163: The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

I can see why this film wasn’t received well in its native Australia.  The 1001 text notes that at the time it was made, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) was the most expensive picture ever produced in the country, which seems hard to believe considering the controversial nature of its subject matter.  At the core of this story is the racial conflict between Aborigines and the white colonists who inhabit the outback at the turn of the last century, and a man who finds himself torn between the two groups.  Jimmie Blacksmith is the son of a native woman and a white man, and as such is fully accepted by neither culture.

            As a boy, he is the ward of a white minister and his wife that hope to educate him enough that he might win the hand of a white farm girl, and produce children that will be less ostracized.  He is punished for the interludes he takes from the “civilized” culture to boomerang hunt with his uncle and participate in tribal rights of passage.  By the time he grows to be man he knows that he will never wholly belong with either faction.  An outcast almost everywhere he goes, he is forced to find manual labor jobs, building fences to stay fed, working for low wages paid by racist farmers.  When he wins the affections of a white servant girl the two are married after she becomes pregnant.

            He hopes to start a life and a family from the small makeshift shack he has built on the grounds of his labor, but is dismayed when the child is born completely white.  Realizing that the baby is not his son, he decides to carry on regardless.  However, when the wife of his cruel boss encourages his spouse to leave him, he flies into a rage.  In an unexpected scene of brutality Jimmie bludgeons the woman, her daughters and a niece to death with a wood axe.  The remainder of the film then becomes an extended chase sequence chronicling the protagonist’s life on the run from the authorities.   

            The depictions of racism, in all of its forms both overt and subtle, as well as violence in this movie are startling.  Initially, it was to be restricted in Australia to only 18+ audiences until it won a controversial appeal.  In all, it is a well made film, and certainly scandalous for its time I’m sure, but this far into the list, and with contemporary hindsight, it didn’t have the shock factor that it once might have held.  Where it failed to shock, it also failed to awe.  The opportunity for such beautiful cinematography surrounds this picture, and yet only once or twice does its director, Fred Schepisi, show us the vastness of the Australian landscape.  Jimmie and his various cohorts are confined too often to full and medium shots.

            It seems odd to me that in a span of not even fifty films, I’ve covered two Australian pictures which focus on class conflict at the turn of the twentieth century.  The first, My Brilliant Career (1979; # 183), was an inspiring romantic commentary on Victorian social values, which as I noted was the type of movie my mother would love.  This picture, made a year earlier, is a rather cynical and violent commentary on Victorian social values that I’m sure my mother would hate.

             The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith legitimized Australian cinema in the estimation of the Cannes film festival, making way for the selection of My Brilliant Career the following season, but I don’t think it has aged well.  Since its release, so many other pictures which center on racial conflict have bravely tackled the complex issue from any number of standpoints.  While Jimmie’s story, based on true events, is compelling, it seams to pull its legitimate punches, while showing its grittier teeth, losing the poignancy of its massage amongst its violent flourishes.  All in all, these missed opportunities add up to a “so-so” movie.

Grade: 2 Hats Off         

164: The Night of the Shooting Stars

In my review of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967; #166) I noted the need for a strong central character through which an audience vicariously lives for the duration of a film.  Here, after viewing the Taviani brothers’ The Night of Shooting Stars (1982), I feel I should also make the case for the ensemble-oriented central group of characters, which can serve an equally important purpose.  Single protagonists can be representative of individual struggle or serve a larger allegorical purpose concerning all of mankind.  Groups in films are usually more literal, but at the same time can be surrogates of actualities outside of the screen.  For example, the “replicants” of Blade Runner (also 1982) can be seen as embodying any number of groups of social outcasts. 

           

            In this film, the group in concern is comprised of the citizens of a rural Tuscan village held hostage by both the Nazis and the Fascists in the days before the American liberation.  These waning days of the war bring both antagonist groups to attempt final flexes of political power, eventually forcing a faction of the villagers to flee in the midst of night.  The 1001 text astutely notes that the film is primarily free of political statements, and rightly so.  For those we follow the war is no longer about politics, black shirts versus peasants, but about the struggle to find bread and tomatoes, to hang on with the hope that the end is near.

