The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

2005
Europa Corp.
Director: Tommy Lee Jones
Length: 121 min.
Country: USA
Format: 35mm
Date Viewed: 20 April, 2006

Is it coincidence that the acting is only major strongpoint of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the new film directed by Tommy Lee Jones, a very good long-time actor here making his theatrical feature debut? I think not. With the exception of the Barry Pepper and his limited range (he spends the film alternating between shouting and looking incredibly serious), the ensemble, headed by Jones, is uniformly excellent, and it perhaps also not a coincidence that this is Jones' best performance in years.

Otherwise, the film has many flaws, least of which is its unfunny attempts at black comedy. A more significant flaw is the cinematography. Chris Menges is a capable cinematographer, and yet his Scope compositions here are remarkably flat and bland, unfortunate as the sheer beauty of the desert locations in south Texas deserve to be photographed accordingly. A few of the landscape shots work, but few enough that they can probably be credited more to the fact that one can't film desert scenery without getting at least one great shot. The problem may be that the compositions appear to have been framed for an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 - which Menges usually shoots in - as opposed to the film's ratio of 2.35:1 (take a look if you rent it on DVD).

A bigger problem with the film is the inconsistent editing style. The origin of this flaw is actually in the script by Guillermo Arriaga. He sticks to his standard personal convention of the broken narrative, but strangely this time, only in the first half of the film. In the first half the film jumps back and forth in time extremely quickly and with almost no visual cues to help us figure out easily where we are and as such we spend more time trying to figure out what point in time we're at as opposed to concentrating on the narrative. Once the film hits the half-way mark, however, it becomes almost entirely linear. It seems that Arriaga was more concerned with maintaining his reputation as the "broken narrative guy" instead of creating a narrative throughline that is more than a useless gimmick.

The film's poor use of ambiguity is the biggest problem in the film, however. Pete Perkins' (Jones) relationship with the titular character (Julio Cedillo) is left purposefully vague, but it's not successful in being enjoyably ambiguous (like, say, a mid-to-late period Kubrick picture). Perkins and Estrada's relationship is established in four scenes/sequences that don't effectively reveal how little to their relationship there really is, nor do they properly convey Perkins' extreme loneliness - the catalyst for the film's events after Estrada's first burial - so much as just feel underwritten and poor at expressing what we think should be a deeper and closer relationship, an error in storytelling by Jones the director. Indeed, the only way we can be sure that the two men's relationship was not a deep one and that sad irony propels the narrative is in the addition of a pathetic relationship between Perkins and Rachel (Melissa Leo), a waitress cheating on her husband with both Perkins and Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yokam). Perkins' overwhelming need to attach himself to somebody only becomes clear in this well-scripted and directed subplot. At some point, though, it feels that this subplot could have been omitted and the somewhat bulky story more streamlined if the main relationship was developed enough to not need thematically related sequences to bring it into focus.

Overall, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada isn't a bad film, but it's not a particularly good one, either. If only Arriaga and Jones had paid more attention to developing the central relationship than to cutting up the narrative, and Menges had tried a little harder with the camera, this film might even have been a great one.

Miyazaki Blogathon

So, for all of you that have websites or blogs out there, a new phenomenon has hit amongst online film critics with blogs: blogathons. One of these sites calls out a topic and a day, and anyone who wants to posts an essay on the subject, fans of the subject as well as people who dislike them.

So far, there have been blogathons for Showgirls, Robert Altman, Code Unknown, Abel Ferrera, Angie Dickinson (meow!), and just today, Michelle Pfeiffer (http://filmexperience.blogspot.com/2006/04/pfeiffer-forever.html).

Next up is a blogathon for Hayao Miyazaki, the anime director for those of us who don't like anime (myself included), coordinated by Quiet Bubble between 12 and 14 May. The introduction for this can be found here: http://quietbubble.typepad.com/quiet_bubble/2006/04/announcing_the_.html

So, whatever you may feel about Miyazaki or his work, if you have a blog or a full-on site, pull together an essay and post it sometime during the blogathon. If you decide to do one, send me a link to it; I am interested in checking out what others think about the man and his career.

kyle

Notorious

1946
RKO Radio Pictures
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Length: 101 min.
Country: USA
Format: DVD
Date Viewed: 16 April, 2006

Francois Truffaut considered Notorious to be "the single work that provides the fullest representation of Hitchcock’s art" (http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=137&eid=152§ion=essay). I concur in full.

All of the standard Hitchcockian devices appear in this film: the beautiful blonde leading lady, the dashing male lead, the dark comedy, the MacGuffin, the inventive cinematography, the careful building of suspense with little or no action, his cameo quietly tucked into the film. It's all very well done, especially the flashy (by today's standards, even) and fun photography by Ted Tetzlaff - his last and best known film as cinematographer.

And yet, Notorious feels a bit underwhelming by the time it's over. Everything we've come to know and love about Hitch's body of work is present and accounted for, but the story doesn't strike a terribly strong chord. The biggest issue is the highly mechanical feeling to the chain of events in the film's narrative through-line. Instead of feeling brief and shorn of fat (and it is on the whole), Ben Hecht's script ends up feeling like it was hurriedly written with little care outside of plugging controversial topics (Nazis on the run and uranium) into a formulaic structure. As a result, the film is an especially light slice of Hitch's proverbial cake. A delicious slice of cake, but a very light one nonetheless.

