Month: February 2020

ADAPTATION: THE THREE MUSKETEERS (2011)

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November 1, 2011

musketeers

Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers has been adapted countless times for the screen, most of them forgotten. There is a 1911 Edison production, a modernized 1933 Mascot serial that starred John Wayne as a French Foreign Legionnaire,  and now a newfangled 3D version crafted by Paul W.S. Anderson. Left out of this un-illustrious list are the canonical Douglas Fairbanks interpretation of 1924, and the popular jokey two-parter from Richard Lester in ’73 and ’74, but alas, it seems the latest Dumas gloss will go the way of Edison’s and the Duke’s, filed away as a rote remake and quietly ignored thereafter. Garnering a variety of gleeful pans and disappointing box-office returns, Anderson’s Three Musketeers nevertheless abounds in visual riches and confirms the director as one of the few to fully explore the possibilities of new 3D technologies.

Anderson told the London Free Press that Richard Lester’s Musketeers was one of the first films his father took him to see as a child. It was this childhood memory, and an interest in filming Baroque and Romanesque European architecture that set the project in motion. The idea started when Anderson and long-time producer Jeremy Bolt were marveling at the buildings in Berlin, where they were shooting Resident Evil: Afterlife, and,  Bolt told ComingSoon.net, “Paul said that we should really try and find a project where we could shoot some of these buildings for real.” The impetus for the project was purely visual, and a bit of a departure for the duo, whose previous films were mainly studio-bound. After sharing their mutual love of Lester’s lusty and slapstick take on the material, they pitched it to Constantin Films, who accepted. I would imagine the pitch included more references to the success of historical fantasies like Pirates of the Caribbean than King Ludwig II, whose Bavarian castles they would shoot in, but the influences of both are prevalent throughout.

Anderson and Bolt made a number of tweaks to Dumas’ story and Lester’s film. Most of the sexual energy of Lester’s version, which is overflowing with innuendo and Raquel Welch’s heaving bosom, is softened and diverted entirely into Milla Jovovich’s wonderfully sinuous and menacing turn as Milady, another of Anderson’s steely feminine heroes (or, here, anitheroes). In a nod to the lucrative tween audience (and inadvertently more faithful to Dumas), D’Artagnan is made younger and callower, with the Bieberesque Logan Lerman taking over the sabre. Not as spry as Fairbanks or as impish or Michael York, Lerman is a bit of a non-entity, but succeeds in not distracting from the often spectacular backdrops. The youth push is rounded out by Freddie Fox as an earnestly mincing King Louis XIII and Gabriella Wilde as D’Artagnan’s chaste love interest Constance. The three title roughnecks (Matthew Macfadyen/Luke Evans/Ray Stevenson), while not matching the oily majesty of Lester’s Oliver Reed/Richard Chamberlain/Frank Finlay, do a workmanlike job of swashbuckling, and were physical enough to perform the swordfights without stunt doubles.

This athleticism allows Anderson to get close and analytical in the sparring scenes, using slow-motion to register every thrust and parry. This facility with clean lines of action is nothing new for the director, but the spaces in which they snap into place  certainly is. The first of Anderson’s films to be shot mostly on location, his Three Musketeers emphasizes dizzying verticals as opposed to the claustrophobic horizontals of the Resident Evil series. This transition is visualized in the the first action scene, which takes place in an underground corridor that could have come out of R.E. The receding depth-of-field works brilliantly in 3D, as it did in Resident Evil: Afterlife (recently named by Stefan Drössler (director of the Munich Filmmuseum), as one of the best contemporary 3D films in a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art), and it even ends, like its zombie-killing forebear, with a Milla Jovovich action scene, as she dives through a barrage of weight-sensitive booby traps. The prize at the end, however, is the plans for an airborne killing machine, supposedly designed by Da Vinci. This hot-air balloon warship is indicative of the vertical heights Anderson will push his visuals for the rest of the film.

The castles of King Ludwig II are a reasonable match for the France of Louis XIII, since Ludwig was obsessed with Versailles and ordered the Herrenchiemsee to be built, a replica of Versailles in neo-Baroque style. These are garishly gorgeous constructions, and Anderson was allowed to film interiors as well, which he approaches in airy high and low angles, the actors receding into the depths of their own history, the ornate ceiling murals gaining the foreground to the characters’ background in the sharp 3D compositions (shot on the Arri Alexa, also Scorsese’s choice for Hugo).

The introduction of the flying warships, while clearly an effort to pump up the film’s action quotient, is also a perfect device to push Anderson’s experiments in verticality. The closing set-piece is a slow ascent followed by a steep decline, the 3D depth effects shifting so that up and down becomes the new background and foreground, a re-orienting of space that is a logical extension of the scene but dizzying to behold. When the battle crashes , the lines of Bavarian architecture re-ground the image, with the climactic swordfight taking place on the vaulting roof of a church, whose steep declines tumble the combatants back down to the earth. A marvel of cinematic architecture, Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers should rightfully carve out a space next to the efforts of Douglas Fairbanks and Richard Lester as the exuberantly entertaining Dumas adaptation of its age.

