Two from Korea: The President's Last Bang and The Brotherhood of War

I haven't been reading nearly as much as I want to lately, and I've got a pile of stuff to go through, but I'd like to find a good book about Korean history in the twentieth century, if only because what I've seen on film the past few years is fascinating. Tragic, more often than not, though it seems to be turning out all right in the end, at least for South Korea: Like Japan before them, they've got a strong economy and their export goods are gaining a better reputation. They've got one of the most vibrant national cinemas going, too.

Which is kind of amazing, really. Up until about fifteen years ago, South Korea was mostly a democracy in name only; it just looked good because it was located next to North Korea on a map, where Kim Il-Sung basically made himself a communist king and his son maintains just as firm a grip. It's easy to look like the good guys next to that, but in the South, Park Chun-hee declared martial law and remained President for eighteen years before the assassination attempt chronicled in The President's Last Bang, but his death didn't change much; Memories of Murder opens by informing us that ten years later, the country was under the rule of a military dictatorship; Ma Vie en Rose describes how dissidents evaded the government's curfew by hiding out in all-night comic book rental shops.

Crazy. Absolutely crazy, and somehow, it's all working out for South Korea. One just hopes that eventually, the two Koreas will be able to reunite as the two Germanies did. The Korean people have earned itself some happiness and prosperity, although I must admit to being glad that they've been able to turn their darker years into some damn good movies.

The President's Last Bang (Geuddae geusaramdeul)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 28 March 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Recent Raves)

History is stranger than fiction.

In October, 1979, the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency assassinated President Park Chun-hee. This is a matter of historical fact, but Im Sang-soo isn't interested in delivering a dry lecture. So he makes The President's Last Bang a comedy. After all, most Koreans know the names and events; what Im does is provide surprising motivations and highlight how an act this audacious will have moments a morbid humor.

President Park, we're informed, has been in office for eighteen years, and though the fiction of democracy is maintained via an opposition party, he is a venal and corrupt dictator. Idle and arrogant in his power, he decides to have a "meeting" (more of a party) at a KCIA safe house. In attendance will be the President, Chief Bodyguard Cha (Jeong Won-jung), Chief Secretary Yang (Kwun Byung-gil), two young and pretty women, and KCIA chief Kim (Baek Yun-shik). After a series of particularly ugly comments by Cha, Kim excuses himself to speak with one Chief Agent Ju (Han Suk-kyu): "We do it tonight." What about...? "The President is the primary target. Killing Cha is just a bonus."

Bang is a comedy, and an action thriller, but there's no mistaking what writer/director Im thinks of this administration: It abused power at every level, from repressing student demonstrations to intimidating prostitutes. It's telling that despite the arrogance of the people in power, they're also insecure, speaking in Japanese when they want to impress someone. Soon after we first meet Kim, we see him exhale with his hand over his nose and mouth, saying he can smell the rot within (his doctor is telling him to retire and enjoy what time he has left). In real life, Kim's motive was more likely a coup than altruism, but equating the cancer devouring Kim and the corruption in his country too good a metaphor to pass up.

Baek's performance as Kim is the one that anchors the film, and it's excellent. He makes the director of a totalitarian regime's spy service a sympathetic character; maybe age and illness has mellowed him, or given him a moment of clarity. Early in the film, when he's interacting with other members of the administration, we get the impression that he's being very careful with his words, and as the dinner party progresses, he does a good job of revealing his increasing disdain to the audience without necessarily making us think he'd tip the other characters off. He sells grimly comic situations, such as looking for another gun to finish off the man crawling toward him.

Just as interesting is Han as Agent Ju. We're set up to believe he's a monster, as he browbeats a young woman and her mother awkwardly trying to blackmail someone in the administration, but as the film goes on, he becomes more nuanced. He's got a smaller world-view than Kim, less worried about principles like democracy than providing for his family. He worries about coming out on the other side alive the most, but is also truly vexed by what to do with the two college-aged girls who witness everything; his face and body language tell us that while he has no issue with killing the President or his advisors, he does have lines he does not want to cross.

The rest of the cast is strong, too. Song Jae-ho plays President Park as thoroughly slimy if short of rubbing his hands with evil. There's no concern for anyone else to him, and little but contempt for the outside world. Jeong Won-jung goes a bit over-the-top as a bully, but it fits; he's never had to be a politician like Park and thus has no issues with not just abusing power, but abusing it in a crude fashion. Kwun Byung-gil is a bit more of a moderating presence as Yang; he knows that part of his job is the be "the President's drinking buddy", and his measured delivery makes us wonder if he might eventually be the voice of reason. A different perspective is provided by Cho Sang-gun as Shim, the house's heavy old butler and caretaker who sees everything but stays aloof.

Im handles all of the film's facets exceptionally well. The action scenes are fast-paced and easy to follow; they are as tense as any you'll see and aren't derailed by the jokes - the crazy situations act add zing rather than decrease tension. The comedy is dark, and it must have been jarring initially to see Park and company portrayed as not just reprehensible, but also foolish. One tends to think of a dictator as a monster, rather than a buffoon, and the idea that the people in charge of an entire country are little more than horny asshats or that history can turn because of a drunken offensive comment at dinner is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious; and the two contradictory reactions enhance each other.

Korea had a crazy twentieth century, but it's certainly making for some great movies in the twenty-first.

Read the rest at HBS (dead link).

The Brotherhood of War (Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Korean War on Film)

The Korean War is overlooked in the United States; the world was much the same at its end as at its beginning, and it never became the unending quagmire that Vietnam or Iraq did. The Communist witch-hunts and later Vietnam became much more interesting stories. In Korea, though, it was one of the century's defining events, and here serves as the backdrop for an intense, if occasionally melodramatic, war movie.

University student Lee Jin-seok (Bin Won) and his older brother Jin-tae (Jang Dong-Kun) live just outside Soeul with Jin-tae's fiancée Young-shin (Lee Eun-ju) and their mother (Lee Yeong-ran). When North Korea invades and Souel is evacuated, Jin-seok is dragooned into the army, as is Jin-tae when he tries to extricate his brother, despite the rule about only one child per family. As they're assigned to the front lines, Jin-tae makes a deal with his superior officer to take dangerous assignments to keep his brother relatively safe, gaining a hero's reputation in the process. Meanwhile, on the homefront, Young-shin is considered a communist sympathizer because she attended meetings for the rice that was handed out - and as you can imagine, being considered a communist sympathizer is much worse in a Republic of Korea in the middle of a shooting war than Cold War America. When the family is reunited, the story takes a lurching (and improbable?) twist.

That last act vexes me. The film is bookended with an elderly Jin-seok (Jang Min-ho) and his granddaughter (Jo Yun-hie) being called by archaeologists excavating the sight of a fierce battle that took place fifty years older, where they found an expensive pen Jin-tae gave to Jin-seok before the war. The plot twist I was expecting from this doesn't happen, but the one that does seems even more far-fetched. I'm sure people did defect during the war, but would they be placed in a position where they could potentially turn on the side defected to? It strikes me that North Korea would be more paranoid than this (as they should be); it's a situation that really wouldn't exist outside of a movie.

So, we need the cast to sell us on it, and they are pretty solid. Jang Dong-kun grabs our attention as Jin-tae, getting an awful lot of range out of his cherubic appearance. Over the course of the film, Jin-tae will be many things - loving older brother, hardened soldier, a fellow enjoying his status as a hero a little too much, and thoroughly disillusioned; he handles all of those facts and transformations without ever losing sight of who the character is at the core. Bin Won is nearly as good as younger brother Jin-seok. The pair has a good dynamic, with college student Jin-seok initially seeming like the sensible one while Jin-tae is a goofball, but Jin-tae's pragmatism allows us to see Jin-seok as somewhat naive later on; he's able to maintain his idealism because Jin-tae has been protecting him. We don't see nearly as much of Lee Eun-ju's Young-shin as we see of the brothers, of course, but she's fine there; we get a sense of her as a thoroughly decent person (the neighborhood kids all tend to congregate around her) while believing that she wouldn't consider the long-term effects of what she does.

We meet a number of other soldiers in the brothers' platoon, and they're standard war-movie types played well enough. One of the main reasons they're introduced is to serve as fodder during battle scenes, and writer/director Kang Je-gyu serves up some pretty nasty combat. The most obvious comparison is Saving Private Ryan, but where Spielberg desaturated the color to give his film the look of wartime photography, Kang eschews such tricks, opting to give us a straight-ahead view of the blood and mayhem. The violence and its effects are garish and graphic, almost at times becoming the "fun" dismemberment of horror movies, but remaining solidly disquieting. The combat is done on a large scale, with several sequences using hundreds if not thousands of extras. Some liberties are probably taken here; at least one battle is presented as being at such close quarters that not only are bayonets used, but it becomes a fistfight. It gets across the point of vicious combat, though, probably better than shooting rifles from a distance.

Kang's script is pretty good - the narrative hook of two brothers conscripted and the older, less-educated one trying to protect the one who represents the family's hopes and dreams is compelling. I like how he contrasts that with the damage that the Home Guard is doing to that family when they're away; it lends tragic weight to the proceedings and tempers the anti-North Korean rhetoric that naturally comes up during the story. But that last act; it's like it comes from another movie. It's an interesting movie, one which would certainly be worth watching, and has another good action scene, but it makes the movie less about the brothers' relationship and more about... I'm not sure, exactly. The insanity of the two Koreas being at war? How some of the authoritarian policies of South Korea were as dangerous as the communist North, if not more so? There's a good theme about the rescuer needing to be rescued, and the ending is satisfying, though it's not really an ending that the first hour and a half was leading up to.

At two hours and twenty minutes, this is an epic-sized war movie, and despite the odd last act, one with much to recommend it. It doesn't flinch from war's ugliness, nor does it ignore the South's own moral lapses in time of war. And there's something right about a Korean War movie being a brother story at its heart. I don't know that this is the definitive movie about that conflict, but it should probably be on the short list.

