Real Life (1979)

This film, written by, directed by, and starring Albert Brooks, has one major problem: Albert Brooks is not funny. I wince every time he is on screen. His presence in the plot (a parody of PBS' "This American Life") is unexplained. His voice is grating. I don't understand his hair or bone-structure. The 1970s seem awful. 

Charles Grodin (Beethoven's 2nd) is the best part of the film, along with a hilarious running gag about the unobtrusive, Dutch headgear-cameras the crew use to film Grodin's family. But every time Albert Brooks comes on, the film comes into orbit around what I imagine was thought to be a winning personality in the 1970s. What is thought to be the film's selling point, then, is really its biggest weakness: without Brooks, this movie might actually be good. It would also be about 15 minutes long. 

To elaborate: most comedies that are turned off the assembly line tend to be "carried" by a personality, such as Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, etc. The movies of each actor are interchangeable with all of his others (Blades of Glory for Semi-Pro; The Mask for Ace Ventura; Billy Madison for Happy Gilmore). Nonetheless, it is true that these movies *are* carried by these actors. No one wishes there were more Courtney Cox in Ace Ventura. Albert Brooks, on the other hand, has pretensions here to be something of an auteur, but also brings a total anti-charisma that jeopardizes all his good ideas. I now know what it must be like to watch Woody Allen movies if someone detests the whiny, ubiquitous Allen character. 

The Anthology Film Archives screened this and another early Brooks film (Modern Romance) with the caveat that Brooks is "no Tati," but that he did a couple of interesting things with editing and humor that were worth watching. I admire the modesty of these aims. But, for all that, Real Life is a bad movie that has very little even to say about the topic (reality television) that it has the unique opportunity to be prescient about. And in defense of Albert Brooks as an actor, might I refer you to his excellent performance as an unlikable liberal jerk in Taxi Driver.

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Here is a cult film that attains what I imagine to be universal likableness. If someone described this movie to me, I probably would dismiss it: "A mad scientist kills young girls in an effort to remove their faces and transplant them onto his daughter's accident-scarred face. In the end he is killed by a number of dogs he keeps for no apparent reason.

Like nearly all cult films, which in recollection seem brief, memorable and action-packed, the film is (in the watching) unbearably talky. End of point.

As Mr. Strick pointed out at the screening, the film is very Cocteau-influenced. To this I would add, Hitchcock's family dynamics, something of the Gothic, and a score that prefigures Danny Elfman's work for Tim Burton. This all overstates the film's style a bit, since the sets are cheap and a great deal of the scenes unremarkable, but when these elements come to the front, one immediately starts to attention.

Neither a great movie nor essential viewing, I can't help but feel that I will watch this movie again in my life and enjoy it again, as well. It has a weird, squirmy uniqueness that is all the more enjoyable as it lapses in and out of self-awareness about its B-quality, its camp, and its artistic pretensions. Most art-films are secretly B-movies (see: Godard), but this B-horror flick is nearly unique in quietly being something of an art-film. 

Duchess of Langeais

Adapted from a novella by Balzac, this new film by Jacques Rivette (of Celine and Julie Go Boating fame) has been playing around the city for a while, and even if you know little about it, you probably know that it is not your typical French trash that makes it over here. This is a real film. It never ever feels like its Hollywood version, the gaudy and over-populated "period piece" that Keira Knightley has made a career of. More surprisingly, the movie does not feel at all enchanted by Balzac's milieu, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and thankfully spares us the kind of immersion and knowingness we saw in Scorcese's Age of Innocence.

The film is very long. It moves slowly and follows a very Stendhalian logic of advance and retreat, from the first scene to the last. Balzac's easily-imitable style has the last word, of course, but the movie is primarily an exercise in frustration, interior scenes, and uncomfortable dialogue where the game is to say the unpleasant thing that has to be said, without being so clumsy that one can be held account for one's real motives (though they are known).

Jeanne Balibar is a strange beauty, and yet so French that I just had to take it on faith that "this must be what it's like over there," while Guillaume Depardieu is a lumbering, almost canine hunk--he could almost be in the Pirates of the Caribbean, except his sullen, sullen, sullen attitude is completely without charm. He is dull and very passionate all at once; it is a great performance.

