STANLEY KUBRICK: PUNCHING ABOVE HIS WEIGHT

For anyone with much investment in Stanley Kubrick as a cinematic stylist - and it's hard to imagine anyone being significantly fond of him as a director without having a lot of specific affection for the surface-level elements of his style - his sophomore feature, 1955's Killer's Kiss, is somewhat of an ideal case study. It is exactly the film you'd want it to be in so many ways: faced with hardly any budget to speak of, the 26-year-old Kubrick pulled out every trick that an independent filmmaker of no means could ever hope to stumble upon. No shooting permits meant footage of the streets of New York that crackle with vérité, especially the night scenes with their cruel blacks and harsh lights. Unusable sound meant that some scenes were rebuilt with elliptical, abstract soundscapes that feel experimental and unreal in a manner shockingly bold for a mid-'50s film noir cheapie. No production design meant spare, frighteningly dessicated locations. No fight choreographer meant a boxing scene pieced together in some of the most jagged, Expressionist editing that side of Raging Bull. All in all, no resources meant that Kubrick had to double down on creativity in every area of a film that he shot, produced, and edited, in addition to directing. It is a captivating, bold, downright visionary piece of independent guerilla filmmaking in virtually every respect save for its terrible, terrible piece of shit screenplay.

The story was credited to Kubrick; the script was written by Howard Sackler, who'd already worked with the director on his 1953 debut, Fear and Desire, who was not credited, and Kubrick went back and re-wrote some things anyway. It would be the last work of Kubrick's career based on an original story, if we can permit the conventions of film discourse obliging us to brutalise the word "orginal" so badly as to apply it to this scenario. The film is such a demented slurry of half-eaten film noir tropes that it would play more like a pastiche of the genre than a late example of it, if only there was even a single frame that suggested Kubrick and company had even the littlest sense of humor.

Indeed, so ossified and hidebound is the film's notion of what noir storytelling can consist of, that even at a wee 67 minutes, it still manages to have boring stretches. It's about Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a hopeful welterweight with a glass jaw, who lives across the courtyard from Gloria Price (Irene Kane, the stage name of writer Chris Chase; she was overdubbed by Peggy Lobbin when she was unavailable for post-production), an employee of one of those vanished dance halls where men could dance with pretty young things for ten cents. The film begins on the night of Davey's latest attempt to break out and make it as a famous fighter - clear echoes of Kubrick's debut film, the boxer documentary Day of the Fight, and there's even a shot of the boxing ring that I believe might be taken from that short, though all boxing rings kind of look the same - and Gloria's latest attempt to shut down her violent, rapey boss Vincent Rapallo (Frank Silvera); neither one of these goes very well, and it culminates late at night with Rapallo in Gloria's apartment trying to force himself on her, with her screams bringing Davey to the rescue. Taken with a fit of romance, Davey whips up a plot for him and Gloria to skip town together, there being no real reason for any of them to stay, but Rapallo has the thugs to make that process awfully hard on him.

You don't need to be a noir expert to have the most groaning sense of been-there, done-that with Killer's Kiss, though that only makes it worse. And the wheezy story is not aided by the flat, dead-eyed acting by everyone but Silvera (who manages to make himself seem intensely, even loathsomely pathetic without sacrificing a modicum of his dangerousness), whose mismanagement by Kubrick suggests his later exercises in anti-directing bad actors, without the obvious thematic or narrative payoff. Anyway, the dialogue is even worse than the performances, and it's hard to know what any actor, no matter how talented, would be able to cope with some of the boilerplate crap Kubrick and Sackler hand their way. Check out this astounding moment of dysfunctional screenwriting:

Davey: "Come on let's go for a walk."
Davey [in voiceover, overlapping the same image]: "She got dressed and we went for a walk."

Presumably, we are really supposed to notice that they went for a walk.

So, it's all pretty junky paint-by-numbers noir, and yet on balance, I can't begin to make myself dislike the movie. It is the work of a young filmmaker with things to learn, undoubtedly, but unlike Fear and Desire, it showcases the photographer Kubrick's instinct for how images tell stories with astounding success: there's a shot of Davey looking out the window, past the camera, at Gloria in her apartment, while to the left of him is a mirror that shows the back of his head and then in just a little square of light, Gloria herself, and it's such a tight, perfect piece of composition and lighting and character building, I could not dare call the film containing it a failure of cinema or the man who imagined it and then put it onto celluloid a developing filmmaker. By definition, anyone who could put that image together is already a filmmaker of skill and wisdom, he simply didn't apply them all the time consistently.

It's not the only striking visual moment, by any stretch: there is a scene where Rapallo's goons advance on Davey's manager (Jerry Jarrett) in an alley, the three men look so inky black against even the underlit backdrop that it feels like something out of a horrible dream about inescapable dark blobs. There's a nightmare sequence with the camera gliding down an empty street with the negative reversed that exactly calls to mind the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, still 13 years down the road. I would, in fact, say that it predicts the mature Kubrick of 1964 onwards more than any of the other films he made prior to 1964, both in specifics like that, and in the more general way that he creates distorted, uncanny realities for his characters - two of the other stand-out moments include a climax set in a mannequin warehouse, in which the violence casually meted out on the dead-eyed, featureless simulacra of women is even more freakish than the already-creepy shots of those mannequins simply standing around in the half-light; and the interiors of Rapallo's dance hall, with a bluntly non-realist sound mix that turns the generic set (with some oddly-positioned white picket fencing as wainscoting) into a hallucination of need and sweat and desperation that doesn't merely prefigure the hellish ballroom scene from The Shining, it arguably betters it.

