Quick Takes (October, 2017)

Toni Erdmann

Cinematic odds and ends... in ascending order...

James Gray's The Lost City of Z is a misjudged failure. Gray seems at home in the jungle and captures moments of intrigue and beauty, but whenever his English hero returns to Europe the film flounders. Efforts to expose British classism and sexism are ham handed. Charlie Hunnam is a disaster as the lead and Sienna Miller is only slightly better as his missus. Only Robert Pattinson emerges unscathed with a nice turn as Hunnam's aide-de-camp. Costumes and cinematography are pretty, but the film fails to engage the mind.

Mike Flanagan's Gerald's Game is a slightly above average Stephen King adaptation. Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood star as a married couple whose getaway bondage weekend goes horribly awry. The scenario is on solid ground when picturing the power struggles of a marital union, but someone, King I assume, over eggs the pudding by providing a back story for Gugino's character revolving around incest. Henry Thomas is effective as her creepy Dad in a triumph of against type casting. Gugino and Greenwood are both underrated players who get to shine in this Netflix sponsored B, but Flanagan has yet to show he can be more than a routine horror director.

Somewhat more successful is Don Mancini's Cult of Chucky. Mancini goes for an artificial look for the mostly asylum set film, emphasizing primary colors which fit the graphic novel tone of the piece. Performances are solid and lead Fiona Dourif grounds the film. Not one I can recommend to the average viewer, but for horror fans this is satisfying fare. 

Kelly Fremon Craig's The Edge of Seventeen is a promising debut. The picture is a fairly rote coming of age story. but Craig and a talented cast milk the formula for all its worth. Hailee Steinfeld, Woody Harrelson, Kyra Sedgwick, Blake Jenner and Haley Lu Richardson all provide memorable moments. The costumes are remarkably selected for a contemporary picture.

Otto Preminger's The Cardinal, from 1963, is the type of pot boiling bestseller that is rarely translated into film these days and when it is, it usually becomes a miniseries. The lead, Tom Tryon, shows why he became a writer, but Preminger's mise-en-scene is eye popping.

Pedro Almodóvar's Julieta is his best since Talk to Her. One of Pedro's less arch and gaudy works, Julieta plays like a Hitchcock film, one of the characters even name checks Patricia Highsmith. A mother reflects, in flashback, on her estrangement from her daughter and Almodovar shows, once more, that though there are plenty of comely boys in his world, his heart belongs to Mama. Almodóvar's empathy for his heroine is amplified by the heroic performances of Adriana Ugarte and Emma Suarez as Julieta then and now. The beautiful shot of a stag running alongside a train is alone worth the price of admission, but Julieta has many wonders. 

Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann is a masterpiece, a tart look at sexism, parenting, globalization, sex roles and lots of other awkwardly painful stuff. Sandra Huller and Peter Simonischek, as her shaggy dog Dad, are nonpareil. Too bleak and off-putting for some, it tickled the darker region of my funny bone. Ade is not a very flashy director, but who needs flash when you have attuned players responding to sensitive direction and a smart script. I dread the American remake.

Jacques Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman's Out 1 is a towering and 12 hours long masterwork that will be fairly impenetrable to all but the hardiest cineastes. As to what this beautiful monstrosity is about, one could explore, endlessly, its focus on the theater or conspiracy theories, but it is chiefly about Paris, post-1968. Namely, a floundering counterculture trying to survive after its moment. Jean-Pierre Leaud personifies the French New Wave kids having a psychotic break while Erich Rohmer shows up in a cameo to embody the ancien regime. Hats off to Netflix for fleetingly airing this hard to find work. 

Undine

The Romantic Agony: Undine and victim

Christian Petzold's Undine is the most romantic film of the year and one of the more accomplished. Petzold has plopped the ancient myth of the water nymph into present day Berlin. His heroine is a lecturer on Berlin's urban development which dovetails nicely with the picture's utilization of the great German city as backdrop and supporting character. The inhabitants of Undine coexist with a rich tapestry of history, but are also busy creating their own fables, myths, and romantic legends. Petzold knows that the primeval myths of Germany stem from its forests, rivers, and lakes. Accordingly, the main encounters in Undine with the other worldly occur outside of Berlin.

We first meet Undine when she has just gotten the elbow from a beau. She rebounds instantly and miraculously upon meeting Christoph, a diver who spends much of the film repairing underwater turbines. Undine and Christoph have instant rapport and undying affection. The destruction of an aquarium upon their first meeting signals the tidal wave of sexual attraction that sweeps them away. The appearance of magical realism in Petzold's work took me some getting used to. The film even includes a giant catfish (a big fish) named Gunther. By the film's end, I was swept away.

Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, who paired in Petzold's Transit, offer two of the most compelling performances of the year. Even when their character's actions are outlandish, there is no denying that they fully embody their motivations and quirks. Some may not be able to suspend their disbelief, but Undine conveys that love is a mystical connection that defies reason. 

Raw

Julia Ducournau's Raw is a striking first feature that transcends its genre. This cannibalism at a veterinarian school feature belongs to the body horror genre and, at times, the shadow of David Cronenberg's work, particularly Rabid and Crash, threatens to overwhelm Ducournau's trenchant vision. The performances of Garance Marillier and Ella Rumpf as ambivalent siblings helps lift this film above arty, slasher fare into something more disturbing. Ducournau's emphasis on the hazing rituals of the school, with its intimations of torture and degradation, presents us a rapacious system whose inhabitants respond in kind. Ducournau's heroine is named, like de Sade's, Justine. As in the work of the mad Marquis, the defilement of an innocent is an expression of evil, but also humanity. Because evil would not exist without humanity. Worth checking out for the brave and few. (10/30/17) 

M (1951)

             

Joseph Losey's M is a better than average remake of the Fritz Lang classic. David Wayne is no match for Peter Lorre, but uses his ballet like movements to convey hysteria, entrapment, and madness. The cast is fairly stellar though Howard Da Silva is wasted as the police inspector tasked to find a child killer. The police procedural aspect drags the movie down a bit. Losey seems more interested in exploring the seamy and down at the heels side of Los Angeles. Losey wisely shoots most of his exteriors in daylight in contrast to Lang's stunning nocturnal compositions in the original. The effect is that of a slightly surreal Group Theatre production. Robert Aldrich and Don Weis were in the production team behind this gripping, if minor effort.

