Best of 2022

               

1)     EO                                                  Jerzy Skolimowski

2)     Hit the Road                                 Panah Panahi

3)     Decision to Leave                           Park Chan-Wook

4)     Russia 1985-1999: Traumazone      Adam Curtis

5)     The Tale of King Crab                     Matteo Zoppis and Alessio Rigo de Righi

6)     Crimes of the Future                  David Cronenberg

7)     Benediction                                      Terence Davies

8)     Vortex                                               Gaspar Noe

9)     The Banshees of Inisherin               Martin McDonagh

10)   Saint Omer                                     Alice Diop

   

Films I Enjoyed

After Yang, No Bears, Aftersun,

The Novelist's Film, The Viewing,

The Girl and the Spider, Petite Maman,

Vengeance, Confess, Fletch,

In Front of Your Face, Apollo 10 1/2. 

Men, Murina, Holy Spider,

The Wonder, Official Competition, 

The Outside, The Quiet Girl,

Flux Gourmet, Pinocchio,

Emily the Criminal, Pearl, 

De Humani Corporis Fabrica,

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, Triangle of Sadness,

The Fabelmans, Operation Mincemeat,

Armageddon Time, Dr. Strange 2, 

Tar, The Northmen,

Lost Illusions, Glass Onion, 

The Murmuring, Skinamarink,

Barbarian, Everything Everywhere All at Once,

The Outfit, Prey,

3000 Years of Longing, Athena, 

Resurrection, Bardo, 

Women Talking, The House,

The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra,

The Autopsy, Halloween Ends, 

Happening, Metal Lords,

Blonde, Lynch/OZ, 

Lot 36, Catherine Called Birdy,

Strawberry Mansion, Gangubai Kathiawadi,

Till, Top Gun: Maverick,

X, You Are Not My Mother,

Below the Mendoza Line

Sissy, Nanny,

After Blue, Corsage,

Lady Chatterley's Lover, Both Sides of the Blade, 

Spin Me Round, All Quiet on the Western Front, 

Elvis, We're All Going to the World's Fair,

White Noise, Bodies Bodies Bodies, 

Nope, Ali & Ava,

Watcher, She Said,

Viking Wolf, Dead for a Dollar,

Compartment No. 6, Kimi,

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Frank and Penelope,

Scream, Speak No Evil,

The Menu, Graveyard Rats, 

Kompromat, Pickman's Model, 

Sharp Stick, The Lost City, Thor: Love and Thunder,

Moonage Daydream, The Burning Sea, Wendell and Wild,

RRR, Poker Face (Crowe),

Playground, Terrifier 2, 

Amsterdam, Bandit, 

The Munsters, The Whale,

Don't Worry Darling, The Cursed,

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,

Turning Red, The Black Phone,

Babylon, Smile,

Dreams in the Witch House, Prey for the Devil,

Lou, Spiderhead, The Invitation,

Shark Bait

                                                             

Medium Cool

Robert Forster in Medium Cool

Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, released in 1969, was the first political film of the American counterculture to gain a studio release. Wexler, one of this country's premier cinematographer, was riding high after winning an Oscar for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and lensing the 1967 Best Picture winner In the Heat of the Night. Radicalized by his opposition to the war, Wexler put his Hollywood career on hold in order to make this very personal film, largely shot in his hometown of Chicago.

The film centers around a reporter and cameraman for a television station in Chicago played by Robert Forster who was cast at the last minute after John Cassavetes dropped out of the role. We first meet Forster's character, named John Cassellis, filming the results of a fatal automobile accident on a freeway ramp. He is being assisted by a sound man played by Peter Bonerz, most famous for eventually playing a wacky dentist on The Bob Newhart Show. The pair show little empathy for the victim of the crash. To them, the footage they shoot is merely fodder for their station where if it bleeds, it leads. From the start, Wexler is trumpeting his theme that the cool medium of television distances rather than engages the viewer with reality.

John is shown to be a rather unengaged and callow fellow. He is bedding a co-worker, played by Mariana Hill, but the relationship is superficial and John seems glib and disconnected, a voyeur on the periphery. However, a number of factors break John out of his shell. He finds out his station has been sharing footage with the FBI, presumably to prosecute war protesters whom John has filmed burning their draft cards. He realizes that he has been an unwitting cog in the American war machine and that it is time to make a stand against the war even if it costs him his job. The film culminates in footage shot by Wexler of the rioting that occurred throughout Chicago during 1968's contentious Democratic Party convention.

