Capsule Reviews: Wavelength, Begone Dull Care, Bezhin Meadow

Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)

Michael Snow' legendary 45-minute structuralist work feels about three times its length, a slow zoom across a vast, near-empty office to a photo on the opposite wall. Yet the time and space experiment is a fascinating work of cinema, the steady shot using variations in exposure and other in-camera tweaks to subtly transform one space into another, and to turn day into night with a filter change. Further challenging the makeup of cinema (and the audience's patience) is the soundtrack mixing synthetic an oceanic waves into steady wails of unending noise. It is an undeniably infuriating experience, but also one of the most brilliantly conceptual breakdowns of cinema ever made. And as Snow's different filters and exposures warped space and time, I found myself bizarrely moved, the director's intellectual, self-critical use of the camera also something of an exhibition of the "magic" of film. Maybe it's weird to look sentimentally upon a film with a soundtrack gradually building to the hissing shriek of a boiling kettle, but there you go. Grade: A+

Begone Dull Care (Evelyn Lambert & Norman McLaren, 1949)

This 8-minute visualization of jazz music (specifically a three-movement piece by the Oscar Peterson Trio) is a triumph of early experimental filmmaking, using paint, scratches and animation in an abstract ballet of synesthesia. The frantic layering of unclear imagery and sound prefigures so much experimental cinema, yet the sheer giddiness of its dance of light and the complex layering of painted strips and extreme-close-ups on symbols gives Begone Dull Care a vivaciousness that rates it over all but the best of the works to clearly derive inspiration from it. This kind of filmmaking can seem closed off and intellectualized, but from the rolling, danceable bounce of Peterson's licks to the listing of credits in multiple languages, Begone Dull Care is clearly meant to be enjoyed by all. Grade: A

Bezhin Meadow (Sergei Eisenstein, 1937)

Reconstructed from a suppressed work about a boy who prevents his father from destroying the collective's food, Bezhin Meadow is, even as nothing more than a progression of film stills, a work of stunning beauty. The edit of the "film" that I saw opens on lush shots of nature, of branches criss-crossing the frame, before telling the audience that the evil father has beaten his wife to death and now plots against the son for loving the Soviet cause more than him. I normally can't bear to watch reassembled stills presented as a lost film; it's like finding fragments of poetry, or uncollected bars of an unfinished composition. But the stunning composition of Eisenstein's images is so gorgeous and the rhythm of his montage so unexpectedly preserved in the stacking of these static photos that Bezhin Meadow is not only watchable but one of the great director's most stirring works. That's true despite, or maybe because, of its unbearable irony, its propagandic shots in service to some of the most insane public collusions with communism—paranoia over "wrecking" of collective farms, the lionization of the child who reports his parents—apparently insufficient to prevent harsh censorship. This is never more clear than in the scenes in which religious imagery and symbolism is mockingly upended even as the film subtly supplants Christ for Stalin and upholds a new, secular fanaticism that relies upon the stifling religious iconography it seeks to destroy. So many of Eisenstein's film bear the burden of this sad irony in retrospect, but they are never anything less than stunning, even when censoring crackdowns reduce his work to nothing more than a glorified slideshow (and we're lucky to have even that).

Capsule Reviews: The Smiling Lieutenant, Ménilmontant, The Miracle Woman

The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, 1931)

A delightfully wicked musical that puts the Lubitsch touch on full display, The Smiling Lieutenant has the sophistication and subtly charged sensual construction one expects of the artist. Maurice Chevalier is a joy as the titular lieutenant Niki, putting his massive grins and thick accent to hysterically suggestive use with some lines that show Lubitsch, as ever, pushing himself to the limit of decency. Claudette Colbert, playing Niki's naughty true love, asks him whether the princess he's unwittingly been forced to marry is blond or brunette. "I don't know," replies Chevalier with a caddish grin, removing all doubt as to what hair he's really talking about. The songs are all jovial, but if you pay attention to the lyrics you realize they could be sung in a pub after a pint or four. It all ends with a demented (yet classy, natch) spin on Cyrano as Franzi teaches Anna how to make our lieutenant switch his affections, and a significant fade-out puts a wider smile on Niki's face than ever before. The way Miriam Hopkins looks when she finally grabs her husband's attentions? Hell, I'd be singing too. Grade: A-

Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926)

The phrase "avant-garde Russian silent cinema" is redundant; I've yet to see a Russian film from the '20s that was anything less than confrontational and experimental, even when it amounted to nothing more than naïve propaganda. Ménilmontant named for the Parisian suburb where it was shot, may technically be a French work, but one need not be told that a Russian emigré directed it to know its true national roots. Opening with an unexplained, terrifyingly edited and grisly axe murder of the parents of two young girls, Ménilmontant soon morphs into an abstracted tale of grief and isolation, following the sisters as they grow up and slowly drift apart when one of them gets a lover. A host of silent-era techniques—including double exposure, superimposition, impressionistic close-ups, mood-setting pillow shots of buildings and nature, and, of course, montage—create a manic state of bewilderment and poetic terror as the women discover what a harsh world it really is out there for a lady. This neglected masterwork feels like a proto-feminist, modernist fairy tale as made by Dziga Vertov. With potential like that, who needs intertitles? Grade: A+

