Monday, July 28, 2008

The Right Light for a Bright Night

Slightly Scarlet (1956)
directed by Allan Dwan
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Howard Hughes had half the aerospace engineers in Texas at work on Jane Russell's bra, but all cinematographer John Alton needed to transfix the perverts at the censor's office was Technicolor, a spotlight, and two redheads playing sisters. Cain's graft plot is beside the point (screenplays dissolve like breath mints in the mouths of actresses like Arlene Dahl), and no amount of lurid political loyalties can do more than pace the two pairs of breasts that parade like Hitchcock's proverbial ticking bomb(s) from first frame to last. "Nymphomaniac," after all, is just a word, and every scene in Slightly Scarlet begins with "action!"

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Peter Doesn't Get to Vote

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
directed by Jacques Rivette
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from the vaults

I bought this movie years ago in an ugly VHS edition from New Yorker Films. I wanted to wait for the right day to watch it, and I waited, and waited, one year, two years, three years. But time is circular, and this is a beginning. Rivette is open with his methods, like an amateur. Another French in Action, but with two pretty girls instead of one! At three hours, Boating beats the drive from San Antonio to Houston, but you settle in.

Nothing makes sense, or it's all unclear. One of the women is into magic, the other is receptive to chance encounters. But there are no chance encounters, and now that you think of it, the editing is off, or on. Time passes.

In the end, the movie is like every low-budget scare from the Utah desert to the woods of Tennessee. Boating possesses none of Lynch's lushness, but there is room for other ghosts in the agony of 2 am; none of RKO's set designers, but the same Lewton-like atmosphere. Everything I like in the movies I love, from the sidewalks at the feet of Rohmer's heroines to the heroines themselves (the later, laughing ones), pulled through pitch and wax, enchanted, and left to green thoughts in a morning shade.

Chorus cat-nip or the greatest movie ever made?

Forgive and Let Die

Bend of the River (1952)
directed by Anthony Mann
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Bill Munny's ascension to feverish Ares is a reaction to the death of his black partner. The descent of Unforgiven from the mountaintop of my estimation - or at least the retreat of my sense of awe - is only the beach revealed by the outgoing tide. A western like Bend of the River shows how varied the genre got, long before 1992. Maybe what remains to Unforgiven is race - and specifically slaves - as the impetus behind so much western violence. It's separate in theme from crimes against Indians, and cannot find its excuse in nation-building or expansion.

One thing's sure, though. Gentleman Jim's got the market cornered on Bleeding Kansas mercenaries starting over on behalf of a good woman's love. For every mixed metaphor in my first paragraph, Stewart slips a threat soft into the beds where bad men sleep. Mann accommodates him with great Wild West sets (young Portland on the Columbia River) and much-higher-percentage-than-studio-average location shooting. A covered wagon never looked so heavy as when a team of horses and a bang-up stuntman try to drag the whole Oregon Trail across snowfields above the timberline. Whatever the Eskimos might say about the white stuff, this was something new.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

The Low Hurdle

Persepolis (2007)
directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from ELO

I didn't read Persepolis for the same reason I never pick up a copy of Blankets at my local comic book store. When I have money for comics, I like colors and other planets more than clean lines and a break-up. Persepolis the movie is about a girl in Iran in the 1970s and 1980s. It doesn't try to be much more - maybe something about growing up or gratitude to mom and dad - and it isn't. Could a film like that be live-action and still get made? Probably not. The sensation of flying on a first date in a car is barely justification for animation. But I didn't know about snow in Iran. Whatever benevolence so benign an observation imparts, it is one more reason to think of human history as shared, as short, and as isolated in its occurrences - an emptiness against which small gestures do their part.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

How to Paint a Picture

The Crimson Kimono (1959)
directed by Sam Fuller
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at the Guild

When Kubrick sent the Eyes Wide Shut screenplay back for revisions, he requested "flatter" dialogue. As much as we made fun of Tom Cruise's parroting as the go-to acting style of America's most serious celebrity, most of his repetition was apparently an effort to make Bill Harford seem more "real." Well, there's the real of a fantasy in Christmastime Manhattan, and then there's a weekly judo tournament at the Korean gymnasium in mid-century Los Angeles.

One of the things I like about Sam Fuller is the degree to which his characters engage the worlds they inhabit; in The Crimson Kimono, it isn't just two cops who work the Chinatown beat and spend a few scenes talking beneath paper lanterns. No, these all-Americans attend a cultural exchange pavilion, wrestle each Saturday in the local judo league, and take time out from visiting LA's Korean war memorial (who knew?) to drink with a wise-as-the-world alcoholic ("I knew women like that!") on Skid Row. If there's a more beautiful shot of the city than a man in a suit pacing outside the Buddhist shrine (and again, this is LA, not Kurosawa Kyoto), smoking a cigarette while a front blows in from the coast, then it was probably shot by Sam Fuller somewhere I never would have guessed.

One more reason why I love the movies.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Where the Nightingale Sings a Pretty Song

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
directed by Stanley Kubrick
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

In praise of Eyes Wide Shut, Michael Chion's BFI book illuminates the little-noticed (peripheral characters do not exist except in the company of protagonists Bill and Alice Harford), the unexpected (Kubrick is hopeful in most of his movies, or at least generous in not judging his men and women too harshly), and the underrated (the whole film). Reading it after a second viewing (still the "edited" cut, thanks Netflix), I closed the book and said to myself, "What a great movie."

What's funny is that, watching Eyes Wide Shut six hours earlier, and me as open-minded as I could be - I've looked forward to sitting down with it again for years, assuming I'd underestimated the effectiveness of its eerie social subversions all along - I felt immediately afterwards that I'd seen two films. The first was the long nighttime descent of Bill Harford into an underworld of perfectly transposed dreams. The second was Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise overacting, like a video a coach might make to show the team how wrong they got the game-losing drive. If the famous trailer was an exercise in star power ("CRUISE - KIDMAN - KUBRICK"), time has revealed the limits of fame over talent. You need both, and the last ten years have simply been too unkind to Tom and Nicole for Eyes Wide Shut to weather them.