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RED: Lesser known films. PURPLE: Lee's comments |
Ultraviolet (2006) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com
Umberto D. (Italy, 1952) If I had to pick an Italian director as the "best," it would not be Fellini, but Vittorio de Sica, even though I've seen only a small fraction of De Sica's films and I've seen almost all of Fellini's. Federico was all about fantasy, even in his most realistic films. His metaphors were the church and the world of the theater. De Sica (at his best; I admit I haven't seen many of his films from the '60s, which I'm told were not very good) was all about the real world. The Bicycle Thief is on my Top 25 of all time list. Having said that ... I didn't like this quite as much as I expected to, given the reviews I've read. I don't know where I could have cut a single frame of The Bicycle Thief, but I thought Umberto D. could have used a trim here and there. We spent a lot of time watching him get in and out of bed. The end was heartbreaking, though. Recommended. IMDb.com
Un Chien Andalou (France, 1928) Written and directed by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. Roger Ebert has this to say in his excellent review: "In collaborating on the scenario, their method was to toss shocking images or events at one another. Both had to agree before a shot was included in the film. ‘No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted,’ Bunuel remembered. ‘We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why.’" It is a stunning short film, one every film student should see, though it may be hard to find. I haven’t seen it in almost 40 years, and many of the images still remain vivid. IMDb.com
Unbreakable (2004) Double feature with The Village. IMDb.com
Unconditional Love (2002) Excellent little gem starring Kathy Bates, who is never bad, and Rupert Everett. When her husband leaves her she takes off on a wild adventure, attending the funeral of a gay singer she worshipped. She gets involved with his lover ... and the movie gets a little wild here, but it kept me going. A great performance by one Meredith Eaton (4’ 3"), as a kick-ass midget. IMDb.com
(2003) Part one of a Diane Lane double feature, alphabetically. This is the better of the two. Not great, but watchable. IMDb.comUnderworld (2003) Underwhelming. IMDb.com
Unfaithful (2002) Diane Lane again, being unfaithful to Richard Gere. Just didn’t quite work for me. Worked for me. IMDb.com
Unfaithfully Yours (1948) I just discovered something of trivial interest. In 1948 George Orwell wrote his masterpiece 1984, picking the year by reversing the last two digits. In the same year Preston Sturges wrote, produced, and directed this ... and in 1984 it was remade with Dudley Moore in the Rex Harrison part!
Go see this one. Avoid the re-make like the plague.
Preston Sturges is one of my favorite directors. He was a prolific writer in the '30s, and directed his first film in 1940. Between then and 1944 he made an astonishing seven comedies, and all but one of them were fantastic: The Great McGinty, Christmas in July (only so-so, by Sturges's standards), The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels (my personal favorite), The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. His career has been described as meteoric, and it was, and unfortunately a meteor flashes for only a brief time before it crashes. He got involved with Howard Hughes, and things started falling apart. He made an ill-advised drama, The Great Moment, and Harold Lloyd's last film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, then had one last flash of genius, this one, in '48.
Rex Harrison dominates the film in a performance of bombastic swagger and comic genius. He's an orchestra conductor, brilliant, mercurial, temperamental, who brings total passion to everything he does. In the history of the world there has been no greater love than he feels for his younger wife. But when the worm of doubt invades his mind, like Othello, he's just as passionate in his anger. While conducting a concert, he plots his revenge against his imagined cuckolding during one movement (Rossini's Overture to Semiramide), his magnanimous forgiveness in the second (Tannhauser), and a daring game of Russian roulette with his rival in the third. He is at first ingenious, in the second magnanimous, and in the third fearless ... until he shoots himself in the head! Oops, let's don't do that! Each fantasy is introduced by a long dolly-in shot that starts back among the bass fiddles and closes in on his eye, until we swirl down the pupil and into his mind, where, of course, everything is about him, and he has a very high opinion of himself. (In 1948 this was a most difficult shot to accomplish, and it was groundbreaking.) Of course, he's egomaniacal, but that's part of the job description for leading an orchestra, I would think.
This is all great fun, but the real fun begins when he decides on scenario #1, to kill his wife. The theme of Semiramide plays behind him as he tries to put his elaborate and ingenious plot into action ... and promptly, everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. The music stops and starts. Nothing goes according to plan. It's slapstick, and very well done. In the end, of course, everything turns out all right.
The dialogue is sparkling and witty and rapid-fire, as in all the best screwball comedies. Sturges's people are never at a loss as to how to express themselves. As a writer, he's at his best exposing human folly, and this is one of his best scripts. As a director he is almost as good, and has the nerve to run through almost the entire Semiramide in rehearsal, which could have bogged the film down in lesser hands, but here is a fascinating to the themes of the movie and of the music itself. IMDb.com
An Unfinished Life (2005) Sometimes I wonder about some of these big stars of my generation. Jane Fonda doesn't make a movie for 15 years, and then what does she pick? The fairly awful comedy Monster-in-Law. Barbra Streisand isn't around for years, then pops up in the cash-in sequel Meet the Fockers. What's the deal here?
Robert Redford used to make movies he believed in. Not all of them were successful, but at least he was trying. Now, I'll concede 2004's The Clearing was a very good film, underrated and hardly seen. But before that, the last film he made that I can believe really mattered to him was The Horse Whisperer in 1998, and even that was rather clichèd. Bottom line, he's not making the transition from young hunk who wants to be taken seriously—and deserves to be!—to the elder statesman, like Paul Newman. Here he goes for rumpled and gruff ... but with an easily accessible heart of gold just waiting to be set thumping by a darling granddaughter he doesn't know about. The whole movie is by the numbers. You can't hate it, but you see everything coming. It's a celluloid salad, all the right poignant and/or frightening elements thrown in, a little salt and a lot of honey, shake well, serve earnestly. Lee was worried the bear would get him, but I wasn't; the bear was just a symbol. But she knew exactly when the asshole stalker boyfriend would show up, and bingo! Just in time for Redford to beat the shit out of him.
