tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48836345075396578662024-03-06T01:05:38.864-05:00Bubblegum Aesthetics...Because authenticity is so bourgeois.Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.comBlogger1107125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-49877085910472467632017-08-09T17:31:00.001-04:002017-08-09T18:58:42.306-04:00New From Me: PARTY GIRL and THE SPY WHO LOVED ME<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfQnRqClRWk">He-he-HELLO!</a>, and welcome back! It struck me that I've been remiss in letting you know about two new pieces of film writing by me that went up at different sites in the last week. I'd never want all 19 followers of this blog (is it still 19 on the Blogger count list? I haven't checked in ages) to be bereft of good reading, so allow me to rectify that now.<br />
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Over at <a href="http://rogerebert.com/">RogerEbert.com</a>, I <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/keeping-the-elegant-end-up-the-spy-who-loves-me-at-40">wrote about <i>The Spy Who Loved Me</i></a>, the best of the Roger Moore Bond films, which celebrated the 40th anniversary of its U.S. release last week. That we're roughly the same distance from this dizzy, effervescent delight as it was from, say, Hitchcock's <i>Young and Innocent </i>is rather surreal-- the Bond films so often feel of-the-moment to me, regardless of how old they are--but the anniversary allowed me to go logorrheic on one of my favorite fantasy adventures, and why Moore's brand of tongue-in-cheek elegance feels so essential to <i>this</i> moment, cinematic and otherwise.<br />
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<i>Party Girl</i> (1995) offers a different, but no less crucial, sort of effervescent escapism. <a href="http://brightwalldarkroom.com/issue-50/2017/8/5/a-sorta-vibe">I wrote about </a>Parker Posey's star vehicle for <a href="http://brightwalldarkroom.com/issue50">Bright Wall/Dark Room's 50th issue,</a> whose theme is "Survival Kits." The film functioned that way for me as I drifted through the post-collegiate, pre-grad school years of the mid-90s, a period I anecdotally explore in tandem with the film, with Posey as my cinematic avatar.<br />
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Thanks to Ebert's Matt Zoller Seitz and Brian Tallerico, and everyone at BWDR for allowing me the space to explore two of my favorite movies. Now, don't let them down-- go, read!Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-6063976275278909162017-06-05T02:51:00.001-04:002017-06-05T18:20:12.389-04:00Quick Takes: A Matter of Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span data-offset-key="dmbr6-0-0"><span data-text="true">Is there a longer cut of <i>A Matter of Time</i> (1976) hiding somewhere in a vault in Italy, waiting to be restored? The last film from the masterful Vincente Minnelli feels like a <i>film maudit</i>, its meditations on the ravages of aging and imagination ironically foreshadowing the movie's own fate (Minnelli's original cut was over 3 hours long, but the American International/Italian co-production was snatched from the director's hands and slashed to 98 minutes by produces, including Jack Haley, Jr., then-husband of its star, the director's daughter Liza Minnelli; it's almost as if the venal producer from Minnelli's earlier <i>Two Weeks in Another Town</i> had come to life to haunt him). Would a three-hour cut give <i>Time</i>'s blend of artifice and neo-realism room to expand? Would it let us see more of the film's lush fantasy sequences, and better balance them with the strikingly drab spaces of its "real" world moments? Would the snatches of earnest character development be fully fleshed out, bringing greater depth to the elliptical themes of memory, richer irony to the way a movie indebted to past cinematic models (including--especially--the director's own work) longs to sing the value of "originality"? Or can what works in <i>A Matter of Time</i> only function within the fracture, its highlights flashing up like h fanciful dreams of its two central characters?</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="90aeu-0-0"><span data-text="true">What remains in the cut-up <i>Time</i> is a strange--in all wonderful senses--movie that ping-pongs between European art film traditions and the sorts of lavish Classic Hollywood productions Minnelli shaped the traditions of between 1943 and 1960 or so; there are moments when it looks and feels like something out of Visconti, and others when it seems quiveringly anxious to burst into song (even beyond the two Kander-Ebb numbers that do appear). </span></span><br />
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<span data-offset-key="90aeu-0-0"><span data-text="true"><span data-offset-key="90aeu-0-0"><span data-text="true"><span data-offset-key="90aeu-0-0"><span data-text="true">Cinematographer
Geoffrey Unsworth, who'd previously worked with Minnelli on Cabaret,
often deploys a flare-driven top-lighting that feels (in conjunction
with the Kander/Ebb songs) more like a Bob Fosse film-- the Oedipal son
haunting the cinematic father, a further play on the movie's looping
through time and memory. </span></span></span></span>The movie makes no concessions towards consistency of visual space: </span></span><span data-offset-key="90aeu-0-0"><span data-text="true"><span data-offset-key="90aeu-0-0"><span data-text="true">the movie is
set in 1949, but its various second-unit shots
around Rome freely incorporate the mid-'70s fashions, cars, etc., of extras and random passerby, without worrying about how it will all blend. At times, especially for a director whose mise-en-scene was often so controlling, it's kind of shocking in its looseness, its desire to let go and improvise (the performances balance between arch theatricality and an almost documentary casualness, as if we're watching the actors work the scene out with the director as it unfolds. It's the clearest I've ever seen the connection between Martin Scorsese's style of direction and that of the auteur he always idolized; indeed, when AIP took the film away from Minnelli, Scorsese organized a public protest in the press). </span></span>Not all of it works-- in fact, much of it doesn't work. But the chemistry between Minnelli and co-star Ingrid Bergman is wonderful, the balance of tones and styles suits the jangle of its dreamy, time-bending narrative, and when it sings, it really sings.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="90aeu-0-0"><span data-text="true"><br />Or to put it another way, imagine this: Liza Minnelli, in one of the film's many flashback/fantasy sequences, says goodnight to the Kaiser and walks into a deserted 19th century ballroom in her lavish gold dress, only to find a jazz band there playing Gershwin. </span></span></div>
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She strolls to the bandstand and joins in with that Sally Bowles voice at its peak, her '70s Broadway style merging with the '30s swing of the band, all of it set against Vincente Minnelli's lushly detailed curtains, furniture and bric-a-brac. We no longer have to be told the movie's themes about the fluidity of time: we see them, we <i>feel</i> them, and we're transported to that moment when the director was the master of MGM's greatest post-war dreamscapes, and we can suddenly sense why he made this doomed film. It only lasts for a moment, but it only has to last that long (and if we believe the film's thesis on life and magic, really only should).</span></span></div>
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Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-10527171298941254052017-04-04T17:16:00.000-04:002017-04-04T17:19:23.075-04:00Four Years Later: Roger Ebert (1942-2013)<br />
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<i>Today is the fourth anniversary of film critic Roger Ebert's death. In remembrance, I'm posting my remembrance of his impact on me, an essay which originally ran at the now-defunct film site <b>Cinespect</b>, on April 6, 2013.</i><br />
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<br />
I had been expecting it. He hadn’t posted a new review to his website
in a while (as a group of talented critics pinch-hit in his stead), his
Twitter feed had slowed down, and a statement issued two days earlier
felt less like a retirement announcement than like his own elegy—but
Roger Ebert’s death on Thursday still hit me like a thunderbolt. I never
met Ebert, never had an online exchange with him, and in recent years I
would sometimes read his movie reviews in disgust or dismissal—how
could he <i>be</i> so <i>wrong</i>, I’d think? Thirty-five years after
Ebert and Gene Siskel’s <i>Sneak Previews</i> first started showing up on PBS
stations, years after I’d discovered Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael,
Manny Farber and James Agee, André Bazin and a host of academic film
specialists, Roger Ebert sometimes felt like a relic from my cinephilic
adolescence. He was someone I appreciated but no longer felt a
connection with, and perhaps even felt a little embarrassed about.<br />
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As Will Leitch said in <a href="http://deadspin.com/5482198/my-roger-ebert-story">this excellent piece</a>, three
years before Ebert’s death: “We were all so, so stupid.” Because when
the news came down, via Facebook, all I wanted to do was cry, scour the
web for responses, and reconnect with his writing, that inimitable blend
of poetry, wit, and reportage that he deployed in his reviews and
essays. Maybe it was a subconscious form of penance for not taking him
as seriously in the last several years, or simply a moment of
recognition, shock burning away the cynicism: You want to return to that
long-dormant critical conversation with the person you’ve only met in
the space of the prose.<br />
<br />
Ebert became a film critic at 24, when his editors at the <i>Chicago
Sun-Times </i>handed him the beat in 1967. It was not a lifelong dream—he
simply wanted to work at a newspaper, and maybe “become a columnist like
[Mike] Royko.” He carried that clear-eyed reporter’s eye with him into
the movie theater, and found a way to blend its observational skill with
a slangy first person voice and a catholic taste, just as American
movies entered another golden age (and a renewed interest in film
criticism opened up media possibilities for someone savvy enough to
recognize the opportunity). This confluence of talent, timing, and
technology made Roger Ebert the most powerful film critic in America,
but the outpouring of eulogies, remembrances, Facebook comments, and
tweets over the last two days suggests he was also the most beloved. In
his memoir, <i>Life Itself</i>, Ebert writes of the impact of blogging on his
life and voice: “It pushed me into first-person confession, it insisted
on the personal, it seemed to organize itself in manageable
fragments…They come pouring forth in flood of relief.” It’s a striking
admission from a man who was never afraid of putting his personality
into his reviews, who was fond of quoting Robert Warshow’s edict that “A
man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit he is
that man,” and its open tone indicates that lifelong bond with his
readership.<br />
<br />
I was eight when I discovered <i>Sneak Previews</i>, the national version
of <i>Coming Soon to a Theater Near You</i>, the local PBS show Siskel and
Ebert had started in 1975; I remember sitting impatiently through
reviews of <i>My Dinner With Andre</i> and <i>On Golden Pond</i>—boring <i>grown-up</i>
stuff—in order to get their thoughts on far more important movies like <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> and <i>Superman II</i>; that they could speak with
intelligent sympathy about such a diverse range of films was my first
introduction to how broadly a love of cinema could stretch. In
subsequent years, as they hosted their own “Oscar picks” shows, or
fearlessly dissected each other’s opinions (with great snark, as many
have noted, but also a real cogency that distinguished them from the
host of cover band tele-critics that followed), a whole style of
thinking opened in front of my young eyes: You could argue about art,
not as a form of put-down, but as an expression of love. That might seem
banal, but to a movie-besotted Midwestern kid in the early ’80s, seeing
this play out on television was a primal moment, and it led me to a
more important discovery: Ebert’s prose.<br />
<br />
Ebert won a Pulitzer in 1975 (the first film critic to be so
honored), but the success of his TV show that same year meant that
millions would know him for his thumbs more than for his Sun-Times
reviews. But for me it was the writing that was the most exciting:
Devouring his <i>Movie Companions</i>, his <i>Film Yearbooks</i>, and his
fantastic essays and interviews was a way of learning about film style,
canons of taste, and what it meant to be a grown-up. Ebert’s compressed
poetry evoked the space of the film, the world he brought into the
theater, and the experience of seeing in what felt like real time. There
was something tactile about his style, how the compact form of a
newspaper review shaped a muscular, evocative voice that could call up a
sensation in just a few words. Writing of <i>La Dolce Vita</i>, Ebert
unwittingly described my own experience of his work:<br />
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<i>Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw “La Dolce
Vita” in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom “the sweet life” represented
everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary
romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I
was living in a version of Marcello’s world; Chicago’s North Avenue was
not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful,
and I was about Marcello’s age.</i><br />
<br />
<i>When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I
was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role
model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that
could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a
frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger
still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I
pitied and loved him…There may be no such thing as the sweet life. But
it is necessary to find that out for yourself.</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>La Dolce Vita</i> (Federico Fellini, 1960)</span></div>
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He could also be funny and anecdotal, as in this passage from his
review of <i>The Lonely Guy</i> (1984), where getting into the theater
sounds more interesting than what he finds there:<br />
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<i>I walked up to the ticket booth of the Esquire theater and with a flourish presented my Plitt Theaters pass.</i><br />
<br />
<i>“What’s this?” asked the ticket person.</i><br />
<br />
<i>“A pass to the Plitt Theaters,” I said.</i><br />
<br />
<i>“I don’t know,” the person said. “I’ll have to phone and check it
out.” I turned my back to the wind until the pass was verified, and then
walked into the theater’s priceless and irreplaceable Art Deco lobby,
which cheered me somewhat.</i><br />
<br />
<i>“It’s a shame they’re tearing this theater down,” said a young
woman to her date, as they swept past me on their way to the street. I
ordered a box of popcorn, and went into the theater.</i><br />
<br />
<i>“Good luck,” an usher told me. “You’re going to need it.” He was right.</i><br />
<br />
But it was in his raves that he was the most blissful, creating a
desire for the movie that was insatiable. Here he is on <i>Five Easy
Pieces</i>:<br />
<br />
<i>At the outset, we meet only the man — played by Jack Nicholson
with the same miraculous offhandedness that brought “Easy Rider” to
life. He’s an irresponsible roustabout, making his way through the oil
fields, sleeping with a waitress (Karen Black) whose every daydreaming
moment is filled with admiration for Miss Tammy Wynette. The man’s name
is Robert Eroica Dupea. He was named after Beethoven’s Third Symphony
and he spends his evenings bowling and his nights wearily agreeing that,
yes, his girl sings “Stand By Your Man” just like Tammy.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In these first marvelous scenes, director Bob Rafelson calls our
attention to the grimy life textures and the shabby hopes of these
decent middle Americans. They live in a landscape of motels, highways,
TV dinners, dust, and jealousy, and so do we all, but they seem to have
nothing else.</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Five Easy Pieces</i> (Bob Rafelson, 1970)</span></div>
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Thrust into his new job in 1967, Ebert quickly boned up on movie
history and film criticism—Sarris, Dwight MacDonald, Agee, Kael–but he
used what was around him to quickly forge his own style, and adapt it to
the spaces of a mass readership. That’s not as easy as it sounds.