The Miracle Woman (Frank Capra, 1931)

An improvement over Capra and Stanwyck's first collaboration, chiefly because Capra, having figured out how to work with Stanwyck's style, now knows how to get even more out of her. The story itself is simple, but it's noteworthy that Capra would rework its basic theme—a protagonist giving up prestige and wealth for morality and/or love—several times after Hays office cracked down but always with the more acceptable male lead instead of a strong-willed female played with fiery, if fabricated passion by Stanwyck. Oddly prescient in its depiction of ludicrously ostentatious evangelism (shame Jerry Falwell never stuck his fat ass in a lion cage for a stunt), The Miracle Woman boasts three unforgettable setpieces in its first 20 minutes. The second half doesn't match the brilliant staging of Stanwyck's opening sermon, theatrical debut as a charlatan (she emerges on-stage over roused men like the dancing robot in Metropolis) and the averted suicide of the sweet blind man, an otherwise grating presence who often plays like a self-treating Patch Adams. I was also mildly disappointed that its rich potential for social commentary gave way to the usual Capra story of an affirming romance. Nevertheless, Capra's increasing visual sophistication, Stanwyck's dynamic performance and a flirtation with the dark side of Pre-Code immorality make this one of the director's more enjoyable pictures. Grade: B

Capsule Reviews: Cronos, Smiles of a Summer Night,

Cronos (Guillermo Del Toro, 1993)

Admittedly more of a primer for Guillermo Del Toro's career to come than a great work in its own right, Cronos is nevertheless a delightfully wicked and kooky spookfest that introduces recurring objects (bugs, gears), actors (Ron Perlman, Federico Luppi) and themes (fantasy's co-mingling with the real and not-as-concrete-as-it-seems in such a way as to expose humans as both the purest heroes and most terrible monsters) in an original vampire story. Intriguingly, Del Toro uses an aged lead and does not transform him into a younger man, instead showing the device that gives cursed immortality to its users only marginally turning back the clock, further demonstrating the futility of this dark quest for eternal life. The film boasts some wonderfully macabre moments, especially an autopsy of the undead man, who revives before cremation with his mouth sewn shut. The scene is all the more darkly funny for the issues the undertaker has with the crematorium's gas line. Perlman steals the film as the put-upon nephew tasked with finding the alchemical device for his loathed, dying uncle, a performance that is as petulant as it is sneering an brutish. Del Toro's camerawork isn't as hauntingly elegant as it would later be, yet his inventive manipulation of existing sets into fantastical sub-realms presages his later gift for grandiose set design. An embryonic work, perhaps, but when you're watching the birth of a filmmaker as good as Del Toro, there's plenty to please the viewer. Grade: B-

Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955)

Bergman's breakthrough hit is a light comedy that initially seems so unlike the director's later experiments in spiritual vacuums. But even its tone of jaunty, theatrical aestheticism (aided greatly by Gunnar Fischer's trademark cinematography of cinematically skewed stage framings) reveals the darker impulses within Bergman, who makes farce of the psychological mire of a love triangle between a father, his son and the lad's stepmother even after the pressure bursts the dynamic and spills into other characters. Yet if this is a sex farce, it must surely be the most lyric and graceful one ever put to film. The men deal with confusion, insecurity and and hormones they cannot control, while the women's hushed plotting is less misogynistic scheming than a show of their dark amusement at the follies of men and their attempts to, as ever, sort everything out for their hapless lovers. The mixture of Wildean wit and Bergman's despair works magnificently, and lines like "How can a woman ever love a man?" imbue the mired sexual relationships with an overarching poetry. And only someone capable of such bottomless depression as Bergman could spin a positive, warm ending out of a climax of Russian roulette. Grade: A

(P.S. Criterion's new Blu-Ray is one of their best transfers this year along with Pale Flower.)

Animal Farm (John Halas and Joy Bachelor, 1954)

More noteworthy today as the first released British animated feature than as a great work, John Halas and Joy Bachelor's Animal Farm is a dated work but not particularly a failure. It's most telling flaw is its substitution of the melancholy of Orwell's book, which realized the folly of Communism with regret for its impossibility, with a more propagandic sense of victory over the authoritarians who seize control of the supposedly egalitarian society. (It is now believed that the CIA itself funded the film as a piece of anti-Commie propaganda.) That robs the work of a great deal of its power and the satire of its bitterness, leaving a film that, to use the old saying, knows the steps but not the rhythm. And while I understand that the budget for any British production will not compare to the Hollywood or Disney machines, but the lack of visual dynamism holds back the film. It would have been clever to show a transition from a utopia to an autocratic nightmare, but instead the narrative moves through a flat, unchanging background. Nevertheless, the animation of the animals themselves is a briefly redeeming flash of light, allowing them more sophisticated movements while still maintaining their proper forms, only fully anthropomorphizing the pigs for thematic purposes. Grade:C-

Jane Campion's Short Films: Peel, Passionless Moments, A Girl's Own Story

An Exercise in Discipline: Peel

 

An Exercise in Discipline: Peel opens Jane Campion's career with a bang. It starts with an echoing tap eventually revealed to be an orange bouncing off a dashboard and proceeding in a series of quick cuts that allow no hint of coherence even as a title card establishes its trio's relation to each other. From there, it only gets stranger, using the vivid color of '80s clothes and the countryside around the stopped car to bring out the dysfunction of the family dynamic exhibited by the father, his son and the boy's aunt. The father chastises the boy for throwing his orange peel out the car window, even stopping to make the kid pick up the pieces along the road. The lad's defiance leads him to run away, but in quiet shame he starts collecting the peel long after getting out of eyesight. The woman, meanwhile, viciously berates the man for making them stop, already peeved that she had to spend the day driving with them when she had other plans.

