Movie Update 11B

I couldn't fit all the labels I wanted into one post yesterday, so here's even more movies. The label issue was so severe I couldn't even neatly divide the films into themes! Labels!

The Earrings of Madame de...


A fancy French movie about fancy French people. There's nothing really wrong with this movie, I just didn't find a whole lot to love about it. The cast is solid, including Vittorio De Sica as an Italian man that the leading lady falls in love with, who I know better as the director of The Bicycle Thief. This movie doesn't really have the power of that one, but tells the story of a married woman who becomes attached to a pair of earrings she sold after her lover buys them back for her. My favorite part was just the way the film played with the idea of never actually giving you her name. Otherwise, it's a nice little romantic drama, mostly worth the time it takes to watch.

High Noon


High Noon is sort of the 24 of the 1950s. I liked it a lot more than I really expected. It has a similar problem to the last Gary Cooper movie I saw, where he was too old for his love interest, in this case Grace Kelly before Alfred Hitchcock got to her. In this case it didn't really hurt the film though, because his character is more likable and the story isn't about their relationship. It's about a lawman ready to retire, but dragged back into conflict before he can, as the whole town seems to turn against him during his darkest hour. The film is mostly in real time, as everyone anticipates the arrival by train of a criminal he had originally put away, apparently back for vengeance. He tries to rustle up a posse, but doesn't get the support he anticipated, and there's a fantastic sense of concern and dread as he runs out of options while the clock slowly ticks towards his likely demise. It's a pretty realistic movie, with an ending that has heroism without being too dramatic or fantastic. One of my favorite Westerns.

The Rules of the Game


I'm not sure anyone from the 30s had a better idea of how to shoot a movie than Jean Renoir. This is another fancy French movie about fancy French movie, although it's one I found more to latch onto in. It's an ensemble piece about the fickle lives of aristocrats, as they bounce from lover to lover without realizing the pain they cause. Renoir himself is among the cast, and they do a solid job of quickly selling their relationships and setting up the entanglements that eventually lead to the surprising and effective ending. Pretty darn good movie.

Samurai Rebellion


This one just seemed a bit too slow to me. I love Masaki Kobayashi's work (unfortunately I'm already almost out of films he made that are actually available), but Rebellion wasn't quite up to the power of Harakiri or the breathless scope of The Human Condition. It actually probably has roughly the same pace as Harakiri, and might even be quicker. But that film was coated in a pervasive, almost oppressive tension that seemed likely to snap into chaos at any second, and while Rebellion has a sad story, there just isn't that feeling. Toshiro Mifune was probably getting a bit old at that point to carry a whole movie on charisma alone (though he still handles the swordplay well), and Tatsuya Nakadi does a lot with his few scenes, but the character he plays is intentionally pretty neutral. It's a solid, no-nonsense samurai film, one that could have benefited from being pushed a little in either a darker or more fun direction.

High and Low

For all of his movies about heroic samurai doing great things, my new favorite film by Akira Kurosawa begins with a scene where four business men discuss the future of women's shoes at their company. Obviously it goes a lot of different place from there, but I just thought that was a humorous image. High and Low is about a kidnapping, the ransom of the child, and the subsequent police pursuit of the perpetrator. It is also simply one of the best crime movies I've ever seen, and easily the best example I've yet seen of something resembling film noir that isn't American.

Toshiro Mifune plays a manager at the shoe company who has been attempting to obtain enough stock to take control before his rivals do, borrowing against everything he has to pay for it. His plans go awry though when he gets a call that his son has been kidnapped. In truth it was actually the son of his driver, but the kidnapper doesn't care, and he has a choice. Either he can pay the ransom and lose everything he invested, or refuse and run the risk that the kid gets killed. A huge portion of the movie takes place just in his living room, as he weighs his options, struggles with the decision, and talks with the police. The leader of the investigation is played by Tatsuya Nakadai, and while neither actor is quite at their most intense in their roles, it's still fun to see them together on screen. The movie eventually changes locations when the exchange is supposed to take place, and from there the story shifts gears away from the internal struggle of before and into a full-scale manhunt by the police force, galvanized by the public support for Mifune after his sacrifice.

It's not exactly a particularly original investigation, though it's hard to say how innovative some of the steps they took would have been when it came out fifty years ago. It's just an exceptionally well handled plot, which effectively uses a lot of the style that Kurosawa was known for the draw you in better than that stuff typically does for me. Some scenes are very long and really get into the fine detail of the investigating and tracking down of leads that goes on, which engrossed me in the manhunt and made every step towards finding the kidnapper feel like a victory. The kidnapper himself is show repeatedly to the audience, and I think they could have used this time a bit more to develop him into a person, but as it stands he's still a suitable villain, and the final scene of the movie that he's in is an amazing one. It's hard to point to one thing in High and Low and say that it's why it worked. Really, it's just a film that is executed proficiently and skillfully on every level.

