Movies: The Official "Movie of the Week" Club Thread III

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Next pick: David Gordon Green's George Washington

 

[Jevo]

Putney Swope (1969) dir. Robert Downey Sr.

The chairman of an NYC advertisement company has a heart attack in the boardroom and dies on the stop. The gathered executives all see an opportunity to seize power for themselves, but the chairmanship will be given based on an anonymous vote. Being unable to vote for themselves, they all vote for the person they find the least threatening, Putney Swope, the only black executive. Putney Swope immediately makes some big changes. He renames the company Truth and Soul Inc., fires all white employees and hires black ones instead, and he bans the company from making any ads for toy guns, tobacco and alcohol. The changes are an immediate succes, and everyone wants to be their client. The success even gets the attention of the US President, who both tries to bring and end to the company, and use its power for his own benefit.

Downey Sr. pulls no punches in this satire, and hits a wide array of topics as well. From the advertisement industry and how it operates to mixture of corporate corruption and its connection to the political class, much of which is still just as applicable today. An even bigger topic is race, both in regards to traditional protrayals in film, but also in general society on the back of the civil rights movement.

Putney Swope is poignant, hard hitting and funny. It's no wonder it became a cult classic. While many of the subjects that the films touches upon are quite universal, and manyof the points that the film is making are still applicable today, it's still very much a product of its time. I feel like you couldn't have made Putney Swope like this at pretty much any other time in history. Putney Swope 2022 would looks drastically different, even if much of the underlying message would be more or less unaltered. It's hard to imagine a 2022 version having the same impact.

The quality of Putney Swope as a cult film and anti-establishment film are evident, but I'm not sure I personally would call it a great viewing experience. It has a lot of fun moments, but for me they stay moments, and nothing more. But I guess if you are coming into this film expecting a well developed bullet proof plot, you are doing it wrong. So it's probably better to just view it as a series of small loosely connected vignettes which all touch on the same themes.

 

[kihei]

24 Frames (1998) Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

24 Frames is a unique movie. It is a film by the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami that takes a series of 24 minimalist images and devotes four and a half minutes each to what happens just before or just after the central image occurs. The end result is 24 short movies that deal almost exclusively with scenes from nature involving mainly seascapes, snowy landscapes and a variety of animals in their natural setting--cows, birds, sheep, deer, and horses. In all of these vignettes not much actually happens at all—yet, except for the first one, each can be seen as a parable. For instance, in one sequence we watch cows walk by a fallen comrade on the seashore. The viewer can see that as about nothing at all or as about something significant.

The animals that make up the “characters” in these landscapes are sometimes very subtly animated. Shot usually from some distance, tiny birds look like tiny birds and move like tiny birds, not like some Disney cartoon birds. But Kiarostami manipulates the image just a fraction to allows us, if we choose, to anthropomorphize the animals slightly. For example, in one bit, a bunch of chickadees fight over a little hole in the snow that provides a tiny cave of shelter for whichever bird can fend off the others. Different birds come and try to claim this miniscule refuge. Finally, having fended off the others, one chickadee settles in, victorious. End of story? Nope. In the final seconds a cat comes out of nowhere and grabs the unwitting victor. Thus, there ends up being an unexpected moral twist to the story as perseverance isn't the message after all. I hasten to add, though, that this is the most explicit, least subtle “comment” in all of the vignettes. The other 23 bits will require more thought from you. But figuring them out is not only fun, it is strangely satisfying, like figuring out a secret code or solving a challenging puzzle.

I found myself asking seemingly inessential and mundane questions that had become suddenly important, like “Why is that deer just waiting there?”; “Is that seagull engaging in a vigil for a fallen comrade?”; “Did the return of that motorboat make the birds fly away?” Not exactly the kind of questions one asks oneself in a Fast and Furious movie. However, most, maybe all, of these little sequences can tell tiny tales if we choose to allow them to do so. Or we can just contemplate the sequences like they were a form of visual haiku verse. Kiarostami leaves the choice up to us.

Most movies want to excite us in some way, viscerally or intellectually. 24 Frames seems to want to slow us down and let us smell the roses. For some reason, I suspect this is a very good movie to watch during a pandemic as it nurtures calm and excites wonder. I just find 24 Frames a beautifully cinematic work of art.

 

[kihei]

My next pick will be: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans by F. W. Murnau (1927)

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

24 Frames
Kiarostami (2017)
Bird chirps

Twenty-four vignettes, each 4.5 minutes long, each born of a still image be it a painting or an actual photograph that Kiarostami had taken at some point in his life. Each is a still that gradually comes to life via animation to tell the moments that happen “before and after” a picture is taken.

This movie is a screensaver. It bored me, but my dogs genuinely loved it.

