Three films a day

#156, 9/24 – The Stepford Wives (1975) (dvd)

My favorite thing about The Stepford Wives is that it doesn’t even try to be subtle.

It’s a straight-up assault on the ideas of suburbia which lurk in the American mind. The images of homogenous, perfectly-kept suburban homes—where the residents all enjoy “good schools, low taxes, clean air”, amazingly fast ambulance service, and the greatest of consumerist conveniences—have been a part of our collective conciousness since the end of World War II. As we all know (don’t we?), it’s total bullshit, and the movie goes after every obvious fallacy with a big smile. (Silly side note: My second favorite thing about the movie is Paula Prentiss, one of the many actors my alma mater has given to Hollywood; she’s perfect.)

When I was watching the film, I first found myself considering it a suburban response to the claustraphobic paranoia of Rosemary’s Baby (disclosure: it wasn’t until after the film that I found out Ira Levin had written both novels). Deeper into the movie though, I found a more obvious and more interesting comparison: Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Santa Mira, just like Stepford, has this “there’s something happening here/what it is ain’t exactly clear” feeling about it. And both use it to great effect. Of course, Body Snatchers (which I first saw for a history class, actually), is well associated with our country’s anxieties about communism. It was saying that our neighbors could be silently compromised by foreign influences. (Sound familiar?)

Stepford, on the other hand, is inward-looking. Rather than worrying about threats posed to our apparently idyllic communities from the outside, the film wonders just how far we might go to make these illusions of ourselves real.

I also can’t help comparing this to a more recent inward-looking critique of suburbia, Desperate Housewives. That shabby mess of a tv show (do you get the sense that I don’t care for it?) tries to “expose” the lies sitting underneath the perceived homongenaiety and “perfection”. That’s all fine and good, but Desperate Housewives is exploitative, obvious, and annoyingly “clever”. In other words, I hate it because it doesn’t even try to be subtle.

#155, 9/23 – The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) (dvd)

My second Anh Hung Tran film this year, and like his later and beautiful At the Height of Summer (I can’t take calling it The Vertical Ray of the Sun any more), it’s elegantly shot and paced. What this one lacked for me I can only define as “pull”. For whatever small reason (I’m guessing because it was more about tone than incident or character), I couldn’t quite bring myself into it. Perhaps the sparse dialog, which I’m normally really into, did me in. Still, it’s a beautiful little piece of filmmaking and I enjoyed my time with it. I just never connected with it.

#154, 9/21 – Pickup on South Street (1953) (dvd)

I seem to be watching one Samuel Fuller movie a year, and that’s probably about right for me.

Last year, I took in the audacious Shock Corridor, a movie I’d never even heard of before Bertolucci so slyly dropped it into the opening moments of The Dreamers. What I missed about Bertolucci’s use of Shock Corridor was how the two movies were tied together by their incestual overtones. Man, sometimes it hits me just how much I don’t see when I watch a movie and it’s a little frightening. Anyway, I will always remember Shock Corridor for the line of the century, uttered by Peter Breck in voiceover: “Nymphos!”. I still laugh out loud thinking about it. I must own that movie on DVD.

Pickup on South Street is no Shock Corridor, but it’s an enjoyable piece of noir, where Fuller again takes the “man who bit off more than he can chew” story idea and runs with it. In it, you learn that pickpockets each have their own style, and there’s a tie-selling stoolie (she hates that word, though) named Moe who is an authority on the subject. That alone made the movie worth my time.

The pickpocket we care about in this instance is the rascally Skip McCoy, a three-time loser who can’t help lifting a wallet from a purse even though he’s fresh out of “the joint”; unsurprisingly, the trouble starts right there. Richard Widmark does very well in the seemingly-callous-outcast-who-isn’t-such-a-bad-guy-really role so often found in films of this period (if memory serves, he plays a similar character in Don’t Bother to Knock, but I saw that probably a good 130 movies ago, so forgive me if I’m wrong). But, despite what the movie tries to tell you, I know what Skip’s really made of. It’s Widmark, after all. Like every other fan of noir, I remember him most for tossing someone’s wheelchair-bound mother down a flight of stairs—while laughing. No. While giggling.

