The Last Ten Films I’ve Seen

1. This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi)
2. The Long Voyage Home (John Ford)
3. Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla)
4. The Red Shoes (Powell/Pressburger)
5. Robinson Crusoe (Luis Buñuel)
6. Adoption (Marta Meszaros)
7. Dracula (Tod Browning)
8. The Boys in the Band (Joe Mantello)
9. The Devil’s Playground (Fred Schepisi)
10. Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam)

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1- I am struck by how genre-bending the modern films of Iran are. This Is Not a Film was made by Jafar Panahi who is currently under a multi-year ban on film-making. Hence the title. Shot on cell phone or on hand-held camera in his own house, this depiction of his mundane life (eating lunch, talking with the garbage man) becomes an extremely moving picture of an artist who cannot stop creating, no matter what the powers-that-be decree. It is fascinating. The scene where he acts out his unproduced screenplay in a stage delineated by masking tape on his carpet is extremely moving.

2- The fact that The Long Voyage Home is a John Ford film starring John Wayne just a year after Stagecoach made it a must-watch for me. Add to this that the cameraman is the legendary Gregg Toland of Citizen Kane only made it more appealing. I had seen it decades ago but didn’t remember much. It looks fantastic, of course, because of Toland’s magical camera work, but the macho high-jinx of the sailors on shore-leave repelled me. Also, the cliché of Irishmen having to get drunk at every opportunity might have been humorous once, but now it is grating and borderline racist. The screenplay is based on four one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill. Yuck.

3- October is the greatest month because it contains the greatest holiday of the year: Halloween. I love Halloween so much. I gorge myself on wonderful, sometimes cheesy horror films for the whole month. I started off this year’s celebration with the wonderfully economical and chilling Village of the Damned. I had forgotten how effective this little movie is. I wish the studio had the wherewithal to make a longer film since the ending seems rushed. But what’s there is cherce. The acting of the twelve diabolical children is stunning. How did the director get these performances out of them? George Sanders is on hand to do his fruity elitist thing, which is always fun. But this is a movie that is all about atmosphere. And all about horror, too. Truly a chilling movie. Great way to start off this year’s Halloween festivities (as if 2020 hasn’t already been Halloween all year!)

4- And talking about a movie that looks great despite its content, I give you The Red Shoes. This is another Technicolor fever dream from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger. Nothing is as breathtaking as the reds in this movie. Unfortunately, so much has gone into the mise-en-scene, that the movie as a whole suffers. It really doesn’t make any sense. The characters are cardboard and inconsistent. But you get to see Robert Helpmann chewing up the scene and the legendary Leonide Massine is on hand to lend a bit of nuttiness and authenticity to the proceedings. But watching it is like being really hungry and all you have in the house is Oreos. But man….those reds!

5- I remember seeing Robinson Crusoe in a school auditorium when I was probably nine or ten. I had no idea who Luis Bunuel was then, and today, if I hadn’t seen the credits, I would not have known he was the director. No surreal or outlandish flourishes. Pretty straightforward story-telling. Just finished reading the novel, so I was interested in the movie. It is very good for what it is.

6- Adoption was shown on TCM as part of their Women Make Film series.  They have a documentary series they are showing over 14 weeks, and each week after the documentary runs, they show a few of the films mentioned. This is a rare treat since very few of the films are familiar, even for TCM-heads like me.  Case in point is this powerful Hungarian film.  A single woman involved in an unsatisfying years-long romance is trying to make a connection.  At first she tries with a troubled teenage woman from a local reformatory school.  There are satisfactions in that relationship which lead the woman to her ultimate decision and her great chance at happiness. Is this a woman’s movie? It is made by a woman, yes, and it concerns women. But can you tell that it was a woman who wrote and directed it?  I think perhaps yes.  The cliché in noting the difference between men and women is that men jockey with each other for position, where women use empathy to make connections.  Adoption is almost claustrophobic in its unrelenting use of close-ups.  It this the cinematic equivalent of empathy?  In any event it is an extremely moving film that I would never have heard of if not for TCM.

