BEST SHOT: ANGELS IN AMERICA

For the final-but-not-actually episode of Hit Me with Your Best Shot in 2015, Nathaniel has picked an old subject, one that I didn't follow along with at the time: 2003's Angels in America, the HBO production of Tony Kushner's monumental 1993 play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and a late masterwork in the increasingly spotty career of director Mike Nichols.

The original play was presented in two parts, "Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika", and the HBO version follows suit. Each half is around three-ish hours long, so Nathaniel presented a couple of options: choose the best shot from the overall 6-hour monolith, choose the best shot from each episode, or just pick one half and then pick the best shot from that. And while I have prided myself on always trying to pick whatever option is most onerous, this was simply not the week for it. So I confess to taking the easy way out: I only watched "Millennium Approaches", which I've always preferred, on the page, the stage,* and the screen (though the two halves are closer in quality in Nichols's hands than in Kushner's original).

Part of the point of Angels in America is that it is a massive, uncontainable beast of a thing, serving as a summary referendum on the history of the United States from prior to its founding to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s (the story is set in 1985), with special attention paid to how identity intersects with history; mostly, but not solely, homosexual identity. It's trying to be about Everything, and the scary thing is how close it comes to succeeding.

This of course means that it's not possible to pick one image and say "yep, that's emblematic of everything I want to say about the piece" (and I also didn't want to pick any of the big obvious showy images: skipping the Jean Cocteau sequence hurt real bad, though). Not even if we're just limiting ourselves to "Millennium Approaches", though I suspect that I'd end up picking the same shot if I were considering the film as a whole (sadly, I did not have anything resembling the free time to watch "Perestroika", and so I rely on memories that are at least eight years old).

In addition to being about the giant courses of history and society, Angels in America is also about just four characters, with some more important figures on the periphery: two are a Mormon couple whom we needn't concern ourselves with (though they're played by Patrick Wilson and Mary Louise Parker in their star-making turns, and they're both fucking wonderful - in particular, given the amount of top-tier talent showing up onscreen, I never cease to be baffled how Wilson could give my favorite performance out of everybody. But anyway, this is totally irrelevant). Two are a gay couple in New York, Prior (Justin Kirk) and Louis (Ben Shenkman). If there's a single thing that drives the engine of "Millennium Approaches" - which there isn't - it's that Prior has AIDS and near the start of the story, finally tells Louis about it.

But that hasn't happened yet at the time of my choice for Best Shot - this is less than ten minutes in, and all we've seen so far is Louis's grandmother's funeral. Prior leaves first, lights a cigarette, and waits for Louis to break away from his extended family. They touch so little that it's almost an accident, then round the corner, and then, out of sight of the judgmental eyes of relatives, they finally move in close.

Two things are going on: first, the obvious one from the blocking that precedes this image, is the need to hide one's true self for fear of the cruel opinions of society. The pain felt by the gay characters in Angels in America isn't simply the mortal terror of AIDS; it's also being found unworthy by majoritarian culture. It's about being unable to live an authentic life because of the Way Things Work. The delay of this moment of physical contact draws all of our attention to that fact, and when Prior finally touches Louis's shoulder, it is a profound statement of identity just as much as it's simple gesture of affection.

The other thing is, I confess, a hoary bit of obvious symbolism. AIDS suffocates every part of the play and movie, and the nearness of death is a major theme. So here we have two emotional impulses simultaneously marching along: love, in the form of the two men comforting each other, and doing so in a way that unambiguously announces to anyone watching that they are a couple and will not, for now, hide that. And death, in the form of the memorial chapel sign, a thick black bar looming over them as they walk towards it. It is a literal memento mori. This tension - love in the presence of reminders of death, love in the presence of memory bearing down - is one of the major propulsive forces in Angels in America, and this moment foreshadows how important that will eventually be in these two men's lives.

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BEST SHOT: CHICKEN RUN

With Shaun the Sheep Movie having dismally collapse in the U.S. but still being one of the most likable and rich children's movies in years, so let's keep talking about it - hey everybody, go see Shaun the Sheep Movie - Hit Me with Your Best Shot this week turns towards Aardman Animation's first feature film, Chicken Run from 2000. I find myself enormously anxious to talk about the whole movie, which I haven't ever come up with a good reason to review, and shame on me. But that's not the spirit of this series, and so with enormous reluctance, I will forbid myself from talking about the crafty puns, the impeccable voice casting, the bravery of not only including WWII and Holocaust imagery in a children's movie about talking chickens but even following through to make those references feel totally earned. And maybe some day I'll figure out a reason that isn't transparently arbitrary to write it up in full.

Anyway, the imagery: it is an exemplary feature-length visual reference to an entire genre, the World War II prison camp films (and Stalag 17 & The Great Escape in particular, along with scattered nods to other films; Raiders of the Lost Ark puts in an especially notable appearance. The joke being that all these familiar settings and images are now filled with latex and clay chickens.

The effect this has on the film is twofold. It means that it's ingeniously funny, and it really never lets up: the absurdity of a genial little English farm with goofy animals, incongruously boasting Aardman's characteristic teeth in their plasticine beaks, all inhabiting the exact world of tough-minded adult action films is a bit more snarky than Aardman's usual sense of humor, the influence perhaps of distributor and co-financier DreamWorks Animation SKG (though this was before DWA had gone all-in on sarcasm; Shrek was still a year away). At the same time, the whole joke is a very generic movie given a loopy facelift through clay poultry, so on a shot-by-shot basis, almost nothing in Chicken Run is creative and beautiful as-such; all of the shots look trite and common because they're supposed to be trite and common.

It makes it tricky to pick a best shot, but I think I've managed:

So you can see, I assume, what I'm talking about in terms of the content and framing of this shot being rather conventional, save for the chickenification of it. Which is no sin, of course; it's a shot type that shows up often because it works very well at communicating a certain emotion.

And this certainly does that beautifully well. The three-tiered composition is elegant as it is straightforward: the two main characters in the foreground, Ginger (Julia Sawalha) and Rocky (Mel Gibson) are noticeably elevated above the field of chicken coops, connected more with the distant horizon and the soothing calmness of the blue sky and the lighter blue clouds. It's a yearning moment, with the ugly closeness of the coops - a clear-cut reference to POW camps - ceding space to clear open air as our eyes move upward to the top of the frame, for that is very much the way our vision has been directed by the composition (all those lines on the roofs!). It's not clever, but it doesn't have to be: it's a direct and elemental depiction of the theme of the movie: the desire to escape imprisonment and punishment, the idealisation of of the world one wants to escape to, and the comfortable familiarity of spending a quiet moment with the ones who you want to escape with.

Plus, it's silly, you see. It's got chickens in. But chickens who feel greatly human, bubbly silliness and all.

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BEST SHOT: SAFE

Slightly more than two months ago, I watched Todd Haynes's Safe for only the second time, after several years. "Damn," I thought to myself, clear as clear can be, "this is a terrifyingly well-composed movie. I really hope Nathaniel picks it for Hit Me with Your Best Shot sometime. Because every shot is perfect. Even the most generic, functional establishing images are so clearly worked into the visual strategy of the whole movie by Haynes and cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy. You could literally grab just any random shot and know that you'd have something to talk about."

Well, now Nathaniel has picked it, and I decided to put my money where my inner monologue is. I did, in fact, decide to pick a random shot. Truly random: first I flipped a coin to decide between the first and second halves of the movie, then I used a random number generator to determine the minute, and then again to determine the second. And it is with pleasure that I thus introduce to you the image that occurs 1:31:55 into Safe:

Random, I tells ya. And still perfect.

Safe, if you haven't seen it - AND YOU NEED TO SEE IT, it's unquestionably in the top tier of English-language films from the 1990s - is the mystifying, horrifying story of what happens to Carol White (Julianne Moore, in what's still probably the best performance of her career) when she becomes allergic to the 20th Century. When all of the usual sources for support - the confused medical industry, her pleasant but emotionally inaccessible husband - prove unable to help her, she turns to the apparently kind folks at Wrenwood, a New Age-style retreat in the desert whose founder and leader, Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), is closer to a cult leader than medical guardian.

