Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Only Strangers Sleep in My Queen-Sized Bed

The Love Parade (1929)
directed by Ernst Lubitsch
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

The first act: "Why am I always awakened from my dreams?"

In the kingdom of Sylvania, ministers of war and housemaids draped in pearls all conspire to keep her majesty's courtyard silent for the sweetly sleeping Queen. The attendants fail anew each day - a cuckoo clock or revue of grenadiers betrays them - and promptly move on to the next order of business: asking when (and who) their fair Louise will marry. Sylvania needs a loan, but foreign lenders demand a royal union to satisfy their investment. Enter womanizing military attaché Maurice Chevalier, the toast of Paris's wandering wives, sent home by the state's ambassador for reprimands befitting his boudoir crimes.

Light as a feather, true to form. But the turning point occurs when Chevalier looks his philandering canine in the dog's wet eyes and rues, "You're the only one in the palace who looks up to me." Whereupon the Count-cum-Prince embarks on his campaign of matrimonial humiliation, embarrassing and demeaning his lovely wife until she cedes power and authority (abroad and in bed) unequivocally to her husband. Tonally, it couldn't be more different from the "Dream Lover" chorus of a half-hour earlier; maybe Lubitsch just needed to get "open-palm slap in the face" out of the way en route to that famous touch.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

100 Years of Solitude

The Indian Tomb (1921)
directed by Joe May
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

However ignorant or malicious the inhabitants of German directors' equatorial fantasies, the magic possessed by yogis of the Indian subcontinent is a real force presumed from the beginning to be taken at face value by German audiences. The rest is enormous sets and exotic tigers, though not all early silent epics are equal. With the exception of the penitents' cave (tortured men on beds of nails, buried to their necks in sand, hanging by their feet over searing open flames), May can't manage a sustained vision long enough to justify the subplots and side affairs that more often that not detour minor characters down half-hour dead ends, leaving us (well, me, anyway), stuck in a frank rut.

"What was he/she doing there in the first place?" was the question I kept asking the dog. Such inquiry inevitably turns inward, and as I racked my brains for the source of my stubborn persistence, morning passed irretrievably into afternoon. Even standard British bigot "MacAllan," the love of the Indian princess's heart, wanders lost through a palm tree-potted wilderness and promptly dies when fed to the tigers two hours down the line. The protagonists' willingness to be lulled into a superficial appreciation of courtly luxury was the one consistency, and a little-needed reminder that rich people will happily cross any distance to congratulate each other on their unearned prerogatives of entitlement. Any servant who looks to high society for protection from tyrants knows the terminal cobra bite is just a matter of time.

The evil maharajah, of course, was the only sympathetic character, and the only one worthy of the movie's name. "You shall build the tomb of a great love, that I squandered like a god or like a fool." Behind the "wall of the living dead," where lepers lurch sickeningly at any healthy passersby - surely one of the medium's first depictions of a zombie invasion - we find solace in shared rot.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Heathen Charity

The Vikings (1958)
directed by Richard Fleischer
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Listening to Richard Fleischer talk about his year in pre-production, flying through fjords and researching Norsemen in the British Library of London, sounds an awful lot like a more confident, smaller Ernest Hemingway relating the stories of his big-game hunts. Fleischer is clearly grateful for the experience, but I've never thought about the degree to which the process of moviemaking is a lifestyle as much as a career. The more cynical interpretation is the unintentional disdain a director who likes to travel must have for the audience who pays money for the final product. By the time The Vikings opened in Tulsa, Fleischer was picking out horse saddles in Montana.

But The Vikings, according to John Carpenter and Debrah Hill, is the reason that Janet Leigh was such a hot commodity in The Fog. Carpenter was ten in 1958, Hill eight, and a one-eyed Kirk Douglas fighting bearded Tony Curtis atop an ancient seaside castle is the perfect (and perfectly ridiculous) movie memory. Again, my cynicism finds it all too easy to ascribe Carpenter's enduring affection for the film to the whole casts' rampant misogyny, but The Vikings is more than your average, lumbering Fleischer Spanish galleon. Orson Welles narrates, the first villain we meet isn't really the villain, and the last hero standing commits so many fratricidal and patricidal slips of the sword (and never, as we would expect, in ignorance of his awful knowledge), that the beautiful concealing fog of those beautiful Scandinavian coastlines - and Borgnine's winking girth - isn't deep enough to slow the agile barbarity of the movie's premise or execution. A gem from someone else's lost youth.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Saffron-Colored Robes

Syndromes and a Century (2006)
directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

I always talk about the time of year with the movies I watch in winter, and it's easy to see how the early dark of January imposes, simultaneously, both stasis and a long, sustained inspiration (a month of silent films, say). I think of it as accompaniment to the season - hand in hand together through the short day - and as conducive to good movie watching as Jaws in late July twilight. Shortly before Syndromes and a Century arrived from Netflix, I saw a screen capture of the title - in Thai and English - from the movie's opening credits:



Not simply a tropical diversion from the pre-dawn cold of my walks with Boone, the image suggested less to me the heat and humidity of Thailand (though characters in Thai script are nicely suited to that, no?) than the prospect of a movie in the morning, over coffee as the sun rises. I used to watch movies on weekend mornings more often than I do now; the worry is that one needs dark to sustain an interest in a film for two hours - that during the day you have new energy and things to do, and it's easy to stop and go do them. Sometimes you go, but sometimes the mood of a film is synonymous with the second cup of coffee on days when you have time to drink two.