Movie Update 6

I saw some more movies. They were all pretty good. Some won awards!

Amadeus


Much like Milos Forman's earlier One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, this won a ton of Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, this time for F. Murray Abraham as a Vienna court composer who had an equal amount of hate and admiration for Wolfgang Mozart. This was kind of an odd movie, with Mozart being shown as both a master of music and kind of a clownish person, and some of the performances felt a little off. It managed to stay interesting for three hours though, and I loved the way it depicted the writing and reading of music. Lots of interesting classical music throughout, even if some of the opera segments seemed to drag on a bit. Abraham really is good too, especially in the scenes when he's older.

Cinema Paradiso


I definitely feel conflicted about this one. I thought it was too long, at almost three hours, especially since the version to actually receive accolades was almost an hour shorter. On the other hand, the shorter version cuts a subplot that I felt added a lot of actual meaning to the story, which makes me wonder which version I actually would have preferred. It's a story about many things; the love of film, a romance that ended too soon, and a man's friendship with a mentor, whose death kicks off the flashback-heavy plot. The first thing came through the best, especially in the final scene of the movie, which is remarkably touching. And Ennio Morricone's scoring can make any movie better. Not great, but there's a lot of heart in it.

Downfall


For all of the terrible things that happen in this movie, about the final days of Nazi Germany's role in World War II, it didn't seem quite as sad as it maybe should have been. There's something just a bit clinical about all of the failure and suicides that add up over time, preventing it from becoming soul crushing but also from being a truly great film. Bruno Ganz is terrific as Hitler though, not really making him sympathetic (who would want that?), but making him seem like a person instead of an inscrutable monster. It overcomes the dozens of videos that put silly subtitles over one of the film's most dramatic moments, which is certainly worth noting.

Red Beard


Akira Kurosawa's final black and white film, and his final collaboration with Toshiro Mifune, is another solid creation from a director that I respect more than I enjoy. If it was just the story of a young, talented doctor coming to work for a gruff but singularly brilliant aging medical talent, I might have liked it more, but too much time was dedicated to the sob stories of many of their patients, which never seemed worth the time they tacked onto yet another three hour marathon of a film. No single scene is bad, and almost all of them are pretty remarkable from a pure film making perspective. I just wasn't interested in watching a lot of them. It makes the story seem choppy and missing some sort of focus. Mifune is again amazing though, impossibly awesome and captivating regardless of the age of whatever character he happens to be playing. That only fifteen years passed between Rashomon and this speaks to his talent. Which is what makes it mystifying that they never worked together again after this, though I'm sure there were plenty of factors.

Seven Samurai

I saw a handful of Akira Kurosawa movies in high school, although I somehow missed his most famous until now. Seven Samurai is a classic adventure tale of a group of villagers hiring seven unemployed samurai to protect them from some bandits after their crops. It's quite long and can be pretty easily broken into three hour long acts - the finding and recruitment of the seven men, the training of the villagers and preparation for battle, and then the actual assault by the bandits. It's a pretty classic story and establishes some classic action/adventure tropes, without itself feeling tired over fifty years later.

The seven samurai are all pretty distinct, not an easy accomplishment for an old movie in a foreign language. The two biggest ones are the oldest one who takes the role of leader, played by Takashi Shimura, and the brash one with a low background played by Toshiro Mifune, both of which are Kurosawa mainstays and the latter of which might have the most charismatic on-screen presence of any foreign actor I've seen. The rest of the group is less recognizable, but no less distinct, as they all have at least a couple memorable traits, and a reason to make you sad if they happen to be killed.

So yeah, the plot is fairly typical, with a few less than mesmerizing subplot sprinkled around to mix it up, but the real strength is just in the filmmaking. There's some impressive touches and editing for a movie this old, and even the acting is pretty good for the standards I would hold it to. Some of the action, especially by the end, is pretty messy. Instead of well staged, choreographed battles, it just seems like chaos as a bunch of guys and horses run around on screen wildly swinging at each other. The conflict itself is interesting because of the immense preparation and strategy to it, but actually watching it unfold is less so. Lots of really good imagery in the film though, especially at the end. It's a bit too long and old fashioned for me to really love it, but it's obviously an extremely significant movie, and an obviously good one as well.