News You Can Bruise for 2012 December 6 (entry 0)

(1) Thu Dec 06 2012 08:23 End-of-Year Film Roundup: I was gonna wait til the end of the month for this but I have seen so many great movies recently that I want to tell you about them now.

This is a combination of movies I watched at the Museum of the Moving Image, usually with Sumana, and Criterion Collection movies, hurriedly purchased during the recent half-price sale, which we watched at home. I've put them roughly in reverse chronological order of when we watched them. Sumana also put up some short reviews recently. Don't want to read this huge post? Read Sumana's entry instead!

Incidentally, I love the name "Criterion Collection." "We only select movies that meet... a criterion!" It's like the "Un Certain Regard" award they give out at Cannes. I imagine a French person shrugging and going "eeeeeeeh..."

• Céline et Julie vont en bateau - Phantom Ladies Over Paris (1974) - aka "Celine and Julie Go Boating" Yes, the original title is in both French and English. The film that made me decide to do this post now. I saw it on Sunday. It's amazing. But it's hard to describe; if I tried you'd think I was telling you about my boring dream. (Okay, I can describe the plot in one non-dreamlike sentence: two best friends discover a haunted house.)

  This is not an easy movie. It's three hours long and takes about an hour to get started. Once it gets started, there's a lot of repetition, due to the holodeck-esque nature of the haunted house. But the enormous chemistry between the lead actresses won me over. I've never seen a better depiction of the endless in-jokes and stupid pranks of friendship. It's as if two Manic Pixie Dream Girls decided to stop finding boring guys to make over and just hang out together. Includes a reenactment of the Duck Soup mirror scene that might surpass the original.

• Cat Scratch Fever (2011) - This film doesn't have a distributor, so I dunno how you can see it at this point, but you should know about it. It's a science-fiction comedy whose direct inspirations are "Primer" and "Celine and Julie Go Boating". (Two best friends discover they can watch alternate universe versions of themselves via Internet streaming video.) It lacks the rigorous confusion of "Primer" but it has the same no-fi aesthetic, and the lead actresses have some of the chemistry found in "Celine and Julie". The best part: it's fast. The movie's 72 minutes long and there's no repetition, even though "Primer" and "Celine and Julie" are based on repetition.
• "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956). Great, creepy stuff. There's a stupid tacked-on framing device, but the framing device has Richard Deacon from The Dick van Dyke Show playing a doctor! Can't complain. Also can't look at Richard Deacon's IMDB page because I want to keep getting these surprises (see below).
• "Night Train to Munich" (1940) - Sumana got this from Criterion thinking director Carol Reed was a woman. A 1940 war thriller directed by a woman would be an intriguing prospect indeed, but Carol Reed was a dude. Good movie, though. The beginning kept pulling the dramatic rug out from under the viewer. Surely our story begins now, with our heroine making her escape with a transfer at Munich... oh, the Nazis got her. Damn, how is she going to escape the prison camp... oh, she escaped. Well, it's a long way to England, surely she must make the first leg of the journey on some kind of "night train"... oh, she made it.
• Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Excellent Hitchcock. (Hitchcock's favorite of his own movies.) Disturbing and meta, it knows you're watching it and mocks the whodunit conceptual framework you've brought to it.
• All About Eve (1950) - So great. Full of witty dialogue and petty snobbery and Machiavellian backstabbing. Marilyn Monroe is in one scene that's funnier than her whole performance in "Some Like it Hot". Everyone's funny.
• "Design for Living" (1933), the movie tangentially related to an apparent temporal paradox. I did not like this as much as Sumana did—it feels like all the really good jokes got censored—but it was certainly interesting!
• "Unfaithfully Yours" (1948) - This movie has a "Fantasia" gimmick I could do without, but it's very sharp and funny. It perfectly captures the mood when you're angrily playing forward your brilliant handling of some hypothetical confrontation, then it shows the chaos that would ensue if you actually tried to handle the confrontation that way.
• "Paper Moon" (1973) - A really funny movie about the Depression, a la "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Classic setup--con artist gets stuck with custody of a little girl who turns out to also be a gifted con artist--and great performances.
• A whole load of silent films from 1912. The museum is doing an annual exhibition of films from 100 years ago. Back when movies were made by the same companies that made the cameras and the film projectors, so there'd be something to film and theaters would have something to show. We saw A Night at the Nickelodeon and Alice Guy Blaché, Queen of Solax together (that's a description of a person, not the name of a movie), and I went to Griffith in Fort Lee on my own. All of them had live old-timey piano accompaniment by Ben Model.

