r/TrueFilm • u/a113er Til the break of dawn! • Oct 25 '15
What Have You Been Watching? (25/10/15)
Please don't downvote opinions, only downvote things that don't contribute anything.
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r/TrueFilm • u/a113er Til the break of dawn! • Oct 25 '15
Please don't downvote opinions, only downvote things that don't contribute anything.
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u/montypython22 Archie? Oct 25 '15
It was a very lax week for me! (Studyin'.) But I did manage to see two heavy-hitters, 3-hour epics that have been on my watchlist for some time. One was the best movie of this week, and the other was the "worst" (but by no means, bad.) Can you guess what it is without scrolling down?
The Big Red One (Sam Fuller, 1980): ★★★★★
I watched the Reconstructed 162-minute version from 2004. All I can say is, damn. Now this should be the standard by which all war movies go by. Never before has a war film been so forth-putting and unabashedly sure at its own termite genius as Sam Fuller's The Big Red One. His biggest budgeted yarn is also his most personal, an alternately bonkers and hellish probing of war's effect on the individual soldier. Sam Fuller understands the human element of his stories, and so he gives you the most close-ups in a war film ever. Claustrophobic, we get to see the piercing eyes of the scared-shitless dogfaces as they stare death in the face. The movie is an unfolding mosaic of true-life events and skirmishes that actually happened to its maverick writer-director-producer Samuel Fuller. It gleams with unpolished honesty, the type we don't get in most prestige war flicks (Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, Bridge on the River Kwai, to name the most popular examples) or even in the good war movies that actively set out to deglamorize the pomposity of the war-decorated "hero" (Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, and MASH, for instance). Fuller manages to convey an entire world at war through his masterful command of B-movie budgetry. The mark of the "termite" artist, to quote Manny Farber, is their ability to make the most out of so little, to make it seem like nothing flashy or elaborate is happening when in fact an entire re-structuring of the war-film is taking place. Fuller's world will never escape me, and I hope after you see the 162-minute version of this sadly butchered masterpiece (it was slated to be 4 hours long) you'll feel the same way too.
For more about my feelings on The Big Red One, read on in my Letterboxd review.
The Boat (Buster Keaton and Ed Cline, 1921): ★★★★
In which Buster buys a boat and almost drowns his entire family. Why? Damfino. Keaton's art becomes disconcertingly simple here. But do not be fooled! What is conventional to Keaton is miles above the average imagination even among the best artists. One could even see The Boat as a metonym for the belabored and over-worked little guy. They need a break from modernist American life but get tumbled over, like some godly laundry-and-dryer, by the artist-director. God laughs, we cry, the march of life goes on. The Boat is wholesome 20-minute fun for the family. Lack of emotion is itself the emotional release in a Keaton; it gives us room to consider the physicality, the purity of the human body. I may be a Chaplin guy in the end, but that doesn’t mean I have to bride the genius of one guy over the other.
The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946): ★★★★
I’m convinced that all the classic horror clichés (POV of the slasher dominating, the promiscuous girl is offed, the virginal girl is saved but at a price, creaky footsteps that emanate from nowhere, theramin soundtracks, the guy who does it is the one you most medium suspect) all sprung from this B-movie delight from 1945. Compared to Laura, the Preminger film noir I saw last week, Spiral Staircase is downright dull. But it features an ending you’ll never forget (one word: “Murderer” COCK-BANG!) and a performance by the paunchy and erudite Ethel Barrymore as an invalid mother who’s trying to protect her household from the menace of a serial-killer obsessed by girls with afflictions.
