20: Manila in the Claws of Brightness (a.k.a. The Nail of Brightness, a.k.a. Manila in the Claws of Neon, a.k.a Maynila: Sa mga kuko ng liwanag—Original Filipino title)

              I think that the most surprising element of Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Brightness (1975) is the sensibilities the film possesses for American culture, while simultaneously subtly criticizing capitalist territorialism in the city of its title.  Brocka was clearly influenced by American films and their themes, and quite possibly he influenced a few himself with this film, often regarded as the greatest of Filipino pictures.  Obviously, the labor movement movies of the 1950s as well as Midnight Cowboy (1969) are reflected here from a somewhat unfamiliar perspective.  Brocka certainly adds his own flare –notably with the film’s homosexual themes (he was openly gay) – and at times makes what might otherwise be a dingy homage into a unique, if admittedly melodramatic, picture about corruption and exploitation in the third world.

            Arriving in the city to find his lost love, Julio (Bembol Roco) is forced to seek work as a day laborer at a construction site.  The unsafe conditions and unforgiving foreman combine for a volatile environment, and Julio is shocked when he sees a man killed by falling debris.  Ordered to return to work immediately, the incident creates political stirrings amongst his fellow workers.  This subplot quickly all but disappears from the remainder of the film however when we see through brief flashbacks Julio’s memories of his beloved, Ligaya Paraiso (Hilda Koronel).  The two lived an idyllic life in a provincial fishing village, but Ligaya left for the city when promised a job and a potential education.  When she sent no word of her arrival, Julio followed to find her.

            Structurally, the film functions as both a disappearance mystery and a parable about the corruptive power of the urban landscape.  Julio is certain he’s seen Ligaya (whose full name translates to “Happy Paradise”) through the window of a trading company building, but he’s kept away by a sleazy gatekeeper.  As he fumbles through the inner-city squalor he finds himself increasingly prone to violence, and he eventually is lured into a ring of homosexual prostitutes who seem to have a connection to the inaccessible building.  He turns tricks for a time, seemingly unaffected by his plight, until by chance he sees Ligaya.  He follows her to a church, where they have a somewhat stoic reunion before going to a movie and then finding a bed in which to rekindle their relationship.

            In the film’s emotional centerpiece, a nearly ten minute dialogue between the two*, she reveals that she too has been trapped into a life of prostitution.  The young lovers make plans to flee the city, but before they can, Ligaya is killed by her pimp as a warning to other girls who might try to escape his clutches.   Enraged, Julio climbs the stairs of the whore house and murders the pimp with an ice pick.  The film concludes ambiguously as a mob surrounds the desperate young man, violently poised to make him the city’s next victim.

            The obvious comparison to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, released a year later in 1976, in the film’s final sequence leads one to wonder how much of a thematic influence Brocka’s film was on the American director and his screen writer Paul Schrader.  Obviously, Schrader’s screenplay was finished by the time of Manila’s release, but visually the films do have some striking similarities.  But Taxi Driver, for the most part, feels like a timeless film that happens to have been made in the 1970s, where Brocka’s to an extent feels stuck in that decade.  Costumes, body language, and even the small smattering of English dialogue in Manila feel dated upon first glance.  Taxi Driver, and to a lesser extent Midnight Cowboy bear the scrutiny of repeated viewings.  Likewise, the flashback sequences and melodramatic directorial tones (“Happy Paradise”…Really?) they display feel like a Ryan O’Neal vehicle rather than a gritty low-budget indy.   For a novice actor, Roco does what he can with the material he’s given, even showing some flashes of greatness, but his immaturity combined with Brocka’s unsure touch leaves something to be desired, as does the VHS quality stream that is available on Youtube.

Language: Filipino

Runtime: 125 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com (NST)

Grade: 2.5 Hats off       

*This was the scene that could have most used the missing subtitles.    

