Films Seen March 2012
(For films seen between my return from Sundance and 5 March, go here, here, and here.)Crows Zero (2007, Takashi
Miike) 
Had a good time with this but I'm having trouble thinking of anything
remotely interesting to say about it, because it's just two hours of
Japanese high-school kids beating the shit out of each other. School is
depicted exclusively as a battle zone (I think there might be one
lickety-split scene set in a classroom, and the handful of teachers we
briefly glimpse are beyond ineffectual), with a rigidly enforced
hierarchy one can only attempt to challenge via brutal, bloody warfare.
But while Miike takes this absurd scenario seriously, he's also in one of
his playful moods: funniest bit has moody hero Genji furtively consulting
notes on what to yell in the midst of a badass rampage, and the
rainsoaked clashing-armies finale gets crosscut with a life-or-death
surgical procedure, the ritual execution of a key supporting character
(already shown in the prologue), and the movie's sole female
performing a cheesy J-pop ballad onstage. When I complained that
Battle Royale didn't seem to be about much of anything, an
anonymous commenter suggested that it serves as a metaphor for "the
competitive nature of post-war Japanese society," which I suppose applies
equally well here; still seems awfully thin, though, especially since
competition for resources is a universal truth, applicable not just to
every nation but to every species. But that's less problematic here,
simply because Crows Zero qualifies as relatively innocent fun --
kids recover almost instantly from punishment that would require months
of hospitalization in real life, and the violence is stylishly
exaggerated in ways that suggest animation (apropos, obviously, since the
film was adapted from a popular manga). Gotta say the sequel seems
highly unnecessary, but I'll probably check it out at some point.
Koyaanisqatsi (1982, Godfrey
Reggio) 
Wow, Man The Despoiler shows up way earlier than I'd remembered -- only
18 minutes in. I'd thought the nature-to-civilization ratio was more
or less 1:1. Honestly, though, I can't say I much care what
environmental/ecological/Hopi-ass thesis this film is trying to push, as
the footage is so mesmerizing that it renders ideology irrelevant. Even
if you're the sort of person who's happiest alone in the wilderness, you
can't deny that the 20-minute time-lapse aria showcasing humanity's
teeming masses renders our mundane lives intensely beautiful; nighttime
freeway shots in particular are just breathtaking, with headlights and
taillights producing different-colored contrails in opposite lanes. And
while I've owned and enjoyed Philip Glass' score for at least 25 years,
hearing it again alongside the images it was meant to complement really
confirmed its allusive power -- "The Grid" can sound overbusy on its own,
but perfectly captures e.g. the jittery high-speed hand movements of a
little blond kid at a Defender machine. (Embarrassing confession: I was so
young when I first encountered this film that I thought the track "Pruit
Igoe" must be some Eskimo reference -- I guess the words reminded me of
"Inuit" and "Igloo." Only much later did I find out about the Pruitt-Igoe
housing project, and only now do I see that its demolition appears in the
movie. Still not sure where the second 't' in 'Pruitt' went, though.) Not
everything compels -- some of the early nature footage just looks like
typical establishing shots for an outdoor adventure, and I'm not
convinced there's any purpose to repeated portraits in which the subjects
stare impassively at the camera for an uncomfortably long time -- and the
unmistakable implication that we should be recoiling from what we're
being shown can make the less eye-popping stretches feel a bit tiresome.
Overall, though, it's a singular experience, and a welcome reminder of
how enormous our tiny home in the universe can seem.