I’m not mad! I’m glad to have watched it and I probably would’ve never done so were it not for this group. I will freely concede I perhaps do not “get” this. I am maybe even obstinate to its ideas and execution. I find the concept of what happens before or after a still picture to be an odd one from a filmmaker who spent his life recording sequences rather than still moments. Are these his actual recollections or thoughts? Just doodles? Both? With possibly one or two exceptions it’s all a mostly tedious drag.

Spoiler alert: A bird is going to fly through the screen.

I still am thinking about what is presented here, so that’s a win for art, I suppose. But I can’t shake the fact that I wrestle with both the concept and the execution and I can’t help but feel if an unknown director rolled out a similar film and with a similar conceit, it would never see the light of day. That Kiraostami is a world legend gave him the platform for this, but I can't say I cared much for the product.

I know Kiarostami died before this was completed and it has a bit of the same feel of a posthumous release of a music artist —maybe a few moments of passing magic, but an overwhelming feeling of borderline exploitative filler. I confess to not knowing how much of the film he made before others took it over to finish it.

 

[kihei]

Slow day waiting for the big game tonight. So I thought I would make a list of every choice I have made so far on the Movie of the Week page. There are probably omissions and some films that I have filched from others but this is the best guess I can give:

Anatomy of a Murder
The Conformist
Blow Up
Suicide Club
Cafe de Flore
Spirit of the Beehive
Children of Paradise
Still Life
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
Shoot the Piano Player
Z
Pather Panchali
The Maltese Falcon
The Double Life of Veronique
The Adventures of Robin Hood
Trouble in Paradise
Barry Lyndon
L'atalante
Alexandra
Chungking Express
Last Tango in Paris
Providence
Revanche
The Wild Child
The Third Man
Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Once upon a Time in Anatolia
A Man and a Woman
Persona
Bringing Up Baby
After Life
Like Father, Like Son
The Sweet Hereafter
A Simple Life
Mon Oncle Antoine
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Norwegian Wood
The Exterminating Angel
My Neighbour Totor0
Somewhere
Alice in the Cities
Mother (Bong)
North by Northwest
Last Year at Marienbad
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
Amour
Charulata
Werckmeister Harmonies
Days of Being Wild
L'enfant
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down
The Official Story
Tokyo Story
Vampyr
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Je t'aime, Je t’aime
Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion
Alexander Nevsky
Chinatown
Rebel without a Cause
Shame (Bergman)
Man of Flowers
Breathless
The Rules of the Game
Solaris
Wings of Desire
You, the Living
Devils on the Doorstep
Certified Copy
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Chinese Take-Out
The Thin Man
Don't Look Now
Memories of Murder
Divorce, Italian Style
Mean Streets
A Child's Christmas in Wales
The Return of Martin Guerre
Haider
The Chaser
Nosferatu (Murnau)
The 400 Blows
The Big City
Ivan the Terrible, parts 1 and 2
Charade
Love Me or Leave Me
In Bruges
The Sorrow and the Pity
Dead Ringers
Orpheus
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
Repulsion
Truly Madly Deeply
Amadeus
Only Lovers Left Alive
Four Lions
Last Men in Aleppo
Seven Beauties
Death in Venice
The Night Porter
On the Beach Alone at Night
The Vanishing (Dutch version)
November
Day of the Jackal
Enemy
Maidentrip
A Prophet
Valley of Shadows
The Assassin
The Scarlet Empress
The Philadelphia Story
Dragon Fly Eyes
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel)
Three Colours: Blue
The Lady Vanishes
Nights of Cabiria
Flame and Citron
Loveless
The Phantom Carriage
Murmur of the Heart
Kung Fu Hustle
The Lunchbox
Life of Pi
Paan Singh Tovar
45 Years
The Passenger
The Hidden Fortress
Black Orpheus
The Last Wave
Heima
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Babyteeth
Mr. Turner
Devi
An Elephant Sitting Still
The Forbidden Room
Vitalina Varela
24 Frames
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
House of Flying Daggers

 

[Pink Mist]

24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami, 2017)

Torn on this on. One on hand I think the concept of the film is really interesting. Kiarostami creates an exercise where he takes a painting or a photograph and then imagines what happens just before and after. He does this exercise 24 times, as the title suggests. The images he creates are truly gorgeous and mesmerizing to look at. They have a hypnotizing quality to them that draws you into the fairly mundane but tranquil nature scenes he has created.

However, the hypnotizing quality may be a little too strong for me on this one. Not going to lie, I missed a couple of frames because I fell asleep. While the images in this film are beautiful, there’s not a whole lot going on in them and its repetitive nature isn’t going to do much to raise your pulse and excite you (not that that’s it’s point or what the point of all films should be). I probably wasn’t in the right headspace to watch this one, I had a long day and was pretty tired, so maybe watching this while my mind was already a little distracted would have created better results, but alas. I normally have an okay batting average watching slow cinema too.