A Decision

With only twenty titles left to go, I find myself a bit exhausted.  Searching for the films has now become a real chore.  I’m still absolutely determined to try to make my June 16^th deadline, but I believe this may only be possible if I view some of the foreign language films without subtitles.  Several of them appear on the web with only their original audio, and alas I speak only English.  I will still be making every effort to see the twenty remaining titles, most of which are foreign, with subtitles if possible.  However, if I come across one that doesn’t have the translation, I’m going to go ahead and view it.  I’ve done this only once before, with Turkish Delight (1973; #88), and I don’t feel that it heavily detracted from my enjoyment of that title.  Is there potential here for skewed ratings? Yes.  However, I feel that the remaining titles may elude me forever, thus providing no opportunity for ratings, if I do not make the choice now to sacrifice the understanding of all dialogue.  I will mark any foreign language film I review, that I viewed without subtitles with an “NST”* after the availability note.

*No subtitles; I will apply this mark to the Turkish Delight entry as well.

21: Housekeeping

 

            There are times when movies serve us well by providing us with answers, but it is invariably true that they serve us even better when they provide us with questions.  This past summer, I was excited when advertising for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) suggested that the film would answer the questions posed by the Alien series.  Upon seeing the film I was resolute in my contention that it not only failed to answer the aforementioned questions, but even went so far as to pose new queries.  Then, after several weeks, it occurred to me that Scott had done something marvelous with the franchise he kicked off in 1979; giving it new life after more than a decade of spin-offs, crossovers, and retreads.  By posing more questions – this time getting at even deeper elements of human nature – he enlivened that which, like his creatures, only seemed to be defeated.  It took his unique touch, that mix of thought and action that he does so well, to truly revive, and perhaps cap the franchise.   

            Fans of Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping (1987) may be wondering by now what a 2012 big budget Sci-fi thriller has do with this relatively quiet and quirky dramedy from the Scottish director (his first North American film).  Nothing really, except that both of these films were helmed by directors that understood the power of questions to draw in an audience.  Scott’s film involves the origin of the human species, while Forsyth’s concerns the mysterious behavior of one of its members.  In a way, it too is an origin myth. 

            A narrator tells us the story of her youth, recounting the strange events that brought both her and her sister to be with their eccentric aunt, Sylvie (Christine Lahti).  At a young age they drove with their mother from Seattle to visit their grandmother.  Shortly after arriving at the geographically isolated town of Fingerbone, their mother took her own life.  When their grandmother passed away ten years later, two aged great aunts came to live with them in the house built by their grandfather.  He lost his life, we are told, years before in a train accident just outside of town that killed hundreds when the locomotive slipped off icy rails on a bridge, and then plunged to the depths of the frozen lake.  Like a congenial ghost, that bridge haunts the town, and the film.

When Sylvie arrives in Fingerbone, after years of transient existence, the girls, Ruth (Sara Walker) and Lucille (Andrea Burchill), are eager to learn more from her about the mother they barely knew.  Fingerbone has a way of making the world outside seem like an awfully exciting place, and Sylvie seems to have lived everywhere, at least for a time.  At first she seems drawn to the train station, eager to again take to the rails, but her affections for Ruth and Lucille convince her to remain as their caretaker.  Her quirks, a habit of collecting newspapers and tin cans, seem minimal at first, especially in the midst of the film’s most memorable sequence. 

Days after the geriatric aunts leave the girls in Sylvie’s care, the town floods.  The house, we’re told, is usually safe from the annual accumulation, but a late thaw leaves no option for runoff and for a time both aunt and nieces are forced to subsist in shin-deep water, donning their goulashes for each trip downstairs to the kitchen.  Initially, Sylvie’s nonchalant acceptance of these circumstances seems to be for the girls benefit, but as the water subsides it becomes clear that the state of the house is far from her mind.  The newspapers and tin cans begin to accumulate, and people in Fingerbone begin to talk.  Are these girls living in a healthy environment?  Ruth, who seems to care little for the world around her, doesn’t think anything is amiss, but as Lucille grows more concerned with her teenage social life, she begins to resent both her aunt and her sister.  Once, the two girls shared adventures together.  Now, Ruth prefers Sylvie as a traveling companion.  The two go on walks by the bridge and through the woods, crossing over mountain springs, and though they talk as they go, Sylvie remains mostly a mystery. 