So let's dig in and do some image analysis, huh? This shot comes relatively early in Carol's sojourn to Wrenwood, before the full impact of its relentless-unto-bullying positivity has played out on her body. It's one of Peter's many group pep talks, to a group of people suffering from the same environmental sensitivity, and that's Carol all the way over to the right. Let's talk about her position within the frame, and the lighting: there's a great trick in this shot of isolating Carol without actually isolating her. There are two people right there in her space, after all. But consider the use of white to separate her out from them, and consider even more that slice of light crossing her left side. It makes her the only human being in the frame who is given that kind of hard, distinguishing lighting, and it makes her stand out as somehow different from all the rest. Plus, the bulk of the people are all in one solid block of the composition, curving around and directing our eye, not to Carol, but to the gap between her and the lamp, setting her apart even more. And so we have the quiet implication of the cult: she is with people who understand her suffering and give her comfort, but this is unfulfilled and artificial - she's still on her own.

And now let's pull back to the whole composition: do you know what's amazing about this shot? You see something in this shot you almost never ever see in a basic conversational wide shot, though it happens quite a lot in Safe. You see the ceiling. And those giant white circles of light, in addition to suggesting that the space is kind of alien and and science-fictional (so to with all the white in this white-heavy image), are so obvious and eye-catching that they tend to make us extra-super aware that we can see the ceiling.

So what we have is a low, crouched angle pointing up, and at divergent lines to the room (you'll note, we're staring into the far corner, and there's nothing parallel to the plane of the camera lens in the whole space), with our protagonist set off to the side, watching the activity like a solitary audience member in a theater. It's slightly weird, slightly uncomfortable, slightly disorienting; it's a shot that is not right. I wouldn't call it threatening, though there are other shots that are, stressing the unstressed menace of Wrenwood. What it does, however, is perfectly express Carol's own sense of not-rightness, and of having the environment around being an inapt fit for her. It is a space that, without being in any way abnormal, is thoroughly uninhabitable. And that's Safe's subject, plot, and mood, all in a nutshell.

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BEST SHOTS: THE VMAS

Nathaniel had to make a last-minute scheduling change, which means that this week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot is all different and exciting and weird: he's assigned all five of the newly-announced VMA nominees for Best Cinematography. This is particularly different and weird for me: as one of those crabby olds who hasn't systematically listened to pop music in around a decade, I didn't even recognise the name of three of the artists/bands whose videos were nominated. And I liked a grand total of none of the songs.

But it's a fun challenge nonetheless, for the style and vocabulary of music videos is one that I find much worthy of praise, study, and criticism, and it just never comes up, does it? So here we are, then, with my favorite shots from five different videos that I would never, in the ordinary course of things, would have watched, and in more than half of the cases, I'm pleased that I did.

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Flying Lotus (featuring Kendrick Lamar), "Never Catch Me" - cinematography by Larking Sieple (watch the video)

A bittersweet little fable in which two black children rise from their coffins to dance at their own funeral and return outside, with the stone-faced non-response from the mourners and the details of the finale suggesting that we're not watching a return to life, but the release of two souls into whatever comes after. Does it track a bit too closely to banal "they've gone to a better place!" sentimentality. Oh aye, it absolutely does. But the exuberance of the choreography contrasting with the hushed lighting inside the church and then compliment by the hazy, afternoon exteriors, is enough to give the video more emotional impact than any description of its content could do.

My pick for best shot, anyway, is the kick-off to all that, and it would be quite impossible to express what makes it great without seeing it in motion.

Obviously, this was coming - we just saw the little boy open his eye. But still, I gasped, literally gasped, when this shot came in. The starkness of the dark figures against the white rectangles of the coffin, the choreographic "oomph" of them both jolting up so quickly and in perfect tandem, and the stately mournfulness of the camera moving down the aisle with its soft lighting and extremely present shadows are going in three different directions, but the combination of sadness and surprise is exactly what the video does throughout to great effect, and never better than right in this moment.

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Ed Sheeran, "Thinking Out Loud" - cinematography by Daniel Pearl (watch the video)

Sight unseen, this was the one I was excited about: I'm way the hell obsessed with Pearl's cinematography for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both of them.

First point off: the song is insipid pap. Second point off: the music video is dull, with thoroughly generic, if impressively flourish-ey dancing. It is, in effect, a video whose whole entire point is "look at the lighting! Look at how the lighting interacts with moving human bodies and moving cameras!" And for that, I can just as easily watch "Single Ladies", which at least has balls-to-the-wall choreography. Still, if you've got Pearl doing your lighting, you can get away with that.

Picking a favorite shot, anyway, is basically an exercise in deciding what you think the prettiest kind of lighting is, and go with it. Me, I like it when light defines negative space and subdivides the image. So here's my pick: the noir moment of "Thinking Out Loud".

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Taylor Swift (featuring Kendric Lamar), "Bad Blood" - cinematography by Christopher Probst (watch the video)

Hey, so I don't like Taylor Swift. Never have. "You Belong with Me" is okay in the sense that I could imagine the person who wrote and performed it having an interesting career if she hung up the country-pop shit and embraced the history of the Nashville sound, and since that's exactly the opposite of what happened, I'm just going to continue to avoid thinking about her as much as possible, which is easier than you'd think, given her dominance of all the music.

As for the video - what the hell is this doing within miles of a cinematography award? It's so computer processed that it barely resembles photography any more. But at least there's some shiny graphic interest, some images that feel like panels from a comic book. Speaking of which:

There is but one reason I picked this image out of all the ones available to me, which is that everything about it reminds me of a splash page from Sin City. The garish red has the tendency to suck the color out of the image, which is itself artfully arranged violence designed to call attention to the shape of the female body. Most importantly, the way the car runs at a diagonal adds a sense of momentum and force to the image.

And to be fair "I could be reading a Frank Miller comic book instead of watching this right now" is no compliment, but it reminded me of good Frank Miller at least. Given how much of the rest of the video reminded me of bad Michael Bay, with just enough sense of humor in some of the images (teddy bear with a knife in the face made me laugh, I confess) to keep the whole thing tolerable, that's enough to put it over.

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FKA twigs, "Two Weeks" - cinematography by Justin Brown (watch the video)

Um. Okay. Both visually and sonically, I think I'm sorry that I wasn't high when I watched this one.

It certainly looks striking, but not in an entirely good way: the soft focus CGI golden lighting feels alarmingly cheap, and the army of small twigslings are goofy without there being any indication that this is supposed to be funny in even the slightest degree. They're also composited into the frame with shockingly poor skill, for a video nominated for both its cinematography and its visual effects - the lighting is just all wrong.

Still, the gentle track back revealing a temple in praise of the goddess twigs is hypnotic, in its own fashion, and the sense of grandeur is absolutely tremendous - as a single moment in a Tarsem Singh movie, and with better CGI, I think I could have been absolutely crazy about this. So it is only fair that for my favorite frame of the single continuous shot, I pick the widest extent of that shot, revealing the gilded splendor of the production design in all its fullness.

Seriously, though, I wish I'd been stoned. I'd like to get something out of this, anything.

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Alt-J, "Left Hand Free" - cinematography by Mike Simpson (watch the video)

Since we're never going to see a beer ad directed by David Gordon Green, this is the next best thing.

The hook is unbelievably straightforward: "in the summer, sexy young people like to have fun with their sexy young friends! Pick-up trucks and getting wet are often involved!" And the images are precisely as unimaginative as you'd expect, though I'd actually be inclined to award this one Greatest Degree of Difficulty: the night shots are obvious, but I'm far more impressed by Simpson's ability to shoot all that sunlight on water and not ever catch any harsh reflections.

