Q the Winged Serpent

This enjoyable b-grade monster movie sees a mythical, dragon-like Aztec god come to life in downtown Manhattan, picking off sunbathers from rooftops and building its nest at the top of the Chrysler building. Larry Cohen helms the film and delivers the goods: monsters, unusual settings, human sacrifices, bikini clad sunbathers, bad special effects, strangely good performances from David Carradine and Michael Moriarty. What more do you really need? It all adds up to a mostly satisfying movie of its kind.

Playtime

Brilliant. Absolutely amazing. I don't even know where to start in describing Jacques Tati's masterpiece. There is no story, only incidents. There are no characters, only recognizable faces (one of which, of course, being Tati's M. Hulot). It's a truly visionary work with an aesthetic so rigorous as to be compared to Bresson or Antonioni, but on a larger, grander scale. There are a few major set-pieces -- an airport terminal, a building lobby/office complex/showroom floor, an apartment complex, and a restaurant. It is a world enclosed in glass and filled with comic mishaps of such subtlty and precision that its almost difficult to even call it a comedy, or put it in any genre for that matter. The production design is meticulous and extraordinary and Tati makes the best use of 70mm that I have ever seen. His compositions are almost exclusively wide shots which encompass an entire world of carefully crafted action, and his camera watches it all, as we recognize the complexities of his vision. Tati, and this film in particular, is difficult to explain (at least for me). His films must be experienced to be understood, and this is best experienced in its native format on the big screen, where the intricacies aren't hidden by a television screen.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

The fourth outing of everybody's favorite boy wizard is the most imaginative and exciting of the series. Mike Newell manages to artistically reinvent the world of Hogwarts as Alfonso Cuaron did in the previous film. Newell is the first British director of a very British series, though I didn't notice this as being any more "British" than the previous films. The three leads continue to develop as actors, people, and characters nicely, in that these all seem to be metaphors for growing up anyway. This is the darkest entry yet, and the stakes are raised as Lord Valdemont makes his return, and the film ends up with a body count. Despite it's 2 1/2 hour length, it manages to jump from event to event, and for me anyway, left me wanting to see more. The story revolves around Harry's mysterious entry into the dangerous Tri-wizard Tournament which is a life or death contest usually reserved for older students. It's through this contest, however, that I believe Harry begins to develop morally. It's in his willingness to sacrafice the win to help others, or to not bend the rules for curiosity sake that makes this the most morally grounded of the series. Plus the darker nature, and more dangerous challenges provide a stronger, more mature conflict for him to face. That combined with Newell's visual flair, and some of the more imaginative digital wizardry in recent memory, make this the most imaginative, exciting and well-rounded of the series.

Peter and Paul

A competent and generally straightforward made for T.V. retelling of what amounts to the book of Acts. Anthony Hopkins turns in a good, but not stellar performance as the apostle Paul -- the man who is more responsible than any other for shaping the last 2,000 years of Western civilization (except for, perhaps, Jesus himself). It certainly doesn't take any artistic risks, but neither does it short change its evangelistic message. The Biblical text is treated faithfully and honestly. I commend Hopkins and Robert Foxworth (Peter) for attempting (not always successfully) to bring humanity and piety to these two great followers of Christ, and even in their failures, I can respect the idea. This would be the perfect film to show to church groups or in various Bible classes, and is a story that is long overdue for a definitive big screen treatment.

Whity

Leave it to Fassbinder to subvert the Western genre. It's a Western, set in America, but of course everyone speaks German. Whity is the mulatto slave of the perverse Nicholson family. The family almost gets as much joy from abusing him as they do from masochistically harming themselves. The grown children of the family patriarch all come to Whity and ask him to kill their father. One of the sons clearly has some sexual issues to work through. In fact, all of the main white characters in the film already look dead. They are made up in a grotesquely pale make up that looks like it would be more at home in a Romero film. This is easily the most subversive Western since Nicholas Ray's masterpiece, Johnny Guitar, but this isn't nearly as much fun, though it is certainly more psychologically probing. Just watch the way Fassbinder (and cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus') camera glides around the room from one character to another in the scene in which the father reads out his will. Like the best of his films, there are moments of almost delicious perversion, but he is unable to sustain the mood for the entire film.

