Zombies and Helicopters

Now and then we come across combinations in life that achieve a kind of perfection. Two things that come together a form a beautiful poetry greater than the sum of their parts. Yin and yang. Peanut butter and jelly. Hall and Oates. Assault and battery.

Zombies and helicopters.

If the zombie holocaust happens (and rest assured, it will), two things will happen.

1.) You Will Escape Zombies In A Helicopter

It's a scientific fact that helicopters are the most efficient vehicle for zombie evasion.

Exhibit A: Dawn of the Dead. Mankind's best guide for surviving zombies. Here, our heroes leave a shopping mall via chopper in the nick of time.

Exhibit B: Nightmare City. Oh shit! Another last minute escape. Bonus points for escaping off the top of a rollercoaster.

Exhibit C: Planet Terror. Military helicopters provide extra safety. At the very least, have some sort of soldiers or law enforcement individual in your crew.

Exhibit D: 28 Weeks Later. Being inside in the helicopter is imperative for a successful escape. Hanging off the landing skids... not so much.

2.) You Will Kill Zombies With The Helicopter's Blades

In addition to being the best means of escape, helicopters also double as an efficient zombie murdering tool.

Exhibit A: Dawn of the Dead. A zombie walks right into the blades.

Okay, to be fair, this was really more of an accident. But a valuable lesson is learned.

Exhibit B: Planet Terror. A more direct application of the helicopter's blades.

Yeah, I guess that's pretty cool. Except...

Exhibit C: 28 Weeks Later...this is way more fucking awesome! YEAH! Suck it, Robert Rodriguez.

I hope this was informative.

The Ouchy Secured Receptacle

From my vantage point, America's filmmakers kind of dropped the ball when it came to Iraq war/Bush administration movies. What could have been a fruitful time for thoughtful commentary mostly was a time of duds and unremarkable misfires. Rendition was self-important Oscar bait with a poorly conceived message. Brian De Palma's Redacted was of some interest because of its occasionally audacious multi-media approach, yet mostly it bewildered me in how intent it seemed on criticizing our soldiers without making any sort of commentary on the war itself or the Bush administration. I know a lot of people enjoyed Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911; personally, I thought it was a smarmy, unentertaining slog that was only popular because audiences agreed with its message, not because it was actually a good documentary.

I skipped Stop-Loss, Lions for Lambs and Home of the Brave, so I cannot comment on them personally, but I recall the reviews being rather brutal. I also recall that In the Valley of Elah received mostly positive notices, but I just can't bring myself to watch a Paul Haggis movie. Maybe some day, when my ears stop ringing from the sound of the jackhammer that Haggis used to drive his point home in Crash, I'll give it a shot.

We're still close to it, so maybe it's understandable if our filmmakers haven't had the objectivity to look at the war and figure out the way to express their feelings on film. After all, the best movies about Vietnam all seem to have come out after the end of the war (Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly chomping at the bit for a great anti-war movie. I'm just a little surprised we haven't gotten one yet. The filmmakers I mentioned above all had their hearts in the right place, but for one reason or another couldn't crack it, could not figure out an effective cinematic means of expressing their ideas.

So maybe we're not ready yet for analysis, but what are ready for someone to capture the zeitgeist of the whole situation that is the American occupation of Iraq, and that's exactly what director Kathryn Bigelow has done with The Hurt Locker. The film, an action/thriller of sorts about American bomb technicians in Iraq, remains mainly apolitical on the subject of the war itself and instead works to build a powerful empathy for the American soldiers.

Unless you're Brian De Palma (seriously buddy, did American soldiers murder your family or something?), I think all Americans agree that we should support our troops even if we don't support the war, and The Hurt Locker is a meditation on what our soldiers are sacrificing by going to war. It's not a preachy anti-war film, and it's not a bunch of rah-rah patriotic bullshit. Regardless of your personal politics, the movie should prove to be a compelling experience.

MAJOR SPOILERS for The Hurt Locker will follow. Also a slight spoiler for The Big Red One.

I've been a fan of Kathryn Bigelow's for a long time. I've enjoyed and admired all of her films that I've seen, including Near Dark, Blue Steel and Strange Days. But she'll always have a special place in my heart for directing Point Break, one of my all time favorite action movies. It's a film with a predominantly male cast, about male relationships, with one of the best chase scenes ever filmed, and 3 or 4 other top notch action sequences. Not a lot of female directors would tackle this kind of material, let alone do a better job than most established action directors.

I think I must have been peripherally aware that Bigelow had been working on a new film, but only really became aware of The Hurt Locker in the past few weeks, after reading some strong reviews. I went from 0 to 60 on the excitement scale in about 5 seconds, and jumped right on it when the movie came to D.C. this past weekend. I thought it might be, if nothing else, a chance to see a more old school brand of action in the theaters. Bigelow was a master of the 80's and early-90's style of action filmmaking; I was expecting a throwback. I've enjoyed some of our modern shaky-cam, rapidly cut action movies, but I felt it would be nice to see something old fashioned.

Which is why I was surprised when The Hurt Locker opened with the sorts of shots typical in modern action movies: handheld, quick zooms, somewhat fast cutting. Nowhere near the intensified continuity frenzy of Bourne Ultimatum or Quantum of Solace, but noticeably not old school. My heart sank a little. It was clear this wasn't going to be a throwback, that Bigelow was trying to keep up with the times.

I hope this post serves as penance for my initial doubts about the style of The Hurt Locker. Bigelow employs the whole documentary-influenced, pseudo-realistic handheld style as well as I've ever seen it. She never shakes the camera so much that the focus of the shot is lost. She cuts in a steady and clear fashion so that geography is maintained, and each shot works to build upon the last (as opposed to the fast-cut information overload that many modern action films attempt). In a film based more in suspense and anxiety than outright action, this look establishes an unsteady, unpredictable atmosphere that runs through the entire picture.

The film starts with a neat fake out. Three soldiers in Iraq are investigating a suspicious heap of trash in a little village, which turns out to contain a bomb. The leader of the group is played by Guy Pearce, and of course I would have naturally assumed that he was the main character if it weren't for the fact that I had read a few articles about the film before I saw it and knew it wasn't to be the case. Oh well. Guy goes in for a closer look at the bomb and after a scene of mounting tension... well, let's just say that Guy isn't around for the rest of the film.

The whole "oh shit I guess he's not the main character after all" approach is a smart way to open this movie. It establishes the constant danger that these soldiers live in, that any character could go at any time, that seemingly simple situations can spiral into hell in a matter of moments.

The structure of the movie is interesting in its episodic nature. There's not an overarching, tightly plotted narrative joining together all of the action sequences. Instead, the film is a series of sequential but somewhat isolated set pieces, usually involving the team of intrepid heroes trying to dismantle bombs. In between set pieces, we are afforded some down time with the protagonists back at their base. There's no one goal or villain, every day is a new job for these guys.

So the real narrative comes from the characters, how their relationships develop over time, and how they change the closer they come to the end of their tour of duty. The leads are Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner, who had previously impressed me in 28 Weeks Later and Dahmer), Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie, who I think has done some Spike Lee movies, but I'll always fondly remember him as Tupac in Notorious*), and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty from I Know Who Killed Me, where he fucked an amputee Lindsay Lohan).

James is the central figure, as his personality is the impetus for much of the suspense and conflict in the film. James's job is to diffuse the bombs while the others watch his back. He is good at his job, but bold, stubborn and willing to take risks on a level that is borderline reckless. Early in the film, he confounds his teammates by wandering brazenly into a potential danger zone to find a bomb, instead of letting their remote controlled robot check it out first. Later, while diffusing a car bomb, his teammates believe that a threat may be building and that they need to leave ASAP; James' response is to take off his headphones so he can ignore them and get back to work on the bomb. How can Sanborn and Eldridge trust their lives to a man who doesn't even seem concerned with protecting his own?

