The Walking Hills: John Sturges

If there is one thing to be learned from John Sturges’ The Walking Hills, it’s that filmmakers—and by extension all storytellers—must be judicious with their use of flashbacks. The set-up is simple: a loss confederation of ne’er-do-wells and cowboys set out into the desert to find a wagon of buried gold. As the environment becomes more and more inhospitable tempers flare, emotions explode, and egos surrender to ids. It brings to mind similar desert-mission movies where the protagonists are placed under extreme psychological duress: John Ford’s The Lost Patrol (1934), Zoltán Korda’s Sahara (1943), John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). But here’s where The Walking Hills plummets from being a decent film to merely sub-par: about halfway through the film there is an obtrusive flashback concerning a love triangle between three characters. Instead of communicating the flashback via dialogue thereby maintaining the claustrophobic atmosphere of the desert, the film cuts to stock footage of the characters back in civilization. I can’t properly express how jarring this is. It shatters the illusion of watching a handful of people being literally and metaphorically sandblasted by the savage wilderness.

6/10

The Unbelievable Truth: Hal Hartley

Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth is the kind of cinema that I instinctually respond to: brash, bold, unafraid of breaking traditions, and singularly idiosyncratic. In many ways a herald of the early 90s American indie explosion, the film is more concerned with style, character, and mood than the necessities of plot. And yet Hartley seems so interested in how his characters act—their eccentricities, their psychological hang-ups, their suburban ennui—that he forgets to actually develop them. The characters are almost robots, an apropos comparison considering how wooden some of the performances are. The film doesn’t just feel decentralized, it feels disassociated and depersonalized as it hobbles from one outrageously deadpan (or deadpan-ily outrageous?) conversation and confrontation to another. The most appealing thing about The Unbelievable Truth is its sheer audacity. But Hartley’s audacity is more admirable in theory than in praxis.


5/10

Charleston Parade: Jean Renoir

Always be cautious when you dive into the early work of your favorite directors. You never know what you might find. Case in point: Jean Renoir's Charleston Parade. A 17-minute short, the film is a truly bizarre work of science-fiction (with effects heavily indebted to Georges Méliès) about an African--in reality a man in minstrel blackface--who visits a futuristic Europe where he discovers an "aboriginal" who teaches him the Charleston. The film's imagery is fascinating: a broken Eiffel Tower; heart-shaped camera irises; slow-motion footage of the "aboriginal"--in reality a white woman--grooving and dancing as if possessed. The film's racial politics are even more curious: Africans are shown to be debonair, civilized, capable of advanced flight; white people have devolved into crazed, hyper-sexualized beings who may or may not be cannibals. Apparently the film was shot in only three days. I believe it. But the cheap, one-the-fly production feels oddly suited for this particular story.

Chocolat: Lasse Hallström

Much like his later film The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014), Lasse Hallström's Chocolat is a breezy, airy, inoffensive film about people who traverse major impasses in life via devotion to food. But whereas in The Hundred-Foot Journey food is seen as a connection to cultural heritage and one's family, in Chocolat food is straight-up magic: it can spur on women to leave abusive husbands; solve "marital problems"; conquer bigots; ease family tensions; rejuvenate an entire town. Make no mistake: Chocolat is a fairy tale. But, as previously mentioned, it's a breezy, airy, inoffensive one. Roger Pratt's cinematography strikes a fine balance between being overtly stylistic (note the red outfits worn by Juliette Binoche and her daughter) and obnoxiously overstated.

7/10

Three Ages: Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline

Though the intent of Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline's Three Ages may have been to spoof D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), the film's use of repeating characters and actors throughout different historical time periods to tell a single story is purely DeMille-ian. I have read that Three Ages was designed so that, if the film flopped, its three segments--the Stone Age, Ancient Rome, the Roaring Twenties--could be edited apart and distributed as three separate shorts. I believe it. For although the film's narrative is deliberately fragmented, it never fully manages to re-arrange itself so that it becomes a cohesive, free-flowing whole. That's not to say that the film is a failure. Indeed, Keaton's stuntwork is admirable and there are many great gags (my favorite being his replacing of a "flat tire" during a bobsled race in Ancient Rome). But this definitely feels like three movies, not one.

