(Image courtesy of Universal Pictures via www.bergoiata.org)
This report comes to us via The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz blog by way of Ain't It Cool News It just goes to show - nothing, including James Whale's 1935 masterpiece, is off limits. There's (maybe) one person I'd ever want to hear about tackling this film, and he's going to be kept busy in Hobbit land for quite some time.
I've got to agree with AICN - Neil Burger certainly has talent, but not the Guillermo del Toro-sized ambitions and vision this project would need. Personally, I had no clue that someone had been trying to get this remake (oh, I'm sorry, I guess I meant "re-imagining") off the ground for the last 5 years.
(Image courtesy of Sony Home Entertainment/American Zoetrope)
Hey all (OK, so who am I kidding, at this point, "all" probably constitutes a very select number of friends and family ... anyway, I digress).
Suite101.com just posted my review/essay of Coppola's Dracula (1992) - I wrote this one under the auspices of the return of True Blood and ensuing New Moon fever. So there's the timeliness for yah.
(Image courtesy of the Criterion Collection via http://members.quicknet.nl/ahum/M20%20in%20the%20movie1.htm)
After seeing the later Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger (a.k.a. The Archer's) classic, The Red Shoes, and reading up a little on Scorsese's high opinion of Powell's work, I purchased The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on a whim. Why this film hasn't enjoyed a reputation equal to Renoir's Grand Illusion as one of the greatest cinematic critiques of war, I really can't say. As I said with The Fallen Idol, British cinema gets overlooked too often in America.
Taken from the popular, farcical British cartoon character, Colonel Blimp, Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) is the ostensibly unchanging face of the British military. From his younger days in the Boer War, Candy matures in a series of conflicts which shapes his expectations for how a war is to be properly conducted. It is a gentleman's game with carefully observed rules. When one party deviates from the script and does something unsportsmanlike, as the Germans do in WWI, it is only fitting that the behaved party emerges victorious.
As Candy's German friend and foil, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) represents a much more flexible view of war. He too is brought up on the idyll of a gentleman's war -- it is this principle that first brings him into contact with Candy, dueling against his personal belief to defend the honor of the German Army, who Candy offends while visiting Berlin at the turn-of-the-century. It is there that both men meet Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr), the woman Theo marries and Candy longs for throughout his life.
Given that the film was released in 1943 -- in the throws of the second World War -- Powell and Pressburger (credited as screenwriters on the picture as well) tackle the evolution of war with an inredibly prophetic scope. Even a fair and balanced criticism of the British Army in a film that is neither blindly patriotic nor scathingly treacherous could not be accepted at the time. Winston Churchill despised the film and wanted to see it banned. But that sort of knee-jerk reaction completely ignores the valuable criticism of war and British culture Powell and Pressburger offer.
Nazism, aside from being the ultimate evil, represents a complete end to the gentleman's game. Candy remains confident through the end of WWI that the Germans lost because they refused to play by the rules. His view of war running like clockwork already seems antiquated then, but when taken in with the full, horrific implications of the Nazi regime, Candy's idylls are entirely invalid. His friend Theo notes that the British are no longer fighting to win -- they are fighting for their entire "existence." And should they lose, there will be no other values but Nazi values for a very long time.
Beneath the political skepticism (Kerr delivers one of the film's best lines: "Good manners cost us . . . 6,000 men killed and 20,000 men wounded—and two years of war. When with a little common sense and bad manners there would have been no war at all.") and razor sharp dialogue, Powell and Pressburger also deliver one of Technicolor's early masterpieces. While their color cinematography is not quite as inspired as in The Red Shoes, their work alongside DP George Périnal (who worked on The Fallen Idol) is no less assured, from the opening shot of the M20 motorcycle (which seems to have informed David Lean in the opening of Lawerence of Arabia) which pulls out to reveal the British Home Guard in all its pomp and splendor.
What makes it all work is The Archer's decision to transform Blimp from a contemptible joke -- a chararicature -- into Candy, a full-blooded tragic figure. He's still bound, like Blimp, to the old guard's failing ways, but there's a profound sadness to the demise of how things were. They handle their satire with absolute sincerity, though not without a sense of humor.
