Disturbia

2007, US, directed by D.J. Caruso


Worth a look primarily for its first hour, a generally solid updating/relocation of Hitchcock's Rear Window: the filmmakers re-imagine confinement for the modern teen, as well as voyeurism in a California neighbourhood as opposed to a New York apartment building. That said, the constant shots of binoculars and cameras eventually become a little heavy-handed: we get it, they're spying on the neighbours. If anything, the film is a touch too specific in time and place; you can't help but think some of the references to popular websites will be terribly outdated within five years, never mind 55, but then perhaps no-one sees a long life for this kind of thing. It's a shame, too, that after setting the location up with considerable care, the filmmakers fall back on a very conventional, and completely over the top, dénouement, as if they don't trust themselves to carry off something a touch more subtle.

Poil de carotte

1932, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

It's not hard to imagine that life for many children in the early 1930s was a less than pleasant experience, with terrible poverty taking its toll, as documented in films like La Maternelle (or Wild Boys of the Road, which I haven't yet seen). There's something more going on here, however, with Duvivier exploring a profound disconnect between adults and children, and the terrible suffering that children endure as a consequence. The director previously filmed the same story in 1925, but clearly felt that the material had more to offer.

While the eponymous Poil de Carotte (Robert Lynen) initially embraces his return to the country after the school year, and runs free through the fields, there's a terrible hole in his life the moment he returns home: his siblings are actively conspiring against him, and his parents, whose marriage is a sham, alternatively abuse and utterly ignore him, with the latter fate especially bitter. Duvivier illustrates the physical distance between Poil de Carotte and those whose acknowledgment he craves, but focuses to an even greater degree on his protagonist's psychology. He dramatizes his inner life through clever use of double and triple exposure, showing conversations between Poil de Carotte's "good" and "bad" sides as the boy lies asleep, and conveying his growing sense of helplessness.

Although some adults sense the boy's troubles, and even endeavour to convey this to the parents - breaking class taboos in the process - they're apparently helpless to effect much change, and there's a distressing sense of inevitability, together with an almost brutal honesty about what a desperate child might consider (an echo again of La Maternelle). Those climatic scenes are almost unbearably tense, and Duvivier also introduces dramatic close-ups to underline the enormity of what may occur. As nuanced as the psychological portrait is, however, the scenes of family life seem less subtle: while Harry Baur is simply a gruff, uncommunicative father, Poil de Carotte's mother (Catherine Fonteney) is a harridan, taking out the failures of her own life on her youngest child, and lacking any sympathy even though her own story has many elements of tragedy. That said, there's something bracing in Duvivier's refusal to contemplate even mild sentimentality in the domestic portrait, with the household dissected without pity.

Un Secret

2007, France, directed by Claude Miller


There's something immensely pleasurable in coming across a well-made film, where the parts are carefully slotted together and there's a payoff for investing time and energy in the narrative. I suppose it's the old-fashioned idea of "craftsmanship," something that you find in, say, the works of Peter Weir. It's not all that cool, but it's also a remarkably difficult thing to do given all of the imponderables and unpredictabilities of a film shoot. Claude Miller's films are always characterised by this kind of artisanal care, even when they don't always quite succeed as involving stories. His L'Accompagnatrice, with a similar period setting, never came alive for me, and I've read various critiques that find this film to be similarly lifeless: I wonder if that's the point where taste begins to interact with technique, for I found Miller's film to be entirely compelling even when I had occasional questions about the directions in which the narrative was pointing me.

The film plays with time, interweaving episodes from the war years with events from the 1950s and, more briefly, a single day in the 1980s where many aspects of the story finally come together, although we receive much of our information out of order, so that we're constantly - and quite deliberately - questioning whether we've yet encountered the eponymous secret. There's a careful distinction of each period in visual terms, too, although the bright 1950s scenes are not quite what they first seem, and that shimmering veneer is slowly undermined as the film proceeds.

Although there's a story to be told, and a secret to be revealed, Miller is ultimately more interested in issues of identity. Underneath the polished sets and solid acting, there's something surprisingly bold going on, as the film tries to make the point that Jewish experiences of and in the war years were by no means monolithic; one of the main characters (played by Patrick Bruel, still best-known as a singer in France) chafes constantly both against authority (French, German, familial) and what he sees as the confines of his own upbringing. Part of the challenge for the character is reconciling his own instincts with a Jewish identity that is being forced on him by outsiders rather than because it has any importance for him, and yet inevitably his life experiences confront him with difficult questions about his own sense of self. It's one of those films you can imagine dissecting over a beer afterwards, since it tends to pose more questions that it's fully capable of answering.

