Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Demon Tied to a Chair in My Attic

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
directed by Tim Burton
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

I'm assuming this musical doesn't meet Steve's standards for a great one, insofar as there's no justification for anyone taking to lyrics to express his sentiments and urges (unless it's the implication of an on-board romance between the pre-London sailor set of Sweeney and young stage-prop Anthony). And once again I'm appalled at how obvious the ravages of computer generation render effects Burton could have managed with much more finesse had the on-retainer stop-motion team drummed up a Claymation meat grinder. But not since the last time I watched the Evil Dead movies have I seen anyone enjoy fake blood so much, and the last ten minutes of Sweeney Todd are perfect: open-ended and beautiful high drama. Throughout the film, main characters are dispatched with so little fuss that death is inadvertently given the weight it rarely receives in movies, where the last gasps of mortality too often inspire soliloquies that make the great beyond seem far less permanent than it is.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Lindsay and Samantha at the Diner



You see the bottle of ketchup, the glasses of Coca-Cola and iced tea with straws, and enough of the table to see it's cluttered, with Blackberries and cigarettes and purses, I'm sure, but also with napkins and plates of food. If they haven't finished eating, they've put a healthy dent in it. The red wall and red booth cooperate nicely, and what everyone mentions is that no one is speaking. It's quiet, or maybe there's noise all around them. But that look on Lindsay's face isn't a reaction to anything, and Samantha is watching her the way you pay attention to the people you eat with at meals. The disinterested expression of friendship, the casual wandering mind. It's my favorite photo so far this year.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Stage & Screen

Slings & Arrows, Season One (2003)
directed by Peter Wellington
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Esteban

The vengeful ghost of drama looming quiet at the shoulder of Slings & Arrows suffers the insistent self-assurance-cum-self-defense of theater types lightly, while the world (that is, me) looks at such irrational happiness among the backstage banter of "real" actors as a roomful of egoists gone mad. The corporate subplot is so slight, only Tommy Lee Jones's Axeman knows from which meager hell these faint spirits issue forth, and all that's left are tedious spats bred from shallow misunderstandings. I am a non-believer in the stage; give me the movies and save the fatuous machinations of the merry few for wide-eyed, sentimental high schoolers.

But no, that's too bitter. The show's heart and humor are in the right place, but all that lovely Shakespeare (in the end, the written word) is just a contrast to the clubby "dramedy" that I never feel (or felt) a part of.

The Rest, to Infinity

Blast of Silence (1961)
directed by Allen Baron
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The Maltese Falcon is a great movie because the personalities of its stars cut loose the script's theatrical tethers. If it were anyone other than Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Humphrey Bogart sitting in Sam Spade's office, we would think of the room as the stage it was. The Big Sleep, likewise, is always as good as its H. Bacalls, but better than that is the hothouse, the bookstore, and the street where Sam hides his car. The sweat beneath Bogart's armpits is less personal than the invasiveness of General Sternwood's Peeping Tom taste for alcohol, and noir, more than the scripted doom that lies in wait for its protagonist's soul, is the hoped-for opening in a door to a dream: not one single, sprawling nighttime landscape, but instead a universe of uninhabited, uncommunicative worlds.

You need only retrace Allen Baron's New York locations with the Criterion staff to realize that Blast of Silence is not New York. It couldn't have been New York even in 1961, even though the same brownstones and marshes remain intact enough today to make the extras. I read about the Village Gate in liner notes for jazz CDs, but I saw it for the first time today in a movie. Once a place exists in a movie, so long as it exists uniquely (the sofas in The Maltese Falcon don't), you can only revisit it in the dark, and nowhere else, forever. The cold winter winds, the reeking heat of Big Ralph's apartment and the wetness on his lips: the sea and stars of an unseen shore.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

The 49ers Hit the Coast

Justice League: The New Frontier (2008)
directed by Dave Bullock
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

A superhero movie about American ideals that cuts its final montage whole cloth from a speech by JFK asking for the help of the "young at heart" is nicely specific as a contrast to the same film's anonymous, meddling government space agencies. But as a comic book reader, I have no particular desire to see my fictional favorites situated in a real history, anymore than I've ever wanted Gotham to be synonymous with New York City. Let it be a fantasy, so inherently well-suited to flights of invention, because a Justice League movie should be more than an origin story where each member is allotted a moment of bravery, a moment of honesty, a moment of comedy, and a moment of violence. Batman gets a great line - Batman always fares best in these Warner cartoons - and because it's the sort of line that can justify a whole evening in front of the TV, it's easy to miss that recaps and great voicework aren't enough on their own.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Occupation Inspiration

Drunken Angel (1948)
directed by Akira Kurosawa
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from JL

Akira Kurosawa is a director whose gifts are sometimes inhibited by his reputation as a "master" of the form, because when critics or professors say "best ever" in relation to international movie-makers who made movies in the thirties and forties (like Sergei Eisenstein or Vittorio De Sica, or even John Ford in the good old US of A), those teachers are still hanging on to the idea of early cinema as a primarily silent, visual medium, and as such, a longed-for relic of a "purer" form. What that means is that shot-by-shot analyses become the definitive means of educating students, which is why everyone complains about being bored to death by Citizen Kane.