TO SAVE AND PROJECT: THE MOVIE ORGY (1968) AND AFRAID TO TALK (1932)

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October 25, 2011

the movie orgy

For nine years running, MoMA’s To Save and Project international festival of film preservation has showcased the latest celluloid surgery jobs by archives the world over. It’s the one place where film stock is still a fetish, each new print ogled with the entitled leer of a sozzled Miss Universe judge. So I was sent to my oft-used fainting couch when it was announced that a digital restoration would open this year’s fest (which runs through Nov. 25th).   This prestigious pole-position was granted to Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy (1968), a delirious mash-up of pop culture detritus, from psychotic b-movies to baffling Bufferin commercials.

Dante and Jon Davison edited the entire feature by hand, splicing in new scenes when intriguing material passed their way. Eventually the project ballooned to 7 hours, but with its broad humor, broads, and critique of the military-industrial complex, it toured college campuses under a Schlitz beer sponsorship. By the end of its run the print had more stitches than Frankenstein’s monster, without the salve of Karloff’s soulful stare. It would be unlikely to survive another trip through a projector. So Dante shoved the benighted thing through a film-to-tape transfer, and after some screenings on the West coast has finally brought his beast to the East. Now at a svelte 4 1/2 hours, it’s a marvel of gonzo editing. It contains an actual narrative, collapsing the apocalypses  of a bunch of sci-fi/teen rebel/horror cheapies into one mega-Armageddon, while finding time for mini-comedies and grace(less)-notes in between.

For this main narrative, I spotted the following titles: Speed Crazy (1959), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), Teenagers From Outer Space (1959), College Confidential (1960), The Giant Gila Monster (1959), Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956), and Beginning of the End (1957). There are many more I couldn’t identify, but these images of nuclear paranoia are spread throughout, until Dante and Davison edit them together in a blaze of melodramatic parallel editing that would make D.W.  Griffith a little nauseous.

W.C. Fields, George Burns and Groucho Marx act as a bemused chorus during the chaos, used in reaction shots in response to whatever absurd travail Dante places before them (maybe Peter Graves gunning down locusts or Andy Devine singing “Jesus Loves You” with a cat and a gerbil). It’s the Kuleshov effect used for juvenile laughs, which I fully endorse. Dante uses this gag in other forms, once in an Eisenstinian montage, cutting from a dog training short to one for the Marines, or equally bluntly, from kids setting up a projector to a striptease. Dante is in full control of the editing-as-joke mechanism, and he wrings some hilarious bits out of it. Another routine worked through multiple variations is condensing an entire feature into a descriptive one-shot. In a B-dog-movie called (something like) “Rusty Comes Home”, he shows one scene of a dog running to a boy. “You came back!”.  Cut to “The End” credit.

Then there are the insane commercials, including a mind-melting series from Bufferin, in which a military recruiter sends a kid to war and a landlord evicts an elderly couple. Both use the pill to ease their guilty consciences. In the latter a building implodes behind the landlord as he pops his aspirin. These play more like parody than ad copy. The true star of Dante’s opus though, is Brett Halsey, the star of Speed Crazy (1959). Under the sensitively absent direction of William Hole, Jr., Halsey furrows his brow and strangles out his motto, “Don’t crowd me!”, thousands of times. Whether he’s chatting up a gum-smacking dame (in which crowding would seem to be the point) or stabbing a square authority figure, he repeats the phrase incessantly, as if Halsey forgot the rest of his lines. But he had already appeared in 20 movies, the absurdity of his repetition a likely result of compressed shooting times and a thin script. By the end, the audience was erupting in scattered cheers whenever Halsey appeared on-screen, as I would like to do for this entire low-brow masterpiece. Because of its endless copyright infringement, The Movie Orgy will never appear on home video, so rush to see it if it ever plays near you.

***

The other highlight of the festival for me was Edward L. Cahn’s Afraid to Talk (1932), a brutally despairing corruption drama, based on the play Merry-Go-Round by Albert Maltz and George Sklar. Made during the depths of the Great Depression, it exhibits a totalizing distrust of authority, with Chicago city officials displayed as more comprehensively criminal than the gangsters they are ostensibly supposed to pursue. Jig Skelli (Edward Arnold) kills kingpin Jake Stranskey (Robert Warwick) to take over his racket. When he’s rousted for the crime, he simply flashes Stranskey’s records, which implicate every major  Chicago official as on the take, from the DA’s office to the Mayor’s. Needing a scapegoat, the cops pin the murder on bell boy Eddie Martin (Eric Linden), almost beating him to death to force a confession.

Cahn and DP Karl Freund (Metropolis) visualize the back-scratching corruption of the government through shifting group shots. At police chief Frank Hyers’ (Ian Maclaren) well-appointed pad, the top officials often gather around the table to pop champagne and talk jubilantly of their double dealings. Hyers is framed to his left by the Mayor (a red-faced Berton Churchill) and Assistant DA Wade (Louis Calhern). On the right District Attorney Anderson (Tully Marshall) and a rotating cast of underlings. They are framed in long shot, with a receding hallway behind them. Down that hallway comes an indistinguishable mass of Fedora’d newspapermen, walking in lockstep, resigned to regurgitate the party line.

