"Accomplishments"
At home: Having seen Aziz Ansari's homage to Italian neo-realism in Master of None, there's no question in my mind that the way angels behave in Good Fortune is right out of Wim Wenders' seminal The Wings of Desire. He's definitely a cinephile, versed in international classics. It's therefore a bit of a disappointment that the film is so unartful. It's even pointedly obvious, looking like any bog-standard comedy set in L.A., with characters that speak very plainly to this moment of social class divide. It's telling financially comfortable people this is what poverty in America is like today, like the words aren't being spoken by people who do very well for themselves, thank you. Its heart is in the right place, and Keanu Reeves' awkward, fish out of water, angel is a comedic highlight, but Ansari has only one character in him (you've seen it) and Seth Rogan as the tech bro forced to switch places with him in a divine mistake is on par with himself. But it's hard to laugh too hard when you're constantly being reminded that you are a progressively more "have not", while also being told to find joy in the littlest of things. That's a fine message in a fantasy universe where angels are protecting lost souls, but that's a fantasy.
In Relay, Riz Ahmed is a professional, anonymous (he's in AA, too, I see what they did there) "broker" who acts as negotiator and protector for whistle blowers who have bowed to corporate intimidation tactics and want to give their stolen documents back and be left alone. Lily James is such a whistle blower, and one whose pharmaceutical masters employ mercenaries who just might be equal to Ahmed's subterfuge. It mostly plays like a procedural, at least until James starts making dangerous mistakes, and is fascinating for any fan of espionage thrillers. It may be set in a privatized world, but it's still spycraft. Take away the patriotism of normal spy stories, and you have a world of muddled grays to navigate. Yes, we're saving the whistle blower, but that means the whistle is never blown. I will say I didn't love the final twist, but thinking back, everything makes sense, so I come off Relay liking it despite my misgivings.
High and Low is, to my eyes, one of Kurosawa's best, but if I were to remake it, I think, yes, Spike Lee might be on my list of directors who could pull it off. I at least respect the audacity of putting superlatives on the title, but Highest 2 Lowest is very much a disappointment. Denzel Washington is a successful music producer, which is definitely more interesting than the original's shoe company, but that's just it. It feels like Lee gets distracted by it, and slams the film out of focus as a result. Gone is Kurosawa's stark dichotomy between the social classes, and a blurrier universe takes... well, not shape, exactly. It's got a good cast (Jeffrey Wright is also excellent), and some fine moments, like the apparently unscripted verbal sparring between Washington and the kidnapper, but then the fathers turn to vigilantism and the movies goes off the rails completely. Lee is perhaps too enamoured by "black success" to give a proper voice to the "Lowest". But even when I don't draw comparisons, I think the film is a failure. The score is incredibly bad - obnoxiously cheesy - which is a crime when the film is about the music business. The domestic scenes would fit in a Tyler Perry ensemble movie. Just so many eye rolls.
Sometimes, I think everyone wants to make their own version of Melville's Le Samouraï, and George Clooney in The American fits the bill. It's the story of a mostly silent assassin, here hiding out in a small Italian attempt after an attempt on his own life. Unlike Alain Delon in that earlier film, he may be losing his edge, seeking companionship in women, drawing out an emotionalism that could prove a liability (and indeed, already has). Even in this small town, there's a prostitute with hidden depths, a contact who seems designed to play on his weakness, and a priest he can't help but becomes friends with. His openness might get him killed. And that's all very nice and all, but the slow burn towards inevitable tropes, the lack of dialog, and the unnecessarily obtuse ending all contribute to making this one rather boring. It's at is best when Violante Placido (the call girl) is on screen, by turns charming and making Clooney's killer paranoid, but it's not enough to make the film all that interesting, even if I'm usually enamoured of procedural spycraft.
Before Christopher McQuarrie became Tom Cruise's go-to guy, he made The Way of the Gun, a dank and dirty crime picture about two anarchic drifters (Ryan Philippe and an almost terminally restrained Benicio del Toro) deciding to hold a surrogate mother (Juliette Lewis) hostage to get money out of the unborn child's rich parents. Of course, it's never that simple. There are many secrets to uncover and the world is about as amoral as it gets. The leads thumb their noses at God's "natural order", and indeed, at notions of Hollywood endings, if not short story ironies. The title is incredibly generic - sure, there's a lot of shooting, but it's not really about that - however, it does sound Asian, and it's just about the closest an American film has gotten to "heroic bloodshed" for me. But then, it also evokes other things. Perhaps Peckinpah. Or with its Mexican setting in the back half, spaghetti westerns. I'm not entirely convinced, but there are some banger hard man lines, and James Caan as the aging bag man is a very intriguing character.
