Archive for the ‘Blind Spots’ Category

  • 01 May

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    Blindspotting: Sans Soleil and Dog Star Man

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    This could be my shortest Blind Spot post ever…Though I enjoy short form experimental films, appreciate the different aspects of filmmaking that get teased out and respect the filmmakers a great deal, it is not an area in which I’m overly well-versed. I’ve seen a few other films from the two directors responsible for this post’s films (Chris Marker and Stan Brakhage) along with a few things from Maya Deren, James Benning, Cocteau, Bunuel, etc., but my knowledge of their techniques, goals and intentions is somewhat limited. Having said that, especially after viewing both Marker’s Sans Soleil and Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, you don’t necessarily have to have any background at all since these films are the perfect art form onto which you can map your own feelings and perspectives. Neither of these films has a clearly laid out narrative or real characters, so it enables you to soak in its variety of images (many of which almost seem random at times) and attempt to put your own personal spin on them.

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    Marker’s Sans Soleil, for example, feels like a freeform wander through the world’s different cultures (pausing longer with some, glancing off others) with a fascination in the activities and ways of life of its people. All the while, Marker (and his sometimes overly serious and pretentious female narrator) riffs on the meaning of memory and how it forgets, changes and shapes history (“We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten” and “History only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated”). The film also plays extensively with Japanese culture by tying into the memory aspects of the film and replaying Japan’s war history (“Small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life”). It also covers cats, an extraordinary ceremony to lay the souls of dolls to rest, more cats, sexual fetishes and a couple of additional cats (not to mention cat dolls placed into sex positions). The horrors of war are explored in a variety of different fashions as well, but focusing more on the concept of horror itself (the graphic death of a giraffe is a tough watch – you can see the life drain right out of it). If this seems somewhat random, well, it did for me too.

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  • 01 Apr

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    Blindspotting: Moonstruck and Fatal Attraction

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    The year was 1987. It was a tumultuous time…A breathless population tried to come to terms with the loss of Shelly Long from Cheers while simultaneously trying to choose sides in the great “Debbie Gibson or Tiffany?” debate. Fortunately Spuds Mackenzie and the announcement of Euro Disney were there to quell the public’s fears (not to mention the arrival of Prozac).

    Side note: there was also the premiere of a little upstart cartoon series called The Simpsons which created an industry of people quoting and borrowing humourous ideas from it – something which continues today unabated.

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    In the movie houses, adultery was on the minds of the American film-goer as two of the year’s biggest releases used it as a central theme. Both Fatal Attraction and Moonstruck had characters cheating on their spouses (and almost-spouses) with varying degrees of consequences – none of which appeared to be lasting. Through different approaches and styles (one a sharply written comedy/drama, the other a consistently paced thriller), they each seem to end up at the same conclusion: infidelities certainly can’t be swept away, but don’t worry since you’ll be forgiven. Since Moonstruck’s main arc really deals with two suffocating people who stumble into each other (and subsequently allow each other to blossom), that’s likely not the fairest assessment of the film. But I’ll get to that later.

    The story opens on Loretta (played by Cher), a tax accountant who seems to have the market cornered on frumpy. She’s unsure about the marriage proposal she’s just received from Johnny (Danny Aiello) because she’s had bad luck before – in fact, very bad luck since her previous husband was killed by a bus. Now she insists that everything be done just right including the actual proposal (she even makes Johnny do it all over again by getting down formally on one knee in the restaurant). When he tells her he has to fly to Italy for his dying mother, her biggest concern seems to be that they set an official date for the wedding. She doesn’t actually want or need him to help, but just agree to the date since all he’ll have to do is show up. It’s quickly established that Loretta isn’t exactly passionately in love with Johnny and even tells her mother (played in Oscar-winning form by Olympia Dukakis) that she doesn’t love him. Her Mom’s response of “Good, when you love them they drive you crazy because they know they can” sets up the issues she has with her own husband (Vincent Gardenia in a possibly too spot-on casting choice). But back to Loretta for the moment…

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  • 25 Mar

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    Blindspotting: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