Holler

Jessica Barden in Holler

Holler is a well intentioned, yet under nourishing slice of rust belt angst. Director Nicole Riegel's script gives us heroine Ruth Avery (Jessica Barden) and her older brother scrapping metal at night so she can afford to go away to college and escape her dead end town. Cultural signifiers parade by contributing to the unrelenting gloom: factory closures, Trump ranting, eviction notices, condescending guidance counselors, prescription drug abusers and crossbow hunters all are here to create an American Gothic style portrait of Jackson County, Ohio. Holler has some mitigating virtues, but Ms. Riegel has created talking points, not drama.

Biff's Best Vintage Films Viewed in 2021

The Blue Kite

1) The Blue Kite                                 Tian Zhuangzhuang                                 1993

2) Chunhyang                                     Im Kwo Taek                                            2000

3) I Know Where I'm Going                Michael Powell                                         1945

4) Vengeance is Mine                          Shohei Imamura                                     1979

5) Christ Stopped at Eboli                   Francesco Rosi                                       1979

6) Morvern Callar                             Lynne Ramsay                                          2002

7) Painted Fire                                     Im Kwo Taek                                            2002

8) Latcho Drom                                   Tony Gatlif                                                1993

9) 11 Minutes                                       Jerzy Skolimowski                                   2016

10) Just Before Nightfall                   Claude Chabrol                                         1971

Bubbling Under

The Story of a Cheat, You and Me, Deep End

Taste of Cherry, Diamonds of the Night

Passing

Tessa Thompson in Passing

Rebecca Hall's Passing, an adaptation of Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, is largely a success, revealing Hall to be as graceful and thoughtful behind the camera as in front of it. Tessa Thompson portrays Irene, a mother of two boys who lives in a brownstone in Harlem with her doctor husband, Brian (Andre Holland). Irene and Brian are part of what W.E.B. Dubois characterized as "the talented tenth", the educated elite of the Afro-American population of the early twentieth century. Irene and Brian are shown supporting progressive social causes, but both are portrayed as staid and a bit rigid in their conventionality. Irene is especially snobbish in her treatment of her black cook, Zulena.

Irene and Brian's lives are upended when Clare (Ruth Negga), a childhood friend of Irene's from Chicago, bumps into Irene while on a visit to New York. Clare, a mulatto, is married to John, a white banker, and is passing as white. Clare feels trapped in her life with John, who, quicker than you can say Tom Buchanan, reveals himself to be a racist cad. Clare reconnects with her negritude thanks to Irene and Brian and they, in turn, are attracted to Clare's glamor and free-spiritedness. Soon, the threesome are enjoying Harlem's nightlife together where they hobnob with a Carl Van Vechten like writer played by the always welcome Bill Camp.

Camp provides some humor to what threatens to become a humorless melodrama. Indeed, a pot of milk boiling over is used at one juncture to (too) bluntly signal the simmering racial and sexual conflicts. The romantic triangle of the film was already a cliché by 1929, it usually involved a blithe flapper upsetting the balance of a marital union. Hall retains the attraction between Irene and Clare, but wisely jettisons Brian's repressed homosexuality. There are already enough repressed passions and social signifiers for a ninety minute film. 

Hall keeps the ambiguous and tragic ending of the book, but she ameliorates the problematic finale with a number of distancing techniques. Shooting the picture in black and white and in an old fashioned boxlike ratio (1.37:1) gives the film an other worldly feel, as if this past was a different country that cannot be regained or fully fathomed. The circular structure of the film adds to this uncanny vibe with both the beginning and end of the film fading in and out of focus. A body on the pavement at the film's start foretells the denouement.

Hall's grasp of cinematic technique is matched by her assurance with her players. Andre Holland is a consummate actor. He is more than adequate in a part that suffers from being the token male lead in what they used to call melodramas: women's pictures. Ruth Negga gets to show off in the flashier female lead role. Hall utilizes Negga's body well, but I thought Negga channeled Vivian Leigh a little too much vocally. Tessa Thompson gives the best performance here and one of the better performances of the year. Her Irene is a modern woman, but one still governed by Victorian gentility and propriety. Not a fun performance, but one that serves the film ideally. 
 

Candyman (2021)

                    

Nia DaCosta's Candyman is one of the more pleasant and unexpected surprises of 2021. The titular bogeyman returns to the now gentrified Cabrini Green locale of the original film to wreak havoc. The script by Jordan Peele and his collaborators stays true to the B movie origins of the series. Characterization and acting are just run of the mill, but Ms. DaCosta's mise en scene is compelling throughout.

Ms. DaCosta excels in portraying Chicago as a giant hive in which the Candyman and his angry bees can snare their victims. The Candyman's dispatch of a pair of victims in an art gallery is one of the visual coups of the year. Computer animation is utilized to picture the mythic origins of the Candyman as a shadow puppet show, reminiscent of Kara Walker's cut-paper silhouettes in their display of antebellum horror. Candyman is an exciting and singular work far outstripping previous efforts in this series.

Alien: Covenant

A sense of deja vu haunts Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant. Scott's third crack at the saga of the little pop-up monster is engaging and well shot, but lacks any surprises. We know that when Billy Crudup, Katherine Waterston, Michael Fassbender and crew land on a seemingly hospitable planet, little aliens will soon be ripping their ways out of the bodies of the lesser players; and that is exactly what occurs. As in Alien: Prometheus, Scott is attempting to put a new spin on creation myths and, as in the previous film, the result is elegant twaddle.