L'Enfant

2005
Les Film du Fleuve
Directed by: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardienne
Length: 100 min.
Country: Belgium/France
Format: 35mm
Date Viewed: 13 April, 2006

Seattle can be a frustrating town when it comes to foreign films. Mediocre or bad movies like Kung Fu Hustle or A Tale of Two Sisters can get mutli-week runs, but real films, like This Charming Girl, The Best of Youth or the recent L'Enfant, either can't get distribution or get a quiet, blink-and-you-miss-it one week run at one of our wildly overpriced Landmark cinemas.

L'Enfant follows the Dardienne brothers' mind-blowing work, The Son, and is a strong film, if not as instantly satisfying as its predecessor. L'Enfant takes a little time to unfold, and is slow, though not to the point of being boring. The cinematography sticks to the same style as The Son, and is used to great effect in both (though it works better in the earlier film because the intensity of the camera work matches the intensity inside Olivier).

The story is a fascinating one, and the main character, Bruno (Jeremie Renier), is one of the most interesting characters in recent memory. The child referred to in the title every bit as much as his son, Bruno is an amoral man-child living hand-to-mouth in a bleak, harsh Belgian industrial town, eschewing any job ("only fuckers work," he retorts) or responsibility that might come his way, and all too ready to sell his new son in the same manner that he sells his hat early in the film. He does this thinking, with all seriousness and innocence, that him and his girlfriend will have another baby, but now they have a lot of money to spend (most likely within the next couple of days on new jackets and convertible rentals). It's hard to think of another film with a main character who commits this many shocking acts and yet is not a "bad" person. It's harder to think of a film that could pull of this main character as skillfully as the Dardiennes do.

Apparently, the film serves largely as a religious parable, but any religious references were lost on this young atheistically leaning reviewer. The main theme, which was thankfully easier to pick up on, is the first spark of responsibility in young men (making this a good double feature with You Can Count on Me); the time when a man realizes that his actions can affect others in negative ways (notice his confusion when his girlfriend, Sonia, faints after learning the fate of their baby) and that he must be held accountable for said actions. This spark comes to Bruno in the last shot of the film. [Minor Spoiler] Before this, he acts so selfishly so often, that when the spark hits him and Sonia forgives him, we still think that she is making a huge mistake on this guy even though he has made an important step towards redemption. We can't help but question whether he will take this spark and build on it to become a more responsible man, or if he will reject it and commit more stupid acts that Sonia will have to pay for (shades of Kenji Mizoguchi's works). The amazing ending is simultaneously and strangely depressing, frustrating and hopeful.

Do the Right Thing

1989
Universal City Studios
Director: Spike Lee
Length: 120 min.
Country: USA
Format: DVD
Date Viewed: 13 April, 2006

The people who confused Paul Haggis' Crash for a thought-provoking treatise on racism are in dire need of seeing Do the Right Thing, a serious and deep look at the continually important topic.

Hearing others' viewpoints on the film, ambiguous almost to a fault, is telling of how off the mark some audiences are to the film's message. Most (white) people who see the film, and this goes for myself the first time I saw Do the Right Thing years ago, seem to not notice that white/Latino cops murder a young black man, but certainly do notice that a black man throws a trash can through the window of a white-owned business leading to the destruction of said business. Most white audiences seem to lament the destruction of (white) property, but not the loss of (black) life.

[Spoiler Alert]
Interesting, too, that most white audiences seem to instinctively side with Sal above anyone else, including Mookie. They can accept that Sal would destroy Radio Raheem's stereo with a baseball bat after calling him a Nigger, but they cannot at all accept that Mookie, a close friend of the now murdered Raheem and the still living Sal, would throw a trash can into Sal's pizzeria as a direct response to the racist murder.

But all of these acts are the direct result of poor communication set up early in the film, and of subsequent venting of suppressed racist views and of miscommunications on all sides on the neighborhood throughout the second act. In the end, nobody save Da Mayor, played by the excellent as always Ossie Davis, did the right thing. In fact, Da Mayor is the perhaps only reason that Sal and his sons remained alive through the ordeal, giving the film one of its glimmers of hope in the promotion of level-headed, colorblind and non-violent persons who will work to save others about to be affected in times of violence.
[Spoiler Alert Over]

The heavy ambiguity of the film mainly comes in the contrast of violent and non-violent methods of self-defense. Lee, in the Cannes press conference supplement on the film's outstanding 2-disc Criterion DVD, says that he believes the violent self-defense of Malcolm X's teachings, but doesn't necessarily discount the non-violence preached by Martin Luther King, Jr. The two quotes at the end of the film that serve to put this conflict into words, whose purpose seemed fairly evident in explaining that there are multiple answers to all situations and that perhaps both are necessary for true change, seemed to confuse even the intellectual critics at Cannes, not to mention the American public. A couple of critics during the press conference made reference to the quotes, and seem to think that they gave an explicit call-to-arms, especially towards the black youth one critic was sure would terrorize New York with racially-charged violence later that summer as a result of Do the Right Thing's theatrical release.

But this heavy ambiguity, originally considered by me to be a flaw, actually seems like a positive aspect upon further reflection. Any mainstream white audience member who sees this film needs to see the realities of lower-class urban life, and that violence is sometimes the only recourse that an oppressed people have. We can see this in the Watts riots of the 60s, for instance, or more recently in the Paris riots last fall, for two examples. White suburban audiences (of which I belonged until a couple years ago) will no doubt be unable to comprehend urban unrest and the necessity of violence where non-violence quite simply doesn't work. This audience can use this film to begin to understand the reality of violence in times of social unrest. It is frustrating that this audience seems to have completely missed the lesson. So long as people really work to think deep about the reasons why everyone in the film acts as they do (and use the supplements of the Criterion DVD for further analysis), the ambiguity should not be as huge an issue as it has become.