4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011,
Abel Ferrara) 
Key image for me here is perhaps the fleeting glimpse of gym rats running
on treadmills, with its absurdist yet somehow fundamentally truthful
suggestion that some people would still be concerned about keeping fit
even in the face of Armageddon. That the world would go about its normal
business right up to the end makes for a lovely, at times deeply moving
idea, especially as punctuated by occasional plangent acknowledgements of
loss; I'm not sure there's a more affecting moment in Ferrara's post-'80s
oeuvre (still haven't seen the early stuff) than the Vietnamese delivery
guy's Skype conversation with his family back home, very wisely left
unsubtitled. But I'm afraid I do have to register the standard objections,
beginning with Shanyn Leigh and her inexpressive anti-gaze-- not as
problematic as it might be, given that she spends a big hunk of the film
silently painting, but she's still pretty much half the cast, so finding
her deeply uninteresting is a problem. Dafoe fares better, naturally, but
often seems to be inventing his character as he goes along; there's a
scene toward the beginning in which he wanders the rooftop muttering
angrily and semi-coherently to himself (a Ferrara impression, judging from
my one experience with the man back at NYU, around the time of The
Addiction), but that aspect of his personality instantly vanishes,
never to be seen or even hinted at again. The film feels sketchy and
sparse in ways that don't complement its solipsistic vision -- the exact
opposite of Melancholia, actually, which likewise isolates two
protags but creates a richly imagined doomed world for them. All the same,
I'm more drawn to the spasms of tenderness in evidence here than to Von
Trier's straw-man misanthropy.
Design for Living (1933, Ernst
Lubitsch) 
Don't know quite what went wrong here, as the film has the rhythm and
sensibility of a droll comedy of manners yet is almost never even remotely
funny. I'd like to blame Noel Coward, who (in spite of my passion for
Brief Encounter) has always felt to me like Oscar Wilde Lite,
retaining the color and texture but very little of the flavor; virtually
none of Coward's dialogue was retained, though, by most reports, and it's
not as if Ben Hecht didn't know his way around fast-paced dry wit. One
might note with some justification that Gary Cooper seems ill-suited to
the demands of urbane mock-sophistication, but he does hold his own in
e.g. Ball of Fire. In any event, and whatever the root cause may
be, Design for Living never achieves anything more potent than
purely theoretical amusement, as if it were a detailed outline waiting for
somebody to come along and fill in the actual jokes. Which is a shame,
because the central idea is quite bold: In essence, the entire film serves
as prolonged rationalization for a long-term, three-way romantic
relationship involving one woman and two men, flying in the face of just
about everything Western society holds dear to this day. (I assume that's
why even in the final seconds it's reaffirmed that there'll be no sex -- a
"gentleman's agreement" that any sensible viewer must expect will be
speedily broken.) There's just no zing to it, no fire, no sense of nimble
play. Only when the boys crash the party at the very end, having finally
agreed to share the object of their affection, does Lubitsch finally
manage to stage a few bits of inspired goofiness. Far too late.
Letter Never Sent (1960,
Mikhail Kalatozov) 
Unimpeachable as pure cinema, marrying The Cranes Are Flying's
stunning, expressionistic close-ups of human faces with the dazzling
mobility Kalatozov would further develop in I Am Cuba. (Thus
endeth my knowledge of his oeuvre, but it really does feel like a bridge
between those two more celebrated films.) Certain sequences I'm not even
sure could be duplicated today -- what did he do, just set a massive
stretch of the Siberian Taiga on fire? In any case, file this among the
medium's great trudge epics, as everything remotely dramatic -- Sergei's
forbidden love for Tanya; the he-man vs. nerd conflict it inspires; even
the titular unsent letter itself -- gradually gets tossed aside like our
heroes' useless radio and burdensome packs, leaving only a brute tale of
survival...or, in most cases, the barely acknowledged lack thereof. What
holds it back from true magnificence is its nationalistic agenda,
apparent in the opening title crawl and dominant in the finale (though
it's thankfully otherwise fairly subdued). Ultimately, what's important
isn't these characters' lives but the map of their find, which will end
the Soviet reliance on foreign diamonds; Kalatozov has made a stirring
testament to their Pioneer Spirit, more or less thanking the fallen for
their sacrifice (while also intimating with those fluttering eyelids that
Russia will always be a survivor). But that's a retroactive criticism,
really -- in the moment, Letter Never Sent could scarcely be more
harrowing or elemental, and Kalatozov declines to indulge in melodrama.