The only really good thing here is Becca Gardner, who looks younger than her 15 years and is somebody to watch for. Very appealing. IMDb.com
Unforgiven (Best Picture 1992) CONTAINS SPOILERS. There’s a lot of actors who could have made this movie work fairly well, as a routine action western. But only Clint Eastwood could have elevated it to the status of a classic, and that’s simply because he’s the last credible mythic western movie star, from the tail end of the golden age. He was no John Wayne, and that was a good thing, because Wayne was always pretty much the good guy, and the hard-faced, emotionless men Eastwood portrayed in those now-distant Italian spaghetti-and-serape epics was morally ambiguous, at best. Nuanced they were not, but powerful in the same way Dirty Harry was powerful. Now, in the maturity of his career, Clint is into much more important things. In Unforgiven he stands most of the western movie clichés on their heads, to great effect, and only he could have made them all resonate as well as they do. He’s getting old, for one thing. He has a lot of trouble getting on his horse, which is good for a laugh every time. He’s out of place, for another. The era of the outlaw is pretty much over, and here is William Munny, doing battle with pigs, trying to raise two children, trying to live up to the promises he made to the good woman who reformed him and then died. But you know, looking at Clint there in the pigshit, that he wasn’t made for this, and there’s no use him trying to make a go of it. He’s a hard man, and a killer, and he knows this about himself and finally gives in, saying it’s because he needs the money, but deep down he’s just fed up with swine. I was enjoying this movie well enough until about a third of the way through, when it went up to a whole new level with the arrival of “English Bob,” wonderfully played by Richard Harris as one of those Brits so insufferable you just want to gobsmack him. He’s a whiz with his pistols, and we’re all set up for a showdown, in the last reel, between him, Eastwood, and Sheriff “Little Bill,” a wonderful performance (as usual) from Gene Hackman. That’s just the way it has to play out, right, by all the rules of western movies? Wrong! Little Bill disarms English Bob with the help of 5 deputies, sucker-punches him, then kicks the shit out of him while he’s on the ground. Exit English Bob, never to be seen again. Little Bill then kicks the shit out of Eastwood, who is half dead with the flu from spending a night out in the rain, something that never seems to affect tough cowboys, much less gunslingers. Oh, and don’t forget the wannabe all-mouth Schofield Kid, who is so nearsighted as to be almost blind, and most especially don’t forget Morgan Freeman as Clint’s old friend, who just gives up and tries to go home. The final bloodbath, when it comes, is shocking, over very quickly, and as brutal as anything I’ve ever seen. Then Eastwood, our hero, shouts out into the street that he’s coming out, and if anybody shoots at him, he will kill them … and all their family and all their friends … and, I assume, their little dog, too. Wow. This was a new West I hadn’t really seen before, long before the calculated in-your-face brutality and obscenity of Deadwood. IMDb.com
United 93 (2006) At 8:42 AM on September 11, 2001, United Flight 93 took off from Newark Airport headed for San Francisco. Aboard were 40 human beings (33 passengers, 7 crew) and four men who looked just like human beings but were actually monsters. Shortly afterward, shouting "Allahu akbar!" (which in the past has translated as "God is great!" but lately has often meant "God is an asshole, and I am a turd squeezed out of it!"), these monsters—and note their names, everybody, and spit when you hear them: Ziad Jarrah, Ahmed al-Haznawi, Ahmed al-Nami, Saeed al-Ghamdi—took over the plane, and 81 minutes later the plane crashed nose-down in a field in Pennsylvania. Shortly after that, the four came before Allah, expecting their dozen six-packs of virgins in Paradise. Allah spit in their faces and ordered them buried upside-down in boiling pigshit, there to spend eternity, immortal, unable to die. Djinni crap on their bare upturned feet. I intend to visit them when I die. Maybe with a feather. Hope they're all ticklish.
All that last is conjecture, of course, and so is much of this movie, but every frame of it is plausible. Hell, it's way beyond plausible. No one will ever know exactly what went down in those 81 minutes, beyond the transcripts of the phone calls made by many passengers. We know the monsters knifed some people to death before the crash. We must presume they killed or mortally injured the pilots. And we know a group of passengers attempted to re-take the plane. One of the most harrowing scenes in a thoroughly harrowing movie is the depiction of the struggle in the cockpit. Those places are small. There's a hundred buttons you don't want to fuck with. Imagine five or six people in there, armed with table knives and forks and whatever else they can improvise, all trying to wrestle this Muslim fanatic bent on death away from the controls. I don't know if a SWAT team could have done it, but these people tried. All glory and honor to them.
What is not conjecture is the scenes on the ground, in various civilian and military control rooms. Many of the people here are playing themselves, and it is a tribute to the director that I couldn't tell which ones they were. None of the actors seem like actors at all, and none of the real people rings a single false note. They are recreating what they did on that awful day, and are completely at ease with it.
I can't praise this film too highly. Paul Greengrass and his production designers were obsessive about detail. It all looks exactly as if a documentary film crew was there to record it all, both on the ground and in the air. (I can attest to its accuracy; more about that in a moment.) I was worried that it would be in some way a cash-in on the misery and suffering of that day, but it never felt that way. It was done with the knowledge and approval of the families of the dead, and some of the supplementary material on the DVD shows some touching scenes. The actor playing one man broke down in tears when introduced to the man's mother.
