Category: The Classics

TRON (1982)

It’s amazing how far computers have come. It has now been 30 years since the original “Tron” came out in 1982, and the film looks so different from the computer generated animation we have today that you have to wonder how anyone could call this movie a precursor or inspiration for the entire style of filmmaking.

Rather, what I see in “Tron” is a cult film that set the spark for what the movies could be. It recognized that computers could do what hand drawn animators had been doing for years, but it could use live action actors and do things differently, if not better, than a pencil and paper ever could. What makes “Tron” durable today is that although no film looked like it in 1982, still no film looks anything like it in 2012. Its rudimentary technology is all its own, and as other films took filmmaking in different directions than the ones it established and passed it by altogether, “Tron” remained distinctive and unique, forever a gem in its own pocket of history.

Director Steven Lisberger was inspired to try and make a computer-generated movie when he saw the motion within the classic video game Pong. He was the first to truly imagine that this technology could be used in film, even though his pitch was little more than a 30 second clip demonstrating what computers were capable of creating. All the major studios rejected him, but Disney opened their doors as they sought to take more daring projects. The only problem there was that the hand drawn animators employed at Disney felt that this movie, if successful, might put them all out of a job, forcing Lisberger to receive outside help from computer companies to finish the film.

“Tron” was not the first film to use CGI, but it was the first to do so extensively, extensively here meaning just 15 minutes of footage. The remainder of the film is essentially animated, but it models its cyber-punk look off something called “backlit animation” that was popular in the ’70s. This process required photographing actors in black and white in front of black backdrops such that animation could be projected in the background. So what you get are 3-D people standing in front of plainly 2-D drawings, all of it amplified with neon color to make the image pop. So occasionally, it looks as though the characters are walking on thin air with the space itself on an entirely different plane. Through the technology known as rotoscoping, animators can digitally add or remove color from the frame. But because these computers could only handle so much data and digital processing at a given time, a lot of the detail in the background would be lost, and rather than have it look poor, the animators would simply black out that segment of the frame. “When in doubt, black it out,” they would say during production. To make the process even less complicated, anything that required these visual effects were done with a completely stationary camera, one that was quite literally nailed to the floor. But you wouldn’t notice because there is constantly so much activity and color on screen.

Even the CGI sequences were less examples of how to do digital animating today but how to apply conventional animation techniques to computers. Computers could not render motion with digital imagery, so “Tron’s” famous light cycle sequence was completed by inputting coordinates of where an object was supposed to move next into each individual frame and spliced together on film. That this looks so seamless and exciting on screen is a testament to just how tireless the effort was on this film. Continue reading “TRON (1982)”

Bond at 50: A look back at Sean Connery classics

The James Bond franchise turns 50 years old this year, but the thing about James Bond is that he never really ages, does he?

For 23 movies now, the 007 series has survived not on consistent quality but on consistent character. It’s a genre unto itself, one that branded itself from the beginning and never looked back.

Although Bond never aged, he became a mirror of the times as well as a look back at a simpler one. When “Star Wars” was the new hit, Bond went to space. When Japan championed Bond, Bond went overseas. When he needed a makeover, Bond started from scratch. When a new generation of video games was born, he became a First Person Shooter staple.

I first knew Bond as Pierce Brosnan. He came to the series after a six year gap in the franchise (the longest in its history). This Bond had to be reinvented to find his place after the Cold War. Because although the 007 movies were never political, they let us know who our enemies were and just how dangerous a nuclear threat could be. Bond put minds at ease in knowing that there was a hero this cool protecting the world.

You can first see these traces in “From Russia With Love,” a movie that very boldly asserts the presence of a secret shadow government named SPECTRE. Before Bond even shows up, we’re taken to an absurd training facility where they use “live targets too.” The Russian Adonis Grant was precisely the nonchalant face that could so easily be the enemy in disguise. What’s more, this film introduced the absolutely brilliant screen villainy that was SPECTRE’s Number One, a faceless entity who stroked a white cat with ominous delicacy.