The other factor that helps John become more human is a romance with an impoverished mother and widow played by Verna Bloom. This was Bloom's film debut after a decade of work in the theater including the splashy role of Charlotte Corday in the Broadway production of Marat/Sade. Bloom's character, Eileen, is the widow of a preacher from West Virginia and the relationship between her and John gives the film some badly needed warmth. John gains empathy for Eileen and her young son. Eileen is not a zipless fuck, but a woman in need of comfort and love. The relationship is relatively chaste and John realizes he must court Eileen like a proper suitor in order to win her. Medium Cool, with its mixture of dramatic and documentary footage, often feels under written, but Forster and Bloom's skill help flesh out their characters.

Verna Bloom, in yellow, in Medium Cool

Eileen's son goes missing during the convention and there are a number of effective sequences of Bloom scouring the streets of Chicago for him as Mayor Daley's police crack open the skulls of the protesters. Then, Forster and Bloom are reunited for an ineffectual coda. Shaken by the violence, the duo speed away from the inner city, but John crashes his vehicle into a tree, killing Eileen. Passing motorists drive by, take pictures, and we have come full circle in this allegory of alienation. The film concludes with a shot of Wexler behind his camera. The implication is (overly) clear, we are all involved in this ongoing reality and are not just spectators.

I could pick nits ceaselessly with the dramatic deficiencies of Medium Cool. The psychedelic discotheque sequence is an egregious example. It is evocative of the groovy LSD movies of 1967, but feels out of date in Medium Cool. The soundtrack to this sequence is a montage of Mother of Invention songs while an anonymous psych band mimes onscreen. Who the heck can dance to the music of Frank Zappa? Otherwise, the score, curated by Chicago native Mike Bloomfield, is effective. What is most memorable in Medium Cool is the power of the imagery. Whether it be shots of a roller derby, a parking lot, two figures in a goldenrod field or a riverside baptism, Wexler's footage pops with vibrant color and a feel for Americana. The dramatic core of Medium Cool is haphazardly structured, but its imagery lingers in the mind's eye. The film features cameos by Jesse Jackson, Peter Jennings. and Claudine Longet.

Hanzo the Razor: The Snare

Shintaro Katsu

Yasuzo Masumura's Hanzo the Razor, from 1973, is the second and best of the trilogy of films about the titular samurai. The films were vehicles for its star and producer, Shintaro Katsu. Katsu is best known as the star of the Zatoichi films which followed the adventures of a blind masseur who excels at swordplay. Between 1962 and 1973, Katsu starred in 25 films as Zatoichi, but by the 70s interest was waning in the samurai genre. Katsu responded with the Hanzo films which amped up the blood letting and added dollops of kinky sex. The Hanzo films more closely resemble the exploitation films of the era that played on the grindhouse circuit in the US than classic samurai films.

A short summary of the plot should steer away the fainthearted from this tawdry piece of pulp. A young maiden is found dead of a botched abortion. Hanzo confronts the (topless) abortionist who hips him to a temple where young females serving the nuns are exploited to satisfy the debased needs of the temple's elite patrons. Hanzo arrives in the nick of time to save a woman being savagely beaten by a wealthy letch. Hanzo, in turn, beats the perv and kidnaps the prioress in order to torture her into revealing the identity of the fiend who has bankrolled her depraved nunnery.

At this point, Hanzo unsheathes his secret weapon and it is not his sword. Previously, we have witnessed Hanzo training his penis in a most peculiar fashion. First he douses it with boiling water, then beats it repeatedly with a thick stick, and, finally, repeatedly plunges it into a large block of rice. Despite (or because) of this abuse, Hanzo's member retains its tumescence. After some preliminary torture of the prioress, he binds her in a net and then suspends her in the air and lowers her on his mammoth manroot. He spins her on his phallus every which way until she is so overcome by pleasure that she spills the beans.

I don't like spoiling a film's plot this much, but feel it is a public service in this case to steer the easily offended away from what is a good, but not great, exploitation film. Certainly the tastes of a culture that spawned tentacle erotica are alien to mainstream America, now and then. The film's final third are a bit of a letdown as Hanzo thwarts a thief's attempt to rob the local mint. However, the verve and color of Masumura's direction (Antonioni was a fan) kept my eyes glued to the screen even when I was rolling them. 

