Director: Robert Harmon
Star: Tom Selleck
I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone, police chief in the town of Paradise. He plays the part very well and very memorably, but in a way utterly different to how he played Magnum, PI. Thin Ice is the fifth Jesse Stone TV movie that CBS have made thus far, and fortunately there's been a notable consistency as the series has progressed. Selleck has played the role all the way through from Stone Cold, the first film in 2005, and he isn't the only recurring actor. Robert Harmon has also directed all of them. Perhaps the most telling comment about the films is that Robert B Parker, the writer of the original Jesse Stone novels, believes that Selleck nailed the part.
This one begins with Stone getting shot. He's sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car, next to his friend, the State Homicide Commander, who is doing something akin to a stakeout without somehow becoming a stakeout. Stone is merely winged, while Capt Healy is hospitalised with serious injuries. The powers that be in Paradise aren't really concerned about his being shot, but want to know why he's moonlighting in Boston. They certainly have it in for him, asking probing questions about how many tickets he's writing and why he doesn't want to hire the town council leader's son-in-law.
While he's dealing with the council's threats and trying to work out why his friend was shot, against his friend's wishes, he gets involved with all sorts of soap opera stuff. All this is brought to screen in the slow and careful way in which these stories unfold: his ongoing battle with alcohol, his troubles with his ex-wife and his new highly inadvised new relationship with the internal affairs investigator, wonderfully named Sidney Greenstreet, looking into how and why he discharged his weapon on the stakeout that wasn't.
He also acquires a new case with very slim prospects: a five year old out-of-state kidnapping of a baby from a hospital. Someone in Paradise sent a letter to Elizabeth Blue to tell her that her son, inevitably named Little Boy Blue, is loved. Of course the town council wouldn't want him to invest time, money and effort into such a longshot, so he has to be very careful about his methods. In fact he has to be very careful about almost everything in this film, which works for me because that's what I love most about this series: how nothing is the stereotypical Hollywood/CSI: Miami style glitz.
Maybe it appeals to me as a writer: it's easy to solve things with explosions and car chases and wild arguments, but it takes a lot more talent to write calm, sparse and thoughtful dialogue. It takes a lot more talent to speak it too. Now this isn't high art but any means it's probably about as close as you're going to get on a TV movie built around commercial breaks. It's very capable television on a network channel that's lasted with consistency for five years with good reason, because it's written well, acted well and built up over time to be a viable series not just a collection of viable films. The question that remains has to do with how memorable it all is.
Sunday, 1 March 2009
The Mighty Peking Man (1977)
Director: Meng Hua Ho
Stars: Danny Lee and Evelyne Kraft
I get a good feeling every time I see the Shaw Brothers opening sequence. I'm not expecting a great movie but I'm expecting something that's a lot of fun. To me Shaw Brothers movies are the Hong Kong equivalent of the old Hollywood serial movies of the thirties and forties. This one dates back to 1977 and has Danny Lee to boot, a decade before he'd face off against Chow Yun Fat in The Killer. As you can imagine from the title, it's a monster movie and it doesn't take long to show us the monster.
We open in a library where a group of men are looking at a photo of a giant footprint on the front page of a Hong Kong paper. This apparently proves outright that the Mighty Peking Man has returned from prehistory to ravage villages in the Himalayas (which makes the European title of Colossus of Congo a little surprising). 'The evidence looks conclusive then,' they say and mount an expedition to make them all rich. To lead the expedition, they call in a drunk who's still whining about losing his girlfriend to a friend. Before we even meet him though we meet the monster, in a flashback while the men talk about the footprint in the paper.
He's huge and pissed off, and happy to break all the models that the production can build. Now, the modelwork is great but the monster outfit sucks and there's some truly awful matching of live action foregrounds with model backgrounds or vice versa. King Kong was about a zillion times better than this and it was over thirty years old at this point. Even the Godzilla sequels which rapidly decreased in quality are all better than this, which doesn't even stand up to the ape in King Kong vs Godzilla fifteen years earlier.
However this film has more to offer than just another giant ape, though at heart it's a blatant King Kong rip off. On the way to find that giant ape, Johnny Fang, Danny Lee's character, has to deal with an elephant stampede, a tiger attack and some huge cliffs for members of the party to fall off. Once they get into the right neighbourhood, he doesn't even to find the ape because the ape finds him. Luckily there's a Russian Sheena equivalent with blonde hair, blue eyes and impeccable makeup, leaping around in her tiny costume from tree to tree. The most fun here is trying to work out when she's going to slip out of it.
Naturally she's befriended all the animals, from leopards to elephants to the Mighty Peking Man itself, so she saves him from imminent death. Just as naturally, after living successfully all these years in the jungle on her own since her parents crash landed in their plane and orphaned her, the moment Johnny shows up she proves to be a weak and feeble woman. She conveniently gets bitten in the crotch by a king cobra so that he has to suck out the venom. By the time he ends up in her pants in her cave, Mighty Peking Man gets plenty jealous, but she calms him and they all head back to Hong Kong together.
Needless to say, Danny Lee isn't called upon to do any great acting here and he went on to many far better parts in the years to come. Incidentally, this was his second cult classic, following his title role in 1975's Infra-Man. The Sheena clone is Evelyne Kraft, who I haven't seen before but who seems to have had an interesting screen career, featuring in many films with multiple titles, always a great pointer to intriguing but probably awful exploitation fare. She started out in The French Sex Murders, which was Italian, then moved on to a couple of Dudu the Superbug films which were German Herbie clones. After The Mighty Peking Man, she made another Hong Kong movie called Deadly Angels, then a German Countess Dracula ripoff called Lady Dracula. Her career wasn't long but it was very varied, both in genre and country of origin.
She brings to this film precisely what's needed. After all, as a King Kong rip off we get everything we could ask for: a giant ape rampaging through Hong Kong, a gorgeous blonde in animal skins, plenty of wild animals to playfully wrestle with in the jungle, along with terrible special effects, awesome models and seemingly no end of rip off material. It's a terrible film but it's pretty good fun. I'd have liked the technical consistency to be much better but I wouldn't give up the bad acting, bad dialogue, bad dubbing, moronic officials and contrived plot twists for the world.
Stars: Danny Lee and Evelyne Kraft
I get a good feeling every time I see the Shaw Brothers opening sequence. I'm not expecting a great movie but I'm expecting something that's a lot of fun. To me Shaw Brothers movies are the Hong Kong equivalent of the old Hollywood serial movies of the thirties and forties. This one dates back to 1977 and has Danny Lee to boot, a decade before he'd face off against Chow Yun Fat in The Killer. As you can imagine from the title, it's a monster movie and it doesn't take long to show us the monster.
We open in a library where a group of men are looking at a photo of a giant footprint on the front page of a Hong Kong paper. This apparently proves outright that the Mighty Peking Man has returned from prehistory to ravage villages in the Himalayas (which makes the European title of Colossus of Congo a little surprising). 'The evidence looks conclusive then,' they say and mount an expedition to make them all rich. To lead the expedition, they call in a drunk who's still whining about losing his girlfriend to a friend. Before we even meet him though we meet the monster, in a flashback while the men talk about the footprint in the paper.
He's huge and pissed off, and happy to break all the models that the production can build. Now, the modelwork is great but the monster outfit sucks and there's some truly awful matching of live action foregrounds with model backgrounds or vice versa. King Kong was about a zillion times better than this and it was over thirty years old at this point. Even the Godzilla sequels which rapidly decreased in quality are all better than this, which doesn't even stand up to the ape in King Kong vs Godzilla fifteen years earlier.
However this film has more to offer than just another giant ape, though at heart it's a blatant King Kong rip off. On the way to find that giant ape, Johnny Fang, Danny Lee's character, has to deal with an elephant stampede, a tiger attack and some huge cliffs for members of the party to fall off. Once they get into the right neighbourhood, he doesn't even to find the ape because the ape finds him. Luckily there's a Russian Sheena equivalent with blonde hair, blue eyes and impeccable makeup, leaping around in her tiny costume from tree to tree. The most fun here is trying to work out when she's going to slip out of it.
