Director: Philip Chidel
Stars: Christian Oliver and Dean Stapleton
Adam Schmidt is a student working in some sort of scientific or medical field, but he's apparently not a good student. This doesn't have much to do with his skill or knowledge, more with his attitude. He has difficulty in focusing, possibly due to chronic migraines. He also writes a blog called 'Meditating for a New Medicine', which doesn't impress his teachers, but does impress a mysterious stranger, who invites him via e-mail to work for him. This stranger is Dr Franklin Vick, and after Adam treks up to the 12,000 foot mark in remote Colorado to meet him, he promptly strangles him to death.
The point is that Dr Vick's work is in resurrection. He talks about cryonics and nanotechnology but he's working on ways to resurrect people who have died. And to put his theories into practice he kills Adam, who he calls Subject Two, over and over again, always bringing him back. The catch, as there's always a catch, is the fact that there are side effects. Slowly but surely, we progress through his methods without ever really being given much of a clue as to what he's doing. We get plenty of buzzwords and technical terms but they don't appear to add up to a full story. But the cycle continues: Adam dies, Adam comes back to life, Adam feels awesome, Adam hurts, Adam dies.
This is a strange film to watch, but the strangest thing is that the strangeness isn't due to the strange subject matter. Most of it is shot right up there in the Colorado mountains in the depth of winter, so the scenery is awesome and palpably cold. It's also far from anything else, so for almost the entire film we see only two people: one of whom is a gradually deteriorating and gradually changing specimen of humanity and the other of whom is a scarily accurate double of early Jack Nicholson right down to the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest beanie.
Christian Oliver is Subject Two and he brings an intriguing detachment to the role, one that I believe was necessary for the film to succeed as much as it does. Even when we get bored with the repetitiveness and gradual disconnection of the story, he's always there with an intriguing new reason for us to watch him. Those freaky contact lenses are part of it but far from all of it. Dean Stapleton is Dr Vick and he's obviously studied, deliberately studied, Jack Nicholson, not just his roles but his mannerisms and his smile and his everything. It's more than a little offputting.
There's a twist, which is actually pretty appropriate and I won't spoil, but as much as it's appreciated the film has already lost enough steam that it can't save it. The problem here is that there isn't anything definitive to say against the film: it's set in a gorgeous location with a decent script and solid acting. It looks good but somehow it doesn't feel good. It feels like it should have been so much more and I can't put my finger on why. That Jack Nicholson problem is unavoidable though.
Saturday, 31 January 2009
No Such Thing (2001)
Director: Hal Hartley
Stars: Sarah Polley, Robert John Burke and Helen Mirren
There's a rule in monster movies that you don't show the monster until you've built up all the suspense and sown all the doubt you need. This one ignores that and begins with the monster, recording his thoughts into a microphone. 'I'm not the monster I used to be,' he tells us, after explaining why he's killed an American television news crew sent to investigate rumours of his existence in an abandoned US missile silo in a remote northern part of Iceland. He's incredibly strong, he breathes fire and he has horns; he also acts like a petty hooligan, partly because he's an alcoholic insomniac but mostly because he's ostensibly immortal without a purpose in life.
He sends his recording back to WRQE in New York and it ends up in the hands of Beatrice, the young lady who despite talent and education makes the coffee every morning. Beatrice is also the fiancée of Jim the cameraman, who was among the crew sent to Iceland. WRQE are a cynical news organisation run, it would seem, by a particularly cynical Helen Mirren, whose character is only named The Boss. 'It's got to be somebody's fault', she says when Flight 167 crashes in the North Sea. On that plane is Beatrice, who managed to persuade The Boss to send her to Iceland, but by some sort of miracle she survives.
She has a weird mix of incredible luck and incredible bad luck, and bounces between these extremes. It takes her forever to get to the plane, for instance, because the way is blocked to her by circumstance wherever she goes: whether it be by terrorists, extreme activists or drug addicts. Yet she makes it through because of sheer luck, only to get dumped in the sea when the plane goes down. She's the sole survivor, but is paralysed and crippled and damaged to no small degree. The hospital in Iceland manages to fix her up through innovative surgery and six months later she's heading on out to find Jim, in the helpful company of Dr Anna for the beginning of the journey. Dr Anna is played by Julie Christie, another major name in this quirky film to play a small role.
It's a strange tale, with obvious similarities to the Beauty and the Beast myth, but with more angles than that to bring to bear. Beatrice is no dumb Beauty and the Monster is not your run of the mill misunderstood creature either. However they definitely change each other's perspectives on life and death and everything in between. Beatrice is blissfully free of the standard nonsense that plagues most of the rest of humankind, much closer to the true human spirit of raw honesty. The Monster is a lonely creature, not because he's shunned by the rest of the world but because he's the only one of his kind, everyone else pisses him off and he can't even kill himself to put himself out of his misery.
It's also not restricted to an insular mansion. Once Beatrice finally finds her way to the Monster's island, not quite how she expects either, she doesn't stay there. Instead of killing her or falling in love with her or all the usual expected outcomes, he explains that he wants to die. He needs her to to find a doctor called Artaud, a scientist who's as crazy as a loon, who can make it happen, but she refuses unless he comes with her. So off they jet to New York, where nothing goes remotely how they expect.
This is a highly touching film, though bizarrely it's the human connections that elicit the most response rather than those involving the Monster. Perhaps his situation is just too alien for us to really grasp. To me, it's most special in the way that Beatrice connects to everyone around her, as her sheer unrestrained humanity makes her as alien from most people in the film as the Monster is. The magic is in the way Dr Anna becomes utterly supportive, even though the story is free from the usual Hollywood sentimentality; it's in the way that the kids wait outside the hospital to witness their miracle; it's in the way that she floats through life dismissive and forgiving of anyone who wishes her harm.
It's amazingly well cast. Sarah Polley is simply perfect as Beatrice and Robert John Burke is amazing as the Monster. He is uncannily good at portraying emotion, even though he spends the entire film stuck under a large amount of makeup, very much up there with people like Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta or Andy Serkis in The Lord of the Rings, who thrived rather than suffered under similar hindrances. Neither Helen Mirren, Julie Christie or the many unknown and mostly Icelandic actors, steal the show, but what seems like everyone in the cast make their presence known.
It's also a very quotable film, written very cleverly and with the good fortune to have actors capable enough of delivering their lines with the right attitude behind them. Lines like 'She was spirited away by the ingenue', 'We'll call the network; they'll threaten someone' or 'Nobody's scared of me any more' seem like nothing written on the page here but are utterly appropriate in their context and delivered with panache so that they feel like genius. This is definitely a quirky film that people will happily quote around others who won't have the slightest idea what they're talking about. Oh, and we definitely need monsters.
Stars: Sarah Polley, Robert John Burke and Helen Mirren
There's a rule in monster movies that you don't show the monster until you've built up all the suspense and sown all the doubt you need. This one ignores that and begins with the monster, recording his thoughts into a microphone. 'I'm not the monster I used to be,' he tells us, after explaining why he's killed an American television news crew sent to investigate rumours of his existence in an abandoned US missile silo in a remote northern part of Iceland. He's incredibly strong, he breathes fire and he has horns; he also acts like a petty hooligan, partly because he's an alcoholic insomniac but mostly because he's ostensibly immortal without a purpose in life.