The title of the film could be seen as misleading -- we never see Blimp/Candy's onscreen death. In fact, the film ends with him very much alive. But that would be an all too literal reading of "Life" and "Death". At the film's conclusion, Candy finally recognizes just how much the world around him has changed. England is no country for old gentleman soldiers, and while this evolution is inevitable, The Archers seem to mourn this passing, despite the absurd decadence and contradictory idea of so-called civilized war.
(Image courtesy of Warner Bros. via www.moviewallpapers.net)
All due respect to Casablanca, but Michael Curtiz was a goddamn hack. Maybe that's a bit strong considering all I've seen of his work is the aforementioned classic and Mildred Pierce. For all his competence on Casablanca though, Curtiz damn near capsizes Mildred Pierce, an otherwise pleasing melo-noir.
Hats off to Joan Crawford in the titular role - she carries the film from beginning to end. Pierce sacrifices everything for her family, specifically her eldest child, the class-conscious, money-grubbing snob Veda (Ann Blyth). She takes a job as a waitress, which Veda resents as socially unacceptable, and eventually builds a successful restraurant mini-empire. Despite the accomplishment, Veda still looks down at her mother for working at all. How, exactly, Vera got these upper-class pretensions, we never really know (it's something that may have been lost in adapting James M. Cain's novel).
Even as Curtiz undermines the drama (more on that later), Crawford sells the tragedy of the woefully unappreciated mother. Ranald MacDougall's tight dialogue gives Crawford and co-star Jack Carson (Wally Fay, Pierce's business partner and one of her suitors) plenty to chew on, though the narrative construct (too much noir flashback and narration) feels a bit dated.
The structure allows the film to toy with the idea of femme fatale a little, especially in the juxtaposition of mother and daughter -- although there's not much in the way of contemplation on the noir figure. Really it's more of a ploy, albeit a pretty good one.
Where the film suffers is in the directorial/editorial department. It's no wonder Crawford won an Oscar for her turn in the film, but it's downright baffling how Curtiz and cinematographer Ernest Haller (Rebel Without a Cause) ended up with nods.
It's not just that Curtiz lacks any recognizable style - he undermines the drama with poor composition and editing. One can only imagine how much better Mildred Pierce could have been in the hands of Howard Hawks, who knew how to work magic on studio supervision. Curtiz's camera and cutting pattern move either too predictably or haphazzardly.
Each dolly in or out punctuates exactly when it you would expect it to. Rather than letting the action breathe within the frame, Curtiz (or Warner Bros., who may have been manning the puppet from behind the scenes) feels the need to break down each sequence with unecessary close ups, punctuating all the easy moments.
Without giving too much away, here's a pretty right on example. One character remains sick in bed, dying, with an oxygen tent around her. The POV shot from inside the tent is powerful -- we're isolated, trapped within the apparature. But when the reverse comes and Pierce runs to the character, we lose her in sight as she comes around the corner. At first, it appears as if Pierce's interaction with the character will occur off-screen -- an unusual and interesting choice for a studio film. However, Curtiz cuts back to a variation on the original shot, and then back to the reverse. The moment gets lost and segmented by adhering to the shot-reverse-shot convention, and to greater detriment, bad composition. It's a pivotal scene, or at least it should be, because for Pierce, it's a turning point.
I know it comes down to a question of preference, but I do not understand how critic Andrew Sarris can file directors like Carol Reed, Elia Kazan and John Huston under "Less Than Meets the Eye" and dub Curtiz "Lightly Likeable". When a lamp placed in the foreground blocks a character's movement in Mildred Pierce, it's doing just that and serves no other purpose.
Having ranted and raved, I still don't regret having seen the film, if only for Crawford's performance. Why this film enjoys such reverence (Amazon deems it "essential" for what it's worth), I have no clue. For my money, Out of the Past is a far stronger post-war melo-noir.
One last note -- Mildred Pierce is sort of atypical in the noir canon for its strong female lead. This could be interpreted as somewhat progressive given the time period. However, it is worth noting that Pierce, when interrogated by the police, admits divorcing her first husband, Bert, (Bruce Bennett) was a mistake. Bert who had lost his job, seemed reluctant to get a new one, admitted to detesting Veda and was openly cheating on Mildred with another woman. Given the mess Mildred's life becomes after the divorce, I guess this is somewhat understandable. Still, it rubs me the wrong way.