James isn't so much a hot shot or a show-off as a man intently focused on his job, who likes what he does because he's good at it. The opening text of The Hurt Locker informs us that "war is a drug." Is James addicted to danger? Does he have a death wish? No, but he is perhaps fascinated by death. He keeps little souvenirs of the bombs he's dismantled, because he's drawn to the idea of something that could have killed him, but didn't.

Much suspense is generated in the film, and Bigelow earns every second of it. The suspense is never contrived, it doesn't cheat. It is built from uncertainty and confusion, and is not manufactured to reach spectacular payoffs. It does in one scene exploit that most reliable of bomb cliches, the digital read-out counting down to explosion, but Bigelow doesn't cut to extreme close-ups of it every 5 seconds like in most action films. In fact, it's barely shown.

The suspense feels more natural than that. During the car bomb sequence, Sanborn and Eldridge see a man in a building video taping them. He appears to be signaling to other men across the street. The soldiers grow increasingly nervous; is something happening, or are they over reacting? Variations on this idea repeat throughout the movie, more often than not with the scenes ending anticlimactically. Maybe the danger was real and maybe it was only perceived, but the threat is always looming.

By far my favorite sequence in The Hurt Locker, and in fact probably the best stretch of filmmaking I've seen in any movie this year, is a tense standoff where the trio finds themselves trapped behind a cliff under sniper fire. I'm not sure exactly how long the scene is, maybe 10 minutes? I was too engrossed to check my watch. Sanborn mans a sniper rifle while James tries to scope out their attackers with his binoculars. Bigelow builds tension with stillness. She cuts between shots of Sanborn and James, laying near-motionless on the cliff, talking in low monotone, with shots of what Sanborn sees through the scope on the sniper rifle. Bigelow occasionally cuts to inside of the building where the enemies are hiding, positioned near a window. From Sanborn's view it's just an empty window; will he see the snipers before they take another shot at him? There's movement and Sanborn fires; a few seconds later, a puff of smoke on the side of the building informs that he missed. James calmly directs him to aim more to the left. And on it continues.

Through action, without much dialogue, the characters' relationships continue to develop throughout the scene. At one point, James asks Eldridge to bring up a drink of water. Instead of drinking it himself, without a word he opens it and puts it to Sanborns lips, so Sanborn can drink without losing his focus. Earlier in the film Sanborn and Eldridge were scared of James, and even discussed the possibility of fragging him if he continued to risk their lives. Now we start to see that a camaraderie has formed between the men, that on some level trust has been formed even if it initially seemed unwarranted.

Sanborn is able to pick off some of the snipers, and Eldridge stops an enemy soldier from sneaking up behind them. The trio doesn't hear or see anything for a while, so they wait. And wait. Hours pass, with Sanborn looking through the sniper scope. The sun starts to go down. "I think we can go now," James finally offers. And the scene ends. No fireworks, no action-packed climax, no spectacular catharsis to release the tension. It seems safe, so they go home.

As I mentioned before, one of the strengths of The Hurt Locker is its willingness to meditate on exactly what our soldiers go through. Logically, I understand how many lives we've lost in Iraq and feel some sense of the weight of the loss. Yet I don't know that I've ever contemplated what it would be like to sit on a hilltop for hours, unable to move because men are trying to shoot me. No other movie has ever made me feel so much empathy for soldiers in war. I would not refer to this film as realistic or lacking in artifice (in fact, I wouldn't really say that about any film), yet The Hurt Locker does seem to hit at some sort of truth as to how these men must feel.

The weakest parts of the film (minor concerns, I assure you) are the elements that seem the most contrived or structured. One character in particular, Cambridge, so clearly has "I am only in this movie to get killed" stamped on his forehead that his inevitable death lacks impact. Though even that I wouldn't bitch about too much, as his death supplies one of the best shots in the entire film.

The camera has him in medium shot, then quickly zooms out to show that we are actually inside the soldier's vehicle, where the other soldiers are chilling out. Cambridge is now in the background of the shot, with the other soldiers in the foreground, when BAM a bomb goes off right next to Cambridge, not only annihilating him but nearly instantly obscuring the action from view as dust and debris launches down the road and envelopes the vehicle. I said that his death lacked emotional impact, but the moment itself is terrifying.

I said before that the movie is apolitical and mainly concerned with imagine what life must be like for the soldiers. That's mainly true, except there is one subplot that could possibly be read as a commentary on the war. James strikes up a friendship with a little boy who calls himself Beckham who sells DVDs outside the base. James has a son back in the U.S., and you could argue that his attachment to the boy stems from James missing his son. One day, the soldiers find a cache of explosives in a building, and on a table in the building is the mutilated corpse of a young boy, stuffed with explosives. James believes this boy may be Beckham, and does not take it well.

When Beckham is absent from the base the next day, James assaults the older man Beckham normally worked with, and hijacks his truck at gun point. James demands that the man show him who killed Beckham. It's clear that the man can barely understand what James is saying, and is terrified of him. He drops James off at a residence in town, and when James goes in looking for trouble, the man drives away. And of course, after pulling a gun on the owners and generally terrorizing everyone, it becomes clear that these people are just regular folks and not terrorists. So now James is lost somewhere in the middle of Iraq, and has to make his way back to the base alone. Later on, after he's returned, he goes outside and there's Beckham, alive and well, trying to sell him DVDs.

Obviously the argument would be that James' actions are a sort of microcosm of the U.S. invading Iraq. He becomes involved with a situation he doesn't fully understand, based on faulty information, and no matter how genuine his intentions he only succeeds in making things worse and harming innocent people.

I'm guessing that might be what they were going for, although Bigelow has kept tight-lipped about it in the interviews I've read, instead maintaining that the movie isn't meant as political commentary and is instead focused on the soldiers. Which is the smart way to play it if she wants to get as many people as possible to see her film.

I knew this film was going to be tense, what I didn't know was how heartbroken I was going to feel by the end. And not because of some last minute, meaningful death of a major character, a cliche many films like to exploit. In fact, in an interesting choice, none of the major characters die in The Hurt Locker. (Maybe for the same reason none of the leads died in Sam Fuller's The Big Red One, because war stories can only be told by survivors.)

Near the end of the film, there's a surprising, maybe somewhat audacious cut: we go abruptly from the war to James back in the U.S., his tour of duty over, home with his wife and kid. And what we learn is sad, but given James' character, inevitable. James can't adjust to life back home. He goes grocery shopping and gets stuck trying to pick out what cereal to buy. Bigelow shoots the shelves as dominating the frame, overwhelming James. Here's a man who has disarmed hundreds of bombs and lived, and now he's defeated by Captain Crunch. Of course he decides to re-enlist; in war he has a purpose and a great power. At home, he's useless.

Before I wrap this up, I would like to give a shout out to all three leads and writer Mark Boal. Much of the film contains the kind of low-key, quietly great acting and character work that I value and feel like we don't see enough of in supposedly serious films. Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoyed Sean Penn in Milk and all that, but why does it seem like actors only get praised when they do funny voices and wear make-up and deliver passionate monologues and shit. The work that Geraghty, Mackie and especially Renner do in this film is all top notch, and compelling in the unforced way where they suggest fully formed human being without spelling too much out in the dialogue. I guess there are a few more noticeable "acting" moments where one of them gets a big scene or something, but most of their best moments are more subtle. Like the weary but focused and professional looks on their faces when they face off against the snipers.