Walk the Line

Another conventional, but successful Hollywood biopic, this time about the iconic Johnny Cash. It's inevitable comparisson will be to last years overhyped, Ray, but I think this is the better film. Joaquin Phoenix is extraordinary as Cash -- a man who in the beginning is just trying to find his own voice and live down the death of his "better" brother and his relationship with his disappointed father, and by the end becomes a true music icon having marched through hell to reach paradise. Equally as extaordinary, however, is Reese Witherspoon as June Carter, the love of his life. I have often found Witherspoon to at time be impossibly cute, but here she provides strength, sensitivity, and a moral grounding to Johnny's life. Most of the film is dedicated to Cash's pursual of her and her numerous rejections, yet always remaining his most faithful friend. James Mangold's direction is conventional, yet steady. It seems at times he chooses to focus on unusual moments in Cash's life which manages to keep it interesting. It's a good film on it's own, but it's worth it just for the performances and the music.

Fear of Fear

After watching a couple of duds from Fassbinder, this was a welcome, if not entirely successful relief. It focuses on a young, middle class housewife who seems to be losing her mind around the time she is to have her second child. Soon, her sanity begins to deteriorate as she finds herself becoming addicted to Valium and alcohol. The most troubling thing is that no one around seems to even notice. Her husband, and mother and sister (who live in the same apartment complex) are all too self-involved to even notice that she needs help (and even if they did, they probably wouldn't do anything but tell her to shape up). She is frightened -- crippled by fear. Fear of fear. This is vintage Fassbinder material, and he almost pulls it off. Unfortunately the idea of the film is better than the film itself. Still though, it could have been much, much worse.

Meet John Doe

I have to admit that I was surprised to find this lesser known film to be Frank Capra's best, excluding of course, It's a Wonderful Life. Yeah, yeah, he's sentimental. That should be a given. However, unlike the overbearing and prechy Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and the ocassional misfires of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Capra finds the right balance between his sentiment and his pathos. Gary Cooper, in one of his best performances, once again is the everyman John Doe who, thanks to reporter Barbara Stanwyck (in one of her best performances), gets an outlet for the injustices of depression era society and becomes a spokesman for the common man. Except, he was hired, and everything he says was scripted (by Stanwyck), and the media mogul that he works for may have ulterior motivations for Cooper's national platform. Soon, though, his message turns from anger to hope and inspiration. It's actually fairly complex how it all works together, but I found it to be an unusually moving film. It's "love your neighbor" ethic never comes across as simplistic as it could have (and probably should have), and there's even a "we're the people" speech that tops the more famous example from The Grapes of Wrath. It may be the most Dickensian of all of Capra's films. I don't necessarily think that Capra was a great director, certainly not one of the greatest, but with this and It's a Wonderful Life, he made at least two great films.

It's Alive

Lame horror film from Larry Cohen, which seems to have a fairly significan critical and cult following. This film picks up at about the point that a film like Rosemary's Baby ended -- with a woman giving birth to a hideously deformed demon child (allegedly thanks to an untested drug that the mother was on). Fresh out of the womb, the vampiric child runs, jumps, an utilizes logical thinking to butcher his way through the town and back to his proud, proud parents -- not bad for a little tyke. It's unscarey, and I found it to be overly ridiculous. Fortunately, Bernard Herrmann provides a solid score, but I'm not sure why he was working on this film in the first place.

Pioneers in Ingolstadt

Apparently this was this was the film that put Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the map of international cinema, though his auteur status wouldn't be cemented until a little while later. Unfortunately, Fassbinder seems as bored with his own film as I did watching it. Perhaps because, unlike his other films, this was based on a play. A group of German soldiers (identified as Nazi's only by their uniforms) are building a bridge in Ingolstadt and most of the film is dedicated to their sexual exploits with a group of naive girls who have taken up prostitution. The idea seems to have potential, but Fassbinder doesn't find it in this film.

