Think you got troubles?

Five Minutes of Heaven (2009) might be an interesting companion piece to Invictus, dealing as it does with reconciliation after a history of violence. Where Invictus is on the grand scale, Five Minutes is a chamber piece, with only two real characters.

The film falls into three distinct "chunks." The first part depicts an actual act of violence during the Troubles in Belfast. If you really want to see a film about this episode, see Bloody Sunday directed by Paul Greengrass, and also starring James Nesbitt. The opening sequence of street violence in Five Minutes is well-executed, but not groundbreaking.

The second sequence, which revolves around a planned televised meeting between the killer and the younger brother of the victim, who witnessed the killing as a child, sounded at first as if it wanted to be a play--two men in a room, having a confrontation, probably primarily in words. And then Five Minutes demonstrated something that film does that theater can't do as well. It shows a confrontation that didn't happen. Liam Neeson plays the former killer, who has been released from prison and is now engaged in various acts of public healing, and clearly carries the guilt of his acts. James Nesbitt is the younger brother, who plans to revenge his brother on television by stabbing Liam Neeson. (The enjoyment of that constitutes Nesbitt's "five minutes of heaven.") But then, after considerable well-executed suspense as to whether the encounter will happen, Nesbitt walks away. This sequence boasts some bravura use of the wide lens and a video aesthetic to convey a sense of actuality.

The third act is perplexing but the most plausible. They do at last meet in a strange, thwarted yet violent confrontation that, in time, exorcises Nesbitt's ghosts.

The revelation here is Nesbitt, who is brilliant in a role 180 degrees from his peacemaker role in Bloody Sunday. Neeson is required to play straight man to him, and given that his presence in the film was probably the factor that assured its distribution, if not actual production, his self-effacing work is admirable. Similarly admirable is the lack of pat conclusions, except that the experience in Northern Ireland has lessons in every place where young man are recruited to enforce group differences through violence.

The film is accused of failing as a document about the Troubles, but that is not its intention. It is a character study, specifically about healing from a terrible hurt, and as such, given two superb performances, it is a small gem.

Feeling Phlegmish

Sadly, Moscow, Belgium (2008) is not an ironic or paradoxical title. It's just the name of a rather pedestrian town in Flanders, which is part of Belgium, in which this very pedestrian love story takes place. It's an example of the, "See ordinary, middle-aged, non-glamorous people can fall in love and have sex just like Brad and Angelina do." Is anybody laboring under the illusion that this is not so?

Evidently, the picture made a splash on the festival circuit, and so becomes one of the first Belgian pictures to have achieve international distribution; probably the first Flemish-language film to do so in a long time, if ever. The film is not unpleasant, but it is not surprising, funny or moving either. Nor is there anything much to say about the cinematic qualities. The only observation I have to make about this movie is that Flemish sounds almost as horrible as Dutch, a language that makes one sound as if one is suffering from terrible bronchial congestion. [Full disclosure- the Lockhart ancestors originate from Flanders.]

Judging by the film In Bruges, that place seems much more interesting than Moscow.

She's not worth it

Among those films noir which include a femme fatale, there are two broad categories. The ones for whom you would gladly go to the electric chair: Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, Jane Greer as the woman in the white dress in Out of the Past. Then there's the ones who aren't: Ann Savage in Detour, Faith Domergue in Where Danger Lives, and Audrey Totter in Tension (1949).

She's greedy, faithless, manipulative and not very bright. But the great thing about manipulators, is they're often the easiest to manipulate, as demonstrated in this scene with detective Barry Sullivan. This has got to be one of the strangest interrogation techniques ever. Did we ever try this in Iraq?

Another remarkable aspect of this movie, especially as it originated at MGM is the normal human scale of the homes and furnishings. This is a recognizable post-war middle-class America, without the chintz and furbelows usually found in studio pictures of the 40s.

I suppose the strange thing about noir as a genre is that although the people creating the films did not know they were contributing to a genre, they are often reading from the same page in terms of design, light and overall mood. And once again, the film boasts the trope of the innocent man doing things a guilty man would do.

