The Marquee

Cool

Ralph Meeker

My Week of Movie Watching

The Red Shoes – Ever since my wife and I saw Black Swan, I’ve wanted to show this to her. RS is still a great film, but perhaps not for exactly the same reasons that I remember. The big pluses are the performance of Anton Walbrook as the one-minded ballet director Lementov, and the set design and choreography (especially in the great extended Red Shoes sequence). The films falters a bit, (and I stress a BIT) where it comes to the romance between Moira Shearer and Marius Goring. The two lovers don’t really get a chance to deliver any heat – The film has to tell us how in love they are, because it’s not that evident. Still, recommended.

Rabbit-Proof Fence – The true life story of two young aboriginal girls who walk 900 miles across the Australian outback after being forcibly taken from their home by Government officials. This is the story of a monumental human achievement, and for all its terrific qualities, the film doesn’t do a great job of capturing the magnitude of what these girls did. I mean, the walk took 9 weeks, and the two don’t really look the worse for wear at the end. Still, this is a good film, and a biting indictment of a shameful racist law. Peter Gabriel does the soundtrack, and it’s top notch - Its organic, ethereal, and moody. Recommended

Woodstock (Blu-Ray Directors cut) and Monterey Pop – I love Woodstock, and I try to watch it every few years or so. Putting aside what I consider the musical highlights (Richie Havens, The Who, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, Sly and the Family Stone and especially Santana) it is such a perfect time capsule because of the non-music. Everything that made the sixties the sixties is here - The fashion, the drugs, the attitude (“We live in a group – what you would call a commune”), and it’s to the films credit that it spends so much time on the stuff that was happening when the music wasn’t playing. I’m fascinated at how many of the characters one remembers – The Porti-San guy and the guy who pops out of the Porti-san. The girl who has lost her sister out there. The “Stay ON the grass” guy. The naked Frisbee girl. The yoga guy. Watch this if you haven’t. If you have, watch it again.

Compared to Woodstock, the Monterey Festival in 1967 was small potatoes when you look at the numbers involved (half a million versus less than 70,000), but Monterey was the template for what was to come two years later. Again, there were some terrific performances, Like The Who doing "My Generation", (and smashing the shit out of everything), Otis Redding, Janis Joplin doing "Ball and Chain", and of course Hendrix again. This was the concert where Jimi set his guitar ablaze, and my favourite shot in this film is a quick audience reaction shot right after Hendrix’ set. Instead of cheering and pandemonium, the reaction is gaping mouths and utter shock and awe. My only musical quibble is that Ravi Shankar’s set seems to go on forever, after most of the other artists only get a minute or two onscreen. It’s doesn’t compare to Woodstock in giving the viewer the sense of what the experience was like, but I still recommend it.

2012 – If you love lotsa stuff blowing up, this is for you, because basically the whole planet blows up. This one is entertainment for 16 year-old boys, I guess. The premise is that the sun starts acting up, the earths core is boiling, and we’re all gonna die. The film centres on a writer (John Cusack), and his estranged family, and how they can make their way to China to join an enormous “ark” that has been built covertly to save the earth’s best and brightest. Hollywood being Hollywood, the bad guys are US Government officials who are willing to kill anyone who endangers the plan. The same pattern happens again and again. There is a little scene where people talk to each other, and then they are interrupted by that damn apocalypse. Cusack and family somehow outrun earthquakes, meteor showers, falling buildings, you name it. Not recommended. Really, don’t bother.

The Marquee

Jacob's Ladder

Adrian Lynes Jacob’s Ladder is a maddening dervish of a movie. It’s dark, nervous, and soaked through with hallucinogenic angst. One could watch it through ten times in succession and still not have a grasp of what you have just seen. Despite all this, it works wonderfully as a portrait of a man’s descent into madness.

The Jacob of the title is Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), a well-educated Viet Nam vet now working as a mailman. The film starts with a flashback back to the jungle, as Singer’s platoon is ambushed and suffers devastating losses. Singer himself is bayoneted and almost dies.