This does not all add up to Killer's Kiss being the secret lost masterpiece of Kubrick's early career: one thing he'd learn almost immediately would be how to yoke his undeniably brilliant visual sense to stories which could be teased out and deepened by his camera. The best thing he'd consistently do later in his films was to make what amount to narrative experiments: using screenplays that are in some ways deeply broken, and turn them into masterpieces precisely because of how their dysfunctions take place, and how they are visually staged to exacerbate and emphasise everything that is is "bad" about their stories by all the usual rules. But while Kubrick frequently made genuine, I would even say objective masterworks out of conventionally "bad" screenplays, he would never after this do so with such an altogether lazy script as he and Sackler saddled Killer's Kiss with. For all its visual potency, it never feels, like later Kubrick, of a filmmaker deliberately redeeming a dodgy story through the the way the images interact with that story; it feels like somebody showing off their visual talents without particularly caring if the story is in any way remotely compelling or free from the most tired cliché. There's enough great filmmaking here to me to be genuinely confused by why Kubrick included it among the three features he'd later disown, but it's impossible to pretend its not part of his learning curve, however accomplished it might be in some deeply important ways.

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TARR BÉLA'S VISION

Following 2000's Werckmeister Harmonies, Tarr Béla took a seven-year break before making his next (and penultimate) feature, The Man from London, and this remains the longest break between long-form projects in his career to date (as I write these words he's given no indication that he doesn't intend for his post-2011 retirement to stick, but he also has four full years to change his mind before setting a new record). The only project he made during that time was a five-minute contribution to the 2004 anthology feature Visions of Europe, in which 26 directors made 25 short films, one each from 25 different countries in the European Union, all of the shorts running five minutes and expressing the idea of "European identity" in whatever way the director chose to interpret it (the discrepancy between the number of directors and films is explained by our very subject: as usual, Hranitzky Ágnes was credited as co-author of the piece; as indeed was Vig Mihály, the composer, and for good reason). Tarr's was called "Prologue", which does not as far as I can tell mean that it was the first of the 25 in the film program.

In fact, "Prologue" is a rather fine and vaguely cynical description of the content of the piece. In one take - for the Tarr of 2004, five minutes was hardly even a warm up as far as takes go - the camera tracks left and slightly back along a long, seemingly endless line of haggard men, filmed by Robby Müller (frequent collaborator of Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Lars von Trier, working for the only time with Tarr) - in particularly murky black-and-white to emphasise the grime and despondency of the images. At the end of the line, the camera stops and pans to the left, to squarely face a window where a pleasant-looking young woman hands parcels of bread to each of the patiently waiting hungry men. "Prologue", then, is in reference to the anticipation and waiting around for the best thing to happen, in this case receiving a meager portion of food. No chipper optimist, that Tarr.

The whole thing is so brief and clear-cut that it's barely worth reviewing it as an individual entity, but why bother taking half-steps so close to the end of this Tarr retrospective of ours? Still, the effect is rather blunt - not ineffective, but blunt - and requires little explication. I am unmissably reminded of Alfonso Cuarón's contribution to the 2006 Paris, je t'aime, which was also a single-take tracking shot at a backwards angle (though to the right, and the angle was much more pronounced), which similarly suggests a great director falling back on something he could do in his sleep to quickly add his bit to an anthology film. The difference being that "Prologue" has a definite social point to make and, thanks to the cutting images and the overwhelming (if also, frankly, overbearing) music, it makes it with force. It is the closest thing to a polemic in Tarr's canon after his very earliest anti-Communist dramas, though more poetic; its argument comes less from stating anything (in fact, it is totally devoid of dialogue), than from pushing the fact of starving, desperate, isolated people all gathered together like animals in a pen right against the viewer's face, beating us down by the sheer volume of forgotten men to the point where they can no longer be ignored as some vague "social problem".

It's hardly Tarr's most complex and dynamic work, but for such a minor slip of cinema, it packs a lot of punch. It's not the sort of thing to seek out as a fantastic individual short film, and I rather wish I'd seen it in the whole context of Visions of Europe, where it might have felt less obviously primitive, but it surely gets done what it means to, and does it through wholly visual means. Can't get much more cinematic than that.

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TARR BÉLA HAS A WHALE OF A TIME

Funny to say about a movie whose immensely cryptic plot can best be summed up as "humanity dances on the brink of cosmic destruction and lashes out violently in desperation", whose characters are almost all nameless townsfolk except for the protagonist who becomes more unknowable the longer we spend time with him, and whose average shot length is a dumbfounding 3.7 minutes - that's a minute long than Sátántangó, y'all - but I'm pretty confident in saying that Werckmeister Harmonies from 2000 is Tarr Béla's easiest movie to watch and process. Which is not something that most people coming blind to the film would be prone to say; indeed, it was not at all the thing I said some years ago when Werckmeister Harmonies was my own first encounter with cosmically-minded Hungarian with the fetish for glacial pacing and languid camera movements.

