Swing Time (1936)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Swing Time (1936) -- G. Stevens

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers demonstrate their chemistry, both through their antagonistic then romantic repartee and, of course, through their tremendous dancing (after 43 takes, her feet bled from the spinning).  Dry wit and oddball character actors spice things up.  I reckon I'm not too certain about Astaire in blackface doing "Bojangles of Harlem" but his dancing in this sequence is still pretty astounding. The times were what they were and this is relatively inoffensive, as these things go.  Astaire plays a poor bloke who is extraordinarily lucky at gambling but engaged to someone he doesn't love (especially after he meets Ginger). Perhaps I liked Top Hat a bit more -- Fred makes too many avoidable mistakes in this one, upping the tension unnecessarily. 

Footlight Parade (1933)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Footlight Parade (1933) -- L. Bacon

Here is another Busby Berkeley spectacular from Warner Brothers.  This time, Jimmy Cagney plays the musical theatre impresario who is on the ropes, struggling to stay in business against competition from the new rage of "talkies" that has eliminated the audience for musicals.  So, he creates "prologues" (basically song and dance numbers) to run before the film and he rolls these out across the country using performing "units".  Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell are here to sing and dance and there is the usual bevy of showgirls.  Oddly, the Berkeley numbers are saved for the final 30 minutes and they are pretty great (and somewhat lewd) as usual; all symmetrical designs formed by arms and legs and shot from above to look like flowers and even patriotic symbols.  Cagney can dance (as later displayed in Yankee Doodle Dandy) but I still prefer Gold Diggers of 1933.  

Giants and Toys (1958)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Giants and Toys (1958) -- Y. Masumura

Manic black comedy about the world of advertising from sixties rebel Yasuzo Masumura sees three caramel companies duking it out for dominance of the candy market. A bad-teethed pixie is scouted by the World Caramel company to represent them and becomes a star, betraying her sponsors.  Betrayal is the name of the game here as everyone will do anything to get ahead, promote their product, make money.  In widescreen with crazy montages, jazzy soundtrack, over-the-top ad campaigns, a pop-art feel, and scathing prescient insights.

Beau Travail (1999)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Beau Travail (1999) -- C. Denis

Taking Melville's Billy Budd (which I have not read) as a launching point, Claire Denis transposes the action to Djibouti and the French Foreign Legion. Denis Lavant (more recently the star of Carax's Holy Motors) conveys the story of his own expulsion from the Legion in flashback and voiceover from a disillusioned point in the future where he escapes into extreme dancing at the local discotheque. The story focuses on his jealousy toward a younger Legionnaire who has captured the attention of the commanding officer and Lavant's attempts to discredit him. However, the story is only a loose framework that allows Denis to show her complete mastery of film language. Indeed, this film triumphs in a glorious visual style dotted with beautiful abstract patterns, carried along by superb editing that mixes and matches segments shot differently into a vibrant whole.  True, I drifted at times, but a second viewing or one on the big screen might curb that tendency.

Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Spirit of the Beehive (1973) -- V. Erice

Gently surreal, as perhaps all films shot in Spain are required to be.  This one takes place in the early 1940s, far away from civilization, where a travelling cinema brings fantastic entertainment to adults and children alike.  For two small girls, James Whale's Frankenstein is a dramatic experience beyond those that children are expected to have; its impact on them returned me back to the days of the monster under the bed and Dracula hiding in the closet.  But the film is lightly fried, not nostalgic, not horror, just rich with sublimely observed anecdotes and the power of images.

Husbands (1970)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Husbands (1970) -- J. Cassavetes

A Cassavetes film is always an intense experience and Husbands is no different.  Subtitled "A comedy about death, life, and freedom", it doesn't seem like a comedy at all, unless you choose to treat the act of living as comedic.  Perhaps it is and we should.  Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Cassavetes himself are all pretty incredible, exuding raw emotion, laced with confusion and sometimes near delirium.  After the fourth of the friends dies, the remaining three look into the void, take stock, go on a bender, and potentially screw things up with their wives and kids.  As with all of Cassavetes films, there is a loose improvisatory feel here and some scenes go on too long, some exposition is seemingly missing, and you never know what will happen next.  In other words, great.

If… (1968)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

If… (1968) -- L. Anderson

Lindsay Anderson's heralded counter-culture film manages to portray a sense of the norms and culture of the British boarding school experience from its very opening scenes.  Then, it shows how arbitrary some of the institutional rules may be and how people in the position to enforce them may act in cruel and irresponsible ways (i.e. power corrupts).  This satirizing sets the stage for resistance and a trio of more independently minded students, led by Malcolm McDowell (impossibly young), take on the establishment.  The film has a slow build and ends with a shock (to which your reaction may show just how desensitized we've become 45 years later).  A tribute in spirit to Jean Vigo's Zero de Conduite (from 1933), also well worth checking out.