7/10

Truth and Illusion: An Introduction to Metaphysics: King Vidor

To read this review, go to: http://theblackmaria.org/2015/05/26/b-roll-king-vidors-truth-and-illusion-an-introduction-to-metaphysics-1964/.

The Cheat: Cecil B. DeMille

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/the-film-canon-the-cheat-1915/56511.

9/10

Ten Seconds to Hell: Robert Aldrich

Where Robert Aldrich succeeds in Ten Seconds to Hell is in the realization that the psychological toll of bomb defusing is just as important as the tension caused from the actual disarming sequences. Where Aldrich fails is in his insistence on injecting a story about the existential terror of dying at any second with a blasé good vs. evil undercurrent. Here, the good is represented by Eric Koertner (Jack Palance) and the bad by Karl Wirtz (Jeff Chandler). Both men were forcibly trained as bomb disposers by Nazis after being labeled dissidents by the Third Reich. Now laboring in post-war Berlin disarming unexploded Allied bombs, they enter into a pact with other bomb disposers to pool their earnings into a pot to be claimed by the surviving members in three months. Karl reveals himself to be almost sociopathically concerned with his own survival in contrast with Eric, a benevolent man who tries to convince the remaining survivors to donate the pot to the widow of one of their fallen comrades. Their struggle is based in post-war ideology: optimist collectivism and teamwork versus pessimistic individualism and greed. A more subtle handling could have made this angle work. But Aldrich’s decision to end the film with one literally trying to murder the other almost veers the story towards melodrama.

6/10

Bird of Paradise: King Vidor

Breathlessly kinetic and shimmeringly beautiful, King Vidor’s Bird of Paradise is a veritable textbook of 1930s Hollywood cinematography, editing, and eroticism. Easily one of the most titillating pre-Hays Code films ever, it’s unapologetically, unabashedly sexual with its nighttime skinny-dipping, exotic dances, and passionate embraces. But even more memorable is its aesthetic beauty. Thinking back, the film as a whole doesn’t spring to mind so much as a procession of marvelous images: a magnificent tracking pan showing the population of an entire island running to pontoon boats to greet Western sailors; a moon-lit flying fish-hunt; a doomed island being swallowed by lava. The story—the doomed romance between a “civilized” white man and a “savage” South Pacific princess—borders on pulp with its melodramatic yearnings, larger-than-life emotions, and unexpected action scenes. Two sequences in particular where the sailor tries to paddle out of a whirlpool and then uses vines to swing over a river of lava feel transplanted from an Ernest B. Schoedsack adventure. The film’s depiction of South Pacific natives is…disheartening. I suppose we should be grateful that the producers cast Dolores del Río, a Mexican, to play the princess instead of simply “darkening up” a white actress. But the film’s racism does make several sequences difficult to sit through.

8/10

Philips-Radio: Joris Ivens

Joris Ivens' Philips-Radio is a kaleidoscope of motion, geometric patterns, minutia, and machinery. Much like Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Ivens channels a pure love of imagery and cinematic technique to create an experience that is singularly filmic. Channeling back and forth between the beleaguered human factory workers and their apparently autonomous machinery, Philips-Radio creates a universe that is simultaneously densely populated, thoroughly human and metallically sterile, bereft of thought and emotions. Ivens' use of sound leads to some curious moments such as a 4th wall-breaking gag where a factory worker replaces a record revealed to be the film's soundtrack mid-song. This suggests a kind of playfulness almost entirely absent from other, more rigorous experiments with "pure" cinema.

