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Movies
I've Seen Lately
by Matt Silcock
Rembetika:
Blues of Greece (Philippe de Montignie, 1983) This
satisfying little documentary about some great music
moves between performance and history in a rapid montage
that can easily be lost track of, especially given Anthony
Quinn's congenial but bleary narration. This isn't necessarily
a bad thing, as the information unfolds like it's coming
from a laid-back dream. Perhaps this can be explained
by how the film focuses, as does the music itself, on
hashish. An impressive last bit depicts the present-day
Athens, with a memorable shot of a tourist group being
shown the delapidated but still astonishing Akropolis,
followed by a nightlife montage that clearly demonstrates
the difference between rembetika for the tourists and
rembetika for the locals. The movie gives you no choice
but to agree that the stuff for the locals is the saltier
of the two, and I didn't mind being manipulated one
bit. (I also learned from this movie that Melbourne,
Australia is the third-largest Greek city in the world!)
A
Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974) John
Cassavetes makes movies about characters who shout at
each other, slap each other around, burst out laughing,
break down screaming, and generally live life cranked
up to 10, and then he turns everything up to 11, just
to make absolutely sure that viewers will be startled
out of whatever assumptions they may have brought to
the viewing. Then, he films all this madness with an
eye for low-key, no-frills realism. The result are movies
that are constantly, thrillingly darting back and forth
between affectation and harsh reality. Whenever the
actors lapse into affectation, you can feel them using
it to rekindle their energies for the scenes of harsh
reality that are going to immediately follow. As we
all know, the final effect is like nothing else in the
movies. This is another Gena Rowlands tour de force,
still filled with affectation and shouting and strange
choices, but also with truly deep drama that had me
thinking about my own household and all my friends and
my family and all kinds of things. Certain scenes and
even just gestures, like Ms. Rowland blowing raspberries
and Peter Falk's comeback of "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba"
to his domineering mother, are still playing over and
over in my head over and over like an Andrew W.K. song
or something.
Beat
the Devil (John Huston, 1953) Fans of Snatch
and The Usual Suspects who are feeling adventurous
might want to check this one out next time it's on Turner
Movie Classics. This quite odd Humphrey Bogart caper
picture reminds me of both, with a bunch of rapid-fire
quasi-comic caper-picture dialogue delivered in various
incomprehensible patois by a motley quartet of villians,
all of which would be bracingly odd in any decade. Peter
Lorre himself plays one of the villians, and he has
a show-stopping filibuster somewhere in the middle that
had me very, very confused. All the lead actors are
stunning; Bogart, naturally, and Gina Lollobrigida and
Jennifer Jones as the leading ladies are both knockouts.
Close-Up
(Abbas Kiarostami, 1990) Once again Kiarostami has
floored me, devastated me, and kicked my ass with his
movie-making. This incredibly ambitious project is a
retelling/restaging/
documentary of a real event, in which an out-of-work
down-and-out film aficionado, living in Tehran, was
mistaken for well-known Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalmaf
by a middle class housewife sitting next to him on the
bus. Following an artistic whim born out of loneliness
and insecurity, he played along, was invited into the
family's home as a friend, and told them that he wanted,
Cassavetes-like, to use them as actors in 'his' next
film with their house as the main set. He even supervised
an actual rehearsal or two with the family members.
After a few days, however, suspicion took over, and
the family had him arrested. The stunning thing about
the movie is that Kiarostami has all the actual people
involved with the hoax play themselves, as well as using
bold footage of the trial. I'm actually not sure if
this footage is the actual trial, or a restaging of
the actual trial, and the magic of Kiarostami's movie
is that it doesn't at all matter which. This is storytelling
like nothing I've ever seen before. As for the story,
like Opening Night (Cassavetes again), this seems
to me be the ultimately quite touching story of a person
finding himself suddenly in the throes of deep artistic
expression in order to save his soul. Hazzian, the impersonator,
quickly begins to thrive on being someone else who is
more important. It gives his life meaning and enables
him to focus his intelligence and gifts for poetry,
and while he can, he plays the role to the hilt, with
a strange sensitivity that even gets to the judge.