The cast is not as stellar as ...Prometheus, but all of the above leads have their moments. Danny McBride is largely wasted because humor is not Scott's forte. Crudup's character is said to be devout, but Scott's cinema is not one of ideas, so the ramifications of a man wrestling with his conscience are never explored. Scott's forte is visual spectacle and there is plenty to gawk at here: a scene of apocalyptic destruction calls to mind Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings. Once again, we feel we have seen this picture before. (11/8/17)

Bad Santa 2

Mark Waters' Bad Santa 2 seems to be living proof of the auteur theory. Whereas Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa was a sharp satire filled with corrosive humor, the sequel is a toothless satire filled with rancid humor. Billy Bob Thornton and Kathy Bates labor mightily, but Waters, who peaked with Freaky Friday and Mean Girls and then valleyed with Vampire Academy and Mr. Popper's Penguins, continues his downward slog with this turkey

Quick Takes (December, 2021)

Plaza and Caine in Best Sellers

Despite a scenario that is resolutely predictable, Director Lina Roessler is able inject some charm into her feature debut. Best Sellers' primary assets are Michael Caine as a drunken writer combatting greenhorn publisher Aubrey Plaza. This shopworn two hander is slight, but graceful. 

RIP: Curley Culp

Good on Paper is a vehicle for comedian Iliza Shlesinger whose stand-up routines have become a mainstay on Netflix. The behemoth has dominated streaming comedy with stars like Shlesinger, Bo Burnham, Dave Chapelle and many others and it makes sense that a film has been built around Shlesinger's obvious talents. However, Good on Paper is a witless debacle and, since Shlesinger concocted the script, she must take the brunt of the blame. The direction is on the level of a kindergarten traffic cop. A talented cast is left stranded.

Rene Clair's La Beaute du diable, from 1950, is a situation comedy version of the Faust legend. Gerard Philipe and Michel Simon are entertaining and well cast, but the humor is feeble. The production is luxe and impressive, but some things are missing. Soul, a hint of darkness, things necessary to a retelling of Faust. There is very little to unpackage in this film because it is congealed in the "tradition of quality" that Truffaut critiqued in 1954. Moderately entertaining nonetheless.  

I love Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman, but The Father is a Masterpiece Theater Afternoon Special. I found it agonizingly boring.

Emma Seligman's Shiva Baby is a promising debut. Rachel Sennott stars as young woman enduring a nightmarish ceremony. Seligman hits the right comic and claustrophobic notes and is helped by an able supporting cast. Masochistic Jewish humor done right. 

Robert Machoian's The Killing of Two Lovers is a pretty good exploration of the tumult resulting from a marital separation in rural Utah. Like Mike Newell's The Good Father, the film takes the perspective of the spurned husband. Instead of Anthony Hopkins racing to and fro on his cycle in an attempt to purge his rage, this film has Clayne Crawford doing a slow burn in his pickup as he contemplates violent acts. Machoian's dialogue is often clunky and obvious, but his choice to shoot his players at a remove results in a film that upends expectations and maintains an ominous power throughout.

Seven Psychopaths

Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths continues in the vein of In Bruges, both are action comedies with better characterization than most of their ilk. One can tell that actors flock to McDonagh's scripts by the impressive roster of thesps on hand: Harry Dean Stanton, Michael Pitt, Abbie Cornish, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Gabourey Sidibe, Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell. Each get to show off their skills with Walken's final monologue particularly affecting.

The influence of Tarantino's work is evident as this film maps the same seamy territory of LA's less glamorous side: pancake houses, working class bars and warehouses. McDonagh utilizes flashbacks like Chinese boxes to structure his film much akin to Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. What makes this film an advancement for McDonagh is a more sophisticated and evocative visual style than In Bruges. 

Indeed, the concluding sequences in Joshua Tree National Park are an apt correlative to his characters need to escape, not only the villainous clutches of Mr. Harrelson, but also the reductive and corrupt milieu of Hollywood itself. A trio of scofflaws are also escaping the demands of adulthood. Like Huck and Jim, they are camping out in the wild away from the day to day grind, but also escaping the civilizing influence of women. McDonagh acknowledges this in postmodern fashion by having his screenwriter protagonist, played by Colin Farrell, criticized for the portrayal 0f women in his script, a charge McDonagh must know could be levelled at his own film. 

The only women of note in Seven Psychopaths are a Russian model who is schtupping two of the titular psychopaths and the protagonist's girlfriend. Ms. Cornish plays the long suffering girlfriend of Mr. Farrell's character. She disappears from the film, except for a brief sequence, after the first third. Sam Rockwell plays Farrell's best friend whose criminal activities with Mr. Walken helps put the kibosh to the Farrell/Cornish union. Mr. Rockwell gives the most remarkable performance of the ensemble. It is his psychopathic character that exemplifies the regressive journey of this film's men.

Sam Rockwell epitomizing regressive masculinity in Seven Psychopaths

Most psychopaths in fiction and film are violent monsters who are able to hide in plain sight behind a respectable bourgeoise façade: such as Norman Bates, Patrick Bateman or the sheriff in Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. However, after working for some time in the mental health field. I've encountered a number of psychopaths who hide their violent madness not behind propriety, but behind an adolescent bravado. They are manchilds who cannot forge an adult male (and they are invariably male) identity. This is the type of psychopath Sam Rockwell is playing. It is a man who wishes to lose himself in adolescent play. 

Rockwell's character is introduced making play faces at the door of Farrell and Cornish's house. Despite showing regret, Rockwell's character delights in wreaking havoc on Farrell's relationship with Cornish. I don't think it is a stretch to say that he breaks up Farrell's relationship because Rockwell unconsciously senses that Farrell is his true love; women are more for sex play than love to the adolescent male mind. The relationship is similar to what Leslie Fiedler called the "sacred marriage of males that Fiedler finds between Huck and Jim and in such works as Moby Dick.