This grouping of power is contrasted to configurations of weakness, specifically in the initial interrogation of Eddie, who is the point of a triangle between Wade and Anderson. Later in this sequence Eddie’s wife Peggy (Sidney Fox) is subjected to an intensely close two-shot, in which Wade leans over her prone body as she rests her head in her hands. These different figural arrangements reach a climax in Eddie’s second interrogation, when his confession needs to be forced. There the cops, after flicking the overhead lamp to tick-tock over their heads, converge to make an airtight boundary around him, the image just one hulking mass of black wool suit. In this shot all of Eddie’s subjectivity is erased, to be halfway restored in the still-pessimistic conclusion. The governmental pack is thinned out, but the structures that allowed for Eddie’s blotting out are still firmly in place, as the news ticker trumpets another mission accomplished.

WARNER ARCHIVE ROUNDUP: LATE FILMS

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October 18, 2011

last run

Every week the Warner Archive dusts off a bundle of forgotten studio productions onto DVD and hopes they find an audience. Recently they released a quartet of late films from veteran studio auteurs, and they all deserve to be seen. They are Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), Richard Fleischer’s The Last Run (1971), George Cukor’s Travels With My Aunt (1972) and Blake Edwards’ The Carey Treatment(1972), all presented in handsome remastered editions. These are directors who had been weaned in the classical studio era, and who were now facing the reality of producer-brokered “package deals” and the escalating power of the lead actors. Many of these were fraught productions, and none will rank with the best of the respective director’s work, but they all, somehow, end up as solidly crafted entries on their brilliant resumes.

The Last Run was originally a project set up for John Boorman at MGM, who was to produce and direct. As the AFI Catalog reports, star George C. Scott requested that John Huston replace Boorman, as he had worked with Huston on The List of Adrian Messenger (’63). After three weeks of shooting, however, Huston quit the picture, “after arguments with Scott over rewrites”. Richard Fleischer became the third and final director on the project, and lead actress Tina Aumont was replaced by Trish Van Devere.  It is unknown if any of the footage Huston shot remains in the film.

It is clear that Scott exerted a lot of control, even marrying two of his female co-stars (he left wife Colleen Dewhurst for Van Devere after shooting), and yet Fleischer still imbues the film with the cool, clean lines that had highlighted his work since The Clay Pigeon and Follow Me Quietly (also in the Warner Archive) in 1949. He traced these lines along the well-worn track of the story, the starkly familiar tale of aging getaway driver Harry Garmes (Scott) accepting one more job, “to see if my nerves and brain are still connected.” He picks up escaped prisoner Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) and his girl Claudie (Van Devere), but it appears Paul was sprung in order to be assassinated. Harry has to decide whether to aid their escape, and risk his life, or return to his solitary life on the Portuguese coast. It’s an easy choice unless you are in an existential road movie, in which the death-drive trumps lazy afternoons in the gorgeous coastal city of Albufeira.

Scott was 43 at the time of filming, but he looks at least 60, with thinning gray hair, a prominent paunch and wrinkles carving up his sagging face. As Harry Garmes, you can see every indignity in his life manifest on his body. His son died at the age of 3, and then his wife up and left him alone with his car obsession. He is subsumed in feelings of loss, using work as an escape. The loveliest moment in the film occurs when Garmes is forced to sleep over in a room Claudie has just departed. Her bra, panties and pantyhose are sitting wet in the sink. With lugubrious patience he takes them out, unrolls them, and hangs them on the laundry line by the dresser. In his ashen face you can see the memories flickering by, of when this banal act was routine, of intimacy once taken for granted and now enshrined in an alien past.

Fleischer does an unobtrusive job in choreographing the love triangle, re-configuring the three jousting players around the frame as their power-relations shift and shudder. These cramped, sticky compositions are a stark contrast to the opening shots of Garmes on the road in his BMW, in which the edges of objects all point outside the frame, towards escape. Now the eye just circles inside low-lit hotel dives, the eye cycling around these three increasingly dour criminals, the only way out a bullet in the chest, to turn the triangle into a line.

***

George Cukor was still a prestige name in Hollywood in 1972 (the trailer included on the DVD trumpets his name), although he didn’t have a hit since My Fair Lady (1962). So when the intended star of Travels With My Aunt, Katherine Hepburn, was “frustrated by budget cuts and demanded several script alterations”, per the AFI, the studio declined her requests, and she quit. Maggie Smith stepped in, and was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for her efforts.

The film is a buoyant adaptation of the comic Graham Greene novel, about milquetoast Briton bank manager Henry (Alec McCowen) who is whisked away on an international adventure by his dotty Aunt Augusta (Smith). Augusta is trying to acquire $100,00o by any means necessary to ransom one of her ex-lovers, Visconti (Robert Stephens, Smith’s husband until ’74), away from his kidnappers. In order to get this money, she re-acquaints herself with her multitude of formerly amorous companions (including North African fortune-teller Wordsworth (Lou Gossett)), as well as engaging in some minor money laundering and art theft.

This international romp (mostly shot in Spain) gets a lot of mileage out of Maggie Smith’s fluttering bohemian routine, but Cukor also manages to invest her character with a tragic sense of time’s passing. Augusta, who sucks life to the marrow, is a creature of the present tense (“I’ve always preferred an occasional orgy to a nightly routine”), but she is granted a powerfully moving reminiscence at “Le Train Bleu”, the Belle Epoque restaurant at the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris. She is speaking to Henry about her youth, and then the camera pans right, and suddenly the years have worn away, and it is a young Visconti who is walking towards a window. Outside a teenaged Augusta, in a schoolgirl’s outfit, exchanges giddy glances with him. She ditches her class and races inside, into a swirl of noise and movement, until Visconti lifts her away into light-footed waltz. It was a time of endless possibility, which has now shrunken for Augusta into re-living her past flings and scrounging for cash. This is the melancholy that underlies all of the film’s high-flying farce.