Read the rest at HBS (dead link)

Boston Underground Film Festival: Day 5

It's fitting that this entry took so long, because the day sort of dragged on for a while. It was one of those days where the films are staggered so that while I could have fit five in if I'd stayed at the Brattle, they weren't the five I really wanted to see. So while there was about half an hour between the silent shorts and Riot On!, I had an hour and a half after that before Camp Daze, then an hour and a half or so before the animated shorts. Good time for some poking around Harvard Square, and going home to get some supper, but not enough time to write things up or work through the backlog of stuff on the DVR.

It wound up being my favorite day at the BUFF, though. I like short films a lot, and these were the packages I was most interested in: Silent sci-fi and horror to start the day and animation to end it. There's not much money in short films - most are student films - so they tend to be done on the cheap. Using the silent aesthetic can let a director get away with a little, and the tools available to animators are getting more and more impressive, especially if they want to invest some time.

Will I see twelve feature and shorts programs at BUFF next year? I'm not sure. The same way that Fantasia hits everything I love, BUFF hits a lot of the things that leave me cold. I like the shorts, so I'll probably concentrate on that next year. Still, there were some fun features, and it comes just before Hollywood really starts gearing up.

Shorts Program Six: Silent Screams

Seen 26 March 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Underground Film Festival)

"The Last Woman on Earth" - * * * - Not a whole lot of story to this one, but it's presented like a lost silent movie looking at an even earlier type of moving picture. A man pulls out a mothballed box that, when properly prepped, shows a flip-book of a woman dancing. Pretty nifty, especially when we cut-away to see stop-motion animation of how the device works, with candles and mirrors and the like.

"Synthetic Bodies" - * * * - Oddly, festival Managing Director Anna Feder eschewed a Q&A after this program because she said only one short's director was around, but she wasn't including herself. Pity, because she makes a nifty silent pastiche here, with a scientist building himself a robot mate. The only frustrating thing is that her movie doesn't end so much as stop.

"The Fine Art of Poisoning" - * * ½ - An interesting-looking animated short by Bill Domonkos and Jill Tracy. Kind of pretty, but didn't make a great impression on me the first time. This second time through, I liked ths one a little more, but the story was still kind of muddled.

"The Muse" - * * ½ - This is one that I remember liking a great deal while watcihng it, but now that I try to write a review five days later, it's strangely vague. I remember it being charming and somewhat fanciful, and how, in the end, the film's subtitle about it being a girl's daydream held true. I'll have to watch it again.

"The Call of Cthulhu" - * * * ¾ - I can't say I'm a big fan of the Lovecraft mythos, and in some ways it's the sort of thing I've made some pains to avoid the past few years: A big, sprawling mythology that comprises multiple volumes and is so complicated as to spin off reference works. But there's obviously something there, for it to still have a following eighty years later, and one rabid enough to put together something like this.

Part of what's extraordinary is that this film is a labor of love, made by members of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society on digital video to resemble a three- or four-reel silent from 1926, the original novel's year of publication. Some modern digital effects and stop-motion is used, but the polish is deliberately held back a little, although in some cases shots of a bizarre, alien landscape which are obviously cheap CGI also look like abstract silent film sets. I don't know if you go this route with a book that isn't from and set in the silent era, but here the conceit works.

As was more common at the time, we get a sort of nested narrative - a man in some sort of hospital setting tells a story of how his inheritance from his great-uncle included a diary detailing his own investigations of the Cult of Cthulhu, and his own tale includes stories related by others. As fans know, Cthulhu and his brethren are Old Ones, alien beings of incredible power who came to Earth in the distant past who can drive men mad with a glance. Cthulhu has been hibernating and must not be wakened, but the very knowledge of his existence brings forth a powerful curiosity...

Lovecraft is known as much for how he wrote as what he wrote, and while screenwriter Sean Brannery and director Andrew Leman can only capture so much of the dense prose via intertitles and pointing the camera at words written in diaries, but they still do a good job in building a growing sense of wrongness, and when the good ship Alert reaches a deserted isle near New Zealand, it's grand pulp adventure. It's here that the film breaks out its special effects, and they look pretty good for a low-budget production. The monster is kept in the shadows, but, of course, that's for our protection - no good driving the audience mad.

The cast does all right mimicking the way silent movie actors performed without camping it up. To be honest, with a few exceptions, I sort of gave up on keeping track of them; there's a lot of characters in forty-five minutes of movie. The silent style can cover up much roughness from the budget cast, so it works out. The music is period-accurate and does a great job of setting the mood.

I'm sure fans of Lovecraft's original work can find things to nitpick with The Call of Cthulhu, and that's their prerogative - though I gather it gets more praise than derision. Fans of silent horror would find it to be a highly effective pastiche, maybe not good enough to be passed off as a film lost for eighty years, but good enough to be considered the real thing.

Riot On!

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival)

Remember the dot-com boom? Ah, those were good times to be in computers. Swanky offices, the most recent version of every development tool you could possibly need available for the asking, high salaries, flexible working hours, investors just falling all over themselves wanting to give money to anyone with the ability to register a domain and describe a service that people might pay for. Good, good times. Where was I? Right, Riot On!. Anyway, as director Kim Finn is all too eager to tell you, some people didn't remember, and made the exact same mistakes when people promised the moon where mobile communication was concerned.

People like the founders of Riot-E. Like many of the first people to stake out a claim on the web, they were able to raise a great deal of money by tossing around ideas that were new and exciting, but were not only of little practical use, but often required technology that was years away (only one of the founders was any good with the technical stuff). Based on those ideas, they were able to secure major investment from the likes of Nokia and News Corporation and valuable licenses to Hollywood properties (such as Marvel comics and Lord of the Rings), which along with great marketing savvy kept them afloat for about two years, when they crashed and crashed hard.

Read the rest at HBS.

Camp Daze

* * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2006 at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education (Boston Underground Film Festival)

Know what's tiresome? "Jokes" about a previous decade's pop culture and fashions. Horror movie characters who are conversant in horror movie clichés. Stories that just don't make any sense when a couple seconds worth of thought. When a movie's got all that working against it, well, it had better have some quality sex and violence going for it. Camp Daze makes a valiant stab at making it work, but winds up being for gorehounds only.

After a teaser for what happened 24 years ago, we get horror movie set-up #3: Vade (Eric McIntire) is driving his sister Angela (Joanna Suhl) to an appointment in Boston, with friends Mario (Matt Dallas) and Jen (Anika C. McFall) in tow. They run out of gas in the Maine woods and get freaked out when a scene right out of a horror movie plays out in front of them. When they wake the next morning, though, nothing appears to have happened, and the teenagers from nearby Camp Hiawatha offer to help - looking like they've stepped straight out of a picture from 1981.

Read the rest at HBS.

Shorts Program Three: Highly Animated

Seen 26 March 2006 in Harvard Film Archive Room B04 (Boston Underground Film Festival)

"Calories" - * * ½ - A cute enough animation that informs kids that one calorie is the heat required to raise one kilogram of water one degree Celsius. It kind of falls between being a parody of "Schoolhouse Rock" type stuff and functioning as one.

"Bingo's Dream" - * * ¾ - A mother cat's dreams an ode to feeding her kitten. Very nicely drawn.

"Milton is a Shitbag" - * * * * - You seldom see cats portrayed as nice; they're either aloof or downright evil. Courtney's new pet Milton is evil. This is a heavily narration-based cartoon, but Courtney Davis's art style is charming without being overly cutesy, and the jokes are pleasantly absurd.

"The Revolution of the Crabs" - * * * * - A very french sort of cartoon; it starts positing a reasonable sounding premise that's revealed as absurd when pushed - crabs can only move side-to-side, so they're trapped walking along one path forever - has a crab spout some goofy philosophy and ends on mocking the idiots which are the majority. I like the subdued, black and white art, with the simple visuals a nifty contrast to the complicated mechanism the crabs use to move.

"Fish Head Fugue" - * * ¼ - "Hey, let's make weird-looking stuff move!"

"Depository Vacation" - * * * - A trip through the creative process. Funky looking, and the final joke about just where the inspiration is coming from is an amusing one.

"Little Dead Girl" - * * * ½ - I'm no fan of the whole gothy vibe, but this is a pretty spiffy CGI-animated music video of a recently decesaed teenager coming back to life to see a concert, and encountering the prejudice that the undead regularly face. The characters are expressive with slight gestures, and the gross-out humor is fun.

"The Guilt Trip, or The Vaticans Take a Holiday" - * * ¼ - The longest short in the collection, and it feels it. The illustrations on the walls of an abandoned church decide to come to life and hit the road, but a picture of Pope John Paul II doesn't like the idea much. Maybe it's funnier/edgier/more amusing if you're familiar with Catholic politics or feel strongly about Christianity in general.

"Bean with Bacon Soup" - * * * ½ - Nifty, well-animated "trash comes to life and walks around" CGI short. The flower that sprouts from the discarded can of the title is awful cute, with one root in a sneaker and the other stuck in the bean.

"Attack of the 50 Foot Fuckers" - * * * ¼ - Animated kaiju-type robot/monsters bust each other's balls while trashing London. The drawings are kind of crude, as is the humor, but it's fun to watch them bust on each other.

"She She She She's A Bombshell" - * * * ½ - This is the sort of thing Chuck Jones called "animated radio", featuring a guy in the backseat of a car going on and on and on about the girl he just met at the concert to the aggravation of the car's driver, who is desperately trying to drown him out but can't get the car's tape deck and her CD player to co-operate. It's animated radio, but good radio, as the animation style lets the driver's expression go over-the-top without it seeming like overacting.

And that's all for BUFF. Now to hopefully catch up before the IFFB (ha!), which I think will keep me behind the eight-ball until Fantasia...

