Fame and Fortune (It's All Relative)

I was surprised to see my site stats go through the roof today, and when I looked into it I discovered that my university's web-newspaper had published a piece on me; I did the interview a year ago when I won a little blogging prize and it only appeared today, unbeknowst to me.

Now I feel like a bad blogger who needs to (a) get working on recent entries and (b) make good on my 2008 resolution to expand beyond the movie diary format (while preserving that as the core). I think that will be more likely to spark a dialogue in response to posts, which is the really fun part of the blogging game.

I really enjoy the websites of bloggers like girish, the siren and cinebeats - quite different from one another, and thankfully not always in perfect step with my own tastes - who prompt vigorous debate, and who are great about responding to and nourishing that debate. Those are, of course, just three examples among many, but all three have a great sense of community that I think is very valuable - and worth emulating.

Bride and Prejudice

2004, UK/US, directed by Gurinder Chadha

Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice is ultimately a rather unfortunate dilution of the Bollywood style, designed to appeal to the multiplex audience. The idea of using the template of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice isn't a bad one - after all, Amy Heckerling's 1995 film Clueless made good use of Austen's Emma in a California high school setting - but the film sticks too closely to the original blueprint and has to cram far too much incident into its running time. The final 20 minutes are particularly compressed as a consequence, but earlier scenes also seem to run disjointedly together (at the more standard Bollywood running time, this probably wouldn't be an issue...).

Things begin brightly enough, with an Indian family in a social whirl, trying to marry off four daughters, and the initial musical segments are lush and often amusing. The opening promise isn't sustained for long, though: the songs quickly become insipid, and are few and far between by the second half of the film, as if a producer somewhere simply ordered them to be snipped. It's also hard to become too involved in such a terribly upwardly-mobile world, which seems to take wealth - even great wealth - entirely for granted, while it's impossible to take the characters' protests about the failure to discover the "real India" too seriously when the film itself whips up such a fairytale version of the country for our consumption - failing, in the process, to understand much of the point of Austen's novel, which made a virtue of its setting among the landed classes.

Call of the Wild

2007, US, directed by Ron Lamothe

Ron Lamothe's documentary traces the path followed by Christopher McCandless, the young man who died in the Alaskan wilderness after a peripatetic journey across America in 1990-1992. McCandless became the subject of Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild (filmed by Sean Penn in 2007), but this is a much more personal version of the story. Lamothe follows essentially the same route that McCandless took, in summer 2006, only Lamothe has a video camera in hand for his journey. He occasionally links up with friends for part of the route before he plunges completely into McCandless's world and resolves to hitch his way across a large section of the US.

Lamothe's film aims to illuminate McCandless's specific journey but also the ideas that inspired him and other members of what Lamothe views as the restless Generation X (Lamothe, a contemporary of McCandless's, sees his own itchy feet against this background, and his film interweaves his own experiences - travelling across Africa as a 22-year-old, or his home life in Massachusetts - with those of his subject).

Lamothe's a trained historian, and to his credit he doesn't simply take his thesis and run with it: he gives time to those with contrary views, including a college friend who thinks the whole "Generation X" designation is bunk, before arriving at his conclusions. He also probes the details of the McCandless story to form a more nuanced picture of the end of McCandless's life, one that contradicts the conclusions of the Krakauer book (and Penn film), while he exposes an extraordinary gap in the original investigation (by both police and journalists) that casts McCandless in a subtly different light, whether you view him as a fool or a romantic hero (the Alaskans interviewed seem to uniformly take the former view, often expressed in pugnacious terms).

Lamothe runs into some of the same people McCandless encountered, but also forms brief on-the-road friendships of his own (he has a knack for hitching rides from some extraordinary characters). This blend of McCandless's tale with that of the teller is generally very effective: it draws the viewer right into the story, giving a vivid sense of the charms of life on the road, and the exceptional diversity of the American population's preoccupations. The film doesn't quite master the arguments about Generation X - Lamothe perhaps isn't quite sure what they are, beyond having a sense that something was different - but his film is an important counterpoint to the more mainstream telling of the McCandless tale, which was overdue for a corrective.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

2007, UK/USA, directed by David Yates

While J.K. Rowling's source novels have gotten significantly longer as the series progresses, overflowing with plot, the fifth of the Harry Potter films is twenty minutes shorter than its predecessor. It's a welcome development: as the filmmakers become more comfortable with the material, they seem less beholden to Rowling's work, and more concerned to craft a version of the books that works onscreen.

Inevitably, this means that large swathes of incident from the book are abandoned - Harry's romance is relegated to a footnote - and many smaller set-pieces are entirely omitted. The film feels much more coherent as a consequence, even if it loses perhaps some of the observational character that director Mike Newell brought to the fourth installment. Near the end, the events do seem a little overly compressed - it's hard to understand how the young wizards break in to an apparently well-guarded place so easily, for instance - but for the most part the action moves on coherently.

The key new face this time around is Imelda Staunton, as a new teacher and Ministry of Magic plant; she does a remarkable job of straddling a fine line between menace and high-pitched ridicule, taking what seems like an entirely light-hearted assignment and giving it considerable depth. As the oddball Luna Lovegood, the Irish newcomer Evanna Lynch is excellent, while Helena Bonham-Carter energetically channels the work of her offscreen partner Tim Burton as the blood-curdling Bellatrix Lestrange.

Director David Yates does a particularly good job of marrying the effects work to the live action: while that's presumably also a testament to advances in film technology since the first film, he uses effects in a way that enhances the action rather than distracting from it, and for the most part the effects work seems to belong to the same plane as the real actors, making it that much more convincing.

