Movie Update 25

Seems sometimes like all I do is watch movies. But that's not true.

Amarcord


One of two films by Federico Fellini I saw this weekend, and the first I've seen in color. It's more autobiographical than his other work that I've seen, and thus more prone to not actually having a plot. It shows the crisscrossing lives of many people living in a small Italian village over the course of about a year during Mussolini's time as dictator. It pokes a lot of fun at the politics at the time, when it's not just depicting small town living. It's a fairly amusing film, but it didn't really grab me. I'm not against simple slice of life stories, but for whatever reason I wasn't really drawn into this one. Nicely done, but not much impact.

Au Hasard Balthazar


A good way to depict suffering and cruelty is to inflict it on something that's completely innocent, and that's what Robert Bresson does in Balthazar. It shows the parallel lives of a young farm girl and her family's pet donkey, as they grow older and face the harsh realities of growing up and being subject to the whims of someone stronger than you. I focused mostly on the donkey, just because it's such a pitiable creature and it's hard to watch what people do to it just because they can. If you want a prime example of a foreign art house movie that shows what's wrong with humanity without hitting you over the head with it... well, here you are.

Rio Bravo


Rio Bravo was made as a response to High Noon, which some such as Bravo's star John Wayne saw as un-American. It has a similar premise of the sheriff of a small, dusty town facing the looming threat of a criminal preparing to come and cause trouble, but rather than asking the town he protects for help, he faces the threat head-on. Of course, he has a couple buddies who are even better with a gun than him, and in general the town just treats him better. I liked Rio Bravo about as much as High Noon. Its approach is different, but it's a more entertaining, if less intense Western. The cast is solid, and Howard Hawks' direction is spot on. I liked High Noon because it was different from most films of its type at the time, but there's value to something just being well made too.

Stagecoach


John Ford's first sound Western, and the breakthrough movie for John Wayne. Solid character actors like John Carradine and an Oscar-winning Thomas Mitchell appear as well in nice roles. A stagecoach tries to make it through Apache territory to a town where Wayne's Ringo Kid intends to face down the man who murdered his loved ones, but there's a marshal riding shotgun who wants none of it. Parts of the movie are a bit slow, including the ending, which took a bit too long to resolve all of its little plot threads. There's some really good stuff here though, with Ford's direction seeming to be ahead of its time. A long chase through the desert that makes the film's climax in particular is just a brilliantly done sequence, and is easily one of the best action scenes from the era. One of the most important movies in the genre.

La Strada


The other Fellini movie I saw, and my favorite work by him. It stars his wife Giulietta Masina again (or first, as this was made the year before Nights of Cabiria) as a slow but well meaning girl who gets sold by her mother to a traveling strongman after her sister who filled the same role dies. She shows obvious talent as a clown, but when the two join a circus and a conflict erupts between him and a fool, bad things start happening. It has a predictably morose ending, but the journey there is at times heartwarming and devastating. Comparisons have been made between Masina and Charlie Chaplin, and I definitely see it. She definitely has that physical comic sensibility, and her character is the naive sort that reminds you heavily of the Tramp. Really good performance, even if there's no scene as great as the end of Cabiria.

To Be or Not To Be


A comedy made during World War II, depicting a troupe of Polish theater actors that use their stage talents to try to sneak their way out of their city, which has been occupied by the Nazis. It's a delicate balance between making fun of Hitler and Germany without ignoring the truth of the situation, even if at the time the full extent of what they were doing wasn't known. Still, I think it works as a comedy and as something that could lift spirits in the face of a devastating war. Carole Lombard unfortunately died in a plane crash a couple months before this was released, but it would be a fitting final performance for just about anyone.

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.