Shooting Down Pictures

WARNING - possible spoilers contained within video.

Some time ago I had the pleasure of sitting among some of my respected colleagues to discuss the films of Clint Eastwood, who had another remarkable year in 2008 with the release of both Changeling and Gran Torino.  The round table was hosted by Evan Davis of Film Comment and included:

• Ed Gonzalez, Film editor, Slant Magazine
• Akiva Gottlieb, Contributor, The Nation & Slant
• Kent Jones, Editor-at-large, Film Comment
• Karina Longworth, Editor, SpoutBlog

To listen to the entire audio podcast, visit the Filmlinc blog.

I took choice segments of the commentary to produce three short videos on Clint Eastwood. Today I present the first of them, on Changeling.  Have a look and listen, and if you like it well enough, please rate it. also, see if you can figure out which of these critics picked Changeling as their worst film of 2008:

For this video essay, I’m especially pleased to have as guest commentator someone who I’ve known for almost as long as I’ve been discussing movies on the internet.   Back when I was a frequent visitor on the iMDb Classic Film board, I considered Christianne Benedict - known there as Chris-435 - to be one of the most readable and down-to-earth participants around.  Chris’ enthusiasm for movies really comes through in her writing, especially when it comes to horror.  You can find many of Chris’ writings at krelllabs.blogspot.com

If you like this video, please rate it!

The end is in sight.  After pushing hard through the holidays, we have now reached the magical 950 mark. With 50 films to go, I am poised to complete this project (assuming I can find access all the remaining titles) by the end of the year, at the rate of one film per week. There’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to keep that pace through the entire year (despite averaging two a week for the past two months), but it’s a reasonable goal for the year.

What’s heartening is that despite the recent binge of viewing and reviewing for the project, I feel that my ability to describe something vital and essential about each film has held.  Posting my latest entry on Elia Kazan’s Wild River prompted me to revisit my entry on Kazan’s America, America from over a year ago, to see if there have been any developments in my writing.  The Wild River write-up is longer than my usual entries; lately I’ve taken a lot of pleasure in packing as much evocative detail into as few words as possible. But one thing I hope is evident by comparing the two reviews is a moving away from auteurist assumptions, reading into films as saying something about their maker, as if I were their shrink.  I’m much more interested these days in getting to concrete descriptions about how a film works and how it feels to watch it.  The third paragraph of the Wild River review is what I want to do more of, trying to get as precise as possible with what’s happening. It may very well eventually lead to just writing about moments as opposed to films. We’ll see.

I haven’t posted a video essay lately, partly because of the increased pace of text entries, but I certainly have not been idle on the multimedia front. This week there will be four video essays posted here, one on a recent film entry and the other three as the video version of a critics roundtable in which I recently participated.  And I’m hoping that the video content will get more interesting and unique as the year goes on.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share the films that are remaining on the project (barring another shuffling of the deck by the list master). There may come a point when I ask for assistance in locating some of these titles.  Stay tuned…