There's no time to mourn the dead, who in two of three cases can't be
buried anyway, and when Konstantin hands Tanya the note Andrei left
behind, she never even glances down at it. Why should she? There's only
one thing it could possibly say.
Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966, Terence Fisher) 
Not counting the quick Horror of Dracula recap at the outset,
Christopher Lee doesn't turn up in this one for 48 minutes (of only
90)...which is fine, really, because it's a much more entertaining film
before he does. Reading about Hammer as a kid, I imagined stark, frankly
horrific chillers, perhaps just extrapolating from the company name; in
reality, they're mostly quite charming in their workmanlike Englishness,
moving stock characters along a series of predictable narrative marks
with brisk, economical assurance and the very slightest of winks. The
early scene in which Father Sandor warns our heroes away from Karlsbad
and its mysterious castle, for example, couldn't be more generically
foreboding, yet it's performed with such sincere gusto that you just
can't wait for these clueless toffs to stroll into that terrible matte
painting and become DracSnacks. But while I recall quite liking Lee in
Horror (made eight years earlier), he's kind of embarrassing in
this entirely silent incarnation, constantly working his mouth to make
sure we can see his novelty fangs and recoiling in exaggerated panic from
crosses wielded by men. (He can hypnotize women into setting them down,
and Lee is at his best by far when merely required to soul-gaze in
extreme close-up.) And while I don't want to spoil the ending for anyone,
it's a hilarious cheat -- imagine a somber speech in which the priest
explains that a vampire can only be killed by a stake through the heart,
by exposure to direct sunlight, by eating too many Cheetos, or by being
burned with a crucifix, followed shortly by a climax set in a gigantic
factory that's suddenly revealed to be Frito-Lay's manufacturing plant.
It's not that silly, obviously, but as far as I know they just plain made
that method up.
What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993, Lasse Hallström) 
Another example of why I'm doggedly rewatching everything halfway decent
from my formative years. I just assumed I didn't like this movie, because
(a) 19 years later all I remembered was that DiCaprio plays mentally
disabled, which sounds unappetizingly I Am Sammy; (b) the title is
an abomination unto numerous nonexistent deities; and (c) Hallström
has since become an utter hack, so I now just assume he was never any
good. (Don't really remember My Life as a Dog, either; it's been
over 25 years for that one.) But I must have at least mildly enjoyed this
at the time, because it rarely steps wrong -- only the treacly guitar
score actively stinks. Mostly it suffers from being overemphatic about
underlining how trapped Gilbert feels, between Juliette Lewis' itinerant
history and John C. Reilly getting ludicrously excited about purchasing a
Burger Barn franchise and Steenburgen's sad housewife actually telling
Gilbert she picked him for her affair because she knew he'd never leave
town. WE GET IT. That aside, though, it's pretty wonderful, with striking
performances even from the unknowns (particularly the girl who plays the
younger sister, with her wild eyes and her nostrils constantly aflare);
credible family dynamics and small-town detail; a generally realistic
sense of life's frustrations and pleasures; and a climactic conflagration
that caught me by surprise with its tender funereal power. Hallström
acquits himself quite well, keeping things nicely low-key -- excepting of
course DiCaprio, who perfectly embodies Arnie's propriety-impaired
joie de vivre and richly deserved his Oscar nomination. Not quite a
revelation, but a much stronger film than I dimly recalled. Could everyone
stop making new movies for about 20 years while I'm reassessing?
Eraserhead (1977, David
Lynch) 
So many superlatives. Best sound design ever. Best nightmare
evocation of young adulthood ever. Most disturbing "character"
of all motherfucking time EVER. (Presaged by the classic line
"Mother, they're still not sure it is a baby," which I suspect is
the first thought most new parents have if they see the kid straight
out of the womb, before it's been cleaned up.) I had a vague memory of
finding some of the surrealism willfully obscure, but this time was
deeply affected even by things I can't necessarily "explain" -- most
notably the Lady In The Radiator, whose gigantic swollen cheeks still
baffle me, but whose loving embrace of Henry in the final shot feels
exactly right, especially in contrast with their earlier encounter.
