The Life Cinematic

The Godfather

Posted January 18, 2010 with 2 comments

#6

1972, US Dir Francis Ford Coppola Cast Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton IMDb

Masterful filmmaking; who can dispute it? The Corleones are shown in an entirely insular world, not really hurting anyone, not really committing any crimes, except against other underworld figures. Thus freed from anything larger than The Family, it becomes easy to care about the whole cast as characters, even identify with them, and to see the other families as villains, since a villain is just a person who is not loyal to the Godfather. The opening scenes at Connie’s wedding achieve the uncommon trick of getting an awful lot of exposition out of the way without calling any attention to it whatsoever. From there, the film is off like, well, like gangbusters: everyone’s position is well established, and over the course of the intricately constructed three-hour narrative everyone’s position will be neatly re-established. Washed of the glamor and cool of the old gangster pictures, obsessed with family relations, it is first and best an astute character study. These people communicate largely in gazes that convey whole histories and hidden motives, and they are entirely intelligible: this is a great credit to actors, script, director. In the film’s many intimate scenes, these are almost ordinary people with passions and grudges like anyone else, hoping and striving for a better future. Until someone disrespects the Godfather and suddenly everything explodes in gritty, unromanticized violence. A rich and exciting film, yes, and great: but #6 of all time? I see myself asking that over and over again in the course of this project. Yes, great, but this great? It will be tiresome for me and all who happen upon it, but there’s no avoiding it. Anyhow looking forward to Part II, and honestly wondering, doubting, if it could really be better than this.

Blog The Current Cinema

Liveblogging the Globes

Posted January 17, 2010 with 6 comments

I’m going to try my hand at this. I’m not sure I’m even that interested, but we’ll see. I haven’t seen half of the nominees yet, but I find myself rooting for a lot of people and films blindly because the ones I have seen are just so… unacceptable. Why am I watching the Globes? Why am I liveblogging the Globes? Why do I caaaare?

Winners updated as the show proceeds (I’m sure people come here for news). Liveblogging below.

♦ Winner ♥ Rooting for • Seen, worthy ο Seen, unworthy

Best Motion Picture—Drama
♦ ο	Avatar
♥	The Hurt Locker
ο	Inglourious Basterds
	Precious
ο	Up in the Air
I almost like Basterds enough in a giddy, trashy way—what a weak category if that’s the case. »»»

The Current Cinema

Avatar

Posted January 16, 2010 with 0 comments

2009, US Dir James Cameron Cast Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Joel Moore, Giovanni Ribisi IMDb

"I told myself I can pass any test a man can pass."

Well, it’s just interesting to watch a film like Days of Heaven and a film like Avatar consecutively. One achieves the height of visual imagery on film, with a hauntingly simple narrative and moving performances by actual people. The other ushers in a new age of visual possibilities, so they say, with a narrative recycled from two dozen other stories, some already copies of copies, and showing the way to a cinema with no need for live actors at all. I watched the film in 2D, for the record, in part because it was the most convenient showtime, in part because I frankly don’t care about this sort of spectacle in general nor about this film in particular, but I’m going to put it down as an act of protest and assert that if you cannot impress me this way, forget your technical virtuosity. Can special effects make me surge with nervous excitement when Jake turns on his own people, make my heart leap triumphantly when he proves himself to his adopted clan? No, no. Without something deeper underlying it, it is an empty experience. Beautiful in its own way, but a completely empty experience emotionally. Clearly it’s enough to evoke a response in most of its audience, so please enjoy Avatar and whatever comes along to copy it (terrifying). I’ll be that curmudgeon, you know the kind, like those few cranks still bemoaning the advent of sound in 1930.

The Screening Log

Days of Heaven

Posted January 16, 2010 with 0 comments

1978, US Dir Terrence Malick Cast Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Linda Manz, Sam Shepard IMDb

"Wasn't no harm in him. You'd give him a flower, he'd keep it forever."

