Feeling Good: Pierre Étaix

I...honestly and truly don't know what to make of Pierre Étaix's Feeling Good. It was originally supposed to be a section in his anthology film As Long As You've Got Your Health (1966) but was cut out and re-edited as its own short. But it makes almost no sense. The first five or so minutes are some decent slapstick about Étaix trying to go camping, but then he's arrested and relocated into what I can only describe as a cross between a concentration camp and a Oakie settlement circa the Dust Bowl. Is Étaix trying to make some kind of statement about how everyday society is so regimented that it's practically like living in a prison? I'm not sure. But the crying shame is that this second part of the film simply isn't funny.

As Long as You’ve Got Your Health: Pierre Étaix

Pierre Étaix's As Long as You've Got Your Health was deliberately divided into four short films. So the fairest way that I can think to review the film is to look at all four parts individually.

Insomnia

A man tries to fight his insomnia by reading a vampire novel. But the novel begins to bleed into real life as he starts to jump at simple things like his wife shifting positions in bed. It's a sweet, gentle segment that gets credit for not having the kind of twist ending that I thought it was going for.

The Movies

Étaix goes to the movies and after a series of unfortunate events gets pulled into the world of a never-ending commercial. I'm still not sure how he ended up in the commercial, but I don't care considering the shtick in the first part of this sequence wasn't very inspired. But the actual commercial segment contains some of the best slapstick and visual gags in all of Étaix's oeuvre. 

As Long As You've Got Your Health

At first a kind of rally against industrialization, this segment has some of the most bold and ambitious effects I've ever seen in a quasi-silent comedy. I loved the bits about the clock hands malfunctioning and the music notes falling off the sheet because of the vibrations from street construction. Then it becomes a low-key Orwellian nightmare as all of the inhabitants of the besieged city try to keep themselves from going insane by either perpetually smiling or seeking the advice of an increasingly beleaguered doctor.

Into the Woods No More

I don't have much to say about this one. It's the weakest of the four segments and can basically be boiled down to a handful of characters mince about the countryside for a while.

The overall film is not more than the sum of its parts. But the good parts more than make up for the lackluster ones.

7/10

1941: Steven Spielberg

Allow me to make something abundantly clear about Steven Spielberg's 1941: most of the visual humor and set-pieces involving things getting blown up work. The opening sequence spoofing Jaws (1975) where a night-swimmer gets trapped on the periscope of a Japanese sub was ingenious. The image of a Ferris Wheel rolling into the California Bay was striking and effective. The scene where a lone bomb from a B-52 disrupts a speech being given about how Japanese bombers will never reach California worked. It all worked. What didn't work were the smaller scale scenes involving individual characters acting weird, crazy, and over-the-top. Why? Because all of the principal characters know they're in a comedy. And nothing wrecks a comedy faster than characters who are in on the joke. The only exception that I can think of are the Marx Brothers movies. And even then only the Brothers themselves were in on the gag. This film also needed at least one less sub-plot. It's two-and-a-half hour run-time is exhaustive, especially for a comedy. Lengthy run-times are alright for action films and dramas, but comedies are much more stamina-draining for both filmmakers and audiences.

5/10

The Suitor: Pierre Étaix

Much like his earlier short film Rupture (1961) and his later masterpiece Yo Yo (1965), Pierre Étaix's The Suitor follows a somewhat aloof aristocrat vying against everyday annoyances and some internal discontent. In this case, Étaix plays the eponymous Suitor, a wealthy young man who decides that he needs to find a wife. The only problem is that he has had almost no interaction with the opposite sex outside of his family. So he struggles to enter and navigate the dating scene with...varying results. Although the film features a single plot, it is highly episodic in nature: he will center entire sequences around certain characters or sets for prolonged comedic routines. And, truth be told, this formula eventually becomes taxing. Not all of the sequences are equally thrilling. There's one in particular involving the Suitor escorting an inebriated woman back to her apartment that went on for far too long.

7/10

Runoff: Kimberly Levin

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-runoff/58811.

8/10

Max: Boaz Yakin

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-max/58762.

4/10

Donovan's Brain: Felix E. Feist

Felix E. Feist's Donovan's Brain was a braver film than I think most people would give it credit for. The reason? Its entire success centers almost solely on the ability of one actor to portray multiple characters with nothing but varying usages of body language and vocal intonation. Here that burden is carried by Lew Ayres, a scientist who gets possessed by a megalomaniac brain in his laboratory taken from a recently deceased business tycoon. And despite the fact that Ayres keeps tricking me into thinking that he's actually Jack Lemmon, he does a fantastic job. It helps that Donovan's Brain boasts a legitimately engrossing screenplay and fantastically moody cinematography courtesy of Joseph F. Biroc. This is one of those rare 1950s sci-fi flicks that didn't succumb to the ludicrousness of its central plot or to hammy special effects. Donovan's Brain legitimately works both as sci-fi and as horror.

