Category: Rapid Response

Rapid Response: The Thin Red Line

Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” is one of the most beautiful war films ever made. Whereas most directors making an anti-war film would photograph in dim light and with a chaotic queasy cam, “The Thin Red Line” is a lush, colorful, sweeping film from start to finish. When it is not in the midst of a battle, it finds more than enough times to be quiet, elegiac, and although it sounds like an oxymoron in a war film, peaceful.

A World War II epic released in 1998, I watched it in preparation for Malick’s upcoming “The Tree of Life,” and it is a stunning, modern, timeless film of relentless emotion and vivid cinematography. Few other war films have a moving, soaring camera during action sequences the way “The Thin Red Line” does, and Malick’s graceful jib shots made for an eye-opening war experience unlike any I had seen on film.

And yet some of the film’s most memorable shots seem very nearly out of place. One of the best is a quick glimpse of a mangled bird struggling to inch its way out of a tree. Malick populates his entire film with rich natural imagery. Nearly all of the battle sequences take place on a verdant hill with tall grasses that were reminiscent of the glorious wheat fields in “Days of Heaven.” And his whole reason for calling our attention to the wonderful looking things around this desolate war zone is to draw the dichotomy between hopeful beauty and pitiful bleakness.

The cast is star studded with past, present and future Oscar winners. Here is just a short list of names you will no doubt recognize: Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, James Caviezel, Elias Koteas, John Cusack, Adrien Brody, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Jared Leto, John Travolta and George Clooney (who is literally in one scene about 150 minutes into this 170 minute epic, but you can’t miss him).

All of them give wonderful performances, and yet all were forgotten that year at the Oscars, despite the fact the film was nominated for seven awards. It lost all of its honors, including the much deserving Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography by John Toll and Best Score by Hans Zimmer to “Shakespeare in Love” and “Saving Private Ryan” (although “Life is Beautiful” took Best Score).

It’s regrettable, because”The Thin Red Line” has yet to be included in the canon of great war films, and ironically Steven Spielberg’s other World War II epic from the same year certainly is. Malick’s film is at least as good, if not better than “Saving Private Ryan.”

I’m looking forward to seeing “The New World” and “Badlands” to finish out all five of Malick’s films.

Rapid Response: Rushmore

When Wes Anderson made “Rushmore,” his second film, he desperately tried to get it screened for the film critic Pauline Kael long after she had retired and was close to her death. I’m not sure if her reaction was good, but I imagine the reason he tried to screen it for her was because his film was simply so different. Being released in 1998, it’s not so much ahead of its time because it kicked off this style of film making for the next decade, but it feels very much like a 2000s movie.

How should Anderson have reacted if he had a feeling he was ushering in the next generation of the movies?

I’ve seen five of six of Anderson’s films, all of them in a peculiar order. “Rushmore” is the movie that put him on the map, along with the film’s co-screenwriter Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman (very young here) and would solidify the sorts of low-key older man roles Bill Murray would take until today.

But my first outing with the director was with “The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou,” a film that is equally odd and clearly identifiable in Anderson’s colorful yet distant visual style, but features Murray in the lead and seems more “classically” funny. Unlike “Rushmore,” it has what you would call “jokes.”

That’s not to say “Rushmore” isn’t funny; it’s hilarious. It’s to say “Rushmore’s” comedy is very much centered around attitude and absurd attention to detail in a quirky screenplay.

But in fact, all of Anderson’s films play and look in this fashion. That’s what makes him striking as a director. It is impossible to watch even a few moments of one of his movies and not recognize it as such.

The fans he established with “Rushmore” would say he fine-tuned his craft to perfection in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” a film I’ll have to revisit but others have heralded as a cult masterpiece. Then he worked with Noah Baumbach (another disciple of his) on “Life Aquatic” and allowed that quirky attitude to meet situational comedy. And Anderson soon got to the point at which his “The Darjeeling Limited” was overstuffed in Anderson’s style that it felt like nothing more than a vehicle for Anderson’s quirks. Finally is “Fantastic Mr. Fox” what I feel is his finest film. That stop-motion animated picture felt so much like an Anderson movie without sacrificing any of its childlike charm that you wonder why he hadn’t made stop-motion animated films his entire career.