I was never particularly drawn to Malick, and so he has been another gross oversight in my film viewership. But another of my vague cinematic new year’s resolutions is to never regret missing an opportunity to see something theatrically again, and so when the Cleveland Cinematheque scheduled all four of his films this month I could hardly pass them up. Badlands was great, a quirky, dark, involving film just as beautiful to look at as I’d always imagined. Already I had been converted. Hell, I had been just from the Thin Red Line trailer, a film that previously held zero appeal for me, but when the music kicks up, and Ben Chaplin says, “Who lit this flame in us?”—so easily it got to me. Still, Days of Heaven, this was something else entirely, something I wasn’t prepared for; it is unutterably beautiful. Everyone knows that about Days of Heaven, but… good lord. During the whole locust/fire sequence I felt like I might fall out of my seat at any moment. I feel rather speechless and silly over it. It should be illegal to see this film anywhere but in a proper theatre.

The Current Cinema

The Young Victoria

Posted January 16, 2010 with 0 comments

2009, UK Dir Jean-Marc Vallée Cast Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Miranda Richardson, Jim Broadbent, Paul Bettany IMDb

"Look at that demure little head. And all of us wondering what's inside it."

This sort of thing is for me what Twilight is to most girls: I totally get off on British monarchy angst porn. It is a straightforward and capable film, marred here and there by some lame dialogue and flash editing. A little heavy on the chess-metaphor court intrigue, too, but when players and pawns are this attractive, who minds it? Jim Broadbent as the eccentric King William IV at the end of his reign; Miranda Richardson as the conflicted, power-grabbing Duchess of Kent; Paul Bettany as the practical, scheming, but good-natured Lord Melbourne. Appealing types played by good actors, that’s what a film like this needs, and that’s what The Young Victoria delivers. Of course Victoria herself must shine above all others, and Emily Blunt does great work, still the most promising British export of her generation. Her Victoria is beguiling and playful, uncertain, sad, and headstrong; very believably a girl of eighteen asked to rule and empire, at once quite keen and terrified to. Rupert Friend is her floppy-haired German suitor, Albert, and knowing how it will end up—ah, the royals who truly loved one another!—does not spoil all the delicious stages of sparring, loving, resisting, and giving in. I would not be opposed to seeing The Twenty-Something Victoria with this cast reassembled at all.

Projects: TSPDT Top 100

TSPDT Top 100 Intro

Posted January 16, 2010 with 3 comments

A new year, some new cinematic resolutions. One of mine is to finish the TSPDT Top 100 at last. I should confess up front that I counted this among my resolutions last January, and over the course of the year saw only three films from the list. But 2010 feels ripe for following through on commitments: I’m sure of it, because I’ve managed to publish three blog posts in a row!

I’ve avoided the canon for the last several years, my one-track mind having been seduced away by less conventional European arthouse fare and forgotten pre-Code Hollywood gems. The films that I have left in the top 100, well, most are not exactly tailored to my tastes. I’d probably never select them for myself out of a world of movie options. And put bluntly, most of them are awfully manly and masculinist. (Absurd generalization? TSPDT has included in the latest update a list of the top 100 films by female critics only, and it’s quite different.) But this is just the sort of thinking that has left me a film lover of six years who has never seen The Godfather. So, in 2010 I will at least see all these films, and perhaps admire more of them than I expect. Full list & project scope after the jump. »»»

The Current Cinema

Catching Up With 2009

Posted January 14, 2010 with 4 comments

From best to worst, roughly, here's what I've seen and left unreviewed from 2009 so far. Lengthier comments were written at time of viewing; lazier comments are tonight.

The Headless Woman [La mujer sin cabeza] LUCRETIA MARTEL—Sly but not slick, deceptively simple, singularly absorbing film that left me utterly shaken. I insist I will reflect upon this film at length in the near future; no 50-word blurb is going to do this justice.