As a video, it lacks the nuance and resonance of "Never Catch Me", but as a collection of images, I actually prefer this (those two are, by miles and miles, my favorites of the five). Some of the shots are fun and relaxed; a surprising number feel worn out, like you will after you've gotten too much sun. And one of those is my pick:

At the risk of making claims for this that it fucking well doesn't deserve, but there's a loneliness here that I find admirable. Taken in isolation - and even in the video proper - it's easy for me to come up with a narrative of abandoned places on the side roads of America, two shops that are just hanging out in the middle of dust with nobody visiting them except this kid who's clearly there for reasons of his own, that involve isolation and solitude. Staring the camera down, like he didn't quite intend to be photographed, he's the only person in the video who isn't overtly having All Kinds of Fun, and that combined with the washed-out palette and the lack of pavement makes it feel like we've stumbled into a forgotten corner of the country that wants to stay that way.

Shorter version of that paragraph: this looks like an illustration from a National Geographic article on the American Southwest during the recession. And that's, again, making claims that the video doesn't ask me to make, but sometimes an image just clicks for you in a certain way and you can't shake it.

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BEST SHOT: SUNSET BLVD.

"You may not use Norma Desmond's final scene, that infamous closeup", ordered Nathaniel, as he assigned 1950's glorious noir melodrama Sunset Blvd. for this week's episode of Hit Me with Your Best Shot. Easily done. From the exact moment that he named it, I knew that there was a 0% chance that I'd go with any other shot than the one I picked - boring of me, I know, especially given the extravagant greatness on the order of director Billy Wilder's best-looking film (and maybe cinematographer John F. Seitz's best-looking film - the men collaborated on Double Indemnity, which looks great, but I'm actually thinking about Seitz's work lensing The Big Clock, one of those movies that you've never heard of till you see it, and then you get to wondering why the hell it's not on everybody's Top 10 of All Time list).

And even more boring because it's the most obvious possible scene to pick from - Nathaniel himself cited it as the film's best, and I know I'm not the first Hit Me... participant to go to this exact spot. But why fight it. Here's my best shot, and if you haven't seen Sunset Blvd. you'll have no idea what I'm going to be talking about, but you also have an exquisite experience in your hopefully near future.

The scene: Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) showing her gigolo, Joe Gillis (William Holden) one of her old movies (played by the incomplete Queen Kelly from 1929, starring Swanson and directed by Eric von Stroheim, who plays Norma's imperious butler Max). It's the most symbolically overripe sequence in the movie: Old Swanson watching Young Swanson, playing Old Desmond watching Young Desmond. It is a scene of literally reflected glory - while obviously Seitz didn't really use a movie screen as the solitary light source in this sequence, the angles of the lights sources all imply that there's no illumination in this other than the glow of Young Norma Desmond, in beatific close-up. And it is a thin kind of light that only kind of gives us enough to see the two actors sitting in the gloom. The glory of youth, the glory of The Movies - it's all just enough to emphasise the darkness.

So that's the symbolic part of it. Then there's the straightforward narrative part. Here we have Norma, staring at herself with a hungry, predatory look; here we have Norma's hand, reaching out to claim Joe in the dark, her fingers splayed like the talons of some bird of prey. Or a vulture, more to the point. And here we have Joe, looking down but not quite at her claw, with a look of revulsion that he keeps all to himself, as he pinches a cigarette with just a bit too much tension and anger. Their whole relationship consists of playing at those two basic roles: she's a carnivore and a rabid voyeur of her own legend; he's forcing himself to be by her side, hating himself and disgusted by her for every moment of it. This image has summed up Sunset Blvd. to me for close to two decades now, and even more than that, it sums up the entire psychological universe of noir: people are animals, people are liars, people are repellents towards themselves and the world. And all it takes to demonstrate it is one uncomfortable pose and one starving look, emerging from an all but impenetrable murk. They don't need words, they have faces. And lots of suffocating shadows.

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BEST SHOT: CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON

This week in Hit Me with Your Best Shot: in preparation for its Netflix-sponsored sequel set to come out this August, Nathaniel wanted to revisit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I couldn't agree more with that impulse. Sadly, it was just announced yesterday that said sequel was getting bumped back to the first quarter 2016. Still, it's a breathtaking movie and worth going back to for any occasion, even if I was horrified to realise as I was watching it how goddamn long it's been since I've seen it - the entire lifespan of this blog and then some. I beg your pardon if I resist the urge to sneakily turn this Best Shot exercise into an excuse to write up the whole entire movie; the sequel is coming out in the future, after all, and that's all the excuse I'll need to re-revisit it come winter.

So let's keep it nice and focused for right now. In my recent revisitations with the various odds and ends of Ang Lee's career, I have mostly latched onto them as relationship dramas - between siblings, parents and children, lovers - meaning that this time around, I was more invested in the human drama than the fucking glorious landscape cinematography by Peter Pau, or the fight choreography by Yuen Woo-Ping that I confess to loving less than I did 12 years ago, when my knowledge of wuxia was basically this and nothing else. And this even caught me a little by surprise; I had every intention when I started the film of picking something from its fight in the bamboo forest, the sequence burned into my memory more than any other, thanks to its fluorescent greens and the slow grace of its movement and sound design. But instead, I went right to one of the film's two love stories.

Quick primer, if you haven't seen the film recently, or at all: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the story of a pair of middle-aged warriors, Li Mu-Bai (Chow Yun-fat) and Yu Shu-Lien (Michelle Yeoh), longtime friends and colleagues, and an intemperate young woman, Yu Jiaolong* (Zhang Ziyi), the daughter of the local governor, who is both a secret martial artist and secretly in love with the bandit Luo Xiaohu (Chang Chen). The older pair, who have never acted on nor confessed to their romantic attraction to each other, chase Jiaolong after she steals a great sword, the Green Destiny, and we are generally encouraged to see the feverish passion of the young lovers as an alternate possibility for the life that the old friends never shared.

So first and foremost, my reading of the film this time around was a love story, and here is the cap to that story:

This is near the end of the movie, so SPOILER ALERT, if a 15-year-old movie actually gets spoiler alerts: Li Mu-Bai has been poisoned, and Jiaolong has been sent to find an ingredient to help make medicine, though it's pretty clear to us in the audience that they're really just trying to get her out of the way to say goodbye. And so they do in a scene that, apparently, reveals the immense limitations of Chow and Yeoh's Mandarin. So I'm ecstatic that I don't speak Mandarin, because I get to just pay attention to the tender, sad looks on the actors' faces, in the moment that they finally allow their defenses to fall and confess their love: a mature, calm love, born of wisdom and familiarity and not the rage of passion. And then it cuts to the wide shot above as Li Mu-Bai passes away.

The shot plays to two of my biggest weaknesses. One of these is the terrific us of negative space: all of that blackness isn't entirely featureless - you can see the wall the left of the characters, and their reflection in the jet-black river below - but there's precious little to see besides the slight curve of Yeoh's back with the light falling directly on her. It is, in the most literal way possible, a portrayal of love as the light in the darkness, the thing that keeps us warm even in an empty, cold world. It is safety and comfort and human connection surrounded by death.

The other thing is that the abrupt cut from a series of close-ups to a wide shot has the effect of giving the couple their privacy, a trick that never fails to get me. Which is silly, sort of - they don't exist. But even so, the film does not want to deprive them of this long-delayed moment of honesty and intimacy, and it's not our moment to share. It belongs to them, and we can politely wait on the far side of the water, thank you very much. To me, it has the effect of making their love feel even more real; it is treated with respect and dignity that's entirely earned. It has formed part of the film's backbone all along, and because of that, this moment is, arguably the movie's emotional climax. And that's true whether we get to be a part of it or not.

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BEST SHOT: THE RED SHOES

Well, Nathaniel went and did it: he finally picked the most beautiful movie ever made for Hit Me with Your Best Shot. We turn, this week, to The Red Shoes, the 1948 ballet drama written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, designed by Hein Heckroth, shot by Jack Cardiff, and generally speaking the movie in which Technicolor reached its peak, as well as possibly cinema itself, though I'd probably need to be a bit cagey about the latter of those claims.

Now, sometimes when I approach these HMWYBS candidates that I've seen before, I have no idea what I want to pick until I rewatch the whole movie. Sometimes I have a good sense of where I want to end up, and I rewatch it all just to be sure. And sometimes I stare myself straight in the face and say, "Tim, don't be a fucking idiot. You're picking something from the ballet. You're probably picking the shot where she looks at herself dancing in the store window. Because this isn't a competition, and you don't get points for being the most obscure."

