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

[Pink Mist]

George Washington (David Gordon Green, 2000)

George Washington is a southern gothic tale of a group of friends who lose their innocence when a friend dies in a tragic accident. A coming-of-age film story that has been often imitated by other indie directors since, first time director Green (who was 25 at the time!) tells his story of this group of friends in their aimless summer in a hazy and dreamlike way. Green has a great poetic sensibility; his characters’ dialogue is full of poetic wisdom and Green finds beauty in the decrepit landscape of a town that has become a forgotten wasteland. In this sense there is a clear influence from the films of Terrence Malick. It doesn’t feel like a first film, Green shows great instinct here in his direction and is more or less fully formed despite his young age. In particular, his subversion of expectations of which character dies is clever and shocking as he slowly introduces details where you come to expect George, a character with a condition that causes him to have a fragile skull, to be the character who will die given the plot description instead of being a participant in the tragedy.

The film is low budget, but you can’t notice it for the most part due to the great craftsmanship on display by those involved in the production. However, where you do notice the low budget is in the acting. The film uses non-professional actors and the results are mixed. Most of the kids are great - the child who plays George is excellent -; but there are many places where the acting is downright bad and it becomes distracting, which is a risk when you use non-actors on a limited budget and limited film stock. Some of the poetic dialogue is also a little too poetic or on the nose with one scene in particular where George’s uncle describes an encounter with a dog that is just stupid. Nonetheless, George Washington is a really strong debut for a director (and many of his collaborators) who would go on to make films like Pineapple Express.

 

[Jevo]

George Washington (2000) dir. David Gordon Green

The film follows a group of kids growing up in a poor and depressed city over the course of a summer. One of the kids is George, his head never fused together right, so he always wears a helmet, because a fall could kill him if he hits his head. One day four of the kids, George, Buddy, Vernon and Sonya, are hanging out in an abandoned public washroom. Buddy playfully pushes George about, forgetting about his head for a second. The other kids starts pushing Buddy around in retaliation, mostly in jest, but you sense there's some malice from George. After much pushing Buddy around, he slips on the wet floor and hits his head and dies from the impact. The three kids decides to hide Buddy's body, fearing the consequences, and now have to live with their conscience, and they deal with that in different ways. George decides to become a hero, he wants to help people anyway he can, and dresses up in a wrestling uniform and a cape and runs around town looking for people to help. Vernon and Sonya deals with the pain in a less constructive way. They get into their heads they need to steal a car and just ride away. When they finally do, Sonya crashes it almost imemdiately. and almost kills them both.

George Washington is more about a feeling of a time and a place than it is about the specifics of the plot. It's about memories of a simpler time before the cruelt realities about life hits the conscience. A time which never comes back once it has been left. It's rarely a truly happy experience to pass this threshold in adolescence, but for this group it's a particularly unhappy time. You are not getting much from George Washington by watching it passively. But if you engage and give something of yourself to the film, you can get a lot back from the film. These kids are have a lot of heart to give if you engage with them.

There wasn't less racism in America 20 years ago. But the public discussion about racism in America was much different then, where it was more generally accepted that racism wasn't really a problem in American anymore. George Washington reflects that a lot. Many of the kids and the poor people in the film are black, but the kids have no problem playing with Sonya who's white, or the other way around. The redneck railyard workers aren't racist against the kids, they instead have a big brother/father role to them instead. Since then racism has come much to the forefront of the American public conscience, and it's hard to imagine a film made now would exists in this sort of environment that seems almost post-racial. This is not something that detracts from George Washington at all, just something that shows the time in which it was made.