He sends his recording back to WRQE in New York and it ends up in the hands of Beatrice, the young lady who despite talent and education makes the coffee every morning. Beatrice is also the fiancée of Jim the cameraman, who was among the crew sent to Iceland. WRQE are a cynical news organisation run, it would seem, by a particularly cynical Helen Mirren, whose character is only named The Boss. 'It's got to be somebody's fault', she says when Flight 167 crashes in the North Sea. On that plane is Beatrice, who managed to persuade The Boss to send her to Iceland, but by some sort of miracle she survives.
She has a weird mix of incredible luck and incredible bad luck, and bounces between these extremes. It takes her forever to get to the plane, for instance, because the way is blocked to her by circumstance wherever she goes: whether it be by terrorists, extreme activists or drug addicts. Yet she makes it through because of sheer luck, only to get dumped in the sea when the plane goes down. She's the sole survivor, but is paralysed and crippled and damaged to no small degree. The hospital in Iceland manages to fix her up through innovative surgery and six months later she's heading on out to find Jim, in the helpful company of Dr Anna for the beginning of the journey. Dr Anna is played by Julie Christie, another major name in this quirky film to play a small role.
It's a strange tale, with obvious similarities to the Beauty and the Beast myth, but with more angles than that to bring to bear. Beatrice is no dumb Beauty and the Monster is not your run of the mill misunderstood creature either. However they definitely change each other's perspectives on life and death and everything in between. Beatrice is blissfully free of the standard nonsense that plagues most of the rest of humankind, much closer to the true human spirit of raw honesty. The Monster is a lonely creature, not because he's shunned by the rest of the world but because he's the only one of his kind, everyone else pisses him off and he can't even kill himself to put himself out of his misery.
It's also not restricted to an insular mansion. Once Beatrice finally finds her way to the Monster's island, not quite how she expects either, she doesn't stay there. Instead of killing her or falling in love with her or all the usual expected outcomes, he explains that he wants to die. He needs her to to find a doctor called Artaud, a scientist who's as crazy as a loon, who can make it happen, but she refuses unless he comes with her. So off they jet to New York, where nothing goes remotely how they expect.
This is a highly touching film, though bizarrely it's the human connections that elicit the most response rather than those involving the Monster. Perhaps his situation is just too alien for us to really grasp. To me, it's most special in the way that Beatrice connects to everyone around her, as her sheer unrestrained humanity makes her as alien from most people in the film as the Monster is. The magic is in the way Dr Anna becomes utterly supportive, even though the story is free from the usual Hollywood sentimentality; it's in the way that the kids wait outside the hospital to witness their miracle; it's in the way that she floats through life dismissive and forgiving of anyone who wishes her harm.
It's amazingly well cast. Sarah Polley is simply perfect as Beatrice and Robert John Burke is amazing as the Monster. He is uncannily good at portraying emotion, even though he spends the entire film stuck under a large amount of makeup, very much up there with people like Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta or Andy Serkis in The Lord of the Rings, who thrived rather than suffered under similar hindrances. Neither Helen Mirren, Julie Christie or the many unknown and mostly Icelandic actors, steal the show, but what seems like everyone in the cast make their presence known.
It's also a very quotable film, written very cleverly and with the good fortune to have actors capable enough of delivering their lines with the right attitude behind them. Lines like 'She was spirited away by the ingenue', 'We'll call the network; they'll threaten someone' or 'Nobody's scared of me any more' seem like nothing written on the page here but are utterly appropriate in their context and delivered with panache so that they feel like genius. This is definitely a quirky film that people will happily quote around others who won't have the slightest idea what they're talking about. Oh, and we definitely need monsters.
Sunday, 25 January 2009
Goth Cruise (2008)
Director: Jeanie Finlay
Most people spend their life trying to be just like everyone else, but I love those people who choose to be themselves, to find their true being or to just invent one. I've found that often the strangest people are the most tolerant and I simply adore the concept of addressing convention by simply being who you are where other people are. This film follows the fifth annual goth cruise, where 150 goths do precisely that by doing something ostensibly un-goth like going on a five day Caribbean cruise from New Jersey to Bermuda and back. Priceless.
Best of all, this is the 4th annual Goth Cruise. It isn't new, it's established and it obviously worked so well that it's continuing onward and upward. Beyond the 150 goths, there are 2,500 other folks, ostensibly normal people, who provide some great reactions to this bunch of freaks in their midst. There are preconceived notions, of course, but it's the double glances that really made me laugh, those and the odd comments and phrases here and there. 'Comfort the disturbed. Disturb the comfortable.' 'Rocky Horror is a gateway drug to having a social life.' 'We only wear black until they invent a darker colour.' All very cool, even if I've heard some of them before.
The worst part of the film is that there isn't more of this sort of thing. When it's there it's fascinating, when it isn't there it's notable by its absence. Luckily it returns big time towards the end of the film for a sort of costume party, though there's not enough time spent watching the reactions to Lobster dressed up as Satan, painted all red and wearing many horns; or especially to Storm, the six and half foot tall black crossdresser whose mother is a pentecostal pastor. The other approach that should have been more focused on is the fact that everyone here seems to have spent their time wanting to be away from where they were but somehow always end up back there.
The other downside here is that most of these 'goths' aren't goths, though that is acknowledged and there is an attempt to address just why it's the case. They're certainly other than the norm in some way, even though they're often the most stable and professional members of society and the film focuses on a variety of them. However none of them would seem to be true goths, most of which tend to keep tantalisingly wandering past in the background. The film focuses on a variety of them: a couple with a young son from Wrexham, a honeymooning couple from New Jersey, a single father from Oregon, a musician and writer called Voltaire.
What they are is a good question: there are fetishists, punks, crossdressers; most are extroverts, at least the ones we focus on, but then that has to come with the territory. There's no real attempt beyond a couple of lines spoken by some of these characters to address how these different subcultures can all coexist happily together in a confined space for a five day cruise. The points at which subcultures cross is fascinating territory but you'll have write your own commentary on that for this film.
This is a worthy documentary and I enjoyed the film, as did my wife and stepson, but it's very much a missed opportunity, perhaps a glimpse into something but not much more than a glimpse. I spent a lot of time wondering what the earlier goth cruises were like: were they full of real goths? I guess we'll never know.
Most people spend their life trying to be just like everyone else, but I love those people who choose to be themselves, to find their true being or to just invent one. I've found that often the strangest people are the most tolerant and I simply adore the concept of addressing convention by simply being who you are where other people are. This film follows the fifth annual goth cruise, where 150 goths do precisely that by doing something ostensibly un-goth like going on a five day Caribbean cruise from New Jersey to Bermuda and back. Priceless.
Best of all, this is the 4th annual Goth Cruise. It isn't new, it's established and it obviously worked so well that it's continuing onward and upward. Beyond the 150 goths, there are 2,500 other folks, ostensibly normal people, who provide some great reactions to this bunch of freaks in their midst. There are preconceived notions, of course, but it's the double glances that really made me laugh, those and the odd comments and phrases here and there. 'Comfort the disturbed. Disturb the comfortable.' 'Rocky Horror is a gateway drug to having a social life.' 'We only wear black until they invent a darker colour.' All very cool, even if I've heard some of them before.