So here is a shot from the ballet - she's looking at herself dancing in the store window.

If you haven't seen The Red Shoes, rest assured that it's the biggest gap in your film education, and you should make it a short-term priority. If you have seen it, I don't imagine this shot needs too much contextualising, but for the sake of form, here's a reminder: Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) is the brightest new thing in the world of ballet, having been taken in by the tyrannical impresario and genius Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) and made a star. She falls in love with the composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring), and thereon hangs a triangle: not so much between two men over one woman, but between artistic passion and quiet humanity. The stakes are expressed, right around the film's midpoint, by a glorious ballet adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes", in which a young girl receives a pair of magical ballet slippers that allow her to dance more beautifully than anyone, but at the grave price that she can never stop until her death. In 15 of the finest minutes in all of film, we see this ballet play out, though it could never be shown on any stage in the world the way we see it, with its whirlwind of dissolves and special effects creating a hellish fantasy that's a metaphorical extension of Vicky's internal dilemma, with Lermontov and Julian flashing into the spaces occupied by the demonic shoemaker in the ballet.

There's not a single moment of the ballet that isn't precious to me, so this is as much a stand-in for the whole as it is the single irreducible shot I wanted to talk about, but let's stick with it. This is the moment that the young woman in the ballet first spies the shoes, and realises how desperately she wants them, more than anything. Right before her eyes, her reflection begins dancing a completely different set of steps than she is, more fluid and energetic, while the shoemaker urges the ghostly dancer on with a most upsetting series of gesticulations and leers. It's as blunt as foreshadowing gets: the reflection is manic, and it acts of its own volition, not behaving according to the woman's desires at all. And while it's not really as noticeable in motion, I'm happy that the specific still frame I got makes it seem like the dancer is warding off her vision, understanding at some intuitive level that it's only there to destroy her.

Anyway, subtlety is nice but obvious can be a lot of fun, and this is as direct and unambiguous a one-image summary of the whole movie as there is. Stay behind with the normal, boring boyfriend in the bright light, or move into the darkness, become a brilliant dancer, and have the devil always at your side. It's ballet, after all, the best marriage of ballet and cinema ever achieved; the whole point of ballet is that you know exactly what's going on the second you lay eyes on the position of bodies. It's that level of rich, overpowering emotion that makes the film a masterpiece, with its rich, overpowering visuals and rich, overpowering melodrama. It's maybe the best of all movie spectacles, and its images are broad and expressive enough to match. Every shot of The Red Shoes is the best shot.

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BEST SHOT: MAGIC MIKE

In preparation for the 1 July release of Magic Mike XXL, Nathaniel has chosen for this week's delayed episode of Hit Me with Your Best Shot none other than Magic Mike itself. 21st Century American cinema's most colorful, smartly-lit and -staged tribute to the form of the mostly naked male body.

Which is why I naturally enough picked this as the shot I wanted to talk about:

Thing is, director/cinematographer/editor/craft services provider Steven Soderbergh didn't have it in him, by 2012, to make anything as straightforward as a crowd-pleaser about strippers. Which is why, right below the surface, Magic Mike functions more more consistently as a fable of self-exploitation, and the body as commodity in the economic free fall of the 2010s. It's a film in which Your Financial Needs glower over the shoulders of every character all the time, and it was too hard for me to resist picking an image that made that theme as literal as it could ever be. Though at least the sign is nonchalantly hanging off to the side, instead of flashing neon, or something.

The action, meanwhile, finds Mike (Channing Tatum) attempting to secure a bank loan for his real dream, which astonishingly enough, isn't stripping at all, but building artisanal coffee tables out of reclaimed industrial scrap. Look at him there, in his suit and tie. It is the most incongruous look Mike sports anywhere in the film (and, I am tempted so say, the most incongruous look in Tatum's film career). Mike is a casual, hang-out sort of guy. That is his appeal as a friend, and it's a big part of his appeal as an objectified hunk of sexy, sweaty man-meat: he's the most approachable and unthreatening of implausibly perfect physical specimens.

And yet here he is, wearing a disguise of Prim Business Man, Do You See My Smart Little Glasses and Everything? Tatum doesn't play up any physical discomfort with the outfit, but it's still an unnatural fit with everything else he wears (and/or removes) over the course of the movie, so even if Mike can play dress-up without complaint, it still feels odd and off-putting to us. It is still, in fact, using his body as a tool to make money, only by wrapping it up in wool instead of rubbing it down with baby oil, and the fantasy is wealth and respectability instead of cartoon sexuality. And it doesn't convince the nice banker lady to trust him with a penny. So even as he buries his personality and everything we know to be his visual identity beneath the uniform of respectable capitalism, it's not enough to sate Mammon's desire for human sacrifice. Your Financial Needs will never let you have such an easy, dignified way out as that.

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BEST SHOT: AMADEUS

This week in Hit Me with Your Best Shot: the sumptuous period piece Amadeus, quasi-biopic of 18th Century composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and one of cinema's finest depictions of envy at its most toxic and self-destructive. It wasn't so long ago that I said my piece on the movie as a whole, so I won't bother with going through it all again, but it does the richly appointed costume drama thing as well as it has ever been done, never as mere eye candy, but in service to the characters and their lives. Which isn't to say that it's not also good eye candy: only that director Miloš Forman and cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček film Patrizia von Brandenstein's production design and Theodor Pištěk's costumes with an eye towards physically concrete realism, and not just "LOOK AT THE PRETTY", like the vast majority of this film's generic bedfellows.

All of which is to say that, naturally enough, my pick for this series is maybe the plainest, blandest shot in the movie. Let me explain really quickly before I share it: this comes right after the gorgeous scene in which Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) reads through Mozart's (Tom Hulce) folder of work-in-progress, and experiences a moment of rhapsodic joy so intense that even as an old man decades later, he still drops into a trance from the memory of how perfect the art in front of him was. That was the scene I was going to snip a still from, until I let the movie roll forward to the next scene, in which we see the curdled reverse of this artistic transport: Salieri snatches his crucifix off the wall and pitches it into a fireplace, declaring war on the God who would bless a crude monkey like Mozart with skills that Salieri can only imagine possessing. In the process, we see this:

In a film about the life and texture and attitude of 18th Century Vienna, a nearly blank wall is a weird choice for an image that defines the whole. But thematically, I can't think of a more blunt message statement. From the title down, the movie is secretly all about Salieri's own crisis of religious, more than about music or professional rivalry; it is the story of a man who dedicated his life to God feeling that he got the worst of the bargain, and then spending the rest of his life trapped in a living Hell where he finds out how much worse "the worst" can go.

And so this image, which comes at the exact point that the movie and Salieri pivot. There has been no cut since we saw him rip down the crucifix, and Forman and his editors linger on the end of the shot for a few seconds, to let the clearly defined absence of that crucifix linger. It is not simply a blank wall, but a blank wall with the ghost of Salieri's faith marked out in negative space. As visual metaphors go, that's hardly the subtlest, but it's immensely striking regardless - even more striking in the moment, since it quietly follows and precedes two violent, stabbing motions. And it is, to me, the perfect symbol for the movie as a whole: the tragedy of Salieri's later life isn't that he has lost faith, but that he remains a believer, who has willingly consigned himself to his own suffering solely as a "fuck you" to God. As he sinks into forgotten irrelevance, Salieri's only option in life is to reflect on the shape of things he no longer has - talent, prestige, God - and to be conspicuously aware of the space they've left behind, to be filled in by nothing at all.

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BEST SHOT: DICK TRACY

Hit Me with Your Best Shot returns from hiatus with one of the best and hardest assignments Nathaniel has ever given us: 1990's Dick Tracy, directed by Warren Beatty and shot by Vittorio Storaro, with costumes by Milena Canonero and production design by Richard Sylbert. And I name all four of those people because they are, between them, the heart and soul of what makes this film all that it is, namely the most comic-ey of all movies yet made. In its colors, its lines, and its compositions, (and in its performances and writing, for that matter), the animating principal behind the movie was to make something that looked as much like a comic strip as it possibly could.

