and-true device, beginning at the end--Plato's
assassination--and proceeding through a series of flashbacks prompted by the
investigation of an honest judge named Chmakov (Andrei Krasko). It's Chmakov's
thankless task to discover the truth behind the financial double-crosses,
political double-dealings and uncomradely betrayals that have led to Plato's
spectacular demise. (A luxury Mercedes is no match for an anti-tank missile.)
Despite its filthy-rich material, Tycoon comes a cropper. The movie lunges from
vignette to vignette, one scene intended to establish character, another to
further plot, a third to explain (often in vain) the complicated relationships
between the players and their get-obscenely-rich-quick schemes. Yet the parts
don't add up to a whole. Plato's gang of four (Sergei Oshkevich as Viktor,
Alexandre Samoilenko as Moussa, Mikael Vasserbaum as Mark, Levani Uchaineshvili
as Larry) progress from a ragtag bunch of intellectual wannabes to
caviar-guzzling nouveau-riche wiseguys in a blink of a frame, the director
relying on the universal language of American gangster films to telegraph their
triumphs and trials. In short, Lounguine has taken, if not an original story,
an amazingly real one, and turned it into a spaghetti eastern, reducing a
Dostoyevskian saga to a Leonean melodrama.
According to an article published in the English-language Moscow Times, the
discredited but unrepentant Berezovsky is rumored to have financed Tycoon in an
effort to rehabilitate his image. The movie indeed presents him as a
sympathetic figure (aided by the fact that actor Mashkov is a Russian
heartthrob). In March, however, Berezovsky and novelist Dubov, who prior to his
writing career was an oligarch as well, were arrested in London on charges of
fraud dating back to the mid-'90s.
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [1/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Mark R. Leeper review [+3 out of -4..+4]
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3.5/4]
Variety (Deborah Young) review
The Boston Phoenix review Tom Meek
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
San Francisco Chronicle (G. Allen Johnson) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
TSAR
France (116 mi) 2009
Tsar Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily
It takes a brave
filmmaker to follow in the footsteps of Sergei Eisenstein. Pavel Lungin has the
daring and the resources (a reported $15million budget) but Tsar is
likely to remain merely an intriguing but far from satisfying footnote to the
Eisenstein classic Ivan The Terrible. Lungin focuses on Ivan The
Terrible’s relationship with Philip the Metropolitan of Moscow and what became
a defining moment in the struggle for the soul of Russia.
The mix of
personal psychology and the wider machinations of the conflict between church
and state lends the film a strange ‘ Sokurov meets The Tudors’ vibe that
will please neither lovers of conventional costume drama nor those in search of
more trenchant fare. Lungin’s reputation may attract interest in some
territories (France, Russia) but Tsar is likely to face an uphill
struggle in most markets.
Described by
Lungin as a metaphor for Russia past and present, Tsar begins in 1565 as
Tsar Ivan IV (Pyotr Mamonov) grows increasingly paranoid at the threat to his
territory from both advancing Polish armies and internal enemies. A personal
militia is created to keep the peace but the bloodshed and injustices it
perpetrates prompt the head of the Russian Church to resign. The Tsar appoints
his childhood friend Philip (Oleg Yankovski) as replacement. Philip’s honesty
and devotion place him at odds with a ruler who has come to consider himself
God’s representative on earth. Ivan even declares that there is “no greater sin
than disobeying the will of the Tsar.”
Distinguished by
the painterly compositions of cinematographer Tom Stern, Tsar is a
handsome-looking enterprise but suffers from something of an identity crisis.
On one level it offers the traditional delights of an old- fashioned costume
drama including lusty hand-to-hand-combat, thundering hooves across snow-dusted
plains, condemned men fighting for their lives against the might of a ferocious
bear and suitably demented lackeys who will follow their leader to hell and
back. An appearance from Jack Palance or Anthony Quinn would not seem out of
place.
On a different
level, the film strives to get inside the mind of the Tsar, shifting into
Shakespearean territory as he confronts the dark demons of his imagination in
the draughty corridors of a dark palace. The two contrasting approaches never
gel in a tale that seems to lurch from extremes, especially as the tone of The
Tsar grows increasingly overwrought. One moment armies are engaged in
mortal combat, the next the Tsar is being carried aloft through white clouds of
Spring blossom. That may very well reflect the reality of 16th century Russia
but it makes for an indigestible narrative.
The two leading
actors provide a suitable study in contrasts with Yankovski bringing a quiet
dignity to his man of faith and Mamonov relishing the wild-eyed excesses of his
rampant tyrant. Mamonov delivers more than a one-note performance though,
conveying some sense of the ruler’s doubts and the very human failings that he
is only too willing too sweep aside for the greater good of his long-suffering
people. The clash between earthly power and loyalty to a higher calling
resembles the heart of Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons but Lungin’s
film has neither the focus nor dramatic force to match that Oscar-winning classic.
Cannes. "Tsar" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 18, 2009
Deborah Young at Cannes from The
Hollywood Reporter, May 18, 2009
Derek Elley at Cannes from Variety,
May 17, 2009
festival Cannes Festival Notice on
the death of Russian actor Oleg Yankovsky
Lutsik, Petr
OKRAINA A- 93
aka: THE OUTSKIRTS
Russia
Using the same
film name as the 1932 Boris Barnet film, also using the distinct humor in the
midst of the drama, which was a similar Barnet attribute, or characters living
in harmony with the Russian landscape, otherwise, these are two entirely
different films. Filmed in a very bleak
black and white, this is a strikingly original, slowly evolving film about the
arduous task to reclaim justice in a lawless world, featuring men who are as
part of the landscape as the earth itself, an allegory on the changing times
and customs, showing how modernity has replaced the fruits of the farmer’s hard
labor with nameless, faceless men who hold all the positions of money and
power. The slow pace of the film and the
storytelling is superb, matched by equally stunning Russian music written by
Gavriil Popov and Georgi Sviridov, who was a student of Shostakovich.
The story begins
in the open farmland of the Urals at a time when oil was being discovered, and
the land was divided and sold to an unnamed person with the aid of a Party
official. Thus begins a long, difficult
journey of about a half dozen farmers to reclaim their land. These are hardened, durable men whose faces
look as if they have been etched in granite.
They know how to survive the mountains, the worst elements of weather, even
the winter cold without batting an eye; they are used to knowing what it takes
to survive. They use raw, tortuous
interrogation techniques to find out answers, submerging men under the ice,
later having to thaw them out to bring them back to life, beating other men
into a pulp before their family and children, threatening to burn the children alive,
and of course, the worst case scenario, which was saved for the Party official
himself, “I think I’ll gnaw on him, tenderly,” where the official dies from
fear after his confession. But these men
huddle together under their collective coats in the snow, eat their soup, read
poetry in the dim firelight, and generally remain true to their code. The closer they get to the landowner in the
city, time seems to pass closer and closer from the past to the present,
starting on horseback, moving to a tractor, eventually riding a train into the
city.
They are shot at
by the Party official’s son. One of the
men tells the others to go ahead, and he slowly walks back after the sniper,
his footsteps the only sound that can be heard, alone in a snowstorm, it has
all the elements of a Clint Eastwood or Lee van Cleef spaghetti western
showdown. When they arrive at the
skyscraper which houses the landowner, they declare, “It looks like an Egyptian pyramid.” They build a fire and camp outside before
entering in clean business suits the next morning, where they are sneered at by
the owner who thinks they are just a bunch of rural hicks who have no idea of
what constitutes good business sense, arrogantly showing off his oil samples
from all corners of the earth, including the United States, where he announces
the oil is “thin.” All eventually goes
up in flames as the men can be seen heading back to their land, bringing the
former landowner’s secretary in tow, later seen on their plows, cheerfully back
to the earth. The director died of a
heart attack after this, his first, film.
Okraina Andrew James Horton from Kinoeye
As a sneak preview to the upcoming
1999 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (see this week's other Kinoeye article),
Kinoeye brings you a revised version of an article which appeared in this
section some months ago: a look at a contemporary take on some early Russian
classics.
Many Soviet films of the twenties
and thirties, despite the best efforts of the Party, are powerfully revealing
windows on the nature of the Russian soul. With his controversial graduation
film Okraina (Outskirts, 1998), Peter Lutsik transplants the heroes of
these early classics into the contemporary setting of ruthless capitalism to
see if they can survive.
Things are not looking good for the
collective. Its leader has sold its land to an oil prospecting company and the
dogs are to be set on the collective's members if they dare step foot on it.
Kolya, therefore, decides to rally a small band of men to fight for their land
back so they can plough it once again. They are not concerned with the little
men who guard the land - they are just acting on orders - they want to find the
man at the top. As they make their way through the harsh Russian winter, they
become ever more violent in their means, torturing and killing all who stand in
their path. Their toughness is admirable, enduring an icy night in the open
country with nothing more for shelter than their coats pulled up into a tent;
but they show amazing compassion too. They are deeply moved by poetry, memories
of the war and the death of one of their numbers. Above all, they have a simple
but honest sense of justice, which allows no room for duplicity or subterfuge.
Those who cross this code are dealt with harshly.
Eventually, their long journey leads
them to
Okraina, a title shared with a film
by the Soviet director Boris Barnet, pays more than a passing homage to Russian
classics. Its atmosphere is steeped in their spirit. The film was shot in black
and white on specially made film-stock designed to recreate the 1930s look in
every frame and even the characters belong to another age. At a post-screening
discussion at the film's UK premiere in London (not long after its European
premiere in Berlin), Lutsik described his love for the cinema of the 20s and
30s, saying that in them horses even seem to gallop in a different way than
they do in later films, and that black and white is in fact "more colourful"
than colour.
In particular, Lutsik conjures up
the world of Chapayev
(1934) by the Vasilyev "brothers" Georgi and Sergei (who in fact were
not related at all) and the 1930s films on the theme of collectivisation. Lutsik
even had Chapeyev's original score, written by composer Gavriil Popov
[more on Popov and the Russian avant garde in this week's Music section],
transcribed from the film (the original manuscript was lost) and re-recorded
for use in Okraina.
Chapayev succeeded as a film because its hero, the
Civil War commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev, was a distinctly Russian
character rather than the "Soviet New Man," which was at the time
irritatingly omnipresent as a role model for good citizens. Indeed Chapayev,
the man, the legend and the film still hold a heroic status in
The film is, therefore, a battle
between old and new
Lutsik's sense of pastiche is perfect. Okraina leans heavily on its source material and yet manages to maintain its own stature completely. Pastiche may not be to everyone's taste, and Lutsik seemed quite embarrassed that he had fathered a film of this sort which had gone on to be so successful. Almost apologising, he explained that it was a student film and had never been intended for show at international film festivals - like Chicago and Berlin, both of which it won awards at. Yet Okraina's rehashing of old themes has a remarkably fresh flavour to it and has an uplifting sense of humour throughout, which defies the bleakness and violence of the story. Ultimately, its final message is that whilst life may be grim and unbearably tough, the Russian soul will survive it all.
Lvovsky, Noémie
Noémie Lvovsky - uniFrance biography
In 1986, after obtaining a degree in modern literature and film studies, Noémie Lvovsky enrolled in the screenwriting department at the FEMIS film school. She scripted several shorts, including her diploma film, "Dis-moi oui, dis-moi non," which won awards at various festivals. Lvovsky has also worked with Arnaud Desplechin as casting director for "La Vie des morts" and "The Sentinel" (which she co-wrote). Her first feature, "Forget Me" (1995, starring Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi as a young Parisian woman clinging on to an ex-lover who wants to be rid of her), won awards at the Venice, Belfort and Berlin film festivals. Lvovsky then participated on the screenplays for Philippe Garrel's "Coeur fantôme," Yolande Zauberman's "Clubbed to Death" and, with Florence Seyvos, "Ferme les yeux et creuse la neige." In 1996–1997, Lvovsky directed "Petites" for the ARTE television channel, about four school girls in the 1970s. This tale resurfaces in "Life is for Loving," her second feature, which won critical and public acclaim upon its release in 1999 and went on to win the Jean Vigo Prize and the Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival.
Noémie Lvovsky profile from Gazillion Movies
Cineuropa - Feature Films - Noémie Lvovsky
The French film industry in the feminine Franck Garbarz from Positif magazine (2001)
Contemporary French women filmmakers -- W<SMALL>ILSON</SMALL> 59 ... Emma Wilson from Oxford Journals (2005)
FORGET ME (OUBLIE-MOI) A- 94
France (95 mi) 1994
This
is no time to swallow anger
This is no time to ignore hate
This is no time to be acting frivolous
Because the time is getting late
This is no time for private vendettas
This is no time to not know who you are
Self knowledge is a dangerous thing
The freedom of who you are
This is no time to ignore warnings
This is no time to clear the plate
Let's not be sorry after the fact
And let the past become out fate
There is no time
There is no time
There is no time
There is no time
This is no time to turn away and drink
Or smoke some vials of crack
This is a time to gather force
And take dead aim and attack
This is no time for celebration
This is no time for saluting flags
This is no time for inner searchings
The future is at head
This is no time for phony rhetoric
This is no time for political speech
This is a time for action
Because the future's within reach
This is the time
This is the time
This is the time
Because there is no time
—Lou Reed “There Is No Time” (1989, excerpt)
First time writer and filmmaker Lvovsky, co-scripted with Emmanuel Salinger, Marc Cholodenko, and Sophie Fillières, shows a keen ear for the kind of small talk superficiality that hides deeper frustrations, where “self knowledge is a dangerous thing.” People speak in short, choppy sentences, with no more than 4 or 5 words at a time, speaking fragmented sentences, living fragmented lives, where the film is filled with such desperate, unromantic people who live only for themselves, where it’s easy to get sick of them after awhile. To the music of Lou Reed’s “There is No Time” and Patti Smith’s “Distant Fingers,” Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi is onscreen nearly the entire film as Nathalie, a mid-twenties French woman whose agenda is searching for men, a sex addict, like people searching for drugs solely because she doesn’t know what else to do, so she drifts from partner to partner, angry, clueless, and obsessively fearful about being left alone, so she lives with Antoine, who claims he loves her, but he’s too nice to excite her. So she harasses another man, Eric, who just dumped her, but she refuses to accept no from this guy, and in a tortured, twisted gesture even proposes marriage to him, despite the fact he’s a self-centered lout who has nothing but contempt for her. So she goes after her best friend’s guy, even getting naked under the sheets where he plays her Lou Reed, but the two simply bore each other to death.
Always running away more devastated than ever, Nathalie is nearly always
on the edge of being homeless and alone, where she hears the doors slamming in
her face with the sounds of rejection ringing in her ears: “You hate being alone. You’re closing up. You’re empty.
You dig at your emptiness.
Goodbye.” Tight close ups reveal
a world closing in on her, where the jittery hand-held camera accentuates the
frantic anxiety of always living for the moment, drinking, arguing, chatting
aimlessly, searching endlessly in all the wrong places with all the wrong
people, best exemplified by hitting on a man and taking it in the ass in a
public men’s urinal, then asking the guy “How was it?” The character of Nathalie spares nothing in
her fierce, seemingly improvised performance which is as raw as the scathing
emotions revealed in THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1973), reminiscent of the
complete emotional exposure, stripping herself bare, emptying her soul onscreen
which provides the powerful and overwhelming sense of crisis going out of
control, culminating in a car wreck.
Afterwards, she has no one, nowhere to go and watches other people on
the street passing her by, all seemingly heading somewhere, so she calls
Antoine from a phone booth, pregnant and alone, filled with self-loathing,
telling him “I’m not worth knowing. I
know very well I’m a pest. I’m hard, I’m
damaged, I’m cold, cruel, a poison, and a burden. Do you still want to see me?” She smiles, revealing her nervous agitation
underneath, giggling with fear in a final freeze frame.
User comments from imdb Author: crisbob from SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE SPAIN
It is the story of people who don't succeed in realizing their lives and themselves. It could happen anywhere but once more it shows that, very often, love can bring sorrow and unhappiness if one demand too much of it. Noémie Lvovsky has taken the best of ordinary actors and of a common story. The picture is very good.
Chicago Reader (Ted Shen) capsule review
Nathalie, who occupies nearly every frame of Noemie Lvovsky’s 1994 first feature, is a sexual drifter in her mid-20s, angry, clueless, and obsessively fearful of loneliness; she feels stifled by her live-in lover, harasses another man who’s dumped her, and puts the make on her best friend’s boyfriend. Lvovksy uses tight close-ups to convey emotional claustrophobia, and the jittery handheld camera adds to the nervous energy and sense of unpredictability. Her young, disenfranchised characters spend their time drinking, arguing, and chatting aimlessly, yet Lvovsky (who coscripted with Emmanuel Salinger, Marc Cholodenko, and Sophie Fillieres) has a keen ear for the kind of small talk that betrays deep frustration; these are desperate, capricious, unromantic people, but we come to respect their brutal honesty and sympathize with their search for emotional refuge. As Nathalie, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi gives a fierce, seemingly improvised performance; the film dares to portray a woman as a frightful sexual prowler who may have found peace at the end.
THE MOVIE GUIDE : Oublie-Moi - International Herald Tribune Joan Dupont
Nathalie (Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi) wanders from phone booth to Métro, adrift in Paris. She loves Eric (Laurent Grévill), who has left her; she does not love Antoine (Emmanuel Salinger), who loves her; in between, she starts something with Fabrice (Philippe Torreton), the boyfriend of her best friend, Christelle (Emmanuelle Devos). On a self-destructive kick, she will find what she has been looking for - rejection. Noémie Lvovsky has chosen, in her first film, to portray a group of moderns dancing a sad variation on "La Ronde," without love, without light hearts, without sex. This generation of aging adolescents has pale cheeks and glassy eyes - too much Métro and TV. They exchange phone numbers listlessly, without conviction. Gifted actors, who seem to have played these roles before (Bruni-Tedeschi made her mark as a near-hysteric in "Les gens normaux n'ont rien d'exceptionnel"), have moments of brio; at first, you think sparks will fly, but the director keeps leading them down dark stairwells, dampening all hope. No doubt the movie is true to a certain generational malaise, relentlessly observed. But although it bears the earmarks of Cassavetes's influence, there is no subversive humor or real abandon; a study in derailment and alienation without a breather can make for a stifling hour and 35 minutes.
YouTube - Oublie Moi / Noemie Lvovsky (1:38)
Naley - oublie moi
(3:15)
Oublie-moi
(4:45)
LIFE DOESN’T SCARE ME A 97
France Switzerland
Chicago Reader (Ted Shen) capsule review
This 1999 coming-of-age drama follows four girls from high school
to college in the
Reel.com: San Francisco International Film Festival Rod Armstrong
Life Doesn't Scare Me is a bracingly
honest and original depiction of schoolgirl adolescence on par with Jane Campion's
Two Friends and Margaret
Atwood's novel Cat's Eye. In each of these works, the sexual and
emotional lives of young women are portrayed with an eye toward the danger
inherent when hormones are being produced in record numbers. In a cinematic
world which prefers to simplify and stereotype girlhood, Life Doesn't Scare
Me is a refreshing departure.
The film begins disconcertingly with an abrupt and confusing introduction to the four main characters and many subsidiary ones. Once each character becomes defined, it's easier to enjoy the various episodes in their lives. Emilie, overweight and with an emotionally disturbed mother, stands out as the most troubled. Stella is the redheaded spitfire who tells off teachers with vigor. Ines and Marion are both quiet, with long, dark hair; it's often hard to separate them in the film's initial scenes.
These early scenes, involving crushes on boys, blood oaths, and problems at home are the highlight. When the film flashes forward to three years later, it becomes more predictable. Fortunately, the same four excellent actresses continue playing their characters, so the transition isn't jolting. When three of the girls go to Italy before their senior year (Emilie is left behind for undisclosed reasons), the pursuit of boys intensifies and virginities are lost.
Life Doesn't Scare Me scores big when depicting the battles that occur between friends, the worries over grades and who's going to graduate, and the immaturity of boys. Noemie Lvovsky's film might terrify those who think that a film like Now and Then is a truthful depiction of girlhood, but, really, they needn't be so scared.
Eye for Film ("Trinity") review [4.5/5]
Do you remember what your teenage years were like at school? Life Doesn't Scare Me, follows four friends - Emilie (Woch), Ines (Molinier), Stella (Parmentier) and Marion (Rousselet) - as they progress through their school years discovering romance and heartbreak together. Together they perform magical rituals to ensnare their victims and support each other despite falling out over the most trivial of things. As they grow older, their paths drift apart and their reliance on each other is no longer enough. They know that life moves on and graduation beckons.
Life Doesn't Scare Me is a follow-up to writer/director Lvovsky's previous film, Petites, which featured the same young actresses as children. The first segment of the film is by far the funniest and records the girls meticulously planned attempts to snare their objects of desire. With military precision, photographs are stolen, every word is noted and every action becomes a reason to die for.
Three years later, and three of the girls (Ines, Stella and Marion) embark on a holiday to Italy, whilst Emilie attempts drama school. Here, their experiences are more painful and life threatens to overwhelm them. In the end it is time to return for their last year of school and the pressures of living up to expectations are sometimes too much to bear.
Like Michael Apted's 7-Up series, Life Doesn't Scare Me was filmed in stages, as the actresses grew up. But where 7-Up was a documentary, this is very much a work of fiction. Nevertheless, the experiences are achingly real and, thanks mostly to the remarkable performances, acutely touching.
It is amazing that Lvonsky managed to find four such assured girls, all of whom have developed into stunning young actresses. There is a truthful quality about the film which shines through the everyday incidents portrayed on screen. The only part of the film which could be considered a slight drawback is its meandering, episodic storyline which in some ways mimics "real" life.
This film is very reminiscent of Ma Vie En Rose, and several fantasy sequences help reinforce this. In the end, the only flaw is what seems to be a somewhat disjointed conclusion. One can only hope that this is because there will be a third film to round off the trilogy so that we can follow the young women into their new careers. A quite remarkable film, with outstanding performances by the four captivating young leads.
- Movie - Review - The New York Times A Tasting Menu of Gallic Cinema, by Stephen Holden of The New York Times, March 10, 2000
LES SENTIMENTS (Feelings)
France (94 mi) 2003
User comments from imdb Author: writers_reign
What I like about French movies is that they're not afraid to appear dated and/or look old fashioned. Here we have three of their best - Nathalie Baye, Jean-Pierre Bacri and Isabelle Carre ringing the changes on our old friend adultery. In a nutshell Bacri and Baye are an item until Carre and her husband move next door. Against all the odds Carre leaps into bed with Bacri, end of several beautiful friendships. That's it really but it's HOW it's done that makes it worth seeing. With a bit of luck this one will come to England Baye and Baye and if it does guess who'll be there with bells on. 7/10
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Les Sentiments
is a richly textured, humorous, deceptively lyrical, emotionally lucid, and
intelligently crafted exposition on the dynamics of love, marriage, fidelity,
and attraction. The film chronicles the genial and affectionate interaction
between a happily settled, middle-aged couple, Jacques (Jean-Pierre Bacri) and
Carol (Nathalie Baye), and their young, overly amorous tenants, a newly married
couple named François (Melvil Poupaud) and Edith (Isabelle Carré) - who have
moved into the country so that the young man can assume Jacques' medical
practice after his retirement - as their relationships evolve from polite
cordiality to friendship, and inevitably, to dangerous, impulsive temptation.
Idiosyncratically (and cleverly) integrating a Greek chorus that alternately
comments, presages, and contextualizes ellipses in the narrative, Noémie
Lvovsky further demonstrates remarkable agility in creating subtle, but
profound tonal shifts that propel the engaging and quietly, but astutely
realized human observation to increasingly complex, difficult, and ambivalent
emotional terrain that, ultimately (and deservedly), takes on the sublime (and
equally compelling), emotional weight of a modern-day Greek tragedy.
The tireless
fascination of French filmmakers for stories of marital ennui and middle-class
adultery has produced some trite and trivial work, of which Noemie Lvovsky's "Les Sentiments" is a
shining example. Brightly packaged, with psychotic color schemes and a
laborious Greek chorus device involving archly theatrical narrative commentary
sung in a barbershop-meets-light operetta style, this irritating comedy-drama
is another rendition of that hackneyed standard "Thou Shalt Not Bed Thy
Neighbor." Local audiences may respond, but crossover beyond a handful of
Euro markets seems improbable.
The marital strife this time
revolves around middle-aged doctor Jacques (Jean-Pierre Bacri) and his wife,
Carole (Nathalie Baye), who live in apparent harmony with their two kids in a
French country town; and their recently wed new neighbors Edith (Isabelle
Carre) and Francois (Melvil Poupaud), a young medic due to replace Jacques.
Despite their age differences,
the two couples immediately hit it off. Jacques and Francois bond
professionally while Edith and Carole slip into comfortable girltalk. But
Jacques' dormant senses are awakened by his attraction to Edith, and the
younger woman soon responds, feeling invigorated by the extra attention and
creating an illusion for herself that she can love both men at once without
doing harm. However, when Carole catches the lovers in a clinch in the wine
cellar, the affair ends messily.
The film is not without moments
of engaging comedy, especially in the lighter early sections. But it too often
veers toward forced exuberance, especially in scenes between the two women.
Edith, in particular, flaps about in a mad rush, beaming like an idiot.
Seasoned thesps Baye and Bacri bring a certain degree of class, but of the four
leads, only Poupaud gives something approaching a contained performance. Valeria
Bruni Tedeschi, who starred in Lvovsky's "Forget
Me" and "I'm Not Afraid of Life," appears briefly as the
mother of one of Francois' patients.
The choral intrusions are
mannered at best, excruciating at worst, notably in a song celebrating Jacques'
newly stoked libido. Similarly precious are the vivid colors, busy decor and
clownish costumes that frequently make the characters look like refugees from a
circus.
Feelings
| San Francisco Film Festival
LET’S DANCE (Faut que ça danse!)
France Switzerland (100 mi) 2007
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Noémie Lvovsky returns to the idiosyncratic, subtly
modulated multigenerational human comedy of Les Sentiments with a more diluted,
but still insightfully rendered examination of aging, identity, and the
changing role between parent and child in Let's Dance (Fait que ça
danse!). Lvovsky's affectionate portrait centers on the sprightly,
Holocaust survivor Salomon Bellinsky (Jean-Pierre Marielle) who, as he nears
his eightieth birthday, has been spending his days dodging funeral obligations
of friends and fellow survivors, taking tap dancing lessons to emulate his
favorite actor, Fred Astaire, arguing with insurance agents who are quick to
reject his application on the sole basis of age, and paying cordial visits to
his willfully independent, estranged wife Geneviève (Bulle Ogier) who has been
reduced to increasing financial straits after struggling with the effects of
Alzheimer's disease for years, attended to her devoted caregiver, Mootoosamy
(Bakary Sangaré). Faced with the reality that his wife is now a virtual
stranger in the final stages of her degenerative illness, and relegated to
obligatory, quick checkup visits from his preoccupied daughter, Sarah (Valeria
Bruni Tedeschi), Salomon turns to the personal ads to find companionship and
meets the charming, if insecure Violette (Sabine Azéma), where soon, his own
fears of an uncertain future begin to take their toll on his relationships with
the people around him. As in Les Sentiments, Lvovsky frames the
parallel lives among the disparate generations as emotional intersections that
reveal the fundamental human desire to remain vital, useful, and relevant.
The father, mother and
grown daughter of an eccentric Parisian family greet life's obstacles with
gradations of wacky fortitude in "Let's Dance!" Uneven ensembler from
Noemie Lvovsky is most rewarding in its frank and funny treatment of aged
characters, splendidly limned by Jean-Pierre Marielle and Bulle Ogier. Terrific
dream sequences featuring Adolf Hitler in both animated and
human-impersonator form augment a food-for-thought attitude toward senior
citizens. Local reception for Nov. 14 release was solid, with Jewish fests a
lock for a film about mortality that brims with life.
Sarah (Valeria
Bruni-Tedeschi), at 41, is surprisingly well-adjusted, considering she was
raised by self-absorbed Solomon (Marielle) and Genevieve (a delectably
spaced-out Ogier). Sarah's parents have lived apart for 25 years but meet once
a week.
Genevieve should be
comfortably well off but has a tendency to give away all her cash and worldly
belongings. This makes it difficult to pay kindly, solicitous Mr. Mootoosamy
(Bakary Sangare), who attends to her every need.
Solomon, whose entire
family perished in Auschwitz, is jovial by nature and loves to tap-dance along
with Fred
Astaire while watching "Top
Hat." In a scene played for the full weight of its dark comedy,
Solomon -- pushing 80 but in fine health -- confronts a young bank official
(Nicolas Maury) who sent him a series of form letters declaring him
uninsurable.
An intense grace
characterizes another scene in which Solomon attempts to donate his body to
science, only to be dissuaded by a young medical student (Judith Chemla).
Solomon meets vivacious history teacher Violette (Sabine Azema) and a romance
blossoms, for which both are charmingly grateful.
Pic is so stuffed with
incidents (and sometimes smothered under a jaunty jazz score from Archie
Shepp), that it feels longer than it is. While presumably deliberate,
instances in which editing looks slightly choppy serve no discernible artistic
purpose. Finale is exhausting.
But the characters are
memorable and the themes worth tackling. Helmer nicely integrates film clips
from "In
the Soup" to "The
Fly II" as winks at how truth can be every bit as strange as fiction.
Sarah's refreshingly grounded husband Francois (Arie Elmaleh) wryly tries to
describe the merits of "The
Godfather" to Genevieve, who has never seen it.
As an elderly neighbor
who delivers a spooky oral treatise on how women just want to exhaust men and
destroy their prostates, the spectral Daniel Emilfork is indelibly strange.
Chris Knipp :: View topic - Noémie Lvovsky: Let's Dance! (2007 ...
FAUT QUE CA DANSE Jerusalem Film Experience
French movies America has missed Mike Lasalle from SF Gate, April 6, 2008
CAMILLE UNWINDS
France (120 mi) 2012
Camille Rewinds Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: Jonathan Romney
A middle-aged woman finds herself magically zapped back in time and given
another chance to live life all over again, first love and all. Sound familiar?
Camille Rewinds is essentially a Gallic Peggy
Sue Got Married, although what seems like a shameless steal is mitigated knowingly by
setting the principal action in the mid-80s, around the 1986 release date of
Francis Coppola’s retro romance.
The familiarity may not matter so much with French audiences - the film is released domestically this October - and the main draw will be the mix of a female-angled premise with much-loved local faces. Otherwise, hit-and-miss feminist comedy, soft-centred cheeriness and offputtingly lurid colour scheme will make Camille Rewinds a limited export, except where there’s a market for broader French entertainment.
In fact, the very mainstream tenor is surprising given the upmarket credentials of director/star/co-writer Noémie Lvovksy who, as well as collaborating as a writer with the likes of Arnaud Desplechin and Philippe Garrel, has her own pedigree as a director of highly-rated and ather subtler films, notably Oublie-Moi (1994). Of late, she’s also become unavoidable in front of the camera, recently appearing in Benoît Jacquot’s Farewell My Queen and Bertrand Bonello’s House Of Tolerance. In her own star vehicle, she’s ditched the arty register in favour of a crowd-pleasing comedy in which she plays a 40-year-old unsuccessful actress whose husband Eric (Guesmi) is about to leave for a younger woman.
Waxing melancholic over chances missed, the heavy-drinking Camille collects her watch from repairs, to find the mender (Jean-Pierre Léaud, wild-eyed even by his standards) has deliberately set it a second out of sync. Passing out at a party, Camille magically finds herself transported back to age 16, still living with her parents (Moreau, Vuillermoz) but inhabiting her 40-year-old body.
Camille doesn’t take long to adjust to the comic absurdity of her situation, and the complications are predictable: her parents’ bafflement, her habit of casually mentioning that she’s a long-married mother, her ungainly deportment in an 80s wardrobe of ra-ra skirts and eye-searing tops. When Camille hangs out again with her best friends, none of whom can see her real 40-year-old physique, it’s a chance to party down like she used to.
Cue much retro jukebox action and highly rehearsed dance floor action, through which Lvovsky grins with distracting abandon. She also strikes up anew her romance with high-school beau Eric (Guesmi in a ludicrous teen coiff). This time, however, Camille gives him the runaround while she makes out with a nervous teenager (in a scene whose potential perversity is cautiously toned down) and pursues her science teacher (Denis Podalydès, currently replacing Mathieu Amalric as French cinema’s Mr Ubiquitous).
The performances are, at worst, dependably lively, and at best very engaging - especially Anthony Sonigo as Camille’s awkward teen conquest. The likeable Lvovsky visibly has the time of her life, but tones down the exuberance to interact poignantly with other players in those scenes where Camille ponders her newly (re)acquired life lessons - notably with Moreau, impressive as the mother whom Camille knows will soon die. But the film is awkward negotiating the twin registers of knowing goofiness and philosophical subtlety, and the result is a sometimes grating bagatelle.
Camille Rewinds (Camille Redouble): Cannes Review Stephen Dalton at Cannes from The Hollywood Review, May 27, 2012
Charming French rom-com parties like it’s 1985.
CANNES - AN EMOTIONALLY DISTRESSED woman goes in search of her lost youth in this bittersweet French time-travel comedy, which owes more to Marty McFly than Marcel Proust. A strong local crowd-pleaser in Cannes, Camille Rewinds closed the Directors’ Fortnight and picked up a minor prize, the Prix SACD. A writer, actor and film-maker with a large fanbase in France, Noémie Lvovsky’s track record should guarantee the film solid local business and a niche Francophile following around the world. But this universal story of love and regret also feels funny and charming enough to break out to wider audiences, with the right marketing.
Lvovsky directs, co-writes and stars as Camille, a 40-year-old Parisian drowning in alcoholic anguish after splitting up from her former childhood sweetheart Eric (Samir Guesmi) after 25 happy years together. In the depths of her boozy despair, at a snowy New Year’s Eve party in 2008, she experiences a kind of fairy-tale flashback and wakes up in 1985. She is still attending school, her late mother is alive again, and she has a bright yellow portable cassette player buzzing with cheesy 1980s Europop hits.
Fate, it seems, has granted Camille a second chance. With the wisdom of hindsight, she struggles to rewrite history, resisting classmate Eric’s advances to save her adult self from future heartbreak, and forcing her mother to address some undetected health problems. But destiny is not so easily persuaded, and Camille eventually comes to learn that some life choices can be changed while others must simply be embraced.
Camille Rewinds opens with a bravura title sequence, a montage of liquor and cigarettes and assorted bric-a-brac tumbling across a dark backdrop in slow motion, followed by a surprised looking cat. Thus Camille’s life as a kind of midlife Bridget Jones is neatly encapsulated in prologue form. The visual style then settles down into fairly straight, light comedy mode: breezy and brightly lit, full of brisk comic energy, and garnished with an agreeably lurid assortment of gauche 1980s fashions and hairstyles.
Playing Camille at both 40 and 16, Lvovsky finds some inspired humour in the gap between what the audience and the characters can see, although Guesmi is more convincing in his physical transformation from middle age to gawky classroom Romeo. Devotees of French cinema will appreciate the sprinkling famous cameos, including Mathieu Almaric as a creepy teacher and François Truffaut’s long-time screen alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud as a magical watchmaker. Denis Podalydès, one of a duo of comedy film-making brothers with a large local following, also plays a small but significant role.
Lvovsky is plainly winking at her French audience here, playing to the gallery. Camille Rewinds is full of such crowd-pleasing touches, mostly well-judged. A wry Gallic twist on Back to the Future or Peggy Sue Got Married, it is hardly the most original or challenging work, but it is effortlessly charming and emotionally engaging.
Bénédicte Prot at Cannes from Cineuropa
DAILY | Cannes 2012 | Directors’ Fortnight Awards David Hudson at Cannes, May 25, 2012
Cannes 2012: Directors' Fortnight Honors "No," "El Taaib," "Camille Rewinds" & Shorts Sophia Savage at Cannes from Thompson on Hollywood, May 25, 2012
Lynch, David
David Lynch
went to school at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and has always
presented himself as an artist first, as he's continued to paint throughout his
entire life. He's a one-of-a-kind filmmaker whose films are never to be
missed, they're like gems brought in by the tides of the ocean.
Lynch, David from Art and Culture
David Lynch has been charged with making incomprehensible films. In fact,
they make perfect sense, but not necessarily to us. An exemplary scene in “Fire
Walk with Me” (1992) shows this: Two investigators are to receive their
assignment from a very odd-looking woman named Lil. What they receive from her,
however, is merely a series of incomprehensible movements and gestures. But as
the investigators drive away, discussing the assignment, we learn that Lil’s
body language has very specific implications, which both of the investigators
apparently understand. We see right away that oddities are relative; they
obviously make sense in certain contexts. Unfortunately, it’s usually the
viewer who’s left in the dark.
The main
characters are often left clueless as well. In “
Those who
try to understand the nature of this twisted world inevitably find themselves
caught up in it. In “Blue Velvet” (1986), the innocent but inquisitive Jeffrey
Beaumont comes home from college only to find himself in the middle of a
criminal investigation. As he becomes obsessively embroiled, his own
high-school sweetheart cannot help but wonder if he’s a "detective or a
pervert." In fact, we can make no such distinction in Lynch’s world. To
enter it is to become unwittingly implicated in its perversions.
Lynch does like to leave us with the hope of escape, however. The road is an image that appears in many of Lynch’s films, revealing at least the possibility of an exit from the perverse labyrinth. In fact, his recent film "Straight Story" (1999) seems to find this exit: everything takes place on the road, as the ailing Alvin Straight drives some 350 miles on a lawnmower to see his brother. Coming from Lynch, this film is quite a surprise. Despite a few trademark quirks and the admitted weirdness of the protagonist's quest, it is a straight story indeed. Its shocking earnestness allows Lynch's twisted world to unravel itself at last into an exquisitely beautiful line.
Cinematography reprinted from Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch, from Lost magazine, March 2007
I'm through with film as a
medium. For me, film is dead. If you look at what people all over the world are
taking still pictures with now, you begin to see what's going to happen.
I'm shooting in digital video and
I love it. I have a Web site and I started doing small experiments for the site
with these small cameras, at first thinking they were just like little toys,
and they were not very good. But then I started realizing that they're very,
very good — for me, at least.
You have forty-minute takes,
automatic focus. They're lightweight. And you can see what you've shot right
away. With film you have to go into the lab and you don't know what you've shot
until the next day, but with DV, as soon as you're done, you can put it into
the computer and go right to work. And there are so many tools. A thousand
tools were born this morning, and there'll be ten thousand new tools tomorrow.
It happened first in sound. Now everybody's got ProTools, and you can
manipulate these sounds, just fine-tune them unbelievably fast. The same
thing's happening with the image. It gives you so much control.
I started thinking and
experimenting. I did some tests from DV to film, because you still have to
transfer to film to show in the theater. And although it does not look exactly
like it shot on film, it looks way better than I would have thought.
Once you start working in that
world of DV with small, lightweight equipment and automatic focus, working with
film seems so cumbersome. These 35mm film cameras are starting to look like
dinosaurs to me. They're huge; they weigh tons. And you've got to move them
around. There are so many things that have to be done, and it's all so slow. It
kills a lot of possibilities. With DV everything is lighter; you're more
mobile. It's far more fluid. You can think on your feet and catch things.
And for actors, to get down into
a character in the middle of a scene and then suddenly have to stop while we
reload the film cameras after ten minutes — often, this breaks the thing. But
now you're rolling along; you've got 40 minutes down in there. And you can
start talking to the actors, and instead of stopping it you can move in and
push it. You can even rehearse while you're shooting, although I start goofing
up the soundtrack, because they've got to chop out all my words. But many times
I am talking to the actors while we are shooting and we are able to get in
deeper and deeper.
The Decade in Review | Dennis Lim - Cinema Scope Dennis Lim
David Lynch is not an
overlooked filmmaker and Mulholland Drive is not a film in need of
championing—quite the contrary, since it has already won the decade-end
critics’ polls of several other publications. Still, this near-unanimous
canonization is not just surprising but suggestive in ways that have largely
gone unremarked. It’s worth taking a moment to wonder why this sad, thrilling,
ominous movie resonates so profoundly with the current mood and to consider
what that says about what we want from narrative art.
I’m guessing that the
affection for Mulholland Drive is partly nostalgic. We now grasp the
industry-wide shift to digital in a way that we were only beginning to sense a
decade ago. We also now know this is Lynch’s celluloid swansong, and it’s an
old-school movie-movie to boot, enraptured by the romance of bygone Hollywood
even as it rues the sordid fates of the city’s unhappy ghosts. By contrast,
Inland Empire, shot on cheap DV, is a raised middle finger to the industry in
both content and form.
Mulholland Drive is
bracketed by Lost Highway (1996) and Inland Empire in a psychosis trilogy of
sorts; all are non-linear films in which the rifts in space-time are a direct
outgrowth of the protagonist’s mental trauma. This has been a fruitful decade,
especially in American cinema, for movies that require some degree of assembly
in the viewer’s head (Donnie Darko, 2001; Primer, 2004). The discourse
surrounding Mulholland Drive has focused on it as a puzzle movie, untangling
narrative threads and mapping its larger cosmology. But the film is more than
an enigma to be cracked. It takes as its subject the very act of solving: the
pleasurable and perilous, essential and absurd, process of making narrative
sense, of needing and creating meaning. To put it another way: Mulholland Drive
is the defining film of the ‘00s in much the same way that Roberto Bolaño’s
2666 is the defining book and Lost the defining television series.
In his homespun,
semi-spiritual way, Lynch has been working toward his own theory of narrative
over the years. There is something akin to mortal dread in his approach to
storytelling: he doesn’t want stories to end, and when they must, they should
leave “room to dream.” For Lynch, serial TV offered the Scheherazade-like
prospect of a continuing tale. The link between narrative resolution and death
is embodied by Twin Peaks, which committed a symbolic suicide by responding to
the network’s pressure for answers and revealing who killed Laura Palmer. That
same network, ABC, aborted Mulholland Drive for fear that Lynch couldn’t be
trusted to answer the questions that his pilot would set in motion. Several
years later, ABC greenlit Lost, a series premised on unanswered questions and
given to moments of the Lynchian uncanny. Lost Highway was, in its way, a film
without a conclusion: a Möbius strip that ends where it begins. With Mulholland
Drive, Lynch creates a sense of the infinite by displacing the story from one
realm to another, the very trick that Lost—at its best, an object lesson in
keeping a story and a mythology alive—has adopted at the start of its
parallel-worlds final season.