Scarfies

1999, New Zealand, directed by Robert Sarkies (US Title: Crime 101)


It's hard to avoid comparing Scarfies with Danny Boyle's début feature Shallow Grave: a motley collection of flatmates, an atmospheric location, an unexpected windfall, an occasionally unsettling blend of violence and comedy, and plenty of visual style. The key difference, however, is that while Shallow Grave featured a very dead benefactor, here the source of the windfall is very much alive, presenting the flatmates with a major dilemma: he's a nasty bit of work, but they have, nonetheless, taken away his income.

As the film progresses, it becomes something of Stanford Prison Experiment in miniature, with the house's inhabitants testing their boundaries as they decide what to do with their prisoner, and their loyalties begin to disintegrate as they begin to contemplate more outlandish solutions; the fun is rapidly leached away once they realize the consequences of their actions. The major weakness here, however, is the fact that the roommates haven't all been sketched in with the same degree of detail: the concerns expressed by Emma (Willa O'Neill) and Scott (Neill Rea) are well-grounded in character, whereas the other roommates are fairly one-note caricatures.

The decrepit old house where the film is set provides plenty of room for visual invention, and Sarkies moves his camera around corners and through floors in clever ways, although it's not always that easy to understand the geography of the place. As much as the film recalls Shallow Grave in its plotline, it's not hard to see the more local influence of Peter Jackson; the hidden horrors and visual trickery aren't a million miles from Jackson's Braindead, although Scarfies is a much more coherent bit of work.

La Rupture

1969, France, directed by Claude Chabrol

The startling opening scene of La Rupture recalls the first few minutes of Hitchcock's Young and Innocent, with both films beginning with sequences of frightening marital strife that apparently conclude in violence. There's no time to settle in to either film, and it's a jarring strategy that ensures we're off balance for the remainder of either film. That La Rupture begins with what seems like an homage to another film is appropriate, too, for Chabrol weaves similar quotations into the remainder of the film - most obviously with the inclusion of a tram scene that references Murnau's Sunrise.

The Hitchcock comparison seems especially apt, given that both films are a blend of themes and tones: Young and Innocent is by turns lightly humorous, tense, and brutal where La Rupture veers from the mundane to the outlandish and drug-addled (with a bizarre film-within-a-film just to top things off). Chabrol's protagonist, played by Stéphane Audran, is a generally credible working mother who finds herself in a strange boarding house filled with comic types (the card-playing old women, the ham actor, the drunken buffoon landlord), and there's a constant sense of being off-balance for we never know quite how a scene will play out: the climactic act of violence comes complete with pop-up comic effects, whereas the matter of a child custody case has more conventional legal discussions and parental jockeying.

Chabrol extends that sense of the unexpected with his filming style, and particularly his editing choices: one shot cuts abruptly to the next, making us wonder how much time has passed or where we are. It's very difficult to make out the geography of the boarding house as a consequence, although the quick cuts do add a great sense of urgency to the film, and particularly help to foster tension when we're never quite sure when a character might reappear to upend carefully laid plans.

(The picture above was taken from Ed Howard's blog; I watched the film on VHS and was unable to get any decent frame grabs).

Strangers on a Train

1951, US, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

I watched this in preparation for David Cairns's Film Club, which he cannily amalgamated with his weekly Hitchcock update on this occasion - he's been watching all of Hitchcock's surviving features week-by-week - so this is as much a reaction to that event as to the film itself. David's done such a fine job of detailing the film's many startling moments - the shot that sticks out for me is the wonderful image where Bruno stands on the steps of the Capitol as Guy, by now thoroughly rattled, drives by in a taxi - and strong performances that I'll focus on just a few ideas.

I first saw the film fifteen years ago, and the main thing that remained with me was the frantic carnival finale, still impressively sweaty here. Watching the film again, though, I was struck by some of the correspondences with Dial M For Murder, particularly the long conversations that open - or nearly open - both films and which introduce the murders which then set the wheels in motion. That the conversation in Strangers on a Train takes place on the rails seems crucial: once Bruno (Robert Walker) gets going with his latest "theory" of perfect murder, he can't be diverted, even when Guy (Farley Granger) shows little apparent interest in the scheme. From the first moment the idea is introduced, there's a sense that Bruno's hurtling along an inevitable path, just as the feet that cross the station in the film's opening minutes seem fated to encounter one another.

There are, of course, more superficial overlaps, too: like Tony Wendice in Dial M For Murder, Guy is a tennis player, and post-playing careers are crucial for the two men, and in both cases a particular woman may complicate those off-court plans. Indeed, sport is seen as a way to forge a path into a different social class: Guy can leave behind the small-town sordidness of his soured marriage for a glittering political career in Washington.

There's also something of a precursor to Hitchcock's use of space in Dial M For Murder, through the use of a map that is supposed to assist Guy in carrying out what Bruno sees as Guy's part of their murderous "bargain." Hitchcock focuses on the document twice, the second time using it to trace a careful path through Bruno's house so that when Guy must find his way in the dark we know exactly where he is at all times. There's no map in the later story, but we're always absolutely certain where the characters are, so carefully does Hitchcock define the geography of his set.