I feel that Hanzo as a character is the result of the conservative backlash to the 1960s in the same way that Clint Eastwood's protagonists were. Like Dirty Harry, Hanzo is a cop dealing with the criminal scum of an increasingly depraved culture. Also like Harry, his higher ups are portrayed as decadent and effete with little sympathy for the common man. Hanzo's sword, like Harry's .357 Magnum, is a symbolic phallus and both series of films are essentially masculine fantasies. Eastwood's sexual conquests, in early films such as For A Few Dollars More, Hang 'Em High, Coogan's Bluff, and High Plains Drifter. are essentially rapes as are Hanzo's. Eastwood, at least, expanded the scope of female characters in his films as he matured. The Hanzo films decry sexual licentiousness while reveling in it: a case of having your beef and cheesecake and eating it, too. 

As an aside, the music of this film was composed by Tomita, the Wendy Carlos of Japan, who released numerous albums on RCA in the 1970s and had composed the scores for a couple of the Zatoichi flicks. This score is very 1973, but more derivative than, say, Lalo Schifrin. Synthesizers rehash themes from Morricone, Stevie Wonder, and Rick Wakeman, but this is preferable to Tomita's subsequent plundering of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Holst.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Mesrine

Vincent Cassel in Mesrine

Guy Ritchie's The Man From U.N.C.L.E. displays the further decline of Ritchie from his scrappy opening salvoes of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. This retread of a rather lame 1960s television series suffers from the same bloat and blandness of Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films. Henry Cavill brings a little more sardonic swagger than the late Robert Vaughn, but Armie Hammer and Alicia Vikander are wasted. The Italian retro style of the film is diverting, but this is an action thriller that doesn't thrill.

Much more entertaining is Jean-Francois Richet's Mesrine, released in two parts. Vincent Cassel is well cast as an unrepentant thug with a soupcon of charm. A parade of distinguished French thespians such as Gerard Depardieu, Mathieu Amalric, Michel Duchaussoy, Cecile De France and Ludivine Sagnier give controlled and memorable performances. A firm control of his actors seems to be a hallmark of Richet's work. Of late, Depardieu seems to bellow like a sea lion in his performances. Here, he is markedly restrained and workmanlike. Amalric usually portrays pervy, intellectual types with an array of tics. In Mesrine, he has a wary, almost paranoid intensity that finds power through stillness. As Cassel gambols through scenes with a dog-like garrulousness and inattention, his partner in crime Amalric perches immobile foreseeing their inevitable downfall.

Not a groundbreaker visually, Richet's films reminds me of  Franklin J. Schaffner, but nervier. They both share a gusto for masculine yarns. Mesrine has four jailbreaks and much mayhem. Politics, though, seem to be out of Richet's range and the script's attempts to link Mesrine with the revolutionary fervor of the 60s and 70s fall flat. Still, Mesrine never bored me for any of its four hours. (4/22/16)

Best Performances of 2022

Aubrey Plaza

Actress                       Aubrey Plaza                          Emily the Criminal

                                   Mia Goth                                X and Pearl

                                   Pantea Panahiha                     Hit the Road

                                   Fatma Mohamed                    Flux Gourmet

                                   Penelope Cruz                        Official Competition

Actor                         Colin Farrell                            The Banshees of Inisherin

                                  Rory Kinnear                           Men

                                  Park Hae-il                               Decision to Leave

                                  Viggo Mortensen                     Crimes of the Future

                                  Paul Mescal                              Aftersun

                                  Ethan Hawke                           The Black Phone

Supporting Actress   Kerry Condon                           The Banshees of Inisherin 

                                  Kristen Stewart                          Crimes of the Future

                                  Penny Fuller                              Strawberry Mansion

                                  Jamie Lee Curtis       Everything Everywhere All at Once

                                  Julianne Nicholson                     Blonde

Supporting Actor       Xavier Dolan                              Lost Illusions

                                  Peter Capaldi                              Benediction

                                  Michael Wincott                         Nope

                                  Barry Keoghan                           The Banshees of Inisherin

                                  Boyd Holbrook                           Vengeance

Colin Farrell

Emily

Emma Mackey as Emily

My reaction to Frances O'Connor's Emily was conflicted. O'Connor has not attempted a biopic of Emily Bronte, but an evocation of the soul of the writer. That is why the numerous historical inaccuracies in the film didn't particularly bother me. Ms. O'Connor wants to show how the tempestuous soul of the strangest and greatest Bronte sister was forged and how the Romantic tumult of her personality was reflected in her creation, Wuthering Heights. So, I will set aside the film's lack of fealty to the facts of Bronte's life which troubled a number of critics.