Bright Star JANE CAMPION—Just when you think you can’t take another English costume drama with country dancing and love forestalled by social convention, this breathtaking, gentle, very real thing comes along. It is entirely of its period without making such a point of it. The inhabitants of this world speak and feel and act like humans, not stilted, overpolite, wry caricatures. And the romance at its heart could not be any more involving. Abbie Cornish’s half-educated and headstrong Fanny Brawne is a great, big-hearted performance, surely will stand as one of the very best of this year. »»»

The Current Cinema

Broken Embraces

Posted January 13, 2010 with 0 comments

[Los abrazos rotos]

2009, Spain Dir Pedro Almodóvar Cast Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo, José Luis Gómez IMDb

If I call this the most disappointing film of the year, you should know there was margin enough in my expectations that I could still consider this a very, very good film, nearly a great film—and I do. It’s just that I want so much from Almodóvar. Visually it’s as stunning and inventive as anything he’s done, as colorful and fluid as ever, every decision in perfect service to the expression or feeling he seeks to capture, as always. His ensemble, too, is collectively solid as usual, passionate and honest and all tuned to the same perfect pitch of melodrama, Penélope soaring above them all just as she should with another beautiful and sad performance, holding nothing back from the camera—I don’t believe she would know how. But as to his story—and what does one admire more in Almodóvar than story?—it comes to very little. He teases with the spark of a thought about identity, vision creative and literal, revisiting remaking and revising, but where does it all go? By the time “big secrets” are revealed in the melo-noir plot, it is all so unnecessary and underwhelming. Oh, I hate to say all this, because I admire it in many ways, and I admire him more than I can articulate. But it doesn’t satisfy, and his play with Women on the Verge just makes me sad somehow, and its main success lies in making me yearn to rewatch that earlier masterpiece. But re- re- re-…

The Current Cinema

Nine

Posted January 12, 2010 with 0 comments

2009, US Dir Rob Marshall Cast Daniel Day-Lewis, Penélope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman, Stacy Furguson IMDb

An empty, joyless thing that’s doubly galling for claiming any association with Fellini. The songs are terrible, ersatz showtunes with ridiculous lyrics (one rhapsodizes about “that Guido neorealism”), and there is no spectacle to their production. The film depends so entirely on these flimsy set pieces; there is nothing else to hold it up. The one possible exception is Fergie’s “Be Italian” number, the one you know from the trailer. There’s a reason it’s the only song they feature in the trailer. And in spite of myself, I had found the trailers so enticing, too; what one really wants to see is not this movie, but a dozen trailers of this movie. I’m not sure what this is supposed to be relative to Fellini, an adaptation, an homage, a flight of fancy, but all it accomplishes is reducing the filmmaker’s entire body of work to sex. It shows less than he ever did but is far cruder about it, taking out all the humor and fun and life until there’s no more characterization to Contini than one-dimensional satyromaniac. »»»

The Screening Log

There’s Always Tomorrow

Posted December 24, 2009 with 3 comments

1956, US Dir Douglas Sirk Cast Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Joan Bennett IMDb

"I had to escape because I was still alive. Alive, and wanting you."

As expressed elsewhere, my fourth Sirk film confirms him as a filmmaker I like and respect tremendously, and consistently, but he has never been the satisfying whole experience I always expected him to be. Opulently framed, veiled critiques of 50s society are perhaps not so intrinsically interesting to me as I imagined—or I get too stuck in the superficial silliness of it all to really take pleasure in the underlying ironies as I watch. There’s Always Tomorrow is much less opulent, and much less veiled, a more direct and effective portrait of the effects social constructions have on the unwary, the great majority of perfectly decent people who will not fight for something real and before they know it it has become an impossibility. It is an unflattering and insightful portrait of contemporary masculinity (the robot metaphor was adorable, and much too much), and husbands and wives—and Joan Bennett’s chilling assertion of what a woman really wants is a sort of fascinating chicken- »»»