State of Play

2009, US, directed by Kevin Macdonald

I've not seen the 2003 BBC drama series on which Kevin Macdonald's film is based so I don't know if it portrays the media in more locally-specific ways, but with the exception of a few tech-friendly upgrades, this American remake could be drawn from the Watergate-era glory days of investigative journalism. While the narrative makes much of the transformations American newspapers are currently experiencing - the grizzled hack is contemptuous of the young hire on blogging duty - in the end, it's old-school journalism that gets the scoop.

Perhaps because the filmmakers are squeezing a mini-series into a shorter running time, the action seems very compressed at times, with barely a moment to try to absorb the shenanigans. In a way, though, that's not a bad reflection of the modern cable-news cycle: every event is immediately transformed into a media happening, with pundits on every channel and a reporting frenzy of satellite dishes, laptops, and jangling phones. The only disconnect is that the central journalist, Cal McCaffrey - Russell Crowe, who is much better employed here than in Body of Lies - looks like he's still working with a pencil and a Rolodex. If only that were enough to save the newspapers...

Bienvenue chez les ch'tis

2008, France, directed Dany Boon

France's most successful domestically-produced release (at least since the advent of reliable records in the mid-1950s), Bienvenue chez les ch'tis is a very enjoyable comedy liable to prove a bit of a head-scratcher to much of the overseas audience - not so much because it's not entertaining but rather because it's hard to understand exactly what enabled it to wash away all before it (save for the unsinkable Titanic, the country's "all-time" number one film).

The film's plot is pretty simple: a postal employee is transferred, for complex reasons, from his home region in the south of France to the dreaded Nord - not just the northern half of the country, but the area nestled right up near the Belgian border, painted in such grim tones in everything from Zola's Germinal to Bruno Dumont first two films, La Vie de Jésus and L'Humanité. Indeed, I couldn't help thinking that Boon's film was conceived as a conscious antidote to the latter pair of films, both of which I found relentlessly grim; like Dumont, Boon is a native of the area, with more of a rehabilitative cast of mind.

The film is resolutely of the provinces: about the only thing more dreadful than being sent to the Nord is the idea of a transfer to Paris, and our fish-out-of-water first proves he's settling in when he gets a laugh at the expense of a Parisian transplant to the area. That, indeed, may be one reason for the movie's appeal: in many ways it looks back to a more gentle France, of small-town welcomes, where even La Poste is seen more as an extension of family than as a business. The fault lines of present-day France, at least as they are expressed in newspaper headlines, are completely absent (though the lead performers, Boon himself and Kad Merad, are of mixed ethnic heritage; both have Algerian fathers and French mothers).

The film is very nicely shot by Pierre Aïm, with fluid widescreen compositions; although the plotline has a sitcom predictability, many sequences were clearly conceived with the big screen, or at least a generous widescreen, in mind (as we see in the first shot above), and Aïm does an especially nice job of contrasting the southern light with its northern counterpart. The two leads are infectiously enjoyable, too, with their early scenes together especially amusing - it's not hard to imagine having an awfully good time in a receptive movie theatre - even if the end is altogether too rushed after the exposition gets away from Boon-as-director.

Body of Lies

2008, US, directed by Ridley Scott

This is Ridley Scott's fourth film with Russell Crowe, which makes it hard to understand why he uses the actor so poorly on this occasion. It's not that Crowe isn't suited to buttoned-down roles - Michael Mann's The Insider gives the lie to that idea - but simply that he's offscreen for far too much of the film, and when we do see him his character, one Ed Hoffman, is a relentlessly simplified caricature. In almost every scene of his domestic life, Hoffman has an earpiece to carry on incessant conversation whether he's driving his children to school or wandering around his home; after the first few instances of this we get that he's an obsessive workaholic, and it's time for a degree of character development.

Of course, that addiction to technology is part of Hoffman's distance from other human beings: they are best observed under distant surveillance rather than seen up close in their messy reality, the side of the spy business that concerns, in every sense, his field agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio). It's notable that Hoffman appears deeply resentful about those occasions when he must actually travel to the locations about which he's making decisions.

For a film dealing with life and death and, however superficially, contemporary geo-politics, there's also a curious lack of excitement in the film; Ridley's brother Tony gets more thrills out of the weaponry of surveillance in both Enemy of the State and Déjà Vu. It seems to me that it's ultimately a desire to be taken seriously in artistic/political terms that separates the brothers Scott: notwithstanding the derivative, even junky aspects of both of the Tony Scott films, they seem to succeed in unveiling something more essential about the ways in which humans are transformed by observing other humans from a distance (emotional, spatial - even temporal).