And oddly enough (I suppose because we're nearing the 5th anniversary), after we finished watching, Lee was channel-surfing and came across the rival production, the made-for-TV Flight 93. I watched it for five minutes or so and that was all I could stand without gagging. It was everything that United 93 was not, sloppy and saccharine and shamelessly tugging on the heartstrings. Yuck.
Now, as to the accuracy ...
In about 1980, courtesy of the MGM research department, I was a guest for a day at the Oakland Air Region Traffic Control Center (ARTCC). I was doing background for Millennium, which involves the collision of two jumbo jets at the beginning of the movie. I was more than a little nervous, as the cause of the collision was going to be computer failure and human error by an air traffic controller. Was this really something I wanted to talk about to the guys who actually did it?
Not to worry. The director and all the ATCs were eager to point out that my thesis was not only plausible, but a disaster waiting to happen. I was shown everything in great detail. The computer running it all, I was informed, was made in the 1960s. It was technology more than 20 years out of date. It used tubes, if you can imagine that. You couldn't get them in the US anymore, nobody made them. They had to go to Poland when one burned out. The system crashed twice while I was there, once for 5 minutes, once for 30. When that happened they went to a backup system that was 1950s technology!
These were the guys juggling thousands of planes every day, full of trusting, unaware passengers. It was a stressful job for inadequate pay, they were seriously overworked, burn-out was frequent, double shifts were common. They were pissed off about it, and wanting to get the word out any way they could, even through as humble a messenger as myself, hence the cooperation.
Not long after that their union, PATCO, walked out. Ronald Reagan fired them all. Many see that as the beginning of the long decline of union power that is still going on.
Now here's the point of all that: The ARTCC depicted in this film is identical in all ways to the one I visited in 1980. I was stunned! I knew that replacement and upgrading of computers and monitoring screens had been proceeding slowly (some were saying, not at all) ... but it is flabbergasting in these days of laptops with 200 gigabyte hard drives and high resolution flat screens that the FAA is still using the same shit they were using in 1965! I don't know what kind of computers were running the show, behind the scenes, but I'd bet you that they are far less powerful than the machine you are reading this on. This is what they're talking about when they mention our degrading national infrastructure, not just bridges and highways and sewers, and nobody's doing much about it, and it's fucking criminal.
Enough of that. Go see this movie. It will be hard to watch, but we all must remember. IMDb.com
The United States of Leland (2003) A 16-year-old psychopath up and stabs an autistic boy to death one day. He offers no explanation, and we see him in juvie hall, and the people whose lives he affected by the murder. He was ignored by his father, played by Kevin Spacey in a real snooze of a performance. Nothing much happens, and I wonder why I was supposed to care about any of these people, particularly Leland. Screw this movie. IMDb.com
Unknown Pleasures (China, 2002) The director is a cinematographer, and this film looks great. But it’s about disaffected Chinese youth wasting their lives, and a little of that goes a long way with me. IMDb.com
Unleashed (Danny the Dog) (2005) Luc Besson, who wrote this, is a highly-overrated Frenchman who made one film I liked (The Professional), and lot of crap (The Messenger, The Fifth Element, La Femme Nikita, The Big Blue). Oh, yeah, all those films were interesting to look at, but they had one failing I just can’t abide: They were dumb. Really dumb. Besson’s reputation has kept me away from two other films that I suspect are dumb, too: The Transporter, and Crimson Rivers. And I have to remember something next time, too. Roger Ebert doesn’t mind if a picture is stupid, if the action is huge and overblown. I rented this on the strength of his thumb, which was pointing up, as well as those of a lot of other reviewers who support the Besson cult.
I suppose the only way one can approach a movie like this is like grand opera, or Broadway musicals. True, no one in real life sings their words, like Carmen, and nobody breaks into song and dance like the Jets in West Side Story. Well ... I just happen to like those theatrical conceits. I don’t have to believe them.
But when a story gets as gritty and bloody as this, I find that belief is important. I’m told that I should view the silly and boring fights as choreography, and of course it’s easy to see that real skill and art is involved. I just don’t like it. In fact, it leads me to wonder what has happened to our culture, and other deep thoughts like that. I’m not being holier-than-thou here; I liked Kill Bill. But I loathed Sin City. A razor’s edge of difference, maybe, but as important as the distinction between erotica and pornography, in my book. It’s funny when Elmer Fudd shoots Daffy Duck, without fatal effects. It’s just plain stupid then two men whale at each other for five minutes with fists and hard objects, and both emerge unscathed. It is stupid when one man takes on 50 guys, and wins. Ask any martial arts expert in the world. One against three ... one is going down, every time. In a real, serious fight with people who know what they’re doing, it might take a bit of time before any real engagement happens, but once it starts it will be over in seconds, and one man will be dead.
One scene here summed up the idiocy of the whole genre. Bob Hoskins, who has absorbed enough punishment to pulverize a blue whale, is conked over the head with a flowerpot and promptly goes to sleep.
Too bad, because the concept was good. A man is raised pretty much as a dog, trained as a killer (I don’t know how he got the training, given how they were treating him, but never mind), and unleashed to kill or maim the enemies of the Big Boss. He gets away, and has to learn how to be human. You think of The Wild Child, and operant conditioning like in A Clockwork Orange. But halfway through our hero is tossed into a concrete combat pit against 4 fighters with weapons for a fight to the death ... with an audience of hundreds of slavering rich people. Do commercial fights to the death really occur on this sorry planet? Probably. In the heart of Glasgow, with an audience of effete thrillseekers? Naw. This type of movie takes place in an alternate universe where there can be a 30-minute shootout and building-destroying fight, bodies littering the pavement ... and never a siren. Plenty of time to play a long, slow scene later. Cops don’t exist. And Danny the Dog is a bow-wow. IMDb.com
Up and Down (Horem pádem) (Czech Republic, 2004) Two guys are filling a truck with gas, and discussing what they’d eat and what they wouldn’t eat. Mice are discussed, and rats, and horses. One says he went to Thailand and bought something that smelled real good being deep fried. Couldn’t tell what it was, but he was eating and liking it, and the vendor opened his box and dipped something in batter, and it was a bat. “I nearly vomited!” Pause. “What did it taste like?” And Lee, sitting beside me on the couch, says, “Like chicken!” And the guy says, “Like Colonel Saunders Kentucky fried chicken.”