Child of the Big City: Yevgeni Bauer

From all of my reading, it would seem that Yevgeni Bauer is a director that I should be considerably more familiar with. Child of the Big City is his first film that I have actually seen. But I'm not sure I can fully appreciate it...yet. I feel that I need to re-familiarize myself with Russian cinema of the era so I can properly contextualize the film. I was impressed by his techniques: his use of double-exposures to highlight moments of emotional climax; un-centered camera compositions; a particularly notable camera pan that moved towards the background like a zoom lens during a party scene. I also admired how Bauer allowed the narrative to succumb to its own nihilism: the ruined, destitute male protagonist is defeated, unloved, and literally stepped over by the woman that he elevated to high society. I'll have to look further into his filmography. If Child of the Big City is any indication, I'm missing out on a considerable part of silent film history.

Verboten!: Samuel Fuller

I’ve never seen a Samuel Fuller film like Verboten! where the soundtrack essentially dialogued with the images: an overblown Hollywood love theme blares during the opening credits over scenes of urban warfare; Beethoven’s 5th booms while American soldiers hunt a Nazi sniper through the bombed out ruins of a German city; Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries nervously shimmers as Nazi terrorists destroy buildings, sabotage American supply transports, and murder GIs. The theme of “listening” is a constant in Verboten!, perhaps in large part because the film feels largely unfinished and haphazardly crammed with awkward stock footage. There are many scenes where newsreel announcers and beleaguered American soldiers intone exposition about the fall of the Third Reich and the Allied Occupation’s struggle to rebuild German society. Verboten! is notable for being Fuller’s first film set during World War Two. As always, he is more interested in the human element of warfare than the actual combat. The film is a Reconstruction drama: Sergeant David Brent (James Best) falls in love and marries a German woman named Helga Schiller (Susan Cummings), gets a job in the Military Government’s Food Office, and grapples with the twin threats of Werwolf—a Nazi group devoted to sabotaging and destroying the Allied occupiers—and the realization that his wife may have only married him because, as an American, he was a “meal ticket.” Curiously for a director so skilled at painting with human emotions, the histrionics between Best and Cummings are the film’s weakest part—other than the ubiquitous stock footage. Verboten! feels incomplete. It begs the question of whether the obtrusive stock footage and narration was a deliberate cost-cutting technique on Fuller’s part or a practical method of suturing together bits and pieces from a movie whose funding was pulled before it was finished.

6/10

Mad Max: Fury Road: George Miller

I had the pleasure of seeing George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road opening night. But I have hesitated to actually write and post my review for the film until now. The simple reason being that it has taken me this long to fully comprehend and analyze just what the hell I had watched. The simplest answer is the most tempting one: the best damn action film I have seen since John Woo’s Hard Boiled (1992). But that leaves me feeling unsatisfied. The truth is that it left me in a hazy, logy delirium: shell-shocked, stumbling, exhausted. The film is a symphony of scrooping engines; a ballet of twisting, desiccated metal; a gasoline opera; a singular cinematic event. Now, we have all seen plenty of car chases, explosions, gun battles, and other time-honored Stations of the Action Movie Cross. But the difference is that Mad Max: Fury Road seems determined to throttle its audience with images that they have never seen before. In a way, this is similar to the grandiose excess of George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977). Everybody has seen sci-fi starfighters before, but not ones literally shaped like X’s and Y’s. Everybody has seen post-apocalyptic, off-road vehicles (mostly thanks to Miller’s previous Mad Max films), but not Volkswagen Beetles affixed with giant metal hedgehog spikes. Everyone has seen imposing space villains, but not a towering figure in a black suit and samurai helmet. Everyone has seen hordes of filthy, animalistic wasteland warriors, but not an army of them led by a bugler playing a flame-throwing guitar. Quite simply, both Miller and Lucas showed their audiences worlds that had never been shown before on screen. However, the original Star Wars will always have the upper hand on Mad Max: Fury Road simply because it didn’t just introduce its audiences to one world, but to several; not just to space knights, but to space wizards, cowboys, fascists, and princesses. But Mad Max: Fury Road is astounding in its single-minded devotion to fleshing out its sole planet in all of its awe-inspiring madness and lunacy. It brings the humanity back to the action genre as well as the most face-melting practical effects since Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy. If the world is just, this film will be the first nail in the coffin of modern Hollywood CGI blockbusters which are more green-screen than real-world sheen; more machine now than man.