The only thing clear-cut about this movie is the aforementioned card with its postmodern family tree, but even that triangle is problematic: by folding back in on itself, it lightly suggests incestuous relationship, an theme common to Campion's early work in both literal and psychologically figurative ways. Though one generally refers to the film by its subtitle, it is important to take note of the "Exercise in Discipline" tag. It speaks to the fractured narrative exercise: the man forces discipline upon his son, who then begins to order around the woman having no been conditioned into a harder adult male. But it also hints at the formal rigor of Campion's piece, which features segmenting and fragmenting angles, framing and focal lengths by cinematographer Sally Bongers to deepen the alienation and power dynamics of the family. It's bewildering to think that something so dense and fully formed was a student film, and much less surprising to note that it won the Short Film Palme D'Or at Cannes four years later. This is one of the best modern short films I've seen, and one can see Campion's gift for microcosmic, obsessive yet always playful characterization in its eight short minutes.

Passionless Moments

Continuing the splintered framing and behavioral observation of Peel, Passionless Moments shows how our attention focuses in and out constantly. Repetitive sounds, double-take glances and sudden bursts of memory cause people to randomly meditate and fixate on things they do not particularly care about but try to solve anyway. Campion then adds her focal aestheticism to the mix by messing with focal lengths to demonstrate how one's attention is always settling on one thing at the expense of the other, and that the vacillation between foci is random and, as the title lets on, passionless. Though Campion's next short would firmly align with a feminist perspective, it is this film's presentation of her minute detail as merely a series of shots she finds interesting at the moment until something else catches her eye, demystifying her approach even as she only furthers her mastery of the form. Though it's a step down from the fully contained bewilderment of Peel, Passionless Moments is no less vital in understanding Campion as a filmmaker. In fact, given how much more accessible it is, it mght be a better starting point.

A Girl's Own Story

Jane Campion's work may be less openly confrontational than the work of Catherine Breillat, but I find her style to be far more combative and transgressive, particularly in her early work. Her fragmented, synecdochical framing eventually blossomed into full-on paranoia and schizophrenia in Sweetie and An Angel at My Table, respectively, but A Girl's Own Story, the longest and admittedly weakest of Campion's early films, shows that style being used to dive into the female perspective for the first time. A Girl's Own Story opens with girls looking in a medical book at a drawing of an erect penis, their hands curiously brushing along this 2D representation to get a feel for the material. At last their hands move down along the drawn legs to the bottom of the page, revealing a bit of text that warns "This sight may shock young girls."

But if a penis is shocking to these young women, Campion suggests that is only because of its power over these physically changing girls. From Beatles reenactments that have other girls in a Catholic school shrieking in quasi-homosexual frenzy to a boyfriend who convinces one girl to have unprotected sex (leading to pregnancy) without the two even sharing a kiss, men hold power over these confused and suddenly sexually appealing women. One shot, in a clinic where pregnant teens meet, frames these women under one of those garishly graphic crucifixes, tacitly pointing out the religious root of chauvinism in the Western world. For the first time, a slight surrealism enters Campion's frame, a tone she would carry out in fullest extent in Sweetie: one girl's parents have stopped speaking to each other and use their daughter to pass messages between them, only to have rough sex in front of their children. Later, the father joins the ranks of the other men circling around these women like sharks. Campion doesn't force any of these shots, and for the first time Campion demonstrates her ability to completely bewilder and stun with such subtlety that the cognitive disruption always seems to hit just after the tone switches once more, only widening the confusion.

Capsule Reviews: Moulin Rouge!, A Corner in Wheat, 31/75 Aysl

Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)

A pop culture kaleidosope-cum-travesty, Moulin Rouge! is as unbearable as it is enthralling, always at once, all throughout the film. The exclamation point in the title is actually the most subtle element of the whole shebang. It's like a Girl Talk musical, running through fragments of a vast range of music in blitzkrieg assaults of color and choreography. Though I don't know where on Earth the people who get emotionally invested in its paper-thin romance narrative are coming from, the film's aesthetic smorgasbord makes for an unforgettable, transfixing experience. Tim Brayton said it best, even if I can't match his level of enthusiasm: "Five minutes of the film can be exhausting; two hours is the most invigorating, blissful experience that cinema can offer."