George Washington is a great little film. I had a hard time letting it go after seeing it. The atmosphere and mood the film left me with stayed with me for days afterwards. David Gordon Green really did a great job establishing the mood and setting of the film

 

[kihei]

George Washington (2000) Directed by David Gordon Green

I didn't know what to make of George Washington so I tried a heuristic trick of reducing my thoughts to one word, the first one that came to mind. That word was "hazy," not in the sense of atmospheric so much as in the sense of indistinct. So how do I unpack that? I'm inclined to like a lot of this film by first-time director David Gordon Green, but I also have a lot of reservations. Somehow, though, even the elements that I have reservations about have a tendency to contribute to George Washington's overall effect. The movie, a tale of children dealing with an unexpected tragedy amidst a dirt poor reality, seems to be trying for a deliberately unconventional style, and it achieves that. However. one could argue that what the movie achieves is something an overly ambitious but inexperienced fiirst time director might come up with whose grasp stilll exceeded his technical skill. Some examples. Green has different rhythms in this film though whether they blend neatly together or are at cross purposes is a matter of taste. One of his favourite devices is to include snippets of conversations among the children and sometimes their older white friends that usually end in an abrupt cut. Deliberately Green seems to like to avoid resolution, but sometimes, espencially when more information would be helpful, this device seems like a first-timer's artsy mannerism. Then there is the dialogue, which works fine about three quarters of the time, but then a kid says something that sounds so patently written by an older author that the moment goes clang. This problem is heightened by the fact that the amateur child actors, though good overall, vary in quality and consistency.

Then there is the setting. This is a world consisting of train yards, empty fields save for junk, run-down buildings, and the odd street or house. The drawls suggest the South, and the details suggest maybe a run down part of a city like Charlotte or something. But the overall effect is so broadly stylized that it could be anywhere or nowhere or on some different planet. It's one of those details that adds to the otherness of the film, but again seems like it might just be a lucky mistake by a director still learning his craft. Another quibble, the sumptuous cinematography, photogenic slumming in a way, seems at odds with the grittiness of the story .

However, some scenes are brilliant including the central locus of the movie, the death of one of the children in a public washroom. Everything clicks in these moments, the performances of all the young actors, the rhythm of the editing, the camerawork, the surprise and unreality of the moment. It's brilliant and devastating and unexpected, and one realizes instantly that lives have changed forever. It's a sequence of such quality and quiet power that it mitigates most of the movie's shortcomings.

The movie is slow in an okay way but not a particularly rich way. So I had a lot of time to think. And it struck me how odd it is that Great Britain has an entire national genre devoted to movies that depict the working class and the the United States has almost no movies that do so. All of the movies that I was comparing this one with in my head were British with one exception--Kes; Fish Tank; This Is England; Ratcatcher, with the odd man out being, The Florida Project,. It would be interesting to speculate on why this is so, though it probably is related to attitudes about having a class system, something North Americans have been loath to admit. The other noteworthy novelty about George Washington that was refreshing and almost radical--the older white guys that were milling around the black kids in the movie for once seemed to have no racist intent whatsoever, some of them lending sympathetic ears to the kids' concerns. So, yeah, maybe this was one of the bits that made me wonder what planet this was actually taking place on, but, you know, it was a very nice touch.

So to sum up. legitimate achievement or mostly beginnner's luck aside, George Washington is a movie definitely worth one's time.

 

[kihei]

George Washington (2000) dir. David Gordon Green

The film follows a group of kids growing up in a poor and depressed city over the course of a summer. One of the kids is George, his head never fused together right, so he always wears a helmet, because a fall could kill him if he hits his head. One day four of the kids, George, Buddy, Vernon and Sonya, are hanging out in an abandoned public washroom. Buddy playfully pushes George about, forgetting about his head for a second. The other kids starts pushing Buddy around in retaliation, mostly in jest, but you sense there's some malice from George. After much pushing Buddy around, he slips on the wet floor and hits his head and dies from the impact. The three kids decides to hide Buddy's body, fearing the consequences, and now have to live with their conscience, and they deal with that in different ways. George decides to become a hero, he wants to help people anyway he can, and dresses up in a wrestling uniform and a cape and runs around town looking for people to help. Vernon and Sonya deals with the pain in a less constructive way. They get into their heads they need to steal a car and just ride away. When they finally do, Sonya crashes it almost imemdiately. and almost kills them both.