I think this film would work best as an art gallery exhibit. You know the types of exhibits where they have a viewing room for an experimental film where you can drop in and watch halfway through it and then leave after 5 minutes or so. This film and how it is structured would make the perfect film for that kind of setting.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

@kihei's comparison to haiku and @Pink Mist's observation about playing it in an art gallery are right on.

 

[Jevo]

24 Frames (2017) dir. Abbas Kiarostami

There's many different thoughts that can enter your head as you look at a picture. Kiarostami was struck by the thought of what might have happened just before and just after the picture was taken. When you take a picture you capture one frame of reality, with no way to know exactly what happened before or after. When you make a film you capture reality 24 times a second, and we see what happens before and after each frame. For pictures we can use our imagination to guess what happened before and after. That's what Kiarostami does here. He starts out by doing it with The Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel. Then he uses his own photographs for the same purpose an additional 23 times. Each segment is around 4½ minutes long.

Watching 24 frames is a lot like being in an art gallery, slowly walking from picture to picture. But they are not just photographs, they are living. Most of Kiarostami's photographs are devoid of humans, but nature is active. Weather is an almost constant part of his pictures, whether it's trees rustling in the wind, or waves slowly crashing in on the shore. Animals move about, sometimes in a rush to get somewhere, sometimes happily playing about with each other, and other times in the way that animals most often do, somewhat lazily going about looking for something easy to eat.

Each of Kiarostami's 24 frames are beautifully compositioned. While often simple there's much depth in them to explore over the 4½ minutes that he presents them to you. Shot composition is not necessarily what Kiarostami is most known for, but he shows here that he has a great eye for it. Many of the shots are quite similar in subject, and can make the film feel a bit repetitive at times. But that's hardly a surprise, artists often go back to similar subjects because that's what they are drawn to, so it's not a great critique. It would be like criticising a Turner exhibition for having too many pictures with the sea in it, that's what he painted most of the time. A few times I was taken out of the film a bit, because there some moments of blending between the different layers of the composition, and it becomes too clear that the animals aren't walking on landscape we are seeing. But with this sort of exercise it must be extremely hard to get it right all the time, simply because birds and wolves aren't fond of being in a green screen studio.

There's not many films like 24 Frames, and even fewer who aren't shown exclusive in art galleries. It's a novel idea, and Kiarostami's execution of the idea is great. It's a fantastic end to the career of one of the greatest filmmakers in history, and perhaps the greatest humanist to ever stand behind the camera.

 

[Jevo]

My next pick will be: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans by F. W. Murnau (1927)

I was so sure we already had seen Sunrise I had to go and check, but apparently we haven't. I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

 

[kihei]

I was so sure we already had seen Sunrise I had to go and check, but apparently we haven't. I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

I thought so, too, and double checked.

 

[Jevo]

The Long Goodbye (1973) dir. Robert Altman

Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) gets approached by his good friend Terry Lennox in the middle of the night, with Lennox asking Marlowe to drive him to the Mexican border. Lennox doesn't say much more than that LA won't be safe for him after people see his wife. Marlowe doesn't ask any more questions and just drives him there. Returning home he gets arrested by the police for helping Lennox escape, after Lennox had killed his wife. Marlowe spends three days in jail before he is released. He is released because Lennox had committed suicide in Mexico, and thus the case was closed. But Marlowe doesn't believe that his friend murdered his wife. On the outside Marlowe is hired by Eileen Wade to find her missing husband Roger, who's an alcoholic novelist with a writers block. He finds Roger in a private clinic and brings him home. The Wade's were acquaintances of the Lennox's. Marlowe also gets accosted by the gangster Marty Augustine, who wants Marlowe to bring him the money that Lennox owed him, and which Lennox brought with him to Mexico. All the stories doesn't seem to quite add up, and Marlowe gets more and more sure that the official story is not the true story.

Elliot Gould is probably not most people's first thought when they think of Philip Marlowe. Either if they've the read the books, and their go-to is just Humphrey Bogart. But this was the 70s, having made the film with a Bogart look-a-like and with the same character tropes as in The Big Sleep, would be grossly outdated. Gould is a great Marlowe of the 70s, I for one couldn't imagine Bogart with a cat. It's seems perfectly fitting that Marlowe should live next to a new age commune who has a shop where they sell candles, and otherwise spends their days completely stoned, and most often naked. It's also perfectly fitting that Marlowe doesn't seem to care one way or another, unlike several of his visitors who are constantly straining their necks. They are nice neighbours who don't make too much noise or trouble, what more could you ask for? This is not a sleek, self-confident womanizing detective. This version of Marlowe is more bumbling and doesn't seem to care much for women. But he's smart and he knows it. It might not be Gould's best performance, but I think he really nails a Philip Marlowe of the 70s.