One last observation. Loews Theaters, the parent company of MGM, primarily owned large profitable downtown theaters. The postwar diaspora to the suburbs was more harmful to Loews than any other chain. Could this film's jaundiced view of the suburbs be influenced by the company's sympathy for the big city and its big theaters?

And the animation is really good, too

The great critical and audience success of Toy Story 3 continues Pixar's unprecedented streak of success--in any type of filmmaking, not just animation--leads one to contemplate why this team continues to make good films, let alone landmarks in their field.

What is remarkable, if not miraculous about Pixar, is that they combine (1) cutting edge technology--the raison d'etre for Pixar; (2) top-level animation skill; and (3) straightforward film skills, including editing, camera movement but most especially long and painstaking development of story.

When you think of it, those are the skills that the original Walt Disney organization offered, but they still stumbled on story fairly frequently, and often did not have the money to push technology. And Disney never had a streak of first-rate features in his life like Pixar has.

Everyone is aware of this, especially the rock-solid story construction under the leadership of John Lasseter. But we all seem to forget that Pixar executes first rate animation. Most notable in Toy Story 3 is the Spanish version of Buzz, little Bonnie, and Andy himself. (You would be surprised to look at the first film to see how crudely Andy is animated--he doesn't much very differently from Woody himself.)

Maybe the absolute highlight is the simple and authentic way in which the characters look at each other and hold hands when they believe they are facing their doom. There is not a trace of irony or camp, and audiences are devastated.

Because finally, the heart of animation is characterization by physical representation--the same thing that actors do, except being done by visual artists, via detailed observation, recreation and heightening of expressive movement. Plus, it can be real real funny, too.

The limits of professionalism

The Helen Morgan Story (1957) demonstrates what happens when the machinery of the studio system is in place without the inspiration, artistry or audience that made the work of the Classical Era powerful. Directed by echt-studio-craftsman-director Michael Curtiz, photographed by Ted McCord (who began with cheap Westerns in the 20s, working himself up to Treasure of the Sierra Madre and East of Eden, and such other studio-era hands as Ray Heindorf for music and actors Richard Karlson, Walter Woolf King, Torben Meyer, Leonid Kinsky and Joe Besser, it moves with a brisk pace recalling early 30s gangster classics directed by people like William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, Lloyd Bacon and Mervyn Leroy.

But though the shell looks perfect, the spark has gone. Paul Newman as the bad-guy boyfriend does his best (remarkable in light of stories that he hated the script and the director), but he is too naturally believable and ambiguous to have the hard-edge snap of a Cagney or a Robinson. And Ann Blyth as Helen Morgan only really comes alive when she is lip-synching Gogi Grant's voice--a rich, stylish contralto in complete contrast to Morgan's wobbly mezzo-soprano. (Blyth was a good singer herself, but with an ingenue voice unsuitable to this story.) And without being able to depict the depth of Morgan's despair and degradation, there is no story. A confused girl has some success, is done in by men who want to exploit her, succumbs to alcoholism. A simple downward spiral, with no second texture or complexities.

One sign of the final gasp of studio filmmaking is the tacked-on happy ending. Morgan died of cirrhosis of the liver without a career revival or personal happiness. But it didn't matter. The audience for show-biz bios of characters of 25 years before had left, seeking historic epics, cheap monster pics, and teen-age hot rod and rock and roll flicks. The Helen Morgan Story tanked and took Ann Blyth's career with it. The craftsmanship meant nothing without artistry.

There's a lot of good tunes, though.

Laugh, damn you!

First of all, what's with the title? Knight and Day (2010) hardly relates to the movie. There is a tangential relationship with one character, but the title tells you nothing about the movie. If the picture winds up being disappointing financially, some of the blame has to fall on that insipid, content-free title.

Director James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line) does not have a large profile in comedy, but with regard to a film in which the most frequent joke is the number of funny ways bad guys can die, he could be said to get the joke. That is, as Walter Kerr pointed out, whereas in silent films and cartoons, anything can happen to a character without permanent injury, in sound films, when you shoot them, they die. Mangold understands that those deaths have to be quick and bloodless.