The flick doesn't live up to the "half-civilized ferocity" of Bronte. When O'Connor tries to mimic the uncanny power of the novel, in a ghostly visitation by Emily's dead mother, the moment lacks impact. The images aren't as startling or disturbing as the moment in Wuthering Heights in which Lockwood dreams of Catherine's ghost bloodying her wrist on broken window glass. The director does make good use of window and ocular (the eyes being the windows to the soul) imagery, but the end result is only fitfully effective. I thought the footage of the brooding Emily wandering the Yorkshire moors was superior to the outdoor sequences in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights, but found sequences of Emily using opiates lacking in any sense of narcotic delirium.

I feel O'Connor wanted to present Emily Bronte as a woman on the cusp of modernity hemmed in by her backwater upbringing. Bronte is portrayed as a free thinker who lacks intellectual companionship. However, because of this, Emma Mackey's performance often jars with the more period appropriate performances of the rest of the ensemble. This, I'll stress again, may have been O'Connor's intent, but the film is neither melodramatic nor perverse enough to support this incongruity. O'Connor's biggest error is having Emily fall for Oliver Jackson-Cohen's William Weightman. The heaving and bodice ripping that results seem out of place for a male character who has all the dash and fervor of a stolid curate.

Still, the film is fairly accomplished for a maiden effort and I hope Ms. O'Connor returns soon to the director's chair. She displays a firm hand with her cast, there are no indifferent performances, and a clear eyed intelligence about her subject. What Emily needed was more of the artistic boldness that Ms. Bronte herself displayed.

Cocaine Bear

               
The carcass of Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear has been thoroughly picked over, but I still found something to gnaw on. I don't believe this was a foredoomed project even though, like Snakes on a Plane, the title promises a one dimensional premise. The makers could have made this film an 80s period comedy, a grotesque comedy, a survival tale or even a subjective film from the bear's point of view like Jean-Jacques Annaud's singular The Bear. However, Jimmy Warden's screenplay lacks any consistent tone and the film is an easily shrugged off kluge.

The film commences with a drug dealer tossing satchels of cocaine into the Chattanooga National Forest from his burning prop plane. The dealer conks his head on the plane door before he can open his parachute and falls to his death. All this is backgrounded by the 80s ear worm of Jefferson Starship's "Jane", seemingly promising us a satire of the cheesy and coked out America of the 1980s. The song also served as the theme to another Elizabeth Banks affiliated satire, the reboot of Wet Hot American Summer which was, at least, more consistent in tone than Cocaine Bear.  Two bands of miscreants are soon searching the forest for the contraband . Both of these groups contain dimwitted criminal types, ripe for satire, as are the goofy staffers of the park.

However, also in the park are two pre-teens skipping school. Soon, one of their mama bears (played by Keri Russell) is hot on their trail. The players all cross paths with the intoxicated bear and mild hilarity and hysteria ensues. However, the satiric tone Banks injects doesn't jibe with the children in peril part of the film. I thought that these sections of the film seemed to belong in something like The Goonies rather than an R rated comedy. Since the cocaine bear herself has two cubs, some sort of parallelism could have been drawn between the title character and Keri Russell, but that is not the type of product Cocaine Bear is. I enjoyed the broad antics that Banks elicited from her cast, particularly O'Shea Jackson Jr., Margo Martindale, and the late Ray Liotta, but Cocaine Bear is too aimless and witless to be memorable. 

Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse

Tye Sheridan

Christopher Landon's Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse sank without a trace commercially and was generally reviled critically, but it is good enough to be a future cult film. Part of its commercial failure may be due to its being marketed as an R rated zombie flick when it has a winsome sweetness that might have more suited the PG-13 crowd. Of course, then we would have missed the spectacle of a zombie Cloris Leachman chomping on one of the lead's naked ass.

