Fritz Lang’s
follow-up to Metropolis (1927) is a dazzling tale of spies confronting a master
criminal (Haghi; Rudolf Klein-Rogge), operating a network of criminals behind
his front as a bank executive. The plot is as convoluted as they get, focusing
on a Russian female agent (Gerda Maurus) who is blackmailed to work for Haghi
after falling in love with Agent 326 (Willy Fritsch) who is trying to foil
Haghi’s plans to steal a treaty between Japan and the UK that would stop the
impending war. The Japanese security chief sends three messengers, only one
carrying the real treaty, in an attempt to fool Haghi but he himself is fooled
when Haghi sends a nubile young spy (Lien Deyers) to seduce him. Add to
this a number of well-paced action sequences (train crash, shoot-out) and a mad
scramble to find Haghi’s secret hideout – and then Haghi himself (leading to a
notorious ending). Full of angular and geometric sets and shots, a Lang specialty,
and co-written with his wife Thea von Harbou, he made only one more silent
feature in Germany before fleeing to Hollywood.
I watched the restored 2 ½ hour version.
I used to own this
on VHS tape but admittedly I couldn’t get into it (possibly due the degraded
quality of the image). So what better time to try watching it again (digitally)
then after re-reading the book by Kafka? This experiment reveals how closely
Welles stuck to Kafka’s story – with only a few added episodes (one involving a
computer) and some rearranging of the chapters in the book (plus a controversial
ending which Welles denies was intended when interviewed years later by
Bogdanovich in This is Orson Welles).
But the realisation of the text reveals some contrast with Kafka. For
one, Anthony Perkins, for all his strengths, seems too young and hapless for
the role of Joseph K even though Kafka writes that he is 30 years old (Perkins’
actual age); in the book K seems more arrogant, more established in his role at
the bank, more wilful and disagreeable. It seemed to me, in the book, that K’s
reactions might be due to his paranoia, free-floating guilt at being arrested on
unknown charges, and the oppressiveness of the Law and attendant judges,
advocates, investigators, and hangers on. But Perkins seems caught in a rapidly
escalating situation, as the pacing of the film thrusts him from scene to scene,
giving him little relief (whereas the book is broken up by long monologues and
less dynamic passages). Although one might think that Kafka’s text might lend
itself to drab bureaucratic greys and unforgivingly bleak settings, instead
Welles, true to his nature, can’t help throwing in more ornate and visually
interesting settings shot at oblique angles, with the film shot in high
contrast black and white. As with some of Welles’ other features, The Trial is
highly episodic, introducing a series of different characters played by high
profile actors (Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider) in small parts. Welles himself
plays K’s lawyer who may be feathering his own nest rather than helping K
(though he argues that he does more for K than for his other clients, such as
Block played by Welles favourite Akim Tamiroff). Despite his perpetual lack of funding,
The Trial turned out to be one of Welles’ least compromised works, even if his
choice of Kafka may not have been perfectly aligned with this usual themes.
The Man Who Wasn’t
There (2001) – J. Coen & E. Coen
The Coen Brothers
love film noir, from their first feature (Blood Simple, 1984) through Miller’s
Crossing (1990) and possibly including Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998)
and No Country for Old Men (2007). These
latter films are genre-bending masterpieces but the Coens playfully toy with
form and content in even their straightest films. On the surface, The Man Who
Wasn’t There (2001) feels like a very sincere homage to the noirs of the 1940s
(think James M. Cain) but, on second glance, it doesn’t shy away from some
other literary references and comic asides (in true Coen style). Shot in
faux-black-and-white (colour but converted in the lab) by Roger Deakins but
still featuring the chiaroscuro lighting preferred by noir cinematographers, as
well as perfect period sets and costumes – you get the sense that this was a
labour of love for the team, reconstructing the past and its dark moves. It may be no surprise that the film’s smalltown
locale is Santa Rosa, CA, where Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) also takes
place. Billy Bob Thornton plays Ed Crane, a barber (narrating the film in a
voiceover from the unknown future) who suspects that his wife Doris (Frances
McDormand) is having an affair with her boss at the department store, Big Jim (James
Gandolfini). When an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new
entrepreneurial venture (dry cleaning!) appears, he decides to (anonymously) blackmail
Big Jim for the $10K he needs, threatening to expose the affair. As Big Jim’s
wife is the actual department store heiress, this puts him into a desperate
situation – and soon things spiral out of control. The plot takes many twists
and turns, reeling in Scarlett Johansson’s Lolita-reference Birdy, Tony
Shalhoub’s cocky lawyer Freddy Ridenschneider, not to mention Coen stalwarts
Michael Badalucco and Jon Polito in quirky supporting roles. There are a fair
few things you’d never encounter in the noirs of the Forties! This time
through, having just re-read Camus’ The Stranger (1942), it struck me just how
much Ed Crane’s character echoes Meursault from the book – a man of few words,
who responds spontaneously in the moment, absorbed by perceptions and
sensations, who ultimately comes to accept the absurdity of existence with no
regrets. Stir in Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle and the poem Antigonish and there’s a bit more than meets
the eye here.