Where all has she really been?  What caused her to leave?  Why did she stay away so long?  Was there a rift that tore the family apart after the train accident?  The answers to these questions are hinted at more than discussed, and Lahti has a way of making Sylvie’s reaction to questions about the past seem detached and defusing all at once.  The inquiries seem to bounce off of her and fade into the folds of the film, like the locomotive into the lake, sinking ever deeper with each subsequent attachment that glides off the rails.             

            Most people see a film that poses larger questions – something like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) – and initially recoil.  It requires more than two free hours to view and to process such a movie, and frankly we are losing our attention span as a culture.  It takes the ability to create and to reflect on critical and nuanced thoughts in order to digest such pictures.  We’ve bought into the idea that has been sold to us by Hollywood that movies exist solely for our enjoyment, and can be forgotten in the interim between the moment when we leave the theatre and the real moneymaker, the DVD release.  Housekeeping is a film of small questions rather than big, sweeping ones, but in the time I spent with it, and for some time thereafter, they were questions that mattered.  Not a masterpiece, but a wonderful look at a life different than my own, and yet similar in so many ways.

Language: English

Runtime: 117 Minutes

Available for streaming @amazon.com

Grade: 3 Hats Off

22: The Mortal Storm

         I can’t understand why it took me so long to find The Mortal Storm (1940).  It showed recently on Turner Classic Movies, and I was thankful to view it there.  As a Margaret Sullivan/James Stewart vehicle one would think it would be readily available from rental services such as Netflix.com.  Perhaps the buyers for such companies felt that one Sullivan/Stewart film from that year was enough, and settled for The Shop around the Corner (also 1940).  What a pity.  While I can’t definitively say that this film is better than that one, both certainly warrant easy accessibility.  As fantastic examples of studio-era filmmaking before U.S. involvement in WWII, these films represent the range that was required of the performers of the day. 

            The Shop around the Corner is a light but engaging romantic comedy in which Stewart plays the plainspoken charmer that he’s become in all of our minds.  He and Sullivan light up the screen in a scenario that has since been rehashed numerous times, but has never been bested.  In The Mortal Storm, released five months later, the two again play lovers, but this time against the more serious backdrop of the fascist takeover of Germany.  One of the few films released prior to the U.S. entering WWII that took a direct stand against Nazism, The Mortal Storm prompted Hitler to ban the screening of the movie and all subsequent MGM productions in occupied Europe.  According to one story this response was predicted by the German ambassador to the U.S., who urged Louis B. Mayer to reconsider releasing the film.  Upon viewing, it’s clear that simply reediting the picture for European release would have been impossible, as critiques of Nazi symbols and “Heil Hitler” salutes are plainly employed throughout.

            The film opens on the day of Hitler’s election to the chancellorship, an event that polarizes attitudes at the birthday party of a well-respected professor (Frank Morgan) of science who teaches “in a small university town at the base of the Alps.”  While many of the young family members and friends of the professor are enthusiastic about the rise of National Socialism, the professor himself, along with his wife, daughter Freya (Sullivan), and a student, Martin (Stewart), are hesitant to embrace the forthcoming changes.  As months pass, Martin becomes increasingly isolated from the professor and his family, particularly his sons Otto (Robert Stack) and Erich (William T. Orr) who have joined the Nazi Party.  He’s convinced one evening by Freya to join them for drinks, but is disgusted when he sees another of his former teachers being harassed for “non-Arian” behavior.  In this, the film’s most powerful scene, Martin and Freya slouch, bewildered, as their friends and siblings stand at attention and sing out their loyalty to the Third Reich.           

            Martin’s opposition to the state of Germany’s national politics makes him an outcast, and each attempt he makes to meet with Freya, who is still living with her swastika-clad brothers, becomes more and more dangerous.  Nevertheless, their relationship blossoms after her break-up with a fiancé whose position in the party is compromised by her own political dissent.  As forces continue to mount against the professor and the ideas he holds which contradict the tenets of the Final Solution, it becomes clear that escape from Germany is necessary for not only his safety, but for Freya’s and Martin’s as well.  The film’s final half hour is both exciting and moving, and as the picture closes Robert Stack breaks free of the confines of his role for a last moment of poignancy.  The script, well adapted from Phyllis Bottome’s novel, deserves ample credit for most of the movie’s finer moments, but the work of Sullivan and Stewart, as well as the strong supporting cast of Stack, Morgan, and Maria Ouspenskaya as Martin’s mother, drives the point home.  

