Movie Update 22

Another weekend of movies. A couple of these I really liked, a couple I didn't.

The Birth of a Nation


It's kind of hard to separate how important this movie is in terms of setting standards of filmmaking that would be followed for a long time, and how horrible the content of its second half is. The film is in two parts, the first of which depicts The Civil War, and ends with Abraham Lincoln's assassination. The second part is about reconstruction, which could have been an interesting subject if handled appropriately. It wasn't though. Black people are portrayed by white actors in make-up, and shown to basically impose their will on the poor white southerners, ruining everything and even trying to steal their women. Eventually the Ku Klux Klan manages to restore order by running out the vile usurpers and their enabling carpetbaggers. It's both inaccurate and terribly racist. Pretty hard to defend.

The Conformist


It's kind of hard to describe why I thought this movie was great, but there was just something very gripping about it. It's a very artful film depicting a member of the fascist party in Italy who is charged with assassinating an old professor who fled to France. He decides to do the job while on his honeymoon, and things get kind of messed up when he also falls for the professor's young wife. The movie uses violence very effectively, with it only being a factor in a couple scenes but having a huge impact every time. Bernardo Bertolucci probably gets a little too obsessed with depicting sexuality in his other movies, but it's wielded effectively here to set a specific mood and explain the film's characters without being too obvious. Definitely not for everyone, but I was into it.

The Leopard


I was enjoying myself with this movie for a while, but I eventually realized that it wasn't actually going anywhere and it started to seem like a waste of time. I think you can tell a story about the lives of royalty and what they experience when the nation they live in starts an inevitable shift towards a more modern form of government in less than three hours, but the director was more interested in painstakingly filming all of the lavish sets and costumes than doing that. It's a beautiful movie, but it just loses momentum at some point. It starts out pretty competently, with a rebellion and a love story, but eventually they get to a ball and it kind of just stops. Weird to watch the life drain out of a film like that.

The Verdict


A David Mamet screenplay directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Paul Newman is a formula for a great movie, and that's pretty much what they made here. Newman plays an aging, alcoholic, ambulance chasing lawyer, who sees a chance to redeem his career when he's given a case concerning a woman who was improperly anesthetized before surgery and then fell into a coma. He's up against a large firm and doesn't have much of a case to work with, but he still brushes aside opportunities for compromise, even against the family's wishes, all in the belief that what he's doing is right. It's ultimately a pretty simple film with a predictable ending, but it works because of the three guys I mentioned. Newman's performance is simply fantastic, not shying away from the character's severe flaws but still coming off as a guy worth rooting for. Lumet doesn't try anything too flashy, but every long shot seems carefully considered and just right for the scene. Definitely one of the best courtroom dramas I've seen.

Movie Update 11A

Life goes on, and I continue to watch a number of films that I have never seen before. I'm running out of "classics" in the instant queue at this point, and I don't know if I'm going to keep that when Netflix switches up the plans in a couple months. But I'll keep watching movies. 11B goes up tomorrow.

The Conversation


Sandwiched between the first two parts of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola made this film, a much more intimate and inward-looking affair. Gene Hackman does a great job (I find it amazing he was already 44 when this was made, but I hadn't realized he retired years ago either) as a surveillance expert who becomes worried by the content of a conversation he is hired to record, and reluctant to hand it over to his client. He's surrounded by a great cast, notably a young Harrison Ford as his main contact with the client, John Cazale as his spurned partner, and a brief appearance by Robert Duvall. It's mostly a character piece, and the script and Hackman's work do a great job of bringing a quiet by interesting man to life. Things do get hairier later on, with some surprisingly shocking moments as it reaches the climax. Nice anti-Hollywood ending, too.

The Hustler


I feel like Paul Newman was sort of a singular talent that came into his own in the 60s, and since he didn't have any direct competitor like Robert De Niro versus Al Pacino, some people my age overlook how amazing of an actor he is. There's no ongoing debate around him, he's just an amazing actor. Could be making crap up, though. In The Hustler he plays a pool shark, and while there are extensive pool scenes in the movie, it's more about the turmoil of the character, who realizes he's not who he thought he was after a game against Jackie Gleason's Minnesota Fats goes bad. George C. Scott is also great in the movie, and it's just a fun film to watch despite some pretty dark material towards the end. The good kind of sports movie that's not really about sports.