Absent the spatial luxuries of <i>The New Yorker,</i> or the cultural prestige
of <i>The Village Voice</i> or <i>The Nation</i>, Ebert was a fascinating hybrid,
writing for newspapers with the soul of a cinephile. He was open to the
New Cinema of Hollywood in the ’70s and the influx of international
cinema in the same period, as well as popular genres, American
independent films, and (especially) documentaries. He found a voice that
could straddle and respect the needs of each, and then crafted a
conversational mode to replicate it on television, on blogs, and on
Twitter, never losing the thread. It was a breakthrough achievement,
opening professional doors and creative possibilities for every popular
media critic who followed in his wake.<br />
<br />
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<br />
It seems notable that Ebert was,
before his days at the <i>Sun-Times</i>, a doctoral student in English: Where
Kael uses the first person to convey her almost physical desire for
imagery, and Agee as a way of working out the poetics of cinematic
narrative, Ebert’s prose suggests a teacher, guiding us through the film
and conveying enthusiasm, while always keeping an eye on the broader
contexts of culture, audience, and response. He organized “Ebertfest”
(spotlighting forgotten films), led film students through shot-by-shot
viewings of a single film, and hosted panels at the Telluride Film
Festival; he also had public and very contentious arguments with other
critics about the merits of films like <i>Crash </i>(2005). But underlying it
all was the desire to share, to key you in to why he felt something
worked or didn’t—that balcony on <i>Sneak Previews </i>was a metaphorical
gathering space as much as a set.<br />
<br />
It’s been a hell of a decade for cinephilic loss. Since 2001, Kael,
Sarris, Sontag, Farber, Robin Wood, and so many others who taught us how
to see have departed (could someone check on Jonathan Rosenbaum,
please?). Ebert came at the tail end of the moment those earlier writers
helped create, but also extended into so many spaces of new media that
he feels like the avatar of an endless critical future. Writing of the
Wim Wenders film <i>The American Friend</i>, Ebert noted, “He challenges us
to admit that we watch (and read) thrillers as much for atmosphere as
for plot. And then he gives us so much atmosphere we’re almost swimming
in it.” He might have been talking about his own reviews. Perhaps the
best tribute to Roger Ebert’s movie love is to pick up its manageable
fragments, and imagine new spaces in which to continue the conversation.Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-71556842961720285702017-01-19T01:57:00.003-05:002017-03-26T03:50:47.518-04:00Con Artistry: Angels Over Broadway (1940)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Charles Engle (John Qualen)'s employer looms over him, enveloped in
Expressionist shadow, dominating the screen via his eerily opaque
glasses and large body, even if he's ostensibly in the background of
the frame. He accuses Charles of embezzling $3000 from the company and talks of Charles' failed marriage, his
tone a mix of anger and mournfulness, at a friendship betrayed, at a
cuckolding of Charles that the embezzlement gives an air of
schadenfreude. Charles denies nothing-- all the accusations are true--and
stumble<span class="text_exposed_show">s out into a rainy New York night, to complete the suicide he's announced in a note in his overcoat pocket.</span><br />
<br />
But he doesn't jump in the river; instead, a bit dazed, he stumbles
into something far deadlier-- a ritzy nightspot with the slightly
on-the-nose name of the Pigeon Club. His ennui and fatalism cause him to
overtip everyone, drawing the eye of con man Bill (Douglas Fairbanks,
Jr.), who sees him as his next mark. Meanwhile, failed playwright Gene
(Thomas Mitchell) and aspiring actress Nina Barona (Rita Hayworth) join
Bill and Charles at one of the club's tables, the mise-en-scene full of
odd, constructivist art of cityscapes, that look like hills the
characters could slide down. And that's when it all gets <i>really</i>
interesting.<br />
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<br />
<i>Angels Over Broadway </i>(1940), written, produced, and
directed by Ben Hecht (with a separate "co-direction" card for the
film's cinematographer, the great Lee Garmes) is marked as a <i>noir</i>, and
in many ways it is-- the fedoras, trench coats, rain and jazz clubs give
it the proper atmosphere, and its blend of crime and existentialism
certainly looks ahead to the narratives and tones of the late 40s. But
it feels less like a genre piece than a space for Hecht to explore
poetic flights of fancy, letting his characters overtake the narrative
with lush, jazzy digressions on life, art, love, and fate-- before the
story snaps them back into the kind of cynical patter that Hecht was
also the master of (my favorite moment in this regard is his meta-playful introduction of Hayworth's character, referencing and reversing the actress's real-life background in a conversation about acting and deception: "I'm Russian, but this year Latin is in"). This push-pull between hard-boiled realism and a
dream logic both verbal and visual (the film is full of gorgeous
black-and-white patterns and busy backgrounds) makes <i>Angels Over Broadway</i> seem less indebted to Hammett than to <a href="https://www.criterion.com/films/614-le-million">Rene Clair</a>, and to the poetics of
'30s French cinema (I half-expected Fairbanks-- who's brilliant here as a
tough guy who's not as nihilistic as he hopes--to turn to Hayworth and
tell her that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029453/">she reminded him of the Metro</a>).<br />
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There's a beautiful moment when Hayworth-- touching throughout--dances
playfully on an abandoned Broadway stage, imagining herself the star of a
show that no longer exists. It's the kind of lovely, character-driven
punctuation the film is full of, and in many ways it acts as the movie's
signature-- she knows it's fake, that her life is harder and
differently shaped than that. But for that moment, the dream is real. Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-65539561954539621212016-10-25T03:56:00.000-04:002017-03-26T03:09:07.639-04:00Quick Takes: The Facts of Life (1960)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span data-offset-key="e86n6-0-0"><span data-text="true">Bob Hope started his film career in a dumb, intermittently funny short called <i>Going Spanish</i> (1934), whose loose 20-minute 'plot' sketched out the beginning and end of an engagement in a small Mexican tourist town. Four years later, his film career began in earnest when he and Shirley Ross sang "Thanks for the Memory," the sole moment of charm amidst the painfully frantic series of comedy sketches Mitchell Leisen offered in <i>The Big Broadcast of 1938</i> (1938). He and Ross would repeat the tune that same year in <i>Thanks for the Memory</i>, an almost forgotten but very good dramedy about a young couple whose marriage is strained by the economic pressures of the 1930s. Nineteen years later, in the hit-and-miss <i>Beau James </i>(1957), Hope's portrayal of '20s New York mayor Jimmy Walker would detail the foibles of a man whose ego and charm are perpetually self-destructive to his marriage, his career, and his mistress (it's a deeply flawed film, but Hope's not the problem-- he understands the need to balance comedy and drama better than the script and direction do). And even in his dizzying '40s comedies with Paulette Goddard--particularly the very funny <i>Nothing But The Truth</i> (1941)-- there's an underlying sweetness to Hope that rarely got tapped by his scripts, but is very appealing; he's a guy whose scheming and verbal dexterity become shields against a crazy world desperate to corrupt him.</span></span><br />
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<span data-offset-key="a6eq2-0-0"><span data-text="true">All of this is to say that <i>The Facts of Life</i> (1960), his deeply felt <i>pas de deux</i> with an excellent Lucille Ball, doesn't seem as much of an anomaly now, looking over the arc of Hope's career, as it might have to critics of its day, who seemed puzzled by the by-then-increasingly-rare attempt by Hope to do something outside of one-liners and slapstick. Telling the story of two distant friends who fall in love by accident on a couples trip to Acapulco-- despite the fact that they are each part of a different couple--<i>The Facts of Life</i> is at once very funny and very melancholy, picking up those earlier threads of love and marriage that were often played for laughs in Hope's movies, and inverting them to find the pain underneath. <i>Life </i>looks less like the surreal comedies of Hope's years at Paramount, and more like the darker dramas of 1960: Charles Lang's hard-edged, wide-screened, shadow-dotted black-and-white camera-work and Saul Bass's titles feel reminiscent of Otto Preminger's films, while Ball's sad and dreamy narration also calls to mind '50s melodramas from Douglas Sirk (in fact, t<a href="http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/74444/The-Facts-of-Life/articles.html">his TCM article on the movie</a> says it started as a script written for Olivia de Havilland and William Holden in 1951, "</span></span><span data-offset-key="a6eq2-0-0"><span data-text="true">as an American variation on <i>Brief Encounter")</i>. And into this visual space of drama and tension are dropped two very skillful comedians whose gifts as actors were often very underrated, and whose more mature ages (Ball was 49, Hope 57) give an added resonance to this tale of a middle-aged affair. Hope and Ball are very well-matched. In her movies of the 1930s and 40s--the best work she ever did--Ball was brilliant at portraying women who were inevitably smarter than anyone gave them credit for; Hope's whole persona is the man who is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Her darting eyes register everything (she's one of the great responsive actresses of all time--her face often conveys three emotions and two objections at once); his down-turned lip makes his face a cynical mask that hides his insecurity, even as the rhythm of his radio-trained voice betrays anger, love, and disappointment (it matters less what he says than the tempo at which he says it, like the very good dancer Hope also was). </span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="a6eq2-0-0"><span data-text="true">Given the opportunity to play something outside of their increasingly comfortable zones, both performers leap at the chance. The film even foregrounds this movement away from actorly personae by making the tired, strained qualities of Hope's stand-up schtick a plot point: Kitty (Ball)'s narration often refers to Larry (Hope) as the "Master of Ceremonies," and in their first scene together (at a country club Halloween party where Larry is telling terrible jokes), Kitty finishes his lines for him, because she knows the routines so well. Later, on a fishing boat in Mexico, Kitty suggests a deal: "You don't tell your dumb jokes, and I won't have to pretend they're funny." All of this meta playfulness is fun, but the payoff is how game Hope is throughout: he is often quite funny, but the humor arises out of (and stays within) his character, a sad ad man whose quips become a means of connecting with others, something Larry desperately wants (and finds, briefly, with Kitty). There is slapstick, there are one-liners, there are some laugh-out-loud moments (particularly during a scene at a drive-in), but the control Hope displays throughout--making sure those moments of physical or verbal comedy seem realistic for the character he's playing, instead of just playing "Bob Hope"--gives the laughs greater resonance, and justifies the shift toward seriousness in the movie's second half. The actors and the script (by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama) do such a good job of getting us caught up in the Mexican romance of the film's first section that it's not until Kitty and Larry come home that we remember the families their affair affects, and the tensions begin to mount in both sad and funny ways (Ruth Hussey, in her final film role, is very good as Larry's wife). We know how the film will probably end (especially given the Production Code of the period), but how it gets there, and how we're supposed to ultimately feel about its resolution, remain surprisingly open-ended questions.</span></span><br />
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<span data-offset-key="a6eq2-0-0"><span data-text="true"><br /></span></span>The TCM piece linked above notes a 1961 interview with Lucille Ball, where she stated, "Bob just didn't believe in his
abilities as a dramatic actor. That was unfortunate because in my humble
opinion he could have been a really fine one if he'd believed in
himself. He should have branched out, given himself a chance." I think that's essentially correct, even if it underrates how good and ground-breaking his comedic performances between 1938 and 1954 (or so) were. But <i>The Facts of Life</i> also suggests why there was such a drop-off in quality in Hope's later films: as he releases Ball from an embrace on the country club dance floor, and wistfully watches her return to her husband, it's possible Hope knew he wasn't going to ever again say anything as poignant with that down-turned lip.</div>
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Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-80272347846870125582016-10-22T18:04:00.001-04:002017-06-08T19:35:24.158-04:00War Games: Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Fifty-seven years ago, in his review of <i>North by Northwest </i>in <i>The Saturday Review</i>, Hollis Alpert observed, "If, by the way, you like to take your suspense straight, the movie has all that's necessary to keep you on the edge of your seat, as Cary Grant gets himself into a variety of baffling and dangerous corners; it is only when you adopt the basic premise that Cary Grant could not possibly come to fatal harm that the tongue in Hitchcock's cheek becomes plainly visible."<br />
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I thought about that quote while watching <i>Jack Reacher: Never Go Back</i>, the sequel to the 2012 cult hit adaptation of Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" series that cast Tom Cruise as the ex-military, drifter hero. There are a few good one-liners in the new film, which opened yesterday, but many of the attempted jokes or catch phrases fall short, in part because the movie that surrounds them is intensely earnest in both its action and its character development (as opposed to Hitchcock's spy classic, or the variously arch James Bond films of the '60s and '70s that took <i>North by Northwest </i>as their basic template). However, if we take Alpert's observation as our skeleton key to the film's dry visual humor, then suddenly it becomes easier to see how director and co-writer Edward Zwick is having some subtle fun with the Cruise persona, and the unavoidable goofiness of the genre that <i>Never Go Back</i> works so hard to conceal. <br /><br />For a start, look at that image above, of Cruise running side-by-side with co-star Cobie Smulders: <i>they run in exactly the same way</i>. The film knows this, and gets a lot of witty mileage (to pardon the pun) out of repeating this trope throughout the movie; in fact, a great deal of the movie's fun comes from watching the twinned nature of its two stars in the same frame, with the same intense looks, same fluid action panache, and same sense of closed-off emotions. It's like a re-gendered take on the <i>Lethal Weapon </i>school of buddy cop films, except both actors are playing Riggs. Dropping these thermodynamic kindred spirits into the middle of a movie that is 1/3 conspiracy espionage chase, 2/3 family dramedy gives <i>Never Go Back</i> a pleasing and deadpan instability: we're placed in the emotional position of one of Reacher's targets, never knowing what direction things are going to move next, or how suddenly it will all just <i>go</i>. <br />
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As the movie begins, Reacher (Cruise) has come to visit Major Susan Turner (Smulders), who now heads the Military Police unit in Virginia that was once Reacher's
command. They've helped each other on a case, flirted a bit on the phone, and hinted at setting up a date. But when Reacher arrives unexpectedly for a visit, he finds that Turner has been arrested, relieved of her post, and thrown into an Army jail cell. He also finds out that a woman has claimed him as the father in a paternity suit, and that he may have a daughter, Samantha (Danika Yarosh), that he has never met. The two stories dovetail as Turner's Army-appointed lawyer is murdered, Reacher breaks Turner out of jail, they rescue Samantha from the hit-men that seem to be on everyone's trail, and the three take off for a bloody climax in New Orleans.<br />