7/10

The Lost Boys: Joel Schumacher

I came to Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys rather circuitously. I have spent several summers living with my aunt and grandmother in Santa Cruz where the film was shot. Without even realizing it I had familiarized myself with several of the landmarks that were featured prominently in the film. The one exception would have to be the comic book shop which actually became the place that I first started getting into comics. They were happy to tell me that they were featured in the film. Now, several years later, I have finally seen the film and can confirm that they have every right to be proud of being featured in it. The special effects are excellent. The humor is surprisingly organic—stealing holy water from a church, having the experts on evil creatures be comic book nerds, using squirt guns full of holy water mixed with garlic against vampires. The only weak point of the movie is the central love story which is ridiculously weak and tepid. But it's not like we came to this film to see a love story anyway, right?

7/10

Surf Nazis Must Die: Peter George

I am convinced that the only reason Peter George's Surf Nazis Must Die has survived as a "cult classic" is its title. And it's a perfect title, isn't it? First, there's the absurd juxtaposition of the terms "surf" and "Nazis." Follow that up with the command that they "must die" and you have a dynamic, brain-snatching title that is sure to stick with people regardless of whether or not they actually see it. But while Surf Nazis Must Die certainly contains Nazis, surfing, and dying, the final product is so banal and lifeless that afterwards the title will be the only thing that viewers will remember. The film feels like the boring bits of about a dozen Z-grade drive-in pictures chopped up and randomly glued back together by a blind macaque. Scenes start and stop and start and stop with little attention paid to how they transition between each other or build a narrative. It's essentially a 90 minute stag reel of surfing footage and dirty teenagers sneering at each other. The film's diegetic universe doesn't make any sense, either. Apparently a catastrophic earthquake so devastated California that roving gangs of Nazis were able to seize power. And yet apparently enough of society remained that social services like nursing homes and small businesses could still operate. But I'm clearly giving this film more thought than any of its makers did.

1/10

A Woman’s Face: George Cukor

To read this review, go to: http://www.theblackmaria.org/2015/06/23/b-roll-george-cukors-a-womans-face-1941/.

8/10

When Strangers Marry: William Castle

What a delightful discovery! I never would have imagined that William Castle, the master of gimmicks and ridiculous horror films, could have directed such a moody, tense, and wonderfully atmospheric thriller as When Strangers Marry. The film, which centers on a young wife who begins to suspect that her husband might be a murderer, incredibly outshines Suspicion (1941), an earlier film with a similar plot directed by none other than Alfred Hitchcock. There are a handful of magnificent sequences that I can only imagine would have made the Master of Suspense green with envy: the suspected husband flummoxing a sideshow carny who boasts that he can guess anyone's profession with only three guesses; a couple on the run being forced to share a cramped cab with a screaming infant; a hallucinogenic scene where the wife is plagued with visions of people calling her husband a murderer while traveling down a darkened tunnel at night. It reminds me of another early noir with a run-time that barely exceeded 60 minutes: Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). Both made up for their low-budget production short-comings with excellent performances, hyper-stylized sequences reflecting their characters' inner paranoia, and a crackerjack script. Where When Strangers Marry falters is that it gives away its major twist with an unfortunate bit of casting. The moment this character appears you know that he's up to no good. They should have invested in a more milquetoast actor. I bet Elisha Cook, Jr. would have been perfect.

8/10

The Devil-Doll: Tod Browning

Tod Browning's The Devil-Doll has one of those delightfully absurd scenarios that could only occur in the pulpiest of sci-fi/horror fever-dreams: a Parisian banker uses people he has shrunken to only a few inches in height with a mysterious chemical formula to get revenge on his one-time colleagues who framed him for robbery and murder seventeen years earlier. The banker, Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore), dresses in drag to pose as an elderly female toymaker who ingratiates herself into the homes of his enemies where his servants carry out his grisly commands. The special effects—mostly limited to double-exposures and forced perspective accompanied by over-sized sets and props—are curiously less effective than similar effects in King Kong, released three years earlier. But what saves the film is Barrymore's performance. At times deliciously over-the-top, at times horrifying (note the death glare he gives his enemies as his servants get ready to strike, Barrymore is able to inject an admittedly silly role with genuine pathos. Nowhere is this more apparent than the heart-breaking scene near the end where he confronts his long-lost daughter...while posing as someone else. The Devil-Doll also reveals a curious contradiction implicit within the boundaries of the Motion Picture Production Code: criminals who lie and cheat and steal can get away unpunished as long as the only people he hurts are worse criminals.

