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This was shown as part of the NYFilm Festival and I mentioned it in my opening roundup :
I compltely agree with you, that it's not a "masterpiece" in any way shape or form.Quote:
Wood's previously lost silent Beyond the Rocks isn't a great movie, but it's amazing to see Valentino and Swanson together in a big budget Hollywood production of the silent era.
Reportedly, neither Swanson nor Valentino, who were friends, liked the film very much. Yet Swanson, in her "Swanson on Swanson" memoirs, lamented the fact that Beyond the Rock was irretrievably lost.
Sun Oct 16th
The Ninth Day (Germany, 2004) at Cosford Theatre
Werner Herzog's recent Grizzly Man and this latest film from Volker Schlondorff speaks well for the vitality and longevity of the directors that, almost 40 years ago, originated the German New Wave_one wonders what Fassbinder would be releasing if he were alive, I have yet to catch Wim Wenders' Land of Plenty.
The Ninth Day also belongs to a category of films about the Holocaust; the grave subject has inspired a large number of remarkable films by European, Israeli and American directors, both documentary and fictionalized narratives. Like Costa Gavras' Amen, Schlondorff's film examines the role of the Catholic Church during the war years, when Jews were subjected to extreme discrimination and persecution, and eventually, mass annihilation.
The Ninth Day is based on the diary of Jean Bernard, the priest from Luxembourg who was interned at Dachau and became Bishop years after the war ended. There are many brief, powerful scenes of Henri Kremer (as Bernard is called here) at a special barracks in Dachau that are totally factual. Yet, the focus of the film is based largely on conjecture, on what could have happened to the priest during a period of nine days in which there are no diary entries. These imagined events are totally realistic though, and they create a most engaging, lucid moral and religious debate. Briefly, Kremer is given a 9 day leave because the Nazis think he can influence the Bishop to be more accomodating towards the Nazis. It's Kremer's long history of impeccable morals and courageous resistance to Nazi "racial laws" that make him potentially influential. Kremer refuses, but they increase the pressure by threatening to kill all Luxembourg priests at Dachau and members of his family. Significant characters include Kremer's pregnant sister, the Bishop's secretary (who believes appeasement is the best policy) and most importantly, Gebhardt, an SS officer trying to reconcile Catholic and Nazi doctrine. Gebhardt, who once attended seminary and hated a brief assignment at a concentration camp, is threatened with permanent assignment to such a place if he can't get the Kremer to cooperate and the Bishop to stop active resistance.
Kremer is played by Ulrich Matthes, the unusual-looking actor who impersonated Joseph Goebbels in the 2005 release Downfall. It's a bravura performance I won't soon forget. The Ninth Day is a Must-See.
NOt sure I'd consider it a must-see, since I've largely forgotten it, perhaps because the material, the milieu, the period, is so much worked over. There was a good review of this in The New Yorker by David Denby quite some time ago and then was when I saw it when it was briefly in the Bay Area. "Matthes may be predestined to play the same kind of role over and over—in his case, a fanatic burning with anguish and intellectual fire." I do think it is good, a commendable effort, and the actor Ulrich Matthes is indeed excellent and striking looking. The New Yorker had a drawing of him. I take your point about Schlondorff continuing to be a contender. But why shouldn't he be? He's younger than I am. I liked his Death of a Salesman, and his Un amour de Swann. Eric Rohmer is 85, and still making movies all the time, and scoring with them consistently too.
*What's easier said than done is not "being a contender" at 60-something, but doing so consistently for four decades. My favorite Schlondoff films are probably Young Torless, Lost Honor of Katarina Blum and The Tin Drum. I haven't seen them for years though. Maybe I like The Ninth Day just as much. The two you mention are good films also, indeed I don't know any Schlondorff film that wasn't worth-watching.
*Denby writes: "Some of his movies have been didactic and heavy-footed, but not The Ninth Day. This film is powerful, concise, fully sustained. In movies, the concentration camps have been dramatized so often that further representation of them threatens to becor kitsch, but Schlondorff, rapidly sets up the world of labor, brutality and death without resorting to cliche. He has a new subject: the sufferings of anti-Nazi Catholic clergy."
What Denby fails to mention is that besides the suffering of Catholic clergy, the film also delves deeply into the collaboration and appeasement of the clergy towards the Nazis, and explores a topic of special interest to me: to render explicit the delusional thinking and rationalization that goes on in the minds of people who consider themselves deeply religious while participating in horrific acts against other human beings. This is certainly NOT "worked over" material.