Since the film’s release, contradicting stories have posited that un-credited producer Victor Saville actually directed much of the final product, but subscribers to the auteur theory place the film nicely in the canon of credited skipper Frank Borzage.  While such stories often run rampant about studio films of the era, there is one truth that cannot be denied regarding The Mortal Storm.  The film should be held in higher esteem, and not relegated to second class status in the Stewart collection.  While it certainly isn’t his best work, it serves as a reminder that he was a solid performer who brought depth to almost every role, not just the characters for whom is so often remembered.  The Film should at least be easily available for online rental, but like so many good films of the studio era it remains at arm’s length for the millennial generation.

Language: English

Runtime: 110 Minutes

Grade: 3 Hats Off 

23: Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol—Original Portuguese title)

            Sometimes, context really is everything when it comes to viewing films.  Such is the case with Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964).  I’m willing to believe, as the 1001 text assures me, that the film was received as a fresh and energetic declaration of a new Brazilian cinema upon its initial release.  However, I doubt that many contemporary audiences would apply either of the adjectives I used in the previous sentence to the film today.  Nearly fifty years removed from its premiere, it feels more like homage to better films than a work of startling originality.  Clearly Rocha was influenced by Eisenstein (as 1001 notes) and the French new wave—which certainly seems like an interesting combination—and it’s possible that Sergio Leone barrowed elements for the “Man with No Name” films he was working on at the time in Italy.  It also plainly seems to have influenced Jodorowsky’s El Topo* (1970).  But even with all of these connections Black God, White Devil failed to peak my interest. 

            The film’s action centers on Manuel, a laborer who kills his abusive employer and then goes on the run with his wife, Rosa.  The two set out into Brazil’s badlands where they fall in with a Black mystic.  They join his cult-like following, participating in his odd religious rituals.  Overcome by jealousy, Rosa eventually tries to free Manuel from the mystic’s control.  The two escape when a hired gunfighter is paid by the government to break up the rouge religious sect.  They eventually join up with a White bandito whose legend has endeared him to the people only enough to sustain a meager existence, but he too is on the bounty list of the gunfighter. 

            Admittedly, this synopsis is drawn equally, if not more so, from the review in the 1001 text than the actual experience of viewing the film.  Partly because the print I viewed was a bad 16mm to VHS transfer, and partly because the characters are poorly developed and at points difficult to distinguish from one another, I was utterly lost throughout the film.  The fact that white subtitles had been applied to the b&w film, and that they were often displayed over the hue that desert projects in that pallet, certainly didn’t help much.  Perhaps these factors doomed my potential appreciation for this film from the start, but I can’t really imagine having particularly enjoyed it in ideal conditions anyhow.  The odd religious imagery feels cheaply exploited, and the performances for the most part feel flat.  Had events superfluous to the picture not taken place, I feel that Black God, White Devil might have faded into almost total obscurity.    

            Between the picture’s production and its opening, a military coup resulted in political upheaval in Brazil.  As a violent, subversive, and challenging film I feel that it benefitted from events that it was, to my knowledge, in no way directly connected to.  It felt fresh because it seemed to have predicted the stirrings of dissent and the violent reaction to conventional norms.  This same point could be made about many English-language films of the period as well, as the 1960s brought vast social change throughout the world.  Many American films of the decade were praised as groundbreaking, but comparatively few have retained vaunted status, and only a small number are regarded as cinematic classics. 

            Apart from one distinctly odd death scene Black God, White Devil contains little memorable material.  The film is littered with images that are potentially powerful, but overall it has no sense of urgency.  A few gunfights are punctuated by rapid-fire editing, but this technique ultimately feels unmotivated, and adrift in an otherwise slow picture.  The 1001 write up on the film alludes to a Brazil brimming with potential upheaval into which this film was thrust with the force of a lightning bolt.  Unfortunately, it seems that this force, like lightning, was brief in its ability to illuminate both elements of a country in transition and an engaging narrative.