A little moment like that right up front can make all the difference. It’s Pulp Fiction dialogue, and we know this is going to be a quirky film. The guys are smuggling people in their truck. They stop in the middle of nowhere on a dark road, and in the angry chaos of unloading, an infant is left behind in a box. I figure this will be like Tokyo Godfathers, where these tough guys learn some humanity by caring for the baby. But this movie never goes where you expect. They sell the baby to one of those crazy, barren women who take kids out of hospitals in their desperation. And then ...
We meet an odd family, learn about their problems. This story intertwines with the first, sort of, but plot is not hugely important here. What matters is characters, and the actors nail them. There is a theme running though it all, that of displaced persons, politically, economically, and emotionally. But the director is not out to make statements, he just wants you to see these people, and he does a wonderful job of it. IMDb.com
The UP Series (UK) This is a VarleyYarn, March 16, 2005. IMDb.com
The Upside of Anger (2005) A woman’s husband has just walked out on her and her four daughters. She’s pissed at him and drinks a lot. A washed-up ballplayer neighbor who also drinks a lot comforts her, and they become lovers. There are domestic squabbles with the kids. There is a big surprise at the end, which a lot of critics didn’t like, but I did.
I experienced my usual trouble feeling sorry for these rich, beautiful people in a neighborhood of Detroit that I never saw during the summer of ’65, when I worked there and drove all through that armpit of a town, from Dearborn to Hamtramck. But the writing is good and so is the acting, and the daughters are so gorgeous it was worth watching just for them (Erika Christensen, Keri Russell, Alicia Witt, and Evan Rachel Wood). Kevin Costner is at his best, laid back and easy to watch. Why does he bother with those overblown pieces of crap like Waterworld and The Postman? He can be funny and wise. But this piece was obviously written for the stunningly great Joan Allen, and she chews it up. I couldn't get past how much I despised the narcissistic toxic mother, whose nurturing never got beyond fixing great meals in a House Beautiful kitchen to die for. IMDb.com
Uptown Girls (2003) A 22-year-old who has never grown up meets an 8-year-old who has never been a child. The adult is in love with an empty-headed geek who plays insipid “rock” music. The kid’s dad is in a coma. Then ... oh, screw it. You know the drill. We rented this because we like Dakota Fanning a lot, and figured that even if the movie sucked she’d be okay. Well, she was ... but I’d forgotten she was also in The Cat in the Hat, and that’s where I draw the line. We should have drawn it here, too. Just excruciatingly bad, bad, bad. IMDb.com
Ushpizin (Israel, 2004) Every once in a while a movie comes along that I am entirely incapable of evaluating, simply because I can’t set aside my prejudice. I try my best, but I just can’t. In this case it is not anti-Semitism, it is my revulsion for religious fanaticism in any form, practiced by any people. In this case, it’s Jews. And my feeling is that these people—ultra-orthodox Hasidics in Jerusalem—are seriously fucked up. If that makes me intolerant, so be it.
I’m working on a theorem tentatively called Varley’s Funny Hat Rule. It still needs some ironing out, but it goes something like this: When a group of people start identifying themselves by wearing funny hats, it’s time for a change. The various sects of orthodox Jews have so many kinds of funny hats you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. (The funny hats in this movie look like fuzzy wagon wheels.) Well, they’ve had 4000 (5000?) years to develop their traditions, no one should be surprised. I remember an excellent Korean historical film in which there were dozens of types of very funny hats. The Pope wears a funny hat, and so do cardinals. Tibetan Buddhists wear funny hats, and select a child to be Dalai Lama when the old one dies. Bullshit. Shinto priests wear funny hats. Shriners wear funny hats, and everybody knows what assholes they are. Mormons are new on the religion scene, they wear funny underwear, but one day it’ll evolve into funny hats. (Scientologists don’t wear funny hats—I told you the Rule needs work—and they are as fucked up as any religion in the world … but give them time. In a century, if they’re still around, they’ll be wearing space helmets that protect them from the Emperor Xenu.) I still can’t figure out why Rapturist Baptists and Evangelicals don’t wear funny hats. Maybe they make up for it by speaking in tongues.
I’m reminded of two excellent works. In Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Lord Sepulchrave, the seventy-seventh Earl of Groan, leads a life so circumscribed by centuries of tradition that he literally doesn’t have a free minute, every day of the year is ritualized for something or other, much of it long forgotten. I look at the Middle East and I see the same thing. Is there a city in Iraq or Iran that isn’t “holy?” How many times have you heard it? “Bombs went off today in the Holy City of Cameldung near the shrine of the martyr Ali Babbler during the annual pilgrimage where the devout coat themselves in camel dung during the holy month of Ramalamadingdong …” Too much history. Too many holy days, holy sites, holy pilgrimages, holy rituals.
Ah, I hear you say, but what about Fiddler on the Roof? In the opening number the villagers of Anatevka joyously bellow out their love of “Tradition!” while Tevye explains it all. (“Why do we wear these prayer shawls and funny hats?” Shrug. “I dunno. But it’s a tradition!”) (My point, exactly. He doesn’t know, he just does it.) But if you examine the plot, it is a succession of stories of how Tevye learns to break with tradition, first by allowing a daughter to marry a man Tevye didn’t choose, then letting the second daughter become political and then … only hinted at, he resists, and resists strongly … the third daughter becoming involved with a—gasp!—goyim!