I can't recommend this movie for entertainment. The audience I saw it with seemed to miss the point, and I got a bit anxious about whether it would ever end. But, if you like movies, this one is extremely well-made, somewhat memorable, and obviously the work of a master, though this is no masterpiece.

Upcoming Reviews

Contempt
Bonnie and Clyde
Battleship Potemkin
It Always Rains on Saturday

Samurai Trilogy

Last Year at Marienbad
Eyes Without a Face
and others

stay tuned...

Ivan the Terrible (1942, 1946)

It is evident in 2008 that Sergei Eisenstein is probably the greatest director who ever lived. Every one of his six films is an unqualified masterpiece. Of the silent directors who made the transition to sound, the stand-outs are obviously:

F. Lang: Metropolis--> M
C.T. Dreyer: Joan of Arc--> Day of Wrath
C. Chaplin: Gold Rush--> The Great Dictator (one could say Chaplin's problems with sound were more as an actor than as a director)
C.B. DeMille: The Ten Commandments--> The Ten Commandments
Y. Ozu: Story of Floating Weeds--> Tokyo Story
J. von Sternberg: Docks of New York--> Blue Angel

In both silent film and sound film, Eisenstein is a titan, but taken together, it can be said that no one made the transition as well as he. No one would compare the sound Testament of Dr. Mabuse with the silent Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (and this is leaving aside Lang's dismal Hollywood work); DeMille's sound epics are ripe for parody; and Dreyer, Ozu, and Sternberg--their important silent films are rather late (Joan of Arc: 1928, Floating Weeds: 1934, Docks of New York: 1928), where Strike and Battleship Potemkin are rather earlier: 1925.

[It really is a shame that sound came along and ruined everything. 1927 brought us Napoleon, The General, The Lodger (Hitchcock!), Metropolis, and Sunrise... and, alas, The Jazz Singer. I don't lament the appearance of sound, but I do mourn the end of silent film as a creative medium.]

Anyways, Eisenstein's work in Ivan the Terrible cements his claim to being the best director of sound films, as well. The pacing, the lighting, the music, the makeup, the battle scenes, the costumes, the bizarre color scene in an otherwise B&W movie!! (I cannot say the script, for I watched it today without subtitles...don't ask.) Countless classic moments, and all in a completely new style from his silent movies.

Now, the naive viewer would be correct in saying that Ivan the Terrible hardly *looks* like a movie from the 1940s. It's hard to believe that this film came after Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, etc. There is nothing breezy or ironical about Ivan the Terrible. It is very nearly a tonal monolith, like many great silent films. The point to make, though, is that Eisenstein's silent movies are nothing of this sort. Strike, October, and Potemkin have no characters at all--they are all expressions of collective, anonymous, and spontaneous action. Eisenstein's silent films bear no resemble to the Lang films that Ivan the Terrible somewhat resembles (Siegfried, Brunhilde's Revenge): 1920s Eisenstein would never focus on a Wagnerian king-hero. Thus, October (let's say) is far more breezy and associative than the very Shakespearean Ivan.

This difference is entirely political: Soviet art entered a major retrogression while Eisenstein was trying to make a film in Mexico (never finished), and so historical realism and major world-historical figures took the forefront in Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, where his earlier films are experimental and always foreground a mass of people, playing down the role of party leadership.

This film is so full of remarkable moments that I can barely run through a list of them all. But the coronation, the siege of Kazan, the chess-board w/ giant shadows, the singing Muscovites in a long line strung out across the steppes, the church-play of the fiery furnace, the assassination in the church, or the jaw-dropping dance scene (in color!)----never a dull moment. One image stood out for me, this viewing, however: Ivan has just realized that his wife has been poisoned (back in Part 1), and he reaches his hands in despair across a table with the poisoned cup on it. And....he has...the most beautiful fingernails you have ever seen. It is stunning. The film is never crude, and the budget seems to have been reasonable, but only at this point does it strike one as a great sound film. We all know that once actor's voices could be heard, it changed the nature of the close-up. A close-up no longer suggests volume. But I don't know that a silent film would ever meaninglessly zoom-in on a pair of beautifully manicured male hands. And really, one might say, this is what is missing from Shakespeare.