Language: Portuguese

Runtime: 110 Minutes

Grade: 1 Hat Off

*a film I can’t say that I particularly like, but is certainly better than Rocha’s

24: The Actress (a.k.a. Center Stage, a.k.a. Ruan Lingyu – Original Cantonese title)

            I’ve always been a fan of movies about the movies, but ultimately I walked away from Stanley Kwan’s The Actress (1992) more disappointed by its irony than moved by its insights on the process of creating cinema.  That’s not to say that the film reveals nothing about the compelling subject of the silent Hong Kong cinema of the late 1920s and early 30s.  In fact it does a fine job in this regard, and in its more obvious purpose of chronicling the final years of the silent star Ruan Lingyu.  It even points, in a fair and nuanced fashion, to the possible explanations for her startling suicide at the age of 24.  What it lacks however, and what perhaps is a given for Hong Kong audiences, is an explanation of why she so captivated them in the first place, and why, so many years later, she’s still a relevant figure in HK cinema.

            It’s possible that Lingyu’s power needs no explanation to Southeast Asian viewers of The Actress, or that those explanations contained within the film are lost in translation.  As I’m not overtly familiar with the historical context of 1930s Hong Kong I suspect that I missed more than just this.  Obviously the elements of the forthcoming invasion by Japan play a heavy role in the picture’s dark foreshadowing, but for the most part even this seminal event exists off-screen.  Herein lies what I perceived as the film’s pivotal flaw.  The scope of the picture feels all wrong.  The range of Lingyu’s influence is discussed but never shown.  I don’t even recall a scene of an audience watching one of her pictures. 

            The argument could be made that Kwan wanted his movie to be a character study, and that he wanted to avoid both large set pieces and sweeping statements about the Hong Kong of the era, but many fine films have undertaken in-depth personal explorations and set them on grand stages.  Kwan never even gives us a real sense of the bustling city.  For the most part we are confined to interiors, and windows are often blocked by faux skylines used as movie backdrops rather than the genuine cities that they imitate.  

            This tight approach might work if the film’s structure didn’t so wholly betray Kwan’s own personal feelings about Lingyu’s grandeur.  Indeed, The Actress often employs a film-within-a-film-within-a-film tactic that shows the director speaking with his actors as they compose a scene within a silent picture.  These sequences, often taken on washed-out video tape, also include Kwan’s interviews with his lead Maggie Chung, as well as their conversations with some of Lingyu’s contemporaries, now in their eighties.  Through these scenes we get a clear sense of his own infatuation with both Lingyu and her story, and yet despite his encouragement he never seems to fully immerse Chung in her character’s world.  Is he insinuating that she was detached from it?  Again, this may be lost in translation.

            But this is not the films crippling irony, and I suspect that Kwan is most definitely not to blame in this particular regard.  Many of The Actress’s best scenes concern the cutting of one of Lingyu’s best performances by the censors – severely altering a film that was perceived as critical of the Hong Kong press.  A similar fate has befallen The Actress but for no reason that I could find.  It’s possible that both an explanation of Lingyu’s on-screen appeal and evidence of an ambitious scope are now on the proverbial cutting room floor.  The original 167 minute runtime of the film was cut down to versions ranging between 118 and 154 minutes, and many of the original prints have been lost or destroyed.  The only known remaining full-length cut is owned by an Australian television network, and still occasionally airs on Ausi TV.

            Sometimes stories like this make a film more compelling.  Silent classic like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Dryer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) feel extra special when we view them because we know that for so many years they were lost.  In the case of The Actress, I suspect that the missing footage itself is what would give the movie more appeal.  In most cases, watching a film that is unenjoyably seems like a never ending process.  You hate the film all the more for every minute of your life that it steals.  This film is the rare exception that I believe I would have enjoyed more had it taken more of my time.  What it contains is good – Chung won Best Actress honors at Berlin in 1993 for her fine performance – but more would have made the film itself shine.

Language: Cantonese (primary)/Mandarin/English

Runtime: 121 Minutes

Grade: 2 Hats Off

25: Mother and Son (a.k.a. Mat i Syn – Original Russian title)

            There’s a hard truth that comes with reviewing films that are not in current release, and that is that there isn’t exactly any pre-established interest or innate sense of urgency in your work.  People may read it and be convinced to see or avoid a certain film, but for the most part they didn’t log on to the internet specifically to see what you had to say about a particular picture.  For the most part, the book has already been written on the material I’m covering, and while I’m fine with that, like every writer I secretly long to change someone’s opinion (read: life) with my scrawl.  This is a problem when it comes to pictures such as Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son (1997).