7- We are so used to thinking of the Universal Studios Dracula as  a horror film classic, that one forgets (or perhaps never knew!) that it was an pretty prosaic adaptation of a great stage success.  Its staginess really shows. Compared to Frankenstein of a year later, it is hardly a movie at all.   

8- For a very closeted, sixteen year old Gay man, going to see the original The Boys in the Band in the movie theater in the 1970s was thrilling.  So thrilling that I completely had no idea what a miserable evening these gentlemen were having.  I hadn’t seen it since, so I was intrigued to see the film version of the recent Broadway revival (the first Broadway mounting of the play, I believe).  The Princh assures me that this version is practically a shot-for-shot twin of the original film, with some performances better, some worse.   I was struck by the decision to keep the action in the original historical time.  No AIDS, no Gay Lib, hardly and Stonewall.  Does it become a period piece? Not exactly. But it is very remote.  Even when I was a callow youth sitting in that Brooklyn theater, I could not understand the self-loathing that seemed to be a given in the play.  The bitchiness didn’t seem to be wit, as in The Women or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but desperate lashing out.   It seems to me that the self-loathing in this new version is centered more on the characters Catholicism than on they’re being Gay.  I still can’t relat. But Matt Bomer is unforgivably handsome.

9- The Criterion Channel has been featuring The Australian New Wave.  The Devil’s Playground is a film that I had missed when it first came out. It is brilliant. The depiction of life in a boy’s Catholic Seminary in the 1950s is fascinating mostly because of the huge scope of characters that it gives us in such loving, or at least penetrating, detail. I think it would be a phenomenal double-bill with Picnic at Hanging Rock.

10- Sunday Too Far Away is apparently a much-loved classic in Australia about the rough-and-tumble life of itinerant sheep-shearers.  See my comments above on the macho high-jinx of The Long Voyage Home and you’ll get a pretty good idea how I feel about this film.

 

 

 

 

The Last Ten Film I’ve Seen

1. The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Eric Rohmer)
2. The Color of Pomegranate (Sergei Paradjanov)
3. Carmen Comes Home (Keisuke Kinoshita)
4. Tampopo (Juzo Itami)
5. The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky)
6. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
7. La Captive (Chantal Akerman)
8. Toni (Jean Renoir)
9. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
10. The Small Back Room (Powell/Pressburger)

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I continue my feast with the incredible Criterion Channel. So much cinematic catching-up! Loving it.

1- The Bakery Girl of Monceau is a breezy (a la Nouvelle Vague) short which is the first of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. Slight, kind of sexist but fun to watch. It begs the question that if the writers and director show the protagonist as awful to women does that endorse the behavior or hold it up for criticism. I think, in this film at least, the later.

2- One of the great features of the Criterion Channel is that you often have the choice of watching the films with or without commentary. I have seen The Color Of Pomegranates many times and have loved it each time, but I would be hard pressed to tell you what was going on. Watching it with the commentary shed a light on all the Armenian symbolism which I would never have understood. Also, Paradjanov’s oblique way of introducing elements from the life of the protagonist Sayat Nova is beautifully explained. Do you need all this to enjoy the film? No, it is always stunningly beautiful and loopy. But I feel like all these years, I have only appreciated 10% of its greatness.

3- After examining the masterpieces of Japanese movies all these years, it was fun to catch up with lighter fare. Carmen Comes Home was always on my radar because it stars the amazing Hideko Takemine and it is the first color film made in Japan. It is also incredibly dopey. Fun enough for 80 minutes, though. Tampopo is also lighter than the great works I have been studying all these years, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and perhaps even loved it. What appealed to me was that though this film is ostensibly about making the perfect bowl of ramen, it borrows all kinds of tropes from American Westerns and Japanese Samurai films to adorable effect. The genre bending is great fun. At the time it was referred to as a ramen Western. Very apt.