Skip may seem all right, but I ain’t buying it.

[I wrote little bits of this on each of the last five days. I struggled to get this opinion out, and I simply can’t promise it’s coherent.]

#153, 9/18 – The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004) (gitn)

So, not only did it remind me how much I liked the song “In Dark Trees”—my second favorite track on Brian Eno’s Another Green World—the made-for-BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares gave me a whole lot to be geeky over.

I should let you know, since I’m about to carve into certain aspects of the film, that I actually quite enjoyed it and suggest that everyone who is inclined to watch it do so. But.

Like its subtitle suggests, the documentary argues that fear-mongering has, over time, become a favored political tactic. To wit, writer/director/narrator Adam Curtis opens each segment of the documentary with this assertion:

“In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed. And today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand.”

Hmmm. I must respectfully disagree with how Curtis puts this. I could spend quite some time working through my problems with it, but I’ll be brief.

In the States, at least, fear-mongering has been an effective tactic throughout the twentieth century. If our nation’s occasional public witchhunts don’t show this, LBJ’s 1964 campaign advertisements (“The stakes are too high for you to stay home”) certainly do. The politics of fear, in the United States, anyway, is old hat. Left, right. Straussian or not. Our politicians have been preying on the fears of others for quite some time and they aren’t going to stop. Certainly, the 2004 election was mired in this “we will protect you!” business, but I don’t think 2004 was all that different from 1964. Who or what the politicians will protect you from may have changed (in 1964, make no mistake about it, the Democrats were offering to protect us from Goldwater), but both are working on principles far from this supposed political optimism of times gone by. (That is, I think Curtis, who endeavors to expose a fiction, is lost in one himself.)

What I’m suggesting is that politicians are advertisers. They sell themsevles in much the same way companies sell their products—and if the ad men were coming to fully understand the power of playing to our various emotions in the 1920s, you’d better believe our politicians got on the bus sometime around then, too. Sometimes they tell us they believe in a place called Hope, or a Shining City on a Hill. Sometimes, they tell us the other guy is gonna let Willie Hortons out on the streets every damn day (pure FUD). In this day and age, optimism and fear are both tools in the arsenal of almost every major politician (I’m hoping you’ll let me have that point. I’m too lazy to support it). The politics of fear may be on the rise (hard to argue that), but my instincts tell me it’s been a dominant approach before, and I’m sure it will wane again.

Alas, I just exposed my own silliness. I spent two paragraphs expressing my misgivings with what is, let’s just say it, a minor point. But his historical analysis bothered me throughout the film. He ignores the spider repeatedly, taking the Straussians and the Islamists well out of context. It all drove me a little nuts.

That said, his contemporary analysis is quite interesting. His opening continues:

“And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism, a powerful and sinister network with sleeper cells in countries across the world, a threat that needs to be fought by a War on Terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media.”

This is where Curtis’ stuff has legs. Is he right? Maybe. The documentary goes to great pains to point out that were no underground complexes in the mountains of Afghanistan; there’s very little evidence of well-connected sleeper cells, despite all the time and effort spent looking for them; and the threat of dirty bombs may be a bit of a fiction, too.

None of this means there isn’t a threat. Clearly, there are radical Islamists hell-bent on killing people—the attacks on London, Madrid, New York and Arlington are proof enough of this. But Curtis posits that the more sinister aspects of the threat seemingly posed by radical Islamists simply do not exist. In other words, we’re not facing anything we haven’t seen before. Images from the four cities I listed above may make you think otherwise, but could such things be indicative of changes of approach and not symptoms of a large, top-down network? That’s what Curtis suggests, and while I’m trying very hard not to say what I think, I certainly believe the argument has some merit. (It reminds me of a slightly less sophisticated take on what analyst John Robb calls “open source warfare”).

In the end, I think the good outweighs the not-so-solid by quite a lot. I’m a nitpicking geek about historical analysis, so there are things which bug the crap out of me. And I’m not saying I know more about history than Curtis, or anyone. Hardly. I don’t. I’m just saying I found the historical analysis in the movie largely unconvincing. A little too facile. He spotlighted things which I think should have been shown as part of a larger whole, but he never showed the connections. And blah blah blah.