            It’s likely that if you’ve heard of the film you’re either tackling this list along with me, or you are a film nerd of incredible nerdiness who already knows that it is a slow, somewhat dreamlike meditation on death that concerns (SPOILER ALERT!) a mother and her son.  There isn’t anything I could write in this post that would convince someone who’d never heard of the movie to seek it out, or to prevent someone whose looking it up from wasting their time on it.  Is it slow? Incredibly.  Is it murky and understated? It’s a contemporary Russian film on the ­1001 list so I’m gonna bet that you readers already know that it is.  Is it moving? Somewhat, and for Sokurov’s purposes I’m certain that it hits the mark. 

            However, I didn’t come away from this film with any startling revelation, nor was I particularly shaken by its portrayal of loyalty even in death.  It runs just short of an hour and 15 minutes, and in that time VERY little happens.  The adult son cares for his mother as she dies.  I’m not going to ceaselessly pan it because it’s quite good for what it is, but it isn’t a film of actions or biting dialogue.  You get pretty much what the title describes.  Two people who know that they will soon be separated by death discuss memories and loss, and eventually they seem to come to terms with what is going to happen.

The love between them is portrayed well by leads Aleksei Ananishnov and Gudrun Geyer, and the emotion they display feels genuine, if a bit overly dramatic.  This is likely due to the fact that the film is composed of so many close-ups of the two eponymous figures.  The notable exception is the scene in which the son goes for a walk while his mother sleeps.  He meanders through woods and along dirt roads, and seems to be looking only for reprieve from the gravity of his mother’s demise.

Mother and Son isn’t a terrible film, but it isn’t conventional in any sense.  For the most part, movies glance over death, making it a footnote to the greater accomplishments of characters or the progression of narrative.  This film lingers on death, reminding me of the way Ingmar Bergman approached the subject.  There’s nowhere to hide from it in this picture.  But death isn’t exciting, and movies that exploit it as such usually aren’t either.  Death is often a slow, painful, and even boring process, and that’s what Sokurov ultimately gives us here.  If that sounds like your particular cinematic cup of tea, by all means drink up.

Language: Russian

Runtime: 73 Minutes

Available with English subtitles @youtube.com

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off  

10 Tips for Making a Bad Movie

            Faithful readers, if there are any of you left (or were any of you in the first place), I have to apologize for my lack of recent posts.  I’m simply running out of ways to find the remaining titles.  I’ve got a bead on a few, so I’ll hold off soliciting help for the time being, but I thought in the interim you might enjoy my thoughts on bad movies, as I’ve seen quite a few throughout the journey.  I’ll restrict my thoughts on the subject to a simple list, often the best way to organize any set of ground rules.  So without further ado, aspiring (and active) filmmakers, here are my humbly offered suggestions for composing a bad movie.

1.      Build your characters around statements, rather than building statements around characters.

2.      Use style more than substance to define your subject.

3.      Make that subject lasers and explosions.

4.      Give every scene a climax.

5.      Project definitives; avoid subtleties.

6.      Prioritize scope over substance.

7.      Substitute vulgarity for wit.

8.      Make either “complexity” or “simplicity” the stated goal of the structure.

9.      Make sure there is “something for everyone.”

10.  If it isn’t working, add a sex scene … in 3D.

26: The Idiots (a.k.a. Dogme #2, a.k.a. Idioterne—Original Danish title)

            Of all the filmmakers I’ve encountered on the 1001 quest, I think Lars von Trier may be the one that is always the most difficult to watch.  He makes films about taboo subjects and he never pulls his punches.  This trait has served him well in many cases, but I think he goes too far with his Dogme 95 debut The Idiots (1998).  The film concerns a group of youthful, healthy, middle class Danes who enjoy acting mentally retarded in public.  Good taste alone dictates that this film should not have been made, but von Trier has no interest in good taste.  Much like his characters here, he wants his observers to feel uncomfortable. 

