STANLEY KUBRICK: A SHORT LOOK AT A YOUNG DOCUMENTARIAN

Director, producer, writer, micro-manager of cinematographers and editors - Stanley Kubrick was one of the most auteur theory friendly of all auteurs, for more than virtually any other filmmaker in history, he was fully and emphatically in control of every visual and sonic element in nearly all of his mature film work. I highly doubt that I'm alone in having come to many of my tastes and ideas about what cinema can and should be based on a young enthusiasm for Kubrick's filmography above all directors, and for that reason I am pleased to commemorate the 15th anniversary of his death on 7 March, 1999, by revisiting his career from the days when he was a hotshot kid with a keen photographic eye, all the way up to the end when he was one of the great mythic figure of world cinema. We start with the three short documentaries Kubrick made in his early 20s, when he was still just a photographer for Look magazine, and felt that the only place to continue developing his visual art was to move into the world of moving pictures.

The first and easily the best of these, from 1951, was Day of the Fight, a cinematic expansion of a photospread Kubrick shot in 1949 for Look, concerning small fry boxer Walter Cartier. It's all there in the title: the film wakes up with Cartier and his twin brother Vincent on the morning of the latest in a long line of make-it or break-it bouts that Cartier hoped would boost him to a title fight. Kubrick followed the brothers around New York, as Walter first tried to keep himself distracted and then tried to get himself revved up for a fight that would mean little if he won and could mean the end of his career if he lost.

Irrespective of quality, the thing that comes through loudest and clearest about Day of the Fight is that the young man who put it together worked for a general-interest photojournalism magazine. But also that he was damn good at his job. The images in Day of the Fight are almost without fail beautiful and shot with an innate instinct for composition and graphic quality; I think it's not claiming anything for the 22-year-old Kubrick that wasn't entirely true to suggest that there are a few shots which clearly suggest, if not the exact career he'd ultimately have, then anyway that he would have some future in finding ways to put striking imagery in front of viewers. The kid, as they say, 'sgot talent.

That there is a flipside comes, I hope, as no surprise, and it's that at this point, Kubrick had a still photographer's eye. A good one. Look at that fucking boxing ring. But Day of the Fight feels for every second of its duration like a series of photos linked by explanatory captions, and it's more a matter of accident that the photos move and the captions, written by Robert Rein, are spoken instead of read, by the hilariously straitlaced Douglas Edwards. I hope it's not just snarky 21st Century provincialism that leads me to believe a line like "Meat is vital to Walter. It gives him the raw energy need for fighting" is gloriously ridiculous in both conception and certainly in execution.

The point being that while Day of the Fight shows up Kubrick's visual sensibility to magnificent effect and proves him an able entrepreneur (it was self-financed for $3900 and sold to RKO for $4000) and ambitious kid, it's not really all that informative. It clips along, gets us invested in Walter's struggle, and shows off mid-century New York to good effect, but it's not the case that we'd be inclined to regard the film as a documentary classic if the director hadn't gone on to make some of the key films of the 20th Century. That said, it's a promising and ridiculously self-assured start.

* * * * *

On the other hand, we could force ourselves to deal with something like Flying Padre, in comparison with which Day of the Fight looks like the work of an unprecedented precocious genius. It's the result of an assignment RKO tossed Kubrick's way to see if the independent boxing documentary was proof that they had a decent talent on their hands; it was a profile piece for their RKO-Pathe Screenliner newsreel series. Specifically, a profile of Father Fred Stadtmuller, a New Mexico priest whose parishioners were frequently found in remote geographic locations,and could only reap the benefits of the priest's ministrations if he traveled to them himself, on his little prop plane Spirit of St. Joseph.

Years later, a bona-fide master filmmaker Kubrick would deride the short as "silly", which isn't entirely fair. Really, it's just trivial, and it does to remember that this was after all a frothy human interest story to be quickly digested for a dose of immediate uplift, and just as quickly forgotten. It is the exact 1951 equivalent to the local TV news doing a segment on a beauty shop owner who set up a ski-ball arcade in the back room so kids can keep themselves entertained while Mom is getting her hair done. It's easy to see why the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey would prefer not to dwell on its existence, but a 23-year-old kid looking to prove that he was a safe investment needn't make any such apologies.

That being said, if Day of the Fight is a surprisingly accomplished and engaging little film that we only really care about because its director grew up to be famous, Flying Padre cuts out the first half of that equation: the reason to watch it is morbid curiosity as to Kubrick's ephemera. There are a couple decently creative shots - a weirdly wide-angle lens of a little girl's face is patently Kubrick - but I'm not being idle in comparing it to a TV news piece. It is generic as hell, with a madly peppy script that finds nothing interesting to say about Father Fred beyond the fact that he exists. And without even crossing the nine-minute mark, the film still feels dubiously padded by a ginned-up "plot" involving a trip to take a baby to the doctor. A good example of the padre's mission in action, I guess, but I'd rather have gotten even the vaguest inkling of who this man is, instead of just seeing a bunch of shots of him flying a plane intercut with shots of a baby. Short enough to justify itself as a curiosity watch, but don't anticipate the germ of a great or even moderately entertaining film artist.