The Chumscrubber

Yet another in a long line this year of independent films that can't seem to move beyond the term interesting. It's a suburband teenage drama that smells blatantly of Donnie Darko and American Beauty with an Altman-esque weaving of an ensemble all-star cast. The fact that it never manages to elevate itself to the place that it wants to be (and probably should be considering all of the talent involved) is disappointing. However, along with his performance in last year's Undertow, and now this, Jamie Bell is quickly becoming one of my favorite young actors around. He's good, and so is most of the cast, in fact, but they don't have much to work from except for some amusing and broadly drawn stereotypes of suburban America. There's drugs, weddings, kidnappings, vitamins, suicide, and a video game, but it all can't save the film.

Effi Briest

Unconvincing, dull, uncharacteristic period piece from Fassbinder about a teenage girl who marries a wealthy older diplomat and then unwittingly succumbs us to the boredom that she endures. Not one of his finer moments.

The Squid and the Whale

Noah Baumbach's film has me a bit torn. On the one hand it does an excellent job chronicling the effects of divorce and joint custody on children, but on the other hand it really left me with nothing. Jeff Daniels gives perhaps his best performance to date as the snobby, psuedo-intellectual, past-his-prime, literature professor father who divorces Laura Linney. Their two boys develop attachments to one of their parents -- the older boy to his father and the younger to his mother. Every party involved seems to be in the wrong in one way or another. It's one of those seemingly personal independent films that never transcends its few ideas or its story. The feels like the kind of film that should be much more than it really was.

Chinese Roulette

Yet another Fassbinder film whose final third elevates this to the status of near-great and makes it a significantly better film than it was starting out to be. It plays out like a murder mystery, except no one dies -- at least not physically. A man and his mistress arrive at a country estate, where he finds his wife and her lover already there. Together, they have a precocious and even spiteful young, crippled daughter as well as a few servants. The first two-thirds of the film establishes their relationships to one another and their feelings towards each other which all leads up to a spectacular game of verbal torture called chinese roulette. I'm not going to try and explain the game, that you'll have to find out for yourself, but it's a suspenseful sequence that plays out in real time like the detective walking around the room examining all of the suspects and explaining how each of them had motive and opportunity until the final revelation. This seems like the kind of film that would be fun to make -- learn an interesting and insightful game and then build a movie around it. Works for me.

The Passenger

Jack Nicholson stars in this "espionage thriller" from Michelangelo Antonioni. I place it in quotes because it's almost useless to describe an Antonioni film in terms of genre, because he only takes the barest traces of the genre and then proceeds to make his own film. It's by no means thrilling, nor is it boring. Nicholson is a reporter in Africa who, for one reason or another, switches identities with a dead man (perhaps in order to feel liberated). It turns out that the man he switched with is an international gun runner. Much of the films is a travelogue through Europe with Jack and Maria Schneider who gives a wonderful performance. Antonioni does more with photographic space -- negative space in particular -- than probably any other filmmaker. It feels empty, even with people in the frame, and speaks volumes about his construction of reality (see Blow Up). This film, however, is lesser Antonioni, with the exception of a bravura piece of camera work that composes the second to last shot of the film -- probably one of the most spectacular shots in the history of the medium, if I may be so bold. Antonioni is a true orginal and often difficult to understand, but then that could be because his films are often about alienation and the difficulty of understanding and the fragmentation of reality.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

A seemingly typical film from Rainer Werner Fassbinder featuring intense female pathology and only the barest traces of style (which in itself constitutes Fassbinder's own unique style). It all takes place in the home of Petra von Kant, a wealthy, arrogant fashion designer who soon falls in love with one of her models. Actually this would probably make an effective stage play in the vein of Tennessee Williams with its limited setting and only a few extended scenes. After winning the heart of her model, the girl becomes complacent and Petra becomes increasingly obsessive. This really shouldn't be a particularly good film, but it becomes one because Fassbinder along with his actors bring us so deeply into the skin of the characters, that it is difficult to no be impressed by the complexity and humanity he manages to create. The final few scenes earn an emotional potency as I came to understand the truth and meaning of the title.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