TSPDT Rank - Title - Director

511    -    Hart of London, The    -    Chambers, Jack
610    -    Heimat [TV]    -    Reitz, Edgar
646    -    Hitler: A Film from Germany    -    Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen
683    -    Limite    -    Peixoto, Mario
740    -    Lusty Men, The    -    Ray, Nicholas
798    -    Plácido    -    Berlanga, Luis García
829    -    Under the Bridges    -    Kaütner, Helmut
865    -    Getaway, The [1972]    -    Peckinpah, Sam
866    -    Rocker [TV]    -    Lemke, Klaus
897    -    Yesterday Girl    -    Kluge, Alexander
898    -    Starship Troopers    -    Verhoeven, Paul
900    -    Lucifer Rising    -    Anger, Kenneth
903    -    Devil in the Flesh    -    Autant-Lara, Claude
905    -    Shin heike monogatari    -    Mizoguchi, Kenji
907    -    Sur, El    -    Erice, Victor
909    -    Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, The    -    Buñuel, Luis
910    -    My Apprenticeship    -    Donskoi, Mark
915    -    King of the Children    -    Chen Kaige
919    -    Bienvenido Mister Marshall    -    Berlanga, Luis García
920    -    Luna    -    Bertolucci, Bernardo
925    -    Female Trouble    -    Waters, John
926    -    Bad Timing    -    Roeg, Nicolas
928    -    Second Breath    -    Melville, Jean-Pierre
930    -    Song of Ceylon    -    Wright, Basil
931    -    Pillow Book, The    -    Greenaway, Peter
934    -    My Friend Ivan Lapshin    -    Gherman, Alexei
939    -    Sign of Leo, The    -    Rohmer, Eric
944    -    Heaven Can Wait [1943]    -    Lubitsch, Ernst
945    -    Moonrise    -    Borzage, Frank
947    -    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers    -    Donen, Stanley
948    -    Tout va bien    -    Godard, Jean-Luc & Jean-Pierre Gorin
950    -    Passion of Anna, The    -    Bergman, Ingmar
955    -    Maskerade    -    Forst, Willi
957    -    Letter to Three Wives, A    -    Mankiewicz, Joseph L.
958    -    Far Country, The    -    Mann, Anthony
962    -    Lost Horizon    -    Capra, Frank
964    -    Dark Eyes    -    Mikhalkov, Nikita
965    -    Blast of Silence    -    Baron, Allen
966    -    Central Station [1998]    -    Salles, Walter
968    -    California Split    -    Altman, Robert
971    -    One, Two, Three    -    Wilder, Billy
970    -    Ladies’ Man, The    -    Lewis, Jerry
974    -    Strangers When We Meet    -    Quine, Richard
975    -    Toute une nuit    -    Akerman, Chantal
978    -    Bells of St. Mary’s, The    -    McCarey, Leo
986    -    White Shadows in the South Seas    -    Van Dyke II, W.S.
991    -    People on Sunday    -    Siodmak, Robert & Edgar G. Ulmer
994    -    Time to Love and a Time to Die, A    -    Sirk, Douglas
995    -    Dracula [1958]    -    Fisher, Terence
999    -    My Love Has Been Burning    -    Mizoguchi, Kenji

Screened January 3 2008 on DVD in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT #896  IMDb Wiki

I generally groan at the creakily subjective categorizing of film directors employed by Andrew Sarris in his American Cinema, but in the case of Elia Kazan I tend to agree with his label of “less than meets the eye.”  The often hysterical displays of moral angst and sexual neurosis among his Method ensemble in A Streetcar Named Desire [TSPDT #356], East of Eden [TSPDT #583] and On the Waterfront [TSPDT #104] (where the most histrionic performer is Leonard Bernstein’s score) may have broken taboos in the Eisenhower era, but today they come off as Oscar bait bordering on camp, offering more heat than light.  In contrast to these films, Wild River is a revelation, both even-handed and even-headed, foregoing steroidal drama for the sake of taking in the full registers and rhythms of a way of life on the way of being literally drowned out of existence.

Kazan’s empathy for his subject matter is embodied in Montgomery Clift’s Tennesse Valley Authority agent charged with evacuating a prideful matriarch (Jo Van Fleet, magnificent) from her soon-to be submerged island on a newly-dammed stretch of the Mississippi. Clift occasionally succumbs to Method ham with a halting line delivery or twitchy mannerism, but mostly his eyes convey his character’s liberal earnestness in trying to win through patient, reasoned conversation.  Similarly, Kazan’s town hall pacing gives time for practically every contending point of view to have its say, and his autumnal location camerawork achieves an authenticity of place and way of life that’s hardly to be found elsewhere in his oeuvre.

For once, Kazan’s theater-bound allegiance to script and performance give way to moments of cinematic lyricism worthy of Ford, particularly in scenes between Clift and Lee Remick’s wistful young widow, whose exchanges are performed with such exquisite timing that it’s breathtaking.  For once, the pscyhological and romantic strife of Kazan’s characters are largely internalized with nuanced body language, and expressed as equally by the film’s masterful light. Clift and Remick’s casual introduction elides into a wordless riverside passage where the distant sounds of hymns being sung over the current’s gurgle, conveying a romanticism so subtly natural that it stealthily sets up a knockout blow in Remick’s dilapidated house, where Remick’s heartbreak and sexuality quietly arise among increasingly looming hues of sunset and shadow.

The film was an immediate flop upon release, its concern with the Depression-era South seeming hopelessly unfashionable, its quiet treatment of sex insufficient to arouse audiences. In retrospect, its measured concern with social progress in the South, especially in its attentiveness to racial politics, gives it a rare prescience towards the civil rights struggle that would dominate the decade to follow.  But above all, its sensitivity and beauty tower over much of Kazan’s other work, and American cinema.