The Hurt Locker is probably my favorite film of 2009 so far. I can't think of much else competition. Up, perhaps? Can anyone else think of some contenders?



*As in "B.I.G." Not the Hitchcock one.

Notes on Transformers 2

I wouldn't have guessed it, but Transformers 2 is the most remarkable blockbuster in years. I don't mean to say that I liked it, just that I can't think of another major release that I wanted to share my thoughts on this strongly. Walking home from the theater, my brother Andy and I had a long, rambling conversation about what we had just seen that continued off and on throughout the day, and I figure that was a good sign that I should write a post. Just two weeks ago, I saw Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves, a movie that fascinated me and ran me through the emotional wringer before making me flat out cry like a baby, yet Michael Bay's Transformers 2 is the movie I most want to talk about. I guess that's classic me.

Transformers 2 may have the worst structured, most obnoxious, most infantile screenplay ever used for a mega-budget action film. I cannot stress how unbelievably, fascinatingly awful this film is on the levels of narrative, character and dialogue. I've read complaints that the story is incomprehensible, but that's not the problem. I followed the plot well enough. The problem is that the story is overstuffed and underdeveloped, with a wildly inconsistent tone. As a result, despite the film's fast pace and rather relentless forward momentum, it has no clear direction. Or maybe it's that it tries to go in all directions at once.

Let me try to give you some idea of the film's narrative corpulence. The film is, in turns, a sci-fi/action movie, a comedy, a romance, a war movie, a disaster movie, an homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and an Indiana Jones-esque treasure hunt. The film begins with an epilogue set, according to Wikipedia, in 17,000 BC, and ends with a massive, 30 minute long battle in modern day Egypt. The first action sequence reintroduces us to the military characters from the first film, only to shove them off to the periphery for the rest of the film. The real main character is again Sam Witwicky, now heading off to college. His story involves a shard of the All Spark (which if you've forgotten what this was from the first film, you're out of luck because part 2 never bothers to explain it) which turns all of his kitchen appliances into evil transformers and somehow psychically implants data into his head, but before that sinks in it's off to college where a Decepticon (evil transformer) disguises as a girl and tries to seduce him, and then other Decepticons try to abduct him to steal the info in his brain, but the Autobots (good transformers) save him and he goes on an adventure with his girlfriend and college roommate to find an artifact that can defeat the Decepticons, and along the way John Turturro's character from the first film joins them and becomes a good guy this time even though he was an asshole in part 1, and eventually they are teleported to Egypt by a bad transformer turned good, oh and also at some point Optimus Prime (lead good transformer) dies and they have to bring him back to life. (Exhale). Meanwhile, the Decepticons awaken an ancient Decepticon called the Fallen who plots to destroy our sun, and he brings back to life Megatron (bad guy from first film), and they blow up a bunch of cities and go on TV to announce their presence (people apparently don't know transformers exist despite their public brawls in part 1) an action which never seemed to pay off in the film and...

And on and on and on. I'm not barely touching the tip of the iceberg here; there's enough plot for 5 Transformers sequels. It's like watching someone try to spin a hundred plates, only instead of keeping the plates spinning the person lets them fall and replaces them with another plate.

That's not the worst part, though. The worst part is the humor. When Transformers 2 isn't all those other things I mentioned, it is a vile, stupid, frenetic comedy. Probably 30% of this movie is like the worst, most expensive sitcom never made. People bitched about the dumb jokes in the first film, but I would argue it at least fit the film's silly, toy-commercial, adolescent tone. What's amazing about the sequel is the volume of the attempted comedy. (I mean that both in terms of amount and in terms of its auditory properties). Imagine watching a Naked Gun style laff-a-minute movie where absolutely all of the jokes fail. Transformers 2 throws a new joke out every 30 seconds or so, and none of them are funny. The humor ranges from infantile bodily function and slapstick jokes (robot humping a leg, robot farting, robots cracking wise in silly voices a la a bad cartoon, guy who gets hit in balls a lot) to juvenile sex and drug jokes (robot with testicles, mom eating a pot brownie and going crazy and talking about hearing her son "bust his cherry").

Most offensive is the stereotyping. I know Michael Bay has had a penchant in the past for broad stereotypes making wise cracks, but in his other films it seemed more benign. This film feautures a pair of ignorant, obnoxious, trash talking robots who speak in stereotypically black voices and spout off shit about busting caps in people's asses and whatnot. One of the robots even has huge buck teeth, one of which is a gold tooth. I can't believe no one at the studio vetoed this. What next, an effeminate, limp-wristed transformer making jokes about getting rear-ended by other cars?

(One part that did make me laugh: Bay treats us to a shot of two dogs jumping away from an exploding dog house, which works a sort of parody of an image we've seen in countless other action movies).

What little human interest there is involves a subplot about the main character's girlfriend thinking he cheated on her, but it's all really a misunderstanding etc etc. The same shit you've seen in a million other movies and TV shows. Even if it wasn't all so obnoxious already, you'd end up hating all of the characters by default because Bay has apparently directed the cast to shout all of their lines at the top of their lungs, as fast as they can. It's all so loud and breathless that there were many times I frankly could not understand what people were saying.

So yeah, narratively speaking, Transformers 2 is a mess. It is stupid, sloppy, and borderline offensive.



And yet...

I can't dismiss Transformers 2. Not completely. As much of a big fucking mess as it is, some of the film is spectacular. And not just in the sense that they had a lot of money to throw into special effects. Many sequences in the movie are notably, memorably well constructed on an audio/visual level. Some moments even approach brilliance.

It got me thinking a lot about the old content vs. form debate. (XTC vs. Adam Ant). The way I see it, most film critics train their focus nearly exclusively to the content, i.e. plot, dialogue, character. In most reviews I read, the form is ignored or given little more than lip service. Just look at all the recent Star Trek reviews that rightly praised the pleasurable elements of the plot and performances, while mainly ignoring several distracting flaws in the visual storytelling. This kind of reviewing is understandable to the degree that it is much more difficult to discuss, say, the editing or camera movements of a film you've only seen once than it is to discuss the storyline. I know I'm guilty of it myself when talking about movies.

Yet it sometimes strikes me that we've gotten to the point where many reviewers place the importance of story over that of storytelling. How many times have you read complaints along the lines of "it was well made but lacking in depth" in a review? Shouldn't "well made" count for more than that? Doesn't being "well made" add depth to a film?

I'm not arguing for pure formalism. I want movies to have a great story, great characters, great dialogue, all that. (Especially if it is a film in a more traditional style, or conforming to a certain genre). But none of that stuff is unique to film. You can tell a great story with great characters in a book, in a song, in a comic, as an anecdote, and so on. The mix of sounds and visuals, framing, camera movement, editing... this is the stuff that makes films special. The way the story is told is at least as important as what is being told. Form is as important as content. Or, perhaps, form IS content. How the camera films a character speaking (and why the filmmakers chose to do it that way) is as important to the meaning of the film as what the character is actually saying.

I've seen plenty of smaller films, be they art films or experimental films or whatever, that de-emphasize narrative concerns and play up the form, but it's not really common in our mainstream. American mainstream films are very much plot driven. Over the years, I've dreamed that some day someone will make a great action movie (or whatever) that completely eschews logical narrative in favor of formalist spectacle. We've gotten a little closer, with films like Shoot 'Em Up, but even that one still feels the need to hit obligatory plot points and character scenes, so we're not there yet. I've joked with my friends that I'd like to see Hollywood make Aliens vs Termintors, a movie that would be all action, special effects and spectacle with no dialogue or discernible characters. Even better would be a movie with no recognizable plot at all that simply treats us to a series of breathtaking visuals of carnage.

