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March 7, 2010 Penny Serenade: Ozu Quake
Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.1
DVD at Amazon
Separate this into two components. One is the story about a couple and their adopted child. It is a sad tale, probably not suitable for aspiring parents. The other component is the framing. This is the first film where the filmmaker tried more formal compositions in the service of the narrative. You can see the influence of Japanese master Ozu in this.
To appreciate how Stevens' personal history is woven into this, consider the following timeline.
By 1937, Ozu was already a talented Japanese filmmaker. I think of him as Doyle or Roeg, someone with a revolutionary eye, rooted in cinema. Dejected by the lack of popularity in his ideas, he was drafted into the Japanese Army where for two years he saw first hand the brutality of his people in China. Returning to film in 1939, he started recirculating prints.
Stevens was interested in non-Hollywood cinematic techniques. He encountered Ozu — what we now call "early Ozu" — through a San Francisco connection by 1940. The Ozu camera was not dogmatically frozen by then, but the terms of narrative composition through katachi were. Wells was making "Kane," with a relative of Stevens. Hitchcock had moved to Hollywood and circulating ideas about the importance of the emotional eye.
Stevens made this film in direct homage to those ideas. He even went so far as to make the Dad a "reporter" sent to Japan! There, he experiences the Sanriku earthquake of 1933. Coming home to San Francisco pregnant, the couple lose the baby. Stevens had wanted to make a film based entirely on Japanese themes. The story here adopts the Hollywod conventions instead, with a simple preface in Japan.
The on-screen couple adopt an American child.
If you watch this for the framing, the composition and the camera placement, you will find it every bit as advanced visually as Wells and Hitchcock. That the story conventions ruin it matters little. Only his understanding of lighting is less experimental. All the walls here are Japanese walls. All the staging is in one plane with a separate background or foreground 3-d scene. Those who fawn over Fassbinder should take a look here at the craft of this.
Ozu, incidentally would return from the horrors of war he had seen determined to matter. He did, though embarrassed by his nations' genocide, he became a drunk in making what are true masterpieces. Stevens would volunteer for war himself and become the main documentarian of the German holocaust. He also would return with a similar purpose.
For me, this minor picture, this hanky-puller, is something of a touchstone where the cinematic worlds of Hollywood and Shochiku. Shortly after this film was released, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and a period of racist rejection of everything Japanese begun, and the San Francisco folks locked in concentration camps. The postwar connection would be through Kurosawa.
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March 7, 2010 Kramer vs. Kramer: Split Decision
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.7
DVD at Amazon
This drama is considered successful. I think it is not because it tells us anything special, or that the characters are particularly worthy.
I believe it is because of the way the narrative is constructed. It has two arcs.
One of these has the husband establishing the world. We follow only him, spending time understanding what he is about and how he adapts. Against this domestic environment, the wife has only one speech. This is in a café. She tells us ahead of time that it is a speech that she has prepared and practiced. This is purely within the real world. Since we are presented the man's world only, this insight-by-reactive-speech is unbalanced. We strive to understand. In the end, she succumbs to the guy's reality.
By itself, this narrative arc would be insufficient.
The second arc is the trial. We know courtrooms in film. We know what they mean. They place us as the jury. We cannot leave the theater without making a judgment. In this, our woman also has only one speech.
What makes this work, I believe, is how one layer is imposed on the other. It works less well today that when it was new. In part this is because we've worn out the power of the courtroom genre. When this was fresh, the simple appearance of the place and its rituals would be enough to convey an entire narrative dynamic.
The other is that when it was new, it was a novel idea that a woman could have her own inner life. Believe me, this was true. So the unusual nature of her leaving and her speeches provided a balance because they were so extraordinary. The insertion of a "sexually liberated" woman to sleep once with Hoffman's character — and the fact that she was a lawyer — underscored this urge.
But today, that balancing mechanism is gone. We see today a film about a guy and not a marriage. The balanced dynamic between the two people is gone. The balanced dynamic between the two story arcs is gone as well.
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March 6, 2010 My Sister's Keeper: Kramer's Child versus Kramer's Child
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.4
DVD at Amazon
*** This review may contain spoilers *** This is more complex than usual for its purpose, which is basically to make you cry.
The simple construction can be seen in "Million Dollar Baby." You spend the movie being exposed to the person who is going to die. The point is to make you feel the loss in the same way your designated observer in the story does. It requires no narrative tricks, and usually they distract.
Not here. There are three devices (one of them unintended) that made this more effective.
The most obvious of course is an emotional slam near the end where you discover deeper motives in what you have just seen. This was not subtle. It was completely out of the blue, and re-interpreted much of what you had seen so far. Very clever resituating. This is a dynamic I study and here it was used effectively.
