simuland Reviews

Black and Tan (1929)

Only for Diehard Ellington Fans

[4 January 2001]

Practically plotless excuse to feature the music of Ellington, accompanied by Harlem dancers. Only for the most died-in-the-wool Ellington fans. Essentially a very primitive early music video of mainly historical interest. Ellington's recordings from that era abound, so that the film's main value lies in its serving as a visual document.

The sound is abysmal, the plot corny, and the dancing nothing to dance about. Many of the images are so murky and dim as to be unintelligible. The entire film consists essentially of 3 tableau set pieces, ornamented with some rough camera tricks, too arty by far. The central plot, the dancer's death, is unconvincing and shrilly melodramatic.

Of note is the derogatory racial stereotyping of the two characters who begin the film by showing up to repossess the Duke's piano. They are ridiculed for their illiteracy and for how easily they are dissuaded from their duties with a bribe of a bottle of hooch.

One Day in September (1999)

The Germans Bungled Everything

[30 December 2000]

(Kevin MacDonald, 1999, 92 min.) Documentary about assassination of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at 1972 Olympic games. Noteworthy for exclusive interview with only surviving terrorist, who is in hiding "somewhere in Africa." Composed of interviews with German authorities involved in the episode, TV clips, etc, and narrated by Michael Douglas.

Interestingly, East Germans colluded with the terrorists, showing them around the Olympic village prior to the operation. Truth stranger than fiction. The ineptitude of the West Germans is astounding. Imagine paunchy German cops, clad in athletic sweats, trying to pass themselves off as Olympic athletes, their automatic weapons in plain sight, positioning themselves to launch a "surprise" attack on the apartment in which the hostages are being held while their every move is being televised worldwide; it's only at the very last minute, when they realize the terrorists too are watching them on TV, that they call the raid off. This is the only attempt they make to storm the apartment building.

Even after an Israeli's bullet-ridden naked body has been tossed out a window down to the sidewalk below, the games continue; the International Olympic Committee refuses to stop them; athletes are sunning themselves within sight of the hostage standoff; and, of course, the media has descended like a horde of flies ready to feast on a carcass. Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, offers to send a trained anti-terrorist unit, but the Germans, who have no such attack force of their own, who are in disarray, disorganized, and frankly at a loss as to what to do, refuse.

The terrorists are taken to a nearby airport in helicopters to a waiting jet. German cops, who are stationed in the jet and disguised as a flight crewm at the very last second, just as the helicopters are about to land, chicken out and abandon their posts. The head of Mossad, who by now has joined the Germans at the airport, is incredulous at the lack of professionalism of the whole ambush; also, he accuses the Germans of taking the hostages out of the Olympic village just so the games can continue. Sharp shooters positioned at the airport are not in radio communication with the outside or among themselves, have no idea of how many terrorists there are, and end up shooting each other and killing one of the helicopter pilots who has broken free. The coup de grace, the vilest insult to injury, comes in the aftermath of this debacle: Three Palestinian terrorists survive the gun battle at the airport and are taken into custody. Within days a nearly empty German airliner bound from Beirut to Frankfurt is hijacked by Arab terrorists who demand and obtain the release of the 3 terrorists in custody. One of these 3 later recounts how the whole thing was a setup: the German government colluded with the Arabs to stage the hijacking simply to rid themselves of the captured terrorists and to avoid the embarrassment of a trial.

The Decalogue: Dekalog, dziewiec (1989) Season 1, Episode 9

Moribund Melodramatic Over-reaction

[29 December 2000]

Surgeon reacts to a diagnosis of impotence as if it were a terminal illness, urging his wife to take a lover and plunging into suicidal depression. His wife, however, is willing to live with the diagnosis and swears to a love above and beyond sex, which he rejects, at first; the movie is about his struggling with and final acceptance of this Platonic ideal. Jealousy leads him to spy on and covet his own wife, ergo the commandment. But this only humiliates him further. In a parallel, somewhat superfluous plot, a young female patient asks his advice about a risky operation which would enable her to sing, her life's dream. Both face the same dilemma of whether or not to accept a physical limitation which deprives them of their life's passion. Unlike him, the young woman is willing to live with her disease and forego singing. He changes her mind.

I thought the surgeon and the film, both, over-reacted to the diagnosis, assigned too much weight to it. The melodramatic lack of perspective makes the movie as moribund as its subject matter. Of course, it's amply color coded; the passing stranger in white rides by again; and, again, there's lapse of credibility: the surgeon shares a cigarette with the patient who is supposed to have a disease so debilitating as to prevent her from singing--this makes no sense. But, once again, K. knows how to make the final scene count, canceling earlier shortcomings, at least for a moment.

Overwrought arty soap opera.

By this stage of the series one is right to be more than a little weary and wary of having the same heart strings tugged on to play the same melancholy tune.

The Decalogue: Dekalog, osiem (1989) Season 1, Episode 8

Movie Itself Bears False Witness

[29 December 2000]

American Jewish Holocaust survivor returns to Poland to confront the woman who refused to save her from the Nazi's by refusing to falsify her Baptism papers when she was 6 (same age as the little girl of VII). This issue of the long-buried, unresolved/unresolvable hatred of the victim and guilt of the tormentor was much more effectively dramatized by the movie Death and the Maiden. As in VII, so much of the conflict takes place in the past, that the film ends up overly talky, too chatty. As usual, color coding intrudes.

Two major problems make the movie specious, morally duplicitous. One, the survivor's physical features, her thick lips, big nose, dark eyes, and coarse black hair, conform exactly to the derisive stereotype of the Jew used in myriad anti-Semitic cartoons dating from the 19th century through the 3rd Reich. It's like casting an African-American who looks just like a cartoon Sambo. Her homeliness stands in marked contrast to the attractiveness of each and every other female in the series. One can only wonder to what degree this was unintentional, unconscious, reflecting an accepted assumed bigotry.