The Long Goodbye is not a parody, but it's very genre aware, and aware that the noir detective genre is heavily outdated by this point. So it plays with the genre and subverts it somewhat. But it also means that as standalone film, it's the best. The tension never gets really high, the film, like its main character, is mostly just quite mellow, and I suspect it's entirely on purpose. Even when the film is building up to a big moment, it just lets the air of the balloon by having Eileen Wade drop off a big bag of money, getting Marlowe out of trouble, before the trouble even really got serious. If you've seen and are a fan of The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon and other big noir detective movies, there's a lot of fun to be had with The Long Goodbye. But if you are not well versed in the noir genre, you will probably find the film lacking somewhat. It's far from my favourite film by Altman, and probably not one I'm going to return to. But I had fun during.

 

[Jevo]

My next pick is Johnny Guitar

 

[kihei]

The Long Goodbye (1973) Directed by Robert Altman

I get Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler confused. I can't differentiate very well between Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe either. And the dames....outside of Nora Charles, they all seem interchangeable to me with both writers. This gets especially confusing as while I know some of their novels almost by heart--The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, The Thin Man, Farewell, My Lovely--the rest, including The Long Goodbye have not stayed in my consciousness with the same tenacity.

However, I know The Long Goodbye well enough to realize that director Robert Altman is doing a modern jazz riff on Chandler's noir. That's okay by me, even necessary, as the plot is not one of the author's best. There is a lot of misdirection and filler, and we don't really care about the characters that much either as they are a rather blah lot. Altman's sleight of hand is to give us a series of set-piece scenes with a lot of seemingly ad lib moments going on that keep the audience on its collective toes. The very start of the movie is a confection that I am pretty sure is not in the book, certainly not at such length if it is, about Marlowe"s relationship with his cat, who turns out to be a really good actor nailing all of his spots and reactions perfectly…make that purrfectly. How did they get a cat to do that stuff, I wonder? Anyway, it is an appealing loosey-goosey sequence that seems mostly there just for the hell of it. The sequence also introduces Eliot Gould's take on Marlowe as an LA hipster who talks to himself a lot. He's a long way from the Humphrey Bogart/Robert Mitchmum model, but in this particular context, an Altman movie, he works just fine. Some of his presumbably ad-lib one-liners don't make much sense, but they’re given in the proper deadpan spirit so no big deal.

The scenes neatly click by at a pace that is leisurely but not slow. I've seen the movie at least five times, and this is the first time, to my delight, that I realized Jim Bouton played Terry, a jaw-dropping revelation for me. Jim Bouton is a once-upon-a-time New York Yankee pitcher who had two brilliant years early on in his career before descending into complete mediocrity (lifetime record: 62-63). But he was the first athlete to write an insider tell-all book, Ball Four, that was the first of its kind, a total blast of fresh air which remains among the very best of this limited genre. Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Billy Martin, Catfish Hunter all come alive in the text though not necessarily in ways they all approved of. Bouton has two scenes which bookend the movie and he is actually perfect in both. So that was new fun.

Another thing that always shakes me a little in this movie, is the suicide scene in the ocean surf that occurs midway through the movie. I find it fascinating to watch in a car-wreck sort of way because it was such a stupid thing for Altman to do with his actors. The scene reminded me of the first thing my Hawaiian pal told me on my family's first trip to Maui, which was "Remember, the ocean is not a lake." You do not go traipsing into high surf, especially at night, because you risk being pinwheeled into becoming a paraplegic. So watching that scene, even though I know how it turned out, I still hold my breath. The only scene scarier for me is Lillian Gish playing footsie on the ice flows above Niagara Falls in Way Down East.

Sterling Haden as a big, loud red herring gives an outsized performance, and I mean OUTSIZED. It bugs me a little, but I bet it was something Altman encouraged him to do, part of his directorial riffing. There are a lot of cross rhythms in this movie. It has a lot of nervous energy. As cinematic jazz riffs go, it is a lot closer to Thelonious Monk than Dave Brubeck. There’s a clear melody but some purposeful improvisation in front of and behind the camera. Like the opening cat sequence, some scenes are there more for their feel than because they are absolutely necessary. In scene after scene one or more of the actors actually seem to solo, acting their little hearts out on behalf of their character. The Altman trademark of people talking at the same time is perfectly suited in this instance, heightening the sense of ensemble. The film is a multi-tonal experience, and Altman doesn't seem to care if everybody hits every note right or not. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the laid back rhythm of the film.