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Based on Child's 2013 novel of the same name, <i>Never Go Back</i> takes that book's plot as its basic blocks, even as it inverts the novel's emphasis and tone, rewriting and rearranging certain narrative points like they were Tetris pieces. Child's book focused on a labyrinthine military conspiracy involving government contractors and corrupt Army officers in Afghanistan: rather than staying primarily in the DC and New Orleans areas like the film, the book literally went cross-country, dropping Reacher and Turner in a stolen Corvette and landing them in California, with stops along the way for violent encounters with meth-heads and related bad guys. The "Daughter Samantha" subplot was more ancillary, an intriguing red herring whose status as a red herring was its point: in the book, Samantha represents a momentary glimpse of a life Reacher's violent restlessness means he can never really have.<br />
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That darker kind of story might have fit the Reacher of the 2012 movie a bit better: that movie was more stripped-down in its narrative and characters, more a pure action machine (and a very enjoyable one). Cruise's performance in the first film was primarily silent, or at least that's what remains in my memory of it: lots of stares, sleek movements punctuated by an eerie and effective stillness in his body-at-rest poses. To return to Hitchcock, plot was the purest kind of MacGuffin in <i>Jack Reacher</i>, the hanger on which director Christopher McQuarrie draped dizzying violence and a growling Werner Herzog. <br /><br />Zwick and co-writer Marshall Herskovitz have long gone in for more dialogue-driven, pensive character studies, dating back to their groundbreaking TV series <i>thirtysomething</i> and <i>My So-Called Life </i>(as a solo filmmaker, Zwick has also long been fascinated with the costs and myths of military honor, in <i>Glory </i>(1989), <i>Courage Under Fire</i> (1996) and a previous Cruise collaboration, the misunderstood <i>The Last Samurai </i>(2004). It's not surprising, then, that they flip Child's script, keeping his basic conspiracy plot, but subordinating it to the family-you-make dynamics between Reacher, Samantha and Turner. This is a wise choice that emphasizes both the talents of its writers and the gifts of its cast, who have a lot of fun with the strained dynamics of learning about each other while dodging gunfire (at one point, they drive off in an action-dented Ford minivan, a lovely symbol of the film's suburban parody). It also lets Zwick and Herskovitz overcome one of the book's primary adaptation problems: Child's tendency to devote much of the prose to the endless thoughts and spinning wheels of Reacher as he works out the mystery and observes Turner in action. Absent an intrusive narration, that might have been hard to translate to the screen, although Reacher's pensiveness is well captured by Cruise, who shares with Robert Downey, Jr. the unique ability to convey several thoughts at once through his darting eyes.<br />
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That doesn't mean the film skimps on action, though, as it stages a great set-piece amidst a Mardi Gras parade, and climaxes with a slow, brutal, drawn-out slug-fest at the end whose graphic exhaustion does a nice spin on the sometimes glossy nature of action movie violence. It also captures the novel's admiration for Major Turner in the great performance of Smulders, whose textured work here moves with three-dimensional ease from the physicality of the action scenes, to the comedy of the trio work with Cruise and Danika Yarosh, to the character's earned authority as an Army officer (and the resentments that have built up due to the misogyny she faces in that position). A recent <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/tom-cruises-female-costar-cobie-smulders-emily-blunt.html?mid=twitter-share-vulture">Vulture piece</a> observed how often Tom Cruise's action films have strong women at or near their centers, and that's especially true of <i>Never Go Back</i>; Cruise is great, but I left the film longing for a Cobie Smulders spin-off: <i>Susan Turner: Never Stop Turning</i>.<br />
<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-14759627918668283962016-09-20T23:38:00.000-04:002016-09-21T10:32:07.448-04:00Curtis Hanson, R.I.P.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I just read about the <a href="http://variety.com/2016/film/news/curtis-hanson-dead-la-confidential-1201866310/">death of writer/director Curtis Hanson</a> today at the age of 71. Hanson's gifts with actors
carried him from guilty B-pleasures like <i>The Hand That Rocks The Cradle </i>(1992)
(where Annabella Sciorra and Rebecca De Mornay face off like '50s-era
vipers) to <i>8 Mile </i>(2003)<i> </i>(whose texture and grace frame Eminem with more
sympathy than he deserves, and find a empathetic heart at the center of
his rage and misogyny). In between those films, he co-adapted (with Brian Hegeland) and directed James Ellroy's <i>L.A. Confidential</i> (1997), an
ensemble prestige picture whose effortless genre play allow<span class="text_exposed_show">s
Hanson to explore post-war economics, gender roles, and McCarthyism
without ever making the proceedings feel like white elephant awards bait
(maybe that's why it received so many awards).</span><br />
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And then there's his adaptation of Michael Chabon's <i>Wonder Boys</i> (2000), as
deft and funny an exploration of academia, creativity, and writer's
block (and all the passive-aggressive behavior those modes often
entail), as has been seen in American films in the last 30 years (it
feels like the spiritual sequel to <i>Breaking Away</i>, where everyone is at
once foolish and lovable). Michael Douglas is the star, and he's great,
but <b><i>everyone</i></b> is great, from Frances McDormand's long-suffering
chancellor/mistress, to Tobey Maguire's calculatedly nihilistic creative
writing major, to Katie Holmes' wise undergraduate, to Robert Downey,
Jr.'s sly editor (it's one of Downey's best performances, which is
really saying something). As Jean Renoir's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031885/">Octave famously said</a>, "The
terrible thing is that everyone has their reasons," and <i>Wonder Boys</i> is
full of tiny grace notes that illuminate both parts of that statement,
from Rip Torn's bullshit artist at a campus cocktail party who grins
unctuously and tells Douglas' character that "I put your novel on my
syllabus every semester"; to Downey's shamelessness at using his
editorial position to score with young writers; to Katie Holmes'
observation that "You always tell us writers make choices, and it feels
like you...didn't"; to the way Douglas chases the pages of his
manuscript as they're thrown-- in both doom and a kind of sad
liberation-- into a gray Pittsburgh sky. <i>Wonder Boys </i>is the kind of film
everyone moans they don't make anymore, and then no one goes to see
(despite strong reviews, it died at the box office, and found cult life
on video). But it's Hanson's best film, the place where his generous eye
and love of performance found its best resting place. R.I.P.<br />
<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-29415915048823359022016-09-13T23:22:00.001-04:002016-09-13T23:23:37.889-04:00Quick Takes: The Lobster (2016)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><br /><br />Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. <br /> --Flannery O'Connor</i><br />
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Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.<br />
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/flanneryo102166.html</div>
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Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.<br />
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/flanneryo102166.html</div>
Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-20449915335413614952016-08-19T23:53:00.004-04:002016-11-16T21:28:34.172-05:00Quick Take: Tumbledown (2015)<br />
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There's a sadness, an ache both acknowledged and unacknowledged, in <i>Tumbledown</i> (2015), the story of the pained interactions between Hannah (Rebecca Hall), a widow whose husband Hunter Miles was a punk-turned-folkie cult icon, and Andrew (Jason Sudeikis), a pop culture academic who turns up in her Maine hometown to work on a book about the late musician. This sadness isn't readily apparent in <i>Tumbledown</i>'s first 30 minutes, which veer uncomfortably between melancholy and a kind of forced quirk, as if the movie can't decide whether it wants to follow the path of an painfully observant family dramedy like <i>Rachel Getting Married</i>, or the ain't-small-town-folk-wacky (but oh so <i>wise</i>) tone of...well, take your pick of the many, many rom-coms that have used that template in the last 20 years. If we think of the movie as a pop song, that quirk is its production sheen, layered on with all the subtlety of Phil Spector going through the <i>Let It Be</i> tapes. This grates, because we can hear the delicate relationship between melody and harmony underneath that sheen-- or rather, we can <i>see</i> it.<br />
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When the writing stumbles, and the direction occasionally makes regrettable choices, what <i>Tumbledown</i> has is its cast, singing and playing and finding changes on chords familiar and unfamiliar. They are the movie's timbre, the place where the magic really exists, beyond the banality of the lyrics and repetitive choruses. We hear the notes when Hall twists her waist and shrugs a shoulder while simultaneously turning her head in the opposite direction, her body expressing the jumble in Hannah's head as much as the musicality of her tossed-off mumbles. We hear them in Sudeikis, whose confident snarkiness as Andrew feels so movie-familiar early on (Sudeikis uses a cocked head like a weapon), but ultimately acts (in Hannah's words) as an "exo-skeleton" he sheds to reveal wounded anger. We can hear it in the interplay between Hannah's parents (Blythe Danner and Richard Masur): Danner feels like she's chewing the scenery, until the narrative reminds us of how much that over-doing covers up, while Masur does just the opposite, his underplaying and dry wit drawing us in, only to bite like a cobra. It's there in Griffin Dunne's warm bookshop owner, with his anxiety-ridden sighs, and it's there in the underused Dianna Agron, as Andrew's music industry girlfriend, Finley. Agron's not in in the film nearly enough, but when Andrew interrupts a dinner party conversation to play a Hunter Miles song (on vinyl, of course), Agron's face becomes a frozen smile, her eyes get a faraway look, and her hand subtly-but-impatiently shakes her wine glass, as if she's experienced this kind of Hunter seance many times, and just wants to get through it again with her patience intact. It's a brilliant little moment, and it makes you want to know more about Finley, and why she's put up with this for so long.<br />
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"Putting up with" is the problem/curse/balm that all of the characters are grappling with in their own ways. "I'm just here for everyone to work through their issues on," Andrew exclaims, with a by-then familiar form of charming passive-aggression, but he's not wrong. Underneath its unresolved romanticism about pop music martyrs and the Curse of Elliot Smith (who, along with David Foster Wallace and Jeff Buckley, the film incorporates into a litany of too-young dead artists, as if longing to diffuse potential criticism), <i>Tumbledown </i>is actually about the unresolved rage of family dynamics, and all the guilt, resentment, love, and longing that fuels them. No one knows exactly how or why Miles-- found dead from a presumed fall at the bottom of a mountain--died at the moment and in the way he did, and even questioning its accidental status is taboo. Everyone in <i>Tumbledown</i> is using everyone else-- for catharsis, for career advancement, for the "next stage" in their presumed personal arcs (in one rather remarkable scene, Danner's Linda sweetly-but-bluntly informs Hall's Hannah that she expects a grandchild from her because she's experienced "all the other juicy stuff in life" and doesn't want to be denied this final thing). They often use unknowingly, but it's no less devastating for that, and often so quick and casual that its impact only occurs to you later, as you turn the movie over in your head. Every character has their turn at truth-telling, even as they simultaneously use their declarations to lie to themselves. Homilies about life and energy carry with them a heavy dose of irony, like they're shibboleths repeated in desperation. Some of the lying is intentional, and some is not, and the film is wise to leave much of its impact hanging in the end (even the kiss that closes the movie is beautifully tentative, a literal pause between lean-in and lips undercutting the genre's normal sense of triumph). But it's in those moments of quiet exchange, as the film slows down to let the everyday in, that <i>Tumbledown</i> really sings.<br />
<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-59389719751271538252016-08-13T21:08:00.003-04:002016-08-14T03:05:57.266-04:00Notes on the Auteur Theorizing in 2016 (or, The Return of the Quizzical Sergio Leone)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It can't be the end of summer already, can it? Even as the temperature's been spiking into the mid-90s here in sultry Ohio, the <strike>threat</strike> opportunity of the classroom beckons in just a few short weeks, bringing with it students, syllabi, papers, and (of course) movies. So what better time to peak into that cathedral of cinephilic higher learning, <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><b>Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule</b></a>, whose kindly proprietor, Dennis Cozzalio, has turned over the student union to a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061655/" target="_blank">fearless vampire killer</a>? That's right-- it's time for some last-minute summer reading, with <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2016/08/professor-abronsiuss-robustly-random.html" target="_blank">PROFESSOR ABRONSIUS'S ROBUSTLY RANDOM, ECCENTRICALLY INQUISITIVE, GARLIC-INFUSED MID-SUMMER BACK-TO-SCHOOL QUIZ</a>. As always with a SLIFR quiz, the questions look like challenging fun (even if it's clear I should have done a bit more studying beforehand), and I extend Dennis's invitation to play along at home, via my comments section. So, raise your stakes, grab your garlic, and let's hit the hills, kids!</div>
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<b>1) Name the last 10 movies you've seen, either theatrically or at home</b><br />
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<ul>
<li><i>WATERLOO BRIDGE (1931) </i></li>
<li><i>RED-HEADED WOMAN (1932)</i></li>
<li><i>INNING BY INNING: A PORTRAIT OF A COACH (2008) </i></li>
<li><i>VARIETY GIRL (1947) </i></li>
<li><i>THE LADY IS WILLING (1942) </i></li>
<li><i>DEADPOOL (2016) </i></li>
<li><i>JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY (1960) </i></li>
<li><i>THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE (1936) </i></li>
<li><i>HIGH-RISE (2016) </i></li>
<li><i>EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! (2016)</i></li>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH3bvxJ8EXC6MTUFFwU_08bv6t0RKwCzERgKBmDrVx5NsIA39oeB6Ls6eEOa_g6decwR2ejueFioXbmmvXJzQ3ZzVGiiF1UNejXmZwLsct58PAAUo2xP7-GJe80jNzS4qVCllOIemFHq_o/s1600/paulette-goddard-145.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH3bvxJ8EXC6MTUFFwU_08bv6t0RKwCzERgKBmDrVx5NsIA39oeB6Ls6eEOa_g6decwR2ejueFioXbmmvXJzQ3ZzVGiiF1UNejXmZwLsct58PAAUo2xP7-GJe80jNzS4qVCllOIemFHq_o/s320/paulette-goddard-145.jpg" width="248" /></a>Speaking of the illustrious Mr. Cozzalio, I stole (with his permission) a long-running feature of his fine blog back in February-- the ongoing "Recently Viewed" list (which you can see to the right of this post). For years, I'd kept a paper journal of the films I'd been watching, along with starred responses; it was a way of keeping track of what I'd seen, and a memory spur for the inevitable question, "Seen anything good lately?" Then, life got busier, and I lost track of the journal, and years of film-going slipped out of my memory like a mindless comment escaping Donald Trump's lips. When Dennis was kind enough to invite me to participate in his end-of-year <a href="http://trailersfromhell.com/a-2015-slifr-movie-treehouse-digest/#.V6-fTLc0j4l" target="_blank">"SLIFR Treehouse"</a> blogathon, I took it as an opportunity to restart the journal list, but in electronic form on my own blog. It's been a good way to remind myself of the last 6 months of movie watching, and also a sometimes anxious form of transparency: "Do I <i>really</i> want them to know I watched <i>Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Dude-Bro</i>?" At the same time, I am a firm believer that there's no such thing as a guilty pleasure, and that one's tastes can be an interesting starting point for writing, discussion, and exploration (and anyway, admitting to t<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2101383/" target="_blank">he Malick film</a> is far more embarrassing). I like the hopscotch quality of the films, which combine catching up with 2016 releases and my recent fascinations with the movies of Mitchell Leisen, key-to-Classic-Hollywood Fred MacMurray, and the eternally underrated Paulette Goddard. Some of these are tagged to writing projects, some are "keeping up" obligations, and some are just curiosities, stops on a trail inspired by other films, a vast network of movie love. In the end, the list's patron saint is <i>Everybody Wants Some!!'</i>s pitcher-with-a-secret Finnegan, who