Landon coaxes warm performances from his leads. Tye Sheridan has a quiet assuredness like DiCaprio or Hanks at this age. But as Joe Bob would say: zombie breasts, detached zombie penis, zombie deer, zombie cats, zombie fu, heads roll. (9/22/16)

Blood and Gold

Marie Hacke takes aim in Blood and Gold

Peter Thorwarth's Blood and Gold is a limber and enjoyable action film. Set during the last days of World War 2 in the European theater, the story revolves around a cache of gold ingots stashed somewhere in a German village. The gold, filched from the town's sole Jewish family, has been hidden by the town's burghers who are waiting for the Nazi regime to collapse before they cash in. However, an SS commander has been tipped off to the existence of the treasure and has his brigade frantically searching for the gold before the Allies arrive.

The film's protagonist, Heinrich (Robert Maaser), has served in the Wehrmacht for six years and, sick of war, has become a deserter. The film opens with Heinrich being captured and then strung up and left to die by the SS. He is saved from that fate by Elsa (Marie Hacke), a farmer who lives on an isolated property with her autistic brother. Their respite from carnage is short-lived. 

The film is well paced and performed. The over the top action and sardonic tone threatens to make the film a cartoon, but Thorwarth makes sure to invest in enough characterization as to render individual deaths, and there are many, as something more than inevitable results of choreographed violence. Even the death of a cow is mourned. The Westerns of Sergio Leone seem to be Thorwarth's main inspiration, so blatantly so that many of the motifs of Jessica de Rooij and Hendrik Nolle's score echo the contributions of Ennio Morricone to those films. As in Leone's films, Blood and Gold pictures a world in which greed unleashes an endless cycle of violence. Recommended to fans of action cinema and currently streaming on Netflix. 

Gervaise

Maria Schell and Suzy Delair in Gervaise

Rene Clément's Gervaise, from 1956, is a quality adaptation of Emile Zola's novel, L'Assommoir. Set during the reign of Napoleon III, Zola's novel is a melodrama concerning a laundress (Gervaise) and the three men her life is intertwined with. The term l'assommoir derives from a noun that roughly means stunned or hammered. The expression became a euphemism for working class taverns that served home brewed rotgut in 19th century Paris. During the course of the novel both Gervaise and her husband succumb to alcoholism as a way to escape the misery of their impoverished lives. If you have read any of Zola's novels, the squalor and deterministic tragedy of Gervaise will come as no surprise.

The film is a condensed version of the novel, but it maintains the seamy feel of the original. So much so that all prints that circulated in the United States in the 1950s suffered from snips by censor boards. I don't know why anyone would spare us the delectation of Suzy Delair's derriere exposed and paddled on by Gervaise (Maria Schell) during an epic catfight. The film was received by American critics as the height of realism and daring at the time. A glimpse of the vomit and blood on a character's pillow after a bender must have seemed plenty real in the cinemas of the 1950s. Certainly mainstream American cinema would wait until the dismantling of the Production Code ten years later before opening the floodgates to such scatological effluvia.

Clement and his scriptwriters also preserved the socialistic tenor of Zola's work. Gervaise's noblest suitor, a blacksmith who mentors her eldest son, is sent to prison for organizing a strike. Gervaise does experience moments of joy in her life, a trip to the Louvre after her wedding and getting to serve a goose to her friends on her name day, but Zola portrays her as unable to escape the traps and snares of poverty. I agree with Arlene Croce who found Maria Schell to be an overly romantic Gervaise. Her luminous beauty lights up the screen, but Gervaise needs to have a little bit of fishwife in her, something Suzy Declair has in spades as Gervaise's frenemy, Virginie. Schell, who was born in Vienna, had appeared in a number of German films and Sascha Guitry's Napoleon. Gervaise made Schell an international star. Her appearance in Visconti's White Nights, a role that suited her talents perfectly, further raised her profile and Hollywood, for worse rather than better, soon beckoned.

Clement makes one change to the novel that I rather liked and which again displays his masterful direction of children, as in Forbidden Games. In the book, Gervaise dies and her corpse molders for days before her neighbors notice the stench. In the film, we last see a disheveled and unhealthy looking Gervaise drinking in a saloon. Her young daughter, Nana, visits her and tries to rouse her, but Gervaise is unreachable. Nana skips outside where the beautiful child is hailed by a large group of urchins. Students of Zola's oeuvre will know that the child will grow into the man-eating prostitute immortalized in Zola's 1880 novel, Nana. Gervaise stands as a portrait of the sordid milieu that would forge such a hard-bitten character. 