Minnie
and Moskowitz (John Cassavetes, 1971) Cassavetes
again. I'm catching up with all of his stuff
right now. This is still early Cassavetes, right after
Faces and Husbands. It was described as
a 'lighter' movie at the time, but anything would seem
light compared to Husbands. Now it seems pretty
dark and mean in its own right. The story is of Seymour
Moskowitz, a kooky hippie parking attendant played by
Seymour Cassel, and Minnie Moore, an attractive but
kooky young L.A. woman on the rebound played by Gena
Rowlands, and how they meet and marry after a stormy
four-day relationship. A lot of the exchanges between
characters seem like workshop exercises ('breakup in
a parked car," "woman won't introduce boyfriend
to her more upper-class acquaintance,' 'man freaks out
and punches bathroom wall') that haven't quite evolved
into actual stories about actual characters. I think
this is mainly due to Cassel's bizarre acting -- while
he has his powerful moments, usually when his character
is over-excited, his performance seems to me only successful
if we're to believe that he's portraying a psychotic.
With his flamboyant moustache and barking deadpan gruffness,
he's an archetype for the urban grotesques that we see
today in the Coen Brothers oeuvre and in Vincent Gallo's
Buffalo 66. (Brief and fairly monstrous turns
by Tim Carey and Val Avery are as well.) But it's still
a Cassavetes movie, and even when I dislike his characters
(which is often), the Cassavetes approach is always
brimming with arrythmic but powerful mise-en-scènes
that suddenly feel exactly like real life. And Ms. Rowlands,
as usual, floats high and radiant over all proceedings,
evoking both Ball and Bacall (the script actually compares
her to the latter), while easily holding her own with
her contemporaries like Jane Fonda. In most of her scenes
with Cassel, you can almost literally see her acting
circles around him.
Y
Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001) Any two minutes
of this movie are better than the entirety of Kids,
and as a columnist in Nerve
Magazine pointed out, better than American Pie
too. It says a lot of the same things as both movies
about wild youth, but it tempers the contrived misery
of Kids with a lot of unbridled joie de vivre,
and it tempers the contrived hijinks of American
Pie with a lot of good old-fashioned realism and
emotion. Add a bracingly Godardian sound mix/voiceover
scheme, a mesmerizing eye for the Mexican countryside
and people, a willingness to believe in magic, an up-to-the-minute
feel for youthful dialogue and customs, and even the
lovely use of Frank Zappa's "Watermelon in Easter
Hay" over the closing credits. I also liked the
director anyway, not because I'd seen anything else
by him, but because I heard him interviewed on NPR's
Fresh Air, and he said that Charlton Heston as a Mexican
in Touch of Evil was "kind of funny."
Hostess Terry Gross, responding to his Mexican accent,
said, "Did you say kind of phony?" and he
responded, "That too!"
Duel
in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946) I finally get to see
a King Vidor picture! Actually, I rented this one after
being rather enamored with Jennifer Jones in Beat
the Devil. This came earlier, and was her first
(and really last) big role, as a beautiful young half-breed
from the wrong side of the Texas frontier. She gets
a chance to overcome her past when she is adopted by
a genteel Texas household, but she just can't help but
throw a sexual monkey wrench into whatever scene she
wanders into. It's quite reminiscent of Bunuel's earlier
Susana, but unfortunately Jones (even though
she was nominated for an Oscar) just doesn't have the
gusto that Rosita Quintana brought to the table in that
one, and the film itself, while watchably campy and
colorful, is devoid of that dry Bunuelian magic. I stopped
after 45 minutes or so, although I wouldn't mind seeing
it all sometime. After all, some apparently steamy turns
of events did nab this movie the original nickname "Lust
in the Dust," and I was enjoying Gregory Peck's
villianous turn as a libidinous ranch-hand (a la Victor
Manuel Mendoza as "Jesus, the ranchero" in
Susana).
