If the Hatchet-Wielding Manohla Dargis Says a Movie Sucks

maybe it does -- or not. If she says it's good -- as she does aboutBatman Begins -- it may be worth a look.

Hey, wanta see a funny name for a director?

Check out this.

Did you know Antonioni's Blow Up was spawned by Julio Cortazar?

I didn't, and that wasn't all I learned from Thomas Beltzer's Senses of Cinema article on story and film. There is one inaccuracy, however: in Brian De Palma's homage, Blow Out, Nancy Allen is killed by John Lithgow, not Dennis Franz.

Andrei Rublev

is a long, long dream and I am having the hardest time staying intereested. Tarkovsky may be a genius, but he's so imagistic and elliptic I have a hard time following him. I'm now taking a break after Part One; I won't bail on it completely, but I think I would enjoy it more if I understood what was going on.

Comme une image

a.k.a. Look at Me is a sweet French film that I'm not going to do justice to, mainly because yours truly - Mr. I Yearn for the Drug of Cinema -- watched it while drowsy, and because I got up to pee during what may have been a key moment of exposition. (I headed for the bathroom when one character was crying, and after a long piss which I just didn't feel like rushing, they were all were driving somewhere in the country for reasons I didn't understand.) Still, it's the kind of movie that I can see myself absolutely loving if I saw it again; in fact, I'm already rather attracted to it. It's a kind of Mike Leigh-type film, not because it's improvised or made up as it went along, but because not a whole lot happens, and you're not sure where it's going or why, and which finds its story in the emotional life of its characters. It's a deeply human and humane movie whose every character wants to be loved but is a little too self-absorbed to love anyone else. The exception is the lead character, a plus-sized young singer curiously named Lolita -- played by a remarkable life-force named Marilou Berry -- who strives for the love of her famous writer father, who is too wrapped up in his own career and his hot new wife to pay any attention to his daughter or her burgeoning talent. The same goes for boys, who only pretend to be attracted to her so they can meet her father. Lolita more or less feels rejected all around by everyone but her vocal coach -- who spends most of her time babying her husband, a mopey writer who has endured years of failure and is about to become a celebrity. Then there's this boy she meets who seems like the real thing. It wends its melancholy way toward an unforced happy ending between Lolita and her beau, walking with her bicycle against a starry sky.

This is easily the slackest review I have ever written. My others will be better. I'll get more sleep ahead of time, and I will drink less cola. But do see the movie. You'll like it.

More DVDs

picked up at lunch: Tokyo Story, The Seventh Seal, Hidden Fortress, Suddenly, Last Summer.

I yearn for what Truffaut called the "drug" of cinema.

But I also have to, have to, have to do the yard this weekend, which is something I doubt Truffaut ever had to do. I am willing to bet you anything Francois never mowed.

What I'm Listening To: Leos Janacek's Jenufa, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras.

Tonight's movie (or this weekend's)

Look at Me -- much adored by Ms. Penn.

13 DVDs I Have Every Intention of Watching Over the Next Week. Or Two. OK, the Next Month.

Andrei Rublev, Autumn Sonata, Early Summer, La Strada, Hour of the Wolf, The Leopard, Man on the Train, The Magic Flute, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Smell of Camphor, The Fragrance of Jasmine, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Tokyo Drifter, Variety Lights.

Scorsese's Italian Trip

I'm terrible with long movies, escpecially if they're on DVD and I have the option to watch whenever I please. I can watch a long movie in a theatre, no problem; well, maybe "no problem" is pushing it, as I spent the last half-hour of Yi-Yi trying to mentally communicate the message to please, please, please stop. But in a theater I can at least prepare myself for the long haul. If I have a DVD of say Tarkovsky's 204-minute Andrei Rublev, i'll do anything not to watch it.

Documentaries by Martin Scorsese are a different matter, especially if they focus on his love for Italian cinema. About ten years ago, he made this four-hour-plus documentary called My Voyage to Italy, and damn if I didn't sit there transfixed through the whole thing.

To his credit, Scorsese doesn't try to give an entire history of the industry. Rather, he makes it personal in the very best sense of the word, recalling how he first saw these films on a black and white television as a boy growing up in New York, where Italian cinema revealed his heritage to him and his family. (The family footage he uses here, reminiscent of the opening credits of Mean Streets, is extraordinary, as are the director's own boyhood drawings of posters of the movies he dreamed of making.)

He focuses mainly on five key directors -- Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica, Fellini and Antonioni -- and what their work has meant to him. It's overlong at points, as Scorsese uses film clips to tell the entire plot and then some of every Italian movie he has ever loved, but he also blends in a lot of sharp analysis about style, camera movement and meaning. Like any good critic, he has an infectious enthusiasm: he makes you want to see these movies, again or for the first time.

Of particular interest: Visconti's Senso and Rosselini's Voyage to Italy, both of which look perfectly stunning.