As modern as these fears were, Bond first belonged to the classical age of Old Hollywood. Had “Dr. No,” “From Russia With Love” or “Goldfinger” come out after 1967, the campy violence and lack of R-rated sex might’ve made the Bond franchise irrelevant.

But here Sean Connery proved to be an update on the Cary Grant archetype. Connery became an instant star after “Dr. No” because although he had a cool demeanor and suave fashion sense, he also had a steely glare that let you know when he meant business. He wasn’t all camp the way Roger Moore or Brosnan was. He had the power to take who was essentially a blonde Hitchcock girl and turn her into a sex icon. Continue reading “Bond at 50: A look back at Sean Connery classics”

Wings of Desire (1987)

“I now know what no angel knows: a sense of amazement.”

The blissful reverie of a movie that is Wim Wenders’s “Wings of Desire” reveals that sense of amazement, wonder and internal gazing that all humans need to live life fully. It’s a movie full of its muchness, its ideas and its people, but it often feels as confusing, mysterious and lyrical as life itself.

It tells the story of an angel, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) who has looked over Berlin for eternity but desires to “take the plunge” into human existence. “I’ve stood outside the world long enough,” he says. He desires the ability to live in the present, not in eternity, to know the feeling of a weight on his shoulders and be able to smell, taste and touch things for himself. He’s inspired by the sight of a beautiful trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), twirling in midair as an angel on Earth.

His desires are not presented literally. They’re filtered through the thoughts and emotions of the people both he and his partner Cassiel (Otto Sander) observe. “How is it that this me wasn’t here before I was me, and that there won’t be a me after this me is gone?” It’s as if these spirits don’t know the meaning of their existence either. Their purpose is to “look, gather, testify and preserve.” Through their black and white eyes, even the mundane of the human world have a poetic, spiritual beauty.

One man wonders why his son has no other interests than music, realizing that buying him a guitar didn’t do enough to please him. Another elderly man struggles to climb up stairs in a library and later wanders the streets reflecting on his time in the war. A teenager’s mind races with thoughts that he needs to leave this life but knows not why as he leaps off a building to his death.

Wenders directs this all with intimate grace and beauty. The camerawork by legendary cinematographer Henri Alekan (Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast”) grants us an immediate, spiritual perspective, gliding elegantly through such small places as a library in tracking shots and in arching crane shots that seem to give us a glimpse of the world as a whole. The humans cannot see Damiel and Cassiel, but occasionally Wenders has them look toward the camera and force us to acknowledge our own presence, to ask our own questions as they ask theirs. Their lilting, whispered voices inside their head may not even mean anything specific to us, but as we’re inside their mind for that brief moment we know just how much it means to them.

Shooting in black and white from the angel’s perspective and in color from the human perspective, “Wings of Desire” owes some credit to “A Matter of Life and Death,” an Old Hollywood romantic comedy that shows heaven in black and white, Earth in color and also knows the joys of living and feeling. In this way, both films are deeply spiritual, and “Wings of Desire” very sanctimonious, but they are hardly “religious.” Characters do not pray, they do not mention God or Christianity. They do not even ask the precise purpose of life but wonder what it is to really live. It’s even more interested in what it reflects of West Germany at the time, a city divided and isolated by the Cold War and left with their own questions and ideas.

But the part I like best in “Wings of Desire” is when it stops being the German art house film for a moment. Damiel wakes up in an empty lot in color and notices three kids staring at him. They assume he’s drunk as they run and giggle away. He gets up and his first sight is a magnificent graffiti mural on a long horseshoe wall. The scene is perfect, but Damiel asks something of the artist that makes it real; he asks what they call each color, and once yellow, blue and green are all named, they never looked so vibrant.

It’s also memorable for Peter Falk playing himself during an on-location shoot in Berlin. He has a scene where he tries on different hats that really doesn’t fit the movie’s flow, but it’s funny and genuine and gets us inside his head without giving him an internal monologue. We realize that he’s aware of the angels’ presence although he cannot see them, and he explains the joys of simply rubbing your hands together when its cold. His line to the newly awakened Damiel is again not as poetic as the rest of the film, but it feels right. “You have to find out yourself. That’s the fun of it.”