  Since these films are all public domain, you can watch them yourself online. For yuks I recommend the comedy of manners "The New York Hat" and the comedy of "throw whatever we can think of into the story" "A Grocery Clerk's Romance". For soul-crushing melodrama, I recommend "The Painted Lady" and "The Land Beyond the Sunset", which starts off as turn-of-the-century social activism and then takes a very dark turn. "Sunset" was made by Thomas Edison's studio as a sort of PSA for the Fresh Air Fund, the charity depicted in the film (which still exists). I'm kind of surprised they approved it.

  But the real revelation was Alice Guy Blaché, who brought to American film a fresh sensibility that I really think is mainly due to her being a French woman. For instance, she directed "A Fool and His Money" (I can't find the video online), the first film with an all-black cast. I don't watch a lot of silent film, but when I see black actors in a 1912 film I'm primed to cringe at horrifying racism. But the racism... never really happened. Sure, it was goofy, but it felt like vaudeville, with the actors in control of their performances. Here's some more analysis of the film and the different ways it was marketed, the marketing being a lot more representative of 1912 in my mind than the film itself.

  There's also "Algie the Miner", a comedy western in which the titular Algie is the most flamboyantly effeminate man you can imagine. Yes, you're cringing already. I, too, cringed. But... it's not what I expected. Algie's pro-forma advances on the New York society daughter are deflected by her New York society father, so Algie goes west to make his fortune and "prove himself a man." He's entrusted into the care of rough-and-tough miner Jim, who mocks Algie's sissy mannerisms and his tiny pistol (SYMBOLISM)... and then shows him the ropes of mining. They become friends. Algie fends off claim jumpers and helps Jim kick his drinking habit. Over the course of the movie Algie learns to handle a bigger gun (SYMBOLISM), and tones the mincing down a bit, but he's still pretty flaming when he goes back to the big city to "claim his girl", with burly buddy Jim in tow.

  I don't know about it. I just don't know. It's not a movie anyone would make today, I wouldn't say it's a "positive" depiction of a gay character, but it's a lot more sophisticated than I was expecting from 1912.

  I told Andrew Willett about "Algie the Miner" and he said he'd heard of it. The Internet Archive description says it was mentioned in The Celluloid Closet, and Andrew happens to own Vito Russo's 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, so I went through it looking to see what the expert opinion was, but there was no Algie, and "Algie" didn't really fit the paradigm of the other silent films mentioned in the book (which, again, were a lot more representative of what I was expecting from the 1910s and 1920s). Well, it turns out The Celluloid Closet was made into a documentary in 1995, and that's the one with Algie in it. So I still don't know. I'd like to know what other people think.

  Finally, there's "The Making of an American Citizen" (I could only find the first part of the movie online, but you get the idea), a heavy-handed film which informs new immigrants that just because your wife's not allowed to vote, that doesn't mean you can beat her with a stick the way you did in the old country. Over the course of the movie we see the entire spectrum of respectable Yankee manhood--the Wall Street toff, the lower-middle-class landlord, the bewhiskered yeoman farmer--stepping in to break up domestic violence with more violence. This is America, pal! [BIFF!] We treat women with respect! [SOCK!] This one's for Elizabeth Cady Stanton! [POW!] Again, it's not the way you'd depict the promise of American freedom today, but its heart is in the right place? Am I crazy here? Don't these sound like movies only an American immigrant woman would make in 1912?