Aito claims not to
like movies, but when I was pondering what to watch, I asked him. He said he prefers character-driven drama to
plot-driven genre films (“anyone can write a superhero film”, he claims). After that, there seemed no other choice than
Sentimental Value, the Grand Prix winner from last year’s Cannes Film Festival
(second place to Jafar Panahi’s It was Just an Accident) and Best Foreign Film
at the 2025 Academy Awards. Actress
Renata Reinsve (who plays eldest daughter Nora Borg here) is having her time in
the sun, after success with director Joachim Trier’s earlier film, The Worst
Person in the World (2021), which I haven’t yet seen, and the 2026 Cannes Palme
d’Or winner, Fjord, directed by Romanian Cristian Mungiu – plus cult hit
Backrooms (2026; youngster Kane Parsons). She’s excellent here, playing an
unstable actress experiencing success on stage and TV who is approached by her
estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a world-famous director who has
not made a film for 15 years but wants her to star in a personal project he
hopes to get funded. They’ve made contact again at the funeral for her mother,
his ex-wife, but she still feels hurt by his long absence from her life. Her
younger sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), also starred in one of her
father’s films when she was a child but is unwilling to have her own son join
the cast of his latest venture, having felt her father’s attention dwindle as
soon as that film wrapped. Indeed, when
his daughter refuses to participate, he turns his attention to Hollywood
starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) who attracts Netflix funding but requires
the film to be in English, rather than Norwegian (or Swedish; Borg is a
Norwegian who moved to Sweden as a child, but Skarsgård is Swedish and Reinsve is
Norwegian -- as is director Trier). As
far as character-driven drama goes, there is more than enough psycho-dynamically-speaking
for this cast to sink their teeth into (they do!) and Trier handles the unfolding
tensions with flair (and a nice use of music, for punctuation or transition).
Although it portends to be yet another film about making films, it is much less
invested in the craft of making films and much more invested in the family
relationships here (implying that we keep these relationships out of
sentimental value only, perhaps); that said, the title might just be a wink at audience
members looking for the kind of meta-commentary often found in films like these
– it hints at the healthy dose of sentimentality front-loaded in the film which
yields several cathartic moments and is tied up with a bow at the end. Trier clearly knows what audiences want – and
critics too. Worth your time.
Jafar Panahi’s
2025 Palme d’Or winner is admittedly not an easy watch, despite its use of
comedy to cut its tension. That comedy made me think of Waiting for Godot before
it was inevitably mentioned by the characters themselves (it is comedy rooted
in absurdity). The parallel is that these characters spend the entire movie
pondering whether the one-legged man they have captured really is or is not
their former torturer – but they can’t know for certain because all of them
were blindfolded during their time in prison as political dissidents (or simply
people who ran afoul of the State). Panahi himself has spent time in prison in
Iran and has been banned from making films there, but still has found ways to
complete his projects, outlaw style.
Where in the past he has criticised the government for their treatment
of women and their violations of human rights more broadly, here it feels more
personal – a bitter recitation of the terrible injustices inflicted on innocent
civilians by their own government. The plot feels like a loose framework (they
drive around Tehran in a van seeking to find others who can identify their captive)
to allow the characters to speak their truths, directly to the audience. Only
late in the film, in a scene shot entirely in red filtered lights, do we hear a
version of the government’s response, that political opposition can’t be
allowed because it undermines support for the revolution. This seems to be the hallmark of those who
know that their power is invalid, without support of the people as a whole. Yet Panahi’s message is that, despite the injustices
and horror wielded against them, protesters must maintain the moral high ground,
as it is in empathy, social justice, and respect for human rights, even of
those who transgress against us, where strength lies.