As for Bolaño, he
was—like Lynch—a lover of mysteries but not a fan of resolutions. The
mind-expanding, not-quite-finished magnum opus 2666 openly invites comparisons:
there is a cybercafe called Fire, Walk With Me, and an exchange about favourite
Lynch works. 2666 is a book about literature just as Mulholland Drive is a film
about cinema. In both, the metaphysical terror of the void beckons just beyond
the mundane facts of the everyday, and the relationship between dream and
reality is thoroughly rewired. By applying a fractured nightmare logic to its
nominal reality (less “realistic” than the preceding wish-fulfilling fantasy),
Mulholland Drive emphasizes the role of fantasy in giving a cohesive shape to
our experiences. That this endeavour is both a refuge and a risk comes across
beautifully in Bolaño’s account, in 2666, of the poet Amalfitano’s wandering
mind. His “ideas or feelings or ramblings…turned flight into freedom, even if
freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into
order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.”
Amalfitano is reflecting on his own mental meanderings, but he could just as
well be describing the seductive purpose and the unnerving force of works like
2666 and Mulholland Drive.
David Lynch.Com Lynch’s own website
A Web Homage to David Lynch - Lynch's filmography as an interactive world The Black Lodge
David Lynch •
Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Thomas Caldwell from Senses of Cinema, May 2002
Film Reference Kim Newman, updated by John McCarty
All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Ankemy
David Lynch bio from NNDB
God of Filmmaking David Lynch director of Twin Peaks biography
LynchNet: The David Lynch Resource Mike Dunn
The City of Absurdity - The Mysterious World of David Lynch Mike Hartmann
The Universe of David Lynch a Lynch website
Lynch Link: The Films of David Lynch another website
David Lynch DreamWorld a fan website
Dugpa.com - Weekly News regarding David Lynch, Lynch Films on DVD, and Lynch Related Music Releases newsletter
David Lynch - Resources Resource page from the British Film resource
David lynch's list of David Lynch's dining favorites
10 FILMS THAT MIGHT HAVE INFLUENCED DAVID LYNCH Mubi
David Lynch prints gallery at the Tandem Press website
David Lynch paintings gallery, 1987-1992 (Spanish)
Sight and Sound, July 1996 Lost Highway article - LynchNet David Lynch: Mr. Contradiction, by Chris Rodley from Sight and Sound, July 1996
Lost Highway Article - Premiere Sept. 96 David Lynch Keeps His Head, by David Foster Wallace from Premiere magazine, September 1996, posted on Lynchnet
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) essay ["Demystifying
___"] Demystifying Lost
Highway (1997)
Jan./Feb. 1997 sex article from
Movieline magazine. Lynchnet
Road Kill David Lynch in Decay, by David Edelstein from Slate, February 26, 1997
Splitting Images | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, February 27, 1997
Philadelphia City Paper (A.D. Amorosi) review The Unconventional Narrative of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, February 27 – March 6, 1997
“Lost Highway” - Salon.com Highway to Heck, by Stephanie Zacharek, March 28, 1997
Lost
Highway (1997) – Film Review - Cinefantastique Online Steve
Biodrowski, April 1, 1997
The
Making of “Lost Highway” - Cinefantastique Online A Surreal Meditation on Love,
Jealousy, Identify, and Reality, by
Frederick C Szebin and Steve Biodrowski, April 1, 1997
Interview:
David Lynch Directs Traffic on the “Lost Highway” Steve Biodrowski interviews the director from
Cinefantastique, April 1, 1997
Interview:
Barry Gifford Deciphers David Lynch's Labyrinthine “Lost ... Steve Biodrowski interviews the co-writer for an
expanation from Cinefantastique, April 1, 1997
Interview:
Robert Blake, Mystery Man of the “Lost Highway” Steve Biodrowski interviews Blake from Cinefantastique, April 1, 1997
www.davidlynch.de/sightlost.html Voodoo Road, by Marina Warner from Sight and Sound, from Lynchnet, August 1997
Serdar Yegulalp
essay ["On ___ and David Lynch"] The Case Against David Lynch (1998)
On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology by Bernd Herzogenrath from Other Voices, January 1999
Tremors
of postmodern spectatorship. | "nach dem film" Notes
on David Lynch’s Lost Highway, by Tanja Visosevic, January 12, 1999
BFI | Sight &
Sound | The Straight Story (1999)
Kevin Jackson from Sight and Sound, December 1999
Lynch Mob. - movie review | ArtForum | Find Articles at BNET Lynch Mob, by Howard Hampton from ArtForum magazine, January 2000
Circular Narratives: Highlights of Popular Cinema in the '90s • Senses ... Fiona A. Villella (on Lost Highway) from Senses of Cinema, February 6, 2000
Le Revelateur and The Grandmother • Senses of Cinema Brad Stevens from Senses of Cinema, May 3, 2000
The Straight
Story: Sunlight Will Out of Darkness Come • Senses of ... Martha P. Nochimson from Senses of Cinema, June 7, 2000
David Lynch turns his TV series Mulholland Drive into a movie Now You See It, by Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, May 11, 2001
Abbas Kiarostami: A Dialogue Between the Authors (Chicago ... Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses his own angry response to Hampton’s January 2000 ArtForum defense of Lynch in this dialogue with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa from Senses of Cinema, September 3, 2001
Mulholland Drive Film Comment
- In Dreams - LynchNet Amy
Taubin from Film Comment, at
Lynchnet, September/October 2001
The Not-So-Straight Story: David Lynch's Mulholland Drive - Bright ... Scott Thill from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 2001
Points of
No Return | Village Voice J.
Hoberman, October 2, 2001
NYFF
2001 REVIEW: On the Road Again: David Does The City of ... On the Road Again: David Does The City of
Angels in "Mulholland Drive," by Mark Peranson from indieWIRE,
October 8, 2001
Twin Peaks | Village
Voice The Yin-Yang Glamour Girls of Mulholland
Drive, by Jessica Winter from The
Village Voice, October 9, 2001
Gone Fishin' |
Village Voice David Lynch Casts a Line Into the City of
Dreams, by Dennis Lim from The
Village Voice, October 9, 2001
David Lynch's Hollywood nightmares - Salon.com Andy Klein, feature and Lynch interview, October 12, 2001
David Lynch's latest tour de force - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, October 12, 2001
Getting
Lost Is Beautiful | L.A. Weekly John Powers from LA Weekly, October 17, 2001
Two blonds - Salon.com David Thomson from Salon, October
18, 2001
Everything you were afraid to ask about “Mulholland Drive” - Salon.com Bill Wyman, Max Garrone, and Andy Klein, October 24, 2001
Truly
Sad, Truly Monstrous Manohla
Dargis from LA Weekly, October 25,
2001
Whaddaya mean, “We
don't know about the box”? - Salon.com
Reader responses to the story from Salon, October 26, 2001
David Lynch - Salon.com Feature and interview of Lynch by Brian Libby from Salon, November 6, 2001
All you have to do is
dream - Salon.com Interview
of Freudian analyst Dr. Frederick Lane by Jean Tang from Salon, November 7, 2001
BFI | Sight & Sound | Mulholland Dr. (2001) Kim Newman from Sight and Sound, January 2002
Address unknown Joe Queenan from The Guardian, January 5, 2002
Amnesia,
Obsession, Cinematic U-Turns: On Mulholland Drive Kirsten
Ostherr and Arash Abizadeh from Senses of Cinema, February 2002
Welcome to Issue 19 of
our journal! Editors from Senses of Cinema, March 2002
David Lynch • Senses of Cinema Jared Rapfogel from Senses of Cinema, March 2002
In
Dreams: A Review of Mulholland Drive • Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain, March 13, 2002
Amnesia,
Obsession, Cinematic U-Turns: On Mulholland Drive ... Kirsten Ostherr and Arash Abizadeh from
Senses of Cinema, March 13, 2002
Cannes: Lynch jury hits wrong note Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, May 27, 2002
A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity Jonathan Eig on movies like The Sixth Sense, The Others, The Usual Suspects, Waking Life, A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, Memento, Mulholland Drive, and Donnie Darko, from Jump Cut, Summer 2003
Sinnerbrink on
Lynch - Film-Philosophy Robert
Sinnerbrink, June 2005
Yale Daily News - David Lynch thinks we're all lightbulbs. What? David Sadighian from Yale Daily News, September 30, 2005
Painting Film with Velvet Sounds: David Lynch’s Lost Highway Felicity Colman from Senses of Cinema, May 2006
The Grandmother • Senses of Cinema Tim Maloney, July 2006
Eraserhead • Senses of
Cinema Catherine S. Cox from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Painting Film with Velvet Sounds: David Lynch's Lost Highway ... Felicity J. Colman from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
The Straight
Story • Senses of Cinema Carla
Marcantonio from Senses of Cinema, July
31, 2006
A Slow Ride down Mulholland Dr. • Senses of Cinema Christopher J. Jarmick from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
David
Lynch Returns: Expect Moody Conditions, With Surreal Gusts ... Dennis Lim from The New York Times, October 1, 2006
David Lynch Folds Space: Because He Is the Kwisatz Haderach! Robert C. Cumbow from 24LiesASecond, November 16, 2006
A Woman in Trouble is Rescued and Loved - Bright Lights Film Journal Dan Callahan, December 11, 2006
David
Lynch Made a Man Out of Me | Village Voice Nathan Lee, January 9, 2007
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum January 25, 2007
Critique. Inland Empire by David Lynch. Stéphane Delorme from Cahiers du Cinéma (February 2007)
Kamera Article (2007) International man of mystery: David Lynch, an extract from the book, the dream, solve the crime – mysteries and secrets in the films of David Lynch, by Colin Odell and Michelle LeBlanc from Kamera, July 14, 2007
Critique. Inland Empire
by David Lynch. Stéphane Delorme
from Cahiers du Cinéma (November 2007)
Why David Lynch Should Learn German - TIME Andrew Purvis from Time magazine, November 15, 2007
David Lynch's
Shockingly Peaceful Inner Life Alex
Williams from The New York Times,
December 31, 2007
Inland Empire —
Cineaste Magazine Martha P.
Nochimson from Cineaste (Winter 2007)
Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy ... - Senses of Cinema Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses by Howard Hampton, a book review by Patrick Ellis from Senses of Cinema, March 16, 2008
David Lynch's The
Straight Story and Inland Empire - Reverse Shot Free
Falling, by Leo Goldsmith, April 26, 2008
On the Terminal in Cinema • Senses of Cinema Andrew C. Schenker from Senses of Cinema, May 19, 2008
On Lost Highway - Bright Lights Film Journal Death, Excess, and Discontinuity, by Thomas R. Britt, October 31, 2008
Film features: 12 Wonderful David Lynch Women... | TotalFilm.com Andy Lowe from Total Film, March 5, 2009
Why David Lynch moves in mysterious ways | Lisa Marks | Film | The ... Lisa Marks from The Guardian, September 10, 2009
The Enigmatic Mr. Lynch –
Offscreen Stefan Gullatz, October
2009
Why I
adore David Lynch | Cinema Autopsy
Thomas Caldwell, January 12, 2010
The Naked Lynch David Cairns from Shadowplay, January 19,
2010
TV REVIEW: Happy Town: "In This Home on Ice" John Kenneth Muir, May 1, 2010
The David Lynch Dossier: Dream States and Underneaths John Kenneth Muir, May 27, 2010
Lost Highway | Inner Worlds / Outer Space Melanie Menard link to 31-page academic paper, Mental space on screen: through the examples of Last Year in Marienbad, Stalker and Lost Highway, December 1, 2010 (pdf)
Cinema, Disappearance and Scale in David Lynch's Inland Empire Jodi Brooks from Screening the Past, July 2011
Krzysztof Pendercki: horror film directors' favourite composer Tom Service from The Guardian, November 3, 2011
David
Lynch: director of dreams | Film | The Guardian Nicholas Lezard, February 17, 2012
Mulholland Dr. & Inland Empire, David Lynch ... - Senses of Cinema Michael Pattison, March 17, 2013
the
certain / uncertainty of david lynch: a paradigm shift Martha P. Nochimson, 2014
Mulholland
Drive David Lynch film analysis - Senses of Cinema Clint Stivers, June 19, 2014
The Los Angeles Review of Books: Michael Nordine October 08, 2014
David
Lynch's Elusive Language | The New Yorker Dennis Lim
October 28, 2015
Lynch, David They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
David Lynch interview 1985 Herman Weigel from TIP
1997 Interview on KCRW Chris Doridas from KCRW radio interviews Lynch, February 19, 1997
Interview: David Lynch Directs Traffic on the “Lost Highway” Steve Biodrowski interviews the director from Cinefantastique, April 1, 1997
I want a dream when I go to a film feature and interview with Lynch by Michael Sragow from Salon, October 28, 1999
Mr Weird plays it Straight | Film | The Guardian Lynch interview by Jonathan Romney from The Guardian, November 19, 1999
Straight Talking
| Film | The Guardian Chad Jones interview with Richard
Farnsworth from The Guardian,
December 4, 1999
David Lynch's Hollywood nightmares - Salon.com Andy Klein, feature and Lynch interview, October 12, 2001
Getting
Lost Is Beautiful | L.A. Weekly
John Powers feature and interview, October 17, 2001
David Lynch - Salon.com Feature and interview of Lynch by Brian Libby from Salon, November 6, 2001
Interview: David
Lynch | Film | The Guardian Interview
by Julian Borger from The Guardian,
December 10, 2003
David Lynch
Interviews -- Uncut | WIRED Scott
Thill from Wired News interviews
David Lynch about DV, DavidLynch.com, his own brand of coffee, and Inland Empire, March 6, 2006, also seen
here: David
Lynch's Weird, Wired World | WIRED
David Lynch -
Interviews - Reverse Shot Interview by Michael Joshua Rowin, December 8,
2006
Catching up with David Lynch Jeff Jensen interview from Entertainment Weekly, December 1, 2006
Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir feature and interview
from Salon, December 7, 2006
Mp3s: David Lynch at the Brattle :
Bradley's Almanac Bradley's
Almanac has audio from the Q&A session with David Lynch at the Brattle
Theater in Cambridge, December 10, 2006
The Happy
Spelunker | L.A. Weekly Scott
Foundas interviews Lynch for LA Weekly,
December 20, 2006
Bingo!
Bango! Bliss?? An interview with David Lynch | The Seattle ... Mark Rahner interview from The Seattle Times, January 22, 2007
David Lynch · Interview
· The A.V. Club Interview by
Andy Battaglia, January 24, 2007
David Lynch |
Film | The Guardian Mark Kermode interview February 8, 2007
Simon
Hattenstone talks to David Lynch | Film | The Guardian The Bliss of It All, feature and Lynch
interview by Simon Hattenstone from The
Guardian, February 24, 2007
The Super
Fun of It | Village Voice Nathan
Lee chats with the director about digital video and the DVD release, from the Village Voice, July 31, 2007
David
Lynch On His 'Empire,' Turning Down 'Jedi' — ... - MTV.com MTV interview by Josh Horowitz, August
21, 2007
David Lynch talks ''Twin Peaks'' | David Lynch | The Q&A | DVD ... Interview by Jeff Jensen from Entertainment Weekly, October 26, 2007
David
Lynch: David Lean Lecture 2007 | BAFTA
An interview by Jason
Barlow from BAFTA, October 27, 2007 (33
minutes)
Gaby
Wood interviews David Lynch | Film | The Guardian Interview by Gaby Wood and Hazel Sheffield
from The Observer, February 28, 2009
Ranked 1st on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best Directors
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
David Lynch and a Cow on YouTube (2:00)
David Lynch's Women Music Video (3:25)
David Lynch a compilation (5:04)
Depeche Mode Stripped David Lynch (6:13)
the art of david lynch (8:51)
Scene By Scene with David Lynch - Part 1 with Mark Cousins on YouTube (8:00)
Scene By Scene with David Lynch - Part 2 (10:13)
Scene By Scene with David Lynch - Part 3 (10:13)
Scene By Scene with David Lynch - Part 4 (10:20)
Scene By Scene with David Lynch - Part 5 (9:37)
Angelo Badalamenti on working with David Lynch (16:46)
David Lynch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The more unknowable the mystery, the more beautiful it is." —David Lynch
Six unique expressions of David Lynch's darkly surreal and unsettling brand
of cinema, including his earliest, pre-Eraserhead experiments. Six
Men Getting Sick (1967, 1 mins.), Lynch's first foray into filmmaking, was
made while attending the Pennsylvania
Academy
DVD Verdict Bill Gibron (excerpt)
Thematically, Lynch lays the
foundation here for all his future voyages, major and minor. Sex, death,
vulgarity, birth, marriage, women, men, relationships, machinery, blood, body
fluid, youth, adulthood, love, and hate all weave their way through his
cinematic pallet. Even recent works like
Overall, this is a truly worthwhile package. The DVD is contained in a coffee table sized box that uniquely displays the disc and conceals of 16-page booklet featuring images from the films (along with some basic information). The DVD itself has a simple setup. You can either watch each film separately, or view them all together. There is a unique special feature that allows you to calibrate your television for optimum viewing, David Lynch style (would a visual perfectionist have it any other way?). There is also the much sought after (by fans) introduction/commentary by Lynch before (but not over) each short. Alas, he offers no true enlightenment into what the shorts mean, but instead perfunctorily sets them up like any good instructor would. Want to know how The Alphabet was financed? Lynch will tell you. Want to know why the parents in The Grandmother speak in animalized yelps? Lynch is silent. Still, for a man notoriously taciturn about the meaning of his work, it is nice to see him smile when reminiscing about a shot or an idea, and you can tell he genuinely loves the work he has done. One of Lynch's biggest fans is David Lynch. After watching the DVD of The Short Films of David Lynch, you will become one too.
Lynch is, well, just plain weird. He occasionally obscures his message with kabuki style makeup effects and revolting visuals that do nothing other than draw attention to themselves. Shock value is placed at a premium, and there is nothing subtle about yellow stains on a bed sheet, or a Frenchman wooing ladies and drinking wine. Lynch packages his fear of marriage, women, and children in the trappings of a horror film and forgets to offer scares, or even melodrama. What he does provide are gross out jokes, amateurish animation techniques, and hideous images of the human body and deformed flesh. In some instances, his work is foolish, like the ranting of a child. Other times, it is mean spirited and faux pornographic, like a snuff film where pretense, and not murder, is the aphrodisiac. The Elephant Man or The Straight Story is the best ways to see Lynch: lyrical, calm, and passionate. This is art for farting arounds' sake.
The perception that David Lynch is some sort of psychotic mental patient who happened upon a camera one day and decided to film his subconscious may not be undone by The Short Films of David Lynch. These long unseen miniature versions of Lynch's universe, along with Eraserhead, form much of the basis for the Lynch bashing and hatred that passes itself off as critical analysis when discussing his canon. But watching this DVD, one can finally begin to view the artist from the ground up, to see and understand where he came from, what he was trying to say, and what he hoped to achieve in his cinema. Is it always pleasant to look at? No. Is it always clear and simple to comprehend? Absolutely not. But in terms of art, in terms of sheer cinematic imagination and unbridled expulsion of the id, Lynch succeeds here. He has masterminded a series of short films, unlike no one before or since, that manage to capture the fleeting, uneasy mental moments of twilight sleep, when the mind is alive and drifting with ghosts from the invisible world, and anxieties from the real one. Like a painting or sculpture, The Short Films of David Lynch is art for your DVD player, masterfully crafted.
David Lynch is declared a genius by this court, and
acquitted of any and all charges of confusion, artistic pretension or insanity.
The Short Films of David Lynch
is found to be a must have for any fan of innovative and imaginative cinema.
Film
Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers
MyFilmReview Reinier
Verhoef
SIX FIGURES GETTING SICK
Lynch introduces the film noting that he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts at the time and was fascinated by the idea of creating a moving painting, entering this film in competition, made for a cost of $200, projected over a 4 X 6 foot sculpture, featuring a disturbing siren sound loop which plays over the continuously repeating imagery. Lynch won first prize, but felt the cost was unreasonable, believing at the time this might be his only venture into film until a viewer at the exhibition offered him $1000 for the film, which he used to buy his first Bolex movie camera. The imagery is odd, but startling, mixing black and white drawings with bold color, which has a raw tone of graphic and unusual nature.
DVD Verdict Bill Gibron (excerpt)
It is a rarity when a true
cinematic artist emerges, one that throws down the gauntlet of materialism and
hype and focuses instead on the image, working the screen like a canvas, and
the camera like a paint box. Such an auteur is David Lynch, who in the thirty
plus years that he has been working in film, consistently offers disquieting
visions of a world split in two, a land where nightmares and hallucinations
co-mingle and intermarry with daydreams and the mundane. Lynch, as a filmmaker,
walks the fine line between worship and scorn, never letting mass acceptance
(or ridicule) influence his creative vision. He can be difficult and obtuse (
This is the first time (officially) that David Lynch has released his short films to the public. These are the works that established and defined his reputation. Long bootlegged and written about, a home audience finally gets to see digitally remastered, director supervised and approved, pristine transfers, with short introductory comments from the man himself. The films and plotlines are as follows:
Six Men Getting Sick (1966)
4 mins (1 minute animation loop repeated 4 times)
This film was created as part of a sculpted work, to be projected over and
bring it to animated life. Essentially, the title expresses what little plot
there is. Six cartoon heads grow ill, and then vomit. Not nearly as nauseating
as it sounds and a good introduction to Lynch in his artist days.
SIX MEN GETTING SICK: A disturbing and intoxicating work, it is presented here in a four-minute loop, and the effect is unnerving. A siren's whine plays continuously as images of alimentary canals and upset stomachs fill the screen. We see bile bubble below. Suspense builds as the siren wails like a crippled banshee. The biological brew continues to toil and trouble. Finally, grue and nastiness are expelled from the mouths, the canvas filling with filth and human fluid. The vomiting is a release, a momentary escape, and the sense of tension being unwound. Yet, the soundtrack warning continues to whir, and the loop restarts, creating the expectation and apprehension all over again.
For a film made in 1966 to be projected over a sculpture, the print quality is very good (Lynch, when offering his personally supervised DVD packages for sale, said he would not release anything unless it met his exacting standards). While there is minimal use of color here, we mostly get Lynch's addiction to monochromatic settings. (Black and white = good and evil? love and hate?) The sound quality is what should be expected from a film of this age, and frankly, it adds an even more ominous tone to the proceedings, like the bittersweet accompaniment to an autopsy. It is easy to see why this staging wowed the critics and art sponsors. As a first experiment in animation, filmmaking, and presentation, this piece of performance art succeeds.
David Lynch - Six men getting sick (six times) on YouTube (4:06)
THE ALPHABET
Please
remember, you are dealing with the human form
Lynch introduces the film with a family story about his wife Peggy’s niece, who was having a nightmare, so she was repeating the alphabet over and over again which he says “must have triggered something,” which is re-imagined into this film, which has a bit of an ominous, THE EXORCIST quality to it, looking overly dour and frightful. The film opens in black and white with a real child lying in bed like a corpse, then jettisons into an animation sequence that expands, again using a disturbing soundtrack of a man singing vocal warm-ups to a continuing hissing sound. This leads into an animated birthing scene where the letter “a” is born from out of a wispy cloud, immediately crying and wailing, while a strange, almost Picasso-like mother sits in the corner and attempts unsuccessfully to offer consoling sounds, reminiscent of a similar tone from ERASERHEAD, where after a brief heart connection forms, the mother then fills her head with letters from the alphabet before violently spilling into streams of blood red imagery, which despite the child’s innocent singing of “The Alphabet Song,” results in the splattering of blood all over the real life child’s sheets in bed.
User
comments (Page 2) from imdb Author: Hal-900
from WA, USA
Lynch's second film is a 4-minute mind-boggling trip into the subconscious. A dream Lynch's niece had while in school inspired it. She had a dream in which she recited the letters of the alphabet. And that pretty much summarizes what this film is about. The filmmaker used that simple idea as the basis of this fascinating short. If you are familiar with Lynch's work, you pretty much know what to expect. Nightmarish images are plentiful, and the film's atmosphere is strangely dense. I did not know what everything meant but it was fun to watch. Something I noticed here was the constant allusion to sex. Is it me or Lynch is a little too preoccupied with sex? The truth is that most of what I saw in the movie struck as being related to sex in one way or the other. It is possible that my mind was simply playing games on me. The fact is that only Lynch can make so much with so little. It is a true delight from beginning to end. If you are remotely interested in the director's work this is mandatory viewing.
DVD Verdict Bill Gibron (excerpt)
A young girl has a tortured night terror about growing up,
learning, and reciting the alphabet. A combination of child-like animation with
haunting, unnerving live action.
THE ALPHABET: This is the transitional film, a link between the art pretense of Six Men with the desire to form a linear narrative that would propel The Grandmother. Basically, this film can be viewed as an allegory for childhood and aging. For the girl in the film, the nursery rhyme rhythm of The Alphabet Song's first three notes ("A…B…C…") acts as an overture to the onset of maturity, puberty, and adulthood. As the children chant, the girl's face registers fear, confusion, disgust, and excitement—all the emotions associated with coming of age. After some very sexually suggestive animation, our confused china doll, enveloped in the blackness of her bedroom, whispers the song in tenuous, uneasy fashion. As the final line "tell me what you think of me" slips from her tongue, she spews a torrent of blood from her lips, staining the ivory sheets and her clean white nightgown. The image is staggering and very symbolic. The sanguine baptism is a none too subtle indication of what development and womanhood is all about: pain and bleeding. These are themes that will play a huge part later on in Lynch's work.
As with Six Men, the picture here is startlingly crisp. The hiss present on the soundtrack acts like a subconscious serpent, tempting and propelling this unfinished Eve into releasing the innocence of childhood, and relishing the sloppy viciousness of adulthood. The recording captures the perfect aural tone, from the odd shrieks and childish mantra, to the delicate sigh of the girl's voice. This is a mature work from an artist barely in his twenties.
User comments from imdb Author:
jodiac
from Lexington, KY
David Lynch says this film was an attempt at visualizing the
"fear of learning." In it, a young girl is tortured by the alphabet
in a competely abstract nightmare. Lynch has always been fascinated by the
darker side of dreams, the seemingly nonsensical black procession of symbols
and fears, and this film simply adds another phobia to the canon.
We are shown images of a head with information going in one side, and this
eventually causes the head to erupt into a black mess. Lynch juxtaposes the
most innocent of subjects (the alphabet), which usually marks the beginning of
our schooling, with disconcerting images of blood and vomit. Disturbing? Yes.
Lynch apparently formed the idea after hearing of a girl who was found reciting
the alphabet during a nightmare.
On a more profound level, the film examines a fear that perhaps appears for
most later in life: the dread of knowledge. There's quite a bit of truth to the
oft-repeated line "ignorance is bliss." Gradually, we realize that
the more we learn, the less we understand, and therefore, the less control we
have over our situations. It's a problem that has vexed people since the
conception of "science." We ask questions out of curiosity, find
there are no accessible answers, create a religious penumbra that satisfies a
great deal with a few simple passages, and then science comes along and we are
confronted once again with the inconsistencies of our faith. Thus, we fear that
which turns the rock-solid black and whites of our existence to a confused mass
of gray.
Also, The Alphabet hints at what linguists and intellectuals and songwriters
have known for centuries; words are wholly inadequate to describe even the
simplest of human perceptions. And once one has etched that list of letters
into one's mind, in a sense, there is no turning back. Life becomes shapes
patterned on paper, and conceptions of reality will no longer be formed purely
and internally; they are immediately attached to an imperfect language and
remained tethered to that which will never truly suffice.
The
Alphabet - TCM.com interesting
photo of a young Lynch, looking almost British
David Lynch - The Alphabet on YouTube (
Frederator Studios Blogs | Channel Frederator Blog | “The Alphabet ... (3:47)
THE GRANDMOTHER
Claiming he had been bitten by the film bug, Lynch already breaks with narrative form, eliminating it altogether in this wordless venture made by a grant from the American Film Institute, which he claims completely changed his life. Another mix of animation and real life characters, where after a similar animated birthing scene, followed by a strange sequence of barking humans acting like animals, we see a white faced young boy with tinges of red on his mouth, eyes, and ears alone in his room dressed in a black suit, a stark contrast in black and white, with somber organ music playing designed by Tractor. His parents, the barking animals, sit at the cluttered kitchen table and drink, a hideous portrait of gluttony and self-absorption, while his father rubs his nose in the bright red puddle that appears in his bed each morning, a reference to abuse through bedwetting imagery.
The boy decides to plant a seed and waits while a Svankmajer-like Otik grows, a concoction of dirt, mud and twigs until a full-grown elderly grandmother is born, also white faced, complete with shoes and a black dress. Their relationship plays like a silent movie of smiles and kindness contrasted against the ominous soundtrack that plays when his parents are seen constantly grabbing and shouting at him, calling him names, which leads to violent animated images of parental decapitation. But in a real sequence that plays like a dream, the grandmother appears to die, and sits alone in a graveyard while animated imagery shows seeds spreading through pollination, while the boy returns alone to his darkened room and dreams.
User comments (Page 2) from imdb Author: LexLutherthe2nd from United States
THE GRANDMOTHER is the kind of experimental film that could
have only came out of the early 70s. Nowadays it would be considered too weird
for general audiences. Thusly, Lynch would probably have a difficult time
getting funding for it. For one thing, you can't show the parents abusing the
kid merely because he wets the bed. No one would let their kid participate.
Lynch would probably be told to put some dialog in the movie rather than have
the main characters bark at each other. "You want me to crawl on the floor
and say what?" the actors would say, "Can I win a prize?" The
jumps from animation to live action would probably be discouraged, too since
that pulls people out of the reality . So experimental films such as this are
rare these days. They are also a refreshing alternative to "reality"
TV.
As someone else pointed out, THE GRANDMOTHER could easily be considered a
prequel to ERASERHEAD. The boy here could easily be the later film's Henry in
his younger years. I like the way Lynch painted his set black, too. It gives
the setting an other worldly feel. ERASERHEAD was described by Lynch as "
a dream of dark and troubling things". THE GRANDMOTHER could be called
" a dream of a dark and troubling place." Not everyone's cup of tea,
but if you like unusual films, it's a must see.
DVD Verdict Bill Gibron (excerpt)
A young couple, immature and brutish, gives birth to a son
who they berate and abuse. Seeking solace, the boy finds a strange bag of seeds
in an upstairs bedroom, one of which he plants. After a long period of
germination and growth, the seed blooms and a "grandmother" is born.
This kindly old woman takes care of the boy. But trouble looms as the parents
discover what the boy has been up to. This is the last time Lynch will intermix
animation into his film work.
THE GRANDMOTHER: Lynch's first true film, a pseudo-linear story of parental abuse and family love that acts as a fitting introduction to all the major thematic material he would exploit in Eraserhead. Beginning again with animation, Lynch introduces us to Mother and Father, two immature beings not fully formed, but mutated in undeveloped and piggish ways. Animalistic in their expression of love, they conceive their son, The Boy, who they truly are not ready to care for. The only verbal connection The Boy has to Mother or Father is their brutish, beast like barking. The Boy wakes every morning to find a yellow stain on his bed sheets, and Father punishing him for it. Even in the quiet moments when Mother and Father are lost in their own primitive worlds, a touch or action by The Boy is met with violent shaking and hellish bleating.
The Boy chooses to grow a Grandmother, an indication of the type of complete, pandering, and unconditional love he seeks. Grandmother represents comfort, peace, and acceptance. Cinematically, the entire plant giving birth sequence is handled in a very visceral, gore-style manner (evidencing yet another Lynch comment on reproduction and the beginning of life) except here, black and brown, the colors of soil and dirt, substitute for blood and afterbirth. Lynch sees the family dynamic as filled with abuse and fear, pain and discomfort. Even the perfect Grandparent, toward the end, begins to make demands. There is no escape. The Boy must accept his fate, and face manhood. There is no peace. There is no true love. One could very easily see The Boy growing up to be the strange haired Henry Spencer of Eraserhead and this film is just as visually striking. Without dialogue, Lynch lets visual cues tell the story. He creates drama and unease, love and longing through gestures and sound. He manipulates everything: frame stops, images and even reality to illustrate his points, balancing explanation with excess. The disc's image is worthy of the material, with amazing sound. If there were one reason to own the disc it would be to see The Grandmother.
User comments from imdb Author: Avant-garde_Addict from USA
David Lynch's The Grandmother is a 34-minute-long
experimental nightmare. The absurdly dark, ominous visuals suggest the film is
set inside a madman's nightmare, though it actually refers to the nuclear
American family gone horribly wrong. Dialogue-free except for primal grunting
and barking, The Grandmother is carried solely through dramatic acting and
striking visuals. The soundtrack is cramped with white noise such as discordant
grating, creaking and droning that compliments the already disturbing
atmosphere. Lynch mixes hand-drawn animation with live-action in an effort to
create a world as disturbing as it is surreal.
The film's four characters remain nameless, appearing to be generic symbols.
The Boy, whom the narrative centers on, is neglected and abused by his parents
who treat him like an unwanted nuisance. They literally bark, growl, and crawl
on all fours, symbolizing their distance from being human. All of the actors
are caked with white powder makeup that causes their skin to glow brightly
amidst the ultra-high contrast photography. The Boy's only attire is a black
tuxedo with a bow tie, which combined with his solemn, pain-stricken face suggests
he is attending an eternal funeral. Perhaps the Boy is dressed for his own
funeral, because his life appears to be 'dead' on a symbolic level. The Father
always wears a stained, moth-eaten white undershirt with equally dreadful boxer
shorts. The photography is so high contrast that you often only see the Boy's
stark white face and hands 'floating' around the pitch black background. On the
opposite spectrum, the Father's bright clothes appear to jump out of the
darkness, making his presence dominant and obvious.
Despite the abstractness of The Grandmother, several themes appear evident. The
Boy expresses the loneliness and pain that accompanies a household with abusive
and neglectful parents. The Grandmother character, who the Boy secretly grows
from a plant-like seed in the attic, symbolizes warmth and comfort. The Boy
both figuratively and literally 'grows' a parental figure, comparing the growth
of love to that of a plant. The Boy's actions suggest that love should be
treated like growing a plant: you first plant the seed, then nurture it until
it matures into something full and complete.
After much attention and care, the Boy's plant grows into a massive, pulsating
cocoon out of which the Grandmother crawls from, fully clothed and aged. The
Boy and Grandmother immediately embrace and offer each other much-needed
comfort. His world seems brighter for the time being, but his living nightmare
is far from over. Ultimately, nothing lasts forever, as this film appears to
suggest.
The Grandmother is highly recommended for fans of the avant-garde, or anyone
looking for something different. If you thought Eraserhead was Lynch's darkest
and weirdest film, wait until you see this small miracle.
Le
Revelateur and The Grandmother • Senses of Cinema Brad Stevens from Senses of Cinema, May 3, 2000 (excerpt)
If Philippe Garrel's Le
Revelateur (1968) and David Lynch's The Grandmother (1970) are among
the cinema's finest depictions of childhood, it will be immediately obvious to
anyone who sees them that they have far more in common with each other than
with such masterpieces as Vigo's Zéro de Conduite (1933), Rossellini's Deutschland
Im Jahre Null (Germany, Year Zero, 1947) , Laughton's The
Night of the Hunter (1955), Mackendrick's A High Wind In Jamaica
(1965) and Kiarostami's Khaneh-Je Doost Kojast? (Where is My Friend's
House?, 1987), the similarities of tone, imagery, theme and structure being
so extreme that it is difficult to believe nothing more than coincidence was
involved. Both films (like Lynch's later Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
present child abuse not as an aberration, nor as something that occurs within
but somehow still separate from the nuclear family unit, but rather as the
inevitable product of familial arrangements under capitalism. Of course, the
word 'capitalism' is not used in either work - indeed, no words are used, for
the Garrel is completely silent, while the Lynch reduces communication to a few
animalistic grunts. But this freedom from vocal discourse - a freedom
inextricably linked to the child's vision of a world not yet structured by
language - enables an even greater freedom. While remaining explicitly
Freudian, the films neatly sidestep psychoanalysis' tendency to make its more
radical discoveries serve bourgeois interests, and it is astonishing to find
Lynch and Garrel anticipating contemporary feminist rethinkings of Freud
(notably Alice Miller's) by more than a decade.
The Grandmother, a work little known in France, goes even further in this direction, telling its story - about a boy who responds to his parents' hostility by growing a loving grandmother in the attic - through a mixture of live-action, pixillation, and animated fantasy sections, one of which, showing the boy cutting off his father's head on a stage recalling that of Le Revelateur, appears susceptible to a Freudian interpretation, something Lynch carefully resists. The sequence in which the boy rejects his mother's affectionate gestures demonstrates that, while the mother may desire the son, the son does not desire the mother (who is also executed in the fantasy) - if the protagonist wishes his father dead, it is because the father is a sullen bully, not because he is perceived as a rival. The contradiction between Lynch's description of his own childhood as idyllic and his apparent identification with the boy caused Philip Strick (in Monthly Film Bulletin 639, April 1987) to argue that an autobiographical reading had been "firmly discouraged", but it should be remembered that when, two years earlier, Lynch's wife gave birth to a daughter (Jennifer Lynch, creator of Boxing Helena [1993]), the director discovered that fatherhood's unexpected responsibilities filled him with terror. It is, then, possible to understand The Grandmother 's monstrous father as a powerful act of self-criticism (Eraserhead [1976] can be seen as a partial remake told from the father's point-of-view
The Grandmother • Senses of Cinema Tim Maloney, July 2006
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
"The Grandmother" by david lynch... YouTube (10 minutes)
THE AMPUTEE
Shot during a depressing time while they were filming ERASERHEAD, but ran out of money. The idea for the film came to him when he discovered the American Film Institute was buying up old video stock, trying to determine which would be the best choice. Lynch decided to make two fairly identical video films, both in poor condition, of a young woman with two amputated legs cut off at the knee, which are wrapped in bandages. She sits in a chair smoking and writing a letter which she reads in voiceover, a bitter, derisive letter challenging her friend’s version of recent events. A male nurse enters to clean the bandages, who she utterly ignores, completely absorbed in her reflections. Eventually one knee turns into a leaky faucet which the nurse can’t repair, but gets up anyway and leaves. Personally, I preferred version number one.
Underground/Overground: The 1st Sydney Underground Film Festival John Conomos from Senses of Cinema, September 2007
David Lynch’s early short five-minute film, the graphically-named and -photographed The Amputee (1974) is a classic compressed catalogue of the filmmaker’s distinctive “Norman Rockwell” brand of popular American surrealism. Its underlying Bataillean current is central to the filmmaker’s dark labyrinthine imagination.
DVD Verdict Bill Gibron (excerpt)
A young woman writes a letter to a lover about friendship,
trust, and betrayal, as a male nurse cares for her hideously mangled leg
stumps. Shot on video as an experiment for the American Film Institute.
THE AMPUTEE—2 Versions: This is really a private joke between Lynch and AFI, The American Film Institute. He creates a tale concerning a female double amputee. She is so wrapped up in the writing of a letter/journal to her lover/self that she does not notice the horrendously gross things that are happening to her stumps as a male nurse attempts to treat them (the story is the same in both versions). One could argue that the monologue by the chair bound woman shows where the true amputation has occurred (in her love life and friendships). Or perhaps the amputation occurs between her physical condition (mangled, runny wounds) and her emotion condition (the feelings of humiliation and betrayal at the hands of associates). Or maybe it's just a sick joke, a Monty Python style vulgarity played more for queasy laughs than true insight.
The video quality of both versions is pretty poor. They are the worst looking items on the entire DVD (and the last sequence was filmed with a 100-year-old camera). Any impact Lynch hoped for is lost in the fuzzy transmission. The sound is fine, the voice-over monologue by Log Lady Catherine Coulson clear and concise. While completely in sync with Lynch's style and mindset, the purpose of this piece is baffling.
The Amputee v1 (David Lynch, 1973) version one on YouTube (4 mi)
ERASERHEAD A 98
USA
a dream of dark and troubling things
An explosive, highly inventive first film, a hallucinogenic ode to fatherhood, the product of more than 5-year’s worth of on again and off again shooting, also post-production work, the first feature film after several notable shorts. Perhaps a deranged look at parenthood, and the whole weird subject of procreation in general, with an excessively phobic view of childbirth which Lynch turns into a black & white industrial nightmare of horror, a parody on the modern urban landscape, called a “dream of dark and troubling things” by Lynch himself, featuring a clueless, hair-brained guy who wanders through it all with his own brand of silent film-style pathetic futility, adding a few comedic touches. Set in an industrial wasteland, where all around are spewing smokestacks and abandoned buildings, Henry is played in near silence by John Nance (who kept his bizarre hairstyle for the duration of the filming, which took nearly five years), who would later become Pete the Logger in TWIN PEAKS, and the film opens in total darkness with a shot of his head, where something mysterious is happening, suggesting this may all be a dream. He quietly goes about his business, where the elevator up to his room doesn’t move, instead it hesitates, then slowly rises while the lights flick on and off, yet this seems a part of his ordinary day. With meticulous pacing and attention to detail, this is a quiet, near wordless, dark, raw and somber mood, with only the sounds of steam hissing, or train whistles, or mechanical industrial whirs and spits, simply an extraordinary sound design by Alan R. Splet and an astonishingly fresh look that accompanies this world of polluting factories captured by cinematographer Frederick Elmes, both fellow American Film Institute classmates. Strange, surreal, and truly bizarre, this film goes where no man has gone before, creating a singularly unique film landscape, somewhat resembling the same toxic environment of Tarkovsky’s STALKER, which was made two years later. Lynch has reportedly indicated he has never yet read any film critic who has correctly described what he had in mind in the making of this film.
Guy Maddin:
As soon as I saw Eraserhead,
I knew he, like I, had experienced unplanned pregnancy and taken all those
feelings of delirium and disorientation that comes when all the terrain you're
standing on is suddenly pulled up from under you. You find yourself standing in
a completely new domestic situation. Especially in the middle of the night when
you just can't believe what's really happened to you. On those trips to the
bathroom where you go, “I'm in the bathroom in my wife's apartment, the one I
share with her, and I have a child,” you kind of dream these odd moments and
realize where you really are in the world... When it's done well, surrealism is as good as anything at getting at
those irrational moments, those certain fears. It's a unique species of
feelings that David Lynch fits in to Eraserhead.
my favorite is from
Jim Ridley,
It's funny that only horror movies(ROSEMARY'S BABY, THE EXORCIST, THE
OMEN) really seem adequate to expressing the messy emotions brought on by birth and new
parenthood. ERASERHEAD gets it exactly right--repulsion at this little thing
with its gross biological functions, exasperation at its constant
crying--while conveying the helplessness and blamelessness of the baby.
After a brief trip to his girl friend’s parents house, which features a memorable dinner sequence that alternates between comic absurd understatement to visions of hell, where the squirming Cornish chicken they are about to eat mysteriously starts moving, as if anticipating that it is about to be eaten. There is an element of grotesque horror, but it’s comically absurd. Her family pressures her to marry, as they hear there is a child. Henry is noncommittal on the subject, and feels uncomfortable by what he feels is their desire to take control over his life. It appears this is the first he’s heard about any child and everything appears to be closing in on him.