The thing is, though, and this is easy to lose sight of in conversations about tracking shots and pointedly empty acting and symbolic cetaceans, is that Werckmeister Harmonies is - or can be, rather, if you let it - an extraordinarily pleasurable experience to watch. Not unlike Sátántangó itself, the way it's structured is so modular, with every new shot functioning as a mini-movie (some of which, you understand, are still ten minutes long), it begins to build a kind of fever-dream, anything goes momentum which makes it skim by faster and in a shorter feeling time than anything this slow and long (nearly two and a half hours, with either 37 or 39 shots - I forgot to count for myself) should remotely be able to achieve. Meanwhile, those individual marathon-length takes tend to be so complex and involving and engaging, they somewhat cease to register as as singular tracking shots that therefore insist upon their own length; it's more like being plunged into a vibrant, tremendously present human moment. The film's setting is vague, but the way Tarr and his six camera operators (including his frequent cinematographer Medvigy Gábor; this would be their final collaboration) frame the activity as immediate and active leaves the film feeling like the director's most emphatically present-tense piece since his early social realist projects, though it is of course in a vastly different form than those.

Whether any of that holds true at all, the film does at least begin with a grand gesture of liveliness and creativity that ranks among the most addictively kinetic moments in Tarr's filmography. In the main bar in whatever beaten-down town in Hungary this is, the drinkers enthusiastically greet the arrival of Valuska János (Lars Rudolph, one of three Germans in the three most prominent roles - make of that what you see fit), who will help to explicate something that the men have apparently been confused about. János, apparently more educated than most of the town (though he makes up for it by being impossibly naïve and slow-witted as events progress), is happy to show of his knowledge, and he takes one burly drunk and sets him directly under a light bulb in the center of the room, waggling his fingers, to represent the sun. Another barfly, spinning around as he moves in a circle around the first, is Earth; yet another is the moon.* Once these three boozy celestial bodies are in play, János slips imperceptibly from the language of science to the language of poetry, explaining the phenomenon of an eclipse using heightened and virtually allegorical descriptions of light and dark. Triumphantly, he sets the spheres back on their paths, bringing the whole room into a dance of balletic orbits not usually found in the drunken inhabitants of a small town in Hungary late at night; but such vigorous dances are of course an important thread found in most of Tarr's films.

Two things have just happened. One is that we've been exposed to a profoundly magnetic piece of cinema, reducing human bodies to their most essential qualities as abstract objects in motion, with Vig Mihály's vivid, intense music adding to the sheer joy of watching movement in the gorgeous monochrom that Tarr employed on this movie (it utilises every hue of grey possible from stark white to jet black, and to significant effect, as we shall presently see). The other is that we've just been handed the answer sheet, so we don't have to spend all of Werckmeister Harmonies puzzling what it means: indeed, for a film where so much of the plot takes place on an entirely non-representational level, it's almost dismayingly easy to say what it's "about". Simply put, it is about the conflict between lightness and darkness, both as literally qualities that duel across the film's grey-soaked frames, and as the expected metaphor for how human beings are capable of great savagery and great kindness alike, though kindness does certainly get its ass handed to it in Werckmeister Harmonies. It is also about human beings as inhabitants of the whole cosmos: we are on the one hand immodest specks that can barely be picked out on the planetary scale, let alone the universal one, and yet we're also the only thing that makes up the universe as we live and experience it - in one brazen gesture, that opening dance suggests both the enormity of planets and stars relative to our lives, but also makes human beings the literal equal to planets and stars.

So that, in brief, is Werckmeister Harmonies: how we live in the universe. The title itself is in reference to the German musicologist and composer of the 17th Century, Andreas Werckmeister, whose writings and calculations form the basis of the 12-tone system used by most Eurocentric musical traditions of the last 300 years; it is based in Werckmeister's belief that properly-divided octaves could function as a musical representative of the harmonious, well-ordered structure of the celestial bodies. He is also regarded within the film, by János's uncle Eszter György (Peter Fitz), himself a composer and apparently the most moral man in town, as a perverse adulterer of the true purity of music, and a philosophical criminal. Tarr and his co-authors - Krasznahorkai László, co-writer and author of the source novel The Melancholy of Resistenace, and editor Hranitzky Ágnes, both of them given the usual credit that implies their contribution to be indistinguishable from Tarr's own - don't take sides on this point, but the question of whether or not the universe is in harmony with itself or not is central to the film's subsequent plot, in which György's ex-wife Tünde (Hanna Schygulla) browbeats him into signing off on her unpleasantly small-minded and authoritarian desire to purge improper behavior from the town, signified by the arrival in the black of night, like a shadow swallowing the whole town, of a carnival whose sole apparent attractions are the shadowy, charismatic Prince, and the corpse of a great whale, kept safe in a massive trailer. The whipped-up conflict between two sides that don't seem to even bother defining themselves is certainly a sign of disharmony, as is the final disposition of the whale, rotting and savaged in the morning mist in a crude parody of the inexplicable mystery and majesty it represents when János first enters the trailer to see it. And yet the fluid motions of the camera, blending gracefully with Vig's best score for a Tarr film, certainly puts the stamp of a weird kind of harmony and beauty on even the most brutish events.

