Posts Tagged ‘TCM Film Festival’

  • 16 May

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    TCM Film Festival: Capsule Review Wrap-Up

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    Just about ready to finally close out the TCM Festival, only running a couple of weeks of weeks late. Heh. Anyway, here are some capsule reviews for the other films I saw but didn’t end up writing full reviews of, for whatever reason. I also threw the couple of shorts programs I saw in here.

    The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

    1966 Italy. Director: Sergio Leone. Starring: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef.

    Good-Bad-and-Ugly.jpg
    (4.5/5)

    I’ve seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly before, but never on a big screen, and I felt that experience was deserving of my time. And it was. There’s a lot more to the movie than I remembered, and I was really struck this time by how omnipresent but yet detached the Civil War is from the main story – our bandits come into close contact with it several times (finding the stagecoach of soldiers, getting captured, becoming involved in the standoff over the bridge), but it’s almost always a mere obstacle in their way. It’s kind of a fascinating juxtaposition, really, between all these men fighting a futile war out of duty and our anti-heroic outlaws double-crossing their self-serving way to a treasure. Anyway. I think that kind of thoughtfulness and depth is what makes this movie great, but what makes it awesome is the score, Clint Eastwood’s implacable smirk, Eli Wallach’s desperate maneuvering, and the languid pacing that knows exactly when to pick up. That last showdown scene has some of the best editing ever in film. Oh, I was also a little surprised to note how close a lot of it is shot. Sure there are a lot of wide vista shots, but for a widescreen western, there are a TON of closeups of faces and eyes – far more than you see in 1950s widescreen films, I think. There are times when it’s positively claustrophobic, which makes for an interesting effect on a giant screen in a huge cinema.

    A few more capsule reviews after the break.

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  • 15 May

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    TCM Film Festival: Picspamming Breathless (1960)

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    (4.5/5)

    I have this thing with Breathless. I think it’s great (though I don’t rate it as highly as some other Godard films, which isn’t an insult because I’m a Godard fangirl), and I enjoy it every time I see it, but even though I’ve seen it four or five times, I somehow manage to forget entire chunks of it exist. Every time I watch it, there are scenes where I’m like, “wait, what is this part? Was this part there the last time I saw it?” This is a phenomenon I’m not entirely sure I can explain, especially since the parts I DO remember are indelibly engraved in my psyche.

    A couple of attempts at explanation: 1) The parts I remember are those parts that are indelibly engraved on the psyche of cinephile culture in general. The parts that get included in montages and retrospectives, the parts that get screencapped in film histories, the parts that get talked about when people talk about the influence of the New Wave. Or 2) The parts I forget are the parts that deal with the narrative plot of Michel’s criminal activities and attempts to get the money he’s owed. Godard tends to bury the actual narrative of his films in general, preferring to focus on the moments that would be incidental or skipped over in straight-forward narratives. So from that perspective, it makes sense that I remember the endless conversations in Patricia’s bedroom, or Michel copying Bogart, or Patricia wearing Michel’s hat, or them driving down the Champs Elysses talking about basically nothing, rather than the scenes where Michel is trying to solve his problems.

    Whichever of those explanations is correct, or even if both of them are to some extent, there’s very little I can say about Breathless that hasn’t already been said. So let this instead stand as tribute to the things about Breathless that I find unforgettable.

    (I should mention that the festival played a brand-new Rialto restoration, which is now touring the US. I’m not sure exactly what was restored; it looked really good, but so did the DVD Criterion put out a few years ago. In any case, keep an eye out for when the print tours near you.)

    “What is your greatest ambition in life?”
    “To become immortal, and then die.”

    Many images after the jump.

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  • 06 May

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    TCM Film Festival: (The Complete) Metropolis (1927)

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    (5/5)

    Before I get into the full review of this, I have a directive: GO SEE this restored version of Metropolis if and when it tours through your city. It’s opening in Los Angeles next week and then touring around various cities after that (full schedule here). There, now even if you don’t click through the read the rest of this, my main point has been made.

    Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has been lauded as a high point of science fiction, silent cinema, German cinema, and Expressionist style almost since it was first released in 1927. And since its release in 1927, that has been true despite the fact that it was edited rather severely almost immediately after release, and nearly 30 minutes of its original run time has been lost for decades. In what I’m sure will go down as one of the greatest footage discovery stories in restoration history, a print of the film containing almost all of this lost footage was found in Buenos Aires in 2008, and preservationists have been working to restore it ever since. The footage is from a 16mm print and was in pretty bad shape when they found it; as such, it’s easy to tell which sections are from the Buenos Aires print because they’re in noticeably worse condition. But that makes it all the easier to tell which footage is new and laud the restoration of it, because it really does make a big difference in the flow of the film.

    I’ve seen Metropolis a couple of times at home before, and you know, liked it a good bit, but it never really blew me away. This time, it was a good half hour after it was over before I could properly walk and talk; it was that overwhelming an experience. There are a lot of things that contributed to my reaction, I’m sure – seeing it on a giant screen, with a very nearly sold-out audience, the incredible live score performance by the Alloy Orchestra, the better pacing and more involving story the restored footage provides, my own greater understanding of silent cinema – but I’m not sure it really matters. This viewing of Metropolis has easily become the most incredible cinematic experience in my life so far.

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  • 27 Apr

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    TCM Film Festival: Playtime (1967)

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    (4.5/5)

    Recently I’ve ripped a bit on filmmakers for relying too much on editing and shallow focus rather than composition, lighting, movement within the frame, and sound design to create meaning and guide attention. Probably not quite as much here as I have on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed, but it’s something I find increasingly annoying lately. Not that I’m totally against the use of shallow focus and editing, and obviously they’re the right choice in some circumstances, but it seems like most current films use them far more than any other possible techniques, and a lot of the time it feels lazy and tends to destroy the sense of cinematic space. When I talk about how great it is when a film uses deep focus and large-scale, long-shot composition (long in both distance and time), it’s films like Playtime that I’m talking about. I’ve been ambivalent on Jacques Tati films in the past, but I need to go back and revisit them, because Playtime is utterly charming from start to finish, and I would’ve been perfectly content if it had lasted all day. It’s shot in 70mm, but with a surprising 1.85:1 aspect ratio, which means that instead of composing shots wide, Tati tends to compose them deep.

    Tati took his cue from silent comedies, especially those of Buster Keaton, with a largely implacable character who gets pulled into various comical situations through no fault of his own and deals with them as they come, sort of just going along with whatever happens around him and trying to adapt to it without causing a fuss. His films tend to unfold around a specific location and explore what humor could come out of that location – humor not centered only on Tati’s character (M. Hulot), but on everyone in the area. His films are largely plotless, based around recurring characters, sight gags, and themes. And they’re essentially silent in so far as there is rarely any dialogue that matters (French is not subtitled into English; a lot of Playtime is actually in English, but it wouldn’t matter if it weren’t), though he does make use of sound gags that true silent comedy could not.

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  • 26 Apr

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    TCM Film Festival: The Story of Temple Drake (1933)

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    (4/5)

    One of the biggest joys of this festival has been the opportunity to catch new restoration prints of films that haven’t been seen at this level of quality since their original release, and even see a few that have been unavailable for quite a while. The Story of Temple Drake is an even more special case. The film was made in 1933, just when the Hays Office was cracking down, monitoring films more closely and exercising more control than they had in the previous few years. They ranked films according to whether they could be recut and exhibited, allowed to fulfill their existing runs before being suppressed, or outright banned. Temple Drake was outright banned, assumedly because of its frank (though non-explicit) depiction of sexual desire, rape, and multiple non-marital relationships. According to the Museum of Modern Art representative at the festival, the film was screened a very few times in 1933, then shelved until TCM asked MoMA (who had received a high-quality camera negative from Fox as part of a general archive donation) to restore and strike a print of it for this festival. As far as I could gather, it has been extremely difficult to see at all in the intervening years, outside of a few lower-resolution prints belonging to collectors. (One of these prints has been put on YouTube, but not in the kind of quality of the MoMA restoration.)

