Marjorie Prime

Jon Hamm and Lois Smith practicing the talking cure in Marjorie Prime

Michael Almereyda's Marjorie Prime, adapted by the director from a play by Jordan Harrison, strikes me as one of the better American movies of 2017 and a capstone to Almereyda's varied career. Almereyda has worked on the fringes of the industry, but has put out an impressive number of films that attest to his ability to craft intelligent low budget features while enticing gifted thesps to collaborate: Twister, Nadja, Hamlet, The Eternal and Experimenter are all testaments to his craft and vision. Marjorie Prime expands on the psychological concerns of Experimenter. Harrison's play presents a future where holographic representations of loved ones exist as companions to the bereaved. Almereyda seizes upon the dialogues between humans and replicants to conjure the encounters as therapy sessions in which grief and memory are twisted by the living for their own ends. As in Experimenter, Almereyda captures an endless chain of self-deceit where memories are faulty facsimiles of the past.

Almereyda's cast all deliver first rate performances. Geena Davis and Tim Robbins, both working sparingly these days, are wonderful as a bourgeoise couple whose placid facades crumble as they care for an aging parent. Jon Hamm nails the slick artifice of a replicant impersonating a long dead mate. Lois Smith, who originated the role onstage and was so good in Lady Bird, delivers a tour de force as a woman struggling with Alzheimer's disease. She and Almereyda avoid the trap of making mental deterioration cute. It is a powerful performance, all the more so with Smith essaying a replicant version of her character later in the film. 

Almereyda barely attempts to open up the play, but does so to devastating effect. The shots of natural beauty, the vastness of the ocean, flowers swaying in the wind, a rain storm, contrasts superbly with the claustrophobia of the interior sequences where the characters flail at coming to terms with the past. Almereyda also cunningly uses snippets of video, shots from My Best Friend's Wedding and a Christo installation in Central Park, to illustrate memory as an unreliable palimpsest. Almereyda's unsparing vision will bring him little acclaim or riches, but Marjorie Prime shows what wonders he can fashion with fine actors and a solid script. 

The Outfit (1973)

Robert Duvall, amidst carnage and chinoiserie, in The Outfit

John Flynn's The Outfit, from 1973, is a taut noir based upon a Donald E. Westlake novel. A career criminal, Robert Duvall, seeks to avenge his brother's death by waging war upon the mob, the titular "outfit". Aided by an ambivalent moll (Karen Black at her twitchiest) and a gung-ho buddy (Joe Don Baker), Duvall's character won't rest until he brings down the mob's kingpin, played with corrosive cynicism by Robert Ryan.

The film is tight and efficient, but unrelentingly rote. What helps it rise above mediocrity is an outstanding supporting cast chock full of famous faces from the heyday of noir: Elisha Cook Jr., Jane Greer, Timothy Carey, Richard Jaeckel, Marie Windsor, Archie Moore (yes, the boxer), and Tom Reese all make the most of their fleeting moments. 

Flynn, best known for Rolling Thunder, offers workmanlike direction and little else. A good point of comparison is that same year's Charley Varrick. The plot of both films is similar, a maverick criminal butts heads with the mob. Both feature the then peaking Joe Don Baker and supporting turns from Sheree North. In Charley Varrick, Don Siegel is able to guide Ms. North into giving a believable and well rounded performance that greatly adds to the depth and texture of the film. In The Outfit, Flynn directs North to offer a series of lascivious poses. This shows off Ms. North's curves to eye-popping effect and does not detract from the film, her character is a white-trash slattern and trollop, but it demarks the difference between following a genre film's conventions and transcending them. 

Sheree North strikes a pose in the Outfit

Annette

Simon Helberg, Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver in Annette

Leos Carax's Annette is an overblown folly. a white elephant and a horse of a different color. Yet, I was often entranced by Carax's attempt to pull off this foolhardy musical. After the success d'estime of Holy Motors, Carax must have been vexed as to how to follow up a film that was both a masterpiece and a summation of both his career and a life long artistic collaboration with Denis Lavant. Annette is not the unalloyed triumph that Holy Motors is, but it is a bold and singular work.

So bold and singular that it has predictably elicited both hosannas and brickbats. I suspect this will ever more be so. Carax's artistic choices are so audacious that the viewer is forced to either go with the film's flow or smack one's noggin in dumbfound horror. Take the decision to make the title character a puppet for most of the film. Annette is the child of the main characters, angry comic Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and soprano Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard). In making the child a puppet, Carax has opened himself up to ridicule. As many commentators have noted, the puppet Annette bears a resemblance to Chucky, the killer doll from the Child's Play slasher franchise. The choice seems off-putting, but it is deliberately so. It pays off during the denouement when Annette morphs into a real child and repudiates her father. Heretofore, Annette has been merely a performer for her father, a helpless innocent whose strings are easily pulled. Condemned and castoff by his only child and society as a whole, Henry is finally able to see Annette as an individual who has her own needs and desires.