            The story’s primary narrator is a young girl, seemingly an odd choice for the film’s perspective until we realize that she has never known peace.  She has lived her life under Fascist and Nazi control, and yet, she smiles and laughs and finds joy in the world.  The war has been her life’s reality, but it has not suppressed her childlike belief in goodness.  Still it is clear the the violence has affected her, as daydreams reveal a morbid fascination.  As she recounts the story to her own young daughter years later, her viewpoint fades in and out, omnisciently shifting to elements she could not have known.  In other films this might be a flaw, but here it resonates with the perfect tone, as small intimate moments between the individual refugees create much of the picture’s charm.  Instances of lust, humor, childish innocence, and terror amongst the group are all intercut, as tension builds while they hide from the authorities.   

            When a confrontation with the fascists does finally occur, it’s clear that the true betrayal is not that of Mussolini against Italy, but of friend against friend.  This battle scene, shot in a field of waving wheat, is at the same time both real and haunting.  The combatants fire their weapons at first almost as if they are toys, realizing only when it is too late the ramifications of their actions.  When a dying fascist utters the Italian dictator’s name with his final breaths, it is clear that the political affairs no longer matter. 

            The film’s final scenes center on a romantic interlude between two lovers whose time passed them by long ago.  These moments are almost pitch-perfect in their portrayal of both shame and regret and serve as a memorable capstone to this piece.  The film is well shot and the art direction is fantastic, but there is also an intangible element of magnetism to these characters which makes the film shine.  We see them briefly, and it is often difficult to distinguish them from one another, but this is ultimately the point.  They could be the inhabitants of any village in any country infected by war.  They do what they must to survive, finding hope in the future and in one another. 

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off

165: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

After the meandering, self-indulgent, post-modern 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967; #166) I needed some fun, and I found I’d made a perfect choice with Dario Argento’s debut feature, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970).  This mystery has everything that a good piece of entertainment should.  It’s enchanting with its depiction of a strange set of murders, and it’s easy to see why audiences and the main character alike get caught up in the resulting intrigue.  It’s a little bit sexy and a little bit scary and all-around enjoyable. 

           

            Just before the expatriate American writer Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) plans to leave Rome with his girlfriend Julia (Suzy Kendall), he witnesses the violent attack of a woman through the pane glass doors of an art gallery.  It’s the kind of gallery which features art that would be loved by fans of 2 or 3 Things and rich weirdoes. The woman survives as a result of his muted interference, but Sam does not wish to become involved in the investigation.  That is until he becomes convinced, at first by a police inspector and then by himself, that he saw something during the attack which does not add up.  Becoming obsessed, he slowly finds that the more he learns about the murders the more the murderer takes an interest in him, setting up some amazing sequences of suspense.

           

            While many of the plot elements employed here are somewhat predictable, the ultimate twist of the story delivers in spades, and the movie had me guessing until almost the final scene.  Ending in the same place where the plot began, here Argento makes clever use of the post-modern décor.  This is the second Argento that I’ve seen in as many weeks and I must say that, based on these pictures, I believe I was mislead about his work.  Neither Bird nor Suspiria (1977; # 173) seemed hokey or schlocky to me while I was watching.  Yes, in retrospect some of the elements employed therein have a bit of a campy feel, but I didn’t find them distracting as I was genuinely engrossed in each of these films.  Admittedly, the dubbing in Bird isn’t as well executed as in the later picture.

           

            Unlike Godard’s attempts with the subject of my previous entry, I don’t think Argento made The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (an intriguing title that ultimately bears relatively little significance to the plot) with any intentions of creating a grand statement about life in the contemporary world.  The film is simply a taut piece of suspense that generated enjoyment, in my life at least, and should be sought out by intelligent audiences looking for a thriller with just a hint of low culture.

Grade: 3 Hats Off

166: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

“I don't believe in the body of work. There are works, they might be produced in individual installments, but the body of work as a collection, the great oeuvre, I have no interest in it. I prefer to speak in terms of pathways. Along my course, there are highs and there are lows, there are attempts...”

-Jean-Luc Godard

            Perhaps no filmmaker understands his own career as much as Godard does.  He didn’t believe that all of his films were brilliant, and he was right about that.  He also didn’t believe that any of Truffaut’s films were brilliant, and about that he was dead wrong.  So it can be said that this critic turned filmmaker didn’t have a perfect record in either of his professions.  Still, this level of comfort, or at least acknowledgement, with risk and failure lead Godard down the occasional right “pathway” of which he spoke.  Several of his films are masterpieces, and of course he is one of the driving forces of the French New Wave that revolutionized cinema in the late fifties and sixties. 