It is a film that doesn't bother trying to answer anything, because it is so invested in raising issues and asking questions of the broadest, most sweeping kind: it is the culmination of Tarr's focus on ever more cosmic films, and while it is neither as overwhelming nor as flawless on a moment-by-moment basis as Sátántangó or, I'd argue, Damnation, it still feels like the culmination of what they were driving for. It is a work of stupefying ambition, overreach, and maybe pretension, though I prefer to reserve that word for people who ask the Big Questions without earning the right to talk in such lofty tones as Tarr does in the meticulous evolution of his film from one scene to the next. It is a film one watches to be forced into a state of reflection and contemplation that has nothing to do with plot or theme, but with consciousness, knowledge and its absence, and humanity. I treasure it as much as I treasure any work of cinema.

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TIME SINK

The first surprise - ah, hell, it's the only surprise, let's be honest - is that Mr. Peabody & Sherman is not terribly good, but it's not terribly good in the way that DreamWorks Animation features tend to not be terribly good. That is to say, it's not a hell-spawned devouring nightmare that leave nothing but charred remains of the characters first premiered in 1959 during the "Peabody's Improbable History" segment of producer Jay Ward's variably-named Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, mocking all that is good and decent about animation that actually tries to be creative and intellectually engaging simply by the fact of its existence.

Instead it's just another damn DreamWorks movie with vaguely unpleasant, angular human character designs, a severe problem with eyes that look like glassy marbles with no personality behind them, bright colors over every vaguely rubberised surface. It does almost entirely without pop culture jokes, which is great, because the ones it comes up with are unfathomably dated (Zumba! Planking!); instead, it makes do with a number of fart- and shit-related jokes that makes me realise quite suddenly how much such things had been slowly disappearing from children's entertainment. Also, if you are looking for a reason to proclaim that the movie has brutally violated the heart and soul of the Ward cartoon from 50 years ago, you can hardly do better than point to the gag where it looks like the Trojan Horse is crapping out Greek warriors.

It also does mostly without gratingly obvious celebrity voice casting, the single most recognisable member of the cast probably being Patrick Warburton, who at this point counts more as a good-luck charm for animation casting agents than anything else; Stephen Colbert, Allison Janney, Mel Brooks, Lake Bell, Leslie Mann, and Stanley Tucci are among the other folks in the cast, none of them obviously there for their marquee value. Which isn't the same as saying that the cast is necessarily good; but they could have gone to some much worse places than they did. For which it is well to be thankful.

Anyway, the film itself, a profoundly difficult thing to discuss in any way; too dull and mediocre to be interesting or interestingly bad, it is the most product-like piece of studio product that I have watched in what feels like a long time. We are first introduced to the world's smartest dog, Mr. Peabody (Ty Burrell), who quickly sketches the details of his life: he is the adopted father of a human boy, Sherman (Max Charles), and to ensure the child's education, he has invented a time machine called the WABAC. The two visit historical events and learn from them, while modestly or immodestly interacting with the historical players; and now Sherman is about to attend public school, where his inflated knowledge puts him at an academic advantage but a profound social disadvantage. Having gotten into a fight with tiny queen bee Penny Peterson (Ariel Winter) on the very first day, Sherman's future with a dog father is called into question by shrill social worker Ms. Grunion (Allison Janney), and hoping to quietly paper everything over, Mr. Peabody invites Penny's parents (Stephen Colbert and Leslie Mann) over for an exquisitely prepared dinner. During that dinner, Sherman and Penny end up traveling into the past and she gets lost in Egypt; thus an adventure begins, during which the adoptive father learns how to be more generous with his affections and allow the pleasant messiness of family life to creep into his immaculately composed domestic situation.

It's difficult to say which is more vexing: the strangely insistent "learn how to be a closer, more loving dad" theme, which can hardly be of primary interest to the child audience that the film obviously presumes for itself, or the descent into clattertrap science fiction boilerplate about rifts in the space-time continuum that turns the film's final act into something that is neither funny nor heartwarming like the rest of it tries to be, sometimes even succeeding. Both, at any rate, suggest that Mr. Peabody & Sherman began production and ended it without any clear sense of what it was supposed to be about and how: certainly, the notion that it was actually just supposed to be a redone version of a cartoon whose cultural cachet is certainly not at a high ebb with the children of the 2010s is quickly dashed, given that "Peabody's Improbable History" never came within a country mile of the twee sentiment of this film, with its vastly more prickly Peabody and the strong impression that Sherman was his human pet, not his adopted son. Though I will credit the film with this much: it manages some fine puns in homage to the groaning, tortured set-ups that were the original's raison d'être, and one - "You can't have your cake, and edict too" - could have come from one of the best of the 1960s shorts. Even if the film stomps all over it by having a Sherman who flatly declares "I don't get it" instead of adopting the justifiable look of disgust and shame with which the original Sherman typically responded to Peabody's jokes.