Because, in the end, that’s what the funny hats are for, isn’t it? To set us apart. We Do Not Mix. Jew doesn’t marry gentile, white does not marry black, Greek does not marry Turk. The Jews believe they are God’s Chosen People, and that is one of the most poisonous ideas ever to haunt us from our tribal past. At base, get down to the nitty-gritty, most religions make this distinction between Them, the unwashed, unbaptized, unfaithful, and Us, the elect, the saved, the chosen. The Jews just say it right out front, and it’s caused them unbelievable amounts of trouble (that, and Christian bigotry because they “killed Christ”).
But tradition, ritual … those can be comforts, can’t they? I don’t deny it, as long as it’s kept to a reasonable level. It’s the people whose lives are totally dominated by their religion that I despise. Yes, it goes beyond feeling sorry for them. I used to, but as I’ve aged I’ve grown less and less tolerant of their bigoted, insular behavior. The Catholics crawling twenty miles on their bloody knees to some pissant shrine or another. Suffering is good for you! God likes it? (Why? Dunno.) The guys in black coats at the Wailing Wall, davening endlessly as they hold their books. Christians who can’t wipe their asses without offering a prayer.
Gee, quite a rant for a small little movie that most people liked, huh? So what did I think about the movie? As I said, I couldn’t see the movie beyond all the bullshit. I learned later that the director and star, Shuli Rand, is an actor who suddenly got religion—a virulent case of it—and got out of the business for 7 years until his rabbi said it was okay to write, direct, and act. What he has produced is a story about a couple during the Holy Days of Succotash (or something like that), where observant Jews live in plywood boxes for a week. What fun! (Why? Well, they said something about why, but I didn’t get it.) The woman has been barren. No son! Oy vey! The man, Moshe, was a bad man before he … you guessed it, found a rabbi to follow. Visitors arrive, complications ensue, Moshe is tested, by God, one assumes, Moshe prays, his wife prays … and the wife gets pregnant through the power of prayer. See what I mean? What’s the Hebrew word for bullshit? IMDb.com
V For Vendetta (2005) The best thing I can say about this movie—and I'm not really damning with faint praise—is that it's head and shoulders above any other adaptation of a graphic novel I've ever seen. I have nothing to say about its faithfulness to the source material (the author has disowned the movie) as I have not seen it ... indeed, I've never managed to finish any graphic novel. They're not my milieu. But as an independent work of art, it has many things going for it.
The biggest plus is that there are actual ideas here, and villains who don't need any super powers beyond the heel of a boot and the crunch of a truncheon. Fascists, in other words. Bad guys who are all too real. That would be enough, but it also examines terrorism, which takes some balls in this day and age, when we're at "war" with it. What's a terrorist? It means different things depending on who's got the sticks of dynamite and who's got the aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, and F-14s. It can even mean different things at different times. If you had asked Menachem Begin, who ordered the bombing of a hotel full of people (the King David) in 1946 as head of the Irgun, he would have described himself as a freedom fighter. Later, he would call identical acts by the Palestinians "terrorism." Which is morally worse, car bombs or cluster bombs? You decide.
The director doesn't pull his punches, either. As surely as Adenoid Hynkel in Chaplin's The Great Dictator is Adolph Hitler, the regime depicted in this movie is the Bush administration. There are many graphic images evoking Abu Ghraib, among many other post-9/11 atrocities done in the name of keeping us safe. The Fearless Leader's dialogue could have been cribbed from a GWB speech, with its talk of "faith" when it means repression and intolerance. All dissidents and deviants are rounded up and executed, including homosexuals. Police have unlimited powers, and are mostly thugs. Secret abductions, trials, and summary executions are the norm. Can you say "extraordinary rendition?" Can you say "Guantanamo Bay?"
It was also gutsy to use Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot as the central trope of the movie. 400 years later, British children are still burning the man in effigy. Whoa! That's getting in your face! That's asking you to ask yourself some hard questions. Is it a good thing to blow up the Old Bailey if there is no justice in it anymore? It is ethical to blow up Parliament if the laws being enacted in there are fascistic? My answer is yes. You decide.
Would it be ethical to blow up the Supreme Court and Congress in 2007? My answer: Not yet, but stick around until 2009 and ask me again. Let's see who steals the election this time.