***

Director Blake Edwards  wanted his name taken off of The Carey Treatment (1972), an efficient medical thriller adapted from an early Michael Crichton novel (A Case of Need, by his pseudonym Jeffrey Hudson). Edwards was unhappy with the cuts MGM had made to the film, just as with Wild Rovers the year previously, but his name remained on the prints. I don’t know what was excised, but what remains is a solidly built contraption anchored by a smugly sexualized performance by James Coburn.

Coburn plays Dr. Peter Carey, a womanizing rogue taking up a new job as a pathologist in a Boston hospital. His adeptness at manipulating women becomes the recurring theme of the film, beginning when his erotic gaze is leveled Georgia Hightower (Jennifer O’ Neill), the clinic’s dietician. Carey’s seductive charm is later utilized in his independent investigation into the death of the hospital president’s daughter, after a botched illegal abortion. Carey’s friend David Tao (James Hong) is wrongfully tagged with the murder. Carey flirts his way through town, becoming more sexually aggressive until it turns to intimidating violence, as when he asks the victim’s old roommate if she is a virgin, and then nearly drives them into the ocean to scare her into talking. He discovers the killer through a bit of homo-erotic flirtation, receiving an aggressive deep-tissue massage from an intrigued meathead until he gets the information he was after.

It is difficult to locate Edwards’ personality, aside from the sardonic shot of a mouse stuck in a jar in the extreme right foreground, the faces that look into it distorted into gargoyles. It’s otherwise a workmanlike production, nothing more than a wonderfully acted episode of House, what with a harrumphing Pat Hingle and nervous Regis Toomey on board to support Coburn’s wildcat act.

***

Still riding the late career renaissance brought on by the camp theatrics of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), Robert Aldrich directed The Legend of Lylah Clare with even less consideration of good taste. A wild kitsch re-imagining of Vertigo, it invents tragic Hollywood star Lylah Clare (Kim Novak), who died before she was to marry her long-time director Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch). 20 years later, Zarkan discovers an actress who looks strikingly like Lylah, the bespectacled Elsa Brinkmann (also Kim Novak). He decides to make a biopic of Lylah Clare’s life, with the unknown Elsa to star. Elsa, however, is prone to channeling Lylah’s husky tenor and mannerisms with disturbing accuracy, and Zarkan becomes entranced, his obsession leading him to make the same mistakes that led to Lylah’s death all those years ago…

Hallucinatory and ridiculous, Lylah Clare is an often uproarious send-up of Hollywood self-seriousness, with its menagerie of skulking gargoyle performances. Peter Finch is the head freak, a narcissistic blowhard who believes his genius trumps reality- he looks pretentious even after he shaves off his pointy devil goatee. He gets the best lines: “Stop poncing about like an oversexed dwarf!” and “You are moving like a deeply offended Tibetan yak!”Then there’s his brittle and viciously jealous assistant Rossella (Rossella Falk), the worm-like producer Bart (Milton Selzer),  Ernest Borgnine as the infectiously boorish studio chief Barney Sheehan, “I make movies, not films!”, and Coral Browne as battle-ax gossip columnist Molly Luther, plus a cameo by Dick Miller as a journalist!

Aldrich often freezes them inside Zarkan’s mausoleum of a house, standing rook still like slowly oxidizing statues. Unable to see life beyond the glories of years past, they try to recreate it with Elsa, who is too open to suggestion to withstand their entreaties. As her life dissolves into Lylah’s, the film gets more strident and less bitchy, ditching the satire for a dime store version of Vertigo’s doubled identities. The presence of Novak only highlights this film’s shortcomings at metaphysical speculations. While it’s not terribly deep, I still had great fun skimming along its sarcastic surfaces.

FALL CLASSICS: IT HAPPENED IN FLATBUSH and BIG LEAGUER

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October 11, 2011

big leaguer

Major League Baseball is in the midst of a preposterously entertaining postseason, with major upsets and wild finishes happening almost every night. As I typed that, Nelson Cruz hit a walk-off grand slam, the first in playoff history, to give the Rangers a victory over the Tigers in the ALCS. Even better for MLB’s image (if not the ratings) is the success of small market teams like the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers, the latter of which has surged into the National League Championship Series, quieting the yearly calls for an NFL-style salary cap. With that and the cheap-team strategizing of Moneyball still in theaters, I thought I’d highlight two scrappy low-budget baseball movies which deserve more attention (read: a home video release): It Happened in Flatbush (1942) and Big Leaguer (1953).

The recent history of baseball on film is not a particularly inspiring one, with screenwriters as prone to mawkish inspirational cliché as their sports-writing brethren. The established “classics” of the genre,  like the The Natural or Field of Dreams, are unendurable parades of New Age philosophical claptrap, which make Moneyball seem as austere as Bresson in comparison. Michael Lewis’ book about the 2002 Oakland A’s described how the team utilized advanced statistical analysis to massage their low-cost club into the playoffs. It’s the first baseball-themed movie to become a substantial hit since The Rookie in 2002. Which is not to say it’s terribly good. Director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin take this absorbing, but essentially undramatic, tale of market inefficiencies and pump it up into an inspirational tear-jerker. Brad Pitt gives a finely detailed performance – see the multifarious ways in which he spits out sunflower seeds – but he’s stuck in the iron maiden of the dispiritingly conventional plot, complete with invented family drama and wise cracking sidekick (Jonah Hill). To see how it also gets the history wrong, see Kevin Goldstein’s review at Baseball Prospectus.

