INLAND EMPIRE - 2006 - Film

Saturday, January 27, 2007



On January 27th David Lynch appeared in person at The Music Box Theatre to introduce INLAND EMPIRE, and to an audience with an almost perverted enthusiasm for him and his work. He offered patrons a free cup of his own brand of coffee, and otherwise provided an abstract mix of answers to questions asked at the post-show Q&A session. Needless to say, it was one of the greatest Saturday nights in months.

Read the full review of the evening and INLAND EMPIRE in Four Magazine.

Brokeback Mountain - 2005 - DVD

Friday, January 26, 2007



A few weeks after Brokeback Mountain was released in theaters I was sitting with my mother when her friend approached and asked what the movie was about. Before I had a chance to answer, my dear old mom says, “It’s the one about the gay cowboys.” In my mother’s defense, she was not the only one to summarize the movie the way she did. We heard it everywhere. In actuality, the movie is about two men in rural 1963 Wyoming, whose love is too tender for the rigid social atmosphere in which they live. More simply, it is a love story.


Read the whole DVD reveiw at Cinema Blend.

The Sun Shines Bright - 1953 - VHS

Sunday, January 14, 2007



I think there must be no more than one copy of this movie in the Chicago area, and I was lucky enough to persuade some friends of mine that it was the most important movie to see on our movie night, which took place almost two weeks ago. It was serendipitous that the folks I was gathering with were apathetic about the movie selection, because John Ford's The Sun Shines Bright (1953) was the very next movie in my queue for this never-ending Ford Film Marathon (dude, it's been going on since September). No surprise that this very scarce movie can't be found on DVD (at least not to my knowledge), so we had to deal with the metallic fuzz of a VHS tape, which had to have originated some time in the 80s.

But who cares, because this is the film of Ford's that Rosenbaum and others say is his best. Yep, that's right, they say it's even better than The Searchers or Clementine, or even Stagecoach. The movie was shot on black and white film stock rather than color stock, which was standard by the time of the film's release. It's headlining actors are all non-stars, and if you didn't know about Ford from the credits, it might initially look to be a cheapie B-movie from a no-name director. All of Ford's hits are studded with stars like John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepburn--all of the big guys. So why the heck did he retreat to such simple style?

Well, I have no idea. Though, it lived up to a lot of its hype, despite its racist portrayal of blacks in a turn of the century south, and some rather dense and hard to hear dialogue. A number of times we had to stop and rewind the tape to figure out what the characters where saying, and the conflict was dealt with so subtly that all of us were never entirely sure what was wrong, and which character was connected to which. The general story, however, concerns a daughter whose mother's identity is hidden from her. Sadly, with the passage of two week's time, and the starts and stops of the screening, I get a little hazy relaying exactly why this was so.



Suffice it to say for now that it is about a family caught between two social worlds: one that is progressive in dealing with a post-war southern society, and one that is distinctly rooted in antebellum culture. Ford is the man of Westerns, and in The Searchers, for instance, the final shot frames Ethan (John Wayne) in a doorway, looking outdoors. He staggers, we guess aimlessly, into the dusty west alone and unsure. Then, comes The Sun Shines Bright that shows its main character in one of the film's final shots, from the opposite angle: he slowly walks into the house away from the outside world, presumably where the culture and history with which he identifies remains intact. How's that for a history lesson? Aahh, the good old days.


Also, please note my absence from the week of January 15th-January 22nd. I traveled back to New York for my sister's wedding, which brings me to this: Congrats to Amanda and my new brother (in-law), Marc! Cheers, you two!

Mogambo - 1953 - DVD

Thursday, January 11, 2007



Mogambo is sexist, misogynistic, and plain offensive in its portrayal of women. Yet, John Ford manages to make it look good. It stars Eva Gardner, Grace Kelly, and Clark Gable in the African countryside, all of them looking fine except for a slightly rotund Gable. He's graying and mean in this film. He always has a condescending smirk across his face as one of the two leading ladies throws themselves mercilessly in his arms (God help them. Under normal circumstances I would say, "go girl!" but Gable is nothing but offensive in appearance and attitude this time around.)