Serenity

2005, US, directed by Joss Whedon

There can't be too many other films in the same category as Serenity, that is, the subset of movies based on TV shows that were cancelled after less than a dozen episodes were screened. If the special features on the DVD are to be believed, the existence of Serenity is testament, among other things, to the development of an extremely passionate online fanbase after Firefly, the original TV show, was released on DVD (complete with the episodes that were completed but never broadcast) - too late for the show, but evidence of enough interest to justify greenlighting a motion picture.

Like most of Joss Whedon's projects, Serenity is a genre-blend, mixing the spaceship drama with the further fringes of the wild West, although the western themes are more obvious in the TV series (signalled both by the choice of episode plots and the opening song, which isn't used in the film). The film simply picks up from the end of the final episode of the show, which means it has to do some nifty plot contortions at times, but has the nice advantage of treating its audience like informed consumers (first-timers may be confused by some of the jokes, and perhaps some of the back-story, which is inevitably given more depth on the small screen).

Whedon steers towards the darker edges of the TV plotlines, eliding some of the week-to-week character humour in favour of a confrontation with some of his bigger themes - the central discovery of the film's plot is grim indeed - but he's careful to ensure that each of his main characters (there are nine in all) has at least a scene or two to shine. Given the restrictions imposed by his own decision not to re-tread the TV series' plot in condensed form, he does a fine job of creating a narrative line, tying up loose ends in generally satisfying fashion, and ensuring that the characters remain true to themselves (one advantage, perhaps, of an early TV death). The fine TV cast all return for the film, and their chemistry together is tremendous: despite the characters' frequent differences of opinion, there's a strong sense of a shared bond, while the spaceship itself becomes an important inanimate cast member, a surprisingly cosy refuge from a universe that's often brutal.

White Lightning

1973, US, directed by Joseph Sargent

In my local movie theatre, the eye-catching original poster for White Lightning hangs in a glass case, mostly surrounded by theatre memorabilia; I've no idea why that particular poster has survived, since there are no others of similar vintage. I've often thought that I should check out the original film, without ever following through, but Larry Aydlette's mammoth and hugely entertaining February 2008 Burt-a-Thon finally prodded me into action.

The White Lightning poster promises plenty of action: cars, guns, and wild women. It's unexpected, then, when the film opens on a somber note on an Arkansas lake, the tone far more Deliverance than Smokey and the Bandit, in terms of Burt Reynolds's other movies. Out on that lake, a dreadful crime sets the plot in motion. The crime carries an echo of the violence explored, however contentiously, in Mississippi Burning: while there's not an explicit racial element at work in these atmospheric early scenes, we subsequently learn that the local sheriff, who rules the county as his fiefdom, isn't too impressed by college kids (variously dismissed as "protestors" and "hippies") coming into town to "give our coloreds" the vote. Though the civil rights backdrop is explicitly evoked in such references, black characters are rarely present onscreen; there's only one meaningful exchange with a black character, though it does serve to underline the fact that Gator McKlusky (Burt Reynolds), hasn't been soured by the prejudices of those around him.

In that, Gator seems to have inherited the tolerance of his father, who is pre-occupied not with issues of race but those of class, beset as he is with the crushing weight of work on his small farm. The scenes where Gator returns home are among the strongest in the film, his elderly parents fanning themselves in the punishing Arkansas summer as they try to pick up the pieces of their lives in the aftermath of their younger son, Donnie. These characters - like many of the down-at-heel moonshiners we subsequently encounter - are all subject to the whim of someone like the sheriff, in cahoots with the worst of the local criminal fraternity, and determined to preserve the status quo.

As the film unspools, this vein of social commentary isn't always sustained, given the need to provide the kind of thrills and spills promised by that poster, with the tone occasionally wobbling between sober drama and good-old-boy backroad tyre-squealing spectacle. To its credit, though, when dealing with Sheriff J.C. Connors (superbly played by Ned Beatty), director Joseph Sargent never yields to the temptation to caricature a man who behaves as though he himself is subject to no law, and the film is blunt about the tactics Connors either employs or condones.

Sargent is exceptionally good at capturing the details of the film's broiling environment, before the ubiquity of air conditioning; clothes are stained, brows are sweat-beaded, and there's a glaze of heat exhaustion on many of the characters. It's no wonder such films were so successful with Southern drive-in audiences in particular, since they actually provide an exerience with which the audience can directly identify, unlike the often sanitized spectacle of backlot Hollywood movie-making. As Gator McKlusky - my favourite character name from his car crash years - Reynolds delivers an excellent performance, credible both behind the wheel or throwing a punch, but also in conveying the complex motivations of a man whose options have been restricted by poverty and powerlessness. There's a poignant scene where Gator makes smalltalk with a group of college kids - from the same school as his dead brother - that feels like a man yearning for a different outcome for his own life, and that perfectly underlines the surprising depth of the film.

Back to the Future Part III

1990, US, directed by Robert Zemeckis

For the final part of the Back to the Future trilogy, Robert Zemeckis and his scriptwriter Bob Gale return to the sources, finding again the seam of wit that animated the original film, and plundering the rich storehouse of the western to beguiling effect. It's clear that the filmmakers are enjoying themselves, and the re-workings of scenes from the previous installments have a freshness this time around which sometimes seems missing from the rather more mechanical - though also quite deliberately darker - second episode. Sequences such as that which confronts Marty with his Irish forebears, or the bit with a scale model re-creation of the plan to send Marty back home, re-visit old haunts from the first film with enough wit and skill to ensure that they seem worthwhile trips down memory lane.

