"Accomplishments"
At home: I saw you, I See You, and what I saw was one contrived twist too many. At one point, I just threw up my arms, as if in surrender, but I was lying to you movie, I was planning to give you a bad review. Or at least a lukewarm one. In this exercise in chain-jerking, a police detective in Amblin Town is investigating the disappearance of local kids. That's background and subplot to what seems the real story, in which a creepy and possibly supernatural presence haunts the man's house and family, including his wife played by Helen Hunt in a role that was made for... well, Toni Collette, honestly. Hunt barely gives a performance and sleep walks through most of the film. Then the action repeats, and we see things from a different perspective. Intriguing reversal and the most interesting thing here, but also a big tension defuser. I'm already feeling like the movie was lying to me with its atmosphere, and then the twists keep coming. But you have to buy the premise to buy the bit, and you may well buy it. Because the film is continually throwing away what makes any given act interesting, and because its action is not the clearest, I found that I couldn't
You can really tell that Kurosawa made Drunken Angel in the immediate post-war era, not just because locations look bombed out, but because it has that very specific examination of traditional Japanese values (in this case the Yakuza code) as artifacts of a culture that no longer seems relevant. The title character is an alcoholic doctor played by Takashi Shimura, a man who despite his brokenness is devoted to his oath and takes care of kids and gangsters alike, and is unwilling to give up specifically on Toshirō Mifune's TB-stricken Yakuza, this Noir's second focus, just as devoted to his code, and that's what's going to kill him. Mifune's Matsunaga is a symbol for that dead Japan, struggling to find relevance. Dr. Sanada is a broken Japan, forging ahead as best he can, living by a man-made swamp of filth. But one of his patients, a young girl, is the new Japan, bright and hopeful. Sanada's nurse is that part of Japan that pines for what has been lost and hasn't yet accepted what's to come. While Matsunaga's story is cruel Noir, Sanada's manages to be a little more positive, and is the more touching for it. And do I really need to say Kurosawa does great things with light, shadow and music? I especially like the use of foreshadowing in the door that refuses to stay open and keeps closing by itself, signaling the end of an era no matter how much you don't want it to.
In 1949, Kurosawa was still interested in post-war Japan, and the subtext in Stray Dog even becomes text, at one point. Toshirō Mifune plays a rookie police detective who gets his gun stolen and crushed by guilt when it is used in violent crimes, partners up with Takashi Shimura's older and wiser policeman to recover it before all its bullets are spent. Interestingly, the cop and the criminal share an origin story as well as a gun, but one chose law, the other, crime. That shared guilt is perhaps Japan's, a Japan at a crossroads between peace and violence, and the final showdown is really about a man facing his darker self, which he nevertheless has empathy for. Kurosawa even plays with mirroring in his camera work. Stray Dog manifests the lead's anxiety in three very clever ticking clocks. One is the seven bullets we know the crook might use. Another is the baseball game, which builds tension for the capture of a person of interest. And the most omnipresent of course is the heat wave, which adds extra pressure, only occasionally relieved by a rain storm, and that rain storm is a moment of madness that brings with it as much chaos as it does freedom. I half expected the gun to fall from the sky like it does in Magnolia.
Mifune is riveting in (and as) Red Beard, Kurosawa's epic about country doctors in Feudal Japan, a film that has a pretty straightforward, even predictable, premise - young ambitious doctor is pissed he has to intern in a country hospital, but eventually learns the true meaning of the vocation through his gruff, red-bearded mentor - and seems to take its time about it as various patients tell their stories, etc. But by the second half, Kurosawa's intent becomes clear, as do his reasons for setting it in a historical setting. Feudal medicine is, let's face it, a bit of a horror show, so what the doctors offer is kindness in an unkind world. And that's what Red Beard is really about. Kindness. Showing it, teaching it, and learning it. And the more that theme came to the fore, the more I wept. Well beyond the amazing cinematography, and that badass fight scene, the intense lesson in kindness is what floored me. Destroyed me, even. This may well be the greatest medical drama ever put to film. FAVORITE OF THE WEEK
Kurosawa's High and Low shouldn't work, and in the hands of a lesser director, definitely wouldn't have. He spends the first half of the film in a closed set, basically shooting a play about a kidnapping, quite procedural once the police arrive, but also highly emotional as a rich man's chauffeur has to humbly stand there as his boss insists he need not pay the ransom for his employee's mistakenly-taken son, a ransom that would break him financially. Then the movie opens up and becomes a proper police procedural showing the investigation and manhunt for the kidnapper, delivering a lot of the information in meetings and press conferences, which again, should not work. But we're riveted either way. Not to say it's all talking heads. The sequence aboard the train is a great, and tension mounts as the cops close in at the end - you're practically tearing your hair out as a man fails to get a taxi cab. It's so well done. On a technical level, it's flawless (duh), and there's one particular clue that just brought a smile to my face in the way it was revealed (you know the one). On a thematic level, the title turns out to be the key to everything, but you still question things to the end. If nothing else, it will make you gain respect for proper, real-world detective work, the kind we hardly ever see in movies.