Carax on set with Annette puppet

Performance, in all its modes is the main theme of Annette. A dichotomy exists between the high art of Ann's craft and the more vulgar and immediate 'comic' monologues of Henry. Both performers prowl a stage set though Ann's opens, significantly, up to a dream like forest. The heroines of opera warble sublimely and succumb tragically for the edification of an adoring public. This mirrors the fate of Ann herself in the film. Henry McHenry is the embodiment of the angry young comic, reeking of toxic, adolescent masculinity. He channels this into an onstage persona lapped by a raucous public in Pavlovian fashion. Henry ends up despising his audience and his self. We have seen this Byronic schtick and know it will not end well. This is the reason for Henry McHenry's redundant moniker.

Adam Driver has obviously studied many of the hoody wearing comics of the day. This, along with a dash of Eminem, informs his bravura performance of mic cord snapping ferocity and self-loathing. Cotillard is good, too, but has little to do except offer herself as an emblem of feminine suffering. Driver has already showed off his vocal chops in Marriage Story and is up to the challenge here. Cotillard is adequate vocally, but her consonants sound mushy; much like Claudine Longet. Wisely, her vocals in the operatic sections are dubbed.

Rock versus Opera

The songs and score are by the pop-rock brother duo Sparks. I have a few of their albums, but, on the whole find their work vacuous and arch. However, they seem to work best with strong collaborators ( such as Tony Visconti, Giorgio Moroder and Jane Wiedlin) and Annette is shorn of their excesses or, rather, it gives them ample room to explore their many ideas which always seemed crammed into forty minute LPs. Baroque and rococo are adjectives that come to mind while listening to A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing and Indiscreet, chock full of bizarre time signatures, over extended bridges and Russell Mael's dog whistle tenor. The brothers Mael Achilles heel has always been melody. In Annette, the love theme is a dull echo of Kurt Weill's (and Ogden Nash!) "Speak Low". 

Still, the Sparks do use choral asides well. What was once a purely musical project probably benefitted being turned into a feature film. Carax seems to understand both the pleasures and absurdities of the rock opera form. Annette has been likened to the 60's Jacques Demy - Michel Legrand musicals (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort), but a better comparison is to Bruno Dumont's two Joan of Arc rock opera. I would give the edge to Dumont simply for coherence. Annette falls just outside cinematic paradise, but it has many interesting strands: apples, apes, Simon Helberg. It will stand up to multiple reviews.

Ordet

A slow, lurching dance to the grave

Carl-Theodor Dryer's Ordet is a masterpiece, but it is also, as David Bordwell described it, his most obvious film. The theological arguments that constitute the majority of Kaj Munk's play makes the film seem like a loop of eternal recurrence of the themes explored by Dreyer and his recalcitrant shadow, Ingmar Bergman. The film is daunting, the magnitude of Dryer's achievement makes me too cowed to attempt extended commentary. The play of light and shadow inside the Borgen House is as bold and expressionistic as Vampyr, but with a subtler, more mellow touch. Dreyer's simple pans open up the play, so that the set seems as vast as the unconscious.

One touch I could discern was the use of conveyance as premonition of death. The shots of travel are used to link the movement from farm house to tailor's house and back. As in Dreyer's They Caught the Ferry, an anti-speeding PSA, they serve as a memento mori. A portrayal of life's transience functioning as a meditation on mortality. We are all traveling to the same end. 

The Rover

 

David Michod's The Rover is a well acted and produced dystopian thriller that stumbles over its contrived plot and monotonous tone. Guy Pearce portrays Eric, a sociopathic loner eking out an existence in the Outback after an undescribed societal breakdown. When his car is stolen, Pearce's character stops at nothing to retrieve it. Eric runs across Rey, brother to one of the miscreants who have stolen the car, and kidnaps the brain addled young man as a bargaining chip.

Predictably, the pair form a tenuous bond with the mentally challenged man helping his more cynical companion get back in touch with his humanity; as in Of Mice and Men and Rain Man. That this premise doesn't descend into icky goo here is a tribute to Mr. Michod and his talented stars: Robert Pattison is the put upon Rey. If anything, Mr. Michod over emphasizes the dark side, even the Mad Max films leavened its post-apocalyptic depravities with humor. When Eric lets slip that he murdered his wife and her lover, he admits that he is more shaken by the lack of consequences than his own actions. This strikes me as Michod trumpeting a theme, a world without a moral compass, that is already explicit in the narrative.

This would not prove fatal to the film if the scenario was consistent, but there are irritating lapses. When Eric confronts the thieves about his auto, they merely whack him on the noggin whereupon he shakes it off and continues the pursuit. When Rey rescues him from police custody amidst great carnage, the duo neglect to stock up with guns and ammo. These details don't jibe with the canine cannibalism Michod attempts to portray. Such details wouldn't detract as much from a more mythic film, but Michod is trying to make a spare, existential one. 