Less obvious was the shifting narrative. Usually we have no explicit narrator in these things. We just exist as observing ghosts. Sometimes, and especially in the cry-dramas, we do have a narrator. She is introduced early in a voice-over, with the purpose of letting us know she is our surrogate in the story. When she cries, we should too.
Here the filmmakers shifted that around. Every character has a voice-over. You are told in clear terms (via genre shorthand) that everyone here is your representative. So the conflicts you see worked out on the screen are conflicts you are allowed to have internally as you get deeper into the thing. It was a small trick. In fact, there are signs that it may have been added after the filming wrapped. But it works. Oh, it works.
The third device was personal. A friend recommended this. I have trouble with Ms Diaz, and have since she messed up "Malkovich." So I prepared myself by watching her in a movie with similar sister-saving-sister dynamics: "In Her Shoes." Now, I do not credit her with much talent as an actress, but carrying that prior movie into this one added dimensions to her performance beyond what she could carry herself.
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March 6, 2010 Triangle: Spilled Blue Paint for Water
Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 6.7
DVD at Amazon
*** This review may contain spoilers *** I love this stuff.
Making stories is at root a challenge of surfing between the expected and known and the ambiguous surprise. The further you go into the world of non-linear sense, the more control and skill is required. If the filmmaker and viewer can negotiate a space that works, then the openness of sense allows both parties to imply all sorts of implicit things.
Strictly speaking, there is a sort of sense to this. An obsessive-compulsive boy spends his days painting a picture of a ship rescuing an overturned sailboat. He does this over and over for years, each time going through various dramas over his future as controlled by his mother. Each time, goes deeper, working out on top of the prior day's work. Because of the obsessive-compulsive repetition, she appears in multiple instances each time. She fights on his behalf to escape his condition, with each attempt either ineffective or making matters worse. Each return carries the despair that it is a return.
This is NOT like the setup in "Groundhog Day," where each instance of person and event is reset, excepting the main character's memory. Here, each cycle has entities and consequences that persist and need to be overcome as the repetition carries momentum and has pathology.
We see it not through the boy's mind (with one exception) but through the mother's. This as I understand it is clinically correct, through it hardly matters. I see that some commentors have problems. The logic is not carefully worked out, as it is in say: "Primer," or "la Jetee." But that is an asset. These are not "goofs," but openings for us.
It has an Australian actress, one that did not come up through the Austrailan system in Sydney. But she started her career doing folded acting in two great films along these lines: "Mulholland Drive," and before that the OCD remake of "The Limey." She works hard and smart here. This is a winner. It (and the fellows name) remind me of another Christopher, Nolan, and his "Following."
The only complaints I have are the "explanation" scenes. I found it patronizing to be told what the myth of Sisyphus was. It was unnecessary and inaccurate in any case.
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March 6, 2010 In Her Shoes: Dixlexika
Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 6.8
DVD at Amazon
*** This review may contain spoilers *** Once you know chronic problems faced by certain trades, you will notice how some projects reach to do some necessary thing. For instance, filming people around a dinner table is rarely done well, and almost never with great effect. So watch what the filmmaker does to change the geometry so that the shot can be other than ordinary.
There is a similar problem with the ordinary fold of "writer within." This isn't quite as ordinary a fold as the young person striving to give a good performance of some kind, but it is ordinary. In this fabulation, the story you are seeing has been written by one of the characters within. Often you are alerted to this fact by a voice-over at the beginning, telling you that this is remembered.
The problem is that in the story, you have to somehow introduce the fact that the character will become the writer. This fact is often shoehorned in using profound and uncomfortable stretches. This is a traditional redemption story, put in a woman's context. The failed soul in question — and our candidate to be the writer — is a promiscuous drunk who selfishly destroys lives.
It is no surprise that she will be redeemed and that her relationship with her sister will be healed. The only suspense is in how they work in the writer angle. Here's how: she is damaged because she is dyslexic, and is essentially unable to read. She ends up as a reader to a bedridden, blind, kindly professor of literature, who is patient as she reads and who teaches her the joys of the printed word. This mostly happens offscreen because the target audience is closer to the before than the after.
This experience, and the missing motherly love transform our lost girl into the writer of this affecting story. Diaz is typecast.
Toni is always astonishing.
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March 6, 2010 RoboCop 3: Spam in the Can
Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 3.4
DVD at Amazon
Remakes and sequels provide me with a playground. What can you do with the same world, the same characters?
Sometimes the results are world-changingly insightful. They were for me in any case with the original Frankenstein trio and the Aliens trilogy (which incidentally follows the same pattern). Rocky? Well, let's let that one pass.