7/10

Eden: Mia Hansen-Løve

Mia Hansen-Løve's Eden was literally the hardest film I have had to watch in quite some time. It wasn't because it was shocking or uncomfortable. It was because it was a boring, poorly-constructed piece of miscalculated rubbish. I can understand what Hansen-Løve was going for: an examination of the 90s French techno scene that was just as enamored with the atmosphere and zeitgeist of the era as the musicians who helped pioneer the actual music. It was supposed to be a calm, reflective piece. In short, it tried to be equal parts documentary, drama, and drug film. Yet it trying to do all three, it became none of them. This isn't a film that moves, it meanders. And while many directors are able to pull this kind of meditative anti-plotting off, Hansen-Løve isn't one of them...yet.

3/10

Inside Out: Pete Docter

Pete Docter's Inside Out marks a return to the fastidious creativity and courage that made PIXAR a house-hold name. Beautifully animated, thought-provoking, and unapologetically willing to test the limits of their audience's emotions, Inside Out is the best film PIXAR has put out since 2010 with Toy Story 3 (2010). And yet, I was largely disappointed with the third act. There was way too much slapstick comedic relief during moments that should have been tense with dramatic weight. The anthropomorphic interpretations of Riley's emotions work as characters because they're metaphorical. But in the last act they use Tex Avery-esque logic to overcome challenges (e.g. using hundreds of clones of Riley's ideal boyfriend to create a human bridge) that the entire metaphorical underpinning of the story becomes confused, cluttered, and nearly lost.

7/10

Jurassic World: Colin Trevorrow

It would be so easy to say that my reasons for not loving Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World stemmed solely from my hatred CGI effects, ESPECIALLY in a franchise known for having some of the best practical effects in cinematic history. But really, my dislike of the film comes from the fact that the characters, with the notable exception of Bryce Dallas Howard, were either bland, forgettable, or annoying. Chris Pratt was underwhelming and ultimately useless, the two boys deserved to get eaten by dinosaurs because of their stupidity, and the people running the park and its security were laughably incompetent, even for a narrative centered around nature punishing mankind for its hubris. Still, I would be lying if I didn't say that the ending fight between the T. Rex, Blue, and Indominus didn't make me almost teary-eyed with joy.

6/10

Dogtooth: Yorgos Lanthimos

I think the key scene to understanding Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth is a scene near the end where the eldest daughter (Angeliki Papoulia) begins re-enacting a dance scene from Adrian Lyne's Flashdance (1983) during a performance in honor of her father's birthday. On the surface it's just another in a long line of bizarre images and sequences; Buñuelian surrealism through the lens of Theo Angelopoulos (and not just because they're both Greek—Lanthimos shares Angelopoulos' favor of long, static takes and glacial pacing). But then it hit me: at not point has this young woman ever seen the film, let alone heard of it. The only exposure she has had to anything outside her deliberately isolated and insulated family were two VHS tapes of Jaws (1975) and Rocky IV (1985). So why, or more appropriately how, Flashdance? My theory is that the eldest daughter is, like a medium, beginning to channel the world outside her family's enclosure. This would compliment the interpretation that Dogtooth is about arrested development and the anxieties that accompany young people as they move out on their own for the first time. But I suspect that limiting Dogtooth to such simplistic comparisons would miss the point. It is more than just an allegory; it is a strange, bizarre riddle of a film designed to intrigue and shock audiences. The only interpretations possible are the ones people bring with them from the very beginning.

7/10

The Wolfpack: Crystal Moselle

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-the-wolfpack/57993.

7/10

Hot Fuzz: Edgar Wright

[Revisit Review]

Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz was and is a miracle of comedic filmmaking. It has one of the most ruthlessly sharp and well-constructed screenplays this side of Robert Smith’s for Irving Pichel’s Quicksand! (1950): not a line is wasted or unnecessary. The use of editing to highlight comedic scenes—fast-paced, dramatic cutting for absurdly mundane activities like filling out paperwork—is magnificent. Just like his previous endeavor Shaun of the Dead (2004) which doubled as a gut-busting comedy and a truly chilling zombie horror film, Hot Fuzz works in its own right as both a mystery thriller and an action cop movie. Wright understands that the best parodies, satires, and tributes can stand on their own merits as representations of the things they’re lampooning. This is a lesson most modern filmmakers have woefully missed.

9/10

Zombeavers: Jordan Rubin

I wish that filmmakers would figure out that deliberately, ironically obnoxious characters are STILL obnoxious. They seem to be popular in horror films that intentionally emulate low-budget, cheesy B-movies. But unlike Eli Craig's Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010) where the annoying characters were balanced by sympathetic ones and Kevin Smith's Tusk (2014) where they stopped being obnoxious when things began to get real, the obnoxious characters in Jordan Rubin's Zombeavers STAY obnoxious the entire time. They were so unpleasant that I had a hard time getting into the irreverent tone of the film and enjoying it for what it was: a light-hearted, goofy tribute to terrible horrible movies. But at least the practical creature effects were really nice!