Martin Scorsese's documentary covers the life of Bob Dylan from his youth through 1966. At nearly four hours in length, it has plenty of time to cover the highlights of his career and bring some insight into the man, but it never really does. There are some revealing and interesting interviews with other folk musicians of the time and even some with Dylan himself. He had already become a legend between the ages of 20 and 25. There is some great archival footage and of course great music, but walking away from it, I don't feel like I really know much more about Dylan than when I began, excepts for some biographical details, and the differing points of view from the other interviewees. Actually, this makes a good companion piece to D.A. Pennebaker's Dylan documentary, Don't Look Back in which Dylan comes across as immature and antagonistic, whereas in this film he comes across more human and rounded. He is proclaimed the voice of his generation, yet to him it was never about the message. I just wish this film would let us get to know him better.

Red Eye

Wes Craven's latest turns out to be perhaps the tightest pure thriller of the year. It starts out one way, then takes a turn to become a mid-air mind game between Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams, and then becomes something of a larger scale story of espionage and political terror. Craft wise, the middle section is the most suspenseful and compelling, but its the ending segment that almost makes this a potentially great film, especially when seen in light of Craven's other work. The auteur theorist in me may be willing to elevate this to a higher level than it deserves because, in some ways, it is a consummation of Craven's career. So many of his best films deal with the dehumanizing effects of violence -- even when it is warrarted (ie. The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and Scream). Here, however, thanks to Murphy's charmingly sinister, antagonistic performance, and thanks to the nature of the genre, Craven builds up a blood lust in the audience that demands McAdam's kill her attacker. But he wisely deprives the audience of that satisfaction, instead allowing Murphy to be shot not by McAdams, but by Brian Cox who plays her father, and even then he only incapacitates the villain rather than resorting to a justified slaying. Craven finally allows his protagonists to retain their humanity and actually prove themselves morally superior to the villain.

Divine Comedy, Spirited Laughter

Here is my paper in response to the recent City of Angels film festival:



I believe it was Mel Brooks who said that, "I cut my finger, that’s tragedy. A man walks
into an open sewer and dies, that’s comedy." Comedy is the inverting of our expectations. Comedy is tragedy plus time. Comedy is no one thing and everything, just so long as it’s funny. And just about everything can be made funny, when looked at from the right point of view. These are some of the things that I was reminded of at this year’s film festival. It’s good to be occasionally reminded of the power of comedy, because it has the potential to be the most subversive of film genres. One is more apt to let things slide if they are being made to laugh than if they are just being made to watch. So as Christians, we must ask ourselves, what makes us laugh? What makes God laugh (or does He laugh at all)? What are the Divine possibilities of comedy? After all, I suppose it’s important.

"Here’s the Treasury report, sir. I hope you’ll find it clear."
"Clear? Huh. Why a four-year-old child could understand this report." He turns to his secretary, "Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can’t make head or tail of it."

If God doesn’t laugh at the Marx brothers, then He doesn’t laugh at all. Duck Soup, in my humble opinion, laugh for laugh may be the funniest movie ever made, with the exception of Airplane!, of course. Comedy has always tended towards the anarchic, but the Marx’s take it to its logical end – utter chaos, and comic brilliance, where everything that can happen, does (and then some). The comedy of this film lies in slapstick and satire, however we’re often so overwhelmed by the level and quantity of the slapstick, that the satire is almost missed. Groucho endlessly throws out his puns and one-liners, Chico provides the foil to Groucho, and Harpo stands there innocently until he honks his horn, cuts off your tie, or places his leg in your hands. But beyond the sight gags and verbal wit, the film takes aim at governments, institutions, war, and politics all in under seventy minutes. Why is it important? Why is it funny? I think both questions can be answered in the fact that the film emphasizes human weaknesses and fallibilities such as our pride. It takes the craziness of the world we know and exaggerates it to comic proportions, creating a world that reflects our own, and one that we may even secretly think is our own. The Marx brothers have a way of inverting logical responses to situations which makes it funny. But it’s also funny because when we sit down and think about it, we realize that really they respond just the way that we do, but they take joy in exposing our irrationalities -- or even our humanness.