Naturally she's befriended all the animals, from leopards to elephants to the Mighty Peking Man itself, so she saves him from imminent death. Just as naturally, after living successfully all these years in the jungle on her own since her parents crash landed in their plane and orphaned her, the moment Johnny shows up she proves to be a weak and feeble woman. She conveniently gets bitten in the crotch by a king cobra so that he has to suck out the venom. By the time he ends up in her pants in her cave, Mighty Peking Man gets plenty jealous, but she calms him and they all head back to Hong Kong together.
Needless to say, Danny Lee isn't called upon to do any great acting here and he went on to many far better parts in the years to come. Incidentally, this was his second cult classic, following his title role in 1975's Infra-Man. The Sheena clone is Evelyne Kraft, who I haven't seen before but who seems to have had an interesting screen career, featuring in many films with multiple titles, always a great pointer to intriguing but probably awful exploitation fare. She started out in The French Sex Murders, which was Italian, then moved on to a couple of Dudu the Superbug films which were German Herbie clones. After The Mighty Peking Man, she made another Hong Kong movie called Deadly Angels, then a German Countess Dracula ripoff called Lady Dracula. Her career wasn't long but it was very varied, both in genre and country of origin.
She brings to this film precisely what's needed. After all, as a King Kong rip off we get everything we could ask for: a giant ape rampaging through Hong Kong, a gorgeous blonde in animal skins, plenty of wild animals to playfully wrestle with in the jungle, along with terrible special effects, awesome models and seemingly no end of rip off material. It's a terrible film but it's pretty good fun. I'd have liked the technical consistency to be much better but I wouldn't give up the bad acting, bad dialogue, bad dubbing, moronic officials and contrived plot twists for the world.
Pretty Baby (1978)
There came a point in time where I realised that many of the best films in the world are French. There are there in my top ten: The Passion of Joan of Arc, Beauty and the Beast and Amelie; and plenty more acknowledged classics that often ring truer as such when watching them than many of their American equivalents. Put simply, they stun me more often: Pépé le Moko, Grand Illusion, J'Accuse, Rififi, Mr Hulot's Holiday, Les Diaboliques... the list goes all the way back to George Melies and his Trip to the Moon. So when I realised this I started paying more attention to the names that kept cropping up whenever I read about French cinema.
One of those names was Louis Malle, who I've now seen more work by than any other French director. He's not the greatest French name in the book but he's a fascinating director because his output is so utterly varied, both in content and consistency, as well as in location and language. The earliest of his films that I've seen was a wonderful film noir called Elevator to the Gallows, made in 1957, and later classics include Lacombe Lucien in 1974 and 1987's Au Revoir, Les Enfants. Based on the 13 of his films I've caught thus far, which comprise 40% of his directorial output, that suggests a great classic every decade or so, interspersed with excellent movies like Murmur of the Heart or Atlantic City and much lesser work like Place de la république, Black Moon or Crackers.
Pretty Baby is a notable Louis Malle film for a few reasons. It was the first of his various American films, shot in America with American actors, and which paved the way for Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street. It's also one of his various controversial films, given that it's set in a New Orleans brothel in 1917 and the central character is played by twelve year old Brooke Shields. Malle was hardly a stranger to controversy, having had his 1958 film, The Lovers, banned in parts of the US for obscenity, and Murmur of the Heart touched on child nudity and incest.
We're in Storyville, New Orleans in 1917 in the whorehouse of Madame Nell. What's very quickly apparent is that this is an honest film that has no bones about showing life precisely as it was like in this place in this time. We get to see plenty but somehow it doesn't play off as excessive or exploitational, merely realistic and apparently it is indeed based on fact, however much it's a conglomeration of stories or hints at stories wrapped together rather than just one true story. It would be a really good starting point for an investigation into the history of one of the most important cities in the States.
We meet a collection of characters and weave intriguingly in and out between them. Madame Nell runs the place: she's an aging lady who has presumably seen and done it all. Now she dresses up to the nines, begins the day with absinthe and progresses through it with opium and cocaine. Most of the time she's like a painted statue but she's definitely someone who would be fascinating to talk to but dangerous to cross. Hattie is a long established prostitute in her establishment, born into the industry and passing it on to the next generation. She keeps talking about leaving and eventually manages it, though it takes the longest time because she tends to hinge her departure on her clients, who tend to be gamblers and drunkards. Mostly the whores here don't have a bad time of it and are hardly trapped in their professions.
Hattie's daughter Violet is the closest thing beyond Storyville itself to being the focus of the story because she's the one that changes through it. She was born in the whorehouse and doesn't even know how old she is. She's certainly underage, though when she's paraded round the table for her cherry to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, Madame Nell is conscious of the law and points out that she's 'just old enough'. She brings $400 which was a heck of a lot of money in 1917 and is a huge comment on life in that era too, especially as the first thing the winner does is to give her a glass of whiskey.
The pianist who plays at the whorehouse is one of the most elegant people in the story, but because he's black is spoken down to, even by the whores. The blacks in 1917 Louisiana are generally cooks and maids and musicians and the only one that commands any actual respect is the voodoo woman. Storyville is where jazz came from and the Professor plays a bunch of standards that I know from artists spanning many decades. Of course if every angle that could come out of this film was fully explored, Pretty Baby would be a week long.
The closest character to a real one is Ernest Bellocq, a photographer who practically moves into the brothel but doesn't share a bed with any of the professional ladies. He's more interested in taking pictures of them, and in fact the entire film is built around the photographs taken by the real Bellocq. He's mostly known for his professional work for local companies but took many pictures of the hidden life of the Big Easy, not just the prostitutes of Storyville but also the opium dens of Chinatown. These were far less well known at the time as they were less widely circulated but were discovered later and have become his true legacy as an artist. This isn't the only thing based on his work.
The story is fascinating but mostly because of how alien it is to us today. This is set less than a hundred years ago but it could easily have been two or three hundred given how far from our own morals these morals are. This is most obvious in our reactions to what we see: watching in 2009, it's shocking to see a twelve year old prostitute shown naked on screen, while in 1917 her virginity was auctioned off to a room of notables, including at least one senator. Of course by the end of the film Madame Nell's brothel is closed down by hymn singing moral crusaders. As much as most of the film is so lost in time, I guess some things never change.
The film is shot beautifully, as would befit a film based on a set of photographs, but not just in the scenes that specifically reenact them. Malle's films are often well shot, because he began as a cameraman, working for Robert Bresson and even Jacques Cousteau, who described him as the best underwater cameraman he ever had. This one could well be the best though, aided as it is by some great sets and even better costumes. Really though, the film relies on one thing above all else: the performance of Brooke Shields, who was justly launched into stardom on the basis of this film. She does an amazing job, effectively giving us both sides of her character: the child and the adult.
The rest of the cast is generally notable too, though they're all walking in the shadow of their twelve year old co-star. Keith Carradine gets top credit as Bellocq, but to my eyes is the weakest link. Susan Sarandon, early in her career, is excellent as Violet's mother Hattie, which prompted a lead role in Malle's next American film, Atlantic City. Frances Faye is highly memorable as Madame Nell. Antonio Fargas is subtly awesome as the Professor, the whorehouse's pianist. He doesn't to say much, being an uppity nigger and all even to the whores, but beyond social convention of the time he's the most elegant person in the place and he says plenty with his eyes that he can't say with his mouth.
All in all, it's a powerful film, definitely up there in the higher end of Malle's output, though perhaps Carradine's performance helps drop it below the best of them.
One of those names was Louis Malle, who I've now seen more work by than any other French director. He's not the greatest French name in the book but he's a fascinating director because his output is so utterly varied, both in content and consistency, as well as in location and language. The earliest of his films that I've seen was a wonderful film noir called Elevator to the Gallows, made in 1957, and later classics include Lacombe Lucien in 1974 and 1987's Au Revoir, Les Enfants. Based on the 13 of his films I've caught thus far, which comprise 40% of his directorial output, that suggests a great classic every decade or so, interspersed with excellent movies like Murmur of the Heart or Atlantic City and much lesser work like Place de la république, Black Moon or Crackers.