Watching “Rushmore,” it did become obvious that his movies have always felt like cartoons of sorts. “Rushmore” is hardly “about” anything, its characters fit into no reasonable human mold, its scenarios are largely absurd and overblown, yet the characters and the world in which they live are so richly “drawn” that it casts a spell nonetheless.

I’m glad I finally got around to seeing “Rushmore,” as I finally understand Anderson’s significance as a modern auteur of film.

Rapid Response: Eraserhead

David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” is one of the most shocking, strange and polarizing cult films ever made.

“Eraserhead” is very likely the most widely seen experimental, avant-garde, cult horror movie ever made.

That does not entail it is the best of its kind or even remotely widely loved.

It is the first feature film directed by David Lynch, and those who are a part of Lynch’s cult followers have not all made the journey beyond “Mulholland Dr.,” “Blue Velvet,” his TV series “Twin Peaks” or “The Elephant Man” to this film.

Those that have are equally polarized to its meaning and to its appeal.

While many today embrace “Blue Velvet” as a masterpiece, there was a time when it was released where critics either heralded it as a masterpiece or shunned it as one of the most shockingly manipulative films ever made. That film earned remarkable critical attention back in 1986, making it the most controversial film of the ’80s, and then it achieved cult blockbuster status in midnight screenings around the country.

“Eraserhead” did not have such attention. It was released in 1977 to low reception at the box office and from critics, but it did begin to cement Lynch as a visual wizard. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Eraserhead”

Rapid Response: Ed Wood

Ed Wood is considered the worst director who ever lived. He held this title for so long, and it wasn’t until recently that my generation has established new cult heroes of awful cinema such as Tommy Wisseau and Uwe Boll and seem to have forgotten Wood somewhat. Beyond that, there is a belief that “Plan 9 from Outer Space” is actually not the worst film ever made but one of the BEST films ever made, that it’s awful sets, performances and effects and complete disregard for continuity was all brilliantly intentional and ironic. Only in the 21st century would such a mindset develop.

It doesn’t help that Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” despite being released in his heyday of the ’90s, despite being one of his most critically acclaimed films and despite starring his eternal frontman Johnny Depp, is one of his least known films amongst the many Burton fanboys still agreeing how great “Alice in Wonderland” was (it’s not).

In this film, Burton doesn’t necessarily vindicate Wood as a genius, but he is sympathetic to him, and he recognizes a certain level of genius (albeit one that doesn’t indicate something “good”) in him absent from most other directors of all time. Depp infuses Wood with a sheer level of optimism and grinning credulity for everything around him, and such was the way Wood directed his movies, in love with every shot and every line of dialogue as a work of art. It’s not that he was blind to his own failure as well as other’s greatness. In his mind, everyone was great.

The film is hilarious, one of my favorite lines being, “Aren’t you a fag? What? No, I’m just a transvestite.” Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, who starred in numerous Wood films, is terrific, as is Bill Murray as an arguably odd and unnecessary character, Bunny Breckenridge. The black and white cinematography has that great ’50s B-Movie vibe, and the scenes in which they recreate “Plan 9 from Outer Space” are priceless in their precision to the film (which I’ve seen, and yes, it is terrible in an amazing way).

I’m not sure on the accuracy of the film historically, but it’s great fun and actually one of Burton’s best.

Rapid Response: The Verdict

In honor of the late great Sidney Lumet, I watched “The Verdict” one of the four films for which he was nominated for Best Director. It’s a courtroom drama starring Paul Newman and written by David Mamet, both of whom were nominated for Oscars as well in 1982.

What sets it apart instantly is how we follow Newman as Frank Galvin, a struggling drunk of an attorney with a reputation for being an ambulance chaser after a divorce, a disbarment hearing and the loss of four cases in the last three years of his career. The movie starts on a note that other films might climax on, showing him trashing his office before his first case in months shows up at his doorstep. It’s a simple malpractice case intended to be settled out of court. He would make a clean $70,000 and the plaintiffs would go away happy too, and although he starts out as a lying dirt bag, putting on performances to explain to his client why he was late and making up pseudonyms and stories to get into funerals and hospitals, he instantly gains a change of heart when he sees his client, a girl in a coma whose life has been taken away by negligent doctors.