When a film's visual style is so unmistakable, it's easy to know what approach to take to picking a best shot: what image most successfully evokes Chester Gould's Depression-era action comic? And then, it becomes stupefyingly hard to actually find that one single shot, because Dick Tracy is pretty close to entirely perfect. There are only images that look like they were ripped directly from the garish four-color Sunday funnies. It's nice that there's no such thing as a wrong choice, but it makes it damn hard to come up with the right choice.

After a hell of a lot of thinking, anyway, I ended up with this one:

There's a hint of perversity in selecting a shot from a movie with such distinctive and luscious costumes that doesn't show off those costumes even slightly. But it has everything else I wanted. The bright cherry red bricks shading into black is a perfect example of getting everything from just one color and smart lighting, capturing the careful shading of a top-notch comic artist with a level of texture and boldness of saturation that would defeat newspaper printing. The silhouettes and the half-seen violence are a nod to German Expressionism, the style that directly influenced Gould's carnival of grotesque human forms, and to Expressionism's American kid, film noir, the style to which so many urban-set crime pictures have owed their everything, with Dick Tracy in particular borrowing extensively from the vocabulary of thick shadows and damp corrosion that make up noir.

But what really appeals to me about this image is none of that, not even the minute echo of red in the hat of the gangster about to be pushed through the window. It's the cracked glass. There's something that feels so perfectly, iconically comic-strip about that cracked glass - it's exactly the kind of small detail that makes great graphic storytelling, suggesting violence, momentum, tensed-up energy. And of course, seconds after this still, that gangster comes plowing through the glass, so that violence and tension are hardly accidental. But let's not skip ahead - in this one moment, the shape of the bodies and the lines in the glass provide all the illusion of force and movement that we need. I can't with a straight face call it "the best" evocation of comic art in the movie. But it's one that gives me a hell of a lot of pleasure.

(For more thoughts, check out my Dick Tracy review).

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BEST SHOT: ALL'S WELLES THAT ENDS WELLES

"You have a choice of one of three movies for the Orson Welles centennial" says Nathaniel at the end of last week's post, like he doesn't even know me. Okay, so I get it, Hit Me with Your Best Shot isn't entirely or even mostly about me. But come on. Give me a choice between three films directed by one of the greatest visual storytellers in the history of the medium, and fuckit, maybe the greatest, you know what I pick? I pick all three. Fella could have said, "choose one movie out of all of the things Welles directed", I'd have found a shot from everything. Damn me, but I'd have considered the Citizen Kane trailer a separate short film (that's a YouTube link, and if you haven't seen that trailer, you really must), I'd have picked something out of the material in the It's All True documentary, and I'd have tracked down the nine episodes of In the Land of Don Quixote even if I had to break every law of man and God to do it.

But I need only pick one shot from three films. That's easy and containable enough. So here, in chronological order, are those shots.

* * * * *

Citizen Kane (1941)

No longer the official Best Movie Ever Made, though its decades in that position were unarguably well-earned. It is a film that synthesises nearly every filmmaking technique available in 1941 and presents them in one neatly wrapped package; it is so driven by the complexity of its images that the rampaging egotist Welles saw fit to share his directorial title card with cinematographer Gregg Toland, an unheard-of gesture of equality. Choosing the "best shot" from Citizen Kane is like trying to pick the godliest saint.

So this isn't necessarily my favorite image from the whole movie, so much as it is the one I decided to write about when the time came to do the writing. Ask me tomorrow, this might have been an entirely different essay.

We all know Citizen Kane, right? So I can just dive in? This is the moment almost all the way at the end of Jedediah Leland's (Joseph Cotten) reminiscences about Charles Kane (Welles), reaching the moment where he passed out drunkenly in preparation to write a scathing review of Kane's wife's stage debut, only to wake to find Kane finishing up the job for him. He walks through the office of the newspaper down the long Z-axis path (this movie is such an orgy of deep compositions) to his desk and his typewriter, and his eerily beatific boss tapping away and holding an entire conversation without looking up.

The lighting first: for all those slate-grey noir shadows, Toland manages to keep Welles and Cotten mostly well-lit. Mostly. There's that rounded wash of jet black around Welles's face, of course, which does all the work that the acting can't - won't - do to imply the cruelty and anger that's being left conspicuously, suffocatingly unexpressed. Kane's quiet calm as he fulfills his last duty as an honorable member of the press is peaceful as it gets; even his dismissal of his best friend and most important employee is casual and unforced: "Sure, we're speaking, Jedediah. You're fired". Welles glides through the moment imperturbably; only the shadows cradling his face and slashing across his arms speak to the moral decay that led these men to this pass.

The staging second: Jesus Christ, that focal depth is a miracle. We have one set arranged so that it can contain a close-up dominating a third of the frame all the way down to a little dot of a man who'd be totally invisible if the backlighting hadn't been arranged specifically to accentuate him. This is the last time that Kane, Leland, and Bernstein (Everett Sloane) all appear in the same image, the three young lions who started off so eager to change the world for the better with their revolution in journalism now fragmented into three visual components so detached from each other that it's hard to imagine that they were all there at the same time, and it's not just some kind of optical effect. The arrangement of their faces in the frame, and the lines (especially the ceiling beams) between them insist on drawing our eyes through the scene in a kind of zig-zag, unifying the characters; but there's no smoothness, no fluidity to that connection. It's harsh, jarring, moving through high-contrast black-and-white and crashing against shapes and lines within the frame that disrupt it even more. This is what three men who no longer have anything to say to each other looks like.

And then the matter of composition and lighting. Welles is by far the most noticeable thing in frame, but the lighting calls attention to Cotten, who appears too bright for the frame, being the one decent thing in Kane's life. It's almost tempting to read the image as a riff on the "shoulder angel" trope, as Leland stands over Kane's shoulder, offering him one last chance to stay a good human being. Of course he doesn't take it; this is a tragedy. And as communicated through shadowy, dense images like this one, it's a rather inevitable tragedy.

* * * * *

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

The director's second feature and the beginning of the end: with RKO butchering the movie while Welles was off on Brazil filming a movie he never completed, The Magnificent Ambersons is the first of five out of the thirteen completed Welles features that does not exist in a form of which the director approved.* And this isn't just a disappointment in the general sense that it's nice when directors get to see their visions carried to completion; on a scene-by-scene and shot-by-shot basis, The Magnificent Ambersons seems like it might very well have been an even more accomplished work of filmmaking than Citizen Kane, if only we didn't have such a transparently hacked-apart finished project to judge it by. The unprecedented tracking shots and long takes that were to have made the film a brand-new kind of exploration of cinematic space remain only in fragments; the guts ripped out of the Bernard Herrmann score leave the soundtrack of the film an emotional grab-bag that veers from working flawlessly to barely functioning (the composer demanded his name be taken off the film as a result of the studio's tinkering with his music as they reshaped the images).

The genius, however, still lies just underneath, despite all RKO's attempts to murder it. In its own different ways, Ambersons is every inch as radical as its more famous and beloved sibling: the use of sound especially is dazzling, particularly the playful and surprising way that Welles's narration interacts with the imagery and performances. What remains of the original editing it truly superb, even above and beyond what was already brilliant in Citizen Kane; entire psychological arcs are expressed wordlessly based on the subtleties of how two frames contrast with each other.

The editing also leads to the bravura sequence near the end, with Welles calmly intoning how the bratty George Amberson Minafer (Tim Holt), having spent the whole film railing against the coming of the 20th Century, with its new styles and technologies threatening to overturn the old ways of the American aristocracy, walks home to his ancestral mansion for the last time. This sequence is presented entirely subjectively, without George showing up in frame even once, as the buildings and streets he walks dissolve one into the other, giving us a chronological tour of the evolution of middle America as classic old buildings phase into new buildings, which phase into the girders and factories of the new industrial nation growing up despite the angry objections of George and people like him. And it looks a little something like this:

The whole brief sequence is a wonderful recapitulation of one of the movie's central themes: times change and can be a rough, disorienting process. The constant, overlapping images bleed into each other till it's virtually impossible to pick them apart, a slurried mash-up of past and present and future all existing at the same time. It's a vivid visual description of memory collapsing on itself, nostalgia slamming into modernity, and the cinema straining against its seams trying to contain them all.