This has some interesting features. The movies themselves are trivial, even for the intended kiddie audience, and this is the weakest. But the evolution is rather solid.
In the first, the scope had to do with ambiguities and issues of self. Identity is set up as the main thing. As in all of them, it is blunt, obvious, overdone and the resolution is childish. But the identity of self concept is at least worthy.
The second expands that to identity of the family. Here it is a simple fabulation: Mom, Dad and teen son. The mechanics of description and resolution are similar. They involve the same situations. All of the key characters are the same. All those that are not are based on the same prototypes of the earlier film. The machinery works the same, only the identity questioned is larger.
Where the first is self, the second is family, this third is community. As before, the same tropes, characters, plot arc. As before, the examination is blunt and worthless. But the point is that it is the same. Same machine parts. Same basic problem. Differently shaped sausage.
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March 6, 2010 RoboCop 2: Bad Daddy
Ted's Evaluation: 1 / 4
IMDB Rating: 5.3
DVD at Amazon
*** This review may contain spoilers *** Sometimes it is more blatant, the pandering to the audience. But business is business. And like OCP in the movie, the makers of this are interested in only one thing: profits. So if you are supplying identity porn to adolescent boys, well then go full throttle.
Start with a moderately successful idea: cyborg cop dealing with issues of good and evil, human and machine, quest and family. The first movie made some money, but so far as you are concerned, it merely establishes characters and a situation for you to exploit. You hire a comic book writer whose career is based on kids. You hire the director who made the only palatable Star Wars film. And then you set about to engineer the story.
Boys like action-as-bullets, so you'll have that. There is the inevitability of punishment, so you'll build all the tension-producing scenes around the relentless powerful steps of the punisher. (Note how the sound engineer manages this as a sort of second score.)
But you'll put most of your effort into engineering a story about teen angst and fathers.
So here we have our cyborg yearning for his lost son, and his new families: a "mother" at the lab and "wife" in the force. We have a surrogate family of criminals, Father, mother and son, where the father becomes the opposed id, after the fashion of "Forbidden Planet."
You'll have subplots. For instance here the bad guy in the robot company is vying for parental approval.
Usually it is the noise and explosions that are in your face in these things. It keeps you from thinking. But here, the noise takes second place in overt attention-getting to these stories of lost teen boys.
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February 27, 2010 Fame: Sweeter Juice
Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 6.4
DVD at Amazon
Watching films and wondering about the experience is made that much richer by comparing the films and comparing the wonder.
It is a bit more fun when the films are similar, like sequels or remakes. I've recently watched the 2009 remake and liked it a lot. That is because the camera was given the energy, the hunger, the risky curiosity of the kids. The investment was made in the capture of the thing. So instead of watching some kids with juice, we became them.
This is an entirely different film, about as different as you can get. The camera and all the cinematic art is hidden. Your place in it is the same as if you were watching a documentary, like "Mad Hot Ballroom," which has some of the same components.
All of the investment here is in the kids, their characters. There are engaging songs, designed not to engage you in the song directly, but the characters you see associated with the songs. The actors have juice, unlike in the remake. These kids put everything on the line. They are not mature powerhouses, but there is an appeal to getting honesty instead of craft.
None of these kids had a meaningful career. But they did make something that matters, and once should be enough.
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February 26, 2010 Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball: Hesitant Womb Tattoo
Year: 2007Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 4.4
*** This review may contain spoilers *** I sometimes mention films in which architecture plays a role. This fascinates me. I believe that the next generation of cinema will be highly spatial, with context in surroundings becoming more important.
Welles' "Othello" used space in ways that both implied dangerous conscious reflection and showed the constraints of the world that drive the tragedy. Greenaway's "Belly" used architecture in more visceral way, merging the urge of forms with the relations among components of a human.
This film here goes even further. It is no wonder that it is Roeg's least accessible movie, sometimes considered a failure. I recommend it. Here come some spoilers; I think it best for you to not read this before you have seen it.
The character in this case is a house in Ireland, a very specific place on the border between the two religions. This is a place where the pre-Christian notions from Viking magic are still recognized and there is a tradition that the Celtic nuns were witches in this vein.
A young woman from London buys the dilapidated house. She is an architect who worked in the firm run by Donald Sutherland's character. Something traumatic happened to the two of them, most likely an affair and she has left to find herself. That involves rebuilding this cottage.