"...The other important joke for me is one that’s usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think it appears originally in Freud’s ‘Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,’ and it goes like this. I’m paraphrasing, ‘I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.’ That’s the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women."

Woody Allen is perhaps the most consistent and personal of American filmmakers. After a while, you just start laughing before the joke is even delivered, because you know it’s coming and it’s going to be funny. But unlike the Marx brothers, the comedy of Woody Allen has an edge of sadness. If the Marx brothers were low brow, then Woody Allen is high brow. Where the Marx brothers will be funny and raise your spirits for the day, Woody Allen might leave you down, though you’ll probably laugh a good deal on your way there. He is the disappointed atheist, and much of his humor comes in the face of an empty universe and the disappointments of relationships. He laughs, and we along with him, because it is better to laugh than to cry. He recognizes imperfections, his above all, and makes us laugh at them, while never allowing us to forget what they really are. His is the comedy of reality, or reality as he sees it. It’s funny, to be sure, but I don’t think God laughs during a Woody Allen movie. I think He cries, because Allen is so close to the truth, but just can’t grab onto it. I do, however, think that it is appropriate for us to laugh, because while we may recognize that he doesn’t have the whole story right, he does have a lot of it right, and he is unusually insightful into the human condition. Annie Hall in particular has a way of exposing truths about life and relationships that we all think, but rarely are able to express (need I mention Marshall McLuhan?). Like Chaplin, he has a way of blending pathos and comedy in just the right doses so that we recognize and experience the sad and the disappointments, but not at the expense of the joy and the humor.

The comedians of the silent era almost certainly had it tougher than comedians today because they had to rely exclusively on pantomime and physical comedy. In many ways, Buster Keaton may have been the real master of his form. In The General, as with his other films, he is able to maintain his stoic demeanor in the face of some amazing stunts. For Keaton, there was no cinematic trickery to his acrobatics. They are primarily filmed in long shots so that the audience can see that they’re real. But as he barrels from one absurd situation to another, we begin to recognize that physical comedy reminds us that we don’t have control of the outside world. As eager as we may be to hold onto things, sometimes we just can’t, and Keaton finds the humor of that reality. His film isn’t profound, but it is memorable and even life affirming, by pointing out the goodness despite the absurdity of the situations. Panelist Ron Austin pointed out that according to Plato, comedy is the gap between the real and the ideal, or if you prefer, between ourselves and God. It becomes funny when we start taking ourselves too seriously, and Buster Keaton never took himself too seriously. The comedy that will last and span the ages is not performed with bitterness or with a mean spirit, but with compassion and love for humanity. I think God can laugh with that.

"Boy would I like to see you give some old harpie the three in one!"
"Don’t be vulgar, Jane. Let us be crooked, but never common."

Of all the various forms of comedy, satire is probably the most critically respected, and Preston Sturges the finest satirist to make a film. The Lady Eve is a screwball comedy which comes with its conventions, but it is also a satire of relationships, stereotypes, and the American aristocracy. The film has been called a metaphor for the fall which is evident by the title, the opening credits, and the motif of snakes. Plato’s gap theory also comes into play here as Henry Fonda’s character is continuously searching for his "ideal" woman. The problem, Sturges points out, is that we are all only human – the bad one’s probably aren’t as bad as we think and the good ones not as good. There are no ideal people, only real ones. As Monica Ganas wrote in her essay of the film, "In this film, people can only become good people when they are forgiven for being bad people." Sounds like a pretty accurate view of the relationship between God and man. The comedy of Preston Sturges pokes fun at our phony "window dressings" and gets right to the heart of the matter. His delight is revealing the flaws of society, and we laugh all the harder because more often than not, we recognize that it’s true.