Jamaica Inn

1939, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Judged as a 1930s entertainment, Jamaica Inn is perfectly serviceable: it's fleet of foot, with several memorable performances, while smugglers and their evil-doings make for inherently rip-roaring misadventures. The problem is that it's a Hitchcock movie, and by 1939 the director had already set the bar pretty high for himself. With a few exceptions, Jamaica Inn doesn't feel like a Hitchcock, particularly following directly on from his sextet of British thrillers. There are several striking shots of Maureen O'Hara - who's wonderfully energetic in her first major role - near the end of the film, and occasional bits of business that showcase Hitchcock's extraordinary ability to create against-the-clock tension (for instance in a hanging that O'Hara's character witnesses) but otherwise the film seems to conform entirely to adventure convention for long stretches.

That seems especially true in the sequences featuring Charles Laughton. While the actor is treasurably hammy, delivering his lines with genuine relish, and occasionally penetrating to an extraordinarily superior state of mind not unknown among the British aristrocracy, his performance belongs in a different film. Each time he appears on screen he unbalances the whole affair, distracting from rather than enhancing a film already over-stuffed with larger-than-life characters (most notably Leslie Banks and Emlyn Williams, the smuggler-in-chief and his sidekick).

The Squid and the Whale

2005, US, directed by Noah Baumbach

In its quiet way, The Squid and the Whale is an extraordinarily violent film, though here the violence is largely psychological and usually involves two young sons being used as weapons in an increasingly bitter separation. Given that the film is drawn at least partly from Noah Baumbach's own life, it's hard to avoid the occasional wide-eyed response as you wonder whether people really do these things to each other and their own children. But of course they do, and often far worse, though at least Baumbach is able to mine his own experiences with considerable blunt humour, relentlessly exposing his parents (or their surrogates) for the self-obsessed people they apparently were - while not sparing the younger generation.

Like Baumbach's earlier Kicking and Screaming, the film has a very loose plot, and yet there's nothing accidental about the way in which he stitches his scenes together: the tapestry of incident builds in power as he subtly but insistently demolishes the apparent honest, open approach of these two self-consciously liberal parents (very well played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney).

Kisses

2008, Ireland/Sweden, directed by Lance Daly


The Swedish presence in the production credits for Lance Daly's third film seems more than simply an acknowledgment of the film's funding, for Kisses draws very much on the traditions of a Scandinavian cinema that has dramatised stories of young people with great skill and honesty, and which has proved remarkably adept at finding talented actors to assist in telling those stories (in films like My Life as Dog, The Ice Palace and Zappa, from Sweden, Norway and Denmark respectively).

Kisses focuses on twenty-four hours in the lives of two children from an impoverished Dublin suburb, who run off to the centre of Dublin following an unexpected windfall. As frightening as the prospect of the city might be in other respects, it's also a refuge from their terrible day-to-day routine, although Daly's depiction of their home lives does lack much in the way of nuance (residents of Dublin's less heralded areas might feel justifiably aggrieved that they're all depicted as feckless and abusive ne'er-do-wells). The film underlines the sense of the city as a sanctuary through a slow shift from black and white to colour as they get closer to town. It's not an entirely original device, but the very gradual introduction of colour - mirrored partly in the choice of transportation - works more effectively than a sudden switch.

The plot is occasionally a little over-stuffed - the pair has a very busy night indeed, packed with random encounters - but the film has a real feel for Dublin's streets: Daly generally insists on geographical plausibility, and he picks up on the kinds of conversational snippets familiar to any resident of the city. The performances of the two young actors are critical to that: both non-professionals, their backgrounds aren't all that dissimilar from those of their characters, and they're extremely lively, committed performers (by all accounts they were a handful on set; their DVD commentary is well worth listening to, and at times it's almost an extension of the film, particularly in the tart language employed).

Although there are moments that briefly suggest alternative lives - a lovely sequence where the two half skate through the Jervis Street shopping centre, their home lives clearly forgotten - Daly avoids easy outcomes, being blunt about the realities from which this occasionally magical twenty-four hours is plucked. Nonetheless, he's always aware of the ways in which his characters differ from the adults around them; if there's something resigned in the youthful expressions at the end of the film, there's also a deeper complicity between the pair, suggesting that they are better armed to deal with the complex, sometimes unpleasant world around them.

Seven Pounds

2008, US, directed by Gabriele Muccino

Seven Pounds owes some debt to the Lost school of dramatic structure, slowly dispensing information, often in deliberately misleading fashion, to form a portrait of a highly unusual person. That's not, of course, a criticism: the first season of Lost, with its fine character portraits, remains for me the strongest aspect of the show to date, and while the producers have killed off various characters it seems to me no accident that they've largely stuck with the group we first identified with. However, the framework of a single episode - or feature film - means we're constantly waiting for the big reveal, since the filmmakers can't extend that out to a future segment.