Also, automobiles: slow.

* * * * *

The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

We skip over Welles's third feature now, 1946's The Stranger, to go on to his famed film noir that was a decisive flop when it was new. And we see here a new kind of Orson Welles, for that matter: Kane and Ambersons were both the work of a fearless, arrogant genius, who wanted to beat cinema into a new form at his own pleasure; his subsequent American movies can't match them, though Touch of Evil comes reasonably close. What they all showcase is intermittent brilliance hemmed in by The Rules; in the particular case of The Lady from Shanghai, this means a solid but not especially unusual noir with a collection of extra-deranged performances and some discomfitingly grotesque close-ups (it's a film that manages to make every named human being seem like a kind of gargoyle, and I mean that in the best way). It's also pepped up at either end by two scenes where the director and his crew were able to go nuts: an early sequence shot in a yacht in Mexico, far from the studio's ability to tinker, and a legendary climax set in a fun house and hall of mirrors, where from absolutely nowhere at all, Welles inserts a Surrealistic horror film with some of the most unhinged editing of his career into the last act of a melodramatic crime story.

It's by far the best-known sequence in the movie, and for good reason: there's not a frame of it that isn't worthy of a master's thesis. But picking a shot from it would be the cheapest way out imaginable, so I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I also was going to steer clear of the film's second most famous sequence, which finds Michael "Black Irish" O'Hara (Welles, sporting a comically disastrous Irish accent) and Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) comforting each other in the San Francisco aquarium. Comforting each other with their mouths, you know. The scene is famous for its wildly fanciful use of projections of fish swimming around, great huge monsters dominating the back of the frame, and giving good credence to the occasionally-voiced idea that Welles was secretly trying to make a farce of this crime picture; but when I ended up picking a shot from this sequence, I comforted myself with knowing that at least I'd stayed away from the completely obvious.

At this point, Michael has no clue that Elsa is actually pure evil, and we in the audience don't know, but we probably understand how '40s film noir works, and if there's a lady from Shanghai or anywhere else that gets the protagonist sexually excited, she's bound to be Satan incarnate. But we don't know. Not until Welles silently inserts this shot, in total violation of the lighting continuity of the rest of the scene, that contrasts their kiss, with the fact that Elsa is a pitch-black nightmare beast, right down to that little tiny speck of light in her left eye, which I suspect took cinematographer Charles Lawton, Jr. a hell of a lot of effort to get exactly right. It shines and sparkles without any other part of her face lit from the same source; it looks for all the world like an inner glow radiating out of her shadowy body. "Satan incarnate", I said, but golly, does any noir heroine actually look as much like a demon as Hayworth does right here? It's potent foreshadowing, made all the bleaker since this is the closest the film gets to sex, and it's emblematic of one of Welles's most characteristic tricks: using the severe contrast between darkness and light to guide our eye and communicate directly with our sense of danger, no brain necessary. The Lady from Shanghai doesn't rank very high on my private ranking of Welles films, but it certainly has its share of moments that stand proudly with anything he ever did, stylishly exaggerating and distorting the studio-enforced rules he was obliged to follow.

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BEST SHOT: BRIGHT STAR

Sometimes, in choosing candidates for Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel decides to just give all of us a present. And so it was this week, with the selection of Jane Campion's 2009 feature Bright Star (her last film, which reminds me that I still need to catch up with Top of the Lake). Do you know what the best shot is in Bright Star? Trick question, it's all of them. This is one of the loveliest movies of the 2000s, the film where we all got our first good look at this awesome new cinematographer Greig Fraser, and marvel at Campion's flawless ability to translate the textures of poetry into images. For the film is about a love affair with a poet; it is Fanny Brawne's (Abbie Cornish) movie, but the title and the artistic sensibility are John Keats's (Ben Whishaw), legendary poet and dead young person.

Bright Star is, to me, a film about four things: romance, Romanticism, being outside, and costuming. The last of these provided by Campion's longtime secret weapon, Janet Patterson, who manages the nifty twofer of easily evoking the first half the 19th Century in its prim, buttoned-up elegance, while using the colors and lines and shape of the costumes to editorialise about the characters in a way that almost turns the film into an abstract visual essay on how imagery evokes an emotional response.

So the goal then became to pick just one image that would cover all four of those bases, and here's the thing: that wasn't even slightly hard. I had a dozen candidates. So I split the difference and threw "awesome compositional strategies" on the pile because why not, I dig Fraser and I want him to do more things. So with that cutting my list down by a couple, I finally settled on this one:

Being outside is obvious, and it brings Romanticism along with it: here we are, in the world of plants and nature, where everything is more correct and right and true than it is in houses. The characters are surrounded and protected by the trees overhead, given a private world that reflects their mood. Romance is almost as obvious: the way that Fanny and John are sneaking a little kiss, quiet unconcerned about anything, the way that people desperately and goofily in love will. And that's only underscored by the composition, which puts them in the crispest focus of anything in the shot: they are the center of each other's worlds, the only thing worth paying attention to. And yet they're stranded in the deepest part of an extremely deep image, almost invisible through all the busy lines and colors, even though the lines all draw our eyes to them, and the focus does the same. For even if they are at the fixed center of each other's lives, they are stealing a private moment, and we have no right to go barging in and getting in their way.

And as for costuming: no, this is not a shot that anybody would pick because it first foregrounds what they're wearing. And yet, what they're wearing is perfect, and very nearly the star of the image. Fanny is in pink and white, the colors of the flowering trees all around; Keats, in his black clothes, is dark as the tree trunks that are the only other objects in the frame that don't erupt with color. By my count, at least three things are going on here, in ascending order of complexity and, if we want to be fair, critical bullshittery:

1) Their clothes color-code them as belonging in this natural space

2) Their clothes specifically code them as two parts of a single object; neither one of them is a complete tree alone, but together they are.

3) Keats is equated with the part of the tree that supports the rest, lofting the blossoms/Fanny up to the sky where they can be more fully appreciated in all their beauty and splendor. And that's exactly what romantic odes do: they provide the subject of the ode with a kind of artistic importance and immortality - they are a means of holding the subject up and saying "here, please, observe this world, and love it the way I do". The story might be Fanny's, but the famous person is John Keats, and we know her well enough to care about her because he wrote the words of praise towards her that showed her off to the world.

Like I said, bullshittery. But I like to think that the utterly splendid images of Bright Star, and the glorious romantic film communicated through those images can withstand being gnawed at a bit too enthusiastically. Some gorgeous films are merely gorgeous, and that's good enough; but some gorgeous films use their beauty in complex and probing ways, and that is what makes them great cinema. The least we can say about Bright Star is that it's great cinema.

Incidentally, this 2009 release has never come out on Blu-ray, because who needs high definition for one of the prettiest movies of its decade?

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BEST SHOT: NINE TO FIVE

Forgive me, dear readers, but I have to make my contribution to this week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot a short one. It's One Of Those Days.

Our subject, selected as always by the kind and good Nathaniel R, is the classic anarcho-feminist comedy Nine to Five (or 9 to 5, I'm never clear which is the more "official" title), in which three hard working women played by the once-in-a-lifetime trio of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton (who contributed the title number, one of the best songs to ever lose the Best Song Oscar) decide they've had enough of their bullying, condescending sexist prick of a boss (played, quite inevitably for 1980, by Dabney Coleman), and so they tie him up in his house and run the office in his absence. There's more to it than that, but even though this development occurs rather more than halfway through the movie, it's the thing everybody knows about it, so it seems fair enough for a précis.

All the attention usually goes - and fairly - to the film's role in the burgeoning Power to the Working Woman genre, and the three widely varied characterisations and performances of the protagonists. It's clearly slanted to encourage our viewing it through that lens: this was the era that "anything a man can do, a woman can do better" feminism was at its peak, and Nine to Five is one of the most iconic triumphs of that belief in pop culture.