The Illumination (1973)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Illumination (1973) -- K. Zanussi

If you looked (back) at a life from say the end of high school up until age 30 and just tried to capture the "most important" events -- or at least tried to report how these were remembered, even if it was just, you know, a single image or a conversation of 1 or 2 minutes, what would that look like?  If you edited these memories together to create a 90 minute film, would it be a coherent narrative?  Would it pack an emotional punch? Would it yield "illumination"?  Stanislaw Latallo chooses to study physics and subsequently pursues an advanced degree, suspends, works in a mental hospital (with neurosurgical treatments), has romances, gets married, has a kid, returns to his degree (amazingly) and so on.  So, this might resonate more if you've considered science (or further study of any kind).  Also, if you are ready to engage with a more experimental storytelling style, in Polish (by Zanussi).

White Material (2009)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

White Material (2009) -- C. Denis

J. Hoberman used the word "lysergic" in his review and that's pretty apt because the Tindersticks soundtrack, used sparingly, does provide a hazy druggy sheen to parts of the movie.  Isabelle Huppert is determined to ignore the trouble that is all around her as the colonial era comes to a decided end in her part of Africa.  Claire Denis's film unblinkingly covers the terrain:  both rebels and the military armed and dangerous along with child soldiers seemingly in their own militia and perhaps much more dangerous.  The social and psychological effects of white settlement (and ownership -- Huppert runs a coffee plantation) in Africa are the focus -- the unnamed country is divided by their feelings toward the outsiders (even those born there).  Denis, also born and raised in Africa, provides impressions, images, something of a story, to show the legacy of (French) involvement and exploitation.  Shot in Cameroon, this is a beautiful horrifying and unresolved film.

Gerry (2002)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Gerry (2002) -- G. Van Sant

A very loosely defined plot (with I believe fully improvised dialogue) is just an excuse for beautiful landscape photography, shot in the Great Salt Lake, Death Valley, and somewhere in Argentina.  Matt Damon and Casey Affleck are lost, but really they are just figures against the ground. Gus Van Sant constructs his film as a sort of drone, long (perhaps seemingly interminable) shots with little dialogue but much beauty, interspersed with a few episodes (Affleck stuck on a rock, notably).  The minimalist music comes from Arvo Part. There are some stunning sequences here that can make you feel alive and then, in keeping with the plot (as it is), some that are more ominous.  View this as an experimental film, if you have the patience, and reap its rewards.

The Master (2012)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Master (2012) -- P. T. Anderson

Joaquin Phoenix gives a really weird performance, really weird but committed and striking, as a man who wanders into a cult (that is not exactly Scientology).  Philip Seymour Hoffman also turns on the acting juice as the titular leader, seemingly making it up as he goes along with science fiction flair and a hostile defensiveness toward criticism.  These characters occupy an amazingly photographed late 1940s/early 1950s landscape and an opaquely plotted story that leaves room for numerous interpretations and motivations.  Expect nothing less than an absorbing, sometimes confronting, often puzzling, but ultimately thought provoking work of art from Paul Thomas Anderson.

Moolaadé (2004)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Moolaadé (2004) -- O. Sembene

In retrospect, this was probably the best movie to watch for mother's day -- a bunch of African mothers fight the tribal elders to try to end the practice of "purifying" girls through genital mutilation.  Apparently, it still goes on and girls (aged 4 to 8) sometimes die from unsanitary conditions/infection/blood loss.  But this is a vibrant and colorful movie that brings culture alive even as it takes on the form of a parable, so don't be turned away by the topic.  It is a protest film by a director who was then 81 years old (Ousmane Sembene from Senegal) and it is feminist.  I wonder did it have any effect on real practice? The media are identified by the village elders as the source of the rebellion, and hence, in a surreal image, radios are burned.  But a travelling salesman who also represents a more westernized Africa is treated with more ambivalence by the director.  Fighting fire with fire, a moolaadé (protection spell) averts the immediate crisis and allows the women (or woman -- Collie Ardo Gallo Sy -- played by Fatoumata Coulibaly) to be heard, if not accepted.

Inland Empire (2006)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Inland Empire (2006) -- D. Lynch

My original (very brief) review was as follows:  "Horrible, beautiful, pulsating, ugly".  I stand by this but add the following:  David Lynch made this by gluing together a number of short films he made for other purposes (or for no express purpose) and eventually the sum reached 180 minutes.  It isn't coherent but your mind, trained as it is, wants to make a narrative out of the parts.  You can't make it work because Lynch uses "dream logic" but it is never dull trying (although I'll admit it does grow long).  The intensity of experience (and Laura Dern's performance) is what is so compelling here and there are allusions to the (much greater) Mulholland Dr, given the framing story is set on a Hollywood set. But this is largely an experimental film and no one should go into it expecting Twin Peaks.  Inland Empire still stands as Lynch's last feature and he may not make another.