The worst part of the film is that there isn't more of this sort of thing. When it's there it's fascinating, when it isn't there it's notable by its absence. Luckily it returns big time towards the end of the film for a sort of costume party, though there's not enough time spent watching the reactions to Lobster dressed up as Satan, painted all red and wearing many horns; or especially to Storm, the six and half foot tall black crossdresser whose mother is a pentecostal pastor. The other approach that should have been more focused on is the fact that everyone here seems to have spent their time wanting to be away from where they were but somehow always end up back there.
The other downside here is that most of these 'goths' aren't goths, though that is acknowledged and there is an attempt to address just why it's the case. They're certainly other than the norm in some way, even though they're often the most stable and professional members of society and the film focuses on a variety of them. However none of them would seem to be true goths, most of which tend to keep tantalisingly wandering past in the background. The film focuses on a variety of them: a couple with a young son from Wrexham, a honeymooning couple from New Jersey, a single father from Oregon, a musician and writer called Voltaire.
What they are is a good question: there are fetishists, punks, crossdressers; most are extroverts, at least the ones we focus on, but then that has to come with the territory. There's no real attempt beyond a couple of lines spoken by some of these characters to address how these different subcultures can all coexist happily together in a confined space for a five day cruise. The points at which subcultures cross is fascinating territory but you'll have write your own commentary on that for this film.
This is a worthy documentary and I enjoyed the film, as did my wife and stepson, but it's very much a missed opportunity, perhaps a glimpse into something but not much more than a glimpse. I spent a lot of time wondering what the earlier goth cruises were like: were they full of real goths? I guess we'll never know.
Saturday, 24 January 2009
Cherry 2000 (1987)
Director: Steve De Jarnatt
Writer: Michael Almereyde, based on a story by Lloyd Fonvielle
Stars: Melanie Griffith, David Andrews, Ben Johnson, Tim Thomerson and Brion James
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Everything looks very romantic at the beginning of Cherry 2000, so romantic that it feels like a setup for something we might see on Skinemax *. It's all pink light and female flesh, candles and red roses, steamy make out sessions in a kitchen flooded with bubbles. However Cherry, the young blonde lady in the equation, isn't a human being. She's a robot, albeit a very realistic one, and she malfunctions right there in the bubbles. Unfortunately the hardware is fried and apparently can't be repaired, though her memory chip is intact. Because owner/boyfriend Sam Treadwell is rather attached to his Cherry, he wants her back and heads out to do whatever it takes. His only option is to find a tracker called Johnson, working out of the Glory Hole Hotel, to head out into zone seven to find a replacement Cherry 2000 from the robot graveyard there to plug his Cherry's chip into.
Yes, this is the future, and it looks awesome. This film was made in 1987 and it's all glorious retro tech, even for then, mixed with a very intriguing take on futurism: some of is is notably ahead of its time, some of it is wildly fantastic or wildly wrong (civilisation falls when gas prices hit $2.11 a gallon?). The attention to detail is superb and everything is joyously analogue with not a drop of CGI to be found. Think Star Wars Episode IV not Episode III. The look and feel of the film is the primary appeal here, with lots of new wave fashion, huge industrial installations and post apocalyptic culture run amok.
The cast is impeccable, especially to those who follow cult cinema. There's Tim Thomerson as Lester, whose gang runs zone seven, thus making him a whacked out judge, jury and executioner. There's Brion James as a sneaky thug of a tracker called Stacy. Laurence Fishburne is a lawyer at a bar back in Anaheim. Johnson's uncle, a legendary tracker called Six Finger Jake, is no less a name than Ben Johnson. Fellow western legend Harry Carey Jr plays Snappy Tom who runs Last Chance Brothel and Gas. Unfortunately all these great character actors have far too little to do and are mostly there to support Melanie Griffith and David Andrews. Griffith is the tracker, Edith Johnson, and Andrews is Sam Treadwell, who reminds very much of Emilio Estevez in
There are also a lot of innovative takes on social customs that are thrown out there like scattershot. I love environments that feature people with wildly disparate looks and the only thing better is when they live in highly individual expressions of their inner selves that feel like they're built out of salvage from the greatest junk in the world. I loved Las Vegas half buried in sand, the Last Chance Brothel and Gas, and the Glory Hole Hotel, a wild place. Yep, there's plenty to look at here and it's all good, right down to Melanie Griffith's bright red hair that looks like she scalped Molly Ringwald and made a wig out of her prize.
There's been some sort of war or breakdown in authority or something. the US has split up into areas that are supposedly civilised and areas that are pure anarchy. California is civilisation and the Nevada border is the wildlands. Las Vegas is deserted (except for basements full of inactivated robots) and half buried in sand. In California everything is either illegal and obtained entirely under the counter or negotiated beforehand with lawyers and contracts, right down to sex with strangers you meet in bars. And of course, people with money like Sam get to live with robots that substitute for humans in every way. In Nevada, everything's real, utterly real from the pain to the pleasure, from the best people to the worst. As Lester points out to his men, "Remember gentlemen, life is adventure."
The general approach of course is that in travelling into the wilds, the guy from civilisation finds that civilisation isn't really that civilised and he has to go all the way to this utter anarchy to find what being human is really all about, not just in his choice of women but in himself too. The difference is most obvious when he finds his Cherry 2000 who proves utterly useless in a gun battle in the ruins of a Las Vegas casino. "Honey," she says, "I'd rather be watching this on television". She's a ditz, the epitome of Californian plastic beauty with literally no brain.
All of this is really cool, but the logistics of how we get there don't make a heck of a lot of sense. There are lot of scenes that defy logic, emotion and reality, from the slew of missiles managing to completely miss a sitting target (a car lifted up into the air by a giant magnet), Sam's sudden transition into action star, the fact that dead robots keep breathing and a whole lot more. If you're looking for plot holes you're certainly going to find them. In fact you're going to find them even if you don't want to go looking for them. As a story, this film has huge promise but completely fails to deliver. However, somehow it's still a joy to watch: I guess that makes it a definitive guilty pleasure. Maybe it's because it looks so utterly cool. Unfortunately director Steve De Jarnatt only made one more film, Miracle Mile, before switching entirely to TV.
* This is a changed sentence. The opening line originally read, "Everything looks very romantic at the beginning of Cherry 2000, so romantic that it feels like a setup for soft ****.", where the four stars represent a word that apparently became a trigger fourteen years after I posted this review. I was forced to change the text to avoid having a warning that readers have to acknowledge before getting to the post. That's not good AI. But, hey, I took the opportunity to add posters because I didn't do that this early in the blog.
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Pocketful of Miracles (1961)
Director: Frank Capra
Stars: Glenn Ford, Bette Davis, Hope Lange and Arthur O'Connell
This one was always going to be interesting. It's Frank Capra's last film, after a long career full of classics. Surprisingly it's a remake and even more surprisingly it's a remake of one of his own films: Lady for a Day, made 28 years earlier in 1933. Now remakes generally suck. After all if a story is watch watching again it's really worth watching first time round, and the originals are often so defining that anything copying becomes just that: a poor copy. Any remake of something as powerful as Lady for a Day would seem to be a pretty bad idea, given that May Robson and Warren William were the original stars. Who could Capra find to follow them in 1961?