* * * * *

And now we skip ahead: the young Kubrick's first film in color (and the last for several more years), 1953's The Seafarers, is in fact his fourth; it followed the arduous and marriage-destroying shoot of his first feature, earlier that year, Fear and Desire. But as we're still firmly in the director's work-for-hire juvenalia phase, and since he made no more non-fiction films after The Seafarers, I see no reason not to discuss it now, especially since like Flying Padre, it offers very little meat. There is a right-to-left tracking shot inside a cafeteria that leaps off the screen as a clear example of fluid, stately camera movement as practiced by a man who clearly knew his Jean Renoir and his Max Ophuls, but filtered through the detached, God's-eye-view perspective that would become one of the director's most prominent stylistic traits. Other than that I can't think of a single visual moment that feels like more than competent day laborer work with some really fine lighting that tends to make the colors look a bit richer than they should, given what I'm sure was no kind of high budget.

There is a moment when when the camera glances through a gallery of amateur paintings, landing on one particularly garish portrait just at the moment that the narrator (CBS newsman Don Hollenbeck) rhapsodises about how the best of these could stand up to be displayed in any gallery, and perhaps this was a quiet bit of the unforced sarcastic humor that the future director Lolita and Dr. Strangelove would do so well. But I am perhaps giving the benefit of the doubt where it should not exist.

The Seafarers, at any rate, is functionally an infomercial for the Seafarer's International Union, with a focus on the services that the SIU provided (and for all I know still does, but these are leaner times for trade unions than the 1950s were) in its on-land union halls for off-duty commercial mariners. "We have restaurants, and game rooms" says Will Chasen's thoroughly flat and informative script (admittedly, in far less impersonal terms than I just put it), with economic details being more alluded to than spelled out. But I suppose for that matter, economics would be a bit outside the purview of a generically gung-ho advertisement like this.

With a 29-minute running time that makes it longer than Day of the Fight and Flying Padre combined, The Seafarers is definitely on the long side even for a historical curiosity, but I have to confess a certain gratitude to Kubrick for having taken the job anyway: this kind of random historical detritus makes for a fascinating sociological relic, a glimpse into living history of a kind that fiction films from the same time aren't able to do in the same way, but by virtue of having so little value other than sociology, it's not the kind of project that would ever present itself to casual viewing if it wasn't a make-work job for an otherwise important artist. Does The Seafarers tell me much of anything about Stanley Kubrick, film director? Only that he was trying to be a real pro and knew how to get a job done with just enough classy-looking visuals to avoid embarrassing himself. But it does tell me a little something or other about the 1950s that I didn't know (although nothing much at all about life as a mariner, since the target audience already knows about that life, and is here simply being sold a product), and at any rate, I am not ungrateful for that.

* * * * *

Day of the Fight can be seen on YouTube here. Flying Padre can be seen on YouTube here. The Seafarers can be seen on YouTube here, or on the 2012 Kino DVD and Blu-ray release of Fear and Desire.

Read More

TARR BÉLA DANCES WITH THE DEVIL

Just the name can send a shiver down the spine of the ill-prepared cinephile. Sátántangó. For Tarr Béla's 7+ hour signature work is one of the endurance tests to tend all endurance tests in the art form of film. It is not the longest movie; even without leaving the realm of (relatively) conventional narrative cinema, we find Out 1 and Berlin Alexanderplatz are significantly longer, right off the top of my head. But neither of them is typically held to a one-day viewing prospect. And neither of them is held to be as massively unpleasant, for after all, neither of them has "Satan" right there in the title.

In honesty, though, Sátántangó's claims to misery are blown substantially out of proportion to it's nihilistic content. Stories of 7-minute opening shots of nothing but cows wandering around in the mud, and little girls poisoning cats that die in disconcertingly realistic long takes are true, by all means, but they tend to obscure the equally true reality that the film is astonishingly, compulsively watchable, attention-grabbing from the first moments and unwilling to relinquish its grip for any part of its hypertrophic running time. Speaking personally, I didn't watch the film in a single sitting - the three discs of the Facets DVD set (which remains the best chance most Americans outside of New York will ever have to see the film) were interspersed with a shower and a meal - but I have virtually no doubt that it would play that way, with enthralling abandon. For all its mass and famously glacial cutting pace - the tally I got was 152 distinct shots over almost precisely seven hours - the film moves, surprisingly quickly.

Let us turn now to that opening shot to see what I mean: we're in a rural town, mud as far as the eye can see, staring down an old building. After some while, cows start to pour out of that building, until eventually a whole herd stands in the street; eventually they start to walk off to the left, and the camera rotates exactly 90° counterclockwise, at which point it starts to track left while the cattle meander through the street; frequently, buildings between us and them obscure the cows from our view, and at one point, a cow that came up right along side us moos irritably as it hustles down an alley on the Z-axis, to rejoin its fellows. I could spend the rest of my life trying to describe that shot in a way that communicates how legitimately exciting it is: how, after a couple of moments following the cows, it becomes impossibly disorienting when we lose sight of them for a good minute behind a structure; how gorgeously Tarr and cinematographyer Medvigy Gábor render the streets, buildings and animals in every stop along the grey scale besides exactly black and exactly white, teasing out so much texture and variability in each and every object that they practically go (setting aside the obvious point that watching a 7-hour movie is a wholly different experience in a theater than in a house: it's been months since I last so a movie that I so desperately wanted to see on a clean, crisp film print). It is beautiful and kinetic, and it's also a perfect introduction to the film in that it basically serves as a quick instruction in how to watch the film: Sátántangó is a movie rich with lateral tracking movements, with right-angle turns, and with gloriously touchable physical tactility those things, and everything that will visually dominate the next 7+ hours of the viewer's life is laid out in simple, easily-digestible terms in that very open shot.