Set against the African landscape, Mogambo essentially is a western. The jungles and hills of eastern Africa are featured prominently in Ford's compositions, aligning it with the American western landscape. Instead of cowboys we've got hunters and tourists. Gable is a hunter by trade. He keeps caged lions and tigers and other animals with large fangs and a growl right there on his property, just outside his front door. Inside he's got a pet snake (a huge phallus if there ever was one) named Joe. Plus he is angry. Not the snake, Gable, and when Ava suddenly appears for a quick vaca from the city (she's from New York, you can tell by her snarky accent) he lets her know it.

The two sort of hit it off. If by "hit it off" you mean "Ava is desperately lusty for Gable but he is too macho and mean to acknowledge her affection as more than a childish adoration." In that case, yes, they really do hit it off. Ava's traipsing around in a deep, scoop neck green shirt that keeps falling off her shoulders, and is barely kept up by the points of her breasts, which are also prominent features in the film. She's wearing high heels and a long draped skirt, not exactly the right look for some African R&R. Though, Ava's body is precisely the point of her being there anyway; she is sex on two long, balletic legs. If only she'd use them to kick Gable where it counts.

The best (i.e. most offensive) part of the story happens when society girl Grace Kelly shows up with her husband, begging Gable to tour them through Gorilla country. Suddenly Kelly falls out of love with her husband and in love with Gable, but the order may be switched on that. I remain baffled why or how this attraction exists between Kelly and Gable. She has no reason to like this man. Perhaps it is because Gable embodies all that Kelly has been taught to fear or despise--is it this that makes him so terribly attractive to her? Either way, like a little girl, Kelly turns into her most naive persona ever seen on film; she behaves like a schoolgirl who has been betrayed by her crush. In the end Gable plays the two women at once, the fine gentleman that he isn't.

Here is a spoiler, so don't read this paragraph if you want the surprise. Grace Kelly shoots Gable when she catches them drunk and reeking of repressed sexual desire together. Shot him right in the arm, and you know what? He smiles when she does it. He turns to Ava and smiles, that condescending grin back across his face again as Ava fumbles with the first aid kit. Grace finally leaves with her hubby. You thought your relationship was dysfunctional.

Though, like I said, through all of this dysfunction and misogyny Ford does make the movie look beautiful. The stock footage of jungle animals gets a little clunky as it's intercut with the smoothness of his original shots, and on a formal note, the blocking of his images is painterly. There must be a mythic tale of the West hidden somewhere in the narrative, but I was too ticked-off by the characters' relationships to give a damn.

Also check out this poster for the movie printed in Spanish. The artist rendering makes Grace Kelly look like Kirk Douglas, and the gorilla look as big as King Kong. Awesome.

Romantico - 2007 - Film

Tuesday, January 9, 2007



The following review will be published in the upcoming print issue of Four Magazine. Release date, TBD.

Romántico is a story about a man, Mexican immigrant Carmelo Muñiz Sánchez. He is a musician who serenades passers-by with his melodies that alternate between bright and melancholy. He is in a “trio” of two men, a keen marketing device for him and his partner, Arturo, who can pick up $50 to $100 per night, probably based on the texture of their character and charm alone.

Carmelo sends his profits home to Mexico where his family, a wife and two daughters subsist on his illegal income. In this strained, and practically estranged, familial structure, Carmelo redefines what it means to be a breadwinner.

In a cramped closet of an apartment that looks more like a garage with painted walls, Carmelo emerges from his sleeping quarters—itself a structure of found items, a kiddie fort of comfort and privacy canopied in bed sheets. This is his home in San Francisco’s Mission District. By day he guards his space from thieving neighbors who steal the milk from his fridge—the door of which is ajar, roaches skittering in and about, and calls home on a corner pay phone, listening to the daily workings of a family that he raises, but cannot see.