Aside from this, the film on the whole is a outstanding achievement of acting, cinematography, editing and screenwriting. Lee was in complete control of his location shoot, and the film's beautiful woven tapestry reveals this truth in its fluid movement around the diverse neighborhood, always hinting at the inevitable third act conflict and at the economic and social realities of low-income urban neighborhoods.

The film stands in stark contrast with Crash's remarkably incompetent technical aspect and its contrived and mechanical character interactions that many people mistook for realism. Do the Right Thing fits Chikimatsu's definition of art as fitting between the real and the unreal, though its high stylization paradoxically allows the real-world situations at its core to stand-out more vividly than if Lee went for cinema verite; Crash spiraled far into the unreal for it to be anything but useless. It's nice that we have at least one film that adequately looks beyond the non-revelation that we (and the cops!) are all racist to some degree.

Update 2

OK, so the new website did not pan out as expected. I am still planning on changing to a new site, but this will be a more long term change. If you or someone you know is interested in creating from scratch a new film review website for me, please contact me so we can discuss particulars.

k

Dark City

1998
Dark City Productions
Director: Alex Proyas
Length: 100 min.
Country: Australia/USA
Format: DVD
Date Viewed; 10 April, 2006

Alex Proyas owes a huge debt to European sci-fi of the 90s, and the films of Jeunet and Caro in particular, for his Dark City, which in turn is owed a huge debt by the Wachowski's for their The Matrix, which took so much from Proyas' sci-fi noir that it's almost surprising Proyas didn't sic attack lawyers on the brothers.

The world that Proyas creates is breathtakingly beautiful in its bleak, near-Dystopian look, and indeed the film's style is its main strongpoint. The timeless look of the film and the costumes help bolster the visuals, and reinforces my view that men wearing suits and fedoras all the time, like William Hurt's character, always looks incredibly cool (just you wait until I can afford a suit). The use of miniatures and CGI are almost always perfectly blended, and Dark City is, until the climactic showdown when the effects overpower the characters and drama and become laughably poor, one of the best examples of heavy CGI done right.

And yet, the film is only mediocre at best. The film looks very cool and plays with some interesting ideas, but the film completely fails to create an emotional connection with us, the only way the film could have truly succeeded. Proyas tries to have us buy into the burgeoning love between John (Rufus Sewell) and Emma (Jennifer Connelly), but between lackluster performances by Sewell and Connelly and only a couple of scenes between them anyways, it is hard for us to really care much. As a minor sideplot it might not matter as much, but Proyas tries to make this a major storyline and the emotional center of the story. It is surprising, then, that it is so underwritten and poorly cast (the other actors in the film do a great job, however).

The main storyline suffers from a similar problem of being underwritten. The ideas come through long, breathless monologues - dull to listen to and a little overwhelming in their very high info-per-minute rates. You can tell that Proyas cared about the themes, but paradoxically wanted them rushed through so he could get back to the (stunning) visuals. As a result, the film is beautiful but empty. There's nothing for us to really latch onto except the style, and that's simply not enough for a film that wants us to feel something.

Apparently, an early cut of the film slowed the pace down quite a bit, developed the story and themes less hurriedly, and omitted the opening voice-over that tells a little too much about the set-up. This may have improved the film, and will hopefully be a part of the director's cut which is slated to have a DVD release later this year.

In it's current form, I can only recommend it for the pretty pictures, but don't expect any sort of emotional depth or well-developed story.

Our Daily Bread

1934
Viking Productions
Director: King Vidor
Length: 75 min.
Country: USA
Format: VHS
Date Viewed: 10 April, 2006

Inspired by the hardships of the Great Depression and the new collective farms that were growing in the Heartland as a result, King Vidor revisited the characters John and Mary Sims from his brilliant film, The Crowd, and puts them to work on one of these farms in his independently produced pseudo-sequel, Our Daily Bread. This powerful film must have been quite inspirational upon its release, and would probably be an inspiration if we found ourselves in another Great Depression today.

It's power comes from a couple of factors. First, the film is very brief. It starts, makes its points very quickly and precisely, and ends; no point is hammed to death and there is no fat on the film. Second, the ideas and themes are incredibly clear, so clear that the movie could be watched with the sound off and we would still be able to understand them. This is helped by the fact that Vidor was an amazing visualist (see also: The Crowd). Vidor's style here is a little more subdued, but the sequence of the men digging the canal to save the farm is a masterpiece in its combination of story, picture, editing and sound.

[Minor Spoiler Alert] There is one flaw to the film, though, a storyline that should have been fleshed out. Sally, the very symbol of boorish Capitalism, makes a play for John and wins his affection; indeed he begins to run off with her at the end of the second act. This whole sequence is incredibly rushed and terribly undernourished, betraying it's importance to the story as a whole. It's importance comes in that it tests John's resolve towards staying with the Collective lifestyle as opposed to reentering the Capitalist system which impoverished him in the first place. And yet, in one scene, they take a walk together, and the next, he's running off with her. It's a hurried plot device that needed a little bit more to make his character's transition much clearer (why is he so eager to leave his wife for this obnoxious shrew?), but of course, not so much that the film would have been bogged down in the subplot. [Spoiler Alert Over]

The rest of the film overcomes this flaw, however, and on the whole, Our Daily Bread is a rather solid film, one that would make a good double-feature with its predecessor, The Crowd.

