...I See Frants

ADAM’S RIB

Ah, Hepburn and Tracy, what a pair.  This fantastic 1949 comedy from director George Cukor stands out for two big reasons.  One, the cast.  Alongside the famous duo are quite a few stage actors in their first major screen roles: Judy Holliday is fantastic (and won herself the job to reprise her Broadway role in 1950’s Born Yesterday, which won her an Oscar). Singin’ in the Rain’s Jean Hagen.  Energetic comedian David Wayne.  And not just these actors, but every single role is filled out completely, down to the littlest part (especially a “strongwoman” brought to the courtroom as a character witness).

The other fantastic thing about this film is the wonderful realism of the marriage between lawyers Adam (Tracy) and Amanda (Hepburn). They’re on opposite sides of an attempted murder trial: Doris (Holliday) discovered her husband in the arms of another woman, and shot at them both. Adam sees this as straight-up attempted murder, but Amanda says if the roles were reversed, it would simply be seen as a man protecting the integrity of his family.  And so the fireworks begin.

In the beginning, the two are loving to each other, both at home and in the courtroom (wonderful little flirtations under the table).  But as the trial goes on, and each is hoping to win, we start seeing rifts in their relationship. Their perfect little household is not so perfect after all. The little tiffs at home are brought to the courtroom the next day, and the courtroom antics are in turn brought home that night, creating an infinite loop of professional competition squeezing out supportive matrimony.

For a film that could easily have played the screwball angle and been done with it, the complexity here is refreshing.

THE INFORMER

If you had told me this dark, violent, cerebral 1935 drama was directed by the great Expressionist Fritz Lang, I would have believed you.  Set during the Black and Tan War with the IRA, a former Republican Army member, down on his luck and desperate for money, squeals on his buddy for the reward money.  Once his buddy his shot dead, the guilt takes him through various stages of paranoia, suspicion, and denial.  He starts spending it, buying people drinks and food and giving money away to others in need.  This might make him feel better, but it also raises the suspicions of the IRA, who find it peculiar that this poor man suddenly has a lot of money to spend.

The dark cinematography, double-exposures to show the character’s guilt and conscience, and the shockingly realistic violence all point to the German Lang. But he didn’t come to the US until this year, going on to make his first Hollywood film Fury in 1936. No, this is the great American director John Ford (who won a Director Oscar for it).

It’s really a bold piece of filmmaking. I can’t think of a Hollywood film from that era (pre-Lang, at least) that so fully embraced the shadowy photography that the Germans pioneered.  While it gets a bit overdramatic in very few moments, overall it’s an impressive and groundbreaking film.  Ford may be best known for his Westerns (many of his silents have since been lost), but this is a bold embrace of a foreign style before that style had become popular.

BREAKFAST FOR TWO

This 1937 screwball comedy, directed by Alfred Santell and starring Herbert Marshall and (my movie girlfriend) Barbara Stanwyck, feels like a true B-movie (in the original, double-feature sense of the word).  It’s short, a mere 67 minutes.  Its story is simple and ludicrous at the same time: a rich playboy wakes up after a night of partying to find he’s taken home Ms Stanwyck (or rather, she brought him home).  For some reason, she becomes enamored with this guy, despite his reputation and lack of business savvy.  Being rich herself, she devises some elaborate plot to buy his company and slowly force him into a corner long enough for him to stand up and take the rightful reins himself.  Along the way, maybe he’ll fall in love with her, too.

It’s just as deliberate as it sounds.  The comedy is fairly broad, relying on physical comedy (like a quintet of bearded window washers that show up for no reason other than the story needed a distraction, or a Great Dane climbing onto an old geezer’s lap), and silly little puns:

“Read this for me, will you?”
“Of course, sir. I studied elocution, graduating Magna Cum Laude.”
“Well, read it Magna Cum Louder. Funnier, too!”

That kind of stuff.  There’s a mild foodfight, a boxing match between Stanwyck and Marshall, a silly butler, an officiating priest that just can’t get a break, and the aforementioned Great Dane’s constant meddling. It’s a good example of the type of film that would play after the Mickey Mouse short, the newsreel, and a true classic like Topper: enjoyable for the moment, giving you your nickel’s worth, and forgettable as soon as you leave the theater.

PLATINUM BLONDE

This fun little 1931 comedy from Frank Capra has some interesting stories behind it.  First, poor adorable doe-eyed Loretta Young. She finds herself cast in a Frank Capra film called Gallagher, playing a character named Gallagher.  Can’t beat it! Only, the other female lead in the film is a hot new thing named Jean Harlow, and fresh off success in The Public Enemy, the studio decided to change the name of the film from Gallagher to Platinum Blonde. Dang.