Boston Underground Film Festival: Day 4

Saturday wound up being a pretty long day at the festival, since the 9:15pm showing of Let The Eat Rock! sold out, but they added a second show at 10:45. The bad news was that the short that was advertised didn't run with it, and we apparently just got the director rather than the band; the good news was that we got to see it in the HFA's main auditorium rather than room B04, which is not bad for a classroom used for screening, but not on the same level as the main room.

Sometime at the start of "Distress Management", I started to feel like I had had enough unpleasant stuff. 7pm had the choice of two nasty-sounding ones, and I wasn't originally going to see Let Them Eat Rock; it just suddenly seemed more appealing than Neighborhood Watch, which had a neat premise but a trailer that promised nastiness. Just got to be enough, you know? It seemed like all the narrative features were like that at a certain point.

The Barn

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Underground Film Festival)

The Barn is an answer to the question "what's the most movie you can make with almost no resources?" For most of its eighty minutes, it gets by with two actors (who also wrote the script), one set, and one sheep. It is, therefore, a pretty fair accomplishment when the movie maintains the audience's interest, keeping the focus on escaping from the barn, as opposed to the theater.

We are trapped in the barn with two unnamed Americans, one skinny and excitable with curly brown hair (Jake Broder), the other bald and wearing glasses (Adam Long). They came to deliver a briefcase to two English gangsters (Gerard Kelly and Mel Radio). Displeased with the contents, the thugs get the drop on the couriers, locking them in the barn where the exchange took place and drive off, saying something vague about coming back to shoot them later. When the skinny one regains his senses, he becomes aware that the barn is solid brick, the door is locked, the windows are barred, and once you get past the dirt and hay, the floor is solid cement. How a sheep later appears while they sleep is a perplexity.

Read the rest at HBS.

Shorts Program 5: Just For Laughs

Seen 25 March 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive Room B04 (Boston Underground Film Festival)

"Baby Pepper" - * ¾ - Oooh, you're so underground and edgy, you make jokes about pepper-spraying babies! If you'd made it funny, that'd be one thing, but for this, you're just a jerk.

"Monkey Walken" - * * - The form used (a monkey puppet with CGI eyes and mouth added) is kind of off-putting, and all the idea is amusing, the guy doing Monkey Walken's voice comes closer to Chris Rock than Christopher Walken.

"Fancy" - * * * ½ - Heh. This one's got a raunchy set-up: A young woman recounting her first visit to a scuzzy new male gynecologist to her roommate, and while it builds to a crude and funny punchline, it's better than a one-joke short, getting a lot of extra laughs in its quick four minute run-time.

"Frozen Food Section" - * * ¾ - The second Bukowski-inspired short of the festival (and better than "A Kind of Screaming"), it's pretty funny in its over-the-top reaction to a man groping a woman's bottom in the supermarket, although it only gets a laugh, rather than the guffaw something this broad is aiming for.

"Amateur" - * * * - A twenty minute short that could be expanded to feature length. The best part of this story about a guy who meets disaster trying to shoot a porn movie in Vegas is the NAME, the actress playing his little sister who fronts him her bat mitzvah money and clearly intimidates the heck out of her screw-up brother.

"Nick Price: Photobooth Detective" - * * * - A flagrantly silly bit showing a fedora'd detective beating a bunch of pulp villains in four photobooth shots each. Yeah, those stories really were that straightforward.

"Atomic Spitballs" - * * * ¼ - There's not a whole lot of milage to be gotten from spoofing 1950s sci-fi movies, but this one does a pretty good job by getting in and out within fifteen minutes, putting in funny visuals such as the girl who prefers a pipe to cigarettes, and having some pretty snazzy visual effects. I'm curious to see what director Brett Ansty could do with feature-type resources, even if the movie does sort of disintegrate at the end.

"Uso Justo" - * * * ½ - Frequently hilarious film made entirely with subtitling and editing. Coleman Miller takes a 1950s Spanish melodrama and remakes it as a story about a town looking forward to the shooting of an experimental film in their neighborhood, only to discover that they're merely found footage.

Shorts Program 4: Distress Management

Seen 25 March 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival)

"Pretty Kitty" - * * - Have you ever watched a movie and gotten the idea that it's just looking to be generally unpleasant without really giving the audience anything to chew on. That, yeah, it makes a certain kind of sense, but why would you watch this for entertainment? This is like that, only it becomes almost completely nonsensical toward the end.

"Disposer" - * * * - Lots of times, trying to get funny from gory just doesn't work, but this one does because one of the characters is able to go from being vaguely creepy and pathetic to being a good straight man.

"Dead" - * * ¾ - A stylish music-video type short that chronicles a bullet passing through a man's brain in super amazing ultra slow back-and-forth cutting motion. I imagine there is a lot of second-guessing during that split-second.

"Slice of Heaven" - * * * - Is this movie trying to say something? Probably. Damned if I know what, but the contrast of the lush, beautifully green plants and happy domesticity and the creepy secret beneath it is a bit unnerving.

"Laundromancer" - * * ¼ - Wait... No... Let me guess... The guy talking to his sister on the phone about the girl he sees at the laundermat every night is more sinister than he appears!

"Blackout" - * * - Ah, weird "was there a crime or is he being messed with" short subjects. What would a film festival be without them.

"Legion: The Word Made Flesh" - * * * ¼ - A pretty complete miniature horror movie, complete with a prologue and a finale that leaves stuff open for a sequel. Solid exorcism-and-possession stuff, with good characters and a genuinely creepy feel.

"The Working Stiff" - * * * - Nifty little zombie movie with a slightly humorous hook - another corpse at the crematorium is walking around - that darkens up nicely as it goes along.

"Tea Break" - * ¾ - Ooh, I get it! We're combining grotesque violence with utter mundanity! How droll!

"Monsters" - * * * - Creepy kids. Nothing makes a body uneasy like kids with real, unvarnished hostility.

Let Them Eat Rock

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival)

How can you tell that Boston/Cambridge is an academically-oriented town? Well, there's the way the population swells by around half a million people when school is in session, but how many other places would give rise to a band like The Upper Crust - a serviceable enough group of hard rockers that take the stage in pantaloons, make-up, and powdered wigs to sing about the travails of being idle English gentlemen in the mid-eighteenth century? You get novelty acts everywhere, but seldom ones as relatively popular and nerdy.

We meet the band in 1995, as they're just starting to break out. At the moment, they're playing venues like The Middle East in Cambridge, but in a few weeks they're booked for an appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. The middle section deliberately recalls A Hard Day's Night, as the band members get ready for their big show. But first, we've got to get to know the members, and they're an interestingly diverse group.

Read the rest at HBS.

Boston Underground Film Festival: Day 3

Hey, BUFF - you cost yourself six bucks giving us more than advertised!

See, before the Friday night screening of East of Euclid, instead of just saying that "My Father is 100 Years Old" would be playing the next night at the Coolidge as part of Short Program 1, they went and showed it. The thing is, it's fifteen minutes long, and I only had fifteen minutes of wiggle room between Euclid at the Brattle and Pony Trouble at the Harvard Film Archive, so I totally would have seen that, which means I'm using up one more punch on my 10-film ticket, which means that by the time Sunday comes around I'm buying one more individual ticket.

But, nope. Instead, I'm not out of the Brattle until 9:40. I suppose I could have turned around and seen Psychopathia Sexualis, but I wasn't really feeling that. Plus, it was the end of the week, so I was tired, and I hadn't eaten since lunch. It wasn't until Saturday that "edginess fatigue" would start to set in, but that's a topic for the Day 4 posting.

East of Euclid

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Underground Film Festival)

A lot of cities have their own distinctive art scene or music scene. But not many have their own film scene, or at least, not one that outsiders would necessarily recognize. Winnipeg may be on the road to becoming one of those cities, as Jeff Solylo, the production designer for some of Guy Maddin's early films, has made a film of his own, which is similar enough to note influences but has a sensibility of its own.

East of Euclid is set in Winnipeg's North End in the early 1970s, and takes its cues more from film noir than silents. This slavic enclave is home to Villosh The Gambler, a former KGB assassin and (very) small-time gangster who dreams of making enough money to go to Atlantic City and test his luck against the gamblers there. Elsewhere, gossip columnist Natalia (Daina Leitold) romances her paper's ace photographer, Valeri (Brent Neale), who becomes smitten with Villosh's mistress Alexandria (Maria Lamont) at a party. The picture Valeri takes of Villosh there prompts him and his henchmen to deliver Valeri a savage beating. Villosh also kidnaps the star local hockey player, Veli-Pekka (Miles Boiselle).

Read the rest at HBS.

Three days behind already. I was so going to turn over a new leaf here. Stupid festivals with their bunches of movies to watch leaving a body little time to write about them.

Boston Underground Film Festival: Days 1-2

I think this is my first time at BUFF. It's always been interesting, but located in odd venues and jumping around the calendar. This year, they're partnering with the Brattle and having most of the screenings take place in easy walking distance. All three programs I've seen thus far have been at the little movie house on Brattle Street, but by the time it's over I'll likely hit shows at the Harvard Film Archive and Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

I'll be honest - I don't expect to love a lot of the features I'll be seeing. I'm fairly squeamish and don't have a lot of love for films that are really out to shock. Hence my only seeing one program last night (no way I go to Modify; it just sounds ga-ross). But, there looks to be a lot of good short films - including a program of silent sci-fi horror and what is apparently the U.S. premiere of Guy Maddin's latest. I love shorts and pounce on every chance to see the on the big screen that I can get.

Of course, by the time you read this, some of these won't be viewable again (Shorts Program One is playing Saturday Midnight at the Coolidge), so I've included links where I could find them.

Shorts Program One: Feast of the Bizarre and Insane

Seen 22 March 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Underground Film Festival)

"Christopher Ford Sees a Film" (video) - * * * * - At four minutes, this is a one-joke short. But it's a great joke. It's something we've all wanted to do after a terrible movie, with writer/actor Ford and director Jake Schreier timing everything perfectly, making good use of their cobbled-together props. No dialogue, but ends with a great gesture.