Small Town Crime

A boss Chevy Nova

Eshom and Ian Nelms' Small Town Crime is aptly self-described. John Hawkes plays an alcoholic ex-cop who left his local department in disgrace. When he discovers the corpse of a teenage prostitute, his search for her killer provides him a chance for redemption. Hawkes rips around Utah in a souped up Nova, a beer always at the ready, intent on a dogged investigation. The film has a paint by numbers feel despite the magnificently cruddy locations. Still, Hawkes is eminently watchable and the supporting cast is superb: including Anthony Anderson, Olivia Spencer, Robert Forster, Clifton Collins Jr., and Jeremy Ratchford.

Zabriskie Point

American capitalism goes kaboom in Zabriskie Point

I caught the last thirty minutes or so of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point while attending a double feature during my teenage years. I was nonplussed by what I saw and it has taken me forty years and a lot more viewings of Antonioni's films to work up any desire to see the whole thing and I was fairly happy I did.

The film's flaws were obvious at the time of its release (1970) and still are. The two leads are leaden and don't provoke much interest, even when discarding their clothes to make supposedly hot love in the desert sands. Antonioni's Marxist platitudes are tedious, especially in the opening rap session featuring Kathleen Cleaver. He comes off as a tourist without much feel for the culture or its citizenry. Rod Taylor as Antonioni's version of a capitalist oppressor is wasted.

However, Antonioni's eye for land and cityscapes redeems this patchy epic. The beauty of the American Southwest is captured here, as is Antonioni's pop sensibility in a memorable montage of road signs. Andrew Sarris typed Antonioni as half mod and half Marxist and Zabriskie Point captures that duality for better and worse. The closing sequence of slow motion explosions, capturing his female protagonist's disgust with America's capitalist culture and desire for violent revolt, failed as prophecy, but succeeds cinematically.

Ultimately, Zabriskie Point can be grouped with a motley group of films such as Jacques Demy's The Model Shop. Agnes Varda's Lions Love, and Milos Forman's Taking Off which display European directors coming to grips with America amidst the tumult of the 60s. 

Touchez Pas au Grisbi

Lino Ventura, Jean Gabin, and Jeanne Moreau in Touchez Pas au Grisbi

Jacques Becker's Touchez Pas au Grisbi (Don't touch the loot), from 1954, is a first rate French crime thriller set amidst the cafes and nightclubs of Montmartre. Freely adapted from Albert Simonin's novel, Becker and his cohorts tailored the film to fit its star, cinematic icon Jean Gabin. Gabin's Max walks through the first half of the film as if he is withholding a secret and he is. Max has stolen $50,000 in gold ingots from Orly airport and is trying to keep that fact under his hat. Moreover, he is feeling too old for the criminal life he has led. He is tired of the Montmartre nightlife and seems only half interested in the numerous women who pursue him.

Of course, not all of Max's compatriots are as tight lipped as he and the chance to cash in on his final score slips through his fingers. Despite the treachery that surrounds him, Max remains faithful to his true friends, particularly Riton (Rene Dary). The relationship between Max and Riton is echoed by the relationship between Jimmy Hoffa and Frank Sheeran in Scorsese's The Irishman to the point of Scorsese copying a bedtime scene of gangsters in pajamas. Gabin is among the greatest screen actors and his performance in Touchez... ranks with his best, but the cast in general is superb. This was Lino Ventura's film debut and the first film to show Jeanne Moreau's potential. A masterpiece, then. Available on a super Kino Lorber disc and for streaming, on Kanopy.

Kolberg

                        

Veit Harlan's Kolberg is a Nazi propaganda film in the guise of a historical war film. This 1945 film chronicles the heroic resistance of a small German city to Napoleon's forces in 1807. Facing stiff odds, the defenders of the town repel a siege that targets the civilian population. This was an attempt to stiffen the resolve of an already beleaguered German citizenry as the Allies crumbled the Axis. Despite a few moving moments, the film's attempts at offering a stirring series of tableaux tends towards waxworks.

The film's two leads both embody the self sacrifice for the fatherland that the Nazi elite wanted to foster. Heinrich George, an avuncular figure on the German screen, plays Joachim Nettelbeck, a no-nonsense brewer and mayor of Kolberg. Nettelbeck personifies the resistance to French tyranny and cruelty. He is adamant that the town will not fall to Napoleon and his minions. He is shown haranguing the town's defeatist commandant, played by Paul Wegener, most famous for his role as The Golem. There are endless scenes of Nettelbeck squabbling with a weak kneed city council which tend to halt whatever momentum the film has generated.