4- Tarkovsky has always been a forbidding experience for me. I loved Andrei Rublev when I saw it in the theater years ago. But subsequent viewings of his films have been daunting experiences. The early Steamroller and the Violin and Ivan’s Childhood I found to be accessible and thrilling. Solaris and The Mirror shut me out completely. But that was years ago, before I had been exposed to all kinds of demanding films. I figured, ‘It’s now or never for Tarkovsky”. Having access to the Criterion Channel gave me no excuse. So, I buckled down and watched two of his films that are supposed to be among his most ‘difficult’: Stalker and his last film The Sacrifice. The Sacrifice affected me much more than Stalker, but I must say that I found both less daunting than I had been led to believe. Could it be that The Sacrifice felt more comfortable to me because of the heavy Ingmar Bergman connection and I am so familiar with Bergman? Erland Josephson starred, the cinematography was by legendary Sven Nyquist, it was shot on a Swedish island and most of the dialogue was in Swedish (although it did look like some of the actors were speaking English and were post-dubbed). I have read that Tarkovsky revered both Bergman and Bresson, but ultimately this is far from a Bergman wannabe the way that the ghastly Interiors is. Like Bresson, it wrestles with ethical and religious questions in a way that is more comforting that Bergman’s approach.

Stalker seems to be a spiritual riff on sci-fi, but I am sure it is more than that. Just how much more I will try to figure out in a subsequent viewing. Yes, I am over my Tarkovskyphobia. Subsequent viewings are in my future.

Something that struck me this time: I never felt bored at any point even during long portions of the film when the camera seems to be looking at nothing. ‘Seems’ is the operative word in this sentence. The camera is rarely still. In scenes when it seems to be focused on an object or a person, it is almost imperceptibly zooming in on that object at a snail’s pace. The effect is astounding. It is almost dizzying in its slowness. It is what keeps you engaged. By contrast, Paradjanov’s tableaux are shot by an inert camera. You are engaged by the riot of visual detail in each frame. Here the emptiness comes alive by the imperceptible movement of the camera.

5- I don’t like the idea of a generational divide. I think it is a lazy way of analyzing differences between people. The majority of my friends are at least a decade younger than me and the friendships are not effected. I am prepared to concede I might be too simplistic about this after watching France Ha soon after Marriage Story. Both films seem to be speaking in a generational voice that I don’t get. Or better put: I might get but I find irrelevant to my life. I wonder if people in their 30s find the the characters in both of these films shallow and solipsistic the way I did. I would love to hear opinions on this. But still: Greta Gerwig, who wrote and starred in Frances Ha, is a tremendous talent at the beginning of what I hope is a great string of creativity. I’m not so sure about Noah Baumbach.

6- Another benefit of the Criterion Channel is access to the films of Chantal Akerman. La Captive is a very loose adaptation of the fifth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu. As such, it is not for everyone. Even though the story is radically changed the central theme, the narrator’s bizarre imprisonment and paranoia about his ‘love’, is very much intact. In fact, I think that this film treatment presents it in a better way than a more ‘faithful’ adaptation would have. If you haven’t read the book, I don’t recommend the film at all. If you have, I would love to hear if you agree that it is a wonderful elucidation of that very strange relationship.

7- With Toni I continued my exploration of all the films of Jean Renoir. This was shot in Provence, under the auspices of Marcel Pagnol’s film company. I had to keep reminding myself that it was not a Pagnol film. It is a fairly brutal story of international immigrants flocking to Provence in the early 30s due to the economic boom happening there. Of course there is infidelity and murder.

8- I had never heard of The Small Back Room. This was surprising because the films of Powell and Pressburger are so well-known and I love many of them. This one is in black and white and made shortly after the Technicolor hallucination of The Red Shoes. It felt like I was in the world of Grahame Green, with an afflicted, self-loathing hero. For me this is a very good thing. Lots of Powell/Pressburger regulars are on hand. Particularly impressive is Kathleen Byron, so memorable as the sex-crazed Sister Ruth of Black Narcissus, here playing the kind of heroic partner we all would want in a time of personal crisis.

Sister Ruth

Small Back Room

Lots of echoes of Spellbound and German Expressionism, with a terrifically nutty dream sequencing with our alcoholic hero being tortured by a demonic whiskey bottle.