Really, the entire film works on such an intensely visceral level that
trying to analyze it, even in a flippant capsule format like this, seems
counterproductive somehow. Can any words even remotely evoke the
flesh-crawling queasiness of e.g. Henry's visit to Mary's parents' house,
in which he sits uncomfortably on the couch exchanging forced
pleasantries with Mom while some ungodly squeaking/squelching noise
threatens to drown out the dialogue? Is it worse when the source of that
sound is unknown (and unacknowledged by anyone in the room), or is it
somehow inexplicably worse when the source is revealed and it's not the
horror show conjured up by your imagination? And to be honest I don't
think I can even bring myself to talk about that...thing, except to admit
that it hits the precise amalgam of repulsion and vulnerability that's
capable of ripping my soul apart. Which I guess is the difference between
David Lynch and somebody like Matthew Barney, who I don't despise as much
as some of my more avant-gardey film-buff friends do, but whose similarly
dream-symbolic approach to cinema lacks the emotional core that would
make it powerful as well as arresting. Then again, that's exactly how I
feel about Inland Empire...
Battle Royale (2000, Kinji
Fukasaku) 
Hate to just do a compare 'n' contrast job with Hunger Games, but
(a) it's unavoidable given that I saw them nearly back to back (after
having waited over ten years for a print of Battle Royale; not
much point anymore, since its commercial run in L.A. was on video) and
(b) the differences really are instructive and well worth noting. Collins'
scenario has far more thematic and satirical heft, even in its diluted
form onscreen -- remove the entertainment aspect and it's not even fully
clear what BR's societal function is, especially since these kids
obviously had no idea the program exists before arriving on the island
(i.e., it's not being used as a deterrent). Moment to moment, however,
Fukasaku's film thrills, startles and wounds in ways that put its
American counterpart to shame. Despite having a couple of designated
heroes and over twice as many combatants, not a single kid is faceless;
every death registers, and the spectrum of reactions to their joint
predicament -- suicide, pleas for cooperation, open rebellion against the
system, homicidal lunacy -- acknowledges the messiness of human nature,
which prevents even students who get offed shortly after we meet them
from coming across as props. (It helps that they all know each other, as
opposed to having been plucked from separate walled districts.) And then
of course Fukasaku is a film director, not a screenwriter with a camera,
and also has the luxury of not needing to deliver a PG-13 rating, so the
violence is expertly composed rather than shrouded in shaky-cam. Truly
exciting for the first hour or so, but it loses steam as it approaches
the endgame, pulling a too-obvious fakeout and then seeming to ask us to
suddenly care about Kitano's home life, or about Kitano at all frankly.
In the end, it's not clear to me what Battle Royale wants to be
about (yes, that old bugaboo), apart from perverse mayhem as a means of
accelerating our collective pulse. But at least it works on that level.
The Ambassador (2011, Mads
Brügger) 
Brügger irritates me almost as much as Morgan Spurlock. With The
Red Chapel, he was at least obtaining footage from the world's most
isolationist country, even if the film's toxic smugness drove me out of
my seat. But what the hell are his hidden cameras revealing here? That the
poorest continent on Earth is a hotbed of corruption where everything is
for sale? Knock me the fuck over with a feather, man. Worse, this time he
spends the entire duration "in character," self-consciously performing
the role of an amoral, racist mercenary not only in his interactions with
the locals (where it's defensible) but even in the voiceover narration. A
real journalist would have played tinpot diplomat for a little while, then
gone home and written about it in detail, rather than play-act for us.