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Screened January 2 2009 on MGM DVD in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT rank #880  IMDb Wiki

A series of loosely connected anecdotes reminiscing over the heyday of radio programs and their effect on a Queens household modeled after that of Woody Allen’s childhood, Radio Days resembles a standup routine more than any of the work of this legendary comedian-turned-actor/director.  Allen’s buoyant voiceover accompanies a wall-to-wall soundtrack of period jazz, a fluid, hard-driving talk-and-tunes narrative approach that anticipates the first hour of Scorsese’s GoodFellas [TSPDT #99] by a few years.  A third of the anecdotes lead nowhere other than to provide amusing flourishes to this vivid period portrait, but the general narrative disjunction makes sense in a film whose underlying philosophy is to resist the passage of time, though history registers gently with the onset of World War II and its effect on both the family and the radio industry. Its hometown nostalgia owes a debt to Fellini’s Amarcord [TSPDT #82] and Allen’s cartoonish cast is also Felliniesque, with not one but two Giulietta Masini holy fool types who are the only characters possessing a narrative arc (Mia Farrow as an aspiring radio star and Dianne Wiest as a spinster aunt looking for Mr. Right). 

It’s typical of the leveling tendency of Allen’s social worldview to make the radio stars seem banal in their appearances and concerns, while the humble working class Jewish family and neighborhood denizens carry the aura of genuine experience, especially in a series of coarse but witty family arguments.  The stars only matter because of the feelings and fantasies they evoke among family members, leading to some gently lyrical moments such as a girl in a makeshift Carmen Miranda getup doing a bedroom cha-cha while family members look on.  Allen’s attempt to bridge the gap between the glamorous radio world the outer boroughs comes through Farrow’s cigarette girl looking for a break into the studio, a saga whose exaggerated incidents (involving gangster hits and Pearl Harbor) are largely unconvincing despite Farrow’s best attempts to channel Judy Holliday.  A number of the punchlines are quaintly anachronistic (i.e. one of Wiest’s suitors aborting date rape when he hears Orson Welles’ panic-inducing War of the Worlds broadcast on the radio) and for that reason a number of them land limply (i.e. one of Wiest’s dates turning out to be gay). 

But even these anecdotes roll by in a rush of such nostalgic goodwill that it’s hard not to embrace its immense charms.  Those charms are due in part to fluid camerawork and triumphant art direction, each set filled with loving detail and shot in brown tones as cozy as a hot cup of coffee.  Ironically - and fittingly - the lush visual design could vanish, leaving the rich soundtrack of Allen’s voiceover, the airtight comic banter and music to thrive as a ninety minute radio program of its own.  

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As the new year beckons, it’s also time to say goodbye to my favorite video store of all time, Kim’s on St. Mark’s and 3rd Avenue, which is relocating its retail operations and shutting down its rentals entirely.

While I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few hundred dollars in rentals at Kim’s over the years, it’s been almost exclusively in accessing titles that I couldn’t find anywhere else: not at the New York Public Library, not on Netflix, not online. I suppose the latter two constituents had something to do with the financial insolubility of Kim’s Video, not to mention the brick-and-mortar video rental industry as a whole. Perhaps it’s an inevitable outcome of video watching in the virtual age, but still it’s sad to see a longstanding revered institution go down.

The fate of the collection of rental titles, numbering 55,000, has been a looming question for some time.  For the past few months, proprietor Yongman Kim has been publicly seeking a benefactor to acquire the entire rental collection. One stipulation was that the collection be available to the general public, thus ruling out academic institutions that would probably have the endowment to purchase the collection but would be unwilling to operate a public borrowing or rental operation. Apparently institutions like the New York Public Library and online companies like Netflix didn’t figure into the solution.

As the fate of the collection became more uncertain over the past few weeks, I’ve focused the Shooting Down Pictures project on watching films that I could only find at Kim’s, so that I could review them in the event that they should no longer be available for rental. Such titles include: Judex, Before the Revolution, Il Sorpasso, Murder by Contract, Variety, Sandra, Carnival in Flanders, and We All Loved Each Other So Much.  I’ve also rented other titles that I digitized for upcoming entries. Like a squirrel I’ve been harvesting cinematic nuts for the bleak winter known as a post-Kim’s video world.