When he's returned to 1885 near the beginning of the film, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) himself reaches into the pop culture trove - so well employed throughout the films, whether in the references to Jerry Lewis, Chuck Berry or sci-fi magazines - to give himself a western persona, employing the as-yet-unused moniker Clint Eastwood, only to find that the locals think it's a hearty joke rather than a tough-guy appellation. The real local tough is Biff Tannen's forebear Griff; again, Thomas F. Wilson does a fine job creating a new character while also ensuring that the links with the other members of the Tannen clan are clear (it's interesting, too, to see how the filmmakers find the common link between the generic characters of the bad seed cowboy and the juvenile delinquent of the 1950s).

The film also inserts some of the sweet romanticism that characterized the1955 segments of the original film, giving Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd, manic as ever) a love interest. Though Mary Steenburgen is a welcome addition, it doesn't really excuse the fact that Marty's own girlfriend is abandoned on a porch for two entire movies; inherited from the resolution of the first part, the girlfriend is treated as a plot inconvenience that the filmmakers clearly didn't want to grapple with, perhaps because they felt it would upset the Marty/Doc dynamic that is so central to the films' success. Though Marty and the Doc have to contend with the evil intentions of Griff Tannen, unlike in the downbeat second installment there's rarely a sense of real menace, not least because the confrontations here always have a comic undercurrent; the whole enterprise has a sunnier feel that has little to do with the authentic old west - even though the filmmakers play with the 1950s spin on tales of that west - and much to do with old-fashioned rousing entertainment.

Back to the Future Part II

1989, US, directed by Robert Zemeckis

In a kind of Lord of the Rings precursor, the second and third parts of the Back to the Future series were shot back-to-back, and released just six months apart. Given that the middle segment actually includes a trailer for Part III before the end credits roll, thus providing hints of a story beyond the bounds of this one, it inevitably has an unfinished feel, an episode in a larger whole rather than a self-contained tale. In the age of DVD it's easy enough to watch the two films in sequence, but when this portion was first served up the conclusion seemed especially unsatifying, like one of those "To be continued..." cards at the end of a TV show - except that the wait for the wrap-up was much longer than a week.

The first film in the trilogy is one of the great post-1980 Hollywood films, an entertainment constructed by masters of the craft, with a series of memorable set-pieces and a witty script. Here director Robert Zemeckis and his screenwriter Bob Gale enjoy creating a vision of 2015 as consciously hokey as their previous take on 1955 - channelling 1950s sci-fi magazines' dreams of what the future might look like - but watching the film again, I was put in mind of the recent discussion between David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson on Zemeckis's 2007 film, Beowulf, and specifically Bordwell's comment that since the end of his collaboration with Bob Gale, Zemeckis has set himself ever greater technical challenges rather than storytelling goals. Though the two work together here, some of the special effects gimmicks, particularly the multiple personae of Michael J. Fox, feel like ideas that don't bring much to the story (by contrast, the challenge of dealing with some cast changes cast is fairly seamless).

Similarly, the film occasionally feels over-contorted, as if it's trying just a little too hard to reproduce the iconic sequences of the first film - from different angles - rather than letting a new story breathe more fully. Still, the film's vision of alternate presents in particular is compelling and even vaguely unsettling, and Biff Tannen's spectacularly tacky adult self-glorification has elements of both Vegas and Tony Montana; Thomas F. Wilson does an excellent job of charting the character's journey from mean-spirited town bully to dangerously powerful man. The wit that made the first film so memorable is also present here, illuminating the scenes where we see events from a new perspective but also breathing life into the film's version of 2015, whether in the self-fitting clothes - achieved by virtue of ingenious effects - or the sometimes bizarre electronic devices that have proliferated in the homes of the future.

On the Edge

2001, Ireland, directed by John Carney

Despite its unusual setting in a mental institution, John Carney's pre-Once feature is a considerably more conventional film than his quasi-musical hit, although On the Edge carefully skirts post-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest cliches, with this particular institution altogether more benevolent. Even so, the film often feels too indebted to other movies to fully spread its wings.

On the Edge's most obvious forebears are Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, with its hyperactive opening and cocksure lead character (who is then confronted with challenges that force him to grow up), and Neil Jordan's darkly humorous The Butcher Boy, which provides a shade of black reflection on the complex and sometimes violent undercurrents that lurk in Irish family life (and a nice line in raw humour).

That's not to say that the film doesn't cohere: even when channelling Trainspotting in the early going, Carney is sufficiently confident as a filmmaker to carry the viewer along for the ride: a sequence set in the Wicklow mountains is particularly eye-catching, with spectacular overhead shots and an unsettling conclusion. In other scenes, the constantly moving camera is more of a distraction than necessary (the unexpected crane shots near the end of the otherwise pared-down Once are perhaps born of the same impulses).


The camerawork sometimes obscures the actors, too, which is a pity since they're generally very strong. Stephen Rea, who has played so many unpredictable parts, here gets the chance to play it straight and buttoned-down, allowing the younger actors, particularly Cillian Murphy, to make most of the running. It's not entirely clear why two young, and fairly obscure, American actors were used in the film, but Jonathan Jackson is charming (even with a sometimes oddball Northern Irish accent). Anna Manahan, better known as a stage actress, has a nice bit as one of the older inmates; by contrast Gerard McSorley, usually such a powerful presence, has an inexplicably small and wordless part.


The film sometimes stumbles in negotiating the transitions from funny to serious, though as the story progresses two of the most powerful sequences creep up almost unannounced, emerging at unexpected moments; it's notable that these scenes are visually far calmer, allowing the script and the actors to do their work. It's not that hard to guess the direction the plot will take - the film telegraphs one development particularly obviously - but the conclusion introduces a convincing element of maturity to the lead character, with Cillian Murphy playing the scene with a tenderness that his character has just learned.