The best baseball films seem to be loose and episodic, as unconcerned with structure as an extra inning game. That’s part of the reason I have a fondness for It Happened in Flatbush (1942), a modest, jokey trifle about an unpopular managerial change by the Brooklyn team (the Dodgers were not cooperative with the shoot, even forbidding use of their name). It was directed by Ray McCarey, who like his brilliant brother Leo, started his career as a gag man for Hal Roach, and later worked his way over to Three Stooges shorts. Some of the slap-happiness from the Roach shorts is retained in this squirrely film, in which battle-ax owner Ms. “Mac” Mcavoy (Sara Allgood) hires disgraced former shortstop Frank “Butterfingers” Maguire (Lloyd Nolan), who cost the team the pennant years before, to take over as head coach. The script was loosely based on the 1940 season of the Cleveland Indians, during which the players agitated for manager Oscar Vitt to get canned because of his constant criticisms. It opens with an on-screen title joke that could have come from a Fatty Arbuckle short. Over a shot of crashing breakers, the text reads:

“This story is fictional but anything might happen, and usually does, on a strange island just off the eastern coast of the United States. It’s people are friendly…could even be taken for Americans, but they have a language, customs, and a tradition all their own… the name of this island is–BROOKLYN!”

The movie hums with clashing working class accents and a relatably insane obsessiveness about the game. Maguire was coaching a semi-pro league in a rural nowhere called Clovertown when McAvoy came calling. Maguire rattled off the Dodgers’s schedule with ease, saying, “I haven’t missed a box score in 7 years.” Then there is the depiction of the fan-base, animalistic and near-rabid. After a disputed call at home plate, a particularly aggressive Irish fan tumbles onto the field and decks the ump just because he can (real game footage from Ebbets Field is intercut with studio inserts). When the team has a successful road trip, they are greeted by mobs at the train station eager for a winner. The movie sparks with unbridled passion perhaps because of technical advisor Johnny Butler, who, according to the AFI catalog,  “was a veteran of twenty-three seasons of major league baseball, including two season as shortstop for the Dodgers. According to studio publicity, at the time of the film’s production, he was working as a studio policeman.”

Another laid back baseball movie is Big Leaguer (1953) the directorial debut of Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly). This amiable drama concerns a summer training camp for amateur talent in Florida, put on by the New York Giants. Edward G. Robinson stars as Hans Lobert, the director of the camp and former third-baseman for the team (Lobert was a real player, who hit .274/.337/.366 over 14 seasons for five teams). Unlike It Happened in Flatbush, Big Leaguer was granted full access to the Giants franchise, and was filmed on their actual training camp in Melbourne, FL, and offers cameos by legendary pitcher Carl Hubbell and head scout (and former 2B) Al Campanis. It is airier than Flatbush’s succession of busy interiors, but is granted a hackneyed script, with constant clichéd voice-over by invented sportswriter Brian McLennan (Paul Langton). Not a lot of Aldrich’s acidic personality comes through in his first venture, although the presence of combative male friendship is present, to be fuller fleshed out in his more despairing war films (Attack, The Dirty Dozen).

Aldrich gets a joyous performance out of Edward G. Robinson, who huffs and puffs his way through like an over-agitated uncle, repressing his love of his boys through hoarse-voiced criticisms. There is one shockingly funny sequence in which Richard Jaeckel, who would appear in Aldrich films until the last one in 1981 (…All The Marbles), brushes Robinson back off the plate with a high fastball. Robinson tumbles backwards with the grace of a frozen turkey. He then rages towards the camera, and in extreme close-up his hair is standing on-end, his eyes flared, ready to brawl like a hot-headed 18 year-old. Robinson brings this childishness to bear throughout, even doing a twirling jig to one of the big band tunes the kids play relentlessly.

I prefer both of these raggedly entertaining items to Moneyball’s slick insularity, and wish Pitt had as much space to play (and dance) around as Robinson does in Big Leaguer. Now if only MGM would release the 1953 film in their on-demand “Limited Edition Collection”, or if the Twilight Time label would poach  It Happened in Flatbush from the Fox library for a future DVD, this MLB postseason would truly be one for the ages.

THE 2011 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, PART 2

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October 4, 2011

nyff 2011 2

The 49th New York Film Festival is strutting into its first full week, rolling out red carpets and doling out free espresso to its star and art-struck audience. As posh as the whole experience is, this shouldn’t hide the adventurousness of the programming, which is rivaled in NYC only by Migrating Forms and the New York Asian Film Festival. I will try to capture the scope of the event with a bunch of short reviews (as opposed to my longer appreciation of DREILEBEN last week). Luckily, almost all have U.S. distribution, so they should eventually be available at a Netflix queue near you.

This is Not a Film (2011, directed by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb). Screens Oct.  13 at 6PM. Distributed by Palisades Tartan.