Mon Oct 17th
Wise Girl (USA, 1937) on TCM
Pleasant trifle about a heiress who goes undercover in bohemian Greenwich Village to "dig dirt" on her brother-in-law, a simpatico painter who has custody of her dead sister's precocious daughters. Of course they fall in love. It's Ray Milland and Miriam Hopkins in roles commonly assigned, in better films, to Jimmy Stewart and Kate Hepburn. Personally I didn't miss Stewart, which speaks volumes about Milland's range (you've probably seen him in Dial M for Murder). As for Hopkins, maybe this is not the right role for her. In case it needs to be said, director Leigh Jason is no Capra or LaCava.
Tuesday Oct 18th
Tan De Repente aka Suddenly (Argentina, 2002) dvd
Debut feature from young Diego Lerman, a reworking of his short La Prueba (Proof), partly based on the novel of the same title by Cesar Aira.Tan de Repente is almost impossible to discuss without mentioning Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise. Both are b&w road movies involving a trio of characters who visit the old aunt of one of them.
Marcia is a lonely and fat 20-something. She commutes to the small lingerie shop where she works. Her co-worker reads a horoscope that promises "the road unknown". Marcia goes to yoga class, dials a number then hangs up, strolls down Buenos Aires streets. Two short-haired girls appear to spy on Marcia, then accost her. They introduce themselves as Lenin and Mao, who wants to fuck Marcia but objects to being called a lesbian. Mao is insistent but Marcia resists. Until Lenin pulls out a switchblade. Marcia becomes increasingly compliant and genuinely curious. Mao offers proof of her "love" by hijacking a taxi and driving it to the sea. It'd be Marcia's first view of the ocean. No force or coercion is required any longer for Marcia to tag along. They eventually end up in Rosario, where Lenin has an aunt. They track her down and end up spending a couple of days there. The aunt's two boarders, a severe teacher and a shy biology student, develop sudden familiarity, even intimacy, with the three girls. Breakups and new alliances ensue. And someone will pass on, oh so suddenly.
What I found remarkable about the film was the impression that's being put together on the fly, without chart or blueprint. And given that, how its characters' transformations and realignments, over the course of a long weekend, manage to seem natural and organic. There are a few missteps, moments that register as false. One in particular I found jarring: Under false pretenses (a blowjob that never materializes), the girls get a ride from a trucker. As they ride in the middle of the night, the truck runs over a man who dies in Marcia's arms.Not a word is exchanged about this. The man seems to have inexplicably parachuted onto the highway! Seems I say because it's hard to tell with complete certainty given the available light, which brings up the film's significant technical problem. Perhaps because of the very low budget, Tan de Repente was shot exclusively using existing sources of light. It is consistently dark and murky, not like the purposeful, high-contrast lighting of classic noir and Val Newton horror. The film is simply and consistently dim and underlit.
Overall, Tan De Repente is an auspicious debut from a young director with obvious skills. It's finally available on dvd, almost two years after its USA theatrical release in 2003.
Wed Oct 19th
Proof (USA, 2005) at AMC CocoWalk
British director John Madden reunites with Gwyneth Paltrow, the star of his Shakespeare in Love, to bring to the screen David Auburn's Pulitzer and Tony award winner. Madden directed the West End production of "Proof", with Paltrow in the lead role. This adaptation is, according to critics who've seen the play, quite faithful yet slightly softened around the edges, in typical Miramax fashion.
Film opens a day after the death of Robert, a brilliant but mentally-ill mathematician (Anthony Hopkins). His daughter Catherine (Paltrow), who interrupted her college career to care for her father, is going over her father's things. The content of his notebooks might include something of scientific value, as it's established via flashbacks that his psychotic fog lifted during lucid periods. Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), an assistant and math professor with a crush on Catherine, promises to help. Catherine's sister Claire (Hope Davis) arrives from NYC. This currency analyst is a shrill, hyper-normal woman whose smothering of Catherine belies condescension and a sense of superiority. Plot revolves around whether a notebook found contains a viable mathematical proof, and who is its author. Just how much of her father's genius and madness has Catherine inherited?
Proof is a good movie with outstanding performances from everyone. Paltrow and Davis particularly deserve some type of recognition for their work here.
Thu. Oct 20th
Cinema is a collaborative art, but when we single out a person as the author of a film, we usually think of its director. The french term "auteur" has been popular since Andre Bazin and others introduced it in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s. It's rare for somebody other than the director to receive credit as an auteur. Val Newton (1904-1951) was certainly a major creative force in the films he produced at RKO. Newton, who'd once been David O. Selznick's story editor, created a new kind of horror film during the 1940s. Nine excellent films that constitute a poetic brand of horror conjured out of minimal sets and literary ambience. The studio gave Newton total creative freedom with three conditions: budget shall not exceed $150,000, duration shall not exceed 75 minutes, and title shall be the result of the studio's test-marketing (invariably something lurid and not entirely appropriate to the content and style of the picture).