More incredible (and devastating) is Robert Williams, a stage actor appearing in his first leading role (and only his sixth film). He’s electric, like a 1930s’ Kevin Kline: rapid-fire delivery with vaudevillian skill, a dry quick wit that seems to find little bits of humor in everything.  This film would have made him a star, no doubt, and he very well may have been a comedic powerhouse for decades. But he died three days after this film’s premiere, of a ruptured appendix. (Harlow herself also died too young, at the age of 26 in 1937, due to kidney failure)

The movie isn’t perfect, you can feel Capra trying to find the energy of it at times.  But then again, average Capra is above-average most-anyone-else.  Williams plays Stew Smith, a clever newspaper reporter with a clever co-worker (Ms Young), who marries into the rich family of his new bride Ann (Harlow).  What follows is a typical Capra theme of a young Joe American being thrust into new and extraordinary situations involving class and money. Some scenes go on a little too long (in the same way many Apatow comedies do today - not knowing when to cut, trying to get just one more laugh). We’re supposed to cheer against his marriage to Harlow (the original title probably would have helped that a little more), shouting at the screen “Don’t let her change you!” But Harlow’s Ann isn’t too terrible, and so Stew finds himself simply idle instead of unhappy (see the “puttering” scene I linked to above). That’s not a very active state for your main character, and the movie does suffer a little because of it.

All said, not Capra’s best by far, but very enjoyable, mostly due to the lovely performance by Williams.  Watching him here, you can’t help but think what a career he might have had, what other classic roles might he have cemented into our memories.  Tragic.

RAMPART

I enjoyed Oren Moverman’s The Messenger, and this film once again stars Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster (among others, a real all-star cast).  Here, Woody is an LA cop, circa 1999, with the department embroiled in the Rampart scandal. Woody himself has a questionable record, and when he’s videotaped beating a man who crashed into his cruiser, he becomes a new poster-boy for police corruption, one the city is eager to exploit to get the press off the Rampart debacle.

And so there it is.  The script, by Moverman and crime novelist James Ellroy, doesn’t do much except simmer along. Woody broods, has family problems, difficulty connecting with his daughters, and problems with authority. He womanizes with no real purpose, drives around with no real purpose, even seems to do his policework with no real purpose, despite multiple confessions that it’s his whole life.

Seemingly to make up for the anemic (though well-acted) story, Moverman’s camera lacks any consistency, trying to inject energy into the film. Crane shots with no purpose, deliberate framings.  There’s one scene with the DA where the camera is continually panning right, in a circle with multiple cuts; I suppose it symbolizes the ‘running in circles’ obstruction that Woody gives the DA, but it just seems sloppy and junior varsity.  Then he seems to (attempt to) channel Fincher in some random techno/sex club scene that has no place in the story, let alone in the visual tone.

Nothing new here, and not really well told, either.

HYSTERIA

Ah, the good ol’ days, the 1880s.  When you could classify anything a woman does that is displeasing to men as “hysteria”: upset, tired, anxious, angry, bored, screechy.  It’s a medical condition, that is eased by a treatment that, um….. well, provides a certain ‘release’ for the woman by the doctor.  It’s either that, or a “removal of the hysteria”, a hysterectomy (talk about a War on Women).

This fun little comedy tells the story of an optimistic young doctor (Hugh Dancy) joining such a practice, and in realizing that his right hand just can’t keep up with the demands of constant ‘pelvic massage’, comes up with an electric vibrating massager.  That part is fun and cleverly naughty: the characters of a costume drama navigating female orgasm as if it’s a medical procedure, the contrast of proper high class manners with playing with the very core of sexual pleasure.

Of course, this is one of those stories where the medical ignorance of the time shines a light on the lingering problems of such biases today.  The War on Women is still in the news today, with the contraception debate, abortion rights, and equal pay.  Here we have an entire society that see a woman getting no actual pleasure from her ‘procedure’, only medical relief from a physical condition. In this context, you’d expect that parallel to be addressed, and it is. Unfortunately, the way it’s addressed is a little too by-the-book. Maggie Gyllenhaal, the doctor’s daughter, is the very opposite of all the women in the film: she volunteers at a shelter for women and their children, she’s outspoken and crass and confrontational and opinionated and, well, hysterical!  I suppose she’s the late 19th Century’s answer to the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”; she embodies everything the film is about, and everything the lead male needs to guide his reawakening. It’s a bit too on the nose, and I could really see how much of a missed opportunity it was. So the comedy bits are a fun time, but the film’s deeper meaning is watered down to a basic formula.

