Caviar in Casablanca

Waxworks (1924)
directed by Paul Leni
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

An octogenarian carnival barker and his sweet, outgoing granddaughter (the tenacious twosome of every sentimental circus movie) hire a writer to give life to their wax creations. The scribe and the girl assume the role of moviegoers the world over, casting themselves as the hero and heroine whose love triumphs over Emil Janning's ample Bagdad Caliph before the lighthearted Arabian adventures are sloughed off for Ivan the Terrible's boneyard. What begins as strange but harmless escapism ends by way of a horror movie in the spectral cacophony of preeminent German Expressionism. Leni's haunts are so much more effective in Waxworks than The Cat and the Canary; how often is an artist's fame once removed from the work that makes him great?

Primary Colors

Éloge de l'amour (2001)
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Because Eglantine will not accept what Perceval tells her - that he placed her too high above him - they break up. If memory has obligations, then an old man is still in love, and Godard is so far from the cynic his detractors expect him to be. Thus "reconciliation" is the fourth stage of love, "separation" only the third. Whatever inquiries are made into art, thought, and adulthood here, the film is endlessly renewable as a discovery: I could watch it a hundred times and not exhaust it of its treasures.



So long as the woman - black, no less - sitting at the bus stop in Paris is smiling, she, and not the actress auditioning for Eglantine, is how the rest - the politics especially - retreats into the background. That isn't me preferring one part of Godard's process to another; I couldn't find her if she wasn't there. He argues that adults need stories more than children or old men, gives us dozens of names, and recommends a book or two. Together, they cascade far beyond his 90-minute frame. Who else is so generous with credit for the ideas he compiles? Has digital video ever looked better?



Anger and frustration can be part of things. They can be synonymous with awareness, even, and with both a willingness and unwillingness to accept the world as it is. But to film those emotions, and to remind your audience more of Douglas Fairbanks on a flying horse in a movie palace in the 1920s - what is that if not a dream?

Crisco Fish

Cisco Pike (1972)
directed by Bill L. Norton
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

If a director today put a print of Charles Manson on the wall of a drug-abusing socialite in 1970s Los Angeles, the dramatic shorthand would be no less obvious than the same stage prop thirty-five years ago. Too, not all movies of their own era are necessarily dated, but this is. Cisco's wife, disregarded in her yogic worry, is sympathetic to her husband, but he, a spoke in the crooked wheel, does no better than leave her. Far-out Doug Sahm and his bobblehead Quintet say the lines, but herky-jerky can't sell good-hearted Sir Doug's betrayal of mentor Cisco; I can just picture Augie asking everyone, "Why the long faces?"

Tweety in the Coal Mine

The Cat and the Canary (1927)
directed by Paul Leni
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Paul Leni was an art director first, and the man behind the camera second. The Cat and the Canary begins like an art director's fever dream, with a patriarch in a wheelchair reduced to the size of a small bird, shaking his cane at the cats and pill-bottles that fill the screen. The frames are in shadow, the silhouettes like ghosts. It's beautiful.

But the director's limitations assert themselves as characters arrive at the old dark house and everyone's static gestures make the movie what it was, before the art director began to imagine the Gothic possibilities of a rainswept mansion: a play. I don't remember title cards having such life before - they stretch and shimmer to make the fonts emotional - but the plot is largely plotless, pockmarked by holes and disappointed by the grand beginning that so quickly devolves into by-the-numbers vignettes of cheap comedy, soft horror, and light romance.

An odd precursor to the peephole Porky's genre, but also a movie about greed that never traps its protagonists with the killer. Everyone is free to leave when he chooses, to forfeit the diamonds but save his own life. If nothing else, the option makes everyone's willingness to be haunted a more interesting take on avarice, and I think choice is very much missed in so many of the later films that The Cat and the Canary inspired.

Diamantenexperte

The Spiders, Part 1: The Golden Lake (1919)
The Spiders, Part 2: The Diamond Ship (1920)
directed by Fritz Lang
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Kay Hoog, the hero of Fritz Lang's half-finished globe-trotting adventure serial, might relish the exotic air of foreign climes (South America, Central Asia); he might be after antiquities (it's the closest I'll be getting to "crystal" and "skull" this week, that's for sure); but Lang's fascination with the urban underworld, here epitomized in the sprawling opium-flushed and lamp-lit city beneath San Francisco's "Chinese Quarter," makes his Indy more a Bond. Hoog romances the same exotic beauties with the same European pedigrees, lets them die with the usual cold-hearted disregard, and plays at making an entrance in an escalating gag-line of gadget-stuffed contraptions. The delight of a Dr. Mabuse mastermind never materializes to oppose the hawk-nosed protagonist, but his enemies, the eponymous gang, find lots of excuses to decorate corpses with a kiss of a calling card: a mounted arachnid.