Second, just like the contortionist in the park (was he meant to mock the film?), K. bends over backward to exonerate the Pole from guilt. The plot twist of her having received word in advance that the SS was sending out children in need of Baptism papers as decoys is just too convenient (again, that problem of credibility). Her belonging to the Polish underground is even harder to swallow, even more unlikely. What Polish underground? That must have been a really exclusive minority. There was no organized effort by any Polish underground to save Jews; whatever Jews happened to be rescued were done so by individuals acting on their own. To claim otherwise, as K. does, is to lie. Widespread deep-seated Polish anti-Semitism both predated and survived the Nazi invasion; Poles killed Jews even after the Nazi's retreated. To this day they make life insufferable for the scarce Jews who remain in their country. (I have this directly from a Jewish colleague who grew up in and fled modern Communist Poland.)

The bonding between victim and tormenter seems a hollow contrivance to evade responsibility. This is the only episode with a pat ending. In fact, it casts all those that preceded in a dubious light. It itself bears false witness.

The Decalogue: Dekalog, siedem (1989) Season 1, Episode 7

Another Freudian Forray into Child-Parent Relationship

[29 December 2000]

Custody battle between 22 year-old mother and her own mother over daughter born to the former when she was just 16. Thus, touches on overweening parental possessiveness alluded to in IV, VI and VIII. Very modest in scope, using few actors, a minimum of sets. Like VI, it suffers from lack of credibility: the young mother, a reasonably intelligent woman, undertakes a rather scatterbrained kidnap. Too much of the conflict takes place in the past, not in the movie itself. And, yes, there's color coding. Despite its shortcomings, the anguish is real, and deep enough to force one to recall one's own relationship with one's parents: Another Freudian foray.

The Decalogue: Dekalog, szesc (1989) Season 1, Episode 6

Cat and Mouse

[29 December 2000]

Cat-and-mouse game of voyeur and victim, with an exchange of roles between the two about halfway through. Seems to have been well-received by the critics, but I found it too coy and contrived, not to mention compromised by a lack of credibility: The supposedly naive pure idealistic love of the voyeur, a 19 year-old boy, fails to acknowledge the inherent ugliness of voyeurism. Voyeurism entails a sinister imbalance of power between watcher and watched; it consists of cruelty and exploitation more than love; all of which the woman seemed to overlook much too easily. If the boy truly loved her, he would have stopped stalking her; his isn't love, but disease. The whole affair is intellectual structuralism at its worst, a plot concocted to demonstrate a point. Apparently, the woman spied upon "adulterates" the boy's love by humiliating him, as well as being unfaithful to her lover and unfaithful to love itself by her cynicism (thus violating the commandment, though unmarried). Her repentance and reversal seems as sudden and arbitrary as everything else in the film. Silly color coding abounds; the stranger in white (angel of death?) here carries a suitcase and shopping bag. The only intriguing element for me was the surrogate mother's sexual possessiveness, a tickle of evil.

The Decalogue: Dekalog, piec (1989) Season 1, Episode 5

The Best of the Series

[29 December 2000]

Dostoevskian descent into hell, Dostoevskian comprehension of evil as inseparable from good and inseparably alloyed to suffering, thus deserving of mercy, no matter how brutal. The piling up of detail, the flow of events, is tight, relentless, funereal, and ominous, shot through half-smoked glass to lend it the surreality of a twilit underworld (compare to Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son, 1997). With a minimum of strokes, the murderer is fully realized; his face alone is unforgettable; his flicking of coffee grounds at the girls in the cafe window illustrates in one simple gesture his murderous innocence. The killing itself is harrowing, hands-on ugly. The narrative is Spartan, matching its hardness to the tale. The only spurious step is the editorializing by the attorney against capital punishment; he would have been more effective if more reserved in his passion and anguish. To its credit, there's no silly color coding, no overtly intellectual structuralism. This is easily the most transparent, thus powerful, storytelling.

The Decalogue: Dekalog, cztery (1989) Season 1, Episode 4

A Tease

[29 December 2000]

Flirts with the sexual ambiguity of the father-daughter relationship. A mysterious letter left by her dead mother to be opened only upon her father's death disinhibits the daughter's Electra complex. The father, of course, is complicit in its opening. The movie, deliciously slippery and sly, matches its playful ambiguity to that of its subject matter; appearances are skillfully manipulated, realities shift. The friendly sexual antagonism is the female counterpart to the Oedipal hostility of Polanski's Knife in the Water.

Like the artificially notched-up conflict in III, there's a long unconvincing scene of direct confrontation between father and daughter at the heart of the movie that would have been better toned down or left out; the daughter's acting lessons similarly could have been deleted or minimized (we don't need to be told about subtext); both are too expository, too obvious, and detract from the momentum. Intrusive symbolism takes the form of a man repeatedly seen carrying a white diamond-shaped punt, i.e., for all intents and purposes a cross, which I found inadvertently funny. I thought the plot reversal near the end ingenuous; others have complained. After all, the letter and its contents are trivial compared to what they represent psychologically. It's a tease.

The Decalogue: Dekalog, trzy (1989) Season 1, Episode 3

Wild Goose Chase

[29 December 2000]

"Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy."

On Christmas eve a taxi driver is compelled by his former mistress to leave home and family to search for her husband. The quest is Kafkaesque, gloomy and bleak, leading to the fringes of the city, parts of society outside all holiday's. We are supposed to glimpse the hunger within us all, here the loneliness of women, including at the last moment, to our surprise, the man's own wife. The conflict between the man and the mistress is often notched up just for dramatic effect; there seems no point to a police chase other than for the excitement of the chase. A naked man repeatedly walks through dragging a Christmas tree, lamenting "Where is my home?" (an example of spurious symbolism). The search itself turns out to be spurious, an allegory. Moral: honor god, his Sabbath, by succoring your fellow mortals. There is no other relief.