One night as he and his strangely unaffectionate girl friend are sleeping, we hear a horrible baby cry, and this could not be mistaken for anything but an abysmally annoying cry from the weird. What we see is a hideously grotesque mutant child, an alien head with a long neck sticking out from some sort of gelatinous substance, wrapped in bandages, lying on a small pillow, but its cry is unmistakable. His girl friend can’t take it, as she can’t sleep, and leaves him alone to care for their alien child. He looks as unprepared to deal with his responsibilities as he possible could, and as he does his pathetic best, we realize just what an ordinary guy he is, how he is hopelessly locked into this claustrophobic universe with little chance of escape. After spending the night with a strange and beautiful woman across the hall, who locks herself out of her room, Henry stares into his radiator, which takes on a life of its own. There’s a tiny stage lit up, with a black and white checkered floor, while a disfigured, putty-faced, angelic-looking girl in white does a little song and dance for her man, “In Heaven, Everything Is Fine,” while stepping on the little sperm-like creatures that drop on the floor from the rafters.
Eventually, however, Henry’s world collapses. It’s as if an ordinary man cannot contain what the universe of the imagination holds. So instead, in utter futility, after attempting to take matters into his own hands by killing the monster baby, Henry imagines his own head exploding, replaced by the tiny head of the mutant baby. Some kid picks up his head lying in the street, like some kind of recyclable product, and brings it to a factory that converts his head into pencil erasers. Henry later embraces the singing lady in the radiator, where they burst into a flash of white light, accompanied by what sounds like roller-rink organ music written by Fats Waller. Absolutely mindblowing. Just remember: In heaven, everything is fine.
Actor John Hurt on ERASERHEAD, from March 2006 Empire Magazine:
“If film is images on screen, I can remember at least 30
images that still have an impact on me from seeing that film for the first
time. And that’s incredible. That’s talking about pure, unadulterated
film. There are lots of other great
films, but if you want to be a purist, you can’t beat Eraserhead. The soundtrack as well – fantastic,
extraordinary, and it revolutionized sound.
I was shown it before committing to Elephant Man because nobody knew who
David Lynch was. He set up a viewing of
it and I saw it with (entertainment mogul) Edgar Bronfman Jr., who was a friend of
mine. And at the end of it, he said,
“Well, John, you won’t be doing Elephant Man, I should think, after seeing
that!” I said, “You’ve got to be
kidding! It’s genius! I’m definitely doing it!” So he became head of Universal and I’m still
a struggling actor. The images, from the
baby, to the radiators, to the image of the hair...it’s the most brilliant,
imaginative understanding of a nervous breakdown you could possibly
imagine. And funny! The sperms raining down! What a student film!”
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
David Lynch's unusual and powerful black-and-white Eraserhead
(1977) may be the greatest debut by an American director after Citizen Kane
(Cassavetes' Shadows comes a close second). Jack Nance stars as the
fright-haired Henry Spencer, who lives and works in a buzzing, humming
industrial section of some unnamed nightmare city. He goes to dinner at his
girlfriend's house and learns that she's pregnant. The girlfriend (Charlotte
Stewart) moves in with him but soon disappears, leaving him to take care of the
creepy, phallic baby all by himself. At the same time, Henry dreams of a
cheerful girl with ovary-like bumps on her face who lives in his radiator. She
dances and squishes little sperm-like things that fall from the sky, and,
well... Suffice it to say that Eraserhead is one of the weirdest movies
ever made -- but it's certainly not just weird for weird's sake. As we can now
see by comparison to his subsequent work, it's a vintage Lynch film, full of
his personal whims, desires and fears, both funny and disturbing. Especially
notable is the stunning sound design calculated to make the audience feel
anxious at all times. It's one of the few movies outside of Bunuel's oeuvre
that captures the elusive feel of dream logic. Anything can happen at any time,
including the still-hilarious sequence that explains the title. There's also
something slightly compulsive about watching it, which explains its success as
a
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Anne Orchier
"It's my Philadelphia Story. It just doesn't have Jimmy Stewart in it." In Lynch's debut feature, a man and a woman conceive a monstrous child somewhere in between suburban alienation and industrial rot, a mostly conventional situation with the most grotesque punchline. Watching ERASERHEAD now feels like wandering through a nightmare more than ever, due in part to its central conceit and the expected barrage of disturbing events and images that it entails--distended faces, animal carcasses, etc.--but even the film's few familiar features add to this dreamlike quality. For example, most of ERASERHEAD takes place in an apartment building whose lobby is recognizable as the Other Place from TWIN PEAKS, and its checkerboard floors trigger a series of half-conscious connections, the common dream trope of a location playing the role of another location. But for every fact we know about the film's production, we're equally uncertain about what it is we're actually looking at, including the creature-child itself, whose uncertain origins have inspired theories that claim it as everything from a cow fetus to an elaborate puppet. Then, amidst this uncertainty, the film's most destabilizing quality emerges: its sweetness. As the father, Jack Nance has a constant wide-eyed, beleaguered stare that is almost as infantile as the creature-child that he tends to, ambivalently at first and then urgently as soon as he sees it in distress. It's effectively moving for the same reason that it's effectively dreamlike, with conscious logic and psychological realism applied to unreal conditions. But because Lynch's mind doesn't seem to format in the conditional or hypothetical, this aspect of unreality is always underlined as literal, so that the scenario of a largely silent father figure demonstrating real concern over his freak spawn is never played as what would happen but what is happening, shifting the focus onto affect and away from conditions. The silhouette of Nance's head has become a visual shorthand for the film, and is also emblematic in many ways of this oddly bound logic; it's shape is both inexplicable and inevitable, and the only place it could possibly make sense is on the floor of a pencil factory, which is exactly where it ends up.
David
Lynch Made a Man Out of Me | Village Voice Nathan Lee, January 9, 2007
Like every touchstone of my nascent cinephilia, I
first encountered Eraserhead on crap VHS. It was the late 1980s, I was
15, and I didn't know what I'd seen, but it was love at first sight. Nerds in
space. Mutant babies. Domestic derangement. Radiator ladies. Inexplicable
seizures. Enigmatic orifices. Weird routines. The hardcore bizarre and
ineffably beautiful. Totally. Like. Awesome. David Lynch became an
instant culture hero. I all but draped myself in Blue Velvet (movie,
soundtrack, poster) and was soon hosting
Hand in glove, my brain
with Eraserhead. Even more than Blue Velvet, Lynch's
non-narrative nightmare scratched an itch in my imagination. Here were my two
favorite genres, horror and science fiction, spied through a murky crevice of
the underground, a perv-o-licious perspective that forever altered my taste in
movies. Out of similar fissures, the philosophic horror shows of David
Cronenberg would strike deeper and sustain me longer, and I would come to find
Lynch's Hollywood Hallucination mode his richest ( Lost Highway, Mulholland
Drive, Inland Empire). But Eraserhead came first, its
swarming spermatozoa impregnating a love of the avant-garde that rapidly
metastasized.
Some years later in San
Francisco (still smoking but now into Stan Brakhage, Sleater Kinney, and moving
to New York), I returned to Lynch's debut rather reluctantly, as you might pick
up a writer beloved in adolescence and now suspected of irrelevance—hello,
Hermann Hesse. A new print was booked at the Castro Theatre, drag-queen
mothership of Bay Area cinephila, a movie palace in the old style, or at least
what a degenerate film nerd like me imagined that to be: frescoed walls, red
velvet curtains, chandeliers, uncomfortable seats.
I remember one thing
only of my reunion with Eraserhead: the discovery that to see the film
means nothing—one must also hear it. Viewing it alone in the dark in my
bedroom, its aphonic oddities may have been diminished on TV, but they well
enough amazed. Watched on an appliance, it sounded like one: a refrigerator on
the fritz perhaps, or a vacuum cleaner stuck in the bathroom. In the larger
reaches of a grand old space, bounding off marble and chandelier, the
soundscape of Eraserhead opened a vast new dimension. Choose your
onomatopoeia: clang, drone, hiss, buzz, squawk, howl, khzzsh-shzz- frphft. All
of which echoed as if housed in an intergalactic seashell cocked to the ears of
an acid-tripping gargantua.
(Speaking of which:
"Eraserhead's not a movie I would drop acid for," wrote J.
Hoberman in his very first assignment for the Voice, "although I
would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the
middle of Star Wars." Was Tyler Durden reading?)
One thing is clear on
third viewing: the genius of Eraserhead as sculpture. What a masterpiece
of texture, a feat of artisanal attention, an ingenious assemblage of damp,
dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze. The immaculate restoration brings
all this to new light. It doesn't deliver a visual revelation on par with the
aural adventure in
Shanghai, 2015 . . .
not coming to a theater near you [Rumsey Taylor]
To mind the single
most frightening image in film is the baby in David Lynch’s Eraserhead.
The thing, grotesquely deformed, bears no direct human characteristic aside
from its persistent cry. Its head, roughly the size of a fist, sports two
spotty eyes on either side. Its limbless body contained in a mummified wrap.
This “child” is the
progeny of reluctant parents Henry and Mary. The two share not one exchange
without displaying some obvious fear of what they have produced. This baby is
the horrid manifestation of the fear of parental responsibility; it is
embarrassingly hideous and difficult to care for.
The title Eraserhead
is a literal reference to a scene late in the film in which Henry’s head falls
off. It is surrounded by a pool of blood and it falls through an unseen hole.
It lands on a day-lit street, a boy picks it up, sells it to a clerk at a
factory that fashions and attaches erasers onto pencils. Henry’s head is
drilled into, the offshoot is made into an eraser, hence, eraser-head.
Attempting to reason this sort of logic is somewhat futile. In this dark
nightmare literalism is as unlikely as a light that doesn’t flicker.
Lynch’s work,
(particularly this, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive) is often
described as dream-like or nightmarish, being that his films incorporate a
logic best understood in the context of a dream. In truth there is no other
way, really, in the vein of traditional criticism to describe it. Eraserhead
is a film that seems to require interpretation. Answers, however, are so
distant that one wonders if they are even intended.
Of the three cited
films Eraserhead is the one that sports a noticeable narrative closure.
Though the film’s narrative is evident, the progression from the film’s opening
to ending is heedlessly meandering in its direction. Unlike Lynch’s later
efforts, the metaphoric quality in Eraserhead is not only implied but
apparent.
Consider the opening:
Henry’s head is seen superimposed over a spherical rock. Inside the stone is a
man staring out a window. The man pulls a lever; a worm is dispelled from
inside Henry. This bombardment of unswallowable imagery occurs in the film’s
first minutes. One may note that no portion of the film occurs in the rubric of
filmic convention, nor, for that matter, does it adhere to any discernable
formula. And thus this persistent barrage of stark sounds and images become
progressively weird.
Ultimately, in a
decade known for producing the most sexually subversive and visually unique
films in history, Eraserhead is distinguished as one of its most
idiosyncratic entries. Eraserhead rivals any work of surrealism.
The film was made with
a grant from the American Film Institute, along with donations from family and
friends. One famous bit of trivia is that Lynch got a paper route close to the
end of filming to secure his budget. Eraserhead was shot deliberately
over the course of three years (the film is similarly paced). This level of
exacting direction is evident in every minute of the film. When Henry waits in
an elevator, it takes exactly thirteen seconds for the device to raise.
Likewise, Henry’s apartment number is 26 (thirteen doubled); Mary’s apartment
is number 2416 (2+4+1+6=13). Again, the meaning of these symbols is unknown,
yet their noticeable frequency suggests that they “mean” something.
Although Eraserhead
was legitimately released in 1977, it has come to be known as a perennial
midnight movie, airing in sporadic late-night screenings across the globe.
Despite its defiance
of interpretation, one motif in Eraserhead remains largely curious. In
Henry’s dark apartment is a radiator. Henry will look at it, scratchy, 30s jazz
will play, and the face of a woman will appear. She is dressed in all white,
and has very large cheeks. This action occurs repeatedly.
Henry eventually finds
way to enter the radiator. Once inside he is on a stage, with the woman
(credited, simply, as “the lady in the radiator”). She is kind and inviting,
yet when Henry attempts to embrace her he is shocked (an action mimicked
visually by a flash of white). A theory (not my own) underlines this image, and
forces an interpretation of the film.
This lady in the
radiator is death. She intrigues Henry because she is a form of escape from his
existence. To further secure this claim is her soothing anthem “in heaven
everything is fine.”
The film is often
described to occur in a post-apocalyptic setting (which is, in effect, a
criticism paired with the film’s theme of isolation). The abundant 30s jazz
counterbalances Henry’s contemporary parental paranoia. Exposing this dialectic
aids not in interpreting the film; it rather serves to illustrate the level of
analysis that may be used to do so. Answers in Eraserhead may be
entirely obscured, though attempting to solve this or any logic in Lynch’s
canon, for that matter, is nearly custom in viewing his films.
I Viddied it on the Screen [Alex Jackson]
DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review (April 8, 2003) another view: PopMatters (Bill Gibron) review (December 15, 2003)
DVD Outsider Slarek, in 4 parts
Eraserhead • Senses of
Cinema Catherine S. Cox from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Erasing Clouds review Paul Jaissle
Choking on Popcorn - Eraserhead Arjan Welles
The Projection Booth [Rob Humanick]
Eraserhead - Talking
Pictures Lucy Reynolds
filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review [5/5]
Film Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw
Electric Shadows David Wester
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]
The New York Sun: Nicolas Rapold
MUBI's Notebook: Christopher Small Comparing a film by David Lynch with one by
Jacques Rivette, December 16, 2015
The Digital Bits dvd review Rob Hale
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Kamera.co.uk review Derek Baldwin
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
Scifilm Review Steve
DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [5/5]
The New York Sun (Steve Dollar) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [5/5] Phil Hall
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
All Movie Guide [Keith Phipps]
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Distorted, Distorting and All-Too Human Manohla Dargis from The New York Times
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
ELEPHANT MAN
USA
Guy Pearce from
March 2006 Empire Magazine:
“I love the way in which David Lynch captured
the story of this man so severe in his deformity and how he captured the
period. It’s not just that he shot it in
black and white; it’s the use of the industrial soundtrack that he had to
really draw you into that period. It
just feels incredibly real and very poignant.
It’s really about getting all the pieces right. I find it hard to overlook a movie getting
elements like the soundtrack, cinematography or dialogue wrong. The Elephant Man gets it all right.”
Joshua Klein from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Mel Brooks fought for years to bring the true story of John
Merrick – cruelly nicknamed the “Elephant Man” due to his large tumors – to the
big screen. He fought equally hard to
bring Lynch on board. The director,
working in beautiful widescreen black and white, depicts 19th century
London
Rescues from a sideshow by a well-intentioned surgeon
(Anthony Hopkins), Merrick (John Hurt) tries fitting into a world whose first
reaction to his deformed visage is shock and revulsion. Trained in the etiquette and formalities of
the times, the gentle Marrick cannot overcome the prejudice and distaste of
many of those around him.
Hut plays Merrick with a
sensitivity and dignity that radiates from beneath the tons of makeup that make
him unrecognizable. Equally excellent is
Hopkins, who realizes he may subconsciously be exploiting Merrick
as a medical oddity despite his initial good intentions. It’s a triumph all around by especially for
Lynch, who earned numerous accolades that helped him escape from the art house
ghetto.
More accessible than Lynch's enigmatically
disturbing Eraserhead, The Elephant Man has much the same
limpidly moving humanism as Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage in describing
how the unfortunate John Merrick, brutalised by a childhood in which he was
hideously abused as an inhuman freak, was gradually coaxed into revealing a
soul of such delicacy and refinement that he became a lion of Victorian
society. But that is only half the story the film tells. The darker side,
underpinned by an evocation of the steamy, smoky hell that still underlies a
London facelifted by the Industrial Revolution, is crystallised by the
wonderful sequence in which Merrick is persuaded by a celebrated actress to
read Romeo to her Juliet. A tender, touching scene ('Oh, Mr Merrick, you're not
an elephant man at all. No, you're Romeo'), it nevertheless begs the question
of what passions, inevitably doomed to frustration, have been roused in this
presumably normally-sexed Elephant Man. Appearances are all, and like the
proverbial Victorian piano, he can make the social grade only if his ruder
appendages are hidden from sensitive eyes; hence what is effectively, at his
time of greatest happiness, his suicide. A marvellous movie, shot in stunning
black-and-white by Freddie
Francis.
Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]
“I am not an animal! I am a human
being!” – John Merrick (John Hurt),
the ‘Elephant Man.’.
It’s one of the classic lines of modern film, and about the only time in David Lynch’s
fine The Elephant Man that Merrick
speaks out in his own defence. It’s a blood-curdling moment, because – while we
see him being abused and exploited throughout the film – the unassuming Merrick suffers largely in silence, as if he doesn’t
realize that he deserves better. But here he demands at least minimal respect,
exposing absolutely his debasement at the hands of others.
This troubling, yet uplifting film, inspired by the actual experiences of a
deformed and terminally ill 19th century Englishman who was treated like an
animal and forced into service as a circus freak show attraction, but later got
to live with respect under the auspices of Dr. Frederick Treeves (Anthony Hopkins),
a surgeon at London Hospital.
Beginning with a shockingly nightmarish scene in which a woman – apparently
Merrick’s mother – is attacked and presumably raped by a huge elephant, the
movie begins in the fanciful imagination of a freak show visitor before
shifting into a much more conventional (particularly for Lynch) narrative form.
Merrick is undeniably a victim of avarice, small-mindedness and the
thrill-seeking of others; his oppressors are just as clearly evil, including
Bytes (Freddie Jones), Merrick’s leering ‘owner’ at the freak show, and an
entrepreneurial hospital night porter (Michael Elphick) who starts the abuse
anew once Merrick takes up residence there. While these characters are starkly
black and white, others more precisely match the shades of grey of Freddie
Francis’ cinematography. Treeves is an ambiguous character, although ultimately
quite sympathetic. Unlike the bad guys, he’s a proper gentleman possessing a
conscience who – at least eventually – treats Merrick
well. However, he rightly questions his own motivations, admitting that he too
has used Merrick , in his case to gain fame
within the medical community. The same critique can be aimed at the hospital
governor (John
Gielgud), whose generosity toward Merrick
smacks more of self-interest than genuine caring. Only the curt head orderly,
Mothershead (Wendy
Hiller) maintains consistent humanity throughout the story.
The moral questions raised by The Elephant Man are fascinating and the
film is exquisitely realized, from Francis’ excellent black and white
cinematography to the awesome makeup of Christopher Tucker and – best of all –
the acting of Hurt, Hopkins Merrick as pitiful.
In retrospect, it’s shocking that The Elephant Man was not honoured with
a single Academy Award, although it was nominated for eight. With the benefit
of hindsight, who really thinks that Robert Redford’s
Ordinary People
was more deserving of the awards for directing, screenplay and best picture?
And who can understand why The Elephant Man’s cinematography wasn’t even
recognized with a nomination? The Academy did not give an award for makeup at
that time, but they recognized the oversight by the next year – too late for
Tucker, of course.
Great films are much more significant than any awards they may or may not
receive. The Elephant Man is a memorable film about human survival and a
powerful commentary on human exploitation.
ScreenGrab: The Nerve Movie Blog - Indie Film News, Reviews and Gossip Paul Clark, scroll down past the Weekly Top 10
One of the most famous figures in the history of Victorian
England was Joseph Merrick, later referred to as John, but best known as the
Elephant Man. Merrick, born in 1862, was incurably deformed, with a severely
enlarged and misshapen head, an alarmingly curved spine, a near-useless right
arm, and skin that was covered almost entirely by large tumors. Merrick lived a
good deal of his short life in freak shows, being exhibited to gawking
thrill-seekers, before spending most of his final years in hospitals under
medical and scientific observation before dying at the age of 27.
David Lynch’s The Elephant Man initially introduces us to
After
“Good heavens, you haven’t acquired a taste for this sort of stuff, have you?”
“Possibly, but not quite the diet of a grown man.”
This exchange sticks out to me for two reasons. The first is because of how
succinctly it illuminates the snobbery still in force during the supposedly
enlightened Victorian era. A century and a half before, Dr. Samuel Johnson
infamously defined oatmeal as “a grain, which in
In addition, the use of food in this scene is something that would soon be a
Lynch trademark. Rarely is the old adage “you are what you eat” more applicable
in movies than in the world of David Lynch. Consider the dichotomy of beers in Blue
Velvet (Heineken for the good characters, Pabst Blue Ribbon for Frank and
his gang), the ice chest full of meats (frankfurters, braunschweiger) Alvin
carts along with him in The Straight Story, or Agent Dale Cooper’s
constant wolfing-down of high calorie foods like pie on Twin Peaks. And
so key is coffee to Lynch’s worldview, especially in his more recent work, that
he recently started his own line of coffee, available by mail-order.
Carr Gomm, recognizing that
Noticing the look of trepidation on the nurse’s face,
It’s at this point that the scene goes in two separate directions. As the nurse
walks away with the oatmeal, Carr Gomm takes
Treves, more than a little nervous (and who wouldn’t be in the presence of the
formidable Gielgud?), becomes evasive, talking about Merrick’s deformity and
the possibly shocking effect he might have on other patients, but never coming
out and saying who it is. He finally admits that the new patient is “an
incurable,” and Carr Gomm latches onto this point. He insists on the hospital’s
policy on incurable cases, but
Then the scene cuts to the nurse, still climbing the stairs. She becomes even
more anxious with each step she takes. The scene then cuts back to Carr Gomm.
“Yes, I quite appreciate your problem, Mr. Treves. But why not contact the
British Home, or the
Finally, the scene returns to the nurse slowly entering the room and seeing
At its core, this scene is a marvelous piece of suspense filmmaking in the
classical sense. Hitchcock once defined his philosophy of suspense by saying,
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” So it is
here. Because we not only know what Merrick looks like but also how others
react to his appearance, the climax of the scene is pre-ordained as soon as
Carr Gomm places the oatmeal in the nurse’s hand.
But what makes the movie as a whole such an achievement is that it is never
content to make
Reverse
Shot: Fernando F. Croce June 29,
2012
PopOptiq: Justine Smith June 1, 2014
The
Elephant Man - TCM.com Bret
Wood
digitallyOBSESSED [Mark Zimmer]
not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston) review
Is The Elephant Man David Lynch's Best Film? - ComingSoon.net Chris Alexander
Monday
Editor's Pick: The Elephant Man (1980) - Alt Screen
Are the hills going to march off?: July 2009 Carson Lund
Artforum: Nick
Pinkerton February 28, 2015
DVD Outsider Slarek
DVD Journal Dawn Taylor
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/5]
The Digital Bits dvd review Adam Jahnke
DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review
DVD Talk (Joshua Zyber) dvd review [3/5] [HD-DVD Version]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray Review (UK Release) [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Sunset Gun: Kim Morgan January 08, 2008
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] dionwr
Movie-Vault.com (Timotei Centea) review
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [5/5]
The Chicago Reader: Dave Kehr capsule
All Movie Guide [Michael Betzold]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
The Elephant Man (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DUNE
USA
The spice extends life. The spice expands
consciousness. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its
Navigators, whom the spice has mutated over four thousand years, use the orange
spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space; that is, to travel to
any part of the known universe without moving. —Princess Irulan, in David Lynch’s Dune
Lynch has toiled to condense Frank
Herbert's mammoth SF novel into two hours twenty: the life-and-death struggle
between the Atreides and Harkonnens for the vital spice melange takes place on
a third planet - Arrakis, the desert planet, home to the Fremen, dune dwellers
with vivid blue eyes. Fremen legend tells of a messiah who will be able to
drink the water of life, previous tasters having tried and died. That Paul
Atreides (MacLachlan) knows how to fit his desert survival suit is taken as a
promising early sign that now, perhaps, the time has come. Lynch's third
feature may have been a commercial disaster, but it gets under your skin and is
marked by unforgettable images and an extraordinary soundtrack. The sets and
props - from steaming machinery to dimly lit interiors, via personal bug-juice
extractors - are reminiscent of Eraserhead, and also recall Metropolis and
Blade Runner. There's a ton of exposition, but consider the source material.
The constant whispered thoughts may be expositionally expedient, but they also
help to establish a much-needed intimacy in a film of this epic scale.
Reel.com DVD review [Kim Morgan]
Dune
is a beautiful movie. Beautiful set design, beautiful costumes, beautiful
cinematography, beautifully gross and imaginative creations—the movie remains
one of the most stunning sci-fi films ever put to celluloid. But here's the
problem: it's laborious.
Although there are those defenders who'll claim you just need to read the source material (the famed novel by Frank Herbert), it's not the viewers who are the problem— the film itself has to play catch-up. Still, Herbert purists will say, "The thing is, they left all this stuff out!" But as it is, there are so many characters, so many powers (many very similar to each other), so many different cultures, archetypes, and sub-plots (or rather, mini-dramas) that one can never relax and become absorbed in Dune's gorgeous frames. Twenty years after the release of the film, its failure seems such a waste. You can see how superb the picture could have been, particularly with a visionary at the helm, director David Lynch, who clearly grooved on making Dune look so damn captivating. If only the plot had been captivating as well. Perhaps Lynch was too faithful to Herbert's sprawling, epic work.
For a time, the film was going to be a project for Roger Corman, Ridley Scott, and Alejandro Jodorowsky (of cult fave El Topo), but it was ultimately offered to Lynch partially for his understanding of surreal cosmic landscapes. Set in the year 10191, the film's first half hour explains the power struggles between the ruling families on the four planets. The key commodity is mélange—, a spice that raises consciousness, prolongs life, and facilitates time travel. Mined on the arid planet Arrakis (a.k.a. Dune), the spice can be addictive. The Harkonnen Dynasty, a group of mutants from the planet Giedi Prime, oversees spice production on Dune.
But the Emperor of the galaxy (Jose Ferrer) strips the Harkonnens of their power and puts in place Duke Leto Attreides (Jurgen Prochnow), the ruler of Caladan. Attreides is swiftly assassinated by the Harkonnens, and his concubine and young son, Paul (Lynch muse Kyle MacLachlan), are left to die. Instead, Paul grows up and becomes a Messiah, and eventually he leads a rebellion against the Harkonnens.
And that's just a cursory explanation—. Going on about Dune requires time and space not available here, and that's one of the reasons it flopped. Over time, the movie has been appreciated in part via the extended cut Universal Studios pieced together in order to, hopefully, make up for their loss. Shown on television, this version was rejected by Lynch (it gets the "Allan Smithee" directorial credit). It's somewhat baffling to think the longer version (two hours and 57 minutes) garners any praise, as it actually makes the film even more tedious and confusing. More poor dialogue is uttered by great actors (including Max von Sydow, Patrick Stewart, Linda Hunt, and Sting, in a teeny-weeny outfit), and there's more voiceover and incessant repetition. Nothing feels richer or more expansive in this edition. (Clearly, that should have been the point of extending it.) It's almost as if the producers wanted to blame Lynch, not themselves, and slapped this footage together.
Which should have also been better explained in this edition. Dune is a notorious film, a picture that's managed to be simultaneously denigrated for its flawed story telling and praised for its innovative design, so addressing any controversy would have been interesting. Instead, bonus materials—"Designing Dune," "Dune FX," "Dune Models," "Dune Wardrobe," a photo gallery, and deleted scenes—mainly focus on what makes the original movie so memorable. These supplements do manage to engage—the design portion in particular—as you further see how hands-on Lynch was in crafting the look of the film with his production designer. For as much as he's an ingenious film director, Lynch is also a gifted fine artist, and seeing his scribbles on cocktail napkins offers an intriguingly intimate view of his genius. Which makes one remember why, though incredibly flawed, Dune remains oddly somewhat lovable. And, again, beautiful.
filmcritic.com
[Jeremiah Kipp]
Did you know David Lynch at one time considered directing Return
of the Jedi? Legions of George Lucas fans are probably delighted that
he never got the shot, because for better or for worse (probably for worse) it
might have turned out like the bizarre sci-fi experiment Dune. I’ve
sometimes been accused of defending Lynch even when he’s not working at his
best. That’s clearly the case here, resulting in a compromised megabudget
effort where Lynch attempts to indulge his graphic art sensibility and please a
mass audience at the same time. It just doesn’t fly.
But Lynch fans might find stuff to enjoy in Dune anyhow. After all,
there’s a floating bug monster that parlays with Jose Ferrer’s space emperor in
the early going, flanked by legions of somnambulant slaves in black raincoats
that probably inspired the villains in
And what a cast. Lynch certainly populates his film with a who’s who of
memorable character actors: Brad Dourif’s nerd-assassin (nearly upstaged by his
mad curly eyebrows), Max von Sydow -- seeming to know what he’s talking about
even as he speaks so much sci-fi gibberish, Dean Stockwell as a paranoid
doctor, Patrick Stewart as a feisty combat expert, and Jack Nance (Eraserhead
himself) as Jack Nance. At the center is Kyle MacLachlan as the son of a duke
(Jurgen Prochnow, of all people) who transforms into a desert messiah once he’s
stranded on the wasteland planet of Dune. MacLachlan allows himself to be a
cipher, which is smart when he’s playing opposite Sting during their climactic
knife-fight. Best to underplay when the lead singer of the Police is shouting,
“I will kill him! Ha ha!”
The nonsensical dialogue is quotable even when it makes very little sense. Take
the mantra Brad Dourif repeats over and over again in his introductory scene
(wandering through an industrial production center that practically defines Lynchian):
“It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sappho that
thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is
by will alone I set my mind in motion.” He’s drinking some dark potion all the
while, enough to make you think that (a) the film is best enjoyed while drinking
some dark potion yourself, or (b) marveling that the cast and crew were
probably drinking some dark potions throughout production.
While Dune is enjoyable as a campy misfire from a visionary filmmaker, I
hesitate to say it’s actually good. The giant sand worms that attack
spaceships and castles throughout look hokey, the constant voice-over dropped
in to help the movie make narrative sense feels murky in a Blade
Runner sort of way. There are long battle scenes that successfully
eliminate any comparisons between David Lynch and David Lean, where the
spectacle becomes a mishmash of running crowds seemingly cut together at random.
It’s a mess, for sure. But it’s also not boring or generic a la The
Phantom Menace, which plays it so safe it never moves beyond feeling
comfortably numb. Accompanied by that droning soundtrack, Dune re-announces
itself as a movie to remember. Whether that makes for good memories or bad
depends on your tolerance for gonzo cinema.
After much delay arrives Dune on DVD, which includes the original
theatrical cut (reviewed above) and the notorious three-hour edition (primarily
known as the television cut), which begins with nine minutes of monotone
voice-over and which Lynch disowned -- indeed, it's "An Alan Smithee Film."
The extended cut is best described as awful, an overlong, messy, sloppy, and
unartistic piece of bloviation. The flipside of the DVD is best ignored. Stick
with the main cut and enjoy the substantial making-of documentaries and deleted
scenes introduced by Raffaella De Laurentiis, who, among other things, notes
that the mythical four-hour cut of Dune never really existed.
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Dune (1984) John Kenneth Muir, June 5, 2010
David Lynch reveals his battle tactics—Brendan Strasser, 1984 The City of Absurdity, 1984
David Lynch Folds Space: Because He Is the Kwisatz Haderach! Robert C. Cumbow from 24LiesASecond, November 16, 2006
Dragan Antulov retrospective [7/10]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
eFilmCritic.com (David Hollands) review [2/5]
411Mania.com [Will Helm], pt. 1
411Mania.com [Will Helm], pt. 2
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers] reviewing both the original and the TV Mini-series
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [5/5] reviewing both the original and the TV Mini-series
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott] reviewing both the original and the TV Mini-series
DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] TV Mini-series version only
DVD
Times [Extended Edition] Eamonn McCusker
digitallyOBSESSED.com [Jeff Wilson] (Extended Edition)
DVD Savant [Glenn Erickson] (Extended Edition)
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review [Extended Edition]
The Onion A.V. Club: Extended Edition [Tasha Robinson]
DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd
review [3/5] [Director's Cut] [Special Edition]
FilmJerk.com
(Brian Orndorf) dvd review [B] [Extended Edition]
DVD Talk
(Joshua Zyber) dvd review [5/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [HD DVD Version]
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Movie
ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
DVD Verdict
(Nicholas Sylvain) dvd review
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) review
[2/5]
The Cavalcade Of Schlock [Brian J Wright]
All Movie Guide [Keith Phipps]
Dune
rights holders set to desert Paramount
Ben Child from The Guardian,
November 9, 2010
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin
BLUE VELVET A 97
USA
It’s a strange
world, isn’t it?
A film bomb: you walk in, you sit down, you hear Bobby
Vinton’s song “Blue Velvet,” you immediately see brightly colored scenes of
Americana, white picket fences with gorgeously decorated flower arrangements,
neighbors watering their lawns, dogs barking, a bright red fire engine driving
peacefully through the neighborhood with a fireman waving, and within minutes,
Lynch has discovered an interesting device.
Kyle MacLachlan, Mr. ordinary everyman discovers a severed ear in an
open field, which Lynch uses as a portal to an alternate universe, one that
bears no resemblance to what we see on the surface, digging underneath the dirt
to discover a wretchedly filthy violent universe, as personified by Dennis
Hopper, who was at the time unemployed, fresh out of alcohol and drug rehab
treatment in real life, shown here turned into the picture of an
oxygen-sniffing murderous psychopath, a creepy venomous monster, Frank Booth,
who has now been transformed into an icon of cinema outlaw history.
MacLachlan is
guilty of nothing more than idle curiosity, and decides to bring his recently
discovered specimen to a neighbor, Detective John Williams (George Dickerson),
the father of Laura Dern, an innocent who is near the same age as Jeffrey
(MacLachlan) finishing her senior year of high school. Their relationship resembles the young love
of Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946). She overhears details about the case, which
is otherwise classified, and shares them with Jeffrey, who has a rush of
interest. He decides to hide in the
nearby apartment of Isabella Rossellini, Dorothy Vallens, a local singer who is
something of a femme fatale, believing she has something to do with the missing
ear. He is immediately discovered, and
she is desparate enough to cling to him, as if for life support, as her deep,
dark secrets are revealed, but she’s horrified at the thought of police
intervention. Her appearance adds a
touch of eroticism to a horror murder mystery.
Frank is manipulating her into offering her services, as he’s kidnapped
her husband and son, or so the theory goes with Jeffrey, eventually discovering
a dirty cop as well in Frank’s company.
But as he gets
closer to the crime, he gets reeled into Frank’s universe and his gang of
misfits, which is simply a mind-altering experience, especially watching Dean
Stockwell lip-synch to Roy Orbison’s Candy-Colored-Clown, as Frank calls it,
“In Dreams.” It’s a strange and cruel
world, but it makes for a fascinating film, as it’s like nothing we’ve ever
seen before. Everything appears slowed
down, as if in a dream-like haze, with similar pacing and absurd imagery as
ERASERHEAD (1977). It’s a phenomenal
surrealistic nightmare that’s impossible to ignore or take our eyes off
of. Simultaneous to the psychotic action
sequences, Laura Dern quietly recounts a mysterious dream she had where
darkness fell upon the earth until miraculously, robins returned in full force,
bringing with them their gift of love.
The film demonstrates near perfect editing, a remarkable director’s
vision, and a command of the medium that is startlingly original and mesmerizing,
always enhanced by the otherworldly music score from Angelo Badalamenti.
Angela Errigo from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
“It’s a strange world, isn’t it?” Graphic sexual violence and Dennis Hopper’s
shocking portrayal of a sadistic psychopath holding a singer’s family hostage
for her acquiescent brutalization provoked a storm of controversy around David
Lynch’s dark, disturbing, dreamlike mystery.
Lynch’s depiction of the cruelty, sickness, and horror lying just
beneath the surface of nice, clean, white-picket-fenced middle
America is not exactly subtle, but it is remorselessly gripping,
bold, and stylish. BLUE VELVET combines
an air of twister mystery with ironic, satiric Americana TWIN PEAKS
Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern are engaging as Jeffrey
Beaumont and Sandy Williams, the naive youngsters caught up in the macabre
relationship between Hopper’s crazed, oxygen-dependent kidnapper-killer (his
insanely scary, obscenity-spewing Frank Booth providing one of the most
unforgettable psychos of the screen) and brave Isabella Rossellini’s bruised
Dorothy Vallens, the tormented cabaret singer at his never-tender mercy while
he holds her husband and little boy captive.
Lumberton
The scene in which Jeffrey, hiding in Dorothy’s closet,
witnesses Frank’s frenzied rape of the blue-velvet-robed victim is most
contentious but an undeniably arresting, classic example of Lynch’s nerve. Clever use of innocuous pop ballads – most
hauntingly the title song – laced through regular Lynch collaborator Angelo
Badalamenti’s creepy score heightens the atmosphere. And althought he appears in only one scene,
Dean Stockwell’s performance as Frank’s confederate Ben, with his deceptively
camp bonhomie – miming to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” – almost rivals Hopper’s
for the spectacularly sinister weirdness.
Jeffrey (MacLachlan) is the
contemporary knight in slightly tarnished armour, a shy and adolescent
inhabitant of Lumberton, USA. After discovering a severed ear in an overgrown
backlot, he embarks upon an investigation that leads him into a hellish
netherworld, where he observes - and comes to participate in - a terrifying
sado-masochistic relationship between damsel-in-distress Dorothy (Rossellini)
and mad mobster Frank Booth (Hopper). Grafting on to this story his own
idiosyncratic preoccupations, Lynch creates a visually stunning, convincingly
coherent portrait of a nightmarish substratum to conventional, respectable
society. The seamless blending of beauty and horror is remarkable - although
many will be profoundly disturbed by Lynch's vision of male-female
relationships, centred as it is on Dorothy's psychopathic hunger for violence -
the terror very real, and the sheer wealth of imagination virtually unequalled
in recent cinema.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Jason Halprin
This is where the legend really began. It's curious to think how Lynch's career would have developed if DUNE (1984) had not been a box office failure, but cinema history can thank him for not playing it safe with this rebound project. Though Lynch had already made three features, VELVET was the first full articulation of his core theme of the evil that lurks in small towns everywhere. Not the outright surrealist endeavor that was ERASERHEAD, it is also not the most accessible of narratives. Dark, violent, sexual, and reeking of 1963 suburbia, the film is at times a noir mystery and at others a violent thriller. Many of the visual symbols that would populate TWIN PEAKS are introduced here, such as red curtains appearing when danger is present in a scene, and Lynch's continued growth as a complete cinematic artist is evident. Despite having a cast that didn't feature a legitimate star (Dennis Hopper may be the exception, but his career was in the dumps when he was cast...as the third choice), the film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, as well as praise from critics throughout the world. It's also notable that Kyle MacLachlan (essentially playing Dale Cooper) might never have worked again if not for his excellent performance. Still dangerous nearly thirty years later, the film is as gorgeous as it is classic.
Edinburgh
U Film Society [Dave Pallin] Dave Pallin
Reviewed at its release as "one of the sickest movies of all time" but also named best film of 1986 by the US National Society of Film Critics, Blue Velvet falls neatly into both categories. It is a bizarrely repellent kinky thriller which begins with a man watering his lawn before suffering a heart attack while the camera dives into a severed ear lying in the grass.
Set in a small rural logging town seemingly stuck in Eisenhower's 50s
Though missing the supernatural element, the film carries many of the
hall-marks of his later TV "soap from Hell" -
Interestingly Isabella Rossellini (the masochistic night club singer) is the daughter of Ingrid Bergman while the grotesque drag queen is played by Dean Stockwell the cutesy child star from the Gene Kelly/Sinatra 1946 musical Anchors Aweigh. A thoroughly enjoyable film proving once again that only a brave man with a large stick would offer David Lynch the psychotherapy that he would seem to most richly deserve.
Young Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan)
is on the brink of manhood in
The Village Voice: Guy Maddin February 28, 2006
The last real earthquake to hit cinema was David Lynch's Blue Velvet —I'm sure directors throughout the film world felt the earth move beneath their feet and couldn't sleep the night of their first encounter with it back in 1986—and screens trembled again and again with diminishing aftershocks over the next decade as these picture makers attempted to mount their own exhilarating psychic cataclysms. But no one could quite match the traumatizing combination of horrific, comedic, aural, and subliminal effects Lynch rumbled out in this masterpiece—not even Lynch himself in the fun-filled years that followed before he recombined with himself to invent The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive.
Lynch was born in 1946, part of that first litter of boomers sired by the paranoia of unmedicated war vets jittering and fisting their way through the sudden proliferation of film noir product. In spite of Lynch presenting his tale in the comforting saturated Kodachromes his generation associates with the "innocence" of their childhood years, there is much of what noir does best in Blue Velvet: Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey Beaumont slips past the safety rails and hops right into a raging maelstrom of guilt and evil as blithely as any noir protagonist ever did; and Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth is just the necessary incarnation of nightmare that Steve Cochrane's Eddie Roman was in Arthur Ripley's The Chase (1946), the most surrealism-propelled crime film ever to sleepwalk out of the Dark City.
But perhaps it is Isabella Rossellini's femme fatale Dorothy Vallens that is Blue Velvet's greatest gift to posterity. Director and neophyte actress collaborated to retool the old genre's often stock figure, to deglamorize and humiliate the supermodel, to knead her pulpy nakedness into a bruise-colored odalisque of inseminated sensualities and untrusting ferocity. There is something sharply porno-entomological, something of the implacable godless terror with which insects mate and devour, and something terrifyingly true, in the bearing of this bravely performed character. Nuns at Rossellini's old high school in Rome held a series of special masses for her redemption after the release of this film—still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain after 20 years. A new print has been struck for the special anniversary two-week run at Film Forum.
Cineaste
Selects: Forty Years of Favorite Films — Cineaste Magazine Martha P. Nochimson
With Blue Velvet, a mystery thriller set in Lumberton, North Carolina, David Lynch joined the ranks of great American filmmakers, like Welles and Hitchcock, who built their cinema on irresolvable tensions between vision and the politics of Hollywood commercialism. His earlier films had led to this development by permitting him to hone his personal style and learn the art of self-defense in the mainstream media. After his first film, Eraserhead (1977), Mel Brooks labeled him the first genuine American surrealist filmmaker, made him the director of The Elephant Man (1980), and protected his decisions, even though Lynch didn’t have contractual creative control. With Dune (1984), Dino DeLaurentiis taught him the necessity of the right of final cut. With Blue Velvet, Lynch began to take on Hollywood on his terms.