So attuned to environment is Apichatpong that his characters are always mopping their brows, seeking shade when they are out of doors, turning their faces to light breezes, and making themselves tea in long pours from big Thermoses. People's reactions to the climate are never the point (mopping her brow is just something the woman does while she speaks), but it makes a good case for Apichatpong's awareness, which is integral to following him to his eventual, vague destinations. When a trickle of sweat traced Daniel Day-Lewis's face in an otherwise temperate scene in There Will Be Blood, I thought not of the movie I was watching (nor its own reality), but of the overwhelming conditions of shooting in Marfa, Texas, in afternoons with a heat index of 110 degrees.

I frequently yearn for the places I see in movies, but I would almost never say I "travel" with film. During Syndromes and a Century, I felt as if I could press pause and walk outside into Thailand. So watching becomes transformative, and the lesser clues - an odd legend here, an eclipse there, the circular nature of time - reveal in Apichatpong that rarest of filmmakers, the mystic. I imagine that the quiet of a ride in a hot air balloon is something similar, as the colors in the globe above you bleed out into the wider country below.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Quiet as it's Kept

She's Gotta Have It (1986)
directed by Spike Lee
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Spike Lee's New York, a world he recognized in person but not in movies (supposedly the director's impetus for making She's Gotta Have It, in response to - what else - The Color Purple), included enough of The Wizard of Oz to inspire a sequence in color. But She's Gotta Have It does what The Wizard of Oz couldn't manage on the backlot: fresh air and soft sunlight. Lee's debut is a great open-air film. From iron benches to the lazy wakes of barges on the East River, currents scout the city in their endless Sunday variations.

She's Gotta Have It is also a good example of how learning-as-you-go sometimes beats the film school influence of aesthetic and historical instruction. A rape - as sure an homage to those hard-luck neo-realists as Mars Blackmon's around-town bicycle - is superfluous to Nola's ascension as her own woman, and as such, a disservice to Nola and the gentler inclinations of Lee's script. The lead, Tracy Camilla Johns, looks the part of a breezy kind of light, too.

The first thing that observant filmmakers lose in their transition to becoming industry insiders is a sense of humor. Which, in a movie like She's Gotta Have It, is as intrinsic to the Brooklyn that Lee didn't think other movies were showing him as the chapter-stop still photographs of subways, snowfall on the monument in Fort Greene park, and early afternoon on Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstones. Sort of everything, really.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Barnum & Barnum

There Will Be Blood (2007)
directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Studio on the Square

There Will Be Blood is a funny, funny movie. In fact, there aren't enough diamonds in the bank of Monte Carlo to ransom a circus as fantastic as Left Foot Dan's. Don't tell me Anderson solicited that wounded bear bark when Plainview drags his broken foot from his first oil well, or those three long fingers like some half-drunk high-schooler shouting out for the riches of west-coast oil.

It's hard to imagine how many Alan Aldas and Nelson Rockefellers someone like Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg would try to cram onto the platform at the Little Boston depot, as if drama was a derivative of look-who's-here cameos. Even Anderson can't cast Day-Lewis without someone to act as the wall - like Hawkeye would assault the gaffer if there wasn't a pasty Leonardo lead to abuse - but oh well. This movie makes a great case for never wanting to describe a great movie as "thoughtful" ever again. Give me the rampaging, drooling slob any day.

I kept thinking of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, as I guess I do when I watch directors who like to foot their ideas of themselves through the low hills and high hills of empty, half-stitched geographies. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is as close to a fairy tale as the western ever got - magic is John McCabe beneath a million creaking pines - and the conventional dissolution of Daniel Plainview pales beside Miller's aching opiate mysteries. But I will say this for There Will Be Blood: I got every thin penny's worth of my admission. The movie makes the price of a ticket look cheap.

I wonder if Daniel Day-Lewis ever goes through Arther Miller's old love letters from Marilyn Monroe and thinks about being the big actor of his generation. Marilyn never dated actors the way she dated theater idols or ball-players (she was such a patriot, even as the butt of the Kennedys' bad jokes - a Clarissa Saunders to the nation). Plainview is a wink from the camera at that one person in the audience the actor knows is going to the movie just to see her Daniel. Which, for all the awards season bluster, still must be the reason some actors try for the team. She might just as well be Marilyn as Rebecca Miller, in the dark opposite the snarling sneer from the crest of a great green wave, breaking into a big-as-the-Pacific smile.



If you squint this looks just like the movie still I couldn't find!