"Don't Fuck With Love" (video) - * * * ¾ - Very funny music video for a song by the Sad Little Stars, done up as an animated pop-up book. Funny cartoon stuff.

"The Fine Art of Poisoning" (video) - * * - An interesting-looking animated short by Bill Domonkos and Jill Tracy. Kind of pretty, but didn't make a great impression on me.

"Over Time" (video) - * * * - A thoroughly creepy CGI movie with a swarm of Kermit-like puppets playing around and mourning their creator in a way. I liked it, although there's something very odd about using CGI to animate pupets, beyond the pupil-less eyes the puppets have.

"Kinetoscope" (16mm) - * * * ½ - Fourth wall obliteration as a projectionist has a gruesome accident and winds up in the middle of the horror movie he's projecting. Lots of great fake-outs.

"Duck Children" (35mm) - * * ½ - Odd and off-putting, as a group of children in duck costumes perform in a school play, with one unable to keep in sync with the others. She notices there's something amiss, and then when a hunter with an eye dangling by a slinky shows up... Weird, and I'm not a big fan of sticking children in something like this.

"A Kind of Screaming" (35mm) - * * - Based on the works of Bukowski, a poet fights writer's block. Artsy, in that "I'm an artist and thus special" way.

"Los ABCs: Que vivan los muertos!" (35mm) - * * ¼ - Flash-animated looking thing as an undead mariachi band recites the alphabet, with each letter representing someone who died horribly. Some amuse, but somewhere around "N", I sort of had the point.

"Flesh" (35mm) - * ½ - I'm not going to be one of the guys who says 9/11 is some way off-limits, but I don't really get where the director's going with this, where planes crash into New York skyscrapers overlaid with naked women. Maybe something about how the city is perceived in to fundamentalist Muslims, but that makes it uncomfortably catchy.

"My Dad Is 100 Years Old" (35mm) - * * * ½ - The newest offering from eccentric Winnipeg director Guy Maddin is written by his Saddest Music In The World star Isabella Rossellini, who also stars as herself, David O. Selznick, Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Chaplin, and Ingrid Bergman as she reminisces about her father Roberto Rossellini. It contains all the usual Maddin flourishes, and the affection Ms. Rossellini has for her father comes through loud and clear. Of course, the way the film talks about prizing reality means I probably won't be interested in his films any time soon.

The French Guy

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Underground Film Festival)

During the Q&A after the movie, filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming said she couldn't watch "icky" films. Which is fine, but it means that she was making The French Guy for reasons other than it being the sort of movie she would like to see. Which leads me to wonder - if someone doesn't particularly like this sort of black comedy as a genre, how are they to know when they've made a really good one?

One way, I suspect, is to ask yourself whether these characters would be entertaining if they were in a less repellent situation. If they're not, then you're probablly confusing shock value with genuine humor, and while there's nothing at all wrong with delivering a jolt, there's a good chance that it won't be as effective because we don't have the personal investment in these characters that would make it really shocking and horrific. That's a big issue for this film; it strings a series of weird and grotesque events together, but doesn't Fleming have the feel for the genre needed to really drive them home.

Read the rest at HBS.

Bill's Dirty Shorts

Seen 23 March 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Boston Underground Film Festival) (projected video)

It's tough to say much about these, since the typical Plympton short is composed of many smaller shorts. He tells a quick joke, executed perfectly with nifty hand-drawn art style.

Sadly, Plympton wasn't able to actually host as had been billed; his 89-year-old father is fighting cancer on the other side of the country. We wish them the best.

"Sex & Violence" - * * * ¾ - A collection of mini-shorts, mostly laugh-out-loud funny. "People Confused About Priorities" is my favorite recurring segment.

"The Exciting Life of a Tree" - * * * * - A tree defends itself against animals, loggers, and the like. Funny stuff, especially the tree which can't change its colors on cue and needs encouragement.

"More Sex and Violence" - * * * - A follow-up which isn't quite as good as the first, but still has several gut-splittingly funny bits.

"Can't Drag Race With Jesus" - * * * - A revival sings about how you can't beat Jesus at drag racin' or rock 'n roll. How Jesus wins is delightfully snort-worthy.

"Eat" - * * * ¼ - Some very beautiful bits, especially the lonely man imagining his date, but it ends on just nasty gross-out stuff.

"Parking" - * * * ¼ - A parking lot attendant fights a blade of grass. Ends on a happier note than most of his cartoons.

Brokeback Mountain

So... Is it odd to watch Brokeback Mountain and come away most impressed with some of the women in it? Between this and The Baxter (which I didn't even particularly like), I'm growing quite fond of Michelle Williams. Backing off trying to be a traditional skinny blonde knockout is really working for her. Similarly, I was hugely pleased to see Kate Mara at the end; she made a great impression on me on Jack & Bobby. Sure, I'm partial to the freckly redheads anyway, but I'm still pretty sure she's something special.

This is one I put off seeing for a while - once I saw the Oscar nominations and realized I'd be spending a chunk of March working on moving, I realized that the usual Oscar catch-up wasn't going to happen this year. I also got stuck in the rut where I'd look at the schedules and it would be at an awkward time or I just really didn't feel like that kind of movie right then. I wound up with a MovieWatcher reward ticket that needed to be used that night and not wanting to get further from home than Harvard Square (there was, after all, the World Baseball Classic and 24 to see afterward) Hopefully passing on this to see Ultraviolet taught me a valuable lesson about how a good movie, even if it's not the particular genre or tone you're looking to see, is a better use of time and money than, well, crap.

One note to the folks at the Harvard Square theater: Change your trailers. There was a trailer for Cassanova on the front of this which, I think, has been, gone, and had its DVD release date announced. I think that there was one for Thank You For Smoking as well, and I think that came out this weekend (or is that just for New York/LA)?

Brokeback Mountain

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 20 March 2006 at the AMC Harvard Square #1 (First-run)

Brokeback Mountain is a remarkable film, and I expect it will remain one even after its notoriety passes. There will come a time, twenty years or so from now, when love stories involving two men will appear in theaters unremarked upon, and when that time comes, I think this film will still be remembered as more than one of the first movies to focus on two men in love to solidly enter the mainstream consciousness; it will be remembered as a being noteworthy even outside the cultural context of 2005 America.

It focuses, as most probably know by now, on two cowboys who find themselves attracted to each other while herding sheep on an isolated mountain in 1963 Wyoming. Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) is an orphan and man of few words and little formal education; he dropped out of high school after a year to start working. He's due to get married in the fall. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) is more gregarious, preferring rodeos to ranching. Over the course of the summer, mostly isolated from the world except for weekly grocery deliveries and an encounter with another flock, they grow close, and their relationship makes the jump from camaraderie to the physical when drink and weather prompts them to share the tent.

The job ends. Time passes. Ennis marries Alma (Michelle Williams), and they have two daughters. Jack eventually meets Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway), marries her, going to work for her father and fathering a son of his own. He's still clearly looking at other guys, but Ennis doesn't seem to be. One could almost think Ennis had just been lonely on the mountaintop until Jack passes through town and suddenly Ennis is all over Jack before having time to think it might be a good idea to get where Alma can't accidentally see them. She does, but keeps quiet; it poisons their marriage, especially once Ennis and Jack get in the habit of meeting each other for "fishing trips" every few months.

That moment Ennis and Jack embrace after a four year absence comes, what, a half hour into the movie but it's the most important scene. The recklessness of it is passionate and alarming; at that moment it stops being this abstract gay-cowboy movie and about these two. It suddenly becomes heartfelt and real, but this is also when we see that their lives have changed since the summer they spent herding sheep. Before, their love was dangerous because it meant being ostracized or threatened; now, they've also got the quite conventional problem of potentially hurting the people who love them.

One thing that director Ang Lee and screenwriters Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana (working from an Annie Proulx short story) do is show time passing. The film opens with a title card indicating it's April 1963, but the jumps forward (eventually arriving in 1983) tend to be introduced by a date being mentioned on a radio or television in the background. One thing that's thankfully avoided is the use of noticeable old-age makeup; Ledger and Gyllenhaal look a little older than nineteen at the start and don't quite seem to be pushing forty at the end, but the actors show the burden of experience. Even as they stay much the same, the background changes - it's initially kind of jarring to see Linda Cardellini, done up in seventies hair and fashions, flirting with Ledger's character after having mostly seen him in very Norman Rockwell-esque environs. At least four young actresses play Ennis's daughter Alma Jr., but casting has matched them well enough to make her a singular character. I also like how Ennis's second daughter, Jenny, sort of disappears midway through the movie, suggesting but not explicitly stating that the girls found out why their parents' marriage failed and that Alma Jr. is more forgiving than Jenny.

Ledger and Gyllenhaal have to carry the first half-hour or so of the movie by themselves, and it's almost surprising how well they're up to the task. Jake Gyllenhaal has the flashier part as Jack, and it's trickier that it looks - he gets to shout and run his mouth and kind of give off a vibe, but he's not ever allowed to be flamboyant in a way that would shout "gay" out of this context. Ledger, on the other hand, is given a much deeper closet. He speaks in at-times incomprehensible mumble that indicates both a rugged man-of-few-words masculinity and guardedness. There's something in his past that keeps him from pushing his luck like Jack - compare a Thanksgiving dinner where Jack explodes at his father-in-law with the guilt and shame Ennis seems to feel around his daughters.

Though Ledger and Gyllenhaal are the stars, the rest of the cast is rock-solid. In fact, it's Michelle Williams as Alma who actually makes your heart break. She's the one who gets dumped on with very little to do about it, and her reactions are a perfectly-performed mix of sadness, anger, and incomprehension. She's come a long way in the past few years, from being "the other girl on Dawson's Creek", to seeming out of place in The Station Agent, to being among the best parts of this and The Baxter. Anne Hathaway doesn't get quite so meaty a role - this is more Ennis's story than Jack's, anyway, we mostly see her grow distant, retreating into a cold beauty. She's initially just as exuberant as Gyllenhaal, so we notice this and it almost makes us dislike her: She's the wronged party, but we'd rather see her Lureen act on it like Alma does.