speaks cinephilia's mantra while sucking on a bong: "It's about finding
the tangents within the framework. Therein lies the artistry, man." <br />
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<b>2) Favorite movie feast</b><br />
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<b>3) <i>Dial M for Murder</i> (1954) or <i>Rear Window</i> (1954)?</b><br />
MGM owned the Classic Hollywood box office, and Warners gets the posthumous hipster cred, but was there any studio between, say, 1935 and 1955 with the sheer, diverse, glamorous <i>fun</i> of Paramount? From <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/bing-crosby-the-road-films-bob-hope-and-bing-crosby/3544/" target="_blank">broken-fourth-wall comedies</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnlDHXUQLAU" target="_blank">aching melodramas</a> to the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043014/" target="_blank"><i>noir</i>iest of <i>noir</i></a><i>,</i> their range, consistency, and ability to balance satire with sheen feels more and more unmatched to me. All of which is a way of saying that it makes perfect sense that Alfred Hitchcock-- whose aesthetic blends all of the above qualities into something singular--would have such a great extended run there in the 1950s. And while I adore Ray Milland's scheming husband and John Williams' sly police inspector, <i>Rear Window</i> has it all over the excellent <i>Dial M for Murder</i>: the latter is a very fine drawing room marriage comedy disguised as a thriller, while <i>Window </i>feels like Hitch's authorial signature (and has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsBXV8i_ZLM" target="_blank">an introduction </a>that is rivaled only by Jane Greer's in <i>Out of the Past</i>). Besides, once I tell you which one has Thelma Ritter, it's really no contest, is it?<br />
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<b>4) Favorite song or individual performance from a concert film</b><br />
<b> </b>The greatest there ever was, the greatest there ever will be.<br />
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<b>Excluding another film from the same director, if you were programming a double feature what would you pair with:</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>5) Alex Cox's <i>Straight to Hell </i>(1986)?</b><br />
Dammit-- I knew I should have boned up on some of these films, instead of spending the night before the exam binging on Prince videos on YouTube. I haven't seen this one, but the cast listing-- Elvis Costello! Grace Jones! The Pogues!--as well as its description ("The film has been called a <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="Parody">parody</a> of Spaghetti Westerns,
and focuses on a gang of criminals who become stranded in the desert,
where they stumble upon a surreal Western town full of coffee-addicted
killers") suggests a playful, pop-driven genre satire, so how about Brian De Palma's fabulous <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071994/" target="_blank">Phantom of the Paradise</a>?.<br />
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<b>6) Benjamin Christensen's <i>Haxan: Witchcraft Throughout the Ages</i> (1922)?</b><br />
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Lotte Reiniger's fabulous 1926 animated feature, <i>The Adventures of Prince Achmed</i>.<br />
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<b>7) Federico Fellini's <i>I vitteloni</i> (1953)?</b><br />
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<b><br /></b>
<b>8) Vincente Minnelli's <i>The Long, Long Trailer </i>(1953)?</b><br />
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<b>9) Sam Peckinpah's <i>The Ballad of Cable Hogue</i> (1970)?</b><br />
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<b><br /></b>
<b>10) George Englund's <i>Zachariah</i> (1971)?</b><br />
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<b><br /></b>
<b>11) Favorite movie fairy tale</b><br />
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My Mitchell Leisen binge exposed me to this classic, and I think I'll stick with it for awhile (although <i>My Man Godfrey</i>, <i>Rules of the Game</i>, and <i>Faerie Tale Theatre</i> are all good runners-up).<br />
<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>12) What is the sport that you think has most eluded filmmakers in terms of capturing either its essence or excitement?</b><br />
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Why is it so hard to make a good football movie? <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095082/" target="_blank">Baseball</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3076658/" target="_blank">boxing</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110057/" target="_blank">basketball</a>, even <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078902/" target="_blank">cycling</a> have all had cinematic high points. But football seems destined to be, at best, a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066026/" target="_blank">funny </a><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090713/" target="_blank">element</a> within a larger and different genre, or <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077663/" target="_blank">the jumping off point </a>for a very different kind of story. At worst, it becomes a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079640/" target="_blank">heavy-handed</a> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071771/" target="_blank">allegory</a> for The Man and his Machinations. Is it because filmmakers want to believe they more closely resemble the poetry of a ballpark diamond, even if their aesthetic is more like the violence of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146838/" target="_blank">a dirty tackle</a>? <b> </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>13) <i>The Seventh Seal</i> (1957) or <i>Wild Strawberries</i> (1957)?</b><br />
Let's just say I don't remember <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA5ryowAyLk" target="_blank">Bill and Ted</a> dreaming of a family picnic by a lake.<br />
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<b>14) Your favorite Criterion Collection release</b><br />
Which child is your favorite? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Why do fools fall in love? This is an impossible question, pre-wrapped in the kind of movie nerd anxiety that will strike at 4 a.m., when you realize you named <i><a href="https://www.criterion.com/films/27561-blow-out" target="_blank">Blow Out</a></i> when you should've named <a href="https://www.criterion.com/films/27527-head" target="_blank"><i>Head</i></a>. And what are we judging here? The film itself? Gear-head questions about transfer and sound quality? The number and quality of its extras? The depth (or joyous silliness) of its audio commentaries? Hell, I could list ten favorite Criterions on the beauty of their packaging alone (in this, I think <a href="https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/744-3-silent-classics-by-josef-von-sternberg" target="_blank">the Sternberg box</a> has everyone beat). Why, Professor, whyyy????<br />
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But as David Thomson, the no-longer-at-the-cool film-kids-table critic, once wrote--a Crusoe must be honest with himself. And so I have to name <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/308-the-rules-of-the-game-everyone-has-their-reasons" target="_blank">my favorite film</a>, whose everything quality as movie and Criterion disc just makes it the best:<br />
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<b>15) In the tradition of the Batley Townswomen's Guild's staging of the Battle of Pearl Harbor and <i>Camp on Blood Island,</i> who would be the featured players (individual or tag-team) in your Classic Film Star Free-for-all Fight?</b><br />
<br />
I like to imagine the casts of various Judd Apatow projects splitting off, Sharks/Jets style, to see who could best re-create the climactic showdown in <i>Meatballs</i> (1980).<b> </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>16) <i>Throne of Blood </i>(1957) or <i>The Lower Depths</i> (1957)?</b><br />
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I still haven't seen either (ducks and dodges thrown knives), but I do love <i>No Regrets for Our Youth</i> (1946).<br />
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<b>17) Your favorite movie snack</b><br />
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I think this was a question in <a href="http://bubblegum-cinephile.blogspot.com/2008/08/summer-reading-list.html" target="_blank">a previous Professor's quiz</a>, but that's cool-- it's always good when you can make connections between courses. I am sticking with my earlier answer of popcorn accompanied by a lovely box of Raisinets.<br />
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<b>18) Robert Altman's <i>Quintet</i>-- yes or no?</b><br />
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This film has somehow been in my Netflix queue for more than a decade, and I still haven't gotten to it. This, despite my love of both Altman and star Paul Newman, as well as my fascination with the perverse curios of directors I admire (I mean, I've seen--and even enjoyed at least parts of!--both <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116669/" target="_blank"><i>Jack</i> </a>and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092226/" target="_blank"><i>Wise Guys</i></a>). I guess the fact it keeps getting pushed down by newer or older releases indicates I'd probably lean towards no? But I do very much want to catch up with it someday. <br />
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<b>19) Name the documentarian whose work you find most valuable</b><br />
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Michael Apted, whose <i>Up</i> films are as humanist as Renoir, as suspenseful as Hitchcock, and as full of observant humor as a great Chaplin film. I can't think of a document as full, sustained, or as generous as what Apted has achieved over the last five decades. <br />
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<b>20) <i>The Conversation</i> (1974) or <i>The Godfather Part II</i> (1974)?</b><br />
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"I loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919." <br />
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<b>21) Favorite movie location you've visited in person</b><br />
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<b> </b>I don't know if I have a "favorite," per se, but it's nice when <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/W/bo25031277.html" target="_blank">our Midwestern metropolis </a>gets to pop up in the movies. So it was a fun coincidence when, just two weeks after my wife and I had spent an anniversary trip there, the Renaissance Hotel suddenly appeared up in <i>The Avengers</i> (2012). Sure, the film claimed it was Heidelberg, Germany. And it was under attack by Loki. But you can't have everything.<br />
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<b>22) If you could have directed a scene from any movie in the hope of
improving it, what scene would it be, and what direction would you give
the actor(s) in it? (question submitted by Patrick Robbins)</b><br />
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<b> </b>The whole of <i>Mamma Mia! </i>(2008). It's a terrible film, and it's possible nothing could improve its hackneyed plot, its abuse of its gifted cast, and its strained use of ABBA. But there are small moments of grace (Pierce Brosnan's non-singing scenes, Meryl Streep helping her daughter get dressed for the wedding) that suggest a more engaged experience, one not so intent on bulldozing you with its size, sound, relentless pacing and insistence on a circumscribed and bullying definition of "fun." <br />
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My advice to the cast would be one simple line: "Breathe."<br />
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<b> </b>
<b>23) <i>The Doors </i>(1991) or <i>JFK</i> (1991)?</b><br />
Oh, my-- can "an enema" be my third option?<br />
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<b>24) What is your greatest film blasphemy or strongest evidence of your status as a contrarian? (H/T Larry Aydlette)</b><br />
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Um, well, I <i>did </i>just admit to enjoying parts of <i>Jack </i>(1996) up above, for which <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIaORknS1Dk" target="_blank">I expect to be stoned in the town square</a> by a collection of dedicated cinephilic priests. Beyond that, I don't like Darren Aronofsky movies, I think most post-<i>Badlands</i> Malick is ponderous and abstracted to the occasional point of offensiveness, <i>The Royal Tennenbaums</i> is actually my least-favorite Wes Anderson film (although I still love it), and I actually like a lot of superhero films (including the much-maligned <i>Superman Returns</i> (2006), which is still <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2012/01/video-essay-deep-focus-superman-returns-angel-of-america-132560/" target="_blank">the best </a>of the recent cycle of comic book movies).<br />
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But does anything really make one <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9foi342LXQE" target="_blank">contrarian</a> anymore, particularly in the film blogosphere? I mean, I suppose one could claim a dislike of "Peak TV" (I sometimes suspect not liking certain TV auteurs is really the only blasphemy left) or an admiration/dismissal of a beloved or reviled critical personality. But those are also the calling cards a lot of folks build their Twitter accounts around. People work so <i>hard</i> to be contrarian, to find their slice of the click-bait. Nothing suggests an insecure narcissist as much as someone who perpetually insists on their rebellious nature (or as an undergraduate mentor of mine was fond of saying, "Nothing's as bourgeois as saying you're not").<br />
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What feels most notable to me about this kind of positioning is how the default for establishing one's anti-establismentarian cred is to say what we <b><i>don't</i></b> like (look at my list above, which is primarily negative). A strangling, glance-over-your-shoulder hipsterism means that "overrated" is much more marketable, sadly, than "underrated." And yet, underrated is where the real conversations begin, because it's the real space of surprise, and its fuel is joy. But that's precisely why it doesn't feel "contrarian," because it doesn't need the momentum of such a justification to make it sing. What I like is what I like, separate from what others like.<br />
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That said, <i>Under the Cherry Moon</i> is a masterpiece, and I will fight you to the death if you claim otherwise, philistine! <br />
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<b>25) Favorite pre-1970 one-sheet</b><br />
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<b>26) Favorite post-1970 one-sheet</b><br />
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<b>27) <i>WarGames </i>(1983) or <i>Blue Thunder</i> (1983)?</b><br />
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<i>Saturday Night Fever</i> (1977).<b> </b><br />
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<b>28) Your candidate for best remake ever made</b><br />
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Well, <i>Diner </i>does Fellini pretty well...<i>Pale Rider</i>'s a pretty good reworking of <i>Shane</i>...<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094812/quotes" target="_blank">Candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she's registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern</a>...<br />
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But my favorite "remake" is actually an adaptation, that so transforms its source material that it makes the original seem like a dry run for its cinematic incarnation.<br />