Now the downside. It's too long, and in the end, too cartoonish. (Sorry, graphic novelish.) I don't have an affinity for characters who have super powers, whether obtained in a lab fire at a sinister government laboratory or by being from Planet Krypton or getting bit by a mutant spider. This is an adolescent boy's fantasy, even if the super powers are just being superhumanly good at throwing knives and kung foolishness. It undercuts the serious message to have the evils opposed by this man who is able to frustrate the tools of totalitarianism so easily, who appears instantly when he's needed, who wins all his fights without breaking a sweat. That's why, in the end, graphic novels are all just comic books. IMDb.com
Vacancy (2007) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com
Valentín (Argentina ... Actually, an incredible international hodge-podge nations: The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and France, but it’s in Spanish and set in Buenos Aires in 1969, 2002) This is a little story that you should avoid like the plague if your favorite directors are Ingmar Bergman, Todd Solondz, or Lars Von Trier. If you are like me and Lee, though, and enjoy a quiet little fable about a cross-eyed 8-year-old boy with Coke-bottle glasses who wants to be an astronaut, from a broken family with a terrible father and an abused mother, living with his not-so-nice grandmother who dies ... well, you see where I’m going. It’s sweet. The boy is adorable, and a great little actor. The child narrates it, but from the perspective of an older man telling his story, and in fact the director says it is autobiographical. There is heartbreaking stuff and funny stuff. Particularly good is the interaction between Valentín and a gorgeous woman who is his father’s latest girlfriend, who Valentín desperately wants to be his new mother. He wants it so bad that he makes a bad mistake and, not realizing what he’s doing, lets her see what a shitbag his dad is, and she naturally dumps him. But she doesn’t dump Valentín, and even becomes his friend. You can see that, if they’d been contemporaries, she’d have married him in a heartbeat. Sad, how accidents of birth can put the right person forever out of reach. IMDb.com
Van Helsing (2004) If ever there was an object lesson proving that eye-popping special effects are not enough to make a movie, this is it. Gorgeous to look at, and hollow at the core. Stupid. Pointless. And long. We were at the drive-in and I slept through it. IMDb.com
The Vanishing (1993) What an odd story there is here. The director, George Sluizer, made a film in Dutch and French in 1988 called Spoorloos. It was odd, and intriguing, and I liked it. Then in 1993 he re-made it, in English, with Jeff Bridges ... and it’s a piece of shit. He turned it into a routine thriller ... actually, dumber than usual. The ending is stupid, everything about it sucks. Why? Because American audiences are dumb, and won’t allow an unhappy ending? That’s certainly the perception. And maybe it’s right. IMDb.com
Vanity Fair (2004) This is one of those classics that I managed to avoid in high school. I haven’t even read the Classics Comix or the Cliffs Notes version, so I came into it knowing nothing at all except the name Becky Sharp. I am informed that the novel is “funny and quietly savage” (Roger Ebert). This film version by Mira Nair is great to look at and has some funny stuff, but it’s basically about a lot of people I didn’t like very much, except for Becky. She does what she has to, but she has a heart. It’s all about class conflict, which isn’t high on my list of interests. And it’s her heart that gets Becky into trouble, marrying a useless fool and gambler. If she’d followed her head more she was smart enough to have cut the legs out from under any of the retarded aristos around her, and ended up the richest woman in London. Like I said, I have no idea how faithful this adaptation is to the novel, but it all seemed sort of pointless, and too long. IMDb.com
Venus Beauty Institute (France, 1999) We rented this one mostly because of Audrey Tautou. She is very good, as usual, but she has a minor part. The star is Nathalie Baye, who is outstanding. The story leaves a bit to be desired, but I’d recommend it just for her performance. IMDb.com
Vera Drake (2004) Sometimes I wish I didn’t follow the movie biz so closely. By watching the news, Ebert & Roeper, and reading reviews I usually know a lot about a movie before I see it, sometimes more than I’d really like to know. I wish I hadn’t known Vera Drake was a housekeeper who, to help out poor girls in trouble, also performs abortions. That way the scene where she casually pulls out her syringes and cheese grater and soap and tells the girl to lie down and take off her knickers would have been a lot more shocking. The scene still has an impact, but it would have been nice if it had been a surprise.
That said, the film is excellent, if a bit slow at times. Every cast member is memorable, I can’t single anyone out. And imagine my surprise when I looked up Imelda Staunton at the IMDb and discovered that she’s 49 and quite the babe. She works a lot, so I must have seen her in several movies, but I never recognized her. It’s the best make-down job I’ve seen since Charlize Theron in Monster.
Naturally the film has been attacked as a pro-abortion polemic, and there is certainly no doubt where Mike Leigh, the director, stands on the issue, and I stand right beside him. I don’t think there’s a real heavy political message, but Leigh does point out that, in 1950, a rich girl could spend 100 guineas, see a bullshit psychologist, and have the procedure done quickly and with no fuss or stigma or lawbreaking. 100 guineas was a lot of money, so poor girls went to people like Vera or, more often, someone not nearly so nice. And if the abortion-is-murder crowd gets its way, it will have only one effect: poor women will have to resort to the back alley and the coat hanger again, and risk imprisonment if they go to the hospital with complications, while any woman who can afford a plane ticket to a civilized country will continue to have abortion on demand, just like they always have. IMDb.com
Veronica Guerin (2003) This lady was incredibly brave, and she paid for it, but the film lacked something for me. The ending was overdone, too. Nothing really new or interesting here. IMDb.com
A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles) (France, 2004) The French title translates literally (the only way I can translate, with an online program) as “A Long Sunday of Engagements.” I wonder if an idiomatic translation might be something like our expression “A month of Sundays”?
This is the second collaboration between director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who is one of the most exciting guys working today, and Audrey Tautou, maybe my favorite actress. The first was Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (Amelie). I was more charmed by that movie than anything else I saw that year ... hell, in many years, and it was partly his audacious directing technique and irresistible story and partly her amazing presence. This is much, much darker ... and yet manages to be hilarious, challenging, and stunningly beautiful.
In World War I, after a few years at the front, many soldiers came to believe that it would be a lot better to get home alive, even if pieces of you were missing. To that end, they would sometimes blow off their own hands or feet. But in the French Army, that wasn’t a ticket home if they caught you at it. It was a death sentence. They would either execute you or send you out into no-man’s land and not let you back in the trenches.
(WWI was waged by generals who were total, criminally incompetent idiots, on both sides. If I’d been alive and had it in my power on November 12, 1918, I would have rounded up all the generals, every blithering degenerate man, lined them up against a wall and gut-shot them with a small-caliber weapon, with bullets smeared with dogshit. Then I would have hung around to watch them die, no matter how long it took. The longer, the better. Men like Lord Kitchener, Pershing, Ludendorff, Haig, Foch, Grand Duke Nikolai, Hindenberg, Tirpitz, von Spee, Petain, Castlenau, Manoury, Sarrail. Names that you should spit after you say them.)