            Two of his earliest works, Breathless (1960) and Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live; 1962) are so visceral, even today, that viewing them is to watch the possibility of cinema change before your eyes.  It has been said by many critics that the history of movies could almost simply be divided into two volumes: films before Breathless and films which followed it.  Without question it is a brilliant film, but it’s sad that it came so early in Godard’s career, or rather that no film therein as good ever followed it.  It was revolutionary in that it introduced to audiences new ways of life and new ways of projecting that life through camera and editing, and it did so through two vivid characters, both lost souls searching for salvation in each other.

            As Godard continued his career he kept up with these first two elements, the alternate lifestyles and projections, but dropped affiliations with strong central characters, and thus lost the heart of his cinema.  Essentially, movies are about two things: stories and the people live them.  Within this context any number of combinations is possible, and the potential for the exposure of truth through the ideas presented is infinite.  Godard decided along his pathway to discard this context, to stop filming stories and characters, and to simply film the ideas.  Memorable movies are rarely about what they are about, but about whom they are about instead (or who directed them for you auteurists).  Ask any 3^rd grade critic what any movie they’ve seen was about and you’ll inevitably hear, “it’s about this guy/girl who…”       

            Movies about ideas are risky and Godard’s comment speaks to the fact that he understood this.  In thinking over the canon of cinema, or at east successful cinema, only one major director whose films are more about ideas than characters and stories comes to mind.  Even Stanley Kubrick needed some pretty good actors and narrative contexts to convey those lofty concepts.  Thinking about his two best films, Dr. Strangelove (1964) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), you’ll find no strong central character.  Instead, Strangelove feature multiple memorable supporting characters (three of which are played by Peter Sellers) which lend to the director’s humorous and ironic point.  Likewise, 2001 intentionally shies away from human stories to make the point that the race has become uninteresting and bland, leaving room for the only real character, HAL 9000, and thus conveying Kubrick’s concept. In whatever case, regardless of the validity of the idea central to a film, it is typically ineffective if not conveyed through a central character that engenders sympathy from the audience.   

            So what does all this mean? Did Godard never make another good film? Of course he did. Band of Outsiders (1964) and Masculine Feminine (1966) are both very good pictures, but it is largely because of their characters, as shallow as the may be, that they succeed.  Unfortunately, Godard also choose to make films like Contempt (1963), and Alphaville (1965), and Week End (1967) that feel like their floating from one idea to another so quickly that they don’t have time to bother with their characters.  2 or 3 Things I know About Her (also 1967) feels much the same way.  Godard whispers on the soundtrack about philosophy and religion and truth but doesn’t seem to speak much life into Juliette (Marina Vlady), the woman who the film is ostensibly about.  He introduces the audience to her as both the actress and the character in voiceover, but then all but disregards her for the remainder of the picture.  We simply view her life, and small snippets of the lives of the other women she encounters, never feeling like we know any of them.

            When Juliette leaves her child for the afternoon to make a few extra dollars hooking, we hardly care.  I understand what Godard is trying to say here.  He is making a comment on the distance we all keep from one another in our contemporary and consumerist society, but he never gives us reason to want to know his characters, even if it is only two or three things.  He intercuts the day-to-day events of Juliette’s life with images brand-name labels, hinting at the ultimate irony that in her quest to gain the money to buy these things, she has made herself the product.  Scenes are book-ended with static shots of the construction of bleak block housing around Paris, driving home the point that we are always willing to destroy the old beauty for the new convenience.  Some have even suggested that the “her” of the title refers to the city, and not Juliette.  In either case I would have liked to be given more about her and less of Godard’s thoughts on her.

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off

167: Satyricon (a.k.a. Fellini Satyricon)

When I first read about Fellini five years ago in Kinn and Piazza’s Four Star Movies (2003) I was more than intrigued.  The way that they described his work made me believe that it was what movie lovers dreamed of.  Since that time, having seen many of his films, I’ve come to respect Fellini, but I don’t love him in the way that I was sure that I would.  His work is more challenging than I was lead to believe, but that isn’t where the disappointment lies.  To me, in both specific films and throughout his career, he is disjointed.  I can’t see with him where one film meets another as I can with Scorsese and Kubrick and even Stone. 

            Fellini is in some ways, for me, the great disappointment (director wise) of this conquest of the 1001 list. Don’t misunderstand; he has made some spectacular films.  La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 ½ (1963), and Amarcord (1973) are all fantastic pieces of cinema, but I’m not sure that I like any of them as much as I’d hoped to, perhaps with the exception of the 1973 offering.  That film spoke to me as an inspired vision of childhood, with all of its interests and misunderstandings, that I could feel the director guiding me through.  8 ½ is affective in quite the opposite way, as the audience feels as lost as the director protagonist.  Thinking about these films and how I remember them, forces me to reiterate my comment that the Maestro’s work is fragmented.  Even La Dolce Vita, his purported masterpiece, lacks cohesion, though intentionally.