I can get frustrated with certain parts of a movie and still think well of the whole, though. Obviously(?). Thank heavens.

(Oh. My favorite track from Another Green World? The almost absurdly mathematical “Golden Hours”, with Fripp’s absolutely brillaint guitar solo.)

#152, 9/17 – A Short Film About Love (1988) (dvd)

A few years ago—I’m pretty sure before I had TiVo—IFC ran Kieslowski’s Dekalog. I’d never heard of it before that, but anything coming from the director of one of the greatest films of the last twenty years (me, opinionated?) was going to grab my attention. I saw the first two or maybe three installments, but missed the rest (which is what makes me think it was pre-TiVo), but I’ve been hankering to see the whole thing since.

I didn’t realize until just before it got here that A Short Film About Love is, in fact, a modified version of Dekalog 6: Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery. Apparently it’s been edited and the ending has been changed, but the basic idea remains intact, I guess.

In it, we see a young man who has fallen for a woman he’s never met. She lives in an apartment across the courtyard from him and he’s been watching her—with opera glasses first, and then a telescope—for a year. When the film starts our protagonist, in classic Bacharach/David form, longs to be close to her, but she literally has no clue he exists. So he contrives ways to be near her, but his ideas are, to put it charitably, not very well considered. Eventually, though, he makes himself known to her and things carry on, in an odd, sloppy, and very human way, from there.

The brilliance of this is that Kieslowski steers clear of easy judging or mocking. Before you get on my case, our protagonist’s obsessive voyeurism is more than a touch creepy, sure, but somehow we always knew that this guy wasn’t the kind to threaten her well-being. Yes, I understand full well that he violated her privacy every night, so don’t think I’m going “aw, ain’t that cute!”. The film shows these characters, faults and all, as they did some hard-to-forgive things to each other. Other directors, when faced with similar situations, have not been able to show this kind of relationship while keeping a straight face.

But this is why Kieslowski was great: He was a patient observer, someone who knew well enough to stay still and let his characters act and react—to not tell us how to feel, because we don’t need to be led, thank you very much. He never lost his documentarian skills and I suppose it’s only natural that he found voyeurism fascinating (see also Red).

I wish he was still alive and making films. It’s great that people are still adapting his scripts, but I wish he was around to direct them.

#151, 9/17 – I Vitelloni (1953) (dvd)

Of all the filmmakers I’ve spoken well of in my life, Fellini is the one I’ve always been the most unfair to. Even when 8 1/2 blew my doors off in 2002, I didn’t, well, shout from the rooftops (sorry, couldn’t be helped) about it. I’ve always qualified my admiration for Fellini with statements like “well, but he has these tendencies…” or “his later films kill me…”. While exactly the same is true of Antonioni, I’ve still called him a genius.

I don’t know why I’ve never been able to unreservedly compliment the big liar, but that’s gotta stop. Fellini was a great director.

(Yeah, here come the qualifications anyway.) Sure, I got about sixty-three seconds into Roma before I said “basta!” and erased that thing from my TiVo (I’ll probably try again soon; but… ow). And I’m pretty sure Satyricon would kill me. (Now there’s a headline for you: Man commits suicide by watching the Italian movie he knew would do him in. Neighbors think he suffered.)

Still (here’s where we nullify the qualifications), I can’t think of many filmmakers who, in a nine year stretch, made a set of films equal to La Strada, The Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2. Fellini was great.

And while I’m never gonna toss out I Vitelloni as an example of what I love about Fellini, it’s still a film I greatly enjoyed watching. Seeing it so soon after La Dolce Vita, it’s a very interesting to contrast the two. I Vitelloni isn’t very dense or complex and it has almost none of the dreamy quality Fellini’s later films would have in sometimes preposterous amounts. This is a pretty modest undertaking, especially when compared with his later work, but I loved it all the same.