Last week I noticed at the checkout counter a blown-up poster-size version of a proposal kit from the city of Salemi, Sicily, offering to house the entire collection in its civic archives.

At first I thought this was some kind of joke, meant to foment enough outrage that a local benefactor would step up with a serious offer to keep the collection in New York City. But it seems that this proposal is for real, and is very much in the process of happening…

But what about Yongman Kim’s stipulation that the collection be available to the general public?  I guess when he said that he didn’t specify what nationality the public had to be, so New Yorkers are screwed. Oh wait, the Sicilians did take this into consideration. Read the fine print in the second paragraph under “keeping up with Kim’s Video members”.

Guess I can plan a trip to Sicily sometime to play into what apparently amounts to a small island city’s cinephilic tourist stunt.  And I love how it’s now to be known as “Kim’s Video Collection of New York in Salemi, Sicily.”

What to make of all this, I don’t know. It’s still too surreal to be believed. Just know that New York, as a global stronghold of cinema culture, has lost an invaluable resource (unless Sicily is now to be considered the sixth borough of the city).  As far as whoever is responsible for this development, I hold them in the same regard as the person who left his mark on Asia Argento’s forehead in a poster for The Last Mistress that was last seen gracing the stairwell of the video rentals section:

Screened December 31 2008 on Image DVD in New York NY

TSPDT #727 IMDb Wiki

John Carpenter’s second feature is often cited as an object lesson in tight, tense low-budget action filmmaking where not a single frame is wasted in conveying suspense and drama. The irony is that the majority of the scenes run longer than is necessary, lingering on deliberate silences or stage movements; the first half of the film is padded with wordless interludes taking in locations or gazing at people driving to those locations. In interviews Carpenter has admitted to extending shots and scenes in order to fill up a feature running length with a limited budget and fairly simple story, but whether by design or necessity, the laid-back exposition generates an seductive air of fateful, impending doom.

Viewers may not notice the slow editing pace due to Carpenter’s irresistibly cheesy but astoundingly effective synth score that pumps tension through a simple five note melody or a hanging chord. The slowness allows for characterizations both cinematic (police lieutenant Austin Stoker’s eyes taking in his surroundings, conveying an attentiveness that will serve his character well later) and dramatic (death row convict Darwin Joston’s Hawksian, jocular manner of sizing one person up after another with repeated requests for a smoke). Carpenter’s use of expansive ‘Scope frames would seem antithetical to shoestring filming, but they match the horizontal flatness of the Southern California setting, an urban wasteland conveying frontier desolation in which a ragtag police outfit finds itself utterly isolated.  While the near-senseless seige of the police station by a seemingly suicidal army of gangsters is the film’s extended climactic setpiece, the film’s most disturbing moment is an earlier inciting incident, the notorious ice cream truck massacre, a uniquely random act of horrific violence in broad suburban daylight that charges the subsequent nighttime siege with paranoid dread over unlimited possibilites of mayhem.

Unfortunately, the second half feels more conventional, relying on flash editing and walls of noise to provide easy scares in the dark, offset by the pornographic video game pleasure of turkey shooting zombie-like mauraders. Carpenter’s innovation here is an ultraviolent intensification of the George Romero heroes-in-a-tincan setup that itself has been co-opted by any number of claustrophobic action thrillers since. Nonetheless, Carpenter remembers the power of anticipatory quiet in between rounds of bloodbaths, as the dwindling number of defenders regard each other with surprisingly touching gazes, a humanist admiration earned through cold, hard survivalist professionalism.

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Screened Thursday December 30 2008 on Something Weird VHS (courtesy of Kim’s, sniff) in New York, NY

TSPDT rank #  IMDb Wiki

This remake of pioneer cineaste Louis Feuillade’s 1916 action serial featuring cinema’s original caped crusader can function today as a surreal subversion of the modern superhero genre that dominates movie houses the world over. While Judex (played by real life magician Channing Pollack) makes a bold entrance in a tuxedoed bird costume to orchestrate the death of a greedy financier, he, unlike most contemporary superheroes, is mostly ineffectual for the remainder of the film.  He’s upstaged by a slinky, shape-shifting minx (Francine Berge) who changes disguises at every step of a kidnapping plot so haphazard it slips like mercury through the viewer’s grasp. No one character maintains control of the narrative, which operates like a soccer game, bouncing in jagged trajectories with every unexpected death, deception or deus ex machina revelation. But once in a while a stunning moment will materialize to sear itself into the memory: a masked ball of wealthy socialites wearing bird’s heads; Francine Berge’s lightning transformation from a sweet-faced nun to a sleek cat burglar outfit; Edith Scob’s delicate body floating downstream; a boy staring transfixed at the fresh corpse of a woman who’s fallen to her death. Feuillade’s grand vision was of a world whose capacity for imminent, explosive chaos resisted the authoritative logic of 20th century narrative; Franju is clearly sympathetic to Feuillade, but goes further in imposing a new authority, one of the lyrical dream image. If only more summer blockbusters had that sense…