What I'm saying is, there are moments in Transformers 2, when the exposition is put on pause and the emphasis switches to action, that seemed like the movie I've dreamed of.

Not everyone will grant me this, but Michael Bay and company have crafted some excellent action sequences in Transformers 2. I wouldn't call any of them exciting or thrilling, but on the level of spectacle and visual pleasure there is amazing stuff on display. The frequent complaint I've read about Bay's action is that the cuts are too fast, and the subjects of the shots (especially in the case of the transformers) are often filmed too close-up and thus become incomprehensible. Bay has been guilty of that in that past, I remember that being a problem some times in the first Transformers, but I don't really think he makes that mistake here. In fact, compared to some of the fast-cutting action scenes we've had of late, be they well constructed (Bourne Ultimatum) or hard to follow (Quantum of Solace), Bay admirably holds a lot of shots for more than a split second. And rather than over-using close-ups, I had the sense that he often pulled the camera back to cram as much spectacle in to each shot as possible.

Now, personally I'm a bigger fan of the Spielbergian school of action, which is clear and concise, and is less dependant on sensory overload. It also places more emphasis on being character driven, the idea being that if we care about the characters then we are more emotionally invested in the action and hence it becomes more thrilling. When people complain about not giving a shit about the action scenes in Transformers because they don't care about the characters, I understand what they mean. Nonetheless, in Bay's finest moments, he uses sound and image to create sequences that are absorbing and sometimes awe-inspiring. We could argue the merits of spectacle; personally I think it can be a powerful use of the medium.

Some of the reviews I've read for Transformers 2 complain that there was too much action and not enough story. Ironically, the action scenes are the only parts of the movie that work narratively. For example, there is a transformer fight scene in the woods that has a beginning, middle, and end, has a clear goal and purpose, has rising and falling action. I felt it was constructed in way that that the audience understood who was doing what and where, we understood where tiny Sam was in relation to the giant robots, and it effectively cut back and forth between his attempted escape with Optimus Prime fighting the Decepticons.

(Of course, I've only seen the film once, and it's not on DVD so I can't get any screen grabs, which makes it difficult to build a strong argument on this point.)

There's other good shit, too. I especially enjoyed the sequence where a bunch of marbles roll into a top secret base and transform into a little flying robot to steal the All Spark shard. It's a cool looking and engaging sequence. If it was released separately as its own short film, I could see people praising it. Trapped inside the behemoth of Transformers 2, stuff like this tends to go unnoticed.

My favorite parts of the film were when it strayed entirely from its dopey humor and ADHD plot, threw logic out the window for good measure, and focused on audio/visual spectacle, a spectacle sometimes so strange and intricate that it was borderline surreal. Scenes at the Fallen's home base, somewhere up in space and decorated with weird, goo-filled sacks that seem to birth new transformers (or something) almost felt abstracted from the rest of the film. Best of all might have been where Sam has a near death experience, and inexplicably finds himself in some sort of robo-Valhalla, a scene which is unexpectedly majestic and beautiful. (And brief).

And I took great pleasure in looking at the robots themselves, watching them unwind and unfold. I loved watching the appliances in Sam's kitchen transform into deadly robots. And I loved the way the dangling metal slats off of one robot's face suggested a robot beard. And plenty of other details like that. You could argue that this is more of a testament to the film's huge special effect budget. Certainly I'd agree that much of the credit goes to the FX team and not to Bay himself. But let's not diminish the amount of creativity in this film just because of its budget.

The film becomes less defensible in the final act. On the one hand, the climactic, epic action scene that wraps the film up seems like the kind of plot-free mayhem I was earlier praising. Pity that it involves the worst action in the entire film. Mostly it consists of repetitive explosions and punching robots, with little sense of progression or momentum. It's tedious. And the final battle between Optimus and the Fallen is brief and anti-climactic.

Ultimately Transformers 2 is not the great narrative-eschewing extravaganza I've dreamed of. There are transcendent moments, no doubt. Like I said, I don't always need a good story or characters to love a movie, but Transformers 2 spends way too much time and energy on it's uninvolving plot, uninteresting characters and unsuccessful attempts at humor. I'd be willing to overlook these problems if the film wasn't so insistent on shoving them down my throat. Somewhere in the 2 1/2 hours of Transformers 2 there might be a 90 minute movie I can get behind. In the final analysis, I'm fascinated with the film, but I can't support it.

Truffaut-con 2K9: The Truffaut-memoration

a.k.a. Ahh ah ah AHHH ah... I know this much is Truffaut.

By proxy, Shenan has become something of a shut-in movie nerd like me. Or, at least, she's remarkably tolerant of my habits and spends a lot of time with me when I'm being a shut-in movie nerd. One of the things I like to encourage, to make my boringness seem more fun, is for us to work on some theme in our movie-viewing for a little while. The themes have been as specific as going through the Dirty Harry series, and as vague as watching a bunch of Spanish-language movies.

So when Shenan expressed interest in watching Jules and Jim back in January when it came on TCM, I jumped at the chance to parlay this interest into an excuse to watch a shitload of Truffaut movies. Back in college I had seen Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows and Day For Night, and had always meant to make my way back to Truffaut some day. I had squeezed in Shoot the Piano Player during my Film Noir Month in September last year, but otherwise hadn't watched anything of his in years.

To my elation, Shenan got jazzed by Truffaut and we ended up plowing through a ton of them over the last few months. The following post isn't really a major analysis of the films, but more of a brief diary where we'll write some blurbs on the films we watched in the order we watched them.

Jules and Jim

Dan - We recorded this one off of Turner Classic Movies at Shenan's request, and I was eager to see the movie again after 3 or so years. In a rather unbelievable twist of fate, the recording cut off moments before a rather shocking event just minutes before the end of the film... if you've seen it before, you'll know what I mean. I don't think Shenan fully realized how important the last few minutes were, and wasn't as manic as I was about tracking down a copy to watch. It turned out that the DVD at the video store was already checked out (I'm guessing the same thing happened to someone else who recorded it off TV), and it was a week or two before we were able to watch the ending.

Otherwise, returning to this film was a joy, and I appreciated it a lot more now than I did back in the day. I enjoyed Jules and Jim when I saw it in college, but I think I was so blinded by my hatred of the character of Catherine that I missed much of what the film was doing. Catherine is a bi-polar narcissist who enjoys playing cruel mind games and in a sense dominates much of the film, yet I see more clearly this time how the heart of the story is still Jules and Jim and their friendship. When I first saw the film, I felt anger towards the protagonists at playing willing victims to Catherine's emotional violence, but I no longer see that as detracting from the film. The men fall in love with the image or the idea of Catherine without ever truly understanding who she is. Their punishment is not deserved, but I do believe it is caused by the way they see Catherine as an ideal or an object and not as the flawed human being she is.

Truffaut has a way of telling stories that are sad and unsentimental, yet still infusing them with a lot of warmth, humor and humanism, and Jules and Jim is one of the best examples.

Shenan - I also think that the film may be a sort of evaluation on the trends of his generation (well, any generation, really, but specific to him, the things that were happening in the youth of his culture at the time), a la bucking convention and engaging in social and romantic relationships that went against the normal conventions. In a way there are a lot of advantages the characters draw from this, like being able to relate intimately to each other in ways that would not have been allowed (at least, not to each and every one of the others) had they stuck to the conventional man-and-wife monogamy foundation. But the movie, especially the ending, I think, strongly suggests that maybe these conventions are there for a reason. That reason being not destroying each other’s lives. In short, that conventions are in place because, while not perfect, they are the best system we’ve come across to gain the most while sacrificing the least, and keep things stable. It’s fine to explore other ways of doing things, but these conventions were not just slapped together without any thought. In very abstract and broad terms.