Le Corbeau (1943)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Le Corbeau (1943) -- H. G. Clouzot

Extremely bitter tale (though laced with black humor) of a poison-pen writer who sows enmity among the residents of a provincial French town, beginning with a new doctor who is accused of being an abortionist.  Henri-Georges Clouzot treats the search for the culprit like a detective story and we are never certain who is telling the truth and who is not -- even the protagonist, with whom we might feel some identification, seems to be hiding something and is portrayed as a cold and rather unfeeling character.  Indeed, I did not ferret out the actual criminal (although one of many plausible possibilities) and had to be told at the end (a very apt ending). Clouzot made this for a German company during the French occupation and was subsequently banned from working for two years after the war ended (he went on to make the equally bleak Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques).  Nevertheless, the film can be read as a bitter take on the paranoia and suspicion fostered by the occupation, during which neighbors spied on neighbors and informed on each other to the gestapo.  One character here even declares "I'm not an informer!".  Hard to know whether this was understood (and accepted as reality) by the German censors or whether it slipped by.  The French later decided that it didn't make them look too good -- but indeed Clouzot is indicting all of humanity here.  Wonderfully shot in high contrast B & W and highly recommended.

The Long Good Friday (1980)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Long Good Friday (1980) -- J. Mackenzie

Easily my favorite British gangster film, driven by a powerhouse performance by Bob Hoskins and an amazing propulsive score by Francis Monkman.  Hoskins is the leader of a "corporation" that is seeking to bring the Olympics to London (in 1988) and do a multimillion pound development of the docklands area.  On Good Friday, he meets with his potential American business partner (played by Alphaville's Eddie Constantine) to seal the deal. However, all hell breaks loose, as bombs explode and Hoskins' associates are murdered.  He is being done over and he doesn't know by whom -- the movie unfolds as a good mystery should, only gradually revealing the brutal truth. The score, the editing, and the intermittent violence help to ratchet up the tension which shows in the emotional performances by Hoskins and his moll Helen Mirren.  Highly recommended. 

La Grande Illusion (1937)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

La Grande Illusion (1937) -- J. Renoir

Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay are shot down and placed in a German POW camp during WWI in Jean Renoir's anti-war masterpiece.  Beyond disputing the idea that war can solve anything (the "Grand Illusion"), he makes several related points along the way:  1) class differences may be wider than national differences (but the upper classes may serve no real purpose); 2) national boundaries are illusory (nature does not recognize them); 3)  Jews are just as human and noble as other people (an important point to make in 1937); 4) romance and friendships can easily exist across national, cultural, or religious divides; 5) war is a damn waste of lives, time, etc.  Why have we still not learned? Overall, the film is also an enjoyable story of camraderie with nary a shot fired -- indeed, from a contemporary perspective, this view of the experience of war is also very likely to be illusory and yet it continues.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Maltese Falcon (1941) -- J. Huston

What is it about The Maltese Falcon that makes it so compellingly rewatchable?  Is it the original story from Dashiell Hammett's novel, scripted by first-time director John Huston (who stayed very faithful to the book)? Perhaps;  it introduced the hard-boiled, pragmatic but honorable private eye to the silver screen (not withstanding a few earlier less notable versions of the book).  Is it Bogart's iconic performance?  Probably; his Sam Spade is his most perfectly realized character yet, setting the tone for a huge swathe of performances to come.  Is it the assortment of unusual character actors, filling out the minor parts (Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Elisha Cook, Jr. among them, with Mary Astor in a larger role)?  Yes; the film would not be the same with others.  Undoubtedly though, the whole package, with its wicked cynical look at humankind and our pursuit of "the stuff that dreams are made of", couched in a not-quite-noir (though often given credit as an early one) mise-en-scene, makes the film fresh each time I watch it.

Andrei Rublev (1969)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Andrei Rublev (1969) -- A. Tarkvosky

Scenes from the life of a fabled Russian icon painter in the early 15th century as projected into mud, rain, fire, and even up into the air (in the opening sequence) by Andrei Tarkovsky.  The short squalid lives of those living in this time seem authentically depicted and their horror and sadness undoubtedly influence the monk/artist (or this is what we are meant to believe).  Rublev even gives up making art (and speaking) because it seems pointless in a world so tragic, but he has his faith (in art, not religion -- although the two are intertwined, presumably for both Andrei's) restored through witnessing the fantastic rendering of a huge silver bell, another piece of creative achievement.  I saw a cut of about 180 minutes but longer versions do exist; they all assuredly include scenes of a Tartar/Mongol invasion, a pagan mayday-like nighttime ritual, an early balloon flight, a minstrel's shenanigans, and lots of trudging trudging trudging and querying querying querying.  Tarkovsky is deeply serious but his focus on detail and the intensity of his scrutiny are transcendental indeed.  It must have been a magnificent campaign to mount it.  This may not be my favorite of his films but I give it 5 stars.