It's also a sneak preview of the themes and narrative of those hours as well. Before they start their tour of the town, the cattle stand in the open street before the building, patiently enduring the mud and looking at nothing in particular. A collection of dumb animals caught in a miserable place and totally unconcerned with the actions that might free them up to go someplace more pleasant: that describes the unknown population of this town to a T, and the plot (insofar as it's the draw, which is certainly a debatable matter) is all about how these bored people are led off to slaughter by a fellow who doesn't even present a particularly appealing or compelling outlook for life: he's' merely the only person offering up any idea for the cows to lumber after.

That person, who fills the role of Satan in this dance, is Irimiás (Vig Mihály, who also provides the film with its electronica-carnival score), who exists in the beginning as an unseen figure viewed by the townspeople with dread that goes far beyond the natural fear of a notorious conman thought to be dead for this past year. "The news is, they're coming" is the title of the first of the film's 12 chapters (six forward, six back, the structure of a tango and the structure of the 1985 source novel written by László , Tarr's collaborator on his previous film, Damnation), which finds the residents of an unnamed communitarian farm that has just about puked out its last drop of life in the waning days of Communist Hungary interrupting the sorry little melodramas of their life with real mortal fear of the impending return of Irimiás and his colleague Petrina (Horváth Putyi). And yet not interrupting their lives so much that don't slink right back into the same patterns of petty double-dealing, lazy adulterous sex, and a detached attempt at spying on one another.

For people who are more or less explicitly being painted as anonymous archetypes, the population of Sátántangó ends up making quite an impression, if only because we spend so damn much time with them that they really don't have an opportunity not to. Tarr, Krasznahorkai and Tarr's reliable co-auteur editor, Hranitzky Ágnes don't depict them as having terribly characteristic personalities and behaviors as such, but by dwelling on the rhythms of their behavior at such length and in such detail, the filmmakers mange to tell us in evocative terms precisely who they are. The resentful loner Futaki (Székely Miklós) waits just so before barging in on the unexpected husband of the woman he's been sleeping with; the drunken doctor (Berling Peter) goes through precisely these actions in precisely this order, and it's easy to tell that he does much the same every day.

By the end of the film, the nine individuals making up most of what's left of the population of the town have made themselves very clear to us: they are pitiable and a bit reprehensible, but Tarr does not look to make any kind of emotional or moral judgment: he merely depicts. What he specifically depicts is the crushing mediocrity of a life stripped of imagination or affect; no living hell like the one scene in Damnation, this is much more of a purgatory of endless muddy, rain, and play-acted emotions. It is the perfect place for Irimiás to sell his obvious and not very compelling lies of another, better but only marginally different, way of living if everybody would just give up their autonomy and self-interest; a metaphor for the dogged refusal of Communism on its death bed to just give up and die that openly indicts the willingness of the people suffering most under that system to keep on suffering out of some mixed combination of comfort and self-laceration. It is both a study of the capacity of humans to do harm to other humans, but also the capacity of humans to bring harm unto themselves; most horrifyingly but also intelligently in the notorious centerpiece that finds the child Estike (Bók Erika) torturing and murdering that cat and then killing herself, precipitating the rest of the action and giving Irimiás the knife to twist into the town's collective psyche, and all because she could find no other way to take control in a world where everyone either ignored or abused her, than by first attacking the one thing weaker than herself and then by taking ownership of her own death.

Grim, weighty, extraordinary stuff, presented by Tarr with remarkable vision and sophistication. It is not merely that Sátántangó creates a complex moral universe, but how - as befits a movie of such gargantuan running time that it would have to do something to fill the space, the movie engages in some remarkable layering of scenes viewed in different chapters from different perspectives, creating a gnarled puzzle box of a movie that doesn't even announce itself as a puzzle until it has shown us the solution. In the fifth chapter, "Come unstitched" we see the interior of a bar in which the adults of the town are drunkenly cavorting in a frenzied dance, from Estike's perspective; in the sixth, "The spider's work II (the devil's nipple, satantango)" we look from inside that noisy, busy room to see the little girl blankly looking in, behind a wall of glass; and as we already know that she's going to die early the next morning, it makes her isolation that much more piercing than the image itself communicates. The film is full of mutually-expressive conversations between shots and scenes, culminating in a climax that queasily but not fatalistically suggests that the while cycle of events is going to repeat itself, albeit with some of the principals dead, exiled, or desperately attempting to entomb themselves in their tiny little worlds, blocking all the light out by boarding up windows (the final shot of the whole movie, a brilliant parody and replacement for the traditional fade to black).

It is dense, rich, and beautiful, a visually challenging movie that uses its long takes not so much to create a reality or to draw us into the world (the blocking is much too stiff and presentational for any of this to seem remotely naturalistic), but so that every one of the cuts feels like a profound moment - a violation or a moment of emotional release, depending on the context, and sometimes both. The slow progression of the film through a relatively full narrative - there are sequences in which the conflict changes multiple times in the span of just one shot - creates a tension that makes the film spectacularly electric and even exciting to watch, a peculiar response to a film that, moment by moment, is so languorous and boring. Not as a whole, though. As a whole, this is anything but boring: it is a whirlwind tour of a whole rainbow of unhappy human emotions, presented with fluidity in the writing, the acting, and the cinematography, and it's surprisingly gripping for something so full of miserable people feeling misery. No film of this length, so fixed on human despair with only shallow, trivial attempts to stave off that despair through drunkenness and cheap sex should trigger a response at the end, "it's not over already, is it?", but that's how you can tell a masterpiece: it turns pain into art and static lives into vibrant, kinetic images, without ever cheapening its subjects in the process. It's a great film, as great as they come, and that's all there is to it.