Carney's background is as a musician, and as well as supplying some of the music he has assembled a tremendous soundtrack (for a small film, the rights costs must have been a major budgetary consideration). Occasionally, the musical backdrop seems overly insistent, rather than stitched into the fabric of the film, but when the sound and images work together, as in a wonderful sequence set to 'Singin' in the Rain', the film lifts off.

Blissfully Yours

2002, Thailand/France, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Apichatpong Weerasethakul said, while making his first feature, that it would just be a 'sweet romance', with 'no politics', but the dreamy atmosphere of the film's second hour comes across in many ways as a self-protecting response to the country's blunt political and economic realities as it emerged from the crisis of the late 1990s. Like his previous feature, the semi-documentary Mysterious Object at Noon, this film's opening paints a picture of a troubled country, where money and prices are at the forefront of everyday life. The usual courtesies are put aside in favour of requesting immediate payment, for no-one -- doctor or factory colleague -- can afford to extend credit, while careless use of another's possessions quickly triggers anger.
Thailand's complex links with its neighbours, as well as its own sometimes fraught ethnic relations, are also an important presence in the film, particularly as the film is set in the north of the country, near the border with Burma/Myanmar. After all, one of the characters is an illegal immigrant from over that border, and much of the opening segment of the film is taken up with the problem of his lack of an identity card. The characters use various stratagems to ensure his illegal status is not discovered, pretending he's a distant relative and even claiming that the man cannot speak. Similarly, when a motorbike is stolen in the forest, a character immediately assumes that the thief is a member of the much-maligned Karen ethnic group.

With all this in mind, it's no surprise that the characters seek out a place to escape from their world, if only for a few hours, finding an idyll in the woods to withdraw and recuperate from the demands of work and town life. The riverbank where they spend their time seems like the traditional place of renewal, where frayed connections can be repaired - particularly between the young Roong and her older colleague Orn. However, while the location allows for some respite, Orn's pain seems to run too deep to be easily washed away; Weerasethakul uses the symbolism of the river without simplifying the realities that poke through the surface of his film.

The river/forest sequences are an extraordinarily sensual experience, deeply focused on textures and sounds (the buzzing of insects in particular) and on an intense awareness of the surrounds. The camera lingers over shots of feet dangling in the water or Roong's face as she falls asleep, lulled by the warmth and peace of the location, undisturbed by a fly that alights on her in a nice bit of filmmaking serendipity. It's a seductive vision that is all the more poignant for the viewer's awareness of its inevitable temporary nature.

10 Things I Hate About You

1999, US, directed by Gil Junger

A superior teen/high school movie - with roots in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, signalled mostly through the characters' names - 10 Things I Hate About You is blessed with a tremendous cast, both young and old, who spark off each other to elevate the film well above the sitcom territory that often dogs such films.

For the most part, the students are played by genuinely youthful actors, almost all of them still teenagers when the film went into production, though the main exception, David Krumholtz, is the most baby-faced of the lot. Krumholtz steals every one of his scenes, and it's a pity that the the film doesn't choose to wrap up his plotline in more satisfying fashion; he disappears rather abruptly from the action. Still, seeing the emergence of actors like Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger has its compensations, and their chemistry together feels genuine.

Director Gil Junger slips into musical montage mode a little too often, selling the soundtrack rather than advancing the plot, but on the flipside he makes good use of his unusual Seattle locations, whether it be the converted gasworks that serve as a public park (and, in the film, a paintball locale), or the attractive Queen Anne scene that opens the film. He's also generous with his actors, giving his adult cast members moments to shine, too: Allison Janney, Larry Miller and Daryl Mitchell (as the no-bullshit English teacher) are particularly good.

Inevitable posthumous postscript: It's strange to see Heath Ledger onscreen in the immediate aftermath of his death, particularly since this film, his first in the US, presumably felt like the culmination of a young man's acting dream. I remember looking the actor up on the IMDB after seeing this film on its original release as I was curious to see an Australian in a Hollywood production; he's charming here but it wasn't until Monster's Ball (2001) that his acting talent first made a real impression.

Mysterious Object at Noon

2001, Thailand, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul doesn't take a directorial credit for his first feature-length project, preferring instead the combination 'Conceived/edited by', to underline the importance of the many amateur storytellers who advance the film. Using the Surrealist technique of the exquisite corpse, Weerasethakul roams the Thai countryside, and assembles a collage of documentary and fictional footage wherein the participants tells stories about their actual lives interspersed with an increasingly off-the-wall tale that encompasses a young boy, his teacher, space aliens, tigers and other strangeness.

As the film progresses, Weerasethakul becomes more and more interested in the processes by which the fictional story is advanced, filming not just additions to the story but the methods by which storytellers collaborate to add their own pieces. This is especially true of the segments featuring two deaf girls who sign to each other as much as they do to the camera, as well as in an extended sequence where schoolchildren play off one another, encouraging the creation of ever-greater absurdities.

The artifice of the filmmaking process also becomes more obvious as the film continues; while early on Weerasethakul's voice can occasionally be heard encouraging a storyteller to elaborate or invent, later the lights and crew make an appearance, while the boom mike hangs down very deliberately in the sequence with the schoolchildren (who seem unperturbed by its presence). The closing credits begin several minutes before the film ends, only to be interrupted by a final sequence that is almost pure observation of incident in a small village, down to the last frame, the final image captured by that particular camera and thus the inevitable end-point of the film (as recounted by Weerasethakul in an interview that accompanies the film).