Pretty Baby is a notable Louis Malle film for a few reasons. It was the first of his various American films, shot in America with American actors, and which paved the way for Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street. It's also one of his various controversial films, given that it's set in a New Orleans brothel in 1917 and the central character is played by twelve year old Brooke Shields. Malle was hardly a stranger to controversy, having had his 1958 film, The Lovers, banned in parts of the US for obscenity, and Murmur of the Heart touched on child nudity and incest.
We're in Storyville, New Orleans in 1917 in the whorehouse of Madame Nell. What's very quickly apparent is that this is an honest film that has no bones about showing life precisely as it was like in this place in this time. We get to see plenty but somehow it doesn't play off as excessive or exploitational, merely realistic and apparently it is indeed based on fact, however much it's a conglomeration of stories or hints at stories wrapped together rather than just one true story. It would be a really good starting point for an investigation into the history of one of the most important cities in the States.
We meet a collection of characters and weave intriguingly in and out between them. Madame Nell runs the place: she's an aging lady who has presumably seen and done it all. Now she dresses up to the nines, begins the day with absinthe and progresses through it with opium and cocaine. Most of the time she's like a painted statue but she's definitely someone who would be fascinating to talk to but dangerous to cross. Hattie is a long established prostitute in her establishment, born into the industry and passing it on to the next generation. She keeps talking about leaving and eventually manages it, though it takes the longest time because she tends to hinge her departure on her clients, who tend to be gamblers and drunkards. Mostly the whores here don't have a bad time of it and are hardly trapped in their professions.
Hattie's daughter Violet is the closest thing beyond Storyville itself to being the focus of the story because she's the one that changes through it. She was born in the whorehouse and doesn't even know how old she is. She's certainly underage, though when she's paraded round the table for her cherry to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, Madame Nell is conscious of the law and points out that she's 'just old enough'. She brings $400 which was a heck of a lot of money in 1917 and is a huge comment on life in that era too, especially as the first thing the winner does is to give her a glass of whiskey.
The pianist who plays at the whorehouse is one of the most elegant people in the story, but because he's black is spoken down to, even by the whores. The blacks in 1917 Louisiana are generally cooks and maids and musicians and the only one that commands any actual respect is the voodoo woman. Storyville is where jazz came from and the Professor plays a bunch of standards that I know from artists spanning many decades. Of course if every angle that could come out of this film was fully explored, Pretty Baby would be a week long.
The closest character to a real one is Ernest Bellocq, a photographer who practically moves into the brothel but doesn't share a bed with any of the professional ladies. He's more interested in taking pictures of them, and in fact the entire film is built around the photographs taken by the real Bellocq. He's mostly known for his professional work for local companies but took many pictures of the hidden life of the Big Easy, not just the prostitutes of Storyville but also the opium dens of Chinatown. These were far less well known at the time as they were less widely circulated but were discovered later and have become his true legacy as an artist. This isn't the only thing based on his work.
The story is fascinating but mostly because of how alien it is to us today. This is set less than a hundred years ago but it could easily have been two or three hundred given how far from our own morals these morals are. This is most obvious in our reactions to what we see: watching in 2009, it's shocking to see a twelve year old prostitute shown naked on screen, while in 1917 her virginity was auctioned off to a room of notables, including at least one senator. Of course by the end of the film Madame Nell's brothel is closed down by hymn singing moral crusaders. As much as most of the film is so lost in time, I guess some things never change.
The film is shot beautifully, as would befit a film based on a set of photographs, but not just in the scenes that specifically reenact them. Malle's films are often well shot, because he began as a cameraman, working for Robert Bresson and even Jacques Cousteau, who described him as the best underwater cameraman he ever had. This one could well be the best though, aided as it is by some great sets and even better costumes. Really though, the film relies on one thing above all else: the performance of Brooke Shields, who was justly launched into stardom on the basis of this film. She does an amazing job, effectively giving us both sides of her character: the child and the adult.
The rest of the cast is generally notable too, though they're all walking in the shadow of their twelve year old co-star. Keith Carradine gets top credit as Bellocq, but to my eyes is the weakest link. Susan Sarandon, early in her career, is excellent as Violet's mother Hattie, which prompted a lead role in Malle's next American film, Atlantic City. Frances Faye is highly memorable as Madame Nell. Antonio Fargas is subtly awesome as the Professor, the whorehouse's pianist. He doesn't to say much, being an uppity nigger and all even to the whores, but beyond social convention of the time he's the most elegant person in the place and he says plenty with his eyes that he can't say with his mouth.
All in all, it's a powerful film, definitely up there in the higher end of Malle's output, though perhaps Carradine's performance helps drop it below the best of them.
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Primer (2004)
Director: Shane Carruth
Stars: Shane Carruth and David Sullivan
The film that knocked me out the most over the last year was a science fiction film, but not one you're likely to have heard of. It won't ever get shown on the Sci-Fi Channel because it has no spaceships, no laser beams, no superheroes. It was a film called The Man from Earth and it posed the age old science fiction question of 'what if?' to a group of characters in a room. It was absolutely fascinating and it stunned me. Beyond the questions posed within the film itself, one question followed in its wake: why doesn't anyone else make this sort of film: pure science fiction not space opera? Well, this one has similarities and it's nearly as fascinating.
We're following four friends or colleagues or whatever they call themselves. They're technical folks working in technical jobs, but they dedicate a large amount of their spare time to building contraptions in a garage, with the aim of making money as entrepreneurs who have built something important. The catch, naturally, is that they need to build something important. What they end up with is something that's undoubtably important but also very hard to fathom. It's some sort of time machine, though it isn't immediately apparent exactly what and how and why, but really it's a MacGuffin.
What it is doesn't really matter because it's not really about the machine, it's about what the machine means. If you have a shortcut through the standard progression of life and you can safely and conveniently cheat to get whatever you want, what do you do? How much do you run with the thrill and how much do you fear the unknown danger. How much do you worry about the paradoxes and how deep into the logic maelstrom do you go? What do you do with knowledge you don't necessarily want? Who do you trust with the knowledge you do?
There are many many questions that leap out of the screen here and bludgeon us. I'm not going to pretend that I understood all the permutations, because it's definitely something to watch again and again to work it all out. I had a lot of reactions. Firstly, I was overjoyed to see another pure science fiction film. Secondly, i was confused and fascinated all at once as I tried to fathom the story. Thirdly, I was shocked to find that the film was made for only $7,000 and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Now, I've read a fascinating book by movie critic Joe Queenan called The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card, so I have a healthy doubt in any quoted figures about how much a film cost, but I also know that that book is over a decade old and the world has changed considerably during that time. However much Primer cost, it's undoubtedly cleverly done and it undoubtedly looks a lot more slick than the budget could ever suggest.
The few people who made it juggled roles on screen and off and produced a very realistic set of characters. This is one of the most realistic non-glossy ensemble casts I think I'ver seen: nobody is a Hollywood actor for sure but nobody is a community theatre actor either. They all appear to be what they're supposed to be: professional people with a technical bent who are often both clever and naive. I don't get it all yet but I'm fascinated and intrigued and eager to return to the film again soon.
Stars: Shane Carruth and David Sullivan
The film that knocked me out the most over the last year was a science fiction film, but not one you're likely to have heard of. It won't ever get shown on the Sci-Fi Channel because it has no spaceships, no laser beams, no superheroes. It was a film called The Man from Earth and it posed the age old science fiction question of 'what if?' to a group of characters in a room. It was absolutely fascinating and it stunned me. Beyond the questions posed within the film itself, one question followed in its wake: why doesn't anyone else make this sort of film: pure science fiction not space opera? Well, this one has similarities and it's nearly as fascinating.
We're following four friends or colleagues or whatever they call themselves. They're technical folks working in technical jobs, but they dedicate a large amount of their spare time to building contraptions in a garage, with the aim of making money as entrepreneurs who have built something important. The catch, naturally, is that they need to build something important. What they end up with is something that's undoubtably important but also very hard to fathom. It's some sort of time machine, though it isn't immediately apparent exactly what and how and why, but really it's a MacGuffin.
