I'll tackle the "best of" topic in a general 2013 wrap-up later on. For now, here's a look at December's cinematic adventures:
The American soldiers in this film are clearly played by German actors. One of them speaks British English with a fake American accent. It was really, really weird.
But then the shiftless losers get thrown in jail, and the movie a) radically changes direction and b) really takes off. The tight confines of the jail cell are the crucible that forges Down By Law into
a tight ball of character humor and callback-based jokes. It becomes a Marx Brothers movie written by Samuel Beckett, in which Groucho and Zeppo vie endlessly, pointlessly for supremacy, spurred onward by a combination Harpo/Chico. I can't recommend the second act of this movie enough. The third act is not quite as good, but what the hell, I'm feeling generous.
This is a puppet adaptation of Manos using Avenue Q-style Muppets (i.e. the puppeteers are not hidden and the puppets are not the official licensed Muppets). It was all right. They added a meta-narrative that recontextualized Manos as a found-footage movie depicting the process of its own filming. Which I don't like conceptually but it kept it from getting boring, as a completely faithful adaptation would have been.
The film was edited the same way as the original Manos, with the same abrupt transitions. (Okay, yeah, it's definitely a movie, not just a filmed play.) It was hard to resist the temptation to riff Felt using the original Manos MST3K riffs.
The puppet design was very good! I want to mention two things I thought were really clever. The teenage couple who make out in their car during the entirety of Manos are depicted by a joined Bert-and-Ernie puppet with two operators. (You can see a photo here.) And in the middle of the film, the "dancing wives of Manos" scene was performed as a The Muppet Show-style "At The Dance" sketch.
Admittedly, the two main interviewees were Norton Juster and Jules Pfeiffer, and hearing them ramble on irrelevant topics appealed greatly to us. It's a delicate balance, and I'm not saying I could have edited the film any better, but I don't think it did justice to the source material. Great animated sequences, though.
Unlike the American soldiers in The Marriage of Maria Braun, the American sailor in Lola is actually played by an American, Alan Scott. It's weird, though: his French sounds just like like an American speaking French, but his English sounds more like a French person faking an American accent.
Funniest line: "Learn your geography! There are no sailors in Chicago! Only gangsters!"
I know less about film criticism than I do about film, so I don't know how deeply this aspect of The Godfather has been explored, but the character progression was really the thing that caught my attention. The movie starts with a milquetoast undertaker asking Vito Corleone for a favor. He's terrified, because Vito Corleone is terrifying and ruthless. Everyone's afraid of him. The fact that he's polite and soft-spoken just adds to the terror. By contrast, Michael is the good guy, the "civilian", the son whose hands are clean.
Then Vito gets shot, and Sonny takes over. Sonny is a psychopath, and he's dumb, and the combination makes for a terrible crime boss. Sonny makes a lot of bad decisions and ends up getting himself killed. And then comes the turn. Vito Corleone calls in the favor he granted the milquetoast undertaker in the very first scene.
Because I was born after The Godfather came out, I came in to this movie aware of the general character of the titular Godfather. As such, this is the scene I've been dreading. How is this poor guy going to be compromised? But I'd read Vito Corleone all wrong. He doesn't compromise people for fun. He's a professional. And right now he really needs an undertaker. He needs his machine-gunned son to look presentable at the funeral. That's the favor.
And then Michael takes over the family, and it turns out that Michael isn't the good guy at all. Michael actually is the man I'd been assuming his father was. It's the "eaten by a bigger fish" trick I mentioned in my Constellation Games commentary, and I love it.
Interesting fact I'm not sure what to do with: The Godfather, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and The Bletchley Circle all cover the same time period.
The heavy use of water and Muppet-sized "outdoor" sets was very impressive technically. I liked the fish Muppet who had to be dragged around everywhere in a tank of water. I also enjoyed the outtakes they showed after the feature, including an interminable series of takes in which an attempt to film the behavior of a chaotically moving object goes endlessly awry. I laughed harder at that than I did at anything in the film.
I'm planning on seeing a lot of movies in 2014, but I don't know if I'm going to write these detailed reviews of each one. It takes a long time to get my thoughts in order and write it down, and, as you'll see when I write the year-end roundup, it really eats into the time I spend enjoying other media. So until next time, I'll see you at the movies! (If you are Sumana, Hal, or Babs.) Thu Jan 02 2014 09:14 December Film Roundup:
Counting it all up, it looks like I saw 85 feature films in 2013, plus some beefy television and a ton of shorts. Unfortunately the retrospective of 1913 silent film (semi-promised at 2012's 1912 retrospective) did not materialize. Oh darn!