Movie Update 24

Would you believe I've seen a few more movies since the last time I wrote about a few movies? The first three of these are the second film I've seen by their well-regarded directors, and the last is the first by another.

All About My Mother


This is a movie that could have gotten unbearably depressing, but something about the colorful way it looks or its deeply human characters or the faith it has in humanity or something kept it watchable, and made me really like it a lot. Pedro Almodóvar seems to be a director's who's a lot more in tune with women than many men in his profession, and even dedicated the movie to them at the end. It's about a woman who loses her son, and then journeys back to her old stamping grounds, where she meets some old friends and makes some new ones. Penelope Cruz is the only one I remember seeing anywhere before, but they almost all instantly become likable, even if they're flawed as people, and it's an interesting movie just to watch. A lot of bad things happen, but hope never completely runs out. At least that's what I took from it.

Chungking Express


Wong Kar-wai employs a very unusual structure with this film. It's not that weird to split a narrative between two different and only tangentially related stories, but it's a good deal weirder to separate them almost completely in editing, with one going through all its paces and then wrapping up before there's a quick transition to the second. They're both love stories featuring lonely policemen and a snack bar, and they both have thematic similarities, although there are definite differences as well. I don't like all of the choices Wong makes, such as the low shutter speed effect when things are happening quickly, but it's mostly a well made, well acted drama. Wong impresses me about as much as any Asian filmmaker who's still working.

Contempt


Made only a few years of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Contempt sure looks a lot different. It's in widescreen and color, and the differences don't really stop at an aesthetic level. It's a very natural film, examining the breakdown of a screenwriter's marriage while he's also struggling with his current project. He's rewriting a script for an adaptation of The Odyssey (why hasn't their been an actual legitimate film version yet?) which is being directed by German auteur Fritz Lang (playing himself), and he finds himself disagreeing with his boss and then his wife after she meets him. A lot of the film is just the writer and his wife talking, evading the issue of what's really going on while being cruel to each other. It doesn't sound that exciting, but Godard does some really interesting things with the presentation of the material that makes up for it. You can read a lot of symbolism and analogy into it, or you can just enjoy the impressive cinematography and Brigitte Bardo's figure.

Written on the Wind


In the past, critics have looked at Douglas Sirk's work in two different ways. When he was contemporary and his films were making money in theaters, he was criticized for making old fashioned, overwrought melodramas. Later though, others saw a certain irony in what he did, like he was prodding at the falsehood of the American dream without calling too much attention to it. Watching the movie, I could see it both ways, but I would tend to agree with the more recent interpretation, because I have a hard time believing someone  who was so good at creating images on film could be so bad at depicting human interaction in the world of 1950s cinema. Maybe he just lucked into great directors of photography, but in any case, the irony is there, whether he intended to have it or not. Written on the Wind is a big movie with big emotions, and it's interesting to look at the absurdity of rich people at any point in history, so I had a good time watching the film and wondering about its real intentions. It's not perfect, but I'm pretty sure I liked it.

Metropolis

I already reviewed the anime based on the manga tangentially based on this, but here's the original. If I waited another month I could have watched a new, even more restored version of the film, with over twenty extra minutes. To be honest... I'm glad I didn't. I have mixed feelings on this film, a German silent classic. Conceptually, for 1927, it's downright amazing. It's a very early example of science fiction in film, and was definitely very influential and important to the history of the medium. Some of the ideas are really great, and aspects of the production are impressive. I just didn't find it terribly entertaining to watch. It wasn't awful by any stretch, it's just that I find it much harder for film to work without dialogue unless it's funny, mostly because scenes tend to last a lot longer than they have to. It's not that you can't convey ideas and emotion without words, it's that movies like this often pretend to have dialogue, so you're watching two people mouth words at each other for minutes on end while only getting maybe two subtitles throughout the whole thing. What's happening in each scene is often clear for a long time before it actually ends, and it just makes it difficult sometimes to maintain attention when things actually start happening.

So it's about a future society where the very rich live in grand, tall buildings, and the working class toils endlessly maintaining machines below the surface. One of the men in charge has a son, who becomes disillusioned after seeing the conditions, understanding what the life of a worker is like, and meeting a woman who has become a spiritual leader down below. The man and his crazy evil scientist colleague come up with a plan to use a robot in the woman's image to regain control of the situation, but things go awry in ways that neither of them expect. It's an interesting, forward thinking story, and I'm definitely glad having seen of the movie. I just feel that it definitely could have been told efficiently, and it's one of those situations where it wouldn't actually be a tragedy to trim some of the fat. Still, I understand the desire for wanting to have as complete a version of the original as possible in existence.

M

I gotta say, this movie is damn impressively made for 1931. It's also a lot darker than what you'd ever expect to see from the era. I guess maybe we can thank Germany for that. M is not without its flaws, but it's an interesting and important film that still manages to be enjoyable today. What's the most amazing thing about it though is how they portray what would normally be the pure incarnation of evil that terrorizes everyone else. Peter Lorre plays a serial killer of children, but in some ways he's actually the protagonist of the film. Like Dexter 75 years in advance. His crimes are treated like a compulsion he has no control over, and you unbelievably find yourself sympathizing him when he wants a real trial rather than having to face the actual people of the city he's been terrorizing. Good stuff.

He's not in enough of the movie to be a true main character, though. Lorre easily gives the best performance, but a lot of screen time is spent with other characters, both police and other criminals wary of a serial killer's effect on their business, who are trying to figure out how to find and stop him. Kind of a lot of the movie is built off of this, but unfortunately I thought these scenes tended to drag a lot as various supporting characters go on for a long time about all the things they know and don't know. Normally I prefer to see films as their director intended them, but in this case I think the pace could have benefited a lot from whatever soulless hacking a studio did when they originally released this in America. It does get better once Lorre's part expands after like half an hour or forty minutes, but it never stops being a bit long-winded. Still, a mostly intriguing story, and Fritz Lang's work behind the camera deserves recognition. There are several iconic moments and set ups, and some of the camera movies are almost criminally good for the era. Stuff that would still be impressive if pulled off correctly today. Despite a couple qualms, it's certainly something all real film fans should seek out.