(Oh, and don't think I missed the dolly zoom tribute to Jaws [1975]. Nice touch.)

4/10

Set Fire to the Stars: Andy Goddard

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-set-fire-to-the-stars/57554.

7/10

Blood on the Moon: Robert Wise

To read this review, go to: http://theblackmaria.org/2015/06/09/b-roll-robert-wises-blood-on-the-moon-1948/.

6/10

Happy Anniversary: Jean-Claude Carrière, Pierre Étaix

Even though Jean-Claude Carrière and Pierre Étaix's Happy Anniversary has more sets, more props, more characters, and more locations, I still feel like more happened in their first collaboration Rupture (1961). Perhaps the action became decentralized due to its greater scope? Whatever the reason, this madcap tale of one man's repeatedly thwarted attempts to get home in time for an anniversary dinner with his wife is delightful and charming. I can understand why it won an Academy Award for Best Short Film. If anything, it demonstrates Étaix's growth as a filmmaker and points the way towards his full-length feature films.

The Gold Ghost: Buster Keaton, Charles Lamont

The Gold Ghost was not an easy or pleasant film to watch. It was Buster Keaton's first directorial effort with sound cinema and it showed. The plot was formulaic and uninspired: a weak, foppish young man Goes West to try and make a name for himself in order to woo the heart of a woman he loves. The film is so mediocre that it makes Algie, the Miner (1912), a ten minute short film partially directed by Alice Guy-Blaché which essentially told the same basic story, look like D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916). Most of the jokes are reworkings of earlier Keaton gags. But unlike Grand Slam Opera (1936) where he adapted old gags to actually utilize sound technology, the gags here are almost the same as they would have been without sound. It always hurts to see your idols fall.

Rupture: Jean-Claude Carrière, Pierre Étaix

Rupture takes a simple idea—a spurned lover trying to write a break-up letter whose things keep breaking on him—and wrings every single bit of comedy imaginable out of it. It is, in a word, bliss. This is precision slapstick the likes of which only the French comedians like Jacques Tati and René Clair truly excelled at (although Chaplin came damn close with Modern Times [1936]). What would be a better term for this? "Surgical Slapstick?" I'll have to think on it...But anyhow, my favorite part is the hokey sound effects which were created and dubbed in by Étaix after filming had concluded. They are so wild and over-the-top that they almost reach surrealistic heights.

Million Dollar Legs: Edward F. Cline

Having seen Edward F. Cline’s Million Dollar Legs, I can’t help but feel that it is the first part in a triptych of Dadaist Hollywood comedies—the subsequent parts being Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup (1933) and H. C. Potter’s Hellzapoppin’ (1941). All three films are deliberately scatterbrained, surrealistic, and nonsensical. But of the three, Million Dollar Legs is perhaps the most consciously “silly.” It was so silly, in fact, that it took me about fifteen minutes to acclimate myself with its humor. More than once the humor veered between “silly” and “stupid.” But there were enough gags that worked (the discovery of all of Klopstokia’s athletes, for instance) that I was able to forgive the ones that didn’t. Plus, I never though that W. C. Fields would work so well in a supporting role. But here he honestly gives one of his best performances, in my opinion. I’ve always felt that Fields was a comedian best enjoyed in small doses. I’ve always preferred his short films to his features. And Million Dollar Legs finds a nice balance between over- and under-using him.

7/10

Hungry Hearts: Saverio Costanzo

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-hungry-hearts/56935.

9/10

Our Daily Bread: King Vidor

King Vidor was one of those directors that I had always heard of but had never exactly watched. I'd seen his "important" films: the silent masterpieces The Big Parade (1925) and The Crowd (1928). But I had remained largely ignorant of his sound films. And yet, it is perhaps in his sound films that Vidor left the greatest impression both as a director and as an auteur. So his 1934 film Our Daily Bread marked the first time that I truly "met" Mr. Vidor. Unapologetically enthusiastic, centering on can-do protagonists, and concerned with individualist triumph over adversity, Out Daily Bread was an unexpected treat. In a strange way, the film is essentially the story of an American Communist farming commune. And yet Vidor managed to mask this fact by insistently focusing on the struggles of a single protagonist. It's Communism by way of Individualism. A strange idea...but Vidor makes it work.

7/10

The Whispering Chorus: Cecil B. DeMille

To read this review, go to: http://theblackmaria.org/2015/06/02/b-roll-cecil-b-demille-the-whispering-chorus-1918/.

7/10

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