#150, 9/14 – La Dolce Vita (1960) (dvd)

Probably the most involved, complex movie I’ve seen this year. And only the second or third that left me with an “I’m… not sure how I felt about this, yet” feeling. I’m seriously going to need time to let this one sink in. It reminded me quite a bit of my beloved L’Avventura (without the mystery, obviously), and that’s obviously a good thing.

All I have to say right now is this: While I doubt it will challenge either 8 1/2 or The Nights of Cabiria in my heart, I can see why this film was such a success.

I hope to say more about it later. I’m glad I own this. I’m going to enjoy watching it again… when I find 3 spare hours.

#149, 9/11 – Vanishing Point (1971) (dvd)

A slice of the American pysche, inspired at least partially by the social anxieties which fueled Easy Rider and personal favorite Two-Lane Blacktop.

The only problem I had with Vanishing Point was the infamous and totally pointless gay-bashing scene. It doesn’t ruin the movie, but it certainly slows down what had been a great ride up until that point.

I enjoyed it. I don’t have much else to say about it at this point.

#148, 9/11 – The Girl From Monday (2005) (dvd)

Hal Hartley. Science Fiction. Two phrases you don’t expect to see together. Ever. I wish I could say it was a chocolate and peanut butter combination, but really it isn’t.

I applaud low-budget efforts at doing science fiction. You don’t need a lot of money to make a capable science fiction piece, after all (because many such films don’t need extensive costumes, set design, or special effects). And while I’m not a financing expert I’m pretty sure the biggest expense genre classics like Frankenheimer’s Seconds, Lucas’ one and only classic, and Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four had were star salaries.

When the biggest name you have comes from the cast of Sliders, that’s not a problem.

All you really need to pull of an effective piece of science fiction is a semi-coherent idea. OK, it helps if you execute the idea well. Hartley had the idea, basically. I thought it was a tad silly, but I got where he was going. It’s a very small scale restatement of some very old science fiction precepts about preserving our humanity. And I’m all for that. But where Girl From Monday fails and, say, Truffaut’s underrated, elegant Fahrenheit 451 succeeds is simple enough to pinpoint: Truffaut didn’t play stupid tricks with film speed. What the hell are you doing , Hal? Maybe this is my persistent headache talking, but christ that was an annoying film to watch.

(Speaking of relatively low-budget science fiction, by the way, I just found out someone is remaking Westworld. Big mistake. Don’t do it. You will fail as surely as the twits who thought Rollerball should be revisted. You’ll embarrass everyone.)

#147, 9/8 – Control Room (2004) (dvd)

If I don’t write something about this now, I might never. I’m winging it for the next couple of entries. I hope you understand.

Control Room had been quietly sitting in its protective sleeve atop my DVD player since August 16th. I tend to wacth a movie within three days of its getting here (seven if I’m really busy). By Labor Day I knew I wasn’t in the mood to see it. And on Thursday I’d planned to send it back to Netflix unwatched, but I threw it into the player just to see how long it was first. Since it was only an hour and a half, I decided to give it a try after all. I’m ever so glad I did.

Briefly, it’s a brilliant study of the nature of journalism (and, yes, of propaganda too). The four major people in the film (Centcom spokeman Lt. Josh Rushing, al Jazeera producers Samir Khader and Deema Khatib, and al Jazeera journalist Hassan Ibrahim) are surprisingly real and interesting in front of the camera. Just as importantly, Jehane Noujaim knows to simply watch and listen. The little discussions between Ibrahim and Rushing are enough to carry the film, but there’s more to recommend it, too.

Of all the documentary films I’ve seen which touch on Iraq, I think Control Room is by far the most satisfactory. (Most of my friends won’t agree with me here, but I find Michael Moore’s movie on the subject somewhat disappointing.) And that’s simply because it’s not very pushy. I’m very glad I saw it.

#146, 9/7 – Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) (dvd)

I don’t know how I’d never seen this before. I loved watching the animated series on mornings before school. I read the book when I was nine. I was fascinated by it. Fascinated. Still am.

