From an Indian Lodge

Happy 100th, Louise!

2006-11-14T23:02:00.000-06:00

Happy 100th, Dmitri!

2006-09-25T12:21:00.000-05:00

Where Are My Elephants?

2006-09-19T22:33:00.000-05:00

The Protector
(Prachya Pinkaew, 2005) ****

The version of this movie that is currently playing in US theaters is 25 minutes shorter than the original Thailand cut. I assume that everything in this movie that is not martial arts has been tossed. There is very little connective tissue in this movie. That is, any sort of mystery element of how Tony Jaa finds out where his elephants are is no longer here and is obvious by its absence. Now I've long been one of those movie buffs who did not approve of the Weinstein brothers' habit, first at Miramax and now at The Weinstein Company, of cutting foreign movies for the American market. However, I am not that indignant this time. Why?

1. Pinkaew's previous Muay Thai extravaganza, Ong Bak, took 35 minutes to get going. Is anyone longing for more city-mouse-country-mouse byplay between Tony Jaa and his sidekick? Pinkaew does not have a good record when it comes to narrative setup.

2. When Tony Jaa is not kicking ass, he does not light up the screen with his presence. He has neither the charm of Jackie Chan nor the charisma of Jet Li. He is just a pretty athletic guy. I do not weep for the lost scenes of Tony Jaa's dramatic acting that I was denied.

3. What remains is so entertaining that any of the martial arts sequences on its own would be worth full ticket price. Once Tony Jaa gets going, the world is his jungle gym. There is one long take around some abandoned streetcars in which Tony hurtles through windows and swings around on the metal bars inside, sending his enemies flying hither and yon. There is another long take in which he finds behind a nondescript Thai restaurant, a multistory atrium surrounded by a spiral staircase and whose different levels can be found everything from hookers to a restaurant serving endangered species. Tony runs up the stairs to the first landing and fights someone on the first landing, out of our view (the camera, acting as a character, seems reluctant to follow Tony at first). The nameless assailant is then thrown through the balustrade that concealed our view. Tony has to fight his way back down to the lobby by which time the camera has summoned up enough courage to follow our hero all the way to the top in one unbroken take in which many bodies, much furniture, and a sink are thrown.

4. Elephants. This has the same plot as Ong Bak. Bad guys from the city come to the countryside to steal a piece of Thai culture, in this case, two elephants bred for use of the King. The elephants here are as satisfying in their monumental pachydermness as those in Oliver Stone's Alexander (whose elephants were easily the best part of that film).

A Quotation

2006-09-13T22:02:00.000-05:00

"Darius the king thus says: In the protection of Ahuramazda there is also much which I have done which is not written on this stele; for this reason it has not been written lest he who should read this writing hereafter should not believe all I have done, but should speak, saying: 'They are lies.' "

--Darius I (549-486 BC), quoted in History
of the Persian Empire by A. T. Olmstead

Scarcely to be described in words

2006-07-13T20:55:00.000-05:00

Dreams from the Witch House by H. P. Lovecraft

I don't mean to add H. P. Lovecraft as an obsession of this blog alongside Raj Kapoor, but he has, like the Bollywood master, become a recent interest. It does seem to be his moment, since he has pretty much entered the canon. He has a volume in the Library of America. I read this book as a respectable Penguin Classic with Fuseli's Nightmare on the cover. I've been an sf fan pretty much my whole life, but still reading something as a Penguin Classic that started out in Weird Tales and Astounding Magazine is unexpected.

There are two ways to describe Lovecraft by way of comparison. The first is that he was halfway between Poe and Borges. From Poe comes the horror, and from Borges comes the bibliophilia, the feeling of being trapped in an imaginary library. However, Lovecraft also reminded me of Huysmans' Against Nature. He is a Decadent writer born a generation too late and writing for the pulps. He despises all modern life, but unlike Huysmans, aestheticism is not a way out. No drinking of "yellow teas brought from China into Russia by special caravans" for him. At the bottom of everything are ancient malevolent alien entities as far above us as we are above the amoebas.

Of course, it's very hard to describe what is billions of years ahead of us on the evolutionary chain. So Lovecraft often finds it very hard to describe his vision with any sort of photographic exactness. ("Certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting, and inexplicable nature.") In writing about what cannot, and should not, be imagined, Lovecraft set himself an artistic bar that he couldn't reach. The truly successful Lovecraft story would drive the reader mad.

Abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy

2006-06-24T11:44:00.000-05:00

The Call of Cthulhu
(Andrew Leman, 2005) ***1/2

The envelope from Greencine was like any other DVD envelope, shewing nothing of the horrors within. Upon pulling the disc out, I was discomfited by the hideous singularity of the lettering thereon. Pressing "play movie" on a menu which faded into the movie in a fashion that bordered on the blasphemous, I was confronted by terrors surpassing those of the mouldier pages of the Pnakotic Manuscripts. Told in the frightful style of the most ancient cinema, this film revealed forbidden horrors that chilled the blood. Of the story, of the frightful dreams of a Providence sculptor, the repulsive statue guarded by a mad Esquimaux shaman, the nightmarish rites of the darkest Louisiana bayous, and the monstrosity slumbering in the ancient depths of the South Pacific, I recoil in fear of mentioning them. I will only give the least disquieting glimpse of these diabolic occurrences.

Shree 420

2006-06-24T11:30:00.000-05:00

Shree 420
(Raj Kapoor, 1955) ***1/4

This is a bit more like typical Bollywood in its bagginess. The first hour is almost unnecessary. (It includes that dispiriting sign of comic desparation, fast motion.) Eventually Raj, after flailing around in poverty at a Bombay laundry, discovers his true talent, cheating at cards. I was reminded of three other films.

1. The Middleman (Satyajit Ray, 1976) Sad to say, 20 years later, India still hadn't solved the problem of what to do with its college graduates, the main career choice in both films being either destitution or selling your soul.

2 and 3. Sunrise (F. W. Murnau, 1927) and One Wonderful Sunday (Akira Kurosawa, 1947) Lovers in the city with dilapidated Bombay, reminiscent of postwar Tokyo in the latter film.

And now for the pictures.

Willy Wonka and the Pornographic Lampoon of Charles II

2006-03-14T12:54:00.000-06:00

The Libertine
(Laurence Dunmore, 2004) **1/2

Yet another film that founders on Aristotle's truism that no one's life is a story. This is even more pointless than most, since, based on this film, the accomplishments of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, were

1. Taught Elizabeth Barry (who? exactly) how to act.
2. Wrote a pornographic play.
3. Died horribly from syphilis.

As a character, Wilmot is of even less interest, since he always chooses that which leads to his self-destruction. Other characters praise him as a great wit and poet, but for the former, there is no evidence, and for the latter, he is, at best, middling. Johnny Depp fills this shell, as best he can, with bits from Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Sparrow, and Willy Wonka. One thing this film gets right is that the past was unbelievably dirty with everyone and everything covered with soot, mud, and filth.

The list blog

2006-03-12T23:20:00.000-06:00

I've come to the conclusion that posting the top 10 lists in the order that I see something new is frankly useless, so I'm going to be posting the whole enchilada from the Kinetoscope to now starting this instant. Check back often.

Top films from the past 2005 (6)

2006-03-12T23:18:00.000-06:00

6. Spartan (David Mamet, 2004)

The new test of believability of cinematic Special Forces-type badasses is do they act like Val Kilmer in Spartan.

5. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

Nothing really to add to what I wrote here. Though to respond to msic, I don't think that having the "white male power structure" in on it is really revisionist. I seem to remember that was the set-up of The Big Heat, for example.

4. Awara (Raj Kapoor, 1951)

Is Raj Kapoor in the canon yet? If not, shame on us all.

3. Menilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926)

Another great director who has fallen through the cracks. He seems hard to classify. Here we have Soviet montage, documentary depictions of Paris streets, and silent avant-garde poetics synthesized into something totally different from anyone else of the time.

2. Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)

I knew this was great from the opening use of Purcell. Seemingly about everything. It's a film about two young people that remembers that they and we are mortal.

And now for the winner...

1. Brumes d'automne (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1929)

A truly sensuous film in that it really feels like sitting inside by warm fire and then going out into the damp of a wet autumn day.

Top films from the past 2005 (5): a digression

2006-03-02T01:10:00.000-06:00

7. Manhatta (Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, 1921)

Some savvy soul at Kino paired this early city symphony after Whitman with the music from the previous video version of Metropolis. The influence of this short film on Lang's sf epic now seems to me to be immense.

The arrival of the workers.

The old church in the modern city.

Babel and the skyscraper.

These next two are a bit more tenuous.

Manhatta has a sequence of steam rising from rooftops with clouds of vapor enveloping the camera, reminiscent of the shot of the steam whistle in Metropolis.