Beyond its ability or not to evoke a brand-name whose natural audience would consist primarily, I suspect, of people in their 60s, Mr. Peabody & Sherman is otherwise a film of the most steadily generic sort, no doubt a good exercise for DreamWorks's artists and technicians (it is a bright film and not unpleasant to look at, though the characters are somewhat more grotesque than expressive - the backgrounds, however, are generally breathtaking, contemporary New York and Renaissance Florence especially) to keep their talents sharpened for whatever more prestigious and ambitious project is coming down the line, but not something that cares to indulge in more than the most basic factory-produced CG animation. On the whole, it is less obnoxious than the studio's 2013 Turbo, but also less idiosyncratic and visually bent than their last March release, The Croods. It is perfectly safe, fitfully amusing, increasingly dull as it goes on, and hugely uninspired in virtually every way that an animated film can lack inspiration (there's a montage that's actually rather neat, using flatter, more impressionistic color and shading than the rest of the film, but it mostly calls attention to how limited the creativity is anywhere else). It is the sort of film where watching it and napping through it are both more or less equally pleasant, and in both cases it's a little difficult to remember anything about the experience once you're done with it.

5/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1919: In which the inmates take over the asylum

The history of the American film industry from its formation into the 1950s is inextricably tied in with the history of trade unions and contracts. Here in the 21st Century, filmmaking on both sides of the camera is typically described in terms of artistry and what the actors, writers, directors, composers, cinematographers, sound designers et alia are trying to "say". For a very long time, though, filmmaking was a job, much like being an accountant, janitor, or mechanic. More glamorous, of course, in that involved being famous and (within limits) wealthy. But a job that took place week in and week out, with really terrible hours most of the time. Films were made almost according to the mentality of an assembly line at one point, even the ones that we now regard as great masterpieces; and this was especially so in the silent era, when it was possible to crank out an entire feature film from script to screen in just a few weeks.

For much of the Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system, the contract players in thrall to the executives devoted much of their time to finding ways to exert some kind of independence over what projects they would make and how they would be presented. Of the many individual attempts to break out in some little way from the seemingly immovable strictures of the big studios, perhaps no effort was so bold, or so far-reaching in its effects, as the formation of United Artists in 1919. The artists who were so uniting were four of the biggest names in American film at that time: superstar Mary Pickford, the most bankable human being in the world; her lover, the comedy-adventure star Douglas Fairbanks; D.W. Griffith, possibly the only director at that time who was his own brand name; and Charles Chaplin, multi-hyphenate talent and the only person in the movies who could challenge Pickford's fame and financial success. The idea was to create an independent production and distribution company that would allow these four mega-celebrities to work on their own terms, and while the experiment in its pure form didn't live very long (Griffith abandoned ship in 1924, while Fairbanks and Pickford saw their careers implode in the sound era, and Chaplin quickly became the sort of methodical, fussy artist who took years in between projects to get them right), the idea of an independent studio has never entirely died off since then, and United Artists itself continues to struggle along, though it exists at this time mostly as a shell company for creating James Bond pictures.

The first film released by United Artists, in the latter half of 1919, was the Fairbanks vehicle His Majesty the American. Then as now, Hollywood likes a sure thing more than a genuine gamble, especially if the sure thing can be made to look like a risk, and accordingly, UA aimed to get things started on a safe foot by releasing the kind of film that had been a hit in the past. At that time, Fairbanks was celebrated for his bubbly comedies set in milieus that gave him amble room to showcase his estimable skills as a physical performer, as much an acrobat as an actor. Those who know Fairbanks mostly as the sword-wielding star of costume dramas - which is just about everybody at this point, I suppose - would certainly be staggered by His Majesty the American, which does eventually become a quick-cutting adventure film of the sort he'd become even more famous for in the decade to follow, but only after spending plenty of time as a startling hybrid of political thriller in a Ruritanian principality, fish-out-of-water comedy, boys' own adventure, romantic comedy, and showcase for Fairbanks's skill divorced from narrative or genre. Hell, you don't even need to drag the star's persona into it: to modern eyes, the feverish assemblage of tones and narrative threads would be peculiar regardless of who was headlining the project. But as much as anything, that merely showcases what a freewheeling sense of the rules that still pertained as the '10s gave way to the '20s.

On the other hand, His Majesty the American is perhaps the first film I have turned to in this Hollywood Century project that largely resembles the kind of filmmaking that we're used to all these long decades later. The shots used are still considerably wider than anything in modern cinema: the proscenium-style compositions that define the middle silent era had a few more years of life in them. But the way those shots are broken up into inserts and close-ups, while a bit stiff at times, feels downright radical compared to movies made just one or two years earlier (something must have been in the water: Griffith's Broken Blossoms, typically agreed as having the first totally modern insert shots in American cinema, was UA's very next release). It is perhaps for this reason that the blithe mixture of genres and plots in the movie stands out so bluntly: the film has enough of a contemporary flow that it feels like it ought to behave like a contemporary film in other ways.

