Original

District 9 (2009) has many virtues: a well-chosen allegorical framework, a convincing visual aesthetic which mixes simulated news footage, security footage and a general air of verismilitude (for a completely implausible premise); seamless motion capture animation (One begins to wonder if the aliens aren't being played by guys in suits like an old 50's horror-scifi pic.), and a completely surprising performance in the leading role by an actor who evidently hasn't been paid to act before this.

But I can sum up it's overall quality by simply saying that it is completely original. The story keeps shifting ground from political allegory to grisly horror to buddy drama to family saga, as though it had no idea it had gone past genrebending to full-on genre mash-up. You can't tell if the filmmakers (a Canadian writer-director working with a New Zealand company shooting in South Africa) were simply going their own way or looking over their shoulders not at just a film or a genre, but practically every film they'd ever seen and loved. With nary a cliche in sight. No wonder it required Peter Jackson to guarantee it in order to be financed--it's just what the suits hate. Complete creativity, complete originality. Without aspiring to be an Important Drama (as Children of Men did), it should not be confined to the sci-fi ghetto. Not important, except in the way that anything really creative and really original and really good is important.

Something to look at

Female (1933) starring Ruth Chatterton as a hard-driving, male-subordinate-chasing auto executive is in circulation on TCM and on DVD because of the kind of racy implications found in Pre-Production Code films such as this. And yes, it's fun for its table-turning aspect as she is startled by the first man who insists on his own dignity and integrity and refuses to jump in bed with her because she is the boss. (Her previous boy toys have all been shipped out of town when she was done with them. And how satisfying that must have been--and still must be--for the female audience!)

But there are reasons to watch and enjoy Female. Chatterton has one of those stuffy theatrical English accents (more forgiveable since she was English) but once you get past that, she is a fun strong heroine, with a nice chemistry with her real-life husband, George Brent. Michael Curtiz with Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy far in his future maintains an even brisker pace than his usual brisk pace.

The real unexpected treat of this film is the quality of its visual design, both in Chatterton's costumes which are novel in that early-30s way without making you say "what-were-they-thinking" as is so common for the era. But the production design is seriously wonderfully crazy--Art Deco gone Expressionistic, with everything in enormous proportion yet looking somehow plausible with its swoops, curves, strong verticals and neo-Aztec decoration. Appropriately, the film ends out in the country, as if it were only when she got away from the dippy proto-fascist architecture that Chatterton's character could think clearly about having a real life. OK, the way the conclusion is stated is sexist as appropriate for its time, but it still seems logical and well prepared, given the protagonist's prior restlessness. A very satisfying sixty minutes.

The illusion of synchronized sound

Watching What's Up Tiger Lily (1966) in Film Studies should remind us that everything we hear on the soundtrack of a film is contributing to an illusion--the illusion of continuous time and space. Virtually every American commercial film will have some dialogue replaced due either to technical or editorial considerations.

WUTL is just more honest about it. This is the film in which a producer hired Woody Allen to take a pre-existing Japanese-produced James Bond-type thriller, strip off the soundtrack and lay in a completely new one. The effect is similar to when you and your friends turn the sound off the TV and make up your own dialogue--provided your friends are really smart and funny.

I will not recite the jokes--you can read them elsewhere in the World Wide InterTubes and besides, you should just enjoy the movie on your own. But I am always struck by one of the smartest and most insightful jokes, which is itself both a comment on the nature of English syntax and our understanding of symbolic language. At one point, a villain points to a small diagrammed floor plan of a rival's home and says, "This is Shepherd Wong's house." Hero Phil Moscowitz asks, perplexed, "He lives in that piece of paper?"

There are symbols upon symbols here. Not only has the first speaker elided words when he actually meant, "This is [a map of] Shepherd Wong's house;" but the map itself is an extremely abstract object, being a two-dimensional representation of the house--not even the house as it appears to a viewer, but a representation of an imaginary view of the house, as if the house were being viewed from above with the roof lifted off. Yet we can communicate easily without having to explain all those levels of abstraction.