The New Ozymandias

Death at a Funeral (2007)
directed by Frank Oz
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD at Josh & Lorraine's

Whenever I see an actor under the influence, I think of Nicolas Cage with a hangover watching last night's tapes of escapade blackouts. I imagine a serious expression throughout, and an honest effort to deduce the "line of thought" in a bad unremembered pickup line. Alan Tudyk is best as a comic actor, and the most awkward character development on Firefly was Joss Whedon's repeated insistence that Wash and Zoe publicly reiterate (again and again) the supportive nature of their marriage. The dinosaur jokes couldn't come fast enough for me.

The funniest thing about Death at a Funeral isn't everyone taking hallucinogens, but Frank Oz exacting revenge on a Muppet-sized blackmailer. The stories those puppets could probably tell!

The Magic Forest

Tropical Malady (2004)
directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

When I wrote about Syndromes and a Century, I used "mystical" to mean an intuitive understanding of existence, one that arrives at comprehension - and the wonder of it - by small alterations in the broadest shared experiences. Andrei Tarkovsky made terror a part of this, in the sense of the deep fear of a sudden awakening late at night that the mind almost instantly tries to conceal in everyday worries about death or meaning. There is a calm at the center of Tarkovsky's films because terror is not manipulated for effect; we witness the director's inquiries, participate in them, and respond instinctively - which is always, first, in awe. The closest I have come to a religious experience in art (as opposed to people) is in those Russian films. They are lonely, though.

Not here. Weerasethakul loves myth, and roots through his fictions to infer from his world of oral traditions what makes fairy tales inseparable from love stories. His romances are characterized most by common, recognizable happiness. The transformation from mundane to eternal is the hours of two people's courtship: the rooms, vacation spots, and cafes that attain legend in memory. He picks actors with interesting smiles, and lets them. The myths return as soon as we are ready to follow them back into the woods.

Sen-ti-men-tal

My Blueberry Nights (2007)
directed by Kar-Wai Wong
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at the Bijou

The manifestation of memory's pain as a character's withdrawal from the physical world was the counterpoint to the sumptuous sets and colors of In the Mood for Love and 2046. Each close-up and slowed frame redoubled the impact of single instances of regret stretched forward through lifetimes. The frames are so alive in all of Wong's films that it's easy to mistake the vivacity of his movie-making for a consistency in the emotional behavior of his protagonists, when in fact the erratic petulance of Faye Wong in Chungking Express has no corollary in anything he's made since Happy Together.

The first surprise of My Blueberry Nights is how often the faces of its women are swollen with tears (for the first time, there are no men to match the women's appeal), not in asides or stolen angles, but sobbing and inconsolable, their foreheads front, center, and stained in the night lights. But if Britney Spears is really the closest American equivalent to Faye Wong - the pop superstar - it's strange that Wong Kar-Wai supposedly made this movie because of Norah Jones. Jones is pretty, but watching her eat in a New York bakery is more or less in keeping with the Norah Jones who sings songs. It's the same persona, and instead of transforming Maggie Cheung from actress to icon, or recasting Faye Wong as an insolent working-class tomboy (the Android is less of a stretch), Wong Kar-Wai becomes the middleman to Blue Note's PR department.

In other words, why not Britney Spears? The script is undeniably bad, perhaps because Wong's old protagonists were so rarely defeated by something tangible like the death of the man or woman they loved. That Jones's silly emotional awakenings return her to Jude Law's arms changes how these movies are supposed to end (heartbreakingly), so in the end I liked it more than I probably should. I could have used a lot more slow-motion pie and ice cream (there's such a difference between the close-ups and the pie she's actually eating), but Wong was smart enough to cut his nights to ninety minutes, and his willingness to accept that kind of accountability means that he didn't want to waste too much of our time. He didn't.

The Happy Medium, or, Finger from the Dam

Ice Station Zebra (1968)
directed by John Sturges
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Jaws (1975)
directed by Steven Spielberg
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Walker (1987)
directed by Alex Cox
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Sorry, We're Open (2008)
directed by Joe York
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Jillien

Iron Man (2008)
directed by Jon Favreau
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Oxford Studio Cinema

Ah, the inevitable flood post of a weekend watching movies with an out-of-town friend! Proof that no good summer blockbuster like Jaws goes unpunished, Iron Man needs only itself to exhibit how much further the peripheral women (mothers, wives, and bystanders) of Spielberg's warmest film can be edged towards the two horizons of matron and whore. Ice Station Zebra does away with them completely, and if that's not the reason why Sturges' film followed Howard Hughes into death, the deep patriotism in finally outing Ernest Borgnine as Public Enemy No. один (my own American wish since Airwolf) is at least a feat of engineering on par with special effects that hold up better than the actors have.

Walker is too much, and finally very funny. Ed Harris is so serious an actor that his self-seriousness here is a light stitch sewn deftly through burlap, while everyone wonders how the sack stays tied. That Cox's movie might have been made last year makes it obvious more than prescient, but the presumptive question of how many times I need to be reminded of mankind's failures can make even the small graces of Ron Shapiro's far memories honestly worthwhile. I have an easier time imagining a link between Ron Shapiro and the three men aboard the Orca than the director's credit that unites Alex Cox, Joe York, and Steven Spielberg, so here's to characters.