Through a Year Darkly November 13, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Modern Films, 2000s , 6 commentsThe paths taken by Hollywood films this year have caused even my half-charcoal heart to skip a few beats. I usually relish a trip to the seediest parts of tinseltown, but 2007 has been unrelenting in its explorations of evil. This isn’t about the foolish “torture porn” that’s swept in and out of theaters and teenage boys’ heads these past few years. I’m talking about the serious and acclaimed R-rated adult fare. You only need to have one eye opened halfway to see the mess and frustration in the United States so the starting point is a bit obvious. The depths, though, are unexpectedly dark and unforgiving. Week after week these past couple of months, a new, incredibly well-made and horrifically depressing movie seems to open.
Obviously, these types of films are far from new. Just last year, Martin Scorsese’s violent, even nihilistic, film The Departed cleaned up at the box office and won Best Picture at the Oscars. But it’s the frequency of the downbeat and deadened that has gotten my attention lately. I believe the first 2007 film I saw was David Fincher’s serial killer procedural Zodiac, a terrifically engrossing look at the depths of obsession and the unresolved strands it often leaves behind. Even for Fincher’s head-in-a-box reputation, Zodiac is decidedly upsetting and without comfort. A vicious murderer terrorizes a city without facing punishment while lives are ruined trying to pursue him. No resolution, no smiles leaving the theater. Fincher’s insistence on making the audience share the uncomfortable and frustrating process of trying to catch a serial killer who shouldn’t reasonably possess the intelligence to elude everyone involved resulted in a 158-minute exercise in endurance that most audiences declined.
Cut to a few months and numerous blockbuster sequels later. Jodie Foster took justice into her own hands in Neil Jordan’s The Brave One. A crowd-pleasing vigilante justice/female empowerment picture or a hamfisted attempt to shed light on a nation’s post 9/11 fears towards a phantom enemy? Next, Jesse James was assassinated to great reviews, but, again, no one came (though Warner Bros. can partially blame themselves here). Released the same day, a young man of upper middle-class wealth and privilege abandons his charmed life for a quixotic (and doomed) life in the wild. More death. At least a trio of films critical of the current administration and the United States’ involvement in the middle east also foundered at the box office. I’ll hold judgment on their merits and their messages until I’ve seen them (if I do at all). I’m pretty confident that uplifting would not describe In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, or Lions for Lambs though.
For sheer unfiltered violence, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises probably takes the blood-stained cake. The much-ballyhooed bathhouse sequence left me literally nauseous, a combination of sustained struggle leaving us nowhere to escape and visceral stabbings that shatter the safety glass usually enjoyed by the audience. It has a semi-happy ending, but the ultimate message is far from consoling for the thoughtful viewer. Mouthbreathing Videodrome nerds struggle with the idea that a 64-year-old Cronenberg has forked off into studio-financed “mainstream” efforts back-to-back now, but Eastern Promises feels about as uncompromising in its ideas on the saturation of violence as anything I’ve seen this year, save for maybe a masterpiece of a film that I’ll get to in a bit.
There are three more “dark” films that I’m anxious to see, but haven’t made time for just yet. Michael Clayton, which might be downright saccharine compared to the other films I’ve discussed, We Own the Night and Before the Devil Knows Your Dead all appear to be decidedly black tales of greed, circumstance, and the perils of criminal behavior. A film I have seen and one I enjoyed a whole lot, Gone Baby Gone is another excellent peek behind a corner Hollywood has long avoided. Ben Affleck made a conscious decision to utilize the harsh faces and alcohol-bruised bodies of a tough Boston neighborhood for his directorial debut. His star and brother, Casey Affleck, is a green private investigator treading water in a kidnapping case. He refuses to sacrifice his ideals, but, as always, at a cost. There’s a scene of harrowing realism that deserves its own award, in some undetermined and likely undervalued category.
Darkly pretending to belong to my invented criteria is Ridley Scott’s American Gangster. Audiences are eating up the cop versus drug lord “true” story, but it’s an empty film with a gossamer-thin impact. There’s the deplorable glamorization of Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas character, given a child safety cap flipside by depicting a stray scene of heroin abuse here and there to, you know, show that the guy who’s built up as cool and rich is really hurting his community. It’s also a film that, despite running over 2 1/2 hours, manages to feel incomplete in characterization and plot. Incredibly messy, disingenuous, and damaging, American Gangster is only depressing if you look at its giant box office take.