The Wild Child

Dan - After watching Wild Child, I dismissed it as good but nothing special. But as time has passed, the movie has stuck with me, I find myself still thinking about certain aspects of it. Which is usually the sign of an excellent movie, and I'm already beginning to re-evaluate it. More amusingly, one detail in the film has become something of an in-joke for Shenan and I. The titular wild child is a boy who was abandoned in the woods at a young age and grew up as an animal, and the film details a scientist's attempt to study and civilize the boy (it is based on a true story). The wild child can't speak and develops the habit, when he's hungry, of tapping an empty bowl against other people's legs when he wants food. Now, in our apartment, Shenan and I have taken to the habit of tapping an empty glass against the other person when we're out of beer.

Shenan - And saying “lait” in a high-pitched voice. Our cats have even picked up on this (the tapping), to the extent that they can. This was probably my least favorite of the Truffaut films (though it wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, just not my favorite). I don’t know exactly why, but it felt kind of flat to me. Maybe because there didn’t seem to be much at stake? I mean, Truffaut’s films are usually very humanist and deal with human relationships and emotions, and this one…I mean, what were really the consequences of socializing or not socializing this boy? The main character (aka Truffaut) obviously finds it a challenging and intriguing task, but never seems to move beyond the scientific curiosity with which he initially approaches it. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I’d have to go back and watch it for emotional connection I probably missed.


The 400 Blows

Dan - My personal favorite of the 15 or so Truffaut films I've seen, and perhaps my favorite film about childhood. This was Truffaut's first film and in it you can already see many of his common themes appearing: conflicted views of women/sexuality, casual dismissal of authority, empathy for the lives of children. In a way, the movie sets the stage for the rest of his films that we watched, not least because we followed this by watching the Antoine Doinel series, Truffaut's cycle of films that followed The 400 Blows's protagonist over a period of 20 years.


Stolen Kisses

Dan - Sadly, we never saw Antoine and Collette, the 2nd Antoine Doinel film (a short film he made about 5 years after The 400 Blows) as it wasn't available on Netflix while we were watching these. Stolen Kisses is the 3rd film in the series (and the 2nd that is feature length), and it catches up with Antoine 10 years after the original. As I recall, this was the most overtly comedic of the series, more in the spirit of the good fun, but still with some dark undertones.

Shenan - The scenes between Antoine and Christine’s parents were particularly funny.


Bed and Board

Dan - Truffaut does a ballsy thing here and starts to show Antoine's flighty, whimsical behavior as having a lot of negative real world consequences. In fact, Antoine is a flat out dick in much of Bed and Board, something I bet disappointed a lot of Truffaut fans at the time but I felt was a rewarding creative risk. Especially when you consider that Antoine is a supposedly semi-autobiographical character; perhaps Truffaut was taking a hard, critical look at himself. This entry is also more audacious visually (even using stop-motion for one strange image of rapidly blooming flowers), and as a result I would probably consider it my favorite of the sequels, even if it is the least likable.

Shenan - This was my favorite too. It’s a rare thing when you can empathize and care about the main character while simultaneously being annoyed and slightly disgusted by their behavior. Well, disgusted is the wrong word. But the feeling you get when you’ve been cheated on. Which we get because we also empathize with Christine. I guess it’s a movie that doesn’t call on us to judge the characters, just get caught up in their relationship and affairs.


Love on the Run

Dan - The final Antoine Doinel film, made 20 years after The 400 Blows, works hard to regain some of Antoine's charm, without completely excusing his antics. What I liked about this one is that it seemed to have equal measures of romanticism and cynicism. There's a somewhat exhilarating ending where everything comes together, and fate is implied to have played a hand, and Antoine is in the embrace of a beautiful woman... and yet there is still a sense that this isn't the end, only a repeating cycle, and that Antoine will make the same mistakes with women over and over again. It's a happy ending with an asterisk.

The other interesting thing here is that Truffaut frequently uses flashbacks by cutting to clips from the previous 4 films. The result is mixed. At their worst, the flashbacks feel narratively lazy or like filler (especially in one case where we are treated to a lengthy scene from Bed and Board), like a cheap horror movie sequel that needs to patch in a extra 5 minutes to reach feature length. At their best, however, the flashbacks highlight Antoine's emotional growth (or lack thereof), underline thematic connections between the films, and create an overall sense that time in film and perhaps real life is an illusion. (i.e. even as Anotine now kisses his lover in a dizzying embrace, he still exists as the 13 year old boy riding an amusement park ride. The moments are simultaneous, not separate). And if nothing else, it's fascinating to watch how the actor, Jean-Pierre Leaud, who played Antoine in all the films, really aged 20 years in front of the camera.

Shenan - I felt the same way about the flashbacks. I really felt I didn’t need them to the extent they were in there, having seen the previous movies. It got really tedious for me, and I felt like they took up maybe half the movie (maybe I’m wrong, but that’s the impression I got). I felt a little cheated, I was getting a lot of re-used material that served as a stand-in for a hefty percentage of the new stuff needed to be feature length.

But having said that, I also realize what he was doing with it. And I do agree with them emphasizing his evolution, the saturation of the present with the experiences of our past, etc. I just wish there was a different way to do it. Which I don’t know if there is, since all the prequels already exist.

And it does have his touch of charming romanticism in it, even if it did have the whole “all these people’s lives just happen to intertwine in all these ways they don’t know about and wouldn’t you know it, they’re all destined to be lovers, isn’t it convenient that my ex-wife knows your unrequited love’s sister’s co-worker’s cousin’s cat’s veterinarian” angle.

Small Change

Dan - Surprisingly, what I thought would be one of Truffaut's best (it looked like a return to 400 Blows-esque material) turned out to be my least favorite of his films. Small Change is not without its merits and charms, but it wasn't as funny, moving or as evocative of childhood as 400 Blows, perhaps because it seems to gloss over the pain of growing up in favor of emphasizing the nostalgia.

Shenan - Uh…why do I have no memory of this one?

Dan - Ouch.


Mississippi Mermaid

Dan - If Small Change sapped away a little bit (just a little, mind you) of my enthusiasm for Truffaut-con, then Mississippi Mermaid brought it back in full force. Truffaut was a great admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, and this film is something of an homage. But instead of copying Hitchcock's style, Truffaut uses certain Hitchcockian story elements, motifs and visual strategies and infuses it with a distinctly Truffauldian attitude. As a result, he makes a top notch thriller that still stops to take the time to go over his usual obsessions and creates a unique and complex screen romance. It's not as tightly pieced together as a Hitchcock film, but it's looseness is part of the charm and doesn't diminish from the suspense or excitement.

Not to go off on too much of a tangent here, but I've also been attempting some due diligence by watching several Jean-Luc Godard films for the past month or two. And while I've come to a certain appreciation of his style, watching his films has mainly confirmed for me how much more I love Truffaut. Both filmmakers' attempts at genre films are a great example why. Godard's Breathless is ostensibly a gangster film, but it's more like an essay or a joke about gangster films. The film is funny and entertaining, and I appreciate the way Godard comments on the genre, mocking certain generic elements, but it in no way functions as an actual gangster movie. This is also true of his Alphaville, Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le Fou and the genres they supposedly represent. Truffaut's genre films, on the other hand, not only comment on their genres and function as film criticism like Godard's films, but they also work as genre films in their own right. Mississippi Mermaid subverts a lot of your expectations regarding the story structure, characters and visual style of crime/thrillers, and is also a great thriller to boot.