A lot of talent shows up for just a few scenes. Randy Quaid is in his close-cropped hardass mode here, as the domineering owner of the livestock Ennis and Jack tend. Linda Cardellini shows up in the 1970s as a waitress who takes an interest in the lonely Ennis, with David Harbour taking an interest in Jack (Anna Faris is his spazz of a wife, a characterization she's really nailed by now). Kate Mara is the last actress to play Alma Jr., and while she doesn't really resemble the younger girls who had played the role, she gets a great scene with Ledger (as does the prior actress, Cheyenne Hill).

Brokeback Mountain is longer than typical, especially for a story that does not have a particularly large cast of characters, but there aren't many minutes that don't work, and work extremely well. The half-hour we spend just getting to know Jack and Ennis at the beginning is important; it not only lets us get to know them, but it establishes their blue-collar credentials and prevents any gay stereotypes from entering our heads. The cinematography is exceptionally beautiful on its own, but it also emphasizes how Jack and Ennis can only be their true, natural selves when they get away from settled places, and other people. Ennis gets more palpably tense the more he's constrained; the trailer park he inhabits toward the end feels like a prison. Lee hasn't really made a Western here, despite the film occasionally being described as one, but he knows how to use the American (or Canadian, as the case may be) West to communicate freedom and both the joy and danger of being outside the reach of law and standards.

That's why Brokeback Mountain is an exceptional movie, and possibly a great one. It's made by people who not only have something to say, but wit hthe craftsmanship to say it in a way that doesn't rely on rattling the audience. That's why this film will be remembered well after the jokes of the past six months are forgotten.

(Formerly at EFC) Next up: Night One of the Boston Underground Film Festival, which, thanks to the fun of writing without an internet connection, will be in the books by the time I post this.

(But I'll back date this to 7:05 pm, when I finished writing it offline. Because I'd be sneaky if I didn't insist on typing things like the preceeding paragraph.)

Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor)

Used one of my free tickets to see this Saturday night. The integration of AMC and Loews is so far showing a few benefits, in that all the TV ads seem to be moved back before the advertised start time, and now the MovieWatcher card is usable in a whole lot more places so I can get rewards faster, but the folks at Loews theaters still don't seem to know how to react when confronted with MovieWatcher reward tickets. The guy at the ticket counter had to call a manager.

Not that this is unique; I remember people scurrying to figure out what was up with the late, lamented "Weekday Escape" tickets when presented with them.

Anyway, not a great movie, but it piqued my interest for Day Watch and Dusk Watch. Kind of the same reaction I had to Chronicles of Riddick - I can really take that movie or leave it, but it ended at a point that made me earnestly want to see where Twohy was going. I hear the director of Night Watch is attached to The Red Star, and I like hearing that. An Russian director spending a lot of American money on that property is sort of ideal. And it was a nice way to relax after a frustrating day of looking for shelves and stools for the new house and not finding anything that fit my needs and budget.

Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 March 2006 at the AMC Boston Common #3 (First-run)

I'm not sure what to think about movies like Night Watch. I don't really find them satisfying while sitting in the theater, but when the film reaches its end, I really want to see what's going to happen next. I suppose that makes the film a successful "part one", if we assume that the commercial goal of a first installment is to make part two an even bigger hit.

Night Watch spends a fair amount of time setting up the story's world. It posits that people with supernatural powers, the "Others", exist in secret within the more mundane world. Hundreds of years ago, they prepared to meet in battle, but seeing that the armies were evenly matched, Geser (Vladimir Menshov), the leader of the Light faction, and his Dark counterpart Zavulon (Viktor Verzhbitsky) struck a truce, Night and Day Watches to police the opposing factions. Flash forward to 1992, where we meet Anton Gorodetsky (Konstantin Khabensky), whose attempt to hire the services of a sorceress reveals him as an Other. He chooses Light and joins the Night Watch. Twelve years later, while chasing a pair of vampires stalking a young boy (Dmitri Martynov), he stumbles upon Svetlana (Mariya Poroshina), a young woman struck with a curse rapidly growing toward the apocalyptic. To make matters worse, the Day Watch becomes involved when he kills one of the vampires, despite his claims of self-defense.

Read the rest at HBS.

Game 6

Ouch. $9.75 for a movie? I so seldom pay full price that it's a surprise when I do - during the week, I tend to go to the Brattle, Coolidge, or HFA, or maybe a second-run place, saving first-run features for weekend matinees. This one was only playing a week at one theater, though, and I missed it over the weekend. So, ouch. The really annoying thing is I have two AMC passes that have to be used by Monday, but they're not good for "special engagments" (basically, a film's first ten days), so pay up.

I suppose some at AMC might consider that cosmic justice for my exploiting a glitch in the MovieWatcher system to get two passes instead of one, though.

Anyway, not a great movie. There were only about a dozen people there, and one guy just had to applaud at every mention of the Red Sox. Hey, I'm a fan too, and I've even advocated the audience singing along with "Sweet Caroline" (bum bum bum) during Fever Pitch, but you're being like that guy at the Brattle who doesn't just applaud names in the credits, but leans forward and fully extends his arms to make sure we all see him applauding. I bet when he goes to the ballpark, he repeatedly tries to start the wave when no-one else is interested.

Game 6

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2006 at the AMC Boston Common #10 (First-run)

I must admire writer Don DeLillo's restraint. He wrote a movie that spends a great deal of time on both the Boston Red Sox and the New York theater, and never once mentions Henry Frazee. It's surprising, not just because he seems to buy into a whole lot of other pre-2004 rubbish about Red Sox fans, but because it would be a way to link the horrific event of the title to the theater-related events that actually comprise the bulk of the story.

Nicky Rogan (Michael Keaton) is many things: He's a playwright, a husband and father in denial over the collapse of his marriage, a former cabbie, and a Red Sox fan. His newest and most personal play is set to open despite obstacles like a star (Harris Yulin) whose memory is failing thanks to a brain parasite he picked up shooting a movie in Borneo. The movie covers the day leading up to opening night, as Nicky travels across town in a series of cabs, aiming to get a haircut before the show begins, but being sent in different directions by seeing his daughter Laurel (Ari Graynor) in the next taxi, a quick morning tryst with one of his play's backers (Bebe Neuwirth), meeting up with fellow dramatist Elliot Litvak (Griffin Dunne), an underground steam pipe rupturing and spewing forth a cloud of toxic asbestos, and trying to convince his father (Tom Aldrege) to either come to the play or blow it off and watch the game with him. Hovering over all of this is Steven Schwimmer (Robert Downey Jr.), the city's newest theater critic with a reputation for being almost as brutal (Litvak unconsciously recites a scathing review Schwimmer gave him) as he is paranoid and eccentric - he lives off the grid for fear of being attacked by the targets of his criticism, maintains the image of a Tibetan monk, and not only goes to the theater in disguise, but goes armed.

One of the chief mistakes I think DeLillo and director Michael Hoffman make is overselling the Red Sox's tortured history leading up to the night of October 25, 1986. Though I was only thirteen at the time and just really becoming a baseball fan, I don't remember the dread Rogan speaks of; that would come later, as a result of the improbable events of that awful tenth inning (in 1986, no-one had heard of the so-called curse of the bambino). But, to be fair, it was my first baseball heartbreak; Rogan has Pesky not making the relay and Bucky Dent in his consciousness. And let's not forget, I'm a New Englander, and thus a Red Sox fan by default; a New Yorker who followed the Red Sox before 2004 is probably, to a certain extent, drawn to the tragic narrative. Even if it's accurate, though, it's still some pretty heavy-handed foreshadowing to give Keaton lines about how he's certain things will go wrong in the game. We also don't know him well enough, in those early segments, to get how his bland pronouncements of impending doom reflect his character.

Read the rest at HBS.

Give Thanks for Bogart

Four months behind. That's just unconscionable. I've got excuses - this was the start of the Brattle Movie-Watch-a-Thon, where I piled up far more movies watched than reviewed in depth, then the SF marathon, then I was moving... Coming up is the Boston Underground Film Festival, and the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Seeing and writing about a lot of movies is hard work.

Anyway, back in November, the Brattle had a Bogart series. The usually play Casablanca around Thanksgiving weekend - the logic probably being that a lot of people are out of town , so rather than miss part of a rep series, they may as well go with a standard that brings the locals in. But, since it's far from a secret that they were hurting for money last year, so they programmed a lot of stuff that would bring people out. Who's going to say no to Bogie at the Brattle? If you want to support the theater, it's a lot easier to do that for these films than, say, Jacques Doillon.

(And, hey, they're not out of the woods yet, despite a one-year reprieve; if you can find your way to give them some extra money via ticket sales, donations, becoming a member, it would be appreciated.)

It's a pleasure, though. When To Have and Have Not is the weakest film in a series, you're doing better than all right. Nobody's perfect, and Bogart made some clunkers over the course of his career - think The Barefoot Contessa - but he was also involved in a really disproporitonate number of outright great movies.

That's the benefit of the studio system - you have Bogart working at Warner Brothers at the same time as John Huston, Howard Hawks, Lauren Bacall, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, etc., so once there's a combination that works, they can put them together again in fairly short order. Today, with most talent free agents, everyone probably makes closer to what they merit in terms of what they bring in, but trying to capture lightning in a bottle a second time can take years.