What it is doesn't really matter because it's not really about the machine, it's about what the machine means. If you have a shortcut through the standard progression of life and you can safely and conveniently cheat to get whatever you want, what do you do? How much do you run with the thrill and how much do you fear the unknown danger. How much do you worry about the paradoxes and how deep into the logic maelstrom do you go? What do you do with knowledge you don't necessarily want? Who do you trust with the knowledge you do?
There are many many questions that leap out of the screen here and bludgeon us. I'm not going to pretend that I understood all the permutations, because it's definitely something to watch again and again to work it all out. I had a lot of reactions. Firstly, I was overjoyed to see another pure science fiction film. Secondly, i was confused and fascinated all at once as I tried to fathom the story. Thirdly, I was shocked to find that the film was made for only $7,000 and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Now, I've read a fascinating book by movie critic Joe Queenan called The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card, so I have a healthy doubt in any quoted figures about how much a film cost, but I also know that that book is over a decade old and the world has changed considerably during that time. However much Primer cost, it's undoubtedly cleverly done and it undoubtedly looks a lot more slick than the budget could ever suggest.
The few people who made it juggled roles on screen and off and produced a very realistic set of characters. This is one of the most realistic non-glossy ensemble casts I think I'ver seen: nobody is a Hollywood actor for sure but nobody is a community theatre actor either. They all appear to be what they're supposed to be: professional people with a technical bent who are often both clever and naive. I don't get it all yet but I'm fascinated and intrigued and eager to return to the film again soon.
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)
Director: Park Chan-wook
Stars: Lim Su-jeong and Rain
Of all the names in Korean cinema that I've been discovering over the last couple of years, the one that has stunned me most is Park Chan-wook and I haven't seen his mostly highly rated film yet. That would be Oldboy, the middle film in his revenge trilogy; but I have seen the first, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, as well as JSA: Joint Security Area, both films that amazed me. This is something completely different again, a difficult film to categorise; it has romance in it and comedy and drama, but isn't really any of those things alone.
Its influences are quickly obvious. The opening credit sequence looks like an Arnie film from the 80s but with a soundtrack by Danny Elfman, suggesting a quirky action film. The initial scenes back up that quirkiness but rather than Arnie we focus on a delightful young lady who looks like a Korean version of Audrey Tautou. She's Cha Young-goon, played by Lim Su-jeong, who is best known for A Tale of Two Sisters, one of the most highly regarded Korean horror films and one that I really should get round to watching. And yes, the way that the story unfolds, with all its quirky characters and back stories, is reminiscent in many ways of Amelie.
However this young lady is not a social misfit with a penchant for quirky hobbies, she's a nutjob. We first meet her at the factory in which she works making radios of some description, but she slits her wrist, inserts wires and plugs herself into the mains. As you might expect, she ends up not in a hospital but in a loonie bin where she explains to the soda machine and the light above her bed that she's a cyborg and that she needs to recharge and get rid of her sympathy so she can kill all the orderlies and escape to return her grandma's dentures to her. She also refuses to eat because, hey she's a cyborg, why should she?
Given the joyously bizarre fellow inhabitants that populate this institution, it's somehow amazing that she can keep our attention, but she does. Among these lovable fruitcakes, who include a man who constantly walks backwards and apologises for everything, a fat lady who's invented a means of levitation through static electrical tension and a young lady who's practicing to join the Edelweiss Choir, there's one in particular who becomes very important to her: Park Il-Sun, played by the Korean musician known as Rain.
He's even stranger than the others, not just because he walks around in very strange ways wearing a rabbit mask. His inherent ability is to steal things from people: not the things you might expect, like money or jewellery, but intangible assets like talents and emotions. Naturally young-goon wants him to steal her sympathy, which she sees as one of the deadly sins, and eventually he does. He's a striking character who fits this sort of strangeness perfectly. No wonder the Wachowski brothers sought him out to appear in Speed Racer, his second film and first after this one.
The story is amazing stuff to watch because all the various fantasies of the various patients get constantly mixed up, so that we quickly lose track of which parts are real and which are entirely fabricated. They're all great fun though and it's easy to ride along with the movie without thinking about what's going on behind it. I wonder what professionals working in the field would think to this with all its veiled suggestions that the only way lunatics can be healed is through clever manipulation of their fantasy worlds. The professionals really don't do much in this film, it's the patients who achieve the victories. It's a fascinating approach and it makes this film part Amelie, part Benny and Joon and part The Princess and the Warrior, along with a whole bunch of uniqueness.
Stars: Lim Su-jeong and Rain
Of all the names in Korean cinema that I've been discovering over the last couple of years, the one that has stunned me most is Park Chan-wook and I haven't seen his mostly highly rated film yet. That would be Oldboy, the middle film in his revenge trilogy; but I have seen the first, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, as well as JSA: Joint Security Area, both films that amazed me. This is something completely different again, a difficult film to categorise; it has romance in it and comedy and drama, but isn't really any of those things alone.
Its influences are quickly obvious. The opening credit sequence looks like an Arnie film from the 80s but with a soundtrack by Danny Elfman, suggesting a quirky action film. The initial scenes back up that quirkiness but rather than Arnie we focus on a delightful young lady who looks like a Korean version of Audrey Tautou. She's Cha Young-goon, played by Lim Su-jeong, who is best known for A Tale of Two Sisters, one of the most highly regarded Korean horror films and one that I really should get round to watching. And yes, the way that the story unfolds, with all its quirky characters and back stories, is reminiscent in many ways of Amelie.
However this young lady is not a social misfit with a penchant for quirky hobbies, she's a nutjob. We first meet her at the factory in which she works making radios of some description, but she slits her wrist, inserts wires and plugs herself into the mains. As you might expect, she ends up not in a hospital but in a loonie bin where she explains to the soda machine and the light above her bed that she's a cyborg and that she needs to recharge and get rid of her sympathy so she can kill all the orderlies and escape to return her grandma's dentures to her. She also refuses to eat because, hey she's a cyborg, why should she?
Given the joyously bizarre fellow inhabitants that populate this institution, it's somehow amazing that she can keep our attention, but she does. Among these lovable fruitcakes, who include a man who constantly walks backwards and apologises for everything, a fat lady who's invented a means of levitation through static electrical tension and a young lady who's practicing to join the Edelweiss Choir, there's one in particular who becomes very important to her: Park Il-Sun, played by the Korean musician known as Rain.
He's even stranger than the others, not just because he walks around in very strange ways wearing a rabbit mask. His inherent ability is to steal things from people: not the things you might expect, like money or jewellery, but intangible assets like talents and emotions. Naturally young-goon wants him to steal her sympathy, which she sees as one of the deadly sins, and eventually he does. He's a striking character who fits this sort of strangeness perfectly. No wonder the Wachowski brothers sought him out to appear in Speed Racer, his second film and first after this one.
The story is amazing stuff to watch because all the various fantasies of the various patients get constantly mixed up, so that we quickly lose track of which parts are real and which are entirely fabricated. They're all great fun though and it's easy to ride along with the movie without thinking about what's going on behind it. I wonder what professionals working in the field would think to this with all its veiled suggestions that the only way lunatics can be healed is through clever manipulation of their fantasy worlds. The professionals really don't do much in this film, it's the patients who achieve the victories. It's a fascinating approach and it makes this film part Amelie, part Benny and Joon and part The Princess and the Warrior, along with a whole bunch of uniqueness.
Monday, 23 February 2009
The Horse's Mouth (1958)
Director: Ronald Neame
Star: Alec Guinness
Two years before Alec Guinness starred with Kay Walsh in a Ronald Neame film called Tunes of Glory, Alec Guinness starred with Kay Walsh in a Ronald Neame film called The Horse's Mouth. He knew Walsh well, of course, given that they'd played together in Oliver Twist a decade earlier, but she played off him so well that it's not surprising to find another collaboration. This one isn't so well known, but what makes it important is that Guinness wrote it himself. As you might expect, he's a real character. He's Gulley Jimson, a painter but also an irascible, gravel throated, dirty old man: Wilfred Brambell was definitely paying attention when he built his character for Steptoe and Son.