Animal House

1978
Universal City Studios
Director: John Landis
Length: 109 min.
Country: USA
Format: Video
Date Viewed: 6 April, 2006

Animal House is another example of mysteriously overrated '70s cinema. Sure the film has some funny jokes in it, and it can be appreciated for, if not inventing, than certainly popularizing and setting the trend an entire subgenre of comedy - the slobs versus the snobs picture. But when it's all boiled down, it's just another half-baked gross-out comedy that can only succeed with rather low expectations from the audience along with the eager anticipation of lots of bare breasts.

Director John Landis would be much more successful later, following up Animal House with a great one-two punch of The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London. And when it comes to dumb, zany comedies, Landis didn't get better than with Spies Like Us, a great guilty pleasure and a comedy much more satisfying than Animal House.

For low-brow entertainment, you could do worse than Animal House, but you could do quite a bit better, too.

Brick

2006
Brick Productions
Director: Rian Johnson
Length: 110 min.
Country: USA
Format: 35mm
Date Viewed: 7 April, 2006

Rian Johnson, with his debut film, Brick, joins Darren Aronofsky and Shane Carruth in a group that, over the last few years, has been bringing back the spirit of '70s cinema by making low-budget, inventive and intelligent films with a visual style reminiscent of their predecessors - Scorsese, Carpenter, Romero, to name a few. With, Brick, the visuals owe a huge debt to the '70s, but the structure and dialogue, of course, come straight from the '40s and '50s, transplanting this era's film noir trappings onto a modern day Southern California high school.

The experiment had so many ways to go wrong, and in a couple small areas it does, but on the whole it's a huge success. As for its flaws, they include inconsistent cinematography, with a handful of shots out of step with the rest of the film which call too much attention to the framing, though these aren't necessarily jarring enough to be more than a quibble.

The other and much bigger flaw is in the sound mix, presenting the dialogue in a very muddy and muted fashion - strange in light of the fact that the rest of the soundtrack is quite clear. This is more of a problem than usual for three reasons: the dialogue is spoken extremely quickly, the plot is extremely complex and we learn the majority of it through the dialogue, and third, the dialogue is peppered with made-up slang to sound like a '40s or '50s film noir but is often vague enough to be unclear as to its meaning (at some point, I wanted a glossary). All of these are heavily hampered by the terrible dialogue tracks on the sound mix. If this is not fixed for the eventual DVD release, it is the hope that it will at least come with English captions. Luckily, it is still quite possible to understand the main plot, but the details are what makes the film especially fascinating, and many of the interesting details are found in this somewhat unclear dialogue.

Aside from these two issues, the film is very well made, and is one of the better modern noirs (for the best of them, see the original Insomnia, and not the Pacino crapfest). The performances are by and large outstanding, the look of the film is dark and intoxicating and the film-noir transition from crooks and cops to students and vice principals is perfect.

But the film mainly works so well because it avoids the pitfall of campiness. Johnson and his actors made the perfect choice in playing the story and characters straight. Had they included a sense of jokiness to the proceedings, even the slightest wink to the audience that they were just having some fun with some quaint dialogue, the entire film would have been a lesser work - another tedious update of older source materials created with smarm instead of a true love for said sources. Film noir is a tricky sell these days; revival screening audiences generally end up laughing at how cheap the productions were, or how "cutely antiquated" the style is. It seems like there aren't many people out there anymore who truly love the genre, and it's refreshing to see that Johnson and his cast and crew treated the genre with the respect it deserves.

Rian Johnson has created a very strong film his first time out, and it will be exciting to see what comes next from the young director.

Sansho the Bailiff

Sansho Dayu
1954
Daiei
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Length: 125 min.
Country: Japan
Format: VHS
Date Viewed: 5 April, 2006

Sansho the Bailiff is another outstanding personal film by Kenji Mizoguchi. His standard theme of the sins of the father being suffered by his wife and children is readily apparent here, as well as his other recurring theme of citizens being consumed and destroyed or driven to apathy by warfare.

The first theme appears time and again in the director's films as he was (understandably) never able to get over the sale of his sister by their father when they were children. Adding this element to his films was not only cathartic, but also an attempt to warn other men not to commit similar unconscionable acts against the family.

The second theme appeared often as a comment on his own anti-war feelings during the Pacific War. By the mid-fifties when Sansho the Bailiff was released, this point was seemingly moot in the wake of Japan's new constitution neutering any militaristic ability and the "awakening" of its citizens from the pro-war hysteria whipped up the country's military leaders during the war, but it was still a necessary and effective theme.

Both themes are masterfully inserted into a script of high tragedy, encapsulating situations that were still largely fresh in the Japanese post-war experience. More importantly, it mirrored most accurately the situations of Japan's Pacific War victims, most notably China and Korea, where the largest numbers of slave laborers and forced-prostitutes came from - a connection most likely unnoticed then and now by the majority of the Japanese audience, but really, audiences anywhere outside of China and Korea. Knowing his strong anti-war sentiment (he even "sabotaged" his own The Loyal 47 Ronin to deny his military backers' satisfaction), it can be guessed that Mizoguchi created Sansho the Bailiff with this connection on purpose.

But the film is all too eerily similar to current wars around the world, especially in the various Africa conflicts, and in the war in Iraq as well, revealing our own continued ignorance or apathy towards the film's timeless message against the horrors of war. There are a handful of world leaders that need to have this film screened for them. You should watch it, too, though, for no other reason than it being an extremely well-made film. Sansho the Bailiff is highly recommended.