The performances are fantastic: Ewan McGregor has rarely been more attractive, Nicole Kidman definitely hasn't, and Jim Broadbent has never been more boisterously endearing. Jill Bilcock's editing feeds every shot through a meat grinder, but Donald McAlpine's lurid throwback to Technicolor and Catherine Martin's vibrant art and costume design are still striking. Luhrmann's bombastic setpieces take choreography and romantic melodrama to gaudy extremes, and it's funny how this, his most bewildering picture, is also his most coherent and successful. I have no grade for this film; it's an A+ and an F at the same time and averaging out to a C doesn't remotely give the right impression of my feelings for it.

A Corner in Wheat (D.W. Griffith. 1909)

With its rapid editing between financially shaken-down commonfolk and monopolizing wheat tycoons, D.W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat presages Soviet montage not merely in aesthetic but political thrust. His intercutting is darkly humorous: boisterous, lavish parties of the rich mix with static tableaux of miserable, exorbitant breadlines that feel like Griffith somehow went through time and brought back photographs of the Depression to splice into his moving picture. Even when they move, the poor trudge like zombies, and when the bread runs out all too quickly, the sense of despair only compounds. Griffith's grim comeuppance for the tycoon who starves the people to add $4 million a day to his coffers is a literal burial in riches, a macabre joke I didn't know Griffith had in him, but then I've only seen Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The depiction of the middle class being driven into poverty to compound the wealth of the rich is, of course, more relevant than ever 112 years later.

31/75 Aysl (Kurt Kren, 1975)

Shooting over 21 non-consecutive days with the same strips of film and an alternating masking board with altering alignments of holes, Kren's 31/75 Asyl turns a static shot into an ever-changing tableaux of colliding light exposures and alternating time periods. The shifting areas of black space and splotches of countryside comprising differing days and lighting/weather conditions make a pointillist landscape, like satellite TV in a storm. When Kren drops the black space altogether for a moment, he's left with a pan-seasonal collage where winter snow rubs against spring bloom, the multiple timeframes glimpsed in the alternating patches of light and exposure now fully visible. I confess I don't know what it "means," but Kren's structuralist experiment is fascinating, beautiful and suggestive, calling attention to the way time affects all images even as they are constructed.

Capsule Reviews: In the Heat of the Night, Something Wild, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967)

I put off watching this film for years because it struck me as Hollywood moralizing that would inevitably resort to stereotypes and a skewed sense of self-righteousness. (I know it's wrong to pre-judge a film, but come on, didn't I just describe 99.9% of Hollywood racial dramas?) But In the Heat of the Night was everything I thought it wouldn't be: even-handed rather than polemical, nuanced and not bludgeoned, artistic rather than cheaply ripped from the headlines. Virgil Tibbs, the displaced Philadelphia homicide detective, wants to get out of the Mississippi town in which he finds himself involved in an investigation as much as the local cops want him gone. The chief, Gillespie (Rod Steiger), doesn't hide his prejudices, but he also notes Tibbs' own to goad the officer he knows is talented into staying. He knows that a man like Tibbs would like nothing more than to solve the mystery and prove himself better than all these country hicks, and Poitier's steely gaze cannot hide his agreement with the assessment.

This revelation of Tibbs' own racial hangups is not an attempt to soften the whites but to deepen and humanize the racial commentary. Admittedly, Jewison's action scenes somewhat undercut the wisome and depth of the dialogue and acting with such on-the-nose visual cues as a Confederate flag emblem on the front fender of a car pursuing Tibbs to some obvious angling of shots of lynch mob members. Nevertheless, this is a powerful document of racial tension that has aged remarkably well, buoyed by two dynamic performances by Poitier and Steiger and scripted with intelligence. I'd like to mull this over a few more times before I'd write a full-length review, but in the meantime read Adam Zanzie's excellent piece on the film. Grade: A-


Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986)

Jonathan Demme's stylish descent into yuppie hell plays like a more class-conscious take on Martin Scorsese's After Hours. Where Griffin Dunne eventually wound up right back where he started, forgetting his mad fever dream, Jeff Daniels' Charlie does not get off so lightly. His corporate VP  gets swept away by a dynamo who goes by the name of Lulu (Melanie Griffin) and endures such a mad and, eventually horrific, plunge off the deep end that he must reevaluate everything he believes in. The three main characters (including a striking Ray Liotta as Lulu's insane ex-husband) are all white, but they move trough a background of multiracial and multiclass people, and Charlie's interactions with them change him. On the flip-side, the more they stick together, the more Lulu begins to domesticate, becoming the sort of bourgeois trophy wife that the normal Charlie would love to be with, though he's already become used to the wild minx version.