            I’ve never been a fan of directors who want me not to enjoy their films, and yet I can’t say that I’ve disliked everything I’ve seen from von Trier.  I can think of only a few films that I felt less comfortable watching than his Antichrist (2009), but I really enjoyed his The Kingdom (1994; # 107), and his Breaking the Waves (1996) is a masterpiece.  Like any other director, it’s expected that he’ll be hit-and-miss over a career, but von Trier’s misses are often epics of grossness and humiliation. 

            Here, he introduces us to Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), a lonely woman who happens upon a group of people in a restaurant who appear to be mentally handicapped.  One of them drags her out of the dining room and into a cab after the maitre d' asks them to leave, and reluctantly she goes along.  The tension breaks when it becomes evident that this embarrassing incident has all been an act to avoid paying the check, and that the man, Stoffer (Jens Albinus), who grabbed her is playing a gag.  Karen is eventually asked to join in with Stoffer and the other friends who stay at his house who also enjoy “spassing,” as they call it. 

            Consisting of a series of such events, and the conversations between these spassing sessions, The Idiots is ostensibly a documentary that also includes occasional “interviews” with the members of the group.  However, this pretense, and the interview segments that support it, feels to me as though it were an afterthought from von Trier, who realized how often his handheld camera revealed boom mics and crew shadows.  There are those who claim that these elements are acceptable because of the film’s status as a Dogme 95 production, but those rules have always, to me, read as an excuse for shoddy filmmaking, and not as the purported “manifesto” that was eventually abandoned, even by its own creators.  

            There is another weakness to The Idiots as well; one that I made similar mention of in my review of Fat City (1975; #27).  There I said that no film could be great if you spent much of its runtime wondering what another actor would do with one of its roles.  Great films don’t allow you such thoughts because you’re too wrapped up in them to have them.  Similarly, with The Idiots I spent much of the film thinking about another movie.  Fight Club (1999) was, for some, the controversial film of the late 90s.  Overly violent and easily imitable, that movie became the problem with millennial Hollywood.  But I like Fight Club.  The connection between the two films that I felt was glaring was another piece of media that reveled in bad taste, MTV’s “Jackass.”  Essentially, both The Idiots and Fight Club take a 3 minute “Jackass” gag and extend it into a two hour movie.  Johnny Knoxville, Bam, and Steve-O were always hurting each other and acting retarded in public, and for some reason my generation ate it up like ice cream in July. 

            In both Fight Club and The Idiots a group of people unable to deal with the realities of contemporary life escape into a subculture where they feel better when they pretend that something is wrong with them.  They come to form a superficial family through their dysfunctions and their actions, and in both films characters begin to argue about one another’s commitment to the idea that brought them together.  The difference between the two pictures comes in the fact that Fight Club attempts to explain these characters’ reasons for dissatisfaction and motivations for alternative lifestyles, where, for the most part, The Idiots leaves these questions unexplored.  Its characters throw around the word “bourgeoisie” and talk about the failures of their society, but they never reach the point that the characters in Fight Club come to, in which they realize that what they truly hate is themselves.

In The Idiots only Karen’s motivations for joining the group are ever revealed, and by the time they were I’d stop caring.  I’d already dismissed the characters; the same way I dismissed the guys on “Jackass.”  They were immature and selfish, and while there’s nothing wrong with such characters in movies, they do need to be one of three things: a villain, a child, or a person with the potential for change.  I didn’t see any potential for change in The Idiots, and thus it did nothing for me.

Language: Danish

Runtime: 117 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com  

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off

27: Fat City

           From the IMDb* I learned what might have been, in the case of John Huston’s Fat City (1972).  Huston was interested in Marlon Brando for the role of the down-on-his-luck boxer Tully, but Brando was indefinite about signing on for the film.  This was perhaps due to the fact that he was holding out for the role of Vito Corleone in The Godfather, a part that Paramount didn’t want him for.  The role seemed like a perfect fit for the actor who’d fallen from Hollywood’s good graces, but when Huston could wait no longer for Brando, the part went to the relatively unknown Stacy Keach.  Huston also thought he had a lock for the film’s second lead— an up-and-coming fighter— but Beau Bridges thought he was too old for the role, and ultimately suggested his younger brother Jeff, whose resume consisted primarily of TV work before breaking out in The Last Picture Show in 1971.  Had Brando, or a slightly more accomplished actor than Keach— let’s say Jack Nicholson—taken the lead, and the older Bridges brother been less insistent, 1972 might have been a very different year for movies.