Earth
(Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930) Funny, the same day
I watched this movie I read a long poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
called "Zima Junction." The movie was from
1930 and the poem from 1956, but my take on both was
very similar. In each case, I found the craft and the
imagery to be beautiful, but I really didn't know what
was going on as far as narrative. I have almost no feel
for Russian history, and this shortcoming affected my
interpretation of both works. Earth begins with
some beautiful shots of, well, the earth, featuring
some lingering takes of apples hanging from a tree.
An old man dies with a smile on his face while eating
an apple, and to give you an idea of Dovzhenko's heavy
powerful pacing, this turn of events takes about ten
minutes of screen time. Still, even at this measured
pace, I had trouble following the familial/agricultural
issues of the storyline, until a striking montage in
which the poor farmers celebrate the purchase and arrival
of a tractor that promises to relieve their long history
of struggle and back-breaking work. The leader of the
tractor-buyers is shot by someone while dancing triumphantly
down a path (a beautiful physical sequence that should
be surreptitiously edited into all extant prints of
Footloose right now), and this turn of events
leads to another montage (this time extremely
intense) that cuts between the march for his funeral
and a naked woman's near-religious paroxysms in her
room. The thing is, I really had no idea who the naked
woman was, or why she was prostrating herself. Does
this mean I don't pay enough attention when I watch
movies at home by myself? Or does Dovshenko's talent
for displaying timeless powerful imagery simply outweigh
his talent for exposition?
Spider
Man (Sam Raimi, 2002) Even with Tobey Maguire and
Willem Dafoe turning in excellent performances as the
superhero and the supervillian, this still doesn't quite
transcend mere CIG-driven blockbusterness. For a while
it feels like it could, especially during the sequences
where mild-mannered Peter Parker discovers his superpowers,
very nicely bringing the self-actualization fantasies
of classic Marvel Comics into live action. And, sure,
the battle scenes are pretty intense, thanks in no small
part to Dafoe going way over the top and creating an
actual sense of danger with his completely bonkers Green
Goblin characterization. Props also go to the special
effects for Spiderman's web-swinging city-travel technique,
which actually make the whole process seem plausible
while making dazzling use of New York City locations.
Eventually, however, like every other CIG-driven blockbuster,
it's just too long and too loud. Whatever happened to
the 89 minute roller coaster ride? I prefer the Sam
Raimi of Army of Darkness. (81 minutes.) Besides,
before Spider Man, I had to sit through a good
10 minutes of advertisements just to get to 20 minutes
of previews for other movies with explosions in them
just to get to the damn feature presentation. There
really oughta be a law....
Coming
Apart (Maxwell Moses Ginsberg, 1969) Interesting
for a few reasons. First off, during the couple weeks
before watching this, I had been reading Cookie Mueller's
memoirs (great, by the way), in which she describes
some guy who has a way of getting off that involves
a live duck and a dresser drawer. I found her story
disturbing without quite getting what she was talking
about. Well, the same guy is talked about in this movie;
it must have been an urban legend floating around at
the time, or an actual person that both Maxwell Moses
Ginsberg and Cookie Mueller knew. I still don't really
get the story. Second point of interest: early work
by Rip Torn. I really just know him as Artie on The
Larry Sanders Show, but early in his career he was
doing an odd angry young man routine, kind of a proto-Harrison
Ford, but more moody, surly, and sociopathic. Third
point of interest: the concept, which is that Rip Torn's
character, who is sort of a psychiatrist/photographer/
hedonist, has a hidden movie camera in his apartment,
and we are watching all of his footage unedited, as
he's filming it, with every sequence of the film a single
take shot from this single camera. Torn's character
uses the camera mainly to film all the women he gets
up there to have sex with, or, at least, that's what
Ginsberg the auteur chose to make his movie about. Torn's
character is so taciturn, moody, and mumbling that the
non-sexual scenes really don't hold a lot of interest,
and the viewer may feel compelled to fast-forward to
the next scene, as if he or she is watching a porn vid.
There are some erotic moments and striking imagery,
but besides looking broodingly handsome, Torn just deadens
the movie. Last point of interest: good garage-y psychedelic
rock music on the soundtrack. The song that plays at
16RPM over the final sequence sounds surprisingly like
the Butthole Surfers. Unless I'm reading the credits
wrong, Ginsberg was involved in making the music. (Never
mind, just found out it was all by the Jefferson Airplane!)