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    The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is an overstuffed, slightly underdeveloped yet deceptively complex beast of a film.  If todays long-form television existed in the early 1940s, wouldn’t it make one hell of an HBO miniseries?  It certainly would, but as it stands the film is pretty damn magnificent. The decades long military career of Calvin Wynne-Candy reveals itself in an extended flashback the a fair number of insights into the British character and soul at the time. While it does not quite have the same towering reputation, it very much is the Citizen Kane of Britain cinema that is slow to reveal its intentions even as it hides its ‘Rosebud’ in plain sight. The first hour is more than a bit slog which I have no doubt will be positively riveting the second time around. This is a movie that takes the viewer a while to get their bearings of what the film is about, but by the time the nearly three hours elapse, it has evolved into an immersive and quite compelling examination attitudes shifts across generations and the myriad costs of war that tends to escalate with every iteration. A second viewing will likely leave me hooked after the first minute. That this was made right in the middle of World War II, featured a significant (and highly sympathetic) role for a German officer, and is critical of the philosophy of “Total War” is nothing shy of incredible.  The very creation of a film such as this remains an act of artistic bravery, for which the film was called to be banned by Winston Churchill (just as Cane was blackballed by William Randolf Hearst.) While the film evaded this fate it was still hacked up and truncated for distribution in the rest of the world leaving it pretty much forgotten outside of cinephile circles, Powell & Pressburger enthusiasts and the eventual tenacity of film-archivist Martin Scorsese.  Having watched the restored version, I can completely see why there is a bit of a cult for this one.

    Calvin Wynne-Candy (a chameleon-like Roger Livesey) is introduced as an old man, completely one-upped by a younger officer that takes a new tactic on a standard training exercise and catches him with his pants down, literally, in a Turkish Bath.  The cocky twenty-something lieutenant has no problem letting his spluttering superior feel like a relic of a bygone age and that the rules of the game have changed. 
    Flashback to the young officer Sugar Candy, a handsome slim, and yes, cocky, young officer in the same Turkish Bathhouse making his own racket while on leave from the Boer War in South Africa.  After receiving a letter from a friend of a friend about rumblings and rumours of discontent brewing in Germany, Candy rushes down to play politics and gets mired in a gentleman’s dual with officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff. Anton Walbrook threatens to (“Very Much!”) steal the picture entirely out from under Livesey, just as his character manages to steal the heart of Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr, in a pre-Dr. Strangelove move, in one of three roles) right out from under Candy.  After their duel, the two officers spend a fair bit of time convalescing in a German hospital in the company of Ms. Hunter and become fast friends. Jumping forward in time the film charts their friendship across the geopolitical adversity both World Wars.

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  • 04 Mar

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    Blindspotting: Saturday Night Fever and Grease

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    I‘m not sure you could you think of a more obvious pairing than this month’s Blind Spot picks…Released inside a year of each other, Saturday Night Fever and Grease starred then teen-heartthrob John Travolta, had wide mainstream appeal, a direct influence on a wide variety of styles and arrived chock full of danceable and, as it turned out, massively popular songs that have ingrained themselves into our skulls (and even rejuvenated certain genres of music). These weren’t simply movies from the late 70s, these were broad based touchstones of the era. And yet…I would’ve been hard pressed to find two more disparate films in terms of tone, topic and approach.

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    First and foremost: Saturday Night Fever isn’t a musical. Now even if you haven’t seen it, I suppose that’s an obvious statement since the barest of knowledge of the film tells you that Travolta and the cast don’t spontaneously burst into songs with throbbing disco beats behind them. But, even knowing that the film had some dark and cynical edges to it, I expected that much of it would have some of the bounce of a typical musical – a dance number here, a montage there and then a whole bunch of other dance numbers. Those elements are present (particularly in a couple of extended scenes in the disco club named 2001 Odyssey), but the reality of the lives of these characters weighs everything down. That’s not a criticism of the film by any means – as a matter of fact, it’s what makes the movie highly engaging and able to withstand any of its elements that would typically feel dated 35 years on. The flip side is Grease: a candy-coated confection of a musical with fantasy elements, slight characters and a shine to its story that doesn’t allow any reality to enter in. Some of the musical numbers are enjoyable, Olivia Newton-John is surprisingly charming and it’s all quite easily consumed, but it’s still just a dated 50s fluff story wrapped in a dated 80s shell. And that is a criticism…

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  • 12 Feb

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    Blindspotting – The Reckless Moment and This Gun For Hire