Minbo

Minbo no Onna
1992
Izumi Films
Director: Juzo Itami
Length: 123 min.
Country: Japan
Format: VHS
Date Viewed: 2 April, 2006

Juzo Itami's Minbo is the classic underdog story, this time set in an upscale Tokyo hotel. The underdogs are two employees picked largely at random by hotel executives to push out the yakuza (Japanese mafia), who have moved in and are bilking the hotel and its employees for millions. The underdogs' add to their corner Mahiru (the fabulous Nobuko Miyamoto), a feisty extortion attorney with plenty of anti-yakuza experience under her belt, as the trainer/mentor character. This comedy breaks no new ground, but is a pleasant and often very funny take on the archetypal story.

The only thing that puts a damper on the proceedings is that it runs too long by twenty or thirty minutes, hammering home its point again and again and again, first in a comedic manner and eventually turning to dramatic and suspenseful examples of extortionary measures and how to stop them. Though it is successfully tense in the final showdown, the movie works best when it stays with its funny side, and is hilarious when it does so.

The film never suffers too terribly from flaw, but it is enough to keep the director's Tampopo in its spot at the pinnacle of the director's filmography. Still, Minbo is worth a rental. It's a little harder to find, but worth the trouble.

Bad News Bears

2005
Paramount Pictures
Director: Richard Linklater
Length: 113 min.
Country: USA
Format: DVD
Date Viewed: 1 April, 2006

Essentially a companion piece to Linklater's own School of Rock, Bad News Bears remakes the well-known kiddie baseball movie of the same name with a fair amount of success. The jokes are piled on thick and fast and with a slant towards poop jokes, but truly funny lines find their way into the proceedings surprisingly often (the "German chick" line nearly had me on the floor). Thornton ambles through the role, seemingly enjoying himself and delivering the endless onslaught of jokes in a casual and naturalistic manner. The Bears are played by child actors with very little acting experience - some have not been in a movie before or since - and it shows. But they do decent enough work for the movie, and indeed it helps in giving a rather genuine feeling of outsidership and uneasiness to their characters. The movie isn't infused with much flair or excitement and the story is nothing new, but it's competently made and moves along at a brisk pace while thankfully avoiding MTV-style editing. Bad News Bears certainly isn't an award winner, but you can find many worse ways to spend two hours on a rainy day.

Sherlock, Jr.

1924
Metro Pictures Corp.
Director: Buster Keaton
Length: 44 min.
Country: USA
Format: 35mm
Date Viewed: 30 March, 2006

Though I recognize Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman's The General as Keaton's best film, Sherlock, Jr. has become my new favorite of his works.

The General has a simple yet effective story and a strong elliptical two-act screenplay with a bevy of excellent gags working for the story as opposed to existing for their own sake, and is easily one of the grand masterpieces of cinema.

Sherlock, Jr. largely eschews a story (two men's fight over a girl and a stolen watch seems to come up as most important, though it disappears for the majority of the film), and is by and large a collection of generally unconnected stunts and gags. Don't misunderstand, though; these stunts and gags are brilliant. The film is consistently and simultaneously hilarious and white-knuckle inducing, most notably during the ride on the motorcycle handlebars. At least one of the stunts is so perfect that it seems completely inexplicable in its execution - none of my friends and I who watched the film together can figure out exactly how he did the jump through the "woman." The sequence when Keaton jumps into the theater screen is another example of surprising technical perfection; the film is already 82 years old and yet I can't think of another film that pulls off such convincing fakery.

It may lack a story that holds this short film together, but it matters little when its so damn genius in all other respects. If you haven't seen this or The General, do yourself a favor and have a Buster Keaton night; these films are essential.

Bride of Frankenstein

1935
Universal Pictures
Director: James Whale
Length: 75 min.
Country: USA
Format: DVD
Date Viewed: 26 March, 2006

James Whale, for the follow-up to his 1931 Frankenstein decided to go for dark comedy as opposed to straight, serious drama and scares. It turned out just as poorly as the original.

The storyline is just as silly as its predecessor's and begins to feel overlong at 75 minutes. The monster somehow remained alive after being trapped under a wooden beam on the top floor of a windmill set ablaze and collapsed, and begins to wander the countryside, being misunderstood as always.

Meanwhile, Dr. Frankenstein gets an offer to help another fellow mad scientist out on a similar project (they were working together but separately all along, it turns out), and jumps on it, once again leaving his bride-to-be in the dust. [Spoiler Alert] By the end, the young doctor is able to escape responsibility the second time 'round in another forced and inappropriate happy ending, weakening this film in the exact same way the first one was weakened (you can actually see that the downer ending was filmed and initially included - that's Dr. Frankenstein against the wall in the exploding bell tower). [End Spoiler Alert]

The film also fails at its attempts at comedy, which in this film is either unfunny in its extreme over-the-top nature, or off-putting (sure do love those necrophilia jokes, or wait, no, I don't). The film adds the nails-on-chalkboard character of Minnie, servant to the Frankensteins, played by Una O'Connor to a volume of 11 but given no actually funny lines to work with. I caught my eyes rolling involuntarily whenever she would reappear throughout the film (she's in many scenes - far too many). The scene in which Dr. Pretorious reveals his miniature humans is another particularly eye-rolling and very overlong (it went even longer in an early cut) exercise in unfunny "comedy," though the special effects were quite good, which leads us to ways in which the film works.

Karloff again gives a great performance as the monster - though the decision to have him talk was a giant mistake - and his sweetly homoerotic relationship with the blind hermit is perhaps the only sequence that can be considered an overall success, though it veers a little too far into camp at times. The special effects are top-notch throughout, and the production design (they finally figured out how to smooth out the backdrops) and cinematography are as great as they were in the first film and once again create a wonderfully creepy atmosphere.

But again, as strong as these aspects are, they can't overcome the many weaknesses, and, like its predecessor, I cannot recommend Bride of Frankenstein.