As a craggy old man, it’s a bit of a reversal of the norms. Usually the down in the dumps guy is always fighting for social justice and has his morals compromised or vice versa. It was refreshing to see Newman in a weak, old man role rather than his young, good looking self. He was in his early 50s at the time, but he plays a character looking to be in his 60s at least. It’s a stark contrast to even his role reprisal in “The Color of Money,” where his character is old but his spirit is not.

The performances are all great and the dialogue is well written, but I sometimes take exception to courtroom dramas that have flaws in their case proceedings. That’s the point of “The Verdict,” I know, that the system is broken and the poor are powerless, but this movie had a judge out to get Galvin and actually opening his mouth to ask questions to the witness, and later a key testimony is stricken from the record on a technicality. There’s also a big twist that comes later, but it and the character’s other purpose both seemed tacked on.

I did enjoy it, if specifically for Newman’s work and Lumet’s ability to keep the camera hidden and let the characters speak for themselves. But the AFI lists it as the 4th best courtroom drama of all time, and that may be pushing it.

Rapid Response: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I won’t pretend I had any idea what was going on throughout “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” The film is based on Hunter S. Thompson’s famous novel of the same name, and with Terry Gilliam’s psychedelic drug trip filmmaking and Johnny Depp’s off the wall Thompson imitation, the film has become a cult classic.

For two hours, the film is a hodgepodge of hallucinogenic madness created by all the many drugs Thompson himself was addicted to back in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Gilliam’s camera wavers and wobbles as much as the completely doped up characters played by Depp and Benicio Del Toro, and his striking canted angles create for arguably the closest thing to recreating a bad drug trip on film. A good number of critics cited this mess of a movie as an aimless, pointless, repetitive and meaningless disaster, and although I can find just as little of a purpose to it all, the film does cast a considerable spell.

The film is remarkably well made, and performed. For all the Tim Burton fans who marvel at how quirky and weird Johnny Depp’s performances consistently are, they have not seen him here in what is his strangest performance next to Ed Wood. Depp’s mastery of the props like the cigarette holder he’s constantly biting on and simply over his body itself is astounding. A strangely comical moment comes when Depp is whacked out on ether and he loses control over his spinal column. He owns the scene.

I also noted how many other known actors and performers can be found in this 1998 film, including Cameron Diaz, Cristina Ricci, Tobey Maguire, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea, Lyle Lovett, Verne Troyer, Ellen Barkin and by far in the weirdest role of his career, a young but not entirely different looking Jon Hamm as an uncredited hotel clerk.

There’s a cute College Humor video that’s been pulled from their site called “Rango and Loathing in Las Vegas,” in which lines from the “Fear and Loathing” trailer were dubbed over scenes from “Rango,” Johnny Depp’s new animated trip fest, although watching the movie now, the two are hardly comparable.

Rapid Response: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

I chose to watch “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” because of Elizabeth Taylor’s recent death, but I probably would have given any reason to watch a Paul Newman movie. Newman is one of my favorite actors, and he along with Taylor give some of the first great performances of their career in this adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play.

The story follows the Pollitt family throughout the one day of Big Daddy Pollitt’s (Burl Ives) birthday party. He’s arriving home on his 65th birthday from the doctor, who did tests to find if Big Daddy has cancer. The doctor lied and told him he would be fine, but he confides in secret to Big Daddy’s son Brick (Newman) that he will in fact die, and soon. Brick has become an alcoholic and he’s fallen out of love with his wife Maggie (Taylor) following the death of his best friend. Brick’s brother and sister-in-law have five annoying children, who Maggie constantly refers to as “No-Neck Monsters,” and they are trying to secure their proper inheritance.

The film is a stirring family drama that considers from each character their love of the others. Brick has grown annoyed with Maggie, Big Daddy seems to have never loved anyone, and the sister-in-law Mae seems only interested in earning her family fortune. The news of Big Daddy’s illness shakes this family from head to toe, and we truly see these characters grow and change over the course of the day.

