A few Proviews. Again, feel free to ask for any I've not covered:
Stagecoach John Ford 1939 USAA stagecoach with a prostitute, a pregnant woman, an outlaw, a gambler, a bank manager, a doctor and a reverend must travel through Monument Valley, with the imminent threat of Apaches nearby.Restricted to a limited setting, though one which moves (a stagecar riding through the Wild West), Ford creates one of those now famous classics which hurtle along without a moment to spare; it happens to be a number of things: a credible romance (the scenes with Wayne and Trevor are very good), a fully realised character ensemble, a sharp social commentary, a suspenseful action film and a witty comedy. Andy Devine steals the show as the bumbling stagecoach driver.
The Magnificent Ambersons Orson Welles 1942 USAThe fall of a well-to-do family at the hands of stubbornness and jealousy.At first it seems as if Welles has lifted lengthy passages from the original novel and added moving pictures to an overly literal voice-over, but there is a lot of technical density here, and at times it hints at, had it been kept in full, being the better picture than
Citizen Kane the director had it intended it to be. It certainly gets better with a revisit, and especially important to keep in mind is the context and controversy surrounding the film - Welles, on the hot success of
Kane, was given free reign by RKO but misled them into believing he was making a film about the American Dream... and his final product, when delivered, was an overwhelmingly bleak affair. It was butchered as a result, and so the final fifteen or so minutes are tacked on, the narrative hurtling into a sugary final happy ending. The opening exposition, matching shots of characters and settings to a rapid, all-knowing voice-over, seems a lot like Scorsese's
Goodfellas, and it has many worthy scenes thereafter, too, and several moments of absolute genius (or simply effective filmmaking): the one that comes immediately to mind is the tracking shot along the street of two people talking, and Welles is able to both capture the bustling day-to-day
mise-en-scène and still concentrate on the emotional intensity of the scene. He does this by tracking them with the camera's back to the street, so that the characters are never lost in the frame, but very much part of it, and yet they walk in front of the glass windows of shops, in which is reflected the environment... emotionally touching, visually complex and authentic, not to mention very unique.
Flags of Our FathersClint Eastwood 2006 USA 1st time; big screenAt the battle of Iwo Jima, several American soldiers are made famous by erecting the US flag atop the conquered hill.Spielberg's executive producer credit brings up several starting points: the washed-out greens and greys of the battle scenes not only resemble the opening scene of
Saving Private Ryan, but sometimes feel like lame imitations; like Speilberg, too, Eastwood is in dire need of a good editor, because as it stands, he cannot for the life of him finish a film. This starts off well enough, with a flashback that propels the narrative into a kind of multiple-angled recollection of the same event, and it does at times look gorgeous (visually, it's his most impressive film), with many POV shots, from the ground and from planes, making it feel like a Medal of Honor videogame; but Eastwood's insistance on a voiceover to lend emotional resonance and narrative closure, both of which are not even needed, ruins any potential for lasting effect.
Why We Fight - Prelude to War Frank Capra 1944 USAA documentary, the first in the series, which was intended to justify America's change from isolationism to entering the war effort.It's propaganda from the start, with Walter Huston's dramatic voice addressing the audience directly over images of Hitler shouting to his masses, Mussolini looking powerful and Emperor Hirohito looking dark, grim and evil. There's a wonderful montage in the middle of the "evil" regime's soldiers marching and marching and marching, which seems to go on forever, but is very effective in creating an awesome sense of robotic killing machines; this is in contrast to the light, preachy music in the scenes in which "our" children give money to charity while Japanese and German children learn how to fire weapons. It's very didactic, but assembled so well that it is of much interest - Disney assisted, too, by animated the world maps and showing the three dictators' ambitions to take over the world, with an ominous black spreading across the globe like a caricaturised plague.
Casablanca Michael Curtiz 1942 USAAn American cynic goes against his views to save an old love from the Nazis in war-time Morocco.Curtiz was Hollywood's most prolific director during the 1930s and '40s, making films left, right and centre, regardless of budget and production value. Like his
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), this has a sense of not being able to stop for one second, and it is a fine, succinct film which shows the director to be an incredibly effective storyteller: the opening voice-over establishes the boring if dangerous life of having to wait for visas in Casablanca, which then moves into something far more sophisticated; characters reveal much about themselves with a simple gesture or editing or camera technique. Examples: Ingrid Bergman walking into Bogey's café and recognising Sam, Sam recognising her, or, later in the film, a character fumbling about to check his pockets having just ran into a thief we met earlier. It helps that the writing is very witty, and the performances are all spot on: Claude Rains would steal the show, if the lead was anybody else but Humphrey Bogart, whose indifferent cynic-cum-born again resistance fighter couldn't be any more obvious a justification of the USA entering the War.