And while you're thinking about it, realise that May Robson wasn't just good as Apple Annie, the old lady who sells lucky apples on the streets of New York, she was simply perfect. As Dave the Dude, the powerful gangster who has a superstition of always buying one of Annie's apples a day (and happily paying over the odds for it), Capra originally had Warren William in the part. Now, for those of you who don't know who Warren William was, he was the epitome of the precodes and the only actor to ever better a part that he played was Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.
Given that this was 1961, Bette Davis may have been the only actress who could have even attempted both halves of this character, which makes it a good job that Capra hired her for the part. She's pretty decent too, though there's a little too much makeup in play. It's certainly not her best role, and there isn't enough of her, but she's excellent. But Glenn Ford as Dave the Dude? That didn't sound like a good idea, though given that Glenn Ford was co-producing, even Capra himself didn't argue, even when he wanted his girlfriend Hope Lange cast as his on screen sweetheart, and he got the top credit too over Bette Davis!
To be fair, Ford does a pretty good job. He patently isn't Warren William, but then nobody was. He may not be great but he's better than I expected and he provides a decent point for the many joyous character actors in support roles to act around. Unfortunately he's also apparently the reason why Frank Capra retired from the movie business: they clashed on everything.
The story is pretty basic. Apple Annie is a lady of the streets: she lives in a run down basement, drunk on gin most of the time, and she's hardly a major name in any circle except the panhandlers of Brooklyn. However she has a daughter in Barcelona who thinks she's the rich and established Mrs E Worthington-Manville, because Annie has been sending her mail on purloined stationery from the Hotel Marberry and exaggerated everything she could to hide who she really is. She's even been sending her money, year after year, but everything's safe at such a distance. The problem comes when Louise, her daughter, replies to say that she's going to marry a Count and they're heading to New York to see her.
It's the support that does the best job here. Apple Annie and Dave the Dude are the pivots around everyone else acts and they're played by a lot of people who are more than happy to steal every scene they can. Peter Falk is great as a thirties style hood called Joyboy, Dave the Dude's right hand man. Mickey Shaughnessy as Junior, the Dude's dumb sidekick, is very reminiscent of the old days of Frank McHugh and Allen Jenkins. While they're playing thirties characters in the sixties, many of the rest were playing thirties characters in the thirties. Capra certainly assembled a gift of a cast. He even introduces Ann-Margret in her first role as Annie's daughter.
Edward Everett Horton may be the best of the bunch as an elderly but characterful butler, though as with the others he looks scarily old here given that I'm used to seeing him a couple of decades younger. Thomas Mitchell could be the biggest natural scene stealer the cinema ever saw, and here he's the judge and pool shark who Annie picks to be her 'husband'. There's Barton MacLane as a police commissioner, Jack Elam as a hood, John Litel as a police inspector. There's even Snub Pollard, proving that Capra certainly went back a way to select his actors. I just wish I could have found George E Stone. I'm pretty sure he's the blind panhandler but I never got the shot I wanted to clinch it.
Stars: Glenn Ford, Bette Davis, Hope Lange and Arthur O'Connell
This one was always going to be interesting. It's Frank Capra's last film, after a long career full of classics. Surprisingly it's a remake and even more surprisingly it's a remake of one of his own films: Lady for a Day, made 28 years earlier in 1933. Now remakes generally suck. After all if a story is watch watching again it's really worth watching first time round, and the originals are often so defining that anything copying becomes just that: a poor copy. Any remake of something as powerful as Lady for a Day would seem to be a pretty bad idea, given that May Robson and Warren William were the original stars. Who could Capra find to follow them in 1961?
And while you're thinking about it, realise that May Robson wasn't just good as Apple Annie, the old lady who sells lucky apples on the streets of New York, she was simply perfect. As Dave the Dude, the powerful gangster who has a superstition of always buying one of Annie's apples a day (and happily paying over the odds for it), Capra originally had Warren William in the part. Now, for those of you who don't know who Warren William was, he was the epitome of the precodes and the only actor to ever better a part that he played was Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.
Given that this was 1961, Bette Davis may have been the only actress who could have even attempted both halves of this character, which makes it a good job that Capra hired her for the part. She's pretty decent too, though there's a little too much makeup in play. It's certainly not her best role, and there isn't enough of her, but she's excellent. But Glenn Ford as Dave the Dude? That didn't sound like a good idea, though given that Glenn Ford was co-producing, even Capra himself didn't argue, even when he wanted his girlfriend Hope Lange cast as his on screen sweetheart, and he got the top credit too over Bette Davis!
To be fair, Ford does a pretty good job. He patently isn't Warren William, but then nobody was. He may not be great but he's better than I expected and he provides a decent point for the many joyous character actors in support roles to act around. Unfortunately he's also apparently the reason why Frank Capra retired from the movie business: they clashed on everything.
The story is pretty basic. Apple Annie is a lady of the streets: she lives in a run down basement, drunk on gin most of the time, and she's hardly a major name in any circle except the panhandlers of Brooklyn. However she has a daughter in Barcelona who thinks she's the rich and established Mrs E Worthington-Manville, because Annie has been sending her mail on purloined stationery from the Hotel Marberry and exaggerated everything she could to hide who she really is. She's even been sending her money, year after year, but everything's safe at such a distance. The problem comes when Louise, her daughter, replies to say that she's going to marry a Count and they're heading to New York to see her.
It's the support that does the best job here. Apple Annie and Dave the Dude are the pivots around everyone else acts and they're played by a lot of people who are more than happy to steal every scene they can. Peter Falk is great as a thirties style hood called Joyboy, Dave the Dude's right hand man. Mickey Shaughnessy as Junior, the Dude's dumb sidekick, is very reminiscent of the old days of Frank McHugh and Allen Jenkins. While they're playing thirties characters in the sixties, many of the rest were playing thirties characters in the thirties. Capra certainly assembled a gift of a cast. He even introduces Ann-Margret in her first role as Annie's daughter.
Edward Everett Horton may be the best of the bunch as an elderly but characterful butler, though as with the others he looks scarily old here given that I'm used to seeing him a couple of decades younger. Thomas Mitchell could be the biggest natural scene stealer the cinema ever saw, and here he's the judge and pool shark who Annie picks to be her 'husband'. There's Barton MacLane as a police commissioner, Jack Elam as a hood, John Litel as a police inspector. There's even Snub Pollard, proving that Capra certainly went back a way to select his actors. I just wish I could have found George E Stone. I'm pretty sure he's the blind panhandler but I never got the shot I wanted to clinch it.
Saturday, 17 January 2009
You, John Jones! (1943)
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Stars: James Cagney, Ann Sothern and Margaret O'Brien
Having worked my way through most of the career of James Cagney, I was almost surprised to find this film that I hadn't even heard of. It's a short, a so-called wartime short because, well that's pretty obvious. When the US joined the war, Hollywood joined in too, with stars working war bond drives and directors making documentaries and shorts like these. This one's a pretty hard hitting one, to really highlight to Americans that while there may not seem to be much happening back home, that certainly wasn't the case elsewhere in the world.