Book Review: Hollywood's Censor

Joseph Breen

Thomas Doherty's Hollywood Censor: Joseph Breen and the Production Code Administration is more of a history of the PCA under Breen than a biography of the man. Doherty scantly records Breen's personal life and chiefly recounts his career as a PR wiz and administrator. It was Breen's successful promotion of the Eucharistic Congress of 1926, a Papist hoedown held in Chicago's Soldier Field, and his ties to the Roman Catholic hierarchy that made him seem to be a wise choice to enforce what was commonly known as the Hays Code. Will Hays, part of the shady brain trust behind Warren Harding, was President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. The Production code had been formulated under Hays' auspices in 1930, but was not enforced until Breen took the reins of the PCA in 1934. Thus, the blessed Pre-Code era.

Doherty aptly illuminates how Breen's job was to run interference for an industry beset by various forms of local censorship. Six states already had censor boards as well as a host of municipalities. In devising a uniform censorship mechanism controlled by the industry, Hollywood producers wanted to vitiate the power of local censors. In this they were largely successful as Hollywood's Censor ably shows. Doherty is an academic and that has its good points and bad. Doherty's research is impressive. It is one thing to cite the Hollywood trade papers, but it is impressive to see such defunct magazine names as Liberty, New World, The Sign, Extension, America, and that grizzled survivor Yankee. Doherty also does a good job of combing through the Catholic press. He steers clear of academic jargon. I particularly enjoyed  him calling Columbia Studios head honcho Harry Cohn a "noted vulgarian". On the other hand, the book's detailing of the byzantine negotiations between the PCA, film producers, special interest groups and local censor boards, limits the appeal of this tome to only the hardiest of film buffs. 

Doherty's focus is often facile, we read pages on the wrangling with David O. Selznick over Rhett Butler's use of the word damn in Gone with the Wind (which has been written about extensively), but nothing about the inclusion of rape, Butterfly McQueen or the Klan in that chestnut. Most of the censorship battles recounted by Hollywood's Censor will be pretty old hat to film mavens. However, Doherty is strong on the Breen office's enforcement of racial guidelines. Most of its racial strictures would not have been considered progressive at the time, the prohibition against portrayals of miscegenation for example, but the Breen office also sought to eliminate the racial stereotypes (Stepin Fetchit, Fu Manchu) and epithets (#!&*) of the era. (A prime example is Raoul Walsh's The Bowery, unreleaseable today) By picking a Catholic for the job, the largely Jewish film magnates were cognizant that they aligning with a minority group based, as most Jews were, in urban areas rife with movie palaces.

Catholics, in this century, are lumped under the rubric White, but they were breeds apart from WASPs in the early 20th century. The revitalization of the Klan after World War had reignited anti-Catholic fervor to its highest point since the Know-Nothing era. One purpose of the Breen shepherded Eucharistic Congress was to show that Catholics in the US were also good patriots. The event was wrapped in the American flag, a strategy Hollywood often emulated. Jews were also targeted in the rising tide of bigotry, yet, like the Catholics, they craved assimilation.

I am a Catholic, but am ambivalent, at best, about the Church. The reason I bring this up, besides divulging my biases, is that I had a front row seat for a late show of censorship in this country. Growing up in Baltimore, I lived in a state with a censor board, formed in 1916 and disbanded to celebrate my twenty first birthday in 1981. I enjoyed reading about the board's misadventures in The Sun and the Catholic Review. Budding film buff Biff always eagerly opened the Catholic Review to find out which new films got the dreaded C rating. Films like A Clockwork Orange, The Damned, The Devils, The Exorcist, I endeavored to see all of them ASAP. I knew that Forever Amber had been Condemned in its day, but learned from reading Hollywood's Censor that Black Narcissus had met the same fate. What a tribute to Rumer Godden and the Archers!

A good look at the Maryland Censor Board from the other side of the lens is fellow lapsed Catholic John Waters first memoir, Shock Value. In it, he describes his battles with the Board and his pint-sized and vituperative nemesis, Mary Avara. Not shy about talking to the press, Avara did more to further Waters' career than any press agent could have. Shock Value, like all of Waters' books, is trenchant and witty.

In my experience, lapsed Catholics are easy to get along with, it is the relapsed one you need to look out for.

Mary Avara strikes a pose in her son's barber shop

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Viewing Christ Stopped at Eboli, from 1979, reinforced my feeling that director Francesco Rosi is the most underrated of the postwar Italian masters, at least in this country. There are many reasons for this. When the film premiered in New York in early 1980, it was in a truncated form. The nearly four hour original had been shown in segments on Italian television. The film has enough bravura sequences to well earn its length. The long tracking shot of field working peasants reacting to Mussolini's announcement of victory over Ethiopia sums up the dual themes of love for beleaguered Southern Italy and revulsion at Italy's ages long attraction to fascism. 