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    I haven’t been on a Film Noir bender in awhile and it’s damn well due. So for my opening salvo in the 2013 Blind Spots, I grabbed a pair of Noirs that I not only felt I should have seen by now, but that I just simply wanted to see right now. I expect from a more mainstream perspective, these two films weren’t exactly gaping holes in my cinematic knowledge, but I’ve been yearning (yes, I said yearning) to see them both. The additional push is that The Reckless Moment is directed by Max Ophuls and he’s a director that I’d like to dig into this year. My only experience with him is the lovely Letter From An Unknown Woman and I’ve cobbled together 3 or 4 of his films on the PVR (oh TCM…you give and you give…), so I’m keen to see more of that constantly moving camera of his. By the way, both of these movies were watched via the PVR, but my capture card is providing horrible resolution on Windows 7 so I’ve borrowed these screenshots from other sites…

    Once Noir gets a hold of you, it’s hard to shake. Like an addictive drug, Noir just leads to more Noir. I’m overstating of course, but Noir’s ever-present feeling of doom, its creeping hand of fate and its shafts of light painted with purpose across every inch of the frame lures me in every single time. Even the “lesser” Noirs manage to ensnare me. Not that every Noir is the same, but they share certain characteristics of style tone and theme. Indeed, both The Reckless Moment from 1949 and the earlier by 7 years This Gun For Hire share stylistic touches as well as central male characters who float through their dark lives. Both of these men end up glimpsing some possible redemption through the eyes of a woman (these ladies are not your typical femme fatales even though they may be the “cause” of the male’s downfall) as they accept the fate they always knew was approaching.

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  • 28 Jan

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    My Blind Spot list for 2013

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    Though I missed a month in my quest to do a year’s worth of Blind Spot posts last year, I still managed to squeeze out 11 posts on the subject. Those scribblings covered 22 movies that I felt I really should have seen by this point in my film-watching career. The operative words there, of course, are “should have”…The whole idea behind the Blind Spot series (kicked off last year by top notch Toronto blogger/writer dudes James McNally and Ryan McNeil) was to poke and prod us to finally get around to those films we feel are not only classics we should see, but ones we really want to see. So it was the perfect vehicle to push us to get to those titles that, for whatever reason, we just hadn’t got to yet.

    Instead of me going on and on blathering too much in depth on movies that have been written about by far better writers, in each post I tried comparing and contrasting two films I was seeing for the first time. It not only made for more interesting things for me to write (and I’d like to think to read as well), but also helped take a bigger chunk out of that loooooong list of need-to-sees. It was also kinda fun to try to tease out similarities in a couple of parings that were somewhat random.

    Considering the “voluminous” amount of posting I’ve been doing of late (sigh), I figured that I should try to tackle the task yet again. Anything to kick my heinie into gear every once in awhile is not a bad thing, so below is the list of parings I’m looking at initially for 2013 – I feel I need more foreign movies in there (Wajda, Ozu and Dreyer made the short list), but these choices felt right and the pairings seemed to be a good mix of obvious, tangential and random.

     

    Saturday Night Fever (1977)
    Grease (1978)

    Aside from the obvious, this pairing is appropriate because they both feel like movies I’ve seen – I know the songs, I know the big scenes and I know the stories – but I’ve never actually sat through them from start to finish.

     

    Breaking The Waves (1996)
    Shanghai Express (1932)

    Almost 65 years separate these two stories of women and their sacrifices – though it takes one film exactly twice as long as the other to tell its version.

     
     

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  • 30 Dec

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    Blindspotting #11 – Barry Lyndon and Doctor Zhivago

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    Though I came up short by one post for the year – except for November, I’ve posted all my Blindspotting posts monthly at my own blog before pulling them to RowThree in batches – I’m happy with the 22 first time watches of classics I managed to squeeze in this year. I plan to keep up the two per monthly post strategy in 2013, if only because it enables some interesting comparisons between films. I hope to publish my proposed set (complete with pairings for each month) early in the new year.