Die Hard John McTiernan 1988 USATerrorists take over a building in which is a trigger-happy cop.Multi-layered, tense and thrilling action film which uses foreign terrorists to disguise an embedded ill regard towards national corporation and inadequate, red-tape procedures. Willis is brilliant as the "good cop bad news" hero, trigger-happy and to the point. Highly influential, and with a fine balance of bloody violence and cheesy one-liners - though nobody but Willis pulls them off quite as they ought to be. It manages to have be comfortably clear in who is the good guy and who are the bad guys, but underneath it there are plenty of digs at the FBI, the police department and the media.
Rebel Without a Cause Nicholas Ray 1955 USAA teenager whose father is far from the idealised figure he ought to be, gets in trouble with the local thugs.James Dean's performance speaks for many things, here - the general phenomenon surrounding his off-screen persona, the cultural status of the film at the time, and the impressive momentum of the film maintained today. It's interesting how he is drunk in one minute, cool in another and crying to his mother and father in the next, and yet still comes out as a hero of great aspirational value. Ray makes fine use of Cinemascope and colour: Dean becomes immortal in white T-shirt and bright red jacket, and there is much visual worth to be had. The knife-fight, for instance, takes place overlooking LA, captured with breathtaking, sunny irony; and the pivotal domestic rebellion at Dean's home is filmed from a tilted, odd camera angle - things are claustrophobic and all askew. While the film has its dips and sags as far as overall rhythm of narrative is concerned, Ray also shows good skill in editing individual scenes: the opening shots, in the police station, exposit its three main characters in a subtle, matter-of-fact and almost entirely visual manner, making good use of glass windows and office booth dividers; the three main set-pieces of the film are all tense, too (the knife-fight, the car-race and the final shoot-out).
Before Sunset Richard Linklater 2004 USAJesse and Celine meet nine years after their first meeting.The characters have developed into wiser, older adults, and the two actors embody them convincingly; sometimes the performances are entirely natural, others they seem forced and awkward. Linklater's philosophical dialogue puts the two into a sketchy context, of a world in dismay, and it feels at its most contrived and cheap when it's talking about the state of American culture and making references to people dying of curable water diseases. The real-time unfolding of the narrative adds an immediacy to the events which
Before Sunrise didn't have - when that film finished, so did the characters' night together, but here, it's the other way round, and when we see a shot of the two on a boat which is sailing into its dock, we feel a real sense of time running out. Self-reflexively, as is suggested early on, it ends on a decidedly ambiguous note, infuriating but sensible.
Little Miss Sunshine Jonathan Dayton / Valerie Faris 2006 USAA dysfunctional family strive to enter their daughter into a beauty pageant in California.Fashionable film in similar vein as
Me and You and Everyone We Know, the kind of small film made big by box office receipts and the kind of bandwagon of supporters that can only sway expectations too high. It is, however, a pleasant surprise of a film, with a good sense of "laugh and cry" rhythm, attractive, varied performances, and consistent cinematography. All of the characters are caricatures, really, and the script seems a draft shy of fully developing them into consistent ("invisible"?) fictions, but as it is, the fact that the directors are husband and wife is telling, because there's a real, rather perceptive sense of "family" here, and that point in the film when the message is presented most evidently - the climactic beauty pageant dance - flirts with cringe-worthiness, but in the end is more similar to
Napoleon Dynamite in being surprisingly quite funny and uplifting.
Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak Charlotte and Her Steak Eric Rohmer 1960 FranceA woman about to leave her home has one last steak, while her lover watches.A short which shows how effective a) opening titles, and b) dialogue, can be. Rohmer's films are very watchable, and his shorts are often delightul, a lot more weighty than Godard's shorts, and a lot more revealing of the feature films he made too. A) an opening title exposits the situation in a simple manner, over a lovely, snow-covered establishing shot; b) the set-up, because of what is revealed in the opening title (that a character is jealous of another), is always interesting to watch, because every line spoken has a weight of responsibility, expectation and intention behind it, which in turns results in intrigue, interest and humour. Clever.
La boulangère de Monceau The Baker of Monceau Eric Rohmer 1963 FranceA man in Paris falls in love with a stranger, and when she disappears from the streets, he acquaints a girl who works in a bakery.Rohmer's voice-over seems to be in a different voice altogether to the protagonist's, here: intentional or not, it brings up questions of authorship and narrative voice, rather quite effectively. The visual narrative seems to unfold in a casually linear manner, with our hero wandering the streets not doing much in between eating cakes at a bakery, but the voice-over seems to work by contradiction, constantly in retrospection and hindsight, a retelling of events already occurred.