Between the title and the poster, Madam Satan set the wrong expectations. It LOOKS like a pulp crime story, but turns out to be a precursor to later, better screwball comedies. The year is 1930, and the set-up isn't unlike a lot of the romcom output of that decade - wealthy socialites, misunderstandings, romantic comedy between people who are already married... although I didn't expect it to also be a musical (I don't like the warbly voices of early sound cinema, so that's not necessarily a plus, but it's not a big minus either). Only the zeppelin sequences really tap into the pulpy side of things and remind you that this is, indeed, a Cecil B. DeMille production, with everything that entails. And that third act is still the best part because it's bananas, with weird call-backs to Lang's Metropolis and cool special effects. What sinks the ship for me is how dated the sexual politics are. The husband is cheating, yet it's the wife's fault for being too "cold", but when she takes on the pre-Code identity of Madam Satan, now she's an outrageous hussy. Both she and the "other woman" Trixie deserved better, but the film takes its patriarchal nonsense take for granted.
There's just something I like about Anne Baxter, and she's so good at light comedy that I can't believe her career didn't necessarily skew that way. Her presence in The Blue Gardenia (and that of her quite fun roommates, Ann Sothern especially) makes it a fairly pale Noir, but one that feels shocking when Baxter is put under sexual threat. The story: After getting bad news, Baxter gets drunk with the wrong person and wakes up without a complete memory of her date... with a murdered man. Well, you know how these things go. The truth is probably more complicated then it seems, yadda yadda, and that's the case here too. I don't really like the abrupt save at the end (even if the movie played fair with the clues), nor the sudden romance between Baxter and the newspaper man who wants an exposé from her (that's a little too Hollywood), but Baxter is so good, whether doing comedy, romance, sadness, or paranoia, that I can't stay mad at the resolution for more than a second. Bonus cast: Raymond Burr, "Superman" George Reeves, and Ed Wood star Dolores Fuller as an uncredited extra!
When both Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan's names show up in Crossfire's credits, you know one of them did it. A pair of two more charmingly sinister actors of this era, I couldn't imagine. (Robert Young plays the straight-arrow detective to this mystery, because you apparently have to be named Robert to be in the film.) Part of the post-war malaise subgenre, this Noir features servicemen, both active and recently released, and an antisemitic murder. The jig is up pretty early a to who the culprit is, and oof, the anti-prejudice message is loud and in your face, quite hokey in its presentation, actually, so I can't give this full marks. Mitchum is, as usual, the one to watch and gets all the best dialog, especially compared to Young's PSA speeches. It's beautifully shot, and I always enjoy Gloria Graham (It's a Wonderful Life), but Crossfire is too dated to leave much of a mark.
Glenn Ford arrives in a Smalltown U.S.A. like he's already on the run in Framed, but he's just trying to outrun hard time. Well, as the title implies, harder times are yet to come. I have a fondness for Ford, and I find it particularly interesting that he doesn't fall as easily for his fatale (played by Janis Carter) as other Noir heroes tend to. He's too suspicious, too jaded, for that kind of thing. The bad guys' plan is teased as we go, enlivening our experience with mystery and deduction, and the twists come naturally. Carter is... some piece of work, let me tell ya. Their one mistake: Thinking our man Glenn Ford is the perfect patsy for their crime. As it turns out, situations are too fluid for that, even if Ford is, on the surface of it, a drunk, a drifter, and technically friendless. Perfectly entertaining for what it is, and I was pre-sold, as I usually am, by Glenn Ford's participation.
There's no doubt that Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog is an exercise in style, taking from German expressionism, Film Noir techniques, and on the literary side, Kafka (with Allen as his usual nebish persona acting as a Josef K. figure involved in a plan he knows nothing about and accused of things without any basis), but it's stylistically very cool. Not only are there great visuals, but it seems like every time a minor character walks on for a single scene or smattering of lines, it's a name actor. Allen's opposite number is Mia Farrow, a woman who runs away FROM the circus because her clown of a husband (John Malkovich) doesn't want to give her a baby. These two neurotic souls meet on a foggy night where a strangler stalks the unwary, and lynch mobs are ready to hang anyone for his crimes. And despite the setting and style, it's still a Woody Allen comedy, with sex talk and nervous blithering. Ultimately, while I had fun with it, it's too random, jumping through story elements as if to check them off a list of the genres emulated, but they don't really come together as a whole. The Allen and Farrow threads are essentially anathema to each other, too-different movies that should never have crossed in the night.