The Decalogue: Dekalog, dziesiec (1989) Season 1, Episode 10

Fuzzy Plot

[29 December 2000]

A poor man's Treasure of the Sierra Madre. A black comedy about two hapless brothers who inherit Poland's most valuable stamp collection from a father who sacrificed everything, lived a monastic life, to amass it. (The father, stamps in hand, makes a cameo appearance in VIII.) They, too, are drawn into the erudite greed of philately, ownership for the sake of ownership, to a bad end. Everything rests on the puzzle of the plot, on who can outsmart whom, and how. But the details are sketchy, not thought all the way through, thus, again, resulting in a problem of credibility; the punch line, by the time it arrives, lacks punch, isn't, say, the same as seeing all one's gold dust blow away on the wind. But, of course, there's always color coding to keep one occupied.

The Decalogue (1989–1990)

Postscript

[29 December 2000]

Familiarity breeds contempt. By the end of this very long ride the puppet strings and grease paint, the repertoire of tricks at K.'s command, are all too evident. There isn't enough depth, variety, and richness to sustain such a long, ambitious oeuvre. K. tried, but failed, to add to the Bible.

The Decalogue (1989–1990)

No Pay-Off

[29 December 2000]

Ten approximately one-hour, made-for-TV dramas based, supposedly in order, on the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue: Modern morality plays of uneven quality, mostly good to fair, some excellent.

At its best: Intense psychological focus married to philosophical questions and questions of humanistic ethics. An unadorned relentless present-tense narrative through which, by sparse detail, the past richly resonates; enticing the audience, if it pays sufficient attention, into a process of discovery and revelation moving both forward and backward in time, all orchestrated with great skill and care by a grand master. The details, acting, and photography are sometimes so good that it's hard to imagine how they could be appreciated on the diminutive TV screen for which the series was intended.

But the master sometimes lets his powers get away from him; he steps out of, hovers above, his tales. Transparency is often marred and made opaque by self-conscious symbolism, nowhere more annoyingly distracting than in K's pervasive color coding, his obsessive use of red, blue, and white--roughly, red for passion, natural need; blue for the inherently lonely condition of the solitary human soul; white for death, impassive neutral fate, and/or distant divinity--which, of course, he exploited to death in his trilogy, Trois Coleurs: Rouge, Blanc, and Bleu. In more than one episode unseen yelping howling dogs sound off in the background soundtrack, in self-conscious reference to Bresson, emblematic hell-hounds? These are unnecessary petty details imbued with too much importance. The author's intention also intrudes in the form of intellectual, as opposed to intrinsically dramatic, structure. His ironies are too often too intellectual, too detached (I am not a fan of Nabokov). Effective storytelling needs no editorial comment, no matter how indirect or clever; it tells itself. Symbols must arise from within, not be added externally. Few, if any, reviewers seem to object, however (the level of film criticism has yet to remotely approach that of literary).

If one were to extract a unifying theme, it would be the assertion of the oldest common humanistic values in the face of modern sorrow and disorder, the affirmation of the purity of the human heart in the midst of the coldest of trials and tribulations. The stringency of each of the absolutist commandments is qualified by relativistic humanism: god is love, love is human, humans are imperfect. Eastern Europeans can be as pessimistic and dour as Americans optimistic and Pollyannaish; but the Stoic bitter world of each film breaks down, usually at the end, to disclose an unabashed sentimental pity, at bottom a conventional vision of Christian virtue and kindness. K. is not as modern, original, or existential as he lets on. Without mentioning it overtly, he is true to the Catholicism of his origins.

All episodes revolve to a varying extent around the same grim monolithic housing project. (K.: Warsaw's "most beautiful housing estate ... You can imagine what the others are like.") Practically everyone smokes like a chimney, just like K., who died in 1996 at age 54, 2 days post-CABG, probably with a cigarette in his mouth.

Filmed during the Solidarity trials, it's curiously apolitical. Was censorship still to be feared? Was K. complicit, or a coward?

Panic (2000)

Funk

[14 December 2000]

A depressed little movie, like a dented mood that might drift through you during the monotony of a cross-country interstate, blue recollection on the radio.

Hit man hits mid-life crisis, resorts to shrink, finds girl in waiting room, but cannot escape his chains, his father, only destroy them, and himself. Patricide is never pretty, but is powerful. (I sensed some of the underlying personal vengeance of The War Zone.)

Setting, mask: The Pleasant Valley Sunday of Southern California, The Village of The Prisoner turned megalopolis, geography of all those Lorimar Productions dressed up and up-dated.

Lumpy-bumpy, uneven, made of unequal inharmonious parts; constructed rather than created. Parts good, bad, & so-so: William Macy, lead, given limited range to play in, exploited for sad eyes, settled sadness. Donald Sutherland as pater sinistre reminds slightly of Christopher Walken in At Close Range. Tracy Ullman underutilized, cliché'd, as neglected wife. John Ritter, even in beard, brings back bad memories of Suzanne Summers sit-com--must have been cheap to get. Lover, Neve Campbell, is right out of the box, just add water, voilá: spiky gender-confused twenty-something in black. Child, David Dorfman, adorable, but overwritten (contrast underwritten of You Can Count on Me); too many grown-up wisdoms put in his mouth by the writer. In fact, all speak for the writer rather than as characters, ringing false when revealing themselves most.

Not what you might expect, from the ingredients. Not mix-up of Mafia and middle class (Prizzi's Honor, Married to the Mob). Not assassin and psychiatrist (Analyze This). Most definitely not dry wry blood bath (Fargo). An odd recipe, bourgeois night sweats with guns.

Basically boils down to, like untold others, the familial orbits we revolve in, solar systems with fathers for suns (pun).

The Fallen Idol (1948)

Superb

[10 December 2000]

Worth it just for that last shot of the little boy on the stairs, whose mother has just come home and is calling to him. Exquisitely crafted--beautifully acted, written, directed, and filmed. They don't make films like this anymore. When you see something like this you realize that intelligence has really left cinema.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

An Interesting, Bold, Generous, Honest Failure

[12 November 2000]

Certainly the premise of this film kept me away up till now. Not much of a Bjork fan, I'm even less enamoured of musicals and abhor films that rely on physical infirmity to elicit audience sympathy. Regardless, I'm very glad I finally went to see it and heartily recommend that any other serious film-goer with similar reservations put them aside and do so as well.