Which is appropriate for a medium which requires that you take a group of two-dimensional images and electronically recorded sounds, all registered at different times and places, observe them when they have been placed in proximity of each other, and interpret them as events which bear some relationship to reality as we experience it. Which is weird, right?

Revisiting Paris

I had the pleasure of seeing An American In Paris (1951) with a paying audience last night as part of the Big Screen Classics program at the Cedar Lane Cinema in Teaneck. And I went with three good friends who are film buffs. And it's been about a year since I visited Paris for the first time. Good times.

Naturally, I've seen this movie approximately 16.72 skadjillion times, but it has been a while since I've sat and watched in its entirety, and probably over 30 years since I've sat with an audience watching it. This is what I noticed this time around.

• The thing really plays with an audience. There were children in the audience--real kid type kids, like 7-12 years old. And they loved most of it.
• There was a real effort to use less commonly known Gershwin numbers, such as "By Strauss" and "Tra-La-La." The film is a personal take on Gershwin, not an attempt to please the crowd with the big popular hits. This is a film that includes not only a 17-minute ballet but most of the 3rd movement of Gershwin's Concerto in F. It cannot be accused of pandering.
• The music department pulled out all the stops. There are some very tasty jazz-influenced arrangements for small groups, probably by Skip Martin, while Johnny Green's conducting of the American In Paris ballet is superb. Anyone know who the on-screen saxophonist is in the underground bistro scene?
• Minnelli is a whiz at staging numbers in confined spaces. Yes, I know Gene Kelly and Carol Haney were the choreographers, but Minnelli pulls off the same trick in The Bandwagon. You would expect cinema to lean toward the vast, the grandiose, given its wider potential pallette of spatial effects, compared to the stage. But as Minnelli and, in his own way, Hitchcock, have proved, film does tiny as well (or better) as it does gigantic.
• The plot with Nina Foch is still boring and a little distasteful. Her character feels like a predator.
• Speaking of predators, with Gene Kelly in late youth or early middle age and Leslie Caron, the contrast gets creepier all the time. Maybe I'm extra-sensitive as a high school teacher. Ick.
• "By Strauss" is a better number than I remember. But why is the first all-out musical number in a Parisian film about Viennese music?
• Most amazing sets--the interior of Kelly's garret; the exterior of Kelly's garret--the walls are beautifully grimy--and the quai by the Seine, in which it is impossible to determine where construction ends and the flat painted material begins.
• John Alton, who shot only the ballet in this film, but is best known for his hard-edged black-and-white work in films noir such as T-Men and Raw Deal should have done many more Technicolor musicals. (He never did another, according to the Internet Movie Database, but his entry there doesn't include American In Paris.) His work as a strength and a plasticity that somehow complements the papier-mache artificiality of the genre. And the color is both strong and diffuse at the same time, avoiding the candy-box look of, say, the Fox musicals.
• For all its Hollywood-ness, it's more Parisian than I knew before I saw Paris.

Was this trip necessary?

A month or two back, I wrote about the 1950 Swedish film adaptation, directed by Alf Sjoberg, of the Strindberg play Miss Julie. That film offered interesting issues about the adaptation of theater works to film.

The 1999 Mike Figgis filming of Miss Julie pretends those issues don't exist. Evidently it was based on a prior stage production with a different cast but substantially the same text. The picture above demonstrates the degree to which the piece has been "opened up" -- a small wooded area just outside the country estate's kitchen which is the sole setting of the play. Otherwise it is a fairly unvarnished stage production shot on grainy and dully-lit Super 16 film.

The problem is, other than one of those fake sex scenes you see in dramatic films (where everyone reaches up under their clothes and the man never takes a stitch off), washed-out color and the face of Saffron Burrows (which is admittedly a cinematic event in and of itself), this film offers nothing not already present or at least implicit in the earlier film. Sjoberg has even gone farther, physically representing characters who are only spoken of in the play. Moreover, the Figgis version embraces that horrible English stage convention that lower-class characters can be represented by use of a Scots or Irish accent, while maintaining the original Swedish setting. I know, I'm supposed to hear the Glaswegian accent and know that this fellow is working class, but I can't help wondering why this guy (played by Peter Mullan) wandered away from Sauchiehall Street to get a job as a footman on a Swedish estate.