Pitch forward to the present, and Singer is now working in a post office, and living with a co-worker played by Elizabeth Pena. There are signs early on that there are some cracks in his psyche. Singer awakens from the Viet Nam flashback to find himself in an almost abandoned subway train. He asks a lady for help, and she is so silent and strange that it is frightening. That’s not the real kicker however – A cursory glance at a sleeping bum seems to reveal a tail like a serpent. These images defy logical explanation – This guy must be nuts, right?

Some more info is introduced. An old photo of Singers now-dead son Gabe (Macauley Culkin). We start to learn about his shattered marriage, and the tragic loss of this child.

A character from Singers past comes into play – A platoon-mate named Paul, who suffers from the same nightmarish visions. This starts to skew our view of what we are seeing, and when Paul’s car explodes in a ball of fire, it’s evident that there are more layers to this story.

The movie calls attention to the Biblical names of the main characters, and it’s interesting to investigate this in the context of the story. Jacob was the son of Isaac, and was known for having wrestled an Angel whilst on his way back to meet his estranged brother, Esau. The movie Jacob is wrestling, too, and a comment made by Jacob’s chiropractor (Danny Aiello) circles back to the biblical Jacob. “If you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”

Then there’s the case of Singers’ woman Jezebel. The name has become synonymous with deceit and treachery, and it’s not by accident that the character has this name. It is, however, a little hard to get a firm grip on Penas’ Jezebel. She’s got a streak of treachery in her, like when she incinerates Jacobs photos of his family. On the other hand, she does seem to genuinely love him, and saves his life at one point. Like I said, she’s hard to pin down.

It’s hard to gain a toehold in this film, because Lyne doesn’t ever give you a chance to reliably stand back and decide what is real. There are passages that are plainly hallucination, sure, but he doesn’t stop there. After Jacob almost dies, and is revived, he is suddenly back with his family. It would be reasonable to assume that the previous events are imagined, but then the screenplay does a sly thing – it has Jacob jokingly reference the hallucination. “You know Jezebel from the post office? I was living with her! She had these fantastic thighs..” I found this scene not reassuring, but disorienting, like I was being teased with another layer of fog.

There’s a scene where Aiello rescues Jacob from the hospital, and again, what seems like a reprise from all the madness and disorientation actually raises a lot of questions, like how did he know Jacob was there, and how does he just waltz in and take him away? I felt the film was maybe pulling a sleight of hand on me.

I’m making this movie sound like an impossible slog, aren’t I? It IS difficult, and disorienting, but it is to its’ credit that it manages to maintain its narrative drive, as Jacob plows forward in his quest to find out what is happening to him. There is a shadowy character that we have seen briefly who seems to be following Singer, and eventually, the two men meet face-to-face. It’s here, in a barren alley that the fogs lift, as Jacob learns about a hippie chemist who made a deal with the Army to stay out of jail, and how the job he was given went horribly wrong.

This final revelation seems to lift the cloak off of Singer, and as he goes back to his old home, which seems strangely preserved in time, we think back to what the chiropractor said “If you’ve made your peace, the demons are angels freeing you from the earth.”

I spoke above about the preponderance of Biblical names in JL. The one I failed to touch on was Jacobs’ dead son Gabe (or Gabriel). The Biblical Gabriel is an angel, who is considered a messenger from God. Thus, when Jacob encounters his son again in his old home, we know why the child is there. This passage is beautifully soothing after everything we have gone through with Singer, and the expression on the man’s face as his son speaks to him is absolutely perfect – It’s sadness, recognition, love, peace, fulfillment, and relief all rolled into one divine smile.

For all the misdirection and twists in this story, however, JL saves the biggest till the last. An epilogue flashes back to Viet Nam and we encounter Jacob after he has been brought to the hospital. Theories abound about what this scene means. Is it an hallucination? Is it what really happened, and everything we have seen the hallucination? I have my own theory about it. Coming immediately after Jacob has again encountered his dead son, I think that this scene is a “reboot”, where Jacob has somehow erased all the pain and paranoia of his post-war life. Just have a listen to the song playing in the background during this sequence. The singer is Al Jolson, and the song? The song is "Sonny Boy".