Demme turns the film into an exercise in duality: The film's tone switches from comedy to horror. The cinematography transitions from pastel-colored romp to cold, metallic tones so quickly the effect is at once barely noticeable and deeply unsettling. "What are you going to do now that you've seen how the other half lives?" Lulu asks, furthering the dualism by clarifying "The other half of you." The other film that makes for an easy point of comparison with the film is David Lynch's Blue Velvet, a connection made in their mutual view of small-town America as no bastion of morality in the face of rotting cities. Yet unlike Lynch's despairing suburban hell and Scorsese's expressionist frenzy, Something Wild has a real sliver of hope running through it, the idea of recognizing one's duality and finding spiritual middle class in the sharply divided racial and class system of the '80s. That's such a lofty idea I nearly forget you have to fight your way past a crazed Ray Liotta to get to it. Grade: A

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)

Howard Hawks' brassy, vibrant Technicolor musical at first glance seems a depiction of vacant gold-digging, but the more one pays attention, the more one can only see the film as a vicious attack on the commercialized notion of romance, a deconstruction brought about by its two female leads. Russell and Monroe are so dynamic and forward they seem to grab a hold of the camera itself and manipulate our view of them. They make an unstoppable duo, Russell's Dorothy consumes every hunk in sight, while Monroe (cannily satirizing her own public image) uses airy, wide-eyed bimbosity to set traps for rich schlubs looking for a trophy of her caliber. I don't know if a film has ever torn down the male gaze so thoroughly, not only hijacking it to show how women have sexual desires (the "fairer sex" has always been more sexually experienced than the men in Hawks' films, but here they are almost unfathomably to the males) but in the pair's manipulation of that gaze to position men right where they want them. Even if the men are sitting in a theater.

Hawks' use of musical interludes in his films (think Rio Bravo and To Have and Have Not) has always been rich in character, and the grand sequences here are as clever and telling as they are dynamic and artistic. From the opening moment, as Monroe and Russell appear in ruby-red sequins to instantly monopolize the attention, Hawks positions the musical numbers to demonstrate their utter power over men and the uninhibited expression of their own desires. Perversity gets stacked on top of perversity here, but maybe I only use that word because it's so unorthodox to be shown the female desire instead of the male gaze. This is damn near a perfect picture, as funny as it is transgressive, and one of my three favorite Hawks pictures, along with Rio Bravo and Only Angels Have Wings. Grade: A+

Capsule Reviews: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Cœur Fidèle, On the Waterfront

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)

Set in a hilly village more twisted with jagged, crowded shacks than a Brazilian favela, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the great landmarks of film history. Like so many early films, its theatricality is literal—one can plainly see the edges of set design—yet Robert Wiene's Expressionist masterpiece turns the psychological thriller into one of the great examples of pure cinema in its infancy. This is a warped film, with buildings twisted and curved in wracked pain and characters plumbing the depths of facial expression. Even the title cards are twisted—the card that the titular doctor hands over is so gnarled and indecipherable in bunched, sinister spiracles that it seems the inspiration for nearly every black metal band logo. Regardless of what Siegfried Kracauer says, Caligari is not as political as later German silents, but its aesthetic power is so distinct from contemporary American and French filmmaking that it certainly feels confrontational. Lang, Murnau and others would soon use the style to tackle the depravity and anomie of Weimar Germany, but Wiene is content simply to wow. And I wonder, is this the first great twist ending of the movies? Grade: A

P.S. Be sure to pay attention to Conrad Veidt's show-stealing performance as the somnambulist Cesare, hypnotized into murder by Caligari. Big and bold as silent acting (especially Expressionist silent acting) was, Veidts introduction is subtle, a close-up on his sleeping face capturing ever slight tic as the synapses along his face slowly fire, undulating his flesh in zombie-like reanimation as Caligari first awakens him. Veidt's most memorable performance is, of course, the ever-disturbing protagonist of The Man Who Laughs, but he is no less unsettling here as the tortured sleepwalker.

Cœur Fidèle [Faithful Heart] (Jean Epstein, 1923)

I cannot even imagine how good MoC's new Blu-Ray of Jean Epstein's unfairly ignored silent looks, given the quality of the old video I downloaded. (It's one of those titles that makes me wish I could afford a region-free player.) Epstein's film, inspired by Abel Gance's editing innovations, makes a starkly realistic yet poetically magical work. Made before Eisenstein et al. started demonstrating their theories on montage, Epstein's film uses a realistic background of working-class concerns and romantic melodrama (its light evocation of Victor Hugo, particularly Les Misérables is no coincidence) as a means of editing experimentation. Even the final shots, showing romantic joy tempered with the traumas of endured trials, finds the balance between poetry and reality. Epstein uses close-ups of hands and faces not only to establish character and occupation but tension and the emotional subjectivity of the film's character relationships. The acting is often "big"—especially Edmond von Daële's lecherous Petit Paul, who infuses every gesture with boozy arrogance—but it too is remarkably restrained, setting a precedent for realist cinema even as it shows how daring and aesthetic probing realism can be. Grade: A+

Best Scene: The fairground sequence set after Paul steals Marie away from her lover Jean, a bitterly ironic jubilation surrounding the miserable woman and the sneering, victorious thug. Epstein turns the carousel ride into an experimental frenzy of editing, using a rapidly cut collage of faces and POV shots of the fairground swirling in a fast panorama to visually elucidate the tension between Marie and Paul and her slow resignation to his domination.