The film of the year is an unassuming thing, shot on an HD digital video camera (and an iPhone) in Jafar Panahi’s apartment. In December 2010 Panahi was arrested and charged with “harming national security and anti-Islamic Republic propaganda.” He is now under house arrest while appealing a 6 year prison sentence and 20 year ban on traveling or making films.  This movie’s existence is a miracle, smuggled into the Cannes Film Festival in a cake, but perhaps more miraculous is its aesthetic rigor. What in the film looks like an afternoon was shot over four days, Mirtahmasb saying in the NY Times, “I refer to Godard, who said if you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction.”

It is an interpretation of Panahi’s daily life, as he putters about his apartment, bickering with a neighbor’s dog and his daughter’s invasive pet iguana. These amusing slices of life about the banalities of home imprisonment are pushed against by two major set-pieces, impeccably staged and performed. The first is Panahi acting out a scene from his new script, which the government will not allow him to make. He stops and starts, alternately inspired and despairing as he blocks the movements of his young female character, using masking tape to mark off a blueprint of the set. It is a tour-de-force of creative power and destruction, constructing a film in our heads and then letting it disappear. The closer has Panahi enter the elevator with the janitor’s relative, who is taking out the trash. This young man was in the apartment when Panahi was arrested, and tries to tell the story of that night. But he is continually interrupted by his job, ringing doorbells and corralling garbage. Panahi follows him all the way outside, but the young man never finishes his story, subsumed by his job (which Panahi is filming with his iPhone, breaking the law of his house arrest) and the sound of the fireworks outside, part of the Persian New Year festival which Iranian authorities have tried to outlaw for its Pagan origins. The sequence is a heady nexus of how work is art and art is culture and all of it is silenced.

***

Le Havre (2011, directed by Aki Kaurismaki). Screens Oct. 5 at 9PM. Distributed by Janus Films.

Bela Tarr: “[Le Havre] is deep, sad and full of jokes, but every joke is very painful. That’s what I like.” I like it too. The swift-moving sadness of aging and the succor of community are the two poles of the latest charming cinephile-bait from the Kaurismaki factory. Set in an anachronistic present of fedoras and analog cameras, Le Havre tracks the stooped steps of Marcel Marx (Andre Wilms) as he tries to nurse his wife Arletty (Kati Outinen) back to health and help illegal African immigrant Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) get to London. Marcel is a shoe-shiner, staring downward at the parade of Converse sneakers that refuse his services. His age and his skills are now both cruel (but funny!) jokes. He and his neighborhood snap to life when they learn of Idrissa’s case, working off the sense memory of all the French Resistance movies they’ve seen (as well as Marcel Carne and Arletty’s Children of Paradise (1945) made during the Occupation). Their lined faces (and what faces!) spark to life as they get a chance to act the hero for once in this benighted cutesy town. What begins in the cold reaches of Jean-Pierre Melville-ville ends in pure Hollywood-land, a place for miracles.

***

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan) Screens Oct. 8th at 5:30PM. Distributed by The Cinema Guild.

An epic ramble through the Turkish criminal justice system and the ethical brambles of a doctor and lawyer, Anatolia moves from macro to micro with elegance and astonishing formal control. Roughly speaking, the first half deals with physical illumination, the second with mental. It opens with a group of law enforcers: cops, the D.A., the coroner and their lackeys, driving suspected murderers around to find the corpse of their confessed victim. This takes all night and into the day, requiring a ballet of lights to illumine the plowed ground. The first shot is a slow zoom into a smudged window, indicating that there will be no clear sights of the truth. The captain (Yirmaz Erdogan, fuming and stamping “like a handful of bees”), continually reorients his truck’s search lights for the right angle, while a quick thunderstorm produces other revelations, not under investigation. As the doctor pees, lightning flashes, and an ancient statue stares at him, another, more permanent, judge of their actions. This play with light culminates in a stopover to a small village, in which the electricity goes out. The mukhtar, or village chief, has his daughter light lanterns and bring tea to the civil servants, and her face is the ultimate revelation. Each stares, agog, at what is clearly an angel come to Earth, another vision of the infinite during their trudge towards the irreducibly mortal. After the corpse is retrieved, everyone comes down to earth, engaging in uncomfortable bureaucratic wrangling and the reality of the lives they left behind.

***

You Are Not I (1981, directed by Sara Driver). Screens Oct. 6th at 9PM. No Distributor.

This maniacally creepy independent, an adaptation of a Paul Bowles short story, was thought lost after a leak in a New Jersey warehouse destroyed the negative. But wait! A print was found in Bowles’ holdings, and is now restored in its high-contrast grainy B&W glory (Jim Jarmusch was the DP and co-screenwriter). A nervous mental patient (Suzanne Fletcher) escapes her hospital, and wanders past a horrific car crash en route to her sister’s house. She desperately wants to eject her frazzled sibling and replace her, to create space for the patient to live alone in her own head. Driver sets a mood that is dreamlike and elliptical – the crash is a pile-up of abstracted forms on grass, and the corpses are lined up like dominoes. We are witnessing the world through the patient’s frazzled brain, so every image is unreliable. The closer is Erasherhead-hysteric, with trembling old ladies and the buzzing non-score by Phil Kline. It’s a authentically disorienting experience.

***

Twenty Cigarettes (2011, directed by James Benning). Screens on Oct. 9th at 9PM. No Distributor.