While the movie was set in then-present LA, Marlowe drives a big ‘30s convertible just to pay a little homage to the time and place of the original work. One of the greatest cinematographers ever, Vilmos Zsigmond, obtains the perfect colour palette for a Philip Marlowe movie in color, shooting mostly at night, his cameras always peeking around corners or looking through windows. It struck me how could Marlowe afford the gorgeous penthouse apartment he lived in (with cat). Not to mention how could the pretty collection of bare-breasted stoner bimbos who lived across the way manage the rent. But those aren't the sort of details Altman ever much worries about. A young musclebound Arnie makes a brief appearance as one of the minor thugs. Just lots of little grace notes everywher. Even more than John Cassavettes, who never really got out of the art house, Altman proved that a director of his idiosyncratic sensibility could make big entertaining movies and be true to his own particular stylistic vision at the same time. No small achievement. Just think how few times it has been done.

 

[Pink Mist]

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

That’s ok with me.

Philip Marlowe is a PI in LA in the hazy sun-drenched ‘70s living in a messy penthouse apartment that he has no right to affording with perpetually stoned and topless female neighbours, and a companion in the form of a cat who is a picky eater. Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe is the coolest of cool; he’s sedate and indifferent, mumbles to himself with one liners, and is never without a cigarette hanging from his lips. As a detective he is a little lousy, never in control, but his relaxed unflappable personality allows him to see through the complexity of his cases.

In The Long Goodbye the mystery of the film is secondary to the stoned atmosphere of the film. The film moves at its own pace and is in no rush to advance the plot, it’s slow but never boring, but it's also never going to get your pulse racing as mystery or thriller. But that’s ok with me. The mystery doesn’t make too much sense and is resolved in a disappointing way, but as I said it’s kind of secondary to this bizarro world of LA that Altman has created and the ad-lib dialogue of the film. I think the bookends of the film are strongest, with the middle being a little too mushy at times. The opening bit about Marlowe hunting for a can of cat food for his cat (and the cat ultimately rejecting it because it’s not the right brand) is hilarious and all too relatable for anyone who has owned a cat. The subversions of the noir genre Altman uses are really creative, and I think it is a film that will grow on me with repeat viewings.

 

[kihei]

To one of Jevo's points: Funniest thing I, too, can't at all imagine Bogart with a cat. But I can Mitchum.

I will now ruminate for twenty wasted minutes on the meaning of that.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

The Long Goodbye
Altman (1973)
“21 cents for macaroni?”

An old friend asks Philip Marlowe for a favor, which pulls the private investigator into a world of murder and deceit swirling around a boozing author, a quack clinic and a short-fused talkative gangster, among others.

I watched Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of MacBeth over the weekend. I liked it. Not my favorite adaptation of the Shakespeare play, but still a worthy one, one that more than justifies its existence. Chandler doesn’t have the volume of The Bard, but like Willy, he’s certainly been adapted enough and in enough ways directly and indirectly (The Big Lebowski owes a large debt) where the act of adaptation almost takes on a cover song dynamic. It’s probably not going to trump the original (or the most famed version) but some tweaks to tempo here, a change of rhythm there, maybe swap around some instruments and viola! You get something familiar but different, maybe just maybe something new.

So it is with Altman’s take on The Long Goodbye. Is it better than Bogey? Does California sun and surf trump moody noir shadows? Nah. But it’s absolutely an entertaining and compelling off-beat cover. Like Sonic Youth’s version of The Carpenter’s Superstar.

While the ingredients of a classic Raymond Chandler mystery are all here, Robert Altman and Elliot Gould leave their fingerprints all over this. Transporting Marlow to the (then)-modern 70s, our hero has some world-weariness, but it comes out less haggard and more smart ass. His temperature never rises much regardless of the nude women doing yoga next door or the brutal thug breaking a bottle over a woman’s face.

Altman’s shaggy style — improvisation, jumbled/mumbled dialogue, mixing professional actors with "interesting non-pros — lends itself well to this shaggy tale of a shaggy man. The moments of control pop — the camera push between the arguing Gould and Nina Van Pallandt through the window and out to the night surf where Sterling Hayden’s Roger Wade walks calmly to his watery suicide. As fits the genre we have a woman and a friend with dubious motives and cast of memorable characters. Hayden is unbound as a Hemingway-esque drunkard with a big, growling delivery that presages John Huston in Chiantown a few years later. Mark Rydell (maybe better known as a director) steals scenes as the skeevy Marty Augustine. “That’s someone I love. You, I don’t even like,” he quips merrily after the aforementioned bottle smash.

The movie’s pretty damn funny in its dry way too — right down to its ending which manages to both be on-brand-cynical for the 1970s but with a moment triumph as well. It’s maybe bad business practice on Marlowe’s part, but you can’t help but forgive him.

 

[Pink Mist]

Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

I wrote recently in a review (for Hitchcock’s Blackmail) that the era in film of the transition from silent films to sound is one of the more fascinating eras in film history to me. It’s the only time in film history where there’s been such drastic changes in stardom as Hollywood directors and actors either rose or faltered with the introduction of sound. Sunset Boulevard is interesting because it’s a film from the 1950s looking back at the already disregarded era of silent films.