10/10

Fig Leaves: Howard Hawks

One of the most notable aspects of Howard Hawks’ filmography was his constant subversions of traditional gender roles. His screwball comedies frequently saw feeble, malleable men dominated by virile, overbearing women. The Hawksian woman was essentially a female coded as a male: they had masculine/androgynous names, were tough-talking, and were accepted by the other characters as “one of the guys.” Perhaps these things are why his 1926 film Fig Leaves is so lackluster. It’s a comedy that reinforces gender roles with sickening vigor. To feed her insatiable lust for nice clothing, modern gal Eve Smith (Olive Borden) disobeys her husband Adam Smith (George O’Brien), becomes a fashion model for a homosexually-coded designer, and nearly ends their marriage. Her desires are depicted as shallow, callous, and destructively self-centered. Her failure ending in recommitment to her position as obedient wife is shown as a triumph. Curious bookending segments set in prehistoric times featuring the same actors as the biblical Adam and Eve are somewhat fascinating for their special effects—huge dinosaurs pull public transportation buses, forced perspective giant chimpanzees foil hunters, a massive snake apparently made from a garden hose and the nightmares of small children slithers its way up a staircase to tempt Eve—which seem to predict The Flintstones several decades in advance. If Fig Leaves is anything (other than a disappointment), it’s an odd curio from the later years of silent cinema.

5/10

Pierrot le Fou: Jean-Luc Godard

[Revisit Review]

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/the-film-canon-pierrot-le-fou-1965/55838.

9/10

Truck Turner: Jonathan Kaplan

One of the major things that people tend to forget about blaxploitation films is how damned nihilistic they could be. People largely remember them for their style—Ron O'Neal cruising the streets of Harlem as Curtis Mayfield croons in the background—their humor—"Hey, where the hell are you going, Shaft?“ "To get laid, where the hell are you going?"—and even their kitsch. But most gloss over the fact that many blaxploitation films end with most of their cast getting killed, beaten, defeated, or destroyed by “the man.” Take Jonathan Kaplan’s Truck Turner (1974). An action thriller about a bounty hunter played by Isaac Hayes who gets a hit placed on him by a vengeful female pimp, the film is a gamut of killings, shoot-outs, and executions. Nobody escapes this film unharmed; even Hayes’ girlfriend’s cat gets killed and strung up as a warning. But what saves Truck Turner from being an exercise in emotional masochism is Hayes’ considerable charisma and humor. Truck Turner isn’t a man who makes jokes and cracks wise in defense against a brutal, racist world: he makes jokes and cracks wise in defiance of a brutal, racist world. And that makes all the difference.

7/10

The Claws of Light: Lino Brocka

The reputation of Lino Brocka’s The Claws of Light precedes it, not necessarily as a good film, but as an important one. And in many ways that legacy is much more damning. Because The Claws of Light has been labeled one of the greatest and most influential Filipino films of all time, one is tempted to give it a free pass and disregard any potential flaws in the name of political correctness. How disastrous it would be for some stuck-up American critic to bash a cornerstone of Third World cinema! Well, I was relieved to find The Claws of Light a rich, rewarding experience. But I hesitate to call it a masterpiece. A kind of socialist parable about a rustic villager named Júlio Madiaga who moves to Manila—the Big City—in order to find his missing girlfriend, the film ruthlessly examines capitalistic corruption that swallows and destroys the working class in the name of the rich and powerful. To live in Manila, Júlio must get a job in construction literally helping to build the concrete nightmare of modern Filipino life. When he is laid off, he turns to prostitution. The act of prostitution is a kind of metaphor in the film: Júlio must sell his body to survive; his girlfriend Ligaya was lured to Manila and promptly forced into sexual slavery; the happiest people Júlio encounters are fellow male prostitutes who have seemingly come to peace with their new lives. The film seems to suggest that all Filipinos are either pimps or prostitutes, victims of capitalism or soulless victors. But the film’s amateurism is woefully apparent. Satyajit Ray, another great Third World auteur, managed to hide his inexperience in his early films with a hypnotic eye for beautiful, striking imagery. He knew how to communicate with pictures and images. Brocka’s storytelling seems contingent primarily on his dialogue. As such, Brocka cannot compare with Ray. The Claws of Light greatly succeeds as a story, but only marginally as a film.