The world of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro is the theatre of the absurd. The world of Delicatessen is a world exaggerated by fish eye lenses, quirky characters, unusual settings, and elaborate production design. It is a post-apocalyptic world that was described as a parody Inferno (Dante’s not Argento’s). In this surrealist dark comedy that’s part Bunuel and more than a little Terry Gilliam, the horror of the situation is offset by its sense of humor. The comedy of this film relieves what might otherwise be an unbearable existence. It’s probably not by accident that the hero of the film is a clown who has a way of bringing joy to a chaotic and deteriorating world. He is the optimist in a world seemingly without hope, reminding us that humor can keep us going in the darkest of times.

Over the course of the festival, a recurring theme maintains that laughter is a grace. Comedy, humor, and laughter may not only be a means to an end, but may be ends in themselves. There are many different types of comedy and many different uses for it. Through it all, I think that God does laugh, and even if He doesn’t, then I think we should. Comedy is about absurdity, joy, sorrow, flaws, faults, inconsistencies, and ultimately truth. We laugh because it’s funny and we laugh because it’s true. We are imperfect people in an imperfect world, and nothing reminds us of this more clearly and entertainingly than a good comedy. Comedy may indeed be Divine and the deepest laughter should be an outpouring of our spirit.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932)

Granted, I haven't seen every adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson's classic horror story, but after watching Rouben Mamoulian's version, I am prepared to call this best. Frederic March plays the duel role of tormented good doctor, and his brutal counterpart. His Hyde is ape like in both appearance and even in action. He abuses and psychologically tortures a young barmaid in some of the more frightening and disturbing passages of the film. The film also has some strong and overt erotic undertones. Mamoulian was one of cinema's earliest innovators. The 1930's presented some of the most visually bland films in American history due to the advent of sound and the unwieldy size of the camera's. Mamoulian, however, refused to be bound by such limitations. His camera moves remarkably. There is some spectacular subjective camerwork involving Jekyll looking directly into a mirror and watching his own transformation into Hyde -- a remakable visual feat even today. A very unusual horror film, and one of the best of the era.

Pride and Prejudice (2005)

This latest incarnation of the Jane Austen classic is one of the best and most enjoyable costume dramas/literary adaptations in recent years. Deborah Moggach's screenplay nicely condenses the novels events into a full two hours, that neither compromises the story nor overloads the running time. Director Joe Wright proves a good craftsman, bringing life and energy to familiar characters and familiar settings. He also seems to have a visual flare, particularly as demonstrated in the ballroom scenes with some extraordinarily well orchestrated camera work. Keira Knightley gives her strongest performance to date as Elizabeth Bennett, an excellent performance for that matter. Matthew MacFadyan brings a strong presence if not a wide range to the role of Mr. Darcy. Wright also manages to avoid the pratfalls and cliches of films of this type, by not devolving into sentimentality. He wisely keeps a restraint on the emotional material, allowing the audience to build sympathy for the character and flow with the story. Overall, a very satisfying and well-realized film.

Santa Sangre

Alejandro Jodorowski's phantasmagorical film plays out like a mix of Psycho, Pulp Fiction, and Freaks as directed by both Fellini and Bunuel. What business a combination like that has of working, I'll never know, but this film does have a strange beauty to it in the way that it shows you things you've probably never seen before in a movie. I was particularly fond of the first half in which we see Fenix as a young boy growing up in the circus, son of the strong man and the trapeze lady. His father is secretly running off with the tatooed lady, whose daughter is a mute mime who is fond of Fenix. Much has been made of the scene in which after the elephant dies it is placed in an enormous coffin, paraded across town and then ceremoniously dropped into the junk yard where a group of starving peasants gather around, break through the coffin and cut up the elephant for food. His mother finds out about the fathers infidelity and throws acid on his crotch, in response, he cuts off both of her arms and then slits his own throat because of his immasculation. The second half takes place a number of years later and has these uber-Oedipal undertones as he effectively becomes the arms of his mother and lacks any will of his own, to the point that he begins murdering girls that he develops a sexual interest in at her command. All of this probably sounds incredibly strange, and it is. This is unusually bold filmmaking. The fact that it even works at all is a testament of Jodorowski's direction and vision. It's certainly not a film for all tastes, but it is by no means tasteless. This is a film that is similar to a dozen other films and utterly unlike anything that I have ever seen before, which is an accomplishment in and of itself.