In Sunset Boulevard when a poor hack Hollywood screenwriter (William Holden) is fleeing his creditors, he takes refuge at the mansion of a lonely forgotten silent film star (Gloria Swanson) who has been planning her comeback (err - I mean return) to screen with a script she has penned. They fall into a mutually beneficial arrangement where he keeps her company and rewrites her script, and she becomes his sugar mommy and showers him with lavish gifts. Sunset Boulevard explores what it means to be a forgotten relic of a time long passed and is full of references and cameos from stars of the silent era. There is a meta-narrative that runs throughout the film in this sense, as Swanson herself was a forgotten star of the silent era making her big return to screen, as well as her butler who is a former director who filmed Swanson’s character’s first film (played by Erich von Stroheim who was a silent film director), and a significant cameo from Cecil DeMille who had made Swanson a star in real life. The meta-narrative of the film makes it feel like a film ahead of its time, as this is something more typical of a contemporary post-modern film than a film from the 1950s.

I always thought Sunset Boulevard was a melodrama, but I was surprised by how much of it is actually a noir with a lot of the language of horror films thrown in for good measure, especially early in as Holden’s character first encounters the mansion. This horror aspect is an interesting technique to use as Swanson’s character is more or less a ghost of the silent era. In terms of performances, Swanson’s performance dominates the screen. I was first put off by her performance as it is loud and overly expressive, but once you settle into it works as she is putting in a silent film performance (told primarily through the face) into a sound film. Though at times I find she overpowers and dominates over all other aspects of the film. That said, while her character is manic, there is a deep empathy for her in the film, as it is a both a celebration and criticism of the Hollywood system which creates stars and throws them to the curb when they are no longer of value (see also Dawson City: Frozen Time for another film we watched recently that tackles this idea). Considered a classic of the golden age of Hollywood for good reason.

 

[Pink Mist]

My next pick is Orson Welles' F for Fake

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Sunset Blvd.
Wilder (1950)
“All right Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up …”

Joe Gillis is a struggling screenwriter. A twist of fate puts him in the driveway (and subsequent orbit) of Norman Desmond, a faded silent film star holed up in her own grown over version of Kane’s Xanadu. She convinces him to become her in house (literally) screen doctor, but her interest turns into something much more personal. Joe knows he’s a kept man, but every time he tries to create separation Norma’s drama pulls him back. He starts writing on the side with a new friend. It’s this betrayal and his revelation that her “fan mail” is all manufactured by devoted butler and former husband Max that ultimately leads Norma to crack and shoot him.

A few weeks back I called La Strada World Cinema 101. If I were compiling Hollywood Cinema 101, this would almost certainly be on the syllabus.

It is deserving of its classic status, a status that still holds today. That’s a testament in large part to co-writer/director Billy Wilder who either by luck or by skill created a diverse career of films that are largely timeless. As with someone like Kurosawa, much of his (much imitated) work still carries the same emotion or thrill or bite it had at the time.

Sunset Blvd. positive snarls. It’s not an unsubtle commentary on Hollywood as a cruel parent that eats its own children, be it a faded start or a word monkey grinding out scripts. That’s evident in the story itself, but underlined with the playful casting of assorted old-guard names and faces like Erich von Stroheim in a major role and cameos from the likes of Cecil B. DeMille, Buster Keaton and Hedda Hoopper.

Then there are the structural and script innovations. It’s a mystery where we open at the end. We know who is dead and how. It’s all about the why. It’s a trick the invites you to invest in character and not plot mechanics. With a few tweaks this could be a classic noir (or horror movie) of shock and surprise. But that isn’t the game being played here. This is more of a creeping (and darkly comic) dread.

A lot of that also has to do with Gloria Swanson herself. This is one of those larger-than-life, absolutely world devouring performances. She’s a Universal Monster (despite this being a Paramount production). It’s the job of everyone else to duck and cover. It’s easy to overlook William Holden as her counterpoint, since he has to be so much subtler but he’s well placed as a man who is desperate, then in-over-his-head. He’s a user too, but he feels bad about it. And he pays the price for seeking redemption.

It’s almost cruel if it wasn’t so damn entertaining.

 

[Jevo]

Sunset Boulevard (1950) dir. Billy Wilder

Joe Gillis is a screenwriter who can't sell a script to save his life. While on the run from a couple of debt collectors looking to confiscate his car, he turns into the driveway of what looks like an abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard. The mansion isn't abandoned though, it's inhabited by Norma Desmond, a big silent film star who couldn't make it when the Talkies took over, and her butler Max. Norma is dillusioned that she's still a big star in the eyes of the public, and that she's going to take over again soon when the right role comes. And she has the right role, a huge manuscript for Salome. When she hears Gillis is a writer, she asks him to look at it, and he sense an opportunity for room and board, and he gets a deal as an editor on the script. But things are strange in the big mansion, and Norma takes a liking to the young man. While he himself starts something of an affair with the fiancee of one of his friends.