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

Marlon Brando was just turning 30 when On the Waterfront premiered: in it, he looks a great deal younger and behaves a great deal older. His plain, goodhearted never-was Terry is world-weary before his time, a washed-up boxer-cum-stevedore gently but forcefully coerced into being a mafia hood, his bosses playing on his obedience and gullibility. Brando's performance set off a firestorm, dismissed today by those looking to kill gods by saying all he did was mumble. But take one look at Brando's plaintive face, occasionally wracked in unsuccessful attempts at intimidation and always filled with longing of romantic and existential varieties, and the hype justifies itself. "He tries to act tough, but there's a look in his eye," says Edie (Eva Marie-Saint), the sister of the dockworker Terry unwittingly lured to his death, and Marie-Saint's fascination with him at times seem as much unfettered astonishment of Brando's skill as Edie's attraction for this lovable bum.

A reworking of Arthur Miller's screenplay for The Hook, a project he was meant to work on with Kazan until HUAC pressure forced denouncing confessions from the director, On the Waterfront's morality play about the virtues of snitching smells of moral wish-fulfillment for Kazan, who wished to see a character honored for ratting. This moral equivalence and fantasy is even more potentially loathsome when one considers that not only are the crimes that prompt Terry to testify far worse than political affiliation, they also actually happened. Still, viewed within the diegesis and broader questions of the morality of speaking up, On the Waterfront emerges a morally sound treatise on the importance of not staying silent in the face of horror. Situated between these extreme poles of self-absolution and rectitude, On the Waterfront finds a moral complexity by truly considering what choice to make and then showing the consequences of those choices. Even the priest, guilted into a social crusade only to become a self-compelling force, is more than a moral stereotype. It's easy to pigeonhole Kazan's film as self-forgiveness, but to these eyes it seems a lot more like a confessional and ensuing penance. Grade: A

Best Scene: Cliché as it is, the "I could have been a contender" scene is iconic for a reason. When his brother Charley (Rod Steiger), the mob boss' lawyer and right-hand man, reluctantly pulls a gun on his own brother to ensure his silence, Terry has a defining moment of reflection and bitterness. Brando never sounds angry, only deflated and sad, as he recounts how his brother's boss ruined his boxing career, and Brando's even tones and measured volume convey overwhelming emotion. Brando was one of cinema's most heartbreaking actors, but I don't know if he was ever more wrenching than here.

Keaton Shorts: One Week, The Boat, The Paleface, Cops

"It was Keaton's notion that cutting, valuable as it was in a thousand ways, must not replace the recording function of the camera, must not create the happening. The happening must happen, be photographed intact, then be related by cutting to other happenings."

—Walter Kerr

I like to space out my Buster Keaton viewings, giving myself just enough time between films that I surprise myself with his genius with every binge. I find the whole "Chaplin vs. Keaton" debate more than a bit tedious, though obviously both are divergent yet titanic enough to warrant comparison. I will say, though, that for the undeniable mastery of the two of them, Keaton is the who, to me, best exemplifies comedy, not simply between them but in all of cinema. His cutting, camera technique, scripting, design and performance capture the flow of comedy better than I've seen anyone else do since.

The above quote gets at part of his skill at crafting movies: despite the obvious construction of the setpieces and the distancing effect of silent film pantomime when viewed through a modern prism (neither of which I intend as criticism), Keaton's movies feel so in the moment, so spontaneous, that I not only continue to marvel at his skill but feel surprise at the payoffs. Roger Ebert gets at that in his own praise of Keaton's work, saying "Another of Keaton's strategies was to avoid anticipation. Instead of showing you what was about to happen, he showed you what was happening; the surprise and the response are both unexpected, and funnier." I'm not the most devoted Keaton disciple, but I've seen some of this stuff more than once, and I almost forget what happens because Keaton does such a great job moving escalating every moment on its own terms without telephoning the next gag over the one that's currently playing.

I've been meaning to pick up Kino's Blu-Rays of The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr., and I'm ecstatic that the company is releasing his early shorts on Blu-Ray on my birthday (gift ideas, people). To get myself ready for that essential purchase, but mainly because it had simply been a while, I decided to visit (and revisit) some Keaton shorts.

One Week


My favorite of Keaton's shorts, though I hardly think I'm going out on a limb with that choice. One Week tells the story of a newlywed couple who discover that the house they purchased is a build-your-own kit, a situation made worse by meddling from a jilted suitor. The resulting monstrosity is one of Keaton's best sets, an angular, tilted, menacing house that looks like Dr. Caligari's summer cottage. The mishaps are brilliant; the lengthy gag about the piano alone leads to several other house-warping jokes as wee, wiry Keaton nearly pulls down his ceiling with the makeshift semi-pulley he rigs out of the chandelier. A bit involving the house spinning (the real thing, not a model) makes use of Keaton's intuitive undercranking to speed up his tumble around the place, giving a constant sense of action without repeatedly breaking the shots for variance. The short culminates in what may be my favorite silent punchline, a double bluff that continues to make me guffaw long after the initial surprise has dissipated.