Why we shouldn't listen to artists talk about their work--Funny Games

This movie has been getting bad reviews.

From A.O. Scott:
His is an especially pure and perverse kind of cinematic sadism, the kind that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism. We will endure the pain he inflicts for our own good, and feel bad about it in the bargain.

[Haneke's] ideas are often facile encapsulations of chic conventional wisdom.

[You, the viewer, are meant to] congratulate yourself for having purchased a dose of Mr. Haneke’s contempt

My favorite blurb comes from the NY Post:
Basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as Hostel, even if it's tricked out with intellectual pretension.

Now, Michael Haneke strikes me as the sort of asshole who would welcome bad reviews. "That's exactly the effect I was looking for!"-- and would delight in bad reviews from America, and would take a bubble bath in bad reviews from the NY Post. But, as one gets older, one gets tired of assholes of this particular species. But A.O. Scott has Haneke right on the money: he's not that smart. Nothing could be further from the truth than the NY Post, which could have been written as a parody of how to misunderstand this film. But equally off-mark is Haneke himself, with his spoutings about the viewer's "complicity" in the violence. This, of course, from someone who makes a shot by shot remake of his OWN movie...

The problem: this film is not WORTH misunderstanding or "intellectually" defending. A.O. Scott is right to conclude that Haneke has better movies than this, but I have to stick up for Funny Games on a movie-going level. We should bracket as inane the ethical questions of "desensitization to violence" that reviewers have focused on, and which Haneke childishly has participated in.

Evidently the new prequel to the Silence of the Lambs committed the ultimate blunder of explaining Hannibal Lector's evil, through some childhood trauma, Nazis, etc. Funny Games, though a remake of a 10-year-old film, is still ahead of the curve in this respect. Everyone will have remarked on this. What should also be noted, though, is that the bourgeois family is equally unpsychologized. A film like The Ref (yes, the Dennis Leary film) knows that, dramatically, an intruder into the family environment naturally brings out the divisions (Oedipal or otherwise) hidden under the placid surface. C.f. also Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, evidently, the Japanese film Visitor Q.

Funny Games shows no interest in family dynamics. I hypothesize that Haneke threw away this immense dramatic possibility (characters turning against one another, relishing the punishment of their spouse, using the child against the other parent, etc) for a reason. He completely leaves aside the question of whether these people "deserve" their fate, and really is not that interested in how they (psychologically) "respond" to their situation. If Haneke's film earns the boring and cliched descriptor "clinical," it is unclear what kind of clinic it would be--i.e., what is the subject of our observation?

If the film were *truly* a test wherein the audience were "dared" to find sadism interesting, my response would be, it's a rigged game. The only funny and charming characters are the torturers. And without them, there would quite literally be no movie. The film is insufferably boring (read: brilliantly directed) when they are off-screen. To desire more torture is our only hope for a rescue from the non-dynamics of the Watt-Roth dialogue.

Oops, I said I wasn't going to intellectualize this. So, yes, on a movie-going level, the film delivers. It is well-known (from Paradise Lost) that we prefer "bad" characters to good, and Funny Games gives us great and inventive entertainment along these lines. Generically, it is interesting: is it a black comedy? And overall, fewer people die in this film than in The Ladykillers, and none of the violence is onscreen, so I don't see what the fuss is about. A smart movie? In a limited way, and as regards its limits, yes. "Torture porn?" Certainly not. Worth seeing for some great direction, snappy dialogue, and good acting? Well, that answers itself.

Strike (1925)

Anthology Film Archives' "Essential Cinema" series is one of the more off-putting, elitist endeavors imaginable: "Let's screen already obscure, unlikable, and forgotten films... but in a way that renders them unintelligible!" The Dreyer screenings of last week have now given way to Eisenstein's masterworks, and nary a subtitle in sight. For this I applaud them. I may not have the eye for technical aspects (a good or bad transfer, 35 mm vs 70 mm, etc.), but without real film, untampered with and played "straight," as it were, one never *could* begin to distinguish these things. And although I have no interest in making films, I regard every Essential Cinema screening of a classic silent film as of the utmost importance in my education in filmmaking.