• "The Birds" (1963) - I got a very strong vibe from this one of "I'm Alfred motherfuckin' Hitchcock, I can make you afraid of birds doing nothing." I was not afraid of the birds doing nothing. It does have some great scenes, like the traditional B-movie "convincing the skeptical townfolk" scene, which a) takes place in a great-looking 1960s diner, and in which b) the skeptical townsfolk derail the whole scene with random, pointless side arguments. It also has some really awful scenes, like... well, I can't find a real source for this bit of IMDB trivia, but it seems accurate:

  Before filming the final [incredibly stupid] attack scene when Melanie goes upstairs, Tippi Hedren asked Alfred Hitchcock, "Hitch, why would I do this?" Hitchcock's response was, "Because I tell you to."

  So, a mixed bag. DID I MENTION RICHARD DEACON IS IN THIS MOVIE? As "Stuffy Guy In Elevator"? Aww yeah.

• "Psycho" (1960) - Finally, a movie that has the guts to kill off its main character at the end of the first act! I knew the arc of this movie from its sheer prevalence in popular culture, but I wasn't expecting that. Good stuff. Tragically, this excellent movie contains a pointless afterword with a psychiatrist who talks nonsense under the guise of "explaining" everything. Even Richard Deacon can't save the pointless afterword, mainly because he's not in it.

  I was really excited to see that the car-lot scene takes place in Bakersfield, but when I looked up the location it turns out that scene was shot in the vicinity of LA.

• Ken (1964) a.k.a "The Sword." I'd like to think I'm open-minded enough to appreciate a movie that presents a point of view I totally disagree with, but "Ken" presented its argument for Japanese feudalism in a really melodramatic way that assumes you're on its side to begin with. It didn't help that this movie was from the same studio as 1965's "Daikaijû Gamera", and featured many similar shots and locations. I kept hoping Gamera would show up and smash everything. Now that's how you speak out against modernization!
• Mushuku mono (1964) a.k.a. "Homeless Drifter", from the director of "Ken". A more approachable film for Americans than "Ken", the kind of thing that could become the basis for a western. More approachable, but not better. "Ken" is super annoying but engaging, whereas "Mushuku mono" is a really boring film, until the last thirty minutes, when it uses the plot twist from The Empire Strikes Back. This movie may be the original source of that plot twist. But this movie does the plot twist better than The Empire Strikes Back. Seriously!

  Okay, dig this. Luke Skywalker spends the whole movie trying to avenge the death of his father, Anakin Skywalker, at the hands of the evil Darth Vader. He can't touch Darth Vader--Vader is too powerful. But he does find Darth Vader's estranged son, Han Solo. Luke Skywalker hates Han Solo. Luke wants to kill Han Solo because he can't get to the real villain.

  But Han manages to convince Luke that Darth Vader, although admittedly a bad guy, might not be the real killer. If they can get to Darth Vader together, they might be able to uncover the truth about Anakin Skywalker's death, and Han Solo might be able to patch things up with his dad.

  But when they meet up, Darth Vader is in no mood to talk. There's a big fight in which Darth Vader kills his son, Han Solo. And then we find out that Darth Vader is actually Anakin Skywalker. Luke's father. not Han's, is the villain. Luke's father killed Han's father, not the other way around. All of Luke Skywalker's misplaced hatred for Han Solo comes crashing down on him. And then Luke Skywalker has to kill Darth Vader, his father.

  Yeah, the last thirty minutes of this movie is pretty awesome. I can't recommend the whole thing, though.

• Ashes and Diamonds (1958) - A nice quiet movie about the pointlessness of war, occasionally bogged down by SYMBOLISM that seems completely random unless you're Polish. The main character in his James Dean jeans and sunglasses and haircut looks like a time traveler among everyone else in WWII period dress.

Update: Gonna post the rest of the movies I see this year here, again in reverse chronological order.