Deceptively darker is Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding. Though no one else in their right mind would probably throw Baumbach’s film in the cage with these other bloodthirsty beasts, it’s actually quite violent emotionally, only made less so by the realization that most viewers will find difficulty relating to any of the characters on screen despite their actions at least feeling plausible. Like his New Wave heroes, Baumbach makes films about upper-middle class white people with damaging problems and populates them with characters you want to wash off your skin immediately after the credits. Nicole Kidman’s Margot is a malignant disease of a woman, brought to life in a brave, fingernails-on-the-chalkboard performance that’s a career highlight. Despite the artificiality of Baumbach’s situations, his characters are brilliantly-sketched train wrecks and Margot is the queen.
And what was that masterpiece mentioned earlier? The Coen Brothers’ Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men. It’s far and away the most disheartening and pessimistic film I’ve seen this year, on par with anything else I can think of, and the best of this dark bunch. Javier Bardem’s dead eyes seem to represent evil personified. The film argues persuasively for the idea that darkness, evil, whatever you want to call it, is undeniable and a harrowing fact of life. Death is inevitable and, echoing themes explored repeatedly in film noir, fate can be cruel and unsparing. Whatever life has in store for us will happen, whether it involves a gesture of kindness or an act motivated by greed. One thing need not follow the next. I keep reading that this film will be looked upon favorably at awards time, and I hope that’s the case. I’m skeptical for now, though, because it’s highly unsettling and a crowd pleaser only in the sense that it’s a great film that keeps you riveted throughout. A minor spoiler, but the suddenness of the ending will leave many viewers cold as well, at least on a first viewing.
There are at least a couple more defiantly bleak films still on the horizon, both ready to strike right around Christmas. Hopefully I’ll have recovered a bit from all this cinematic rot and ruin by the time Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd film hit theaters. The former stars Daniel Day-Lewis as a turn-of-the-century oil man who, judging from the brutal trailer, is far from a nice guy. Early reviews have been near-unanimous in praise and in mentioning how difficult and downbeat the film is. Burton’s movie stars Johnny Depp as a serial killer barber and it’s at least partially a musical. Most of Burton’s film have that macabre, but shallow flair that I still enjoy. They’re usually more shiny black than starkly so. Then again, Burton may deliver a depressing bloodbath to keep ahead of the curve.
I’m sure I’m leaving a few things out and this is not my way of making a statement against these films, nor am I claiming to be the only one noticing the trend. There’s just so much I can watch before slowly taking a step back and wondering what’s going on. When nearly every movie I walk out of the theater from has managed to suck the marrow from my bones and inspire a heightened sense of unease, it starts to take a toll. Without going too far, I have to wonder if this borderline apocalyptic view of the world repeatedly being reflected from the screen is a fitting interpretation of our times or just a wrinkle that will be ironed out with a new year and a new crop of films. Are we getting what we deserve, or have things gotten off-kilter? These days, these days.
Top 50 of 1960s November 1, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1960s , 4 comments
As the weather cools and the leaves fall, the Lists Project’s oversized, bespectacled head emerges once again. After working my way through the 1940s and 1950s, the decade of radical changes is now up. The 1960s marked a stinging decline in the quality of Hollywood films, but the international output blossomed beyond expectation, enjoying perhaps its strongest decade in cinema history. Unlike the previous two lists I contributed, I’m not terribly satisfied with the number of films I’ve seen in this period. There are many that remain unreleased and even some things available that I didn’t have time to view. I still had a really tough time whittling a full decade down to only fifty films. (I don’t know what happened in 1965, but nothing released that year made my top 50.) Any previous writing I’ve done about these films has been linked to, and I’ve tried to be as brief as possible in providing comments and justifications for each selection (though the intended couple of sentences often ballooned to a full paragraph or more).
1.) The Apartment (Wilder, 1960) - A very personal choice, not because of a kinship to the subject matter, but due to it being my favorite film by my favorite director. Billy Wilder’s beautiful and bittersweet triumph was always going to be number one and I’d imagine it always will be. I’m going to refrain from any more praise because hopefully I’ll be able to put together a more in-depth piece someday, but I adore The Apartment almost as much as C.C. Baxter adores Miss Kubelik. (Here’s that more detailed review I hinted at.)
2.) The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) - An amazing time capsule that somehow has aged very little. Simon and Garfunkel’s music feels a tad ’60s, but I think it still evokes the timeless confusion of love. The film is the youngest forty-year-old you’re likely to find. And it’s actually very funny, too. Benjamin Braddock’s familiar awkwardness is flawlessly captured by Dustin Hoffman and the idea of “arrested development” of the young American male was given its perfect representation in Mike Nichols’ film. They’ve been trying to loosely re-make The Graduate ever since the original, but nothing has really come close.