Although I confess that I might have emitted a gasp when it all finally clicked into place in Seven Pounds, somehow the trick overwhelmed the material, unlike in the previous collaboration between Smith and director Muccino, The Pursuit of Happyness, which, for all of its occasional sentimentality in telling the central story of father-son redemption, was grounded in a very real setting, whereas here we're in wealthy anywheresville, and we've lost that connection to a vivid sense of place and daily reality. It's a pity, because Will Smith is, again, very good, the more so when he's pushing further against the bounds of his Mr. Nice Guy persona.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt

1982, New Zealand, directed by John Laing

A docudrama that recounts one of New Zealand's most famous murder cases - and more to the point one of the country's most notorious legal proceedings, the trials and pardon of Arthur Allan Thomas - Beyond Reasonable Doubt is also a key early film in the development of the New Zealand film industry, whose modern incarnation began around 1977 with début features from Roger Donaldson (Sleeping Dogs) and Geoff Murphy (Wild Man). Prior to that date, feature production was intermittent in the extreme (I'd love, though, to see the 1964 Runaway, featuring a very young Kiri Te Kanawa), which meant that there wasn't much of a local talent pool. When production began on this film, director John Laing was enticed back home from Canada, having spent time both there and in the UK honing his craft; it's nice to see that he was subsequently able to carve out a career at home in New Zealand, moving between TV and movies.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt was Laing's first feature assignment, and it's generally a very confident bit of work. The story is presented as a procedural, and yet one with an unresolved mystery at its heart, since the murderer of Harvey and Jeanette Crewe has never been identified. In that respect, at least, the film has something in common with David Fincher's Zodiac. Neither film attempts to provide the audience with a truly satisfying resolution, although Beyond Reasonable Doubt does jettison the question mark which appeared in the title of David Yallop's book, which he adapted for the screen, perhaps because by that point real-life events had vindicated Yallop's thesis that Arthur Allan Thomas was not the murderer, despite being convicted on two separate occasions (in one of those odd coincidences, a man by the name of Arthur Leigh Allen was a suspect in the Zodiac killings).

Although the film presents events in generally straightforward fashion, Laing creates a mood of deep mistrust in the farming communy where the murder took place. The area seems riven with rivalries and slightly off-colour characters, where strange behaviour is quickly given a sinister spin. The Lower Waikato landscapes are shot in flat and uninviting terms (the photography is by Alun Bollinger), a radical contrast to the use of landscape in Sleeping Dogs and in so many subsequent New Zealand films. The Price of Milk, for instance, which takes place in similar farming country, uses the landscape as a jumping-off point for magical happenings.

The state of the New Zealand film industry in 1980 was especially apparent in front of the camera, with three of the key roles allocated to imported actors: Englishman David Hemmings, who does a very fine job as the over-zealous Inspector Bruce Hutton, walking right into the abyss marked miscarriage of justice, along with Australians Tony Barry, as Hutton's right-hand man, and John Hargreaves as Arthur Allan Thomas. Still, there are appearances from soon-to-be-more-familiar local faces like Martyn Sanderson, Marshall Napier and, especially, Bruno Lawrence, the oddball and much-missed star of films like The Quiet Earth and Smash Palace.

One scene in particular caught my interest for the way in which it contrasts with a similar sequence in There Will Be Blood - a scene analysed, as I've already written, in a fascinating blog post by David Bordwell. Both scenes involve a group of men standing in front of a map: in There Will Be Blood the men are looking at an area that holds the promise of oil wealth, while in Beyond Reasonable Doubt they are examining the distances between different farms as they try to establish whether various individuals might have been capable of committing the Crewe murders. Paul Thomas Anderson holds a shot of his actors, carefully positioned, with the map spread out in the foreground. Laing establishes his scene in near-identical terms, the police carefully assembled around the map (below). However, he chooses to insert several quick shots seen from the perspective of the lead detective, whose hand surveys the map, before returning to that same larger view. At first, the inserts seem to punctuate an increasingly tense scene - which begins with the police moving purposefully toward the map as ideas start to crystallise - but the key difference is the fact that Laing is dealing with an actual setting and a true-crime event, and feels the need to establish the literal placement of the farms so that the audience is fully informed of the facts. That desire to provide accurate information - something that the police signally failed to do at Arthur Allan Thomas's trials - is fundamental to the entire purpose of the film, which later uses voiceover to add details of evidence that the police (or at least some of the police) either concealed or misused.

Ian Conrich makes a somewhat apologetic case for Laing's standing as an auteur in New Zealand Filmmakers, a 2007 collection he co-edited with Stuart Murray - with whom I once took a class on the other side of the Atlantic - and I can't help thinking that even Conrich isn't entirely convinced; that Laing might not be an auteur is no knock against this compelling film. The Conrich/Murray book is, however, essential reading for anyone with an interest in New Zealand film.