MASH


All I really knew about Robert Altman before seeing this was he made movies with ensemble casts that talked over each other, and that's certainly the case here. It's a Korean war movie that's really about the Vietnam war, and showcases funny actors rather than comedians trying to act. The three main characters are military doctors played by Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, and Tom Skerritt who don't care much for proper chain of command or behavior for their positions. It's not really realistic how cavalier they are with their mistreatment of other officers in the movie, but it's a satire, and it works. I didn't think it was an amazing movie, but I did enjoy watching it go through its paces, and there are a number of memorable scenes, even if some don't quite pay off or go on too long. I can definitely see how some producers looked at it and saw a way to make a series out of it, after removing some of the racier stuff. I assume I'll continue to never see it, but you never know.

Play Time


One of those movies that I didn't really love, but I appreciated the immense amount of care and craft behind. It's hard to say what Jacques Tati's deal is, beyond a lot of wide shots filled to the brim with little bits of physical comedy in every corner of the screen. Play Time is a film where dialogue isn't very important, and I could easily see the whole thing working almost as well with no subtitles at all (it's already a mix of French and English), or even as a silent film. It's about a tragic future version of Paris, where all of the famous landmarks people love have been replaced with plain buildings filled with sterile cubic offices, steel floors and chairs with squishy cushions. Humanity still shines through though, as Monsieur Hulot and an American tourist bumble around the trade shows and turn a disastrous restaurant opening into a heck of a party. I think the whole thing could have greatly benefited from chopping as much as half an hour off, but there's nothing wrong with any individual scenes. You can just only take so much whimsy and clever visual comedy before it all seems like the same stuff. Still a solid film.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

I'm glad I saw this, because I was almost starting to forget how awesome Paul Newman and Robert Redford were together in The Sting, another movie directed by George Roy Hill. This one was released a few years earlier, when tastes were really changing in Hollywood and the old kind of Western was dying out if not already dead. Newman and Redford are Butch and Sundance respectively (Did you know the film festival was created by Redford and named after this character? I didn't.), the latter with a fast gun and the former with an even quicker tongue. They lead a gang of bank and train robbers, going around merrily like Robin Hood, stealing from those who can afford it and keeping it mostly for themselves, but generous enough with handouts that they aren't sitting on a fortune. These early scenes are a lot of fun, establishing the friendship and collaboration between the two leads, as well as their relationship with Sundance's girlfriend.

Things change though, when a man with the train company that they've been repeatedly robbing hires an expert posse to chase after them until they're caught or killed, featuring a couple people they know by reputation. They get separated from the gang and go on the run, eventually resorting to relocating to Bolivia for the rest of the movie. They can't give up their lives of crime though, culminating in an extremely memorable and well made scene. There's a lot of interesting things about this movie, besides the fact that it's just entertaining and funny and Newman and Redford are fantastic in it. The tone varies significantly over the course of the movie, but it never feels out of character with itself. The song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" was written for it, winning one of it's handful of Oscars for best song and featuring in an odd, cute scene featuring a bicycle. And it's sort of unique how the characters never actually come face to face with any of their real antagonists in the story, but they still manage to drive them towards the ending. Sundance Kid was one of at least three significant Westerns to come out in 1969, and I'll be watching one of the others pretty soon. I'll be interested in how they compare.

Cool Hand Luke

Like a lot of prison movies, Cool Hand Luke relies on the quality of the craftsmanship on the screen more than the events that drive the story. Not a whole lot happens in the plot, but it still sustains itself well for two hours thanks to skillful direction by Stuart Rosenberg and a good, restrained performance by Paul Newman. George Kennedy acquits himself well in an Oscar winning performance as Dragline, and the rest of the cast is solid as well. But it's Newman's performance I'll remember the best, doing a great job holding up the character end of a character-focused story. He can be the coolest guy in the room in one scene and a broken-down mess in the next, and while his journey can be depressing, on the other hand it's also an example of how the human spirit can never truly be broken, and in a way it's about how legends are made.

Luke is a war hero who seems bored with life, and gets arrested and sentenced to two years in a Southern work prison when he gets caught drunkenly cutting the heads off parking meters. Dragline is a leader among the inmates, and at first the two butt heads. But eventually they bond when Dragline is impressed by Luke's refusal to ever give in, and gives him his Cool Hand nickname after a poker game. Things go pretty well for Luke considering the prison setting for a while, but after a tragedy, he is unfairly punished and becomes rebellious, repeatedly trying to break out of the place, which results in some pretty harsh treatment. The transformation of the character is the meat of the whole movie, and while it's often difficult to see it's always compelling as well. The movie is also famous for some of its dialogue, like the prisoners telling the guards about everything they're doing and the "failure to communicate" line, and those things were entertaining to see, but what most impressed me about the film is just the amount of care that went into making it. Prison is usually a good way to examine the psychology of men, and Cool Hand Luke is as good an exploration as any. It's not my favorite, but it's darn good.