IMDb

Amazon

The Art of Showing Nothing - An Interview with Robert Bresson

This is another interview from Charles Samuels landmark book Encountering Directors. Samuels spoke to Bresson in 1970, and the two covered most of Bressons’ work to that point in this lengthy conversation. Samuels’ discussions are notable in that he actually has the balls to tell these great filmmakers how they might have done their job better. Enjoy.

My commentary on Bressons' A Man Escaped

My Week of Movie Watching

This is actually a few weeks worth.

The Kings Speech – It’s like someone sat down with a “How to win an Oscar” kit and put this movie together. First of all is the lead character with the disability (Much like Rain Man, Forrest Gump, My Left Foot, etc). Add in sumptuous costumes and set designs. Add a couple of high-profile stars in Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, and fill in with the cream of Brit character actors (Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi, Timothy Spall). Yeah, it’s easy to look at this film and be cynical, but I have to say I still enjoyed it. I never knew the story of King George and his stuttering, and the way that the abdication of Edward VIII is woven in is well done. Guy Pearce is terrific as the monarch who gave it all up. Recommended.

Mouchette – I always have hits and misses with the films of Robert Bresson, and this is one of the latter. The story concerns a troubled French girl, her dying mother, and her abusive father. Mouchette’s life is a hard one, and it gets worse as she suffers a rape at the hands of a man she trusts. Bressons’ protagonists are always tight-lipped, and Mouchette maybe more so that any other. The films’ heartbreaking finale will leave you grasping for answers. I sort of recommend this, but I don’t put it in the class of the great A Man Escaped, which I consider Bresson’s masterpiece.

Proof – Little-known Australian film from the early 90’s concerns Martin (Hugo Weaving), a blind man who takes photos of his everyday life and has a friend (a young Russell Crowe) describe them to him. There’s also a housekeeper (Genevieve Picot) whose relationship with Martin is a jumble of sexual attraction and calculated cruelty, and who begins a clandestine affair with Crowe. This film is low budget, and looks it, but it redeemed by stellar performances by the three leads. It’s definitely worth a look.

Between the Covers

Wheeler Burden did not think of visiting Berggasse 19 until the third day in Vienna, or at least there is no mention of it in the journal he kept with meticulous care from almost the moment of his arrival. The first days he spent adjusting, you might say, to the elation of newness and the spectacle of this city he knew so well in theory but had never actually visited. Then the practicalities settled on him, followed by a deep feeling of displacement. Wheeler was a long way from home with no means of either identification or support. But before the gravity of the situation set in, he was almost able to enjoy himself. Much of the first day, of course, he was busy marvelling at his mere presence in such a magnificent and imperial city. It was 1897 Vienna, after all. The first hour, we learn from the journal, he spent clearing the fog from his mind and pulling himself painfully back to full awareness, emerging from the miasma of what seemed like a long uneasy sleep, and from the catastrophic precipitating event he was nowhere near ready to remember.

Wheeler wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed to 1897 Vienna. If that premise makes The Little Book sound like a Back to the Future-esque bit of triviality, rest easy. Guided by the notes of his old teacher, the venerable Anaud Esterhazy, Wheeler unravels the mysteries surrounding his family; His war-hero father, who was murdered by the Gestapo and his beautiful, yet repressed grandmother. Also making appearances are Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Mark Twain, and an eight-year-old Adolf Hitler. Turn of the century Vienna is captured beautifully here: A vibrant city of art and music, albeit one rife with an anti-Semitism that would plant the seeds for the horrors to come 40 years later.

An article on the creation of The Little Book, which was a decades long labour of love for author Selden Edwards.