            Thus, Fellini’s lessor works which the list has prompted me to have in some ways been frustrations.  Juliet of the Spirits (1965) felt forced and at the same time distant and I’m afraid his Satyricon (1969) follows this model more so than that of his great films.  As I watched this film I again compared it retrospectively against the canon of films to come both before and after.  I was cognitively engaged in an activity I’ve dubbed the “backdated pitch,” as in “it’s kind of a Ben Hur (1959) meets The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) meets Pricilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) sort of thing.”  I think you kind of get where I’m going with this disjointed claim now.

            Someone once told me that there are essentially only two stories; someone goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town.  Satyricon definitely falls under the first distinction, but it’s like few other journeys I’ve ever followed in film.  The action commences in ancient Rome, where student Encolpio (Martin Potter) and his friend Ascilto (Hiram Keller) are fighting over the companionship of their young slave boy (Max Born) to whom they’ve both developed an attraction.  This is about the most typical segment of the film in terms of both mores and narrative.  From here it descends into an almost unending labyrinth that includes prostitutes, obesity, gladiators, gluttony, impotence, and a hermaphrodite oracle. 

            The work is based on the remaining segments of Petronius’ novella on life in the time of Nero, and thus, much of the onscreen hedonism seems justified by the source material.  However, what is absent here is the same thing that initially appears to be missing from La Dolce Vita.  Fellini does not seem to comment on the actions presented before the audience.  He simply lets them be, and the sense of moral futility amongst the mob which is conveyed in that other film is, as a result, noticeably absent.  This is a film that does not end.  It feels to be going on forever for myriad reasons.  As I was never able to relate the protagonists, I found it difficult to engage in their ever-shifting plight.  As with many classic epics, the film gives the impression that it continues on even after the presented action ceases, going so far as to conclude mid-sentence.  This might be reflective of the fact that portions of the original material have been lost, but in either case this entire film was lost on me.

Grade: 1 Hat Off

168: The Spirit of the Beehive

Having just completed my entry on Kes (1969; #169) I was struck by the fact that I chose a movie with so much similarity to follow it up.  This is coincidence of course, as I have little more than the 1001 text and the netflix summation to work from as far as preconceptions of the remaining films.  While I could do more research, I prefer to go into them knowing as little as possible at this point.  It makes the surprises so much richer, and indeed I was rewarded in spades with Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).  I write that this film is similar to Kes because they appear to entail similar themes, ostensibly at least.

            Both are films which center on children and the secret worlds they inhabit when away from the watchful eyes of adults.  I wrote that a weakness of Kes was its having lost itself between being a “coming of age” story and several other genres.  Ironically, this same enigmatic trait is one of the strengths of Erice’s picture.  Set in Spain “around 1940” the film tells us, it is the story of a family, but a dreary family drama it is not.  There are issues which boil beneath the surface within these familial relationships, but not all of them are addressed by the movie.  Some simply exist.  The central relationship is that of the two young daughters, one only a year or two older than the other, but eons wiser as far as children are concerned.

            After a screening of Frankenstein (1931) in their small village, the younger asks the elder about the famous sequence which leads to the drowning of the young girl and the eventual demise of the creature.  Neither really understands the implications of the flowers floating in the pond or the message about playing God that the film implies.  Still the older sister, Isabel (Isabel Telleria), tells the younger, Ana (Ana Torrent), that she has seen the spirit of Frankenstein’s monster, and knows where he resides.  One of the elements that so richly adds to the tone of this film is the way in which Erice captures how children react to the movies.  The boys and girls of the village are both captivated and horrified by the picture they’ve seen, and the director displays this, as its story slips into the mythology of their own play.

            Simultaneously, a political fugitive (who may or may not have been the lover of the girls’ mother) takes refuge in the same abandoned farmhouse where Isabel claims she has seen the spirit of the creature.  When Ana sneaks away in the night to search for him she comes upon the man, believing him to be Frankenstein’s monster.  This scene is brilliant, as almost silently it pays homage to the scene in the 1931 film which set the plot in motion. 