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There is no better Rodgers & Hammerstein movie than <i>The Sound of Music</i>, a film so trillingly omnipresent in my childhood that it took decades for me to appreciate just how stylish, sly and humanized the movie is compared to its stiff, underwritten stage version. Ernest Lehman deserves all the credit in the world for reworking its scenes, beefing up Captain Von Trapp's part (a cipher in the original), and giving plenty of room for the dazzling Eleanor Parker to make the Baroness <a href="https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-regret-to-inform-you-that-my-wedding-to-captain-von-trapp-has-been-canceled" target="_blank">a surprisingly human figure</a>. But of course, the MVPs are its stars. <i>Music </i>was written as a vehicle for the great Mary Martin, and it shows-- Maria is virtually the only character in the play with depth. But as embodied by Julie Andrews in the film, Maria maintains her gentle nature while replacing the dull naivete with some of Mary Poppins' dry wit. Most of all, Christopher Plummer makes Captain Von Trapp a figure of real sadness, rage, humor and nobility-- far more than in the stage version, we both believe and understand the politics of Von Trapp, so crucial to making the narrative go. And the way Plummer quietly controls the "pinecone" scene ("Fraulein, is it to be at every meal, or merely at dinnertime, that
you intend on leading us all through this rare and wonderful new world
of... indigestion?") is the best example of how his stern charisma shakes the sap out of the story, and makes the movie sing.<br />
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<b>29) Give us a good story, or your favorite memory, about attending a drive-in movie</b><br />
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I must have been about nine, since <i>The Empire Strikes Back</i> was re-released a year before <i>Return of the Jedi</i> to goose interest in the upcoming film (which, clearly, needed to build anticipation among youthful acolytes like me, who only spent nearly every waking hour pondering the previous film's riddles and cliffhangers). I think I'd seen <i>Empire</i>, in those pre-video days, three or four times in its initial 1980 release, and again in a "regular" theater two years later. But it was playing at our local drive-in in Kalamazoo, and going to a drive-in was a Family Event. The sound from the speaker-box was tinny, the view was slightly obstructed by both the windshield and surrounding cars-- but darkness fell just as the Millennium Falcon took off from Hoth into outer space, destroying the distinction between the stars on the screen and the stars in the sky. In that moment, the entire space felt like it was transported to a galaxy far, far away, and it's still my favorite moment of you-are-there serendipity.<br />
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<b>30) Favorite non-horror Hammer film</b><br />
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I know I'm going to get a cross in the face (or perhaps sled tracks on my back) from the Professor for admitting this, but Hammer remains a big gap in my cinephila, and all the films I can think of would fit into a "horror" mold. That said, I do have the Paulette Goddard Hammer crime thriller <i>The Unholy Four </i>sitting next to me as I type this, and look forward to diving in. <b> </b><br />
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<b>31) Favorite movie with the word/number "seven" in the title (question submitted by Patrick Robbins)</b><br />
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<b>32) Is there a movie disagreement you can think of which would cause you to reconsider the status of a personal relationship?</b><br />
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"You feel...<i>how</i> about <i>Pixels</i> (2015)?"<b> </b><br />
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<b>33) <i>Erin Brockovich</i> (2000) or <i>Traffic</i> (2000)?</b><br />
Aha! Speaking of contrarianism!<br />
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I've never understood the acclaim around <i>Traffic</i>, a film that feels bogged down by its own self-importance, its sprawling narrative and its all-star cast's tendency to Oscarbate to a disturbing extreme. Its dark moments feel contrived, its message feels heavy-handed, and its look predicts the overexposed deserts that dot too many AMC programs. So, of course, it's what Soderbergh won the Oscar for.<br />
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<i>Erin Brockovich</i>, on the other hand, feels like the embodiment of the auteur theory-- the ability of a gifted director to take standard studio material and place his stamp on it. I don't think <i>Brockovich</i> is a classic, either, and it's hampered by its plot machinations. But those concerns fall away in the interplay between Julia Roberts and Aaron Eckhart, whose scenes feel so much more relaxed and improvisational than any of the "dun-duh-DUNNNN" moments of 'revelation' in <i>Traffic</i>. The beautifully detailed mise-en-scene of the everyday and the quiet pleasure Soderbergh takes in his performers' work make <i>Erin Brockovich</i> a far more cinephilic experience.<br />
<br />
That said, I'd take <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h_iD1us304" target="_blank"><i>The Limey </i>(1999)</a> over either one any day.<br />
<br />
<b>34) Your thoughts on the recent online petition demanding that Turner Classic Movies cease showing all movies made after 1960.</b><br />
<b></b><br />
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<b><br /></b>Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-57018446213020845732016-07-14T16:03:00.000-04:002016-07-14T16:03:08.989-04:00Watch The Skies: Empire of the Sun<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When I was fourteen, Steven Spielberg's <i>Empire of the Sun</i> opened at the new UA theater in my hometown of Kalamazoo. It would be a key moment in my budding, teenaged cinephilia, and I explore the film, and trace out my shifting responses to it over the last (nearly) 30 years <a href="http://brightwalldarkroom.com/issue-37/2016/7/8/watch-the-skies-empire-of-the-sun-and-the-difficult-third-album" target="_blank">in a new piece</a> up at <i><a href="http://brightwalldarkroom.com/" target="_blank">Bright Wall/Dark Room</a></i>. Thanks again to the editors there for all their great work, and to Google Doodle artist Sophia Foster-Dimino for her beautiful accompanying illustration!Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-75527088636937415472016-06-07T18:23:00.000-04:002016-06-07T18:27:07.938-04:00Super Americana: The Rocketeer 25 Years Later<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<i>"I’ve bought a ticket in a lottery, the grand prize of which amounts to this: being read in 1935."—</i>Stendhal<br />
<br />
Released 25 years ago this month, <i>The Rocketeer</i>—director Joe Johnston<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null"> </a>and screenwriters Danny Bilson
and Paul De Meo’s adaptation of Dave Stevens’ acclaimed indie comic—was
pitched as Disney’s second attempt (after the previous year’s equally
stylized, period-set <i>Dick Tracy</i>) to compete with <i>Batman</i>, after that film stormed theaters in 1989. It had rising stars like Billy Campbell (making his film debut after gaining good notices for work on TV shows like <i>Crime Story</i> and <i>Dynasty</i>) and Jennifer Connelly; a marvelous villain portrayed by the most recent James Bond, Timothy Dalton; well-regarded character actors like Alan Arkin, Paul Sorvino and William Sanderson
in key supporting roles; a screenwriting team who’d just show-run a
well-received adaptation of <i>The Flash</i> for CBS; and a director coming
off the surprise hit of <i>Honey, I Shrunk The Kids</i>. The gorgeous,
painted Art Deco poster captured the look of Stevens’ comic brilliantly
for longtime fans, while grabbing the eyes of those (like 18-year old
me), who’d never heard of the Rocketeer in 1991, but were certainly
curious to see what this flying helmeted man was all about.<br />
<br />
But the film failed to take off that year, garnering good reviews but doomed by a summer scheduling that dropped it smack-dab between the season's two biggest hits, <i>Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves </i>and <i>Terminator 2</i>. It sunk at the box office, and only found commercial success later on home video. And yet, looking at it now, its retro optimism feels like a road-map to
the future, a presaging of precisely the blend of action, wit, nostalgia
and pathos that drives the Marvel blockbusters currently dominating the
marketplace (released, ironically enough, through parent company
Disney). Like Stendhal, resigning himself to contemporary failure in
order to find posthumous glory, <i>The Rocketeer</i> has outlasted Costner
and Ah-nuld as a model of all-ages action filmmaking.<br />
<br />
Over at <a href="http://rogerebert.com/">RogerEbert.com</a>, I take <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/before-the-first-avenger-the-rocketeer-25-years-later" target="_blank">a long look at the movie</a>, its genesis, and the lasting impact of its retro vision on contemporary pop culture. I'd be grateful if you'd give it a read, and even happier if you'd take a look at the the film-- I assure you, you won't regret getting caught up in its tailwind.<br />
<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-3213344249746865452016-05-12T15:29:00.001-04:002016-05-12T15:29:36.060-04:00Apocalypse, Then: The Bed-Sitting Room<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
I've long been interested in writing for the excellent online film magazine <a href="http://brightwalldarkroom.com/" target="_blank"><i>Bright Wall/Dark Room</i></a>, so I'm thrilled to be in <a href="http://brightwalldarkroom.com/issue35" target="_blank">their new "sci-fi" issue</a>, which went online Tuesday afternoon. My piece is about Richard Lester's brilliant, bleak, and brutal 1969 apocalypse comedy <i>The Bed-Sitting Room</i>, which pulled together several threads of sixties British satire and themes from all of Lester's previous films, and put them at the service of a vision so unrelenting in dystopic tone and imagery that it might have made Brecht reconsider alienation. My piece can be found <a href="http://brightwalldarkroom.com/issue-35/2016/5/4/post-apocalyptic-alienation-revue-richard-lesters-the-bed-sitting-room-1969-and-the-dream-of-london-at-the-end-of-the-world" target="_blank">here</a>, but I urge you to subscribe to the whole magazine and read everything-- the folks at <i>BW/DR</i> are doing wonderful work that deserves your ongoing support.<br />
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<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-91101701841160530382016-04-21T23:19:00.002-04:002016-04-22T00:19:45.452-04:00I Wish U Heaven: Prince, R.I.P.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I genuinely believed I'd never have to write this blog post. <br />
<br />
When my wife came upstairs this afternoon and told me Prince died, it didn't actually register at first: I thought of John O'Hara writing of George Gershwin's death: "I don't believe it if I don't want to." It's not an exaggeration to say I feel like a whole chunk of my universe has been ripped away-- aside from the Beatles and Miles Davis, no musician meant more to me, or did more to transform my life, than Prince. I wrote about it a couple of years ago in <a href="http://bubblegum-cinephile.blogspot.com/search?q=wicked+%2Bdivine" target="_blank">this blog post</a>, which was not even about Prince, but about the comic book <i>THE WICKED+THE DIVINE</i> (which, I could not have known then, <a href="https://twitter.com/McKelvie/status/723199466619035648" target="_blank">was going to add a Prince-like character</a> to its pantheon of warring pop gods):<br />
<br />
<b><i> It was a few nights ago, and while talking about pop music with my wife,
I was trying to explain the impact Prince had on my teenaged self.
Finally, after talking about the playfulness of his persona, the
powerful contradictions in his lyrics, the energy of the music, I
settled on the most expressive reason: "Prince taught me how to walk."<br />
</i></b><br />
<b><i></i></b><br />
<b><i></i></b><br />
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<b><i><br />
I wasn't sure what that meant, exactly, except that I felt it very
deeply: vivid visual memories of high school hallways, being sixteen,
understanding that there was such a confidence to Prince's work that you
literally felt it, that it transformed your body. Hundreds of songs
exist about dance floors and nightclubs, but the best pop music gets
under your skin everywhere, transforms the everyday into a song.
It's alluring and liberating and addictive, and Kieron Gillen and Jamie
McKelvie get it down to their bones. When, in one of his patented
end-of-the-issue essays at the back of issue two of The Wicked + The Divine,
Gillen alludes to his own experience with the physicality of pop--
talking of how Hole's "Beautiful Son" made him "...walk better. I wasn't
uncomfortable, but now I'm beyond comfortable. It's the first time I've
felt like a shark in any waters. Whatever this is, I'm at home here,
and I'm powerful here."--I smiled and nodded in recognition.<br />
<br />
There are pop artists that speak to you so deeply that it's like you've
known them your whole life, that they were buried in your subconscious,
and each new work is less an act of consumerism than one of
self-recognition, another part of their body of work intersecting with
yours, and everything moving together.</i></b><br />
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<b><i><br /></i></b>I spent the rest of the past several hours in a kind of haze, <a href="https://twitter.com/BrianCDoan/with_replies" target="_blank">tweeting incessantly about Prince </a>as a kind of catharsis, as if I was subconsciously building a wall of remembrance, as if sharing images and song lyrics and memories (and cross-listing and re-posting other people's similar tweets) could both expunge the confusion at his sudden death and perhaps work like a sort of seance. But mostly it's because I wanted to say <i>something</i>, but lacked the words (at least on first hearing the news). Talking about him, reading about him, listening to the music was and is both a gesture of mourning and a joyous act, similar to what Shawn Taylor says in<a href="https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2016/04/21/the-beautiful-one/" target="_blank"> this lovely piece</a>:<br />
<br />
<b><i>Losing <a href="https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2016/03/23/rest-in-power-to-the-5-ft-assassin/" target="_blank">Phife</a>, <a href="https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2016/01/11/farewell-to-the-star-man/" target="_blank">David Bowie</a>,
and now Prince in the same year is devastating. Not because of an
unhealthy relationship to pop stars, but because art matters. It matters
differently to each of us, but it matters. But out of all forms of art,
music, I feel, matters the most. It can speak for you when you’re
tongue tied. It can describe what you’re feeling when you can’t get your
mind right to identify it. It can get you out of bed, dancing across
the floor, shaking the blues from your fingertips and swaying hips. It
can help you find the tears that don’t come when you need them to. </i></b><br />
<br />
I hope to say more about Prince and his work, and what it meant to me, in the coming weeks. But for now, I just want to re-post a link to something I wrote three years ago for the late film journal <i>Cinespect</i>. It's called <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130705154547/http://cinespect.com/2013/05/the-curious-case-of-christopher-tracy/" target="_blank">"The Curious Case of Christopher Tracy." </a>It's nominally about his criminally underrated movie <i>Under the Cherry Moon</i> (and its relationship to the Baz Luhrmann <i>Gatsby </i>adaptation that was about to be released), but it also takes a wider view of what Prince meant in a particular cultural moment, and what his work still means to me, and it says a lot of what I would want to say in the immediate wake of his death. In particular, this part feels resonant for today:<br />
<br />
<b><i>When Christopher is killed by Issac’s thugs at the end of the film, he
ascends to heaven, or at least that’s what the music tells us: The
fragile acoustic ballad “Sometimes It Snows in April” offers a vision of
Christopher from Tricky’s heartbroken perspective, while the appearance
of the actual Prince and the Revolution on the credits, singing
“Mountains” while floating in the clouds, suggests a witty play on myths
of rebirth, the ending Gatsby didn’t get. Is it possible that this is
also the “heaven” that Duke Ellington wrote of in his work, the code
word for Harlem, with all its political and artistic possibilities for a
burgeoning black artistic class, one more historical nod to the past by
the director, even as his funk closes the film out in the musical
future? Or has the green light moved out of the bay and across the
continent? At a key moment in “Under the Cherry Moon,” Tricky sports a
cowboy hat; it’s an ironic play on a key signifier of American
masculinity, since Tricky is wearing it during a breakdown, but also a
reminder of where Jerome Benton and Prince are from—the Midwest that
Fitzgerald (himself a St. Paul native) refers to throughout “Gatsby” as
“the West,” without any qualification. For Nick Carraway, it’s a space
of retreat from an East he no longer wants any part of; for Fitzgerald, a
space he escaped. But for Prince it remains the frontier in all senses,
the center out of which stretches his endless creative horizon, where
concentric circles of style, image, and history float like cherry moons.