A minor but enjoyably playful video from the minimalist master James Benning. Last year’s festival brought his debut on digital, Ruhr, a massively beautiful meditation on duration. Twenty Cigarettes is more of a lark, a way for him to work and hang out with his friends at the same time, kind of an avant-garde Ocean’s 11. Benning shot portraits of twenty subjects smoking a cigarette. He cut only when they completed, at their own pace, with cigarettes as a timepiece. They are all positioned in front of flat backgrounds (except for filmmaker Sharon Lockhart, who is framed in front of sky), and the fun is in detecting personalities in the style of smoker. So you have the reluctant smokers, the speed demons, and the ones, usually older, who luxuriate in their cigs and extend the movie”s running time (it’s 99 minutes).  It’s in conversation with Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, although Benning’s subjects are not performers, but fellow artists and friends. Warhol’s films have the sense of a happening, of a communing with wild spirits, where Benning’s film is just companionable, a sitting down and getting back in touch with friends you didn’t know you had. Which is not a bad way to spend a night at the movies.

THE 2011 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, PART 1

robertemmetsweeney2 Comments

September 27, 2011

nyff 2011

The 49th New York Film Festival begins this Friday, September 30th, with a main slate of 27 features and an abundance of sidebar and retrospective screenings, including a massive survey of Nikkatsu Films. All of my favorite entries so far share an obsessively detailed sense of place, locations that subsume central characters and emerge as active agents of memory, myth and fate. Dreileben, a group of three features made for German television, is set near the Thuringian Forest, folkloric heart of German culture, and former home to Wagner, Schiller, Bach and Goethe. Ancient fables are invoked as templates for the tragic circlings of the unlucky few who come in contact with a man-made monster.  The Turin Horse utilizes a perpetually wind-thwacked dust bowl as a bluntly metaphorical vision of the barren, anxious souls of its poverty-stricken leads, while Two Years at Sea follows the hermit and former merchant seaman, Jake Williams, as he goes his silent bearded way in the beatific and lonely Caingorm Mountains of Scotland.

Dreileben began as a series of e-mail exchanges between directors Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler, which were published in Revolver magazine in 2007. All three men are grouped under, or have pushed back against, the “Berlin School” of German cinema. Marco Abel wrote in Cineasteabout the genesis of this somewhat misleading description: ” The label, coined by German film critic Rüdiger Suchsland, originally referred to what is now known as the first generation of the Berlin School: [Angela] Schanelec, Christian Petzold, and Thomas Arslan. All three attended and graduated in the early 1990s from the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb)…and were taught by avant-garde and documentary filmmakers Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky.” The style is associated with cool, restrained dramas that analyze the minute psychological dramas of everyday life, and are generally ignored by local audiences.  Hochhäusler was part of a second wave of directors, who studied at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, along with Benjamin Heisenberg (The Robber) and Maren Ade (Everyone Else). The turn to genre subjects (The Robber and Arslan’s In the Shadows), as Dennis Lim (NYFF programmer) notes in a Cinema Scope piece, could be “partly a reaction to the marginalization of the early films.”

Dominik Graf has criticized the Berlin School for their avoidance of emotion, as he told Abel in an interview in Senses of Cinema: “This is part of my debate with the Berlin School directors. I tell them that I have the feeling—not always!—that they are not doing anything in order to move away from their glass-like, distanced position towards the world and feelings.” Dreileben is the extraordinary result of this generational debate.The three films circle around one motivating event: the escape of convicted killer Frank Molesch (Stefan Kurt) from a mental hospital. The first film, Christian Petzold’s Beats Being Dead, profiles a bitter affair of one of Molesch’s young potential victims. The second, Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around, follows a police psychiatrist around anyway, who is on the case of pursuing Molesch, but also gets entangled in a decades old love triangle. The closer, Hochhäusler’s One Minute of Darkness, tracks the killer as he stumbles through the Thuringian woods, a gentle monster roused to violence by the fumblings of the humans around him.

Beats Being Dead is the zombie-like love story between Ana (Luna Mijovic), a working class Serbian immigrant, and Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), a brilliant medical student screwing around for a summer, working at an empty hospital (which Molesch eventually visits). Petzold based the story on the German myth of Ondine, the water nymph who would lose her immortality if she bore a mortal man’s child. Ana and Johannes meet, in various states of undress, by the water. They gravitate to each other instantly, magnetically, their mutual seduction occurring during a series of hypnotic walks to and fro, down the tree-lined paths that separate them physically and economically. The spectre of money and class is never far from the surface in Petzold’s films (see his Postman Always Rings Twice adaptation, Jerichow), and here it is the key that wakes them both up from their trance. Ana, with mascara streaming down her face, has been felled from the euphoric heights of love and made human. Johannes, less than that.

Don’t Follow Me Around is Graf’s play for a communicative cinema, shot in soft, sun dappled 16mm, shifting from the hard-edged 35mm and HD of Petzold and Hochhäusler. In it, police psychologist Johanna (Jeanette Hain), travels to the forest to investigate Molesch’s disappearance, and stays with her old friend Vera (Susanne Wolff) and her husband Bruno (Misel Maticevic). During long nights of wine-fueled reminiscence, they discover they had both loved the same man before they met, sending them deeper into the past. The presiding myth here is of Emperor Barbarossa, mentioned by Johanna’s father before she leaves. He says that Emperor Frederick of Barbarossa, “and all his soldiers have been sleeping for 1,000 years in the mountains, waiting for Germany to finally become an empire again.” Johanna’s father says this as a historian’s idea of a joke before her departure, but what Graf’s story awakens is not an ancient leader but repressed memories. Johanna’s lost love emerges as a ghost by her side, an unwanted guest to eliminate with as much prejudice as Molesch, still roaming the countryside.