Back to my main point, this is a great film. Truffaut made a genre film, heavily influenced by Hitchcock, but without sacrificing his own point of view or personal touch. Note the way that Truffaut borrows one of the unused endings from Hitchcock's Suspicion. He's exploring the theme of idealized love that he's explored in many other films, and using the genre to find a new, darker take on the material.

Shenan - Sort of the opposite of Jules and Jim, in a way. Propagating or romanticizing the act of eschewing all societal conventions (and legal ones, too) for the sake of and idealized Love that, after all, is supposed to stand above all other things in the end anyway, isn’t it? Not love, mind you, but Love, with a capital L (sort of like my…or, Stephen Fry’s…distinction between Poetry and poetry). Anyhow. It was very suspenseful and I found myself engaged similarly to the way I get drawn into a Hitchcock film. Even his style of filming and using setting/isolation of two people together in the end feels like suspicion (or Vertigo, or Rear Window, or any other number of his films).

On another note, I think genre films can sometimes get a similar bad rap to the one that genre novels get. Maybe not as much, because film is excused more when it is made solely to entertain (you know, think Jackass, Borat, Transformers 2, etc) and not to try to accomplish anything else, whereas books/novels/stories/poetry what have you are, I think, considered an “art” or at least, the good “literature” is, and it is what everything is supposed to strive for. But there can be some great writing and great plot construction and characterization and craftsmanship in detective novels or Stephen King books or sci fi shit. And I like seeing someone like Truffaut make a genre film, be unafraid to make a genre film, and put his craftsman’s shine on it.


The Last Metro

Dan - Sort of a spiritual sequel to Day For Night, only about theater instead of film and heavier on plot. Typical of Truffaut, all the stuff in this movie about WWII and Nazism and the thriller elements are really just elaborate window dressing for a love triangle and a comedy/drama about a theater troupe. The one unexpected detail is that it grapples a bit with Jewish identity... I read somewhere that Truffaut was the illegitimate son of a Jewish man, a fact that Truffaut suspected but never confirmed until much later in his life. Parts of The Last Metro, with it's Jewish protagonist hiding from the Nazis, may be Truffaut's attempt at exploring this part of his heritage.

Shenan - I don’t have a lot to say about this one, but it was my favorite. I just found it the most intriguing and engaging. Simple as that.


Confidentially Yours

Dan - Another Hitchcock homage, this time more in the comic-thriller vein. Part of the fun is the way he applies his usual strong women/immature men theme to the Hitchcock template, and casts Fanny Ardent (his girlfriend) in what's essentially the Cary Grant role, with a man playing the hapless heroine. Not as great of a mystery/thriller as Mississippi Mermaid, but a good fun way to end a career, as this turned out to be his last film.

Shenan - Oh yes, I almost didn’t remember this, then I did. I came in a half hour or so in, maybe that’s why I was a little fuzzy at first. I like the rogue, self-fashioned female detective angle on this. She reminded me a lot of Grace Kelly in Rear Window; she had that same spunk, I guess is the best word I can come up with for it. That same recklessness maybe in an attempt to prove something, but she can definitely handle herself, and she’s sharp.

The Story of Adele H.

Dan - Another Truffaut film notable for having a female lead, which was not usually the case. Emotionally, this was one of Truffaut's most powerful, about a woman's descent into obsessive love and eventually into madness. I've read a bit here and there about possible sexism and/or misogyny in Truffaut's films. But while The Story of Adele H. doesn't present a positive portrayal of a woman per se, it's clear that Truffaut feels a strong empathy for Adele, and our sympathy lies with her even as she goes off the deep end. It's one of those movies that is a little hard to watch at times because the emotions are painful and the character just keeps making it worse and worse on herself.

Shenan - Why don’t I remember this one either?

Dan - Ah yes, as I recall you fell asleep and missed this one.

The Man Who Loved Women

Dan - Kind of an extension of the Antoine Doinel series, perhaps about what Antoine would be like when he reached Truffaut's age, where it focuses on a flaky but lovable man who is too infatuated with women to commit or settle down. And like the Doinel films, it feels at least partially autobiographical. As with Love on the Run, it may be just a tad too forgiving or permissive of the character's sometimes cad-like behavior, but still casts a critical and perceptive eye at it's subject. And I cared enough that I felt unexpectedly moved by the film's ending. If this character is a surrogate for Truffaut himself, then this movie is Truffaut asking us to accept his flaws along with his virtues.

Shenan - It is pretty lovable. Though don’t you remember that IMDB made it sound like the venereal disease was the driving point of the movie, the plot point fulcrum on which all the events of the movie hinged? When it was just a small little thing that came up like 2/3 of the way through the movie?

Fahrenheit 451

Dan - Definitely not one of my favorite Truffauts, but it seems to have an unfair reputation as a bad movie. Although some of the production design and special effects are a little dated/corny, Truffaut mainly succeeds at creating a strange and unique future world, giving it a weird, dreamlike feel.

Shenan - I agree. I especially liked getting to see the world of the people who memorized the books at the end, who identified themselves by name as the piece of literature they’d memorized.


Shoot the Piano Player

Dan - As you can see in my post about it back during Noir Month, I was a little underwhelmed when I first saw Shoot the Piano Player. My esteem for it grew considerably on my second viewing. While not the triumph that Mississippi Mermaid is, it is still a highly entertaining and charming combination of crime movie ingredients and Truffauldian idiosyncrasies. I originally bitched about "weird stylistic touches and broad comedy" contradicting the more dramatic elements of the story. I now realize that the blend of styles is what makes Shoot the Piano Player so fun.

Shenan - Also, that guy has the worst luck with women. I’m just saying, no matter how much I loved him, I would not be this dude’s girlfriend, unless I wanted a death sentence.


Day For Night

Dan - Another one that I appreciated more after seeing it again. I soured on Day For Night a little back in college, but for reasons that weren't the film's fault. Two classes I took showed it in the same semester, about a week apart, and watching it a 2nd time so soon after just seeing it I was a bit restless and bored. I knew I liked it, but something about the experience tainted the film for me.

Coming back to the film now, I took much pleasure in how Truffaut's good natured, meta, movie-within-a-movie-about-the-making-of-a-movie Day For Night revels in the process and the artifice of filmmaking. This is Truffaut's busiest and most Altman-esque film in the way it juggles a large cast of characters within a somewhat relaxed narrative, and like Altman's films each subsequent viewing helps clarify all the characters and their connections. These kinds of movies can tend to be self-indulgant (even great ones like 8 1/2) so it's a testament to Truffaut's charm that Day For Night stays likable and relatable.

Shenan- I didn’t notice it before, but now I can kind of see it being Altman-esque. If it wouldn’t take like five hours to do, I might suggest a Nashville/Day for Night double feature. And if we hadn’t just watched those two within a couple weeks of now. Maybe some day. Anyway, not much to say here, except that it was light and funny and likeable. My favorite part is the cat. Some choice quotes- “We’ll wait until you can find me a cat that can act!” and “Throw it in!” I like to imagine that’s something that happens with regularity on movie sets that involve animals. When the animals don’t behave or aren’t good “actors,” you just hike them into the shot like a football and see what happens.

The Bride Wore Black

Dan - And so we wrapped up Truffaut-con 2K9 with The Bride Wore Black, a film I initially didn't think we'd get to see since it was not on Netflix or at the video store. Fortunately, I discovered while shopping for a Father's Day gift that Amazon had a used copy for $3, which I quickly snatched up.