Sex

Britt Ekland

The Marquee (A gallery of Archers)

The Marquee

The Last Detail

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Cloak and Dagger

Sex

OK - THIS is Lilli Palmer

Sex

Lilli Palmer

The Marquee

Cool

Billy Wilder

The Marquee

My Week of Movie Watching

Iron Man 2 – A disappointment. The original is my favourite comic-book adaptation, so the sequel had its work cut out for it, but some of the failures are mystifying. First, take the villain Whiplash (Mickey Rourke) He’s a great invention, and the sequence where he attacks Tony Stark on the racetrack is terrific. But then he has no contact with Iron Man until the finale, and it is over all too quickly. The OTHER villain, the arms dealer played by Sam Rockwell can’t be taken seriously. Shouldn’t a villain seem formidable? Too much of this film was just empty sound and fury. I longed for a classic comic-book moment like the one in the first film where the prototype Iron Man emerges from the cave. Not really recommended.

Street of Shame – Another in Mizoguchis “Fallen Women” series. This one deals with the denizens of a Tokyo brothel in the post-war period, and focuses primarily on the financial hardships they face. The film features a back-story about a piece of legislation that would outlaw prostitution, and it’s striking to see the dilemma its passing would present. Most of the women hate the degradation and shame attached to their life, but they also realize that if the law passes, they have no other prospects. Poignant, sad, and heartily recommended.

My Architect – This documentary follows the efforts of filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn to learn more about his father, the renowned architect Louis Kahn. The film doesn’t arrive at many answers about the brilliant but erratic father, who had three separate families and was found dead in a train station. The real appeal of this film is in its presentation of the mind of a flawed visionary, who could create stunning works of art, but often had no clue about the practical aspects of his craft – Or of his family. A treat for an architecture junkie like myself is the exploring of some of Kahn’s major works, primarily the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Fort Apache – The first movie of John Ford’s “Cavalry” trilogy is a re-working of the George Custer story. Henry Fonda stars as Colonel Owen Thursday: A cold, brittle megalomaniac whose hubris results in the needless deaths of he and most of his men. John Wayne plays Captain York, who has a more sympathetic view of the Apache nation. On the plus side here are the performances of the two leads, and some magnificent shots of Utah’s Monument Valley. On the minus side is Fords penchant for salting his films with clunky comedic elements. In this case it’s a cadre of hard-drinking Irish sergeants, led by Victor McLaughan. As much as I admire most of Fords work, the man just had no instinct for comedy. A lukewarm recommendation.

Sex

Ava Gardner

My Week of Movie Watching

Black Swan – My only previous exposure to the work of Darren Aronofsky was Requiem for a Dream. Although I admired that film for its technical excellence and its go-for-broke storytelling, I have to admit that it left me depressed for days afterward. Thus, I went into Black Swan with a bit of trepidation. It turns out that BS is a great film, albeit one that also gets inside your head and stays there. Natalie Portmans performance as the doomed ballet dancer Nina is really a tour de force. It would have been really easy for an actress to look ridiculous in this, but she pulls it off. Vincent Cassel as the controlling director is worth a shout-out, as well. Barbara Hershey stars as Portmans controlling mother in a performance that has distinct Bergman-esque overtones. Recommended.

Kagemusha – First time seeing this Kurosawa epic. This one always gets grouped with Ran, and the two films tread similar ground. Both concern great dynasties that crumble due to arrogance and pride. Kagemusha follows a petty thief who is recruited as a double for a slain warlord. The films' central point is that it doesn’t really matter who is leading the clan, and that the warlord is strictly a figurehead. The climactic battle scene is really a marvel, as waves of men are sent into battle, only to be cut down. A masterpiece.

The Hitch-hiker – This Ida Lupino B flick from 1953 is a great example of a film being greater than the sum of its parts. Two fishermen (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) pick up a psychopath hitchhiker. That’s the movie. There is little interplay between the two men as to how to get out of their predicament. So, why does this movie “work”? The film develops it’s tension around whether the men will be able to get rid of the killer before the police realize he is with them, at which point he kills them and moves on to another poor soul. The reason this film works so well despite it’s lack of sophistication is the presence of William Talman as the mad hitcher. With his Jack-O-Lantern smile and his lazy eye (He sleeps with it open!), Talman’s Emmet Meyer is a truly unsettling presence - a low-rent cousin of Richard Widmarks’ Tommy Udo. This is not a great movie, but it’s sure a fun one. Recommended.

A pretty good week.