In counterpoint to this apparent artlessness, though, other sequences are carefully framed - a shot of a window and a wall covered with posters that accompanies the first segment of the closing credits, for example, or a shot looking between two houses that recalls the careful geometric interplay of Ozu's Good Morning (both above). While the combination of fictional and documentary elements is surprisingly fluid for the most part, the film does extend a little more than perhaps justified by the material; as compelling as some of the images of Thai life may be, Weerasethakul implies that he himself lost some steam as his project advanced, reinforcing the impression of a film that eventually just peters out.

Female

1933, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

Female packs an awful lot of action into its 60 minutes, paring many of the sequences right to the bone to make punchy points while still allowing opportunities for the supporting players to get in some choice bits. Ruth Chatterton plays Alison Drake, a female auto executive who chews up many of the men who work for her, discarding them - or transferring them to the Montreal office, in a running gag - as soon as they start to cling.

The first 40 minutes thus unspool as a kind of paean to female empowerment, at least in terms of permitting a woman to run a company as long as she behaves like one of the boys. However, even in these apparently pre-Code times, the prevailing social order is restored by the film's end; the reversal is so complete as to be almost literally breathtaking, though one wonders if the 1933 audience swallowed the whole thing.

Though the film has a brief running time, it's no throwaway. Considerable care went into the set design, for instance: Drake's office, with a huge picture window looking onto the manufacturing facility, is spectacular, while the staircase of her house, complete with a church organ, is an extraordinary creation. Perhaps that set appears in other Warner Brothers films of the period; another of their films is cited when two characters mention the Jimmy Cagney picture The Picture Snatcher, released a few months before.

Ruth Chatterton was a major star in the 1930s (though this film was my introduction to her work), and unusually for a female star she didn't break into films until she was in her mid-30s. Here she is paired with her then-husband George Brent, playing her main onscreen love interest. Brent's Irish accent and considerable charm slip through frequently, and the pair's scenes together, particularly in the early going, are played with great verve.

Employees' Entrance

1933, US, directed by Roy Del Ruth

Part of a series of "pre-Code" films screened at the Harvard Film Archive (though as Richard Maltby suggests, that category is as much a critical invention as anything else; the Siren provided the link), Employees' Entrance features Warren William at his best, that is to say his worst, playing an utter cad who cuts a swathe through the female staff of the department store he manages, while callously dealing with long-time employees.

Unlike some other films of the Depression period, here it's not the boardroom that's a threat to the little man - the directors are portrayed as buffoons, when they appear at all - but rather the fellow who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps. For all that William's character is despicable, it's possible to come away from the film with the blunt moral that it's necessary to be ruthless to survive the economic turmoil of the period; certainly one of William's many conquests is prepared to mould her principles as needed in the circumstances (with a great one-liner to sum up her attitude).

There's a second strand at work, though, which tries to provide a more redemptive message, focused on one of the junior management types at the store and the new female employee who wins his heart. The film provides two contrasting conclusions, almost as if two different endings were shot and then simply combined here to provide radically different outcomes for the characters; the film doesn't seem to lend different moral weight to those outcomes, preferring rather to imply that the real world contains both the good and the not so good, each of whom will make a different set of choices.

12 Angry Men

1957, US, directed by Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet's compelling first cinema feature shows the director's origins in stage-bound television drama, but the director experiments with technique throughout this sweaty tale of jury justice, to give his work a distinctly cinematic sensibility that works on the larger canvas (though the fact that it also plays rather well on a TV screen perhaps partly explains its sustained popularity as a "classic").

The film opens with a pair of shots that pan up the columns of a courthouse, then pan down inside that same building, looking up toward justice, and then down toward the antlike figures on whom that justice is dispensed inside the court building. As the camera settles at its lowest point, it moves away to bring us into the courtroom where a trial is in its final stages.

After this brief courtroom prologue, the film spends almost its entire running time inside the jury room, where one man - Henry Fonda - insists on a proper discussion of an apparently open-and-shut murder case. Lumet consciously sets up a series of "types": he's not interested in these men as people (while we learn certain facts about them, we learn only a handful of names), but rather as representatives of certain strands of the city - within limits, since this is, after all, a group of white men only.

Lumet makes use of the mirroring technique of that opening pair of shots throughout his film, most strikingly in a brace of scenes that isolate first the sole dissenter in the initial jury vote, and later an outspoken bigot who finds himself alone in a room full of men. The individual jurors frequently experience epiphanies in shots that refer back to their initial stance on the issues at hand, as if to reverse those early introductions.



Despite the close confines of the jury room, Lumet makes relatively little use of close-up shots; while one character, an older man, is often framed at close quarters, it isn't until the latter stages of the film that such shots proliferate, as the men come face-to-face with the reality of their decision.


While the film idealizes the justice system's checks and balances in implying that a good jury can make up for a poorly-conducted trial - Fonda is a surrogate for the ideal defense lawyer, who was missing from the courtroom, while other characters "prosecute" the case - it remains an intriguing insight into one of the key responsibilities of a jury-based justice system, with a tremendous cast (many of them television stalwarts).

Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier

1959, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Made for French television - though it also had a brief cinema release - Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier is Renoir's contemporary Parisian take on Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with Jean-Louis Barrault in the dual role of Cordelier and his "experiment", Opale. The film comes complete with an "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" prologue, wherein the great director arrives at the television station and settles in before introducing his bizarre tale.