Read More

HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1916: In which Hollywood's ability to create worlds of unprecdented scale, creativity, and boldness is put to an absurd test

It is generally agreed that D.W. Griffith's 1916 epic Intolerance: A Sun Play of the Ages (also subtitled Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages, if that's the way you roll) was made because of the reaction to his The Birth of a Nation from the year prior, though the exact reason behind that because is a little fuzzy. Some say it was an apology, with Griffith making a film decrying intolerance as a way of making up for the controversy caused by his maddeningly intolerant movie that set race relations back a half-century; some say it was him smacking down the critics who were intolerant towards him and his enthusiastic tolerance of the Ku Klux Klan. Both of these possibilities miss the forest for the trees, though since the real motivation behind Intolerance, as I see it was the 1914 Italian epic Cabiria, and Griffith's feeling that American cinema needed a gigantic historical film of its very own.

That being said, Intolerance didn't begin life as a costume drama at all, but as a characteristic Griffith modern-day melodrama called The Mother and the Law, investigating the cruel behavior of self-appointed social reformers whose bigoted approach to correcting the sins of others would be directly responsible for all the many awful things done to and by a young married couple. From this, the film ballooned into a history-spanning spectacle that looked at intolerance in four periods: the modern day of America before the First World War, France in the 1570s, at the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, the Judea that turned on Jesus Christ and crucified him for his message of peace, and Babylon in the 6th Century BCE. The final version of the film, sliding between the four time periods with a rhythm that steadily increases as it progresses, with more and more specific thematic, narrative, and visual overlap in the cross-cutting as well, was so unutterably radical in 1916 (and, to be totally fair, it largely remains so), the film was obliged to open with what amounts to onscreen instructions for how to watch it, title cards that methodically explain how the structure is going to work and why it's not weird.

The sheer magnificent ambition and complexity of Intolerance were by no means unprecedented, but there had probably no film to combine so many elements in such grandiose ways: if The Birth of a Nation demonstrated the sheer scale and effect to which the relatively new technique of cross-cutting could be employed (a technique which Griffith did not first invent, as is often claimed, though he may well have invented it independently), Intolerance takes that demonstrations into even more bravura places. It is, undoubtedly, the case that we tend to prefer talking about Intolerance because unlike the more objectively important earlier film, it's not horrifyingly uncomfortable to watch or even think about by contemporary standards; but I would absolutely claim for it the further merit that even if we remove representational issues from the equation entirely, it's still by far the more accomplished and exciting movie.

All of which is not to say that it's flawless, because no film of such a massive length could be flawless (as to what that length is meant to be: it's pretty hard to say for certain. Different prints have different total lengths, and on disc there's the added issue that not every version has the right projection speed - for reference, I watched the recent Cohen Film Group Blu-ray that presents the movie in astoundingly beautiful clarity, but is visibly running it too fast, and runs for 2:47:32, including restoration credits). There's a reason that you only ever see stills from the modern day and Babylon sequences (both of which were turned into independent features in 1919, the former under the original The Mother and the Law title), which is that the film is far more interested in them in every way. The material pertaining to the Crucifixion occupies such a marginal amount of the running time, and is presented with such narrative dis-cohesion that I have to wonder why Griffith even bothered.

At the same time, as busy and overwrought and sometimes melodramatically clumsy as Intolerance can be, those kinds of considerations are well and truly beside the point: this was clearly not conceived as a sleek, effective narrative or even an exploration of character psychology, but as a tremendous, overwhelming experience. It is in this regard the natural extension of everything that Griffith had done before; he was at all times and in all ways a director more concerned with walloping the viewer emotionally than in the niceties of how he did that. Certainly, just to look at Intolerance, we find a remarkable mixture of some truly sophisticated, forward-thinking filmmaking techniques along with sentimental touches that are caveman-like in their inelegance. Sometimes they happen at exactly the same time: twice the director introduces one of his female leads in a pathetic medium shot, then immediately cutting to a close-up of her face in a flat-out beatifying gesture. We have at once the relatively cutting-edge use of inserts, used in service of hoary "LOOK AT THE PITIABLE WOMEN OF GREAT FEELING AND MORALITY" sentiments that, even by 1916, were a bona fide Griffith cliché as much as Spielberg films with people looking in awe at something glowing or Wes Anderson films with people standing directly in the center of the frame looking straight at the camera are today.

But who would want it any other way? Intolerance works because it is so vigorously, achingly earnest about everything. It believes passionately in its message and in the florid way it chooses to present it.