Inexplicably, I
never reviewed James Whale’s classic version of the H. G. Wells’ story, even
having watched it many times before (and now in 4K Ultra HD). This is Claude Rains’ Hollywood debut: even if
you don’t actually see him for most of the film, that voice is enough! We begin
somewhere in the middle, after Rains as Jack Griffin has already discovered the
secret of invisibility (through chemical means) and now desperately wants to
find the antidote, to become visible again.
He’s holed up at a local British pub/hotel owned by Una O’Connor and
Forrester Harvey (playing as broadly as they can for comic relief), becoming
more and more disagreeable (under his bandages, hat, and false nose) until they
call in the constable. Meanwhile, the
head of his lab Cranley (Henry Travers) and scientific colleague Kemp (William
Harrigan) have figured out that Griffin is the Invisible Man and even know the
unfortunate side effects of the chemical he’s used that will eventually make
him go mad. Although Cranley and his
daughter, Griffin’s love interest, Flora (Gloria Stuart, later in Titanic,
1997), want to help Griffin, his rival Kemp wants to turn him over to the
police. Of course, it doesn’t end well
for Griffin. Whale pulls out all the
stops with regard to the special effects and, as this is still the pre-Code
era, it shouldn’t be a surprise to find out that Griffin has to spend most of
his time naked – although he’s too preoccupied with finding a way back to
visibility to get up to much mischief (apart from a couple of murders and some
monomaniacal rambling). Quite a few
sequels followed this.
It seems that I
only go to the cinema for “event movies” these days, since everything else
seems to eventually come to the small screen (which has gotten increasingly
sophisticated across my lifetime). Somehow,
I scored some $7 tickets, so Amon and I headed out to see Christopher Nolan’s latest
this afternoon (though not in iMax or even 70mm). I purposefully hadn’t read too much (except parts
of one essay declaring it not true enough to Homer’s original). Amon and I have watched a lot of the classic
adventure films, so it is good to be able to say that this is a fine example of
the genre. Nolan introduces some of his
typical flashback structure to the film, where we first meet Penelope (Anne
Hathaway), wife of Odysseus (Matt Damon) and her son Telemachus (Tom Holland),
who have been awaiting Odysseus’s return from the Trojan War for the past 20
years. We know his exploits have been
passed among the people of Ithaca in song, but no one knows if he is alive or
dead, even though many of his men and even his King (Agamemnon) have long since
returned home. We soon discover that
Odysseus has been stranded in a mental fog, eating lotus flowers, on an island
with Calypso (Charlize Theron) recovering from his injuries for the past 7
years. We see his exploits in flashback, featuring the classic episodes involving
the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, the witch Circe (Samantha Morton), Scylla and
Charybdis, the Sirens, and more. Nolan knows how to manage the pacing of the
adventurous bits and the more talky parts of the narrative (mostly involving
Robert Pattinson and other suitors for the hand of Penelope and their conflict
with Telemachus and with Odysseus’s aging servant Eumaeus (John Leguizamo)) to
keep things moving across nearly 3 hours. As he journeys home to Ithaca,
Odysseus is occasionally visited by Athena (Zendaya) who serves as his guide
and inspiration. I’m not sure having Zendaya and Lupita Nyong'o (in a bit part
as Helen of Troy) in the cast is enough to make this film “woke” (although
perhaps some MAGA viewers may also have concerns about Elliot Page, who has a
key role); the American accents on display from Hathaway and Damon alone are
enough to require suspension of disbelief that this is really ancient Greece. (and
let’s leave the boring-old culture wars out of this anyway). Moreover, although
there is a lot of fighting, ultimately there is some anti-war sentiment here
too, as we learn of Odysseus’s regrets at the terrible killing and raping of
civilians in Troy by his own men/army. He wants to repent. (This doesn’t stop
him from becoming a one-man army late in the film though). As a spectacle, the
film is loud and action-packed although pretty sombre through-and-through. I only occasionally thought of Jason and the
Argonauts (1963) and Ray Harryhausen’s special effects but that was for kids
and this is for adults (with similarly wondrous cinematography but less of a
sense of wonder). Perhaps this would be
diminished on the small screen and perhaps I have over-rated it due to the
big-screen. Nevertheless, for an escapist day out, it ruled.