Cagney is the John Jones of the title, of course, and he's an air raid warden, number 18787. He's obviously serious about his job but out on a blue alert, presumably some sort of practice run for the wardens, he talks to God and thanks him for the fact that it's not a real air raid. God responds and gives him a pretty vicious slice of reality to underline that while he may well mean what he says he doesn't really understand the true depth of the words he used.
So while there's no air raid happening in the US on John Jones's watch, meaning that his daughter is happy and safe at home, practising the Gettysburg Address for an elocution contest at school the next day, other children are not so lucky. God treats him to tableaux of other children in other countries fighting the same enemy, all in the image of his own, whether they be left screaming in bombed out houses in England, hobbling around with blown off feet in Greece, living in the gutter on thrown away melon in China and on out. God even brings in Lidice, completely missing the point but he did only have a few seconds to work with.
Of course the end comes when God points out that he's on John Jones's side, the side of the United States of America. While the film is only ten minutes long, it carries serious impact to the degree that it's only an hour later that obvious questions leap out like 'Why would God need to take sides when taking sides would imply involvement and if he was going to be involved then why didn't just use his omnipotency to win before atrocities like Lidice could take place?' Such dilemmas have plagued the theologians for years. Who'd have thought they'd plague Jimmy Cagney?
Stars: James Cagney, Ann Sothern and Margaret O'Brien
Having worked my way through most of the career of James Cagney, I was almost surprised to find this film that I hadn't even heard of. It's a short, a so-called wartime short because, well that's pretty obvious. When the US joined the war, Hollywood joined in too, with stars working war bond drives and directors making documentaries and shorts like these. This one's a pretty hard hitting one, to really highlight to Americans that while there may not seem to be much happening back home, that certainly wasn't the case elsewhere in the world.
Cagney is the John Jones of the title, of course, and he's an air raid warden, number 18787. He's obviously serious about his job but out on a blue alert, presumably some sort of practice run for the wardens, he talks to God and thanks him for the fact that it's not a real air raid. God responds and gives him a pretty vicious slice of reality to underline that while he may well mean what he says he doesn't really understand the true depth of the words he used.
So while there's no air raid happening in the US on John Jones's watch, meaning that his daughter is happy and safe at home, practising the Gettysburg Address for an elocution contest at school the next day, other children are not so lucky. God treats him to tableaux of other children in other countries fighting the same enemy, all in the image of his own, whether they be left screaming in bombed out houses in England, hobbling around with blown off feet in Greece, living in the gutter on thrown away melon in China and on out. God even brings in Lidice, completely missing the point but he did only have a few seconds to work with.
Of course the end comes when God points out that he's on John Jones's side, the side of the United States of America. While the film is only ten minutes long, it carries serious impact to the degree that it's only an hour later that obvious questions leap out like 'Why would God need to take sides when taking sides would imply involvement and if he was going to be involved then why didn't just use his omnipotency to win before atrocities like Lidice could take place?' Such dilemmas have plagued the theologians for years. Who'd have thought they'd plague Jimmy Cagney?
Friday, 16 January 2009
Downstairs (1932)
Director: Monta Bell
Stars: John Gilbert and Paul Lukas
Life at the von Burgen castle seems to be pretty happy, so much so that 'blissful' would appear to be a better word. We open with Albert and Anna getting married, a wedding thrown by the Baron and Baroness for their servants. Albert is their butler and head servant, his family has served succeeding barons for generations and the von Burgens are obviously very thankful. Anna also works for the family, serving the Baroness. Everyone seems to be happy and what's more everyone seems to trust everyone, the servants downstairs following a code and the family upstairs treating them well. Even the actors playing these characters are reliable names: Paul Lukas as Albert, Reginald Owen and Olga Baclanova as the Baron and Baroness, Virginia Bruce as Anna.
And into this bliss comes a new chauffeur, Karl Schneider, to turn everything upside down. He's played by John Gilbert and this is unmistakably his film, not just because he's the lead character and the catalyst for everything that happens but because he wrote the story too. While it's no spectacular success, none of it is bad but the strange thing is that this is 1932 and it's hard to see the motivations of the studio. Why would the biggest studio of them all, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, whose chief, Louis B Mayer, the most important man in Hollywood, was apparently bent on destroying Gilbert's career, allow him to star in a pretty decent film that he wrote? It doesn't add up but then there are a lot of contradictions in the John Gilbert story.
Gilbert was the most obvious casualty of the sound age and history hasn't treated him well, but now that we have the luxury of seeing these old films we can see how unfair that was. He was no small talent, taking over the heartthrob slot left vacant by the death of Rudolph Valentino and running with it, becoming one of the biggest names of the silent era and was commanding a quarter of a million dollars a film by the end of the twenties. Yet his last picture came as early as 1934 and two years after that he was dead, of a heart attack brought on by serious alcoholism.
Many stories have circulated with reasons for this massive decline, but the one that rings truest speaks to sabotage. Gilbert had almost married frequent co-star Greta Garbo but she left him standing at the altar and when Mayer made an unwelcome comment at that event Gilbert knocked him down, effectively committing career suicide in an era where everyone was stuck inside a contract. In return for such an affront Mayer had his stories sabotaged, his films re-edited and the pitch of his voice altered so that audiences would laugh when he spoke to young ladies of love. They laughed at him in His Glorious Night, which is rarely seen today except in the take on it in Singin' in the Rain. The more Gilbert films I see, the more I want to see this one.
By 1932 he was so desperate to have this film made that he sold his script to MGM for a single dollar and for some reason they let him make it. Maybe they felt that it would go precisely nowhere, given the circumstances. After all, it's a period piece set in an undisclosed European country at the height of the precode era when audiences were happy watching gangsters, gold diggers and prostitutes in the modern day. It also sees Gilbert playing very much against type: he's no great lover here, he's the slimeball that tries to screw everything he can out of everyone he can.
That he sounds fine and does a solid job, both as an actor and a writer, is hardly surprising, as I've seen a number of his sound films and fully realise that he was a talented man. Maybe this was just so much the wrong thing at the wrong time that it became simply another nail in his career coffin. He only had three more films in him, and even the superb Queen Christina couldn't reverse the decline. At least he got one thing out of this film: wife number four. His character may not have stolen away Virginia Bruce's in the film but they were married shortly after shooting wrapped, though the marriage only lasted two of the four years he had left.
Stars: John Gilbert and Paul Lukas
Life at the von Burgen castle seems to be pretty happy, so much so that 'blissful' would appear to be a better word. We open with Albert and Anna getting married, a wedding thrown by the Baron and Baroness for their servants. Albert is their butler and head servant, his family has served succeeding barons for generations and the von Burgens are obviously very thankful. Anna also works for the family, serving the Baroness. Everyone seems to be happy and what's more everyone seems to trust everyone, the servants downstairs following a code and the family upstairs treating them well. Even the actors playing these characters are reliable names: Paul Lukas as Albert, Reginald Owen and Olga Baclanova as the Baron and Baroness, Virginia Bruce as Anna.