I have somehow managed to get this far while only suggesting the most abstract shape of the plot. In the 1910s, a moral scold and social activitist named Mary Jenkins (Vera Lewis) wants money with which to do good; she thus cajoles her brother (Sam de Grasse) into raising funds for her, which he does by cutting wages at his mill. This has the effect of putting a pinch on all his employees, including a Boy (Robert Harron), who is in love with the Dear One (Mae Marsh), whose father (Fred Turner) is also employed at the mill. The Boy and the Dear One marry and have a child, but this only increases their miseries, as he turns to crime to try and make ends meet. She struggles on, but the same puritanical forces whose misguided sense of charity led to her current state are not terribly keen on her mothering skills. In 1570s France, against the background of the struggles between queen mother Catherine de Medici (Josephine Crowell), a Catholic, and nobleman Gaspard de Coligny (Joseph Henabery), a Huguenot, the young Huguenot girl Brown Eyes (Margery Wilson) and her beloved, Prosper Latour (Eugene Pallette) prepare to wed, little realising the the religious schism in France is about to erupt in brutal violence against their faith. In Babylon, against a different religious struggle, between the worshipers of Ishtar and Bel-Marduk, the Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge) tries to find her way through the garish city at the height of its influence and splendor under the control of Belshazzar (Alfred Paget). And in the deeply undernourished Biblical sequence, Jesus Christ (Howard Gaye) plays his greatest hits, with little plot connecting them. Seriously, it's a really dodgy attempt at dramatising the Gospels, until the Crucifixion, which at long last is well integrated into the film's overall scheme.

Does that sound complicated and dense as all hell? It sort of its, but Griffith and his co-editors, James Smith and Ross Smith, make it flow surprisingly cleanly and smoothly, gliding between segments with shots of the Eternal Mother (Griffith favorite Lillian Gish) rocking the cradle of human history. They slowly ramp up the energy of each sequence until the final two reels are a non-stop flurry of some of the best action that survives from the 1910s: the massacre of the Huguenots, an assault on Babylon by Persian King Cyrus (George Siegmann), a race against time and a train to prevent the Boy's unjust hanging, and the march to the Crucifixion all spinning together in a frenzy of excitement that has very little to do with intolerance, or with the melodramatic situations baking for the previous two hours, but is really top-shelf filmmaking.

That, to me, is the film's secret, of sorts: for all that Griffith wanted to make a gigantic epic of feelings and themes and spirituality, a tremendous monument to the humans who have died because of intolerance and those who have beaten it, the film is always at its best when it's going for pure experiential dazzle. The most impressive filmmaking technique, the most memorable images, and the most gobsmacking sets are all clustered in the Babylon story, and Griffith knows it: there are slow tracking shots and grand, stately crane shots whose sole purpose is to pull us into the lavish world populated by thousands of extras, and this at a time when tracking shots and crane shots were rare as hen's teeth. These are surprisingly fresh moments, inviting us to partake of their spectacle just as readily as Avatar did 93 years later. And it works - if I have any reservation, it's that the Babylon and France sequences are both spoiled a bit by anachronistic acting and even more anachronistic make-up, which makes them always seem like a dress-up party from 1916, and not a real attempt at bringing history to life, which became the goal of costume dramas even by the end of the silent era.

Still, spectacle and all, the best part of the film is probably the modern sequence, and not just because Mae Marsh is giving far and away the best performance, and the Dear One is far and away the most vividly sketched of the film's many deliberately archetypal protagonists. It's the segment closest to Griffith's previous work, and his increased comfort is palpable, even if he's never as inventive with the camera here as in the Babylon scenes. Certainly, on a narrative level, the modern plot is the only one that feels, start-to-finish, like a complete and coherent object; it is, in fact, the only one that feels like it's telling a story, and not simply rotating through moments in a story being kept just out of view. Not that such things are necessarily a huge consideration in a film so exuberantly alive with spectacular images and propulsive editing rhythms; narrative is a third-tier consideration here, fourth if we can agree that it's also subordinated to the grandiose acting on display.

It is, at any rate, a jaw-dropping thing to watch, massive and physically robust in a way that few epics ever have been, even at the height of the '50s and '60s vogue for the things. In all four sequences, this is a visibly titanic, expensive production, and even though it was a hit in 1916, it still didn't come close to making back its budget, pitching the year-old Triangle Motion Picture Company into the jaws of bankruptcy, and eventually leading it to be folded into Paramount. But so many decades after everybody involved has died, we needn't concern ourselves with that; instead, we can merely gawk and stare at the first great example of what the Hollywood entertainment factory could achieve when you threw money at it like there was no tomorrow.

A final note: this was, I think, the first silent film I ever saw; it was certainly the first one not starring Charles Chaplin. I don't know that I'd recommend it serve that function in anyone's life - it's long and unapologetically sentimental - but it seems to have worked out well for me, so I guess I don't know what to say. But it would have felt wrong not to nod my head in its direction, for filling such a key role in my cinephilic development.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1916
-The first feature-length adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea pioneers underwater cinematography
-Charles Chaplin directs One A.M., the first of his films to seriously explore the possibilities of the medium
-The version of Snow White that made a young Walt Disney fall in love with the story opens

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1916
-The escalating war in Europe has a significant negative impact on film production on that continent. It is because of the reduction of native-made films at this time and up to the beginning of the 1920s that American-made films gained an early economic toehold overseas
-Zhang Shi-chuan establishes the first film production company in China

Read More

MARCH 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

Golly, this one just shot right by me. Possibly because not one single North American wide release all month has me genuinely excited. Possibly because the end of February has been so punishingly busy IRL. At any rate, it's not Friday yet, so I still get to call this a preview. Though not a particularly anticipatory one.


7.3.2014

Okay, so "wide release" in the intro paragraph was a hedge: I am in fact massively excited for one film, though one unlikely to have any more than a particularly visible limited release. That being Wes Anderson's eighth feature, The Grand Budapest hotel, which somehow, and somewhat oddly, has me more excited in advance than any of the director's previous films ever have. Getting his momentum back on track has something to do with that; solid trailers as well; certainly its three aspect ratio's gimmick. Boy, do I give it up for multiple aspect ratios.