Rockwell's character's regressive tendencies become more pronounced as we reach Seven Psychopaths dénouement. Whether wearing a childish skullcap or devouring Cheetos, Rockwell seems to be regressing to latency age. The capper is his desire to have a final shootout as a fitting end; a childish desire to go out in a proverbial blaze of glory. A desire that is gratified.

Martin McDonagh's oeuvre descends from the black comedy of Wilder and, especially, Kubrick. A good current comparison would be Shane Black whose films have also been buddy movies set within the action genre with black comic elements. McDonagh's films seem more thoughtful and better shot than many, including Black's, so I eagerly await his upcoming Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (11/17/17)

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond...

Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman

Chris Smith's Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond... is a behind the scenes look at the making of Milos Forman's Man on the Moon. The documentary also traces the arc of Andy Kaufman's and Jim Carrey's careers. The film chiefly documents Carrey's staying in character during the down moments of the shoot much to the bewilderment of the cast and Forman. That this film is surfacing nearly twenty years after it was shot is summed up by Carrey in a present day interview in which he says the studio felt it made Carrey look too much like an asshole. This gets no argument from me, but I found Carrey's candor refreshing.

The old clips of Kaufman's and Carrey's television work would alone make this rewarding viewing, but it is the behind the scenes footage that is a boon to the cinephile. I'm not a huge Forman fan and think Man on the Moon is underwhelming as cinema, but I found Carrey's quest to find his character interesting and felt a flood of sympathy for old Milos as he tries to deal with his star's shenanigans. This was Forman's last Hollywood film and one wonders if the aggravating nature of this shoot drove him out of La La Land. Carrey's star has dimmed and I think it is safe to say that he is a peculiar individual, but there is no denying his talent. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond... lets us look behind the curtain of a demented business.
 

Logan Lucky

Channing Tatum, Riley Keogh and Adam Driver in Logan Lucky

Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky is a middling effort from one of America's top tier filmmakers, yet even a pleasant commercial diversion from Soderbergh is better than most. Soderbergh's best films balance his commercial and independent impulses: King of the Hill. Out of Sight, The Limey, Che and Magic Mike. Soderbergh has expressed his dissatisfaction with what is left of the film industry and has shifted his artier instincts into television work with success in Behind the Candelabra, The Girlfriend Experience and The Knick. Logan Luck more resembles his genre work on Erin Brockovich, Haywire and his biggest commercial successes, the Ocean's 11 films.

Like those films, Logan Lucky is a heist film, though tailored to the more working class appeal of Channing Tatum rather than George Clooney in Armani. The West Virginia setting suits the class consciousness of Soderbergh, but the Southern accents fly every which way. The West Virginia accent is hard to pin down, but only Riley Keough gets close. The debut script by Rebecca Blunt is solidly constructed, but indulges in broad redneck humor. Adam Driver and Mr. Tatum are somewhat miscast. Particularly, Tatum, one of the most physically talented of the current crop of Hollywood leading men, who plays a character saddled with a limp.

However, the script's most possibly bathetic moment, a song at a children's beauty pageant, is well handled by Soderbergh; as is the rural pageantry of stock car races and county fairs. Soderbergh does not condescend to his material and there is less winking at the audience than in the Ocean's films. This is a heist film that begs the audience's indulgence at its contrivance, but also eggs us on to root for its heroes as emblematic underdogs of American society. Soderbergh once again works with composer David Holmes and it is the kinetic clashing of mise-en-scene, editing, sound and music that provides the film its main interest. Logan Lucky ends with tentative romantic partners paired at a bar for a celebratory toast, much like the ending of a Shakespearean comedy or a musical. This tips us that this film is more interested in choreographed movement and reaction rather than character development or deep thematic import. All the same, Soderbergh has directed a largely winning entertainment, if not a deeply personal expression. (12/15/17)
 

Baby Driver, Atomic Blonde

Ansel Elgort is Baby Driver

Edgar Wright's Baby Driver is solid entertainment that never transcends its comic book premise. Regardless, this is a step up for Wright after the tedious machinations of The World's End. Yet another heist film, Wright is up to the challenge of mixing action and music to exciting effect as he did in Scott Pilgrim vs the World. The heists and car chases go swimmingly. The acting is pretty good, though Kevin Spacey and Jon Hann veer close to self-parody. Wright is able to build a nice rapport between his two leads, Ansel Elgort and Lily James.

However, all the sound and fury do not add up to much. Elgort's relationship with a crippled African American foster Dad is cringe inducing and the effort to make Baby both a complete innocent and an expert getaway driver seems foolish for even this slim story. A scene showing our hero self-reflexively singing along to Carla Thomas' "B-A-B-Y" strains to echo Tom Cruise in Risky Business, but doesn't even rise to the level of Jon Cryer in Pretty in Pink. Baby Driver runs out of steam three quarters through and limps along to a redemptive and 'happy' ending. It is a pleasant enough diversion which, as is true of most of Wright's work, leaves one hungry for a trace of sense or meaning.

Charlize Theron is an Atomic Blonde

David Leitch's Atomic Blonde does not transcend its comic book premise and is barely reasonable entertainment. Leitch's background is in stunts and these do provide the highlights of this film. The Cold War skullduggery set in Berlin strands worthy thesps like Charlize Theron, Toby Jones, John Goodman, James McAvoy and Bill Skarsgard in an inane succession of double crosses. The soundtrack is predictable, as is the demise of the lesbian love interest. The sets resemble those of a softcore porn film. Not that I am complaining, but why does Ms. Theron bathe in a see through tub? A stupefying rather than edifying movie. (12/19/17)

 

Biff's Favorite 10 Books Read in 2021

                                   

1) William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early 

     American Republic

     Alan Taylor, 1995

Rivals any American novel in the density of its portrayal of American life. A biography of

politician and land speculator William Cooper and a dynamic portrait of the settlement he

founded, Cooperstown, New York. Cooper's fortunes rose and fell with that of the Federalist

party. Cooper's son, James Fenimore, would reflect ruefully on the landed gentry's decline

in his fiction. Taylor's book is unusually colorful and pungent for an academic writer.