6/10

Run of the Arrow: Samuel Fuller

To read this review, go to: http://theblackmaria.org/2015/05/12/b-roll-samuel-fullers-run-of-the-arrow-1957/.

7/10

Black God, White Devil: Glauber Rocha

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/the-film-canon-black-god-white-devil-1964/55524.

9/10

Jade: William Friedkin

David Corelli (David Caruso) is Western—painfully, obnoxiously Western. Red-haired and devoutly Catholic, Corelli alternates his work as San Francisco Assistant District Attorney with games of squash and black-tie balls. So much is Corelli the embodiment of Occidental excellence that Stravinsky blares in the background while he investigates crime scenes. All of these embellishments serve to highlight the juxtaposition between the ordered world of law and justice and the steamy underbelly of sin and crime in William Friedkin’s Jade. For in this film corruption and mystery are synonymous with exotic Orientalism. Throughout Corelli’s involvement in the film’s central murder mystery he repeatedly encounters elements of Chinese culture that at times flummox him, at times fascinate him: he chases a suspect through Chinatown; stares longingly at a group of people doing Tai Chi in the park; and, in the film’s only sequence which hints at Friedkin’s true genius, he takes part in a car chase that leads him right in the middle of a Chinese New Year parade. But the counter-point between Western and Easter (i.e. Chinese) culture doesn’t have any inherent meaning. Here, it’s just stylistic excess meant to distract the audience from the fact that Jade is poorly made and features a script that would have flunked out of a high school screenwriting class. It’s Orientalism for the sake of Orientalism. And that just isn’t acceptable.

3/10

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: Elio Petri

The true strength of Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is how it keeps the audience confused as to the motives of its protagonist, a police inspector played by Gian Maria Volonté who savagely murders his mistress and deliberately plants evidence pointing to him as the culprit. At first, the sheer ridiculousness of the evidence he creates—he leaves his fingerprints all over her apartment, tells a colleague that he had an affair with the victim, and forces a plumber to report his physical description to the police after revealing himself as the murderer to him—and the baffling lengths the police go to ignore it suggests that the film is a black comedy and Volonté’s character is merely on some darkly perverse power trip. But as the film goes on the audience begins to suspect that the murder was an act of revenge. And by the third act when Volonté begins to beg his fellow officers to arrest and imprison him for the murder, it is impossible to parse his motives. The only logical conclusion is that Volonté was simultaneously fueled by a desire to test the limits of his power as a citizen “above suspicion” in Italian society, his drive to exact revenge against the woman, and a self-destructive, masochistic urge to be punished. Or perhaps it was something else. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion has more layers than a good novel and only repeat viewings can do justice to them all.

7/10

Boomerang!: Elia Kazan

To read this review, go to: http://theblackmaria.org/2015/05/05/b-roll-elia-kazans-boomerang-1947/.

8/10

Avengers: Age of Ultron: Joss Whedon

For my original brief review of Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, I jokingly wrote that the film had: “Great performances, good characterizations, decent writing, sub-par special effects, terrible editing [and the] only thing that bothered me about the Scarlet Widow was her 3rd act battle cleavage.” Looking back, I’m struck by how comprehensive this review really is. I don’t think much more elaboration is needed. As always with Marvel movies, the characters are the main draw and to Whedon’s credit they are all strikingly realized. But the motivations of the villain du jour, Ultron (James Spader), are murky and poorly explained. Apparently he wants to help move humanity to the next level of evolution by…killing them all? The action sequences carry surprisingly little weight as they over-rely on undercooked CGI, most egregiously in the opening scene which supposedly features a long tracking shot of the Avengers all storming a castle but in reality is just a haphazard mess of live-action footage cobbled together with CGI models with rag-doll physics that wouldn’t pass muster in a Playstation One-era first-person-shooter. Entire chunks of the movie seem missing: Thor’s underwater vision-quest; explanations of how Ultron and the Maximoff Twins manage to travel from New York City to Seoul in less than a day (did Ultron just carry them while he traveled at supersonic speeds in the upper atmosphere?); what Ultron was actually doing for a good 15 minute chunk of the finale while the Avengers fought his robot army and evacuated civilians. I don’t say this often, but the sound editing was atrocious. There were punches or full-body collisions with metal walls that barely produced any audible sound. Avengers: Age of Ultron, while entertaining, feels rushed and unfinished.