Lars von Trier is the only major contemporary director I know of whose work hasn't turned to piddle with success--the only one--which is quite heartening, in that from the decay in integrity of every other working major director, I've become thoroughly convinced film-making is inherently corrupting, an innately compromised medium of big lies that only get bigger with big money. (Most prominent publishing critics have commented on the decline of current film.)

Which is not to the say that "Dancer in the Dark" is a complete success, or a success at all. It isn't. The film is a flawed continuation, elaboration, of "Breaking the Waves": the premises and heroines are nearly identical.

The heroine here sacrifices all for maternal love, whereas that of the latter film does the same for romantic love. Both are purists, absolutists, seeing the world strictly in all-or-nothing terms; both are simple, impossibly good souls, cut, say, of the same cloth as the Prince of Dostoevsky's "Idiot," or put in the reduced terms of pop culture, the simpleton of Peter Seller's "Being There." Von Trier is expert in pitting such unalloyed innocence against the equally drastic evil of the world of The Fall. The schema, the coordinates, are entirely Christian. His expertise lies in creating a genuine sense of peril: everything is at stake.

But where "Breaking the Waves" pulled me along over the edge in its wild exuberance-- like going over Niagara in a barrel--"Dancer in the Dark," however close it may have come, left me warm and dry, safe on shore. I watched it from a comfortable distance.

Why? Because ... It's too long and uneconomic; it statically dwells and obsesses, rather sweeping one right along like "Breaking the Waves." It's stylizations, no matter how good, too often divert from the dramatic movement, are less essential than superfluous and self-indulgent. The plot becomes commonplace with the murder, forfeits originality by relying on this convention, on that old war-horse, crime-and-punishment--this removes the conflict from within the character and places it in external circumstances, thus overriding character development with plot (not another trial; TV's full of them!!). Everyone knew that the money was going to be stolen and by whom. Also, Von Trier's America is not quite American enough; it retains a queer touch of the European.

Above all, the central metaphor is a quack: the conflict between the inner dream of love vs. cruel outer world is less than convincing because the former is given form and expression in the make-believe show-biz glitz of musical film extravaganzas. Selma's love of life, her hearing its pulse and sensing its joy despite not being able to physically see it, is linked to the tacky manufactured unreality of Buzby Berkeley and Esther Williams. The metaphor just doesn't work, doesn't elevate, doesn't transcend--the film refers to film rather than to life. (No matter what, I'll forever resist what to me is the hystericism and fakery of musicals; I can never be a Judy Garland fan.) The music here doesn't approach Bach's "Passion According to St Matthew," or Rachmaninov's "Vespers," which is what it would have to be for the metaphor to work. "Breaking the Waves" relied on no such elaborate metaphor or theatricality; just the opposite, it was completely itself, unadorned, able to brutally suck the viewer into its here-and-now.

Despite these flaws, "Dancer" never fails to delight, surprise, or engross; it's never stupid, manipulative, exploitive, or pandering, which is quite something these days. The story is told in telling details. Von Trier has evolved his mastery of image to a higher plane: the jitters of the hand-held camera uncannily resonate in precise sync with the ineffable jitters of the on-screen drama; the camera sweeps and jerks in a kind of kinetic dance; close-ups magnify just the right detail; the technique of transfering video to film and/or digital manipulation, with its edge enhancement, its enlivening of light, lends images a perfect, stripped-down immediacy and truthfulness, creates the magic of being there.

Bjork is perfectly cast. She radiates an impish joy; her face is as readable as an open book. By contrast, Juliette Binoche, who also plays a young woman losing her sight in Leos Carax's Les "Amants Du Pont-Neuf," is positively wooden. (Contrast, too, that film's pretentious, chilly manipulation of image for the sake of image.) Catherine Deneuve, however, seems out of place among such blue-collar surroundings; she never sheds her patrician air.

In sum, "Dancer" qualifies as an interesting failure, genuine in intent and worthy of respect for bold experimentation.

From the Edge of the City (1998)

Simply ANOTHER Derivative Noir Genre Piece

[6 November 2000]

Self-consciously hip Wasted-Youth genre piece, the usual downward spiral of sex, petty crime, and drugs, done much better, and less pretentiously, by innumerable American Black ghetto films, here set in and around Athens among a group of transplanted Pontic Kazakhstani teens. The lads hustle their bodies, flirt with but never openly embrace homosexuality, to pay for drugs, living from one score and wad of cash to the next. Of course, the film exacts retribution so that a bad end awaits all, either in the form of arrest, severe injury, or death.

The film succumbs to the pointlessness of its subject matter; there's nothing particularly profound, compelling, or even remotely sympathetic about its cast of bored, directionless, and none-too-bright loafers who do nothing but selfishly chase after money and pleasure, unscrupulously screwing each other over to fulfill the pettiest of desires. There are no big dreams, no big hearts, nothing much gained or lost.

The film tries to make up for lack of content with self-conscious flourishes of style, relying heavy-handedly on a trendy soundtrack of techno-house and dilute hip-hop, fast-forwarding the frame rate, fooling around with aperture settings, conducting mock interviews with the main protagonist for a pseudodocumentary effect, and even at one point resorting to a totally gratuitous quote from Goddard's Contempt.

It seems Europeans are now fashioning their version of a very old American genre, the lower-class-self-destruct-coming-of-age story. Except for the empty stylistic intrusions, there is hardly any difference between this movie and Erick Zonka's Le Petit Voleur (The Little Thief, '99). By an odd coincidence--talk about unoriginality--the wayward boys of both find their first criminal employment by baby-sitting a whore, both even going so far as to disastrously double-cross their pimp bosses.

Not that the Americans aren't busy recycling this same old trash: try Requiem for a Dream.