We are told that she will keep the outside as it is, but completely re-arrange the insides. Very quickly, the magic of the place conflates this building and its insides with her body, the "insides" being her womb. The cottage had been owned by Rita Tushingham's character where she and husband lived with two daughters and a son. A fire in the building killed the boy. The family moved to the adjacent farm. At the time of the story, we have Rita as an old, somewhat demented witch, living with her son in law and one of her daughters (Miranda Richardson), who in turn has two daughters. The other sister is unmarried and works in the office of the town's obstetrician.
The old witch is obsessed with having a son. Nearby is magical stone with a vaginal hole. By touching your beloved through this hole, you make a bargain with Odin. The area is scattered with globular fungi about a foot in diameter, giving the film its name. That is where the story starts, and this is all revealed economically.
The cottage is conflated with the young woman. The mother (Rita) and her daughter (Miranda) share a womb and magic is wrought to impregnate the woman architect/house and somehow transmute the male embryo from her to them. Along the way, there is lots of sex, sometimes magical and dreamed which every time ends with internal shots of ejaculation, followed by continuing shots within the shared womb of of the developing souls. This womb in turn is conflated with the puffballs around the place, locally called the devil's eyeball.
The plot is defeated by Rita's granddaughter who is newly fertile herself. This all is really complicated in terms of narrative. There are multiple magical forces, shifting identities, a rather amazing role of music and musical magic. Twins and twining galore.
It is confusing and intended to be so because it is from the point of view of the woman- building. The film is not there for the story, though. It is there so that Roeg can explore this notion of creation as space, story as birth, actor as magical token. What a trip.
I can recommend this to you if you have the ability to give form agency, to see this from the side of the magic. I will warn off any women who are pregnant or soon to be, as it surely will produce nightmares.
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February 22, 2010 Bad Timing: Doubts that Bind
Ted's Evaluation: 4 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.1
DVD at Amazon
*** This review may contain spoilers *** Love is internal. It is sustained by questions of doubt, tension, expectation. The solidity of the hand is strengthened by the slipperiness underfoot.
So suppose you wanted to make a film about the fields that animate your anchor relationships. You couldn't do what everyone else does: deal with the tokens: the looks, the physical moving away of bodies and then re-entering. You want it to have the passion it deserves, which is a tricky thing: the passion in the relationships between the film and the viewer has to be based on the same field of passion between lovers. That field requires faith to overcome doubt. This need for investing in love as a counter to the doubts about love is what drives us, with religion and tribalisms as mere side effects.
Roeg wanted to do this. During a certain sweet spot in his career, he could shape any story into this, a story about what makes story. And to do it all by cinematic misdirection. This isn't "Last Year at Marienbad," which is abstract. This is internal, subconscious, but with the real fleshy stuff we actually dream in.
Some viewers will think this is a simple detective story. Bad guy lies; insistent detective catches him. It is all about sequence, the "timing" of the title. What happens first; how the thing is "explained."
But I believe this is something much more important. Like Roeg's other films, these are dreams. The things that happen here — that we see — drift close to what actually happens, and then away being more like imagined fears.
It is all about urges; the grandest passions rest on a collection of urges, most of which slip into uncontrollable futures.
I will advise you to approach this as something that goes on in the character's soul. Polanski and Kiesloswki have the same relationship to reality, but here we work closer to image and the uncontrollable ends.
The overall shape of thing is a love affair, one that is deep and all-consuming. The hero/filmmaker's mind has some tools that allow us to enter the world of dreams:
— He is a "research psychoanalyst" in Vienna. This is the most unlikely of cities for intellect, and even today produces ideas that fold in on themselves in tightly wound ways. Roeg quotes "The Third Man" a bit, and assembles a number of Austrian artifacts, all having something to do with control. It is Wittgenstein in his first period.
— He is a spy. He lectures about spies. He spies on patients as a theorist of obsession. He literally works for a spy agency, spying on the woman, who in other identities he is falling in love with. This is Wittgenstein in his second period, having renounced the genius of his knotted mind and theories of word play as mazes.
— He is a detective, instanced as a second being, a sort of "Fight Club" alter ego that examines himself from the outside. This is Wittgenstein in his third, suicidal period, where his work was on himself. He literally builds a container, a house, here a film. Harvey Keitel since Taxi Driver understood the idea of playing and imagined other. Garfunkle's cluelessness as a person and actor is overwhelmed by him, just as that part of the character's mind is.
These three fight for control of self over a woman. The film is so effective, and so energetically unsprung that there is a fourth layer outside. Roeg himself developed an obsession over this woman, falling deeply in love with her. (He would marry her.)
The visual storytelling, the editing, the timeshifting, the identity swapping, the depth of texture could not have been as effective were he not obsessively in love in the three ways of the doctor.
The genius of starting with Tom Waits and ending with Jarrett's Koln concert is by itself enough to make this an essential experience.
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