I do not, however, give it up for animated movies based on cartoons I have adored for as long as I've been alive, all the more so when those animated movies look like they're completely missing anything resembling the attitude or function of those cartoons. Which is why I'm approaching Mr. Peabody & Sherman with the enthusiasm of somebody who just found out they have to clean out the office refrigerator.

For those who care about such things, the seven-years-later sequel 300: Rise of an Empire is finally coming out, to the delight of somebody, I guess. For myself, my opinions towards the project begin and end with my conviction that it really should have been titled 302.


14.3.2014

The end of an era: The Single Moms Club is the very last film in Tyler Perry's longstanding partnership with Lionsgate, and he has at this point no more announced films in the pipeline. I've disliked more Perry films than I've liked - hell, I've hated more Perry films than I've liked, but this is still a weird and discomfiting development, like your first night without a childhood blanket. Dare I say that I'm even kind of looking forward to it now? I dare.

I am not kind of looking forward to Need for Speed, a car racing video game movie that promises to be worse than the Fast & Furious franchise at its all-time lowest. I'm probably not really looking forward to Jason Bateman's directorial debut either, the vulgar comedy Bad Words, though I'm kind of fascinated by the decision to give it a platform release over the remainder of the month.

I am kind of actually terrified of the Veronica Mars movie, though I'm sure as hell going to see it.


21.3.2014

Boy, I'm sure certain that I'm meant to be excited about Muppets Most Wanted, but neither my increasingly diminished affection for the 2011 The Muppets, not the hard-to ignore impression that this is just a remake of The Great Muppet Caper that nobody was asking for or really needs, are making it at all easy to get into that place mentally. I mean, it's the Muppets, so of course, but that only goes so far...

The YA train keeps trying to pull out of the station, with Divergent, about which I presently know nothing other than Kate Winslet plays a villain. Which I can get behind. Also, the notorious Nymphomaniac, Lars von Trier's two-part sex epic, starts to makes itself known in the United States - for myself, if I ever see it at all (and I really, really don't want to), I'll wait for the director's cut, which turns a very long movie into an absurdly long movie, but if you do something, you should do it right.


28.3.2014

Somebody decided that giving Darren Aronofsky a whole lot of money to make Noah was a terrific idea, and that is hilarious to me. But not as hilarious as the beard Russell Crowe has been saddled with. I am by no means an Aronofsky partisan, but I don't see any way at all for this to not be captivating, even if it is a weird, awful misfire.

And speaking of misfires, Arnold Schwarzenegger's dogged attempt to have his old career back continues with Sabotage.

As we started the month with a limited release I can't wait to see when it gets in my neck of the woods, so do we end with another: The Raid 2. It ist he kind of very special film where the negative reviews (there's so much violence and plot-denuded action that it's tiring) make me even more excited than the positive reviews. Which, by the way, have been giddy.

Read More

REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - A MOTH-EATEN STORY

Pay close attention: there we have Mothra vs. Godzilla, a 1964 film that for most of its life was better-known in English-speaking territories as Godzilla vs. the Thing or Godzilla vs. Mothra. Here we have Godzilla vs. Mothra, a 1992 film that for most of its life was better-known in English-speaking territories as Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth. But we're going strictly by Toho's official titles here. I saw this as much for my benefit as for yours; even to this day, if I hear reference to "Godzilla vs. Mothra" my first thought is for the 1964 film, which is after all more classic and infinitely better.

Not that the official Godzilla vs. Mothra is terrible, by any means - it wasn't even the worst Godzilla film featuring the gigantic moth-shaped protector goddess of Infant Island (a title that Ebirah, Horror of the Deep clings to stubbornly). The biggest problem is that it is, in many ways, a retread-unto-remake of the 1964, and in such a way that calls maximum attention to all the reasons why that film is frequently ranked among the top two or three Godzilla films, while our present subject isn't usually even ranked among the top two or three films from the VS Series. It does a lot right, almost entirely in the areas strictly pertaining to monster spectacle. And this is not, of course, uncommon, particularly with special effects director Kawakita Koichi continuing in this film to produce some of the loveliest and most complete monster sequences since Tsuburaya Eiji at his high-budget heyday. The flipside is that while most of the Godzilla films suffer from variably pointless, ill-expressed, or lazy human plots - just the year before, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah had amply demonstrated how ridiculously convoluted and arbitrary a Godzilla script could be, to relatively little purpose - vs. Mothra is out-and-out annoying in large stretches, particularly when it turns into a half-assed family drama in the back half. Even when it's still relatively decent, while the action takes place in the South Pacific, there are plenty of dead stretches and repetitive statemens of exposition that we've already learned, enough to make one positively ache for the brain-bending time travel shenanigans of vs. King Ghidorah. At least that film had forward momentum.

I will have said all there is to say about the human plot of vs. Mothra when I say that it hinges on a massive crisis that brings a divorced couple back together. There's a lot more to it than that, obviously, but I would unhesitatingly describe myself as instantly suspicious of any film which includes as one of its plot threads a cliché that was already hilariously tired by the end of the 1970s. It smacks of desperate, lazy screenwriting; but then, this film was also the first Godzilla film since the '70s to be produced and released within a year of its immediate predecessor, and so we might safely suppose that screenwriter Ohmori Kazuki (writing his third consecutive Godzilla picture, though not returning to direct this one, nor did he ever direct another) was, in fact, desperate and, if not lazy, then perhaps at least too harried to come up with anything more creative.