            The beehive of the title references those kept by the girls’ father as he cultivates honey, and the clear visual likening to them which is created by the stained glass windows of the family’s home.  While the father is a naturalist, his daughters seem much more concerned with the supernatural, and the title and visual motif thus insinuate the presence of the “spirit” within the home, the family itself.  Not quite a fairy tail or a children’s movie and not quite a family picture, The Spirit of the Beehive might seem out of place in many sections of the average Blockbuster.  Yet it is a film with universal themes that can resonate with both younger and mature audiences, and is a surefire winner in the “classics” aisle.              

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

169: Kes

Ken Loach’s Kes (1969) isn’t a bad film, but it isn’t anything all that spectacular either.  It tells the story of a runtish kid from Barnsley, in industrial Northern England, who finds hope in his empty life from the discovery of a kestrel falcon.  Not quite an animal picture and not quite a coming of age tale, Kes is lost somewhere in between.  Much as with Suspiria (1977; #173), I found myself thinking about another film, made long afterward, throughout much of its runtime.  Billy Elliot (2000) succeeded where, for me, this film failed.  While I related to the primary protagonist of Kes, coincidentally a Billy (David Bradley) as well, I didn’t find that I cared much about the brief reprieve from oppression he finds in training his winged pet.  With Billy Elliot, set in a similar venue of industrial oppression, I cared deeply about that character’s emotional escape.

            No technical element of this film in particular stands out as reason for its failure to draw me in.  Its production is on par for an independent feature made in Britain at the time, and its performances hold their own.  I believe the characters of Billy’s family and their situation of working class poverty, as well as the other authority figures in his life that seem unable to understand him.  In fact, I’d say that many of the scenes which feature these characters resonate with me much more so than those of Billy with his bird.  Particularly good is a scene in which the young man is forced to dress for Gym in a pair of shorts made for a boy twice his size.  In this brief vignette the character experiences his most universal humiliation.

            As I wrote, the relationship with the falcon that the boy finds and trains didn’t interest me much.  Obviously the raptor is a metaphor for liberty, as it flies free above the world and the harsh realities of the row houses and coal mines below.  Yet I feel that this literary flourish is incomplete.  If the kestrel represents the autonomy that Billy wishes for, then why does he tether the bird?  Does he wish to control this symbol of freedom as he is controlled by his mother, his brother, and his teachers?  As it stands, the film’s ending does not address these questions, instead choosing to galvanize the harsh realities of Billy’s world through an act of cruelty.  I’ll opt not to drop that spoiler here, but if you are compelled to see this film, do check out the “Trivia” section on the Kes page at imdb.com afterward to see how Loach chose to elicit emotion from his young actor in the final scene.

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off

Note: Usually when people complain during films that they can't understand British accents, or any other accents for that matter, it drives me crazy.  Get some culture, don't be a xenophobe, and just pay attention! You'll be surprised at the capacity of the human brain to understand.  For this one, those who cry out for subtitles might have a legitimate beef.     

170: A Touch of Zen (Xia Nu)

This poster is honestly the best thing about this film

More than eighty percent of my way through the list I can honestly say that few films have been as much of a waste of my time as King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (a.k.a. Xia Nu; 1971).  The selection committee for the 1001 list should seriously consider removing this film from the tome.  It’s simply awful.  Like Hu’s Come Drink with Me (1966; # 188) it embodies everything wrong with melodrama and plays almost like pathetic self-parody.  The makers of the spoof Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002), an incredibly stupid movie in its own right, must have had films like this in mind when they were looking for something ripe for lampooning. 

Zen attempts to be stoic and slap-sticky simultaneously, never quite finding any sort of discernable tone.  This mirrors its lack of pace and any real coherent plot.  There is something about embezzlement and ghosts, but it is hard to remember when nearly every scene is fragmented.  Fights erupt out of nowhere, sometimes in the middle of conversations, which continue after they’ve commenced.  So dull and poorly choreographed are these lengthy altercations that I often found that I’d forgotten who was actually fighting, let alone why.  Perhaps I would have been able to tell had the DVD transfer not been almost too dark to see during many of these scuffles.  This poor quality is only surpassed by that of the dismal sound transfer.

In the entirety of “Part One” of the film, I caught only a single creative edit.  As if this lack of artistic creativity weren’t enough to bore any audience to tears, “Part Two” of the film opens by repeating, yes shot-for-shot repeating, a scene from Part One.  This is no summation of the first act’s characters and action, but just a single scene played over again, in which indistinguishable bad guy minions inexplicably cut down bamboo trees while trying to fight a group of the extremely flat protagonists.     