Saturday, January 19, 2008

No Seesaw, That Cecil

The Affairs of Anatol (1921)
directed by Cecil B. DeMille
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD at ELO's

Since most social comedies these days feel like a lecture playing dress-up (he lectured), how pleasant that Cecil B. DeMille - tyrant of pagan temples, trainwrecks, zeppelins, and classic Hollywood put-downs ("DeMille remarked that Mature was '100% yellow'") - could dance light comedy right out the door to the tune of comme ci comme ça. Without empathy, too much self-righteousness sours the mist of champagne moonlight that waters the fields of high society he-said-she-saids. On Broadway they call that a play, but DeMille made movies. His is a nightlife of chiaroscuro and Chinese fans, hand-drawn titles and Hindu hypnotists. The sad, short history of star Wallace Reid is why movies are made, so we'll have that sadness (the small loss of particular people) and the faces to remember it by.

Monday, January 14, 2008

The Killing Joke

The Man Who Laughs (1928)
directed by Paul Leni
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

How many movies begin as cruelly as this one? With a haggard prisoner doomed to death in an iron maiden by rat-like, mole-like King James, the face of the prisoner's son cut into a smile, and his escape tormented by frozen corpses hanging wind-blown from their ropes? If Val Lewton's films reflect the dark uneasiness and footprint of the American years in World War II, this early run at Universal's crown of horror is the prophecy upon which countrymen Leni and Conrad Veidt's one-time hinterland saw its mighty future of profane and terrible deeds. The greatest marriage in movies wed the polish of the studio system to the insanity of the German Expressionists; this is one of several blushing brides. If the title cards' urgent recurrence hints at the wolf of sound behind each frame (more like the novel it draws from), no furry specter is quite like the wolf named Zimbo; you can pencil in my first TCM Spotlight for "Howling Success: Canines Beeline to Tinseltown." Starring Robert Osborne's pet pup Lucy.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

On a Match, On a Flame

Destiny (1921)
directed by Fritz Lang
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Mississippi is cold enough to underscore the bare branches and gray skies of a mid-south January. I've planted basil and lemongrass by my kitchen window, but neither is growing at a rate to suggest its own willfulness to life. For the first time, I'm watching silent movies with regularity, and I think Fritz Lang is as good a clue as the aesthetic outside comforts of a quiet season through my long, narrow living room window.

Lang excelled in phantasmagoria, and his success in horror is implicit in the frailty of his visions. They share a dust-worn physicality with the age of the film stock that seems to have just barely reached us in time. Think of how Mabuse haunts the last maniacal drive that concludes The Testament of Dr. Mabuse - how his specter hangs in the air above the car, a tattered ghost in rank defiance of the laws of aerodynamics that tear mercilessly through his frayed but oily hair. The merest breath should evict Mabuse completely, but he persists.

Silent-era magic tricks are the thin sieve for catching such nightmares. Each of Lang's supernatural images - a long scroll that twines like a snake to the twitch of a sorcerer's wand, a retinue of Lilliputian stature, candles in a hall of dead souls - is the most elemental of effects, but so wondrously effective. It's surprising to see how little Douglas Fairbanks' Thief of Bagdad actually takes from Destiny (Fairbanks reportedly bought the rights and buried it in the process of bringing Bagdad to the screen), beyond a few mythical flourishes (the magic carpet, a flying horse) and the storyteller's debt to threes in classical epics.

Destiny is an altogether more heartbreaking film, epitomized by the gentlest spell in its wizard's grimoire: the heroine commits herself to death, and as she raises the poison potion to her lips, the background behind her and the cupped vessel recede into a pale expanse of silence, as her now-empty hand continues softly over her face, a penitent's gesture at the doorway to some holy, far-off tomb.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Yes

If... (1968)
directed by Lindsay Anderson
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

If... dispatched by fatigue from his "No Country for Old Humanists" pancake, I vow today to never visit Dave Kehr's blog again, will my last memory be of the VeggieTales banner at the top of the page?

If... I look at these three Netflix sleeves for silent movies long enough, will I watch one of them this weekend?

If... it rains hard enough in Water Valley, will I regret my decision before work to "air out" my apartment with lots of open windows while I was at the office today?

If... I think about the Mexican fish I ate for dinner, will I be less hungry?

If... I complain that the ending was heavy-handed because it devolved into farce, instead of playing the assassination straight and flying right, can I still tell you how much I loved the movie?

Sunday, January 06, 2008

In the Room Where Christopher Doyle Dreams

Chungking Express (1994)
directed by Kar-Wai Wong
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Yes, I've seen those pictures of Mathilda with bobbed blonde hair, and yes, I remember Sky Captain, Inman, and Gigolo Joe. If David Strathairn plays a Tony Leung cop with a third of Tony Leung's brio (and twice Tony Leung's bryl!), won't Strathairn's melancholy still be a strictly sexless disconsolate set of eyes? Then again, in Chungking Express, Tony talks to stuffed animals, Wong condescends to the Cranberries' level in his best American Graffiti shorthand, and the slow-motion opening is a too-easy tricky chaos.

But he's still my director for warm, rainy days. The slow-motion shot of Faye watching Cop 663 is as beautiful as slow-motion gets. Same for the sweet Indian staff, slipping away for Faye's big push, the busybody uncle who never quite intrudes, and 663's architectural philosophy. 663's teary apartment is a commercial quantity of red dye away from the bleeding house of The Evil Dead, and how can you help but haunt such lonely habitations?