While telling a story with many generic romance and mystery elements, Lynch took issue with recipe filmmaking from the first frames of Blue Velvet—with darkly undulating blue draperies which form a backdrop for the romantic, pristine white font of the credits, while the dissonant yet melodic main title theme plays—to the partly comic, complex closure which blends a version of Hollywood’s happy ending with a malaise about what continues to lurk under the surface. Blue Velvet offers an altered form of spectatorship that pulls two ways: into the familiar acquiescence to Hollywood’s reassurances about boy meeting girl, and outward toward a dream-like distance from which we see and/or intuit the darkness behind such reassurances. Protagonists Sandy (Laura Dern) and Jeffrey (Kyle Maclachlan), who defy the warnings of Sandy’s police detective father and successfully investigate drug dealer Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), are Peyton Place ingénues–and they aren’t. “I don’t know whether you’re a detective or a pervert,” Sandy tells clean cut Jeffrey. “You’re like me,” the degenerate Frank tells him. And both Jeffrey and Frank are equally drawn to Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a masochistic night club chanteuse. In fact, the clichéd ‘good’ men of Lumberton all have their ‘Frank moments.’ American constructions of masculinity are under the microscope here when Lynch plays with our movie stereotypes, as are the structures of law, morality, art, and even our perceptions of physical reality. Thus the closure, in which Jeffrey sorts out his resemblances to and differences from Frank, may satisfy conventional, rational expectations; but it doesn’t put a dent in the larger mysteries Lynch conjures. Lynch complicates the moment when the ‘bad guy’ gets his, by continuing to point beyond Frank’s death toward multiple planes of reality and irrevocably tangled skeins of human identity.
Was Brooks correct about Lynch, and has Lynch since used his creative control to sow in mainstream filmmaking the seeds of an American surrealism? The matter is up for debate. Although Lynch is more anchored in the materiality of the world than Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, a materiality he senses is often blocked by social constructions, he and the surrealists do share a common interest in the subconscious and in creative dissonance, and Blue Velvet was pivotal in his administering of injections of these elements into American popular culture. Unhappily, for every Jim Jarmusch who has experimented in a dynamic, organic way with Lynchian discontinuities and altered perceptions, there are a dozen commercial hacks who have imitated Lynch’s surfaces to produce ersatz window dressing for tired generic narratives, as in the films of Ron Howard and in trivially quirky television series like David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences.
Critical refusal to confront Lynch’s evocation of the fraught interconnection between reality and social habits of mind has led to other forms of irrelevance and triviality. Slavoi Zizek stares at his own image in his neo-Lacanian mirror instead of looking at the films. Others have trivialized Lynch’s work in interpretations that misread into them a politically reactionary bent and gimmicks. But others have taken an arguably more productive perspective that embraces Lynch’s visionary play with established narrative and visual markers. Decades ago, feminist and Marxist critics paid Hollywood a high compliment in their against-the-grain readings, which probe the power of film to influence the way America constructs gender and class. In Blue Velvet, Lynch assumed a role—which he has continued to play—of director-as-reader-against-the-grain, going beyond feminism and Marxism toward the creation of a cinema that taps into the emotional power of conventions and simultaneously suggests how rigid formulas foment an alienation from the world we might more joyously inhabit.
Indecent,
improper and dangerous - Salon.com David Thomson from Salon, June 6, 2002
The shocking thing about modern movies is how quickly the shock wears off. I remember when I took my wife to "Alien" in 1979 and when guess-who came out of John Hurt's chest, demanding a little attention, she had to leave the theater in distress. Yet a few years ago, our son watched "Alien" with me and was reckoning the outrage to Hurt from a technical point of view. It was how did we think they did that, nothing about whether it was decent or kind for them to have thought of doing it. You can see the same slippage in us, and the things once known as our sensitivities, all over the place. Meanwhile, in this greatest of the great nations, there is what amounts to an academic discussion over whether and when torture can be used with terrorists. So it goes.
But I wonder, still, whether with its heralded DVD release, "Blue Velvet" will still send some of us in search of the Valium. Not that anything you might expect to find in a "re-release" will actually be there. There is talk of scenes that were cut or omitted from the original, but apparently they amount to nothing more than sketchy reports and vaguely suggestive stills. The footage itself is lost. As other recent events have made clear, this is a culture that cannot keep clerical control of its outrages.
My estimate of David Lynch is that he never really allowed anything that he wanted to be cut. He's far too clever, and far too capable of assuming a mask of innocence. The censors we possess always have trouble with that kind of person. If you come on childlike, they find it hard to think the worst of you, no matter that their nerve endings are screaming "PANIC!"
Something like that happened when "Blue Velvet" opened in 1986. This really was a film that some otherwise sane people felt bound to attack as "indecent," "improper" and "dangerous." And in this case, I have to say, every promise in those grim warnings was rewarded. "Blue Velvet" was and is an outrage. And a masterpiece. It is one of the few films in the last 20 years that has kept alive the capacity of the movies to deliver beautiful offense, to dig so deep into the psyche that you feel you've been operated on without anesthetic.
People still ask how they should handle "Blue Velvet," and I like to say, just sit there, feel it, look at it, feel wrapped in it -- what else would you do with blue velvet? In other words, just as with Lynch's most recent film, "Mulholland Drive," don't get yourself in a state of fierce readiness, don't be prepared to wrestle with the film. Let it take you. And people say, you mean ...? And I say, yes, of course, just sit there in the dark and let it surround you, and ... But that is really scary, they tell me.
So, if you insist on being active (as opposed to someone experiencing a dream), you could regard it as childlike: Jeffrey (Kyle McLachlan) is a good little boy who is going to do some naughty things but it's all in the cause of growing up -- which is what we're supposed to do, isn't it? And, after all, when a lad finds a severed ear early in the morning, who knows how the day is going to turn out? An ear, just lying there on the ground, is a very strange thing -- so carnal, so cut or torn away, so unexpected. It's like a good little boy looking down and seeing the great jungle that has grown between his legs all of a sudden. I'm alive, he says.
And he thought he lived in a perfect, picket-fence, red, white and blue
little town, a slice of
And just like a flag at night, Isabella Rossellini -- the blue velvet lady -- will rear up out of the dark, stark naked but for her hopes and fears, and she is all of them, red, white and blue, and she is the bad thing that will not go away, she is the horror of growing up. Oh no, I never told you that you would not be frightened. In fact, the more I listen to your miserable whining, fucker, the more I begin to wonder whether even now you're ready for "Blue Velvet."
Film
Comment: Violet Lucca March 25,
2016
There are few scenarios so well suited to the constraints of mainstream film as the homecoming. It’s a universal experience that perfectly follows the three-act structure, as the protagonist is called back home and there has life-altering experiences that either explode or realign closely held values. But what Syd Field won’t tell you is that the manner of oak which grows from the acorn of this premise—and what sort of discovery the character makes—can vary wildly among extremes depending on the storyteller. You can get something like This Is Where I Leave You, Shawn Levy’s cloying, risible drama centered on a family sitting shiva for their patriarch (and being as annoying and self-absorbed as ever), or one of those Christmas calendar-fillers (The Night Before, Love the Coopers) in which a dysfunctional family snipes at each other for 90 dramedic minutes. Or you just might get a film like Blue Velvet, which charts a young man’s journey into a dangerous, adult world that he was previously unaware existed in his hometown.
Jeffrey’s level of familiarity with darkness in all senses is part of the film’s narrative intrigue and his emotional development. Just as there are beetles gnawing away under the dark earth of a freshly cut suburban lawn, so is our fresh-faced protagonist capable of shadowy pursuits such as rough sex with someone else’s wife and blowing a drug dealer’s brains out. (It also underpins the emotional struggle at the heart of the film: at one point, Jeffrey breaks down sobbing to his love interest Sandy, saying that he can’t understand how a bad person like Frank Booth could exist.) Jeffrey, first introduced strolling through a field at midday on his way to visit his impossibly ill father in the hospital, becomes more and more nocturnal as he continues his investigations of Frank and Dorothy. Scenes are lit and staged to depict him emerging from and disappearing into total darkness; at the end, he’s glimpsed sunbathing before having lunch with Sandy and his family. (The finale’s other pointed detail is a mechanical robin holding a large, writhing bug in its beak, a restoration of order foretold in Sandy’s dream—but its falseness can be viewed as making this restoration ironic, or not real.)
Blue Velvet poses a powerful counternarrative to the usual homecomings that has hardly been rivaled, but in an earlier conception of the film, Jeffrey was a far different character. As the deleted scenes on the 25th-anniversary Blu-ray demonstrate, David Lynch had originally intended for Jeffrey’s abrupt return from college to be more punishing and permanent. Before the descent into darkness that we know in the current version, he is infuriated by his homecoming, which strains his interactions with his single-minded and insensitive mother and aunt. Throughout her scenes (in an expanded, gadfly role for Priscilla Pointer), Mom hardly goes five minutes without reminding him that they can’t afford to send him back to school. His troubles with women don’t stop there: Jeffrey’s college girlfriend, Louise, whom he claims to love but almost constantly bickers with, is indifferent to his departure and tells him over the phone that she’s going to some dance with another guy, effectively ending their relationship. In such scenes, Jeffrey is less a blithe innocent and more akin to another Lynch creation: the title canine of his comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World (83-92), which depicts a dog tied to a chain in a backyard that growls while overhearing snippets of inane conversation (or bad puns) from inside its house. As the first panel explains: “The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl . . . Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.” It’s difficult to think of a sharper metaphor for dealing with situations where you feel like you can’t speak your mind, and have no option to make a polite exit. This particular variety of simmering resentment is an undercurrent in much of Lynch’s work, from the frustrated, primitive forms in his paintings to the brusque FBI Agent Albert Rosenfeld, or more explicitly manifested in the Ids that inhabit Dumbland. And, as Lynch himself has explained, his own struggles with anger are what drove his initial interest in practicing Transcendental Meditation. (Isabella Rosellini once described him as the happiest person she’d ever known, an assertion that’s interesting to bear in mind while watching the documentary Lynch (one).)
But the biggest revelation of the Blu-ray’s deleted scenes—echoing the differences between Agent Dale Cooper in the pilot of Twin Peaks (who gleefully inspects Laura Palmer’s corpse) and the squeaky-clean Cooper of the rest of the series—is a scene set at a kegger at Jeffrey’s college before he has returned home. In a dorm room basement, Jeffrey secretly watches a couple furiously making out on a barren mattress, and waits an uncomfortably long time to intervene after the woman makes it clear she doesn’t want to have sex. It’s a damning (and uncomfortable) moment, but there are several others in the Blu-ray’s deleted scenes that also complicate Jeffrey’s backstory going into the story. At different moments in these excised scenes, Jeffrey surreptitiously peers through venetian blinds, which mirror the doors of Dorothy’s closet—making clear he’s predisposed to peeping. By making these tendencies explicitly present before Jeffrey crosses paths with Frank and the wrong side of Lumberton’s tracks, his character seems more duplicitous than curious about or tortured by his sexual urges. This Jeffrey is someone who’s been willfully misrepresenting himself to everyone—meaning that there’d be no homecoming transformation.
Whether or not Blue Velvet would have achieved cult status were these scenes included, it is safe to say that it would’ve been very different tonally and spurred different interpretations of the film. (Given that these scenes effectively nullify the character’s affable nature, the character also comes off a little bit smarter than he does in the final version.) Yet the mastery of Lynch’s probing, drifting camera, Alan Splet’s frequently terrifying sound design, and the wide range of colors and moods in Frederick Elmes’s photography help elevate the film’s Freudian-tinged, quasi-existential crisis, which some Eagle Scout might have on an unexpected semi-hallucinatory trip home, into something truly wonderful. Blue Velvet is a film predicated on precise details, frequently flipping the accepted understanding of what should or should not be emphasized in a narrative film. These reversals of foreground and background are evident from the opening sequence, which lingers on tulips against a white picket fence and a slowed-down shot of a bright red fire truck (complete with smiling, waving firemen and Dalmatian). These are the only bits of Americana that are foregrounded in such a way and aren’t shunted into a longer montage of small-town signifiers; instead, each is given time to breathe and become magnified.
This collage of pleasantness and purity is contrasted with the details Lynch through which composes Lumberton’s seedy underworld. Distributed across the frame, these arranged scenes suggest still lives by way of Francis Bacon: for example, the party at Ben’s apartment (which, prior to Frank’s arrival, seems to be almost exclusively attended by heavyset, middle-aged women) and the penultimate sequence at Dorothy’s apartment during the police raid. Dorothy’s apartment (which Michel Chion once perfectly described as being the color of a bruise) is littered with the remnants of some horrific violence: the man in yellow, a dirty police officer working with Frank, stands upright next to an art deco lamp with a bit of brain poking out of his skull, barely conscious; Dorothy’s husband is dead, bound to a chair wearing only boxers and undershirt, a bit of her robe stuffed in his mouth, face frozen in a wince. The rest of the apartment, with a large, spiky potted plant near the corner and matching grey couches, also projects a sense of foreboding—all without ever using close-ups on all of the many things that are perverse, disturbing, or out of place. The closest the camera gets to either the man in yellow or Dorothy’s husband are medium shots, and these are done in service of following Jeffrey’s or Frank’s movements through the apartment around them. Stripped of their humanity, they have been reduced to objects that exist in a visual field.
In other words, each of these frames is composed the way memories are formed, a network of associations flowing out of one or two details. Lynch’s use of space and mise en scene reflects not only his training as a painter but also his own approach to storytelling: specific places or feelings are evoked, but they retain a degree of falseness by the way that they’re mediated. (I’m thinking again of the robin at the film’s conclusion, which is clearly fake; the magical realist ending of Wild at Heart functions in a similar, more extreme way.) This interplay of specificity and artifice works in tandem with the way in which he envisions characters, which are very often not truly human beings, but a set of personality quirks (an angry woman with, say, an eye patch) or a narrative arc (a woman in trouble, a very bad man) personified. His stories have little to say about our world in practical terms, other than that there is a lot of violence and evil out there, very often in the service of nothing but ego. They’re Manichean and aspirational tales, just as Sandy’s dream conflates the returning of birds with the return of light and goodness. (The endings of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Inland Empire have nearly identical, angelic visions of a return to peace, wherein a “woman in trouble” levitates in bliss above the sick world that’s done her wrong.) The fantastical and strange vision of going home that Blue Velvet offers, refracted and distorted through tactile details, is one that should be seen on a big screen, as many times as possible.
Berlin Film Journal: Claire Drummond Coming Home: Postmodern Ecstasy in Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet,’ July 27, 2015
Salon: Dennis Lim “David Lynch should be shot”: Looking back
on the madness and chaos of “Blue Velvet” and Ronald Reagan’s ’80s, excerpted
from his book, David Lynch: The Man From
Another Place, March 26, 2016
DVD Outsider Slarek
Jigsaw
Lounge (Neil Young) review [10/10]
Salon:
Charles Taylor June 27, 2000
“Blue Velvet”’s mystery of masculinity: How David Lynch’s
masterwork... Andrew O’Hehir, including an interview with
Lynch scholar Martha P. Nochimson from Salon,
March 28, 2016
The Complete Blue Velvet: Rewatching Lynch's Masterpiece With Long-Thought-Lost Scenes Bill Wyman from Slate, November 8, 2011
The Lost Scenes from Blue Velvet, Explained Forrest Wickman from Slate, June 11, 2012
Blue Velvet - Features
- Reverse Shot Matt
Connolly, August 27, 2012
Dragan Antulov
retrospective [9/10]
not coming to a
theater near you [Rumsey Taylor]
also seen here: dvdfuture.com
(Rumsey Taylor) dvd review
Film
Court (Lawrence Russell) review
The Greatest Films
(Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Ears to
David Lynch! | Village Voice Artist
Christian Tomaszewski rebuilds the world of BLUE VELVET, by Robert Shuster from
the Village Voice, June 5, 2007
The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson March 22, 2016
MUBI's Notebook: Christopher Small Comparing a film by David Lynch with one by
Jacques Rivette, December 11, 2015
Are the hills going to march off?: July 2009 Carson Lund
Brooklyn Magazine: Samantha Vacca March 30, 2016
Little White
Lies: David Jenkins
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]
CultureCartel.com
(John Nesbit) review [5/5]
Film
Freak Central dvd review [Special
Edition] Bill Chambers, also
seen here: Bill
Chambers, Epinions.com
DVD
Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review
[4/5] [Special Edition]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Mark Zimmer) dvd review [Special Edition]
The
Digital Bits dvd review [Special
Edition] Adam Jahnke
DVD
Journal Dawn Taylor, Special edition
DVD
Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review
[Special Edition]
DVD Town
(John J. Puccio) dvd review Special Edition
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Blu-ray.com
[Jeffrey Kauffman]
Blu-rayDefinition.com
- Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Slant
Magazine Blu-ray [Jaime N. Christley]
Movie-Vault.com
(Vadim Rizov) review
Apollo
Guide (Derek Smith) review [90/100]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
filmcritic.com (Blake French) review [4/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Blue Velvet Gerald Peary
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5]
Kevin Patterson retrospective [A+]
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [5/5]
Nitrate Online (Capsule) Eddie Cockrell
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Jerry Saravia review not so impressed
Ted Prigge review [3.5/4] it feels more like a one star review
World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh, still bitter at Lynch from BLUE VELVET, takes a few more swipes in his MULHOLLAND DRIVE review
The Chicago Reader: Pat Graham capsule
Blue Velvet: why I still can't take my eyes off it Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, February 10, 2012
'I've got to find the flaming nipple!': the hunt for Blue Velvet's lost footage Cath Clarke from The Guardian, November 3, 2011
Washington Post (Paul Attanasio) review
Blue
Velvet: Last Tango in Lumberton | L.A. Weekly John Powers, July 12, 2006
Blue Velvet at 20
| L.A. Weekly Scott Foundas, July 12, 2006
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4] Roger Ebert was offended in 1986
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The Chicago Tribune: Dave Kehr September 19, 1986
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
THE COWBOY AND THE FRENCHMAN
(Les Français vus par) – made for TV
What
we have here is a failure to communicate
An amusing short made after BLUE VELVET that was inspired by a trip to Paris where Lynch was asked to participate on a French television show to express an American’s view of the French, along with other filmmaker’s views of Americans, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Andrzej Wajda, and Luigi Comencini, which ended up being, as Lynch describes it, two cliché’s in one. Sort of a precursor to Altman’s PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION, this is an absurdly ridiculous spoof on Western Americana and French haute culture, all expressed through stereotype, with cinematography by Frederick Elmes. Harry Dean Stanton, Jim Nance, and Tracey Walter are Slim, Pete, and Dusty, 3 hearing-impaired cowboys, as a result of a childhood explosion revealed in a Silent film innertitle at the opening. One day they see a man come down from a mountain dressed in a suit and beret speaking French, carrying escargot in his pockets and a bag or Bordeaux, followed close behind by an Indian, and they have a little incomprehensible chat on a ranch where the gist of it was Slim repeatedly yelling out “What the hell?”
Once Slim realizes he’s a Frenchman, however, when he finds he’s carrying around some French fries, all is well and they decide to get drunk on into the night, to recurring images of 3 young female country singers, like the Lennon Sisters, who advance the silly narrative. But eventually there’s an exquisite montage sequence of dancing French Can Can girls, chickens fighting over chickenfeed, a lassoist, then a mix of American and French girls all dancing to rock ‘n roll, as they just get drunker into the night. Finally Slim is singing to the bare naked leg of an offscreen girl his version of “Home Home on the Range,” as the Frenchman carries out a replica of the Statue of Liberty, while Slim fires off a round a yells out “Viva la France!” Everything is silly and tongue in cheek, so over the top in stereotypical cliché’s of bad, bad humor that the deadpan absurdity renders everything else completely harmless, all told to the the upbeat Western sounds of a jazzy swing band. The French, as seen by David Lynch.
User
comments from imdb Author: stephen_bounds
(stephen_bounds@yahoo.com) from Philadelphia, PA
This 25 or so minute short film, now available as part of a collection titled "The Short Films of David Lynch," is a ridiculously funny dive into a kind of pure realm of cliché about some cowboys who encounter a wandering Frenchman, and the antics that ensue as they become acquainted. Stereotypes are served up relentlessly as if to demonstrate just how ridiculous they are, while at the same time a kind of light sweetness pervades. There's both a silly, vaudevillian surface humor, and a deeper dreamlike release - if you get the joke. David Lynch basically goes as far as anyone could go with the idea, without getting dark. Though fascinating, nothing on David Lynch's 'Short Films' compilation was too surprising - except this one. It's a real treat.
DVD Verdict Bill Gibron (excerpt)
Slim, Pete, and Dusty spend a lazy afternoon on the dude
ranch, when what should come down the hillside but a lost man, dressed in a
very European suit and beret. After ransacking his valise, they discover he is
French. There is a huge language gap, but mutual goodwill (and an Indian scout
named Broken Feather) seems to bind them together. They party all night and
into the next day. This was originally conceived as part of a French television
show.
THE COWBOY AND THE FRENCHMAN: Fans
of Lynch's off the wall humor, like the short-lived ABC sitcom On the Air
will warm to this film. Lynch loves certain "comic" devices, and
repeats them here. Slim is deaf (like Gordon Cole in
While light and airy, sadly, this is just not that funny. Lynch has never been able to truly sustain a comic tone, and some of the aforementioned devices that he employs for laughs end up falling flat. Perhaps the material is the problem. Making fun of the French is like shooting frogs in a barrel and Blazing Saddles set the standard for ridiculing the Old West. Without that kind of vulgar, manic zaniness, Lynch's passive pasture play fails to amuse. The transfer is very nice, if not a little over modulated at the beginning. There is a distinct blue screen style halo over all the actors that, eventually rights itself as the film plays on. The sound here is some of the best offered on the disc.
INDUSTRIAL SYMPHONY NO. 1: THE DREAM OF THE BROKEN HEARTED – made for TV
User comments from imdb Author InvisigothGypsy from Alabama, USA
This is a fantastic production that caught my eye because of my long love of
'
User comments from imdb Author Andreas Moss from Tromso, Norway
For some reason I tend to start disliking Lynch because I like his work so
much. I went into this quite critical, as I didn't really expect much. But
still.... Lynch just continues to enchant me as an artist.
To explain what this is: Its a musical and a play, and its about a woman being
brokenhearted as she's been left. The strength of the whole thing is the
atmosphere. Really gripping and wonderful. There's fog all over the stage, and
the haunting music is simply perfect. And of course the imagery.. and the
lyrics. Its shocking, but attractive. You never really get whats going on
though, its really dreamy. People floating in the air... and at one point
there's a huge devil walking around on stage. When the haunting scene with the
millions of dolls was strung down on the scene with creepy music alongside it
was the point I personally was convinced that this is a masterpiece.
I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys the further-out side of Lynch's work. The
atmosphere in this one is just gripping.
User comments from imdb Author: Filmjack3 from United States
How to describe Industrial Symphony? Well, it almost defies
description, in conventional terms, except that it's a story of broken love,
and of a sort of floating angel (dream-self) singing of the inner-most feelings
of love and happiness that are always out of reach. That's the basic description,
I suppose, but what if I were to add that includes a dwarf sawing a log, or
that the said angel gets "killed" (killed in quotes cause I don't
know for sure, and I don't want to) and dumped in the trunk of an old 50s car,
or that there's a big elk zombie at one point, or baby dolls that come down
slowly with masks over their heads? That's just some of what makes up one of
David Lynch's most under-seen efforts, where he experiments yet again by
filming a live stage show- occasionally in 80's style slow-motion and dissolves
like in a live music video of the period- and in using lighting effects and
methods of 'storytelling' that are completely abstracted from anything you
think you've seen before.
First off, there is no "4th wall" in this world of the Industrial
Symphony, far from it. As in Inland Empire, to which this shares a kinship in
terms of how the lighting and production design goes, there's only a reality,
and then an un-reality, and then the two possibly blended into another
un-reality, or something like it. So it's, for lack of a simpler description, a
dream-land where the peaks and terrors of love are meant to be taken in
emotionally, not intellectually. And he provides us with a very talented
singer, Julee Cruise, who would also appear on a couple of episodes of Twin
Peaks. She helps put into some kind of context the story of Heartbroken Man
(Nicolas Cage) and Heartbroken Woman (Laura Dern) after their break-up over the
phone. Lynch then throws in these extra images, of destruction, death, of as
naked woman writing on a car, a dwarf going busy sawing a log (as well as
repeating in full accentuations the conversation that opens this special), and
the dream-self singing from the trunk of a car into a TV camera. Finally, the
last song is played over a rendition of the Twin Peaks theme, and it closes
like any dream should, on the precipice of pure emotional catharsis.
What this catharsis will do for some instead of others I can't say, but overall
it marks as something to behold not just from Lynch who makes a great leap into
theater direction and staging and using it as a crazy opera, but for
Badalamenti who gets to spread his own creative ideas and melodies that stick
in one's head long after it's done. My favorite was "I wan't you rockin'
back into my heart", and the finale Twin Peaks theme, but the mid-segments
that played, like the music over the sawing or the elk-zombie's uprising, plays
like it's a cross between new-age sap and the most haunting 40's noir music
around (and, perhaps, like music one would think is played over a tender sex
scene in Twin Peaks). So, if you're a die-hard Lynch fan, track it down, and
enter into what's described on the original pamphlet as a "triple-exposure
dream." Whatever it is, it's a delirious, sumptuous testament to the
heart, as corny as that sounds. Goofy at times, sure, but the humor there-in is
outweighed by the grand theatrics of it all.
david lynch "industrial symphony no. 1" pt 1/5 on YouTube (9:54)
david lynch "industrial symphony no. 1" pt 2/5 (9:28)
david lynch "industrial symphony no. 1" pt 3/5 (9:43)
david lynch "industrial symphony no. 1" pt 4/5 (9:58)
david lynch "industrial symphony no. 1" pt 5/5 (9:56)
TWIN PEAKS
USA (94 mi pilot, 113 mi video version, 47 minute episodes, pilot and 7 episodes for Season 1, and 22 episodes in Season 2) 1990 – 1991
Lynch directed the pilot and Episode 2 from Season 1, and from Season 2, Episodes 1, 2, 7, and 22 (the Finale)
She’s
dead, wrapped in plastic
David Lynch’s breakthrough into television is legendary for its
subversive tone, delightfully humorous eccentricities, terrific casting, rich
colors, lush Pacific northwest locations, Angelo
Badalmenti’s hauntingly melancholic soundtrack, and a moody, completely
absorbing atmosphere never seen, before or since, on television. Despite Lynch’s critical accolades with WILD
AT HEART, winning the Palme D’Or at Cannes, this was the venue that launched
his notoriety in the US, spawning discussion groups around the nation that
continue to this day to assert their fondness not only for the show, but for
the beloved director as well. David
Lynch is simply not like anyone else, utilizing his art school background to
implement fairly avant garde methods to mainstream movies, like playing around
with the narrative structure, using a near macrobiotic tendency to accentuate
regional or local themes, usually with a great deal of deadpan humor, and to
follow his own absurdist tendencies to implement dreamlike pace and imagery to
heighten the intrigue, much of which remains ambiguous under a cloud of mood
and atmosphere.
Each TWIN PEAKS episode starts
with a fascinating opening credit sequence, a montage of regional imagery, the
forest-oriented greeting sign of the small town, what appears to be a wealth of
trees, fog on the mountains, a lodge sitting atop a sensational waterfall in
the snow, giant, sprawling lumber mills, and huge trucks hauling the oversized
timber, not to mention that colorful, orange-breasted robin, all this while the
TWIN PEAKS musical theme plays, which sets the tone for each new episode,
always leaving the viewer hanging for more.
There’s a simple premise, the show examines how a murder of a beautiful
young girl affects the stability of a small, close-knit community tucked away
at the foot of the woods. Long on
atmosphere and character development, short on answers, there are already Lynch
trademarks present, like stairways, fans, his fixation on shoes, telephones, a
burning fire, and lights, such as the changing colors of the stoplight in the
night, and uncontrollable grief in ordinary places. In the pilot episode directed by Lynch,
there’s a wonderful musical sequence at the Roadhouse where Julee
Cruise, the dreamy, otherworldly bar singer on
stage, sings the theme of the TV show in a dusky atmosphere drenched in sensual
lighting. The continuing stream of newly
introduced characters is fascinating, as the curiosity about what few clues we
are given only grows, yet the plot expands like tree branches, growing farther
and farther away from the trunk, leaving the viewer in a perpetual state of
puzzlement, and perhaps a bit of astonishment wondering how they got there.
Tony's Options: The Sopranos and the Televisuality of the
Gangster ... Tony's Options: The Sopranos and the Televisuality of
the Gangster Genre, by Martha P.
Nochimson from Senses of Cinema, September 2003 (excerpt)
When I interviewed Mark Frost
about Twin Peaks (1990–1) as part of the research for my book The
Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood, he discussed with pride
the show's cinematic qualities, contrasting its skilful frame compositions and
editing with the usual flat, pedestrian television image. He likened that
aspect of the show to Wiseguy (1987–1990), a series about gangsters,
which Frost admired for its cinematic qualities. Frost felt that he was part
of a group of practitioners raising the bar for television, which for him meant
pushing it to be more like film. Frost believed, as I heard him, that film is
the standard to which television should aspire, and illustrated his point by
referring to a sequence in Twin Peaks in which the camera pushed forward
to an extreme close-up of a revolving roulette wheel that dissolved into the
eye of series protagonist Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). It was a
spectacular effect, and one difficult to achieve in serial television because
of the pressures of the production schedule. He was justly proud. However, as a
critic, scholar, and sometime toiler in the television vineyards, I wonder if
such cinematic production values are the primary benchmark for televisuality, a
term that I use here to indicate the aesthetic capability of television. I
rather think that televisuality may be discussed in terms of the unprecedented
ability of television to produce virtually endless visual, serial narratives,
both fictional and non-fictional, and that the hallmark of great television is
its ability to probe and extend this capacity.
DVD Traffic Report: October 2007 Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus reviews the Complete Series
OK, it's a mixed bag, really. The second season of
DVD Times Season One, Mark Boydell (excerpt)
Twin Peaks was the brainchild of Mark Frost, writer of Hill Street Blues
and the wild and weird David Lynch - a man who has a knack for putting his
subconscious onto the screen. TP made its way onto our TV sets in the early 90s
and was pretty much an overnight sensation trailblazing the way for the likes
of the X-files and consorts. Sadly TP was probably a little too avant-garde
(and still seems to be) and was cancelled after its second season. (Lynch did
revisit TP later with a prequel to it, the famed and oft-derided Fire Walk With
Me but in his usual way managed to offer more questions to the viewers than
answers... ). Despite the somewhat classical plotline, TP was much more than a
whodunit as the series had an uncanny ability to seamlessly straddle genres,
often mixing melodrama, soap, thriller and comedy within the same episode. Add
to that the great soundtrack put together by Angelo Badalmenti, probably one of
the best soundtrack composers of the last decade, Lynch's ability to make the
mundane fascinating and unpredictable, and you've got the recipe for a
fantastic TV series.
TP in my opinion probably marked one of the highest points of television drama:
it may be the last time we'll see a great director being given full artistic
control over as wide a canvas as a TV series and the result is flabbergasting.
The characters are fully developed yet unusually interesting; the setting - the
true lead character IMO- becomes so familiar to us it seems like our back
garden (albeit a very scary one) and it features some of the most memorable
scenes ever committed to celluloid: who can erase the Red Lounge and the Man
from Another Place from their memory?
User comments from imdb Author Tom May (joycean_chap@hotmail.com) from Sunderland, England
One of the truly great, original TV dramas, Twin Peaks was
far from perfect; however, quite a few of its run of 29 episodes undoubtedly
were. Speaking just after watching the finale, I'm torn between satisfaction at
a superb final episode, and tenterhooks over what is a stark cliffhanger
ending. The initial Laura Palmer murder case is unravelled expertly, by episode
16, with many great surreal and shocking moments, notably the scenes involving
Bob. The show's brand of off-the-wall deadpan humour was perhaps at its best in
the initial episodes, for example, Cooper's rock-throwing in the woods and
Leland's bizarre, impromptu dance with Ben and Jerry Horne. The main characters
were all well introduced; Kyle MacLachlan is on career-best acting form here as
Agent Dale Cooper. Jack Nance is lovably gruff and likeable as Pete Martel,
while Ben and Jerry Horne are wonderfully brought to life by fine writing, and
acting from Richard Beymer and David Patrick Kelly. The strange spirit-like
characters are introduced aptly; the Giant, the backwards-dancing Dwarf,
One-armed Man, the bizarre Tremonds and killer Bob. Ray Wise deserves much
credit for a sensitive portrayal of Leland. Once the initial mystery is more
than adequately resolved, the focus was lost for a while. For around 7
episodes, the series comparatively treaded water: the comedy became more
laboured and conventional, some tedious storylines dragged on and on - eg.
Evelyn Marsh, Andy/Dick; the guiding hand of David Lynch was missing. These
episodes are still very watchable; as other aspects of the mystery are mused
over, but things move slowly. There is welcome characterisation of Major
Briggs, but the acting and writing is at times more ordinary. While still a
comfortably above-par TV show, the sublime atmosphere had been squandered to an
extent. The arrival in the town of
Ben Horne is well developed; the Civil War stuff fails to amuse quite as it
should, yet once he is rehabilitated, the change in his character is refreshing
and nicely handled.
The very final episode is, I would say, as good a series ending as they could
have come up with; tantalisingly placed, as the battle between the good and
evil forces in
The Onion A.V. Club: First Season [Scott Tobias]
Due to legal
issues too convoluted to dignify with an explanation, David Lynch's brilliant
two-hour pilot has not been included on Twin Peaks: The First Season, an
otherwise stellar four-disc boxed set of perhaps the greatest anomaly in
network television history. Without the pilot, which is still available on a
cruddy but essential region-free Taiwanese DVD, the first season loses the
intense emotional anguish that underlies its canny marriage of daytime melodrama,
intricate suspense plotting, and free-floating oddity. Though the liner notes
include a helpful summary and character profiles, they can't begin to express
what the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) meant to the residents of a
timeless small town in the Pacific Northwest—or, for that matter, to the
millions of viewers that made the series such an unlikely sensation. But
accepted on its own terms, this sterling seven-episode special edition,
beautifully designed and packed with commentaries and eclectic features, harks
back to a great moment when television dreamed of being more than just TV.
Created by Lynch and Mark Frost (Hill Street Blues), Twin Peaks
returns to the retro-'50s Americana of Lynch's Blue Velvet, devising a
close-knit community of hipsters, squares, and oldies with more dark secrets
than its gee-whiz surface would suggest. When Lee's body is found on a
riverbank, "wrapped in plastic," the news ripples through town like a
curse, unearthing small pockets of evil that had never been acknowledged, and
forcing its residents to finally come to terms with them. ("Everyone knew
she was in trouble," rages boyfriend Dana Ashbrook, "but no one did
anything about it.") As a cheerily eccentric FBI agent who enthuses over
the simple pleasures of fresh black coffee, huckleberry pie, and "the
taste sensation when maple syrup collides with ham," Kyle MacLachlan is
the perfect man for the case, a remarkably intuitive investigator who
appreciates the town's essential goodness. Working closely with aptly named
local sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), MacLachlan finds an array of
suspects with connections to Lee, including her psychologist (Russ Tamblyn),
her "secret" boyfriend (James Marshall), her unhinged father (Ray
Wise), and a snarling trucker (Eric DaRe) with an explosive temper. The first
season introduces many other characters, most notably mischievous bad girl
Sherilyn Fenn and her good-girl counterpart Lara Flynn Boyle, and numerous
other subplots, some of which are only marginally related to Lee's death. In a
medium that tends to draw an iron curtain between one genre and another, Twin
Peaks freely meshed the heightened emotions of soap operas and suspense
while constantly tweaking both into bizarre new territory. While it may seem
hard to believe that the public was once held rapt by "The Log Lady,"
a backwards-talking dream, and a woman's obsession with noiseless drapes, the
show remains incredibly seductive, tapping into a rich vein of nostalgia for a
small-town America that has never existed. Of the seven episodes in the first
season, only the one directed by Lynch—with the hilariously tactless FBI agent
Miguel Ferrer, MacLachlan's Tibet-inspired method of hurling rocks at a bottle
from a set distance, and the "Red Room"—approaches the pilot's
inspired weirdness. Yet even at its most pedestrian, Twin Peaks
insistently pushed the limits of network television, offering a fleeting
glimpse of what popular entertainment looks like in an alternate universe.
The Onion A.V. Club: The Second Season [Tasha Robinson]
Nearly
15 years before Lost pushed television sharply back toward prime-time
supernatural-mystery serials, the TV sensation Twin Peaks set the
template for such shows, both in terms of marrying an irresistibly fresh vision
with a series of compelling overarching questions, and in terms of losing the
mission along the way. The long-overdue box set Twin Peaks: The Second
Season showcases the lion's share of a series that at its best was transcendent
television, but at its worst, was particularly frustrating because it so
profligately wasted time that creators David Lynch and Mark Frost kept proving
they could put to better use.
The
series' short first season—a two-hour pilot and seven one-hour
episodes—introduced the little Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks, where the
homecoming queen had just been found dead, naked, and "wrapped in
plastic." Quirky FBI agent Kyle MacLachlan tackled the case with
crackerjack investigative techniques and a wide-eyed, practical mysticism
suitable to a scenario full of prophetic dreams and otherworldly forces. The
first season ended with MacLachlan shot by a masked assailant; the 22-episode
second season begins with an excruciating 20 minutes in which he lies bleeding
and half-conscious on the floor, at the mercy of a ghostly apparition, an
ancient bellhop, and his own weird habit of spilling his guts to a tape
recorder. The sequence is typical Peaks; it delves into Lynch's syrupy,
alien rhythms at length, contrasting the stillness onscreen with Angelo
Badalamenti's oppressive, urgent score to produce almost unbearable tension.
Such
sequences guaranteed that in its heyday, Twin Peaks was like nothing
else on television. Lush in every aspect—the score, the vivid colors and
gorgeous cinematography, the intense character machinations, the hugely
ambitious arthouse tone—it built a sense of gravity far beyond its
soap-operatic content. Sometimes it played with that tone—as with Lynch's
recurring cameo as a half-deaf, obliviously screamy FBI higher-up—but more
often, the show's dreamy intensity worked to hold together all the bizarreries
about backward-talking dwarves and otherdimensional crossings. But as season
two progressed, the gravity dispersed through a series of increasingly ditzy
subplots, and as with Lost, too many mysteries lay fallow amid episodes
packed with filler. Audiences turned away, and the show was cancelled partway
through this season, though Lynch and Frost had time to craft a staggering
"screw you" series-ender packed with cliffhangers. Still, hard as it
is to forget the ignominious ending, this set is essential viewing. The roots
of half the ambitious TV serials of the past decade were planted here, in the
best episodes of an intermittently breathtaking show.
Key features: The
gratingly obscure "Log Lady" episode intros from the show's Bravo
run; brief interview snippets with some episode directors and cast members.
Listed directors
per episode below, also another list has brief plot summaries: List of Twin Peaks episodes
S1Pilot 04/08/90 David Lynch
S1E01 04/12/90 Duwayne Dunham
S1E02 04/19/90 David Lynch
S1E03 04/26/90 Tina Rathbourne
S1E04 05/03/90 Tim Hunter
S1E05 05/10/90 Lesli Linka Glatter
S1E06 05/17/90 Caleb Deschanel
S1E07 05/23/90 Mark Frost
S1E08 09/30/90 David Lynch
S2E01 10/06/90 David Lynch
S2E02 10/13/90 David Lynch
S2E03 10/20/90 Lesli Linka Glatter
S2E04 10/27/90 Todd Holland
S2E05 11/03/90 Graeme Clifford
S2E06 11/10/90 Lesli Linka Glatter
S2E07 11/17/90 David Lynch
S2E08 12/01/90 Caleb Deschanel
S2E09 12/08/90 Tim Hunter
S2E10 12/15/90 Tina Rathborne
S2E11 01/12/91 Duwayne Dunham
S2E12 01/19/91 Caleb Deschanel
S2E13 02/02/91 Todd Holland
S2E14 02/09/91 Uli Edel
S2E15 02/16/91 Diane Keaton
S2E16 03/28/91 Lesli Linka Glatter
S2E17 04/04/91 James Foley
S2E18 04/11/91 Duwayne Dunham
S2E19 04/18/91 Jonathan Sanger
S2E20 06/10/91 Stephen Gyllenhaal
S2E21 06/10/91 Tim Hunter
S2E21 06/10/91 David Lynch
entering twin peaks... An interesting journey from Jim Emerson’s
cinepad site
InTwinPeaks.com An extraordinary photo guide of the Twin
Peaks filming locations, then and now
A Guide to Twin Peaks
An interactive guide, includes reviews of each episode and the prequel
film, from Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Twin Peaks Jeffrey Sconce from The Encyclopedia of Television
#94: Twin Peaks: "Pilot" (1990) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, November 6, 2009
Twin Peaks Turns 20 John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, April, 2010
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review ["Pilot"]
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review [Season One] review of each episode
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review [Season Two] review of each episode
Twenty ways the '90s changed television Joyce Millman from Salon, December 22, 1999
Season One
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [Special Edition] [Season One] review of each episode
Film Freak Central Bill Chambers
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Season One]
Pop Entertainment.com review [Season One] Ronald Sklar
DVD Journal - season 1 review Gregory P. Dorr
Doogan's Views - Twin Peaks: The First Season - Special Edition ... Todd Doogan from Digital Bits
Apollo Movie Guide: The First Season [Brian Webster]
Season One and Two
Twin Peaks - Season 1 Mark Boydell from DVD Times
Twin Peaks: The Second Season James Gray from DVD Times
Reel.com dvd review [4/4] [Season 1, Episodes 1-7] Pam Grady
Reel.com dvd review [4/4] [Season Two] Pam Grady
DVD Verdict- The First Season Special Edition Mike Pinsky
DVD Verdict - The Second Season [Brett Cullum]
tvdvdreviews.com - Complete First Season Special Edition DVD Review Jonathan Boudreaux
tvdvdreviews.com -- The Second Season DVD Review Jonathan Boudreaux
Season Two
Edward Copeland on Film Season two, review of each episode, also FIRE WALK WITH ME, and a Lynch book review
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Season Two]
Revisiting Season Two of "Twin Peaks" Dana Stevens from Slate
Slant Magazine - Season Two DVD Review Keith Uhlich
Monsters and Critics - DVD Review - Season 2 [Jeff Swindoll]
Complete Series
Slant Magazine - DVD Review: Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition Keith Uhlich and Ed Gonzalez
DVD Times - Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition Clydefro Jones
dOc DVD Review: Twin Peaks Definitive Gold Box Edition (1990-91) Mark Zimmer from digitallyOBSESSED
411mania.com - Definitive Gold Box Edition DVD Review [Chad Webb] brief episode synopsis
DVD Verdict - The Definitive Gold Box Edition [Brett Cullum]
The Bottom Shelf by Adam Jahnke Gold Box Complete Series DVD review from Digital Bits
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5] [Complete Series]
PopMatters [Stuart Henderson] Gold Box Edition
tvdvdreviews.com -- Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition DVD Review Jonathan Boudreaux
Entertainment Weekly interview with David Lynch by Jeff Jensen, October 26, 2007
Twin Peaks Twin
Peaks page from Entertainment Weekly
"The
100 Best TV Shows of All-Time: Complete List" Time
magazine
The
Ten Greatest Cult TV Endings in History
John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, November 19, 2010
Highly detailed
timeline of the show from twinpeaks.org
Twin Peaks Jasons web
TwinPeaksFestival.com yearly Twin Peaks festival
Twin Peaks Gazette
Visiting "Twin Peaks" Filming Locations Odd Things I’ve Seen (O.T.I.S.), June 15, 2010
"Twin Peaks": Twenty Years Later Andrew Anthony from The Observer, March 21, 2010
TELEVISION; When 'Blue Velvet' Meets 'Hill Street Blues' - New ... Richard B. Woodward on the eve of the TV premiere from The New York Times, April 8, 1990
TV WEEKEND; A Skewed Vision of a Small Town In 'Twin Peaks,' - New ... John J. O’Connor from The New York Times, April 6, 1990
THE MEDIA BUSINESS; 'Twin Peaks' May Provide A Ratings Edge for ... Bill Carter from The New York Times, April 16, 1990
DVDBeaver dvd review [Season Two] Kurtis Beard
Twin Peaks - The Definitive Gold Box Edition (The Complete Series) Gary W. Tooze
Twin Peaks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image results for Twin peaks photos
Twin Peaks - "Cooper's Dream" on YouTube (6:00 mi)
WILD AT HEART B 88
USA
This
whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.