AVLE begins with 5 of these poor schmucks, one of whom is actually innocent. They are sent out to die. Then we meet the fiancée of one of them, Mathilde, in 1920. She refuses to believe he is dead, and sets out to track him down. (This could be dangerous if he is alive, because he would then be sentenced to hard labor.) (The French Army apparently never discovered the concept of forgiveness. See Paths of Glory.)
No way I’m going to get into the plot. It is very complicated, and I’m not sure I understood every nuance of it. But I’ll gladly see it again, because with Jeunet, it’s the way the story is told as much as the story itself. There is omniscient narration, there are lovely process shots, every character is interesting, there is flashy camera work that enhances the story instead of distracting from it and, wonder of wonders, there are some wonderful special effects that are used for a real purpose. The battle scenes are quite gory, but I sure don’t know how to portray WWI without showing people getting blown up. Audrey is her wonderful self. Jodie Foster puts in a brief appearance, speaking French. I can find no faults with this movie.
The DVD has
a “Making Of” that is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Instead of a
lot of fatuous interviews, it shows you the real behind-the-scenes
process, the nuts and bolts that are so fascinating. How
did they get that shot? ... Oh, I see. That is so
cool! Jeunet does something he probably learned from
Frank Capra, which is going around
to each and every extra that will be walking through a scene and
telling them what they are supposed to be doing. “You’re going to
meet your lover. You just came from the bank where they turned down
your loan. You two are planning your holiday this summer ... no,
this winter. You’re going skiing.” Believe it or not, this obsessive
attention to detail is the difference between a movie that works and
one that doesn’t.
I will probably be buying this DVD, and I hardly buy any these days.
IMDb.com
Victory Through Air Power (1943) I’ve been waiting for this film for about 25 years now. I’d begun to accept that I’d never see it. I started collecting Walt Disney animated features pretty much as soon as they started issuing them on VHS tape. I have all of them up to #39, The Emperor’s New Groove. There are now 46 of them, with three more in the pipeline … but that’s just the “official canon,” meaning they are all-animation, don’t include Pixar films, or DisneyToons direct-to-DVD knockoffs like The Lion King II, A Goofy Movie, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, and 37 others, none of which I’ve seen or own. (Gotta draw the line somewhere.) It also doesn’t include corporate hybrids like The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and Dinosaur. However, I extended the definition to include Disney features that were partly animated, so I have The Reluctant Dragon, Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Pete’s Dragon, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Enchanted will go on this list when it’s released on DVD.) I even have a copy of the second-toughest title, Song of the South, which has never been released for home video in the US … but Disney thought the Brits and the Japanese could handle it, so I got a Japanese copy that includes both a subtitled and a dubbed version. And believe me, you ain’t seen nothin’, chile, until you seen Hattie McDaniel speakin’ fluent Japanese!
But this one seemed hopeless. After all, it’s never been publicly shown since the war, and would seem to have little commercial value. (Parts of the beginning, concerning the history of flight, were recycled into a featurette shown on “Wonderful World of Disney.”) But I hadn’t counted on the obsessive archivists at Disney, nor the fanatic collectors. Since 2001, unknown to me, they have been releasing a series of double DVDs in metal boxes, called “Walt Disney Treasures.” These are pulling obscure things out of the vaults, like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Silly Symphonies, the Alice shorts (Disney’s earliest stuff), plus complete sets of Pluto, Donald, etc. There are also “Wonderful World of Disney” things, like Spin and Marty, and the Swamp Fox. There must be at least a dozen of these I’d like to own, but this was the only “must see,” included on the set of “On the Front Lines.” During the Second World War, Disney perhaps more than any other Hollywood studio devoted itself to the war effort. They made over 200 training films. (One of these is included: “Four Methods of Flush Riveting.” I have to say it’s less than … well, riveting, but is certainly concise and well-thought-out, and really set the pattern for later films of this type.) There are also a lot of propaganda films featuring Donald and Pluto and Goofy, and educational films made for the Canadians, and for South America. The prize of these shorts is the Oscar-winning “Der Fuehrer's Face.” Still funny, still scary, after all these years.
But the centerpiece is—at last, at last!—Victory Through Air Power. It’s based on a contemporary book by Alexander de Seversky, who was an admirer of General Billy Mitchell, and an advocate of long-range bombing as a way of winning the war. Walt was so impressed with the book that he used a lot of his own money to produce the film, which helped convince Churchill and, later, Roosevelt, to invest heavily in big bombers. It is a masterpiece of both reasoned argument and propaganda. Everything he says makes sense, and much of it was proven out in the next two years. In the end, the Allies adopted a little of the island-hopping plan he scorns, and a little of the B-29 heavy bombers he advocated, based on islands close enough for the Superfortress’s 3000-mile range. (A contemporary review in the New York Times feels these super bombers look a little far-fetched—and it’s true, no bomber ever bristled with quite as many heavy machine guns as these do—but within a year planes much like the ones shown here were raining fire on Japanese cities.) Of course, he didn’t know that the atomic bomb would soon make most of his arguments moot and usher in the age of the ballistic missile, but how could he have known? His arguments were sound for the time. This is an excellent movie, and I’m so glad I finally got to see it. IMDb.com
View From the Top (2003) Might have worked if it had been set in the ‘60s, which is what the airline hostesses costumes look like, but I couldn’t buy it as present-day. And besides, it was pretty dumb. IMDb.com
The Village / Catwoman (2004) We saw these at the drive-in. Lee and I will go see just about anything at the drive-in. It’s $6 each, we can bring our own food, and I can smoke. Some of my fondest memories are of going to the drive-in. (No, not that; my girlfriend’s father, who would have frightened Stalin, would never let her go.) At the Don Theater in Port Arthur, and another place in Beaumont whose name I can’t recall, they often had dusk-to-dawn nights, 4 or even 5 features for the same price they usually charged for the standard double. As soon as I got my drivers license (age 14 in Texas) Phil and Calvin and Jan and I, and sometimes Chris or Floyd, would pile into my dad’s old baby blue ’53 Hudson Hornet with the vast interior. Sometimes a couple of us would get in the trunk to save a little money for popcorn and hot dogs. There was plenty of room and we never got caught.