It also helps when your audience-identification character--in this case Cameron Diaz--is oblivious to the extreme violence taking place all around her. This joke plays for the first third of the movie, but then Diaz has to be aware of the bodies dropping around her. Then the film becomes annoying because Diaz continues to make idiotic choices although the consequences of making mistakes around Tom Cruise are all around her.

The biggest drawback of the film is that it resolves that Cruise is a good guy far too decisively far too early. As other writers have noted, the film draws a lot of its fun from the feeling we in the audience have that Tom Cruise may just be crazy (that's true in life and in the movie). If he's not crazy, but just super-cool, then he's just another action hero. That's not terrible, but it's not unique.

There is also some pretty poor-looking green screen in the early portion of the film, especially the chase through Boston tunnels. In one shot of Cruise crouching on top of a vehicle, one can almost see the matte line around him.

And, as much fun as the ride is--and it is fun--a movie like this can never really resolve. The spy character will not only be off to more adventures, but unlikely to engage in a permanent relationship with anyone. I suppose one more fantasy doesn't hurt when piled on top of the crazier fantasies that have kept the film afloat.

But we don't know what it's like to ride backward on a motorcycle through Pamplona shooting semi-automatic weapons, but we do know what it's like to try to maintain a relationship. So that fantasy rings false in a why the James Bond stuff can't.

And why don't these films have good music any more? Where are the Henry Manicinis and John Barrys any more?

Film noir and the long take

Where Danger Lives (1950) is, for the most part, standard-issue film noir of the sub-genre that might be called "Being punished for bad stuff you wanted to do but didn't actually do." This includes films like Detour and Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train. This explains Mitchum playing an unaccustomed "good guy" role, because he wants to do bad. Well, he didn't really want to kill Claude Rains, but he wasn't all that sorry when he thought he had. Besides Mitchum, photographer Nick Musuraca is on hand to provide all his cool shadows and long angles.

What makes the film stand out is a couple of long take scenes in which the characters can play out the deception, desperation, guilt and despair that is overtaking them. Most remarkable is the second-to-the-last scene, which runs about 7 minutes--most of a reel of 35mm film--in which Mitchum and his co-star, newcomer Faith Domergue, castigate and torture each other as they try to figure out a way of the tightening noose. Mitchum's character is trying not to pass out, having experienced a concussion 24 hours earlier, and he stumbles about, even at one point disappearing from view as falls off a bed, but the scene goes on. It is not a showy long take shot, as in Touch of Evil or Rope. It is unlikely that the original audience even noticed it, but it is an interesting choice.

So what do long takes do for noir? Rope fairly well establishes the principle that long takes are destructive to certain types of suspense, especially that which relies on emphasis of objects, expressions and other types of detail. Yet long takes have a suspense of their own, as they take place in real time and have the capacity to stretch time, especially empty time to an unbearable degree. Some directors make the mistake of using long takes for expositional scenes near the beginning, possibly because no close-ups are needed or perhaps they are bored and would like to get through the scenes faster. But they make the shoot harder and make it very difficult to excise unnecessary material. (The idea is that if you have a lot of angles covering a scene, it is easier to shape it, cut it, even change the order of events. If you shoot it one shot, you have no protection: the scene you shot is the finished scene. Most experienced directors will at least shoot some inserts to cut away to in order to get themselves out of trouble if necessary.)

But if noir is about the dark night of the soul, then long takes can make that dark night longer and more agonizing. Moreover, it preserves a sense of space among the characters and their setting. It would be interesting to survey the entire body of noir to see if shot lengths vary in any consistent way--longer or shorter--from the rest of Hollywood in the Classical Era.

See, there's a PhD. thesis all ready to go for someone with a stop watch and too much time...