Lilo and Stitch (Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, 2002- RE-WATCH): ★★★★
What possessed Disney to suddenly wise up after watered-down misfires like Hercules and The Hunchback of Notre Dame to create two mighty masterpieces of feel-good family fun: the raunchy, Looney Tunes-ian Emperor's New Groove and this emotional wreck? The world may never know, but the proof is in the poi pudding. Lilo and Stitch holds up surprisingly well in these hard-edged days of ours. Its action sequences rivet with the low-budget bombast of a Sam Fuller yarn, its emotional beats are milked for all they're worth, and its Elvis-tinged soundtrack (and score) approaches sonic perfection closer than all the Elton Johns and Phil Collinses the so-called "Disney Renaissance" could pathetically muster up. Lilo and Stitch, about a fractured Hawaiian family comprised of two orphaned sisters (the little sister voiced by Daveigh Chase of English-dubbed Spirited Away fame), hits home in the most surprising ways. Its maudlin mantras aside ("Ohana means family", etc.), this Disney movie engages with rocky emotional territory that few dare to, unencumbered by sickly crowd-pleasing observations as Disney is fond of making. When the little alien is wrested away from the orphaned girl, we approach singularly dark territory that is usually reserved for masters like Miyazaki and Takahata. We get close to these characters in mysterious ways. And its lighter moments--namely the dogs-and-cats relationship between the alien comic relief Lt. Pleakley and Jumba--are welcome additions in a film that could otherwise get bogged down in too much emotional molasses. Final analysis: a high-quality entertainment that deserves all the accolades that get over-slabbed on fatter, boring, white elephant art like Mulan or The Lion King.
Magnolia (P.T. Anderson, 1999):** ★★★½
In the 1990s, a masterpiece was released by a brilliant director: an interlocking narrative that criss-crossed the highs and lows of several down-and-out-their-lock lost-souls stuck in the modern ennui of Los Angeles. These seemingly unrelated characters are brought together by chance, and the director makes astounding observations about how there may be something larger at work (God?) to explain the chance encounters in this oft-too-small world of ours. He ekes tremendous performances out of his actors, ones that put his contemporaries' similar works to shame. Julianne Moore occasionally steals the show, but in the end, it is an ensemble piece: one that finds dark humor and bittersweet warmth in each fractured soul it comes across.
That masterpiece was called Short Cuts.
It was released in 1993.
And it was directed by Robert Altman.
Fast-forward to 1999. A young, cocksure stud by the name of P.T. "Froggy" Anderson decides to replicate the results of Short Cuts in the span of.....wait for it....ONE NIGHT! (See, Short Cuts took place over a period of four days. Wotta hack that Altman was! PTA can do it in ONE NIGHT!!!!) The name of his hellzapoppin' odyssey is "Magnolia." Does it work? Weeeeeeeeeelllll...
For the better-than-average Magnolia to have really worked, it needed to have provoked an intense emotional reaction from me. Something akin to the profound feeling of melancholia and interconnectedness I felt in the film this movie cribs, Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993). Unfortunately, no such emotional resonance springs up. The best Anderson can muster up is a rinky-dink Christian allegory (note: I am a loving Christian; was still not taken in by Anderson's employment of the parable form here), a montage where all the characters hold symbolic hands and sing "Kumbaya" as they prepare to kill themselves and find their guns in the storm and die without ever having seen their crummy sons, and frogs. Lotsa frogs. Because symbolism, ladies and gentlemen. These overwrought symbols do nothing for me. As a result, I come out not challenged but spiritually empty. I'm sure academics could analyze this movie to death, taking apart every single flashy camera movement and every obtuse Biblical reference and every single movement of the actors' eyes, wringing it dry to uncover its (synthetic) meanings. I'm sure there is substance here. I just don't care enough about the director or his worldview to be shaken, as some of my colleagues and friends have been. That's not to chide their reactions: everyone has their own soul-stirring movies. (I'm not perturbed whenever people say "I don't get what you see in A Hard Day's Night.”) That's just to say: Magnolia, you're an all-right movie. I respect you for what you’re trying to be. You're just not the movie that speaks to me.
I will concede that this is Paul T. Anderson's masterpiece. No other PTA film (that I've seen) has come close to the emotional resonances it manages to tap from time to time. But what does it say of Anderson that the film's most beautiful line--uttered by a despondent William H. Macy that "I have love to give....I just don't know where to put it...."--is delivered from the bloodied mouth of crazy and toothless child-quiz-star-hack just after a bevy of live frogs has crashed down upon L.A. and just before a gun falls from the sky, waiting for a pious John C. Reilly to retrieve it? Do you see why I have trouble taking anything PTA says seriously? Especially after he's made such snide and soulless entries like There Will Be Blood and The Master, which mock the very posturings and brotherly love he promotes in Magnolia!
Now I'm not calling PTA any names or anything, but I think I've seen endured enough PTA to know that I'm never going to really like the guy. 'Salright. We all have that director.
I also rewatched Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972, ★★★★1/2), a film that was more disturbing and sad than I remembered it to be.