In that prologue, Renoir plays with perspectives, using television monitors to frame his monologue within larger frames, then cutting to a closer shot of his face. Later, once we enter the world of Cordelier and his creation, much of the action is shot in a manner reminiscent of the stage, with the characters carefully placed across the set, but as if to prevent the action from seeming excessively stage-bound, characters occasionally emerge from "behind" the camera.

Barrault, the great stage artist best known for his role as a mime in Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis, plays his two roles with a minimum of special effects artifice. Cordelier is a pretty conventional doctor type - his research base recalls that of the doctor in George Franju's extraordinary film Les Yeux sans visage, made the same year - but Opale is a strange creature indeed. Though the character is prone to a bit of the old ultra-violence, and attacks a child in an early sequence, he moves almost like a dancer, and often recalls the physical comedy of performers like Chaplin. It's an unexpected interpretation that keeps the viewer constantly off-balance, never quite sure how to judge Opale, a creature born against his will from another's ill-judged experiments.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

US, 2007, directed by Andrew Dominik

For one reason or another, I ended up seeing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford without having read any reviews. As the lights dimmed, I finally remembered why I recognized director Andrew Dominik's name, having seen his only previous feature, the 2000 Australian film Chopper. As this new film washed over me, it put me in mind of a Western shot by Terrence Malick, something that seemed worthy of noting in a future blog posting, only to discover, when reading about the film subsequently, that everyone else already knew this. Dominik even received a 'Thanks to' credit on Malick's most recent film, The New World, though I don't know what his contribution was.

Dominik's film is reminiscent of Malick primarily for its gorgeous visuals, and its frequent focus on visual textures; in other respects it departs the Malick mould, with a stronger narrative line, and fewer extended passages of abstraction, than Malick's more recent films, parts of which occasionally strike me as self-indulgent. Dominik's choice of title (from Ron Hansen's source novel) also gives his film a sense of concrete inevitability that isn't captured in Malick titles like The New World or The Thin Red Line. The themes of Dominik's film are familiar from Chopper, which also focused on the image of a notorious outlaw who became a folk hero to some (there's an echo of the Ned Kelly myth here, too). Mark "Chopper" Read has been more active in crafting his own media image, where Jesse James left the mythologizing to others, while remaining acutely aware of everything written about him. The film casts James as a proto-modern celebrity (an idea enhanced by using as actor as visible as Brad Pitt) with his own developing fanbase, as exemplified by the adoring yet thin-skinned Ford (Casey Affleck).

From the film's opening moments, there's a gnawing air of foreboding to the entire enterprise, as if death could emerge at any moment. The characters themselves often seem to accept this, having chosen to live in a violent world wherein death is accorded no great weight when it finally arrives; when James talks of a murder, one of his gang says simply "I'm a little angry with you", as if referring to some minor event. That doesn't mean James and his gang are unfeeling: James is hollowed out by stress, while other men are reduced to shadows by shifting loyalties, against a brutally hardscrabble rural background. Indeed, almost all of the men are strikingly pale, despite lives lived essentially outdoors, on horseback or in the fields.

As Robert Ford, the erstwhile hanger-on, Casey Affleck is unnerving. He hangs on James's every syllable, constantly seeking affirmation, pathetically unable to exit his hero's orbit. Affleck's face captures Ford's emotional disarray at even the mildest of slights; it's subtle work, his face changing so slowly it's sometimes like watching the play of light rather than muscle movement. With Gone Baby Gone added to the mix, 2007 was a remarkable year for the actor.

Secret Agent

1936, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Made the year after The Lady Vanishes, Secret Agent initially strives for that film's breezily comic tone, but as the action progresses, and the eponymous agent finds himself confronted with the inevitable dirty side of his business circa 1916, things turn more serious. The same transition isn't to be found in the original source material, W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, or The British Agent, more cynical throughout; what is turned on its head in the film (the Hairless Mexican, played by Peter Lorre, neither hairless nor Mexican) is literal in the book, which was deemed accurate enough on the business of espionage that for a time it was required reading for aspiring spies.

As Maugham writes, "Well, that was war, and only fools thought it could be waged with kid gloves on"; you imagine he might feel that Hitchcock's dueling protagonists, played by John Gielgud and Madeleine Carroll, were fools indeed. They see the error of their ways eventually, though, which allows Hitchcock to play with notions of loyalty and patriotism as the shadow of another war began to creep over Britain. He's also good at capturing the atmosphere of intrigue so characteristic of the cinematic take on Central Europe, a world where any combination of loyalties seems possible (exemplified by Lorre's own complex personal history, which criss-crossed nationalities as nations rose and fell).

I was prompted to see Secret Agent by a comment left elsewhere on this site by blogger Pacze Moj, who passed on the tidbit that the multi-talented New Zealand artist Len Lye had done some special effects work on commission for the action-packed conclusion to the film. Judging from Roger Horrocks's account of the work in his biography of Lye, as well as the relevant scenes in the film itself, it doesn't appear that any of Lye's work appears in the surviving prints of the film; his contributions were apparently deemed so realistic they might cause a panic, and were excised before the film was widely distributed. While the climactic scenes remain impressive as they stand - credit to the unnamed effects artists - one can only imagine how they might have been enhanced by Lye's imaginative and playful work.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

1975, UK, directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones

The first "real" film by the Monty Python team, Holy Grail remains a hilarious showcase for their flights of verbal exuberance and energetic absurdism. Given that the film is still a series of sketches inside a larger framework - their next film, Life of Brian, feels more fully conceived as a single storyline - the team resist the temptation to pad the length beyond what the material will bear, though they play with the timing of several jokes, perhaps most notably the very first gag. The gag is much more than a quick visual joke, extending over a minute, more than long enough for an audience member to become uncomfortable and wonder what's going on.