In Salvatierra, Mexico, “858” are the numbers of his address on an unidentified street. Here, upon his return from the States, he has a designated place of ownership. Now he is in his family’s presence, but his pride as a father shrinks with his income. $6 a day, or a handful of pesos from the sale of handmade nieves, or snow cones, is scarcely enough to cover the cost of his family’s food, school, and healthcare.

Carmelo sings one lyric, volver, which in translation means “to return.” He is a father and a man in search of a home that strikes a joyful balance among family, work, and community, but seems eternally separated from the spaces he inhabits. Reflections in windows and the traffic against a static background are the things that cross his path constantly, almost imperceptibly; they are fragile symbols that pull him out of space and transient between worlds, always in search of home.

Things To Do - 2007 - DVD

Friday, January 5, 2007



Check out my review of Things To Do in Four Magazine!

What Price Glory - 1952 - DVD

Thursday, January 4, 2007

I guess it is not a coincidence that in another John Ford movie I have found one of the best performances from an actor on screen. James Cagney, hailed by all, and for good reason with his multifaceted ability to sing, dance, and behave in accordance with a script and with his own jerky gestures and inflection intact, completely blows my mind in one defining scene as a soldier dies in his arms. How do you relate the tremors of death, the last instance of life before it flitters away into the intangible ether? How do you show what this physical tragedy does to a person emotionally and intellectually without sledging them over the head with sentimental rhetoric? I guess if you're John Ford you don't say much at all, and hold the scene in long shot as you watch James Cagney's character clench his teeth so hard, and in complete silence that the moment almost becomes separated from space. This is how Ford works, with a hyper-masculine minimalism that strips the scene from emotional elements like weeping and tears and replaces it with a physical thing so heavy you can't look away.

What Price Glory is gory and violent, at least by the standards of 1952 that never come close to the limb-loss, decapitations, and rivers of blood and wormy intestine spills that define war movies of late. Even better, the film subtly hints at the grotesque as Ford chooses to show us the faces of his characters, their reactions to the gore, instead. This is how the violence in The Searchers works as well, with Ethan (John Wayne) playing the canvas on which the macabre is expressed across his face; Ethan's subsequent bitter eruptions among his fellow cowboys (and remaining family members) is also the abstract expression of the human slaughter he witnesses. As previously mentioned in notes on 3 Godfathers, Wayne has the same platform to relate a complex matter, uncut and organic, with time provided by a long-take to show us how his character works through his thought; the expression changes on his face multiple times and the camera holds steady and shows each of Wayne's facial twitches and blinks.

Recently I viewed Peter Bogdanovich's Directed By John Ford (1976/2006), a testament from all of Ford's regular actors, including Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, that the director kept up a high pressure atmosphere accented by an acerbic attitude that seemed to denote that if you couldn't perform to Ford's expectations you were a personal failure. Apparently, Ford had this mental power over his players, and for better or worse, with performances like Cagney's (and the uncountable moments with Wayne), it worked.



What Price Glory takes place in 1918 France during the first world war, and gives Ford the additional credit of an author who is aware of the enemy's face as much as those of his protagonists. There are numerous shots (some I believe in close-up) that show German soldiers behind barbed-wire trenches, and later the actual capture of a German Colonel. The enemies in this film are given character, which makes the muddy rubble of mortar rust and blood all the more devastating, and certainly more real. There are sound tools Ford uses, as well, that shape the gloomy mood of the soldiers' lives: from the start of the film faint rumblings of explosions linger through the ambiance; as the story progresses the explosions become louder, until finally the characters are in the depth of battle. Finally, and what is perhaps the singularly best shot of the film, is Ford's overhead camera that holds on a yard of American soldiers exercising to the cadence of their uniform chant, which then in one smooth motion pans across the fence to a separate yard of French school girls as they sing and stretch together. With all of its violence, What Price Glory is a war movie where people coexist peacefully.