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Screened December 28, 2008 on New Yorker VHS in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT #988 IMDb

We have Bernardo Bertolucci’s second feature to thank for serving a vivid analogy to the flaws of communism: like sleeping with your hot aunt, it’s a utopian fantasy that, once achieved, goes downhill in a hurry.  This semi-autobiographical account of a doomed love affair between a young bourgeois leftist (Francesco Barilli) dallying and diddling with his disaffected aunt (Bertolucci’s then-wife, the delectable Adriana Asti) is filmed with genuine emotional conviction towards its ideological confusion, trying its damnedest to articulate its ambivalence through a barrage of stylistic conceits openly borrowed from New Wave contemporaries (even Asti is a mash-up of Anna Karina kitten-cute and Vitti-Moreau-nioni neurosis). The jump cuts, poetic monologues and musical interludes are alternately impressive in their omnivorous ambitions and overbearing in their bombast (especially when Ennio Morricone’s music swells to overkill levels). The most memorable stylistic elements are those that would become the touchstones for Bertolucci’s career: a camera that moves like a dancer through time and space, wishing to brush its gaze against everything in sight; and a darkly sensuous knack for depicting forbidden sex as a form of self-knowledge, an inescapable vortex at the heart of existence. Few filmmakers have been able to channel the cinema to evoke their all-consuming libido; the catch is that the leftist sentiments depicted in this film (which, upon its spring ‘68 release in Paris, helped incite the May Riots) amount to just another dalliance for this quintessentially bourgeois superconsumer of life experience.  It amounts to an international arthouse version of The Graduate [TSPDT #215], as clever as that film in fashionably tweaking middle-class boredom with cougar sex and hip filmmaking to compensate for a muddled, reactionary critique of society.  As far as movies depicting scandalous intercourse leading to social revolutions go, Harold and Maude [TSPDT #493] reads like Das Kapital compared to this defeatist tract.

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screened December 28 2008 on VHS in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT rank #828 IMDb Wiki

Dino Risi, who passed away this June to little fanfare, helmed nearly 80 features over a career spanning seven decades, the most celebrated of them being this road comedy, one of the early influencers of the genre.  A mild-mannered student (Jean-Louis Trintignant, more buttoned-up than usual) has his eyes opened to the excitements and vices of booming 60s Italy when he’s taken for a ride by a braggadocio businessman (Vittorio Gassman, whose last name fits his character in terms of his talking and driving).  The garrulous script is co-written by Ettore Scola (We All Loved Each Other So Much, A Special Day), and it shows in the story’s reliance on broad social types who require a full story arc to acquire dimension and pathos. Trintignant never overcomes the flat naivete of his character, basically a prop for Gassman’s blowhard hedonism, which borders on belligerence (not surprisingly, Risi also wrote and directed the original version of Scent of a Woman).  But when Gassman points out a family secret to his protege’s unbelieving eyes, he gains credibility as a social critic who’s not so much an asshole as too smart for his own good, earning the film a rib-jabbing cynicism worthy of Billy Wilder.  The sudden, tragic ending feels as arbitrary as the one in Easy Rider [TSPDT #331], a film it allegedly inspired, while other sardonic moments are undercut by the film’s essential ambivalence towards its own social critique: a fete full of gum-chewing teenyboppers eager to lose their virginity brims with leering undertones of adult envy; a sun-baked beach party exceeds tourist ad levels of brain-fried fun. The Easy Life’s ambivalent worldview may lack the singular formal curiosity of Antonioni (whose L’Eclisse is the target of the film’s biggest punch lines) or the carnivalesque lyricism of Fellini, but the way it mixes equal parts hipper-than-thou wisecracks, mainstream morality and tasty dollops of la dolce vita may account for its mass appeal.

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