Island of Lost Souls (1932,
Erle C. Kenton) 
Hollywood to H.G. Wells: I wanna sex you up. Introducing the Panther Woman
(billed by that name in the opening credits, alongside the actors!) makes
Wells' anti-vivisection allegory play more like a progenitor of E.C.'s
Vault of Horror, which featured a stacked, vacant-looking bimbo in
virtually every story; Kathleen Burke succeeds in investing her version
with a little pathos, but she's still mostly around to flash some leg and
make the idea of miscegenation between man and beast seem seductive. And
since Richard Arlen's a chiseled drip, we're inevitably drawn to Laughton,
who deftly straddles the line between creepy and campy. ("You're an
amazingly unscientific young man," he memorably sniffs at one point in
response to some moral outrage.) What's most striking to my eyes is how
matter-of-factly the film introduces its manufactured mutants, in broad
daylight on the ship that rescues our hero, without the emphatic reveal
you'd expect -- they're just wandering the deck like the regular humans,
looking vaguely disturbing. I have no real sense of Kenton as a director,
as this is still the only film of his I've ever seen , but that choice
alone makes me curious. Nicely atmospheric; kinda creaky; mostly a pale
shadow of its source until the last few minutes, when it suddenly
metamorphoses into a keening, nerve-shattering nightmare vision so
powerful that the early sound era can't contain it, meaning the movie just
has to abruptly end. The pat irony of Moreau's fate (a complete divergence
from the novel, also anticipating E.C.) is overwhelmed by the creatures'
almost lascivious brutality; the survivors haul ass to sea, leaving us
with the grave admonition of the angel to Lot and family: "Don't look
back."
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988, Martin Scorsese) 
Let's not pretend this movie isn't blasphemous. It clearly is. (Fine by
me, since as far I'm concerned it replaces one largely made-up story with
another, far more compelling one.) Protesters in '88 who hadn't seen it
and got worked up about Jesus boning Mary Magdalene were misplacing their
proxy wrath -- the real fuck-you to true believers occurs later in the
temptation, when Paul tells Jesus that it doesn't matter whether or not he
died and was resurrected, so long as people believe that he did/was. That
the film ultimately has Jesus accept the cross and die exultant doesn't
really contradict this very secular thesis, as Kazantzakis never provides
a decent counter-argument explaining why Paul's ministry in the
alternate, Jesus-lives reality is in any way problematic, or why it
couldn't (ahem) accurately describe the actual reality in which we the
viewers live. Instead, Judas and the other aged disciples show up at
Jesus' deathbed to more or less guilt-trip him into fulfilling God's plan,
with the tone of someone bitching that you promised to pick him up at the
airport and then didn't show. Again, doesn't matter to me, and I mostly
dig this all-too-human depiction of a figure who's traditionally beatific
to the point of tedium; Dafoe gives good anguish, portraying Jesus as a
sort of manic-depressive who vacillates between holy ardor and abject
terror, and Scorsese encourages the actors to perform Schrader's script
naturalistically, so that e.g. Keitel sounds credibly exasperated saying
things like "No you listen. Every day you have a different plan!
First it's love. Then it's the axe. And now you have to die! What good
could that do?" Which is closer to how I'd imagine the disciples would
truly react than, say, Matthew 16:22, in which Peter merely expresses his
preference that Jesus not die, and gets called Satan for his trouble.
The Hunger Games (2012, Gary
Ross) 
Since I'm getting a halfway decent word count for my Las Vegas Weekly review, let me use this space to ask a few spoiler-heavy questions of folks who've read the book(s). [Answer at the blog, obviously.]
(1) Is any justification provided for the age range of 12-18? Ostensibly, the purpose of the Games is to keep the populace of the outer districts willingly enslaved, but seems like tossing pre-teen girls into the arena as chum for the college-age kids would only set off precisely the sort of angry riot that's provoked by Rue's death.
(2) Clearly Gale must play a larger role in the subsequent novels, but does he have a discernible function in the first one, or is he just a complete waste of space like he is onscreen?
(3) Does Collins actually write it so that the Asshole Alliance chases Katniss up a tree, decides to wait until starvation forces her to descend (itself not that credible, frankly), and then goes to sleep en masse, without taking turns keeping watch like any group with even a dozen functioning brain cells among them would surely do?