It is trivial to discuss the place of Strike within the canon; we may consider it sufficient to mention that Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible have both placed in the Sight and Sound polls, while Strike and October have not. For myself, I find the three silent films virtually interchangeable in (ludicrously high) quality. Ivan the Terrible may just be the best film ever made. But let me make a little case for Strike as a film you cannot go another day without seeing.

There are no characters to speak of. The plot is one-dimensional. The "meaning" is transparent and blunt. These are qualities of film that we have learned to ask for. Strike dashes these assumptions. Characters are shown to be unnecessary, and perhaps even a juvenile addiction of viewers. Complexity of plot appears weak and trivial. Subtlety seems like mediocrity, a compensation for poor sets and uninteresting shots. This was a direction film did not take. We have long thought of film as a novelistic or narrative genre; failing that, a dramatic one. Strike is symphonic. It *builds*. Motifs are repeated and varied. Individual voices are unimportant. Interludes are purely for tonal effect. And so on.

Like L'Atalante and La Belle et la Bete, I wish I had seen Strike dozens of times as a child. Far from the dour Marxist propaganda one might imagine it to be, one has rarely seen such fun had in filmmaking. One feels very far away from the formalism of Abel Gance's Napoleon, or the realism of Alexander Nevsky. Those are boring films that are "good for us" to watch. Strike, one of the more didactic films ever made, is anything but the chore that implies. And like the greatest films, one begins to forget, while watching it, that reality itself does not look like this. As morons correctly note, in a foreign film, you stop noticing the subtitles after ~ five minutes. In the best moments of Strike, I have never felt as more of a question about *reality*, nudging my friend, "Who are these guys?... Ah. Up to no good, it seems."

The Thin Man (1934)

Mr. Strick's next review will be of A Brief Encounter, a humorless and draining depiction of marriage as "the longest journey" (Shelley)-- in utter contrast to the delightful and frivolous marriage which stands at the center of The Thin Man. The Wikipedia entry for the film series (six in all) describes the couple, Nick and Nora, as "a hard-drinking and flirtatious married couple who banter wittily as they solve crimes with ease." Yes! That is all true.

Although, boiled down to plot elements, the film contains murder, blackmail, bigamy, embezzling, and the like, the main characters are so unfazed by everything that one begins to feel it would be very naive to even care about the crime committed, whose solution is the ostensible motor power of the plot. Let me illustrate this point: in a mystery film, such as Murder on the Orient Express, every effort is made to play up the contrast between the apparent nonsense of Poirot's method, and the stunning results he produces. In the Thin Man, the mystery itself turns out indeed not to have been attended to any more by the screenwriters than by ourselves. All the pleasure, as it were, is to be had along the way.

Dashiell Hammett has earned a reputation somewhere below James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler for American noir novelists, and this is as it should be. The Thin Man skates over the thinnest premise entirely on charm: nearly every minor character over-stays their welcome, explanations and motives are rarely coherent, and the conclusion is absurd and unsatisfying. But we all know what charm is, no? And not only do Nick and Nora Charles (and their dog Astor) have it, but they are married. Married. I can not think of another film that makes being married look this great. Love stories all either lead up to a wedding, with married life never shown, or they deal in adultery. A good marriage is, for most purposes, not a cause of narrative.

This, of course, is true for our happy couple here. They never quarrel, but rather flirt. Nick is retired and they have no money concerns. Left to their own devices, their parties would *not* be invaded by reporters and suspects. The real genius of putting a delightful married couple at the center of a tumultuous murder investigation is precisely how little their marriage "needs" something like this to hold it together. One reason that I imagine the sequels are probably quite good is that there would be no reason to recreate the circumstances of the original's mystery. Like the Marx Brothers films, there is strictly speaking no need to limit these characters to a certain genre. I would follow Nick and Nora anywhere. They owe me nothing.