These movies are impeccably shot, and photographed in a style that anticipates film noir, with particular attention to texture (lots of shadows) and contrast. The content is characterized by the development of a sense of everyday reality before the creepy possibilities are introduced. Besides their obvious quality and the care that went into every aspect of production, a major reason Val Newton horror films have not dated is their reliance on suggestion and mood, rather than special effects that invariably become obsolete as new technologies are developed. Newton worked on all the scripts of the films he produced but refused to take any credit (the exceptions are Bedlam and The Body Snatcher, in which he was credited under the name Carlos Keith).
The Seventh Victim (USA, 1943) on TCM
Val Newton practically wrote the script of this masterpiece which appears to have been a major influence on Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. It was directed by Mark Robson, who had co-edited Citizen Kane with Robert Wise. It's about a teenage girl (Kim Hunter) who has to leave her boarding school because her older sister has failed to send tuition payments and can't be located. The girl travels to Greenwich Village to search for the mysterious missing woman. Before we get to a highly unconventional ending, The Seventh Victim broaches a character's death wish, familial and romantic love, the allure of art and anonymity, the sustaining power of friendship, and the influence of a cult. The Seventh Victim opens and closes with a fitting quote from John Donne's first "Holy Sonnet".
The Leopard Man (USA, 1943) on TCM
This classic was directed by a true auteur, Jacques Tourneur, and inspired by Cornell Woolrich's novel "Black Alibi". Extremely beautiful to regard, full of melancholia and dread, and remarkably evocative of a small town New Mexico although it was shot in the studio. After an escaped leopard is found dead, the nightime killings of women continue.
Fri Oct 21th
The series of films from Chile playing in town this weekend prompted my desire to compile a brief filmography of Chilean cinema, focused on the most recent movies to arrive from this South American country. Unlike Mexico and Argentina, Chile never had a strong tradition of quality filmmaking and it still lags behind them. The reasons are cultural, geopolitical and economic but I won't go into detail.
The two greatest narrative directors from Chile, Raul Ruiz and Alejandro Jorodowsky, left Chile in the late 60s/early 70s and became established abroad. The highly prolific, globe-trotting Ruiz, became so comfortable with his Parisian base he adopted the French spelling of his name (Raoul). Perhaps his best recent film is the Proust adaptation Time Regained. Jorodowsky has lived in Mexico since the late 60s where he created some amazing surrealist films including Fando y Lis.
So we've narrowed it down from Chilean directors to "films from Chile".
Patricio Guzman. A great director that has specialized in making political documentaries. Among his major works: The Battle of Chile, Chile: Obstinate Memory, The Pinochet Case and his recent Salvador Allende.
Valeria Sarmiento. Ruiz's editor and wife has returned to Chile to make Amanda Lopez O'Neill (outstanding film shown at the Miami Fest, would love to see it again) and Rosa La China.
Ricardo Llarain. Veteran director of the best Chilean fiction film in recent memory: The Frontier, a Berlin winner released on vhs in the UK but not here. Also Enthusiasm (1998).
Silvio Caiozzi. Veteran director has specialized in adaptations of novels by Chilean author Jose Donoso. Films include The Moon in the Mirror, Coronation (on dvd), and Cachimba (review upcoming).
Four promising younger directors:
Andres Wood (Loco Fever, Football Stories, Machuca)
Ricardo Carrasco (Negocio Redondo aka A Sure Deal).
Orlando Lubbert (Taxi para 3 aka A Cab for Three)
Alex Bowen ( My Best Enemy)
Promedio Rojo aka Below Average (Chile, 2005) Cosford Cinema
Debut feature from director Nicolas Lopez, a huge fan of Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith who's directed rock-en-Espanol videos and programs for MTV Latino. The film is additionally titled:"Chronicles of Scholastic Survival". It's about a comics-drawing, high school nerd named Roberto Rodriguez (Ariel Levy) who falls in love with a girl who's just arrived from Spain. She only has eyes for the suave, "hot" jerk with a car. Lopez describes his flick as a "black romantic teen comedy with superpowers". What I saw was: Pretty in Pink meets Porky's with brief homages to Star Wars and superhero comics. The English title is fitting (below average). Crude, tiresome juvenilia.
For the first time after Hurricane Wilma devastated South Florida 9 days ago someone in my family has electricity. I'm posting from my brother's home, with a baby crying in the background, about the films I watched before the storm.