We first meet him getting out of Wormwood Scrubs and promptly asking to be taken back in again because a young man is trying to help him. This is Nosey, who is a huge fan of Jimson's and who wants to be a painter himself. Jimson doesn't want to know and has a habit of being rude to everyone, regardless of whether they want to help him or not, so he steals his bike and heads back to his rundown houseboat. Naturally Jimson, like all apparent geniuses, has no money, so Mrs Coker, the barmaid at his local pub and very possibly special friend, takes him on a quest to raise some by locating some of his early paintings that a millionaire is apparently willing to pay good money for.
They can't recover the paintings but they do end up in trouble, as always. They're with Mr Hickson, an old collector who Jimson has taken money from for years, but he's not happy with him. Jimson has a habit of ringing Hickson up on the phone and threatening to kill him, which means that the police are very aware of who he is. Before they find him though, he finds the millionaire, Sir William Beeder, and decides that he has a mission to paint a wall in his apartment. So he does, even though the Beeders really have no clue about any of it because they promptly leave on a long holiday. Jimson moves in and takes over, selling most of the property in the apartment in order to pay for the supplies to turn this wall into his vision.
Jimson is an unlikely hero, and an unlikely anti-hero at that. He's a rogue and a terror and there's not a lot that can be said in his favour, but somehow he remains sympathetic in the way Guinness embues him with life. It's a very unique taken on life, but as Jimson describes one of his paintings, 'you can put any price on it because it's unique.' He's one of those people who through their very existence liven up everyone around them, usually in ways that aren't appreciated but which provide plenty of stories after he's gone. It doesn't take a huge mural of the Last Judgement, it just takes who he is. And he's who Alec Guinness makes him, as both writer and actor.
It's another peach of a Guinness performance, full of joy and bluster and blissfully characterful body movement. Just the way his eyes move is wonderful to behold and that final flourish of the arm as he passes another new wall is perfection. This one came a year after his Oscar winning performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai and a year before Our Man in Havana. Of course each performance is utterly unlike the ones around it, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest, but it's getting to the point that I'm beginning to wonder if he ever played any character twice.
Star: Alec Guinness
Two years before Alec Guinness starred with Kay Walsh in a Ronald Neame film called Tunes of Glory, Alec Guinness starred with Kay Walsh in a Ronald Neame film called The Horse's Mouth. He knew Walsh well, of course, given that they'd played together in Oliver Twist a decade earlier, but she played off him so well that it's not surprising to find another collaboration. This one isn't so well known, but what makes it important is that Guinness wrote it himself. As you might expect, he's a real character. He's Gulley Jimson, a painter but also an irascible, gravel throated, dirty old man: Wilfred Brambell was definitely paying attention when he built his character for Steptoe and Son.
We first meet him getting out of Wormwood Scrubs and promptly asking to be taken back in again because a young man is trying to help him. This is Nosey, who is a huge fan of Jimson's and who wants to be a painter himself. Jimson doesn't want to know and has a habit of being rude to everyone, regardless of whether they want to help him or not, so he steals his bike and heads back to his rundown houseboat. Naturally Jimson, like all apparent geniuses, has no money, so Mrs Coker, the barmaid at his local pub and very possibly special friend, takes him on a quest to raise some by locating some of his early paintings that a millionaire is apparently willing to pay good money for.
They can't recover the paintings but they do end up in trouble, as always. They're with Mr Hickson, an old collector who Jimson has taken money from for years, but he's not happy with him. Jimson has a habit of ringing Hickson up on the phone and threatening to kill him, which means that the police are very aware of who he is. Before they find him though, he finds the millionaire, Sir William Beeder, and decides that he has a mission to paint a wall in his apartment. So he does, even though the Beeders really have no clue about any of it because they promptly leave on a long holiday. Jimson moves in and takes over, selling most of the property in the apartment in order to pay for the supplies to turn this wall into his vision.
Jimson is an unlikely hero, and an unlikely anti-hero at that. He's a rogue and a terror and there's not a lot that can be said in his favour, but somehow he remains sympathetic in the way Guinness embues him with life. It's a very unique taken on life, but as Jimson describes one of his paintings, 'you can put any price on it because it's unique.' He's one of those people who through their very existence liven up everyone around them, usually in ways that aren't appreciated but which provide plenty of stories after he's gone. It doesn't take a huge mural of the Last Judgement, it just takes who he is. And he's who Alec Guinness makes him, as both writer and actor.
It's another peach of a Guinness performance, full of joy and bluster and blissfully characterful body movement. Just the way his eyes move is wonderful to behold and that final flourish of the arm as he passes another new wall is perfection. This one came a year after his Oscar winning performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai and a year before Our Man in Havana. Of course each performance is utterly unlike the ones around it, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest, but it's getting to the point that I'm beginning to wonder if he ever played any character twice.
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Tunes of Glory (1960)
Director: Ronald Neame
Stars: Alec Guinness and John Mills
I grew up watching Alec Guinness, but looking back I find a surprising few of his films under my belt. He only made fifty of them, after all. I've seen the classics, or least the ones I thought were the classics, from Oliver Twist and The Bridge on the River Kwai to Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, to say nothing of Star Wars. What I'm finding though that they were pretty much all classics, even the ones I'd never even heard of, because every one of them contained a peach of a performance from Sir Alec. This one's no exception.
It pairs him with John Mills, with support from Dennis Price and Gordon Jackson. It even introduces Susannah York, so we're not talking minor names here. Guinness looks bizarre as Maj Jock Sinclair, DSO, MM, the acting colonel of a Scots battalion. However bizarre he looks with his red hair and moustache, to say nothing of his tartan trousers, he looks utterly appropriate, but the most telling thing he wears is his face. He's a loud and lively character with fire in his eyes and a fight right behind them. He's a good man, it seems, and a good leader, but he's a dangerous man and no gentleman, that's for sure. He worked his way up through the ranks from boy piper to get to where he is today.
Unfortunately tomorrow he won't be there any more. Instead of being promoted to colonel and granted him full leadership of the battalion, a fresh colonel is brought in above him, one who hasn't served with the regiment himself but who has history with it going back generations. He's Lt Col Basil Barrow, played by John Mills, and he's a university educated gentleman who saw time in a POW camp during the war, being waterboarded by the enemy in a way very similar to what the Americans have been getting up to in Guantanamo Bay.
While he's generally a calm man, these wartime experiences haven't left him incredibly stable and a battle begins building from the moment they first meet. Barrow doesn't even drink whiskey, which is nigh on heresy to Sinclair. It doesn't take long for him to order dance practice for all officers in the cold at 7.15am three days a week, even though some of them have been dancing reels for thirty years. He believes in the concept that 'dancing should be considered as a social grace rather than a noisy ritual' and that puts him at odds with what seems like every man in the battalion.
Now I've seen many films that saw battalions in battle, but this one may be the first film in which I've seen a full scale battle without ever seeing a war. What's most stunning here is the way it builds in the hands of two masters of their craft. Guinness is the standout but Mills is no slacker here: the scene when he first blows his top is a blistering tour de force. He's hosting a battalion cocktail party and he's ordered his men to dance like gentlemen, yet they disobey and leap around the dancefloor with raucous abandon. His rage grows until it can't be contained and he explodes at them.
Guinness is so magnetic here it's impossible not to watch him. Jock is a fiery character throughout but he does something very dumb halfway through the story and he knows it: on discovering his daughter Morag with one of his pipers, he knocks the man down hard. The worst of it is that he's in a pub and while an officer striking a corporal is a serious offence at the best of times, doing so in public with witnesses present is not easily ignored. For the next half an hour he's like a tornado raging through the film and we're almost scared he's going to rage through the fourth wall at us. Only Dennis Price, the executive officer of the battalion, can blissfully ignore the tension.