The trilogy comes to a brooding close with One Minute of Darkness, in which the forest emerges fully as a character – magical, threatening and aloof. Here Molesch is Barbarossa, stumbling into a tourist’s bedroom that contains maps of the Emperor’s caves and a book of “Wagner’s Thuringen” on the desk. He faces the myths, and he goes on to embody them. His gambol through the verdant wood has him hallucinate a masked creature and tend delicately to a young runaway, as sympathetically as Karloff’s Frankenstein. In Hochhäusler’s patient thriller, Molesch is cross-cut with lumpy inspector Marcus Kreil (Eberhard Kirchberg), the man who had imprisoned him the first time on circumstantial evidence. The jumps between Molesch and Kreil are between incantatory fantasy (the shape-shifting forest, a satanic inferno) and banal reality (a family BBQ). These two strands, woven throughout the whole series, come thudding tragically together as Ondine comes undone, the immortal brought down to the cold earth.

***

The Turin Horse and Two Years at Sea are two disparate versions of the solitary life. In the first, the outside world is a face-wrinkling terror that is best seen through a window, the dividing line between a father and daughter and encroaching obsolescence. In the second, there is no difference between outside and inside, as winding branches and tall grass take over lounge chair and an RV is magically lifted in the arms of a tree. Bela Tarr claims that The Turin Horse is his last film, and it acts as a summation of his work. It begins with the story of Nietzsche’s last sane days, written by frequent collaborator László Krasznahorkai. Nietzsche sees a horse being beaten by its owner. He rushes to stop the abuse, weeping. He would spend the rest of his days as an invalid. The narrator goes on, “of the horse, we know nothing.” Thus begins the Old Testament penitence of the father and daughter. The silvery B&W cinematography by Fred Kelemen begins – a low angle of the bedraggled horse, with matted hair like a stray dog, pulling the carriage of Ohlsdorfer, the father (János Derzsi, whose craggy bearded visage has the perpetually stunned look of oncoming senility like Richard Bennett in The Magnificent Ambersons). Thus begins a murderous daily routine in gale force winds, with Ohlsdorfer returning home to his gouged-out shack, with walls that look like they’ve been gnawed on by muscular beavers. His already wizened daughter (Erika Bók) undresses him, cooks him his nightly scorched potato, and shuffles off to bed.

This is their entire life, both of them perpetual work machines chipping away at their life expectancy one day at a time. Tarr sets up the visual dichotomy early on, of inside/out. The camera, and the characters are constantly peering outside its frame, denoting an absolute otherness to the nastiness outside. The daughter sees their first guest, a nihilist philosopher-drunk over to buy some palinka (a Hungarian fruit brandy), depart through the precious window. His thunderous presence dissipates to a shadow seen through glass, his sub-Nietzchean pronouncements (twisting Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” and death of God pronouncements into a world of eternal subjugation – similar to how the Nazis perverted his work) already forgotten. Ohlsdorfer had already called “rubbish” on him anyway. Their only purpose, their only thoughts, are geared towards work. And once the horse stages a quiet rebellion, refusing to eat or move, their lives of sullen, productive enervation now become entropic and drawn to dissolution. Eventually they go through the looking-glass, and become the travelers on the other side of the window, searching for an escape. Presumably finding only worse deprivations on the other side of the hill, they return, irrevocably changed. The camera, for the first time, shows the outside of the cabin, and the daughter looking out, trapped.

Jake Williams, the subject of Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea (in the Views from the Avant-Garde) program, is totally, frighteningly free. Living alone in the Scottish mountains, he is shown cleaning, reading, chopping wood and sleeping – without saying more than a few words. His living quarters have become intertwined with the nature around him, birds and plants and insects have as much a foothold on his property as he does. Shot in anamorphic B&W (although projected on compressed video, sadly), the film is immersive and cordial. It’s clear that Jake wouldn’t mind if you napped along with him, lulled along by his blissed out existence. The pacing gets so gently buzzed it’s no surprise when his mini-RV gets raised heavenward by unseen hands (or winches). The film consists of staged re-enactments of Jake’s daily life, with hints of his past appearing in photos lying on a desk. Stills of children, a woman, an old man shoveling snow, these are the narratives and mysteries that clang around in Jake’s head that we don’t have access to. We project stories onto his invitingly open face, or at least I did, of a wife who couldn’t hack the back-to-nature bit and hustled her kids back to civilization. Or maybe the photos were simply (likely) planted by Rivers to enact such fevered speculation. Whatever the reason, it is a film that encourages such idle thoughts and wild guesses. Filled with flickering light and the squiggles of processing stains, Rivers is playing with the form as well as narrative expectations, mirroring the play of light on leaf with light through film. This comes to the fore in the astounding final shot, a long take of Williams’ face as he nods off in front of the fire, his eyelids and the flames both fluttering, closing to another day and to my prying eyes.