WE BOUGHT A ZOO

I dig Cameron Crowe, most of the time.  But when I saw the trailer for this, it just looked like a horrible sappy mess.  Add to the mix Crowe’s last film, 2005’s poorly received Elizabethtown (which led to the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” meme), and I cast a cynical eye this film’s way.

The good news: it’s not nearly as sappy as the marketing makes it seem.  The bad news: it feels like a first-time writer/director is trying to follow the Crowe Formula. Based on a memoir, Benjamin Mee, having lost his wife to cancer and struggling to raise his two children, decides for an extreme change: he buys a zoo. An eccentric group of zoo employees are now his family, and we hope that in fixing up the zoo, he can fix his family. And himself.

It feels just that straightforward and formulaic. It’s not horrible, but it doesn’t have that character-driven energy and spontaneity of previous great Crowe films. It’s a little too precious at times, though to Crowe’s credit it doesn’t seem intentionally so. Damon holds the film together quite ably, and Johansson seems like an actual adult for probably the first time in her career.  But in the end, it’s simply too Cameron Crowe paint-by-numbers. Some clever little lines and call-backs to those lines (though none as lasting as “show me the money”, “you complete me”, “rock stars have kidnapped my son”, or “sport of the future”), a soundtrack spanning current indie and classic rock (with a score by Sigur Ros), and an attempt by a man to gain a new freedom, a new start, and a new perspective by taking a huge chance.

THE SITTER

For some reason, director David Gordon Green has transitioned from character-based dramas like George Washington and All The Real Girls into raunchy pothead comedies like Pineapple Express and this little trivial film.

Everything about this film is just phoning it in.  You can see the architecture of the plot from the start: here’s Jonah Hill, and what he wants. Here’s the kids he’s to babysit, each one with a specific quirk that will make trouble early on but come in handy later.  And as the film moves forward with I’ve-seen-this-before predictability, it just gets too convenient.  He randomly stops at a store in Harlem, where he just happens to be spotted by an ex-high school classmate who hates him.  Of course we’re going to see her again, at another shocking time.  And that second time we see her, there’s also another girl there that he also just happened to run into at the Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn.

I understand the need to have some things happen to our hero, but it’s all just too small to be anything resembling realistic. I mean, it’s New York City. Out of 12 million people, he just randomly keeps running into the same few people to move the plot forward? Part of the fun of Adventures in Babysitting was that “Chicago” was this enormous, dangerous, foreign place.  Here, everybody the hero knows seems to hangout at the same three places that everyone else does.  They might as well have set it in Billings, Montana (seriously, when are we going to get a film set in Billings?). Beyond that, there are the standard jokes about drugs, gays, violence and sex.  A few moments when Hill has a heart-to-heart with one of the kids has suggestions of sincerity that feel out of place (though I’d rather the rest of the film adjust to match the sincerity than lose those moments altogether).

I didn’t expect much, but I got even less than that.

CRIES AND WHISPERS

Visually, this 1972 classic from Ingmar Bergman is quite a force.  A trio of sisters at the turn of the century live in a vast mansion, whose walls are steeped in deep red. One sister is painfully dying of some sort of cancer, the agonizing screams and tortured breathing reaching every corner of the house.  And because of the house’s red walls, we feel almost as if she’s the house, and the cancer inside her are the tortured relationships between the two remaining sisters. They lie and argue and doubt. Neither care particularly for their husbands, nor appear to care very much for their dying sister (thankfully, a loving maid is at her side 24/7). They’re killing her by waiting for her to die so indifferently.

While the film is rich in symbolism and a dreamy (or nightmarish) feel (it won a Cinematography Oscar), I found the story a bit too internal for me to really get into it.  It was a huge critical success at the time (one of the few foreign language films to earn a Best Picture nomination), and I can see its bold themes really packing a new punch for audiences at that time.  But it was too introspective for me.  I prefer a film more like Bergman’s 1978 Autumn Sonata, which deals with similar discord amongst women/family, but with more outward confrontation. This is a piece of art, ripe for deep analyzation, and holds up as such. But it didn’t capture me as a story in the same way.

HAYWIRE

Director Steven Soderbergh seems intent on making every genre of film he can. From political to screwball to disaster to noir.  Since 2002’s Full Frontal, he’s broken up his bigger Hollywood films with shot-on-video smaller fare: Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience, and this “action” film.