Spirit of the Beehive

El Esparitu de la Colmena
1973
Elias Querejeta Producciones Cinematograficas S.L.
Director: Victor Erice
Length: 97 min.
Country: Spain
Format: 35mm
Date Viewed: 26 March, 2006

James Whale's Frankenstein comes to a rural Spanish farming community and changes the life of seven year-old Ana in Victor Erice's debut film, Spirit of the Beehive. The screening of the famous horror film leads to a series of events that culminate in the ending of the young girl's innocence: she learns that the adult world is a scary place, filled with people who lie and people who are not what they seem, that death is inevitable and perhaps most importantly, that monsters do not exist.

This is all slowly revealed throughout the course of the film, which takes its time with very long yet beautiful shots of nature, the father's beehives and the large and eerily empty house that Ana and her family live in. But these shots don't quite reach the level of poetry or include the level of meaning that comes with similar shots in, say, a Terrence Malick film. After a while, and though they look pretty, these shots seem to function more as padding than meaningful atmosphere.

Spirit of the Beehive is a very good film, though, if for nothing more than the terrific performance by Ana Torrent, the greatest performance by a child actor I have seen to date. But the story and the beauty of the film developed through the cinematography and editing, aside from the latter's eventual narrative unimportance, are also good reasons to see it. The film's complex symbolism makes the story very difficult to understand (I'm sure there are deeper meanings I've missed), but it is somewhat easy to pick out the main ideas, and it is very refreshing that Erice chose not to insult our intelligence in the creation of his debut.

Frankenstein

1931
Universal Pictures
Director: James Whale
Length: 69 min.
Country: USA
Format: DVD
Date Viewed: 26 March, 2006

Here is an opening disclaimer to potential annoybots. I know what movies were like 1931, and I know full well how the techniques, standards and technology differed in this era from what we have now. I know that I shouldn't expect car chases in Gone With the Wind (thanks for the heads up, man in video store!), and that All Quiet on the Western Front will not feature Saving Private Ryan-style battle realism (as well as knowing the former war film is superior on all counts to the latter dummy moneymaker). So, before I get yet another lecture on how I "don't understand that movies were different in the past," please understand that I don't dislike James Whale's Frankenstein because I'm some dumb 25 year-old expecting a horror film like The Thing; I dislike Frankenstein because it's not a very good film for any time period.

One of my major complaints revolves around the script. The film works far too often on credibility-destroying coincidences and plot holes, such as the monster just happening to enter Elizabeth's room through the window, the villagers somehow finding Dr. Waldman's body in the bell tower, and Maria's father somehow knowing how his daughter died, to name a couple. These are especially distracting and help weaken the film more than they would in most other horror films because Whale takes everything so incredibly seriously and yet is poorly written at the same time. In a film that's a little more fun, plot holes are somewhat inconsequential, but here, with a pretentious introduction and a sense that the filmmakers were dealing with an important moral lesson, the writing must be taut to back it all up. Francis Edward Faragoh and Garrett Fort's script, on this point, does not deliver.

[Spoiler Alert]
The tacked-on ending is another major flaw despite its brief length. My problem with it is two-fold, the first being the fact that the film's ego-mad producer and then-President of Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle, Jr. (not only is his name dropped in the aforementioned introduction, it appears three times on the film's title card alone!), added the intro to the film to warn of us how dark and scary the film will be, but then cops out and gives us hastily created (apparently after principal photography) and poorly written happy ending in which the mad doctor somehow survives his fall off the windmill and will soon be married as initially planned. Looking through the lens of a film that claims to bring up dark subject matter and discuss it in an adult-like fashion, the ending is insulting to the audience. My second issue with ending is how weak it is in a storytelling sense. For such a moralistic tale, it only makes sense that the doctor should die in the end, be as one character says, "destroyed by his creation." Sure, bad guys get away with crimes all the time in real life, but this type of story demands a certain type of resolution, and it's simply bad storytelling to end Frankenstein with a "happily-ever after" conclusion.
[End Spoiler Alert]

My other problem with the film is how sloppy the production was. For as much effort as the crew put into art design, you think they'd make sure the set backdrop during the climactic chase across the mountain would be smoothed out, so major, distracting wrinkles wouldn't appear all the way down it. Further, the crew's complete disregard for continuity was astounding. From cut to cut the actors are standing and looking in completely different places and directions throughout the film. This gives a feeling that the production was rushed and that little overall care was put into its creation. No other film from this period that I've seen suffers nearly as bad or at all from this sloppiness, so I know it's not symptomatic of this era, just an inferior crew - strange for a major studio picture.

The film does some things right, though. Karloff's performance as the monster is amazing, and though all his movements consist of shuffling and his dialogue of grunting, he expresses emotion better than any of the other actors in the film. He is deft at making the monster likeable and sympathetic, and is one of two reasons that the monster is so memorable.

The other major reason is the outstanding make-up design by Jack Pierce, beautiful in its grotesque nature. Pierce's work on the monster far outdoes make-up work on most modern horror films.

The film is also rightfully well-known for its sinister yet gorgeous atmosphere, the result of overall strong cinematography and production design (wrinkled backdrops notwithstanding), notably in the opening cemetery sequence and the scenes in the mad doctor's laboratory.

The mood of the film is fantastic, as is the monster. But the story and script, the ending, and the rushed feel to the film bring Frankenstein down just too much. This is by and large considered a horror classic, but I can't recommend it. If you want to see a good, older horror film, save your time and check out The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera, or Vampyr instead.