This re-scene precedes another in which 6-way split screen displays myriad conversations, none of which are subtitled, all off which apparently advanced the non-plot into yet another uninspiring confrontation.  There is but one shot in the film which I deemed to be cool, but if you’ve seen anything by post-Jackie Brown (1997) Tarantino it won’t exactly blow your mind.  By far the low point comes after a battle involving the aforementioned “ghosts,” as a character walks through the aftermath laughing manically for almost five uninterrupted minutes.  I say “almost” because the continuity errors contained therein did provide some distraction. 

            The movie ends mysteriously in some sort of bad acid trip meets mountain top showdown configuration which somehow involves both a group of monks and a baby that appears from nowhere.  It’s movies like this that make people not want to watch foreign films, but in truth I can’t see how any group of people, regardless of race, religion, culture, or native language could have ever thought A Touch of Zen was a good movie.  At 3+ hours, this was one of the worst movie afternoons of my viewing life.

Grade: 0 Hats Off

171: Wanda

As I wrote in my review of Suspiria (1977; # 173), films often succeed with an audience because in some way they remind that audience of other enjoyable filmic experiences.  While some films succeed solely because of their originality, most movies that do well at the box office or build a significant home video following do so because viewers believe they will like them based on their apparent similarity to other films which they’ve enjoyed.  This is not only the basis of genre convention (for those who like Noirs or Westerns), but also the reason that the star system prevailed, nay flourished, even after the studio system was dead and gone.  Producers realized early on that putting actors that audiences already liked into leading roles would garner bigger box office returns.  This is why Tom Cruise still makes $20 Million a movie, despite not having turned in a decent performance in almost ten years.  It is also the reason most people go to the movies; not to see plots, cinematography, editing or set design that they like, but to see actors that they love.

            As a result of this profit-driven, actor-oriented system Cruise has worked with the absolute A-list of directors from the past half century.  Scorsese, Coppola, Kubrick, Stone, Spielberg and P. T. Anderson all realized that with him involved in their projects, studios were willing to expand their budgets.  Now consider that the elitist film snob scoffs at this entire premise, preferring mostly the films’ of the directors (other than Coppola) listed above which were sans big budgets, and certainly sans Cruise.  The cinefile instead chooses movies to see based on the auteur theory, which can and has been explained in a number of lengthy books, but basically boils down to this: a film is not about what it’s about, it’s about who directed it.  I understand that choosing to see a film based on who directed it seems about as pathetic as choosing based on eye candy or gritty tough guy appeal, but we film elitists have to have something to distinguish ourselves from the masses who enjoyed 300 (2006). Most of us are under- or overweight social misfits who desperately cling to this difference as if it were some sort of a badge of honor anyway, so why not do it proudly.

Whew…now that I have that out of the way:

What I liked about Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) was that indeed it did remind me of so many other films that I’ve enjoyed.  Some critics might argue that begging comparison to other pictures is a bad thing for any movie, but isn’t comparison what all critics are supposed to be doing?  You stand movies up against those that are known to be great and see if they are up to snuff.  In the case of Wanda, three other road films from the 1970s, all of which are listed in the 1001 canon, came to mind. 

Five Easy Pieces (1970) was released the same year as Wanda and the two feel to me so much like companion pieces; the opposite sides of a coin commemorating a strange time in American history.  No decade before or since hit American culture like the 1960s.  And when it was over, there was deafening thud.  The Altamont incident and the Kent State Massacre proved that giving peace a chance just might get you killed, and many of those who tuned in, turned on, and dropped out found emptiness when they reached their center.  Movies soon followed suit.  The characters at the center of both Five Easy Pieces and Wanda lead empty lives.  One is a chauvinist slacker, the other a woman who appears to care for nothing at all.  Both shirk responsibility and hit the road in search of nothing in particular.  In a way, they both find it.

Badlands (1973) is the romanticized version of Wanda, and most women who would hope to find someone such as the Martin Sheen of the former out on the back roads of America, would be far more likely to meet the Michael Higgins of the latter.  It is a superior film to Wanda, mostly due to the Sheen performance, but the two would make an excellent double Bill. 

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) is not high on my personal favorites list of Scorsese pictures, but much like Wanda it is a film about a woman at the end of her rope who decides to leave everything she knows behind.  The similarities between the two characters end there, but the message of female empowerment, though understated by Loden in Wanda, echoes through both movies.  I’ve always found it ironic that this theme was ascribed to Alice, as in the end it proves to be rather conventional in its values, but I’m reminded now that in the early 1970s a single woman even trying to subside without a man was still a novel concept to some.