All that's a lot of verbiage to throw at a pleasant slip of a thing that isn't really very distinctive in any way you could name. It is, first and above all, a Fairbanks picture, meaning that most of what happens is at some level a contrivance designed to put Fairbanks in positions to show off. In this case, he plays Bill Brooks, a well-to-do New Yorker who has no idea where he came from or who his parents are, but somebody in his past is keeping an eye on him and throwing enough cash at him that he has no real worries in life and is able to pursue his passion to have adventures as an amateur fireman and policeman. We see each of these in setpieces staged with quite a lot of vigor and kinetic energy by writer-director Joseph Henabery (his fourth consecutive Fairbanks picture, near the start of a career that would include dozens and dozens of movies into the late '40s), with the burning tenement building that opens the film a particular standout of effects work and action choreography, setpieces that moreover make not the smallest effort to work themselves into the plot of the rest of the film, and are clearly just there as spectacle for spectacle's sake (talk about feeling modern). Eventually, the story rather arbitrarily packs Bill off to Mexico, to seek out ever more exciting adventures, and that's where he's contacted by representatives of the government of Alaine, a small kingdom in the European Alps currently experiencing some tension over the succession, with King Philippe (Sam Sothern) trying to democritise the country as Grand Duke Sarzeau (Frank Campeau) schemes none too subtly to destablise the king's position. Bill quickly ends up head-over-heels in dynastic intrigue, while also crossing paths with the lovely countess Felice (Marjorie Daw), proving to be the hero of the Alaine people in multiple ways involving greater and smaller demonstrations of swashbuckling and daring.

It's all a bit foggy in expression, though how much of that is the film and how much the heavily beat-up print that I was able to watch it in is up for debate. What's always clear, though, is that the film is first and foremost about Fairbanks, and in that regard it's largely, though not uniformly successful. There's the not-insignificant matter of the frequent cutaways in the first half or so of the film, before Bill arrives in Alaine, where the film spends minutes at a time dramatising the minutiae of politics in a made-up country with a zealous care that could only appeal to a filmgoing population still high on its love affair with Anthony Hope's 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda (which had been filmed twice in the 1910s). These scenes deaden a film that wages everything on being so fast and fizzy that we don't stop to notice the threadbare characters or muddy story, and it takes an awfully long time for the film to find its rhythm.

Once it does, it becomes a lot easier to notice the even bigger and more serious problem, one that maybe speaks to the changing nature of tastes over the years and maybe simply my own: Douglas Fairbanks isn't a terribly good comedian. Obviously, audiences in the '10s who made him a superstar on similar hybrids of comedy and adventure would disagree with me on that point, and I do not think it has anything to do with him. The problem is, simply, that he doesn't have a funny face. Look at the great comics of the same era whose work has remained more or less popular: Chaplin had his fussy, twitchy expressions and his absurd greasepaint hair; Buster Keaton his long face and unfazed, modestly unsettled expressions; Harold Lloyd's rubbery mouth and bright, open eyes; Fatty Arbuckle's round pie face with its tight little smile. Fairbanks, not yet boasting his matinee idol mustache, looks emphatically normal, with a bit prominent of a forehead and a slightly wider face than ordinary; he looks like the most handsome man in the real estate office. He certainly doesn't look like someone who should do the face-pulling and wacky activity he's called upon to do, and in such a visual medium, not looking funny is awfully close to not being funny.

Still and all, His Majesty the American is such a mixed bag of tones and registers that it can survive a bit of bad comedy, just like it can survive a bit of tedious overplotting. What works, anyway, is terrific: Fairbanks himself, a fearless stuntman who jumps and hangs from roofs and rides horses and fights with aplomb, is obviously the best standout, but perhaps surprisingly, he's not the only thing the film has to offer. Henabery's direction is of the lightest, most delicate sort, creating a breezy European fantasy that skips along cheerily through some charming sets and exquisitely gorgeous backdrops of the mountains and towns whose obviously artificial nature only manages to make them cuter and more dear. And while this is a largely actor-proof movie, several of the supporting players are pretty great in their own right, anchoring the human side of a story that Fairbanks, with his somewhat irritating tendency to pose and declaim (no mean feat when your words can't even be head), does not remotely keep from flying into overwrought theatrics.

Amiable enough all in all, though not by itself an argument that we should still care about Fairbanks, or silent Mitteleuropean adventures. Its a film of a sort that we still see plenty of every year: the well-made but wholly unambitious attempt to do well something that was also done well last month, last year, and the year prior, and is entertaining every single time without ever being truly awe-inspiring. It's an altogether unassuming candidate for the historical importance it holds, but that doesn't keep it from being entertaining; it's a pleasurable frolic of a sort that would barely make an impression a week later, let alone 95 years later, though it's still agreeable in its way even through the thick haze of changing styles and artistic priorities. I would want it to be nobody's first silent or first Fairbanks picture, but I certainly don't see how it could ever do anyone harm.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1919
-Erich von Stroheim makes his debut as writer and director with Blind Husbands
-The Miracle Man makes a star of Lon Chaney and his uncanny skill with make-up
-Cecil B. DeMille and Gloria Swanson work together for the first time on Don't Change Your Husband

Elswehere in world cinema in 1919
-The British First Men in the Moon is the first official adaption of a work by H.G. Wells to film
-Fight for Justice, a filmed play, is traditionally held to be the first Korean film production
-The first important World War I film, Abel Gance's J'accuse, is released in France

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BEST SHOT: ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

This year's iteration of Hit Me with Your Best Shot at the Film Experience snuck up on me quite unawares, making me feel like I'm failing not just as a member of Team Experience, but as a long-time booster of the best multi-site experience on the whole of the film blogosphere. I've said before and I'll say again (like, every Tuesday, probably), but if you're not playing along, you absolutely should. It's the most fun thing that I do with this site, and I frankly think that some of the best analysis I've ever done has been in this series.