The 39 Steps (1935)

It so happens that this is the earliest Hitchcock movie I've seen--Juno and the Paycock, the Manxman, and The Mountain Eagle; they may be masterpieces all, but they will probably remain unseen by me. Early though it is, watching it I am completely convinced by the Auteur Theory. Nearly every scene bears the Hitchcock stamp: blondes, trains, the Macguffin, a meet-cute (R. Ebert), the strange genre of the spy-thriller/comedy, the open secret protected by the (in)attention of a crowd, etc.

Hitchcock occupies a strange place in the canon of "old films that most people have seen and liked"-- remarkable because of how many of his films are regarded as classics by an undiscerning public (eight or so), how entirely suitable for every taste they seem to be, and how continually ahead-of-their-time they seem to be. That all sounds very banal, but I dare anyone to think of another director so... so very popular! with everyone! The only possible rival is of course Howard Hawks, but Bringing Up Baby, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, To Have and Have Not, and Sergeant York don't hang together at all in the same way as Hitch's ouevre.

The 39 Steps is a great Hitchcock film. I prefer it to Spellbound, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Birds, and Rope (to name only the duds among his famous movies). The pacing is flawless, the leads are likable, and there are five or six indelible shots (in a movie that is extremely "light" and not at all striving for indelibility). Mr. Strick and I will often mention Howard Hawks' definition of a good movie as "three great scenes and no bad ones"-- The 39 Steps has a dozen great scenes, easy.

On the back of my copy of Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, there is a blurb by W.H. Auden comparing it to The 39 Steps, the novel by John Buchan, "on the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next," in which I suppose these works are supreme. But Hitchcock's vision is immeasurably more profound than the good-evil world of Middle Earth: the world of this film is populated with indifferent, newspaper reading persons, who find it hard to believe anything outside of their routine gossip, who can barely be bothered to interfere in a matter of the greatest national importance. In short, a world of idiots. All of the intrigue which fascinates us, barely arouses any attention from the bumbling background of human life, which at most aspires to a local nosiness.

Perhaps one doesn't think this while watching the film, but what occurs to me while reflecting upon it is, "how unfortunate that the character cannot go back through every location, after it's all over and done with, and find everyone whom he had to evade or deceive, and let them know that they had been wrong and/or simply in the way!"

Vampyr (1932)

Many who have seen Vampyr will remember--misremember--it as a silent movie. There is spoken dialogue, to be sure, but very little, nearly all of it inconsequential, and much of the film's brief running is taken up with still shots of a book about vampires. It would be very easy to guess that the film was a hold-over from a silent project, and that very little was done to bring it up to the expectations of a talking picture.

As we have been taught to do with early horror films, the proper thing indeed is to gush over the "atmosphere" presented here. Much of this atmosphere is unintentionally masterful and weird, such as the entire thing (a vampire film, I remind you) being shot in broad daylight. The first scenes are precisely Kafkaesque: sparse, claustrophobic, shadowy, and peopled with halting and confused villagers. The latter half of the film is incoherent, and no one will find the "horror" suspenseful--the titular vampire is a slow-moving old woman. The saving point of the second half is a long "burial alive" dream sequence that is suffocatingly slow (and, from a modern point of view, refreshingly unexplained).

What can we learn from this film? For one, even this too-late development of the silent film was remarkably anti-theatrical. There is hardly 40 seconds of this film that could be staged. Compare this with the Hollywood Dracula (Tod Browning) of the previous year, which began as a Broadway play. [Sidenote: evidently the technically superior version of this Dracula is the spanish-language version simultaneously produced by Universal Studios, which has, from what I've seen, far more dramatic and engaging camera work.] Vampyr: only 70 minutes long, anti-climactic, confusing, and reliant on long stretches of explanatory intertitles, barely knows what it is to be a MOVING picture, much less a talking one. But its ambition is less to be a filmed record of Aristotelian drama than to be *illustrative*. A few indelible, recurrent still images dominate the film: the man with the scythe (above), the hero's face under glass, a distorted feminine grimace, and an angel's silhouette.

While I cannot recommend Vampyr, with its narrative incompetence and long boring stretches, as entertainment, nor--for Dreyer was certainly on the "wrong side of history"--for its influence, the film asks an important question: why is it that we do not ask our horror films to any longer resemble, exactly and uncannily resemble, our bad dreams?