The Final Countdown

1980
Polyc International B.V.
Director: Don Taylor
Length: 105 min.
Country: USA
Format: DVD
Date Viewed: 24 March, 2006

How Don Taylor's The Final Countdown gained a sizable cult following is completely beyond me. The film has a great idea and a good cast and does everything possible to hinder both. Having a modern (for 1980) aircraft carrier loaded with top-of-the-line fighter jets get transported back to Hawaii on 6 December, 1941, with the ability to stop the attack on Pearl Harbor is a fantastic idea centered around a hugely provocative ethical quandary.

The ship also comes in contact with very important players in 1941, a downed Japanese pilot and a Senator who apparently in real life disappeared off the coast of Hawaii on that day, and has to decide how best to deal with these alterations to the space-time continuum. But the film's central idea and these characters, all with outstanding potential for great drama, are lost in the script by four(!) hack writers who apparently just didn't care about exploring any of the ethical implications they bring up; they are quickly written out of the film so that we can spend more time with endless masturbatory shots of fighter jets flying around the blue skies and of flight deck crews in action. It's nice that Taylor and the writers tried to insert Naval realism into the film, but someone forgot to tell him that it should not be the main focus of the film as opposed to mere detail.

Even the leads, Martin Sheen and Kirk Douglas, are woefully underwritten and given little overall screentime. Both men seem to know it, and give lackluster performances that betray their talent, clearly hoping the production will be over soon so they can collect their checks.

The cinematography is similarly poor, shot in Scope but framed like it was amateur night behind the camera, with every composition looking horribly rushed and all the actors placed in the middle of the frame.

All the makings for a great science-fiction drama are there, it just needed to be done right. Let's stop remaking foreign films that were fine the first time around and remake The Final Countdown, which is desperately begging to become a good film.

Vertigo

1958
Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Length: 129 min.
Country: USA
Format: 35mm
Date Viewed: 23 March, 2006

The obvious theme of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is obsession. But what is perhaps less clear is where this obsession stems from.

Scottie Ferguson's (Jimmy Stewart) obsession with Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak) is a reflection of Hitch's own obsession with Novak, and his other blonde leading ladies by extension. Scottie cruelly remolded Judy into Madeleine ("It can't matter to you!") to fit his intense and uncompromisable desires because of his overwhelming fixation on a specific female type, much in the way that Hitch did with his lead actresses throughout his career. It is here that Hitch breaks from creating films as "slices of cake" to revealing himself in what may be the only personal film in his oeuvre.

In this light, it may begin to make some sense that Stewart is often shown with a hazy gloss when he shares the screen, or at least a scene, with the blonde Novak, but not, it should be noted, her brunette incarnation. Here, Hitchcock is making explicit Ferguson's moral ambiguity and his uncertain intentions towards Madeleine and Judy; but perhaps the director is also blurring the distinction between Ferguson and himself, a strong reminder that the two have a major characteristic in common.

Of course, Novak is most always photographed with a high amount of gloss as well. But this was for purposes of glamour as opposed to the reasons for Stewart's glossing, whose actions are not being, and should not be, glamorized. These glossy shots, especially during the first time Ferguson shadows Madeleine, stand in sharp contrast with perfectly in-focus and crisp shots of buildings and trees, emphasizing that the world around these two rather destructive people is still in order.

That Hitchcock shoots Stewart using traditional glamorization technique for purposes entirely antithetical to their standard use, while putting it in contrast with its standard use for Novak as well as carefully inserting the jarringly clear and non-glossy shots of the real world in between the two, is fascinating, and is one of the reasons why the film is still bold and daring to this day.

Another reason, of course, is the beautiful-in-its-perfection elliptical story, written by Samuel A. Taylor, with almost perfect mirroring between the two halves.

The film's only real flaw is the dream sequence, which must have blown heads in '58, but now seems pretty silly (though Stewart's head falling down the empty grave admittedly still looks cool) and more than a little unnecessary.

But this is a minor quibble, and the film undoubtedly deserves its place as a film classic. Vertigo is essential viewing.

Every Man For Himself

Sauve qui peut (la vie)
1980
MK2 Productions
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Length: 87 min.
Format: 35mm
Date Viewed: 22 March, 2006

A note to directors: if you are going to include a character in your film that is obviously a stand-in for you, it's not a good idea for you to write him, and in turn reveal yourself, as a man who is keen on having sex with his teenage daughter. I guess this was supposed to be joke in reality, but I must have missed why it's funny, then. And the point of the entire film as well, for that matter. All I really got out of Every Man For Himself is that all people are stupid and mean. The prostitute is supposed to the sole redeeming character of the piece, and yet, it's not exactly clear why we are supposed to care for her. Nothing happens in the film, and the climax comes when one of the characters rents out an apartment - and is as exciting as it sounds. 90 minutes of shitty characters doing largely unexplained shitty things does not a good movie make. Here again, another pretentious waste of time courtesy of Jean-Luc Godard.

Stranger Than Paradise

1984
Cinesthesia Productions
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Length: 89 min.
Country: USA
Format: DVD
Date Viewed: 20 March, 2006

Stranger Than Paradise is one of the best debut films I've seen (I, as Cannes before me, count Permanent Vacation as a student film). Consisting entirely of single long-take shots bookended by three seconds of black frame, the film is a genius exercise in inaction. Precious little happens and little is said by any of the three leads, and yet, the film is never dull. The minimalist performances of the leads are well done while non-actor Cecillia Stark (Aunt Lotte) steals the show whenever she appears. Some may be put off by the black-and white photography and slow pace, but it only adds to the film's marvelous realism. Jarmusch would top himself with Down By Law two years later, but this remains one of the jewels in the director's crown. Highly recommended.