Hollywood loves films about Hollywood, and there's few films more about Hollywood than Sunset Boulevard. It's so much about Hollywood that it even has famous actors and 'characters' playing themselves, among them Buster Keaton as part of Norma's 'waxworks', other formerly famous people who are mostly forgotten, who she plays bridge with. And Cecil B. DeMille as the unlucky former collaborator who Norma picks as the director she wants for her big comeback picture. But even the characters in the film closely mirror the actors in more than instance. Erich Von Stroheim plays Max Von Meyerling, Norma's butler, former husband, and the director who made her breakthrough, and is described as one of the big three in early Hollywood together with D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. And one could certainly argue that Von Stroheim was in that stratosphere during the early 1920s. Gloria Swanson was also a star in the silent era, but her career quickly lost steam once silent films disappeared, until she got her return in Sunset Boulevard, somewhat mirroring Norma Desmond, only with a succesful return. Although Norma Desmond probably could be any number of stars from that era. Certainly seems that Wilder and Brackett had a lot fun writing Sunset Boulevard and poking fun at Hollywood and the types of people working in Hollywood.

Sunset Boulevard is more than just a bit of Hollywood self-indulgence. It's a humanising drama, which feels for Norma Desmond a lot. While she's an easy target for ridicule, the movie never goes the easy way with her. And when she starts to become a bit too cartoonish, the movie quickly makes sure we know she isn't just a charicature, but a real character with depth. Even in the end when she goes insane, the movie doesn't laugh, it only has pity.

The acting ensemble in Sunset Boulevard is fantastic. Gloria Swanson delivers a performance for the ages, and she steals the show practically every scene she's in. William Holden is also good opposite her, and he isn't given much to work with compared to Swanson, but he caries his part of the deal as the straight man and he never tries to one-up Swanson, and his performance is better for it. I also have a very soft spot for Von Stroheim in this film. I don't know why, but he makes every scene Max is a part of a joy.

I've only watched Sunset Boulevard once before, on a trans-atlantic flight. Not the best conditions for movie watching. So it was great to get to see it again in a much better setting, and it really made it possible to also appreciate the cinematography. If I was in doubt before, I'm not anymore. Sunset Boulevard deserves its reputation fully.

 

[kihei]

Sunset Boulevard (1950) Directed by Billy Wilder

It seems somehow weirdly appropriate that Sunset Boulevard was released in 1950 ushering a new half-century of Hollywood movies into existence. In a way the movie with its strange mix of cynicism, nostalgia and acidity, stands as a caustic summation of Hollywood and what it stood for in the past. Yes, Hollywood peddles dreams but don't expect them to come true; yes, small fry have to get used to being little more than gigoloes in order to chase those dreams; yes, the industry is filled with megalomaniacs; yes, too much fantasy can take over from reality with tragic consequences. Sunset Boulevard is close to being a comedy, almost in the All about Eve class, but the genre dearest to director Billy Wilder's heart seems to be the expose. This is a very negative look at the industry and the people in it. But smack dab in the centre there is Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, and I had to wonder if she found the role a curse or a blessing, a humiliation or a liberation. Sunset Boulevard's attitude toward its lead character is a tangle of ambivalence. She is one part the bride of Frankenstein (with wonderfully expressive hands in some scenes--I kept thinking if spiders had hands at the end of their legs, they would look and move like hers do); one part, an egotistcally delusional and almost psychotically vain old woman; and one part, controlling banshee. Alterantely, she is also lonely, generous and a victim of a system and a society that have relegated her to a golden pasture from which she doesn't even wish to escape.

Swanson gives a remarkable performance. A lot of it is deliberately over the top as Wilder wants to portray her as a monster on one level but he doesn't want to totally alienate the audience's sympathies either--Swanson balances on that tight rope the whole movie. As I think was the point, I ended up having many conflicting feelings about her character and about what she represents. Ultimately she seems a victim of the very success she had, a victim of the movies. William Holden makes the most of a difficult role, one which he has to play dead, which was a nice directorial twist--a clear indication that Wilder doesn't want to make a suspense movie. Holden made a career out of playing charming, intelligent, cynical characters with a slightly jaded view of authority. He brings out a lot of these facets in Joe Gillis, a kept man, a gigolo, a bit of a conniver, a good guy, too, but no stranger to self-pity. In a way he is a victim of the dream, too, though he only barely got his toe in the door. My guess is Wilder liked all the contradictions evident in his central pair of characters--he wasn't the type of director who thought the audience needed to be spoonfed. Finally there is great silent-film director Erich von Stroheim as the long-suffering butler, another character whose best days are way, way behind him. Hollywood uses you and then it spits you out seems to be the general theme here.