Nadja à Paris Nadjya in Paris Eric Rohmer 1964 FranceA foreigner in Paris records her day-to-day life.Difficult to decide if this is fictional short or short documentary, since it is quite literally a chronicle of life in Paris as seen through the eyes of a foreigner - or it might be a look at the world through the eyes of somebody new to it, an alien or a newborn human. It's very effective, with a voice-over which must have surely influenced Chris Marker for his essay films (
Sans soleil in particular seems to borrow from its format of matter of fact recording of everyday life).
Blood DiamondEdward Zwick 2006 USAA diamond smuggler in war-torn Sierra Leone pursues a jewel buried by a native.Another chapter in Zwick's "filmmaking by numbers" oeuvre, in which a conventional narrative moves fast enough to keep you watching, but goes on for far too long. He is at least an effective craftsman as regards environment: not in the geographical sense (though we're reminded throughout of the African setting), but in the very tense, war-torn environment on one hand, and the double-crossing and dishonesty on a wider scale on the other. There is ample opportunity for visual flair, but this is only evident, not surprisingly, in throwaway establishing shots... and because the emphasis is clearly on character and performances (which is fair enough), the final pre-credits title cards, which reveal that more than 200,000 child soldiers are still in Africa, seem misplaced and undeserving.
Ben-Hur William Wyler 1959 USAThe life of a Judean prince under the harsh Roman regime, at the time of Christ.Wyler's epic might well be sincere, but it is bloated even so, to the point that almost every single scene unfolds in a succession of delayed responses and emotional overkill. It's heavy-going but at times lovely to look at - widescreen is used to great effect, often to produce a great sense of depth, and to establish emotional differences and distance between characters. The chariot race, which gets the second half after the intermission going, is mesmerising filmmaking, dramatic and drawn-out, but worth it all the same; and the sea battle, around halfway through the first half, is one of the rare moments in the film when Wyler intrudes upon the methodic rhythm and induces a hard-worn feeling by means of fast cutting and a relentless musical beat.
The Unknown Tod Browning 1927 USAA circus act pretends to have no arms so he can gain the affections of a fellow performer.Brilliant film, dark and perverse, with an incredible performance from Lon Chaney, whose multitude of emotions is vast and convincing. There's always something deeply unsettling in this, the rather malicious intentions behind characters' reasoning, but also something rather touching, in the way the villain of the piece undergoes a real transformation and it all turns out wrong. The grotesque malformation of his double thumb on one hand is never made into a gimmick to be shown in every shot - it's always there, and you're always looking at it when it's onscreen, but there's no more than a few close-ups of it in the entire thing. The climax, with a horse going wild and finally stamping on somebody, is very effective - though it ends surprisingly abruptly, a finish which seems a bit of a cop-out, but satisfyingly succinct all the same.
It Clarence Badger 1927 USAA shopkeeper falls for one of his employees, and she for him.An amazingly sophisticated film, in both film language, and the mature, rather engaging way in which the in-film romance unfolds - and although the climax might seem a lazy dive into slapstick to overcome the script's difficulties, there is, throughout, a fine balance between comedy relief and sexual tension. The opening shot zooms out, tilts down and zooms back in again, an establishing shot which belies its age and bears a resemblance to
The Conversation's opening shot. In fact, the entire thing, particularly early on, is an impressive array of shot selection and visual composition, which, given the bog-standard setting of a department store, might well be overlooked: whip pans, fast zooms, half a century before Kubrick. While others at the time might have been limited (if not crude) enough to chop a scene into a succession of manipulative close-ups, so as to have simultaneous action revealed in a kind of non-linear, distracting manner, here Badger shows remarkable skill in revealing information in a way where it's nice to look at and not visually over-crowded - not to mention coherent and linear; one scene in particular which comes to mind is that in which Moreno ignores Bow in favour of somebody else, and we see the cause and effect in the same shot, at the same time. Economic and interesting filmmaking; Bow's performance is fantastic, the very embodiment of an "it" girl, whose appeal goes elusively beyond mere physicality... and it is due to her performance that the film's romance is electric and timeless.
The Fountain Darren Aronofsky 2006 USAA doctor researching a cure for his wife's tumor reads the manuscript of her unfinished novel and vows to break through with a cure for Death itself.Aronofsky's films have no ebb and flow or "give and take"; instead, their narratives seem to be a relentless, constant flow of sustained energy, which means they are ambitious in concept, difficult in production, financially risky and challenging to watch.
The Fountain, as it turns out, also happens to be emotionally devastating, due to an accumulation of several different things under the direction of a talented filmmaker - Hugh Jackman's performance, the Kronos Quartet score, and the editing across several interrelated fictions. These fictions do not exposit themselves or take time to establish their place in the overall narrative of the film, so that it unfolds not so much like a Lynchian puzzle but an exciting texture of shot-to-shot cutting more akin to Julio Medem, with thematic similarities to Cronenberg.
I'm back, and it feels good.