Admittedly, today's post doesn't hit that level of pride, because my pick for the best shot from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - that masterpiece of post-modern romance is celebrating its 10th anniversary this month, if you can believe that goddamn bullshit - is hardly cunning or deeply insightful. In keeping with my general principle that the best way to approach HMWYBS is to look for the shot that best evokes the themes of the film that seem most important to me, to express something useful about its narrative, and to showcase its cinematography - in this case by the glorious Ellen Kuras, who needs to come back from whatever mud pit she sank into after Away We Go - and while I frequently have to sacrifice one or two of those goals, Eternal Sunshine offered up one moment that pretty clearly gets it in one:

Go away right now if you haven't seen the film. RIGHT NOW. This comes almost at the end, and if you read the film the way I do, it is the literal climactic moment of the whole picture.

If you've stayed, then you know already that Eternal Sunshine is a movie about memory: specifically, the memory of past romantic relationships that didn't end the way we'd have liked them to, and the pain caused by dwelling on those memories. This is explored through the film in a highly literal way, with the introduction of technology that allows people to eradicate specific, unpleasant memories, but writers Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, and Pierre Bismuth clearly have something more metaphorical in mind than the sci-fi machinery of their plot suggests.

The moment I've chosen comes when Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) has just about concluded the process of wiping every trace of Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) from his mind, with the last memory of their time together being a moment in a beach house where they first fell in love. It was a happy moment that he has since turned into a knife to stab himself with (to the unhappy person, nothing is as miserable as the memory of joy), but it's also the strongest single memory he has of the relationship; it is, we can assume, the one he has re-lived more often than any other, dwelling on its every nuance.

And now that it's about to fade away forever, the aspect of Joel's memory identifying itself as Clementine (it's important to stay aware with this film that most of the time we're seeing Kate Winslet, she's not actually playing a person, but an echo in his mind) asks him why he has to keep rehashing the same memory, why he can't simply think of it in a different way and build a new narrative around it. In other words, why dwell on the past in a way that makes you sad, when you can just as easily dwell on it in a way that makes you happy. And this he does, finally shifting his thoughts on his relationship with Clementine into a register where it brings him peace instead of agony, just as the memory starts to disintegrate and the last of her is gone.

So, back to the shot. It is a moment of both transcendence and destruction: Joel has finally learned the healthy way to process his painful memories without having to resort to draconian sci-fi technologies, just as the draconian sci-fi technology is done doing its work. And so we have three things vying for attention in one frame: the close-up on Carrey and Winslet, emphasising just them and their emotions, a memory of feeling rather than event; the fade to white; the diffuse focus. The latter two qualities both obviously imply the end of this memory, but in two different ways: as the focus gets blurrier, it's a fairly literal evocation of Joel's memory going fuzzy until they blank out completely, but what of the white-out? Elsewhere in the film, fading memories are associated with black-outs, and generally speaking, the association we're typically expected to make with death that involves a great deal of light pouring in (and make no mistake, this is a death scene) is one of finding spiritual peace and ascending to a better state of being. And this is exactly what Joel is experiencing, in the last possible moment: a peacefulness of mind that he has not to this point experienced at any point in the movie. It is the one moment where we're given reason to hope that he is capable of learning from his past, instead of just being wounded by it. I'm not sure that Eternal Sunshine has a terribly optimistic perspective on whether that learning and growth will stick, but it clearly wants to be hopeful on that front, and in its most beautiful moment, it depicts how that kind of real shift in thinking can happen, even if it's probably too late for this version of Joel to do anything good with it.

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WES HAS HIS CAKE AND EATS IT TOO

15 years and change since Rushmore, it would seem that there couldn't possibly be any more development in the aesthetics of Wes Anderson, a director whose personal stamp is about as obvious as anybody's ever has been. And yet here we are, and The Grand Budapest Hotel exists, and it feels like it might be the most purified and direct expression of the Anderson Style that has ever existed, the one that most completely takes place entirely within the artificial world that he has created for it. Even the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox doesn't feel like it takes place in such a thoroughly artificial series of locations.

Which would ordinarily be enough to mark the film out as the most airless and irritatingly arch thing in the director's career, yet a miracle has happened, and the exact opposite is true: if anything, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the film that Anderson was born for, unabashedly the best thing he's done since The Royal Tenenbaums, and I could probably be gotten drunk enough to start declaring how it's the new masterpiece of his whole career. For despite the unbelievably and almost literally indescribably fussiness of the imagery, it's one of his most thoroughly expressed depictions of theme and feeling. Despite the understanding we all have of what the Anderson Style actually means (brightly color-coded sets and costumes; centered compositions with actors staring directly at the camera; staccato, patter-like dialogue involving a nest of clauses and subjunctions that can barely be diagrammed, let alone spoken aloud), it's easy to forget that it also involves a healthy dose of melancholy and loss, and Grand Budapest doubles-down on this by opening and closing in a wintry cemetery, of all places, where a young woman (Jella Niemann) visits the grave of a great author (Tom Wilkinson), clutching a copy of his book The Grand Budapest Hotel (the onscreen depiction of the book cover doubles as the only statement of the film's title). From this setting we flash back to 1985, with the author giving an interview of how he came to come upon that book's story in 1968, when as a young man (Jude Law) on a spa trip in the Ruritanian country of Zubrowka (which, in our reality, is a brand of Polish vodka), he met Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), the owner of the Grand Budapest Hotel, the nearly empty ruin where he was then staying. Moustafa, sensing a receptive soul, told him the story of how he first came to the hotel during its greatest period of splendor, in 1932, when he (Tony Revolori) was a green lobby boy under the command of the legendary concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes).