This is truly awesome stuff. Both Guinness and Mills give stunning performances, full of as much subtlety as raw power, text book stuff for budding actors to watch and spend a career trying to emulate. It's not just the words they're given or the way they speak them, though the not so subtle dismissals and barbed insults are note perfect; it's in the body language. This is my first time through Tunes of Glory but I'm sure I could watch it time and time with the sound off just to experience the pure craft of the pair of them. The film was only nominated for one Oscar, for James Kennaway's adaptation of his own novel. It's criminal that Guinness and Mills were overlooked, regardless of what the competition was.
Stars: Alec Guinness and John Mills
I grew up watching Alec Guinness, but looking back I find a surprising few of his films under my belt. He only made fifty of them, after all. I've seen the classics, or least the ones I thought were the classics, from Oliver Twist and The Bridge on the River Kwai to Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, to say nothing of Star Wars. What I'm finding though that they were pretty much all classics, even the ones I'd never even heard of, because every one of them contained a peach of a performance from Sir Alec. This one's no exception.
It pairs him with John Mills, with support from Dennis Price and Gordon Jackson. It even introduces Susannah York, so we're not talking minor names here. Guinness looks bizarre as Maj Jock Sinclair, DSO, MM, the acting colonel of a Scots battalion. However bizarre he looks with his red hair and moustache, to say nothing of his tartan trousers, he looks utterly appropriate, but the most telling thing he wears is his face. He's a loud and lively character with fire in his eyes and a fight right behind them. He's a good man, it seems, and a good leader, but he's a dangerous man and no gentleman, that's for sure. He worked his way up through the ranks from boy piper to get to where he is today.
Unfortunately tomorrow he won't be there any more. Instead of being promoted to colonel and granted him full leadership of the battalion, a fresh colonel is brought in above him, one who hasn't served with the regiment himself but who has history with it going back generations. He's Lt Col Basil Barrow, played by John Mills, and he's a university educated gentleman who saw time in a POW camp during the war, being waterboarded by the enemy in a way very similar to what the Americans have been getting up to in Guantanamo Bay.
While he's generally a calm man, these wartime experiences haven't left him incredibly stable and a battle begins building from the moment they first meet. Barrow doesn't even drink whiskey, which is nigh on heresy to Sinclair. It doesn't take long for him to order dance practice for all officers in the cold at 7.15am three days a week, even though some of them have been dancing reels for thirty years. He believes in the concept that 'dancing should be considered as a social grace rather than a noisy ritual' and that puts him at odds with what seems like every man in the battalion.
Now I've seen many films that saw battalions in battle, but this one may be the first film in which I've seen a full scale battle without ever seeing a war. What's most stunning here is the way it builds in the hands of two masters of their craft. Guinness is the standout but Mills is no slacker here: the scene when he first blows his top is a blistering tour de force. He's hosting a battalion cocktail party and he's ordered his men to dance like gentlemen, yet they disobey and leap around the dancefloor with raucous abandon. His rage grows until it can't be contained and he explodes at them.
Guinness is so magnetic here it's impossible not to watch him. Jock is a fiery character throughout but he does something very dumb halfway through the story and he knows it: on discovering his daughter Morag with one of his pipers, he knocks the man down hard. The worst of it is that he's in a pub and while an officer striking a corporal is a serious offence at the best of times, doing so in public with witnesses present is not easily ignored. For the next half an hour he's like a tornado raging through the film and we're almost scared he's going to rage through the fourth wall at us. Only Dennis Price, the executive officer of the battalion, can blissfully ignore the tension.
This is truly awesome stuff. Both Guinness and Mills give stunning performances, full of as much subtlety as raw power, text book stuff for budding actors to watch and spend a career trying to emulate. It's not just the words they're given or the way they speak them, though the not so subtle dismissals and barbed insults are note perfect; it's in the body language. This is my first time through Tunes of Glory but I'm sure I could watch it time and time with the sound off just to experience the pure craft of the pair of them. The film was only nominated for one Oscar, for James Kennaway's adaptation of his own novel. It's criminal that Guinness and Mills were overlooked, regardless of what the competition was.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
The Broadway Melody (1929)
Director: Harry Beaumont
Stars: Charles King, Bessie Love and Anita Page
Back in the days when Cedric Gibbons was the only art director on MGM films, The Broadway Melody became the first film with sound to win Best Picture Oscar. It's hardly surprising to find that once pictures picked up sound, they didn't just focus on people talking in stagebound dramas, they went whole hog into the world of the musical. This one is a little clunky and it pales in comparison to later Best Picture winners but it's not a bad film really and seems to have set the stage for much of what followed later, not just to the Warner Brothers musicals of the thirties but onward from there.
We begin with a Broadway songwriter and a sister act from back west. The songwriter is Eddie Kearns, who thinks he's a big shot but is really just an up and coming name, singing his own songs in Francis Zanfield revues. Yes, that's an obvious take on Florenz Ziegfield, about as obvious as it gets, as surely as Jock Warriner is a take on Jack Warner. The sister act are Hank and Queenie Mahoney, who are successful on the small town circuit but find themselves out of their depth on Broadway. The connection is that Eddie and Hank are a couple, so presumably Eddie merely found his way to Broadway first and it just took a while for the girls to catch up.
He gets them into a Zanfield show, but not everything goes according to plan. Anyone who's watched at least one early Hollywood musical knows what went on without even seeing it: the sabotaged audition, a quick catfight, the snap judgement from the man in charge, the accidental second chance and everything else, all the way down to the flaming gay costumer. Now Hank is the one with the brain, who has run their business all along, and she's played by Bessie Love, who is gorgeous with a face full of character. However it's her sister Queenie that everyone falls in love with, and she's played by Anita Page, whose death last year at 98 severed possibly our last direct connection back to this era.
The girls are a great couple when they arrive, but it doesn't take too long for everything to go sour. Hank stays on the straight and narrow, waiting for Eddie to propose and trying to stay in work. Queenie finds her way to the clouds though, because the rich and powerful Jock Warriner sets his sights on her. That causes no end of friction but what's worse is that Eddie falls for her too. I don't care too much for Charles King's portrayal of Eddie Kearns, though he fits the low down part well. Anita Page is excellent as Queenie though she's not a patch on Bessie Love as Hank. The best acting in this film comes when Hank realises that Eddie isn't hers and that's the closest thing to really Oscar worthy anywhere in the whole picture.
Bessie Love, the stage name of Juanita Horton, is a highly underrated name in cinema, unjustly forgotten today. Her first role was as far back as 1915 and she had a decent part in something as important as D W Griffith's Intolerance, Griffith having given her her stage name. Yet seventy or so films into her career, when the industry switched to sound, she was as natural in the new order as she was in the old. For some reason, even an Oscar nomination for her work here didn't keep her career on the up. By 1931 her star had waned and sadly her roles became fewer and less important, including a lot of bit parts in major films from The Barefoot Contessa and On Her Majesty's Secret Service to Ragtime and Reds. Watching The Broadway Melody makes me wonder how that could have happened. It was a Best Picture winner and she's by far the best thing about it.
Stars: Charles King, Bessie Love and Anita Page
Back in the days when Cedric Gibbons was the only art director on MGM films, The Broadway Melody became the first film with sound to win Best Picture Oscar. It's hardly surprising to find that once pictures picked up sound, they didn't just focus on people talking in stagebound dramas, they went whole hog into the world of the musical. This one is a little clunky and it pales in comparison to later Best Picture winners but it's not a bad film really and seems to have set the stage for much of what followed later, not just to the Warner Brothers musicals of the thirties but onward from there.
We begin with a Broadway songwriter and a sister act from back west. The songwriter is Eddie Kearns, who thinks he's a big shot but is really just an up and coming name, singing his own songs in Francis Zanfield revues. Yes, that's an obvious take on Florenz Ziegfield, about as obvious as it gets, as surely as Jock Warriner is a take on Jack Warner. The sister act are Hank and Queenie Mahoney, who are successful on the small town circuit but find themselves out of their depth on Broadway. The connection is that Eddie and Hank are a couple, so presumably Eddie merely found his way to Broadway first and it just took a while for the girls to catch up.