Like Mississippi Mermaid and Confidentially Yours, this is a Hitchcockian thriller with a decidely Truffauldian spin. A woman goes around killing off men, for reasons not immediately clear, and there is a lot of suspsense and dark comedy in the way she sets her intricate plots in to motion. And unsuprisingly, Truffaut uses this premise to explore his typical obsessions with male/female relations... the heroine's murder plots often resemble dates or flirtations. There is also a sense in which the film is, not exactly feminist, but an attempt at female empowerment: the victims are all men who have done the heroine wrong, and seem to try to control or diminish her in other ways, until she eventually turns the tables and snuffs them out.

Shenan - It’s Hitchcockian, and also Kill Bill-ian. I definitely have a hard time imagining, having seen it now, that Quentin Tarantino hadn’t seen this film and didn’t count it as an influence at all when making Kill Bill. I liked this one quite a bit; the only part I found kind of hard to “suspend my disbelief” for, so to speak, at first was the part where the woman obviously looked nothing like the teacher and counted on the boy being so stupid and easily confused or easily swayed that he would start believing she was his teacher if she told him so. But note I said “at first.” I think Truffaut ended up handling it with a grace that really was honest to the way little kids think or get confused when they are supposed to trust adults to tell them what is real and what isn’t, by the way he sort of remained unconvinced that she was his teacher, but didn’t really care and just went along with it, then to the police insisted that “Ms. Becker” had been at his house, while never actually indicating that the woman at the school who really was his teacher had been at his house. It was like there were two Ms. Beckers that existed, both of whom were supposed to be his teacher, but they were still two separate people at the same time.

The other part that I thought maybe relied a little too much on things conveniently happening was planning out that whole thing where they played hide and seek, and then she goes to leave and refuses to stay and then realizes she’s “lost her ring” and thinks it’s in the closet because she played hide and seek there, and then somehow assumes that the father will insist on looking for it himself, and will climb all the way into the crawl space and she will lock him in there and happen to have duct tape and blah blah blah. I mean, how could she have know there was a crawl space there before she entered the house? I thought at first, actually, that maybe he tried to show this as a spur-of-the-moment plan, acted upon when she saw there was a closet, because she initially grabs a knife in the kitchen, and I thought maybe she was going to kill him with that, but then has a better idea once she starts feeling the house out. But then I remembered that was intentional, to make us think she was going to kill him with the knife, when actually she just uses it to cut the phone line. Meaning she never intended to use it to kill him at all. Meaning she had her plan from the beginning, presumably. I don’t know. It was a bit much to swallow.
But overall I really liked this one. I thought it was great. And I liked that he used a slightly older Jeanne Moreau, and didn’t just go for some hot young bombshell to play the sexy killer heroine. It gives the sexual relationship she and the painter start having a more real and honest feel to it too- that she’s not some seductress who any man would fall instantly in love with, but (though still not unattractive, I’ll grant you) a slightly older and imperfect woman who happens to make a real emotional and physical connection with this artist (who is a self-described skirt-chaser, but with her it’s different, etc etc).

Catching Up: Awesome Directors

Wow, it has been over a month since I've updated this damn thing. I find myself in the position of being too lazy to post/not finding enough time to post, while still not having the heart to let it completely wither away.

It's a tough call. On the one hand, no one reads this. I tried to spread the link to last years Police Academy marathon write-up and as far as I can tell generated no new traffic. So that's demoralizing, I guess, although I haven't really tried to promote it too hard.

On the other hand, it's actually a lot of fun to go back and re-read my own posts. The blog was even more of a diary than I realized, and it's amusing to see what thoughts I was having about what films a year ago. Ever since I stopped posting regularly back in November, I've been slowly but surely combing through the old posts and trying to correct them; not just the plethora of spelling and grammar mistakes, but also trying to punch up the language and make the posts read better.

What I've decided is, even if no one ever reads any of this, I still enjoy having this around as a personal record. So I'm going to try to keep intermittently updating the blog. I got burned out a bit on the "Shitty Movies by Great Directors" thing, mainly because I didn't feel I had the time to do it justice, but I may return to it over the summer when work is slow. Right now, I figured I'd throw down some random musings about some movies I caught this winter.

Shenan's grad school career has afforded me a wonderful opportunity. This past semester, she has been gone every Tuesday and Wednesday evening at class. I have been using these times to watch movies that Shenan wouldn't want to see. I don't mean that in a considerate way; it's not so much that I'm avoiding movies she wants to see on the nights she's gone, so much as I'm getting a chance to watch movies I wouldn't otherwise get to watch with her around.

That's not a knock on her. Shenan is a remarkably tolerant girlfriend in putting up with my movie nerd shit, but there is a lot of nerd shit I want to watch that she (understandably) has no interest in.

I used this semester as an opportunity to brush up on some filmmakers I had either admired in the past, or felt that I needed to become more familiar with. I watched 3 films from each director. Here are some random thoughts on what I watched.


Akira Kurosawa

Kagemusha - For a director who seemed reluctant to switch from black and white, Kurosawa does some interesting stuff with color here, especially in a weird, near-psychedelic dream sequence. Kurosawa was a stylish director, but I was not expecting that kind of flamboyance. Kagemusha is Kurosawa doing what he does well: an epic adventure with a humanist heart. Maybe a little too heavy on the epic-ness and a little too light on the humanism, but still an ambitious achievement. Kurosawa's epic battle scenes maybe be a fraction of the size of Peter Jackson's, but they are ten times as spectacular.


Throne of Blood - Kurosawa's take on MacBeth is notable for being the only Kurosawa film I've seen completely lacking in sympathetic characters. Throne of Blood is a study in human greed and evil, presenting a nightmarish world of violent conflict, ominous castles occupied by power-hungry soldiers, and dark, shadowy and seemingly endless forests filled with evil spirits. More or less the opposite of what I have come to expect in a Kurosawa film. It's faithful in tone and in plot generalities to the source material, but recontextualized in a samurai/feudal Japan setting. Kurosawa's other samurai films tend to feel like westerns, but Throne of Blood more like some weird samurai/Shakespeare/film noir hybrid.

Red Beard - This turned out to be a great follow up to Throne of Blood because it starts out by wallowing in darkness, but gradually transforms into a celebration of the goodness of humanity. Watching these movies in this order, it's like you get pulled through the wringer, but you come out whole at the end, and you feel better for it. The inspiration feels more inspirational because Kurosawa acknowledges the darkness first. The sweet ain't as sweet without the sour, etc etc.


Werner Herzog

Stroszek - Gloriously oddball. Herzog has made some of the most visually intense films I've ever seen, but not in a saturated color, perfectly framed, elaborate, expensive-looking Atonement sort of way. It's more along the lines of... he thinks up or finds the craziest-ass things and puts them on film. And he uses these mind-blowing images to try to capture the essence of something beyond normal comprehension. His movies are almost comparable to the final sequences of 2001. Not in the sense that they look like an acid trip, but in the sense that the filmmaker has an epic vision of mind bending events. I never thought that a dancing chicken could be so strange, hypnotic and convey a horrific sense nihilistic dread, but that's Herzog for you.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser - I had recently watched Truffaut's Wild Child before seeing this, and Herzog's film is a more philosophical version of similar material. Both films examine individuals raised without human interaction and their subsequent integration into normal society. Wild Child is, as the title suggests, about a boy who was abandoned in the woods and grew up alone in the wild, and Kaspar Hauser is about a man who, for reasons never made clear, was locked inside a room alone his entire life and is one day set free. Truffaut's film is concerned with the formation of language and expression, the joy of creativity, the relationship between father and son, and tries to examine both what the boy gains by becoming socialized (love, companionship, means of expression), and what he loses (connection to nature, individualism). Herzog goes a little further into the intangible... what would this man understand about the nature of reality? About logic? About other people and his relation to them? And are his seemingly strange perceptions any less valid than our own? In typical Herzogian fashion, it's not that all these questions are answered (it's called Enigma and not Obvious Explanation for a reason) so much that the fun is in raising them.