It’s Prince’s final reversal on the Fitzgerald dilemma: “to be borne
back ceaselessly into the past” not as nostalgia trap or defeat, but as a
postmodernist call to arms.</i></b><br />
<br />
R.I.P., Prince.<br />
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<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-72813107586438355482016-04-10T17:18:00.001-04:002016-04-10T17:18:08.791-04:00CIFF40: Chronic (2015)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Chronic</i> opens with a long take, framed with the interior of a car, as we peer through a windshield at the front of a house, the driveway and lawn seen in pieces, an unidentified person seen locking the door. The shot lingers for a minute, really allowing the eye to wander, to observe the person close the front door, fumble with keys and then walk to the car. There's no cut to a close-up, no music on the soundtrack, no indication of where we are or why this moment is important. Nothing is explained or justified. It's an act of seeing, a glimpse out of time. It is banal, and it is riveting.<br />
<br />
Introduced at the <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/" target="_blank">Cleveland Film Festival's</a> March 31 afternoon screening by hospice workers from Cleveland and Ohio City, <i>Chronic</i> details the life of David (Tim Roth), a professional care-giver working with different patients in Southern California. I saw this film more than a week ago, loved it, and yet have delayed writing about it, for reasons I can't quite ascertain. In part I think it's due to the personal, often-difficult nature of the material, but I think a bigger reason is its tone and approach to David's story. This is a film full of long takes like the one I described above, long extended shots of space whose duration and stillness generates a paradoxical response (at least in me): the often-immobile camera's unshakeable, intense focus on what the frame has cut out of its world at a given moment lets the mind wander and observe, drift and make connections to what is unsaid, even as we observe the rich and sad detail of David's work routines. Director Michel Franco allows details to pile up (the way that David shifts a resting body in bed, how he bathes a patient, the exquisite sensation of tiny things like the smell and texture of parsley in the kitchen), and the immersion in the everyday feels vital.<br />
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The first interaction with a patient we see is David's care of Sarah (Rachel Pickup), dying of cancer, framed on couches, in bathtubs, against kitchen walls, as if she was a figure out of a <a href="http://www.elboomeran.com/upload/fotos/blogs_entradas/jacqueslouis_david__la_mort_de_marat_med.jpg" target="_blank">Jacques Louis David painting</a> (especially in the film's earlier scenes, there's a way in which the still frame makes the photography feel almost painterly in its figuration). Sarah and David are often framed within the frame by doorways, or the jutting edges of a hallway, creating a split-screen effect that suggests David's distance from her, even when they are in the same shot. Throughout the film, recurring door-frames and windows will provide ironic commentaries on transparency, connection and access--emotional, familial, professional, legal. The interplay between Tim Roth and Rachel Pickup in these early scenes feels like a documentary while maintaining a stylized theatricality; there's a complex tone
of control and looseness (as when Sarah's family are saying their final goodbyes to Sarah on her living room couch), which slowly seeps from being simply a pleasing stylistic tool, to becoming the main thread of the narrative. While an excellent care-giver, we slowly learn that David's life outside of his job is far messier.<br />
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The first hint is at a bar, after Sarah's funeral (again, an earlier moment marked by a shot through a windshield). Chatting with a young couple, David tells them Sarah was his wife, and she's just passed away. Later, taking care of second patient John (a sad, funny Michael Christofer), a retired architect who's suffered a stroke, David becomes obsessed with architecture, haunts bookstores and visits the houses John has designed, taking pictures and almost absorbing his spirit (as in the earlier bar scene, he also fictionalizes his relationship to the patient, describing himself as David's brother). David's intense desire to connect with John generates moments of real comedy, but also leads to unpleasant complications with John's family, while David's own family situation is equally problematic: his relationship with his daughter and ex-wife is strained (a long, brilliant tracking shot follows David's footsteps as he surreptitiously follows his kid around her college campus), and his past as a care-giver is clouded by controversy.<br />
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And yet, even as the narrative slowly unravels David's contradictions and fuck-ups, the quiet, controlled tone remains, its small moments of visual observation rubbing up against the actual melodrama of David's life in a way that feels increasingly unsettled. It's an out-of-time drift enhanced by the California setting--seasons and temporal shifts become uncertain, marked only by holidays like Thanksgiving. Everything else is just routine. <br />
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This works so well not only because of Franco's pitch-perfect control, but because Tim Roth's sad, open face generally maintains <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEMPGlMyX2g" target="_blank">a blankness like Garbo's</a>: he signifies almost nothing except his professionalism, and that allows us to complete the thought, or to luxuriate in the ambiguity of what he might be thinking. It's one of Roth's best performances, and he crafts a disturbing character study of addiction and "chronic" behavior that's reminiscent of Ben Mendelsohn's in last year's <i>Mississippi Grind</i>: you know he's doomed, he knows he's doomed, and yet the empathy never fades amidst disturbing revelations and narrative shifts. <br />
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The film is admirably, resolutely unwilling to settle on how it feels about David, to either sanctify or defrock his work, its performative qualities, and the way it becomes increasingly inseparable from the messiness of the "life" David has outside of it. As the film progresses, each of David's new patients plays a different role in his flat-lining: tragedy, comedy, reality/resignation. Perhaps that's why I wasn't as upset as some of the people around me in the CIFF screening room when the movie ended: what might feel shocking becomes, at last, an almost cathartic release from the responsibilities of watching, of observation. And like David, we're drained.<br />
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<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-83191805552506611962016-04-09T17:13:00.001-04:002016-04-09T17:15:27.713-04:00CIFF40: Translation Study: Returning Home (2015) and Notes on Blindness (2016)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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What does it mean to translate that which escapes conventional language? How do films speak of silence, visualize blindness, generate empathy about subjects that might be alien to wide swaths of their audiences? Two films that played this week at the <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/" target="_blank">Cleveland Film Festival</a>-- <i>Returning Home </i>(2015) and <i>Notes on Blindness</i> (2016)--offer models whose mixed success presents warnings as well as guideposts for other filmmakers.<br />
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The pillow fight between brothers that opens <i>Returning Home</i> goes on at length for two or three minutes, and that should have been a warning: this is a film that will engage in overly earnest, often sentimental metaphors at every opportunity (the post-pillow fight torn couch, for example), in a manner that's technically impressive more than it is emotionally engaging. That's ironic, given that its writer/director, Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken, who was at the screening for a post-viewing Q&A, later described his purpose as finding an entry point for talking about feelings, and the difficulty of expressing difficult
emotions within certain cultural frameworks. He said that people "don't talk about [their] feelings
in Nordic countries," and he wanted <i>Returning Home</i> to explore why it's "important to be there for people around
you."<br />
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<i>Returning Home</i> does so through the genre of the post-war film, observing the fall-out from the coalition efforts in Afghanistan on one fictional Norwegian family when their father Einar returns home from the conflict. Ingar Helme Gimle has a sad, angry face that allows him to register both ferocious dominance and child-like helplessness, sometimes in the same moment: even when his large body dominates the frame (forcing the space to become vertical, a nice stylistic contrast to the earlier, pre-return horizontal openness of the framing), it's his lack of confidence that we sense.<br />
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His return exacerbates the sibling rivalry between his sons, 17-year old Oscar (Asmund Hoeg) and younger brother Fredrick (Fredrick Grondahl): Oscar is adrift (often literally, as in a scene when he and some friends drunkenly do donuts in a parking lot) and in passive-aggressive rebellion against his father's military legacy; Fredrick worships his father, and longs to hear stories of his exploits (as much to just connect as out of any interest in their details). Their mother works herself up into a nervous 'happiness' when her husband returns, but then falls back into the same depressive, pill-ridden stupor she was in before his homecoming. A couple of days after he comes back from war, Einar goes hunting alone; when he doesn't return, the sons go out into the wilderness to search for him.<br />
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The first-feature earnestness I noted above does generate some nice effects. Dahlsbakken has fun with the margins of the screen, often utilizing a "split-screen" effect by having simultaneous action occurring in the left and right of the frame (as when Einar returns home and hugs Fredrick in the upper right of the screen, while Oscar smokes dismissively in the left), or in the foreground and the background (during the "welcome home" dinner, Einar and Frederick arm-wrestle in the former, while Oscar and his mother quietly drink in the latter). There's a matte quality to certain shots, where an image of a uniform drying on a clothesline or the light hitting the snow of a mountain can feel like an interstitial that takes on a haunting power. And Dahlsbakken has a taste for long takes, letting a scene play out so the full effect of its unspoken emotional awkwardness is felt.<br />
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I also found myself fascinated by the smaller visual touches that popped up-- the pink of Oscar's Crocs (a nice feed into the movie's color scheme of blues, pinks, grays, greens amidst dark shadows), <i>Batman Returns</i> poster on Fredrick's wall, the white/blue light streaming into the mother's bedroom, and the framing that enlarges the pills and hand-cream on bedside table. In one great moment, the camera tracks across an epic mountainside, and captures father in an almost casual way, like he's an aside, as it continues rightward across the landscape: it's a lovely way of visualizing the scope of what the father means to the boys, and the paradox that his PTSD and their own pain means neither side can fully communicate it in the rush of imagery and emotion.<br />
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At the same time, it's a fine line between "slow" and "empty": even as we stay inside the spinning, donut-making car with Oscar and his girlfriend, for instance, it never really feels like anything is happening. I don't just mean narratively-- I mean that the effect of such lingering can sometimes come up empty, generating only a trace meaning of the themes Dahlsbakken wants to explore. It's the difference between an earnest student telling you what his thesis will be, and making you <i>understand</i> that thesis (it sometimes felt like Jerry Lewis' line to Robert De Niro in <i>The King of Comedy</i>: "Don't tell them it's the punchline; just tell them the punchline"). <br />
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During the Q&A, Dahlsbakken (who was quite personable, in a quiet way) shared background on his personal ties to the film: that his own brother did the cinematography; that the names of the brothers
in the film were flipped because of casting (it seemed easier to call Fredrik Grondahl's character "Fredrick"), that the movie reflects depression in his family, that he utilized a friend's
displaced military experience. He spoke of his own lack of film training, and his interest in film theory, as well as the ways in which the limited budget and limited amount of 35 mm film stock meant there were only three takes
for each set-up, forcing him to largely use wide shots, like he was directing a stage play. Despite the fawning questions, I liked the Q&A a lot, and appreciated Dahlsbakken sharing his experiences. I still felt like <i>Returning Home</i> was an abstract exercise, a film that impressed more than it involved.<br />
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That still places it a step or two above <i>Notes on Blindness</i>, the ambitious, admirable, and ultimately disappointing effort from co-directors James Spinney and Pete Middleton, which documents the descent into blindness of academic John Hull beginning in 1983, and his subsequent attempts to adjust to and then document his experiences. "Documents" is the key, tricky word here-- the film uses audio recordings of Hull and his wife Marilyn, and then has actors Dan Renton Skinner and Simone Kirby (both very good) lip-synch to the cassettes. If the movie didn't let us in on this strategy, I doubt you'd be able to tell: Skinner and Kirby are superb at matching their lips and body movements to the recordings in a manner that feels entirely naturalistic. Together, they (and the actors playing their children) ground all of Spinney and Middleton's experimental play in something real and felt. <br />
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That's good, because that experimental play fails as often as it succeeds. From the first close-up on spinning tape-heads during the credits (as we hear interrupted fragments of recordings, of the credits, pieces of voices cut together), the real question or subject of the film seems less Hull's experience itself, than how that experience is framed and visualized. How do you translate and perform audio recordings? And in finding answers to those questions, in narrativizing a life, what cinematic tropes/cliches does that translation rely on, in order to make the ineffable felt by the audience? One of the epigraphs at the end of the film comes from Hull (who died in 2015), talking about the need to close the gap of understanding between the blind and the sighted. That's a great goal, of course, but it's worth asking if it's a meaningful closure when it's achieved by overly familiar, sentimental imagery (wind blowing through grass, kids running through
grass, flared light against blurred image, light through curtains, light
reflecting off water, <a href="https://windhaming.com/windham-hill-discography-100/" target="_blank">Windam Hill-style </a>piano music, rain rain always rain) that, like the omnipresent subtitles that translate Hull's accent, seems determined to force a clarifying symbolism on an experience that is often described as unruly, frustrating, and contradictory.<br />
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Like <i>Returning Home</i>, that doesn't mean the film (which grew out of a short film of the same title from 2013, and is accompanied by a <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/films/2016/notes-on-blindness-into-darkness" target="_blank">VR movie </a>in the<a href="http://bubblegum-cinephile.blogspot.com/2016/04/ciff40-virtual-realties-notes-on.html" target="_blank"> CIFF "Perspectives"</a> space), is without any visual pleasures. I loved the shadowy molding of faces during some of the "recording" sessions (framed in a darkened room, like a message from the underground), and the way blurry leaves look like amoebas through the lens-- we're floating in Hull's world. There's a pleasantly dizzying meta-play when we see Hull pressing the tape-player to record, then listening to playback, because we're <i>always</i> listening to one recording or another, something the movie reminds us of visually when we see Hull climbing the stairs in his University building, and the stair-rows look like one of his cassettes turned sideways. In theory, I liked the segmented, anecdotal structure the film plays with-- it makes sense that these recordings (done over a period of years) would allow us to drop in on snippets of a life at random moments, in a manner reminiscent of <i>32 Short Stories About Glenn Gould</i>.<br />
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But <i>Blindness</i> is much less
interesting than that film, or others that explore illness and the body
through blends of found footage and recreation (like last year's <a href="http://www.heartofadogfilm.com/" target="_blank"><i>Heart of A Dog</i></a>), and much less assured in its tempo: there were numerous moments when it felt like the film had reached its end, only to continue on in a manner that felt increasingly insidious in its twee, sentimental lectures.<br />