And into this bliss comes a new chauffeur, Karl Schneider, to turn everything upside down. He's played by John Gilbert and this is unmistakably his film, not just because he's the lead character and the catalyst for everything that happens but because he wrote the story too. While it's no spectacular success, none of it is bad but the strange thing is that this is 1932 and it's hard to see the motivations of the studio. Why would the biggest studio of them all, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, whose chief, Louis B Mayer, the most important man in Hollywood, was apparently bent on destroying Gilbert's career, allow him to star in a pretty decent film that he wrote? It doesn't add up but then there are a lot of contradictions in the John Gilbert story.
Gilbert was the most obvious casualty of the sound age and history hasn't treated him well, but now that we have the luxury of seeing these old films we can see how unfair that was. He was no small talent, taking over the heartthrob slot left vacant by the death of Rudolph Valentino and running with it, becoming one of the biggest names of the silent era and was commanding a quarter of a million dollars a film by the end of the twenties. Yet his last picture came as early as 1934 and two years after that he was dead, of a heart attack brought on by serious alcoholism.
Many stories have circulated with reasons for this massive decline, but the one that rings truest speaks to sabotage. Gilbert had almost married frequent co-star Greta Garbo but she left him standing at the altar and when Mayer made an unwelcome comment at that event Gilbert knocked him down, effectively committing career suicide in an era where everyone was stuck inside a contract. In return for such an affront Mayer had his stories sabotaged, his films re-edited and the pitch of his voice altered so that audiences would laugh when he spoke to young ladies of love. They laughed at him in His Glorious Night, which is rarely seen today except in the take on it in Singin' in the Rain. The more Gilbert films I see, the more I want to see this one.
By 1932 he was so desperate to have this film made that he sold his script to MGM for a single dollar and for some reason they let him make it. Maybe they felt that it would go precisely nowhere, given the circumstances. After all, it's a period piece set in an undisclosed European country at the height of the precode era when audiences were happy watching gangsters, gold diggers and prostitutes in the modern day. It also sees Gilbert playing very much against type: he's no great lover here, he's the slimeball that tries to screw everything he can out of everyone he can.
That he sounds fine and does a solid job, both as an actor and a writer, is hardly surprising, as I've seen a number of his sound films and fully realise that he was a talented man. Maybe this was just so much the wrong thing at the wrong time that it became simply another nail in his career coffin. He only had three more films in him, and even the superb Queen Christina couldn't reverse the decline. At least he got one thing out of this film: wife number four. His character may not have stolen away Virginia Bruce's in the film but they were married shortly after shooting wrapped, though the marriage only lasted two of the four years he had left.
Monday, 12 January 2009
The Dark Past (1948)
Remakes are just a curse of the modern era, they've been around as long as there have been films and sometimes it takes the passage of time to see where the differences and similarities in old time remakes worked and which didn't. This one appeared to be a gimme, given that it's a Rudolph Maté film starring William Holden, Nina Foch and Lee J Cobb, but then I saw the original, 1939's Blind Alley and I started having reservations. The 1939 version with Chester Morris, Ann Dvorak and Ralph Bellamy was really impressive, with both Morris and Bellamy excelling against type. I didn't doubt that Nina Foch was more than up to playing Dvorak's role, but what about Cobb and Holden?
What I found was that there's much here that improves on the original, but not all of it. The story is essentially the same: we have a professor of psychiatry (Dr Andrew Collins here instead of Dr Anthony Shelby) being held hostage in his own home by an escaped convict (Al Walker instead of Hal Wilson), one who has already killed a number of men. Walker is waiting for a boat which doesn't turn up and doesn't turn up, so keeps the Collins and his family and friends hostage while he waits. For his part, while the professor waits he psychoanalyses Walker and his dreams to find a way out of the situation alive.
The story is basically the same but it's hung better. Some scenes are staged better than the original and there are some better ones added tot he mix. There's a little more depth but mostly the success is in the linking. Scenes are linked together much better so that motivations are more believable and more consistent. There's also a framing story here that's new. This professor becomes a police psychiatrist and our story is one long flashback provided as an explanation to an arresting officer with a bandage on his head why he wants to help the eighteen year old delinquent who caused the need for the bandage.
The acting is where things fall down a little. Nina Foch is superb, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest, balancing care with suspicion and looking like a less iconic Marlene Dietrich. She always looked awesome in a trenchcoat. Lee J Cobb is decent as Dr Collins. Perhaps he's a little too serious at points but then at points he raises his voice in just the right manner and it makes it all right again. He does a good job but I can't say it's a better one than Bellamy did or not. I think sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.
As I suspected after seeing Blind Alley, William Holden is wrong for the part of Walker, though he's hobbled by a few unfortunate facts that are entirely not his fault. He doesn't look right, for a start: he's too young, as if he hasn't grown into his face yet. If this was his last film, that wouldn't be a problem, but this is William Holden with a memorable career ahead of him. He'd done his supporting slots and was progressing through the lead roles at this point in time. It would be two more years before Sunset Boulevard and the big time.
The language he has to work with isn't right either: it's 30s language full of screwballs and kitchen jockeys, which fits Chester Morris but not William Holden. The last fault is the only one that's really his: he's trying too hard, so that it's obvious that he's acting. Cobb and Foch are natural in their roles but Holden is just too conscious of what he's doing: he says the right things and moves the right moves but he's doing it as precision stuff rather than just rolling with it.
As a film, this has plenty that's better than the original but as a whole it doesn't match it. Maybe remakes worked the same way in decades past, things like The Maltese Falcon notwithstanding.
What I found was that there's much here that improves on the original, but not all of it. The story is essentially the same: we have a professor of psychiatry (Dr Andrew Collins here instead of Dr Anthony Shelby) being held hostage in his own home by an escaped convict (Al Walker instead of Hal Wilson), one who has already killed a number of men. Walker is waiting for a boat which doesn't turn up and doesn't turn up, so keeps the Collins and his family and friends hostage while he waits. For his part, while the professor waits he psychoanalyses Walker and his dreams to find a way out of the situation alive.
The story is basically the same but it's hung better. Some scenes are staged better than the original and there are some better ones added tot he mix. There's a little more depth but mostly the success is in the linking. Scenes are linked together much better so that motivations are more believable and more consistent. There's also a framing story here that's new. This professor becomes a police psychiatrist and our story is one long flashback provided as an explanation to an arresting officer with a bandage on his head why he wants to help the eighteen year old delinquent who caused the need for the bandage.
The acting is where things fall down a little. Nina Foch is superb, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest, balancing care with suspicion and looking like a less iconic Marlene Dietrich. She always looked awesome in a trenchcoat. Lee J Cobb is decent as Dr Collins. Perhaps he's a little too serious at points but then at points he raises his voice in just the right manner and it makes it all right again. He does a good job but I can't say it's a better one than Bellamy did or not. I think sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.
As I suspected after seeing Blind Alley, William Holden is wrong for the part of Walker, though he's hobbled by a few unfortunate facts that are entirely not his fault. He doesn't look right, for a start: he's too young, as if he hasn't grown into his face yet. If this was his last film, that wouldn't be a problem, but this is William Holden with a memorable career ahead of him. He'd done his supporting slots and was progressing through the lead roles at this point in time. It would be two more years before Sunset Boulevard and the big time.