The film is such a literal rendering that when the footman sends Miss Julie upstairs to get money, we never see her do it. She just goes away and comes back with money. It would have made more sense if this film had been made first and Sjoberg's more cinematic adaptation had followed. As it is, I have no idea why this film was made at all.

Let the NY Times rot

The Grey Lady is planning to go behind a pay wall online, which I think will mean the end of the company which young Arthur Sulzberger has been working so hard these past few years to destroy. First, they encouraged the lazy, sloppy and biased editing of Abe Rosenthal. Then little Sulzberger made it clear that cozying up to people in power for "access" and consequently gussying up their lies and putting them in print (see Judith Miller) was the Times way. Plus the Times became home to the collected works of fiction of Jayson Blair, who didn't bother getting other people to lie but just made them up out of his little head.

Today I was reading a story first published on Sunday (3 days ago, mind you) about the weak auction for the beleagured MGM. On the second page of the story, as published online is a photo of Peter Sellers with the following caption: "Peter Sellers as the Pink Panther, the franchise of which is controlled by MGM." The most uninformed film correspondent should know that Peter Sellers played Inspector Clouseau. Nobody played the Pink Panther, because THE PINK PANTHER IS A GEM, NOT A PERSON!

I know this is not a big point, but it's like the broken-windows philosophy of crime enforcement. If the little stuff gets by, how can you believe anything they say about the big stuff?

I sincerely hope the Times goes out of business and that the world recognizes it has been due to the successful and unstinting effort of Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. to kill off one of America's formerly great institutions.

Crime does not pay off

The reason people are still looking at those gangster movies of the 1930's such as Public Enemy and Little Caesar and Scarface, despite the primitive qualities of the early talkies, is the sheer joy and brio brought to them by James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni and all those other exciting gangster actors of the era. Yes, of course the cops (or rival gangsters) were going to gun them down in a hail of bullets, but they would go down swinging, or laughing or in some way expressing the excitement of living outside the land of decent, law-abiding people. We could enjoy such a feeling in all its full-throated glory and then go back to our jobs or schoolwork or taking care of our families relishing the frisson of watching unrepentant evil.

But in Public Enemies (2009), not only doesn't crime pay, it doesn't pay off, at least in terms of fun. It's bad enough for us regular people to hate our jobs (I don't, but I have in the past), but this film's John Dillinger, as portrayed by Johnny Depp treats bank robbery as the worst sort of mindless drudgery. I don't know why the poor fellow should have to go through this sort of thing.

Michael Mann is a director of surfaces. When those surfaces are exciting, as in Miami Vice (the television show, not the film) and Thief, the film is exciting. Public Enemies is all gray. No one seems very interested in what they're doing, not Depp, not Christian Bale as the G-Man, not the cinematographer, not the composer. The whole film gives an impression of being dark grey.

You want to see a fun film about Dillinger, check out this B-picture from the 40's (requires Adobe Flash):

A dream come true you can believe in

Disney stories push the ideas of wishing and dreaming very hard. "A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes" Cinderella tells us. As the parent of young children I was always worried by the implicit passivity of that philosophy.

Imagine my delight to see a new Disney princess who has a dream, not based in fantasy, but a solid realizable dream--opening a fine restaurant--a dream that connects her with her family, specifically her father, especially after his wartime death; and who takes palpable steps and undergoes sacrifice and hardship to try and realize that dream. Never mind the color of her skin, progressive as that development may be--her active participation in her dream makes her the 21st Century Disney Princess we need.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. This is a spectacularly entertaining film. Disney's return to cell animation reminds us that 2D characters can be both more exaggerated and more convincing realistic than the squishy (if sometimes hairy) rubbery ball-characters we see in 3D animation. There is one virtuoso slapstick sequence that reduced the little girls behind me to hysterics, while I was in tears.

I was already in tears, not for sadness, but because Randy Newman's music is so much literally toe-tapping fun. A student of mine described the music as "real Disney" and so it is, filled with joy and wonder and imagination and fun. It doesn't hurt to have superb jazz, cajun and zydeco musicians on the soundtrack, including the glorious Terence Blanchard on solo trumpet.