It seems a huge rift has opened up in film between mainstream morality, on the one hand, and underworld noirish voyeurism, on the other. One can either go see a squeaky-clean, soft-core, Cellophane-wrapped, light-hearted goodie like Charlie's Angels, or a dark, damaged, doomed (increasingly imported) perversion like this. Talk about specialized, fractionalized markets.

Two Family House (2000)

Strictly Prefab

[2 November 2000]

Another film killed by what Pauline Kael calls "the serious-intention trap," that is, another film drained of fun, chaos, spontaneity, and bounce by its over-deliberate delivery of A Moral. Since when does life serve up morals?

The ingredients are all second to third-hand: East Coast blue-collar Italian struggles against the limitations of his ethnic background to find self-fulfillment and expression, i.e., Marty redux. (The same plot, incidentally, has been exploited ad nauseum by feminists by switching a female for the male hero, e.g., Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More, Thelma and Louise, etc.) The mid-1950's nostalgia with which the movie drips is similarly old hat, e.g., Levinson's The Tin Men & Avalon. In fact, 1950's-New York City borough-blue-collar-ethnic has by now become a recognizable, well worn genre unto itself.

The pace is moribund, the characters too deliberately inarticulate and inchoate, and the setup too transparent. Man does this movie ever play the race card for all its worth (who's heart won't be melted by that chocolate newborn?). Italian and Irish stereotypes, too, are played to the hilt. And nothing surfaces from the torpid, muted molasses, the suffocation, nothing has the energy to break loose of the stolid premeditation and heavy-set goodwill with which the story was fabricated. Political Correctness is the stifling Victorian more of our era.

Americans are incapable of making honest movies about their own peasantry, as if the shame of poverty is so deeply ingrained in our ethos that we can never really face or escape it, e.g., the golden glow with which Okie's are imbued in the original Grapes of Wrath (1940, John Ford). Contrast the bitter, sharply etched depiction of gritty working class reality by Tony Richardson ( Look Back in Anger) or Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief). Perhaps its easier for Europeans to be open about the messiness of class struggle and failure because of their Marxist heritage, as opposed to the US where Marxism, of course, has always been heresy rather than heritage, and where deep down everyone wants ( read, deserves) to be a millionaire. Happy, redemptive endings are a must for the underdogs in American cinema. Not so their European counterparts.

Hard to believe that the New York Times described this movie as furnishing the genuine pleasure of film, or that it's second-most highly rated by American film critics. There's got to be something definitely wrong with films these days, something very very seriously wrong.

Two Family House (2000)

Prefab

[2 November 2000]

(dir. Raymond De Falitta) Another film killed by what Pauline Kael calls "the serious-intention trap," that is, another film drained of fun, chaos, spontaneity, and bounce by its over-deliberate delivery of A Moral. Since when does life serve up morals?

The ingredients are all second to third-hand: East Coast blue-collar Italian struggles against the limitations of his ethnic background to find self-fulfillment and expression, i.e., Marty redux. (The same plot, incidentally, has been exploited ad nauseum by feminists by switching a female for the male hero, e.g., Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More, Thelma and Louise, etc.) The mid-1950's nostalgia with which the movie drips is similarly old hat, e.g., Levinson's The Tin Men & Avalon. In fact, 1950's-New York City borough-blue-collar-ethnic has by now become a recognizable, well worn genre unto itself.

The pace is moribund, the characters too deliberately inarticulate and inchoate, and the setup too transparent. Man does this movie ever play the race card for all its worth (who's heart won't be melted by that chocolate newborn?). Italian and Irish stereotypes, too, are played to the hilt. And nothing surfaces from the torpid, muted molasses, the suffocation, nothing has the energy to break loose of the stolid premeditation and heavy-set goodwill with which the story was fabricated, built like the proverbial brick s***house. Political Correctness is the stifling Victorian more of our era.

Americans are incapable of making honest movies about their own peasantry, as if the shame of poverty is so deeply ingrained in our ethos that we can never really face or escape it, e.g., the golden glow with which Okie's are imbued in the original Grapes of Wrath (1940, John Ford). Contrast the bitter, sharply etched depiction of gritty working class reality by Tony Richardson ( Look Back in Anger) or Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief). Perhaps its easier for Europeans to be open about the messiness of class struggle and failure because of their Marxist heritage, as opposed to the US where Marxism, of course, has always been heresy rather than heritage, and where deep down everyone wants ( read, deserves) to be a millionaire. Happy, redemptive endings are a must for the underdogs in American cinema. Not so their European counterparts.

Hard to believe that the New York Times described this movie as furnishing the genuine pleasure of film, or that it's second-most highly rated by American film critics. There's got to be something definitely wrong with films these days, something very very seriously wrong.

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

A Man In and Out of Time

[1 October 2000]

A man out of time finds the way back in. And so, too, do we. Films about such big subjects, metaphysical, quasi-metaphysical, or near metaphysical, can't afford to be petty. So this one meanders, lays a loose and light hand on its subject, finds and follows it by a process of mutual discovery, audience and film maker wandering an unknown road, led by faith in a final destination.

Three men journey from Tehran to a tiny remote village for purposes unknown. Contrasts evolve between their urban modernity and the ageless life of the rural village. They're ostensibly there for the funeral of an ancient woman, a stranger, not a relative, who confounds their expectations by not dying. Let's just say, for the sake preserving the mystery, that they're there, in a way, to cheat death, to rob the villagers of a ritual they themselves fail to understand.

By way of first person narration, the film centers on their leader (Behzad Dourani), a man who accepts being called "engineer," but really isn't--or is he? The perspective is doubled: The world of the film narrowly revolves around him at the same time that it doesn't, claustrophobically relating everything to his solitary universe, at the same time that it encompasses the full scope of a world independent of him, thus giving the lie to his limitations, his distortions and blindness. This is narrative executed with great skill, care, and a free imagination.