George Washington is more about a feeling of a time and a place than it is about the specifics of the plot. It's about memories of a simpler time before the cruelt realities about life hits the conscience. A time which never comes back once it has been left. It's rarely a truly happy experience to pass this threshold in adolescence, but for this group it's a particularly unhappy time. You are not getting much from George Washington by watching it passively. But if you engage and give something of yourself to the film, you can get a lot back from the film. These kids are have a lot of heart to give if you engage with them.

There wasn't less racism in America 20 years ago. But the public discussion about racism in America was much different then, where it was more generally accepted that racism wasn't really a problem in American anymore. George Washington reflects that a lot. Many of the kids and the poor people in the film are black, but the kids have no problem playing with Sonya who's white, or the other way around. The redneck railyard workers aren't racist against the kids, they instead have a big brother/father role to them instead. Since then racism has come much to the forefront of the American public conscience, and it's hard to imagine a film made now would exists in this sort of environment that seems almost post-racial. This is not something that detracts from George Washington at all, just something that shows the time in which it was made.

George Washington is a great little film. I had a hard time letting it go after seeing it. The atmosphere and mood the film left me with stayed with me for days afterwards. David Gordon Green really did a great job establishing the mood and setting of the film

Were racial attitudes all that less caustic 20 years ago? I thought Green was deliberately suggesting that racial tensions did not define every single interaction in the South between black people and white people, sort of playing against the obvious audience expectation. Another one of those areas where I wasn't certain but sort of gave the film maker the benefit of a doubt, perhaps.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

The movie is slow in an okay way but not a particularly rich way. So I had a lot of time to think. And it struck me how odd it is that Great Britain has an entire national genre devoted to movies that depict the working class and the the United States has almost no movies that do so. All of the movies that I was comparing this one with in my head were British with one exception--Kes; Fish Tank; This Is England; Ratcatcher, with the odd man out being, The Florida Project,. It would be interesting to speculate on why this is so, though it probably is related to attitudes about having a class system, something North Americans have been loath to admit. The other noteworthy novelty about George Washington that was refreshing and almost radical--the older white guys that were milling around the black kids in the movie for once seemed to have no racist intent whatsoever, some of them lending sympathetic ears to the kids' concerns. So, yeah, maybe this was one of the bits that made me wonder what planet this was actually taking place on, but, you know, it was a very nice touch.

Interesting observation about Britain v. U.S. I'd throw a small alteration on it ... I think the U.S. does have films that depict a class system but it's often only as an excuse for drama or melodrama. What the kitchen sink films do so well is that more observational approach. I think British films are interested in the people and life while most U.S. films are more interested in dramatics. The people and setting just allow them to do that. Does that make sense?

Your observation about The Florida Project and how it fits that tradition and how uncommon it is in the U.S. really hit home for me. Though I'm a flyover state person I'm not often one to make any proclamations about the "coastal elites" but I was blown away by how much of the critical reaction (largely NY and LA writers) to that movie contained an element "OMG I can't believe these people exist and have to live like this." I saw it so many times I wondered if they really didn't grasp that there are entire classes of people that exist between living comfortably and being homeless. But maybe that's true? Maybe they don't really grasp that?

 

[kihei]

Oops. Apologies. I was completely engrossed in the Olympics and forgot I was up next. Will post my review of Sunrise tomorrow.

 

[Jevo]

Sunrise (1927) dir. F. W. Murnau

A woman from the city is holidaying in the country side, residing in a small village by a big lake. Here she has a romance with a married farmer. She wants him to sell the farm and come live with her in the city. There's only the problem of the wife. She convinces the man to stage a boat accident. The man suggest an outing to his wife, where they sail across the lake and have a day in the city there. She suspects nothing. When it becomes time to do the deed, the man regrets in the last second, sails them ashore, and the wife runs off an boards a trolley to the city. The man follows her and manages to get on the trolley as well. In the city they two rekindles their love for each other.