(4) What's the deal with the sponsors? So much is made of this early on, and then as far as I can tell the only result is two care packages that it's implied -- unless I completely misunderstood -- are sent by Haymitch. Which that's more like having your pit crew change your tires than like being forced to pimp yourself out to a national viewing audience, which is by far the story's most compelling aspect. Which brings me to, most crucially, and this I do intend to address at length in the review proper...
(5) Does the book make it abundantly clear, via Katniss' interior monologue, that her feelings for Peeta are manufactured, or at least that she initially believes herself to be feigning them as a cynical strategy? Because that's the impression I get from the Wiki synopsis, and the film seems to me to deliberately mute that angle, to the point where it's barely even perceptible to viewers like myself who are coming to the movie cold (while at the same time, I can see in retrospect, being very perceptible to those who already know via the book what's going on). "Afterwards, Peeta is heartbroken when he learns that Katniss's actions in the arena were part of a calculated ploy to earn sympathy from the audience," it says here, for instance, which is decidedly not how that bullet-train scene in the epilogue plays. Feels like Ross and the screenwriters worked hard to have it both ways, gutting the story's heart in the process. I'd like to credit Ross with being enormously subtle, but, y'know. Pleasantville. Seabiscuit. It's kinda hard.
The War Room (1993, Chris
Hegedus & D A Pennebaker) 
Arguably more interesting now than it was at the time, since it functions
as a time capsule in addition to an intimate behind-the-scenes portrait
of a campaign. Emphasis is entirely on manipulating the mass media, with
virtually zero effort made to target voters directly (what are they gonna
do, mail physical objects to their homes?); the team's jubilation about
Brazilian TV footage showing that Bush's re-election committee had its
flyers and such manufactured overseas, for example, quickly dissipates
once the networks do some fact-checking and decide the story isn't as
juicy as it first appeared. Gotta wonder how that might play out today.
As I remembered, though, this is basically The James Carville Show, as
well it should be given his endlessly entertaining amalgam of folksy +
ornery -- I especially love the concession speech he extemporizes early
on Election Day, as they await the first returns, which sounds exactly
like what the loser always actually says even though Carville
sarcastically laughs his way through the whole thing. Stephanopoulos, for
his part, mostly looks junior-exec eager, but he does have one mildly
startling moment in which he skates right up to the edge of offering
political favors to a journalist for burying a Clinton rumor, seeming to
realize at the last second that he's on-camera and abruptly pulling a
Nixonian "That would be wrong." Such awareness makes me skeptical of
fly-on-the-wall docs as a rule, but in this case it really does appear as
if we're getting a fairly accurate sense of how the sausage is made (in
rooms with lots of flies on the wall, I'm guessing; no it's not
mixed, so there!), to the point where the film would be no less valuable
a document even if Clinton had lost the election, or the nomination. If
anything, it seems a tad skimpy at 96 minutes, skipping past Buchanan and
the culture war, Sister Souljah, "I didn't inhale," etc. Sign visible in
the background of several
shots that ought to have been passed along to Al Gore: "If we buy it,
we will win. FLORIDA."
All In: The Poker Movie (2009,
Douglas Tirola)
I just can't watch this kind of rapid-fire, heavily expository,
multi-talking-head documentary anymore, even about a subject I know and
love. Tirola often cuts to someone speaking literally one sentence, so
that you barely even have time to register who it is, or wonder what
they're doing in the movie (Doris Kearns Goodwin? Evander Holyfield?); he
clearly just interviewed every person he could think of, worked out the
story he wanted to tell, and then went through the footage splicing in
sound bites as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Excruciating.
Doesn't help that he structures it all around Chris Moneymaker, who's
only interesting for what he represents (the dream that you, an amateur,
could win millions with a tiny investment), or that the landscape has
radically changed since this movie originally premiered three years ago
(acknowledged via a new prologue shot after Black Friday, plus no doubt
newly shot material at the very end). But seriously, who wants to watch
this kind of doc anymore? Is there still an audience? Just pick Phil Laak
or Gus Hansen or some other charismatic pro and follow him around.