3.) Le Samouraï (Melville, 1967) - Melville’s most perfect character in all his films is Jef Costello. Played by Alain Delon, Costello is an emotionless assassin who lives a spartan existence. Trenchcoat and fedora perfectly in place, he follows a samurai’s code and maintains a lonely solitude comforted only by a pet bird. Like the bird, Jef is in a cage, but his is of his own creation and he must follow the rules that go along with his chosen profession if he wants to stay alive after an uncharacteristic misstep. This is the quintessential Melville film, arguably his best and definitely the one that most successfully exhibits the sparse, no-nonsense approach taken by the classic Melville protagonist. Its inspirations are numerous, notably This Gun for Hire and Murder by Contract, as are the films it inspired, namely The Killer and Ghost Dog.
4.) Persona (Bergman, 1966) - I’ve seen eight Bergman films from this decade and this one packs the biggest punch by far. It’s really the only unequivocal masterpiece of his I’ve found so far, but that’s good enough really. Telling a ridiculously involving story of two women, one an actress gone mute and the other a nurse, the Swedish master explores themes almost never approached by other filmmakers. The two women share a home and, eventually, much more. The implication that these two women somehow merge is both extraordinary and unnerving.
5.) Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962) - Few movies make instant legends of previously little known actors, especially on the scale of Lawrence of Arabia and Peter O’Toole. Premiere magazine named his performance the greatest in movie history not too long ago and, notwithstanding personal preferences, it’s almost difficult to argue otherwise. I don’t usually go for “epics,” but I really can’t comprehend how someone can sit down to watch Lean’s film (assuming the screen they’re viewing is of reasonable size) and not be awestruck. The reason I don’t usually like epics is because they often seem to eschew normal film conventions for bombastic spectacle. That isn’t Lawrence of Arabia at all. It could have been split into two parts, released a couple of years apart, and both would be equally as good as the whole. And has the film ever been more timely than it is now?
6.) The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, 1966) - I always hear people rave about how great Sergio Leone is and the quality of this film, yet I don’t consider myself one of those zealots. Still, put this DVD in and I can’t take my eyes off the screen. Three hours (in the newest cut) of incredible entertainment and near-perfect execution. When Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef spend what seems like an eternity staring each other down as the camera creeps further in, I can’t help but wonder if any other filmmaker could have gotten away with such a dynamic bit of bravado. Somehow, it works, as does most everything in the picture.
7.) The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 1962) - Of all the re-watches, I think this got the biggest boost. It’s really an incredibly gripping political thriller, as well as technically brilliant. Frankenheimer’s film also holds up remarkably well. It’s a good decade ahead of its time, considering the paranoia conspiracy thriller subgenre that bloomed in the 70’s. Probably the most suspenseful film made in Hollywood this decade, and one of the scariest.
8.) The Face of Another (Teshigahara, 1966) - This is the film that started me on the journey of writing about what I was watching and it was also my introduction to the Masters of Cinema line. I still find it fascinating and haunting, painful even. Masks and identity, what makes us who we are, and how can we change ourselves are all topics approached, but never explained by Teshighara and writer Kôbô Abe. Certainly a face is only so important and the physical nature of appearance, again, defines our actions only to a limited extent. I didn’t get a chance to watch this again in compiling my list, and I struggled with exactly where to place the film, but it’s as philosophically powerful as anything I’ve seen from the ’60s.
9.) Army of Shadows (Melville, 1969) - I saw this last year for the first time at New York’s Film Forum and was entertained, but, as with nearly all of Melville’s films, felt somewhat deprived. More characterization, more action, more explanation. It’s not there, and it needn’t be either. Jean-Pierre Melville had an incredible foresight, intentional or not, to make films that demand multiple viewings in order to better understand his characters and their motivations. His heir apparent Michael Mann is currently doing the exact same thing in Hollywood. Army of Shadows develops additional power and resonates on each additional viewing in a way few films do.
10.) Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) - The best pulling the rug out from underneath the audience in movie history, courtesy of Janet Leigh’s untimely and still-chilling demise. I’m not sure how to best think of Hitchcock’s film, as it’s basically two completely separate halves of a whole, but maybe there’s no need to, as the director fills the brisk running time with wrong turns, red herrings, and a $40,000 MacGuffin. Copied and ripped-off past the point of excess, Bernard Herrmann’s scoring of that scene has rightfully become perhaps the most famous combination of music and editing in film. The psychological wrap-up feels out of place, but it’s somewhat redeemed by setting up Anthony Perkins’ final scene.