The Disney legacy in animation begins with Steamboat Willie, which is not only the first publicly exhibited animation with synchronized sound, but the first to demonstrate how critical music would be to the creation and joy of animated cartoons. Disney artists (meaning directors, writers, animators, all creative personnel) seem to have recognized how central music is to that story-telling experience. That's not because "it's great for kids." Drama, which is story-telling by a group (rather than an individual) literally grows from dance and singing; from the 'orkestra', the place for dancing, by the 'choros', the people who provide background and comment on the story. Music thus, is never incidental to drama, but is the parent stem; a parent who likes to come and visit, and, as in The Princess and the Frog (2009), bring some good times.

Life is too short...

...to finish watching an atrocious piece of claptrap such as Redacted (2007). Since the beginning of his career, Brian DePalma has shown himself to be a third-rate imitative talent. Now, not content with copying his betters, mostly Hitchcock, he has now begin to copy himself.

Let's be clear. I'm not unresponsive to the underlying thesis of the film, that the US confrontation with Fundamentalist Islamic terrorism has been bungled and that the war in Iraq was an inept, cruel and destructive sideshow. But the plot DePalma has seized on to illustrate the point seems (loosely based as it is on a real event) to have been cribbed from DePalma's own Casualties of War.

But that is not the real problem of Redacted (after all, Shakespeare stole all his stories), nor is it the fact that at nearly one hour into the film the issue of redacted documents had still not made an appearance. The fundamental atrocity of this film is not the repulsive act at the center of the narrative but DePalma's complete misunderstanding and incompetence in the use of alternate media in storytelling.

By alternate media I mean simulated homevideo, security cameras, simulated interviews and other purported "real" documents. These are uniformly produced with an ineptitude that is stunning. The shots are well-lit, the sound is balanced and clear. The actors take turns like a well-directed evening in the theater. Let's leave aside the fact that the actors are completely amateurish and unconvincing--not one bit of this supposedly "real" footage looks like anything other than a staged conventional commercial film.

So I did what I rarely do--I stopped watching. Now, I will sit through a lot. I made it through the original and the remake of Solaris--talk about a snoozefest! But I couldn't stomach the horrendous quality of the film. Make no mistake--it's not the repellant subject that turned me off this film. On the advice of friends, I sat through Saw. I think Paul Verhoeven is a talented director, though many of his films are disgusting in concept and execution. (He was recently reported to be preparing a film asserting that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of a Roman rapist.) But the double-whammy of bad taste and DePalma's incompetence combined to make this film not worth my time. I'm 54 now and with only 25 or so years left, I can't waste my time with Brian DePalma.

Enough said

The first question out of my students' mouths when we finished screening The Birds (1963): "Is there a sequel?" "What would happen in a sequel?" I asked. "What more is there to say?" As I see it, there are two continuing story options: (1) The bird attacks stop. You got no movie; (2) The bird attacks continue with a similar intensity. No movie. (3) The attacks escalate until you've got a silly Godzilla movie, and the audience is not scared, it's laughing its collective head off.

Young people seem to have trouble understanding that once you're done saying something, you stop saying it. I've observed this in conversation, in written assignments, in oral presentations. They seem to believe (with some justification, I fear) that no one is actually giving anything their full attention and that therefore the solution is mindnumbing repetition. They don't believe in or trust anything said only once, like people of some ethnicities who believe that all offers of hospitality must be repeated at least three times, because the first two refusals are not sincere (this is true for some people).

There is a brilliant scene in the musical version of the play Merrily We Roll Along. The songwriter protagonists perform their new song to great praise and admiration at a swanky party. The society guests, none of them performers or artists, demand to hear the song again. The lyricist, wise about these things demurs, saying a performer should know when to get off. The composer, basking in the adoration, prevails, and they launch into the song again. Now, however, everyone has heard it, and they begin little musical interjections on irrelevant topics. Slowly at first, then they build until they completely swallow up the song, which disappears into a fog of musical chitchat.