Starring MMA fighter Gina Carano, this is the story of a kick-ass girl who kicks ass for a private company. She’s set-up for a reason I’m not sure of, and spends the majority of the film finding out whose ass she needs to kick for revenge.  This film feels like a Jason Bourne film without the intrigue or plot. There’s some talking (in Carano’s case, quite stilted dialogue delivery; she’s no actress), and then Carano kicks some ass.  Then some more implied plot twists (they don’t feel like actual twists, but we’re told they are), and then she kicks someone else’s ass.  Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor.  Just kicking handsome men’s asses.

That’s really about it.  Like I said, there’s an implied double-cross, but it’s shot so matter-of-factly that you’re only aware of it because she keeps saying it: “What really happened in Barcelona?” I don’t know, and neither does she.  But I don’t have any real feeling that there’s any reason to wonder what “really” happened in Barcelona or anywhere else.

Soderbergh seems to be self-consciously making an action B-movie. I don’t begrudge him these experiments, but they’re not all going to work.  This one seems to think its only uniqueness is that we get to see a girl kick men’s asses.  We see a lot of that, and little else.

WRITTEN ON THE WIND

When I think Douglas Sirk, I primarily think the melodrama of the proper suburban/small town housewife. The gossips, the kids, the facade of nuclear family perfection.  Here, we have something a bit more sinister, more dangerous.  The film opens with a drunk Robert Stack rushing inside his home, and the sound of a gunshot.  Then flashback a year, when Stack, a wealthy oil billionaire, meets Lauren Bacall. He woos her aggressively (to the chagrin of his best friend, Rock Hudson), and she relents to marriage. 

What is she getting into?  Stack’s Kyle Hadley seems to own everything and everyone in town. He’s outgoing but insecure, dangerously so.  Over-protective of his unbalanced sister (she’s futilely in love with Hudson, who’s in love with Bacall, who’s in love with Stack, who’s in love with himself), an alcoholic taking a break from drinking… until some news delivers a blow to his confidence and manhood.

The result is the quite obviously the first seeds of future TV soaps like Dallas, where we watch the filthy rich quarrel and betray and conspire and cheat.  There’s much less subtlety (or what you’d call ‘subtlety for a Sirk film) here than in his other melodramas like All That Heaven Allows. That film is about social ‘norms’ and a love that grates against it, a mostly internal fight.  Here, while the insecurities and desperation and unrequited love are also internal, the actors project it with the utmost hammy drama, and their actions are so exaggerated in relation to the emotions triggering them that you just have to sit back and relish watching the one percent destroy each other.

LA RONDE

I was introduced to German director Max Ophuls two years ago, when I was blown away by his film Le Plaisir.  This one, from 1950 (two years prior to Le Plaisir), blew me even further away. I’m no film historian, but here Ophuls does things I haven’t seen other directors of the era do. Both the story and the camerawork have an amazing fluidity.  

The story is a series of vignettes about love, lust, and sex (based on a controversial play from the turn of the century).  What links them all together is a narrator, who refers to them all as his ‘characters’.  Open on a soldier and a prostitute, then the solider and a young girl, then the narrator picks up the young girl and carries her into her own future, where the next story begins: the young girl and a young boy.  Then the young boy and a married woman.  So on and so on, until we arrive back at the prostitute, with yet another man.  It’s delightfully self-aware, the narrator addressing camera, playing different roles himself in each story (including one moment, where he appears to physically censor a sex scene by cutting it right out of the film negative). The performances, too, are quite modern, casual, playful.  Nothing stuffy or costumed about them, just real people laughing and crying and navigating the awkward reality of sex.

Combine this with the stunning camerawork of Ophuls (a heavy influence on directors such as Kubrick and P.T. Anderson, favorites of mine for similar reasons).  He never seems to cut (the first 10 minutes consist of only two lovely shots), and he finds symmetry and reveals and tricks of perspective in the most clever ways.

On his Wikipedia page is a poem written about Ophuls by actor James Mason.  It’s just too perfect:

A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor old Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once, when they took away his crane
I thought he’d never smile again.

He’s fast becoming one of my favorite directors. 

THE AVENGERS

Writer/director Joss Whedon had such a daunting task in this.  First, it’s a $220 million dollar tentpole action film.  It features way too many good guys for any normal film to have.  Some of these good guys have already had their prologue in one or more previous feature films.  The bad guy is from a previous film.  And yet, it was Whedon’s job to weave all of this together into a stand-alone film that had to deliver enormously.