The Boat


From its first moments, as Keaton completes his titular vessel and finds he's made it so big he can't drag it out of his house, The Boat is suggestive, huge and hysterical. Where Chaplin continued to play the downtrodden Tramp long after he hit it big, Keaton was willing to play with the idea of his wealth, but ostentation proves his downfall here. Simply getting his yacht out of his garage rips apart the family house, while putting the damn thing in the water costs him a car. (The way he takes out his aggression for this by yanking his son up off the dock with one hand absolutely slays me.) At sea, matters are even worse, with Keaton slowly demolishing his prop into driftwood. The degradation of the ship in the storm is one of Keaton's best large but self-contained setpieces, surpassed only by his use of the train in The General and the house in One Week. Numerous Keaton films are masterclasses in filmmaking, but few are as succinct as this. The best example of this? Just watch how he subtly establishes the name of the boat solely for use in the punchline, which is so hysterical Keaton lets the mouthed word get the laughs without following up with an utterly redundant title card.

The Paleface


I've yet to see a bad Buster Keaton from the silent era, but obviously some shorts and features aren't as essential as others. The Paleface is one of Keaton's lesser efforts, entertaining but dispensable. Surprisingly, however, it does not particularly fall into the ever-looming trap under such old films of giving way to casual racism or jokes at the expense of Indians. Truth be told, it doesn't have that much to say about Native Americans at all despite its plot, centered on a oil company seeking to throw the Indians off the land to drill, yet Keaton clearly sympathizes with the downtrodden. His alliance with the put-upon makes the film's middle sag with inaction between chases, and the gags are a bit simple for the man who burst out of apprenticeship with Arbuckle with such timeless, advanced work as One Week and The Boat. Yet I still laugh at the simple cheek of Keaton, tied to a pole near the start to be burned for trespassing on Indian ground, keeps waddling away from the tinder pile when his executioner goes to fetch more (it reminds me of Eric Idle's playful convict in The Life of Brain jovially telling his killer that he's actually been released, only to say "just kidding!" when the Roman nearly lets him go.) Minor Keaton from this period, as the old cliché about masters goes, is still Keaton, and the comedy works well enough that The Paleface's chief failure seems to be that it is "merely funny" in comparison to so many outright brilliant works by its maker.

Cops


Purportedly a take on his friend and mentor Fatty Arbuckle's infamous scandal, Cops takes Keaton's gift for perfectly modulated manic crescendo into Kafkaesque realms. Keaton knew how to time his films perfectly, to the point that he can progress a film from trying to impress his lady with good business sense to an inadvertent bomb throwing at a police parade and make it all linear, if deliberately bewildering. Less reliant on stunts than Keaton's construction and pacing, Cops works on the basis of its deadpan presentation of lunacy: the outrageously overladen cart Keaton drives is presented, as ever, without comment, Keaton applying his own stoicism to the frame as he pilots the monolith on wheels through the streets until it almost seems to fit. And when he inadvertently tosses an anarchist's bomb into a crowd of police, all hell breaks loose. The ensuing chase adds more and more cops until it seems everyone in the city has turned into an officer, Keaton chased by a swarm wherever he goes.

Less grandiose than many of Keaton's other works, Cops is nevertheless one of the best showcases of Keaton's style and one of the best fusions of Keaton's own performance and the film's aesthetic around him. The black wave of uniformed officers crashing after Keaton is almost surreal, and every time he thinks he's gotten away, another flatfoot appears in front of him to stall until the horde catches up. As a commentary on Arbuckle, Cops does not sufficiently make the connection between the idea that everyone can act as judge, jury and executioner through public opinion and the literalization of this by filling the city at the end with cops and only cops. But Keaton's demented two-reeler is incredibly atmospheric, even unsettling despite its hilarity; even when he finally gets the upper hand over the police, a disapproving civilian sends him back into the vengeful arms of the law. As such, the wry end card punctuates the sense of doom hanging over such instant, public conviction. Many years later, Chaplin must have watched this with more than a faint hint of recognition, too.

Capsule Reviews: All About Eve, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Mary and Max

All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

Probably the most glaring omission in my movie viewing. And boy was I missing out: this camp satire on showbiz is a vicious cycle of ageism, bloodthirsty ingénues and critics who use and are used by the stars they praise and damn. It may be all about Eve, the not-so-innocent farm girl looking to hit the big time, but the real star is the icon she seeks to usurp, played by Bette Davis. Though there are stereotypical portrayals of predatory homosexuals in the film, Davis is by far the campiest figure on the screen, chewing every line with relish, but then who wouldn’t savor this incredible dialogue? The final shot, an unexpectedly arty flourish involving endless reflections in mirrors, cheekily visualizes the unending cycle of new talent ever ready to kill their idols. Grade: A+

P.S. Check out a cameo by a then-unknown Marilyn Monroe, who steals her entire scene as a ditzy wannabe. Corrected for yelling “Waiter!” at a butler, she responds with hysterical sincerity and worry, “Well I can’t go yelling “Oh butler!” can I? Maybe somebody’s name is Butler!” The dour critic Addison can barely fight back his loathing when he deadpans, "You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point."