Tokyo Chorus

1931, Japan, directed by Yasujiro Ozu

I assume that the prominence of Tokyo Story, which seems to get far more repeat exposure than other Ozu films, explains why the director is so persistently associated with an entirely melancholy view of life; it's almost a pity that the later film casts such a long shadow given that Ozu is equally adept in comic mode (or, as here, in melding both comic and dramatic treatment); ultimately, his nuanced, humane view of the world shines through irrespective of the means of expression.

Even where Tokyo Chorus compiles wonderfully extended gags about, say, salarymen receiving their wage packets or the adventures of troublesome children, Ozu never loses sight of the social reality of his films. Thus, while the film's lead actor exchanges slapstick blows with his overbearing boss, another employee deals with a shoe that's falling apart (which punctures the boss's alleged generosity while also underlining how precarious things were in the early 1930s). Ozu has an exceptional eye for the minor details of life - the street dwellers who make use of the remains of a cigarette butt, a former teacher who suddenly realizes he can't fund dinner for all of his students, or an elderly, suddenly unemployed, salaryman with healthcare concerns that are strikingly contemporary: one of the most worrisome aspects of job loss in the US is the simultaneous disruption in health insurance, if you ever had it to begin with.

Although those poignant moments linger long in the memory, they are balanced with Ozu's wonderfully light work with his child actors; the interactions between brother and sister - a punch here, an argument there - are entirely natural, while there's an undercurrent of comment on family ties and obligations that takes fuller flight as Ozu's career developed.

Note: For some reason, my usual computer program/screen capture software didn't work with the Criterion/Eclipse DVD; the images above came from DVD Beaver and Criterion. I also made use of David Bordwell's detailed account of the film in his Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, originally published in 1988, and now available online. Update July 2010: Craig Keller has put up a very interesting, personal take on the film, complete with numerous screen captures.

Away We Go

2009, US, directed by Sam Mendes

Away We Go often feels like two different movies roughly shoehorned together, the one a string of (often amusing) caricatures, the other a surprisingly nuanced portrait of a young couple facing parenthood. While the juxtaposition works on occasion, at times there's a little too much of a gulf between the main characters, played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, and many of the people they encounter on a peripatetic odyssey across North America (if journeys involving air travel can be termed peripatetic). The central couple are, for all that they worry about being "fuck-ups," two pretty normal people who hold down apparently decent jobs and wonder, not unreasonably, whether they'll do right by their unborn child. But the outlandish, and even clichéd, characters they meet up with only serve to underline their own pretty solid foundations.

To Mendes's credit, he doesn't insist on introducing each location with a series of routine establishing shots; that choice emphasizes that the characters are in search of a sense of place and community rather than just attractive monuments. There's a little more looseness, too, to his filming style on this occasion; as much as a shot that straps a camera to a car in Montreal is a little showy, there's something exhilarating about the moment, too, as if the city has treasures in store for us.

Young and Innocent

1937, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock


Young and Innocent is surely the least known of the sextet of brisk thrillers that Hitchcock reeled off from 1934 to 1938, perhaps partly because it is saddled with a title that possesses neither the intrigue of something like The Man Who Knew Too Much nor the punch of a Sabotage. At least it's a bit more catchy than A Shilling for Candles, the Josep hine Tey novel from which the film is drawn. Tey's fine work seems remarkably under-appreciated by filmmakers, incidentally, with only The Franchise Affair prompting frequent attention.

The film opens on a scene of almost brutal marital strife, with a couple arguing bitterly as their union very obviously disintegrates; the scene is so fraught that I expected the camera to cut away and reveal that we were watching a stage play or a film set, since there's nothing quite as scalding in any of the other Hitchcocks from this period. After the scene's dramatic finale on a storm-tossed cliff we cut almost immediately to a much more light-hearted treatment (leaving aside the discovery of a body), with a young man (Derrick De Marney) so incredulous about his arrest that he simply doesn't take the whole affair seriously.

The central sequences recount the young chap's adventures on the lam as he and the local police chief's daughter (Nova Pilbeam, the kidnapped daughter from The Man Who Knew Too Much) try to establish his innocence, and the increasingly enamoured pair roam across the countryside and into the city in search of a vital clue. There's a phenomenal crane shot near the end that arcs across a hotel room to focus unsparingly on the killer, paired with an almost equally audacious shot out from the now unmasked killer back to the bustle of the hotel. What's key to both shots is the way in which they contribute to the momentum of the film rather than being mere directorial flourishes - the first sequence is desperately tense, ending up almost in the actor's eyes despite starting its journey far across the room. Earlier, Hitchcock derives similar tension from a shot of De Marney as he walks into a dorm in a men's hostel, the camera dollying back in front of him and then moving from left to right as he scans the beds in search of his man. As technically dazzling as the work is, it's again fully justified by the needs of the film, with Hitchcock adeptly moving from the drama of the mystery plot to the comic relief of the police chief's dinner table.

Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake

1942, US, directed by John Cromwell


A very brisk adventure in the ripping yarns mode, Son of Fury packs an extraordinary amount into its 98 minutes, during which the eponymous Benjamin Blake (Tyrone Power) becomes a bonded servant, deals with tangled parenthood and inheritance issues, goes into exile, frolics on a tropical island, and goes on trial to clear his name. There's plenty of vigorous action, too, with several exciting fist-fights marred only by the very obvious use of stunt doubles in ill-fitting wigs.

The film has a sterling cast to spin the tale: Power is more than capable of holding the attention whilst he's on screen, and gets formidable support from George Sanders (the consummate villain, who utters every line with wonderfully ripe disdain), Gene Tierney as an island beauty, and Frances Farmer - and on to the likes of John Carradine, Elsa Lanchester, Dudley Digges, and Halliwell Hobbes in supporting roles. Lanchester's brief scenes, as a Bristol prostitute, are especially memorable.

While the sequences in England that bookend the film are generally very successful, with the aristocracy coming in for their usual pasting, the island segment is less memorable in large measure because it's so rushed: no sooner has Blake arrived on the island than the needs of the plot have him looking to leave again, even though the film does attempt to account for the passage of several seasons. Director John Cromwell also seems more at home in the atmospherically-shot nooks and crannies of (studio) Bristol streets and country houses than in the sunny climes of the South Pacific.

Note: This film is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. Son of Fury was exhibited in Kisumu, a city in western Kenya, in 1944.

The film attracted the particular ire of the District Commissioner (DC), the local British colonial representative. In a letter to the Chairman of the Board of Censors, who was gathering opinions regarding the possible liberalization of Kenya Colony's film censorship regime, the DC wrote: 'I am personally of the opinion that the vast majority of films have nothing but a harmful effect and I addressed the Municipal Board on the subject of scenes depicting depravity, brutality and violence in "Son of Fury"' (November 8, 1945). This appears to be a reference in particular to a sequence of whipping. The Chairman of the Board of Censors responded rather tartly, noting was the film was passed and exhibited widely throughout the United States and United Kingdom.

At the time, censorship in Kenya included a racial element: films could be placed off-limits to black African audiences, although in practice this appears to have been a rare occurrence. However, as soldiers returned from wartime postings where they could watch whatever films they liked, the administration was concerned that racially-based censorship could be inflammatory, and sought opinions, mostly from white Kenyans, before proceeding to a revision of the rules. By 1947, race-based censorship had been abandoned, but the censor more frequently banned films outright, for audiences of all races -- particularly after the beginning of the Mau Mau insurgency in 1952.

Prendre femme

2004, Israel/France, directed by Shlomi Elkabetz and Ronit Elkabetz

Set in 1979, Shlomi and Ronit Elkabetz's debut film is inspired by their own difficult childhood, during which their parents were constantly at war; the film is set at a time of growing rapprochement between Egypt and Israel, but that period detail only serves to remind the viewer that other conflicts continued to simmer. Apart from the very brief indication of the date, there's almost no reference to the outside world, however, with much of the film taking place in a small apartment where an elderly mother and four children are witnesses to a troubled marriage.

Although there's no doubt that there are other problems in this relationship, the couple's deepest fault line is between religious tradition and secular interests: husband Eliahou (Simon Abkarian) structures his life around weekly services and other obligations, while his wife Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) chafes against what she perceives as old-fashioned restrictions. As with other Israeli films I've seen, Prendre femme portrays life as an inherently communal experience, with close-knit extended family groups feeling empowered to intervene in personal disputes. This is most strongly emphasized in the exceptional opening scenes, during which Viviane's brothers try to persuade her to take Eliahou back. There's nothing culturally unique about this, of course - there's a striking photo in Elliott Skinner's 1974 book African Urban Life: The Transformation of Ouagadougou which depicts an almost identical situation - but Israeli filmmakers seem to dramatize this experience with some regularity.

What makes Viviane compelling as a character is the fact that she's not depicted as a domestic martyr: while her husband often seems inflexible and certainly doesn't help to defuse certain situations, she's prone to dramatics (giving Ronit Elkabetz ample room to display her formidable acting talents; during these scenes, Viviane's reality seems absolutely convincing), and quick to use her children as a gambit in the back-and-forth with her husband. That, indeed, is one of the film's strongest cards: the faces of the children as they see their parents shred each time after time (the film is set over just three days but you sense that this is an all-too-familiar routine).