Suddenly this arty, metaphorical movie has become something else: a direct, colorful, accessible movie in the German New Wave. It takes us to a brooding, underground post-punk show and puts us in a new kind of trance. Its ending perhaps jams too much philosophy into one lovelorn conversation, but it casts us in the moment that is both now and never.

Wim Wenders directed “Wings of Desire” after the film that won him the Palme D’Or at Cannes, “Paris, Texas,” a loose remake of “The Searchers” with Harry Dean Stanton. Wenders did however win Best Director at the 1987 Cannes and made a sequel to this film called “Faraway, So Close!” He’s been nominated for two Oscars, but both for documentaries. He’s an ambitious, profound director. His films are timeless and spiritual, but they operate in the here and now.

The Apartment (1960)

“And the girl…?”

The romantic comedy changed with those three little words in “The Apartment.” Shirley MacLaine played “the other woman,” the scandalous character who always broke up the true love. But here, she was the lonely girl forgotten by the love of her life, cast out, neglected and contemplating suicide. How did we miss her?

Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” is one of the groundbreaking comedies of all Old Hollywood. It gave the screwball comedy severity. Its characters were lonely, depressed and scummy, and it found a funny color amidst all the blue, proving to be heartwarming and filled with emotional pathos.

Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, an office drone in a movie that would inspire the image of the working man for decades to come. The desks stretching to infinity was inspired by King Vidor’s silent film “The Crowd,” but Wilder’s numerical facts of a singular employee in a massive insurance company seem to paint a broader picture of his workforce servitude.

To move up in the world, Baxter has agreed to a deal with the executives. They can use his apartment as a haven to take their mistresses. The company’s head-honcho, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), promotes Baxter for the same reason, but his mistress is the lovely Fran Kubelik (MacLaine), the spritely elevator girl with the short haircut Baxter has a crush on.

The interesting thing about Baxter is that he’s living a lie that he’s not actually living. His neighbors and his landlady both think he’s a rambunctious party animal bedding a new girl each night and polishing off several bottles of liquor as well. He does need to wake up and smell the coffee, but for different reasons than his neighbors believe. We see him living completely mundanely, changing the channels on TV in the hopes of watching “Grand Hotel” only to be teased with more commercials. And in the short time he earns these new promotions, he earns none of the extra money, still straining pasta with a tennis racket and washing martini glasses by hand. When he takes another lonely woman home from a bar on Christmas Eve, he’s doing so out of complete depression. He’s like the guy not invited to the party but forced to clean up afterwards. Continue reading “The Apartment (1960)”

Don't Look Now (1973)

One of the longest and most simultaneously passionate and unsettling sex scenes in all of cinema is one between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in “Don’t Look Now.” It’s an emotionally charged scene of elegant love making, but spliced in between are shots of the two of them getting dressed separately. The images don’t belong together, but side by side, they show through creepy resonance how our lives exist in two moments. We have our memories and our often bleak visions of the future.

“Don’t Look Now” is an art-house horror classic. It’s a film that in its ether alone considers the unspoken sensations, feelings and emotions that surround death. Nicolas Roeg’s disjointed editing is strange on a narrative level, but it addresses these questions more fluidly and realistically than a standard melodrama ever could.

Sutherland and Christie play John and Laura Baxter, a married couple who has just lost their daughter by drowning in a pond behind their house. None of these images before her death are particularly pastoral. A red ball floats ominously in the scummy water, her brother runs over and shatters a piece of glass in the middle of a field, and a photo John is studying is stained blood red when he spills his drink on it.

We attain a sixth sense that something terrible will happen thanks to Roeg’s heightening of sound to something beyond diegetic. It’s as though the noises resound in our mind and not just on screen. These are sounds that will come back to haunt us.

In a jarring smash cut, we’re transported to Venice months after the incident. The Baxter son is at boarding school, and John and Laura are taking an extended work vacation to forget the past. Stray images of silverware or jewelry some how remind us of the tragedy, and we know that the Baxters must still be suffering. Continue reading “Don't Look Now (1973)”

Do the Right Thing (1989)

Is “Do the Right Thing” a “black movie?”