All groan up

Mystery Team (2009) shouldn't work at all, or if it did, it shouldn't be an actual movie. The creators, Derrick Comedy, are a sketch comedy group from NYU most famous for their online videos (click the picture). Their many predecessors, including National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, Kentucky Fried Theatre, The Proposition, Ace Trucking Companyh, Broken Lizard and Kids In The Hall have rarely, if ever, produced films worthy of the name. Even the great Pythons only made two actual films, Holy Grail and Life of Brian. We will not discuss the fairly dismal track record of films made up solely of unrelated sketches--they are best watched in chopped-up bits on YouTube.

And the premise of Mystery Team (Encyclopedia Brown grows up and interacts with the real world) should not have been able to play longer than ten minutes. The fact that Derrick has created a three-act story with real development and rounded characters suggests that this team may have a real future in film, both together and separately.

On the other hand, we have had a parade of preposterous child-men in movies for the last 30 years ago, including Pee-Wee, Steve Martin in The Jerk, Tom Hanks in Big (and all the other body-switch movies of that year), and nearly all the Farrelly brothers characters. Going farther back, there are such inexplicable characters as Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel, Lou Costello and Jerry Lewis. The first two were even sometimes married in their films--which boggles the mind. So Derrick's concept is not utterly unprecedented. What is difficult about their characters is a certain monomania and a resistance to growth and change. When a character like this matures, the story is over (which is, indeed, the resolution, of Mystery Team).

One thing that makes the film successful is that it takes its own story seriously, resisting the temptation to drift into parody or burlesque, or to point up the story's natural ironies in an obvious way. The camera keeps its distance in order to let the players interact and tell the story, and never strives to make them more ridiculous than they are by definition. The result is that both the film and the characters have an absurd dignity and integrity. It is as if the film were directed by Oliver Hardy, who was always doubly funny to me, because he thought believed that while his buddy Stan was a fool, he himself was a perfectly sensible person, despite being a bigger fool than Stan.

Nor does the film attack the innocence of its central characters, despite putting them in extremely raunchy and tasteless hard-R situations. Their obliviousness shields them from our distaste, and they become almost more charming for being so pure. There's something sort-of noble, literally Quxiotic, in reaching into a backed-up toilet to retrieve a worthless trinket merely in order to make a child happy. Or the comparison of indefatigable lap dancers to some annoying pigeons. That mixture of disgusted admiration keeps the film afloat for much of its running time.

[Incidentally, this film will live forever in my own family's hall of fame if only for the scene in which the Mystery Team attempts to crash a "gentleman's club" by impersonating their juvenile concept of gentlemen--complete with construction-paper top hats, monocles, muttering, "harrumph", "top hat" and (best of all) "England." Priceless.]

I'm going to go watch some more Derrick videos now and hope they'll be making another real movie again soon.

What to watch on the 4th of July?

America's Independence Day has a surprisingly prominent place among movie holidays. There's a sequence in Holiday Inn in which Fred Astaire plays with firecrackers. How about that black-and-white fireworks sequence that begins Manhattan? Born on the Fourth of July is a scathing critique of conventional American patriotism. Revolution was a hideous misfire, and The Patriot, despite good intentions, becomes a gorefest. Of course there is the kill-the-aliens epic Independence Day, but the most patriotic image in that film is the blowing up the White House. Best to stay with the more conventional choices:

1. 1776 - an unimaginatively literal transcription of a musical play (the failure to come up with cinematic solutions to stage ideas is most disappointing in a song about a slave auction - "Molasses to Rum" which never leaves the hall in Philadelphia), but that play does an astonishing job of creating suspense about an historically known outcome--the passing of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 2, 1776.

2. Yankee Doodle Dandy - For the unreconstructed flag-wavers. What is about Michael Curtiz's movies that make them so re-watchable? Casablanca, Robin Hood, Mildred Pierce, this one--they never wear out their welcome. Curtiz was supposedly unable to talk to actors, but why do they provide such clear, economical and high-energy performances for him that they don't always provide for other directors? It doesn't matter anymore that the story is pure fiction or that Cagney hated Curtiz. The combining of those energies, together with a screenplay that is utterly relentless and uncompromising music and dance is irresistable. And Yankee Doodle Dandy, by resisting the conventions, especially musical conventions of its own time, has become timeless. (Can you imagine if the producers had insisted on adding a new song as they would today?)