The language he has to work with isn't right either: it's 30s language full of screwballs and kitchen jockeys, which fits Chester Morris but not William Holden. The last fault is the only one that's really his: he's trying too hard, so that it's obvious that he's acting. Cobb and Foch are natural in their roles but Holden is just too conscious of what he's doing: he says the right things and moves the right moves but he's doing it as precision stuff rather than just rolling with it.
As a film, this has plenty that's better than the original but as a whole it doesn't match it. Maybe remakes worked the same way in decades past, things like The Maltese Falcon notwithstanding.
Time (2006)
Kim Ki-duk has one of the most interesting and distinctive voices in Korean cinema, though his work seems to be better received in the west. I've found him an intriguing filmmaker, even though it's pretty obvious to me that I'm not catching all the nuance and symbolism that he throws into his stories. That does't stop me coming back for more though. This one has to do with perception and identity and follows a young lady called Seh-hee, who given the circumstances of the film is played by two different actresses.
Initially she's played by Park Ji-yeon and she's the jealous girlfriend of Ji-woo. She's crazy about him (that word is used more than once) and is highly jealous of any attention other women may throw his way. There seems to be quite a lot of this because he obviously has charisma to spare, but whether this goes beyond basic chemistry is a question that isn't answerered. My impression is that Ji-woo isn't cheating with anyone at all but is happy to look at these lovely young ladies to appreciate the scenery, as after all he's a photographer by vocation who must look at the world with a photographer's eye.
However Seh-hee wants to do something about it. This sort of thing drives her nuts because she's seriously in love with him and wants him all to herself. So she gets abusive to women who look at him or talk to him and even persuades him to pretend that she's someone else in bed, anything so that he doesn't have to concentrate on what she calls her 'same boring face'. Of course her face isn't boring at all and it's pretty apparent that it's not him she's worried about but her own lack of self esteem making her think that he'll leave her for someone else.
So Seh-hee thinks back to an incident at the very beginning of the film, when she bumps into a lady leaving an 'aesthetic clinic' that carries a sign reading 'Do you want a new life?' She moves out of her apartment without providing a forwarding address, discontinues her phone service and becomes completely unfindable to Ji-woo. To all intents and purposes she's dropped off the face of the plant. Really she goes back to the clinic to get plastic surgery to become a new woman, then 'meets' and pursues Ji-woo from her new job as a waitress at the Room & Rumour cafe he frequents.
Quite what she wants to accomplish is a good question, because the chaotic emotional situations she finds herself in are hardly surprising. Does she really want Ji-woo to wait six months for her to come back from her self-imposed exile, but then fall in love with her all over again with her new face? How could she think anything with such mutually exclusive goals could all end up happily? Of course while most of the film isn't surprising in the slightest, Kim Ki-duk has more to say than just the obvious. There's a pretty vicious change of direction that is as surprising as it's completely appropriate, and once we get to that point we can't help but ask ourselves what he's leaving for the end: is this going to be a happy story or something disastrous?
The story is tight, the direction good and the cinematography excellent. Kim Ki-duk has a photographer's eye himself and his films are never free of some wonderful imagery. It's the acting that really carries this one though, because the two leads are both amazing. Ji-woo is played by Ha Jung-woo, who carries every aspect of a pretty deep role superbly. While Park Ji-Yeon is decent as the former Seh-heh, Seong Hyeon-a is even better as the new Seh-heh, or See-hee as she calls herself. I haven't seen Ha before but Seong is the young lady who impressed me hugely in a Korean horror film called Cello. This is my first chance to see her act in something else and she's even better here than there and more desirable to boot. Unfortunately if IMDb can be believed (and it can't always when it comes to foreign films) this seems to be her last film appearance to date. At least there are seven previous roles for me to track down though.
And as for all that obscure symbolism that Kim Ki-duk is renowned for, it's far less obscure here. Unlike something like The Bow, which is a cinematic painting that invites us to work out what it all means, or even Samaritan Girl which got pretty cryptic on occasion, this one's pretty straight forward. He even drops major hints about the theme, in dialogue or in the choice of karaoke song that Ji-woo selects at a party, a month after she's left: 'If time never stops running, can I forget you like a dream?' This isn't a forgettable movie; it's powerful and effective. It may even be my favourite Kim Ki-duk out of the four I've seen thus far, but somehow I'm still seeing The Bow in my mind's eye. That film is deeply resonant, and I doubt this one will resonate anywhere near as much, Seong Hyeon-a or not.
Initially she's played by Park Ji-yeon and she's the jealous girlfriend of Ji-woo. She's crazy about him (that word is used more than once) and is highly jealous of any attention other women may throw his way. There seems to be quite a lot of this because he obviously has charisma to spare, but whether this goes beyond basic chemistry is a question that isn't answerered. My impression is that Ji-woo isn't cheating with anyone at all but is happy to look at these lovely young ladies to appreciate the scenery, as after all he's a photographer by vocation who must look at the world with a photographer's eye.
However Seh-hee wants to do something about it. This sort of thing drives her nuts because she's seriously in love with him and wants him all to herself. So she gets abusive to women who look at him or talk to him and even persuades him to pretend that she's someone else in bed, anything so that he doesn't have to concentrate on what she calls her 'same boring face'. Of course her face isn't boring at all and it's pretty apparent that it's not him she's worried about but her own lack of self esteem making her think that he'll leave her for someone else.
So Seh-hee thinks back to an incident at the very beginning of the film, when she bumps into a lady leaving an 'aesthetic clinic' that carries a sign reading 'Do you want a new life?' She moves out of her apartment without providing a forwarding address, discontinues her phone service and becomes completely unfindable to Ji-woo. To all intents and purposes she's dropped off the face of the plant. Really she goes back to the clinic to get plastic surgery to become a new woman, then 'meets' and pursues Ji-woo from her new job as a waitress at the Room & Rumour cafe he frequents.
Quite what she wants to accomplish is a good question, because the chaotic emotional situations she finds herself in are hardly surprising. Does she really want Ji-woo to wait six months for her to come back from her self-imposed exile, but then fall in love with her all over again with her new face? How could she think anything with such mutually exclusive goals could all end up happily? Of course while most of the film isn't surprising in the slightest, Kim Ki-duk has more to say than just the obvious. There's a pretty vicious change of direction that is as surprising as it's completely appropriate, and once we get to that point we can't help but ask ourselves what he's leaving for the end: is this going to be a happy story or something disastrous?
The story is tight, the direction good and the cinematography excellent. Kim Ki-duk has a photographer's eye himself and his films are never free of some wonderful imagery. It's the acting that really carries this one though, because the two leads are both amazing. Ji-woo is played by Ha Jung-woo, who carries every aspect of a pretty deep role superbly. While Park Ji-Yeon is decent as the former Seh-heh, Seong Hyeon-a is even better as the new Seh-heh, or See-hee as she calls herself. I haven't seen Ha before but Seong is the young lady who impressed me hugely in a Korean horror film called Cello. This is my first chance to see her act in something else and she's even better here than there and more desirable to boot. Unfortunately if IMDb can be believed (and it can't always when it comes to foreign films) this seems to be her last film appearance to date. At least there are seven previous roles for me to track down though.