Its director Spike Lee is an African American who has long made films about race and politics, is very outspoken about the lack of black actors and roles in Hollywood movies, closed this film with two quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and even made a biopic on the latter.

Hollywood knows how to market a movie like “Do the Right Thing” today, if it could even be made. And Lee has attained a label that colors (for lack of a better word) his films for better or worse.

But “Do the Right Thing” is non-partisan and unified in the way it depicts a whole melting pot of a community that doesn’t actually melt together, only simmers. Its blacks, Mexicans and Asians are no more admirable than the racist whites. Everyone shows hate and anger, but everyone has their problems and their reasons. No one party is strictly immune or antagonized.

The brilliance in Spike Lee’s film is that he led us to believe that this was a small-scale story about a misguided community, one he depicted with disappointment, but compassion, only to show chaos on a global scale. Like Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) blaring “Fight the Power” at all hours, Lee shouts his frustration with the country and the world. He doesn’t make a film about race but about how anger and hate begets more violence and destruction. And to really alert us to our hypocrisy, he does so with a film that is as aggressive and animated as society itself. Continue reading “Do the Right Thing (1989)”

Vertigo (1958)

The worst thing that can happen to “Vertigo” after being named the Best Movie of All Time by Sight and Sound is that the movie will turn into homework.

For decades, “Citizen Kane” carried the burden of being seen as a good helping of cultural vegetables. I know how people are. They think they’ve seen a lot of movies in their life, then stumble across a list like Sight and Sound and proceed to boastfully challenge the top choice.

“I don’t see what makes it so great.” Maybe if the Sight and Sound poll weren’t treated like a figurative film canon, then maybe people wouldn’t be so quick to write off masterpieces as stodgy, arty, no fun movies for critics and old people.

So naturally upon rewatching “Vertigo” with my family, I quickly asked my dad if he knew why “Vertigo” was considered worthy of the number one spot. He gave the best answer I could’ve imagined. “Because other movies just aren’t as good?”

In terms of film auteurs, Alfred Hitchcock is far and away the most approachable, the least “challenging,” the least stodgy and often the most fun. His films are technical flourishes. Where other directors fail to set the mood, where other directors use a plot device that is all too obvious or where other directors incorporate a twist that is all too ridiculous, Hitchcock never stepped wrong.

We call him the master of suspense because he brought no-nonsense thrills into the cinema and became a household name before anyone else. If his movies lacked the emotional heft of other Old Hollywood classics, it’s because he played his films with such virtuosity and perfection that stray feelings never got in the way.

“Vertigo” on the other hand is his most personal and his most emotionally complex. That’s why this is in the number one spot; because it’s excellent. Continue reading “Vertigo (1958)”

Metropolis (1927)

“Metropolis” doesn’t really resolve anything. At its conclusion, the worker village underneath the Earth has been destroyed, the luxurious Garden of Eden is abandoned and the majestic city to represent all cities has been brought to a stand still.

The people of “Metropolis” have only reestablished human morality for the moment. Man is equal once more, but there is no sense things are about to change.

Fritz Lang used the most money ever spent on a German film to make an epic about mankind’s scary dependence on technology, the massive rift between social classes and the rapid decline of humanity when posed with our own ego, sin and anger. This civilization can only thrive with the gifts of modern engineering. What’s more, the wealth inequality will remain intact and sin has not been eradicated. The story ends happily, but you can see how Lang would leave the eventual fate of the world somewhat tentative.

“Metropolis” was butchered and never to be seen appropriately due to its length, its poor box office appeal, its religious overtones and its confusing imagery for American audiences, but one gets the idea that some of the themes Lang was engaging here were just a bit too much for some people to handle.

It’s an impossible gift then that Lang’s film still exists at all, and now with additional footage such that Lang’s vision can be fully understood. It’s a pivotal film because of its scale and its visionary glimpse of the future, but it’s been so captivating through the years because it capitalizes on so many fears, all of which are universal. Continue reading “Metropolis (1927)”

My Best (and Favorite) Movies of All Time

These are my 10 “Best” movies of all time, along with my 10 “Favorite” movies ever.