Murnau was brought to Hollywood to make a expressionistic film in America, and so he did. The cinematography and set design is fantastic. It is beautiful and atmospheric, and really heightens everything else the movie is doing. I love the variety of techniques which have been used to get the desired result. Everything from miniatures of a bustling city, and huge sets of city streets. I also loved how the film uses double exposure. First of all it's a really cool effect which seemed to mostly go out of style together with silent films. But it's also used in some ingenious ways. SUch as when the man and the woman from the city are watching the sky with pictures from a big city projected onto the sky in front of them. Or when the woman from the city is manipulating the man from afar, caressing him through his corrupted mind. It's simply a fantastic use of effects, which really live up to the saying that pictures are worth a thousand words. They fit into the films so naturally, and never feel gimmicky at all.

Sunrise starts out very dark, a man is gonna kill his wife in cold blood. The one weak spot in the film is probably the way the man is characterised in this part of the film. He is almost zombie like, and while a certain amount of overacting can be required in silent films, I don't think this has aged very well, and considering how well acted the rest of the film is, particularly Janet Gaynor as the woman, it sticks out like a sore thumb. But after this early bit, the film almost completely changes tone, from being dark and almost horror like at times, to being a sweet and beautiful love story. It's probably one of the best love stories on film, and it just makes the ending hit that much harder. It's really quite an accomplishment to have a main character who is so corrupted he's willing to murder his wife, he's conflicted but definitely villainous, that you grow to like as a good guy. You want the wife to run away. But then only a short while later, you are convinced of their true love for each other, and that he means her no harm. If you think about it, you probably shouldn't want them to be together, because he seems like an unstable and dangerous individual, but in the film it feels completely natural.

Sunrise is consistently listed among the greatest films ever made, and for a very good reason. At 95 it has aged like fine wine. Actually at 95 even fine wine probably isn't good anymore. So lets says it has aged better than fine wine.

 

[kihei]

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) Directed by F. W. Murnau

The tale has an almost biblical simplicity. A good man is tempted by a woman from the city who tries to convince him to drown his wife. At first, he succumbs to temptation and plots out a way of drowning her. But once actually faced with the task, he realizes he cannot do it, and, instead, he rows them both safely to shore. There, on the other side, he must confront what he has done. First, he must win back his wife’s love and trust, but when that is accomplished, they have a wonderful day in the city and virtually renew their vows (there is a lovely scene of them watching a marriage take place and then walking out of the church like they were the couple that wed). Going home again, a storm comes up suddenly (God’s wrath, perhaps, though what She is mad about by this point is anyone’s guess), he tries to save her by tying her to the bale of reeds that he was initially going to use to save himself. But when the boat is capsized by gale force winds, he makes it to shore and she doesn’t. Not surprisingly his first thought is to kill the fallen woman who tempted him in the first place, but he is saved from that criminal act by word that his wife has been found safe. A brilliant sunrise marks a new beginning.

The first thing that should be mentioned about this movie is the beauty and construction of its images. Sunrise is a movie that tells its story almost exclusively in images. Though intertitles are used, they are relatively few and far between. From the beginning, the composition of the images is a wonder to behold. Murnau uses some tricks, like superimposition, very effectively, but his approach at other times is almost painterly. Murnau presents us with an ordinary reality, except nothing about it seems quite ordinary. The movie is dream-like, atmospheric, surreal, subtly and not so subtly Expressionistic, romantic, horrifying, and bucolic, all of these attributes scattered throughout the movie, some being used simultaneously but never really bumping into one another. It is a feast for the eye. I found it captivating, and it swept me up into this wholly imagined world as surely as The Wizard of Oz transported me to its magical reality.