The comparison between Wanda and these three films is likely to be challenged by some readers.  This is fine.  They are simply the movies I thought of while viewing a picture worth seeing in its own right.  However, I do feel that one more comparison is necessary.  Loden was the wife of director Elia Kazan from 1968 until her death (at age 48) at the hands of cancer in 1980.  Wanda was her lone feature but in some ways speaks volumes about the types of characters she and Kazan were drawn to.  His best films were always those about individuals living on the fringes of society.  Dock workers and pool hall patrons were his fare.  Based on this work it’s fair to say that Loden held the same sympathies for those trapped on society’s edges.

Grade: 2 Hats Off               

172: Vidas Secas (Barren Lives)

Insomniacs rejoice! The cure for your affliction has been found residing in the contents of this 1963 film from director Nelson Pereira dos Santos.  Often regarded as the masterpiece of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, Vidas Secas (a.k.a. Barren Lives) rivals only such pictures as Jackie Chan’s Project A: Part II (1987) and Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) as sure fire snore inducers from the 1001 list.  The book’s text reveals that the picture was adapted from the novel of the same name by Graciliano Ramos, and likens this author to Faulkner.  However, while watching Vidas Secas I felt more like it was a Portuguese-dubbed version of the The Grapes of Wrath, specifically the chapters John Ford chose not to film, as they are basically rambling incoherence on the part of Steinbeck.*

The text also praises the varying perspectives the film takes to tell the story of a poor nomadic farming family traveling through a land ravaged by drought.  It specifically cites the daring of dos Santos’ to shoot the skewed thoughts of the family dog in its dying moments.  I’ll concede that this scene is touching and affective (one of the few in the film), but this has little to do with this overblown directorial flourish.  I’ll also note that much of the cinematography in this piece is solid “A”-level work, but is lost amongst this “D” for disjointed film.

 Ebert called Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2003) “the worst film in the history of the [Cannes Film] Festival.” He particularly disliked a shot sequence in which a lone indistinguishable motorcycle is driven toward the camera from an extreme distance, leading to a cut that displays it being driven away to the same distance.  I’m pretty sure Gallo modeled this sequence from the opening and closing shots of this film.

Grade: 1 Hat Off  

*My apologies to high school literature instructors who are still unexplainably teaching this as the “great American novel.”

173: Suspiria

One of the things that make the movies so infinitely fascinating to me is the fact that there are so many ways to make a good movie, and even more to screw one up.  Sometimes films are good, or great, because they are self-contained.  They allow their audience to become lost in the world they project, completely forgetting their problems beyond the theatre door.  Conversely, some films achieve greatness because they acknowledge that they exist as part of a larger canon, referencing and paying homage to other fantastic pictures.  Both of these tasks are difficult, and the trick to either is in not going too far. 

            I kept thinking of another film throughout almost the entirety of Dario Argento’s brilliant Suspiria (1977); not one that had come before that it made reference to, but one made many years later.  I couldn’t get those dorks from American Movie (1999) out of my head.  Everything Argento was doing seemed like it must be regarded as celluloid gold to Mark Borchardt and his friends.  If you haven’t seen either film it occurs to me that they would make a killer double billing.  One is the story of a man desperate to make a film, the other an example of everything he aspires to do with it.  Both detail the horrors of the creative process, one literally and one metaphorically.

            I should be forthright and admit that horror falls low in the ranks of my favorite genres.  I’ve seen most of the classics that the 1001 list prompts, and must say that I only found a small few to be effective.  I have another title now to add to that short list.  I was legitimately frightened by Suspiria.  Most of what I’d read on Argento said that the majority of his work was schlock at best, but here at least I’ll have to disagree.  There is often a correlation between a low budget and a hokey movie, but with horror films it can be an advantage.  The director is forced to actually scare his audience, instead of simply startling them with special effects, and here Agento succeeds wildly.

            The story is simple enough, in fact it is almost cliché, but the technique is brilliant.  Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) is a young attractive ballet student who travels to a school in Germany to study her craft.  After frightening events mark her arrival, strange things seem to befall everyone involved with the academy.  The premise is almost bare bones, but the way in which Argento employs space and architecture make this film visually complex.  He is said to have had his cinematographer Luciano Tovoli view Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) prior to shooting so that he would mock the brilliant animated color scheme. 