The Diary of Anne Frank (1959,
George Stevens) 
Randomized queue decreed that the time had finally come to get this Best
Picture nominee + Cannes Competition title out of the way. Knew it was
hopeless, though, as I acted in the play in high school (as Otto Frank)
and disliked it even then, Pulitzer notwithstanding. Sure enough, the
film has the same monotonous rhythm, alternating bland scenes of
cabin-fever bickering with repetitive "suspenseful" interludes in which
the Annex's inhabitants are threatened with discovery; the knowledge that
it actually happened can only ennoble Goodrich and Hackett's turgid sense
of drama (they were comic writers at heart) so much. But I was unprepared
for the sheer awfulness of Millie Perkins, who captures none of Anne's
restless intelligence and is distractingly "adorable" (especially when
whining about how homely she supposedly is -- they might as well have
gone whole hog and cast Audrey Hepburn in the role). Stevens works hard to
make this single-room production cinematic, and he does achieve one
genuinely stunning effect: Anne and Peter's first kiss, which occurs in
deep silhouette, after which Anne opens the door and light suddenly floods
her astonished face. (A rare nice moment from Perkins, too, who seems well
suited for less harrowing tales of young love.) Really, the whole idea of
a dramatic work based on Anne's diary is deeply misguided, except insofar
as it gives audiences an opportunity to sadly shake their heads. Barring
wall-to-wall voiceover, all you've got, in lieu of a remarkable young
woman's frustrated self-examination, is a bunch of people cooped up in a
tiny space for a couple of years, getting on each other's nerves. For an
equally tiresome current film saddled with pretty much the exact same
problem, see, or rather do not see, The Forgiveness of Blood. Also,
did I mention that this thing is three hours long? THREE. HOURS. LONG.
To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch)
One of those comedies in which the setup devours half the film's running
time, without being especially funny or (in this case) cuttingly
satirical for its own sake. Once Jack Benny starts impersonating Nazis,
it's a hoot...yet even in the back half, there's a curious remoteness, as
if everyone involved was too aware of the scenario's real-world ugliness
to truly cut loose. You know the story about the line of dialogue that
got cut in the initial release because of Lombard's death -- something
along the lines of "What could happen in a plane?" In a way, the entire
movie feels like it's walking on those sort of eggshells. As if it's
been slightly defanged, even as it dares to mock Hitler and so forth.
(And even the mocking sometimes verges on a proto-"Hogan's Heroes,"
especially w/r/t Sig Ruman's Col. Ehrhardt.) Cherishable mostly because
it's one of Benny's only leading roles in the movies, along with
Charley's Aunt (which I've never seen); he more or less pioneered
the persona of the self-regarding schlemiel, and nobody's ever matched
his impeccable sense of timing, which amounts to a series of exclusively
vocal double-takes. Lombard isn't given nearly as much to do here, being
stuck opposite the young Robert Stack in most of her scenes, but still
manages to get laughs in unexpected ways -- one of her scripted lines is
"Lieutenant, this is the first time I've ever met a man who could drop
three tons of dynamite in two minutes," which she delivers in a sort of
dreamy rapture and then beautifully punctures with a breezy "Bye!" Good
fun, but I'd rank it alongside lesser-heralded Lubitsches like Monte
Carlo and Cluny Brown rather than all-time greats like Shop
Around the Corner and Trouble in Paradise.
Being Flynn (2012, Paul Weitz)
Reviewed in brief for Las
Vegas Weekly. Way better than I expected -- the first half-hour or so
really crackles, and Dano's recessive nature seems to be working for him
rather than against him for a change. But the movie I wanted it to be
would feature this exchange at about the midpoint (where it starts to go
wrong):
Paul Dano: Do you think I'm like my father?
Olivia Thirlby: I think you need to be slapped for asking something that
retarded.
[Slaps him hard in the face, exits.]