Forced to wait, idle and deprived of most of his customary modern distractions, his anxiety, emptiness, and his unease surface; this is a man out of time, who resists the present and fights against the future. His one connection to the outside world, a cell phone, requires every time it goes off that he drop whatever he's doing to run to his truck and drive up to a mountain-top cemetery for clear reception, an association of technology with death concurrent with its indifference to and alienation from it, a comical escapade repeated periodically throughout to give the film a rhythm, an intrusive repetitious beat that contrasts with the natural rhythms of the village.

With nothing else to do, he gradually is tugged by and eventually succumbs to the life around him. This is the kind of movie in which a shot is held so a rooster can walk across the frame. We, too, are made to wait. While waiting, stuck in a plotless limbo, all sorts of beautiful and instructive things emerge from an apparently banal reality, if one cares to notice. There is the unassuming visual poetry of the world, the shadows on a wall of a woman hanging clothes, rolling hills of golden grass, and the organic architecture of a village molded into a hillside; and the subtlety of social interactions: the tender trust of a young boy; the engineer's yearning for a pot of milk, which finally leads him into a primeval cave-like cellar alone with a fecund young woman who refuses his money; the casualness of the birth of a neighbor woman's 10th child; the shrewish complaints of a cafe proprietor, which are answered by one her customers with implacable peasant wisdom; and so on, one scene following upon another, small miracles falling into our laps unannounced.

If only this process of poetic inference, metaphor, indirection, and openness were in more widespread use, commonly adapted, thus more fully developed, instead of the literal dry analytic "objectivity" which tyrannizes modern fictions, nails meaning as if to a cross. Here there isn't even a hint of manipulation or exploitation, not a drop of didacticism. Instead, Kiarostami achieves the difficult feat of keeping water in cupped hands. The film teaches us to observe nature by observing nature.

The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)

Glorified Coke Ad with Razor Blades

[27 September 2000]

(dir. Leos Carax, 1991) Sleepless in Seattle meets The Lower Depths, or Midnight Cowboy meets A Man and a Woman. Finding love in a loveless world, a young homeless couple discover each other on Paris' oldest bridge, the Pont-Neuf, symbolically in a state of reconstruction, to be restored in parallel with the restoration of their lives. Also, of course, besides being an historic monument, a link to the glorious past, the bridge is a symbol of connection. She, waif-like Juliette Binoche, has a tragic disease, a ticking time bomb; he, Denis Lavant, for the world looking like a petit Lou Farrigno, a miniature Green Hulk, suffers from unspecified mental maladjustments which make him a perfect vehicle for generalized extreme alienation and angst; and the post-industrial city as wasteland is exploited for maximal effect: All in all, soap opera plot twists and histrionics dressed up, toned down to trendy minimalist medium-cool pretentiousness. Oooo, watch me suffer now, ain't it better than "The Real Thing"? The image's the thing.

Got a razor blade? Anything to get to the primal, even self-laceration. Watch me bleed. Self-inflicted pain is the only way to know you're still alive. Keeping everything on the edge, just a flick away from final self-destruction, is a surrogate for originality and substance. Well, I suppose if an older generation had its Bonnie and Clyde to serve it a heady brew of Eros and death, that final Goethean fling over The Abyss, then the current one is entitled to its own mix of death, insanity, and drugs. But how many films to they have to see with that same exact prescription?

And why is it impossible for mass entertainments to even glance the ding an sich these days? Could it be that the mass consciousness has been reduced to the consistency of TV-ad mush? Carax, like Richard Lester (The Knack, Hard Day's Night, & other Beatle movies) and so many since, seems to be perfectly suited to the half-second commercial image-byte, except here it's more likely to be 30 or more seconds long. A look for the sake of The Look, even shots of the couple prancing along the ocean silhouetted against the sunset (except, this being a New Century, the male has to have a 12 inch dildo strapped to his groin, the groaty goat). Every single review I've read of this movie mentions the scene of fireworks water skiing on the Seine, a New Age spectacle on the level of Cirque Du Soleil. Oooo, ready for the Intel-sponsored Whitney?

I'm positively convinced the French have a sadistic fascination with the morbid. Their film heroes these days are almost uniformly depressed. Drastic life-negation seems to be requisite to "serious" drama, sort of like making your morning cup of coffee with a dozen teaspoons of freeze dry and a dash of strychnine. In China of past centuries, it was considered appropriate for an artist to distance himself from society, especially in times of social turmoil, e.g., Ni Tsan, but, ironically, as disengaged as these recent French film heroes may be, the films themselves are as chatty as a session on Oprah, none benefiting from the lofty perspective of true philosophical detachment.

Whatever you do, don't mistake this film for the effort of an indie hunger artist. It was big budget all the way. Denied access to the real Pont-Neuf, Carax build his own bridge, even dug his own pond, just outside Montpellier. He's widely credited with being a risk taker, but the kind of risks he takes are all gloss. Given the generous splashes of splashy images, the man definitely has a bright future in advertising whenever he's through sowing his wild oats and gets ready to make some real money.

The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack (2000)

Teller Gets in the Way of the Tale

[11 September 2000]

Of general interest due to Ramblin' Jack Elliott's role in creating the archetype of the American folk music hero, given tangible historic expression in his serving as the link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, specifically, as the model for the latter's original stage persona. Elliott, fashioning himself after, as protégé of, Guthrie, was one of the first to imagine and create the role of the American minstrel from which innumerable others have borrowed and to this day continue to borrow.

This film would have been infinitely more interesting without the first-person intrusion of the film maker, Elliott's daughter, who from the start sets out to have that one heart-to-heart with her daddy she never had; she almost makes herself the subject of this film, but who would see it if she were? The daughter-in-search-of-father theme interferes not only with the objectivity of this biography of folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott (1931-present), but it disrupts the chronological depiction of events: the film jumps confusingly between recent and distant past to accommodate the daughter's story, which includes redundant home-movie footage of her as a child. Does the world really need one more egocentric female narrative of the parent-that-never-was, of familial "dysfunction"? Bookstore shelves and the rolls of indie films are already overfilled with every conceivable variant of this bourgeois American-woman self-preoccupation. This domestic mindset is so pervasive that I suspect its root cause is the feminist parochialism of university writing and film departments in which these women were initially "empowered." And/or is this the self-pitying cultural legacy of psychoanalysis? (Faulkner: "motherblood with hate loves and cohabits.")