Woyzeck - The Herzog/Kinski collaborations are stuff of legend. Herzog has a willingness to rush headlong into insanity, and Kinski was maybe the only actor who could keep pace. That's why I found this one surprisingly disappointing, it's down right laid back when compared to the likes of Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo. There were definitely some nice, quirky touches here, but it lacks the obsessive passion that distinguishes the best Herzog films.


Errol Morris

The Thin Blue Line - When I was a little younger I think I had this sense that documentaries should strive for objectivity or fairness, and try to capture reality. Now I realize that that is a reductive way of thinking, and doesn't allow for much "filmmaking" to actually take place. What's great about the Errol Morris films I've seen is that they display a vision. They are biased, visually intense, emotional. And in this case, The Thin Blue Line is also actually important: it helped get an innocent man off of death row.

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control - What's neat here is that the subject of this documentary is entirely manufactured. What I mean is, Morris tells the stories of 4 different eccentrics who have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. What Morris does is intercut the stories to draw parallels between the different, otherwise unrelated subjects, and illustrate points about creativity, philosophy, and maybe obsession. And Morris kicks the style up to 11, with an intense score, fast cutting, Natural Born Killers-esque switching of film stock, etc.

Standard Operating Procedure - I've enjoyed some of Michael Moore's films in the past, but I wonder if he feels embarrassed when he watches movies like this. Errol Morris' thoughtful, complex and disturbing documentary about Abu Ghraib is every bit as opinionated and provocative as Moore's films, but makes Moore's smug, self-congratulatory style seem amateurish by comparison. I mean, I get that can be part of Moore's charm, but watching Morris' work underlined for me Moore's failures as a filmmaker.


Yasujiro Ozu

Late Spring - Ozu's films a little hard for me to talk about because they seem simple yet they stir up some complex emotions. The films appear minimalist in story and visual style, but upon closer inspection actually contain many interesting, bold flourishes. The story of Late Spring centers around a young woman being pressured into a marriage she wants no part of... yet we never see her groom-to-be, nor is the wedding actually shown. Those are major artistic decisions, not necessarily immediately noticeable but not something you see in most films.

Early Summer - Not a sequel, although it is somewhat of a different take on similar things. It's mentioned often how, as his career progressed, Ozu moved his camera less and less. His final films, from what I've read, consist entirely of static shots. This is a somewhat earlier film of Ozu's, so he still moves the camera some times. In fact, the final and most moving shot in Early Summer is a tracking shot of a field, slowly passing by as a breeze rustles through the plants.

Good Morning - This was a little weird; an Ozu comedy crammed full with fart jokes. Including a scene where characters fart in time to music while exercising. Has to be seen to be believed.


John Ford

Stagecoach - I'm not a huge western fan per se, but I can appreciate a good one. I figured this was worth seeing not just because of Ford's involvement, but also that it was the film that turned John Wayne into a star. It's a fun western, though certainly not a must-see.

The Grapes of Wrath - The interesting story here is that Ford held somewhat right-wing political beliefs, yet this is a story often discussed as having a left-wing message. I didn't necessarily sense any tension between ideologies going on in this film, perhaps Ford thought it was a great story worth telling despite its politics.

My Darling Clementine - Entertaining retelling of the Wyatt Earp/Tombstone story, with Henry Fonda in the Earp role. Again, I'm not inherently crazy about westerns, but this is a good one.


Jean-Pierre Melville

Le Doulos (aka The Finger Man) - Knew I'd have to circle back some day and catch-up on the films of Melville, the French master of the existentialist crime drama. His crime/noirs are all variations on the same premise: a cold-hearted criminal (who is the protagonist) plans a major score while a cynical, world-weary cop with fascist leanings closes in. Oh, and the "hero" always dies in the end. What makes these movies so damn good is the precision with which Melville directs the heists, and the stylish but sparse attitude he applies to both the look of the films and their protagonists. Le Doulos is noteworthy for its entertainingly convoluted plot, and for a performance by Jean-Paul Belmondo that feels like a more legitimately badass and iconic version of his character from Breathless.

Le Deuxième Souffle (aka Second Wind) - As I recall, this one took a little while to get going but picks up as it goes along with a great heist sequence, a few interesting twists and a nifty suspense sequence involving a hidden gun. All of his films portrayed the police negatively, and this one especially so, where the police are depicted as beating suspects into confessions and even pulling off an elaborate ruse to trick one crook into ratting out his friends.

Un Flic (aka A Cop aka Dirty Money) - The cool thing here is that this is another reworking of the Melville formula I mentioned above, only this time the focus is shifted somewhat off the crook and on to the cop pursuing him. And in a neat twist, Alain Delon, the actor who played the crook role in Melville's sweet Le Cercle Rouge and more importantly in his masterpiece Le Samourai, is cast as the titular cop for this go around. But let me pose a question to you: how much can one unfortunate detail derail an otherwise excellent movie? Because for the first half or so of Un Flic, I was convinced that it was going to be Melville's next best movie after Le Samourai. Then came the centerpiece heist sequence. It involves a man grappling down from a helicopter onto a moving train, which is a little too much to take, but is not the real problem. The real problem is the the helicopter and the train and both very, very, very extremely obviously tiny models that Melville tries to pass off as the real thing. I can't properly describe how badly this breaks the spell of the film... they actually look like toys. It takes a while for it to recover, and it's a damn shame because the movie surrounding this distractingly phony sequence is top notch. It's amazing how 2 or 3 minutes of screen time can greatly alter the rest of a film.


Ernst Lubitsch

The Smiling Lieutenant - It's maybe a little shocking to see what they could get away with in terms of sexual references in some of these pre-code films. It may be tame by today's standards, but you're really not expecting to see characters in an early 1930's musical comedy make unmistakable allusions to fucking (in terms more polite than that). As with most Lubitsch, this is light on its feet and immensely charming.

One Hour With You - Again with the sexual content, here even the title is a reference to the sex act. This is another funny and charming musical, surprisingly frank, cynical and maybe even progressive in its message that married couples are almost incapable of remaining faithful, and that if they love each other then they might as well forgive each other their transgressions.

To Be Or Not To Be - I'll give this one the benefit of the doubt, since it was made during WWII, that Lubitsch and the rest probably weren't aware of the full scope of the atrocities committed by the Nazi party. That would explain why they would make a lighthearted comedy about a troupe of actors trying to infiltrate the Nazis to help the resistance, complete with jokes about concentration camps. Hard to judge this one, when so much of it made me feel a little uncomfortable. I know that wasn't the filmmakers intent, but knowing what we know about the Holocaust, it's hard to view this one the way it was intended to be viewed. Shortly after seeing this one, I saw Truffaut's The Last Metro, which also involves Nazis, WW2 and a troupe of actors. And while it features Truffaut's usual light touch, it doesn't feel as inappropriately silly as Lubitsch's film.



During the year I was regularly updating my blog, I made a big deal about my Kommittment to Klassiks. What's funny is that in the past few months, since my K2K has ended, I've done a way better job of watching klassik, older, artsier films. Not only the ones listed above, but I've also caught up on other stuff, including a buttload of Truffaut. It's like I had to stop trying, and then suddenly I started watching a lot of great movies.