Saturday Oct 22
Cachimba (Chile, 2004) at Cosford Theatre
This is the fourth film that director Silvio Caiozzi (Coronation) has adapted from novels by Jose Donoso. Marcos (Pablo Schwarz) is a bank employee who convinces his old fashioned, full-figure girl to spend a weekend in the coastal town of Cartagena. During a casual stroll, they stumble upon a dilapidated house with a makeshift sign: Museo Larco. They discover that the caretaker, a drunk slob named Felipe (Julio Jung), inherited the paintings of a forgotten mid- 20th century artist of great renown. Marcos shares his discovery with arts organizations and the media in order to finance the restoration of the house and exhibit the paintings properly. Through deception and manipulation, commercial interests manage to appropriate the artist's legacy and toss Marcos and Felipe aside. Plot provides commentary regarding corporate power over individuals and the difficulties encountered by artists in Chile. It's a shame Cadiozzi wastes so much time in the ridiculous, trite aspects of the relationship between Felipe and his insecure, jealous girlfriend.
Saturday Oct 22 (cont.)
Ana and the Others (Argentina, 2003) dvd
Debut feature from yet another young and talented Argentine, writer/director Camila Murga.
A 20-something woman living in Buenos Aires returns to her riverfront hometown to sell her deceased parents' home and search for an old flame. The latter takes up most of the film's duration, although it's a leisurely search, as Ana renews old friendships and becomes reacquainted with once familiar surroundings. Comparisons to present-set Rohmer films are unavoidable_Summer comes to mind particularly_but gradually, in her interactions with a boy that serves as her guide, Murga channels Kiarostami. Whether or not this synthesis of influences results in a uniquely personal vision is debatable. Murga's debut is accomplished and recommended but, unlike first features by Lisandro Alonso and Lucrecia Martel, Ana and the Others feels like the work of a filmmaker yet to find her own style. It's greatest asset is its naturalness, betrayed only once, in a forced reference to the banking crisis affecting Argentina at the time. Camila Toker (Saturday) is quite good in the title role.
Sun October 23rd
The Eyes of the Mummy (Germany, 1918) on TCM
A young English painter sojourns to Egypt. He learns about a curse and an ancient site and becomes intrigued. There he discovers a beautiful damsel (Pola Negri) kept hostage by evil sorcerer Radu (Emil Jannings). He rescues her and leaves Radu injured. Radu survives and vows to get her back at any cost. I think this is the earliest film available from director Ernst Lubitsch, who like the legendary Emil Jannings, evolved into a supreme film artist both in Germany and the USA.
Thursday Oct 27
Hurricane Wilma likely caused me to miss two films on current release I wanted to watch: Serenity, and especially, Separate Lives. The theaters where these films were showing prior to the storm sustained significant damage; they're nowhere close to reopening. Separate Lives seems to have been largely ignored by audiences. One theatre opened today, on a limited basis. Suffice to say, going without movies for 4 days was unprecedented and painful.
Capote (USA, 2005) at Regal SoBe
Friday October 28th
MirrorMask (UK/USA, 2005) at Regal SoBe
A fantasy about the dreamlife of a young teen played by Stephanie Leonidas (Yes) whose parents own a small circus in Britain. First-time director Dave McKean and co-writer Neil Gaiman's combine computer-generated imagery, live action, drawings, photographic effects, puppetry (Jim Henson Co.) and imaginative costuming and set design to serve up a visual feast. MirrorMask is an otherworldly riff on a teen dealing with identity issues, her mother's illness and romantic longing. It's a PG-rated fairy tale in a style Peter Greenaway would approve. The gorgeous orchestrated score by one Iain Ballamy is critical to the overall effect.
Saturday October 29th
North Country (USA, 2005) at Regal SoBe
Well, if you go when the snowflakes storm,
When the rivers freeze and summer ends,
Please see if she's wearing a coat so warm
to keep her from the howlin' winds.
"Girl of the North Country" by Bob Dylan
Josey is a single mom who flees an abusive relationship and moves with her parents in Northern Minnesota. Encouraged by childhood friend Glory (Frances McDormand), Josey takes a job at the local iron mine despite Dad's disapproval. By court order the mine is forced to hire a few women but, as Josey soon learns, the women there are subjected to relentless abuse and hazing. Her good looks and decision to complain make Josey even more of a target.
North Country, directed by Niki Caro (Whale Rider), is loosely based on the nonfiction book "Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harrassment Law". Courtroom scenes? Of course, but sprinkled in discrete, powerful bits throughout the film's duration. The bulk of North Country provides a detailed sketch of a working-class heartland community through the plight of the young mother's struggle for self-dependence and dignity. Theron is superb, but so is everyone else. The whole production earns the "prestige" label of a fall release meant to be remembered at awards-time. Yet the film suffers from one major flaw: thematic overkill. (Spoilers) Poor Josey is burdened not only with a violently abusive boyfriend, insensitive and distant father, and exclusively misogynist co-workers and superiors, but also a history of rape-by-highschool-teacher that comes to light during the court proceedings. It renders not a film about women subjected to sexual harrasment but a compendium of male hatred of women. North Country is engaging and affecting but too emphatic and tendentious to suit me.