He gets them into a Zanfield show, but not everything goes according to plan. Anyone who's watched at least one early Hollywood musical knows what went on without even seeing it: the sabotaged audition, a quick catfight, the snap judgement from the man in charge, the accidental second chance and everything else, all the way down to the flaming gay costumer. Now Hank is the one with the brain, who has run their business all along, and she's played by Bessie Love, who is gorgeous with a face full of character. However it's her sister Queenie that everyone falls in love with, and she's played by Anita Page, whose death last year at 98 severed possibly our last direct connection back to this era.
The girls are a great couple when they arrive, but it doesn't take too long for everything to go sour. Hank stays on the straight and narrow, waiting for Eddie to propose and trying to stay in work. Queenie finds her way to the clouds though, because the rich and powerful Jock Warriner sets his sights on her. That causes no end of friction but what's worse is that Eddie falls for her too. I don't care too much for Charles King's portrayal of Eddie Kearns, though he fits the low down part well. Anita Page is excellent as Queenie though she's not a patch on Bessie Love as Hank. The best acting in this film comes when Hank realises that Eddie isn't hers and that's the closest thing to really Oscar worthy anywhere in the whole picture.
Bessie Love, the stage name of Juanita Horton, is a highly underrated name in cinema, unjustly forgotten today. Her first role was as far back as 1915 and she had a decent part in something as important as D W Griffith's Intolerance, Griffith having given her her stage name. Yet seventy or so films into her career, when the industry switched to sound, she was as natural in the new order as she was in the old. For some reason, even an Oscar nomination for her work here didn't keep her career on the up. By 1931 her star had waned and sadly her roles became fewer and less important, including a lot of bit parts in major films from The Barefoot Contessa and On Her Majesty's Secret Service to Ragtime and Reds. Watching The Broadway Melody makes me wonder how that could have happened. It was a Best Picture winner and she's by far the best thing about it.
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Flying Tigers (1942)
Director: David Miller
Stars: John Wayne, John Carroll and Anna Lee
This early John Wayne war film is a very telling marker of the times, in a number of ways. Most obviously it's a John Wayne film with him playing the same heroic figure you've seen him play a number of times in a number of films in a number of wars. This could well be the first time of many for him in the type of role he'd soon become comfortable in and many viewers would become comfortable with, over and over again. This time out he's Captain Jim Gordon (no, not that one).
He's better known as Pappy and he's the leader of a squadron of Flying Tigers, American volunteer pilots who were training in Burma to fight the Japanese before the US ever entered the war. in reality, they saw their first combat twelve days after Pearl Harbor with notable success rates and it didn't take long for them to be immortalised on film, though the film plays fast and loose with the timeframe. Here, Pearl Harbor doesn't happen until almost the end of the film, when the long established and respected squadron listens to it on the radio.
Flying Tigers came out in 1942, so this is a wartime propaganda film, but that's notably less obvious than in many such movies. OK, the first time we see a Jap, he's bombing the United China Relief building which is feeding and providing medical care to an endless stream of Chinese orphans, but we really don't see much of the enemy except inside their cockpits and gun turrets being shot to death by the Flying Tigers. We do get introduced to the Japanese habit of machine gunning flyers hanging under parachutes, after they've bailed out of their planes.
Of course being World War II, the Japs are the bad guys and the Chinese the good guys. Global politics has a habit of turning everything on its head in the shortest time. Less than ten years later this was all reversed: the Japanese were a growing democracy with an Emperor who had relinquished his divinity, and the Chinese were a Communist power under Chairman Mao. There are a couple of telling changes in time from a cinematic standpoint too. One is a surprising use of copious amounts of blood: in the aerial battles, we see the shattering glass and the blood that pours out of the faces of the pilots and gunners. There's more realism in the surprising use of the Chinese language.
The other isn't surprising except in degree. As a flying film that pays a lot of attention to the flying and the fliers, it sits squarely with a string of films made ten to fifteen years earlier. However the pessimism and stark realism of writers like John Monk Saunders (some scenes are stolen directly from The Dawn Patrol, including those after Blackie's death) is generally progressed forward to a more Hollywood outlook, so we get a whole romance angle between Pappy and a nurse called Brooke Elliott that is pure hokum and a whole bunch of less than subtle subplots. Hap's death is overblown: one minute he's grounded after a medical because he's lost his depth perception, but the next he's apparently blind as a bat.
The acting is varied. John Wayne is fine in the lead, playing it a little more subtle than you might expect. He's there very much to portray what Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek describes in the opening quote as the 'intrepid spirit of the Flying Tigers in the face of superior numbers.' Pappy is the leader of the squadron and is intrepid but realistic, and caring about the Chinese people that he's working to keep safe. Some of those following him up into the air aren't quite so realistic though. The largest amount of time is spent in the film showing the difference between Pappy and a young hotshot pilot called Woody Jason.
Jason is an ace flier but he's gung ho for all the wrong reasons: the $500 bounty on the head of every enemy. He's played by John Carroll, who is so trying to be a lively Clark Gable it's unreal, even though he looks more like a cross between William Powell and Victor Mature. He mostly succeeds in being annoying, but then he's supposed to be: he has to learn what it's all about, not the flying but the war. How this all unfolds is not going to be surprising in the slightest but it's carried off pretty well. Anna Lee does her job as the love interest but the role is pointless.
Stars: John Wayne, John Carroll and Anna Lee
This early John Wayne war film is a very telling marker of the times, in a number of ways. Most obviously it's a John Wayne film with him playing the same heroic figure you've seen him play a number of times in a number of films in a number of wars. This could well be the first time of many for him in the type of role he'd soon become comfortable in and many viewers would become comfortable with, over and over again. This time out he's Captain Jim Gordon (no, not that one).
He's better known as Pappy and he's the leader of a squadron of Flying Tigers, American volunteer pilots who were training in Burma to fight the Japanese before the US ever entered the war. in reality, they saw their first combat twelve days after Pearl Harbor with notable success rates and it didn't take long for them to be immortalised on film, though the film plays fast and loose with the timeframe. Here, Pearl Harbor doesn't happen until almost the end of the film, when the long established and respected squadron listens to it on the radio.
Flying Tigers came out in 1942, so this is a wartime propaganda film, but that's notably less obvious than in many such movies. OK, the first time we see a Jap, he's bombing the United China Relief building which is feeding and providing medical care to an endless stream of Chinese orphans, but we really don't see much of the enemy except inside their cockpits and gun turrets being shot to death by the Flying Tigers. We do get introduced to the Japanese habit of machine gunning flyers hanging under parachutes, after they've bailed out of their planes.
Of course being World War II, the Japs are the bad guys and the Chinese the good guys. Global politics has a habit of turning everything on its head in the shortest time. Less than ten years later this was all reversed: the Japanese were a growing democracy with an Emperor who had relinquished his divinity, and the Chinese were a Communist power under Chairman Mao. There are a couple of telling changes in time from a cinematic standpoint too. One is a surprising use of copious amounts of blood: in the aerial battles, we see the shattering glass and the blood that pours out of the faces of the pilots and gunners. There's more realism in the surprising use of the Chinese language.
The other isn't surprising except in degree. As a flying film that pays a lot of attention to the flying and the fliers, it sits squarely with a string of films made ten to fifteen years earlier. However the pessimism and stark realism of writers like John Monk Saunders (some scenes are stolen directly from The Dawn Patrol, including those after Blackie's death) is generally progressed forward to a more Hollywood outlook, so we get a whole romance angle between Pappy and a nurse called Brooke Elliott that is pure hokum and a whole bunch of less than subtle subplots. Hap's death is overblown: one minute he's grounded after a medical because he's lost his depth perception, but the next he's apparently blind as a bat.
The acting is varied. John Wayne is fine in the lead, playing it a little more subtle than you might expect. He's there very much to portray what Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek describes in the opening quote as the 'intrepid spirit of the Flying Tigers in the face of superior numbers.' Pappy is the leader of the squadron and is intrepid but realistic, and caring about the Chinese people that he's working to keep safe. Some of those following him up into the air aren't quite so realistic though. The largest amount of time is spent in the film showing the difference between Pappy and a young hotshot pilot called Woody Jason.