But everyone can agree on how enjoyable Kurosawa's best films are, and Drunken Angel is exactly the reason why. For all the visual metaphors of a rancid, festering sump, the guy this slummy neon post-war Tokyo (beautifully "bombed about a bit" a year before The Third Man) most reminds me of is love 'em and leave 'em cheapskate Sam Fuller. The lightbulb marquees, big wooden doors, lots of projectiles lobbed through American glass windows: you need some noise to make a great movie (well, most of the time), and some semblance of the audience you're making it for. It's why Kane is the least of Orson's efforts, and why this and Stray Dog make more with so much less.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Windy Road to Ranchipur

The Rains Came (1939)
directed by Clarence Brown
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

I realized yesterday that the second disc of Phantom India was cracked clean through, and it looked just like the Criterion logo. Anything generous in Louis Malle's narration only shows how far our journalistic obligation to understanding cultures has expanded since 1969. Malle is a windbag, and the country far exceeds him. It is an India I dream about in the same way I think of Russia, where I sweat in the balmy swamp of St. Petersburg and try to picture the sea.

So prompted, I watched the Hollywood take, something from a pitch I didn't see through, I think because I wanted to write about The Music Room and invented an angle with Myrna Loy. Nora was never my type of Hollywood beauty. She was too often assigned the thankless task of embodying solidarity (matching martinis, say) without ever being the kind of girl you'd meet at the bar. At best, she softened the brush-off of high society condescension, but she was always with the man in the tux, and never the reporter, the criminal, or the bum.

If rain is particularly suited to the hushed reunion of old lovers introduced by husbands and wives at a party of the Maharani, and the production designer and cinematographer use the latticework in oriental screens to recast lightning as a flourish of Mughal architecture, the death of a British lady in love with an Indian Tyrone Power is less the melodrama of the matinee than one more allowance that the craft of old Hollywood was as dexterous as the mystery of the big Egyptian pyramids. Bodies in the floods! Monsoons even by monsoon standards. And the flame from a lighter that looks like a match, like kindling, like a way to get in out of the weather.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Chop Shop

Battlestar Galactica - Season Three (2006/2007)
created by Ronald D. Moore
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The obvious low ebb this season - when I felt compelled to apologize to someone who wasn't even watching the show for what I've since heard was everyone's least favorite episode - made the movies I've put aside for another fifteen hours of Ronald Moore's half sci-fi/half West Wing next-generation extravaganza feel like that much more of a loss. But I persist because Battlestar Galactica is a great idea, however often it is humbled by hysterically bad writing. Unintentional humor is unfortunately all that the show ever provides, between bouts of characters growling their way towards the next round of fistfights or cardboard familial estrangements, but at the eye of that Bluto-like machismo (even the girls hit like boys) is a hero so full of cowardice and egotistical self-preservation that it's tough not to think he's the point of it all. And that potential - for the show's own subversion of everything I dislike in everyone from Kara to Adama to the scribe behind "The Woman King" - is what keeps me on the telephone.

At least the on-set barber knows the value of a laugh.



I'm pregnant with triplets!

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

All I'm Looking

The Mist (2007)
directed by Frank Darabont
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD at JL's

The Mist, to me, is a great example of someone making a career in Hollywood without knowing a thing about movies. Knocking the writer of a handful of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is a straw short of flimsy, I know, but The Shawshank Redemption bought Darabont more of a pass on The Mist (and all future productions, I'm sure) than he deserved. Is there any way he earned less than six figures for this? Is that "low-budget" to anyone not blessed by Steven Spielberg's benevolent graces?

Like the old line on Buckaroo Bonzai, none of the first-time horror films I love tried for the penniless appeal of shoestring craftsmanship. Herk Harvey and Maurice Prather famously thought of Ingmar Bergman when making Carnival of Souls, and in 1962, as now, it's hard to imagine any lighting more professionally astonishing than Through a Glass Darkly must have looked a year before. For Darabont, the aesthetic is synonymous with lowered expectations, and if the director is that condescending about his own shoot, how can the actors or crew care less?

Not surprisingly, the guy so in love with B-movies can't close down his awful conclusion in less than two hours. At which point it isn't even an adaptation, just a bore.