These D-to-Ds were usually themed. There was Edgar Allan Poe night: The House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Raven. Big Friggin’ Japanese Monster night: Godzilla vs. The Giant Moth/Monster Zero/King Kong/The Monster of the Month; Rodan; Gammera; The Mysterians. Swimsuit night: Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, all the Frankie and Annette movies with Harvey Lembeck as Eric von Zipper: Beach Blanket Bingo, Bikini Beach. Trashy White People night: Peyton Place, Parrish, Summer and Smoke, God’s Little Acre. We’d go see anything, but it was mostly primitive, silly, b&w sci-fi and horror. The Thing. The Attack of the Killer Shrews. Them! I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Jesse James vs. Frankenstein’s Daughter. Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy.
So The Village and Catwoman seemed like the perfect 21st century summer double feature to me. I had few or no expectations for either one. And Catwoman, which has been getting really sucky reviews, was the second feature. We could leave, like we did with White Chicks.
M. Night Shabadabadoo (or whatever) has had an interesting career. He made two small films no one has ever heard of, then the monster smash hit The Sixth Sense, with Bruce Willis in his best role in some time. I loved it. I was totally taken in, like just about everybody else. Then he made Unbreakable, again with Bruce. I remember it as okay, but frankly I can no longer recall what the big "surprise" was, so it must have been at least unsatisfying. Then he made the perfectly awful, really stunningly bad mega-hit Signs, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Now comes The Village, and the only good thing I can say about it is that it’s not quite as awful as Signs. I’m even tempted to give away the pathetic, totally unbelievable "surprise" ending so you won’t go see it out of sheer curiosity ... but I won’t. It’s not even worth the time it would take to outline it. Let me just say that the idea of a blind woman running through an uneven, branch-strewn forest without her cane and never falling down was just beyond ludicrous. We hated it.
So take the Catwoman review with a grain of salt. We’d driven in hoping to like The Village, and prepared to hate Catwoman. And we stayed to the end. Now, I am not recommending it, precisely. The plot is pretty ridiculous (but hey, Spiderman’s plot isn’t?), and there is zero chemistry between Benjamin Bratt and Halle Berry. Yet it’s a pretty good drive-in movie. Halle Berry’s moves are incredibly catlike; she is sexy as hell. There are some laughs, like her chowing down on canned tuna or peeling the raw fish from the rice when she’s eating sushi, and hissing when dogs bark at her. (I’d have gone further, maybe a giant catbox in the bathroom, a huge scratching post or torn-up upholstery in the living room. When she was first brought back to life by Mungojerry or Rumpleteaser or whichever mysterious jellicle cat it was, she started to cough. A big hairball coming up would have been funny.) But what I enjoyed most was that she liked being a superhero. She reveled in it, didn’t have any angst like Spiderman, wasn’t out to avenge something like Batman. She wasn’t a do-gooder stiff like Superman. She just dug it. Wouldn’t you? IMDb.com & IMDb.com
Visions of Light (1992) The person most responsible for what you see up on the silver screen in a darkened theater is not the writer, nor the director, nor the set designer, nor the producer. That person is the cinematographer. Film is a visual medium first, a story-telling medium second. Plot is not strictly necessary, but light is, and the structuring and shaping of that light is the most important job in movie-making. Just ask Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo (if you have a good psychic at hand); those ladies knew that the light on their faces had to come from the proper angle, and be at least 10% brighter than the light on anyone else. Choice of cameraman was always their first consideration in a movie. Some old black & white actresses went so far as to marry their cameramen.
Some directors were also cameramen (or started out that way), like Stanley Kubrick, but most are not, and the wise ones know that the choice of the right person to run the camera is the difference between an ordinary film and a masterpiece. The look of The Godfather was achieved by Gordon Willis, not Francis Ford Coppola, and while it would have been a cracking good story no matter who was running the camera, I firmly believe it would not be the memorable classic it is without that look, without that light that Willis captured. This movie is the best I’ve ever seen at making you look at the light. IMDb.com
Volver (Spain, 2006) Means "to return." The main plot points here are murder and incest, and possibly resurrection. For a while it seems like Hitchcock, maybe The Trouble With Harry, about comic exploits disposing of a body. There is even an echo of Chinatown ("She's my sister! She's my daughter!) But it's not about any of those things. It's mostly about women and their relationships. It is very funny at times, and quite sad at others. Men hardly appear, except to be disposed of, or as irrelevant pests. That's fine with me; it's interesting to see a gay man's take on women, and all these characters are finely drawn. Like all Pedro Almodóvar's films it wanders around, but it's always worth following. And yet, in the end, it didn't quite all connect for me. Well worth watching, but not as good as I'd hoped.
Must say a word about Penelope Cruz. She has to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. Those eyes! And those ... other parts! And she is a great actress, one who I think will age well, as Sophia Loren did. In fact, she reminds me of Loren, though their body types are quite different. Something in her bearing, perhaps, in the movements of her head and hands. I had forgotten that she was once involved with Tom Cruise, then I remembered hoping they'd be married so they could be Tom and Penelope Cruise-Cruz. But she dodged a bullet. I figure she realized before the rest of us that, though he's handsome and smart and a good actor and probably a ton of fun to be with, that he's crazy as a fuckin' bedbug. Poor Katie Holmes. IMDb.com