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.