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975)


The first 10 minutes or so were so dull that I couldn't even get into the camp of the movie, but the second Tim Curry showed up I couldn't take my eyes off him, which potentially raises a few questions I might have to dwell upon. Curry's performance is rightly iconic, a completely un-self-conscious belly flop into pansexual lust communicated in every side glance, body thrust and blink. But, as my pal Sasha James rightly told me, "the first half is ten times better than the second." After a certain point Curry's rowdy, epically incomprehensible numbers about transvestism and making a Frankenstein monster out of Hitler's wet dream give way to more middling tunes that sap a great deal of momentum from the proceedings. I must admit, though, that I found the climactic image, structured around a parody of King Kong enacted on a prop of the old RKO logo, screamingly funny, if utterly bewildering. Still, when it comes to '70s rock opera films, I'm gonna have to side with the more coherent (if somehow even stranger) Phantom of the Paradise. Grade: C+

P.S. The second best character in the movie after Curry's Frank-N-Furter, Riff Raff, is played with Igor-esque comic menace by the actual writer of the musical, Richard O'Brien. Though not as consistently great as Curry (Riff Raff is one of the characters who gets completely altered by the end), O'Brien is nearly as entertaining.

Mary and Max (Adam Elliot, 2009)


Feeling bizarrely like a mumblecore film as filtered through Great Depression aesthetics, the claymation Mary and Max flits between monochrome and sepia-toned visions of poverty, loneliness and neurosis of insecure pen pals separated by generations and oceans. Even at 92 minutes, there's not enough here to justify the running length, and the padded repetition of Mary's dark home life and Max's Asperger isolation robs the film of some of its emotional power. That it is still so routinely affecting, however, is a testament to the sincerity of the characters, animated with simple resonance, written with minute, wry detail and voiced to perfection (check out Philip Seymour Hoffman's almost unrecognizable performance as the Yiddish Max, only guessable in moments using Hoffman's trademark deflation). Bonus points for the soundtrack, a nice blend of the unironically bouncy and the affectingly dramatic. Grade: B+

Capsule Reviews: Alice in Wonderland (1951), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Alice in Wonderland


The animated Alice in Wonderland does not represent Disney's storytelling peak. Even for a movie that takes two surrealist books and hacks up what limited context existed between them, Alice in Wonderland is thin. A series of half-connected vignettes that always seem to be building toward a story that never comes, the film at least uses its nonsensical threads as an excuse for experimenting with animation forms, and the overcrowded staff of highly talented but disparate animators certainly used one of Walt Disney's dearest projects to let loose. It's certainly a beautiful film, especially in Disney's restored Blu-Ray, which lets Mary Blair's striking background colors pop even more, but animator Ward Kimball (one of the Nine Old Men) had a point when he brought up too many cooks being in the kitchen.

Nevertheless, the film is one of Disney's most sumptuous visual feasts, behind only a handful of arguable contenders, and the loopy comedy floats the movie when it sags even at its spare running length. In some ways, the film is ahead of its time, if only because its gentle surrealism made it perfect for the love generation about 15 years later. Seen today, it's more worthy of artistic admiration than actual enjoyment, though it is by no means a bad film; it would probably just miss my own ranking of the top 10 Disney animated films. At the same time, I only ever process it as a whole and can barely retain anything that happens, remembering only the bold colors, the crashing noises and overwhelming contradiction of it all. But I don't tend to remember much about my dreams, either.


Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs


Having never even heard of the children's book upon which the film was based, an unappealing trailer failed to grab my attention when Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs neared its theatrical release. Even when I started to hear positive reviews in the press and among friends, I never got around to watching it, and when I saw the Blu-Ray on sale the other day I finally decided to give it a whirl. It was fantastic.

The same simplistic premise that failed to grab my attention in the first place -- a wannabe inventor who strikes it big with a device that makes food rain from the sky -- turns out to be its biggest strength. It latches on themes of father/son relationships, feeling unaccepted and the desire to prove oneself, but the film never sags even though its dense 90 minutes covers some surprising story turns and an admirable depth of character. It is also hilarious, from a monkey fitted with a thought translator serving as the protagonist's companion and assistant (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris, no less, who shouts one-line non-sequiturs) to a sly bit of satire in the form of a Guatemalan weather cameraman revealed to be a doctor and pilot who came to America looking for a better life only to do menial labor.

And the visuals. Dear God is this film gorgeous. Sony Pictures Animation previously struggled with finding an aesthetic, first going the Dreamworks route with the cartoony but bland Open Season before using more realistic character and background animation à la Pixar. Here the animators have found their niche, using expressive and interpretive character rendering without resorting to the sloppiness of Open Season. The color palettes are dazzling, fuchsia clouds sparkling with cobalt lightning as they dump burgers and ice cream onto a small, economically devastated island. Character animation looks believably human but makes the necessary adjustments to avoid plunging in the uncanny valley, from Flint's sloping nose to the ingenious face of his father, bushy unibrow covering eyes and like mustache obscuring mouth.

I would say that the film forces some of its points, but I rarely have the inclination to take a children's film to task for its childish moments, especially not when so many other areas are grown up. I have a special fondness for the scene where the love interest is acknowledged to be more attractive and true to herself by, in a reverse Pygmalion, putting her glasses back on and pulling her hair back up into a ponytail (and seriously, who decided that ponytails were not, like, the sexiest thing ever in all those "let your hair down" movies?). One of the most charming films I've seen in some time.