Life
and Nothing More (Abbas Kiarostami, 1992) Another
one of Kiarostami's beautiful blends of documentary
and fictionalization. This is a sequel to Where Is
The Friend's Home?, and has slightly fictionalized
versions of Kiarostami and his son travel by car to
the region where they filmed the first movie. The area
has been devastated by an earthquake, and the Kiarostami
character wants to find out if the young child actors
in that film are still alive. The results, as you might
expect from this cinematic master, are visually beautiful
and philosophically rich. One character, after describing
the earthquake's devastation, says "I don't know
what crime this nation has committed, to be punished
by God." I wish lots of American could see this
scene and think about it, considering that George W.
Bush would probably be willing to bomb the fuck out
of Iran in order to merely make more money for his estate,
and his barely-informed supporters throughout America
would like for him to bomb the fuck out of Iran because
a) they won't get hurt and b) it'll make for cool footage
on CNN.
The
Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001) I believe
that the people of my generation (aged 18-34) have too
many choices. Freedom's great and all, but there's something
to be said for focus, which a lot of our best and brightest
seem to have lost. We go from guilty-pleasure TV to
plans for going to Europe, from Wendy's Value Menu to
Italian dinners with red wine, from girlfriend to boyfriend
to artsy stances at family reunions. I feel that Wes
Anderson is a sort of poet of this illusion of infinite
freedom of choice, and it's hard to imagine him making
a more elaborate statement about it than The Royal
Tenenbaums. It's a dizzying movie that's on a par
with another of this generation's big statements, David
Foster Wallace's 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest.
(In fact, both works are about an eccentric East Coast
family and involve professional tennis... Coincidence?)
Tenenbaums depicts characters trying to find
satisfaction as they move through options like tennis
stardom, literary stardom, tables full of drugs, chain
smoking, living on picturesque streets in Manhattan,
appearing on reggae album covers, rummaging through
closets full of more hipster board games than the coolest
thrift store in the world would have, falconeering,
cruising solo on ocean liners, starting corporations,
growing long hair, cutting hair short, dressing in cowboy
chic, owning freaky paintings.... and that's literally
just a small fraction. The cast list itself is like
a dream: Hackman, Huston, Paltrow, Stiller, Wilson and
Wilson, Glover, Cassel. Anderson's emergence as a filmmaker
even seems to mirror his generation's malaise; he has
endless options, and can use them to make dizzy, intricate,
fascinating, colorful films, but in the end, like a
well-off college dropout who can't decide whether he
should move to Brooklyn, Portland, San Francisco, Austin,
or Europe, he isn't quite sure how to bring the dazzling
strands of his movie to a sharp point. Which might be
his point all along, and either way, though it is kind
of melancholy, this movie put a huge smile on my face
for at least an hour straight of its running time.
The
Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson, 1977) For Bresson's
second to last film, his subject was post-war alienation
among the rebellious youth of the day. The first half
is rather confusing and disjointed, and seemingly given
over largely to powerful but non-narrative environmentalist
propaganda. (A deforestation montage is actually painful
to watch.) This section reminds me of Godard with all
the politics, especially during a very stylized scene
where students in a classroom recite, without a moderator,
various slogans in deadpan voices. Bresson's legendary
use of non-actors helps to drive home his point; no
matter how sensitized these youth become to social woes,
modern society is set up to keep their knowledge ineffectual.
The enigmatic title is the answer a man on the bus gives
when asked in whose direction modern mankind is following.
I think it also refers to the main character, an absolutely
sullen youth named Charles, unforgettably played by
Antoine Monnier. The last half of the film gains stunning
force as it focuses on his miserable attitude. Even
though we never hear him listening to music, people
who are curious about the whole Norwegian black metal
phenomenon might find this movie enlightening. Bresson
knew his shit; 20 years before Euronymous was murdered
by Count Grishknach, this flick had already pegged nihilistic
tendencies among long-haired European youth.
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