Sabotage

1936, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock


After the somewhat more expansive The Thirty-Nine Steps and Secret Agent, Hitchcock reverts to the very brisk pacing of The Man Who Knew Too Much here, with not an ounce of fat in the 76 minute running time. The opening scenes are an especially clever montage of sabotage attacks and their aftermath, effectively capturing the mood of London's simultaneous paranoia and stoicism - characteristics that would be raised to the level of national mythology after 1940 but which are already present here.

As in his other 1930s British thrillers, Hitchcock blends comedy and action, with a love story thrown in to the mix too as a Scotland Yard agent attempts to gather intelligence on a network of (unidentified) foreign terrorists, but he over-reaches here in swinging abruptly from tragedy to romance; the horror of the film's central act of violence is credible and dreadfully tense, but the aftermath doesn't hold together as well.

Hitchcock films this sabotage sequence, involving the delivery of a bomb, with a series of cross-cutting shots between the passengers on a bus, close-ups of what we know to be the bomb, clock-faces as we approach zero hour, traffic lights going from green to red; even though I was familiar with the film, the suspense by the climax of the sequence was almost literally unbearable, and it's one of the darkest moments from this period of Hitchcock's career.

Although very much a studio film with occasional inserts of the "real" London, it's a fascinating glimpse into the English mindset of the mid-1930s, with the spectre of war already very much on the horizon: between Hitchcock's films and their literary inspiration (Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham), London must have been a very nervy place to live - especially for those from Germany and beyond, who can't have found the place all that welcoming, however innocent their motives.

Hidalgo

2004, US, directed by Joe Johnston

Joe Johnston has carved out what seems a self-consciously old-fashioned niche, making family-friendly films long on entertainment value if not necessarily on profound insight. Ostensibly based on a true story, Hidalgo might have made its real-life inspiration, the fabulist Frank Hopkins, proud, for it tells a rip-roaring tale of exotic adventure - with plenty of the clichés of Hollywood intact, such as the demise of a trusted "native" - without lingering too long on the details that might make the seams show too clearly. This was Viggo Mortensen's first role after the Lord of the Rings films, and while he's moved on to far stronger starring material since, he's well able to hold the screen even with a pretty silly script that denies this rough-and-tumble horseman all but the most chaste of romances.

The Hangover

2009, US, directed by Todd Phillips
The weather in Boston was irredeemably awful for the month of June, and when July started on the same note it seemed like the only thing to do was take refuge in a crowded pre-Fourth of July movie theatre. The Hangover was, ironically, the appropriate cure for wet-weather blues, with the audience proving highly receptive to what was one of the most consistently funny films I've seen in a long while. At times, you almost wish that the filmmakers didn't feel the need to explain some of the more bizarre aspects of the aftermath of what appears to have been a truly epic drinking bout - they do leave a few details to the imagination, such as the role played by a chicken - and one or two of the crudest moments seemed to leave the audience cold, but the script is well-served by the three lead actors, with the shambolic Zach Galifianakis - not generally to my taste, particularly in his repetitive "Between Two Ferns" web series - especially well cast.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

1934, UK, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

The first of the half-dozen breezy thrillers that Hitchcock made in the 1930s, the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much clocks in at just over 70 minutes. Hitchcock found an extra 50 minutes of material for his 1956 remake, a very different kind of film, as much a study of a family under pressure as it is a thriller, but the snappy pacing and memorably ghoulish touches are more to my taste than the expansive 1950s take on the material.

Hitchcock wastes no time plunging us into the action, with the film's precipitating crime - a shooting death in Switzerland - taking place just a couple of minutes' in, before we've really learned much about protagonists Bob and Jill Lawrence, who manage to become embroiled in international intrigue without knowing why. Before we know it, we're back in London on the trail of the criminals, who've kidnapped the Lawrences' daughter, and it's here that the film really comes alive, as the pursuit takes us to the studio streets of Wapping.

While the film is best remembered for the scenes in the Albert Hall, it's the earlier sequences, in a bizarre revival hall and a creepy dentist's office, that give the film a darker twist; while both sequences have comic touches, they both ultimately descend into often brutal violence. The film's latter sequences, centered on a lengthy shootout with the police (which did not make it into the remake) could have been lifted from a Warner Brothers gangster picture of the period, except that the key shot is fired here by a woman (Edna Best), helping prove that crime certainly doesn't pay.

The film was Peter Lorre's first English-language role; he didn't spend long in England, appearing the following year in Karl Freund's wonderful Mad Love for MGM, before shuttling back for Hitchcock's Secret Agent. Hitchcock seems to have felt the need to up the ante on Lorre's already unusual appearance by giving him a skunk-like hair stripe, though no-one dares to mention this unusual feature to the sinister mastermind.

I was amused to note that David Cairns and I picked the same shot when choosing screen captures to illustrate the film; his shadowplay write-up is highly recommended. The shot in question, with half-a-dozen fingers pointing at a bullet hole, has a mate in Hitchcock's 1936 Sabotage.