The ex-married couple in question are Fujita Takuya (Bessho Tetsuya) and Tezuka Masako (Kobayashi Satomi). We meet Takuya first, raiding an ancient archaeological site for treasure in a manner that will be freakishly familiar to anybody who has seen a certain movie about a certain whip-wielding adventurer named after a state; he's caught immediately, though not, alas by Nazis. While he awaits sentencing, Masako arrives with an offer, courtesy of the not remotely secretive and threatening land development corporation Marutomo: if he'll offer his explorer skills to help her and Marutomo executive Ando Kenji (Murata Takehiro) investigate an island that has been seriously affected by a recent meteor hitting Earth. The name of the place is Infant Island, a name that means nothing to anybody in this continuity, but we who've been sticking with the franchise for 28 years know that it's the home to a certain giant egg from which will spring the one unambiguously good - though, by virtue of her size, still awfully destructive - kaiju in Toho's bestiary.

From here on out, the plot falls into a very familiar groove, with a few wrinkles in the series mythology: now, Infant Island is a wasteland where no humans live, only the tiny twin priestesses now known as the Cosmos (Imamura Keiko and Osawa Sayaka). And while the precise nature of Mothra is roughly the same - she is called upon to protect the natural order when human or giant monster activity threatens it - she has a dark twin now; many thousands of years ago, a human civilisation was running rampant, and so the Earth conjured up a spirit to avenge itself on mankind's avarice, and that spirit was called Battra. Mothra herself was initially called up to combat Battra when it grew too destructive. The recent meteor strike has made everything all topsy-turvy, and with the general pattern of humans fucking about, Battra and Mothra are about to be reborn (making this the first outright fantasy in the new series of films, which has till now been heavily weighted to science fiction).

But that's just background material. The main thrust of the plot finds the Cosmos kidnapped by a greedy corporation to serve as mascots, causing Mothra in her larval form to rampage to Japan to rescue them, and this happens to take place just about the same time that a newly woken-up Godzilla is about to start causing mischief. Taken as a whole, Battra feels less like an inspired new direction to take the plot, more like a Hail Mary effort to differentiate the film from Mothra vs. Godzilla in any kind of useful way. Not that Battra isn't a neat concept, and beautifully executed - a giant black butterfly with angry red eyes, cockroach-like grabby arms, and spikes all over its head. And the underwater fight between it and Godzilla, ending with both of them falling into an undersea volcano, is one of the most novel battle scenes in the whole franchise, if ultimately a little bit silly.

Back in the human plot, our divorced couple return home to their horribly annoying daughter Midori (Yonezawa Shiori), and for some reason the psychic Saegusa Miki (Odaka Megumi), the only real link between this and the two previous VS films, where in both cases she was incorporated into the action far more logically and gracefully. Here it just plays like an obligatory small role for a character Ohmori was obliged to insert into his scenario.

The good news is that the back half of the movie is heavily dominated by monsters, and they are wonderful in all respects. Most respects. Some respects. The larval Mothra that comes to Japan to rescue the cosmos before an attack by the Japanese military sends her into a cocoon is given a lot of close-ups that make it really hard to see anything other than jointed plastic jaws and rigid skin. And as for Godzilla, we see here the transformation begin in earnest that would continue throughout the '90s, with every new suit giving the monster thicker, more rubbery legs, and a smaller head, and after the high water mark of the suit used in the previous two movies, I find it hard not to look at it and think to myself "...oh".

But the new design for the fully developed Mothra puppet is an absolute delight, brightly colored in a way that doesn't seem as obnoxious "plush toy"-like as the Mothra of old could tend to do; and the plastic illuminated eyes, looking like nothing found in nature, are nonetheless a touch that I enjoy. Plus, the level of detail and articulation has been increased to the point that she just feels more real than prior. And I mostly adore Battra in either incarnation, with the red, yellow, and black pattern of the Battra imago giving it a harsh but not unpleasantly dark look that just works really terrifically well. Kawakita's lighting through the monster scenes makes both of these flying monsters even more dramatic and attractive, while taking fully advantage of the pictorial possibilities of having light filtered and divided by butterfly wings. It's gorgeous and dramatic, and the music underlying it makes it even more exciting, as Ifukube Akira trots out new orchestrations of the Mothra theme from the '60s that turn the score into something of a battle between musical cues. It is, I'd go so far as to say, among the very best scores in the entirety of the franchise, keeping the battles vibrant and intense even as they go on for rather longer than it seems like they should be able to sustain, or when they seem to be a bit too clearly about the three-way metaphor fight between Protection, Vengeance, and Uncontrolled Technology.

But you can only go so far with that kind of thing, and while I'd rather have a lousy movie with great monster scenes than a lousy movie with terrible monster scenes like the low points of the late '60s and early '70s, Godzilla vs. Mothra has a lot of tedium to overcome. I do not know how much to blame director Okawara Takao, making his first of four Godzilla movies, and suggesting no real sense of pacing or creativity (the most visually dynamic part of the film is the one ripping of Raiders of the Lost Ark), how to blame Ohmori's arid script, and how much to blame the actors, who taken as a whole are among the worst in all Godzilla history (which is titanically large claim to make). Whatever the case, the film has one of the least-engaging storylines in the series, not at all the same as one of the worst; but aliens and time machines and sentient sewage and transmogrifying space gorillas all have a kind of zestiness that Godzilla vs. Mothra lacks, and what it achieves in basic coherence, it loses in being unbelievably dull.