Jason is an ace flier but he's gung ho for all the wrong reasons: the $500 bounty on the head of every enemy. He's played by John Carroll, who is so trying to be a lively Clark Gable it's unreal, even though he looks more like a cross between William Powell and Victor Mature. He mostly succeeds in being annoying, but then he's supposed to be: he has to learn what it's all about, not the flying but the war. How this all unfolds is not going to be surprising in the slightest but it's carried off pretty well. Anna Lee does her job as the love interest but the role is pointless.
Sunday, 8 February 2009
Ed and His Dead Mother (1993)
Director: Jonathan Wacks
Stars: Ned Beatty, Steve Buscemi, John Glover, Miriam Margolyes, Sam Jenkins, Gary Farmer
I think every household has its guilty pleasures when it comes to cinema. This is one that keeps getting mentioned within the family I married into, second only perhaps to the soft porn version of Cinderella, which I finally saw in 2008. Everyone's seen Ed and His Dead Mother except me, but now I can catch up, given that my better half picked up a DVD copy for me for Christmas. She gets to catch up too, because the fact that it's such a memorable film for the family, they only saw it on late night TV and never found a copy to own.
As the film opens, the Ed of the title is stuck in black and white in some bizarre courtroom. He's there because he's cut off his mother's head, though apparently he didn't kill her because she was already dead. We reach colour when he wonders just how he got into all this, and then the story unfolds in flashback. He's Ed Chilton, who has been running Chilton's Hardware since his mother's death almost a year before. He's still mourning her year, something his Uncle Benny thinks is seriously unhealthy. Then again Uncle Benny spends his time watching the sexy new neighbour through a telescope.
Life isn't exactly peaches and cream but it's entirely stable, up until the moment when A J Pattle walks into Chilton's Hardware to sell him life. Mr Pattle is a salesman and the commodity he has to sell is life itself. He works for the Happy People Corporation and he promises that for a simple thousand buck fee he can resurrect his dead mother. The cinch seems to be that no fee is forthcoming until delivery of the service promised, so there's no risk of losing any money in case Mr Pattle is some random nutjob who can't wield supernatural powers. Of course, given that this is a comedy, it doesn't quite work out the way you might expect.
For a start, Mr Pattle keeps finding ways to charge Ed more money. He's a slick salesman, after all: one who has a tan that sets off his perfect teeth and a sharp white suit with an intricately folded red handkerchief in his breast pocket. He even has a licence plate that reads R U HAPPY. So the initial $1,000 becomes $2,500 when he brings the varied pieces of Ed's mother to him in his trunk, missing organs that she'd had donated to science. Then it's another $400 when she drops dead in the front room, because life is a drug and each dose only lasts so long. It's an expensive business, even when you have a Happy People Good Customer Discount.
As you can imagine this is a really dark comedy, but it never has a nasty feel. It has a valid if basic message and has a riot telling it. The script is a good one but it's the cast that bring it to life, because they're perfectly cast. In fact the lead role of Ed could only go to one person and just the fact that he speaks the very appropriate line, 'Why does all this stuff have to happen to me?' is a gimme to the casting director that they have to cast Steve Buscemi. Buscemi is excellent, not just because he's always great at walking that fine line between social misfit and whatever else he chooses.
Ned Beatty gets the top credit, even though he's neither Ed nor his dead mother. He plays Uncle Benny with a perpetual and blissful calm; he may get rattled on occasion given the increasingly trying circumstances, but always returns to this blissful calm. Miriam Margolyes is perfect as Ed's dead mother, effortlessly stealing many scenes. The image of her bouncing down the pavement in a stars and stripes outfit chasing a collie with a hungry look on her face and a large knife and fork in her hands is going to be highly memorable.
Sam Jenkins is a lovely sexy neighbour, who falls hard for Ed but has a secret she isn't sharing. Gary Farmer is a favourite in this household, not just from a couple of recurring roles (as Nobody in a couple of Jim Jarmusch films and as the reservation police captain in the Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn TV movies) and he has fun here being deadpan as Big Lar who works at Chilton's Hardware, dealing with people who want to buy large pieces of equipment to kill people with, like the local priest who wants a bear trap to take care of his cheating whore of a wife. Best of all though is John Glover, who joyously evokes Bruce Dern's grin to play A J Pattle, the drug dealer dealing in life. I can see why it's a family guilty pleasure: now it's one of mine too.
Stars: Ned Beatty, Steve Buscemi, John Glover, Miriam Margolyes, Sam Jenkins, Gary Farmer
I think every household has its guilty pleasures when it comes to cinema. This is one that keeps getting mentioned within the family I married into, second only perhaps to the soft porn version of Cinderella, which I finally saw in 2008. Everyone's seen Ed and His Dead Mother except me, but now I can catch up, given that my better half picked up a DVD copy for me for Christmas. She gets to catch up too, because the fact that it's such a memorable film for the family, they only saw it on late night TV and never found a copy to own.
As the film opens, the Ed of the title is stuck in black and white in some bizarre courtroom. He's there because he's cut off his mother's head, though apparently he didn't kill her because she was already dead. We reach colour when he wonders just how he got into all this, and then the story unfolds in flashback. He's Ed Chilton, who has been running Chilton's Hardware since his mother's death almost a year before. He's still mourning her year, something his Uncle Benny thinks is seriously unhealthy. Then again Uncle Benny spends his time watching the sexy new neighbour through a telescope.
Life isn't exactly peaches and cream but it's entirely stable, up until the moment when A J Pattle walks into Chilton's Hardware to sell him life. Mr Pattle is a salesman and the commodity he has to sell is life itself. He works for the Happy People Corporation and he promises that for a simple thousand buck fee he can resurrect his dead mother. The cinch seems to be that no fee is forthcoming until delivery of the service promised, so there's no risk of losing any money in case Mr Pattle is some random nutjob who can't wield supernatural powers. Of course, given that this is a comedy, it doesn't quite work out the way you might expect.
For a start, Mr Pattle keeps finding ways to charge Ed more money. He's a slick salesman, after all: one who has a tan that sets off his perfect teeth and a sharp white suit with an intricately folded red handkerchief in his breast pocket. He even has a licence plate that reads R U HAPPY. So the initial $1,000 becomes $2,500 when he brings the varied pieces of Ed's mother to him in his trunk, missing organs that she'd had donated to science. Then it's another $400 when she drops dead in the front room, because life is a drug and each dose only lasts so long. It's an expensive business, even when you have a Happy People Good Customer Discount.
As you can imagine this is a really dark comedy, but it never has a nasty feel. It has a valid if basic message and has a riot telling it. The script is a good one but it's the cast that bring it to life, because they're perfectly cast. In fact the lead role of Ed could only go to one person and just the fact that he speaks the very appropriate line, 'Why does all this stuff have to happen to me?' is a gimme to the casting director that they have to cast Steve Buscemi. Buscemi is excellent, not just because he's always great at walking that fine line between social misfit and whatever else he chooses.
Ned Beatty gets the top credit, even though he's neither Ed nor his dead mother. He plays Uncle Benny with a perpetual and blissful calm; he may get rattled on occasion given the increasingly trying circumstances, but always returns to this blissful calm. Miriam Margolyes is perfect as Ed's dead mother, effortlessly stealing many scenes. The image of her bouncing down the pavement in a stars and stripes outfit chasing a collie with a hungry look on her face and a large knife and fork in her hands is going to be highly memorable.
Sam Jenkins is a lovely sexy neighbour, who falls hard for Ed but has a secret she isn't sharing. Gary Farmer is a favourite in this household, not just from a couple of recurring roles (as Nobody in a couple of Jim Jarmusch films and as the reservation police captain in the Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn TV movies) and he has fun here being deadpan as Big Lar who works at Chilton's Hardware, dealing with people who want to buy large pieces of equipment to kill people with, like the local priest who wants a bear trap to take care of his cheating whore of a wife. Best of all though is John Glover, who joyously evokes Bruce Dern's grin to play A J Pattle, the drug dealer dealing in life. I can see why it's a family guilty pleasure: now it's one of mine too.
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