A gory, blood-laden, and ultra-weird rock ‘n roll road trip
with ex-con Sailor, Nicholas Cage, doing a complete Elvis impersonation, with
songs, slicked back hair, and a snakeskin suit, which he wears to express his
“individuality,” and his girl Lula, Laura Dern, that he likes to call Peanut,
who is running away from her deranged, over-possessive mother, Marietta, played
by Dern’s real life mother, Diane Ladd.
From the outset, this film is defined by excess, with characters that
are way over the top, as if this was meant for the outdoor drive-in
circuit. The dialogue is so steeped in
Southern white trash, that when Lula gets turned on, she purrs “You’ve got me
hotter than
The film jumps into the middle of action from the opening minutes, where something wicked is going on behind the scenes, causing a huge fracas, ending up with the spilling of blood, where the color red dominates the screen. There’s plenty of explicit sex between the two of them, as they go at each other like alley cats, afterwards stop and have a smoke, where the pace of the film comes to a crawl, then get dressed and go dancing at a club featuring glorious rock ‘n roll musical sequences bathed in red. Using “the power of E,” Cage actually sings an Elvis song (“Love Me”) to the excited whistles and catcalls from the swooning female audience, somewhat reminiscent of Vincent Spano’s slick Sinatra crooning in John Sayle’s underappreciated romantic gem BABY IT’S YOU (1983), and when Lula questions why he didn’t sing her “Love Me Tender,” as she thought that was his favorite song, he unhesitatingly informs her that’s the song he’ll sing only to his wife. Marietta, however, wants the two of them kept apart at all costs, for reasons that remain hidden for most of the film, occasionally bubbling up to the surface in flashbacks. First she sicks her current lover, Harry Dean Stanton, after them, promising her he’ll take care of things, but when he doesn’t act fast enough, she enlists the services of her previous beau, Santos (J.E. Freeman), who is connected to the syndicate, beautifully expressed through a series of image-related phone calls where a hit man is contacted to take care of Sailor once and for all, as even jail time didn’t stop their flaming passions, seen through repeated imagery of a match bursting into flames.
How this film won the Palme d'Or award at Cannes is a mystery, but
there are certain Lynchian elements here that are simply superb, all drenched
in sex, murder, and rock ‘n roll, such as the multiple musical set pieces, the
continued fascination with red lights, mirrors, light bulbs, telephones, strobe
lights, match flames and cigarette embers, flickering lights, explicit sex,
even fire dancers. Some of the dialogue
between the lovers is priceless: “You
remind me of my daddy. Mama told me he
liked skinny women with breasts that stood up and said hello.” There’s beautiful use of actual locations
from New Orleans to El Paso, where Harry Dean Stanton is seen riding alone in
the night listening to Van Morrison, the lead singer of Them, sing “Baby,
Please Don’t Go.”
Eventually they make their way to Big Tuna, Texas, where the road sign greeting says “Fuck You,” where they nearly exhaust their money, where Sailor knocks on the familiar door (from the initial hit man telephone call sequence) of Isabella Rossellini in a blond wig and black leather, and where later we find Willem Dafoe, the so called “black angel,” strutting out of a motel scene where they are shooting Texas-style porn with fat naked ladies. Everything points to a dark fate; everyone knows Sailor’s in deep shit as he sits in the back of a convertible car driven by Rossellini and Dafoe on their way for a “sure thing” robbery spree that couldn’t possibly go right. This film feels tongue in cheek the whole way, gratuitously violent in spots, hopelessly romantic in others, overflowing with pop culture references, where the respect the on the run outlaw lovers have for one another is tender and sincere, offering each other genuine hope and affection amidst all the turmoil surrounding them. We have enough images of car wrecks and things bursting into flames to believe there’s no hope, but like the WIZARD OF OZ mantra “There’s no place like home,” in this film, it’s “Don’t turn away from love.” Despite all the wicked caricatures of evil incarnate and death, this film actually appeals to the better nature of man.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
As petty criminal Sailor (Cage) and
his lover Lula (Dern) go on the run through a murderous Deep South, fleeing but
meeting sleazy oddballs hired by Lula's mom (Ladd) to end their relationship,
Lynch evokes a surreal, sinister world a mite too reminiscent of his earlier
work: bloody murder, violent sexual passion, kooky kitsch, freaky characters
immersed in private fantasies, digressive metaphors, symbols and cultish
references, and bizarre humour to lighten the nightmare. This déjà vu
weakens the film; sometimes the weirdness seems so forced that Lynch appears merely
to be giving fans what they expect. But it's churlish to focus on flaws when so
much is exhilaratingly unsettling. Even more than a virtuoso shoot-out, two
scenes - Stanton tortured by a gang of grotesques, a truly nasty car crash -
exemplify Lynch's ability to disturb through carefully contrived atmosphere;
while the performances lend a consistency of tone lacking in the narrative (but
ever-present in Fred Elmes' fine camerawork). The film, finally, is funny,
scary and brilliantly cinematic.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Julia Monelle]
Elvis devotee Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), 23, and his devoted lover Lula (Laura Dem), 20, are on the run in the deep south - mostly from her crazy psychotic Mother, and as the twisted events unfold, the jaw. He commands respect and wears his snake skin jacket like a badge. He's also in the wrong place at the wrong time too often. She struggles between love for her mother and love for her man; is she being led astray or not?
The peripheral characters are the kind of outrageous characterisations that seem to be part of a dream or a nightmare - obscure, dangerous, menacing, and eccentric people that you can imagine but never encounter. This strangeness and perversity is characteristic of Lynch's work where there is no clear division between good and evil, just some kind of kind of surreality.
When casting, Nicolas Cage wasn't even auditioned - he already had a reputation that put him in the slightly-surreal-and-definitely-nuts bracket. Laura Dern was also ideal for Lynch, partly because he wanted Dern's real mother - Dianne Ladd - to play the part of her screen mother.
This is a love story typical of David Lynch, who described it as a violent comedy. The book by Barry Gifford appealed to him so much that he wrote the screenplay in just six days, but then this is the man whom Mel Brooks described as "Jimmy Stewart on Mars" - appropriate considering this is meant as a homage to The Wizard of Oz, the original road movie.
David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" is unlike anything that's ever been made before. It's swampy and destabilizing in that subversive, perversely original, signature Lynchian way. But "Wild at Heart" isn't the David Lynch movie that anyone could have hoped for -- not his new fans, who've discovered him through "Twin Peaks," or his older ones.
At his best -- in "Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet" and the pilot for "Twin Peaks" -- Lynch achieves a fragile, almost godlike tone, where comedy and tragedy bleed together, and irony and passionate, obsessive sincerity are mixed in precisely equal portions. His images are projections straight from the bogs of the unconscious, and they make it onto the screen raw and undiluted, dripping wet. There's an ineffable potency and danger in them -- they carry vibrations from the lizard realm -- and, watching his films, we can be simultaneously repulsed and enthralled.
"Wild at Heart," though, is lacking in the dreamlike irrevocability of his most brilliant work. From the outset, just after the wondrously poetic opening credits, he seems to misstep. In "Wild at Heart" -- which Lynch adapted from a novel by Barry Gifford -- the director is working with pulp conventions; it's a road movie about a pair of seemingly doomed young lovers named Lula and Sailor (Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage) on the run from the girl's hysterical mother (Dern's real mother, Diane Ladd). But Lynch wants to explode the rules of the game without really understanding them.
It's not that Lynch has gone too far -- he went just as far in "Blue
Velvet" -- it's that he's gone wrong. There are flashes of virtuosity in
"Wild at Heart," but too much of what he's created here verges on
self-parody. It's as if, for the first time, Lynch were trying to make a David
Lynch movie. He's trying to top himself, and as a result, the picture feels
more like the work of a Lynch imitator than the genuine item. It's like one of
those episodes of "
What Lynch seems to have been going for is a sort of white-trash variation on "The Wizard of Oz" -- one that's been left out in the sun to rot and fester and run lousy with maggots. But there are other echoes and allusions as well. Sailor's snakeskin jacket is straight out of Tennessee Williams, and Cage's performance is pure "Jailhouse Rock."
As Sailor, who, as his attorney kept telling the parole board, grew up without much "parental guidance," Cage enters into a wild parody of the limp-shouldered early Elvis, speaking his lines with a mumbled-low, " 'scuse me, ma'am" accent. He wedges the King's later Vegas moves in there too, thrusting and kick-boxing against invisible opponents, and even breaking into song (he does nifty renditions of "Love Me" and "Love Me Tender").
This is amyl nitrite acting -- the Method on poppers -- and Cage isn't the only one who seems to be jubilantly out of his head. Dern squirms and arches her back in her leather halter tops as if she can't stop her veins from itching. Dern's inspiration seems to have been Marilyn Monroe, and in her scenes with Cage she's a sex-crazed, gyrating dervish. Dern cuts loose as Lula in a way that few actresses have ever attempted; she's passionately uninhibited and without a shred of vanity or self-protection. But her performance -- and Cage's -- work more as spectacle than as anything else. They dance the lurid edge, but their acting is so achingly mannered that after a while it begins to grate on your nerves.
The same goes for Ladd, who flexes her kitty cat talons and, at one point, smears her face with blood-red lipstick like a Kabuki Medea, and Willem Dafoe, who as Sailor's would-be killer is outfitted with a full set of rotting, stumpy choppers.
The thing about Lynch's characters is that they have so much energy; it's as
if they'd been injected with a combination of B12 and rattlesnake juice.
Members of Lynch's fast-growing stock company show up to play small but
garishly vivid roles. Isabella Rossellini lounges in the doorway of a cinder
block shack, her hair a palomino blond with coal-black roots, and Sheryl Lee
(Laura Palmer in "
The couple's journey takes them through
But nothing in "Wild at Heart" -- not Zabriskie's snarling profanities as she and her cohorts carry out their hit against Harry Dean Stanton (who's touchingly genuine as Ladd's sweet-natured lover), not Lynch's splatting close-up of Dafoe's shotgunned skull -- is as unnerving as it's meant to be, or as funny.
What "Wild at Heart" feels like is a kind of housecleaning -- a disjointed collection of images and odd snatches of ideas that the director couldn't make room for anyplace else. They have no context, and as a result, no power to thrill or disturb. And using the references to "The Wizard of Oz" to unify them is the most disastrous ploy of all.
The most peculiar thing about "Wild at Heart" is how perfunctory and joyless it seems. There's always been an urgency to Lynch's films; whatever he was saying, he needed badly to say it. Fire is the film's dominant motif -- Lula's father, it seems, doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire, and Uncle Pooch (Marvin Kaplan), who raped her at 13, died in a fiery car crash -- and Lynch returns again and again to the mini-explosion of a lit match. But for all its torrid sex play and violence, fire is precisely what "Wild at Heart" lacks. Instead of being wild at heart, it's empty at heart.
"Wild at Heart" contains profanity, nudity, graphic violence
and, well, you name it.
User comments from imdb Author Robert J. Maxwell
(rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming ,
New Mexico
When Lynch wants to say something he takes his time, no doubt about it.
Sometimes he takes his time even when he doesn't have much to say. Example?
Isabella Rosselini in torn stocking, shabby wig, and red shoes is swaying
gently to some music when Willem DaFoe crashes in and gives her a vigorous
smooch. That's the beginning and the end of the scene. Another example? Cage
and Laura Dern are having an argument just after he's let out of the slams.
She's nervous and upset because she hasn't seen him in six years. He looks at
her intently and tells her it's a mistake for them to get back together again.
There is about a twenty-second closeup of Dern's magnificent blue eyes. They
don't drip with tears. They don't even blink. They stare directly into the camera.
Why? Like you, I'd have to guess. (I'd guess that her unblinking, unteary stare
is meant to tell us that she sees things pretty clearly despite being shaken.
That's pretty banal, I know, but my mind is open to other interpretations.)
I don't mean to sound as if I'm bashing the movie because that's not what I
mean to do. Let's linger a little over a much later scene. It takes place in
the middle of a city street,
Now, I can see where a lot of ten-year-olds (or ten-year-old minds) might be
bored with this film. It's long. There isn't an abundance of violence, although
DaFoe does get his head blown off by twin blasts from a shotgun. I mean, quite
literally, his head is blown completely off. It bounces off the wall like a
football and lands with a loud splat on the pavement. So maybe there's a little
hope for the horror afficionados after all, but not much, when you get right
down to it.
The movie is punctuated with violence and, even more, with oddities, but mostly
it moves languorously. Cage and Dern thrum through the
I wouldn't argue that "Wild at Heart" should be put into a time
capsule, but it's not a movie that's easy to forget. David Lynch may or may not
be a hot commercial property but he's one of the most original directors
working today.
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review
Wild At Heart: Life's Wicked Game « Grump Factory John Mora from Grump Factory, April 2, 2008
#899. Wild at Heart (1990, David Lynch) Shooting Down Pictures, January 3, 2007
Side trip: Wild At Heart (1990) Keith Phipps compares WILD AT HEART to TWIN PEAKS, from the Onion A.V. Club
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Better Than Sex: David Lynch’s Wild at Heart | SpoutBlog Lauren Wissot
Wild at Heart (1990) A Film by David Lynch Are the Hills Going to March Off? August 4, 2009
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C+]
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review
Eye for Film (Nicky Falkof) review [4/5]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [5/5]
Newsweek (David Ansen) review David Lynch’s New Peak, describing the week at Cannes, June 4, 1990
DVD Times Noel Megahey, Special Edition, still the US cut, not European Uncut edition
Film Freak Central Review [Travis Mackenzie Hoover] Special Edition
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review [Special Edition]
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]
Reel.com dvd review [3.5/4] Pam Grady, Special Edition
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Peterson) dvd review [Special Edition]
MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant) dvd review [9/10] [Special Edition]
Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth, Special edition
Wild At Heart (Collector's Edition) still the US cut, not European Uncut edition
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [Special Edition] Special Uncut Edition
filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review [2.5/5]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Dragan Antulov retrospective [8/10]
Jerry Saravia review [3.5/4] Jerry Saravia
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [1/5] It’s just all so insincere
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Image results for Lynch "Wild at Heart" photos
TWIN PEAKS
A prequel to the
event that spawned the small town turmoil in the 1990 TV series Twin Peaks, the discovery of the dead
body of high school prom queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), which led to a
memorable but short-lived TV series, which stopped abruptly when the Lynch
vision was short circuited by the restrictions of what can be expressed on TV,
so he set his sights on a feature length film more in line with his own vision
of the corruption and darkness that lie under the surface of what constitutes
an all American town. The cast is pretty
much the same, with one exception, as Moira Kelly takes the place of Lara Flynn Boyle as the actress who plays
Laura’s best friend Donna, who looks a bit older and adds a dreamy quality to
her character that was not in the original.
An incendiary piece on sexual abuse, this is a horrific exposé on the brutally nightmarish world of a
teenage girl who is continually sexually molested by her all too smothering father,
whose image of him transforms in her head to protect the innocent, perceiving
him as the personification of evil, seeing only evil, confusing the mixed up
world of visions and dreams with her own sense of reality, altered even further
by a heavy dose of pharmaceutical drugs of choice, and the audience sees a girl
in a horrible world of hurt and pain.
When she visits with her friend Donna, this actually feels like the
altered state of mind, yet it’s simply the slow pace of reality where nothing
happens. Laura would rather punch her
way out of a paper bag universe to place herself anywhere except at home, which
is the heart of all her troubles. Her
father Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) drugs the warm milk he serves to his wife (Grace
Zabriskie) on nights when he enters his daughter’s bedroom. She’s usually so high on coke that all
perceptions are altered, where all we ever see are fragments of reality. But eventually her father’s face pushes to
the forefront, which leaves her disgusted with him. But he’s a man possessed who refuses to let
her go.
The film opens
with two FBI agents meeting at an airport where they are assigned to work
together to solve a brutal murder of Teresa Banks in a small town in the
Pacific Northwest, a town where outside help is seen as undesired interference,
especially when the federal authority outranks the local, something that really
rankles the locals. But we see a couple
of agents discover the initial clues of what turns into a rash of similar
murders. But examining the first victim,
they’re not aware of what to expect, so everything they see and hear is
unfamiliar territory. Eventually one of
those agents simply disappears. Agent
Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) has already had a vision about the next victim,
so he is assigned to the case, where his connection to Laura Palmer is only
through a shared dream. When the
familiar opening chords of the Twin Peaks
theme are sounded, and the lovely and smiling Laura Palmer walks out of her
front door, it’s nearly impossible to keep a smile off your face, as one
relishes Lynchian moments like this, which extend the BLUE VELVET (1986)
portrait of perfectly manicured homes in small town America which hide a dark
and insidious underbelly. Leland
Palmer’s troubled, dysfunctional family life is on full display here as his
twisted, distorted view of reality is already clearly evident, as he’s a
ghastly cruel man even at the dinner table, where his overbearing bullying of
his daughter remain tucked out of sight from the rest of the world, safe within
the confines of a place called home.
Eliminating the
soap opera melodrama and the sweet small town charm of the TV series, this
takes us where the TV series never dared to go, which is the discordant
interior horrors of Laura Palmer. What
starts out as a straight narrative easy enough to follow slowly fractures into
an altered reality, perhaps accentuated by the prolific drug use, nudity, and
sexual promiscuity displayed by Laura herself, where large chunks of scenery
are chewed up in dank cabins or roadhouses getting wasted while enticing men
with her sexual allure, all bathed in soft, pulsating red lights and quiet,
jazzy themes where the sensual intrigue factor is paramount, even using a
camera shot that rotates 360 degrees. But
eventually Laura succumbs to her own situation in life, something she felt she
had no control over, something abysmally horrible and sick, something that
nearly drives her crazy, as her school friends are so innocent they haven’t got
a clue to what she’s acutely aware of every waking instant, so she’s lost in
the headlights of her own nightmarish world which becomes a reality onscreen, a
mixture of beauty and horror, expressed through fragmented images lit by a
series of flashlights, strobe lights, car headlights, and even the moon, all illuminating
the darkness of a depraved world that exists on earth before taking the viewers
into the familiar territory of Laura and Agent Cooper’s dream of the “Red
Room,” where a battle ensues for the soul of Laura Palmer, eventually
transcending on angel’s wings, like a picture hanging in her room, a
wonderfully insightful view on sexual abuse by Lynch that absolves her of any
responsibility for the crimes inflicted upon her, for the tragedy that became
her everyday, ordinary life where she eventually became easy prey for those
predators that walk among us. This is
one of Lynch’s most unflinchingly imagined and morally disturbing works.
Mark Harris:
On watching Mulholland
Dr. again recently, I was reminded that Lynch had once before faced the
issue of "completing" a TV pilot, when he turned the Twin Peaks pilot into a self-contained
movie for the European market. The result that time was interesting, but not
exactly good. Lynch handles a similar task in Mulholland Dr. in a much more satisfactory fashion, although I
still wish we could have seen the planned series -- so many of the set-up
scenes can't achieve a real pay-off in the feature film version.
Although the tendency is to value Mulholland
Dr. more highly than Lost Highway
or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, I'm
not sure I go along with that. Lost
Highway is at least Mulholland Dr.'s
equal as a dream-influenced narrative, and since it was executed as intended
and not re-fashioned from an aborted project, I suspect its internal
consistency is greater. Twin Peaks: Fire
Walk with Me, although not a self-contained piece since it depends so
heavily on the series, strikes me as Lynch's most beautiful work since Eraserhead. As David Foster Wallace
pointed out (in his essay on the making of Lost
Highway, in which he evaluates Lynch's entire career), re-considering Laura
Palmer as a dramatic subject instead of as a (dead) dramatic object is the most
morally complex and structurally ambitious project that a Lynch film has ever
take on.
Agent Dale Cooper has to be decidedly de-emphasized in the
movie. The series is pre-dominantly from his point of view, and his world, even
with its mystifications, Eastern religion, and the rest, is decidedly
comprehensible. Good is good, and evil is evil; he's an FBI agent, after all.
And from the very first seconds of his appearance in the pilot, talking to
Diane on his recorder in the car on the way into town, he is transparently in
love with Twin Peaks and its environment. There is darkness, but it is a
fairy-tale darkness, complete with woods, owls, and logs. Whereas there is
nothing even slightly fairy-tale-like about Laura Palmer's existence or her
apprehension of it -- Twin Peaks is a dirty old mill town with sick and
backward people, not lovable eccentrics, and her family is completely sick,
too. Same material, totally different key, and that is why I loved Fire Walk with Me -- it completely
eschewed the predictable, so that even Lynch's friends and collaborators were
disturbed.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
'Goddamn, these people are peculiar!'
opines Harry
Dean Stanton's trailer-park manager in Lynch's big screen prequel to his
cult TV series. He's right: not only are his fellow-characters weird, but the
film's makers must be pretty odd too. For one thing, they evidently never felt
that the tortuous narrative need make sense to audiences; for another, they
appear to have made no attempt to conceal the cynicism that presumably
motivated their desire to cash in on their TV success. It begins a year before
Laura Palmer's death, with FBI agent Desmond (Isaak) investigating the murder
of one Teresa Banks (Gidley); meanwhile, Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) has his usual
premonitory dreams. The whole thing looks like off-cuts from the series that
were eliminated because they were either too nasty or too inept. Moreover, the
cast consists largely of the series' weakest performers (Lee, particularly, as
Laura Palmer, proves she can't carry a movie). Self-parody would seem too generous
an assessment of Lynch's aims and achievement.
Cine-List
- CINE-FILE Chicago Rob
Christopher
As a student in high school I once interviewed film critic Howie Movshovitz, and during our conversation he told me about his recent experience seeing TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME at Cannes. As he left the theater afterwards he turned to a friend of his, a fellow critic, and said, "I have a feeling that I'm the only person on three continents to like this movie." The friend replied that no, he was wrong; it was more like five continents. Lynch's belated continuation of his pathbreaking TV show was greeted with boos at Cannes and ennui in theaters (although for its first week it did somehow manage to crack the box office top ten). Some of the quirky humor from the series is intact, but Lynch's focus is on the last week of Laura Palmer's life, and the shroud of doom that hangs over the film was off-putting to nearly everyone but the show's die-hard fans. Today, it's easier to see the beauty alongside the pain, including Ron Garcia's autumnal cinematography, Angelo Badalamenti's peerless jazz-centered score, and Sheryl Lee's bravura performance. What especially captivates (and disorients) me even now is the film's wholly peculiar geography of time. Lynch continually interrupts the story's "natural" flow, jostling time out of joint in ways that anticipate LOST HIGHWAY and INLAND EMPIRE. Taking a cue from the White/Black Lodge, which exists outside of human chronology, scenes in the film skip around between past, present, and future. Chunks of time even "go missing" in the midst of a scene (David Bowie's translucent cameo being merely one example). Devotees have been puzzling over those missing pieces for more than 20 years now, and that scrutiny will only grow more intense as the air date for the new season approaches. One thing to bear in mind, however: the owls are not what they seem.
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Off-putting, reductive, yet
playfully vindictive, Fire Walk With Me's preface-within-a-preface
Over in
Bob is Lynch's most terrifying
boogey-man, the shameful alter ego of Laura's father Leland (Ray Wise). The
man, though, is more resentful of his secret place if only because his fate
remains unsealed. However terrifying and overwhelmingly sad, Fire Walk With
Me is also disturbingly and deliberately funny. Lynch's
"This would look great on your
wall," says Mrs. Tremond in the parking lot, handing Laura a portrait of a
doorway as if teasing the girl to walk closer to the fire. This door, though,
is a different kind of gateway, a reminder that Laura is seriously out of touch
with her subconscious. Her fate is sealed yet Lynch suggests salvation is hers
should she take hold of the truth. "He is under the fan now," says
Tremond's grandson—another clue for Laura that an unfathomable terror lies
close to home. Despite the girl's rocky road to death, Lynch takes pains to
make his heroine hyper-conscious of her own downfall. Why else would Lynch show
her the flight of angels from bedroom paintings only to give Laura her own
angel once she makes it to the Red Room? A death unenlightened is not worth
suffering.
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) John Kenneth Muir, January 25, 2010
not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston) review
Twin Peaks Fire
Walk With Me Mike Sutton from DVD
Times
DVD Times Noel Megahey, Collector’s Edition
Bigger Than Life (1956) and Its Influence on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) Tony Dayoub, March 29, 2010, also seen here: Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Film School Rejects (H. Stewart) dvd review [A] also seen here: Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Reel.com dvd review [2.5/4] Pam Grady
DVD
Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review
SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Todd Doogan
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[3/5]
Pretentious
Musings (Kevin Koehler) review
Ted Prigge retrospective [2/4]
Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [1/5]
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
LA LUMIÈRE ET COMPAGNIE: PREMONITIONS FOLLOWING AN EVIL DEED
A rather remarkable effort, created in celebration of 100 years of motion picture history, using original 100 year old Lumière Brothers cameras, using acetate rather than nitrate based film stock on 35 mm film, one sprocket hole per frame, and only 55 seconds of film. Forty directors around the world (all of whom may be seen here: full cast and crew) were asked to make a 55 second short based on the same restrictions: no more than 3 takes, using natural light, no synchronized sound, and once you started, you couldn’t stop the camera. Lynch, of course, films the aftermath of a murder, showing police arriving at the dead body lying on the ground, a mother appears to be called from a carefree group of young daughters lounging in a beautiful garden, a murky underworld of METROPOLIS-like sci-fi imagery of mutant men holding a naked woman’s body floating in a vat completely filled with water, which then bursts into flames as the police arrive at the mother’s door. This short is accompanied by a dense melodramatic orchestral score which rises to a crescendo of shrill industrial noise by the end, and throughout the film we can hear the swishing sound of the film moving through the camera.
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith
Phipps]
Pioneer filmmakers
in the purest sense of the term, Auguste and Louis Lumiére created the cinematograph,
the first real moving-picture camera, in 1895. To commemorate the 100th
anniversary of the event, this project unites 40 renowned directors (including
Spike Lee, Peter Greenaway, Wim Wenders, David Lynch, Zhang Yimou and a whole
bunch of Frenchmen) to pay tribute by making their own short films using the
Lumiére cinematograph. Given the restrictions imposed by director Sarah
Moon—each filmmaker is limited to 52 seconds and three takes, and forbidden to
employ synchronous sound—the diversity of the results is amazing. Almost as
interesting as the films themselves are the responses given by the participants
when asked questions such as, "Is cinema mortal?" Both a tribute to
the Lumiére Brothers and an essay on cinema's past, present and future, Lumiére
and Company is fascinating, essential viewing.
DVD Verdict Bill Gibron (excerpt)
A young woman's murdered body is discovered by police. An
older woman rises from a swing with a distressed look on her face. Smoke fills
the screen, and we then see three distorted beings surrounding a large water
filled cylinder. There is a nude woman inside. Flames explode, and we are in
the living room of an older couple. The woman rises to answer the door. The
police have arrived, hats in hand. Created to celebrate the 100th year of the
Lumière camera and the advent of motion pictures.
LUMIÈRE ET COMPAGNIE: PREMONITIONS FOLLOWING AN EVIL DEED: If there is any artistic justice in the world, David Lynch should be allowed to direct a film with a Lumière camera. His work and artistry here is that effective…that stylized…that classic. No other modern filmmaker understands the intoxicating magic, the hallucinatory mood, and the dramatic potential of grainy, hazy black and white. In only 52 seconds, he creates a compelling cinematic masterwork, a visual enigma that demands repeated viewings and intense dissection. Its impact is immediate, disturbing, and sensational. The images compress a novel's worth of information into four simple setups. It raises fascinating questions and offers sketchy, intriguing answers.
Again, the audio and video transfer is an artistic tour de force, capturing the look of the 1900s with the tone and talent of the new millennium. Everything ancient about the Lumière camera adds to the ephemeral wonder of this piece. A bizarre ambient industrial hum completes the experience. This is the very definition of a short (less than one minute) film (an entire universe visualized) and together with The Alphabet and The Grandmother, reason alone to seek out this DVD. Like the majority of Lynch's work, there is no easy explanation as to what is going on here, but the fun, the delight and the fulfillment is in the discovery.
User comments from imdb Author: Cineanalyst
This is a conceptually intriguing project: 40 film directors
from around the world each make a 50-some second film with a restored Lumière
Cinématographe. Interspersed among the short films is footage of them making
the films as well as interviews with the filmmakers. One thing I found
surprising was how inarticulate many of them were in responding to such
essential questions as why they film, or whether film is mortal. Overall, the
added material outside of the 40 films is interesting and adds further layers
to the project.
I've been especially interested in the early history of motion pictures and
have spent much time with the Lumière brothers' films; thus, this project
becomes more rewarding for me. I suggest watching this after seeing 'The
Lumière Brothers' First Films,' with narration by Bertrand Taverneir. The
medium has advanced severalfold in the 100 years between today and when the
Lumière brothers contributed to the invention of cinéma. One of the great
advances of the Cinématographe was its light weight--providing mobility. First,
the Lumière Company exploited this added mobility with the subjects of their films,
with the actuality films and by taking their camera across the world. It's
appropriate that this project consists of an international array of filmmakers,
as the Lumière brothers were responsible for introducing motion pictures and
cinéma to much of the world via their (or rather their assistants) traveling
the world. The next step the Lumière Company took in exploiting this mobility
was with camera movement. One of the company's filmmakers, Alexandre Promio,
was, apparently, responsible for much of this innovation. These films consisted
of panoramas or fixing the camera to a moving object (i.e. a boat). In his
Hiroshima short, Hugh Hudson holds the camera--a "shaky cam"
effect--ending with overexposing the film by pointing the camera towards the
sun, which is more movement than the Lumière brothers had envisioned.
When limited to the technology of the Cinématographe, however, many of the
modern filmmakers' films demonstrate little to no advancement in film grammar
or insight into the medium. One of them is an updated remake; others are like
something the Lumière brothers might have filmed. You can take that as a poor
mark upon those modern directors, or as further good marks for the Lumière's,
or both. Yet, there are exceptions in this project, such as Hudson's short.
Some of the directors do use the benefit of 100 years of hindsight to expand
upon those first films. Several of the films are clever in their self-reference
and are interesting tributes to the Lumière brothers and film. Gabriel Axel's
tracking shot of the arts and Claude Lelouch's rotating kiss with a background
progression of a history of camera technology filming it are two of the more
outstanding in this way.
Helma Sanders' "Tribute to Louis Cochet" shows the orchestration of
lighting of a stage waterfall fountain. It shows both the beauty and
limitations of the relic camera--ending with the lights turned towards the
camera. Peter Greenaway also plays with the lighting and exposure of the film
in one of the few multi-shot films in the series. As he says, film is a great
arena for him to play with image and text. The consensus favourite, the short
film by David Lynch, is also one of the most original in the program. It also
contains multiple shots (and even the continuity transitions are creative,
including flames, as though the negative catches fire). Lynch also provided one
of the more agreeable interviews, relating that film is "a magical medium
that makes you dream." Additionally, I think the final film is
appropriately placed. It's by Theo Angelopoulos, who's in Athens and films a
scene from Homer's "Odyssey." With a title card, Ulysses ponders:
"I am lost! In which foreign country have I landed?" It clarifies and
elaborates upon a few of the other short films that had people staring into the
camera (which harks back to 100 years ago when people weren't familiar with
movie cameras). Ulysses has landed in the foreign land of film.
User comments from imdb Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom
The idea of 41 of the world's leading film-makers attempting
to create a short film lasting no longer than 52 seconds and using the original
Lumiere Brothers' hand-cranked cameras to celebrate cinema's centenary is a
mouth-watering prospect. So why didn't the finished film overwhelm us with this
potentially staggering ode to cinema? Well, perhaps because the majority of the
directors asked to take part in the project are hardly indicative of the very
best of contemporary world cinema. Of course, this is an entirely subjective
criticism on my part - I mean, who has the authority to say that one filmmaker
is greater than another? Certainly not me - but for the purposes of personal
critique I can say quite comfortably that many of the filmmakers included here
are lesser talents, comfortable making decent enough films with the occasional
greater work thrown in, but certainly not representative of the magnitude and
imagination that contemporary world cinema has to offer.
The films collected here are symptomatic of this lack of quality, featuring
obvious odes to the Lumiere's with a combination of visual homage and sketches
devoid of imagination, or abstract pieces that seem like unfinished ideas. The
most obvious of these is Lasse Hellstrom's film depicting a woman waiting for a
train and Patrice Leconte's project, which is essentially a shot-for-shot
recreation of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896). Some directors
attempt symbolism; Greenaway for example, who I admire, turns in a tedious film
more befitting of the man who gave us 8 and a ½ Women (1999) as opposed to the
ornate majesty of The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) or The Pillow Book (1996),
whilst Bigas Luna gives us breast feeding and frontal nudity in an empty field.
Arthur Penn's symbolic piece - seemingly juxtaposing the birth of cinema with
the notions of child birth - is not too bad and has an interesting use of
shot-structure and composition, although even here, it must be said that Penn
isn't a filmmaker that I would normally consider worthy of such an endeavour,
despite the greatness of films like Bonnie & Clyde (1968) and Night Moves
(1975).
Other director's squander their chance with worthy experiments that don't pay
off. Theo Angelopoulos for examples gives us Greek myth that doesn't really
work on such a limited canvas; John Boorman turns his camera on the filming of
Neil Jordan's historical biographical film Michael Collins (1997) but lacks the
intellect and the depth to actually say anything of interest; whilst Spike Lee
attempts to capture the first words of his daughter on film (which is certainly
a noble cause, but one that doesn't necessarily lend itself to captivating
cinema), etc, etc. Other interesting projects include Hugh Hudson's attempt to
document the Hiroshima incident, Claude Miller's delightfully Chaplinesque
sketch, Francis Girod's imaginative metaphor, the entertaining and wonderfully
composed sketch of Jacques Rivette, and the films by Claude Lelouch and Nadine
Trintignant (although they do nothing radical with the format, they are at
least beautiful to look at).
It is interesting that many of the director's remain true to form, with their
work, for better or worse, managing to tie in with the themes and ideas present
in their feature-length work; with Spike Lee placing the emphasis on family;
Jerry Schatzberg documenting real life, lower-class struggles; Luna and his
adolescent obsessions with sex and women; Costa-Gavras and Michael Haneke
offering up clinical, political polemic; Greenaway indulging in essay; and then
David Lynch going wild with B-movie homage, shock and imagination. Without
question, Lynch's segment is the best of the bunch; the only film that has
seemingly had more than a day's worth of planning go into it, with costumes,
movable sets, lighting and special effects presenting a mini-surrealist parable
about police investigations, the atomic age and extraterrestrials in a single
moving dolly shot lasting 52 seconds in total. It's a stunning work; one that
reinforces his current-standing as the greatest living American filmmaker and
one that captures the pure creative spirit and sense of free-form expression
that cinema is supposed to be about.
The other filmmakers on board could learn a lot from this, and probably should
have lowered their heads in shame when faced with Lynch's wild imagination and
boundless passion for pure, cinematic expression. Many of the other segments
are forgettable, even those from talented filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Wim
Wenders, not to mention many of the other filmmakers mentioned above. Some of
the director's included here were new to me, and judging from the interviews
and the standard of their work as it is presented, it would seem that they're
probably not worthy of any further investigation (but I suppose only time will
tell). Overall, it's not a bad film; the talking heads offer some interesting
insights, the cause is worthy enough and the films, for better or worse, reveal
something rather interesting about the people who made them.
However, when watching the film, it struck me that many of the greatest
filmmakers currently at work (or at least, circa 1995) are curiously absent
from the proceedings. Given that this is supposed to be a celebration of film
at its very best, it seems strange that highly acclaimed, original and award
winning filmmakers - like, for example, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Ingmar
Bergman, Lars von Trier, Mike Leigh, Jean Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Shinya
Tsukamoto, Shohei Imamura, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Terry Gilliam, Aki
Kaurismäki, etc, etc - weren't given the opportunity to create their own short
film is truly criminal (or perhaps they were but didn't want to). Either way,
it's a great shame, and results in a film that is only of passing interest as
opposed to be a completely enveloping, life-changing experience.
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]
Nitrate Online (Capsule) Carrie Gorringe
All Movie Guide [Dan Friedman]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
David Lynch: Lumière et compagnie on YouTube (52 seconds)
LOST HIGHWAY A- 94
A
man in trouble.
A superb film any way you want to look at it, but Patricia Arquette especially in this film is operating on a different wavelength than anybody else. One should not immediately attempt to figure this film out, but instead link it to the time in which it was made, during the OJ Simpson murder trial, where the film may attempt to explain how a guy could become completely detached from his former self. The film may be defined by its own weirdness, the tidal wave shift in tones, the nudity, the drug use, the violence, the mafia toilet humor, the murders, and that evil guy (Robert Blake) who may as well be the Grim Reaper. Interesting also that the beginning of the film resembles the opening sequence from Michael Haneke’s recent film CACHÉ.
LOST HIGHWAY features Robert Blake as a deranged madman, and may be Lynch's take on the OJ Simpson saga, how a man can completely divorce himself from his personality. Perhaps Lynch’s funniest film, I saw the film on a night Robert Blake was interviewed by Barbara Walters on TV for allegedly murdering his girlfriend, so there was a spiritual connection with his grim character, but I had to laugh every time I saw him, looking like the Prince of Darkness. Robert Loggia was unbelievably funny, and the goon: "the fucker gets more pussy than a toilet seat." It felt like a Twin Peaks style of episode that David Lynch may have made for himself, and if he also paints, it may also have featured some of his own paintings in the living room of the house. Despite a dizzying incoherence in the initial stages of the film, the turning point for me was after the sax guy returned as the mechanic, in the body shop, as the gorgeous blonde arrives, everything instantly slows down into an alluring dream state where we hear Lou Reed's "This Magic Moment..." Everything was in perfect synch after that.
Of notable
interest, Lynch claims he wrote this as a response to his interpretation of OJ
Simpson’s reaction to the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. As
Lynch writes in “Catching the Big Fish:”
"At the time Barry Gifford and I were writing the
script for "
Chicago NewCityNet (Ray Pride) review
As year-end lists get tallied and naughty critics claim to know who's been nice, "Lost Highway" is likely to get lost in the fray. In what may be Lynch's best and most Lynchian film yet, the director seems to be even more determined to escape the shackles of narrative convention, even after four years of being unable to get his projects financed. Dark and disturbing, unrelenting and unsettling, gorgeously made, sizzlingly sensual yet coldly fatalist, it shows Lynch at the top of his form. In its fever-dream orchestration of incident, sound and music, Lynch has made a musical -- one that after you've seen it, you find yourself humming in your sleep. In interviews Lynch is notoriously elusive, wanting never to pin down meaning, symbolism or directorial intent, but he is fond of saying things much like his characters would, such as that he's "lost in darkness and confusion." "Lost Highway" is the story of Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), who has a world of trouble boiling through his head over his feelings for his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette) -- jealousy, madness, rationalization, some large thing. Whether taken as fantasy or nightmare, Lynch's revisionist noir yarn is as pungent as a punch in the face, as quixotic as revisiting a lost love; it's essentially a romantic tragedy, tinged with a deep undercurrent of sadness and hurt. Lynch and co-writer Barry Gifford use minimal means in trying to convince us that Fred could transform himself into another person out of his emotional pain; the amazing surfaces that the former painter composes while working through the plot are nothing short of ravishing. And yet... is the story banal, riddled with psychological clichs, or grandly mysterious? I lean toward the latter.
Lost Highway [Region 2] from Amazon.com reviewer David Jamieson Rancho Cucamonga, CA USA:
For many of you who saw Lost Highway
Well, my interpretations were all well and good, but I was interested in what was going through the mind of David Lynch and Barry Gifford when they wrote the movie. I did a little research, and this is what I found...
Night People
The idea for this movie came to David Lynch while reading a book by Barry Gifford called Night People. In the book, Barry uses the term "lost highway" and those words sparked an idea in David's head. From this early point, David knew he wanted to make a movie about the unknown. He contacted Barry, and they set out to write the movie.
Murder
If any of you are wondering if Fred actually killed Renee, the answer is yes. Fred lived in constant fear of loosing Renee, constant fear that she was cheating on him, and most importantly, constant fear of her past. He loved Renee, but at the same time hated her. Whenever he saw her, he saw her past. Sex with Renee was a torturous reminder of her experience in porn, making it impossible for him to even finish. Eventually, he just snapped. If you watch the movie again, pause it at the point where he watches the final video tape, and jog slowly over the portion where we see Renee's body. You will see what kind of anger and rage exploded inside Fred when he killed her. Her torso is ripped apart, her upper and lower body are completely separated and her hand is cut off and lying on the bed. Continue to jog slowly and you will see Fred stare directly into the camera with a piercing, maniacal gaze.