Read More

THOUGHTS ON THE 86th ACADEMY AWARDS, or: TO ELLEN BACK

There have now been an Oscars. To get the grubby part out of the way: I set my personal prediction record, with 21/24 (I always think I got 21 right in 2004, and then I always realise I missed Editing. Also, prior to now, that was the only year I ever got all of the Big 8 right). Not a hugely impressive achievement this particular year - the only legitimate surprise winner was Mr. Hublot for Animated Short, and most of the rest was calling the three 50/50 races in Picture, Original Screenplay, and Editing correctly - but I am pleased. It was enough for me to win in the group I was watching with, by only one (and that one came down to Best Picture itself).

About the awards themselves: being largely in-tune with the Academy is a weird feeling, but there you go: the film to win the most awards was my favorite non-documentary film of 2013, and the Best Picture was in my Top 10. Sometimes, a fella is just on-consensus like that, though I can't recall another time in my life of watching the show where I was so on-board with so many of the awards given out. I get the argument that it's all arbitrary and meaningless, and if you love the movies you love, that's all that matters, but here's the thing: Emmanuel Lubezki and Alfonso Cuarón are now on the cheat-sheet that will get handed out to people hoping for a quick and dirty version of movie history 50 years from now (assuming there are still movies and movie-watchers 50 years from now, but Jesus, let's not go down that path). And that's a great thing. Is it more fun to snark and bitch? Of course it is. But hey! Roger Deakins lost for the eleventh time! So there's still something to be haughty and angry over.

About the ceremony: you know, not that terrible. It helped, I suppose, that I was busy playing Oscar-themed bar trivia and was able to drift away for the tedious parts; but that didn't make the nightmare that was the James Franco/Anne Hathaway ceremony in 2011. Ellen DeGeneres's hosting skills could best be described as "harmless"; her absolute worst joke came early enough in the night ("So much has changed in seven years, when Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio were both nominated", or whatever strained milquetoast nonsense it was), that she had nowhere to go but up, and largely did so.

It also helped that the night was, as a whole, weirdly surreal for the Oscars: between Harrison Ford being the angriest man who ever set foot on the stage of an auditorium and John Travolta mangling Idina Menzel's name -it is not, perhaps, the easiest thing to say, but I genuinely don't know to get from even a generous mispronunciation to the cocktail of syllables he offered up - I pretty much don't want anyone else to ever present at awards shows. Nor, in light of Matthew McConaughey's hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness ramble through fractured chronology and shifting self-awareness, do I want anyone else to ever win an award. For I am easily amused by derangement and confusion.

But for all that, there was a whole clutch of great speeches - Lupita Nyong'o and her bald-faced joy and humility at being on that stage, with the knowledge of history both pressing down and raising her up, was the clear standout (it very well be the best speech in receipt of a competitive Oscar that I have ever watched as it was happening), but there was a lot of heart being felt by a lot of people, and Steve McQueen's post-speech jump in the air was magical - and a set that I liked, I find, much more than the internet did, finding it clever and restrained without being too minimal (because who wants minimal? The show is the very definition of a white elephant). The montages sucked - they always do. The songs, unexpectedly, also sucked - Pharrell Williams's "Happy" was an early burst of energy, but the other three nominees sagged, with Adele Dazeem proving unable to get through "Let It Go" without flatlining on half her high-notes, and U2 making a ponderous song even more soporific. Pink's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was surprisingly pleasant, though, and Bette Midler - far and away the most steady and confident of the Old Workhorses trotted out (the animate corpse of Sidney Poitier and the unconvincing wax marionette puppet of Kim Novak suggest that the time has come to leave the golden age of Hollywood out of the Oscar ceremony) - nailed "Wind Beneath My Wings", a song that I thought had long since run out of its ability to move me at all.

Unusually long though it was, it was the most enjoyment I got from an Oscar ceremony in a lot of years - since the recent high-water mark of the Hugh Jackman Oscars, easily - and not least because I agreed with so many of the winners (of the 20 categories for which I've seen all four nominees, seven went to the film I'd have voted for - an unprecedented number). A good cap to a good year, and now we can settle in and get to the meat of the 2014-that-will be.

Read More

IN MEMORIAM

I have a third of a Godzilla review written, the afterglow of a spec-fucking-tacular night of Oscar themed bar trivia, and I am about ready to pass out while sitting at my computer, but I couldn't possibly allow the night to go by without nodding in the direction of Alain Resnais, the great French director who passed away this weekend at the age of 91. A fine age for any of us to reach, especially for a gifted creator working right up to the last (his final film premiered at last month's Berlin film festival, and he leaves behind a truly enviable body of work, challenging and beautiful films that complicate the viewer's relationship to the image, to history, and to narrative representation. His masterpiece, by my lights, was the short documentary Night and Fog, an examination of how Auschwitz is processed visually and morally by people who weren't there and can't be trusted to have learned from it, but you could dip in anywhere in his career and pull out essential cinema. One more great mind from the Golden Age of art cinema has left us, and in this moment, nothing seems more important to me than to reflect on what he gave to all of us who love the medium, and to thank him for some of the most mind-expanding experiences I've had watching a movie.

Read More