Still, I should be pleased that even with its antiquated visual effects, The Birds still works its evil magic on a young audience, who reacted just as the master hoped. For my own part, has anyone remarked on how audacious the lack of a score is--in two places in the film in particular. Over the opening titles, which lack even a fanfare for the Universal logo. And at the end, when the future of the human race on earth seems to be all used up, we move without music--just the thrumming and fluttering of the waiting birds--into the "End" card. No credit roll, nothing to offer any comfort before we go out into that waiting bird-infested world.

It's only funny when it's a real old lady

Is Anybody There? (2008) is the latest entry in the eccentric-but-innocent-kid-befriends-crusty-but-loveable-old-codger genre which I remember beginning with The Two of Us (1968) but which has its roots back at least as far as Silas Marner (that's a book, boys and girls).

Michael Caine, who plays a demented and dying low-rent magician has even been around this track before, most notably with Secondhand Lions. But one should never pass up the opportunity to see Michael Caine, who, in a single regretful glance, offers an entire seminar in motion picture acting. It's possible that he is the best that ever's been. Maybe it just helps to have tired, puffy eyes.

In the early days of Technicolor, cinematographers marveled at the quality of color in British films--so much less stark and obvious, more diffused and subtle. Turns out it wasn't the cameramen, it was the fog. Mist is so pervasive in England that the cameras pick it up everywhere. It doesn't look like they had one good day when they shot this film, and it suits the picture straight down to the ground.

The novel element in this piece is that, whereas death hovers in the wings throughout this genre, Is Anybody There? puts it front and center, not because of the old man but because of the boy, who has grown up in a private nursing home and is death-obsessed. Probably no American film could look death so squarely in the eye and without sentiment, but for the quick appearance of a badger toward the end. (This will be clear to anyone who has seen the film.) No weepy Mitch Albom moments here. This is a film for those who would go down giving the Reaper the finger.

As Groucho said, "An amateur thinks it's funny to dress up a guy as an old lady, put him in a wheelchair and push it down a hill. A professional knows it's only funny when it's a real old lady."

American Graffiti is so European!

I cannot be objective about American Graffiti (1973). I saw it in the first September of my college career, and it hit me right where I love. I'm not sure, but I probably went back and saw it again that first week, and I've never stopped enjoying it.

It's consistently characterized as wholesome all-American entertainment, especially since most people remember the film through the distorted lens of the TV series that ripped it off, Happy Days. But watching it with my young Film Studies class, I was reminded that the film is not really conventional American big-studio entertainment. Several students felt disappointed and a little confused by the film. "It has no point," said one of them. And it's true. The story is equally divided among a large group of protagonists, it is episodic, seemingly meandering. There is no clear goal for the characters--two of them have decided to leave town at the beginning of the story, and the only thing they want to do is have one last fling. The other characters are just hanging out. The conclusion offers one modest reversal, but certainly no major dramatic development as it is conventionally understood.

I am certainly not the first person to note that the structure and the mood of the film recall Italian neo-realism and I Vitelloni (1953) in particular. That early Fellini masterpiece focuses on a group of friends, "idlers" as the title translates who aimlessly but with tremendous charm through a series of episodes. Not only do these wastrals lack clear dramatic goals, they don't even want to have them. It's an amusing comparison.

A couple of other notes on Graffiti--I was very taken by Candy Clark's performance. She never condescends to or ridicules her somewhat ridiculous character, and even affords her some dignity and strength.

The film was shot in Techniscope, which was called "a poor man's Cinemascope." Instead of using the entire 4:3 negative to squeeze in a 2:2.1 picture, the way the anamorphic processes do, Techniscope simply mattes the frame down, so that only have of the available space on the film negative is used, and thus blown up to a larger scale. The result is grainier and grittier and so I remembered Graffiti. But this time around, perhaps because of the DVD transfer or the nature of our projector, the film looked creamier and smoother than I remembered. Maybe we have just adjusted to higher grain as we see more independent and non-studio work.

Finally, when the final images appear with those wonderfully realized faux-yearbook pictures with a description of the fate of the four male principals, my students were shocked that two of them died in a way that my generation was not. We regularly lost friends and fellow students to car accidents, disease and especially Vietnam in those days and it was good to be reminded that we should have been more shocked back in 1973 than we were.