2) The Door

     Magda Szabo, 1987

A Hungarian novel about the relationship between a bourgeoise writer and her mysterious 

peasant housekeeper. Part folie a deux, part power struggle, the bond between them is too

chimerical to pin down, but resounding enough to fill this wonderous masterwork.

3) Cloud Cuckoo Land

    Anthony Doerr, 2021

In its polyphonic scope, similar to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. The differences are 

interesting. Mitchell constructs post-modern vignettes, while Doerr hews more closely

to a modern realism with roots in George Eliot, Dickens and Hemingway. A worthy 

successor to All The Light We Cannot See and a treat for bibliophiles.

4) Ingres

    Georges Vigne, 1995

A scholarly study of the French painter, Definitive and eye popping.

5) Chronicle of a Death Foretold

    Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, 1981

The most compact and straightforward of his masterpieces.

6) The Polish Officer

     Alan Furst, 1995

Superior World War 2 spy fiction.

7) Hug Chickenpenny: The Panegyric of an Anomalous Child

    S. Craig Zahler, 2018

The film director is a talented writer of varied works including Gothic Westerns such as

Wraiths of the Broken Land. This novel is a bit of a departure for the author. It chronicles

a talented outsider in a fable that is aimed at literate children and adults. It would make a

good Tim Burton film. 

8) Listening for Coyote

    William L. Sullivan, 1988

A naturalist hikes across 1,300 of Oregon. One of the best portraits of the state and its people

and still as timely as when it was published.

9) The War That Ended Peace

     Margaret MacMillan, 2013

A diplomatic history of Europe in the years leading up to the First World War. A good

companion to Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower. 

10) The Princess and the Goblin

       George MacDonald, 1872

MacDonald writes unusually clean well-lit sentences for a fantasist. I am indebted to Jonathan

Cott's Beyond the Looking Glass, a collection of Victorian fairy tales, for hipping me to

Macdonald.

I very much enjoyed and can't believe the following did not make the list...

Titan, Ron Chernow, 1998

There's a Mystery There..., Jonathan Cott, 2017

Reconstruction, Eric Foner, 1988

Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz, 1965

Trespassers on the Roof of the World, Peter Hopkirk, 1982

The Hard Crowd,  Rachel Kushner, 2021

The Kremlin Ball, Curzio Malaparte, 1957

Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker, 2017

The worst book I read this year, by leaps and bounds, was...

1601 and Is Shakespeare Dead?, Mark Twain, 1880

Unrelieved tedium.

The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion is surely the greatest Antipodean film director, only George Miller's work approaches her achievements. So it was with both hope and trepidation that I viewed her latest, an adaptation of Thomas Savage's novel, The Power of the Dog. It fits Ms. Campion almost too snugly, like a rawhide glove. Campion has fashioned the novel into a film of five acts and given the scenario some needed ambiguity. Savage's novel is overly schematic and the film suffers from this. Both works center on two brothers living on a ranch in Montana in 1925. One brother, Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) is mercurial, proactive, full of caustic comments, seething with malice and a frustrated homosexual who mourns the loss of lover and mentor, Bronco Henry. The other brother, George (Jesse Plemons), is stolid, passive, silent, but suffused with charity. When he suddenly marries a downtrodden widow named Rose (Kirsten Dunst), brother Phil reacts badly. We see him whipping a mare and calling her a "bitch" after his brother has embarked upon nuptial bliss. An example of the film's (and book's) major flaw: overstatement.

Phil does everything he can to rattle the newlyweds and Rose is soon hitting the bottle. Dunst is not a particularly convincing drunk, but is expert at conveying feminine vulnerability ( not only here, but, especially in Melancholia and the Spider Man films). When George attempts to comfort her, the viewer can't help but sympathize with his clumsy attempts at chivalry. Dunst would have made a great gamin for DW Griffith. Plemons and Cumberbatch are pluperfect for their roles. Campion has fun emphasizing their physical disparity. Phil is introduced vertically, as a ramrod straight, strutting cock caked with dirt from the range. George is introduced horizontally, reclining in a bathtub. A fleshy, clean baby lolling indolently. 

The third act brings Rose's son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to the ranch. Peter has been away at school studying to be a doctor. Phil and his cowhands ridicule the gawky teen, but Phil, seeing something in Peter's stoic countenance, begins to befriend and groom Peter. Peter, Rose, and George are all fairly passive characters, the rest of the cast are barely sketched in. Thus, the actor playing Phil must provide a vivid villain and this Cumberbatch does in spades, glowering like a prairie dog and snorting like a wild mustang. As an actor, he does seem like the parts he has been typecast as: a cold and overly rational technician. Yet, he is enough of a technician to have played Dr. Frankenstein and the monster. His American accent in The Power of the Dog is passable and he is never less than convincing whether he is in the saddle, braiding a rope or rolling a cigarette. Everybody else stands around, but he is always doing bits of business. Campion loves utilizing men's bodies and Cumberbatch, like Harvey Keitel, is game. The riverside bathing sequences with Phil and his cowhands have the beauty and homoerotic aura of a Thomas Eakins painting; particularly "The Swimming Hole". Campion, who started out as a painter, and cinematographer Ari Wegner shoot the buildings and landscape in a fashion that heightens our sense of the alienation and loneliness of life on the range. The effect is similar to the paintings of Edward Hopper or Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. 