• "The Whole Town's Talking" (1935) A nearly-pre-Code screwball comedy directed by John Ford and starring Edward G. Robinson. Stupid title makes this sound like a movie version of a boring Broadway musical, but it brought down the house more than any other movie I've seen at the museum. Robinson plays his typecast "Little Caesar"-type gangster, but also plays a wide-eyed nebbishy clerk who gets into many varieties of trouble due to his resemblance to the aforementioned gangster. These two characters would later be averaged out into Robinson's insurance adjuster character in "Double Indemnity". Sample joke: gangster about to rub someone out reaches for a tommy gun instead of his pistol, saying "It's more humane this way." Co-starring Jean Clark as a brassy dame who puts up with more creeper shit from the nebbishy clerk than you'd see in a movie today, but given that she lies to the cops just for fun, with no apparent consequences, I guess she's got everything under control.
• "The Nutty Professor" (1963) Jerry Lewis's cinematic revenge on Dean Martin; the tragic tale of a university that institutes a shortsighted ban on independent research. I was expecting big laughs, and I got medium-sized laughs that petered out after the first reel. Lewis is funny and everyone else is terrible. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes level of terrible. I don't think it's snobbish to say that Jerry Lewis could have made a much funnier college movie if he'd gone to college himself. I do like that Julius Kelp isn't portrayed as being particularly smart; he's just... nutty.
• "All That Heaven Allows" (1955) - Rock Hudson as Manic Pixie Dream Boy. Crushing social satire featuring the sort of WASPy country club party that begs for the Marx Brothers to come in and start busting comedic heads. Jean Wyman takes a more restrained approach to her head-busting, and the film provides some genuine emotional moments, but they're drowned out by cornball melodrama. The happy ending is tacked on, but the depressing ending that precedes it is its own kind of cornball melodrama.

  It doesn't help that in this "May-December romance" Rock Hudson appears to be about five years younger than Jane Wyman. (He's actually a whopping eight years younger.) A couple in-jokes about the fact that Hudson was gay got big laughs from the 2012 crowd.

• "Fanny and Alexander" (1982) - I wasn't in the mood to watch the entire miniseries in one sitting, so I left after the first episode. That was the one I really wanted to see, anyway--the Christmas party. I'd never seen a Bergman film before, and the prelude fulfilled all the stereotypes, but once the movie actually started I got into the raucousness and the family drama. I will see the other four hours eventually.
• "The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey" (2012) - Yes, amazing, a new release that I bought a ticket to (along with my sister and brother-in-law). Apparently people are dissing this movie but I had no problem with any of it except the action sequences were too actiony and the one-liners were dumb (even the ones from the book--they were dumb in the book). The Hobbit was my introduction to fiction, I love it, and I love anything to do with it so long as it's consistent with Tolkien's original worldbuilding. Three 170-minute movies? Make it four! Long dramatizations of Gandalf's investigation of the Necromancer? I've been waiting years for that! Radagast being goofy? Tolerable! I'm the guy whose biggest problem with the "Lord of the Rings" series is the lack of Tom Bombadil. Keep it coming, is what I say.

  Oh, the one good joke that wasn't from the book was Gandalf being unable to remember the names of the other two Istari.

• La Dolce Vita (1960) - My first Fellini film. I was going to watch "Satyricon" earlier this year, but I misread the starting time and got there an hour late. Sumana has negative tolerance for films in which the unlikeable POV character surrounds themselves with unlikeable secondary characters, and I must admit it rubs off. This film is great when it goes for the gut. The sequence with the kids who saw the Virgin Mary is probably the most horrifying thing I saw in a movie this year. But "La Dolce Vita" spends most of its time showing how trivial trivial things are, and I thought that was dull. Still want to see "Satyricon", though.

Comments:

Posted by Andrew at Fri Dec 21 2012 12:50

This one's for Elizabeth Cady Stanton!

I'm sure she'd have been grateful. (Pow.)