Remade four years later as Vanilla Sky, Open Your Eyes ALSO stars Penélope Cruz as the woman of a man's dreams (here, Eduardo Noriega), a man who can't tell the difference between dreams and reality anymore. It's been decades since I saw Vanilla Sky, so I could look at Open Your Eyes with fresh ones, and only a vague sense of déjà vu (appropriate for this film). If I didn't remember the twist ending exactly, I did remember that it wasn't that hard to predict, and same here. I don't think that's what it's going for. Rather, we're meant to question whether the twist will happen or happen or note, as the lead's mental state continues to deteriorate after an accident leaves his handsome face mutilated. It is a visually arresting film, and not just because the camera loves Cruz like no other, full of surreal images, odd transitions, beautiful lighting and idiosyncratic set dressing. Vanilla Sky didn't leave as much of an impression.
From the World Cinema Project![Samoa] To Western eyes, The Orator is so steeped in Samoan traditions that it initially comes across as mysterious and semi-opaque. There will be no big exposition scene, you will learn as you go. In that context, it's very much a film by Samoans FOR Samoans. But it pays off no matter where you're from. Saili is a little person, the son of a now-dead chief, who stands to lose everything because of his cowardice (or, to be kinder, an insecurity rooted in his disability). This is a culture where one must speak up and demand what is theirs, and faced with mounting losses - farmers planting on his parents' plot, his wife's family wanting to take her away, etc. - he inches ever closer to finding his voice. From the performances, you wouldn't think these are all unpracticed screen actors - they feel natural and emotional (if restrained). Each family member gets a subplot that dovetails into Saili's story, giving them room to shine (I especially like his wife). Tremendous.
[Torkelau] The VAKA of the title is a boat, as in, we're all in the same one. I'm finding that climate change is actively submerging a lot of Pacific islands and that most of these territories have produced short ecological documentaries. This one is largely about the Torkelau's adaptations to climate change, strategies to fight its effects, etc. I've done work on sustainable communities, and this looks like one of the stronger models. Urgency demands it.
[Tuvalu] An elliptical short made in editing, .TV centers on Tuvalu, whose main export is their national web extension, a tiny country being eaten away by rising waters. Made entirely of footage found on YouTube and (dot)tv sites - and hear I was going to recommend its gorgeous cinematography - it's replete with shots empty of people, suggesting a disappearing country that might eventually only exist in the cybersphere. I'm enamoured of the manifesto narration as well.
[Tonga] The video look and borrowed music cues undermine The Legend of Kava Tonga, a retelling of a dark Polynesian myth explaining their cultivation of kava. There's no much there.
[Marshall Islands] In Zori, a kid has lost one of his zori (they're flip-flops) and is told not to come home until he finds it. The kid logic results in a kind of hero's journey unfortunately punctuated by unnecessary flashbacks to the same couple lines. It had potential to rise above its limited production value, but becomes too tedious for that.
[Seychelles] I like the castaway comedy of The Ferals, but the horror element that eventually takes over is undercooked. Feels like director-star Stefan Ruiz is fishing for the budget to take this to feature, but didn't prove he could have handled it.
[Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha] A love story set on a remove, isolated island in the South Atlantic, 37°4 S is all narration and images, as perhaps it didn't have the equipment to record dialog properly, but oof, that narration is dull as dishwater, or at least, its delivery is. It's too bad because there's value in presenting a world from which people leave and never return, and those left behind are alone with their delusions.
[Norfolk Island] Inasmuch - Spirit of the Norfolk Island Custodian tells a story I didn't know anything about, but that I connect, in some fashion, to my own (Acadian) ethnorigins. Though clearly a documentary on one side and not showing any other, it's the story of the people of Norfolk Island, descended from the castaways from the Bounty and Polynesian natives, now with their distinct genetic heritage, culture and patois, and Australia's land grab, taking away their independence in 2015. The situation is doubtless more complex than shown here, and Inasmuch is therefore incomplete. I appreciate the "passionate eye", but it left me wanting more.
[Vatican] Pope Leo XIII Being Seated Bestowing Blessing is an extremely early piece of footage (late 1890s) that, surprisingly, includes audio of the blessing (was that added later, or could this be the earliest "talky"?). Either way, it's interesting that Leo XIII modernized the Catholic Church and is here in a piece of film, but this one's for historians more than cinephiles, surely.
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