Heinrich George and Kristina Soderbaum

Heinrich George had appeared in Harlan's Jud Suss, an Ant-Semitic period screed that is, despite many contenders, the vilest product of Nazi cinema. The female lead of both Jud Suss and Kolberg is Kristina Soderbaum, the third and final Mrs. Harlan. Soderbaum was a Swede who Harlan helped mold into the preeminent female star of Nazi cinema in such popular melodramas as Covered Tracks, The Immortal Heart, The Trip to Tilsit, and The Golden City. Soderbaum's character represents the stoic endurance the Nazi elite demanded of those on the home front. Families are shown burning their houses so they won't fall into the hands of Napoleon's forces. Farmers flood their fields to impede the advance of the French troops. Soderbaum, who often met a tragic end in Harlan's films (she was nicknamed "the floating corpse"), loses her father, two brothers, and her sweetheart during the town's siege. However, as Nettelbeck rams the point home, "death is overcome by victory."

It was this theme of self-sacrifice that Joseph Goebbels, Harlan's boss as Minister of Propaganda. wanted to convey to wartime Germany. The film's epic production began in 1942 just as the war began to tilt away from the Axis forces. Goebbels would soon be preaching a doctrine of "total war". Kolberg was shot in color and proved to be the most expensive Nazi era production. Harlan and Goebbels clashed over the depictions of the horrors of the war. Many scenes depicting the suffering of Kolberg's population were excised per Goebbels who feared they would engender pacifistic tendencies in the populace. The film boasts handsome sets and costumes, but feels truncated with some herky-jerky editing. There are countless awkward wipes as the film lurches from one incident to another and leaps back and forth through time. In the end, it was all for naught. When the film opened in early 1945, the end of the Third Reich was near and very few cinemas were still operating. A movie designed to shore up the German people's morale and turn the tide of the war disappeared as the Third Reich experienced its Gotterdammerung. The ultimate irony, hopefully, is that what was once known as Kolberg is now known as Kolobrzeg and is part of Poland.

What interest I have in Kolberg largely that of a historical nature rather an aesthetic one. The film, like most totalitarian art, is kitsch. This is not to say that Harlan was untalented, just morally bankrupt. Soderbaum has some baby doll charm. I enjoyed the scene where she is working hard at a loom, this is interspliced with a montage of Aryan labor and bounty: a paean to the toil needed to keep the fatherland strong. The finest sequence of the film is that of Napoleon visiting the tomb of Frederick the Great and intimating that if the German had living leaders of Frederick's caliber, his attempts at conquest would have been thwarted. Frederick the Great was Hitler's greatest hero and role model. Harlan had already filmed a movie about Frederick, The Great King. That picture won the Mussolini Cup as Best Picture at the 1942 Venice Film Festival amongst a fascist friendly field. Both Harlan and Goebbels wanted to draw a parallel between Germany's greatest military leader and its present Fuhrer.

Harlan was prosecuted two times after the war. Each time he was acquitted of crimes against humanity. His defense was that he was following orders and feared for his life. Both he and his missus were able to continue their film careers, albeit at a B movie level. I don't think most people would get much entertainment or insight from watching Kolberg or any of Harlan's other films, but, if you intrigued by his career, I would recommend Felix Moeller's documentary Harlan: In The Shadow of Jud Suss which balances an overview of Harlan's films with the ambivalent reminiscences of his family.

Triangle of Sadness

Charlbi Dean: RIP

I liked, but didn't love Ruben Ostlund's Triangle of Sadness. What was most praised about the film was what I found to be its most superficial aspect: its satire of the ultra rich. As Susan Granger has pointed out, the plot is an update of J.M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton which has been filmed numerous times. Ostlund's satire has the subtlety of a blunderbuss (the names of the English couple living on their family's armaments fortune are named Winston and Clementine) and the laughs depend on one's tolerance for vomit and feces. I did find Ostlund's comic timing to be well-judged, though.

As with Force Majeure and The Square, Triangle of Sadness is most rewarding when picturing males shirking their responsibilities, exemplified by Woody Harrelson's drunken Captain. I didn't find much to poke through in the film's mise-en-scene, but appreciated the performances of Harrelson, Zlatko Buric, and the late Charlbi Dean.