But somehow, some way, I never caught a filmed verion of it before now. This was such a WNYW (well, it was WNEW at the time) Saturday afternoon kind of movie (or, was that Sundays? Saturdays may have been for poorly-dubbed Hong Kong movies.) I really should have seen it at some point. But then, I haven’t seen Fantastic Voyage, either.

Oh, well. I’ve caught it now. 50s adventure/sci-fi, complete with “giant” lizards. You know how that goes.

Still fascinated, but, man, the movie kind of didn’t sweep me away the way I’d hoped it would. Did I mention that they made Pat Boone belt out a coupla numbers? (I fast-forwarded. My head couldn’t take it.)

What did I expect from 1959?

(It was silly for me to do in my current state, but I dragged myself to a movie on Saturday. I spent some of it with my eyes closed, trying to live through the splitting headache. But, hey, I was out of the apartment anyway because I needed to buy some stuff. And it’s Ralph and Rachel. I had to give it a shot.

There’s one more movie I’ve seen but yet to write about. But I only just watched it this morning….)

#145, 9/3 – The Constant Gardner (2005) (tofw)

“He’d kill us if he had the chance.”

That one sentence might be my favorite line in the history of film (certainly my favorite line in the history of 70s thrillers). Its ambiguity is not instantly apparent, but there simply is no way you can tell me what that sentence actually means outside of its proper context.

Our perception is sometimes all we have, and it’s a rather subjective thing. A little conjecture can sometimes lead a person to the most unfortunate of conclusions. It’s those tiny revelations (the “my god, what have I been thinking?!” moments) which are far more interesting and potent to me than, say, the startling truth behind Soylent Green. That is, stories which reveal reasonable errors in perception are far more interesting to me than twisty conspiracies.

The Constant Gardner, bless its heart, has both. It invites us to follow Justin Quayle’s perception as he goes through, arguably, the most important personal journey of his life. And it connects this odysey with a plucked-from-the-zeitgeist conspiracy tale. Heavens. (Now how much would you pay?). As Quayle’s perception changes, so does ours, and this is thanks entirely to, yes, the nature of the thriller (Ha! And you thought I could only badmouth the genre).

It’s Quayle’s emotions, his internal state, which carry this movie. It’s a lovely way for a thriller to be. Full credit to the cast and crew, because I think this movie was well done all the way around.

I had more to say, I think, but I can’t remember what it was.

Oh, Bill Nighy. When used properly, Bill Nighy rocks. I’d expound, but you already know I’m right.

[@Century 12 Evanston, 1:00pm]

My illness is severely eating into my movie-watching. And, my writing about movie-watching.

Fun.

#144, 9/2 – Oldboy (2003) (dvd)

I think revenge films all run the risk of losing touch with the humanity of their central characters—of turning the seekers of justice into robots programmed for exactly one mission. (I think Tarantino’s revenge epic fell into precisely this trap until its very last moments, and by then it was too late.) This would be OK if the movies themselves didn’t seem to think this robotic-ness was just fine. It’s not. No matter how justifiably inhuman this person becomes, they certainly had hopes, dreams, fears, and pains which are still bubbling inside them (moreover, there’s the loss of whatever hopes and dreams were killed by the person(s) they seek to bring down). It’s an element I’d like more of these movies to explore.

On this score, at least, Oldboy is a step in the right direction. Though not a rule-breaking classic of the form, the film at least acknowledges that Oh Dae-Su is so driven to exact his revenge that no one (especially not Oh Dae-Su) is sure what he’ll be after he achieves his goal. As the Mr. Oh’s tormenter notes in one of their face-to-face encounters:

Seeking revenge is the best cure for someone who has been hurt. Try it. The loss of fifteen years, the pain of losing your wife and child, all this can be forgotten. Once again, revenge is good for your health. But, what happens after you’ve had your revenge? I bet that hidden pain probably emerges again.

The heart of film is a basic mystery where “what’s being done?” is answered very easily, though “why is it being done?” remains cloudy until somewhere near the end. It fairly effectively steals a page from one of my favorite thrillers (though in that movie’s case, both the what and the why were full-on surprises), and, hey, it has some interesting one-versus-many combat scenes. I can’t complain. Well, I won’t complain.