Sunrise relies heavily on a theme that is now moribund but not quite extinct: the juxtaposition between the goodness of rural values contrasted with the evil nature of the city, a corrupting influence where yokels risk not only being destroyed but losing their souls. There is a subtle use of German Expressionism especially in the early going, in which the angles and extremes are evident but they have been toned down. The indoor images are slightly dominated by out of kilter geometry of corners and walls. But it is not until we get to the city that a more directly advanced surrealism is evident, part of what makes the city such a dizzying experience for the two reunited lovers. Especially fun is a sort of carnival cum dance hall that seems simultaneously attractive but slightly out of control. Strange things happen there, like drunken pigs, femme fatale manicurists, and a comic encounter in a barber shop that turns darkly violent in a troubling way. The city is heady stuff, intoxicating, but it is not where good people live.

There is another even more shopworn and sexist trope at play here, the dichotomy of the mother and the whore. Basically, all woman are either one or the other…they can’t be both. The mother figures are the long-suffering wife and her mother, both born and bred on farms and tied to the land. The whore figures are the seductress, the aforementioned manicurist, and a woman who does no more than stand around and have her evening gown straps keep falling off her shoulders. All are firmly identified with the city, all are dark-haired, and all seem related to the notion of sexual temptation and pleasure out of wedlock. These women are bad, even if there only sin in two of the instances is to make other people, the moral, upright ones, feel uncomfortable.

The movie is magnificent despite its dated moral view. However, its ending represents a sizeable flaw. Sunrise steps back from the logic of its plot development in the last instant. We end up with one of the least believable happy endings that I have ever seen. Husband and wife are united in the end, city seductress goes home under the darkness of night, and all is right with the world again as evidenced by a sunrise of epic proportions. Murnau didn’t quite have the courage of his convictions? Maybe, but this was his first Hollywood movie (though the unnamed city in the movie seems distinctly European, much closer to Vienna or Munich than, say, Chicago or New York). I can imagine a producer taking the German director aside and saying happy endings are non-negotiable and moral rectitude must be served. Well, as Mark Twain said you go to heaven for the climate but hang out in hell for the company. Regardless, Sunrise is a film that anyone who loves movies should see.

 

[kihei]

My next pick will be Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Sunrise
Murnau (1927)
“This song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere, at any time.”

Boy has girl. Boy meets new girl. Girl wants boy to kill first girl. Boy can’t do it. Boy thinks he loses first girl. Boy considers killing new girl. First girl is ok. Good triumphs over evil. The sun rises.

Sunrise is a timeless story of love conquering temptation. It still packs a punch nearly a century later.

Murnau was well established at this point with classics like Nosferatu and Faust already on his belt. He took those fantastical sensibilities and style and applies them here to a different sort of dream-like story. Here there’s a softness and a beauty compared with the nightmares he put on screen previously. This is big, bold, active directing. Striking sets. Tracking shots. Forced perspective. It’s a wonderful bag of tricks. It doesn’t even warrant the caveat of “for the time” as a lot of old silents sometimes do. This is great without qualification or excessive explanation.

Sunrise is the sort of silent film with visuals that are so strong it makes you wonder why anyone ever thought we needed dialogue.

Yeah, the morals are broadly drawn. The city is corrupting. Rural is pure. The two women are stereotypes we still see represented today. But the whole affair has such a fairy tale quality to it that those sweeping strokes aren’t a hurdle for me. Feels fitting.

 

[Pink Mist]

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)

The more I watch films from the silent era, the more I am convinced that the technical capabilities of moving pictures were pushed as far as they can go. Sure, there have been some innovations in the 90+ years since sound was introduced, but nothing as creative and momentous as some of the techniques the silent film directors came up with. If anything, contemporary become lazier today since you can substitute CGI in place of practical effects and technique. The greatest of them all during the silent era at pushing the envelope of what pictures can do is F.W. Murnau, and in Sunrise he does his swan song before the sound era made its entrance.