Casablanca

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 26 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Give Thanks for Bogart)

There is not a whole lot to say about Casablanca that is new. I feel vaguely silly writing anything at all, because anyone likely to read this probably already knows that this film is an all-time classic. Here in Boston/Cambridge, the Brattle Theater runs it at least twice a year, often preceded for a month by a trailer that regulars have memorized ("but they're all trapped!"). People attending a "Great Romances" double feature February 13th were advised to arrive by four the next day if they wanted to get tickets to the annual Valentine's Day showings. And despite Theo's constructing the Red Sox team that finally won the World Series, that his grandfather Philip and great-uncle Julius wrote this classic screenplay may be the Epstein family's greatest claim to fame. This is a beloved, famous movie, and rightly so. Do people really need to be convinced to see this?

Well, sure, maybe. People aren't born having seen it, and even if they have absorbed the plot and some of the greatest lines through osmosis, there's still plenty of delights to be found from actually watching the movie. There's a great cast on hand, so they can get introduced to some of the finest stars and supporting characters of classic Hollywood all at once. They can assure themselves that Humphrey Bogart does not, in fact, use the line "play it again, Sam". And they can witness just how a fantastic cast and crew can make a flawed story into a classic, and what a delight it is when that happens.

Because, let's face it, Casablanca's plot creaks a little. The central plot device - "letters of transit" that will let anyone, even Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), travel freely during a time of war - doesn't really hold up to a second of examination. But that's okay. Those letters are just an excuse to throw Laszlo, his beautiful wife Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and her one-time lover Rick Blaine (Bogart) together. Rick runs a bar in Nazi-occupied French Morocco, and comes into possession of the letters after the untimely death of small-time gangster Ugarte (Peter Lorre). The Laszlos have recently arrived in Casablanca, but SS Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) is watching Rick's like a hawk. Besides, Rick's got a policy of sticking his neck out for no-one, and to help Laszlo escape would mean saying farewell to the love of his life once again.

Look at the events logically, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But we love watching Rick struggle against his better nature, and five minutes don't go by without someone popping out a great line. The cast is full to bursting with great supporting characters; in addition to those already mentioned, there's Claude Rains's gleefully corrupt Captain Renault, and Sydney Greenstreet as a mobster who probably wields as much power in Casablanca as either the French or the Germans. Dooley Wilson is mostly there to sing and play the piano, but he carries himself in a way that makes him feel much essential than many black characters of the time period. The movie is pure, classic melodrama, but also funny and built on winning chemistry between its leads.

It's a love triangle that works, because neither leg seems less than genuine, and the film portrays love as a powerful force that can wreak havoc on these people's lives and, because of their actions, the world around them. Bogart's Rick is the apparent epitome of cool, growling and appearing unfazed by the evil around him. It's a front, of course - not sticking one's neck out is an attitude born of fear, not strength, and it's a front that crumbles upon Ilsa's return. Henreid's Laszlo, on the other hand, does make a habit of sticking his neck out, but that sort of activity takes a toll on a man, and he needs the support Ilsa give him. Meanwhile, we see Ilsa genuinely torn between her two lovers, devoted to her husband but ever mindful of the raw passion she and Rick shared. English isn't her first language and she doesn't seem as assured delivering her lines as the others are, so the movie at times has to rely on her looks to explain why she is so central in these two men's lives. Being one of the most beautiful women ever captured on film is one hell of a crutch, though.

And in the end, that this must be relied on doesn't matter a whit. The cast is thoroughly charming, the love story is grand and uncompromising without ever being saccharine. Michael Curitz knows his stuff, working in both snappy patter and gunplay without ever losing the focus on the central romance and drama.

Of course, you should already know this. If you like movies, you should probably have this half memorized, and not just because you're expected to. It's a great movie, one that stays great even if it couldn't be made the same way today.

(Formerly at EFC)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 26 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Give Thanks for Bogart)

Nasty thing, greed. It's in every one of us, lying dormant while we have nothing, waiting for us to get a taste of prosperity before flaming up and convincing us that it's not enough. That's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in a nutshell, and few if any have played that theme as well as director John Huston and his cast.

As the film starts, we see Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) homeless in Tampico, Mexico, begging money off American tourists. After hitting the same American up for money three or four times, he's directed to Pat McCormick (Barton MacLane), who's offering work. There he meets Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), and after they convince McCormick to actually pay them rather than running off, they meet an old-timer named Howard (Walter Huston), who convinces them to re-invest their earnings in a gold-mining venture. It's hard, at first, but that difficulty is nothing compared to what happens when the mine pans out, and each is worrying about the others coming after his hoard.

Few of Humphrey Bogart's most memorable roles are steadfast heroes, and his characters don't get much scuzzier than Fred Dobbs. We get hints of what's to come when we first meet him, as we see him push his luck panhandling, but we can chalk that up to desperation to simply survive. Later on we we see his a hard worker when he gets the chance, but we don't see Bogart's best work until Dobbs has his gold and will be rich no matter what. Then we see him crazed with gold fever, twitching, looking at his friend like he expects to be killed at any moment. It's the type of manic performance that can make a lesser actor look like, well, a lesser actor, but Bogart's tense body language and facial expressions that can jump from calm to crazed to conniving sell it.

And Bogart isn't even necessarily the performance people remember from this movie; that honor likely goes to director John Huston's father Walter. He makes Howard a lovable old coot whose acquisition of wisdom with age just means he can see his future screw-ups coming. He knows that he'll blow his gold on women and booze and probably end up right where he started, and he sees his partners' paranoia as an inevitability. He talks like a rube and dances funny jigs, but there's never any doubt that he knows the score. Indeed, the audience will spend a lot of time wondering if he's playing his younger partners against each other. Mostly, he makes relating hard-won knowledge sound like a reminder of something any fool should know, and gains the audience's respect without ever distancing himself from them.

The rest of the cast is pretty good, too, although it's tough to outshine Bogart and Huston Sr. on-screen. Tim Holt doesn't get to go enthusiastically insane like Bogart as the other partner; he's got the unenviable task of being the most apparently level-headed one in the group, a couple steps behind Dobbs in terms of the gold fever. Bruce Bennet appears midway through the film as James Cody, a young guy who stumbles upon the camp, and thus increases the tension between the secretive miners. And, of course, there's Alfonso Bedoya, whose character leads a crew of banditos who menace Dobbs and company in the last act. He essays his part broadly but with genuine menace. His most famous line ("Badges? We ain't got no badges...") has become a target of many bad puns over the years, but Bedoya sells it with venom.

John Huston writes and directs, working from a novel by reclusive expatriate B. Traven (rumored to have been on-set as a technical advisor under a pseudonym). The movie divides into clear chapters - Dobbs begging, the building job, mining, bandits, etc. - connected by the characters' growing distrust. Huston is able to choose shots that emphasize the world closing in around the party even while shooting outdoors, on location in Mexico; it's either night, or there's a mountain rising sharply to cut off part of the sky, or the like. He's got no trouble making things progressively more grim, or pushing Dobbs further and further from being redeemable.

Which is as it should be. Stories of human greed seldom have happy endings, and the bitter, violent conclusion of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is just what it should be.

(Formerly at EFC

To Have and Have Not

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Give Thanks for Bogart)

So, it's World War II. Humphrey Bogart is playing an expatriate American running a small business in an occupied French colony, more or less minding his own business until an important resistance figure and his wife show up and turn his world upside down. This sounds awful familiar, but the action takes place not in Morocco, but Martinique.

Truthfully, To Have and Have Not really only resembles Casablanca in broad outline. Bogart's Harry Morgan operates a small fishing boat, and business isn't nearly so good as it is at Rick's Café. His first mate Eddie (Walter Brennan) drinks most of the profits, and his most recent customer (Walter Sande) refuses to pay up. The beautiful Marie Browning (Lauren Bacall) arrives on the island just as the war starts to come in earnest - a trip to secretly transport de Gaule lieutenant Paul de Bursac (Walter Szurovy) and his wife Hellene (Dolores Moran) ends with de Bursac wounded and the authorities hot on their trail.

Though based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway and featuring a screenplay by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, the film is famous for not being constrained by its pedigree. The events of the film are only alluded to in the novel, the cast improvised many of their lines, and the focus of the story changed with the discovery that Bogart had much more chemistry with future wife Bacall than with Ms. Moran. By the time it was all said and done, the film Howard Hawks made bears scant resemblance to Hemingway's novel.

But, it works quite well as a movie, thanks in large part to how Hawks lets his costars' chemistry dictate the movie he makes. So you get the sort of love at first sight between Harry and Marie that reveals itself via sarcasm and teasing; you also get a sense of long-held camaraderie between Harry and Eddie. At times, Harry is in the position of a child dealing with a parent who has lost his faculties, holding on to what initially made him admire his old mentor, even if all anyone else can see is a sad drunk.

Indeed, even though we're trained to look at the romance as the central relationship in a movie, it's Harry's caretaking of Eddie that serves as the film's main metaphor. After all, it's easy to fall in love with a girl as attractive as young Lauren Bacall, especially when she takes the lead in flirting and just refuses to ignore requests that she go away for her own safety. Eddie's aware that he's a burden, though, and if Harry were to tell him to go away and not come back until he'd dried up, he'd probably understand and slink away. It's sticking by the Eddies of the world, even when they do nothing but cause trouble, that define a man's character, and suggest that he'll do the right thing by the fugitive de Bursacs, even when it would be simpler to turn them in.

Still, Walter Brennan's Eddie grows on us fairly quickly; he's a genial drunk with a core of sadness. This sort of performance looks somewhat outdated now, but it gets the core of the character across without us having to deal with a great deal of exposition about how Eddie got to this point. Bogart, meanwhile, plays Morgan as a curmudgeon - short-tempered with everyone but Eddie but practical about his reliability once he's left the room. Bogart has a very recognizable way of delivering his lines which suits Morgan well: Dry as a bone most of the time, until something gets the character angry, at which point his speed picks up and the words gain an edge that hits the audience like a physical blow. Bacall, meanwhile, is unflappable; the actress was only about nineteen years old when this film shot, but she projects much more confidence. Her character (nicknamed "Slim", which would stick with Bacall afterward) can trade wit with Morgan without being intimidated, and Bacall makes herself a movie star through sheer force of personality.