Any critic voting in the Sight and Sound poll that was announced yesterday (my coverage here if you care to compare lists) will tell you how impossibly difficult it is to select 10 films as the best of all time. Occurring every 10 years since 1952, this is really the only list that matters. They have to select with their minds and their hearts, and the two don’t always coincide. If you’ve seen all the masterpieces, how do you choose between all that is perfect? And how would you like to be the critic who finally displaced “Citizen Kane” as the best movie of all time?

I don’t have nearly as much pressure on my head (not yet), but it hasn’t stopped some of my friends from asking what are my all time favorites.

I tend to dodge the question (often pretentiously, I might add). “Well, how do you rank works of art anyway?” “Oh, you probably haven’t heard of them.” “I’ve just seen so much that it’s so hard to choose.” And then I’ll say something about how I’ve seen the Harry Potter movies a lot because they’re always on HBO and I have a sister with no qualms of re-watching stuff, so maybe those could be called some of my “favorites.”

Often, I don’t even like the word “favorite.” “Best” and “favorite” usually go hand in hand. If I called “Drive” the best movie of 2011, it’s because it’s the one I most want to see again AND because it’s the most important/best made/critic-y jargon bullshit.

There’s also the possibility that I just haven’t seen enough films. In fact, I know I haven’t seen enough. One day decades from now when my Excel spreadsheet of classic films to watch is completely marked up with yellow highlights, when I’ve written and read all I can about them and am looking back on my entire life of watching movies as opposed to looking forward to what’s coming out this Friday, then maybe I’ll make a decent list.

So for all those reasons and more, I’ve never officially made public what are my all time picks for best movies ever. I’ve always had titles in mind, but they’ve never been put on paper like this. It’s damned hard to do.

But I’ll concede that in this instant, “best” does not mean “favorite.” I’m not going to lie and pretend that some obscure foreign movie I’ve seen once two years ago means more to me than something I’ve seen dozens of times since I was a kid. At the same time, that movie I know by heart is probably not even in the same conversation technically or historically as that obscure foreign film.

It’s why I’ve decided to provide TWO lists. One has the movies I would call the most powerful and most significant movies ever made. The other has the titles that I could never forget. They define me as a critic and a person. Continue reading “My Best (and Favorite) Movies of All Time”

Unforgiven (1991)

“Unforgiven” holds firm as an excellent, classical Western long after their heyday and a turning point in the legendary career of Clint Eastwood.

You have to hand it to the Coen Brothers for making 2010’s “True Grit” into such a well made and entertaining movie, because as far as I’m concerned, Clint Eastwood gave the Western genre its victorious last stand in “Unforgiven.”

“Unforgiven” is brilliant for being the last truly old fashioned Western and yet also a modern elegy of it. Eastwood starred in enough Westerns in his career to know how the genre ticked, and his characters in “Unforgiven” display unsuspected depth that expand on all the themes common to the genre without harming its integrity. It’s a film from the early ’90s but fits into the canon of Westerns as well as any.

Beyond that, “Unforgiven” is an important landmark in the career of a great actor and director. It’s an imperfect masterpiece; a human mark on the face of a titan.

Eastwood plays William Munny, a former killer in the West who has now grown old and tame as he started a family. Three years after the death of his wife, he’s a lonely and hopeless pig farmer. The new bounty hunter on the block is the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), and he needs a partner. Will however hasn’t pointed a gun at a man in 10 years. The cowboys they aim to kill mutilated a prostitute, and the other girls in the brothel have put a $1000 price tag on the cowboys’ heads. But protecting the town from any bounty hunters is the corrupt and ruthless Sheriff Little Bill (Gene Hackman).

The world in “Unforgiven” is cold and dangerous, where even the law is heartless and scary. But the stunning horizons and bright blue skies paint a pastoral picture that is not “glamorous,” but still beautiful. Nobility remains in this world, however dated it may seem. Continue reading “Unforgiven (1991)”