Sunrise is deceptively simple. The plot follows a man having an affair who is convinced to kill his wife, but after failing to kill his wife he goes to the city with her and remembers why he loves her. It’s a simple plot and there’s even very few intertitles needed to tell the story as Murnau tells it almost entirely through his visuals. And what marvelous visuals he uses. The film is absolutely stunning. There is a lot of Murnau’s trademark German Expressionism on display here, especially as the man moves like a brainwashed zombie to kill his wife, but there is also a Romanticism too as Murnau plays with lightness and beauty contrasting the hustle and bustle of the city as a place of pleasure (and sin!) to the peacefulness and serenity of the countryside. I think I have a fairly good handle of understanding the “how” of film techniques but there are some shots and editing techniques that I am baffled at how they pulled it off or audibly gasped at how skillful it was. The shot of the man’s mind being corrupted by his mistress and having her being superimposed around him with his troubled thinking was so well done (it sounds unsubtle and uncreative in writing but by Murnau it is anything but).

The elephant in the room with this film is its inexcusable misogyny. It's hard to look past it at times but the visuals do well at sweeping you into its narrative so you forget about it until you are given a stark reminder of it at the end.

The film is the only film to have won the Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Picture and it’s a worthy award since there isn’t anything like the films of Murnau. As they say, they don’t make em like they used to.

 

[Jevo]

Johnny Guitar (1954) dir. Nicholas Ray

Vienna (Joan Crawford) has set up a saloon in a desolate place in the west. A railroad is coming right past the saloon, and she's going to build a new town there. However townfolks in the nearest town aren't too happy about her being there. Especially McIvers, the local leading cattleman, the Emma Small, the owner of the bank, are against her. She has invited Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) to come play guitar in her saloon. When a stagecoach is held up and Emma's brother killed, blame is quickly put on the Dancin' Kid and his group, a somewhat innocent local outcast group who frequents Vienna's saloon, and by extention Vienna, although neither were involved. The stand-off in Vienna's saloon ends with the townfolks giving both the Dancin' kid and his group, and Vienna, 24 hours to leave the valley. Vienna intends to stay out of things and wait for the railroad in her saloon, while the Dancin' Kid and his group decide, that if they are blamed for a crime, a crime they shall commit, and plans a robbery of the bank in town.

Johnny Guitar is undoubtedly a western, but it's unlike most other westerns from that time. First of all Johnny Guitar isn't actually the lead, that's Vienna. Vienna is a woman, quite unlike most western leads, but she's a very masculine woman, undoutedly something that's needed if you want to survive in the situation she has put her self in. But her masculine behaviour is contrasted by her clothing, which particularly in the latter part of the film, is very colourful, and even downright feminine at times. She also displays some very motherly qualities towards her staff, and particularly towards the young Turkey, who she even allows to write her own death sentence, in an attempt to save his life. Joan Crawfords portrayal is great, and shows her as both strong willed and tender. The film is also quite aware of wetern tropes, and finds some of them a bit silly, with names like Johnny Guitar and the Dancin' kid for major characters, and the weird kind of dancing introduction that the Dancin' kid makes. But mostly Johnny Guitar is about a group of outsiders, who attract the wrath of the establishment, and who without evidence or trial, gets judged, and unfairly at that. The mob only wants blood and doesn't how it is produced. Some want it to a sense of justice, others for pure self serving means. Real life parallels to this are not hard to find. With lynchings in the American south or McCarthyism in Hollywood being some obvious ones.

Nicholas Ray always brings his own style to his films. He does it narratively, but mostly he does it in terms of visuals. Most strikingly in his bold use of colour. Not many in the west probably had a wardrobe like Viennas, but I doubt Ray cared one bit about that. For him all that mattered is what colours means, and what they can be made to represent, and how it can be used to contrast characters. The best use is undoubtedly when Vienna dressed in an all white evening gown faces an angry mob dressed in all black. But also Vienna's many costume changes in the last 45 minutes of the film, changing from one brightly coloured outfit to the next, while still being opposed by an angry mob in all black.

I like Johnny Guitar quite a lot. I like Ray in general and his style, and I think in Johnny Guitar is one of the films where his style is presented best. There's also a great set of performances lead by Joan Crawford, but also Mercedes McCambridge as Emma is great in a role you love to hate.

 

[hangman005]

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Movies: - The Official "Movie of the Week" Club Thread IV