And as for all that obscure symbolism that Kim Ki-duk is renowned for, it's far less obscure here. Unlike something like The Bow, which is a cinematic painting that invites us to work out what it all means, or even Samaritan Girl which got pretty cryptic on occasion, this one's pretty straight forward. He even drops major hints about the theme, in dialogue or in the choice of karaoke song that Ji-woo selects at a party, a month after she's left: 'If time never stops running, can I forget you like a dream?' This isn't a forgettable movie; it's powerful and effective. It may even be my favourite Kim Ki-duk out of the four I've seen thus far, but somehow I'm still seeing The Bow in my mind's eye. That film is deeply resonant, and I doubt this one will resonate anywhere near as much, Seong Hyeon-a or not.
Thursday, 8 January 2009
Mister Roberts (1955)
Now if a movie with names attached to it like those attached to this one went wrong it would end up as a disaster of scary proportions. The names here are huge names and there are a lot of them: Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell and Jack Lemmon in a John Ford film. I don't want to know what those wage packets added up to! And yet it nearly went pear shaped: Ford left the production after getting into a fistfight with Fonda about how he should play the title character. As Fonda had originated the role on Broadway and played it for two years, he won out and Ford was replaced by Mervyn LeRoy, hardly a minor name himself.
All these stars live on a US Navy cargo ship called the Reluctant, though it's known more colloquially to the folks who serve on her as the Bucket. They're somewhere in the South Pacific towards the end of World War II and they've been at sea for a year, so tempers are getting frayed. That's not a good thing given that James Cagney is the captain, Capt Morton, and he's is a strict taskmaster and a contrary soul, putting people on report because they don't wear shirts on deck and pulling privileges because leave cigarette butts in the bucket that holds his palm tree. While he can certainly bluster and rant, he doesn't actually seem to do much else except piss people off.
And while he blusters and rants, the Mister Roberts of the title really runs the show. He's Lt Doug Roberts, in the capable hands of Henry Fonda, who is extraordinarily efficient running a cargo ship but who really just wants to get into the war, so writes continual letters requesting reassignment to an active combat role. The film starts off capably but slow and it's when the two of these men finally clash that it really sparks into action and laugh out loud comedy. Adding to the mix are Ford regular Ward Bond as Chief Petty Officer Dowdy, who helps to keep the peace; William Powell as the savvy but laid back ship's doctor; and not least Jack Lemmon as Ensign Frank Pulver who won an Oscar for his work.
Pulver is the officer in charge of laundry and morale but he spends most of his time staying his cabin, or at least keeping well away from the captain. He manages it pretty well too. As if the first real face off between Cagney and Fonda wasn't a gem of a scene that most films are dying for, it gets bolstered with another one right afterwards: Ensign Pulver running right into the captain who doesn't even recognise him. Morton asks him how long he's been on the ship and Pulver has to answer '14 months'. Apparently Cagney rehearsed with Lemmon at length so that he wouldn't crack up when it came time to shoot the scene for real and he only just kept his face straight. Not far away, Fonda obviously couldn't manage that much.
As a comedy this has some awesome moments but is no laugh a minute romp. It has its serious moments and plenty of them, especially in the how the title character's psychology is addressed, but it's definitely a serious film with a light heart. Everyone has fun with their roles, especially Cagney who gets more and more iconic as the film progresses. Fonda brings all the depth needed to his role, and the pair of them are a riot when locked up in a room together, playing off each other joyously. It's also a sentimental film all about camaraderie, devotion and loyalty, nicely played so that it's touching without ever becoming overdone.
Powell is excellent in what would turn out to be his last film, after debuting on screen 33 years earlier in 1922. This is hardly his most memorable performance but it's a worthy last bow and I enjoyed it immensely. While Jack Lemmon is excellent, his performance didn't scream out at me as an Oscar winner. He did a great job and it's certainly the most flamboyant role of the film, but I've enjoyed other flamboyant Jack Lemmon roles more. He has a knack of being memorable in anything he does and he's memorable here but he's been just as memorable, if not more so elsewhere. In fact I enjoyed Cagney and Ward Bond even more and I'll take Lemmon in other films like The Apartment any day.
All these stars live on a US Navy cargo ship called the Reluctant, though it's known more colloquially to the folks who serve on her as the Bucket. They're somewhere in the South Pacific towards the end of World War II and they've been at sea for a year, so tempers are getting frayed. That's not a good thing given that James Cagney is the captain, Capt Morton, and he's is a strict taskmaster and a contrary soul, putting people on report because they don't wear shirts on deck and pulling privileges because leave cigarette butts in the bucket that holds his palm tree. While he can certainly bluster and rant, he doesn't actually seem to do much else except piss people off.
And while he blusters and rants, the Mister Roberts of the title really runs the show. He's Lt Doug Roberts, in the capable hands of Henry Fonda, who is extraordinarily efficient running a cargo ship but who really just wants to get into the war, so writes continual letters requesting reassignment to an active combat role. The film starts off capably but slow and it's when the two of these men finally clash that it really sparks into action and laugh out loud comedy. Adding to the mix are Ford regular Ward Bond as Chief Petty Officer Dowdy, who helps to keep the peace; William Powell as the savvy but laid back ship's doctor; and not least Jack Lemmon as Ensign Frank Pulver who won an Oscar for his work.
Pulver is the officer in charge of laundry and morale but he spends most of his time staying his cabin, or at least keeping well away from the captain. He manages it pretty well too. As if the first real face off between Cagney and Fonda wasn't a gem of a scene that most films are dying for, it gets bolstered with another one right afterwards: Ensign Pulver running right into the captain who doesn't even recognise him. Morton asks him how long he's been on the ship and Pulver has to answer '14 months'. Apparently Cagney rehearsed with Lemmon at length so that he wouldn't crack up when it came time to shoot the scene for real and he only just kept his face straight. Not far away, Fonda obviously couldn't manage that much.
As a comedy this has some awesome moments but is no laugh a minute romp. It has its serious moments and plenty of them, especially in the how the title character's psychology is addressed, but it's definitely a serious film with a light heart. Everyone has fun with their roles, especially Cagney who gets more and more iconic as the film progresses. Fonda brings all the depth needed to his role, and the pair of them are a riot when locked up in a room together, playing off each other joyously. It's also a sentimental film all about camaraderie, devotion and loyalty, nicely played so that it's touching without ever becoming overdone.
Powell is excellent in what would turn out to be his last film, after debuting on screen 33 years earlier in 1922. This is hardly his most memorable performance but it's a worthy last bow and I enjoyed it immensely. While Jack Lemmon is excellent, his performance didn't scream out at me as an Oscar winner. He did a great job and it's certainly the most flamboyant role of the film, but I've enjoyed other flamboyant Jack Lemmon roles more. He has a knack of being memorable in anything he does and he's memorable here but he's been just as memorable, if not more so elsewhere. In fact I enjoyed Cagney and Ward Bond even more and I'll take Lemmon in other films like The Apartment any day.
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