Psychogenic Fugue
Psychogenic fugue is an existing mental condition in which the subject, wanting to escape reality, creates a new reality inside their head. The person will create new friends, a new job, a new home, everything. Pretty much the entire movie takes place within Fred's head. When the movie opens, Fred has already killed Renee and he starts creating an alternate reality. He infuses his own reality with tiny portions of the truth, so some of what we see is actually based on fact, but the majority is what Fred is creating inside his own head. A very important line in the movie is when Fred and Renee are explaining to the police why they don't own a video camera. Fred says he doesn't like them, that he "would rather remember things his way, not necessarily the way they happened"
When Fred is imprisoned, his mental illness kicks into high gear. He is on death row, and any hope of escaping his nightmare (his real life) is lost. He is stuck in this cell until his death. His only way out is to completely escape to a new reality. This is when he essentially snaps and in his own mind, he takes on a new identity, Pete. The rest of the movie is him trying to live a life he finds more attractive. He is a young, good-looking guy, who has no trouble getting any woman he wants. Then he meets Alice (a now blonde Patricia Arquette), his alternate version of Renee.
But, Fred is so sick, that even in the reality that he is creating, Alice becomes a product of his paranoia, eventually turning on him, declaring "you will never have me" while they are having sex and then getting up and walking away. This is the point in the movie, in the desert, when Fred decides to abandon this alternate reality and he reappears and Pete disappears.
The last scene of the movie is Fred being chased by the police down the highway as he begins to transform again, just like in the prison cell. This reality didn't quite work out the way he wanted it to, and now he is out there somewhere, living a new life again. Let's hope this one worked out for him! 
Robert Blake
The mystery man is truly the most fascinating aspect of this movie. In my opinion, he is Fred's idea of the devil. He has supernatural powers and he feeds off the sins of mortals. The scene at the party is one of the creepiest movie scenes I've seen, yet at the same time it is hilarious. The way the music and party noise fade when the mystery man and Fred walk up to each other created a bizarre and surreal exchange. Another great scene of the movie is when Mr. Eddy and the mystery man call Pete together. "Yeah Pete, I just wanted to jump back on and let you know I'm glad your ok!" Click. That was great. And of course, I can't talk about the great scenes in the movie without mentioning the "tailgating" scene. Robert Loggia (Mr. Eddy) is a master.
Conclusion
Keeping in mind David's use of psychogenic fugue as the main characters mental illness, the movie is actually very simple. Watching the movie again, keeping this all in mind, is an entirely new experience. The first several times I watched it I was intrigued by the puzzle. Now, watching the movie, I can relax, stop trying to figure out how everything relates to everything else, and watch what is actually happening. I suggest, if you are a fan of the movie and haven't seen it in a while, or if you learned some new things here, then go back and watch it again. You will realize more than ever that David Lynch is brilliant, a master of the avant-garde.
Re:
Caché/Lost Highway by Sepulchrive from
IMDb Message Boards
Caché is a vastly superior movie
to Lost Highway
And to criticize Caché for lacking "production values" or a
"kickass soundtrack" is to miss the point of Michael Haneke's
directorial style. David Lynch's method of filmmaking is very personal and
subjective. Scenes are meant to invoke moods, dreams, or the surreal. For the
most part, we're completely immersed in one character's psychological
landscapes (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire)
Haneke on the other hand is almost close to being a documentarian: using long,
static shots, no recorded soundtrack and realistic settings. He simply observes
his characters from a completely detached angle. Maybe you don't like this but
I think this is exactly what makes his movies so interesting, because it erases
emotional cues and creates an unsettling atmosphere we're not used to. He
presents what he sees and we're left to draw our own conclusions. What David
Lynch does is very similar, but he's usually looking inward. With Haneke, we
watch the characters and puzzle at what they might be thinking.
Lost Highway is good, but ultimately not much more than a cold exercise in
style. In my opinion it violates one of the principle rules of character development,
and that is that characters with psychiatric conditions offer no dramatic
tension. They're just doomed to behave like they do because of their illness. Mulholland Drive
Caché is simply one of the most maddening puzzles ever constructed. The
solution constantly seems just one step out of reach. Hints are dropped but
every time we think we have a firm grasp on what's happening a scene stops by
that completely contradicts the earlier theories, and sets the stage for
another one. You're constantly guessing at everyone's motivation and the
meaning of a particular scene. Some scenes will seem more significant to one
person than another, and that's one of its great strengths.
Full
explanation (this time in english!!) - SPOILER by campioli_milo from IMDb Message Boards
First of all this explanation is not mine. I founded it out
on this board some years ago. I've just translated it in Italian. Since I understand
it's now lost, I posted it in English. Sorry I don't remember the name of the
original poster.
Enjoy...
...
Fred and Renee Madison have been married only for a short time. Fred is a calm,
quiet, reserved kind of guy. Renee is a woman who has a wild past, but who has
for some, to us unknown, reason decided to marry a guy like Fred. So maybe
their marriage was happy in the beginning, but after a while Fred started
getting more and more jealous and uneasy about Renee's past (of which he knows
little about, but has some serious doubts).
We enter the story at a point when their marriage is not really doing that
great. Fred spends a lot of time with his music, Renee shows little or no
interest at all for him or his activities. Their sex life sucks - Fred is not
exactly the best lover, and Renee is not exactly the happy and willing wife
either. Renee hangs around really freaky characters, probably gangsters, drug
dealers, porn producers. This really makes Fred wonder about Renee's past. Fred
starts to get increasingly jealous of his wife. He thinks she is sleeping with
another guy, possibly one of her strange friends (remember when he sees her
leave the jazz bar with Andy). It seems to him like he has lost his wife - she
was once his, but he can now feel her slowly slip away.
One night Fred decides to follow his wife. He follows her to a motel, a place
called "Lost Highway Hotel". He follows her to a room #26 so he
decides to take the room opposite to #26, room #25. (Mind that I'm now just
making up these room numbers, they are mentioned twice in the movie). In room
#26 Renee meets with a man that Fred has seen before at one of the parties -
his name is Dick Laurent, he's a notorious mafioso. After they have sex, Renee
leaves the hotel. Fred waits until she's gone, breaks into Laurent's room,
drags him out of the hotel, puts him in the trunk of his car and drives off to
the desert. There he kills Dick Laurent with his gun and leaves his body in the
desert.
A few days pass since the murder. Laurent's body is not found yet, because, of
course, it's somewhere in the middle of the damn desert. Fred and Renee go to
one of her friend's parties and Fred engages in a conversation with Andy. After
Andy mentions Laurent's, Fred accidentally blurs out "Isn't Laurent
dead?", to which Andy replies "How do you know he's dead?", and
then, as if realizing that Laurent is gone and he really could be dead, he asks
Fred "Who told you he was dead?!?"
Fred and Rene leave the party and go home. That very same night (or it might be
the next night), Fred goes back to Andy's house and kills Andy by throwing him
at the edge of a glass table. Why? Perhaps to cover up for his stupid give away
earlier that night, or perhaps because of jealousy (he thinks Renee is sleeping
with Andy too).
Fred realizes that the only way out of the whole mess now is to go all the way
and eliminate the root of his problems, the only woman he could never have -
his wife Renee. So he goes back home and brutally murders his wife (the
screenplay mentions that her body was chopped up into pieces).
The next morning, the police arrive at Andy's house and find Fred's
fingerprints all over the place (don't be confused by the fact that the cops
say how "the place is full of Pete's fingerprints"). The movie actually
begins with the following scene: we find Fred sitting in his apartment, after
he just murdered his wife, when he sees the cops coming. He gets into his car
and starts running away from the cops. These are the last scenes in the movie,
but this is not the end of the story. We're actually right around the middle.
:)
Fred is caught. He is put on trial (we never really find out what he's guilty
of, right? He might be in jail for a triple murder!) and sentenced to death in
the electric chair. His is put on death row. As he's waiting for his death
penalty, he increasingly becomes aware of how serious his crime is and he
begins feeling remorse and guilt for killing his wife. The feeling of guilt
starts to haunt him. His conscience really starts giving him a hard time, he
cannot escape the fact that he has murdered his wife. He even starts getting
headaches.
Fred does not disappear from the jail. He doesn't even get sick and die in his
jail cell.
Fred Madison dies in the electric chair. We are not told how much time he spent
on death row, but it's not impossible that he spent several months or years
there. And the moment of his execution finally came.
And as he's sitting in the electric chair and thousands of volts are beginning
to fry his body, Fred decides to escape to the only place he has left - his own
imagination.
And so he transforms into a young man called Pete Dayton. Pete Dayton is
everything Fred Madison isn't. He's young, good looking, very macho, has a sexy
young girlfriend, excellent in bed, works at a car shop (how much more macho
can a man get?) and even has important connections with some very influential
people. Pete and Fred have absolutely nothing in common.
We follow Pete's life for a while. A perfectly normal life, nice parents, nice
job, nice girlfriend. Everything that Fred would want, right? The problem is
that Fred's guilty conscience fools him and plays a trick on him. Fred cannot
escape his guilt even in his own fantasies, so slowly, but surely, his real
life starts taking over.
First we see the character of Dick Laurent come into his fantasy under the name
of Mr. Eddy. There's still nothing wrong there, in fact, Pete seems very proud
to know Mr. Eddy. But than SHE comes in. Renee comes back as
As Pete gets more seriously involved with
Pete and Alice go to the desert and as they wait for some guy to show up, they
make love. As Pete climaxes and cries out "I want you... I want
you!", Alice/Renee sends him the final message: "You will never have
me." And so Fred's fantasy finally ends and it's pure recollection from
then on. The murder of Dick Laurent is shown exactly how it happened.
And so we reach the end of the movie. As the cops chase Fred across the desert,
we see Fred's face twist into a horrific painful expression, and as the blue
lights fill the interior of the car, Fred disappears and we are left alone on
the
Re:
Full explanation (this time in english!!) - SPOILER by Sepulchrive from
IMDb Message Boards
Nice explanation. I was about to post something very
similar when I found this thread. The only difference I would make is that,
nothing we ever see actually takes place in "the real world". I think
from the start, we're part of Fred's delusional memories, at certain points
simply closer to what actually happened than at others. Occasionally reality
slips in, under the form of the tapes or the appearance of Robert Blake's
character. The storyline involving Pete is simply a further twisting of the
main themes but I couldn't explain it any better than the Italian guy just did
here.
David Lynch once stated that part of the idea for
Either Fred was driven to "insanity" over his guilt on the three
murders (Renée, Dick Laurent and Andy) or he has always had psychological
issues. At one point the mystery man says: "in the East, the
That is exactly the state Fred is in, locked up in a cell on death row, doomed
to continually re-experience the events that lead to the murders. More
poetically, the film has been compared to walking along a Möbius strip. Or
alternatively, you could see it as a sad case of a psychiatric patient who
shouldn't really be in prison but treated at a mental hospital.
Re: Full explanation (this time in english!!) - SPOILER by ericrickman from IMDb Message Boards
In my opinion, Robert Blake's character (the Mystery Man) is
the manifestation of Fred's guilt. The Mystery Man is the absolute truth, the
one who "remembers" the murders and Fred's actual life (hence the
camera) and chooses to remind him of it while he is attempting to live out the
delusion of being Pete.
In his final attempt at happiness, Fred retreats into his imagination to become
the person he always wanted to be. In this scenario, the ultimate antagonist
would be the memory of the truth; the knowledge in the back of his mind that
this alternate life was all a fantasy to escape his own tragic reality. This,
to me, is what the Mystery Man is; the projection of Fred's memory of the
terrible truth.
Sight and Sound, July 1996 Lost Highway article - LynchNet David Lynch: Mr. Contradiction, by Chris Rodley from Sight and Sound, July 1996
Lost Highway Article - Premiere Sept. 96 David Lynch Keeps His Head, by David Foster Wallace from Premiere magazine, September 1996, posted on Lynchnet
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) essay ["Demystifying ___"] Demystifying Lost Highway (1997)
Jan./Feb. 1997 sex article from Movieline magazine. Lynchnet
Road Kill David Lynch in Decay, by David Edelstein from Slate, February 26, 1997
Splitting Images | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, February 27, 1997
Philadelphia City Paper (A.D. Amorosi) review The Unconventional Narrative of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, February 27 – March 6, 1997
“Lost Highway” - Salon.com Highway to Heck, by Stephanie Zacharek, March 28, 1997
Lost Highway (1997) – Film Review - Cinefantastique Online Steve Biodrowski, April 1, 1997
The Making of “Lost Highway” - Cinefantastique Online A Surreal Meditation on Love, Jealousy, Identify, and Reality, by Frederick C Szebin and Steve Biodrowski, April 1, 1997
Interview: David Lynch Directs Traffic on the “Lost Highway” Steve Biodrowski interviews the director from Cinefantastique, April 1, 1997
Interview: Barry Gifford Deciphers David Lynch's Labyrinthine “Lost ... Steve Biodrowski interviews the co-writer for an expanation from Cinefantastique, April 1, 1997
Interview: Robert Blake, Mystery Man of the “Lost Highway” Steve Biodrowski interviews Blake from Cinefantastique, April 1, 1997
www.davidlynch.de/sightlost.html Voodoo Road, by Marina Warner from Sight and Sound, from Lynchnet, August 1997
Serdar Yegulalp essay ["On ___ and David Lynch"] The Case Against David Lynch (1998)
On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology by Bernd Herzogenrath from Other Voices, January 1999
Tremors of postmodern spectatorship. | "nach dem film" Notes on David Lynch’s Lost Highway, by Tanja Visosevic, January 12, 1999
Circular Narratives: Highlights of Popular Cinema in the '90s Fiona A. Villella (on Lost Highway) from Senses of Cinema, February 6, 2000
Painting Film with Velvet Sounds: David Lynch's Lost Highway ... Felicity J. Colman from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
On Lost Highway - Bright Lights Film Journal Death, Excess, and Discontinuity, by Thomas R. Britt, October 31, 2008
The Enigmatic Mr. Lynch – Offscreen Stefan Gullatz, October 2009
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Lost Highway (1997) John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Film/TV, June 21, 2010
Lost Highway | Inner Worlds / Outer Space Melanie Menard link to 31-page academic paper, Mental space on screen: through the examples of Last Year in Marienbad, Stalker and Lost Highway, December 1, 2010 (pdf)
the certain / uncertainty of david lynch: a paradigm shift Martha P. Nochimson, 2014
Slant Magazine [Jeremiah Kipp]
Thoughts on Stuff Patrick
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [C+]
And You Call Yourself a Scientist! (Liz Kingsley) review
Kamera.co.uk review Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell
Images -
Lost Highway - Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture Gary Johnson
The Digital Bits dvd review Adam Jahnke scrutinizing the quality of the Region 1 anamorphic DVD release
DVD Outsider Lord Summerisle reviews the 2-disc Region 2 release
Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [3/4]
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review
The Flying Inkpot (Joshua Wan) review
Kevin Patterson review [3.5/4]
Eye for Film (Gator MacReady) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Michael S. Goldberger
Lost Highway Mike D’Angelo
Lost Highway - The AV
Club Keith Phipps
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
DVD Verdict (Daryl Loomis) dvd review
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
eFilmCritic.com (Jack Sommersby) review [2/5] a tragic disappointment
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Dragan Antulov retrospective [2/10]
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
Jan./Feb. 1997 sex article from Movieline magazine.
TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
The Globe and Mail review [2/4] Rick Groen
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
Lost Highway - MOVIE REVIEW - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com Living for the Odd Moments Along Lynch's 'Highway,' by Kenneth Turan, February 21, 1997, also seen here: David Lynch Lost Highway, Los Angeles Times, or here: Lost Highway -- Newsday.com
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
Image results for David Lynch "Lost Highway" photos
character makeups | multiplicity | Patricia Arquette in 'Lost ... Patricia Arquette in character makeups
Patricia Arquette - Nude Scene (1:07)
LH · ThisMagicMoment (1:21)
Lost Highway - Movie Scene - Demon At Party (2:45)
Lost Highway -- Party Scene (2:53)
Lost Highway - I put a spell on you ( Marilyn Manson ) (3:14)
David Lynch, "Lost Highway," and Laurie Anderson, "Poison" (3:45)
Lost Highway (1997) - Unbound (4:39)
Lost Highway - Andy's Party (5:47)
Lost Highway Final Scene (5:27)
Dandadadan - Kara Araba (Lost Highway) (5:34)
David Lynch Lost Highway short video (5:56)
Lost Highway-David Lynch (1997) (7:10)
Lost Highway [Porn Piece or the Scars of Cold Kisses] (7:14)
David Lynch Lost Highway (7:15)
Femmes Fatales: Bad is better. By Clara. (9:08)
THE STRAIGHT STORY A 96
USA France Great Britain
I
think I’m going to mow the lawn
In David Lynch movies, life is a continuing, ever evolving mystery, usually full of surprises, with an element of danger and risk, oftentimes death, but there’s also a harebrained love story, and this film is no different. Though it’s a PG Disney release, a first in the Lynch repertoire, this is a film with Midwestern sensibilities, opening with the first of many images of vast fields to be ploughed, turning into a humorous yet improbable story based on a real man, dedicating the film to Alvin Straight, who at age 73 drove his John Deere lawnmower (top speed, 5 miles an hour) some 250 miles over a six weeks journey from his home in Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin to visit his brother, who he hadn’t spoken to in ten years, after he received word that his brother had a stroke. Using the Grey Fox, Richard Farnsworth, as the wise, all-knowing messenger, a Lynchean Odysseus, Alvin is a grizzled old eccentric who loves smoking cigars, but who also stubbornly refuses the help of others, a man who can barely walk two steps without the aid of two canes and is nearly blind, yet he’s the kindest, most chivalrous of gentlemen living with his grown daughter Rose, a stuttering Sissy Spacek, who loves birds. They are a couple that enjoys sitting and watching a lightning storm from out their front window, or just looking at the stars in the night. A phone call changes their lives.
Lynch’s genius is tapping into the unusual rhythms and patterns of ordinary life and this film beautifully captures just the right pace of Alvin Straight. Laurens is a small farm town with residents who show an eloquent grace and concern for others, and it is with this sentiment in mind that Alvin, who can’t see well enough to drive, or feel inclined to accept help from others, decides to head back out on the road. His journey past farms of endless cornfields is accompanied by a rhythmic guitar theme and liltingly melancholic music filled with long silences or gazes at the stars at night, where the observant Alvin never misses a thing, capturing the natural harmony of days turning into night and night turning back again to days. His travel methods certainly capture the eye of people he sees along the way, as he’s a sight wherever he goes, always worth a wave. He stops to witness a seemingly endless cavalcade of bicyclists passing by who he joins later at an outdoor barbeque and he’s a man sensible enough to wait out a rainstorm under cover before heading back out again. Along the way, he has his difficulties, as does his lawnmower, but the people he meets are generous to a fault, with the exception of a pair of quibbling John Deere repair twins, in a wonderfully understated sequence where the brothers remind him of his true mission on this journey, and vice versa. It’s his interactions with people along the way that are the true treasure in this film, as they include reflections of such an easy going nature that include jaw-dropping wisdom, usually in the form of gentle banter or someone joining him to watch a glowing fire.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott
Tobias]
With his sweet,
lyrical masterpiece The Straight Story, David Lynch frees himself from
the heavy irony and noir affectations of his last few films, discovering the
pure, mythical slice of Americana previously confined to Agent Cooper's coffee
and donuts in Twin Peaks. His surprising deliverance comes in the form
of an unusual and moving true story that appeals to his offbeat sensibility,
yet invites more emotional directness and clarity than anything he's done
before. In a warm and unassuming turn, Richard Farnsworth stars as Alvin
Straight, a 73-year-old widower who journeys from Laurens, Iowa, to Mt. Zion,
Wisconsin, to make amends with his estranged brother after the latter suffers a
stroke. Too vision-impaired to drive a car, Alvin stocks up on cigars and
Braunschweiger, climbs atop a 1966 John Deere lawnmower, and bridges the
distance at 10 mph. His stretch of highway is far more hospitable than the
dreary freakshow that populated Wild At Heart, but the conviction behind
Lynch's unexpected ode to the Heartland is no less persuasive. Though a radical
departure in his career, not a minute of The Straight Story could be
mistaken for another director's work. Scenes that might have been too
conventional in other hands are graced by hallmark Lynchian touches, such as a
tender moment under the eerie whir of a silo elevator or a hilariously
discordant exchange between Farnsworth and an old hardware clerk reluctant to
part with his "grabber." Assured in every detail, from Freddie
Francis' shimmering widescreen vistas to Angelo Badalamenti's gentle acoustic
score, The Straight Story rings with a simple poetry that's bracing and
true.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Based on a true story, The Straight Story follows 73-year-old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth, an Oscar nominee in 1978 for Comes a Horseman) as he travels cross-country on a John Deere lawnmower. This G-rated Disney movie is directed by none other than David Lynch, who is generally known for dipping into the darkest corners of the human soul for deranged movies like Eraserhead (1978), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997), and the Twin Peaks television series and movie. The Straight Story is like none of these, and yet it still has a thin lining of Lynchian sensibility.
Alvin doesn't have a driver's license, can't see very well, and can't stand without the help of two canes. There are other things wrong with him, as we learn in an early visit to the doctor. But what he can do is drive his little motorized lawnmower (top speed, 5 miles an hour). When Alvin hears that his estranged brother has had a stroke, he knows that he must make the trip to visit him come hell or high water. When a friendly neighbor offers to drive Alvin to his destination. His reply is, "you're a kind mind talking to a stubborn man."
Alvin has all kinds of old-fashioned country wisdom at his fingertips. He meets lots of different people on his journey and everyone is immediately taken with him, just as we in the audience are. A young girl who is a pregnant runaway listens to his stories about family and heads back home. Alvin teaches a group of bicyclists that the worst thing about getting old is remembering when you were young. When his lawnmower breaks down halfway, he spends a few days on a nice couple's front lawn, and forges a relationship with them as well. This effect is due to Lynch's lovely pacing and Farnsworth's amazing Oscar-worthy performance.
The astute viewer may find traces of Lynch's usual bizarro small-town characters from Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks in The Straight Story, but the people in the new movie are on the level. There's no odd undercurrent or mean streak involved. There are slight weirdnesses here and there: Alvin's daughter, played by Sissy Spacek, has a strange speech impediment; Alvin's next-door neighbor is a fat woman who suntans while eating chips and Ding Dongs; and there's a set of twin brother mechanics who work on Alvin's lawnmower -- one of whom has what looks like a chunk of metal protruding from his lower jaw.
There are no cover-ups in this movie. It moves slowly because Alvin moves slowly and it would be a cheat to make a faster-paced movie about him. The Straight Story doesn't kid us about the horrors of old age, or even about some of the horrors of everyday life. But Alvin has learned to deal with them. When on the open road, it starts to rain and Alvin parks his lawnmower underneath an abandoned barn on the side of the road, to wait it out. Though he doesn't say anything, we know he is more thankful for the shelter than he is upset about the rain. Because of this, The Straight Story becomes Lynch's most human film to date. Even though it's not as vicious or dangerous as Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, it ranks along with them as one of his best achievements. It's also one of the best pictures of the year.
Yes, The Straight Story is
G-rated; yes, it's from Walt Disney--and yes, it's directed by David Lynch, the
guy who made Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, and Lost Highway.
Yet this pastoral fact-based drama is not only unmistakably a Lynch film from
its first frame, it's also his best in many years, marked by a newfound warmth
and depth of feeling. Above all, it's graced by a beautiful performance by
Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight, a septuagenarian Iowa man who set out--by
lawn mower--to visit his long-estranged brother hundreds of miles away when the
brother suffered a stroke.
Superficially, Lynch would seem
an odd choice for the Straight story--no cast-off ears, no mutant babies, just
an aging man's leisurely travels through a countryside rippling with wheat and
sun. But Alvin Straight's trek across a middle America that's both benignly
inhabited and unspoiled taps into the unironic conservatism at the heart of
Lynch's work. With their cancerous depiction of sex and sin, Blue Velvet
and Twin Peaks were a Boy Scout's vision of America in peril: The
director's surreal, oddly retro style obscured a very real fear of monsters
advancing on Main Street from the inside.
Though anything but perverse, The
Straight Story (a telling title) fits surprisingly well with those works.
If Lynch's earlier films are about the threat of corruption, the new movie is a
testament to the square, corny, and utterly essential values that corruption
endangers. Lynch sets the stubborn Straight and his quixotic quest against the
backdrop of a vanishing rural tradition; he builds a kind of spatial comedy by
juxtaposing Straight's putt-putt pace and dinky vehicle with the bigger, faster
machines all around him. But the small but heartfelt kindnesses he
encounters--from a suburban family, from a teary-eyed veteran--are linked to a
bygone, prewar age of manners and ideals. Mortality is a mournful melody in the
background of every scene.
The movie is least successful
when it tries hardest to be "Lynchian"--in a stilted, bumptious
encounter with two feuding brother mechanics, or a shrill scene involving a
motorist who's hit a deer. (The payoff to that scene, though, is very funny,
very odd, and very un-Disney-like.) Here, the quirks are allowed to overtake
the characters, but what's most winning about this Lynch film is its insistence
on the humanity of people who talk, live, and act differently--witness the
empathetic handling of Sissy Spacek's startling role as Alvin's emotionally
scarred, speech-impaired daughter.
The other hallmarks of Lynch's
style--the use of ambient sound to signify place, the attention to textures of
land and light, the framing of mundane objects in unfamiliar ways--are deployed
as strikingly as ever. But the movie's emotional punch is unexpected. Lynch
trains his camera on the creased decency in Richard Farnsworth's salt-map face,
which, like the people he encounters, is hugely expressive without showing a
lot of outward emotion. That reticence culminates in a last scene that's one of
the most moving moments on film this year, an all-but-wordless meeting between
two people for whom words are inadequate to the task of feelings. No, The
Straight Story isn't what you'd expect from the guy who wrapped Laura
Palmer in plastic. But perhaps Lynch understood that the last thing he could do
to shock his audience would be to move it.
Salon.com [Charles Taylor]
"There's a lot of weird people everywhere now," says a character in David Lynch's "The Straight Story." It's a good joke because for Lynch there's nothing weirder or more wondrous than ordinary people. In "Blue Velvet," when Jeffrey Beaumont exclaimed, "It's a strange world," he was as bedazzled as he was confused. You could practically hear Lynch responding to his hero's observation by saying, "Yeah. Isn't that neat?"
There have been other American filmmakers, Preston Sturges and Jonathan Demme among them, who've recognized the quirks and eccentricities of normal folk. But in "Blue Velvet" and in the best episodes of "Twin Peaks," in the muddled and criminally neglected "Fire Walk With Me" and now in "The Straight Story," no director has been so buzzingly alert to the emotional lives of those people or to the beauty of the world they inhabit as David Lynch. In the phony, condescending "American Beauty," Sam Mendes pretends to look beneath the surface of suburbia and comes up with only clichés about suburbia's stifling conformity, all of it offered up with unconcealed contempt for his characters and setting. David Lynch starts with clichés -- a picture-postcard view of a small American downtown, conversations conducted in "Gee whiz!" or "Well, whaddya know about that!" exclamations -- and comes up with the unarticulated longings, joys and sorrows those clichés struggle to contain.
The talk in a David Lynch movie is often banal; what's being expressed in that talk is often emotionally profound. It's a little like listening to the astronauts in the films NASA took of the moon missions and hearing as they try in their regular-guy way to find a way to express the inexpressible. David Lynch makes movies about the moments when the familiar becomes as thrilling and strange as orbiting the Earth. It's no accident that in the first image of "The Straight Story," we're staring at a nighttime sky impossibly heavy with twinkling stars, while listening to the reassuring chirp of crickets. The image sums up the dual pull of Lynch's work: the simultaneous desire for the comfort of the familiar and the compulsion to find out what else is out there.
"The Straight Story" has its origins in a newspaper item that
appeared a few years back. Upon hearing that the brother he hadn't spoken to in
10 years had suffered a stroke, 73-year-old Alvin Straight set off to visit
him, traveling more than 300 miles from
If "The Straight Story" is the gentlest, most straightforward film Lynch has ever made (that's the dual meaning of the title) it is no less recognizably a David Lynch movie. The advance word on "The Straight Story" has made much of the irony of a G-rated David Lynch movie being released by Disney. The Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times, always on the lookout for one of those idiot trend pieces editors are so enamored of, decided that the film represents the trend of "major directors with reputations for outré subjects ... making fare to which they can, at last, take their children." The writer, Brendan Lemon, characterized Lynch's work as being about "sadistic, drug-enhanced sex and small-town violence." What a pitifully narrow view of David Lynch's work. At the risk of sounding like a New Age greeting card, I'd say Lynch's movies have always been about the light as much as the darkness. The sex and violence in "Blue Velvet" or "Fire Walk with Me" exist not to refute the welcoming suburban sights, the white picket fences and firemen waving from their trucks and the coffee shops of your dreams, but on equal footing with them. Like Elvis Presley in "Love Me Tender" refusing to choose between the aching plaintiveness of true love and the growling earthly pleasures of sex, Lynch sees a continuum instead of a contradiction. Lynch's characters don't want to escape the idyll of small-town life, but rather to cling to it even as they descend further and further into their own personal infernos.
There are no infernos in "The Straight Story," but right from the
opening views of Alvin Straight's
Everything we see -- the houses, the stores, even the people -- has a
middle-American sturdiness. Things don't appear to have changed here for quite
some time. And yet there's a fragility to it all, of which
Lynch has often seemed the natural heir to the lyrical expressionism of silent films. Shooting along the same route that Alvin drove, Lynch and his cinematographer, the great Freddie Francis (who also shot "The Elephant Man"), have made a film in which the vast reaches of landscape and sky, the gold of wheat fields and the green of trees, the brightness of sunlight and the grayness of rain, warmth and cold, the glow of a campfire, are all charged and alive. The elements themselves are characters here, and the blue clarity of Richard Farnsworth's eyes appears to be taking the measure of each, looking at it as Lynch and Francis do, as if what he's seeing is so miraculous he can scarcely believe anyone has seen it before. You come to understand his beatific smile as something like a means of thanksgiving. Watching Alvin enjoy a rainstorm from the safety of a fortuitous shelter is like seeing a Zen version of Agent Dale Cooper of "Twin Peaks" taking pleasure in a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. It's a reminder that to Lynch the ordinary is never ordinary.
It's a measure of the grace of Farnsworth's performance -- and the love
Lynch has for the character -- that
In the smaller role of Rose, Sissy Spacek employs none of the showy tricks (Oscar tricks) actors fall back on when playing mentally impaired people -- devices that usually show only how far outside the character the actor is. Using only a small glottal stop, a hesitation that makes her words -- when they come out -- tumble over each other, Spacek conveys not Rose's handicap, but the sharpness that's left, the eagle-eyed concern for her father and the weight of an unspoken sadness.
Like any road movie worth its salt, "The Straight Story" is a
story of chance encounters and spur-of-the-moment camaraderie. Lynch has cast
unfamiliar faces as the people Alvin meets, and with no past associations, the
actors seem fully what they are: Anastasia Webb as a pregnant teenager whom
Alvin shelters for the night; Barbara Robertson as a hysterical motorist who
keeps running down deer; James Cada as the man who provides Alvin with a place
to stay while his mower undergoes repairs, solicitous of not violating his
guest's pride; Russ Reed as the bartender who serves Alvin the first beer he's
had in years; and, in the film's most wrenching episode, Wiley Harker as the
contemporary with whom Alvin shares his memories of serving in World War II.
The movie pauses for this sequence, letting the men speak of things still too
painful to share with someone who wasn't there. As a depiction of what veterans
carry with them, these five minutes of film put nearly everything in "Saving
Private Ryan" to shame. And though we've long since accepted that
"The Straight Story" is the kind of triumph that most filmmakers
as distinctively talented as David Lynch can only dream about: a completely
accessible film that's still entirely faithful to its maker's sensibility. This
G-rated movie is as wonderfully strange as anything Lynch has done. Lynch
follows
BFI | Sight &
Sound | The Straight Story (1999)
Kevin Jackson from Sight and Sound, December 1999
The Straight
Story: Sunlight Will Out of Darkness Come • Senses of ... Martha P. Nochimson from Senses of Cinema, June 7, 2000
The Straight
Story • Senses of Cinema Carla
Marcantonio from Senses of Cinema, July
31, 2006
Lynch Mob. - movie review | ArtForum | Find Articles at BNET Lynch Mob, by Howard Hampton from ArtForum magazine, January 2000
Abbas Kiarostami: A Dialogue Between the Authors • Senses of Cinema Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses his own angry response to Hampton’s defense of Lynch in this dialogue with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa from Senses of Cinema, November 20, 2001
Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy ... - Senses of Cinema Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses by Howard Hampton, a book review by Patrick Ellis from Senses of Cinema, March 16, 2008
David Lynch's The Straight Story and Inland Empire - Reverse Shot Free Falling, by Leo Goldsmith, April 26, 2008
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Tom Block
Nitrate Online (Sean Axmaker) review
AboutFilm.com (Dana Knowles) review [A]
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review Page 3
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]
Reel.com review [3.5/4] Tor Thorsen
DVD Verdict (Harold Gervais) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]
World Socialist Web Site David Walsh
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3.5/4]
The Digital Bits dvd review Dan Kelly
Kamera.co.uk review Iain Tibbles
Philadelphia City Paper review by Sam Adams
Film Journal International (David Luty) review
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [2/5]
Planet Sick-Boy (Jon Popick) review
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3/4]
Plume Noire review Fred Thom
I want a dream when I go to a film feature and interview with Lynch by Michael Sragow from Salon, October 28, 1999
Mr Weird plays it Straight | Film | The Guardian Lynch interview by Jonathan Romney from The Guardian, November 19, 1999
Straight Talking
| Film | The Guardian Chad Jones interview with Richard
Farnsworth from The Guardian,
December 4, 1999
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Liam Lacey
'Straight'
Is a U-Turn For Lynch - The Washington Post
Amy Wallace from The
Washington Post, September 26, 1999
'The Straight Story' (G) Desson Howe from The Washington Post
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [4.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
FALL
SNEAKS : David Lynch, Mild at Heart : The ... - Los Angeles Times Amy Wallace from Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1999
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
New York Times (registration req'd) Janet Maslin
DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
The Straight Story - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image results for Lynch "Straight Story" photos
MULHOLLAND DR
Don’t play it for real, until it gets real
A joy to watch such a beautifully paced, well-acted, interwoven story about drive and personal ambition in the already altered state of Hollywood, California, about the dreams you feel inside and the affect it has on your inner soul, one of the most intelligent and perhaps the best directed film of the year. David Lynch dedicated the film to his former assistant, Jennifer Syme, Keanu Reeves’ girlfriend, who died in a car crash in 2001. A near surreal story that seems to wind itself backwards, as everything takes shape as a romantic love story, then alters itself, takes on paranoiac hallucinations of a hideous proportion, and finally comes crashing down on the victim with the full force of the unforeseeable accident that opens the film. A love story in the city of dreams—dreams dry up in a puff of smoke, careers are lost and forgotten, interchangeable actresses disappear from sight. All that’s left is silence.
The film starts out as a vehicle for former beauty queen Laura Elena
Harring, astonishingly beautiful in her amnesiac state after a car accident, as
in her impeccably dressed allure, carrying a bag with a blue key and loads of
cash, she can’t even remember her name.
She stumbles into the life of a star-struck young girl from Deep River , Ontario
This sensual, lusciously beautiful film features plenty of signature Lynch touches, opening with a garishly colored, avant garde jitterbug dance number that is a joyous delight, another film about someone that is in trouble, warned in this case by a visiting neighbor who senses the trouble lurking behind the door, another film within a film, one that involves a steamy romance and murder, wonderful musical set pieces, incomprehensible interweaving stories, a constantly moving camera known for slowly probing down hallways and around corners, rude interruptions by knocks at the door or a ringing telephone, and similar images of red lamps, blue lights, red curtains, men in red suits, graffiti in the alleyways, or flickering lights. This film is accentuated by two beautiful women who have steamy sex scenes together, by the way the film changes gears, starting slowly, as if in a dream, accumulating small, seemingly insignificant details, but reaching high gear by the suddenly unexpected, powerfully designed climax, and by the bold transformation in the character of Naomi Watts, who gives a career performance about a would be, wannabe actress that is eventually double crossed and left adrift by the very industry she admires. This film has a huge intrigue factor that is designed and sculpted like a piece of architecture, becoming something transformed and completely unrecognizable by the end, almost taking our breath away by the sheer astonishment of what we finally experience.
Michael Wilmington:
Joanna Berry from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Fans of David Lynch – and his twisting, odd, and addictive
television series TWIN
PEAKS MULHOLLAND DR. TWIN
PEAKS
And what a movie.
Beautifully made and almost infuriatingly impossible to figure out, it
begins with a beautiful young woman (Laura Harring) staggering to the wreckage
of a car crash on Hollywood’s Mulholland Drive, unable to remember who she is
or how she got there. Somehow she makes
her way into the apartment of Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), and Betty decides to
help her recover her identity (for now, the woman calls herself “Rita” after
Rita Hayworth). So far, so
straightforward? Well, not really. We then seem to be pulled through Lynch’s
warped looking glass, where Betty is actually a struggling actress named Diane
and the lover of a star named Camilla (who looks remarkably like Rita). Camilla, in turn, is preparing to leave Diane
for a young director (Justin Theroux).
One of the joys of MULLHOLLAND DR.
Like TWIN PEAKS, ERASERHEAD (1977), BLUE VELVET (1986),
WILD AT HEART (1990), TWIN PEAKS: FIRE
WALK WITH ME (1992, a “prequel” to the TV series), and LOST HIGHWAY (1997), the
confusion, surrealness, and blurred lines between dreams and reality are part
of what makes MULHOLLAND DR. so addictive.
Some viewers may get impatient that the end doesn’t resolve what has
gone before, but the beauty of Lynch’s luscious visuals, Angelo Badalementi’s
haunting score, and the superb performances more than make up for any such
frustration. Interestingly, Lynch cast a
series of actors who had previously appeared in daytime soaps – Laura Harring
was in SUNSET BEACH Australia Watts ,
especially, is a discovery as Betty/Diane, playing the ingenue and the jealous,
vindictive lover with equal conviction.
A superb, engrossing, annoying,
and dazzling film that is Lynch’s best work since BLUE VELVET.
Mulholland Drive Movie Review (2001) | Roger Ebert a confrmed Lynch hater finally seeing the light, October 12, 2001 (an excerpt)
The movie is hypnotic; we're drawn along as if one thing
leads to another--but nothing leads anywhere, and that's even before the
characters start to fracture and recombine like flesh caught in a kaleidoscope.
"Mulholland
Drive" isn't like "Memento,"
where if you watch it closely enough, you can hope to explain the mystery.
There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery.
There have been countless dream sequences in the movies, almost all of them
conceived with Freudian literalism to show the characters having nightmares
about the plot. "Mulholland
Drive" is all dream. There is nothing that is intended to be a waking
moment. Like real dreams, it does not explain, does not complete its sequences,
lingers over what it finds fascinating, dismisses unpromising plotlines. If you
want an explanation for the last half hour of the film, think of it as the
dreamer rising slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream fight for
space with recent memories from real life, and with fragments of other
dreams--old ones and those still in development.
This works because Lynch is absolutely uncompromising. He takes what was
frustrating in some of his earlier films, and instead of backing away from it,
he charges right through. "Mulholland
Drive" is said to have been assembled from scenes that he shot for a
1999 ABC television pilot, but no network would air (or understand) this
material, and Lynch knew it. He takes his financing where he can find it and
directs as fancy dictates. This movie doesn't feel incomplete because it could
never be complete--closure is not a goal.
If you require logic, see something else. "Mulholland
Drive" works directly on the emotions, like music. Individual scenes
play well by themselves, as they do in dreams, but they don't connect in a way
that makes sense--again, like dreams. The way you know the movie is over is
that it ends.
Points of No Return | Village Voice J. Hoberman, October 2, 2001
Mulholland Drive
Fashioned from the ruins of a
two-hour TV pilot rejected by ABC in 1999, Lynch's erotic thriller careens from
one violent non sequitur to another. The movie boldly teeters on the brink of
self-parody, reveling in its own excess and resisting narrative logic.
This voluptuous phantasmagoria,
playing the New York Film Festival this weekend before it opens commercially on
Monday, is certainly Lynch's strongest movie since Blue Velvet and maybe
Eraserhead. The very things that failed him in the bad-boy rockabilly
debacle of Lost Highway—the atmosphere of free-floating menace,
pointless transmigration of souls, provocatively dropped plot stitches,
gimcrack alternate universes—are here brilliantly rehabilitated.
What was it that Dennis Hopper
called Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet—one suave motherfucker? From the
absurd midnight automobile
accident on the Los Angeles Mulholland Drive
The narrative, such as it is,
commences when a lush brunette of mystery soon to be known as Rita (Laura Elena
Harring) dodges a bullet, staggers out of her crashed car, and descends from
the Hollywood Hills into the jewel-like city below to find refuge in an empty
apartment. She's suffering from amnesia, which makes her the perfect foil for
the flat's caretaker, Betty (Naomi Watts), who arrives the next morning—blond,
perky, and inanely optimistic—from the Ontario Deep River
Where did Rita's suitcase full of
money come from? What is the significance of the blue key in her pocket?
There's a definite Nancy Drew quality as the naively trusting and ever
enthusiastic Betty takes it upon herself to solve the enigma of Rita's
identity: "It'll be just like in the movies. We'll pretend to be someone
else." Although Betty is initially a mass of cornball clichés, possibly
modeled on Eva Marie Saint or Lynch himself, it unexpectedly develops that she
really can act. (So, too, Naomi Watts.) Betty's audition at Paramount
Whatever Mulholland Drive Hollywood L.A. Chinatown —except that
the period is ours.) The locations are quietly fabulous; there's a museum
quality to the musty deco apartment where Betty and Rita live under the
watchful eye of a showbiz landlady (Ann Miller). The cloyingly lit nocturnal
landscape and splashy glamour compositions seem pure essence of 1958, as do
Betty's ingenue poses. The ominously rumbling city is malign and seductive; the
movie industry, or should we say dream factory, is an obscure conspiracy. In a
secondary narrative, an inexpressive, self-important young director (Justin Theroux)
is compelled to endure a production meeting from hell wherein a shadowy cabal
seizes control of his movie—but only so that the presence of a single, unknown
actress can be dictated by an irony-resistant bogeyman called the Cowboy (Monty
Montgomery, producer of Lynch's Wild at Heart, among other credits).