            I mention Nicholson for two reasons.  First, in 1972 he starred in the underappreciated The King of Marvin Gardens for BBS productions, a film remarkably similar in theme to Fat City.  Second, and more notably, I found it impossible to watch Keach’s performance in this film and not think that he was doing his best Nicholson.  In most cases when critics make this claim about an actor they mean it as knock on their performance, but here I intend it as the highest form of compliment to both parties.  Nicholson’s dark and edgy style was worthy at the time of being imitated, and Keach, looking very much like Nicholson, nails the restrained frustration and controlled rage that I think is Jack at his best (I can take or leave him when he goes really over the top). 

            As Tully, Keach uses his energy economically, and in this way handles the material more effectively than perhaps Nicholson could have.  The film opens as he searches for a match.  He’s got his cigarette—the last one in the pack—but he needs a light.  By the time he puts on pants and exits his shabby hotel room to go to the corner he doesn’t want the smoke any more.  He heads to the YMCA to workout, trying to make his way back into the fight game.  There he meets Duane (Bridges) and asks him to spar.  Tully can only dance for a few moments before the abuse he’s put his body through catches up with him, but from what he’s seen he thinks Duane may have a shot as a fighter.  He directs the reluctant kid to his old trainer, Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto).

            The remainder of the film charts the divergent, but often linked paths these two fighters will follow.  Both men meet women that hurt their chances of success, but the narrative moves back and forth between the two in showing how much they seem to care about this fact.  Tully falls in with Oma (Susan Tyrell), an alcoholic who’s opinion of her man is only cushioned from rock bottom by her opinion of herself.  She and Tully seem to need each other in the way some truck drivers say that they need to pick up hitchhikers to keep them awake.  It’s dangerous and irrational, but it’s better than falling asleep at the wheel alone.

            Duane makes the mistake that many young men make in cars with girls, and he feels more or less obligated to do the right thing.  He loves Faye (Candy Clark), but didn’t see himself supporting a family at nineteen.  After about a year he and Tully run into each other as they both work as day laborers, and somehow the two convince themselves that they should both take one more shot in the ring.  However, it may not be so easy for the aging Tully, especially when old wounds between he and Ruben don’t seem to have scarred over.  

            Because Fat City is a relatively short film at just under 100 minutes, particularly when compared to The Godfather, it’s entirely possible that the filming of that epic had completed by the time Brando was offered the role in this picture.  However, I can think of another reason he might have been reluctant to sign on to Huston’s film.  He may not have wanted to deliver another “I could have been a contender” speech, which is effectively what much of Tully’s late dialogue is, and be accused of becoming a parody of his former self.  After all, eighteen years after On the Waterfront (1954) is a long time to have been a washed-up boxer.  But there is still another coincidence that makes this actual vs. desired casting bout so interesting.  In this role Keach beat out Brando in initial voting for the New York Film Critics Circle choice for Best Actor of 1972.  However, neither performer garnered a majority of the vote, which was required by the rules of the time.  A necessary rules change was implemented that called for a revote, and both men ended up losing to Laurence Olivier for his performance in Sleuth.

                Though I was unaware of all of this while watching the film, I was nonetheless, as I noted, distracted by the thought of Nicholson in the lead.  I think Keach’s performance here is particularly good, and he leaves more room for the other actors (particularly Colasanto and Tyrell) to give their own fine performances than Jack would have left.  It is a fine film, and one that deserves a wider home video release**, but there is a truth that no reviewer can ever avoid.  If during a movie you’re unable to keep from thinking of what it would be like if a certain detail was tweaked, then it isn’t a great movie.  But Fat City comes awfully close.

Language: English

Runtime: 99 Minutes 

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

*The IMDb blurb on this film mentions that the two primary characters are brothers.  There was nothing in the film that even implied this in my recollection.  The two men seem to meet for the first time just after the opening title sequence.

**It should not have been difficult to find to the point that I’m seeing it with only 26 films remaining on the 1001 list.