Jonny Greenwood's score, full of pizzicato strings, and David Ward's banjo playing also work to heighten the lonesome prairie feel. New Zealand is a suitable stand-in for Montana. The Power of the Dog gains from Campion's choice to end the film more ambiguously than the novel. The film's message is obvious, if not as explicit as the novel: Campion has come to bury machismo, not to praise it. I would place the film in the middle ties of Campion's oeuvre, which I have indicated I hold in high regard. What The Power of the Dog lacks is the humor and tonal variety to leaven this ant-patriarchal screed. Something Harvey Keitel and Holly Hunter were able to provide in Campion's best work. Certainly, it is a more successful work than In the Cut, The Portrait of a Lady or Bright Star. I would put it alongside An Angel at my Table and the second season of Top of the Lake as a success, but ranking below such masterpieces as Sweetie, The Piano, Holy Smoke!, and the first season of Top of the Lake. 

Nine Days

Winston Duke in Nine Days

Edson Oda's Nine Days, his feature debut, is an absurdist fantasy that is somewhat rewarding. Winston Duke plays Will who resides in a ranch style bungalow on a salt flat somewhere on a different celestial plane than ours. Utah, where the film was shot, is suitably otherworldly. Will is a clerk for an unseen deity, selecting souls qualified for life on earth. Applicants are tested by Will over nine days, after which one is selected as the winner. 

Will monitors his selections once they reach earth by watching VHS tapes of their experiences and than filing them in a Kafkaesque room of cabinets. The selection process that Will chairs is a little like The British Baking Show or other reality show contests. Naturally, the two youngest, best looking and highest billed actors square off in the finals. Will tries to be gracious to the losers, but his job eats at him. A ponderous tone somewhat undermines the film, though Benedict Wong offers some needed comic relief as Will's sidekick. Oda handles the cast well, but Nine Days suffers from its overly abstract premise. At times, the film is as arid as its setting. Still, this is a promising start for its young director and writer. 

A Quiet Passion

Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Ehle play Emily and Vinnie Dickinson

Terence Davies' slow cinematic burn meshes well with a mordant vision of Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion. Davies is one of the least flashy directors in the Anglophonic cinema, but his melancholic tenor is perfectly suited to this poetic genius and tormented shut-in. The evocation of 19th century New England salon culture is superbly rendered in acting, costume and set design. Davies' script and direction portray Dickinson's life as a reproach to an insular and patriarchal culture. This feminist rebuke flows naturally from Davies' career long sympathy with life's outsiders.

Cynthia Nixon's readings and spasmodic physicality are a capstone to her career. She has often been cast as a put-upon ugly duckling, but she shows how Dickinson overcame great physical and mental anguish and and a hostile culture to create a lasting testament. In my youth way back in the 20th Century, Dickinson was embalmed in the public eye as a starchy Victorian, but Nixon, though encased by corset and bustle, presents her as a tart terror seething with resentment. Like Jo Carol Pierce, she blames God. Certainly Dickinson's work has more teeth to it than her old "Belle of Amherst" image, though I wouldn't go as far as Camille Paglia who compares her to the Marquis de Sade.

The rest of the cast is generally good. Jennifer Ehle is always dependable and Keith Carradine registers with his most interesting performance in some time as Dickinson's pater. Only Duncan Duff, as Dickinson's wayward brother, strikes a false note. The script sometimes compresses events too tidily, as with the introduction of the Civil War into the narrative, but, on the whole, I found this to be one of the cinematic treats of 2017. (12/22/17)

 

An American Tragedy (1931)

Josef von Sternberg's An American Tragedy doesn't quite reach the summit of the director's masterpieces, but it is a very good adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel. My Dad said of A Place in the Sun (the 1951 adaptation of the novel), that every male in the audience would have hit Shelley Winters on the head with an oar in order to be with the astonishingly ravishing Elizabeth Taylor. This version is more balanced and hews more closely to Dreiser's work. Phillips Holmes' protagonist is not portrayed as sympathetically as Montgomery Clift was in George Stevens' film and, unfortunately, is not half the actor Clift was. Sternberg portrays him as more of a sociopath than Stevens would. Stevens' loving close-ups of a trysting Clift and Taylor, glowing in all their youthful beauty, tipped the audience's sympathies in their favor. Winters was typed by her portrayal as a whining slattern, while Sternberg gives her character more of a fair shake as embodied by the wonderful Sylvia Sydney; an actress I am inordinately fond of. After the stock market crash, audiences of the time would have been more inclined to sympathize with Ms. Sydney's working girl than Frances Dee's high society lass.

Sternberg is chiefly remembered for the deliriously romantic expressionism of his Dietrich pictures, but there is a social realist aspect to his early work that can be found here in the factory scenes. Tracking shots with metronomic industrial sounds convey the repetitive, soul and body crushing nature of factory work. This is contrasted with lakeside romantic scenes which glisten with Lee Garmes' expert cinematography. Irving Pichel chews the scenery nicely as a DA in courtroom sequences which benefit from rapidly paced editing. An American Tragedy is middling Sternberg, but it confirms to me that he was one of the ten or so best directors working in the American cinema before World War 2. 

 

Biff's Top 40 Silent Films

Faust

1) Faust                                               FW Murnau                            1926

2) Underworld                                    Josef von Sternberg                1927

3) Sunrise                                            FW Murnau                            1927

4) The Passion of Joan of Arc           Carl Theodor Dreyer              1928

5) Steamboat Bill Jr.                           Keaton/Reisner                      1928

6) The General                                    Keaton/Brickman                   1926

7) The Gold Rush                               Charlie Chaplin                       1925

8) The Birth of a Nation                     DW Griffith                             1915

9) Les Vampires                                 Louis Feuillade                        1915

10) The Last of the Mohicans          Brown/ Tourneur                      1920

11) A Dog's Life                                 Charlie Chaplin                        1918

12) The Doll                                       Ernst Lubitsch                          1919

13) Ballet Mecanique                        Leger/ Murphy                         1924

14) Strike                                           Sergei Eisenstein                      1925

15) Broken Blossoms                        DW Griffith                              1919

16) Way Down East                          DW Griffith                               1920