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"Thoughts just came tumbling into my mind," Hull says at one point, which makes perfect sense for a life, and less sense for a film (there are ways to make the "random" and the "tumbling" float and signify and feel, but Notes on Blindness only intermittently achieves them). The "shallow focus" of foreground and background used throughout ultimately feels like the movie's unintentional signature.<br />
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<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-44496006629103896822016-04-08T16:39:00.001-04:002016-04-08T18:20:12.559-04:00CIFF40: Virtual Realities: Notes on "PERSPECTIVES"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1. A woman waits nervously in the pool-house of a desert complex, the space stretching around and above her like an endlessly reflective <a href="http://www.mcescher.com/" target="_blank">Escher </a>piece, as she talks to a strange companion on the other side of the room, and one's eye darts around to make sure nothing is missed; a train blows across the river <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk" target="_blank">like it's 1895</a>, and suddenly erupts into a hail of bats; ghosts make sudden appearances in a 360-degree space; the ineffability of love and the sensation of blindness are made three-dimensional. Your blue hand reaches out for a lens that slips your grasp, the 7 deadly sins are given a humorous multi-media spin, you walk through Walden, and a Japanese internment camp life is made vivid.<br />
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2. There are dozens of <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/" target="_blank">CIFF</a> films screened each day in the Tower City Cinemas multiplex; go upstairs to the multi-level mall's second floor, and you'll find a different kind of cinematic future. <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/festival/special-programs/perspectives" target="_blank">"Perspectives," </a>billed by the Cleveland International Film Festival as "An interactive/immersive exhibition/expo/experience" offers 10 virtual reality films (viewed via headset goggles and earphones, ideally in one of the room's plush egg chairs), six interactive media sites (on desktop computers), a demonstration of a new interactive virtual reality headset from GW-VR.com, and an interactive big-screen program that lets visitors toggle around the history of the Fest. It's free with admission (visitors receive three tokens for different experiences when they enter the room), and just opened yesterday. It's running through the end of the Fest on Sunday, and I'd highly recommend making it a part of your visit: I've loved a lot of films at CIFF this year, but the "Perspectives" experience might be the most fun I've had yet.<br />
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3. I sampled two of the VR films and one of the interactive multi-media sites with my three tokens (a complete listing of available experiences can be found at the "Perspectives" link above; participants can make multiple trips to the room to sample everything, if they like). <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/films/2016/evolution-of-verse" target="_blank">"Evolution of Verse,"</a> a four-minute VR film by Chris Milk and Vrse.works, transforms the imagery one might associate with a desktop screen-saver (water, sky, mountains) into something kinetic and eerie; the immersive, 360-degree space never stops moving, and as one's eye goes back and forth, a new gathering of objects (light streams, animals, an intensely creepy, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6umxthz1Ys" target="_blank">Kubrickian </a>baby) suddenly appears in one's peripheral vision. It transforms a bucolic space into something both suspenseful and cathartic. <br />
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This play with space and suspense is even more effective in <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/films/2016/the-visitor" target="_blank">"The Visitor,"</a> a seven-minute VR movie from James Kaelan, Eve Cohen, and Blessing Yen (in collaboration with BRIGHT IDEAS and Seed&Spark), whose vertiginous play with both visuals and sound makes the style of the film its substance: a woman waits in the room for the force that she fears, but the real panic is the viewer's, as he or she constantly scans across the depth of the room to keep up with the conversation, and make sure nothing is missed. "The Visitor" takes the literal, "this-movie-is-happening-on-your-head" nature of VR technology to get at the way any good horror piece is about the symbiotic relationship between what's happening on screen, and what's happening in the viewer's mind.<br />
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<a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/films/2016/good-luck-soup-interactive" target="_blank">"Good Luck Soup Interactive"</a> is a companion piece to the film of the same name playing in the Fest. I have not had a chance to see the feature yet, but the interactive experience is compelling, drawing on a variety of audio recordings, still photos, newspaper stories, and film/video footage to archive the experiences of Japanese internment survivors and their families over the last 75 years. In addition to the 7 primary stories of the program, there are functions for uploading your own stories, and for sharing the program via Twitter and Facebook, in order to extend the web of remembrance. <br />
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4. Alongside the various digital experiences is what the volunteers wittily noted was a more "analog" one: the sticky board on one wall of the room that they called "Storyboard," which let Festival-goers write down their favorite CIFF experiences. Its a nice way extending the communal spaces of the Fest (and perhaps allowing you to thank the tireless volunteers, who were extremely helpful, and even smiled in the face of two particularly passive-aggressive Boomer attendees who yelled, "This isn't a <i>perfect</i> experience!!" to a twenty-something man behind the VR counter. It's true, dears-- perfection will escape us as long as <b>you two</b> are here). But it also works as a reminder that the entire Festival is an "interactive" experience, a deft blend of the human and the cinematic into a "virtual reality" of choice, chance, movement, and revelation. <br />
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<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-36687128196384058922016-04-05T18:23:00.000-04:002016-04-05T18:31:45.168-04:00CIFF40: Malick for Dummies: Gold Coast (2015)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Innocence will soon vanish. Welcome to the graveyard of ambitions," a cynical fellow Dane tells Wulff (Jakob Oftebro), an idealistic young engineer who's come to Ghana/"New Guinea" in 1836 to establish a coffee plantation. He might have been talking about <i>Gold Coast</i> itself, a film whose good intentions and bad aesthetics mingle promiscuously, and wind up replacing one set of colonialist cliches with another. It was the fourth movie we saw last Thursday at the <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/" target="_blank">C</a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" target="_blank">leveland International Film Festival</a>, and easily the worst; several minutes in, I felt grateful to have my cherry Icee as a distratction, and began to long for the bouncing popcorn shell and hyped-up usher that were the stars of the CIFF's omnipresent introductory cartoon. Even though I'd already suffered through them three times that day, at least they knew what they were trying to say.<br />
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If you've seen <i>The Mission</i> or <i>The Piano</i>, then you've seen <i>Gold Coast</i>, which borrows heavily from their 80s art-house lighting and framing, as well as their tendency to reduce people of color to props in their smug, "let me tell you what to think" white martyr narratives. And while the film constantly reminded me of Pauline Kael's classic line on Jane Campion's film-- "<span class="st">The symbolism never really registers fully, because you can't tell what she's symbolizing, though you know damn well it's symbolic"-- </span><i>The Piano</i> at least had Holly Hunter's complex face and body movement to ground it, and <i>The Mission</i> had one of Ennio Morricone's finest scores. <i>Gold Coast</i> is left with Oftebro's telegraphic emoting (it's not so much "best" acting as "most" acting, although in fairness there's not a lot to do when the film wants to constantly make you a Jesus figure), and a score by Angelo Badalamenti whose ominous, tell-tale synthesizer lines leave nothing to the imagination (that said, it was the only part of the film I even vaguely liked). I was putting the film out of my head even as I watched it, but the film certainly helped that process along.<br />
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As the CIFF program description indicates, the film longs to create an ironic, <i>Heart of Darkness</i>-like juxtaposition between the forced idealism of Wulff's letters home to his fiancée (heard in heavy-handed narration), and the growing darkness and violence of what we actually see unfolding on the screen-- the slow build and then destruction of Wulff's plantation fields, his evangelical idealism about "uplifting" the African slaves who work the colony, his shock and disgust at the discovery of an ongoing slave trade in the area after Denmark has outlawed it, his attempts to lead an uprising, and his slow descent into madness when the uprising fails.<br />
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That's the outline of a potentially good, complex, moving film in the right hands: the history, the politics, the regional and period detail that could be created and deployed for a variety of effects. Unfortunately, despite some occasionally striking imagery--Wulff backlit by a jumping flame that creates an almost psychedelic quality, severed heads on a slave trader's castle wall--director Daniel Dancik too often relies on a series of close-ups that either feel like blatant borrowings from better directors (a close-up of water going down a drain that's a stand-in for the c<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8pbRJUVQBU" target="_blank">offee cup/universe metaphor</a> in Godard's <i>2 or 3 Things I Know About Her</i>), or so on-the-nose that they lose all power (at one point, we see the brand of the slave trader Richter (an eerie "HR") burned into the shoulder of a slave, a shot whose effect is destroyed by Dancik's need to then cut to a close-up of the branding, in case we missed it). At one point, I wrote "Oh, good-- a poisoned chalice" in my notebook; everything is abstracted, not just by Wulff's narration, but the structuring of the images themselves. The irony that Gold Coast misses amidst its art-trope finger pointing is that it's a film that wants to stake an anti-colonial position, but is nothing if
not controlling. Its methodology is to excavate cinematic resources from a pained and problematic history, in order to present them to its patrons who can then congratulate themselves on their own political self-awareness in the lobby. Nothing breathes.<br />
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<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-33459828722354480092016-04-03T18:13:00.000-04:002016-04-03T18:41:36.674-04:00CIFF40: Traders (2015)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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From its <i>noir</i>ish, <i>Trainspotting-</i>esque narration at the start to its blatant stylistic lifts from Danny Boyle, Guy Ritchie, Quentin Tarantino, and <i>Office Space</i>, the first 25 minutes or so of <i>Traders</i> felt like a signal beamed from outer space in 1996, but only just reaching us now. Twenty years ago it would've been the Hot New Thing, but now it just felt warmed-over. <br />
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Centering on two financial analysts who design a winner-take-all game of murder when their firm goes belly-up, the early moments of <i>Traders</i> were interesting but flat, a recuperation of turn-of-the-millennium laddishness that wanted to filter the politics of global financial meltdown through violent genre play. Harry (Cillian Scott), our central anti-hero, even looked like Brad Pitt, circa <i>Fight Club</i>. Like its two leads, it seemed willing to take the "stakes" of other films and filmmakers as its own, at any cost (within this game of borrowing and bricolage, my favorite lift was the thick, atonal synthesizer chords that felt borrowed from an '80s <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2015/10/cannon-box-set-best-of-moments.html" target="_blank">Cannon film</a>). "There are decisions in life you know you'll come to regret," mutters Harry, the anti-hero narrator of <i>Traders</i> (2015), and as the <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/" target="_blank">CIFF40</a> animated introduction (with its pleasant little earworm of a bluegrass song by local Cleveland band <a href="http://www.honeybucketohio.com/" target="_blank">Honeybucket</a>) faded into Rachael Moriarty and Peter Murphy's feature, and I sunk deeper into my seat, I began to dread that Harry was right.<br />
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"But then again...," Harry says at several points, and it's an important point to remember as a movie unfolds. Suddenly, after Harry has his first, disastrous "trade" (i.e., fighting) encounter with his business partner Vernon (John Bradley, all sinister baby fat, like Charles Laughton), and the latter is laid up wounded in bed, there's a turn: Orla (Nicki McGuigan), the object of Vernon's un-returned affections, shows up in response to a phone call from Harry, who really just wants Vernon out of his apartment. There's a funny exchange between the three, with Vernon's weaponized blend of childishness and sharp-edged entitlement jostling against Nicki's dry cynicism and Harry's exhaustion. The scene began to suggest there was something smarter and more complex bubbling underneath all of <i>Traders</i>' neo-mod signifiers and cinematic borrowing. <br />
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This was confirmed by the second "trade" of the movie, a brilliantly staged burst of violent energy, full of well-deployed hand-held shots, quick cuts, and harsh sound effects at increased volume, all of which brought out the terror and explicitness of the fight. Like the whiplash chain that Harry's "trading partner" sneaks into the battle, the confidence and raw terror of the scene's staging refocused my eye and energy, and I began to see how well the movie was sneaking smart details of ritual and resonant, critical puns into its jus' blokes structure. From the wide-angled faces (suggesting Kubrick or Ken Russell) that slowly distort Harry's handsome features, to the flat light and off-white/yellow backgrounds that make his skin even more pallid; from the overcast gray of the Dublin sky and the use of landscapes as grimy funeral pits, to the fake horror-movie blood that spurts from lips and limbs, to the frozen edamame bags that Harry wryly stuffs his winnings into; from the twin blue hoodies of Harry and Vernon that visually link them even as they pull away in disgust from one another, to the green anorak Harry wears to "trading meetings," like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079766/" target="_blank">Phil Daniels' </a>devolved heir-- there's an interesting tension throughout the last two-thirds of the film between reinforcing and critiquing lad culture, and the wider codes of masculinity that feed it. "Trading" as a kind of addiction for those in both the fighting and the financial markets (and the "coding" that underlies both), as well as puns on "rough trade" as a gender metaphor, give the film's stylistic borrowing a stronger spine. That doesn't mean it's perfect-- the gangster turn toward the movie's end feels somehow both predictable and forced, I never really liked Harry's narration, and the movie's
open-endedness here feels like a cop-out (whereas in the earlier <a href="http://bubblegum-cinephile.blogspot.com/2016/04/ciff40-everything-nothing-paulina-2015.html" target="_blank"><i>Paulina</i></a> it feels like a necessary abeyance). But by the end of <i>Traders</i>, I still felt like I'd been jazzed in a good way, that the signal had hit its target.<br />
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<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-84635179455156099722016-04-02T21:20:00.001-04:002016-04-02T21:22:38.954-04:00CIFF40: "Everything, Nothing": Paulina (2015)<br />
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The first scene of <i>Paulina</i> is done by director Santiago Mitre and cinematographer Gustavo Biazzi in one unbroken shot, as the title character explains to her father Fernando, a respected and powerful judge, why she is dropping out of her Ph.D. program in law in order to teach in a pilot program for a rural Argentine school. "Explain" might not be the right word-- it's an argument that takes the form of exchanged justifications from both characters. Paulina, self-righteous in her theoretical certainties about social justice, faces off against a parent who's equally sure that his realpolitik cynicism is something his daughter will learn in time (the dialogue by Mitre and co-writer Mariano Llinas does a nice job of weaving both father and daughter's respective (and unacknowledged) privilege into their face-off). Filming it in a single take creates both tension and irony: even as the characters discuss their differences, and Paulina longs to literally break away, the staging emphasizes an inescapable bond between them. The remainder of<i> Paulina</i> will be about the limits of that bond--physical, emotional moral, political--and how far the connections and beliefs laid out in the movie's first five minutes can be stretched in the face of violation and trauma.<br />