Yes, Ramblin' Jack was a lousy parent, always absent, on the road. Anyone who expected otherwise had to have been totally impervious to who and what he was. The very qualities that make him special, for which he is prized and loved, namely, his unspoiled childlike sense of wonder, the freshness and simplicity of his vision, his offbeat folky genuineness, all arise from the fact that Elliott from the first refused to grow up, that he willfully turned his back on the world of adult responsibility and conventional adult social identities, choosing, instead, to live out the fantasy of the cowboy troubadour, literally running away from his Brooklyn home to join the rodeo at the age of 16. Was this in reaction to the anhedonia of his Jewish parents, the echo of the holocaust in modern America? His mother (we are told) was a driven, unpleasant woman who wanted Jack to be a doctor just like his father, who (we are told) was an aloof workaholic. Elliott Adnopoz--Jack's real name--obviously rebelled against being force fed the conventional American dream, sought instead bohemian outlet in the romanticism of the American frontier, the American West.

Unlike Louis Prima: The Wildest, which was redeemed from its adulatory distortions by ample actual footage of its subject performing, this film mercilessly cuts into Ramblin' Jack's performances to editorialize on his failings and vent his daughter's frustrations. Still, because Elliott's life intersected so deeply and so often the currents of American folk and pop music, we are inevitably given a backstage glimpse of that larger, more important drama. His journeys encompassed the cultural suffocation of the Eisenhower years, the skiffle movement and origins of rock music in England, the American folk renaissance of the 60's, and the hippie culture of the West Coast. Alan Lomax, Dave van Ronk, Arlo and sister Nora Guthrie, Odetta, Kris Kristofferson, and Pete Seeger all check in with impressions and recollections of Jack.

One could only wish that Aiyana Elliott could have imbued her film with more of her father's casual charm, his gentle whimsiness. The heavy hand of this author makes one appreciate all the more Errol Morris, whose documentaries tell themselves without even the voice of a narrator.

Louis Prima: The Wildest! (1999)

Just a Gigalo

[24 August 2000]

(1999, dir., Don McGlynn, 85 min.) Thoroughly enjoyable biopic of the entertainer (1910-1978), entirely unobjective and overly adulatory, but redeemed by generous helpings of Luigi's onstage jumpin, jivin, an wailin to da max. Of interest to those unfamiliar with, or even averse to, his music because it captures the gist of the kitsch of the various eras through which Prima's career passed, with engrossing footage of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, Luis' hometown, including Mardi Gras; 1930's New York, including the jazz club scene; 1940's L.A., then amazingly mostly parkland; and Las Vegas from its fledgling days in the '50's to its rococo neon explosion of the '60's. Arguably, just the sight of Keely Smith's torpedo tits, anatomic correlate on the female body to the big fins on the cars of those days, is alone worth the price of admission.

Talking heads include many near and dear to Luigi: wife-singers Keely Smith & Gia Maione; his manager and life-long buddy, a scar-faced smokey-voiced cat who looks like he just stepped out of the Italian-American Club in Bensonhurst to ice someone; mainstay tenor man Sam Butera; Prima's son and daughter; and even Woody Herman; none of whose words say anything really new or unexpected, but whose faces and voices say more than enough.

The bio is very much an "official" version, that is, respectful--chuckling in admiration of Prima's endless marital infidelities--and a bit sketchy, jumping here and there, hitting mostly highlights, but skimpy on intimate details, the nuts and bolts of finances, or juicy gossip. One odd note: against images of Hitler shaking Mussolini's hand, the narrator explains that while Italian-Americans were "dumbfounded" by the alliance, Prima publicly stuck to his Italian roots without apology. This raises more questions than it answers, awkward questions that wouldn't have even come up of their own had this not been mentioned, namely, what exactly were Prima's affiliations with fascist Italy during W.W.II?

(For those whose entire lives are referenced by movies and TV only, Prima's unseen presence, Prima as cultural phenomenon, propels most of the movie Big Night; and dancers clad in Gap trousers hopped to one of his tunes in a recent TV ad.)

Clinical lowdown: The musical fecundity of New Orleans gifted Prima with a solid competency in jazz and experience in stage entertainment that served him his entire life. He was propelled from the orchestra pit onto the stage not as some jazz prodigy or innovator, by no means a Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet, but as a vivacious, audacious musical performer eager to find whatever it took to please his audience. He never deviated from his rock-solid business sense of what the public wanted, even if it meant sinking to what some regarded as vulgar antics. Sometime during the 30's he fused popular Italian songs to his already flamboyant rocking, swinging jazz act and caught fire. Of all places, he launched New York's famous 52nd Street jazz scene, at least according to this film (I remain skeptical). He then did the same first in LA in the 1940's, making friendships and business contacts with biggies like Disney, and finally in Vegas in the 50's, after a long stretch of down-and-out one nighters, single-handedly rocketing Sin City to its glories as an international musical venue (again I remain skeptical).

On the sobering side, as likable as he is, as much fun as he is to watch, as warm and giving as his act was, he still remains one more example of how whites profited out of proportion to their talent from exploiting black music: compared to the Basie or Ellington organizations, his coevals, Prima is a pimple. While Basie was struggling in the 1930's under the weight of a blatantly exploitive contract with Decca, slogging through grimy low-paying one-nighters, Prima was the toast of the town. Life has its ironies, especially when it touches

Sadly, for the last three years of Luigi's life he lay in a semi-comatose state following unsuccessful surgery for a brain tumor, a cruel end to such a lively and extroverted life. His tombstone in New Orleans bears the ironically accurate self-description: "When the end comes, I know, they'll say 'Just a gigolo.' Life goes on without me."