     

    If there’s one thing we likely all have in common when comparing lists of “major” films we haven’t seen, it’s that we have a couple of those Epics missing. You know the ones I mean: the 3+ hour epic love stories, epic period pieces and epic historical dramas that tend to be a bit foreboding. You’ll usually find one of them among our top movies of all time, but there’s a stack of others whose weighty nature and lengthy run times make viewing them seem like, well, “homework”. In many cases they turn out to be a joy to behold – quickly engaging, filled with characters of depth, chock full of interesting turns – and even feel much shorter than they really are. But when you hit one that doesn’t connect with you…Well, let’s just say that time crawls at around the same pace as it does when you’re in the dentist chair. And even though two great filmmakers were at the helm for this month’s choices, that was my concern with both films – two that have been sitting on my shelf for much, much longer than I’m comfortable admitting.

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    I will admit it’s an odd reaction for me to have to a Kubrick film since I’ve loved everything else he’s done (short of his first features before the great The Killing). But Barry Lyndon struck me as a different beast and one whose apparently slow meandering nature might wear thin over its 184 minutes. Aside from knowing it was the tale of a farm-raised young Irish man who finds his way into the aristocracy of 18th century Britain, I knew nothing of the story. So the changing fortunes of Barry (Part 1 of the film is entitled: By what means Redmond Barry acquired the style and title of Barry Lyndon) throughout were unexpected and kept me engaged. Even more surprising was that the film is really somewhat of a comedy. Not laugh out loud by any stretch, but the ups and downs of Barry’s life after he leaves his village (along with many of the narrator’s comments) brings an almost farcical tone to much of the film. Though Barry has a promising life ahead of him (born to a genteel family and bred to be a lawyer), his father is killed in a duel. While his mother stays a widow, Barry struggles to deal with his first love Nora – she tries to get him to be more assertive by hiding a ribbon on her person, but he seems too meek to search her for it. After she shows interest in a British army captain (who would relieve her family of its debt), Barry challenges him to a duel and is forced to leave town afterwards. He’s actually a bit of a selfish dim-witted putz when you get right down to it and as he begins his travels, there’s a moment where I wondered how long I could stay invested with that kind of character. Fortunately, as mentioned above, fate seems to have a push/pull battle with Barry as it keeps changing things up on him – he swears he’ll remain a gentleman, gets pulled down again, new opportunities are once again presented and the cycle repeats. He gets robbed, joins the army, deserts the army, is forced to rejoin when found, learns “bad behaviour” from other low-lifes in the army, saves the captain who forced him back into service, is sent to spy on an Irish nobleman, etc. He’s like a cipher at times, so it’s not surprising when he can suddenly be heroic, fight well or handle weapons masterfully. Ryan O’Neal doesn’t bring a whole lot to the character, but his blank slate performance actually fits Barry Lyndon perfectly.

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  • 28 Dec

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    Filling the Holes in 2013 [Blindspotting]

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    Thanks so much to everyone who voted on the titles which will help me out in covering some serious cinephile blind spots in my viewing repertoire. Seriously, thank you!

    As promised, I’m choosing the top ten vote-getters (plus two of my own choosing) and starting in January I’ll be watching and writing about them (in no particular order).

    So here are the top ten films you guys voted on from the primary ballot in order of most votes to fewest. I’ll choose the two runner-ups at a later date:

    # of votes     Title
    22      The 400 Blows
    21      Sunset Boulevard
    20      Manhattan
    17      His Girl Friday
    16      Some Like it Hot
    16      Bicycle Thieves
    15      On the Waterfront
    14      Mean Streets
    13      The Last Picture Show
    13      Rope

     

    If you’re curious, out of the original 60 titles on the ballot, only four got no votes:
    All the Right Moves
    Pink Flamingos
    Sounder
    The Towering Inferno

  • 18 Dec

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    Blindspotting #10 – Amadeus and Marty

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    At the time I set out to write this particular blind spot post originally, it was during the Toronto International Film Festival and I found myself without much time left and in a quandry as to what to choose for the Blind Spot. What did I feel like writing about this this time around? I don’t know, what do I feel like writing about? I didn’t just want to slap something mediocre together, but found myself looking for two films that would at least somewhat relate to each other. I ended up choosing two Oscar winning pictures: 1984′s Amadeus and 1955′s Marty. Besides each film taking their titles from the first names of their main characters and each having taken home the Best Picture prize of its year (as well as Best Actor, Director and Screenplay awards), I thought that the 30 year gap between them would add some interesting comparison points. It turns out that the main characters of each film are much more interesting comparison points than I would’ve guessed – especially when it comes to the area of mediocrity.