The Rules of the Game - 1939 - Film

Tuesday, January 2, 2007



This is my third or fourth time seeing Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, and my first time seeing it on 35mm film. A famous Chicago film historian was in attendance, and I heard a rumor that he was underwhelmed by the print, noting that it was practically unchanged since its last release in 1961. That could be true, and he would certainly know better than I, though, the print was sparkly-clean and I saw it as a lovely opportunity to see what is perhaps the best film ever made on the format which it was intended to be seen. It was gorgeous.

Each time I see Rules it is new to me, which could be attributed to the fact that it is usually years between screenings (it was in fact at least two years since I had last seen it this time around), but I still keep the basic outline intact in my memory. As I watched this time I was awestruck once more by the choreography. Not dancing per se, but the synchronized movement among the characters and camera, and how they both manipulated the layout of the house they occupied. Servants and attendants scurry up and down stairs; doors slam and one person exits while another one enters from some point off screen. Oftentimes the camera is in a continual pan that meets the character as he crosses paths with another one; almost like a relay one character will pass the camera's attention on to the next, and so it continues for roughly the entire duration of the film.

Everything happens so fast, and people move fast in Renoir's film. Christine (Nora Gregor) manages to have three different men fall in love with her in the course of a night, all of whom give up on her (or get shot and killed) in the same length of time. That's what's so fantastic about Rules for me, the amount of action (and compelling action) that is compressed into a matter of minutes. It's a life cycle that runs the gamut of emotions, from love to hate, all the while keeping us conscious of class and social divide. Of course, watching the rabbit die in the famous hunting scene is enough to make you quake or even cry, and in fact I think I heard soft sniffles from the woman sitting next to me as that bunny stretched out his last ounce of life.

Stranger Than Fiction - 2006 - Film

Monday, January 1, 2007



First day into the New Year and I already need to alter, ever so slightly, my top ten list. While Will Ferrell's latest movie Stranger Than Fiction did not grab a slot in last week's list it certainly gets an honorable mention. This is the first time I've seen Ferrell in a role that is not a) an SNL character, b) a gross exaggeration or caricature of some personality, or c) a guy who is funny, plain and simple. Comic actors have a history of trying their hand at something more dramatic, but most of the time they fail because the roles are played too straight. Robin Williams, for instance, is terrifying to watch in a movie like Good Will Hunting, I know I fall into a minority on that one, but I can't help it, I think he's downright scary. Others have been more successful, like Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey, but even they make me think they'll snap out of character for a moment and crack a joke, make a noise, do other things slapstick, etc..

Ferrell was a pleasant surprise as a straight man because he didn't completely abandon his audience's expectations of the classical "him." His character is a regular guy. He's a tax man for the IRS who is so widely despised that at some point he became numb to life. That part isn't explicitly stated in the movie, but judging by the blank walls and neutral, minimalist design of his apartment, and the routine of his outfits and the times he wakes, sleeps, and eats, it's easy to tell this guy, Harold Crick is his name, doesn't have much stimulation. But he is likeable because he is still "Will Ferrell" and there are moments where we get to read some of his inflections as comic, almost like an inside joke. Like I said, I always feel like I'm waiting for comic-actors-turned-dramatic to break character and tell me the things about them I already know. I like watching them for this reason, it's intriguing.

The fantastic thing about Ferrell though, is that he never descended into a full-fledged clown. He stayed level without taking himself too seriously, I mean that in terms of his character (he of course takes the role seriously.) There is a scene where Harold breaks down when he keeps hearing the narrator's (Emma Thompson) voice. He's pacing through his apartment, tearing it apart trying to find where the voice is coming from, and while for the first few moments the audience giggled at his drastic movements, the scene continued and people (myself included) realized the sympathy they felt for Harold. It was a great act of frustration, but done light enough that we read it seriously, with a touch of humor, so as not to think the guy mental. That is not something this gal can say about creepy Robin Williams.

Pan's Labyrinth - 2006 - Film

Friday, December 29, 2006



Read my review in Four Magazine!