While the film remains most memorable for the verbal duels between King Arthur and his recalcitrant subjects, as well as the various challengers he encounters, as the film progresses it also reveals a surprising visual flair; perhaps Terry Gilliam was finding a visual style as the shoot progressed, with several carefully composed landscapes giving the gags a properly cinematic underpinning. Gilliam makes intelligent use of his limited resources throughout, playing sleight of hand with angles and smoke to craft a suitably expansive medieval landscape.

The Spy Who Loved Me

1977, UK, directed by Lewis Gilbert

After the all-out silliness of The Man with the Golden Gun, the next entry in the Bond franchise is a considerable improvement, with a plot that pools the resources of the US, Soviet and British secret services, who find their interests suddenly aligned when the megalomaniac du jour decides to steal three nuclear submarines of varying nationalities (the opening sequence is economical and quite gripping, perhaps because it is free of the tongue-in-cheekery of the scenes featuring Bond).

It's not quite plain sailing, of course: while B-movie queen Barbara Bach is an enjoyable foil for Bond, Richard Kiel's Jaws, the iron-toothed villain, is absurb even by the standards of the series (which wouldn't stop him from returning in a later film). The film also feels twenty minutes too long, with the usual array of tropical locations (most notably Egypt on this occasion) padding out the running time. Lewis Gilbert returns for directing duties; he has more skill with the camera than Guy Hamilton, though he tends to repeat the same movements -- smooth dolly shots in particular -- with distracting frequency.

Satan Met a Lady

1936, US, directed by William Dieterle

This second version of The Maltese Falcon changes the names and some of the plot details just five years after the original filming, playing the whole complicated affair as a light farce (in the wake of the hit adaptation of another Dashiell Hammett novel, The Thin Man).

Warren William is cast as Ted Shayne, the Sam Spade character, a pretty affable fellow by William's standards, as the actor was more frequently cast in roguish parts. William's character is absolutely the rogue where women are concerned, though, pursuing virtually every actress who walks across the screen, even flirting shamelessly with a much older woman (Alison Skipworth, who plays the Sydney Greenstreet role). William is clearly having tremendous fun as Shayne, who treats everything as one big joke (most notably in an extended "robbery" sequence with Arthur Treacher, one of Hollywood's great butler types).

Even by the standards of Warner Brothers in the 1930s, the first half-hour feels extremely brisk, with some scenes seeming to end abruptly, though it's not entirely clear if this is due to William Dieterle's swift direction or the surviving print. Bette Davis shows up after about 30 minutes, and the rhythm settles down, but this isn't one of the actress's more notable films; she's upstaged, for the most part, by Marie Wilson, who has the right breezy tone as Miss Murgatroyd, Shayne's secretary.

There's a striking moment near the end which seems, at first glance, an instance of ugly racism of a kind that, even for an industry that was hardly progressive, seems rather blunt. The character who casually orders a black porter around quickly finds the joke's on him, however, and as the joke is extended it's hard not to think that the film is trying to make a broader point about the treatment of black characters (and the actors who play them).

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

1982/2007, US, directed by Ridley Scott


Blade Runner begins with a stunning shot of an imagined Los Angeles future, echoed, 25 years later, by the evocation of San Francisco past that opens David Fincher’s Zodiac. This first evocation of the dark city, with ominous plumes of flame bursting from massive factory structures, is filled with a sense of foreboding – where do these flames come from, and what do they imply about the city that lies beneath? Ridley Scott’s aerial cityscapes are wonderfully suggestive, part of a richly-textured future that seems fully alive. That his version of the city is unlikely, at least in its weather patterns, to match the future of the real Los Angeles in 2019 is beside the point, though it is occasionally distracting to note that companies like Pan-Am and TWA have survived as future artifacts through the advertising-scape of the film.

The film has a stately pacing that seems like a historical artifact of another kind; many of the scenes unspool quite deliberately (for example in the often humorous sequence during which Brion James’s character is questioned; that scene’s explosive conclusion is all the more powerful as a consequence). Later in the film, particularly near the climactic scenes, the action sometimes seems to miss a beat, almost as if to compensate for the earlier stateliness, the characters – particularly Rutger Hauer’s replicant - popping up with jack-in-the-box swiftness. There are eye-catchingly atmospheric moments throughout the film, whether a shot in which bicycles sweep by unannounced, or in the extraordinary family of grotesques that inhabits the “old dark house” where the action comes to a head.

The Kingdom

2007, US, directed by Peter Berg

Peter Berg expands his field of vision from Texas high school football to international terrorism but in the transition he retains the occasionally disorienting hand-held shooting style of Friday Night Lights. He also betrays the influence of one of his producers, Michael Mann, in the insistent, and sometimes overbearing, use of music. It's a pity that the raw material isn't up to more, since Berg is more than able to handle the logistic demands of his film – the climactic gunfight is a great bit of modern action cinema, adrenaline-laced and brutal - but instead he's saddled with hokum that throws an elite FBI team into Saudi Arabia to solve a terrorist attack on an American compound.

Even with Jamie Foxx deploying his considerable charisma, it's awfully hard to swallow the idea that his team could disembark in Saudi and ride roughshod over not just local custom but also local bureaucratic protocol – and make swift progress in their investigation into the bargain. Foxx cultivates one of the Saudis as his advocate, so that the film becomes, in its mid-section, a kind of buddy picture, with the two men learning to work together, but when push comes to shove things revert to Gunga Din territory. The surprisingly downbeat ending seems tacked on from another film - Syriana, perhaps - a moral conclusion at odds with the nuance-free operation we’ve just seen.