But not wishing to be enormously obvious, I found myself gravitating towards the film's other inversion of traditional gender roles, the one that never gets talked about, because Coleman's Franklin Hart is such an un-nuanced gargoyle. Still, it's worth pointing out that as the three women in the movie take over the customary male role of decision making and office managing, the male villain is thrust into the role of a stay-at-home woman, literally tied down to his house. And that leads, at a certain point, to this delightful visual gag.

By this point, the film has already exploded traditional girly fantasies from the inside in the form of a marvelous series of sardonic dream sequences; it doesn't espouse a particular attitude about soap operas, but it's not hard to assume that it would be balled up with all the other things used to keep women docile and bored, and happily discarded. Or, in this case, left to rot a man's brains for a little while, as he learns firsthand how shabbily he and people like him have been treating 51% of the population for his entire life. And Coleman's resigned slumped posture just sells it that much more: he's not even miserable and angry anymore, he's just stuck in the house, watching his stories because there's nothing else for him to do. This obvious lesson is wasted on the character, but the punchy, perfectly-timed visual joke makes it impossible for us in the audience to fail to see and appreciate the irony.

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BEST SHOT: TAXI DRIVER

Unpopular opinion time! To me, Taxi Driver is Martin Scorsese's most overrated movie and almost his least-interesting feature of the '70s, beaten only by the insufferable Boxcar Bertha. I find it takes all of the director's control and Robert De Niro's savage animal power to redeem - barely - Paul Schrader's obnoxious screenplay, and even then it's neither as insightful about codes of violent masculinity or the gritty awfulness of '70s New York City, nor as interesting to look at, as Scorsese and De Niro's masterful first collaboration, Mean Streets.

So now that I've gone and ruined all my credibility forever, we can turn to the business of Hit Me with Your Best Shot, which this week journeys to Scorsese's career for the very first time with the aforementioned story of an unhinged cabbie and his antisocial attitudes and cruel behavior. It's also, at its best, a superb document of New York at its filthiest, when Time Square was a hellpit of dead-eyed whores, sex shows, and trash littering every flat surface, and it honestly hadn't occurred to me that I could possibly make it all the way through the movie without picking an image of all that squalor, preferably one that juxtaposed the ratty ugliness of the city with the even rattier soul of its broken, misanthropic title character. And yet I went somewhere completely different.

Travis Bickle (De Niro), having received his taxi and begun making his pronouncements against the deviants and minorities and all things and people he regards as scum, has begun to drive through the city in a fashion I can only describe as "prowling", his taxi viewed in isolated pieces that slice through the night air like a shark's dorsal fin.

And that image having occurred to me, it was with giddy delight that I ran across a shot that perfectly summed up that aspect of the protagonist as silent predator, gliding into the shot smoothly and silently, casually sucking on his drink like he doesn't care about anything in the world, and then catching sight of the resolutely decent and normal political campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), and just... stopping.... staring her down with that that one bright eye of his, shining in the center of the frame, perfectly spotted by the great cinematographer Michael Chapman as the piercing focal point of the whole shot. That's a cold, predatory eye, one that sizes Betsy up less as a woman than as a target, and the first half of the movie largely plays out as an exercise in seeing what happens when that kind of devouring attitude is let loose in a world that wants really badly to believe that people are basically nice.

My biggest concern with the screenplay has always been that Schrader seems entirely too interested in siding with Bickle; my greatest appreciation for Scorsese's direction is that he never gives into that impulse - even in the scenes that allow us to understand Bickle as a sad dope who has been broken by society as much as anybody, the director and the lead actor both understand that there's something red and raw and deadly dangerous about him. And that, to me, is the heart and soul of this shot: a stalker, a shark, a silent killer moving in for the attack with a loose physical carriage that borders on disinterest. It's a great moment of menace, flawlessly choreographed down to the way that De Niro's right eye is blocked out by the door frame, and immaculately acted without any words to support it, without any action at all other than the conscious lack of action.

Look, I said it was overrated. I never said it wasn't extraordinarily well-made.

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BEST SHOT: JOHNNY GUITAR

Nathaniel is spoiling me. For this week's episode of Hit Me with Your Best Shot, he's selected Johnny Guitar, one of my favorite movies of ever, one that I have revisited multiple times since I reviewed it in 2008, and have just loved it more and more even above and beyond that rave.

I'm going to skip the usual preamble and context, since there's that review waiting right there, though I will note a paradox: director Nicholas Ray and cinematographer Harry Stradling, Sr. made one of the best shot Westerns in history with this movie, and yet its brilliance comes more from its visual schema than any individual shot - it's the way that shot styles keep repeating that makes the film look brilliant. Which makes it tricky to pick a singular Best Shot, since all the good candidates show up multiple times, echoing each other.

And above all the things that keep showing up is a repeated motif of Joan Crawford as Vienna, the proud and self-reliant woman who owns a saloon out in the wild, waiting for the train to come by and make her a wealthy, proud, and self-reliant woman, standing alone in empty frames that she's allowed to completely dominate. Frames like this one:

It's not only my pick because it is typical, though when I think of Johnny Guitar, I do primarily think of Crawford standing in proud isolation. I also think of the unnerving, genre-blasting campy weirdness of it, and we have that here too: Crawford in the flounciest dress she'll wear all movie (she tends to wear masculine clothes), sitting against a rock wall that has been framed to resemble a cave dressed up as a Victorian parlor. The sheer oddness of the shot almost tends to dominate the actual content of it, though the content matters: Vienna using the trappings of delicate femininity, something she has eschewed all movie, as a way of asserting her dominance and power to control the interior space of her saloon - for we are presently in her saloon - against the mindless mob brought there by her arch-enemy, Emma (Mercedes McCambridge).

Which, since I can't resist, said mob shows up in reverse shots, thusly:

And that, with its disorienting low angle and freaky lack of depth, would also be a decent pick for Best Shot, but let's go back to the one I actually picked. So we have the gender-bending Vienna pantomiming femininity in a totally incongruous space, bringing a touch of fussy civilisation to the very bedrock of the American West in the most heavily ironised way possible. The extremely narrow band of colors - there's really nothing going on here besides brown and white - makes Vienna's triangular shape stand out as an even more aberrant element in the composition than it would be simply because of the narrative requirements of the moment and the story being told by the image.

It is, in all ways, an image of things that shouldn't go together being forcibly wedged into one place, and to hell with how peculiar the result turns out to be - it is a patchwork of irreconcilable elements that are all collected solely because Vienna's will is that they should be. Out of all the great solo shots of Crawford in the movie, this is the one that most dramatically represents her character's stubborness and willpower; and its hallucinatory aspect, that sense of random absurdity, makes it a perfect embodiment of the director's uniquely offbeat, outsider quality - the queer straight guy sensibility that makes a Ray film a Ray film, and makes this the most Ray film of them all.

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BEST SHOT: MOMMIE DEAREST

Nathaniel's pick for this very special April Fool's Day edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot is none other than the legendary camp disasterpiece Mommie Dearest, the infamous Joan Crawford biopic from 1981, a film that I had never seen before, and one that plunged me into a deep personal crisis.

Basically, it goes something like this: for a while now, I've begun to be terrified that I overindulged on camp at a young age, and have inoculated myself against. Crazy deranged badness just doesn't strike me the way it used to; instead of pointing and gawking and being delighted at the sheer madness of it, I find myself more and more thinking about it analytically, and dear God help me, looking for the good even in bad movies. And so when I finally sat down with this most infamous misfire, a career-killing miscalculation for Faye Dunaway, and I found it to be...

Fine.

It's not a good movie, Lord knows. The performances of anybody and everybody besides Dunaway are unforgivably flat, and the script has a dreadful sense of chronology, especially in its second hour. But even as it rolled around to the famed "Tina! Bring me the axe!" scene, and the notorious "No wire hangers!" scene, all I could think of was how entirely not ridiculous I was finding everything. Are these big, sprawling moments that are hysterical in the most old-fashioned, sexist sense of the word? Sure they are. But the movie kind of actually earns them. Or anyway, Dunaway does. She's basically playing Joan Crawford as Norma Desmond: an actress gone to seed and dealing with her never-distant awareness that she's old and faintly laughable by lashing out with unhinged anger. It's a good performance: not good because it's so outlandish and insane and florid, good because Dunaway does a spectacular job of portraying a woman who spends all of her time and energy being constantly On, a hammy performer even in her own private home, because she is mortally terrified to stop being The Iconic Joan Crawford long enough to discover what it means to be just plain Joan.