    TempleDrake-poster.jpgThe film is based on a William Faulkner story, and you can definitely see his Southern Gothic style and themes coming through. Temple Drake (Miriam Hopkins) is the flirtatious granddaughter of a well-respected judge. She flits from boy to boy, teasing and going further than a respectable woman of the time should, but not as far as the boys would like. She’s loved by the upstanding Stephen, a young lawyer who she refuses to marry. One night as she’s out with another boy, their car crashes and they’re intercepted by a rough family of bootleggers – a family with men who take what they want and won’t put up with Temple’s “no” the way the boys she’s used to do. This is a world where she’s not in control, and sex is a weapon wielded by men, not a game played by women.

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  • 24 Apr

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    TCM Film Festival: King Kong (1933)

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    (4.5/5)

    Seventy-seven years ago, King Kong premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. The year was 1933, and it was the same week that President Roosevelt declared a national bank holiday in order to stop bank runs in a desperate Depression. But King Kong captured people’s imaginations and was an immediate hit, and has been beloved by generations since. Today, a newly restored version of the film premiered at that same Chinese Theatre to an enthusiastic audience – most of whom had seen it before, but a few hadn’t, and most of us had never had the opportunity to see it on a big screen. And the Chinese is one of the biggest, and I can easily say that seventy-seven years on, the big guy still doesn’t disappoint.

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  • 23 Apr

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    TCM Film Festival: Sunnyside Up (1929)

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    SunnysideUp-lobby.jpg
    (3.5/5)

    Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard argues that when she was a star on the (silent) silver screen, “we didn’t need dialogue; we had faces!” And she may be on to something there. Sunnyside Up was the first sound film for popular silent star Janet Gaynor (fresh off winning the first ever Best Actress Oscar for her three films in 1927) and her frequent costar Charles Farrell. It’s still very much a transitional film, trying to figure out how to deal with sound and what changes in script and acting style were going to be necessary, and I won’t lie and say many of the line readings aren’t cringe-worthy. But as soon as Gaynor tips her head and smiles (or cries, or glances), suddenly nothing else matters at all, and you remember why she was such a huge star.

    Gaynor plays Molly, a working-class young girl living in New York City, dreaming of a rich, classy boyfriend. Meanwhile, Jack (a rich, sorta classy guy) fights with his non-committing girlfriend and speeds into the city, only to have a tiny accident outside Molly’s window, provoking a series of events that leads to Jack inviting Molly and her friends to the Southamptons to a) sing in the local charity show and b) make his girlfriend jealous. Things go fairly predictably from there, but with more charming moments than not.

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  • 20 Apr

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    TCM Classic Film Festival Preview

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    Turner Classic Movies is highly regarded around these parts for their dedication to providing basic cable subscribers with classic films uncut, commercial-free, with correct aspect ratios, etc. I certainly tout their programming enough in the Film on TV posts. Now they’re taking their love of showing classic films to the next level with the first annual TCM Classic Film Festival, running this weekend, from April 22nd through the 25th. It’s taking over two of the most revered classic Hollywood screens, the Chinese and the Egyptian, as well as the adjacent Mann cinemas and the Roosevelt Hotel for panel discussions and mingling.

    The festival opens Thursday night with a gala presentation of a newly restored print of A Star is Born, featuring one of Judy Garland’s great performances, and closes with a restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on Sunday, both in the opulent Chinese Theatre. In between, everything from well-known beloved classics like Casablanca to unsung discoveries like silent screen star Janet Gaynor’s first talkie, Sunnyside Up. Many of the screenings are being attended by stars and family associated with the films, or accompanied by Q&As with people involved with the films. I’m trying to catch a variety of films, some of which I’ve seen and others which will be new to me. It promises to be quite a collection, and quite a trip down the classic Hollywood timeline.

    More detail on the screenings, arranged by series, after the jump. You can see the full schedule here, and weep about how many scheduling conflicts there are. Passes to the festival are still available, and individual tickets will be available before each screening.

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