This shot reminds me of the aerial views of Metropolis' elevated roads. (I seem to remember that Metropolis also had an el.)

Apparently the story of Metropolis being inspired by Lang seeing the New York skyline is as truthful as his tale of fleeing Nazi Germany right after Goebbels offered him control of German film. But I think he did see the skyscrapers of New York. He saw them in Manhatta.

Top films from the past 2005 (4)

2006-02-27T21:14:00.000-06:00

9. All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

The freeze-frame blew my mind, and then it really took off.

8. Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat, 1987)

What can one say after seeing the lumpishly earthen Gerard Depardieu hold a dead girl over his head and challenge God to show him who rules the world?

Top films from the past 2005 (3)

2006-02-26T00:21:00.000-06:00

14. Anemic Cinema (Marcel Duchamp, 1926)

I always like 3-D cinema that doesn't need the glasses.

13. H2O (Ralph Steiner, 1929)

The early avant-gardists were fascinated by water and reflections in it. (About one-third of the films in the Avant-Garde set contain such images. Maybe a subject for a later post.) This is the most "avant-garde" of all of them. It begins in representation and ends in abstraction.

12. The House is Black (Fourogh Farrokhzad, 1963)

More like a psalm than a documentary.

11. LÂ’Etoile de mer (Man Ray, 1928)

A dream, under glass.

10. La Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947)

Another great leading role for water, this time as an immense ocean storm.

Inside my head

2006-02-24T12:52:00.000-06:00

The Film Snob's Dictionary by David Kamp with Lawrence Levi

I'll get back to posting about the old movies I saw in 2005 (there is also a top 10 list of books and new movies also in production); the holdup was technical in nature (the old version of VLC is crap, and the Mac DVD Player app is defeated by the 1920s avant-gardists). But now, The Film Snob's Dictionary. This is funny reading, but also a little uncomfortable, since I share quite a few of the likes of the Film Snob Kamp and Levi are dissecting. There are entries on Doc Films, Greencine, and Shaw Brothers. Raj Kapoor is name-checked in the Bollywood entry. There were moments in reading this, I felt like I was reading my biography as chronicled accurately by someone I never met. What really put this feeling over was finding an entry on Seijun Suzuki. Had there been an entry on Sergei Paradjanov, I would have closed this blog down and just said read this for my thoughts. The strangest part of all is at one point, Kamp and Levi list Ten Worthwhile Snob Causes Celebres and Ten Fraudulent Snob Cause Celebres. I agree with them on the worthwhileness of 9 of their worthys and two of the film snobbisms I find most fraudulent, L'Atalante and Peter Greenaway, are on their list. That I'm to the side of the Film Snob and in line with an outside assessment is just too weird.

Top films from the past 2005 (2)

2006-02-01T23:29:00.000-06:00

23. The Chess Player (Raymond Bernard, 1927) I love big-budget silent historical melodramas. This one involves Polish independence, Catherine the Great, and the famous chess-playing automaton, The Turk.

22. Police (Maurice Pialat, 1985) A terrible confession: Nearly all French crime films, no matter how good they are, do not convince me. At bottom, there is always something in quotation marks about them, as if the French movie is "doing" an American crime movie in the same way someone would "do" an impression. However, this one is the exception. A French crime movie that is actually about cops and criminals.

21. I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932) I love how fogeyish the kids are.

20. Les Mysteres du chateau du De (Man Ray, 1929) Probably the best "I shot this last weekend at my friend's house" film.

19. Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926) More silent big-budgetism, this time with John Barrymore as Don Juan. Every set looks like a 20s movie palace.

18. Female Convict 701 -- Scorpion (Shunya Ito, 1971) No one does Hell on Earth movies like the Japanese. (I think this comes from being the only country to be atom bombed.) Also, no one did New Wave as well as the Japanese.

17. Legong: Dance of the Virgins (Henri de la Falaise, 1935) Like Tabu, a docu-tale of doomed love in the tropics, but this time in beautiful two-strip Technicolor. Comes on DVD with both original and new gamelan score (both excellent).

16. Alias Jimmy Valentine (Maurice Tourneur, 1915) A bank robbery sequence that can stand alongside Heat.

15. Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974) She got her black belt in bar stools.

Top films from the past 2005 (1)

2006-01-18T21:44:00.000-06:00

I didn't see quite as much this year as in the past, but there were as always quite a few discoveries, most of which were connected with Kino's Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920 and '30s set. But before we get into that, the newfound appreciation category, that is, films that I had seen before but that struck me as better on this year's viewing.