6/10

Jailbreakers: William Friedkin

I can understand the appeal of doing a throwback film imitating the teenagers-gone-wild genre of the 1950s. Flicks like Lou Place’s Daddy-O (1958) and William Morgan’s The Violent Years (1956) have taken their places in the pantheon of cult B-movie schlock. But William Friedkin’s Jailbreakers (1994), a kind of updated Bonnie and Clyde story about two teenage lovers on the run, completely misses the mark. I’m sure it was good fun for the actors to run around with vintage leather outfits and mush-mouthed greaser accents. But somewhere amongst all of the f-bombs, graphic violence, and oral sex the deliberate 50s camp disintegrates and reveals the carcass of a boring movie featuring a tepid script and even more tepid direction. The film’s main flaw is the protagonist Angel Norton (Shannen Doherty). She isn’t a good-girl-gone-bad who finds herself in over her head, she’s a bad-girl-gone-worse who takes every opportunity to dodge facing the consequences of her actions. Combine this with the fact that Jailbreakers can’t decide whether to glamorize the crime spree of its teenage leads, thereby making them sympathetic, or condemn them as debased, self-centered crooks and you have a confused, miscalculated misfire that cankers the filmography of one of America’s best contemporary directors.

3/10

Thank You For Playing: David Osit, Malika Zouhali-Worrall

To read this review, go to: http://screencomment.com/2015/05/thankyou-forplaying/.

8/10

Snake Eyes: Brian De Palma

When Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes was first released, it was met with abysmal reviews. I think this was due to two main reasons. First, it’s a whodunnit cop procedural that reveals the identity of the main antagonist about halfway through its run-time. Second, even for a De Palma film it is unusually obsessed with the concept of spectatorship: there are several sequences shot with newsroom cameras; deliberately choreographed tracking shots; a crucial scene is done with his trademark split-screen technique. The result is a mystery film with no mystery that repeatedly reminds its audience that they are, in fact, watching a movie. In a sense, these Brechtian techniques result in a kind of anti-thriller. But that’s what makes Snake Eyes so compelling: it’s not the mystery that’s important, it’s how the people involved in the mystery are effected by it. Nicolas Cage—in a performance that seems like a warmup for his later turn in Werner Herzog’s The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)—is downright heart-breaking as an unapologetically corrupt police detective who is forced to deal with a devastating betrayal. One scene in particular left my jaw on the floor. It’s a moment where Cage explodes at a woman who helped him identify the mastermind behind the assassination around which Snake Eyes revolves. The reason for his anger? Her revelation forces him to become the last thing he would ever want to be: a good, honest person. There would have been no way to seamlessly incorporate such a scene into the film if it had waited until the end to pull back the curtain on the identity of the killer.

8/10

Hi, Mom!: Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma's Hi, Mom! deliberately, deliriously jumps from genre to genre with wild, unrepentant abandon. The result is a confusing yet nevertheless charming black comedy. I think that De Palma is trying to say something about spectatorship and the need for attention in the media with this story of a failed pornographer-cum-urban-terrorist. But much of the intellectual impact is lost in the stylistic pyrotechnics and narrative digressions, particularly the intense "Be Black, Baby" segments. Some of the scenes are very funny (especially one part where Robert De Niro goes shopping for contraceptives), some are just weird and uncomfortable. But I think that was probably the point. Hi, Mom! doesn't collapse in on itself like De Palma's later comedy Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972), perhaps because he was trying to make the latter film a comedy. Hi, Mom!? It's its own beast entirely.

7/10