There are a lot of movies like Blackboard Jungle, and I kind of thought it might be the first of its kind, but even if it is, it can't escape formula. In terms of results, it's a mostly predictable film, with all-too-clear set-ups marking the way. In the particulars, it may surprise, but that's because it's way over the top. The movie actually loses points in the opening scroll, warning us about the dangers of juvenile delinquency before overstating its point by portraying a school where all the bad kids seem to get funneled, where teachers get knifed in back alleys or raped by students in the library... and yet these truants and gangbangers still show up for class. I did catch the explanation that in 1955, we have a teenage generation that lost their father figures in the war, but it all seems to extreme as to be unbelievable. Dated '50s attitudes are prevalent (there's also some ugly slut shaming from the protagonist's wife that goes relatively unchallenged). But look, I will never find Glenn Ford not watchable, even if his character is a little hard to latch on to at first, and Sidney Poitier, in a supporting role, is immediately engaging (as usual), and I do like Blackboard Jungle as a double feature pick with To Sir, With Love, where Poitier takes on the inner city school teacher's role. Very watchable, but melodramatic and histrionic. Show it to your teacher friends to give them nightmares.
Sidney Poitier's first directorial effort, Buck and the Preacher, takes for its premise a very interesting piece of forgotten American history. In the wake of the Civil War, some people facilitated the exodus of former slaves to the West, while others paid to have them rustled back by whatever needs necessary to serve as an if not free then cheap workforce. Poitier plays one of the former, teaming up with a con man/preacher played by Harry Belafonte, going up against the white man in a western worthy of being called a precursor to Django Unchained. By the third act, however, I feel like it's abandoned its unique historical background to cycle through classic western tropes, and though the action ramps up, it's sort of lost its way. Too sensitive at first to turn into a western/blaxploitation hybrid in the end, maybe. And though the minimalist score is distinctive, lone mouth organs and strident harmonicas just isn't for me.
In Fingers, Harvey Keitel basically gets his training for Bad Lieutenant, which I realize now was heavily inspired by this 1978 flick. The structure is kind of the same. Keitel moves despondently from incident to incident until he melts down. It's not quite as bleak as Bad Lieutenant (how could it be?), but the vibe is very much the same. In this case, he plays a would-be concert pianist who collects debts for his father, a bookie. He walks around with a tape deck, accompanied by his own rock'n'roll soundtrack, which annoys the people around him and often sparks violence (and eventually a very raw fight scene in a stairwell). Keitel is great, of course. Passionate about his music, a fumbling Lothario in the bedroom (and public bathroom), violent and unpredictable as a legbreaker, and uncompromisingly brave as an actor (if you tell me that was a real prostate exam captured on screen, I would believe you). And yet, Fingers only held my interest with difficulty. It's a film about a self-destructive guy who fails to realize his ambitions, and comes across as a pointless urban picaresque as a result. I respect the performance more than I do the disjointed story.
The Set-Up is as fit and trim as a boxer should be, not just in terms of length, but in the world it creates in those 73 minutes. Everything that happens is either in preparation for a fight, the fight, or its aftermath, practically in real time. It's one of the better boxing fights I've seen on film too, it feels long and desperate, an aging athlete's last shot at glory (Robert Ryan is good in the role). Whether we're in the crowd, or in the boxers' locker room (which feels like the waiting room of a meat grinder), or on the streets of that town with long-suffering girlfriend Audrey Totter walking around and anxiously waiting out the clock, director Bob Wise is building that world as much as he can. Sound design also comes in, eschewing music for ambient sound - the roar of the crowd, traffic in the streets... And what do we think of that ending, and in particular the mixed feelings playing on Totter's face? The last of Wise's low-budget efforts for RKO, he certainly made it a good one.