Fracture

2007, US, directed by Gregory Hoblit

Director Gregory Hoblit has been here before, mining material similar to that of his first feature film, Primal Fear (which featured a memorable debut from Edward Norton). As in that film, Hoblit ensures that the narrative tricks play second fiddle to the confrontation between the two lead actors, Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins (playing a young prosecutor and a wealthy murder suspect, respectively).

Hopkins, his voice rich in his original Welsh accent, is much better here than is often the case when he's on the Hollywood dollar, referencing his original turn as Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs but toning down the subsequent ham, while Gosling has held on to something of the rawness of his recent turn in Half Nelson, investing his character's hard-scrabble back story with more than usual conviction. Hoblit shoots the film in a calm, precise style, lingering over surfaces and shadows, of which there is no shortage in Hopkins's remarkable house, where the film's plot kicks into gear. It's a nice contrast to the more frenetic style that's so characteristic of recent Hollywood storytelling, allowing ample room for the actors to work, rather than reducing them, Bourne-like, to a single expression for the duration of the movie.

Shoot 'Em Up

2007, US, directed by Michael Davis

With just under 90 minutes of frenetic over-the-top gunplay and stunt work, Shoot 'Em Up would like to think itself a throwback to the glory days of Hong Kong action films, right down to the hero carrying a baby as he blasts everything in sight. Although some of the set pieces are carried off with chutzpah, particularly the opening sequence when an apparently unremarkable bystander - Clive Owen - turns out to be a master with a weapon, the filmmakers unaccountably graft on a plot about, of all things, gun control. Director Michael Davis no doubt finds this extremely witty, along with his very literal mother/whore (Monica Bellucci) and a running joke wherein the ultra-violent villain (a remarkably poor shot when the plot requires) gets nagging phone calls from his wife. Like the high-octane Hong Kong movies on which it models itself, the film exists in a world completely divorced from the one we inhabit, with shootouts prompting not even passing police interest. It renders the average James Bond adventure surprisingly credible, and a lot less bloody.

River of No Return

1954, US, directed by Otto Preminger

Marilyn Monroe makes a rare appearance in a western here, directed by Otto Preminger making his only outing in the genre; old hand Robert Mitchum is there to keep things on track (a good thing, since Monroe's unusual diction sometimes seems to belong to a different film). In plot terms, it's a fairly conventional tale, with Mitchum trying to escape a troubled - though not dishonorable - past in the Canadian Rockies, along with his young son, but getting himself dragged into someone else's tale of greed.

While the film succeeds admirably as entertainment - Mitchum's performance is particularly good - I can't help thinking that the auteurist case for the film has been perhaps a touch overstated. The narrative arc that conveys bitterly-won knowledge from father to son seems a typical Hollywood contrivance, while many of the individual incidents, are standard western fare (which is not to say that they aren't enjoyable, nor that they aren't stitched together with care).

By contrast, the director is more obviously present in the insistently mobile camerawork. The early scenes, in a gold miners' camp, are especially strong, and a sequence when the camera roams through the makeshift bar where Monroe performs is exquisitely choreographed. For all his tilting at moral convention elsewhere, though, the sexual politics here seem decidedly old school, particularly in the sequence where Mitchum first imposes himself on Monroe.

[Update: Via girish, I read Dan Sallitt's post on Henry Hathaway, and it seems to me that he's suggesting some of the same issues with auteurist evaluation of a filmmaker. It reinforces my sense that River of No Return may be a decent illustration of some aspects of Preminger's visual style without necessarily being a great primer on some of his thematic interests. I read somewhere that he made the film under contractual obligation, and wasn't that interested in the project, but I need to find a solid source for that speculation.]

Once

2007, Ireland, directed by John Carney
A small but infectiously enjoyable film about a serendipitous artistic encounter, Once is also a quietly pointed commentary on Ireland in the age of the Celtic Tiger. The slight story revolves around the meeting between a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard, lead singer of the Dublin band The Frames, and sometime Commitment) and a young Czech immigrant (Markéta Irglová) who proves to be a talented musician. It's a pretty familiar tale of growing attachment and dreams of the big time, but director John Carney keeps the film consistently anchored in reality, creating a deft, humorous portrait of life on the fringes, that results in a thoroughly satisfying payoff.

The film adeptly captures the air of Dublin circa 2006, a city with a burgeoning immigrant population (most notably, in recent years, people from Eastern Europe), and a newfound wealth. Carney, a former member of The Frames himself, isn't taken in by tales of gold in the streets, however: even within the world of the film, dreams of musical success lie not in Dublin but in London, tempering the images of economic boom. The director is also insistently accurate in his account of Dublin geography: the characters accurately navigate the city's streets while walking from one location to another, as if to reinforce the idea that the film is grounded in a particular place and time.

Given how natural they seem onscreen, it's tempting, too, to conclude that Hansard and Irglová are playing thinly-veiled versions of themselves, though they can't conceal their musical talents. Carney allows their work free rein, playing several songs in their entirety (the film's main weakness is perhaps the overuse of musical montage, even allowing for the fact that it's more a musical than a drama). For the most part, he films the action in stripped-down style, using a handheld camera and sometimes minimal lighting (a sequence where a group of musicians eat, drink, and play together one evening has a wonderful shadowy warmth). He does nonetheless allow himself the occasional directorial flourish, particularly near the end, but also early on in a beautiful slow handheld shot that advances on Hansard as he busks on Grafton Street after dark, moving in on the singer's face as he reaches his song's climax.