CQ (Roman Coppola, 2002) Still a cool recreation of the 1960s, but this time I responded much more to the theme of human and artistic connection.

Emak-Bakia (Man Ray, 1926) One of the few films on the Kino Avant-Garde DVDs that I had seen before. Maybe this time the music was better.

Fighting Elegy (Seijun Suzuki, 1966) One should distrust psychological explanations of historical events, since they tend to be ridiculously reductive. However, Fighting Elegy seems to me to be an exception. Maybe I've been taken in, but as an explanation of early 20th-century Japanese militarism, this feels right.

Powaqqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1988) When I last saw this 15 years ago, this struck me as a lesser work than Koyannisqatsi, since it seemed less integrated than its predecessor. But now, this really seems kind of a film version of the ultimate issue of National Geographic.

And now for the actual "new" past films.

24. Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess, 2004) The moment that put it over the top for me was the van running over the Tupperware. A cult film that deserves its cult.

More to come....

One more from Barsaat

2006-01-10T22:24:00.000-06:00

Blogger would only let me add 5 to a post, so here's the last one.

Why 2006 should be the year of Raj Kapoor, aka something I've had from Greencine for way too long

2006-01-10T22:09:00.000-06:00

For Westerners to appreciate Bollywood, there is a gap that must be crossed. "Once you get past the overdose of kitsch (the extreme length of the movies, the pseudo-silent movie acting of Shahrukh Khan, etc.), they're actually pretty entertaining." However, it's interesting that the farther back you go in Bollywood history, the smaller that gap was. The one Guru Dutt film I've seen was as billed neorealism in Bollywood. Raj Kapoor was Welles, Chaplin, and neorealism. Raj Kapoor isn't as foreign as Bollywood now. That is to say, even with Bollywood films now that I like, I understand that I'm not the intended audience. However, Kapoor seems to me to be universal. And to make the case for his greatness, my words will be entirely inadequate so here are some captures from Barsaat (1949).

Content and an announcement

2005-11-19T04:06:00.000-06:00

First, the announcement. Things have been a bit slow here lately. That's because I'm getting married in two weeks so my life has been all abuzz and aflitter. Her name's Rachel, and as Roger Livesey said in one of the Powell and Pressburger films, "she's a grand girl." If I were to do her virtues complete justice here, I would be typing all night, so I'll just leave it at that.

And now the content. It's a list after the IMDB of the top 15 films of the last 15 years, as some film bloggers have been doing. For those who don't know me, maybe this will give you an idea of where I'm coming from.

1. Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)
2. Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993)
3. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir, 2003)
4. The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
5. Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998)
6. 2046 (Wong Kar-Wai, 2004)
7. Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)
8. Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)
9. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
10. Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
11. Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992)
12. Frankenstein Unbound (Roger Corman, 1990)
13. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
14. Kundun (Martin Scorsese, 1997)
15. Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-Wai, 1995)

Honorable Mention: The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993), The Heart of the World (Guy Maddin, 2000), Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), News from the Good Lord (Didier Le Pecheur, 1996), Pistol Opera (Seijun Suzuki, 2001), 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002)

A lot from the early 90s, which to my mind was one of the top 3 periods in film history.

1. 1919 to 1934 (Broken Blossoms to The Black Cat)
2. 1959 to 1971 (North by Northwest to Solaris)
3. 1989 to 1994 (My 20th Century to Heavenly Creatures)

Recently read and briefly noted 1

2005-10-16T00:24:00.000-05:00

Roughing It by Mark Twain

In 1861, Mark Twain's brother was appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and Twain went along as his secretary. Out there, the silver rush was in full swing with all the attendant folly that vast, sudden (and almost totally baseless) wealth brings.

"Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it! One would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a wild cat mine [by wild cat I mean, in general terms, any claim not located on the mother vein, i.e., the "Comstock") yielded a ton of rock worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not putting too much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a thought of such a thing. They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy."

And there's more. Stagecoaches, Mormons, buffalos, outlaws, Lake Mono, silver mining, wild and woolly territorial journalism, catastrophes, legal tomfoolery, poetry, gunfighting, and then Twain gets bored of all that and goes to California and then on to Hawaii. This is the definition of a rollicking good book.

Recently seen and briefly noted 3

2005-10-15T23:57:00.000-05:00

Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
****

I can see why this is considered a revisionist take on film noir, but that seems incorrect. Film noir was not a particularly sunny genre and thus did not need to be "revised." (Also, and this may be splitting hairs, I think the prewar setting is significant.) What this really is a projection of the 70s paranoia film (like the same year's The Parallax View) backward in time. Even nostalgia for past Hollywood was not going to be a way out. Finally, yes, this is one perfect movie.