3. The Music Man - Another filmed play, but the entire second half takes place on the Fourth of July. It celebrates and remembers small-town Fourths sort of the way I remember my own. And there's that strong, brassy music. Is it mere coincidence that Ray Heindorf was music director for Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Music Man AND 1776?

But there's a less conventional choice that I would like to urge you to try out in the days to come: Avalon the 1990 film by Barry Levinson. It is one of the finest films ever made about what it is to be an American. It is about 2-1/2 generations of an American Jewish family, beginning with the arrival of immigrant Sam Krachinski in the Avalon neighborhood of Baltimore on the Fourth of July at the turn of the century. He glows with wonder at the fireworks and supposes that this happens all the time in this wonderful country. His wonder and his pride never really fade away. America is truly a land of opportunity, of growth, development and improvement, even if Sam doesn't understand improvements like the difference between "can" and "may." Even the family councils, which continue to be maintained as the family stretches farther away from each other, feel like an echo of American democracy itself.

With time, the shine wears off for some of the rest of the family, as "being an American" comes to mean being a consumer and a television viewer. (Television is one of the main sub-threads of the story.)

The narrative revolves almost entirely around holidays, and mostly Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, underlining that the film is about being American, not about being Jewish. (Labor Day makes one guest appearance.) The cast is astonishing. This was my introduction to the brilliance of Armin Mueller-Stahl. (I will never forget how he sings under his breath, "We go to the river so we can sleep..") But Aidan Quinn, Kevin Pollak, Lou Jacobi ("You cut the toikey without me!"), Joan Plowright, Elizabeth Perkins and a very young Elijah Wood are all superb.

You will be entertained, provoked to thought and, if you are open to it, moved. Please see Avalon.

Revisiting an old monument

Looked at The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) for the first time in a number of years, and was surprised to note how very simple it is, and how subdued its comedy of eccentricity--a peculiarly English strain of the comedy of manners--is played.

Lavender Hill comes about halfway through the famous run of comedies out of Ealing Studios in the late 40s through the mid 50s, and features its house star, Alec Guiness. (Peter Sellers's early movie career could almost be seen as a send-up of this phase of Guiness's career, before he starting appearing in the great gaseous David Lean epics of the 50s and 60s. He is paired with the great Falstaff manque of the era, Stanley Holloway, who is enjoyable, but seems to be under wraps, adopting a respectability suitable to lesser clowns.

Memory bestows greater complexities and more slapstick farce on the films than they actually possess. They used to seem so zany. The most unconventional aspect of the film is the easy social mix between the working middle class (bank clerk and souvenir merchant) and the rather mild British criminal class (some charming smash-and-grabbers). To the original audience, the idea of a casual working friendship with a second-story man was both incongruous and democratically liberating.

Usually in a heist picture (and this is certainly a "proto-heist" comedy), one enjoys seeing how the plan is laid out, and then seeing how the perpetrators will cope with the inevitable mishaps. The only mishaps are a brief chase through a Scotland Yard museum exhibit, and a mix-up with the souvenir Eiffel Towers. The climax of that sequence is a delirious scamper down the steps of the real Tour Eiffel, effected by some not-bad-for-their-time process shots. What is remarkable about the scene is how panic and desperation slip into giddy delirium as they run faster and more carelessly down the stairs. It is only at that moment that our loveable villains exhibit real uninhibited joy and delight in the results of their criminal activies.

There is also a very amusing sequence of Guiness and Stanley Holloway desperately trying to board the Channel ferry back to England and running into every kind of French bureaucratic delay--capped with the little man who is looking for exactly the right rubber stamp to stamp the proper forms. And the final wrap-up gag forms a frame for the entire story. Still, the film seems slighter than it was as remembered, and it is hard to imagine this film inspiring the affection its 1951 audiences had for it. Nonetheless, I shudder at the prospect, or should I say, threat of a remake scheduled for release next year. Yes, Lavender Hill could be improved, but you will forgive me for being skeptical that it will be.