            The richness of the pallet here is equaled by the range of sound employed to evoke fear.  Argento worked closely with the band The Goblins to create his soundtrack, and as with so many horror films, it is the true culprit of terror.  Everything from nursery rhyme-influenced harpsichord melodies to unintelligible mumbling creates a sense of dread.  Indeed, I find it difficult to think of images from the picture without mentally playing back these disturbing harmonics.    

            I learned from imdb that Argento originally planned to make this film with children as the protagonist ballet students, as opposed to young adults.  When this idea was dismissed because the screenplay was so disturbing, Argento changed no dialogue.  This gives the film’s antagonists a disquieting but subtle creepiness, as they often refer to the students as “boys” and “girls.” Likewise Argento manipulated the set to reflect this vision, creating pieces that proportionally made the actors appear like children.

            I won’t say anything else, except to admit that I too felt like a child again as I took in Suspiria.  It’s just creepy, and I was as scared as a tubby kid on dodge ball day in gym class.  Aspiring horror directors should take note of how effective not showing things can be. 

Grade: 3 Hats Off

174: My Night at Maud's

I love the French New Wave; particularly the early films that, viewed in context, feel like they’re changing the possibilities of cinema instantly before your eyes.  Eric Rohmer’s My night at Maud’s (1969) is something different though.  This was my first Rohmer, and it won’t be my last, but I didn’t get from this film what I got from Breathless (1960) or Jules and Jim (1962).  Those two pictures are often cited as some of the finest ever made, and certainly as two of the seminal works of the New Wave movement, so a comparison here might seem harsh.

 It seems natural to want to compare these works, as all critics are want to do,  but I don’t believe that Rohmer was trying to do the same things that his contemporaries had done.  This is not a film based in technique or the expression of lives and lifestyles so contrary to the bourgeois.  By the time this film was made those ideas were old hat within the movement.  This film instead seems to be a reaction to those masterpieces which preceded it.  Characters here sit and talk and worry that perhaps they embody all of those bourgeois clichés.  I don’t think that they do, in fact I’d say that the primary character defies movie clichés too, but they worry about it nonetheless.  

       Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a Catholic.  Despite the secularization of the world around him he still believes.  He is neither zealot nor saint, as the film details, but he does hope to one day settle down with a Catholic girl (preferably a blonde) and raise a family.  He’s in no hurry.  Early in the film he tells the audience through voiceover of a premonition he has about another frequent communicant in his parish.  She is lovely and he thinks of her, but is unsure each time he sees her if it will be the last.  He has never even approached her.

Working as an engineer, Jean-Louis fills his days as best he can after work.  He is new to the region and has few acquaintances.  He has taken to studying mathematics and philosophy in his spare time.  One night, by chance, he happens upon an old friend from high school, Vidal (Antoine Vitez).  As they discuss the probability that they would meet again after so many years they begin to broach subjects of fate and faith.  Vidal is an atheist, and though Jean-Louis has no interest in converting him, he asks him to join him for Christmas Mass. 

After the service the two end up at the apartment of the friend and sometimes lover of Vidal, Maud (Franciose Fabian).  She is beautiful and kind, but complains to Jean-Louis and Vidal of her unlucky streak with men.  The three talk and talk and talk, and eventually, through circumstance, Jean-Louis must spend the night sleeping with Maud.  He resists her, then she resists him, and though nothing really happens by the time he leaves he feels somehow different than he did the day before. 

Many of Rohmer’s biggest critics complain that his films are nothing but conversations, and, here at least, their summations are correct.  But these are some of the deeper conversations you’re likely to hear at the movies.  This has to be because of these characters.  They are neither heroes nor villains, but simply people living their lives, trying to find meaning.  Somehow Jean-Louis finds great meaning in this night, which in the film’s epilogue he refers to as his “last fling.”  

This is an odd movie.  It has so little of what we think of when we think of motion pictures, and yet it has so much more as well.  There are no guns or explosions or speeches or sweeping statements about politics.  Even the sparse voiceover doesn’t give terrific insight into Jean-Louis’ thoughts.  Yet there is a message here of some kind.  It is not hopeful or despairing or sweeping either, but it is true.  Life is as it is whether you believe in fate or in God or in nothing, it carries on.  So few are the moments in this life that we can pinpoint, and say that then we were changed.  This is the story of such a moment, and in that it is a success.

Grade 2.5 Hats Off