What's Top Secret!'s slogan? Don't tell anyone? Well, okay, don't tell anyone, but I don't really jive to parody films in the style of Airplane, Naked Gun, et al. Or at least, I haven't in a long time. Probably thought it was very funny as a kid or young adult, but now I just sit there stoned-faced, predicting what the next gag should be, and only really appreciating the surreal absurdist sequences, like say, the underwater fight, while wincing at the occasional off-color humor. Top Secret! has one other thing going against it. It bugs me that it can't decide what time period it's supposed to take place in and doesn't seem to know a damn thing about East Germany. It starts as a Cold War spy story, but the Germans act like Nazis, and by the end, we're really doing World War II gags, but with a 1950's rock'n'roller as the lead (the modern anachronisms I at least expect from this type of film). It worked well enough as a spoof that I didn't want it to betray its world (silly as it was) for the sake of parodying specific films, especially when it made them cross genres. I'm sorry guys...
Haunted Spooks is a Harold Lloyd short that, at 25 minutes, should have leaned into its premise more. It's the old story (already old by 1920? or is this the first instance of it in cinema?) of having to stay in a haunted house to gain one's inheritance, and it gives us a number of good ghostly gags (and the classic meme-worthy hair-raising shot), albeit sometimes at the expense of the African-American characters being stereotyped (I frankly expected worse when the first title cards told us the story took place in the South - crap, is the title a horribly racist pun?). There's just a lot of set-up before we get there, some animal endangerment and fun but perhaps objectionable attempted suicide gags. Even so, the latter is where the comedy really picks up, and that's 10 minutes in. I do always like the text cards in a Lloyd picture, and the ending, a kind of symbolic wedding for the two leads, is rather clever.
There is a type of theater that really annoys me, and I'm afraid National Theatre Live's 2015 adaptation of Jane Eyre falls in that category: Plays that want to be movies. The chief sin of these plays is providing a continuous score, which I find trite outside of musical theater, even if the production is lavish enough to have a orchestra on stage with the actors. I gnash my teeth when the other gimmicks come out: Freeze frames and slow motion and other effects. In Sally Cookson's Jane Eyre, there are even more gimmicks - dynamic lighting cues, abstract set designs, fire effects, actors voicing Jane's thoughts, lyrical dance, pop songs and hymns sung on stage, people playing animals, and ok enough already. A couple of these would have been clever. All of them together is particularly exhausting. It's too bad because some of it is quite clever, but overall it's too gimmicky for me. And here's the thing. Novels can do things that plays aren't very good at. An adaptation OF a novel means a certain level of sacrifice. This production doesn't want to sacrifice anything. I struggled through the first act showing us Jane's life from infant to child to school girl - adults playing kids for a good hour - and the play doesn't start to be interesting until Rochester shows up (and Felix Hayes gives a fun performance in the role). If they'd boiled it down to Jane's life at Thornfield, integrating her earlier life in stories told through dialog, I would probably have been less impatient with it. Final rating: Humbug.
Shakespeare's most misanthropic play, Timon of Athens, was one he never staged, and given how straightforward and simple it is, possibly one he never quite finished. His more experimental latter-day period is also one filled with exiles, some self-imposed, and one might almost surmise he was becoming impatient with the theater scene. And yet, like all Shakespeare, it can be staged effectively. The BBC gave it a shot in '81 as part of its Complete Shakespeare and brought to it something special, in my opinion. Jonathan Pryce is perfect as Timon, a rich but naive man, easily flattered and obliviously buying friendships with gifts and bail-outs. When he loses his fortune, he finds all his friends have vanished, and embittered, leaves the company of humanity altogether, living on roots outside the city and cursing all who dare come near him. The echo of King Lear can be heard. And this is where the spareness of the play is used to good effect by director Jonathan Miller. While there is obviously a reality to this thanks to the sole subplot of the exiled soldier coming back to take the city by force, I could be totally convinced that all of Timon's visitations by characters from the first half are in his mind. Certainly that would explain the buried treasure he somehow finds himself sitting upon, and the repeated action of throwing gold at all comers since that's all they want of him (even when it isn't). Timon's progressively sinking into the ground is a romantic and ultimately symbolic notion, defying the natural character arcs of Shakespearean drama. I like it for that, and I do not consider it the least of Shakespeare's plays at all - some of his early comedies, while more entertaining, are very slight, and Henry VI can be a drudge - but it is extremely bleak. It is extremely fitting, I find, that the phrase "high and low" that gave Kurosawa's film that title is in this play.
Comments