This is the crux of the film's source material, Primo Levi's novel. Rosi and his collaborators fashioned a fairly faithful version of the novel. The mini-series format allows Rosi enough amplitude and time to capture the breadth and pace of life in the boot of Italy. The protagonist, a thinly disguised version of Levi, has been exiled to an obscure and crumbling burg because of unspecified transgressions against the regime. Carlo Levi, as he is named, is a doctor who has never practiced, but the populace have been stuck with two quacks and they swiftly enlist Levi as their medical savior. Gian Maria Volonte, Rosi's usual leading man in the 70s, soulfully portrays Levi as a sensitive type who responds to the locals' close connection to the natural cycles of existence. He wins them over with quiet assurance and an understanding of the efficacy of the placebo effect.

The ravaged beauty of rural Italy is the real star of the picture, as in Rosi's 1962 masterpiece Salvatore Giuliano. The only real rival to Rosi as a portrayer of the Italian landscape was Antonioni who used his backdrops to picture urban alienation as opposed to Rosi's rural desolation. A shot of fog lifting from the town is as ravishing as anything in cinema. The beauty here is always a stark one because the sun baked Italy Rosi pictures is impoverished by the taxing dictates of Rome. The peasantry endure and it is their example of stoic resistance and humility that Levi takes with him when his exile is ended.

Rosi gets in his digs at the Black Shirts, but stops short of the comic grotesqueries of a Fellini. The film only falters in the last quarter when speeches too baldly enunciate the film's themes, a flaw shared by Rosi's equally superb Cadaveri eccellenti. A sequence where Levi teaches the town's children painting is also misjudged, perhaps because Rosi wanted a sentimental counterpoint to the pig castration sequence.

The theme of exile is predominant in both the novel and film of Christ Stopped at Eboli. The title refers to the boot of Italy, a region ridden with superstition and calumny, being untouched by Christianity. Within the populace are sub-communities of exiles: the educated elite, returnees from America, and the exiled prisoners of fascism who are forbidden to commingle. The theme of exile was common in the postwar existential wave of fiction, especially Camus' The Plague and "Exile and the Kingdom". Once the golden glow of childhood discovery fades, we are forever in exile across a dark plain, cast out of paradise for all eternity. Christ Stopped at Eboli is a beacon amidst a vast wasteland. 

Best of 1935

1. Steamboat Round the Bend                                                    John Ford
2. The Devil is a Woman                                                              Josef von Sternberg
3. The 39 Steps                                                                             Alfred Hitchcock
4. The Bride of Frankenstein                                                      James Whale
5. Ruggles of Red Gap                                                                 Leo McCarey
6. Toni                                                                                           Jean Renoir
7. The Whole Town's Talking                                                     John Ford
8. David Copperfield                                                                   George Cukor
9. Captain Blood                                                                          Michael Curtiz
10. Sylvia Scarlett                                                                          George Cukor

         Films I Enjoyed

         Top Hat, Barbary Coast,

         Living on Velvet, China Seas

         A Night at the Opera,

         The Informer, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,

         Gold Diggers of 1935, The Crusades,

         Happiness, Crime and Punishment,

         A Midsummer's Night Dream, The Scoundrel,

         Shipmates Forever, Mutiny on the Bounty

         Below the Mendoza Line

         Les Misérables,

         The Call of the Wild

         

        

Destiny

Destiny is the dopey English title given Fritz Lang's 1922 silent feature whose title is literally "The Tired Death" . When a man dies prematurely, his fiancée convinces Death to give her three chances to get her man back. This gives Lang the opportunity to picture his beleaguered lovers in three separate exotic locales, a la Intolerance. The Orientalism of two of the episodes is a recurring feature of Lang's work in such films as Hara-kiri, The Blue Gardenia, and The Indian Tomb. What struck me was how spritely the film's tone was compared the dark determinism of most of Lang's oeuvre. Death is always in the frame, but has more compassion for his victims here than in, say, The Seventh Seal.

The special effects, ghost images, miniature army and such, are why the film is remembered historically. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was inspired by Destiny's magic carpet ride to produce his The Thief of Baghdad. Destiny was such an enormous production that Lang utilized five cinematographers. The film's look is more Art Deco than expressionist, especially the décor of the Oriental sequences. 

Lang is very restrained here. The camera barely moves and the use of close-ups is limited. Lang goes for a tableau vivant effect as he did in Die Nibelungen. The ensemble offers well etched performances. Both Bunuel and Hitchcock admired the film, no doubt appreciating the story book surrealism. An undoubted masterpiece, I enjoyed it even more than Die Nibelungen or Metropolis. 