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Loosely based on the 1960 Argentinian film <i>La Patota</i>, and winner of both the Nespresso Grand Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, <i>Paulina </i>derives much of its power from what remains unsaid after this dialogue-rich opening. <br />
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Paulina goes to teach in the village, framed in long shots of orange and yellow, pink and brown and green,
against a countryside whose beauty can also feel enveloping and
claustrophobic. She struggles to connect with students who view her (not unfairly) as a naive outsider (and whom, a colleague points out, she tends to view as objects of pity or care). One night, riding a friend's motorcycle home from an evening of pleasantly drunk conversation, she is attacked and raped by a gang of young men, some of whom are students in her class. The rest of the film is about the fall-out from this violence, and way it both alters and reinforces certain beliefs and relationships.<br />
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Sitting in the darkened theater, I scrawled "ambivalent certainties" in my notepad, and I think that works as an apt description of the gaps and tensions in <i>Paulina</i>, how both the characters and the film itself frame and shape their perceptions of what's happening to and around them. Close-ups abound, but there's no release in the cuts from long or medium shots to the faces. The tight framing and matte expressions are barriers as much as gateways to deeper understanding; they create a tension and paranoia; there's always a question of the ambiguity of what people are thinking in close-ups, what they're not saying, what they're holding back.<br />
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The uncertainty generated by the framing is further enhanced by the multiple shifts in both time and perspective within the narrative: Mitre's insistence on a naturalistic shooting style allows him to play with temporal space in a manner that's unsettling, as scenes that initially seem to be occurring in the present are revealed to be flashbacks or flash-forwards. The "stories within stories" sensibility that arises from these shifts allows Mitre to play with complex and unresolved notions of memory and remembrance, the gaps or misreadings that are generated not only out of deliberate acts of violence, but well-intended rituals of recording (sitting in a police station, her father blurrily waiting in the background, a shaken Paulina tries to recount the details of her rape to a police officer wedded to the bureaucratic forms he has to fill out: "We'll say it was dawn," he suggests, when Paulina cannot give him an exact time for when the attack occurred).<br />
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The film's floating perspectives also create unresolved questions of knowledge and voice. Following the opening dialogue between Paulina and Fernando, the film seems to be framed by Paulina's recounting of her experiences to her therapist. But if that's true, how do we account for the flashback moments with her father, or the rapist Ciro, of which Paulina could have no knowledge? These breaks from a set structure are, by the nature of the movie's naturalistic shooting and editing, interpolated into Paulina's narrative, but they also function as breaks, places where clarity of perspective is lost. <br />
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Subtle, horrifying visual grace notes run throughout: Paulina in bed, the tight, horizontal framing and dark lighting making it look like she's been buried alive; the way Mitre emphasizes a right-facing profile in Paulina's close-ups when she first arrives at the village, then a left-facing profile or series of overhead shots after her attack, as if the world's been flipped; small touches of costuming and make-up, how Paulina's hair is pulled back early on in the movie, then slowly falls around her temples as the film progresses; the classroom scenes, where the student bodies crowding the middle and edges of the frame in the beginning recur after Paulina's rape, but with a darker edge (student's heads cut off so we just see the tops of their heads, like de-personalized, potential attackers); scenes shot through car windshields, providing another ironically "transparent" visual frame. There's a constant pull toward vision/framing/policing as metaphors for control, the body, knowledge, the passage of time. We're always aware that what we see or know (visually, narratively) is always just a piece of an unseen whole.<br />
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The impact of this stylistic strategy--both a critique and perhaps an unintentional endorsement of its characters' insistence on maintaining a theory in the face of experience--rests of the strength of the two lead performances. As Paulina, Dolores Fonzi skillfully negotiates her character's shifting emotions within various time frames, finding power and expressiveness in the bite of a lip or the tilt of a hip: in a screenplay that purposely leaves much of Paulina's motivation unsaid, these tiny gestures express volumes. As her father, Oscar Martinez has the more verbose role-- his constant questioning of what's happening makes him as much an audience surrogate as Paulina is--but that's also a potential trap: it is Fernando's tendency to hide behind words that has driven his daughter away, and it is Martinez's charisma and sad face that make him both empathetic and terrifying.<br />
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<i>Paulina</i> isn't a perfect film-- I found the recourse to hand-held shots a bit on-the-nose at time, as was the blackout frame after Paulina's rape. While much of the film is gripping, and its unwillingness to resolve its contradictions admirable, there were times when its purposeful inertia felt a bit problematic in relation to the violence its narrative was exploring. But there's much to admire in its layered politics and richly ironic visuals, and I hope it registers as a compliment to its general effectiveness that I felt sympathetic to one character's cry towards the end: "Enough please, I can't take anymore."<br />
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<br />Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-69021456087084038472016-04-01T18:16:00.000-04:002016-04-01T18:20:03.606-04:00Cinephilia on the Cuyahoga: CIFF40<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjIQ8Jc3bMC5XXBh4uvxRiwYVCGahi8sboS9htQZa-uxJN__CUQ5c48if2Rf-uFbMIsYLFJmFu3PKFof4y8hmxNQt35Qk2gaeK6XUSg4YWTHjW9iDjP-wk0hi7h3l2x2spgmc6wI68CnbR/s1600/CityTower.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjIQ8Jc3bMC5XXBh4uvxRiwYVCGahi8sboS9htQZa-uxJN__CUQ5c48if2Rf-uFbMIsYLFJmFu3PKFof4y8hmxNQt35Qk2gaeK6XUSg4YWTHjW9iDjP-wk0hi7h3l2x2spgmc6wI68CnbR/s400/CityTower.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Tower City Cinemas lies within a shopping complex at the corner of West 6th Street and Canal Road, in downtown Cleveland. Half a mile north lies the Public Square and the Renaissance Hotel, perhaps familiar to you as <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/avengers/index.ssf/2011/08/avengers_turning_cleveland_ohi.html" target="_blank">the stand-in for Stuttgart, Germany in the first <i>Avengers </i>movie</a>. Tower City and the hotel are connected via a series of hallways, staircases, and escalators that carry you through a multi-level mall where the Starbucks, the Cleveland-based <a href="http://raggedclaws.com/2009/06/21/look-here-greeting-cards-by-r-crumb/" target="_blank">American Greetings</a>, and other stores alternate with banners and posters announcing the <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/" target="_blank">40th annual Cleveland International Film Festival</a>. A reflecting pool sits in the center of the second-level where the movie theater is hidden away; above it jut third-level hallways whose meeting rooms have been converted by the Festival into discussion spaces and media centers. As you walk through the food court that is the final space before the cineplex, you can see the curved arch of the Detroit Superior Bridge to the south, stretching out across the gray fog of the <a href="http://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/63#.Vv7lPbd0BSs" target="_blank">Cuyahoga River</a>. <br />
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This jangle of images, spaces and tones--commercial, aesthetic, urban, prosaic, industrial, and cinematic--provides an apt and atmospheric transition into the spaces of <a href="https://twitter.com/CIFF" target="_blank">CIFF40</a>, a longtime center of cinephilic activity in Northeast Ohio that's brought hundreds of films, from more than 60 countries, to hundreds of thousands of attendees from around the region during its long and rightfully proud history. It started on April 13, 1977, with eight films from seven countries, shown over the course of eight weeks at the <a href="http://www.clevelandcinemas.com/theater.asp?ptID=AAGYU" target="_blank">Cedar Lee Theatre</a>, in Cleveland Heights. The enthusiastic response allowed the festival to grow over the next 15 years, eventually transferring to the larger spaces of Tower City, whose multiplex allowed for a greater number of films to be shown simultaneously (stats from CIFF's website suggest this move has grown festival attendance 600% over the last 25 years). This year's festival will show 196 feature films and 234 shorts to an estimated 100,204 attendees, while also inviting 300 guest filmmakers to participate. They've also offered satellite mini-fests of select films for residents in Oberlin, Akron, and other nearby cities who aren't able to make it into Cleveland. That's all very cool, but the statistic that draws my eye is this: CIFF employs 1,000 volunteers over the course of its 12-day run, and that doesn't even count the Cleveland educators and community leaders who introduce each film. This is a real communal effort, full of a down-to-earth kindness that all the harried aspects of a festival-- crowded spaces, long lines, occasionally passive-aggressive attendees (dig that dirty look! Yes, sweetie, we <i>all</i> hate waiting for tickets)--cannot wipe out. Framed by the river and the transmutable spaces of a<a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.com/" target="_blank"> movie-rich city</a>, the Cleveland International Film Festival offers a montage of perspectives and experiences from around the world, while never losing sight of what being grounded in a specfic region means.<br />
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I somehow managed to live in this region for nearly 10 years without ever being able to make it over to the Festival (partially this was because it often took place during spring break, which was often a busy period). This year, I've been lucky enough (thanks to this blog, the kind encouragement of <a href="https://new.oberlin.edu/arts-and-sciences/departments/cinema_studies/faculty_detail.dot?id=ccc33882-1c03-4595-9853-d9beb8e2f985" target="_blank">Alberto Zambenedetti</a>, and the generosity of the <a href="http://www.clevelandfilm.org/mediaaccreditation" target="_blank">CIFF media staff</a>) to be media-accredited for the Fest. Off and on over the next 10 days or so, I'll be offering thoughts and impressions on the Fest, as well as the films I've been able to see (my screening days were yesterday and next Thursday). This will, by necessity, be only a partial view of everything CIFF40 has to offer, but I encourage anyone who might have the chance to get downtown and get in line: it's not just a chance to see movies, but (as if any other reason were needed!) to be reminded that movie-going at its best is also about the larger meanings that arise from small gestures and interactions, on-screen and off, connected to a vivid sense of place.Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-28733698081882091522016-03-20T01:41:00.001-04:002016-03-20T01:45:40.076-04:00Double Takes: Hollywood Anti-Nostalgia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivm_UYppQMKPNX15TGiErpZ7cn13VCVd7le130lhV2WR7x6_7uwbvGtOqI-cakND4wgKPN2aKuDzZqc1172hwHuFCU8g6nqFxt_la9EUlREUHbC91RGNrw3aTgwhejP-uZkZ99IOam4XhG/s1600/vlcsnap-2016-03-20-01h33m47s622.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivm_UYppQMKPNX15TGiErpZ7cn13VCVd7le130lhV2WR7x6_7uwbvGtOqI-cakND4wgKPN2aKuDzZqc1172hwHuFCU8g6nqFxt_la9EUlREUHbC91RGNrw3aTgwhejP-uZkZ99IOam4XhG/s400/vlcsnap-2016-03-20-01h33m47s622.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Robert Redford and Natalie Wood, <i>Inside Daisy Clover</i> (1965)</div>
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Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, <i>The Way We Were</i> (1973)<br />
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Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-34632809060654930592016-03-18T16:31:00.001-04:002016-03-18T16:32:08.746-04:00The Freelance Dance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqBDxG2KnnRSfsUDUx2LCru3dE4ooYtj4QHDk-GLerEs-bzhcJD_A2PU8oyE9fvslSEQe2mxEvwDZxtmw95GuddytMrLX5zvFFliyAXDM_ZxsMUoyS9P5jlMty2Vf1qj0wugCpoidFQ2u0/s1600/red-shoes-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="323" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqBDxG2KnnRSfsUDUx2LCru3dE4ooYtj4QHDk-GLerEs-bzhcJD_A2PU8oyE9fvslSEQe2mxEvwDZxtmw95GuddytMrLX5zvFFliyAXDM_ZxsMUoyS9P5jlMty2Vf1qj0wugCpoidFQ2u0/s400/red-shoes-3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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For the last year-and-a-half or so, I've been doing business freelancing for <a href="http://mystaffnow.com/" target="_blank">MyStaffNow</a>, an online staffing platform specializing in recruitment and placement of freelance professionals, which matches writers with clients, acts as an editor for writing (and buffer for any client/writer difficulties, and generally makes the whole freelance gig thing a lot easier. It's been a really good experience, so when Sarah Matalone, my editor, asked me to write about my freelancing experiences (both MyStaff and otherwise) for their blog, I was very happy to do so. You <a href="http://blog.mystaffnow.com/freelancehub/why-do-you-want-to-dance-a-freelancers-two-step-on-why-he-writes" target="_blank">can read my piece here</a>, and find out why that image from <i>The Red Shoes </i>is leading this post.<br />
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Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-70708969635427797342016-03-11T16:46:00.002-05:002016-03-11T16:46:47.246-05:00Quick Takes: Mitchell Leisen <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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From <i>No Time For Love </i>(1943), an example of how well Mitchell Leisen
deploys his designer's eye and subtle wit as effective counterpoint. The
character on-screen rails against his star photographer (Claudette
Colbert) going on assignment backstage at the ballet and only
photographing objects, not dancers; meanwhile, Leisen arranges his props
and lights to do the same thing, drawing our attention away from the
ranter and towards the shadow cast by the lamp, which further draws<span class="text_exposed_show">
our eye downward to the way bolts of light create "stripes" across the
dresser it sits on, which pulls us leftward, further into the lines of
light across the office door. A foolish editor is framed, in all senses,
by his director, and aesthetics triumphs over the mean logics of plot.</span><br />
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It's the opening salvo in a wartime comedy that upends gender roles (a
Leisen constant); has enormous fun with set design, mobile framing and
the playful arrangement of sweaty bodies in spaces above and below
ground; and creates a delirious tone so tied to its ever-shifting visual
patterns (which look like Steichen in the penthouses above ground, and
Eisenstein in the NYC underground) that one might almost call it
Pointillist Screwball: all the elements we'd expect from the genre,
densely layered in a manner that shows off the artist's hand, while
simultaneously creating a rich, intense pleasure. It also provides
another great showcase for Fred MacMurray, whose blend of charm,
darkness, playfulness and potential violence Leisen had scoped out a
decade before Billy Wilder got ahold of him for <i>Double Indemnity</i>.</div>
Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4883634507539657866.post-85099654687667652652016-01-16T03:00:00.001-05:002016-01-16T03:00:42.126-05:00Branching Out: Wrapping Up TREEHOUSE '15<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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We're coming to the end of the illustrious Dennis Cozzalio's <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2016/01/dear-readers-wouldnt-you-agree-that.html" target="_blank">"2015 SLIFR Movie Treehouse,"</a> and it's been a week of fun exchanges and wise insights from Dennis and the other Treehouse denizens (including Odie Henderson, Marya Murphy, and Phil Dyess-Nugent), and occasionally from me, too! If you're coming to this post out of order, you can begin the process of catching up by clicking on the above, which will take you to Dennis's introduction of the round-table; if you read <a href="http://bubblegum-cinephile.blogspot.com/2016/01/cinephilic-review-2015-slifr-movie.html" target="_blank">my earlier post</a>, you can zoom ahead to what's followed by clicking <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-2015-slifr-movie-treehouse-5-coming.html" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-2015-slifr-movie-treehouse-6.html" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-2015-slifr-movie-treehouse-7-motion.html" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-2015-slifr-movie-treehouse-8-on.html" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-2015-slifr-movie-treehouse-9.html" target="_blank">here</a>, and--well, hell, you can find your way around the branches after that, right? Climb on up and join us, won't you? There's no membership fee, and we only kick out Batman. Brian Doanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17903729233401672600noreply@blogger.com0