Alarming as the Cowboy is, Mulholland
Drive's most frighteningly self-reflexive scene comes when Betty and Rita
attend a 2 a.m. performance—part séance, part underground art ritual—in a
decrepit, near deserted old movie palace called Club Silencio. The mystery
being celebrated is that of sound-image synchronization, which is to say
cinema, and the illusion throws Betty into convulsions. At the show's climax,
Rebekah Del Rio sings an a cappella Spanish-language version of
"Crying." She collapses onstage, but the song continues—just like the
movie. For its remaining three-quarters of an hour, Mulholland Drive Mulholland Drive
Curiouser and curiouser. From the
moment Betty and Rita leave the club, the narrative begins to fissure. Mulholland Drive
Betty's dream becomes a
nightmare—or perhaps the previous story was itself only a dream. Not that it
matters. Mulholland Drive
David Lynch's latest tour de force - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, October 12, 2001
"
"
With its liquid pacing -- ever seen drops of mercury spilt from a broken
thermometer in slow, shiny, heavy droplets? -- and codeine-glorious imagery,
"
Betty unlocks the door to the borrowed flat, eager to familiarize herself with all its secrets and delights; in the bathroom, she finds a beautiful naked girl (Laura Elena Harring) in the shower. At first the woman, a raven-haired stunner (she's got Snow White's coloring and Jayne Mansfield's body), can't remember her own name. In a panic, she catches sight of a framed poster for "Gilda" and announces spontaneously that her name is Rita.
Betty and Rita are uneasy friends at first, but it's not long before their differences -- Betty the small-town innocent; Rita the slow-burning temptress -- begin to interlace and reinforce one another. Together, they must find out who Rita really is: The clues they start out with are a blue key and a handbag stuffed with cash; their search leads them to a dingy apartment court and a nightclub suffused with neon-blue light. The people who penetrate their orbit, either significantly or tangentially, include a cocky hipster film director (Justin Theroux); the spokesperson for a shadowy mobster who's out to control Hollywood (Dan Hedaya); and a malevolent cowboy who looks as if he were lifted straight out of a '30s radio serial (Monty Montgomery) -- his belted sepia-tone jacket, trimly tied kerchief and mountainous white hat speak out so loud and clear you can almost hear them.
There's also a midget in a wheelchair (Michael Anderson -- it wouldn't be a Lynch movie without him), a singing sensation in frosted lipstick and a bouffant skirt who's poised to be a major movie star, and a creepy, shamanistic homeless man who rules a discarded-shopping-cart kingdom in the back of a cheerfully run-down Sunset Strip coffee shop. That's Lynch for you. Some characters are woven firmly into the plot and others dangle, but even the red herrings contribute something, adding patches of shading to the picture's overall mood.
But everything and everyone in "
Betty then heads out to her first audition. There, she tries the lines out
against her potential costar (Chad Everett, in a marvelous little cameo), only
now they sound entirely different: Betty's bravura audition performance is like
the resonant ping of a tuning fork, vibrating with sensuality. This is Lynch's
shorthand way of clueing us that Betty is the quintessential
By the movie's end, the women's roles have been turned around and refracted so that they become barely recognizable versions of their earlier selves. But again, that's Lynch for you, only here it's Lynch improvising on both a juicy plot and a sustained mood -- one reinforces the other until the two are inseparable. It's a minor spoiler to tell you (stop reading now if you're sensitive to such things) that Rita ends up seducing Betty, but it's impossible to talk about the movie in any significant way without mentioning the scene: Its oneiric, charged eroticism is so potent it blankets the whole movie, coloring every scene that came before and every one that follows. The actresses, semi-nude but emotionally completely exposed, play the scene in a way that's both natural and thrillingly theatrical. Its beauty is only intensified by its heat.
People can have great sex anywhere. But for the space of that scene,
But for all its malevolence, could Lynch's
Lynch does sort it out, skillfully and in a way that only heightens our
sense of wonder: "
Truly
Sad, Truly Monstrous Manohla Dargis from LA Weekly, October 25, 2001
A DREAM OF THE MOVIES AS WELL AS A NIGHTMARE, David Lynch's
newest film is a phantasmagoria of hot bottle blondes, cold-blooded monsters
and all the things that go boo in your head. The time is the present, or
maybe three weeks ago, or maybe tomorrow. The place is
Here, point of view is everything, including the moral of the
story. Lured to
Kesher has troubles of his own, including a cheating wife and
some movie-business thugs whose numbers include a hulking double for Miramax
head Harvey Weinstein. It's a terrific, mean jab, but while
MULHOLLAND DRIVE STARTED OFF AS A PILOT FOR ABC, where it was doubtless rejected for not cleaving to the exacting standards of, say, The Drew Carey Show. Network executives apparently found Lynch's pilot too slow, too complex; Tad Friend's 1999 New Yorker article about the fiasco suggests that they even deemed the female leads too old. While there's a nice irony to the idea of a failed television project becoming one of the year's best films, you have to wonder if what pushed Mulholland Drive to greatness was the ambitiousness of the original project, its scale, and then the time Lynch had to whittle it down. There's enough plot in the film's 146-minute running time to fill a television season, yet there's none of the narrative slack you might expect. As with much of Lynch's work, not everything ties together, but the loose ends seem less like stray threads than divertissements. They're excursions into the weird for the sheer un-instrumental joy of it, but they're more than indulgences. Each time Lynch pulls away from Rita and Betty, he flicks at our nerves a little more, a little harder. The women look like fairy-tale centerfolds, Rose Red and Violet Blue gone seriously astray, so you want to keep watching them, but because they also come across as good and decent, you want them out of harm's way -- you tense up when they're not around. As with Kyle MacLachlan, trapped with his eyes open in Blue Velvet, you can't bear to watch or look away.
Part of what keeps you watching is that
Betty tugs at our own sympathies with cornflower eyes and a
dazzling optimism that seems definitively American, and it's hard not to think
that part of what makes her so vulnerable is that Lynch sees a little of
himself in her. A genius at casting, Lynch calls on Watts, who's been knocking
around in small parts since the mid-'80s, to do almost everything an actor can
possibly do in a role, and she returns his confidence with an extraordinary
performance.
Lynch knows we can't stop watching, and this time he's not punishing us for our pleasure -- or his own. Lynch is our homespun Buñuel, an aesthetician of cruelty, but he's not an intellectual, and his work sometimes suffers from a lack of real, lived-in ideas. He's so at home in a dream world of his own making that it sometimes seems he isn't much concerned with navigating the world in which the rest of us have to live. He's entitled to that, though not to our blind devotion. He is, of course, a savagely gifted artist with an unerring instinct for composition, and a fantastical visual imagination that recurrently pushes our sense of what narrative film can be. But genius alone doesn't make art great. There's the human factor, too -- empathy, the very quality that can go so grievously missing from Lynch's work, the quality that turns the likes of a Buñuel or a Francis Bacon into more than empiricists of misery or brilliant technicians. But maybe rejection has softened Lynch a little, roughed him up in all the right places. Mulholland Drive isn't just his most affecting movie since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the sequel film to his vaunted television series, it's his most tenderly felt since The Elephant Man, the film that now curiously seems his most autobiographical, especially if you think of Lynch playing both doctor and patient.
In The Day of the Locust, a novel Lynch's new movie
evokes in its sordid texture and its sense of this city as fundamentally
unforgiving, Nathanael West wrote, "Few things are sadder than the truly
monstrous." There are plenty of monsters in
Mulholland Drive Film Comment - In Dreams - LynchNet Amy Taubin from Film Comment, at Lynchnet, September/October 2001
The Not-So-Straight Story: David Lynch's Mulholland Drive - Bright ... Scott Thill from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 2001
NYFF
2001 REVIEW: On the Road Again: David Does The City of ... On the Road Again: David Does The City of
Angels in "Mulholland Drive," by Mark Peranson from indieWIRE,
October 8, 2001
Twin Peaks | Village
Voice The Yin-Yang Glamour Girls of Mulholland
Drive, by Jessica Winter from The
Village Voice, October 9, 2001
Gone Fishin' | Village Voice David Lynch Casts a Line Into the City of Dreams, by Dennis Lim from The Village Voice, October 9, 2001
David Lynch's Hollywood nightmares - Salon.com Andy Klein, feature and Lynch interview, October 12, 2001
Getting Lost Is Beautiful | L.A. Weekly John Powers from LA Weekly, October 17, 2001
Two blonds - Salon.com David Thomson from Salon, October
18, 2001
Everything you were afraid to ask about “Mulholland Drive” - Salon.com Bill Wyman, Max Garrone, and Andy Klein, October 24, 2001
Whaddaya mean, “We
don't know about the box”? - Salon.com
Reader responses to the story from Salon, October 26, 2001
All you have to do is
dream - Salon.com Interview
of Freudian analyst Dr. Frederick Lane by Jean Tang from Salon, November 7, 2001
David Lynch - Salon.com Feature and interview of Lynch by Brian Libby
from Salon, November 6, 2001
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Mulholland Dr. (2001) Kim
Newman from Sight and Sound, January
2002
Welcome to Issue 19 of
our journal! Editors from Senses of Cinema, March 2002
In
Dreams: A Review of Mulholland Drive • Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain, March 13, 2002
Amnesia,
Obsession, Cinematic U-Turns: On Mulholland Drive ... Kirsten
Ostherr and Arash Abizadeh from Senses
of Cinema, March 13, 2002
Cinematic Meaning in the Work of
David Lynch - Michael Vass Revisiting
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, & Mullholland
Drive, originally published in CineAction
#67, 2005
Sinnerbrink on
Lynch - Film-Philosophy Robert
Sinnerbrink, June 2005
A Slow Ride down
Mulholland Dr. • Senses of Cinema Christopher J. Jarmick from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Mulholland
Dr. & Inland Empire, David Lynch ... - Senses of Cinema Michael Pattison, March 17, 2013
Mulholland
Drive David Lynch film analysis - Senses of Cinema Clint Stivers, June 19, 2014
Address unknown
Joe Queenan from The Guardian,
January 5, 2002
A
beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity Jonathan Eig on movies like The Sixth Sense, The Others, The Usual
Suspects, Waking Life, A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, Memento, Mulholland Drive
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
DVD Verdict Bill Gibron
Deep Focus
(Bryant Frazer) review [A-]
Jigsaw
Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10] which
includes his explanation
DVD Journal Damon Houx
Slate [David Edelstein]
Mulholland Drive - David Lynch Daniel Montgomery from Culturazzi, June 1, 2009
Drive Theory Melissa Anderson from Artforum magazine, October 27, 2015
Movie
Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review
[4/4] including
a brief as well as a longer analysis
JackassCritics.com (Tom Blain) dvd review [9/10] offering his own take on clues and theories swirling around the film
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]
Reverse Shot review Altered Beast: Tropical Malady meets Mulholland Drive, by Michael Koresky
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Scott Von Doviak
See also - Scott Von Doviak's review of the Mulholland Drive television pilot
Nitrate Online (Elias Savada) review
Alternative Film Guide Review An Unbalanced Mind, by Andre Soares
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
Film Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw and Bill Chambers
Jerry At The Movies David Lynch’s Bewildering Masterpiece, by Jerry Saravia
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) review
[3.5/5] which
includes a critical look at his overly harsh critique of LOST HIGHWAY
Images Movie Journal Gary Johnson
DVD Times [Mark Boydell]
DVD Times [Raphael Pour-Hashemi]
CineScene.com
(Nathaniel Rogers) review Nightmares
in Room 17, from The Film Experience
"Kissing
Betty/Diane" Nathaniel Rogers of The Film Experience
CineScene.com
(Mark Netter) review Lynch
Law
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null and Jeremiah Kipp) review [3/5] duelling movie critics, which includes a mano a mano dust-off 6 months later: feature discussion about the film
Flak Magazine (Andy Ross) essay [Story Analysis] Mulholland Drive, An Analysis
Flak Magazine (Sean Weitner) review Film review
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [3/5]
CultureCartel.com
(John Beachem) review [5/5]
PopMatters (Kirsten Markson) review
Mulholland
Drive Gerald Peary
World Socialist Web Site review David Walsh, still bitter at Lynch from BLUE VELVET, takes a few more swipes in his MULHOLLAND DRIVE review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review
[4.5/5] Michael
DeQuina
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review
CultureCartel.com
(Lee Chase IV) review [5/5]
Plume Noire review Fred Thom
Flipside
Movie Emporium (Michael Scrutchin) review
[A+]
Goatdog's
Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review
[5/5]
Kamera.co.uk review John Atkinson
hybridmagazine.com
review Dalel
Serda
Film Journal International (Peter Henn) review
sneersnipe
(Paul Castro) review
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Todd Doogan
Only
The Cinema [Ed Howard] some
terrific photos
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [C] angrily declares Lynch doesn't care if you solve his riddle. Question for Carlo: how is this film average?
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review Lynch needs to lay off the cretins and hobgoblins and zombies for a while
Reel.com dvd review [2.5/4] James Plath, anyone who makes total sense out of this
stylish, atmospheric, but heavy-handed film deserves a merit badge
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5] Ken Fox
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
The Globe and Mail review [3/4] Liam Lacey
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]
Philadelphia City Paper review by Sam Adams
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Mulholland
Drive Movie Review (2001) | Roger Ebert October 12, 2001
Lost
on 'Mulholland Drive' | Roger Ebert's Journal | Roger Ebert April 16, 2002
Mulholland
Dr. Movie Review & Film Summary (2001) | Roger Ebert November 11, 2012
Poetic
Logic: On David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr." | Balder and Dash ... Max Winter, November 9, 2015
Lost
on 'Mulholland Drive' | Roger Ebert's Journal | Roger Ebert April 16, 2002
Mulholland
Dr. Movie Review & Film Summary (2001) | Roger Ebert November 11, 2012
Poetic
Logic: On David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr." | Balder and Dash ... Max Winter, November 9, 2015
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
DVDBeaver dvd review [HD-DVD Version] David Hare
INLAND EMPIRE A 95
USA France Poland
A woman in trouble
Vintage Lynch, a return to the eerie experimentation of ERASERHEAD (1977), complete with remarkable industrial sounds and Hitchcock-like orchestrations accompanying the grainy video visualization of lone characters walking up dark, winding staircases, through a neverending labyrinth of long hallways and doors, into a Donnie Darko-like TV set piece with characters wearing bunny suits and long ears, including an obnoxious laugh track, where we see a constant stream of distorted faces enlarged, stretched or pulled, also an obsession with various forms of light, from total darkness, to barely lit rooms, dim lamps, candles, cigarette lighters, to brightly lit streams of light which reveal an awesome power of their own, ending with one of the most brilliant end credit sequences ever filmed. One noticeable effect was a fidgety audience, where people constantly got up and down from their seats, making endless trips back and forth, in and out of the theater. Lynch’s first venture with digital video film, which by the way is not shot in ‘Scope, is largely plotless, but follows the synchronicity of dreams, many of which veer into nightmares, disturbing images that return to familiar surroundings with horrific results. Initially, the audience is privy to a series of images that are startling by the sheer design of the frame, by the washed out colors, and by an audacious oddness that defines the formal structure of the initial conversations, some of them absurdly funny, as if we are being told what’s about to happen by a strange Gypsy fortune teller (Grace Zabriskie) speaking in a thick accent as she unexpectedly visits her supposed neighbor, Laura Dern, in one of her multiple roles, making apocalyptic pronouncements about yesterday, today, and tomorrow, suggesting that by tomorrow things will not be the same.
Even earlier, in black and white images, we see a prostitute (Karolina Gruszka) with a client in a hotel room with their faces digitally blurred. Nothing of consequence happens, yet the girl becomes a central character of the film despite never leaving her room, as in tears, she proceeds to watch a television show of the Rabbits, which has a decidedly slower sense of time. The room of the set is similar to Dean Stockwell’s plainly designed room in BLUE VELVET (1986), where a bunny with a pink apron irons in the back, while two other bunnies sit on a sofa where the prevailing tone is oddness. This sequence was pulled from Lynch’s 2002 short film RABBITS and is fully integrated into the film. Much like the ear in BLUE VELVET, there seems to be multiple portals to other dimensions, creating a layered effect of overlapping realities, one of which is Gruszka, known only as the Lost Girl, apparently stuck in a waiting room.
Recalling a similar mood of the future co-mingling with the past, where
time leaves a mark of scarred psychological isolation and exaggerated decay
from Norma Desmond’s mansion in SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), here our vantage point
is from the opulence of another estate, where Dern, as has-been actress Nikki
Grace, receives news that she’s been offered the lead role as Susan Blue in a
hot-boiled romance film, On High
In Blue Tomorrows,
starring opposite Justin Theroux, a reputed womanizer, who is warned by Grace’s
husband (Peter J. Lucas) to keep his distance from his vulnerable co-star,
which, of course, falls on deaf ears.
Almost immediately we learn the movie has a cursed history, as the initial
film was scrapped after the leads were mysteriously murdered. The venerable Harry Dean Stanton, no less,
provides comic relief on the set, and in the middle of an initial reading, the
drama is so fierce that it supplants existing reality when Stanton hears a
strange noise from the adjoining room, suggesting a shadowy presence lurking
nearby that is then seen from multiple realities, one that is real, another
that takes on the life of the movie, which is also viewed by the Lost Girl on
television, who may in fact have morphed into the film she is watching. Grace becomes so wrapped up inside her
character, we’re never again able to distinguish which altered state we are
witnessing, as the imagined and the real merge into one, but we follow her
throughout the film on her journey through this labyrynth of fragmented
identity and lost souls, which includes a trip to the snowy streets of Poland
and the interruption of a backyard barbeque by a strange concoction of Eastern
European men who seem like they just walked off the set of a Béla Tarr movie, who then become interspersed
throughout the film.
The initial humor gives way to
an underworld of grim disconnection and fear, where Dern continues to find
herself a stranger to the person she is playing, almost as if she is outside
herself, continually trying to find a way back in, similar to the Lost Girl,
whose fate seems to be linked to an unrealized outcome on the television
screen. There are moments that repeat
themselves, like the television Rabbits sequence, an alley behind a grocery
store, an interrogation sequence with a brutalized Dern, which supposedly was
the initial sequence written by Lynch for the film, and we often find ourselves
in similar rooms, as if the subconscious is striving to push itself to the
surface. Three of the most perfect
realizations in the film are cued to musical sequences. The first involves several girls working as
prostitutes who are seen in a moment of reprieve dancing to the music of Little
Eva’s “Loco-Motion,” a joyous moment that provides a temporary uplift of
spirit. The second is a hurried walk
down Hollywood Boulevard by Dern to the enlivened rhythms of Beck’s “Black
Tambourine,” moving through a maze of streetwalkers who may as well be the
ghoulish silhouettes of dead or forgotten souls that Hollywood has discarded
and left behind, as she fears for her life, certain that someone is out to kill
her. The final is set to Nina Simone’s
“Sinner Man,” a jazzy rendition that pulsates with a soulful sensuality as it
plays over the end credits to the wondrous vibrancy of a jubilant group of
dancers, which bookends a similarly dazzling opening credits jitterbug dance
sequence from MULHOLLAND DR. (2001).
Among her recognized roles, Dern
plays a has-been Hollywood actress under pressure to revive her career, also an
ordinary wife of a blue-collar Polish worker, and a Hollywood
prostitute. One of the most beautiful aspects of the end, when she
finally enters the room of the Polish prostitute who's been sitting in
tears watching television since the beginning, who seems to have her life
connected in some way to what Dern does, and in the end the two embrace, is
that Dern has somehow released that woman from her fate, perhaps by killing her
murderer, choosing a reality that does NOT include the victimization of
prostitution, allowing her to return to her family at the end, and for Dern to
return to the picture of innocence. Prostitution is certainly one fate
that awaits fallen actresses that never make it in the business. The amusing
breast sequence among prostitutes only accentuates artificial beauty, even
artificially enhanced beauty, which contrasts mightily with the
"sweetness" of Nina Simone over the end credits, and the
discovery of real love.
Lacking the luscious beauty of
MULHOLLAND DR, it would be hard to say one enjoys this as much, but it’s
certainly a film that blows everything else out of the water in terms of its
defiance of convention and its ambitious scope, a hypnotic free form
stream-of-conscious statement that is at times relentlessly aggravating,
strange, uncompromising, dazzlingly inventive, lurid, sexist, creepy, sadistic,
baffling, mind-altering, brilliantly unsettling, mystifying, indifferent,
languid, ambiguous, horrifying, and not like anything else except other Lynch
films. There are obvious moments of
brilliance, while at other times, we keep being pulled into a wearying darkness
that saps our energy reserves with unending references to brutality and abuse. This film feels like a walk down memory lane,
though it is never anything less than inventive, filled with superb Lynch
imagery that may remind us of his other films, but it also paves a path for the
implementation of experimental technique in a feature film, where plot and
narrative are secondary to the overall artistic stylization, which always
includes superb performances to match the power of the director’s vision. By plumbing the depths of Lynch’s own fertile
imagination, which reimagines and reinvents with such ease, he is constantly
challenging the audience’s ability to reawaken their own sense of
consciousness.
from Amazon.com Jim Penname "Old Posthumous"
Ok, I watched 2/3 of this movie 6 months ago
and gave up.
But I talked about it with my daughter and she wanted to see it.
Fortunately she was able to piece it together.
The Movie is cursed. This is made clear. It has been made before and people
died.
The Polish husband who lives in the 50's style house is cursed and when laura
dern takes the role she is thrust into his world.
His wife is the girl watching everything on TV. (In the Rabbit's back room)
There are multiple universes here, with the RABBITS being the gate keepers
between universes.
They are holding the wife for her own safety. The husband has been trying to
exchange dead hookers for her but they are not acceptable.
Laura enters their Polish universe through her role and finds herself in the
girl/wife’s life role.
Laura has to plug her way through to the end and beyond to save this girl,
reunite her with her husband,
and cure the rift between the universes caused by this cursed set of events.
In the end she does plunge through and beyond death, symbolically exchanging
her life to free the wife.
She is freed from the Rabbits back room and reunited with her husband (happy
now) and son (Nikki has no son)
Then Laura and all the hookers are also freed (and go to
This movie is full of entrancing visuals, and acting that really sets a mood
and sucks you in.
The extras are fascinating in the extreme and a right viewing in themselves.
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Easily the most anticipated film of the New York Film festival, David Lynch's Inland
Empire generated theater-lobby debate that quickly split into two camps:
those who think Lynch's three-hour, aggressively non-narrative feature is a
self-indulgent yawn, and those who haven't the foggiest idea what to make of
it. In his post-screening press conference, Lynch described the movie's lengthy
shooting period as experimental in the most literal sense. Entranced by the
possibilities of digital cinematography, Lynch began shooting a series of
disconnected scenes, beginning with a 14-page single-spaced monologue in which
Laura Dern describes a history of domestic abuse and violent revenge.
Distilling the metanarrative schisms of
Some called it an eyesore anyway, unfavorably comparing the
movie's distressed colors and blurry backgrounds to digital abominations like Tadpole.
But Lynch made it clear that he saw the movie's look as a bonus, not a
drawback. "For me, film is completely dead ... It's like swimmin' through
molasses." There's no question that
Diving headfirst into the digital realm, Lynch announced
after the festival he'd be releasing
Cinematical [Erik Davis]
Let's get this out of the way right here, right now: I'm not a huge David Lynch fan. While I feel the man is a phenomenal artist who creates sensational visuals to accompany a fleet of complex characters, his films never hit that special spot for me, if you know what I mean. That being said, life-long Lynch fans should feast on his latest effort; a three-hour long experimental epic called Inland Empire.
To give you a small example of how odd this film is, its press materials
included an assortment of still photographs (actor bios printed on the backs of
each one) and a very brief synopsis (if you can call it that) which read,
"A story of a mystery ... A mystery inside worlds within worlds ...
Unfolding around a woman ... A woman in love and in trouble." Welcome to a
David Lynch film -- next stop,
The film's story revolves around Nikki (as played by Laura Dern in one of the greatest roles of her career), a once popular actress who's married and holed up in a huge mansion. Upon receiving news that she's landed a role in a new film called On High and Blue Tomorrows, Nikki is ecstatic and eager to return to the profession that she adores. Once on set, however, things slowly begin to spiral out of control, beginning with an announcement from the film's director (Jeremy Irons) that Nikki and her co-star Devon (Justin Theroux) are, in fact, shooting a remake. The original film, based on a Polish folktale and titled 4/7, was never completed due to the fact that its two main actors were murdered. From this point on, Lynch opts to ingest the blue pill in an attempt to see just how far the rabbit hole takes him.
Soon, Nikki can't distinguish between her own life and that of her character's (named Sue). An adulterous affair with her co-star on screen turns into one behind the scenes. Two people from very different worlds become one -- and that's when the Polish folks show up. Early on, a Polish prostitute is seen weeping in front of a television whose screen broadcasts a sitcom starring three adults dressed as rabbits (which may or may not be an extension of Lynch's 2002 film Rabbits), complete with a laugh-track tossed around some very dramatic dialogue. Throughout the film, different characters show up on the television screen (and in this sitcom) which appears to be some sort of porthole linking reality and what's perceived to be reality. We're to assume the Polish connection ties into the origins of the cursed film Nikki is shooting, though this is a David Lynch film which means nothing is cut and dry -- the images and these characters are whatever (or whoever) we want them to be.
How do you review someone else’s bad dream? One Sunday
morning at the New York Film Festival, insomniacs and hardcore cinephiles
assembled to see David Lynch’s first movie in five years. His latest plumbing
of the unconscious is three hours long and his first to be shot on digital
video, but not the first featuring Laura Dern (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart),
shifting identities, and creepy characters doing truly creepy things. There's a
spooky Russian neighbor who mumbles veiled threats into the fish eye lens, and
then William H. Macy announces: “
The movies that made Lynch a star featured healthy helpings
of weirdness, but they were usually couched in a solid, discernible narrative. INLAND
EMPIRE (Lynch insists on an the all-caps spelling) barely gestures in the
direction of an obvious story--Justin Theroux and Jeremy Irons deliver some
hesitant exposition about a movie with a history of murder, but before you can
quite get your head around the premise, things get much weirder than even the
delirious third act of Mulholland Drive: a suburban BBQ party is overrun
by Eastern European carnies, a Kafkaesque interrogator listens to Laura Dern’s
curse-word peppered confessions, a gaggle of hookers dances the locomotion, and
blood is vomited up on the Walk of Fame. INLAND EMPIRE is so Lynchian
that it often appears to veer into self-parody, but somehow this works for the
movie; like the unmotivated laugh track of the recurring sitcom where everybody
wears a rabbit mask, the audience can never be quite sure what's meant as a
joke and what's dead serious. INLAND EMPIRE is in turn maddeningly
absurd, haunting, and bizzarely funny (such as Harry Dean Stanton's monologue
about his "damn landlord.")
Some of the shivers are all too real, and I'll admit that the film contained
moments of subconscious recognition that frightened me to the core. At the end
of INLAND EMPIRE, prostitutes lip-synch Nina Simone’s “Sinner Man” while
a pet monkey frolicks and a man in a red wool cap saws a log. I have no idea
what it means, but I'm glad that as unique a visionary as Lynch can still get
funding (in
INLAND EMPIRE: Jürgen's Second Viewing
You notice a lot seeing
The reason
A woman in trouble. The tagline suggests an entire narrative, and it’s
there.
Some things to watch out for the next time you see
On seeing Inland Empire for the third time Jürgen Fauth
“
At the IFC Center,
a short clip now precedes the movie, in which Justin Theroux reads a note from
David Lynch: a quote from the Upanishads to the effect that all the world is a
dream, and then he wishes us “a good experience.” And indeed, the film felt completely
different every time I’ve seen it. My original
review tried to approach it in terms of David Lynch’s oeuvre; the second
time around, I looked for structure and began collecting clues that may or
may not form a coherent story. This time, I saw shots, hints, cross-references,
and entire scenes that somehow hadn’t registered before, and it made me
reconsider
Perhaps it’s too literal-minded, and maybe there are already a few
dissertations about this, but especially in the light of Catching
the Big Fish and my own limited
experimentation, it seems useful to compare the experience of watching Inland
Empire to the practice of Transcendental
Meditation, of which Lynch is a adamant proponent. For anybody
with any familiarity with TM, the parallels are right there on the surface:
there is a lot of sitting and “diving within” in
The “transcending”
in “transcendental
meditation” refers to a particular kind of mental yoga that shuttles the
mind back and forth between a completely relaxed state of pure consciousness
and a more analytical day-to-day awareness. In TM, transcending is achieved
through the repetition of a mantra.
But “figuring it out” is only half the point. The real purpose of the clues
is to keep your mind engaged, suggest that there is a graspable story here (and
indeed
Transcending is supposed to
release deep-seated stress in the form of damage done to the nervous system in
the past. In this between-state, old emotions are dredged up from the icky
bottom of the subconscious. In the movie, these things include guilt over
adultery, shame at selling one’s body or soul, grief over the loss of a
child–perhaps even Polish carnies who can hypnotize people into murder by
screwdriver. A transcending meditator who is unstressing will often weep, much
like the woman watching mysterious images flutter by in a hotel room “in the
Baltic region.” When the dive within is completed and another layer of past
damage has been healed, there is a feeling of bliss and newfound peace, perhaps
even a sense of a blessed light as if facing the beam of a movie projector, and
one might sit, with a smile, just like Laura Dern on the other side of the room
in the film’s last shot: “Sweet.”
More and more interesting
commentary about this movie is popping up online, so I made a page collecting the best
articles
Cinemathematics Dan Eisenberg – Another attempt at "solving" INLAND EMPIRE
I must admit, I'm
very hesitant to write about Inland Empire, even after three viewings.
There may be two weeks left in the year, and I still need to do some catching
up (Inside Man, L'enfente, et al), but I can guarantee Inland
Empire is in my Top 10 of the year. It's currently sitting pretty at #1,
but that may change. You never know.
The most important thing to remember about Inland Empire is that, even
though the majority of the action surrounds Nikki Grace/Susan Blue (Laura
Dern), the movie is actually about the redemption of the Lost Girl (Karolina
Gruszka). The movie opens with a single beam of light, probably from a film
projector. As the camera pans to follow the light, we see the title of the
film, and then a record player. The soundtrack mentions the longest running
radio program in history, and then tells about a grey day in an old hotel in
Europe. This is where we first meet the Lost Girl, a prostitute with a client
in this hotel. They both have digitally blurred faces, but her face clears
after the man leaves. She proceeds to watch a television where, in fast motion,
we see both the Rabbits we'll see later and the Visitor (Grace Zabriskie)
walking towards Nikki Grace's house.
I think I've worked out some of what happens next. The Lost Girl, besides
watching the rest of the film on her television, appears as the character that
would become Susan Blue in On High In Blue Tomorrows, the film at the
center of Inland Empire. Her husband, known only as the Phantom
(Krzysztof Majchrzak, in the scariest Lynch part since Robert Blake's Mystery
Man in Lost Highway) also appears later in the film.
Consider this my spoiler warning, though I can't really see why you wouldn't
want to know as much about this film as possible before going in. Oh well.
SPOILER ALERT!
I believe that the Lost Girl is trapped in a purgatory of sorts. She was the
Polish version of Susan Blue, and her lover (Peter J. Lucas) was murdered by
the Phantom. From here, I think either the Phantom killed her, leaving her in
this place, or the death of her lover caused her to have a mental break-down
and turn to prostitution. I'm inclined to go with the former explanation. The
Lost Girl is dead, and so she is trapped in this hotel room, watching Nikki
follow in her footsteps.
The difference, or
course, is that when Nikki finally meets the Phantom, she has a gun. In killing
the Phantom, Nikki both releases herself from the Lost Girl's fate (that final
shot of her on the sofa is her changed destiny), and the Lost Girl. Once Nikki
kills the Phantom, she appears in the Lost Girl's room and disappears. Nikki
has escaped and left the door open. The Lost Girl leaves the room and finally
returns to her lover and their son.
Some important
things to note:
-The door Nikki
enters after killing the Phantom is 4 7. The name of the original film that
became On High In Blue Tomorrows was German, translating to "four
seven." The Lost Girl was trapped in the curse of 4 7, and Nikki rescued
her by rescuing herself.
-Nikki's husband
(Peter J. Lucas again) does not have a part in On High In Blue Tomorrows.
This means that the majority of the film, where Nikki is Susan and her husband
is Susan's husband, is not the actual film. I believe that this is completely
imagined by Nikki to try to fill her role as Susan.
-The Phantom
hypnotized the woman who kills Susan (Julia Ormond). Ormond also plays Doris
Side. Doris' husband, Billy (Justin Theroux) is having an affair with Susan in On
High In Blue Tomorrows. I think that Doris, after learning of Billy and
Susan's affair, decides to kill Susan. Susan, meanwhile, has been slowly losing
her mind. After her husband leaves her and her son dies, she begins to work on
the street and create her own backstory.
I could probably
watch this film once a week for a year and never completely understand. But I
don't think I'd ever tire of it. It constantly engaging, and it works on every
level. If you just want to enjoy the images on screen without connections, then
there are numerous scenes which work among Lynch's best. He crafts his lights
and sounds to their maximum effect, and the raw emotion he presents on screen
runs the gamut, often in one scene. This is not a movie for everyone, but if
you're willing to go with it, it will take you to places rarely, if ever, seen
on the big screen.
New York Times
(registration req'd) The definitive INLAND EMPIRE review by Manohla
Dargis, December 6, 2006
There are, in the movies, few places creepier to spend time than in David Lynch’s head. It is a head where the wild things grow, twisting and spreading like vines, like fingers, and taking us in their captive embrace. Over the last three decades these wild things have laid siege to us even as they have mutated: the deformed baby of “Eraserhead” evolving into the anguished distortions of “The Elephant Man,” the Reagan-era surrealism of “Blue Velvet,” the serial home invasion in “Twin Peaks” and the meta-cinematic masterpiece “Mulholland Drive,” a dispatch from that smog-choked boulevard of broken dreams called Hollywood.
Mr. Lynch revisits that bewitched boulevard in the extraordinary, savagely uncompromised “Inland Empire,” his first feature in five years, his first shot in video and one of the few films I’ve seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse. I’m still trying to figure out what the giant talking rabbits — which seem to be living in Ralph Kramden’s apartment, as redesigned by Edward Hopper — have to do with the weepy Polish woman who may be a whore or merely lost or, because this is a David Lynch film (after all), probably both.
As the Good Witch of the North says, it’s always best to
start at the beginning and, so, once upon a time, an actress, Nikki Grace (a
dazzling, fearless Laura Dern),
receives a stranger (Grace Zabriskie, hilarious, unsettling) into her home. The
unnamed visitor, a new neighbor with bulging eyes and an East European accent,
engages in some gossip (“I hear you have a new role”) before delivering two
brief parables that hint at the weirdness to follow. When the boy went out into
the world to play, the stranger says, evil was born and followed the boy. When
the girl went out to play, though, she got lost in the marketplace, which
pretty much sums up what happens to most pretty actresses in
Like “
Few are tastier or finally more terrible than the role of Nikki Grace, whose porn-star name suggests tacky self-invention and a straight-to-video career. Soon after entertaining her foreign-accented visitor, Nikki, who looks to be in her mid-30s, is rehearsing for a new film called “On High in Blue Tomorrows” with a director, Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons, expertly blending unction with ego), and her co-star, Devon Berk (Justin Theroux, butched-up as a neo-greaser). A romantic melodrama, this preposterously titled film involves Susan Blue and Billy Side, nattily dressed Southerners who flirt with indirection on the veranda while an almost-unrecognizable Julia Ormond plays the other woman, kind of. In time, this film-within-a-film casts an enveloping shadow over Nikki, leading her real and reel lives to blur.
The reeler it gets, the weirder it gets. Nikki or Susan or
perhaps both enter another story that resembles a tawdrier version of “On High
in Blue Tomorrows.” In this unvarnished version of the film-within-the-film,
Susan spends a lot of time in a sinister house with some half-dozen women who
appear to be whores. The whores chew the fat and their naughty lower lips,
lounge on a street in a snowy Polish city in what appears to be the 1930s and
end up laughing on a nostalgically seedy modern
The easiest way into “
How Nikki and the other characters wind up in these rooms —
how, for instance, the pampered blonde ends up talking trash in a spooky,
B-movie office — is less important than what happens inside these spaces. In “
Each new space also serves as a stage on which dramatic entrances
and exits are continually being made. The theatricality of these entrances and
exits underscores the mounting tension and frustrates any sense that the film
is unfolding with the usual linear logic. Like characters rushing in and out of
the same hallway doors in a slapstick comedy, Nikki/Susan keeps changing
position, yet, for long stretches, doesn’t seem as if she were going anywhere
new. For the most part, this strategy works (if nothing else, it’s truer to
everyday life than most films), even if there are about 20 minutes in this
admirably ambitious 179-minute film that feel superfluous. “
In an interview published while this film was in production,
Mr. Lynch said he shot “
“
Inland Empire — Cineaste Magazine Martha P. Nochimson from Cineaste (Winter 2007)
Inland Empire, now available in an exceptional two-disc DVD edition, tells the story of Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), a Hollywood actress hoping to make a comeback in a film called On High in Blue Tomorrows. But the way ahead is murky: the production is rumored to be cursed. What’s more, Nikki is saddled with both a sinister, powerful husband, Piotrek Krol (Peter J. Lucas), and a womanizing costar, Devon Berk (Justin Theroux). If these quasisupernatural, stereotypically melodramatic plot elements sound like an unlikely foundation for a David Lynch film, Lynch thinks so too—he introduces them only in order to elbow them from the center of the film, to make way for the blazingly original story of Nikki’s evolution into a free woman and a free artist. Lynch often begins a film by deflating stale Hollywood formulae, encouraging audiences to trade comforting but tediously familiar clichés for something more threatening but much more exciting. Here, affairs and curses turn out to be tired, old men’s issues, not Nikki’s. As in much of Lynch’s work, there is an inadvertent feminist undertow to this film—in Inland Empire, as he has in the past, Lynch uses the experience of women, who are, quite realistically, both sources of creativity and objects of repression in patriarchal cultures, to reveal how creative energies can be trapped within rigid social systems.
Nikki begins the film beset by the small-minded definitions of her situation imposed by her husband, costar, and numerous other characters who can see nothing more interesting about her than potential adultery in the workplace. This includes her pretentious director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons), who varies the formula by valuing her artistry only in terms of the industry awards it might bring her (and him). What else could be interesting about being a movie star? Plenty, in Lynch’s view.
In order to release his audiences from their accustomed responses, Lynch pulls the kill switch on normative time/space conventions. Since, from the film’s opening images, nothing follows in reassuring chronological order but rather in a fluid stream of fragmented spaces, nothing in Inland Empire looks as it usually does in the movies. When the romantic triangle appears, for instance, it does not emerge typically with a rush of sexual attraction between Nikki and Devon, but rather with a scene between the two men, Piotrek pulling Devon aside after the three have had dinner together, and ordering Devon not to mess with Nikki. Piotrek knows Devon’s reputation and, as he puts it, his wife is not a free woman: “She is bound.” Piotrek’s warning, like none we have ever seen before in Hollywood melodrama, takes the form of high comic homoeroticism—he alarms Devon more by telling him that he wants to hold him close as they speak than by staking Nikki out as his private property. It would seem that Lynch’s instincts have led him to an insight similar to that of the theorists who have asserted that Hollywood’s onscreen triangles tend to mask homosexual desire for which the contested woman is just an excuse.
But this brief comic interlude leads away from, not toward, the men. The dynamic element in the scene is our discovery that Nikki, hidden in the shadows, is listening in on this tête-à-tête. That she lurks on the periphery of this “guy talk” prefigures the rest of the film. If Nikki is bound, both in her mausoleumlike mansion and her becalmed career, it will not be the possibility of an affair with Devon, to which she is very much a third party, that will enable her escape.
Her way out is her performance as Sue in On High in Blue Tomorrows. Intriguingly, the film emphasizes that this is just what the men do not understand. While husband and costar see Nikki’s work in sexual terms, and the pretentious Kingsley Stewart focuses on tinseltown fame, the film itself points toward the way Nikki’s creative process frees her from both patriarchy and the values of Hollywood by allowing her to experience a much larger reality than her more limited colleagues and her domineering husband can conceive of. Working on a film means being an object of exploitation by industry politics and by small-minded hustlers like the parasitic Freddie Howard (Harry Dean Stanton), one of Stewart’s staff members, who endlessly slithers around conning money out of everyone on the set. But that is only the external, socially constructed aspect of filmmaking; Nikki’s exploration of her character also has an internal trajectory. As she submerges herself in Sue, she enters the flow of internal time and into internal space, a mysterious pilgrimage into a reality in which numerous bodies can occupy one place at the same time. Thus we see that as an artist, she can be both Nikki and Sue, discovering who Sue is while simultaneously peering into the repressed and secret areas of her self.
For Nikki, as an artist, making the film becomes a collision between the exterior time and space—linear and clear—in which she is objectified, and the interior time and space—spiraling and slippery—of creative discovery. At the end of the film, we see that this complex participation in inner and outer universes impels Nikki toward personal freedom. Adding to the complexity, Lynch’s reliance on flashforwards suggests that Nikki’s freedom is already there, ready to discover as she begins work. Inland Empire exhibits Lynch’s usual sense of balance, as he probes the interdependence of both aspects of time and space, rather than finding in the internal and external two mutually exclusive states of being. Indeed, Nikki’s dive into the whirlpools of inner time and space, through which she forges her own personhood, depends on her engagement with the linear, commercial process of making a film. In its insistence that it is within our power to use the corrosive world of commerce for spiritual and imaginative ends, Inland Empire is a thrillingly optimistic ode to human freedom.
The Inland Empire DVD set comprises two discs. The first contains the film itself, while the second contains the extras, which unsurprisingly make no attempt to explain Inland Empire. The three most impressive extras are a series of outtakes called “more things that happened”; a playful visual essay in which Lynch teaches us how to cook quinoa; and candid documentary footage of Lynch on the set of Inland Empire, in a mood very different from any I detected when I had the opportunity to witness him in action during the shooting of Lost Highway. The provocative outtakes intensify our understanding of how important the malleability of space and time are to this director, while the documentary disposes of all the nonsense asserted about Lynch’s purported weirdness, providing us with a privileged view of his precise command of all aspects of filmmaking in action. And even the quinoa lesson is an ingenious guide to Lynch’s complex relationship to linear constructs.
Film and extras together strongly suggest that Inland Empire is best understood as an inclusive reality, one that insists on parity between a nonrational flow through those spaces of memory and vision that are available to us through creative work, and the external events through which we move in logical clock-time. In numerous interviews with others and in conversation with me, Lynch has enthused about what a great, marvelous world we live in. Inland Empire and its DVD extras, more than any previous work, reveal that he’s not just talking about the external fragments of life to which reductionist Western attitudes attempt to restrict us.