Scorsese also hit some very important points, I thought, such as the way film enthusiasts are divided between Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Antonioni's L'Avventura, two films about the same thing -- the soullessness of the early 1960s Eurotrash class -- that couldn't be more different in style or execution. (Both, I might add, are two long films I've managed to get through many times.)

Fellini's great film hits this world from every angle, telling something like (if I remember correctly, because I once counted) seven main stories, with six connective ones between them. It's a film about fakery, about masks -- they appear all the way through it -- and how, with the main character, Marcello, the mask ultimately absorbs the personality.

Where Fellini's film was loud, noisy, intensely visual, Antonioni's was comparatively cool and restrained, and tackled the very idea of narrative form itself. Like Psycho, which came out around the same time, it has one of the most distinct story arcs in history, taking a ninety degree turn early on.

It begins with a group of wealthy young pals on a voyage; when they stop at an island, one girl goes missing. They can't find her. She could be dead, she could have disappeared, she could have fled the scene altogether, no one knows. Over the rest of the film, her boyfriend and best friend look for her, and then fall in love themselves. The story of the search fades completely -- the adventure of the title is their advernture together, and our adventure in watching it, in trying to figure out where this unpredictable journey will lead. It's a movie with a beginning, a middle, and an ending that wanders completely off course. We never find out about the missing girl; she vanished. What matters isn't that she vanished, but what her vanishing causes, what it creates, the chain of events it sets into motion, reflecting along the way on a society where people live somewhat by comfort and impulse.

I think you could almost make the point that both movies are latter-day extensions of Renoir's Rules of the Game, the original Eurotrash masterpiece.

I remember both Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann extolled Antonioni's over Fellini's, and ever since then it's been seen as the hipper, more with-it, more intellectual of the two choices; Fellini's great film is seen as flashy by contrast.

Anyway, this was just one aspect of Scorsese's documentary, which I watched more or less is one ass-fatiguing sitting, with only occasional breaks to smoke or piss.

It was like being at an Italian meal with the director where I never wanted to leave, and I very often found myself talking back to the screen, saying "Oh yes, the Bicycle Thief is great," and and "Wow, how come I've never seen that? Tell me more..."

Kiss of Death (1947)

You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over. -- Richard Widmark, as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death.

Over the weekend I watched Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death, commonly known among film fans as “the one where Richard Widmark pushes the old lady down the stairs.”

It’s about a down-on-his-luck ex-con (Victor Mature) who can’t support his family, turns to robbery, and gets quickly caught and convicted. After refusing to squeal to the prosecutor (Brian Donleavy) about his accomplices, Mature is sent up the river. While in prison, he meets Tommy Udo (Widmark), a sadistic sharpie who breaks into a broad ecstatic grin whenever he talks about subjects dear to his heart, like torture and murder. When Mature learns that his own wife has committed suicide and his daughters are in an orphanage, he rats out his fellows, ultimately putting him in a showdown with Widmark.

It’s a terrifically paced and structured movie. I liked the fact that, although the story frequently involved courts, there were no courtroom scenes; as if Hathaway and writers Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer and Eleazar Lipsky wanted to keep the story squarely on the streets and in the cells. Mature is perfectly cast, and Widmark is immortal – in fact his work here seems to have served as a template both for Frank Gorshin’s Riddler character on “Batman” and Joe Pesci’s character (also named Tommy) in GoodFellas.

Like a lot of gangster films of the time, it’s overtly theatrical and overtly moral, that old balancing act of trying to please the Hays office and trying give the audience something worth looking at. Also, I hated Mature’s little girls, who are as gratingly sweet as 1940’s Hollywood kids get. But it’s a little like reading a 19th Century novel; look past the period conventions and you have a terrific film noir that still packs a pretty good punch.

A few days ago, I got into this terrific chatroom argument over what defines film noir. My opponent was this imperious purist who used to teach film and really knew her stuff, eventhough I disagreed with her heartily on everything she said. What set us apart was White Heat. She didn't think it was really a noir, and I told her she didn't really know what the hell she was talking about, and the cyberfists flew after that. I forget her reasons; something very stiff, academic, and rule-oriented about mankind trapped in society. Some people define these things like the Catholic Church defines sainthood.

This little scuffle sent me straight to the library, where I checked out a pile of books about film noir that I will almost certainly never read, although I thumbed though enough of them to know that most of the world thinks the Cagney classic is a noir, and that there’s debate as to whether noir is an actual genre (like the Western) or a mood.

Whatever you call it, it’s a supercharged crime film.

Mike Leigh: Family Films

The first time I ever heard of the English director Mike Leigh was in a great New Yorker article by Terrence Rafferty, published some time in the early 1990s. I remember precious little about what it said but I knew just from reading it -- before I had seen a single Leigh film -- that I liked him. He was my idea of a filmmaker: productive, worked with a small company, made intimate dramas about life at the domestic level. Seeing his work did not disappoint, even when it seemed a little "too English," when his people started yammering about in their rural idioms and I had to rewind scenes and listen carefully just to get the jokes.