Undecided

Uncertainty (2009) is a good idea for a movie. In fact it was a good idea when it was called Sliding Doors or Run Lola Run (not to mention the execrable The Butterfly Effect).

Clearly the intention of the coin-flipping opening (see illustration) was to set off a bomb with two fuses. But for such a story to work, there must be actual stakes. Both Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run risked life and happiness. In one story, the couple finds a phone coveted by criminals and must decide whether to make a dishonest buck by trying to sell it to the highest bidder. I will spoil no one's day by telling you they decide not to, and end up no worse off than when they started. In the other story, they can't decide whether to tell the girl's family she's pregnant. There seems to be a slight question hovering over the future of the pregnancy, but that is dispensed with. The worst consequence here will be slight temporary family friction because of a delay in informing them.

It's a shame. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is usually a reliable guarantor of an interesting film. And he has real chemistry with the very beautiful Lynn Collins, who ought to become a movie star if there is any justice in the universe. There is some skill in the filmmakers, but not enough. There is no visual scheme other than the color-coding of the principal characters so that we know which of the alternating episodes we are watching. The dialogue was reportedly improvised and sounds it--that is, it is flat.

The writer-director team, Scott McGehee and David Siegel never seemed to want to convince us that anything about the film mattered except that they got to make it. These two made their debut with an odd film, Suture, in which identical twins were played by actors of two different races. The conceit had no thematic or other resonance that I could discern, and it all played like a private joke. McGehee and Siegel are going to have to let us in on the jokes if they are ever going to become compelling filmmakers.

When a film's auteur is not the director

John Ford is that most wonderful paradox in film theory, the man who confirms both the virtue of audience-oriented studio filmmaking and the consummate auteur, in full control of all the tools of filmmaking, and employing them in a purely personal expression.

The Will Rogers vehicle Steamboat Round The Bend (1935) proves the limits of that theory. Unlike any other I have seen, the film boasts few if any Ford compositions or other visual clues of his authorship. It has some busy physical comedy toward the end, but it is not the trademark roistering Irish slapstick. There is a Fordian mix of sentiment and somewhat black comedy in the partly improvised gallows-side wedding sequence, but that mix could stem from Rogers as much from Ford.

In fact this film doesn't much resemble other Ford films, except for his others with Rogers, and its clearest antecedent is the W.C. Fields vehicle Tillie and Gus, about the effort to rescue a ferryboat. (Harold Lloyd even did a movie about rescuing a trolleyline, Speedy.) W.C. Fields was indisputably the auteur (and usually the literal author) of his films--we have not seen Andrew Sarris form an Eddie Cline or Norman Z. MacLeod cult--and Rogers was an even more popular and well-known figure. (It is entirely possible that they influenced each other while in vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies. Both Fields and Rogers began as silent or near-silent novelty acts, juggling and rope tricks respectively, and over the years bled into verbal comedy to the point where the physical comedy dissipated into thin air.)

And more importantly, Rogers was more important and popular than Ford in 1935, even with Ford's Oscar for the overrated The Informer. Not to mention, Ford seems to have liked Rogers very much and seemed to be content to point the camera toward the performer while he was talking and let Rogers's charm and wistful humor carry the day. Besides the aforementioned wedding sequence (which does seem Fordian), there is the converted wax museum, in which Northern heroes have been converted to Southern ones to please the locals. And there are some bankside shots of the riverboats passing, although most of the time on the river is executed via rather indifferent process work.

In the theater, author William Goldman posits a theory of "The Muscle," the person with the influence, reputation and market power to exercise dominance in the direction a project will take. It is sort of a rough term, implying a combat, which was probably not the case with Steamboat, but Rogers was indisputably the muscle, and the film is built strictly to embody his characterization and point of view. It does that admirably; but attempts to place it in the Ford canon seem strained. Can't a great man have a holiday?