17) October                                       Eisenstein/Alexsandrov            1928

18) Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler          Fritz Lang                                 1922

19) Intolerance                                  DW Griffith                              1916

20) Battleship Potemkin                   Sergei Eisenstein                    1925

21) Metropolis                                   Fritz Lang                                 1927

22) Seventh Heaven                          Frank Borzage                         1927

23) Our Hospitality                          Keaton/Blystone                       1920  

24) A Page of Madness                     Teinosuke Kinugasa                1926

25) The Kid                                       Charlie Chaplin                         1921

26) Destiny                                         Fritz Lang                                 1921

27) Sunnyside                                    Charlie Chaplin                        1919

28) Seven Chances                            Buster Keaton                         1925

29) The Musketeers of Pig Alley     DW Griffith                               1912

30) Nosferatu                                    FW Murnau                              1922

31) The Crowd                                  King Vidor                                1928

32) Greed                                           Eric von Stroheim                    1924

33) Sherlock Jr.                                 Buster Keaton                          1924

34) I Was Born, But                          Yasujiro Ozu                             1932

35) He Who Gets Slapped                Victor Sjostrom                        1924

36) The Wedding March                  Erich von Stroheim                   1928

37) Orphans of the Storm                DW Griffith                               1921

38) The Outlaw and His Wife            Victor Sjostrom                          1918

39) The Last Laugh                          FW Murnau                               1924

40) The Thief of Bagdad                  Raoul Walsh                              1924

Bubbling Under

The Docks of New York, Die Nibelungen, The Big Parade, Entr'acte,

The King of Kings, The End of St. Petersburg, The Three Ages

Various Melies shorts...

Must to Avoid

DW Griffith's One Exciting Night

Dancing Outlaw

Jesco White

Jacob Young's Dancing Outlaw is a documentary short introducing us to one Jesco White, a tap dancer, spouse and drug abuser and all around miscreant from Boone County, West Virginia. After introductory footage that establishes the trailer trash milieu of the region, this 1991 film endeavors to humanize what could have been a cartoonish portrait. White and his family are presented without a smidgen of smirk, telling stories of their lives, loves, and fracases. Footage of Jesco's father, also a graceful dancer, adds a welcome sentimental note to this unvarnished film. 
 

New Rose Hotel

New Rose Hotel

Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel, from 1998, is a film maudit that I found to be invigorating beneath its scuzzy surface. Ostensibly an adaptation of a William Gibson short story, New Rose Hotel eschews a linear narrative and general comprehensibility to such an extent most will dismiss this as a bad film. I beg to differ, but can see why it has few champions. Jonathan Rosenbaum lauded its "decadent erotic poetry" and I, too, found it compelling cinema.

Because the film mixes lo-fi surveillance footage of one of its principals with the "action", New Rose Hotel is hard to decipher. I didn't even recognize the talented Annabella Sciorra and Gretchen Mol is limited to a non-speaking role in the murky surveillance tapes. Ferrara's perverse fiddling with audience expectations is epitomized by his casting of Christopher Walken, an accomplished dancer in real life, as a cane wielding cripple. Walken is marvelous as a hustler looking for a big score or, rather, a loser courting disaster because he needs to live with an "edge". Willem Dafoe is more subdued as Walken's partner in crime, but, when their plans have gone awry and he is hiding from his persecutors, he opens up as events of the past flood his memory.

This for me was the most intriguing sequence of the film. Ferrara slightly alters our view of what has gone on before and further scrambles our sense of the narrative, but never gives the audience an 'aha' moment. Asia Argento gamely embodies the femme fatale who leads the male leads to their doom, but there is no big reveal of her perfidy, only glimpses. Ferrara's worldview is too bleak and unrelenting for my dolorous tastes, but I cannot deny his talent. New Rose Hotel finds Ferrara's cinema incarnate in technological residue. 

Fracture versus Day of the Outlaw

Fracture

Gregory Hoblit's Fracture is a thriller that doesn't thrill. Anthony Hopkins is an eccentric millionaire who murders his wife, but is able to stay one step ahead of the DA assigned to his case, Ryan Gosling. Gosling and Hopkins are both fine, though Gosling seems ill at ease with a Southern accent. Hopkins is reprising Hannibal Lecter here, another diabolical genius toying with the forces of the law. The supporting cast is impressive, but has little to do. Only Zoe Kazan stands out in a small role.

Hoblit employs a few interesting lighting effects to convey disquietude, but is generally nondescript in his direction. For some reason, the lipstick on the male actors is visible and distracting. The music is a slog and the costumes aren't much better. The flick is very predictable. Thanks to the actors, it holds your attention, but, thanks to the direction, it is instantly forgettable.

Day of the Outlaw

Andre de Toth's Day of the Outlaw is a good B movie from 1959. Andrew Sarris has stressed that the instability and treachery of relationships is de Toth central theme and from what I've seen of his work, particularly Pitfall and Play Dirty, this seems dead on. Even before Burl Ives and his outlaws beset a snow bound town, it is rife with discord and double dealing.

Costumes and sets are B level, but de Toth's direction is not. A circle dolly shot heightens a tormented dance sequence as the outlaws paw at their female captives. The outdoor sequences have a stark elegance that underscores the picture's somber drama. One wishes de Toth had better opportunities. 