One thing that came clear to me after seeing Leigh's latest, Vera Drake, is that Leigh is especially skilled at what might be called "family films," a phrase in need of expansion. Instead of meaning "suitable for the kids," let it mean something similar to "family novel," which accomodates both the generous vision of Tolstoy and the tight focus of Flaubert or Anne Tyler. Mike Leigh makes films about a lot of things, but families are his natural subject. This may have something to do with his preferred method of working, which involves shaping the material in rehearsal, sometimes involving members of a loose repertory group who reappear from film to film. He has a feel for the character of a family, like a silent visitor who is curious, interested and sympathetic.

Vera Drake is the story of an English maid in the early 1950s who is arrested and tried for performing abortions on the side, and it too is centered on the idea of family. It's also a first-class example of his particular brand of working-class realism, for which he has a democratic knack, like Ken Loach; a neo-Realist knack, you might say, personal and political.

Well before we get to Vera's story, we meet her family, and Leigh takes his time letting us settle into it. Vera, played to perfection by Imelda Staunton, is a hearty soul; a domestic who looks after several homes, as well as her own, and also cares for her dying mother. Hers isn't a grim life, or at least she doesn't see it that way; her day to day disposition suggests no problem can't be settled by a good cup of tea. She and her husband, George (Richard Graham) who operates a garage with his brother, are the picture of middle-class content: they both work hard, enjoy what they do, and they're still happily in love after decades together. The Drakes have two children; a shy and homely daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly) who doesn't seem likely to ever find a boyfriend (and -- in a sweet and funny subplot -- does) and a gregarious, obnoxious son Sid (Daniel Mays).

Among her other tasks, Vera also performs abortions for poor girls, the ones without money or connections. She's the opposite of what we think of as a "back street abortionist." She offers her services for free, and in the place of sharp instruments she uses a carbolic soap solution that induces miscarriage and, so far as she knows, is perfectly safe. She's also naive. She doesn't know that the greedy go-between for her troubled clients has been charging a fee, or that her abortion method is actually borderline lethal. After the near-death of one of her clients, Vera is arrested, her life and family -- who don't know about her work as an abortionist -- come crashing down.

She is also, as far as the film is concerned, less the villain than society, and while that may sound like a lame, socially conscious point, the film makes it with powerful conviction. Leigh has a distinct feel for how the subtle repressiveness of 1950s culture seeps into the lives and the language of everyone. When Vera applies her treatment to her clients, she never uses words like abortion or baby or pregnancy; she talks about "taking it away." After her arrest -- in the single most powerful scene of the movie -- she can only describe what she does to her husband in a hushed, pained whisper. He in turn can barely find the words to broach the subject with his brother. Graham is superb in this role of a man who finds himself completely conflicted in his feelings about his wife.

The politics of a film like this are fairly obvious before you walk in the door; pro-choice and pro-family, which is exactly what Vera is. She loves her own children deeply, she's thrilled for her daughter's marriage and later for her sister-in-law, who on the eve of Vera's arrest announces she's pregnant.

But there is, also, something a little strange, maybe, about the movie's politics, particularly when compared with Leigh's 1990 Life is Sweet. One of the wonderfully unsettling facets of that great film -- about the workaday life of a Middlesex family who could have been the Drake's neighbors in another time -- is that it seemed almost anti-abortion, especially in an overwhelmingly powerful scene near the end, when the chirpy working-class mother played by Alison Steadman talks about why she chose not to have an abortion in her early marriage -- despite being poor and broke -- and even says, with the director's seeming approval, that she doesn't believe in it. There was a startling reality to the moment, regardless of your position on the issue; it seemed true to this character. I was less convinced by the money quote in Vera Drake, tenderly uttered by Alex's new boyfriend: "If you can't feed them, you can't love them."

Besides being a glaringly untrue statement -- utterly destitute women love their children all the time -- it sounded forced, and the way the movie addressed the complexities of the issue seemed to me like a lot of preaching to the choir. The family rallies `round Vera, eventually. While the movie has a genuinely loving and gritty feel to it, near the end you get the feeling Leigh is playing with a stacked deck.

P.S. I was rather startled by the following note in the Guardian review: "So far, public opinion stays resolutely pro-abortion - but the religious right, spurred on by US politics, keeps pushing for new limits. Even David Steel, author of the original 1967 reform, now wants the present 24-week limit cut. New pictures of foetuses `walking' are guaranteed headlines in rightwing papers. In schools, abortion is presented as a subject for abstract debate. When does a foetus acquire human rights? When does life begin?"

Rather a discomfiting note on writer Polly Toynbee's part -- she's distressed that the issue is even up for debate. News flash, Polly: a hundred years from now, it will still be.