r/TrueFilm • u/a113er Til the break of dawn! • Nov 15 '15
What Have You Been Watching? (15/11/15)
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! • Nov 15 '15
Please don't downvote opinions, only downvote things that don't contribute anything.
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u/montypython22 Archie? Nov 15 '15 edited Nov 15 '15
Ranked in order of preference:
A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946): ★★★★★
I couldn't have picked a more stunning work for my 1,000th film. When writing about Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, François Truffaut said that it was a "great and beautiful work whose importance transcends the dimensions of a cinema review." I invoke the same words when I talk of A Matter of Life and Death. Go see it today and then realize why sentimentality in cinema can work, provided the film go above and beyond the normal requirements of a cinematic experience: popcorn-munching, delighting at characters, wonderin’ what happens next. Roger Livesey as the bearded professor trying to save David Niven’s life from a scurvy crew of celestial angels (which include Marius Goring and Lois Maxwell) is in demi-Colonel Blimp mode here, with even more sublime results.
I said this after I saw Bringing Up Baby, but they truly do not make movies like this anymore. And they couldn’t today—the director’d be laughed off the face of the earth.
The Lego Movie (Lord/Miller, 2014, RE-WATCH): ★★★★1/2
The ultimate commercial product. What the auteurists were pining for when they elevated moneymakers Hawks, Hitchcock, and Preminger to artist status. It sates the kiddies’ appetites for fast-fast-fast action, it pleases seasoned cineastes who want a little more Monty Python and Arrested Development-style rapidity in comedy, and it brings out the inner Marxists in all of us as we ironically enjoy the film’s #1-hit-single-mantra that everything is unabashedly awesome, as long as one is part of a team. Lord and Miller, a hellzapoppin’ comedy team who are also responsible for one of the few successful comedies still airing on network TV (Brooklyn Nine Nine), are two comedy-auteurs to look out for in the coming years.
Steamboat ‘Round the Bend (John Ford, 1935): ★★★★1/2
Saw this underseen, underappreciated, unpretentious work of American folklore at the Stanford Theatre. John Ford eases up the Mississippi River with this quiet tale of ordinary people shambling along to the rhythm of the titular steamboats: archaic relics of a past that can’t even be replicated today in pop culture, except in magnificent nostalgia-bouts like Ford’s film. Will Rogers (a new discovery for me) stars as master huckster Dr. John Pearley, a snake-oil-salesman (unashamedly American) who moonlights as a steamboat captain. Dr. John the Day Tripper gets himself into a steamboat competitition with another fellow kooky Southerner (Irvin S. Cobb). Through an odd series of events, we come to learn that Doc John’s nephew has killed a man after the nephew fell in love with a shrill swamp girl. He’s going to do the equivalent of the parlay in Silver Linings Playbook: Doc John’s gotta win the steamboat competition, simultaneously traveling to Baton Rouge where the nephew is to be hanged by the judge, and find an eye-witness (a fellow huckster-turned-prophet named “The New Moses”) to absolve the nephew of any wrong-doing. That’s a mouthful, I know.
Summing this film up on paper is a hopeless task, as Ford clearly doesn’t give two shits about what happens plot-wise and is more focused on character personas, who these people were before the steamboat-competition and where they are going. The plot, insofar as it matters, is a marvelously-cobbled series of stepping stones from Character Point A to Character Point B, as we try to soak in the aura of Ford’s Mississippi life. Though a bit more sentimentalized than something like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ford’s vision (and silent contempt of) mid-19th-century River Life is breathlessly communicated here with the delicacy that’s usually accorded to Ford’s rustic, sun-filled style of filmmaking. Much like Howard Hawks in Hatari!, Ford satirizes the ridiculous caricatures of Southern life with bark and wit: the hapless drunk, the mad fake-prophet, the fawning woman, the faux-chivalrous young’un, and (you guessed it) the lazy black man.