Those Lips, Those Eyes

Frank Langella

Michael Pressman's Those Lips, Those Eyes, from 1980,  is an obscurity that will remain so, mostly due to Mr. Pressman's anonymous direction. Frank Langella, Glynnis O'Connor, Tom Hulce and Kevin McCarthy strut their stuff winningly, but the story is sub Neil Simon nostalgia and the mise en scene pedestrian. A Minnelli or even Bob Fosse could have added some pizazz to this backstage musical, but this is a wanly shot and poorly recorded film.

What pleasure I derived was from the movie's recreations of early 20th century operettas: Rose Marie, The Desert Song, The Vagabond Prince, etc. Just the musicals a third tier touring company would be performing for the rubes in the early 50s. Works that have disappeared from the collective consciousness after the rock and roll era. One of my earliest theatrical memories was seeing a touring show of The Student Prince at Baltimore's Morris Mechanic Theatre in 1970 or so. I was mostly bored, but amused when the rotating set didn't rotate and the grips had to come out and do it manually. A similar moment occurs in Those Lips, Those Eyes and it is this sense of the backstage camaraderie and hardscrabble effort needed to put on even the lowliest of shows that gives this film, however shoddily constructed, a few grace notes. (9/27/16)

Quick Takes, June 2023

The Return

The Return is the debut feature film from Andrey Zvyagintsev, most famous for his 2014 feature Leviathan. This 2003 film tells the story of two brothers on the cusp of puberty who are reunited with their father after a mysterious twelve year absence. Dad takes them on a fishing trip to an isolated lake. The boys find their father to be a cruel taskmaster and the trip turns into an ordeal. The Return is monotonously grim, but I would recommend it to those seeking challenging fare.

Tay Garnett's The Night Fighters, from 1960, is a Robert Mitchum vehicle set in Ireland during World War 2. Mitchum is a member of an IRA cell which is being prodded by the Nazis to create unrest in the emerald isle while the Battle of Britain rages. Predictably, Mitchum's character has a crisis of conscience and abandons his comrades. Worth seeing for the entertaining banter between Mitchum and Richard Harris alone. The pubs of Ireland must have had to stock up when alerted to the presence of such eminent tankard men as Messrs. Garnett, Harris, and Mitchum. The film also features good performances by Cyril Cusack, Dan O'Herlihy, and Marianne Benet. A worthy late film from the underrated Garnett,

Ben Affleck's Air is an amiable workplace comedy which chronicles Nike's campaign to sign Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal. Affleck's breezy directorial style is a good fit for this pleasant and inconsequential flick. Matt Damon is well cast as a schlub and so is Affleck as the cocky Phil Knight, but it is the winning supporting cast that gives the film most of its charm: Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, Viola Davis, Julius Tennon, Chris Messina, Marlon Wayans, Jay Mohr, and Barbara Sukowa all contribute memorable bits. The face of the actor portraying Michael Jordan is never shown, like Jesus in Ben Hur.

Billy Wilder's Fedora, from 1978, is a rehash of Sunset Boulevard, though this time William Holden doesn't have to play the corpse. Fedora herself is a reclusive star, modeled on Garbo, who Holden's character wants to entice back to the screen. Tom Tryon's novella, the basis of Fedora, is thin showbiz gruel. Hildegard Knef gives the film some camp value as "The Countess" and I enjoyed the recreation of The Emperor Waltz. However, the film is static and predictable, especially the multi-flashback structure. Atherosclerotic cinema, but still, a more interesting and expressive failure than either The Front Page or Buddy, Buddy. With Marthe Keller, Jose Ferrer, Frances Sternhagen and both Henry Fonda and Michael York playing themselves. 

George Marshall's Houdini, from 1953, is a forgettable biopic about the legendary magician and escape artist. Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, then a married couple, play Mr. and Mrs. Houdini. The domestic scenes are tiresome: Leigh constantly chiding her hubby to consider a safer profession. The sequences showing Houdini's performances fare better, showing off Curtis' physicality and Marshall's vaudeville charm. 

Damien Chazelle's Babylon is a polished elephant turd of a movie. Chazelle's films have diminished in quality as they have grown in ambition. There are some good supporting performances on the periphery of this three hour epic: I enjoyed the contributions of Olivia Wilde, Olivia Hamilton, and Flea. However, there are an abundance of deplorable performances: I'll omit the names of the many players due to youth or prior contributions. The whip pans ping ponging back and forth between actors drove me crazy. Baz Luhrmann, all is forgiven.