Marcel Proust's Time Regained (1999)

Chilly Coffee-table Ornament

[24 July 2000]

TIME REGAINED

(Fr., dir. Raul Ruiz, 165 min.) doesn't even pretend to stand on its own; is an homage useless and unintelligible to anyone who hasn't read and remembered Remembrance of Things Past. Having digested only the first 2 of the 7 novels which comprise this opus, and this long enough ago to have allowed memory of them to deteriorate, I confess much of the film remained beyond me. But even with the book as scorecard, the film functions as hardly more than a metasoap opera, a costume pageant of the book's characters who parade by, talk and walk, without ever coming to life.

Nothing much happens onscreen; the movie is practically void of action. Despite impeccable staging, it consists largely of one conversation after another, endless scenes of dinners, lunches, social gatherings, etc., in which people dispassionately discuss events and relationships that have already transpired elsewhere. To make up for this, Ruiz moves furniture about, has near and far fields migrate disjointedly in opposite directions, litters the screen with symbols and leitmotivs, and mingles different times in the same frame, so that, like Bruce Willis in Disney's Kid, Proust observes, is observed by, and even converses with his younger self. Scenes shift so fluidly back and forth through time that one easily gets lost, disoriented, unless thoroughly familiar with the book.

The movie fails, has to fail, because of the impossibility of translating the book to film. The book is too introverted, too subjective, too fundamentally static and multilayered. Cinema-time is linear and dynamic; even though it can create the illusion of multiple things happening at once, it is restricted to a sequence of events, actions, happening one after another, one at a time, all of which are, above all, visual, graphic, right there before your eyes. The novel, however, layers the past on the present so that the two effectively coexist, are simultaneous; and delves into subjective states and ideas, interweaves mood, reminiscence, and philosophizing inseparably with place and person. The subject of time and memory, as elusive and evocative as it is on the page, is near nigh impossible to get hold of with film, that most literal and physical of mediums. It's like trying to photograph the passage of mist, of fog--all you see is a mess of grey.

The movie also fails because it can only gloss the myriad details with which the novels slowly, deliberately mount their magnificent edifice. In the end, all you get here is a rushed visit, a mad dash through a museum of images, a disordered travelogue of the psyche.

Croupier (1998)

Frigid Nastiness

[29 June 2000]

Down-on-his-luck writer with writer's block resorts to a job as croupier. Through a rather conventional take on "art imitates life and vice versa," said writer unblocks when he discovers his subject in the croupier: writer becomes croupier, croupier becomes the book's narrator, and a book/movie is born, which is what we are supposed to be watching (O the irony). But in order to write one's own life, one has to at the same time both live it and be a detached observer of it. Thus the film's central tension: how long will the sullen, sunken-cheeked snot, who eschews gambling and holds himself above the compulsions of others, remain immune? Does ice really flow in his veins? Can his contempt for humanity, all those who greedily grovel before him every night, really prop him up and sustain him?

Well, of course not. Any experienced movie-goer knows this overconfident fool's jig is up the minute the femme fatale takes her seat at his blackjack table, cleavage exposed and dressed in black, no less. She's ER's Gina McKee (is the price of admission really worth seeing her in the buff, nipples plump and taut?). The only question remaining is who is setting him up? The movie relies heavily on this for its major punch line, which, unfortunately, by the time it arrives, has been practically neutralized by: a) too many plot details left dangling (who really killed Marion? who ratted on the reformed hooker and why?); and b) the movie's overwrought chilly pretentiousness.

And the voice-overs: when will they ever learn to use them sparingly, if at all? Spoken narration superimposed on image violates, distracts from, cinema's inherent visual language; the action might as well be interrupted by explanatory written placards as in silent movies. Every beginning writer learns "show not tell," yet voice-overs do nothing but tell, tell, tell. Here they're particularly pretentious and obnoxious because the protagonist is supposed to be a writer.

Style eats into content, all in the name of greater seediness, in a self-conscious exercise in film noir. This little dark underexposed flick tries too hard to be bad. Americans are much better at this sort of carny; director Hodges would have done better to memorize American B-movies of the 40's and 50's. An essential requirement in noir is at least one incorruptible innocent, inevitably sacrificed. But the one shining beacon here isn't bright or shiny enough to lend the noir around her its requisite doom and gloom, without which it's simply dreary mush, contrived seediness for seediness' sake.

Sunshine (1999)

Historical Epic as Soap Opera

[27 June 2000]

SUNSHINE

(dir. Istvan Szabo) Sprawling novelistic historical epic of 3 generations of Hungarian Jews, circa ~1900-1950, which at 180 min. is still not long enough, which is to say that it's much too ambitious in scope and lacking in depth. Quantity has never been a substitute for quality; this is really two movies crammed into one, neither one satisfactory, neither done justice. As with a Mahlerian symphony it's difficult to sustain unity and cohesion over so much material, a requirement Szabo fails at, losing his grip somewhere at midpoint (the fencing Olympics). Published reviews have compared it to soap opera: plot overpowers character.

Ralph Fiennes plays the lead protagonist of all 3 generations, and it's hard to tell his characters apart, they're all so similar, all stiff-backed intense ideologues mistakenly loyal to whatever governing elite happens to be in power at the expense of their own people, the Jews, which is the moral hammered in repeatedly for 3 hours.

The movie self-consciously borrows literary techniques, e.g., leitmotif and symbolism (e.g.'s, the family name; the elixir responsible for the family's wealth; broken china as curse), in fact almost reads like a Romantic 19th century novel, but ends up suffering for it, ends up somewhat stilted and heavy. Too many scenes are cinematically static, coming off as theatrical and stagy, wordy and expository like an "old" movie. Some are so patently Romantic as to be corny--e.g., when the courtyard pavement breaks out with yellow flowers to signify that someone is in love. Still, for all the frantic shtupping--an there's certainly an abundance of lusty women throwing themselves at Fiennes--there's a curious lack of spark, of passion, of sexuality even. There is, however, one unforgettable image: the frozen body hanging from a tree.

Recommended for those who like TV miniseries and/or to escape into operatic historical novels.