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    The main character in Amadeus is, in many ways, not actually the famous composer himself, but his rival Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham in the Oscar winning performance). Though he fancies himself quite the musical genius (and is indeed the court composer for Emperor Joseph II), he is gobsmacked when he encounters the ease with which Mozart creates entire fully-formed pieces (the “voice of God”) within his head. Salieri is not only jealous of Mozart’s skill, but he wonders why God has given these talents to this vulgar character who drinks, carouses and appears to have no manners about him. Salieri vows to block Mozart’s success by working against him behind the scenes and, eventually, to murder him. From the confines of an insane asylum, we learn much of this many years after Mozart’s death as Salieri confesses all to a priest after a botched suicide attempt. From Salieri’s point of view, everything was fine before this young punk showed up on the scene. Not that it necessarily affected his career, but he suddenly couldn’t help but see his own shortcomings. Previously, “everybody liked me…I liked myself.”.

    He can’t help but now see himself as just a mediocre talent, forsaken by God. Even though he secretly attends every Mozart performance and opera, he cannot accept this and continues to work towards crushing Amadeus (e.g. ensuring people don’t hire him for tutoring positions, closing operas in short order, etc.). His only chance to rise above his own mediocrity is to destroy Mozart and triumph over God.

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  • 17 Dec

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    Blindspotting #9 – The Searchers and Stagecoach

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    I had already chosen The Searchers for my Blind Spot list (one of the first I picked last year actually) by the time it was slotted into the number 7 position in this year’s Sight And Sound Greatest Films of All Time Poll. It ended up being the only member of the S&S Top 10 list that I hadn’t yet seen, so it was nice to at least close off on that tiny milestone. I would have reached it sooner, though, if I had managed to get around my excuse for not having seen it yet (essentially the same one I previously had with Casablanca): I’ve read so much about it and seen so many clips that I felt I already knew the story. In the case of Casablanca, as soon as I realized how extraordinarily great it was, I probably should have discarded that excuse for any and all movies. Slowly, but surely, I’ll get there.

    I had no excuse for avoiding Stagecoach, though, apart from some stupid thought in my head that a Western from the 30s would be slight and low on excitement. It’s funny how expectations can so easily be shattered, isn’t it? Stagecoach – John Ford’s kickstart to the Western genre from 1939 – is a wonderful blast of fresh air, moving at an entertaining clip while setting bars for action photography that would remain for years to come. Meanwhile The Searchers was both more and less than what I expected: a post-doc course on how to frame scenes and actors through scintillating visuals and with a cast that contains nary a single cliche or unflawed character, but also with a tendency to undercut its power with broad humour and acting choices.

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    I should tread carefully here though – Ford’s flip of the standard conventions of a Western is deserving of its place in film history if only for its anti-hero Ethan Edwards. John Wayne’s portrayal of Ethan doesn’t allow for much warmth since his racist ideas don’t take much effort to tease out and short of a tender moment early on with his two young nieces (who shortly thereafter get kidnapped by Indians), Edwards’ only moments of happiness seem to be at the expense of others and its a wonder why we stay with him on his travels. In particular, as he journeys to find the girls, he never hesitates to remind his main companion Martin (who was taken in by Edwards’ brother and wife when young and who has some Indian blood in his heritage) about his dim wit and void of a personality. Of course, these are indeed traits that Martin seems to possess and it hurts the plausibility of each and every moment he has with the lovely Laurie. When additional bits of poorly constructed slapstick are thrown in, those scenes become downright difficult to watch. Add to that every utterance coming from the dopey and dense Mose Harper (one of the set of deputees a U.S. Marshall has in tow) and the film continuously gets pulled back from the dark waters it so clearly should be wading into deeper. For every time Ethan loses control (as when he shoots the eyes out of a dead Indian or fires randomly into a herd of buffalo to diminish the amount of food for the Indian tribes) or when they discover a body under one of the tombstone like rock formations in Monument Valley or when they must examine a burned out shell of a home, it feels like the film needs to follow that scene with an attempt to reassure the audience that there’s still some good old fashioned fun to be had in the Old West. For me, though, whenever this happens it reset Ethan’s despair, loneliness and anger as well my own feeling of where his quest was headed. Fortunately Wayne is able to stir Ethan’s intensity, determination and hate right back up in very little time as he delivers a commanding performance throughout. The film’s final image is justification enough for its standing: Edwards left alone, somewhat helpless and framed all in black, after his remaining family have re-entered their house to begin anew.