That an off-screen romance developed isn't surprising - while this sort of on-screen passion can be simulated between two actors, what would make these two movie stars is the larger than life charisma that they brought to the screen in their various roles, and that probably doesn't come from nowhere. Saying it shows on the screen is probably just interpreting data to fit a known conclusion, but knowing that this film is where one of Hollywood's biggest romances started certainly adds interest.

Of course, even without that factor, To Have and Have Not is still a highly entertaining movie, well worth checking out. The talent involved, both in front of the cameras and at the typewriter, just grabs one's attention.

(Formerly at EFC)

The Big Sleep

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Give Thanks for Bogart)

The Big Sleep isn't confusing; it's rich. Its plot is too convoluted for many to fully grasp in one viewing, but where that could be seen as a negative for many films, it's a delight for this one. Depending on the type of person you are, it either gives you an excuse to re-watch it (and experience all the bon mots and pretty ladies again), or it will allow the film's stature to build when you watch it again for all the great lines.

Private detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is hired by dying General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to investigate the blackmail of his daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers). Before he can leave the Sternwood mansion, though, older sister Vivian Sternwood Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) is looking to take control of the situation. Good luck with that; every rock Marlowe turns over reveals some new crime, be it blackmail, drugs, gambling, or murder. And when the person initially blackmailing the Sternwoods is found dead, that doesn't mean their problems are over - it just means there's more (and more dangerous) people involved than had originally been thought.

The plot is kind of incidental, though. It throws Bogart and Bacall together, and occasionally gets someone trying to kill them. Either Marlowe has dealt with cases like this before or he's got a copy of the script, because he's got a knack for knowing just what each turnaround means despite the clues not being nearly so transparent to the audience; it's a good thing for us that he's got Vivian tagging along much of the time for him to explain it to. The fun comes from watching Bogie be James Bond before Bond was much more than a twinkle in Ian Fleming's eye; he saunters through a dangerous case with calm self-assurance, breaking out firearms when necessary, stumbling across beautiful women who are instantly attracted to him (including Dorothy Malone and Joy Barlow as a bookstore proprietress and a cab driver, respectively) and thugs who want to kill him at roughly the same rate.

These encounters are all great fun because Marlowe's wit is even quicker than his draw, and he's got a comeback for everyone, whether it be crook, client, or beautiful young widow (or is it divorcée, not that it matters?). Bacall's Vivian has the best responses, which isn't really surprising; director Howard Hawks and his writers (William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman) rewrote and reshot scenes after seeing how the audience responded to them in To Have and Have Not, resulting in the film's release being delayed two years (try to imagine how poisonous the internet buzz would be if that happened sixty years later). Hawks, Faulkner, and Furthman had also worked on that film, so they had first-hand experience with making this work. The dialogue is easily the best part of the script, which famously had Hawks and Bogart calling original novelist Raymond Chandler to ask whether a character was murdered or committed suicide.

When you've got a pair of leads as well-suited to each other as Bogart and Bacall, you can let some of the plot slide so long as their constantly being fed chances to work off each other. Here, they almost seem to be in a competition to see who can deliver their great lines more casually, trying to convince us that yes, they are this clever in every conversation. They're well-matched, both affecting worldly amorality while displaying obvious affection for and loyalty to the general. Martha Vickers has a very nice turn as Carmen, all bratty and spoiled and cold sexuality. It's a shame we don't see her and Bacall playing off each other more than they do; that could have been a very fun dynamic.

Hawks and his writers keep the movie barreling along at a rapid pace; plot twists come nearly as quickly as great lines, so much so that there's scarcely a moment to breathe even with the occasional stops to explain what's going on to the audience. If anything, the movie is too punchy. It's hard to build up suspense when the plot twists often come straight out of left field; shaking things up, after all, is only noticeable when the ground had been steady at some point. The way Marlowe and Vivian fall for each other is kind of perfunctory, but that's okay; this isn't the sort of movie where we really need to believe that they stick together until the day they die. Just finding someone they like and can relate to in the middle of a world full of scheming and murder is enough.

The mystery story is there, and makes a certain amount of sense after a few viewings. But figuring out the whos, whens and whys is only a quarter of the fun of this movie. The real delight is the fun dialogue, delivered like only Bogie & Bacall could.

(Formerly at EFC)

Key Largo

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Give Thanks for Bogart)

Key Largo was one of four movies Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall did together, and as such it's tempting to make them the central focus of the review. But I've already written a couple bits about them recently, so let's talk about Edward G. Robinson.

If you compare stars of yesteryear to those of today, Edward G. Robinson might be said to be his era's Christopher Walken. He was ubiquitous, showing up in a lot of supporting roles. He had an instantly recognizable voice, look, and persona that he carried between films, so that when he showed up, it didn't take more than a few moments to know what this guy was about. He played a lot of bad guys, and bounced freely between A and B movies. He was a famous enough name to be prominently displayed on the poster, but his presence alone probably didn't put a lot of butts in seats. People were glad to see him more than they went looking for him.

People are still glad to see him. In Key Largo, he plays Johnny Rocco, a big time New York gangster who, after a few years exiled in Cuba, is returning to the States in a big way with a bunch of counterfeit money. He's made special arrangements to use a hotel on the titular island during the off-season, but his plan doesn't take into account two factors: A massive hurricane about to hammer the Florida Keys, a police manhunt for two Native American escaped convicts, and Frank McCloud (Bogart), a WWII vet coming to meet the family of his killed-in-action war buddy: Wheelchair-bound father James Temple (Lionel Barrymore) owns the hotel, and widow Nora (Bacall) lives and works with him. He's got his favorite moll and a quartet of enforcers with him, and that should be enough to hold tight until the deal is done, but maybe it won't...

Robinson has scenery to chew here, and he launches into his role with gusto. Johnny Rocco's been the top dog for too long to even consider failure, even though his situation is obviously reduced - his goons are idlers, and lover Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor) is getting a bit past her prime. Robinson has a different attack when nature's fury throws the situation out of his control, still blustering but with enough nervousness to clearly expose him as a coward. He and director John Huston use Robinson's his girth to indicate power and powerlessness in turns, and his delivery is a combined sneer and growl.

Of course, this isn't really Robinson's movie, even if his is the most outsize performance. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall are, after all, both around. Compared to some of their other collaborations, there's less of a spark here. She is, after all, playing the widow of his comrade-at-arms, and the sort of immediate, can-you-top-this flirting of To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep would be inappropriate. Bogart carries survivor's guilt in his initial interactions, despite how quickly the Temples warm to his character. The war has drained this man. Bacall and Barrymore play less conflicted roles; Bacall's Nora is tense but has faith in Frank; it's nice to see that their chemistry holds even when it's not primarily sexual or romantic. Barrymore's role can be summed up with "if I wasn't stuck in this chair..." He's impotently righteous, not only expressing his disdain for the gangsters at every moment, but wanting to shelter the local Indians during the storm (he's described as having been a friend to them when many others aren't) and acting as a father figure to the forlorn Bogart. Barrymore sells us on Temple's rectitude, making us believe in his strength despite his physical weakness.

Director John Huston adapts a play by Maxwell Anderson, and even though the majority does take place on the hotel's ground floor to give some feeling of being claustrophobic and trapped, but it's a large enough set to keep things from looking too monotonous. He also gets outside and onto the water for the action climax, and some nice-looking exteriors before the hurricane hits. It's probably easier to show some destruction if the set doesn't have to be rebuilt every night, too.

Key Largo is perhaps not as much fun as some of the other movies to pair Bogart & Bacall, but that's okay with Robinson walking off with every scene he's got. And, hey, who doesn't love Edward G. Robinson?

(Formerly at EFC)

The Maltese Falcon

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 December 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Give Thanks for Bogart)

The Maltese Falcon straddles the line between pulp fiction and film noir like few other films. The black statue of the title is a fantastical target for the film's motley crew of thieves and scoundrels, and ancient treasure suggesting far-off places and high adventure. It's not in some mysterious European vault, though; it's in Los Angeles, and none of the people involved in the caper are particularly high-minded.

Certainly not Miles Archer, a private detective who is putty in the hands of a woman (Mary Astor) who claims to be seeking her missing sister. The next morning, though, Archer's dead, and even as his business partner Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is unceremoniously having the office door re-stenciled, he aims to find out why. The trail leads to a pair of hoods (Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr.) and a collector of rare antiquities (Sydney Greenstreet), all looking for a black statuette originally belonging to the Knights Templar.

Bogart is at his best when doing the right thing doesn't necessarily come easy to him, and Spade is far from a saint. He doesn't waste any time mourning over his dead partner, nor does he flinch at guns in his face. Bogart plays Spade drier than usual, with a bit of a mean streak where Marlowe was playful. He describes avenging his partner as a vague obligation, and the way he seems equally at ease among cops and crooks makes the audience wonder whether he just doesn't care about the law and justice, whether he does care but has to wear a mask of amorality in order to survive in his environment, or whether the life of a private investigator has eroded his sense of right and wrong so that he's somewhere in between, heading in the wrong direction. At times, Bogart projects cynicism, at times common sense, and it's the audience's sad job to figure out where the line between the two lies.

He's mixed up with a fine set of scoundrels. Mary Astor, for instance, who is so convincing as the damsel in distress at the start of the story that she retains our good will even as the things her character initially hides from the detectives are revealed. She gets under our skin by not vamping it up as a femme fatale, even though she could have easily gone that way. Peter Lorre is weaselly perfection as Joe Cairo, the sort of henchman who constantly and ineffectually plots for his own gain. He and writer/director John Huston have a little fun playing up a sort of petty rivalry with Elisha Cook's Wilmer; there's something a little more than vaguely gay about both characters, which at the time the film was made would translate to "sneaky and disreputable". It's a different take, and gives a different feel compared to standard toothpick-chewing toughs.