Detroit

Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit is the point where Bigelow's artistic reach exceeds her narrative grasp. In her previous films with screenwriter Mark Boal, Bigelow crafted her films around a central figure. In Detroit, she and Mr. Boal attempt to provide a polyphonic portrait of the Detroit riots of 1967, centering on murders by police officers at the Algiers Motel. Bigelow contrasts warm color tones of home life (browns and yellows) and the local music scene with cold tones (mostly sickly green) of the police's racist culture. What doesn't jell is characterization. Bigelow seems to work best in mythic genre pieces centered around a flawed protagonist. As with Strange Days, a multi-perspective narrative seems beyond her ken. (1/14/18)

Ingrid Goes West

Aubrey Plaza Goes Wild in Ingrid Goes West

Matt Spicer's Ingrid Goes West is a competent first feature that rises above the limitations of its scenario. Ingrid is introduced crashing the wedding of a woman she has been following on social media. Enraged that she hasn't been invited to the ceremony, Ingrid, lovingly embodied by Aubrey Plaza, proceeds to mace the bride. After a short stint at a mental health facility, Ingrid becomes enamored with another social media darling, Taylor Sloane, a SoCal interior designer who Ingrid starts to stalk. Though Ingrid is able to ingratiate herself with her new obsession, things deteriorate and a pattern is repeated. Since this is a black comedy, Ingrid's psychological problems are not seriously explored and "social media" is the Snidely Whiplash.

This dark farce, more awkward than humorous as in almost all 21st Century American Indie comedies, would be not worth more than a passing thought were it not for Spicer's framing and gift for characterization. Each character is given more depth than in most farces and Spicer ably captures the boho vibe of Silver Lake and Joshua Tree. Elizabeth Olsen is fine as the Tory Burch like designer, but it is O'Shea Jackson Jr. who really shines as Ingrid's landlord and eventual boyfriend, Dan. Jackson is relaxed and centered, sharing a winning rapport with Ms. Plaza. It is significant that the first intimate scene between the two involves erotic role playing of Dan's Batman fantasies. Spicer is portraying young Americans who don't have fixed identities, but are playing with different personas. Often, they latch onto comics, games and the like to help present a hip mask to society. This is an acute capturing of the zeitgeist in the era of Facebook friends and Instagram identities.

I must offer a palm frond for Ms. Plaza. She has provided needed fizz in a host of films and TV shows; some not worthy of her talent. In an earlier era, the sass and vinegar Ms. Plaza displays would have made her a second banana, much like Eve Arden or Celeste Holm. That Ms. Plaza has risen above character actress roles may be indicative of some small progress in filmdom. Ms. Plaza has provided me with much enjoyment this century and I eagerly await her barbed delivery in the next season of Legion. (1/16/18)

Kes

Ken Loach's Kes, from 1969, is a heartrending film about a working class English lad who finds solace amidst much wretchedness by training a kestrel, a small falcon. Those familiar with Mr. Loach's work can glean that things will not end well, but, even with that knowledge, this viewer found Kes' tragic denouement to be more affecting than those of either Old Yeller or The Yearling. Part of this is due to the rigor of Mr. Loach's portrayal of Barnsley, the coal town in South Yorkshire where the protagonist, Billy Casper, lives. A committed socialist, whose latest film is a documentary on current UK Labour party head Jeremy Corbyn, Loach has always sought to chronicle the plight of the working class. His portrait of Barnsley is a vision of squalor amidst the anonymity of postwar council houses. It is a picture of English life that does not suffer from sentimentality.

However, Mr. Loach's films often do suffer from the drabness and monotony of social realism and Kes is no exception. A soccer game where Billy is bullied by a tyrannical teacher is belabored, as is the portrayal of his school's principal. A kindly teacher is presented, but the grimness of Billy's existence is unrelenting. This seems to me the main flaw of Loach as an artist. His adherence to the tenets of social realism renders his films in tones that are overly hectoring and dogmatic.

This is ameliorated in Kes, somewhat, by the charm of the falconry sequences. Chris Menges' photography gives a warm, verdant feel to Billy's out of door excursions. Finally, David Bradley's portrayal of Billy is superb. He captures his character's plight without cloying mannerisms or condescension. His Billy feels lived in and alive. 

The Best of Stephen Sondheim

Angela Lansbury in Anyone Can Whistle

1) West Side Story                                 1957

2) Sweeney Todd                                    1979

3) Company                                            1970

4) Anyone Can Whistle                          1964

5) Into the Woods                                   1987

6) Merrily We Roll Along                        1981

7) Sunday in the Park With George      1984

8) Gypsy                                                  1959

9) A Little Night Music                            1973

10) Follies                                                1971

Even if his credits as a lyricist to West Side Story, Gypsy and Do I Hear a Waltz? were the sum total of his contributions to the American Musical Theater, Sondheim would rate more than a footnote. As it is, he is the most significant Broadway composer of his generation. Compare him to slightly younger composers such as Andrew Lloyd Wright or Stephen Schwartz and his status seems self-evident. However, his melodic invention is limited compared to his forebears. Frank Sinatra once complained that Sondheim didn't write enough melodies for saloon singers. Sondheim's use of a Recitative style helped him follow his dictum that the songs in a show must support the narrative. This bore fruit in such numbers as "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd", "Company", and "Into the Woods".

I saw a roadshow production of Sweeney Todd with Angela Lansbury and George Hearn that was one of the theatrical highlights of my life. My punk rock side could appreciate a musical in which a mass murderer sings a love song to his straight razors. I would advise giving a wide berth to Pacific Overtures and anything after Into the Woods. The only film version of his mature work worth a toss is Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd. 

The Best of 1929

                             

1) Un Chien Andalou                                                Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali

2) Hallelujah                                                              King Vidor

3) The Love Parade                                                  Ernst Lubitsch

4) The General Line                                                 Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Aleksandrov

5) Blackmail                                                              Alfred Hitchcock

6) Arsenal                                                                  Alexander Dovzhenko

7) Pandora's Box                                                      G. W. Pabst

8) Man with a Movie Camera                                  Dziga Vertov

9) Lonesome                                                             Paul Fejos

10) Diary of a Lost Girl                                            G. W. Pabst

Films I Enjoyed

Lucky Star

Thunderbolt, Alibi,

Applause, They Had to See Paris,

The Cocoanuts, Woman in the Moon,

The Hollywood Revue of 1929,

The Broadway Melody

Below the Mendoza Line

The Taming of the Shrew,

Big News