Pig

Michael Sarnoski's Pig tells of a reclusive chef, memorably embodied by Nicholas Cage, whose beloved truffle pig is kidnapped. Rob Feld, the chef, has taken to the Oregon woods after a traumatic loss. He survives by foraging for truffles and selling them to Amir, a young supplier to the palaces of Portland's haute cuisine. The filching of his pig unhinges Feld and he enlists Amir in an attempt to reclaim the swine. 

In this way, opposites are joined. Feld lives in union with nature and his self-reliance is reminiscent of the pioneer forbears of Oregon whose ethos was reclaimed by the counterculture. Amir is an example of the much derided millennial yuppie scum of Portland. He lives in a high rise condo in the trendy Pearl district and his high tech pad is poles apart from Feld's shack. The search for the pig draws these contrary characters together and helps them both deal with the setbacks and losses of their lives. 

Sarnoski ties this together all too neatly, but is able to assist an array of arresting performances. This film presents Cage at his most taciturn and still. In a performance shorn of tics and schtick, he ably shows a man whose loss of his porcine companion pokes at the festering wound of a previous tragedy. Alex Wolff is equally good as Amir whose wallowing in materialistic bling masks an equally damaged soul. The supporting cast is exemplary. I particularly treasure any film containing a performance by Gretchen Corbett. Corbett, a contract player in the waning days of the studio system, is best known for portraying James Garner's on and off girlfriend on The Rockford Files. Since moving back to her native Oregon, she has become a doyenne of the local theater scene and she pops up occasionally in Northwest based television fare such as Shrill and Portlandia. 

A treasure and Portland as fuck: Gretchen Corbett

This points to one of the film's major strengths. It is, as the locals say, Portland as fuck. The location shooting gives it the nod in verisimilitude compared to such faux PDX pictures as I, Tonya, but its capturing the sordid underbelly of Portlandia plays especially well. Sarnoski does overplay that aspect at one point. A Fight Club type sequence seems out of place; more of an homage to David Fincher and former Portlander Chuck Palahniuk than an organic part of the film. Sarnoski also over relies on close-ups, but I would give a guarded recommendation to The Pig; mostly for its well judged performances.

I, Tonya

Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya is an amusing, if superficial look at the saga of Tonya Harding. Being a Portlander of long standing, I am overly familiar with this saga. For most Portlanders, Tonya was the epitome of the white trash denizens of Gresham, a working class enclave just east of Portland. This film, shot in Georgia, fails to capture that milieu. The homes are too nice and the characters too well turned out. This is not fatal to the film, but it means the picture lacks the verisimilitude of a Waters movie shot in Baltimore or a Linklater one shot in Texas.

Steven Rogers script starts off with verve and energy. Its use of flashbacks and interviews is well served by Gillespie who shows more visual flair than previously. Gillespie has displayed before an ability to draw strong performances out of his players, especially in Lars and the Real Girl. Margot Robbie and Alison Janney have been justly celebrated for their performances and Sebastian Stan's turn as Harding's husband, Jeff, is equally good.

I Tonya's second half flags a little. There are too many dead end scenes between Jeff and his henchman. A bigger problem is the half-assed attempt to make Tonya a sympathetic figure. That Harding was abused by others I have little doubt, but the film is too lightweight to really make a connection between that and Tonya's self-destructive and violent behavior. I, Tonya is a better satire of sports and American culture than the recent Battle of the Sexes, but it is only intermittently successful. (4/20/18) 

Summer of Soul

Gladys Knight & the Pips in Summer of Soul

Questlove's Summer of Soul is a compilation of musical performances from the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969. The festival was a celebration of Afro-American culture held at Harlem's Mt. Morris Park (Marcus Garvey Park since 1977) over six weekends. The concerts, free to the public and fervently attended, were financed by Mayor Lindsay's administration partly to reduce tensions in a Harlem that had been beset by riots the previous summer. The performers were a host of notable Black and Hispanic artists ranging from the legendary (Sly and the Family Stone, B.B. King, Stevie Wonder) to big stars of the day who are largely forgotten now (The Chambers Brothers, The 5th Dimension, Mongo Santamaria).

The performances are superb and beautifully captured. Because of this, Summer of Soul stands alongside other notable concert documentaries of the era such as Monterey Pop, Woodstock, and Wattstax. Questlove is particularly adept at demonstrating how Gospel music was the mainspring of 60's Soul. I could have done without the talking heads blithering over the music, but Questlove wants to evoke the tumult of the Sixties (something I lived through) for today's audience. I would have preferred more Sonny Sharrock and less Nina Simone, but I am a quibbler. Summer of Soul is a feast for the eyes and ears. 

I viewed Summer of Soul in a theater, my first time in 2021. The theater was the Tigard Joy Cinema and Pub, a Portland area jewel. What was primarily a second run theater has morphed, under the stewardship of  Jeff 'Punk Rock' Martin, into a sterling repertory house. Sound of Summer was on a double bill with Vertigo, which should give you an idea of the quality of the theater's offerings. I particularly commend its free Weird Wednesday late show to those in the area. 

Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Ludwig, The Outlaw and His Wife

Once more unto the breach: Mark Hamill in Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the best film in the series since The Empire Strikes Back, but it is also interminable; an hour or so too long. Most of the cast are at sea: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, even Laura Dern are all dull and colorless. Only Adam Driver and Benicio del Toro add spark to the prolonged proceedings. Director and scenarist Johnson gets some rhythmic energy from cross cutting between the two main narratives, but can't sustain it past the ninety minute mark. A sense of bloat permeates the project.

The set design is the thing in Ludwig

Equally interminable is Luchino Visconti's Ludwig, from 1973. This biopic of the mad King of Bavaria is an ordeal to sit through, but does gain some power as Ludwig loses hold of reality. The set decoration, location shooting, and costumes intrigue the eye, but the overall effect, no matter how spectacular the spectacle, is mind and butt numbing. The film, which is poorly structured, has no center because Helmut Berger is not up to the demands of the title role. Romy Schneider and Trevor Howard are good in support, but Visconti's magisterial touch continued to slip here.

Majestic visas in The Outlaw and His Wife

By contrast, Victor Sjostrom's The Outlaw and His Wife, from 1918, is a silent melodrama that packs a punch in under two hours. Sjostrom's use of outdoor vistas is nonpareil and the finale flaunts convention by picturing the titular lovers in a morbidly chilly embrace. Sjostrom's acting is superb and the rest of the cast all produce memorable vignettes. Still, Sjostrom does not strike me as a major director. His version of The Scarlet Letter is misjudged and silly and I find both The Phantom Carriage and The Wind overrated. My favorite of his is the audacious He Who Gets Slapped, but The Outlaw and His Wife is just as outstanding and memorable. (4/29/18)

 

Taste of Cherry

Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry has divided critics since it won the Palme D'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. While I can't say it shook me to my core, I was never bored even though its neorealist style is not my cup of tea. A man drives around rural Iran looking for someone to bury him after he commits suicide. He talks with a couple of prospects before a Turkish immigrant agrees to do the deed. The ending is ambiguous, but it is the journey and its glimpses of Iranian life that is the point here. 

Some have voiced frustration that we gain no insight into the protagonist and his plight. I would view him more as a tabula rasa that Kiarostami uses to provide a contrast to a country growing more fundamentalist and militaristic. By his dress and vehicle, the protagonist can be seen as more Western and elitist than any of the other characters he encounters. He is alienated from the harsh surroundings and fails to engage with anyone over the course of the film. The Turk, who urges him to try to savor the beauty and bounty of life, stands in contrast as a man who is still in touch with his childlike sense of wonder; like Tolstoy's Platon Karataev. 

Book Review: Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris

An almost perfect match of biographer and subject, Mark Harris' Mike Nichols: A Life is a definitive work and, given Harris' access to Nichols' collaborators, I suspect it will remain so. I enjoyed Harris' two previous books (Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back), but this book has even more breadth and depth. 

The son of German emigres who became the toast of Manhattan's cultural elite, Nichols has meteoric success, but was plagued by lifelong feelings of insecurity. The sensitivity that made Nichols such a superb handler of actors and writers also left him vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and addiction. Generous to his friends, Nichols could also be self-absorbed and prickly. Harris is even-handed in portraying Nichols' conviviality and cold-bloodedness.

I have always found Nichol's film work to be urbane and superficial. Perhaps, like Tony Richardson, George C. Wolfe and Sam Mendes, his talents were better suited to the theater. His main artistic conflict was reconciling his love of modernist existential theater (Pirandello, Becket) with his love of improv and schtick. The Venn diagram of this was his stage direction of Waiting for Godot with Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Bill Irwin, F. Murray Abraham and Lukas Haas, no less. I feel he was better suited to Neil Simon than Beckett. I wish he had directed on film other Simon adaptations besides Biloxi Blues, especially The Odd Couple. However, Nichols had locked horns with Walter Matthau while directing the stage production. 

Harris confirms that Nichols was fairly ignorant of the technical aspects of film. Yet, through the detailing of Nichols' attempts to bounce back from numerous disasters, Harris made me admire his subject's tenacity. A must read for theater and film buffs.

The Square, Violet and Daisy

The Square

Ruben Ostlund's The Square is a fairly effective satire for most of its 151 minutes, an achievement, but it bites off more than it can chew, much less masticate. It concerns the director of a modernist museum in Stockholm, ably played by Claes Bang, whose life descends into chaos within the course of a week or so. The film touches upon immigration, postmodernism, violence, divorce, art world pretensions, disability rights, Me Too and a host of other current memes with a bracing manner. I was never bored.

Elizabeth Moss is excellent, as usual, as a museum newbie who has ambivalent fling with her director. However, Dominic West's artist barely registers. Ostlund tries too many surreal effects that come off as strained, particularly the pet ape in Moss' apartment. When Bang's character loses his job and reconnects with his two daughters, we are led to believe that he has lost the world and gained his soul, but the insight seems dubious because it is not felt.

Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan in Violet and Daisy

Geoffrey Fletcher's Violet and Daisy, from 2013, is a first feature that I found to be slightly better than its putrid reputation. Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan play a hit woman duo who bond with one of their targets. The film lay on the shelf for awhile and feels mangled at 88 minutes. Fletcher, like many former film students, borrows liberally from what he has seen. The intertitles employed evoke Wes Anderson, as does the twee tone. The narrative is reminiscent of Tarantino, Mexican standoffs alternating with soliloquies. The two leads are good though Bledel resembles a faun too much to conjure a hard bitten appearance. Fletcher gets a very fine and restrained turn from James Gandolfini as the target of the hit with an issue or two. Fletcher nicely develops the twin themes of arrested development, this time with a gender twist, and ambivalent familial bonds. The film never fully succeeds, but stays in the mind. A mixed bag. (5/4/18)

Best of 1936

1. My Man Godfrey                                                              Gregory La Cava
2. Sisters of the Gion                                                           Kenji Mizoguchi
3. Story of a Cheat                                                               Sacha Guitry
4. The Prisoner of Shark Island                                          John Ford
5. Modern Times                                                                  Charlie Chaplin
6. Secret Agent                                                                     Alfred Hitchcock
7. Rose Hobart                                                                     Joseph Cornell
8. By the Bluest of Seas                                                       Boris Barnet
9. A Day in the Country                                                       Jean Renoir
10. Swing Time                                                                       George Stevens

                  Film I Enjoyed

                  The Road to Glory, 

                  Desire, Things to Come,

                  Show Boat, Sylvia Scarlett,

                  Charge of the Light Brigade,

                  After the Thin Man, Come and Get It,

                  The Milky Way,

                  Romeo and Juliet, Devil Doll,

                  Fury, Dodsworth,

                  Libeled Lady, Follow the Fleet,

                 Big Brown Eyes, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

                 Below the Mendoza Line

                 The Petrified Forest,

                 These Three,

                 San Francisco

An Actor's Revenge

Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge, from 1963, is a Cinemascope feast for the eyes that suffers from a lack of emotional commitment to the scenario and its characters. The film is a remake of a classic from the 30s and tells the tale of a transvestite actor in early 19th century Japan who seeks vengeance against three wealthy burghers responsible for his parents' death. Kazuo Hasegawa, who plays both the title character and a knave, is particularly memorable, but his character's motivations are slighted due to a sketchy back story. At times, I was convinced that Ichikawa was less interested in telling a story than in filling the frame in an eye pleasing fashion.

The film has a wonderful opening. Hasegawa is onstage and spies his enemies in a box. Ichikawa uses inserts within the wide frame to illustrate the mind's eye to exhilarating effect. However, this energy dissipates as the film unspools and its tone becomes more haphazard and uneven. Some critics have praised this as a polyphonic effect, but it struck me more as an attempt to jazz up a script that the director was only half interested in. The film's score reflects this schizoid nature: half moody jazz, half syrupy strings. The action scenes seem clumsy, the melodramatic ones are overly formal. I enjoyed the film quite a bit for its pungent playing and gorgeous cinematography, but felt no emotional charge at the dénouement. The play's the thing in An Actor's Revenge, but death has no sting. 

Molly's Game

Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba in Molly's Game

Aaron Sorkin's Molly's Game, his directorial debut, is a muff. An  example of a gifted, yet limited screenwriter who knows how to tell, but not show a narrative. A good example of this is a scene following a mob enforcer's beating of the titular Molly Bloom. Sorkin throughout utilizes his lead actress's narration, but to what end. Sometimes it amplifies Jessica Chastain's characterization, but here the effect is redundant. Chastain describes the injuries at the same time Sorkin is showing the same. Why? There is no reason to do this in a motion picture. In film, one must show or illustrate one's tale.

I have read the book Sorkin has based the film on, mostly because I wanted to read about the high stakes poker game Molly Bloom hosted. However, Sorkin is obviously not interested in poker per se and has recast the memoir into a portrait of a driven woman beset by creepy men. This is all fair in an adaptation, the memoirs is flimsy, but Sorkin's additions reek of contrivance. He chooses to expand the presence of Molly's father, a choice that fatally results in what Manny Farber referred to as "The Gimp"; a resort to Cracker Jack box Freud to explain a character's psychological makeup. Farber was writing in 1951, the heyday of Freudian noir, but The Gimp plagues us to this day. Sorkin is most assuredly not an avant gardist, his work is rooted in the social realism of The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse and its ilk. He is our Paddy Chayefsky.