It's not insisted on while you're watching the film burrow through its layers, but the return to the girl and her book in the cemetery at the end makes it impossible to forget: we're watching a tremendously fluffy bit of nonsense in which all of the participants are dead - so dead that the film has to add an entire outermost layer of framework narrative to make sure that it's given enough time for all of the people with speaking roles to die. And that is how a movie that, for the great majority of its running time is a blissed-out collage of '60s Euro-caper, pre-Code Lubitsch comedy (an obvious, surface-level comparison to make; but I don't think all those shots of people walking through doors can possibly be an accident, and unyieldingly brutal black comedy (not only is "the cat is dead" used a joke, "the cat's brains are splattered all over the cobblestones" is the amazingly funny punchline to that joke, and I say that as an unrepentantly ideological cat lover), can actually be about the tang we all feel when we stop for long enough to glance back and realise how much we have lost, and how much has changed beyond our ability to recognise it. It's not a sorrowful wallow in misery: the signal moment in the movie comes when a character, recounting how someone he loved died, lightly and almost laughingly describes it as a ridiculous disease.

It is, however, absolutely saturated in the awareness of time passing. At the structural level, there is its layering, distancing accumulation of frames and narrators (to the common complaint that Anderson's films hold the characters at arms' length, The Grand Budapest Hotel enthusiastically replies, "oh, no, much further than that!"); at the narrative level, there is the constant, film-long spectre of revolution and war in a time place that the film rather specifically situates in the space between the Russian Revolution and the outbreak of World War II, a time when the charming tourist's Europe in which the film takes place was wiped from the face of the Earth; at the stylistic level, there is the use of the 1.37:1 aspect ratio for all of the 1932 scenes, which is both good film history and a very obvious attempt to make something alien and old-fashioned out of the material (also, Anderson and his longtime cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman create more exciting compositions in that ratio than they ever have before, so there's that). It could not more literally be a film about how things decay and die. And compared to this, the brittle Andersonisms play less like the work of a man who truly does not grasp what people behave like and why (the impression one can sometimes get from something like The Darjeeling Limited), more like the witty anthropologist of The Royal Tenenbaums, who understood how highly artificial, presentational behavior could be understood as an attempt by the damned and dying to assert control over an uncontained situation. There's a line in The Grand Budapest Hotel that says this almost overtly, near the very end where it can't possibly be missed as anything but a statement of purpose. It is with this film that I first realised that Anderson is depicting bands of small-c conservatives, standing athwart history and yelling stop, without realising that history is already far past them.

Which makes the film sound like an unbearable slog, so I should backtrack and talk about what an immensely pleasurable film this is. The dominating theme of the film is pastry: the Grand Budapest looks like an elegant multi-layered frosted cake that might serve as the triumphant climax to one of its own dinners; baked goods of the highest quality and most fussy sort serve as key elements of the plot at multiple turns. And the film itself is an immaculate dessert, dauntingly sweet and impressively complex. There are those who would use this as an argument against the film and the filmmaker, because even the fanciest dessert is just junk food, and to them I say: I have made more than one dacquoise in my life, and just because it's not nourishing doesn't mean that it's not profoundly difficult artistry that only the most brilliant can make look as fleet and easy as Anderson does with this film. Everything about the film is candy: Adam Stockhausen's sets and Milena Canonero's costumes are pink-and-purple-and-blue eye candy, Alexandre Desplat's score (which by the film's halfway point, had already become my favorite thing he's done since at least The Painted Veil) is playfully multi-ethnic, Mitteleuropean ear candy, and the typically swirling dialogue delivered by Anderson's best cast ever (Fiennes in particular giving, the best performance in an Anderson film since Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenanbaums or Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore), full of anachronistic cursing and gleefully self-aware wordplay, is mind candy. But candy is not bad unless you have a steady diet of it, and I don't think there are enough Lubitch-slash-Tarantinto-slash-Nabokov exercises in the world to be worried about it.

I have said not a damn thing about the plot because it's much too joyful in its precise clockwork to give away even the earliest details, and much too complicated for a spare synopsis to do much good for anybody. I will mention, however, that you need to stay for the ending credits. Not only is the best musical cue in the whole film ("Traditional Arrangement: Moonshine", the name for a madcap orchestration that's anything but traditional) at the end of the credits, the most delightful joke in the movie and the most delightful joke I expect to see in 2014 is there as well. It's as fussy and silly as anything else in the movie, with the added delight of being astoundingly random, infused with the same kick of self-critiquing nostalgia that makes this such an ambivalently frothy lark.

10/10

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