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  • 14 Dec

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    Blindspotting #8 – Our Hospitality and The Family Jewels

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    If you’re wondering what Jerry Lewis’ decidedly non-classic The Family Jewels is doing on my Blind Spot list, well, you can easily be forgiven. I blame the NetFlix gods for unceremoniously turfing The Nutty Professor from the ranks of their streaming library, so I took a flier with his 1965 effort that (just like The Nutty Professor) was also written and directed by Lewis (and additionally produced in this case). The intent was to watch and compare two of the top comedies from a pair of brilliant physical comedians who also worked behind the camera. One of them (Buster Keaton) is a personal favourite while the other (Jerry Lewis) is someone whose filmography has barely been scratched by me. Keaton, of course, is the great Stone Face: a gifted and slightly bonkers physical comedian who did insanely dangerous stunts, but whose characters on screen rarely showed any emotion. Lewis, on the other hand, drew strongly on his elastic facial expressions to double down on the physical gags of his films. My preference has always been with Keaton (knowing Lewis just from clips off TV, etc.), but a viewing of one of Lewis’ earliest films called The Bellboy made me reconsider digging into his film career.

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    Therefore The Nutty Professor was the obvious next step for investigating Lewis – it’s typically his highest rated film (among those he directed and starred in), is rife with potential for slapstick and is essentially part of general pop culture at this point. The Bellboy was an excuse to squeeze numerous skits and ideas together into a non-plot film, but it succeeded in impressing me along several lines. Lewis showed he could actually be subtle and very inventive while being a complete goofball. The Nutty Professor will have to wait, but I had some high hopes going into The Family Jewels that I’d get at least more of the same and build further anticipation to his other films. How did that pan out? Well, let’s review my first sentence of this post again…Barring several moments of reasonably inspired absurdity and several deftly timed bits by Lewis, the film flops and flounders as it haphazardly wanders through its plot mechanism: a 9-year-old heiress (first time actress – and boy does it show – Donna Butterworth) gets to spend 2 weeks with each of her five different uncles (all played by Lewis) to see who she prefers to be her guardian. The family chauffeur Willard (also Lewis) is her best friend and escorts her to each new candidate. He also happened to accidentally stop an armoured car holdup at the start of the movie which is not forgotten by the gangsters he thwarted.

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  • 13 Dec

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    Blindspotting #7 – White Heat and Angels With Dirty Faces

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    This particular blind spot post is easily the most obvious pairing of films I’ve done so far. Though a good 11 years separate the release dates of these two key representations of the gangster genre of the ’30s and ’40s, their commonalities far outweigh their differences. Each pairs characters on opposite sides of the law (the moral kind as well as the criminal code) and are directed by masters of pacing and snappy storytelling. Each suffers from some similar problems as well (minimal use of the tiny set of female cast members, too much time spent with extraneous characters, etc.), but they both rise high above any small potato issues and build to rousing iconic finales.

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    The great James Cagney (who just seems to become greater every time I see him) plays the heavy while a pair of O’Briens take on the respective righteous roles in both 1938′s Angels With Dirty Faces and 1949′s White Heat. While Cagney flexes some of his trademark mannerisms – at least those on which latter day mimics focused like his rolling shoulders in the former and his lower lip biting in the latter – his real life chum Pat O’Brien plays nice as a childhood friend turned priest trying to reform him in “Angels” and then Edmund O’Brien takes on the role of an undercover cop trying to infiltrate his gang and bust him in “Heat”. Both play out as morality tales, though the former bounces a bit more between styles as it hits period comedy and melodrama along with its gangster roots. Fortunately, Michael Curtiz is at the helm and he manages to meld all the styles with relative ease and very few slow moments – which makes sense for a director that has worked in pretty much every genre. Raoul Walsh tackles the duties behind the camera for White Heat and grounds the film in the crime and police procedural form with many Noir touches.

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