Thus, Sorkin presents Bloom's contentious relationship with her psychologist pater as her primary motivating force. Boyfriends lightly touched upon in the book are excised. The demanding Dad is embodied by the miscast Kevin Costner, who nicely underplays. He's given a speech in which he has to offer a snap analysis of his daughter's travails and Chastain and he make the moment palatable, if not believable. Unfortunately, Chastain has no such chemistry with Idris Elba, who plays her lawyer. I can't decide if we are seeing the limits of Chastain's range or if Hollywood has simply typecast her as a cold bitch. Nevertheless, neither she nor Sorkin are able to elicit much sympathy or interest in Bloom's plight. 

The character of the lawyer is another Sorkin add on. The lawyer has a daughter who bonds with Bloom, limply underling the film's putative feminist message. The lawyer exists in the film because Sorkin evidently feels, post A Few Good Men, that the courtroom drama is in his wheelhouse. So, Elba is given a rousing speech in which he chides the FBI for overzealously going after a fairly virtuous small fry. But since Bloom pled guilty and got off lightly, the speech occurs in an interrogation room and the grandstanding effect does not come off; despite a good try by Elba. With its high flying protagonist succumbing to drug abuse, Molly's Game seems at times an inept retread of The Wolf of Wall Street. Perhaps a better comparison would be Fincher's The Social Network, another Sorkin script more ably served by its visuals. (5/13/18)

Charlie Says

Matt Smith in Charlie Says

Mary Harron's Charlie Says disappeared without a trace after a brief theatrical release in 2019. A film about the Manson family and their murders, it was rendered anonymous in the wake of Quentin Tarantino's splashier and more mythic take on the same topic, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Both film used the same Spahn Ranch set, but Harron's film is a more realistic and ambivalent version of the subject. Charlie Says screenwriter Guinevere Turner, who also collaborated with Harron on American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page, used Ed Sanders' The Family (still the best book on Manson) as a basis for her script. Turner uses the recruitment and grooming of Leslie Van Houten into the "family" as the focus of her tale. The film is told largely in flashback. A graduate student, well played by Merritt Wever, is assigned to the incarcerated women so they can overcome their brainwashing and face up to the havoc they have wrought. 

To my mind, Ms. Harron has never made a completely satisfying film, but Charlie Says is her most accomplished to date. Charlie Says pick up on the feminist themes that have always percolated in her (and Turner's) work, but does not attempt to deny the culpability of Manson's deluded young women. Portraits of psychopaths has dominated Harron's work (Valerie Solanas, Patrick Bateman and, now, Manson), but she is too committed to realism and ambivalence to paint them as monstrous embodiments of evil. The contrast to Tarantino is striking in this respect. Tarantino is all too happy to have his mythic embodiments of evil be flambeed or carved up in order to satisfy his rather Old Testament moral sense and the audience's need for catharsis. However, though I respect Harron's moral sense more, I do feel Tarantino is the more talented filmmaker. Though not a flashy visual director, Tarantino's camera set-ups are more striking than Harron's. A good comparison between the two are the entrances of cars and cycles into the Spahn Ranch. Tarantino's framing gives these moments more thematic impact than Harron's does.

I also think Tarantino is more gifted with actors, though Charlie Says contains the best ensemble work yet in a Harron film. Chace Crawford and Kayli Carter are both superb as, respectively, Tex Watson and Squeaky Fromme. Matt Smith is suitably creepy as Manson, but lacks the charisma Steve Railsback displayed in Helter Skelter. This, through true to the film's intent, strips it of a bit of excitement and danger. Hannah Murphy, most famous for her Gilly in Game of Thrones, overplays her callowness.

Neither a whitewash nor a rancid exploitation, Charlie Says tries to present these perpetrators as rounded individuals led astray by a psychedelic pied piper. Harron's ambivalence towards her subjects was a turn off for audience and critics, but Charlie Says stands as her most fully focused film. 
 

Painted Fire

Choi Min-sik as painter Jang Seung-eop in Painted Fire

Im Kwon-Taek's Painted Fire, from 2002, is a superb biopic of 19th century Korean painter Jang Seung-eop. The lowborn Jang rose to the status of court painter amidst the tumult of his era. Portrayed here as a rebellious aesthete and hellion, the role of Jang provides a nice opportunity for Choi Min-Sik, best known as the protagonist of Park Chan Wook's Oldboy, to show off his acting range. This he does in a titanic performance going from muted sensitivity to truculent fury. 

The film suffers from the decision to use Mr. Choi to portray the painter as a young man. A parade of bad wigs does not help. However, as Jang grows older, the picture gains its stride. Choi has a field day portraying Jang's dalliances with prostitutes, testy relationships with patrons, and drunken benders. The film is a riot of color and sensuality whether portraying flesh, flowers, fauna or food. Mr. Im's main theme here, as in his masterpiece Chunhyang, is the forging of Korean national identity despite its being buffeted  by two more dominant cultures in Japan and China. Painted Fire is a rung below Chunhyang, but only just.