You know what I think the movie's big sin is? Being a straight-up melodrama on the back side of the New Hollywood; being a total throw-back of a "woman's picture" using the raging aesthetic roughness of a decade of films by boys, about boys, for boys. Not a good melodrama, of course, which is its small sin. We're miles from Douglas Sirk here, and I think director Frank Perry is surely guilty of having no clue how to manage tone on a scene-by-scene, or even shot-by-shot basis. But I don't know. It's proficient. It is a proficient biopic. As a work of cinematic storytelling, I'd unironically watch it any day of the week before I turned my attention back to A Beautiful Mind or The Imitation Game. And I've spent the whole afternoon sick to my stomach and terrified that I just can't do camp anymore. Because if you watched Mommie Dearest sincerely and didn't hate it, what hope can there be for you?

Eventually, I was able to get myself aligned to the film's campy wavelength, after it's burned off all of its most famous scenes and aged up little Christina Crawford from the bland child actor Mara Hobel to the openly helpless Diana Scarwid: she fumbles everything that comes her way and plays up her hidden glaring and portentous line deliveries so much that it seems like Joan might have been the victim of her bad seed daughter all along. And that's good for some silly laughs. Still I found myself disappointingly non-outraged, so much so that for my best shot, I didn't even pick one of the outlandish moments of High Melodrama, Dunaway caked in kabuki-white face cream like a monster from a bedtime story or the like. It is, in fact, not a goofy shot in any way.

This comes early on, at Christina's birthday party, but the moment is All About Joan; it is, in fact, more or less the first time that we start to figure out that Mommie Dearest is an abusive, self-centered tyrant. And more to the point, a self-centered tyrant who is deeply invested in presenting a carefully polished image of herself to the world. A baby in one hand, four of Our Boys ready to go Serve Their Country in World War II, and a smile that couldn't possibly be any more warmer or welcoming or matronly; for it to be any more wholesome, familial and All-American, it would have to involve a bald eagle eating an apple pie and shitting baseballs. And it's fake as hell, a calculated pose for those cameras that cuts off right at the edge of the frame.

Mommie Dearest is all about the gap between the images that are presented and the things that are true: Joan Crawford, glamorous actress, was an abusive monster; Christina Crawford, earnest truth-teller, comes across as a schemer and whiny pill; a prestige adaptation of a major book starring one of the preceding decade's key actresses is appreciated today solely for being tacky and low rent. And that's what drove me to this shot: it embodies everything about that. It is a carefully manipulated moment designed to bid for sympathy and love, but we see the reality, not the canned photograph. Of course, Mommie Dearest is itself one more manipulation; but it is not a careful one. It is sloppy and the seams show all over. And that is perhaps the best part of its charm, ironically or otherwise.

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BEST SHOTS: YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW

Fun times! For Hit Me with Your Best Shot this week, Nathaniel has assigned Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, one of the finest examples of that marvelously oddball genre, the 1960s Italian Anthology Film. And, on top of it, perhaps the most uncharacteristic work ever directed by Neorealist master Vittorio De Sica.

The film is made up of three individual segments, each named for the woman played in it by Sophia Loren; cumulatively, they explore the sexual mores of three different slices of Italian life, as Loren and Marcello Mastroianni play three enormously different kinds of couples. Naturally, Nathaniel left the optional rule that we could select one shot from each segment; naturally, I'm exercising that option.

First up is "Adelina", the brightest and best of the segments, showcasing De Sica's almost entirely untapped gift for comedy. Adelina has run up a stupefying list of bills, and the police have come knocking; but she and her husband Carmine discover that Italian law provides for any pregnant woman, or woman who has given birth within the last six months, can't be sent to prison. And thus do the couple forestall the inevitable for years, as an increasingly fatigued Carmine keeps knocking Adelina up, while she brings her ever-expanding brood to help her sell black market cigarettes and keep the family afloat.

It's breezy, but there's still a satiric bite, and it offers a surprisingly rich array of images to pick from: the way that Adelina is situated in the midst of a supporting community, through a series of repeated set-ups, ensures that much of the comedy and storytelling are achieved visually. That being said, I went someplace entirely differently. Herewith, my pick for Best Shot, in which Adelina demonstrates to the newly-arrived cops that she's pregnant once again, and safe from their clutches:

What I love about it its bluntness. Loren's face is just so utterly devoid of affect or even the slightest interest in her unwanted visitors. She knows, even if they don't, that she's too damn busy to deal with their nonsense - can you see that already-born kid standing right there? And look how cluttered that kitchen is! It's a fussy, jam-packed mise en scène that wonderfully suggests why Adelina, in this moment, doesn't even have the stamina to open her mouth and speak words to the cops, just to blandly indicate why they need to get the hell out and leave her be. In a funny short, it's the moment that made me laugh the loudest, and that's sometimes all you really need.

Next up: "Anna". The shortest of the segments, and also the film's obvious clinker (but then, what anthology film bats 1.000?), it's a banal drama about a shallow rich woman and her increasingly disillusioned lover, who realises over the course of a drive out from Milan that she cares more about things than people. Particularly when he damages her precious Rolls-Royce in order to avoid hitting a child. The points made by the wan script - credited the three writers, the most of any segment in the film - are obvious and there's limited visual interest; De Sica and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (who shot all three segments) are hemmed in by how much of the action takes place in the front seat of the car, and long passages of the film go by with only three or four different ideas for how to set up the camera.

Towards the end, though, intriguing images start to pile up, and among them we find this:

In the foreground: a furious Anna and a flustered Renzo trying to deal with the smoke pouring out of the broken Rolls. In the background: the boy whose non-death triggered this most severe tragedy in Anna's life, silently watching the clownish flapping about of these two sophisticated, wealthy Milanites. Generally, "Anna" grows more successful as it buries its judgment of the title character in silent, weighty moments, instead of handing off dully horrified pronouncements to Mastroianni. And this is the first and best of a handful of shots which position an out-of-focus in the back behind a two-shot in the foreground, allowing the depth of the staging and the static silence of the background character to serve as an implicit commentary. These people are putting on a little show of human behavior, and their audience is at best unimpressed with their noisy self-regard.

The film ends with "Mara", a return to genial comedy, though of a more grounded sort than was shown in "Adelina". Mara is a prostitute, whose cranky old neighbors have taken in their grandson Umberto (Giovanni Ridolfi), a seminary student. As the sheltered young man sees her untroubled ownership of her life and her sexual drive, he of course falls in love with her, which forces her to rely on her most amorous regular client, Augusto, to help her shake the boy out of his puppy love and get back on the right track.

It's the sweetest of the three stories, and the sexiest, and those mostly come in the same form: the smoldering hot Loren (who spends the film's final moments doing a striptease) dealing as nicely as she can with the boys who fall head-over-heels for her without stopping to think what her opinion on the matter might be. In practice, this means multiple scenes of her and Mastroianni (who is at his clear best in this segment, out of the three) playing scenes that weirdly blur the sexual charge of a john visiting his beloved whore, and two adults in a comfortable long-term relationship jousting with each other. That's when this happens:

Augusto wants to have sex; Mara, pissed off at her judgmental neighbor, just wants to fume and vent and do some cleaning till she calms down. He flirts, canoodles, talks dirty, and eventually gives up, as she passes him the dishes to dry. Of course, he's still an immature horndog, and this moment will pass, but for for the moment, "Mara" speaks a wonderful truth about the way grown-up lovers work together. Sometimes you have rich, passionate, filthy sex, and sometimes the damn dishes need to be washed.

And if you were to accuse me of also picking this shot for the bright, joyful '60s color scheme in the green-yellow cabinets and Loren's pink apron, day-glo domesticity that makes this plain little moment hum with visual energy: dear reader, I would not deny that accusation.

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