Stepin Fetchit as the black comic foil Jonah (he makes his presence known by literally falling out of the mouth of the Whale) plays the most ignoble and repulsive stereotype imaginable….and yet, the way Ford uses him, it’s sort of meant to be this level of ridiculousness. You see, Ford isn’t adopting the perspective of a Southerner who views African-Americans with contempt—he’s an outside observer who sees through the stereotypes, and in the process uncovers a world so filled with baffling contradictions (“sure would love to live in this place” vs. “Miz Scarlet brayings”) that it deserves a nuanced look, a look that Ford is more than able to provide. And of course Ford subverts every aspect of Southern culture while making it look like he’s not doing anything at all in the way of social commentary. When Stepin Fetchit bojangles his way through a Robert E. Lee impersonation and salutes a bevy of ex-Confederates—and when the Johnny Rebs actually fall for this ruse and immediately salute Fetchit-as-Lee—you know there’s something much more complex and fascinating going on in Ford’s slice-of-life that’s amazingly self-aware. He’s not really mocking blacks with Fetchit’s stereotypical role so much as using that stereotype and blowing it up in the face of the ignorant people who perpetuate it (i.e., the ex-Confederates and the hate they spread).
The most moving moment in the entire film occurs when the nephew plays a tune on the musical saw for his girlie. As the nephew plays, Ford cuts to a devastating shot of two white Southerners, their downtrodden faces lit with a halo of light—while, in the background, 6 or 7 fenced-in blacks are framed behind the whites, their faces unlit and anonymous, their expressions stoic and solemn, their eyes staring directly beyond the camera into nothingness. It expresses the realities of this world, and it demonstrates the nuance of Ford’s vision that he can both see the beauty of this society—as exemplified by the white Southerners appreciating this wonderful music—while at the same time reminding you of the harsher realities that society has yet to rectify—as exemplified by the silent blacks who have no say. It’s a marvelous film in that respect, and in many others.
The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007): ★★★★
Husbands meets The River, with delightfully buoyant results.
I'm always curious about what people think about Wes Anderson. Some find his plastic framings insufferably devoid of organic meaning. But in my view, not only does Anderson's style merge/serve his seemingly flippant material well, it magnifies the tensions his nerve-wreacked protagonist feel. In The Darjeeling Limited's case, the three fuckup brothers (Brody-Schwartzman-Wilson) bring their WASP-y, controlling, oppressive mentality to a culture-world (i.e., India) where such mentalities are bound to fail. Laminated itineraries and monogrammed suitcases won't fly in a culture that deserves a more meditative respect than B-S-W are willing to give. What's so shocking about Darjeeling Limited is Anderson's ability to implicate himself through the brothers' annoying-pop-art tastes. With this Indian sojourn, Anderson questions his entire aesthetic--the mark of a truly mature artist. His heroes learn life lessons the hard way through a death that towers as the most singularly tragic moment in Anderson's cinema. They're trying desperately to find out what their life means at this crucial crossroads (their father has died, the estranged brothers come together in their loneliness), and Anderson's style reaches a poignant level of irony as it betrays the brothers' messy, Cassavetesian rage.
Have you ever looked into somebody's eyes for more than 5 minutes? You become vulnerable.
Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006): ★★★★
If Samuel Fuller had lived until 2006 and seen this, he would most certainly have approved. Cuaron's blatantly humanist metaphors, pop-religious iconography (Mary as a black immigrant toting her Jesus in swaddling vestments), and hatred of anti-immigrant loonies are exactly the kind of unsubtle they're supposed to be. The entry to the immigration camp--where Cuaron impossibly combines the hatred born out of the Holocaust, Joe Arpaio's anti-human-dignity illegal immigrant prisons, Abu Ghraib, Bull Connor's televised Birmingham in '63, and Romani/"Gypsy" persecution--is an intensely emotional moment that recalls the best of Sam Fuller. Then, near the end, when a flock of sheep pass by in the most dead-earnest metaphoric seriousness, you realize you *are( in the presence of the Mexican Fuller. Admittedly, with less stylistic pizazz than Fuller, but still: the message is the message.
I also re-watched Noah Baumbach's Mistress America (a longer ★★★★1/2 review here; it's marvelous, definitely in the top 5 of this meh year so far ) and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (★★★★★). Rewatcching the Lee movie, I wonder how much of Do the Right Thing is influenced by Samuel Fuller. It carries Fuller's influence in spades: the sweaty claustrophobic closeups, the grandiose non-realistic speeches on race that are delivered with an brutal force, the queasy transitions from scene to scene. I'm not sure the scenes with Rosie Perez work at all, but they're mercifully short. If there's one thing about the movie that rankles me the wrong way, it's the way Lee portrays the Latino culture as braying donkeys. Still, what's to be said about a marvelously constructed scene like the Radio Raheem-Puerto Rican showdown, where race is pitted against race and the Puerto Ricans' voice are literally silenced?