Wedding Crashers (David Dobkin, 2005)
***1/4 to ***1/2

I disagree with those who think that Owen Wilson's comeuppance and maturation in the second half of the movie does violence to the sex comedy of the first half of the movie. (The scene in which Owen is asked whether he is full of shit or just half-full is key.) I laughed my ass off all the way through, and I was not thrown off, but rather pleasantly astonished, by the funeral scene. (I don't know why, but the thought that has stuck with me is that in 70 years time, if classic movie conventions like Cinecon and Cinevent still exist, this would be a big hit there. "You know, that was the first real pairing of
Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn.")

Preview post

2005-08-11T01:11:00.000-05:00

(Yes. Sometimes I read a book.)

2005-08-04T01:38:00.000-05:00

The Key by Junichiro Tanizaki

Tanizaki was apparently influenced by French Decadent literature, and like any decadent literature, this is a book about the final efflorescence, the candle flame brightening for a brief moment before it dies out. A middle-aged university professor begins the new year by confiding about his sexual life with Ikuko, his wife, in his diary. Ikuko, a conservative woman with a strong sexual drive, begins her own diary. The professor is dissatisfied with sex without the light on, and sets out to loosen Ikuko up, first with brandy and then the possible attentions of a younger man. The best way to describe the horrible fascination of what follows is that you can't partly drive off a cliff. In outline, it sounds like late-night Cinemax, but this novel is suffused with a strangeness of motive and incident. What is the daughter's role in all this? Is destruction what the professor really wants. Like Kubrick's film, death hangs over the erotic, a trap hidden in plain sight. And like that film, this has an oddness that needles you. (I do think the idea that unlocking a woman's sexual desire is like pulling the pin out of a grenade is something that only a man would write.)

On viewing the first 20 minutes or so of Logan's Run

2005-07-26T12:36:00.000-05:00

Logan's Run (Michael Anderson, 1976)

1. Thank God George Lucas came along and lifted movie sf out of doom and gloom. Before this, TCM showed Watch the Skies, a Richard Schickel documentary in which Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott discussed the sf films of the 1950s. (Spielberg could give Scorsese a run for his money in the film doc department.) Of course, everyone knows about the bomb and McCarthyism as the context for Them! and Invaders from Mars. But in this and other movies (sf and non-sf) all around the world in the early to mid 1970s, I feel that these are films made by people living in the ruins, but in the ruins of what? An examination of 70s sf would be very complicated.

2. It's interesting that after the youthful 1960's, this and Zardoz showed that societies that denied aging would be unhealthy.

3. You probably can't get more 1970s than Michael York.

4. On seeing the horrible stucco walls of the atrium where Logan kills the runner, I thought of Crow T. Robot saying "Filmed at the Student Union of the University of Minnesota, Duluth."

Awara

2005-07-26T12:14:00.000-05:00

Awara (Raj Kapoor, 1951)
****

The plot is almost straight from Dickens or Victor Hugo. Raj (director Kapoor) career criminal stands in the dock accused of attempted murder of Judge Raghunath (Prithviraj Kapoor, father of Raj), who believes criminals are born, not made. Raj is defended by Rita, the judge's adopted daughter (Nargis). Raj's defense is his life story. Years earlier, Leela, Raghunath's wife, was captured by Jagga, the bandit. As his revenge on the judge for wrongly sentencing him and setting him on his path of crime, Jagga, after finding out that Leela is pregnant, realizes that the judge will think the child is Jagga's and reject him, whereupon Jagga will complete his revenge by making the child a criminal. That is just the setup. To detail the rest of the plot with its confrontations, coincidences, triumphs, and reversals would be a 19th-century doorstop novel in itself. The rich plot is only one of the many great elements in this movie. Kapoor's direction is equal parts Chaplin (Awara could be translated as tramp), Welles (low angles), neorealism (Raj also seems to be straight out of De Sica), and film noir (a key scene takes place at night on a rain-soaked street), with a dash of Powell and Pressburger (the dream sequence is like a Hindu version of A Matter of Life and Death's heaven, with dancing). The Bollywood film aspires to be a Gesamtkunstwerk that people would actually go see. This one succeeds. Song, dance, architecture, literature, theater, painting. It's all here and it's all excellent.