Escape From New York

1981
Avco-Embassy Productions
Director: John Carpenter
Length: 99 min.
Country: USA
Format: DVD
Date Viewed: 20 March, 2006

Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken is another one of the great anti-heroes in cinema history. Russell and director Carpenter (near the height of his peak in 1981) both believe that some men truly are islands, and this shared notion led to creation and perfection of the Plissken character. He wanders around a gorgeously dystopian New York (which looks amazing, even on a $5-6 million budget), not giving a fuck about anyone or anything unless it helps him find the President and get the microscopic explosives neutralized (even to the point of allowing-through-inaction a rape to happen in a controversial but altogether necessary scene).

This keeps Plissken and the film moving at all costs, which leads to the film's one major flaw of not fully developing the fascinating world that was created. We only get fragments of life inside the prison which leave us begging for more, but not necessarily in the good sense of the phrase.

But regardless, there's much here to like: the fine performances, the interesting politics of the script, the amazing Joe Alves production design, the typically outstanding cinematography from Dean Cundy, the perfect-for-the-film Carpenter score, and the excellent analog special effects.

If you're a fan of dystopian nightmares like I am, this film is definitely for you.

Band of Outsiders

Bande a Part
1964
Anouchka Films
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Length: 97 min.
Country: France
Format: 35mm
Date Viewed: 19 March, 2006

Band of Outsiders is not as good as Godard's brilliant Masculine, Feminine, but it is the only other Godard film I think is any good (I have seen six, and part of a seventh, for the record).

There are many reasons to love this film: its playful attitude, Anna Karina, the muted yet beautiful cinematography by Raoul Coutard, the entire cafe/dance sequence, Anna Karina, the Louvre scene, the hilarious gags, the offbeat narration (provided by the director himself), and of course, Anna Karina.

But the reason the film is not as good as Masculine, Feminine is because Godard and company apparently had to pad the film out to a contractually obligatory 90 minute run-time, and these scenes are not hard to pick out. These various scenes (such as Anna Karina running from her house to the factory, and the guys reading the newspaper) are dull and go nowhere, detracting from the overall quality of the film.

The film as a whole is still incredibly enjoyable, though, and is strongly recommended.

Week End

1967
Cinecidi
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Length: 105 min.
Country: France
Format: 35mm
Date Viewed: 18 March, 2006

Some critics point to Week End as the turning point in Jean-Luc Godard's career: the film where he turned his back on making "Hollywood-esque" films and delved deep into art and theory. I say he did this one-year earlier with his brilliant Masculine, Feminine (one of only two Godard films I like - the other being Band of Outsiders), but that's a judgement call.

It is interesting that Masculine, Feminine works so well in its lack of form and heavy politicalization while being paradoxically made purposefully uninteresting and yet being endlessly fascinating. It is more interesting in contrast with Weekend, which shares its predecessor's lack of form and heavy politicization, but works hard to make the events contained within exciting and entertaining. It largely fails.

There are some funny moments (especially Jean-Pierre Leaud's cameo), and some interesting ideas, but overall, the film is complete mess of pretension and dull diatribes that go nowhere. Godard has much to say, but, much like Michael Moore, can't focus his ideas and gives us a uselessly fractured film. By the end, it's hard to know what's happening, but by then, it's near impossible to care. All we know is we've gotten an onslaught of theories and politics over 105 dreadfully long minutes, dressed up whore-like with its garish outfit consisting of automobile accidents, guns, immolation, rape and cannibalism (it's the apocalypse, you see), every bit as off-putting as it sounds.

The film is critically acclaimed (there are no negative reviews for it on Rotten Tomatoes), but I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Histoire(s) du Cinema (Chapters 1a, b and 2a, b)

1989-1997
Gaumont
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Length: 270 minutes (for all eight parts)
Country: France
Format: DV
Date Viewed: 17 March, 2006

Jean-Luc Godard's experimental four-and-a-half hour Histoire(s) du Cinema is an eight part series made by the New Wave director for French television. Hated by the studio execs and rarely shown due to headache-inducing copyright issues, the film recently got a rare, full-length screening at the Northwest Film Forum.

As it turns out, though, I could only make it through 150 minutes (minus some for a little snooze), or four of eight parts, before I could handle no more (and the high number of walk-outs during the screening shows that I was not the only one). I must here admit a strong aversion to experimental cinema. I applaud that people are trying something new and working to expand the possibilities of the medium, but the experimental films I've seen all tend to be overwhelmingly pretentious and artistic for the sake of being artistic, which is incredibly off-putting. Histoire(s) du Cinema was no exception. Repeating pictures, film clips, banal narration and strange sound effects over and over and over again (for some 270 minutes) to create a form of formlessness does precious little to excite me.

Supposedly heavy on film theory, Godard parses out approximately one idea per chapter (but admittedly there may have been more in the unsubtitled text)- though sometimes he uses the same idea for multiple pieces - and is usually completely baseless and seemingly designed only to make Godard sound like a poetic intellect (see: Godard's theory on why films were largely black and white upon their invention). The only interesting idea I found during the 150 minutes I made it through was when Godard interspersed clips of hardcore pornography and clips of violence, especially from the Holocaust, in the background throughout the series - an unfortunately not explicitly discussed pairing commenting on the sexualized violence casually inserted into an uncomfortably large number of modern films.

Most critics heap a huge amount of praise for Histoire(s) du Cinema, raving about the style of the piece and the interesting ideas. I found the style and ideas to be little more than components of an egotistical exercise in creating "capital-A" Art.