(Image courtesy of Disney-Pixar via http://pixarblog.blogspot.com)
Last night, I saw Up for the second time -- finally in 3D and with the short attached (loved it!). Have to say, the 3D was not nearly as essential as Coraline's, but Pixar's first foray into the third dimension was pleasantly (and not surprisingly) subtle. As Peter Docter has said in many interviews, the idea is to create a window (i.e., an image with greater depth), not a spectacle.
But I digress. What I really wanted to discuss was that absolutely brilliant/gorgeous/heartbreaking four-minute montage detailing Carl and Ellie's marriage at the beginning of the film. After WALL-E's wonderfully contemplative dialogue-free opening, Up really had its work cut out for it. I don't know if I'm ready to say one film is better than the other, but I will put the montage down as one of Pixar's greatest achievements and easily the best four minutes of cinema I've seen in the theaters all year.
When I interviewed Docter back in April, he talked about how some of the Pixar team had stumbled across a collection of old home videos of people they didn't know during the production of Up. Despite not knowing who these people were beforehand, through these minimal (and, if my memory serves me right, dialogue-free) interactions, the Pixar artists were able to instantly connect to these "characters". Not unlike the opening of Mean Streets - when we hardly know Charlie, the one character we've met in the film, Scorsese gives us clips of Super-8 home movies. By the time we do finally meet these people, we feel we know them (check out Uncle Giovanni's reponse to the camera the next time you watch it, the shot speaks volumes).
So, for Up, the challenge was distilling an entire marriage -- the dreams, dissapointments and in-betweens -- into one, silent-scored montage. We need to understand Carl and Ellie's relationship, and more importantly, how each character functioned within that relationship. There's a lot of clever production design at work, which gets continued throughout the film (notice the juxtaposition of Carl's chair with Ellie's chair, his square-framed pictures to her ovular ones, the rigid objects stacked on Carl's nighttable). I think, what really hits home though, is the relability of a couple whose wild fantasies eventually got grounded by simple realities of life. They never compromise happiness, but as time goes on, the dreams become more modest, or arguably, fade into the background of what is a fairly normal day-to-day existence.
That Pixar is able to cram so much emotion into these little computer generated figures (and in only four minutes!) says more about their power as storytellers than the evolution of computer animation. Hell, the first time I saw the montage I started to well up a little. The second time too. And while the talking, cooking, airplane flying dogs didn't hold up for me quite as well on viewing no. 2, I get the feeling no matter how many times I rewatch Up, that montage will still get to me on some level.
If WALL-E was about the audacity and naivite of dreaming for the stars, Up explores what happens when you find something worth trading in some of these dreams for. The montage, along with some of the other more melancholic scenes in the film, probably expresses this idea better than the film on a whole, much as WALL-E loses steam in its second half and never quite recaputres the visual expressiveness of its opening 35 minutes or so.
Seeing things like "the montage", though, suggests Pixar is still willing to challenge itself and its core youth demographic. For at least one studio, cinema, not the profit line, still comes first.
Don't have much time for this post, nor do I want to go at any great lengths in case I end up doing a full DVD review. But if you've seen Repulsion, Roman Polanski's first English-language feature, then you know - this one requires some discussion.
I regret having seen Robert Altman's Imagesa few months ago (well, not really "regret" per say) and not after having seen Repulsion. While Images is not one of Altman's most successful/accessible/overall enjoyable films, it's sort of a clarification of the themes of isolation and female sexual repression Polanski sets forth in Repulsion.
Polanski's film isfar from perfect or steady, but it is genuinely disturbing in its portrayal of confinement and madness. Beautiful composition, startling effects (the hands groping through the walls really predicts/informs all those wonderful Cronenbergian creepers) ... oh, and did I mention a quietly crazed performance from Catherine Deneuve?
Ah, I've said too much already. So, lest I trample all over a possible forthcoming review, I will leave with this. Something to brighten up your day ...
(Image courtesy of Universal Pictures via www.bergoiata.org)