The dialogue feels authentic and the performances are rich throughout. Only Newman and Taylor were nominated for Oscars, but the entire supporting cast is just as strong. The film was also nominated for best color cinematography, and while it’s not exactly a visually striking film, there’s something about the way the color camera can reveal Liz Taylor’s remarkable beauty.

Rapid Response: Leaving Las Vegas

There are lots of movies about alcoholics and about prostitutes with a heart of gold. There are even more love stories, and there are many that take place in Las Vegas. “Leaving Las Vegas” is a film about so much more, and it is so devastating and shockingly unreal, it becomes really one of the most moving and heartbreaking tragic romances ever made.

The film follows Nicolas Cage in his Oscar winning performance as Ben Sanderson, a notorious drunkard unlike any ever seen on camera. Cage’s work even within the first 10 minutes of the film before the title credits roll defines him as the epitome of all drunk performances. He is so preposterously absent minded and immersed in his performance that every time he’s on screen we are in awe of this monstrosity, sometimes to comic effect.

After losing his job, he uproots his life and escapes to Las Vegas where he intends to “drink himself to death.” When he meets Sera, played equally brilliantly by Elisabeth Shue, he imagines her to be his angel, someone with whom he wants to do nothing more but be with. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Leaving Las Vegas”

Rapid Response: My Neighbor Totoro

After doing an article on animation in the art world and popular culture for my student publication the IDS WEEKEND, I gained a real appreciation for how impossibly difficult animation is. Hand drawn cel animation demands a level of mastery amongst its animators, and it becomes such a shame when the film put in front of it is so ordinary and drab. “My Neighbor Totoro” is by animation master Hayao Miyazaki, and many consider this film to be his masterpiece.

Thousands have seen this film from 1988 following Disney’s re-release of the film in America with English dubbed voices done by Dakota and Elle Fanning, and they’ve responded so highly because it is a charming family film where everything is beautiful, happy and perfectly imperfect, no one is evil and everything is rich with color, imagination and joy.

Watching it, I found myself with a grin from cheek to cheek throughout its 86 minute run, and while it is rich with a carefree comedy, it’s also wonderfully bright and detailed in its animation of the surrounding world.

For those who have seen a Miyazaki film (and those that have often revere him with cult status) know his admiration for the fantastical and the appreciation for the environmental. “My Neighbor Totoro” does have supernatural elements, but it does not immerse you in them immediately the way “Spirited Away,” his other masterpiece, does, and nor does it hammer home with the green message the way it does in “Princess Mononoke,” also a brilliant film.

It makes “My Neighbor Totoro” the perfect film to show when introducing them to anime, to Miyazaki and possibly even to film itself.

Rapid Response: The Inglorious Bastards

Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film bares nothing in common to “The Inglorious Bastards” except it’s similarly spelled title, but this is still a movie worth watching if nothing else.

Watching the film, it’s easy to see why QT would respond so highly to it. Like the Spaghetti Westerns of which he is such a fan, “The Inglorious Bastards” is a “macaroni combat” film. It has an entirely American (or also German) cast and yet an Italian director and writing team.

It’s also a very well made B-movie cult film, loaded with violent, yet PG-13 rated action and very little overarching plot. Four American soldiers set to be court marshaled, a renegade lieutenant and a stranded German soldier all try and make their way to the Switzerland border before they are enlisted for a secret mission after killing the original team responsible for the mission.

Watching it, I was impressed by just how good the action scenes were. Sparing are the shot/reverse shot action scenes that dominate so many war movies, instead replaced by combat that is constantly in full view, and what’s more is often stealthy and creative rather than just macho and violent.

And yet the film is ridiculous enough to be a barrel of fun. One character is the trouble-making thief and forger, and when another soldier asks him how long he’s been in military jail, he takes off his helmet to reveal hair going down to his shoulders. And that’s later topped when a group of naked German women bathing and playing in a river end up grabbing machine guns and shooting at the Bastards when they see the black guy in their team.

No, it’s not “killin’ natzees,” but it is just good old killing nazis.