One of the social oddities of 1950 was the whole attitude to women and aging. Swanson plays the role like she is in her mid-60s, a once beautiful starlet fallen upon the ravages of Father Time. Swanson was 50-years-old when she made the film. She plays Norma old and for the movie to work, the audience had to buy it and they did. Today, 50+-year-old actresses include Selma Hayek, Halle Berry, Taraji Henson, Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, and Jennifer Lopez, all of whom would struggle in this role to be believable. Meryl Streep or maybe Helen Mirren could pull this role off but both are in their 70s. But of course it is only fairly recently that there have been more roles for actresses over 40, which though not directly stated, was partly the fate that Norma Desmond suffers from in Sunset Boulevard. It probably has much less to do with an industry striving for gender equality than it does with trying to get people who are 60 and over interested in watching new movies again.

To conclude, I would say that in any talk about the top ten to twenty Hollywood movies in history, Sunset Boulevard at least deserves to be in the discussion.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

George Washington
Green (2000)
“Did you think we would be together forever?”


George Washington follows a handful of kids and adults, namely a young boy named George, through one of those transitional summers where the characters enter at one point in their life and exit different. New, but maybe not for the better. The story takes place in an unnamed southern town. There’s not much work for adults and not much for kids to do aside from hang out at the pool and to wander free among the vacated industrial landscape. The environment almost looks post-apocalyptic at times with its abandoned buildings and grass-grown rail tracks. There is an apocalypse of sorts among the small group of kids with the accidental death of their friend Buddy, an event that is both concealed and revealed with so little drama, it’s almost if it’s in passing. An aside. It sounds wrong writing it, but it felt fitting watching it. Things happen in George Washington, but it’s not really a plot movie. This type of story has been done before, but typically as a plot movie. This is a feeling movie. It isn’t wistful about a past but it is melancholic about change. It isn’t judgmental about its characters. George leaves on a hopeful note. Vernon and Sonya, by contrast, are adrift with murkier futures.

David Gordon Green is a director who has long fascinated me. I’m a similar age and caught George Washington for the first time within a year of its release so I’ve always felt invested in the arc of his career in a way.

There are a lot of versatile directors out there, but he’s got to be among the most interesting. His first few films are a bit of the traditional, indie dramas. Generally pretty good. The he jumps to Pineapple Express, a mainstream stoner comedy then follows that up with two more mainstream comedies of diminishing returns. He then goes back to his roots with a series of small indie dramas like the Nicholas Cage starting Joe and Prince Avalanche, which I’ve always loved. He’s done some paycheck work like the Jake Gylenhaal Boston Marathon drama Stronger and the forgettable Sandra Bullock political flick Our Brand is Crisis. Now he’s overseeing the Halloween reboot with a trilogy of Exorcist movies next. Add to that his work as co-creator and primary director of a trilogy of TV comedies Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones.

That’s a wild resume of work from a guy who started with the lyrical Terrence Malick riff that is George Washington.

First films are forever fascinating. Green emerges pretty fully formed. His future movies that are distinctly his all don’t fall far from this tree. He’s a natural born director with a strong visual sense. He’s got that Malick eye for poetic landscapes and sundowns. But it’s not just that. The scene of Buddy’s death is honestly one of the most upsetting movie deaths I’ve ever seen. He patiently lets it transpire, which makes it all the more horrifying. My shock was their shock. Things play out slightly skew from how you expect. You kinda know Uncle Demascus’ hatred of dogs is going to play out how it does, but even though the event is predictable, how it’s conveyed and what results from it isn’t quite expected. There are other small surprises like that that show a confident hand.

George Washington does have a few first film type problems. The acting is pretty good for a bunch of non-professionals, but a few don’t quite hit so some of the more episodic scenes miss the mark. Blessings for being the rare movie that casts kids and keeps them fairly naturalistic rather too cute (I’m looking at the similarly Southern-fried poetic precociousness of The Beasts of the Southern Wild or The Florida Project). The superhero bit for George is maybe a tad too cute. And most of the characters do speak in a very poetic sorta manner that only happens in movies. Everyone seems to have a key bit a wisdom when someone needs to say something.

But the overall look and execution of George Washington has stuck with me for nearly two decades now. A confident debut from a director who’d gain his biggest successes in realms completely unlike this.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Next pick: A Cop Movie. 2021, Alonso Ruizpalacios.

 

[Babe Ruth]

Gleaming the Cube.

Young Tony Hawk and Christian Slater solve the murder mystery of a Vietnamese immigrant. Classic '80s car chase at the end. Hadn't seen this one in years, made me nostalgic as a motherf*cker..