Also making an impression as alpha villain Kasper Gutman is Sydney Greenstreet. It's Greenstreet's first screen role (though he was already in his sixties) and he makes us wish he'd started a little earlier. His Gutman is a classic antagonist in part because he contrasts so well with Bogart's Spade, being mountainously large, well-spoken, and happily committed to his goal. When they're on-screen together, though, you can tell they understand each other all too well, recognizing other intelligent, ruthless people on a quest whose cost is likely not ultimately worth the reward.

Also making his debut, as a director, is John Huston. Working from a Dashiell Hammett novel, he makes a prototypical film noir. We're denied anybody we can like without reservation, and most of the action takes place either indoors or after dark, keeping the natural world from brightening things. He's got a knack for throwing a fair amount of information at us without stepping up to overload - the story has as many players as The Big Sleep, but each step does feel like it's getting Spade closer to the answers, rather than just stringing events together.

When people have imagined a private detective over the past sixty years, Humphrey Bogart is the image most often conjured up. That's in part because he also played Philip Marlowe, but mostly on the strength of this film.

(Formerly at EFC)

Next up: Probably Game 6, as I try to balance reviewing stuff while it's fresh in my mind with working down the backlog.

Cahiers du Cinéma presents Jacques Doillon

This was the first series at the Brattle for their month-long "movie watch-a-thon" in November, creating in me a fervent wish that they had started with the samurai movies instead. This was pretty dry stuff, artistically interesting but also indicative of why American audiences assume French films are crashing bores.

It was also one of the least exciting examples of having the director present I can remember. To be fair, I missed what was probably the most interesting segment, where a film was rescheduled so that the guests could talk about the rioting going on in the Paris suburbs. Doillon only appeared to answer questions about the films he directed, and only some of those - he was apparently severely jet-lagged throughout his whole stay in Cambridge, and left before the end of the series. Personally, I think it might have been more interesting to have him talk about the films he chose. Filmmakers can answer questions directly about their own works, but the answers are seldom as exciting as expected, and often they don't want to go into much detail for fear of "spoiling the magic" or making definitive in the audience's mind what had deliberately left ambiguous (which is fair - was anyone really happy when Ridley Scott came out and said "Deckard is a replicant"?). But when talking about a favorite film, ah, that's different. Then they could engage in an actual discussion with the audience, because they are one of us, only with more knowledge about how films are made.

And, of course, the audience (when not speaking in French and leaving us guys with a very rusty high-school command of the language in the dark) was kind of annoyingly obsequious. Guys - when you feel compelled to start a question with "though some may claim the film is boring"... The film is boring.

And speaking of La Vengence d'une Femme...

La Vengence d'une Femme

* * (out of four)
Seen 11 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Cahiers du Cinema Presents Jacques Doillon)

Actors love shit like this. At least, a certain type does. They receive a long screenplay that's almost all dialogue, between just a few a characters, with obviously complicated backstory and a contentious relationship beneath the civility, and they're like, oh, wow, this is my chance to look good. And the type of actor who is attracted to this sort of project - they generally can pull it off. Here's my question, though: Is a film packed to the rafters with fine and subtle acting but little else have any more value than any other type of unbalanced film? Is this really better than a gimmick screenplay or two hours of empty eye candy?

I tend to think not. I think that in part as a reaction to people touting performance-heavy pieces which bored me over flashier movies that provided real entertainment, no matter how simple. I understand the feeling; of all the pieces that go into a movie, the acting is the most human. If how Isabelle Huppert says a word makes you cry, she does it without mechanical or electronic tools. It's an accomplishment that can't be denigrated or explained away. We want it to be most important, because we can see people doing it. But even when it is the most important thing, it can't be the only thing. And as fine a showcase as La Vengence d'une Femme is for its two leading actresses, it's not much more than that.

Read the rest at HBS.

A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Cahiers du Cinema Presents Jacques Doillon)

The title doesn't leave much doubt about the outcome of this film, though I suppose there's the possibility that it's metaphorical, that Lieutenant Fontaine frees himself of fear or guilt or some other emotional prison. Writer/director Robert Bresson may have been feeling philosophical when making this film, but not so much that he feels the need to obscure events. The title (at least, the English translation) is straightforward, and the movie is truth in advertising: The ticket says "A Man Escaped", and the events of the movie are never far from that.

The film begins with an escape attempt, as Fontaine (François Leterrier) attempts to jump from the car while the Germans transport him to prison. Once he arrives, he is just as single-minded in his purpose. He examines the grounds, taps messages to people in the next cell, and takes inventory of the raw materials in his cell. From there, it is time to put his plan in action - and that's when the Nazis saddle him with a new cellmate. He can't escape without adding the kid to the plan, but everything about him screams "informer".

Read the rest at HBS.

Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Cahiers du Cinema Presents Jacques Doillon)

There were no credits on the print of Day of Wrath that screened at the Brattle, and if that's the way it originally played in 1943, well, that makes a certain amount of sense. If you were a European filmmaker who had made a film about the evils of intolerance and persecution, it's probably a good idea to keep a low profile.

Day of Wrath opens with an old woman being hunted for witchcraft. She has, of course, been doing nothing more dangerous than dispensing some herbal remedies, but it's not a tolerant time and many people in this small village are willing to use the church as a way to lash at out those who have angered them. Presiding over what passes for a trial is the Reverend Absalon Pedersson (Thorkild Roose). Pedersson has a young second wife, Anne (Lisbeth Movin), who is attractive and good-natured; she aided the old woman, hiding her in Pedersson's basement. Pedersson also has a harpy of a mother, Merete (Sigrid Neiiendam), who doesn't much like Anne, and a good looking son, Martin (Preben Lerdoff Rye), just back from sea and meeting a stepmother several years his junior for the first time. I suppose there are movies where this sort of family dynamic does not lead to trouble, but Day of Wrath isn't one of them.

Read the rest at HBS.

Rendez-Vous

* * (out of four)
Seen 13 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Cahiers du Cinema Presents Jacques Doillon)

I can't say that there weren't warning signs. The description of this movie in the Brattle's program was not the thing I usually go for, and I didn't much like the previous three films I'd seen in the Caihers du Cinema series that weekend. But the Watch-a-Thon was on, so by seeing this, I would raise another ten bucks to keep the Brattle open. It's not so tough to sit through a bad movie for charity, right? And then Olivier Assayas's name appeared in the opening credits. I looked left, I looked right, and I realized enough other people were feeling charitable that I was blocked in.

Assayas is only the co-writer for André Téchiné, who also directs. They tell the story of Nina Larrieux (Juliette Binoche), a young actress who regularly bails out after her one scene in a play to have sex with her boyfriend/roommate. After leaving him, she meets Paulot (Wadeck Stanczak) at a rental agency while looking for a new place, but though he falls for her, she has eyes for his roommate, Quentin (Lambert Wilson). Quentin's a virile, unstable sort who used to be an actor and now works in live sex shows; after he leaves the scene, his former director (Jean-Louis Trintignant) appears to offer Nina a role.

Read the rest at HBS.

La Puritaine

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Cahiers du Cinema Presents Jacques Doillon)

That theater people are crazy and self-important is a sweeping generalization, but one that apparently contains enough truth that people can watch a film like La Puritaine and say "you know, as insane as that is, I bet it might actually happen. Friggin' weirdos." It's the sort of movie that makes sense only if you presume a certain amount of individual and institutional insanity.

Renowned theater director Pierre (Michel Piccoli) has just received a letter saying that his daughter Manon (Sandrine Bonnaire) is coming home and will meet him at the theater the next day. His next move, therefor, is obviously to call in all the actresses in his troupe, assign some representation of his daughter to each of them ("you will be Manon's eyes... you will be her voice... you will be her hand...") so that he can figure out how to speak with her upon her return. In the meantime, Manon arrives at the theater, lets herself in the back way, and observes this whole exercise, occasionally talking to one of the actresses or her father's assistant Ariane (Sabine Azéma) before finally speaking to her father.

Read the rest at HBS.

Mon Oncle

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Cahiers du Cinema Presents Jacques Doillon)

I saw my first film with Jacques Tati as his signature character, Monsieur Hulot, as part of a series spotlighting him along with Charlies Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Tati initially seemed like the odd man out in that group, making his movies a generation after the others, with sound, and in Paris rather than Hollywood. It is, however, immediately clear after watching Mon Oncle that Tati certainly resembles that group more than his contemporaries.

However, M. Hulot is uniquely Tati's. He's an older gentleman, at least middle-aged, though still possessed of a childlike delight in the world around him. Here, he's the title character, the much-adored uncle to Gerald Arpel (Alain Becourt) who buys him ice cream and teaches him how to use a slingshot, in contrast to the boy's bourgeois parents (Jean-Pierre Zola and Adrienne Servantie). They live in an ultra-modern house with all the bells and whistles, and try to convert Hulot to their way of life, fixing him up with women and getting him a job at the plastics factory where M. Arpel is a manager.

Read the rest at HBS.

Raja

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 November 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Cahiers du Cinema Presents Jacques Doillon)

During the Jacques Doillon series at the Brattle, I found time to see four three of the director's favorite films and three he'd directed himself. By the time the end of the series came around, I had to admit, I was less than enthused about the whole thing. His films were well-acted and grappled with some interesting emotions, but were so focused on observation and performance as opposed to story that I found them quite dull. I was pleasantly surprised, then, by how much I enjoyed Raja. It may not actually have more plot than his other films, but the environment he's observing is less familiar, so there's not quite the same sense of having seen it before.

The title character is a teenage girl from Marrekesh, played by Najat Benssallem. She has ideas about escaping poverty, which involve tagging along with her friend Nadira (Ilham Abelwahed) to find work on the estate of a French expatriate (Pascal Greggory). Her plan succeeds; Fred notices the pretty girl and gives her work inside the house. Once there, she teases and pulls back, trying to find ways to work less and spend more time by the pool, while also juggling her boyfriend Youssef (Hassan Khissal).

Read the rest at HBS.