He does it, fantastically. Some may say that the audience for this film would have already seen both Iron Man films, Thor, and Captain America.  That may be the case, but a film needs to be its own story, with its own character arcs and plot points.  While it might make more sense to someone who has seen all the other films, it can’t leave newbies behind. Whedon walks that tightrope very well.  He knows the characters are well-known enough that they don’t require too much exposition. The characters already developed from other films (like Downey Jr’s Tony Stark and Evan’s Steve Rogers) find themselves well at home in the world Whedon weaves for them.  And those that are somewhat new (like Ruffalo as the Hulk) are given a such a full life that it’s like we’ve known them all along.

Match this with Whedon’s masterful control of his set-piece action sequences.  Again, there are so many characters, with so much to deal with simultaneously, that it could have easily gotten too frenetic or cluttered or mashed up to follow any or all of it.  The big climactic battle: jaysus, I don’t know how you storyboard that thing to keep it flowing naturally, let alone shoot it, with stunts and pyrotechnics and green screens and CGI.

There’s nothing really new here, and there needn’t be.  Trying to reinvent the wheel would have made this a serious confusion salad.  What we have is just a masterfully-directed fun summer superhero film.  No dark metaphors (we can look forward to Nolan’s Batman for that), no odd twists or turns, just straight up good times with a hero ensemble made up of people who could (and have) carry a film (or two…. or three) on their own.

THESE AMAZING SHADOWS

In 1986, Ted Turner bought MGM, including the massive film library they possessed.  Then, the unthinkable: he began colorizing the old black & white classics.  The resulting uproar caused Congress to pass the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, creating the National Film Registry.  This documentary tells the story of the Registry, from inception to how and why each year’s 25 films make the list.  And it’s a must-see for absolutely anyone with even a casual interest in film.

The National Film Registry is filled with all kinds of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” works (here’s the full list).  The classics you expect (It’s A Wonderful Life, Gone With The Wind, Casablanca), sure.  But it’s the ones you don’t that really help define the importance of cinema in our history.  Documentaries like Hoop Dreams and Harlan County, USA. Pop culture oddities like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and and Flash Gordon.  Short films like Duck and Cover and Let’s All Go to the Lobby. Home movies, like Topaz (an illegally shot home movie of life in the Japanese internment camps of WWII). The importance of films that reflect more ignorant (and racist) times, like Birth of a Nation or The Searchers.  Of women in film, like Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance.

The scope of the list, and the sheer scale of the restoration work the Library of Congress does every year, is inspiring.  Their vaults are so vast, they don’t even know all that they own.  A classic example is the discovery of an original, pre-censored negative of 1933’s Baby Face.  Or how the negative of The Godfather looked before the 2005 restoration.  This is important work, not just for film buffs and critics, but for our history.  Films, good and bad, are a time capsule, a snapshot of how we saw our past, present, and future from a certain point in time.  Those viewpoints have evolved over time, and the most complete and popular record of that evolution is in our 100+ years of cinema.

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS

Ahh, the sudsy Technicolor that is Douglas Sirk.  His films are the height of melodrama, with cooped-up 1950s housewives navigating the dense social netting of their neighborhood and trying to find little forbidden delights on the side.  The story here was basically an excuse to get Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in each other’s arms again (Magnificent Obsession, Sirk’s film with the duo the previous year, was successful enough to give him some more money to play with), but the real mastery here, as with most of his films, is the dazzling color and compositions.

Wyman’s widow finds herself falling for the gardener.  He’s a free spirt, doesn’t give a damn about the cocktail parties and country club and the gossips in town.  This is attractive to her, but her kids disagree.  And then the rumors start: he was their gardener when the husband was still alive!  What will people think!

Every frame of this film is dripping with beautiful color (seriously, can we get a nice new restoration for Sirk’s films?).  Each frame is structured like a painting, rich with symbolism.  An argument between mother and son, the son partially blocked from camera by an opaque screen.  The reflection of a lonely woman in her brand new TV (“for the lonely woman to have company”). The backlit beauty of a kiss in front of a frosted window (frosted enough for the outside world to see only part of the romance, not the full picture).

The films weren’t too popular at the time (critics weren’t wild about this one), and the melodrama can feel quite dated these days (see Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, a direct homage to Sirk’s films).  But they are, in their own way, cinematic works of art.  Romantic and over-dramatic, yes.  But you can’t turn away from a single second.