David
Lynch Returns: Expect Moody Conditions, With Surreal Gusts ... Dennis Lim from The New York Times, October 1, 2006
David Lynch Folds Space: Because He Is the Kwisatz Haderach! Robert C. Cumbow from 24LiesASecond, November 16, 2006
A Woman in Trouble is Rescued and Loved - Bright Lights Film Journal Dan Callahan, December 11, 2006
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum January 25, 2007
Critique. Inland Empire by David Lynch. Stéphane Delorme from Cahiers du Cinéma (February 2007)
David Lynch's The
Straight Story and Inland Empire - Reverse Shot Free
Falling, by Leo Goldsmith, April 26, 2008
On the
Terminal in Cinema • Senses of Cinema Andrew C. Schenker from Senses of Cinema, May 19, 2008
Cinema, Disappearance and Scale in David Lynch's Inland Empire Jodi Brooks from Screening the Past, July 2011
Mulholland Dr. & Inland Empire, David Lynch ... - Senses of Cinema Michael Pattison, March 17, 2013
The Los Angeles Review of Books: Michael Nordine October 08, 2014
MUBI's Notebook: Christopher Small Comparing a film by David Lynch with one by
Jacques Rivette, December 22, 2015
Letterboxd: Nathan Smith June 18, 2017
Notes on INLAND EMPIRE
Notes on INLAND EMPIRE Pt I, Dave McDougall at Chained to the Cinémathèque posts a series of selections from a
work-in-progress about the film, January
9, 2007
Going Inland: Inland Empire and Transcendental Meditation Notes on INLAND EMPIRE PT II
Memory, Identity, Confusion, Recursion: Narrative Structure in
Inland Empire - A Primer Notes
on INLAND EMPIRE Pt III
CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Inland Empire (2006) John Kenneth Muir, June 11, 2010
Thoughts on Stuff (No Spoilers) Patrick, October 9, 2006
Thoughts on Stuff (Spoilers) Patrick, October 9, 2006
Thoughts on Stuff: The Second Viewing Patrick tries to solve the riddles of INLAND EMPIRE, December 19, 2006
Strange
What Love Does: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE
Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door,
Inland
Empire, a Conversation with Lisa K. Broad
Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, December 6, 2006
Syndromes of an Inland Film Snob Empire: The 44th New York Film ... Kevin B. Lee from Senses of Cinema, September 2006
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review The Mind Is a Terrible Thing (2007)
The Stranger Song
[Rob Humanick] Strange What Love Does,
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) review [4/4] also seen here: Hollywood From the Fringes
Wild at Heart J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, November 28, 2006
Reverse Shot (Michael Joshua Rowin) Found Highways
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] October 5, 2006
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Jenny Jediny]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
DVD Times Noel Megahey, Lynch seems to now be feeding off himself, recycling the same themes and no longer appears to have anything new or meaningful to communicate to an audience
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
The Observer (Philip French) review
Pretentious Musings (Kevin Koehler) review
Film Journal International (Chris Barsanti) review
DVD Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night Critic]
Twitch (Peter Martin) review Wells Dunbar
Electric Sheep Magazine Kim Nicolajsen
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4.5/5]
BeyondHollywood.com Brian Holcomb, including excellent photos
Critical Culture [Pacze Moj] more extraordinary photos
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [1/5] Richard Scheib, nothing more than a collation of scenes made without any underlying rationale
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [C] it's beyond the reach of all but his idolators
The New York Sun (Steve Dollar) review Following Lynch Down the Rabbit Hole
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [A-]
Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
End of Media (James Slone) calling it self-indulgent is redundant
PopMatters [Matt Mazur] his most infuriatingly challenging film
Reel.com review [4/4] Jim Hemphill
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
sneersnipe (David Perilli) review
The New York Sun
(Nicolas Rapold) review A
Film Auteur Goes Digital
Film School Rejects (H. Stewart) review [A] also seen here: Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]
Slate (Dana Stevens) review there's narrative fragmentation, and then there are unsorted heaps of debris
Strictly Film School Acquarello
stylusmagazine.com (Patrick McKay) review
sneersnipe (Paul Castro) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [4/5]
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [1/5] this time Lynch has really lost his bananas
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review there are too many devices we've seen so often that they now seem tired
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] the film goes off the rails
The Lumière Reader Tim Wong, cinema at its most perilous
Within the Context of No Context Stuart Klawans from the Nation calls it a prison house of futility
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [F] It’s an exercise in empty mystification, an endurance test there’s no reason to take
Bina007 Movie Reviews I was basically bored rigid
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [6/6]
Inland Empire Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr
San Francisco Chronicle review Walter Addiego
Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
RogerEbert.com (Jim Emerson) review [4/4]
David
Lynch - Inland Empire - Movies - New York Times Dennis Lim,
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
INLAND EMPIRE Official Site David Lynch's official site for the self-distributed film, with poster, theatrical schedule, trailers and still photographs
Wired News:
David Lynch Interviews -- Uncut
Scott Thill from Wired News
interviews David Lynch about DV, DavidLynch.com, his own brand of coffee, and Inland Empire , March 6, 2006
An Interview with David Lynch | Reverse
Shot by Michael Joshua Rowin, Fall
2006
Catching
up with David Lynch Jeff Jensen
interview from Entertainment Weekly,
Andrew
O'Hehir's Interview with David Lynch feature and interview from Salon
Lynch Q&A at the Brattle Bradley's Almanac has audio from the Q&A session with David Lynch at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, December 10, 2006
The
Happy Spelunker Scott Foundas
interviews Lynch for LA Weekly,
The
Seattle Times: Interview with David Lynch
Mark Rahner interview,
David Lynch | Interviews | Guardian
Unlimited Film Mark Kermode
interview February 8, 2007
The Super Fun
of It Nathan Lee chats
with the director about digital video and the DVD release, from the Village Voice,
YouTube
video of David Lynch with Cow (
LYNCH B- 81
USA
What
a heavy load Einstein must have had.
Fucking morons, everywhere. —David Lynch
This is largely an endearing documentary movie of David Lynch puttering around his house, an art studio, a work room, a film set, a chair where he makes daily announcements to the members of the online David Lynch website, or just idle moments where he’s collecting his thoughts. Without any coherent structure, though there are chapter headings, this is simply a stream-of-consciousness vignette of what it’s like to be David Lynch. We watch him tell various stories, usually while comfortably sitting in a chair, one of his favorite spots apparently, as we hear him describe sagebrush in Idaho, that turns into a surreal vision of a rabbit, or his recollection of finding a bloated cow which he immediately wanted to “pop,” or his initial memories of Philadelphia, a city that played a prominent place in his life.
Much of this was also shot, like diary entries, as he was shooting INLAND EMPIRE in 2005, as we see him give out ideas to actors before a shoot, or assemble a set exactly as he wants, describe an early scene in the movie, or make odd requests for “a one-legged 16-year-old girl…a beautiful Eurasian, about 23…and a monkey.” We also see him delight at taking pictures of Poland in the winter of various empty factories that he was given access to shoot, where the washed out industrial colors match scenes from the movie. Lynch talks affectionately about transcendental meditation, and also definitively indicates he’s through shooting on film, that he’s an ardent supporter now of digital video, where the look is not nearly as good, but he claims it’s good enough. He spends a lot of time talking on the phone, calling Jeremy Irons at one point, and also smokes constantly. The film is put together in a rather haphazard way, not focusing on any one area, but is generally a potpourri of events in his life, small, memorable, personal events which will likely confuse those actually seeking biographical information, but delight those who are already interested in Lynch’s variable states of mind.
User comments from imdb Author: swagner2001 from New York, NY
'Lynch' really reminded me of Pennebaker's "Don't Look
Back" Dylan documentary. There's no set form or story holding the film
together. It's more a series of candid vignettes. David Lynch spins yarns about
his days living in
Nearly all the footage was shot in digital video. But don't let that turn you
off. There's a very strong sense of mood and visual style in 'Lynch'. (With a
director named 'blackANDwhite' how could the film NOT have intense, creepy,
visual flair?)
What pleased me most about the film was the creative editing. Rather than
clumping all the
The scenes never grow tiring, because the environment and the activity
constantly change.
I've seen some documentaries on David Lynch before, where they interview people
on the set, and actors explain how he works, etc. 'Lynch' is NOT that kind of film.
'Lynch' gives you a fly-on-the-wall perspective on what it's like to be David
Lynch. It's an ideal film companion piece to the book "Lynch on
Lynch".
User
comments from imdb Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm)
from
In the book Lynch On Lynch, director David Lynch explains: "Your mind focuses on a certain thing and it pulls in ideas that will marry to that thing." The results, as we see from Lynch's films, can be surreal. It links in to his use of Transcendental Meditation (TM) - a form of concentration developed by repetition of a mantra and used by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (to pull in vast amounts of money, among other things).
Lynch has used the technique for 32 years, as he explains in this offbeat documentary. We see the camera turned on the director at work - and in moments where he waxes philosophical. He uses TM "to dive into pure creativity". There have been many critical reports of the Maharishi's methods. Ex- TM teacher, Joseph Kellet says "As a teacher I frequently lied to people for their own good because they weren't ready yet to receive the full truth." But the misuse of a technique for financial gain or fame does not, in itself, negate the value of it. This documentary provides a fascinating insight into the creative processes of someone who is among the most enigmatic of contemporary experimental directors. His use of TM - as a creative tool - is more accessible than some of the more extravagant claims commonly made for it (by others or by Lynch himself).
'Curiouser and curiouser!' were the famous words of
We watch Lynch in his musings. He comes out with a story about popping a dead cow. A rabbit disappearing out of the brush. Or someone he knows getting his head bashed by police. He is fascinated by what crawls just beneath the surface of beauty. We wait (as he does) while other 'fragments' are drawn in. He is fascinated with taking still photographs of factory interiors. No agenda - just enjoying them for their own sake. It's a bit like lateral thinking - take some unconnected ideas and find a new connection.
Just as ideas are pulled in, just as Lynch's feature films intrigue and pull us in, so does this film use cinematic story-telling techniques to inveigle the viewer. We watch a close up: his hand turns a handle. Emphatic directions to the crew bring an intensity of concentration to bear. There is a strange repetitive noise, a ghostly sound, we cannot identify. Only after the viewer has been entranced does the camera pan back to reveal an old-fashioned gramophone. Lynch is winding the handle that powers the turntable. The stylus is on the endless repeat of the last groove. Sound crew record the noise amplified by the acoustic speaker.
As the film gets on to the early stages of filming Inland
Empire, Lynch talks about a new technique - about being excited but
tormented by not knowing. Usually, by the time cameras are rolling, the ideas have
come together and the director knows exactly what is going to happen. But we
are given to understand that
The photography in the documentary is - appropriately - as wacky as any Lynch film. Multiple screens, masking, slow wipes, different formats. Locked-down shots contrast with relaxed, hand-held filming. An unconnected shot of Lynch (apparently) at his desk in a bunny-rabbit suit. The inventiveness makes us feel like explorers, rather than passive recipients of a dry documentary.
Lynch is a fascinating portrait of an intelligent, celebrated and charismatic director. No doubt it will eventually find its way into the 'extras' of a DVD boxed set. The heavy-handed references to Transcendental Meditation may annoy some viewers - when he gets on to his 'David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace' it's easy to sense excess fragments of hippy beads, flowing robes and happy-mantra vibes. But the personal relevance of TM to his own creative work is more believable.
Lynch is a must for all fans of his work and a great add-on
to his movie,
New York Times
(registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
Whether you dig “Lynch,” a feature-length video visit with the director David Lynch, will largely depend on your views of his work and whether you think there’s something instructive and characteristically wonderful and weird about him telling an assistant, “I want a one-legged 16-year-old girl.” It says something about the unflappable nature of his employees or their familiarity with his desires that the assistant doesn’t appear startled by this request or his ensuing demands for “a Eurasian” and “a pet monkey.”
A one-legged lovely, a woman who might indeed be Eurasian and
a small shrieking monkey all show up in Mr. Lynch’s most recent feature, the
feverishly brilliant and nightmarish “Inland Empire.” In many respects “Lynch,” an
expressionistic and minor portrait of the artist, works as a footnote to that
2006 work; it would make a great DVD extra. It shows us Mr. Lynch at work,
prepping and shooting and cajoling and sometimes cursing his movie crew. He
helps paint the floor of one set and even takes a broom to
“Lynch,” which was shot in video and Super-8 film and will be
shown in a digital format, reveals little obviously solid about its subject. We
learn that he was born in
Is there anyone else? Certainly he has a cluster of mostly male assistants, all of whom seem young and scrupulously attentive. They facilitate his genius and listen to his stories, one of which involves a youthful attempt to puncture a dead, gas-inflated cow like a balloon. Sometimes one of those assistants presumably procures a monkey.
The video’s director is identified in the credits only by the
silly construction “Blackandwhite,” though given his access — his gender is
about all I can confirm — it’s clear he enjoys a trusting relationship with his
subject. Mr. Lynch may shy away from dispensing the usual documentary
revelations, but he fearlessly and openly voices the worries that surface
during the making of “
If anything, at 82 fast minutes “Lynch” gives us too little: too little of that struggle to wrest art from cloudy uncertainty, too little of the artist-doubter himself. On his beautiful image- and text-filled Web site about the making of this movie (davidlynchdoc2007.blogspot.com), the video’s director reveals that he shot for more than two years, an impressive stretch, especially in view of those documentaries that speed through topics as quickly as possible. (Some of the Web site’s contents would also make nice DVD extras.) Here too we see the struggle to create in the video director’s copious notes about Mr. Lynch: “Ask him what he wants to talk about. Ask him what he feels is the best way to approach this film. Question him.”
You don’t see much evidence of that questioning in “Lynch,” which comes across as more devotional than interrogative or searching. Too many nonfiction works try to obscure their partisanship through formal devices meant to suggest some kind of journalistic-type detachment, like voice-of-God narration or the presentation of two (though rarely more) sides of an issue, never mind the documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio’s shrewd observation that “with any cut at all, objectivity fades away.”
Yet it’s precisely the worshipful feel of “Lynch” — including scenes in which the camera points up at Mr. Lynch from what seems to be the floor, as if it were a faithful dog — that makes the movie so sweet and so appealing. It’s like watching a schoolgirl crush unfold, through a glass darkly.
The Village Voice [Jim Ridley]
Inland Empire Michael J. Anderson from Tativille
Film-Forward.com Jack Gattanella
Lynch, Jennifer
SURVEILLANCE
Surveillance Allan Hunter at
Fifteen years after the career-killing debacle of Boxing Helena, Jennifer Lynch dares to raise her head above the parapet once more. Her return to film-making is not quite on a par with the resurrection of Lazarus but is certainly not an event that many could have foreseen. Eccentric thriller Surveillance shows no signs of any lasting impact on her self-confidence as it mixes together a lurid cocktail of jet black humour and bloodshed with a startling, left field plot twist. Very reminiscent of the surrealist, mannered sensibility on view in her father David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me or Lost Highway, Surveillance is definitely not a film with mainstream appeal. However, it should attract enough attention and support to ensure some kind of commercial viability as an offbeat cult attraction, especially on DVD .
On first acquaintance, Surveillance suggest the possibility of a fairly conventional Rashomon-whodunit as FBI Agents Hallaway (Pullman) and Anderson (Ormond) arrive to discover the truth about a bloodbath in which several people have died. Killers are on the loose and the body count is rising. Survivors Bobbi (James), eight year-old Stephanie (Simpkins) and injured police office r Jack Bennett (co-writer and co-producer Harper) are to be questioned on their side of the story to determine the truth about what has happened.
It quickly becomes apparent that this will be a far from conventional handling of the material. The local cops are twitching, defensive individuals who act in the most inappropriate manner. Flashbacks reveal a story populated by obnoxious, unsympathetic individuals, including office r Bennett and his partner who get their kicks terrorizing unsuspecting tourists on the highway. This becomes a nightmare scenario that unfolds in the bright light of day with piercing blue skies and golden cornfields captured in some sharp, clear cinematography from Peter Wunstorf.
The notion that everything is not as it first appears is underlined by interviews with survivors who are often economical with the truth. Flashbacks provide a surer sense of what really happened and reveal elements of character and motivation. Contrasts in the visual texture of the film come from the mixture of vivid colours and the bank of black and white surveillance monitor images where agent Hathaway watches the three interrogations unfold.
Surveillance holds the attention as it gradually allows the viewer to piece together the story but it also sacrifices that attention with crude lurches into buffoonish comedy and self-conscious excess. Several scenes feel like acting class exercises rather than a coherent element of the film. The result alternates between being fairly gripping and quite baffling although this may have been the intention as a means of luring viewers up the garden path.
All clenched jaw and clipped sentences at first,
Surveillance feels like a film that belongs more naturally to the era
of Blue Velvet or even Natural Born Killers. Audiences not
attuned to its wavelength of politically incorrect comedy and soulless
slaughter will be running for the nearest exit but there is enough intrigue and
craft here to suggest it will not be another fifteen years before Lynch returns
with her next brave effort.
Lyne, Adrian
FOXES
USA (106 mi) 1980
Almost like an inverted
Saturday Night Fever, Foxes follows four LA teenage girls who seduce,
humiliate, adore and befriend various men, but whose primary loyalties are
always to each other. The first half, unfortunately, is poor: the producers
(Casablanca Record) have lumbered it with undigested lumps from the company
rock catalogue; there is some pretty variable comedy, dreary travelogue
footage, and a very ugly use of filters and soft focus. But gradually a much
more interesting film takes over. The tone becomes darker and more moralistic,
concentrating on the relationship between Foster (looking uncannily old) and
her impossible, dope-happy friend (a fine performance from ex-Runaway Cherie
Currie), both contemplating with real hurt the certainty of separation. The
ending takes this feeling to its logical conclusion, and works a hell of a lot
better as post-'60s tragedy than The Rose.
Baltimore City Paper (Heather Joslyn) review
From the spate of shiny new teen-targeted movies, you'd think
the biggest problems those "twixt 12 and 20 face is unpopularity and the
occasional serial killer. From the current appetite for all things '70s, you'd
think the Me Decade was one long, carefree, cannibis-fueled orgy. For a
bracing, anti-nostalgic dose of Clearasil and Quaaludes, check out Adrian
Lyne's directorial debut, Foxes, one of the high points of an unfairly
mocked '70s serious teen drama. Jodie Foster—never this unself-conscious again—plays
the de facto mother hen of a quartet of lost girls (Kandice Stroh as a nympho,
future talk-show hostess Marilyn Kagan as a virgin, and ex-Runaways frontwoman
Cherie Currie, very convincingly playing a stoner) and caretaker of her
terrified divorced mom (a manic Sally Kellerman). Foxes is episodic but
its characters are recognizably rooted in reality, and the film boasts lines
that are at once cutting, hoot-worthy, and true to the drama-queen tendencies
of teenage girls and their bewildered moms. (Kellerman to Foster: "Just
because they fit you for a diaphragm doesn't mean you're a woman!") For
every giggly anarchronism (Hey, my dad got us tickets to the Angel
concert!) there's a moment that will make any ex-teen cringe with recognition.
Movieline Magazine review Edward Margulies
What is there to say, in a column devoted to films, about
last year's gender-bending L.A. theatrical production, Phoxes, which put
on the stage, word for word, Adrian Lyne's 1980 movie Foxes?
"Thanks a million," that's what, for if the play hadn't become a hit,
we might never have had any reason to rent Foxes, which turns out to be the
Bad Movie milestone of late '70s cinema. It's the kind of retro howler that'll
make you want to--as Jodie Foster puts it, in the film's very first line
of dialogue--"Shake your booty!"
One of those formula movies about a group of gals livin', lovin' and learnin'
about life--think Where the Boys Are, Come Fly With Me, Satisfaction
and Shag--Foxes follows a clique of San Fernando Valley high
school hipsters who, though they're "teenage dopers" from broken or
troubled homes, are all nevertheless the usual types found in such flicks:
Foster's a trampy brain, Kandice Stroh's a trampy nice girl, Cherie Currie's a
trampy bad girl, and Marilyn Kagan's a trampy innocent.
When she isn't saying things like, "I'm no Suzy slut!" Foster is
heartbroken over her parents' split and feels things more intensely than
her buds--though it's possible it just seems that way because she's the only
one of the four Foxes who can act. Speaking about Foster's former beau,
Robert Romanus, Kagan opines, "He sure has changed since he got the
van," but Foster looks deeper, offering, "He's changed since
he got the hair-blower."
So we'll know that these Valley foxes are misunderstood by
their folks, moments before Kagan gives a big party, her mother Lois Smith goes
bonkers upon hearing that kids prefer scotch to beer. "Maybe Dad and I
should go out of town tonight," Smith rages. "Everybody could get
real drunk on scotch and have a real sexual time. Your friends, they're all
having affairs in junior high school! Dad and I... we experimented. But I
always wished that we'd waited." Humiliated, Kagan cries, "You don't
understand, I have waited. I'm a virgin!" The shame is too
great for Kagan to bear, so she collapses, and her kid sister tells the
arriving guests, "Party's off. She's grounded--she's a virgin!"
Kagan then embarks on an affair with older man Randy Quaid, primarily so that
the gals can throw a wild party in his bachelor pad. Not surprisingly, the bash
soon turns violent--the teens are apparently driven nuts (as you may be too) by
hearing Donna Summer sing the Foxes theme, "On the Radio,"
over and over again. Everyone gets busted by the cops, which is bad news for
Currie--her abusive pa is a cop who has her committed--but worse news for
Foster, who must listen as her mom, Sally Kellerman, launches into one of the
all-time Bad Actings speeches: "I don't like your friends. Are there any
nice people left in the world? Maybe the whole bunch of you is sick. You booze,
you dope, you sleep with whomever. You look like kids, but you don't act like
them. You're short 40 year olds--and you're tough ones." She adds,
"Just because they fit you for a diaphragm doesn't make you a woman."
Wait, there's more: the real reason she's upset is because Foster and
friends are so svelte. "You make me hate my hips," Kellerman wails.
"I hate my hips!"
It all ends when Currie breaks out of the institution, and
Foster and pal Scott Baio rush to save her from socializing with white-trash
druggies who, memorably, toss Baio into a trash bin. But it's Too Late for
Currie, who thumbs a ride with drunken, married, middle-class swingers who hit
on her. Currie would rather die than have sex with (shudder!) squares,
and, thanks to a convenient car crash, she does.
It's not Too Late for Foster, however. She is seen driving off to college in
search of a better education and, presumably, better co-stars, directors and
scripts. Hunt down a copy of Foxes and rent it, now!
Wider Screenings [Robert Cettl]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [2.5/5]
DVD Talk (Jason Janis) dvd review [1/5]
Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review
They Shoot Actors, Don't They? Aaron
Mr. Satanism's Video Picks for Perverts
Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Weinberg]
The Video Vacuum [Mitch Lovell]
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
FLASHDANCE B- 81
USA (95 mi) 1983
Never given much critical acclaim, in fact, many vehemently hated it, so
much so that this film nearly bombed at the box office when it first opened,
but before it could be pulled out of theaters, word of mouth turned this into
one of the year’s biggest hits, raking in over $100 million. So much for the public’s taste. The critics were correct, of course, as the
actual movie is pretty wretched, as is Lyne’s directing, but somehow that’s not
the point with this film. It’s all about
style and attitude. And did you see those
Rock Steady Crew break dancers stop pedestrian traffic? Even early b-boys, tame by today’s 21st
century standards, are still magnificent and add just the right element of
daring to be different. Jennifer Beals,
on the other hand, was a fashion icon, whose face graced the covers of many
women’s magazines, and with this film, her hair and those gorgeous, piercing
eyes became a household item. To this
day, if you pull into the mini-mart at gas stations across the country, take a
look at the video section and where they may have a miniscule selection of 20
or 30 films, it’s not at all surprising to find a copy of FLASHDANCE. As backwards and bizarre as this may sound,
at the time, this was considered an anthem for women’s independence and it
remains amazingly popular to this day.
The theme song is sung today by aspiring Pussycat Dolls on TV and Beals’s
stylish mix and match wardrobe of torn, off the shoulder sweat shirts and leg warmers
have never gone out of style. Have you
checked out the girls practicing at any neighborhood ice rink lately?
The film features some terrific upbeat dance numbers, performed to Irene
Carr’s “Flashdance,” Michael Semballo’s “Maniac,” or Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock
‘N’ Roll,” without which this would be a fairly lame love story. The fact that most of the singers used in the
film are female is not lost on the audience, an interesting mix of music and
fashion that pandered to the female pocketbook while providing leering images
for the male population as well. But the
idea of setting this film in the working class neighborhood of Pittsburgh,
where Beals is a welder by day and a dancer by night is just too ridiculous for
words. Add into this mix her dream of
wanting to become a ballet dancer (starting ballet training when, at age 18?) and
you’ve reduced her dreams to that of about a million little girls across the
nation, perhaps around the world. Of course
it’s absurd that she dances at a working class bar that wouldn’t be caught dead
showing off such highly stylized, artificially designed production numbers, but
this film kicks out the jams and lets this girl be a dancing fool, upping the
amplified Giorgio Moroder music to disco volume and lets her inner freak run
free. The dance numbers have MTV
reflected all over their slick production values, but they’re a blast,
especially the strobe light effect, which is not for viewers with epilepsy, and
also Laura Branigan singing “Gloria” on the ice rink. And the big finish was so life affirming in
its era that it remains unforgettable to this day for those who actually
experienced it in their youth. There was
mild outrage when it was discovered Jennifer Beals didn’t do her own dancing, primarily
using body double Marine Jahan, and did it really take 4 dancers to complete that final dance edit? It’s hokey, but it works, and I attribute it
all to the freedom and creativity of the breakers, who allowed her to break
free from all the conventional bullshit and simply dared her to want more out
of herself.
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
It's hard to write about films that you saw and loved as a youngster. This was one of the first adult films I snuck into and I was swept up in the music and romance. Michael Nouri was so sexy, Jennifer Beals so cool and "Maniac" the best song ever. (Give me a break, I was 14.) Well, after almost two decades, I can honestly say that I wouldn't throw Nouri out of bed for eating crackers, Beals is even more beautiful and my taste in music has vastly improved. You'll have to take my word for it. There's nothing all that new about the little, poor girl with a dream story, but Beals truly sells it. It's her energy and passion that carries this tired tale. She makes you believe that she could not only make a rich, older man fall in love with her, but that she has the talent to be a real dancer. Is it hokey and overplayed? Absolutely, that's part of the fun. Nouri and Beals have great chemistry, giving their scenes together heat and honesty. If you're too young to remember the 80s and are curious what it was like, watch this flick. The art direction, costumes and music can only have come from that decade. These aspects of the film are somewhat laughable now, but they were on the cusp of cool then. This was Beals big break and she makes the most of it. A decent romance trapped in a time warp of outrageousness. A true 80s classic.
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Given MTV's
tarnished reputation, it's easy to forget that the channel was once hailed as
an important showcase for cutting-edge editing and visual design. Flashdance's
1983 release seems to mark the exact moment when "MTV-style editing"
stopped being used primarily as a compliment, and instead became a pejorative
phrase. When Flashdance director Adrian Lyne embraced the MTV aesthetic,
the result wasn't a bold evolutionary leap forward, but a big step in the wrong
direction. The film offers the worst of both worlds by combining the crowd-pleasing,
mothballed working-class-underdog-pursues-dream formula of yesteryear with
MTV's kinetic emptiness, in the process creating the ultimate in '80s kitsch.
When Jennifer Lopez transformed her "I'm Glad" video into an homage
to the movie's famed climax, the music-video/film fusion came full circle: a
film sequence shot and edited exactly like a music video became a music video
shot and edited exactly like a "classic" film sequence.
A shockingly
successful fusion of faux-grit and genuine glitz, Flashdance cast
dance-challenged newcomer Jennifer Beals as an 18-year-old welder by day/dancer
by night who dreams of attending a prestigious dance academy. Then again, if
Beals didn't live in a converted warehouse roughly the size of Orson Welles'
mansion in Citizen Kane, she probably wouldn't need two jobs or a
wealthy boss/boyfriend (Michael Nouri) who plays fairy godfather.
History has
rendered Flashdance's lead character and plot iconic, but this marks
another instance where "iconic" doubles as a euphemism for fuzzily
conceived and underrealized. The non-dance sequences are roughly as important
to the film's overall success as the plots of porn films, and not much better
written. Lyne succeeds in creating an entirely new kind of musical, one in
which a lead actress who couldn't dance was less important than the
enterprising editors who stitched shots of her body doubles into a cohesive
whole. In one of the featurettes, Lyne claims that a good movie can thrive
without production values, but a great-looking nothing will never work. It's a
curious, deeply ironic statement when applied to one of the most successful
great-looking nothings in film history.
Filmcritic.com Don Willmott
1983 was a sleepy year in the midst of the first Reagan
administration, but it was also the year of Flashdance. What
Flashdance is an exercise in Cinderellaesque teenage female wish
fulfillment so preposterous that it shoots right over the top and is ultimately
richly entertaining in spite of its ridiculousness. All you have to do it get
past the main message, which is that finding success in life is not just about
your talent. It's about your talent plus your ability to snag a rich and
powerful boyfriend and put out. With production values courtesy of the legendary
Simpson and Bruckheimer and a screenplay co-written by the polymorphously
perverse Joe Eszterhas, you know you're in for quite a ride.
Cue the famous theme song as we watch Alex (a very appealing and energetic
Jennifer Beals), the most bodacious 18-year-old welder in
How will the welder/stripper with the heart of gold overcome an insurmountable
class divide? By finding a powerful sugar daddy, natch. Alex reels in Nick
(Michael Nouri), her day-job boss, and soon she's scooting around town with him
in his Porsche and enjoying decadent lobster dinners in fancy restaurants. In
Along the way the movie gets sidetracked by subplots involving Alex's kindly
old dance mentor (Lilia Skala) as well as her sister Jeanie (Sunny Johnson),
whose equally Disneyesque dream is to win a figure skating competition. In
Eventually, though, the movie always returns to Alex's sweaty dancing or her
even sweatier workout sessions ("She's a maniac, maniac, on the
floor!!!!"), captured in detail by leering director Adrian Lyne, who
clearly has a thing for intense cardiovascular exercise.
In the film's famous climax, Alex stumbles in her big audition (an audition
arranged behind the scenes by her boyfriend, by the way) and recovers by
pulling out all the stops for a gravity defying hip-hoppity number that leaves
the snooty judges dazzled. (Any woman who was 16 years old in 1983 will
probably tell you that watching this scene was one of the most important
moments of her life.) It looks like Alex can finally drop her welding torch for
good.
Flashdance gets zero stars for its absurd plot, but I'll give it some
props for its influence on fashion (one could argue that '80s style began on
the day it was released) and for its Giorgio Moroder-heavy soundtrack, still
one of the fastest sellers of all time. If only Irene Cara could have followed
up that Oscar-winning theme song with something... anything.
Flashdance: "what a feeling" indeed.
The new special edition DVD includes the expected retrospective featurettes
(with focus on music and that inimitable choreography), plus you get a tepid,
six-song mini-soundtrack on a separate CD.
Watching the Flashdance (1983) Special Collector’s Edition DVD will make anyone want to put on a pair of legwarmers and hit the dance floor. The movie, directed by Adrian Lyne, still resonates with a younger generation (especially now that big hair and leggings are back in style), and promotes the idea that anyone can succeed if they dance their way through all the rough times.
In essence, Flashdance follows the story of a typical working class protagonist struggling to achieve the American dream. The viewer’s first glimpse of Alex (Jennifer Beals) appropriately characterizes her: she is a welder, wearing a hard hat that covers her face, and for all we know she could be a man. However, when she takes the hat off we see (in slow motion) that she is a sexy young women, livin’ in the ‘80s.
This is our first understanding of the nature of gender and sexuality in the film. Alex (a purposefully sexually ambivalent name) does a “man’s job” during the day, and a “women’s job” at night. The same men who respect her as an equal during the day job go to Mawby’s Club and enjoy her as a sex object after hours.
Alex is determined to make it, and to find her way through dance, but to do so, she must exercise her independence as a women, as well as just exercise in general. The film is careful about finding a balance between Alex as a sex symbol and Alex as an independent individual. She herself doesn’t want to be appreciated only for her body, though the cinematography is such that the viewer is constantly being exposed to shots of Alex’s thighs and crotch, rendering her character as a sex object for the viewer despite the over-arching message of the movie.
Alex’s day job boss and love interest, Nick (Michael Nouri) has already followed and succeeded in the American dream, presumably because he is male. He is technically an authority figure to Alex, and seems to be a threat to her simply because of his gender. Though Alex succumbs to her sexual attraction to him, she insists on acting the conventional (and sometimes stereotypical) part of the male in their relationship. She hits him when they fight, wears suits to dinner as an outward expression of how she views her own gender (and then takes off the suit jacket to reveal the worst/ most amazing shirt that has ever been made—yet another reason for watching this movie) and she gives him flowers.
Alex’s insistence on not taking any help from a male is put to the test when Nick secures an audition for her at the ballet studio. By accepting this audition, despite the fact that she did not secure it on her own, Alex is in a way yielding to male authority and power. However, in order to not make submission to male authority the final understanding of gender relations in the movie, Alex ultimately makes the decision to audition as an homage to her old friend Hanna, thus attributing her success not to Nick, but to the memory of her dead friend.
We are left with the impression that upon her entrance to the ballet company, Alex is going to change the face of the seemingly stiff and routine world of ballet by introducing to the committee members the most ‘80s dance routine ever, in which Alex’s hair seems to be bigger than it ever was before. The dance helps the admissions committee break free from their conservative caricatures, and apparently they don’t notice the male, moustache-clad body double for Alex’s break dancing scene.
Like any good dance-a-thon, Flashdance is peppered with dance numbers throughout the movie (though it lacks a good angry dance à la Footloose and the more recent High School Musical 2). The dancing itself may be distinctively’80s, but unless you are a professional dancer yourself and know better moves, Alex’s dance routines make anyone sitting on the couch feel envious. Luckily, the DVD comes with a soundtrack, so after you watch the movie, you can re-live the whole thing.
The creators of this collector’s edition are aware of the fact that Flashdance might seem a little dated to current audiences, so they provide a “History of Flashdance” and “The Look of Flashdance” so that audiences are more familiar with the culture of the time. There is also a “Flashdance: The Choreography” extra, which I was a bit disappointed to find out was not in fact a step-by-step instructional dace routine, but is instead a in-depth account of how the dance numbers were created and performed.
Though it is a bit ridiculous how seriously the cast and crew involved in the movie take themselves (“Academy Award Winner” is printed boldly on the DVD box), it’s still nice to have some behind-the-scenes and making-of footage for a day when you have nothing else to do but sit back and learn every detail of how they got the water to fall from that bucket and look so good. And, ultimately, 26 years after it appeared in theatres, Flashdance, with its sexy dance routines, unforgettable inspirational dialogue (“You give up your dream, you die!”) and attempt at a statement on gender relations, is still so hot that you will need the contents of an entire bucket of water poured on you after you watch it.
Flashdance Flashdance: The
dead end kid, by Kathryn Kalinak from Jump
Cut, 1984
Music
Video Music
video: messages and structures, by Deborah H. Holdstein
from Jump Cut, 1984
DVD Verdict - Special Collector's Edition [Brett Cullum]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
UNFAITHFUL B 85
USA Germany France
(124 mi) 2002
Yes, it's a Lyne film with an upscale American couple rocked by infidelity, but this isn't 'Fatal Attraction 2'. Unlike the cheap shock tactics of its predecessor, it proves a surprisingly grown up affair, exploring the panoply of emotions unleashed by sex outside an 11-year marriage. Horny excitement, burning shame, selfish liberation and incipient fear all play across Lane's face in the most striking scene, as she returns home musing on an illicit afternoon just spent with her young French lover (Martinez). What she doesn't quite count on is the response it provokes from her husband (Gere). Like Chabrol's La Femme Infidèle, on which it's based, the film eventually slides into teasing thriller mode, and though it lacks the original's astringent concentration, the range of sympathies is definitely broader here as secrets on both sides lock the couple in a private hell. An old ad man's habits die hard, however, and too many scenes are pumped up for instant impact when slow burn might have brought greater reward. Still, the superb acting and intelligent script negotiate an absorbing course between Hollywood glitz and Gallic soul-searching.
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Suburban housewife Connie Summer (Diane Lane) isn't looking
for Mr. Goodbar though it's difficult to turn down a fuck from a bookish,
pin-up French Hispanic when a magical realist windstorm all but rips her
panties off. Softcore porn poet Adrian Lyne knows good sex and while Lane and
Olivier Martinez put on a good show, beyond the sex lies a more existential
Lyne (curiously, the food products from 9 1/2 Weeks are Unfaithful's
ice packs). The elements bring Connie and Paul together, the ominous gaze of
god-like statues in a SoHo flat assuring penetration. Though his approach is
predictably Gallic, Peter is less opportunistic than you might expect. His
near-effortless romantic approach guarantees her return: he makes her walk
through a maze of books and sculptures, guiding her with words toward a book of
poems. Lyne evokes Connie's loneliness and deceit via lyrical fades and careful
product placement (here, a poster of a couple kissing at a rush-hour metro
stop) when she remembers her trembling orgasm aboard a train to suburbia. Now
that women are cheating on Richard Gere, a door has opened for a
fresher Mr. Goodbar. Lyne contemplates newer models when he first lingers on
the wrinkles of Gere's sex appeal but, in the end, the actor fights back with
evocative blood-splatter. A skipping record is Lyne's transitional element
between Connie's comfort and fear, a forgotten garb a permission to fuck and a
snow globe the haunting reminder of nature bringing and tearing lovers apart.
Loyalty is egregiously referenced at the workplace yet Lyne seemingly engages
Antonioni when Connie and Edward contemplate marital rootlessness and the ennui
of suburbia in the film's fantastic closing scene. No boiling rabbits this
time, just a stop-go-stop-go streetlight metaphor that suggests the Summers
must suffer to come back to love.
Judging by the neo-puritanical standards being gradually introduced by MPAA in recent years, Hollywood movies in the near future are most likely to resemble those made in the era of Hays Office and Production Code. Nowadays, when Hollywood studios decide to re-make a 1970s or 1980s movie, it is almost certain that the new version would have "PG- 13" rating instead of the original "R" (and these days "PG-13" is much closer to "PG" than it originally intended). So, when Hollywood studio does the opposite, many would interpret it as a cause for celebration and the sign that some of the disturbing trends might be reversed. One of such rare instances occurred with UNFAITHFUL, 2002 drama directed by Adrian Lyne. Marketed as "erotic thriller", this film is significantly more explicit in the depiction of sex than LA FEMME INFIDELE, 1969 original directed by famous French filmmaker Claude Chabrol.
Protagonist of the film is Constance "Connie" Sumner (played by Diane Lane), whose life is a perfect embodiment of every 40-something housewives' ideals - she shares posh suburban home with loving husband Edward (played by Richard Gere) and cute nine-year old son Charlie (played by Per Erik Sullivan) and, thanks to Edward's successful business, doesn't have to worry about finances. Her idyllic life begins to change one windy day in New York where she meets Paul Martel (played by Olivier Martinez), good-looking French bookseller who would use minor incident as an excuse to invite her to his apartment and start making romantic advances. After initially rejecting, Connie finds an excuse to visit his apartment again and this encounter results in the start of a torrid extra-marital affair. While Connie desperately tries to hide her double life from her family, she gradually becomes careless and creates enough suspicion for Edward to hire private investigator. This would begin cycle of events that would end tragically.
Explicit sex scenes in UNFAITHFUL don't break any new ground but they nevertheless represent quite a surprise for all those accustomed to the standards of modern Hollywood. However, the most pleasant surprise of UNFAITHFUL is not eroticism itself (although the quality of those scenes rises even above the other works of Adrian Lyne, filmmaker who made quite reputation with the word "erotic" in past decades). The most pleasant surprise of UNFAITHFUL is in the genre - this film belongs to the realm of drama rather than the realm of thriller. Script by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr. is completely dedicated to the serious exploration of all the psychological and other consequences of marital infidelity. Lyne, despite whole-heartedly adopting moralistic and pro- marriage stance, doesn't preach the sermon and makes his case with a lot of restraint, allowing the viewers to draw their own conclusions. UNFAITHFUL shows the effects of infidelity, but, in this particular case, doesn't show the causes - Sumner's marriage is portrayed as perfect; Edward doesn't neglect or abuse his wife. Connie's decision to start an affair doesn't have any rational or pseudo-rational basis, except, perhaps in the hedonistic ideology of instant self-gratification that is so prevalent in modern world. However, Lyne and his scriptwriters leave those speculations to the viewers and that makes film even more realistic, since many people in real life make serious mistakes for entirely irrational reasons.
Another pleasant surprise in UNFAITHFUL is incredible quality of acting. Diane Lane, actress with a long but not particularly stellar career, is able to blow the audience away with superb performance. Lane in this film bares all, and not just in the literal sense - the role she had taken required all of her talent. The character of Connie, with her conflicting agendas - succumbing to lust and trying to protect the shell of the family life in the same time - was complex and required the top class actress. Lane did it so magnificently that she deserves the serious consideration for top acting awards for 2002. Her partner Richard Gere, once a hot Hollywood hunk, seems quite comfortable with the age that brought him one of the first roles of cuckolded husband. His role also requires a lot of talent and Gere delivers, but this performance is overshadowed by Lane's triumph. French heartthrob Olivier Martinez, on the other hand, is burdened with somewhat thankless role of a man whose sole function is to look good and seductive and thus provide the catalyst for the drama. Martinez, however, plays this role very well.
Unfortunately, after the serious plot twist (rather unpredictable for those who haven't seen Chabrol's original) UNFAITHFUL starts to meander into the cliched thriller territory. The audience is succumbed to boring and predictable scenes involving police and criminal activity. Somewhat unusual and open-ended finale saves impression a little bit, but it happens almost half an hour too late. Yet, despite all that boredom at the end, UNFAITHFUL is still very interesting film and although it isn't a masterpiece, it features a performance that is quite worthy of that status.
Nitrate Online (Paula Nechak and Cynthia Fuchs)
essay or Paula
Nechak: Unfaithful and Cynthia Fuchs: Unfaithful
also seen here: PopMatters
(Cynthia Fuchs) review
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]
Kamera.co.uk review Simon Jones
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review also seen here: Cozzi fan Tutti Celluloid Musings (Jill cozzi) review
Salon (Charles Taylor) review Why Can’t Hollywood Make Sexually Mature Films? May 10, 2002
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [D+]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
CineScene.com (Shari L. Rosenblum) review
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C+]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Michael Rankins) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/4]
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review Special Edition
DVD Talk (Thomas Spurlin) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (Christopher Kulik) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Michael Zupan) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [2/5]
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [2.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review
IndependentCritics.com [TC Candler]
eFilmCritic.com (Jack Sommersby) review [2/5]
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [2/4]
Moda Magazine (Brian Orndorf) review [8/10]
filmcritic.com (David Levine) review [2/5]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [C+]
Talking Pictures (UK) review Jen Johnston
Plume Noire review Ed Dantes
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [D]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Movie Magazine International review Erik Petersen
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Exclaim! dvd review James Keast
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2.5/4]
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
The Boston Phoenix review Gerald Peary
Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray
Version] Gary W. Tooze