Category: Rapid Response

Rapid Response: Barton Fink

It’s a bit hard to imagine a time when the Coens were not living legends and instead were precocious young filmmakers imagining any film they could. “Barton Fink” was their fourth film, and it’s tough to say which film really put them on the map.

This one won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. But it didn’t just win; it was selected unanimously. Seems like it would be a big stepping stone, but their debut “Blood Simple” was so riveting and classically good in its Americana thriller way that they already captured the attention of critics, and “Raising Arizona” became a cult comedy long before “The Big Lebowski” did. Then of course they made “Fargo” in ’96 and struck Oscar gold, and ever since they won their Oscar for “No Country for Old Men,” they’ve had the freedom to do whatever they want as bona-fide auteurs.

But “Barton Fink” is a pivotal film for them. It pairs them with legacy character actors of theirs, including John Turturro, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi. It depicts one of the best films about writing a screenplay since “Sunset Boulevard” by following the neurotic Jewish writer Barton Fink (Turturro) after the massive success of his first play on Broadway. He thinks he can radically change Broadway to be a place for the common man, and from these humble beginnings it evolves into a psychological thriller/dark comedy of sorts. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Barton Fink”

Rapid Response: Tender Mercies

If a movie is good enough, you can enjoy any music in it. I’m not a country music fan, but I’ve been an admirer of the filmmaking, performances and sheer charisma on stage in movies like “Walk the Line,” “Crazy Heart” and now “Tender Mercies.” It’s also hard to deny Robert Duvall’s sheer acting presence in any film he’s in, and this is the one he won his Oscar for, despite being one of the most understated performances of his career.

It’s about a former country music star, Mac Sledge, who lost his fame, fortune and family to the bottle and will now try to make a comeback in a way other than just with his music. It did remind me a lot of “Crazy Heart,” as did Duvall’s character in comparison to Jeff Bridges’ (ironically, Bridges won his Oscar for that role as well), but “Tender Mercies” is in many ways better than it. Rather than show Mac’s plummet, we meet Mac at his low point and see him rise from there, and we also don’t know anything about his past, least of all as a country singer. Instead, the movie floors us with his history all at once when a journalist outs his presence in this small Texas town to the world.

There are no cornball scenes of him falling back on alcohol or montages of him writing music again. It doesn’t even devote too much attention to his marriage to Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), but that’s because there’s more to this character than just his surface level problems. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Tender Mercies”

Rapid Response: L.A. Confidential

I’ve been playing the video game “L.A. Noire” for the last few weeks, and a game critic I admire said the game’s story borrowed heavily from the 1997 “L.A. Confidential.” I had seen the film before, but hadn’t remembered it for whatever reason. And the two stories do have their similarities, but the film’s rich characterization, stark yet colorful cinematography and gritty action sequences just can’t be beat by a video game.

It’s a story of the corrupt and broken Los Angeles police department in the 1950s when the actions of the police could still be brushed under the rug and their image manipulated within the press and how three completely different cops respond to that environment. Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce are the three cops, each of them giving great performances and giving the film more memorable moments than almost any noir made in the ‘40s.

That’s not to say “L.A. Confidential” is the best noir of all time, but the reason it stands out as a unique example of a noir is because while it has the complexity of “The Big Sleep” and the sleazy characters of “Double Indemnity,” it also has the modern vigor and intensity of other ‘90s action films. Continue reading “Rapid Response: L.A. Confidential”

Rapid Response: Wild Strawberries

Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” is a gorgeous film with a tenderness and spirituality that is universal.

One of the most beloved, critical favorite directors of all time is the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Some of his films are dark and haunting, but most are the most profound, spiritual films ever made.

“Wild Strawberries” is one such of those masterpieces. Made in 1957, the same year as one of his other masterpieces, “The Seventh Seal,” Bergman here follows Dr. Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom), an aging and lonely professor going on a road trip to accept an honorary degree.

The first post-credits scene is a bizarre and silent dream sequence, one that exists free of time, space and the rules that populate “Inception.” Rather, this is a film that is reflective and contemplative. It has simple characters but reveals deep truths.

Bergman carries us through themes of pain, love, life and loneliness by introducing us to Dr. Isak, his daughter in law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), and three young travel companions they pick up along the way. Each of them is at critical stages in their lives, and in this long, silent drive they ponder otherwise tough philosophical questions.

The main theme of the film comes out in a touching moment when Marianne reflects on how she departed from her husband, he so cynical and jaded with life that he feels already dead. Why would he want to live in such a terrible world, let alone bring a child into it with his wife, and Isak realizes as he hears this that he is not too different from his son. It is only then that Bergman shows us that removing all the pain in the world from our lives comes at the price of loneliness, leaving us nothing but coldness and death.

In fact, Bergman even explores similar themes of the afterlife as were recently explored in “The Tree of Life” for instance, but he does it so subtly and quaintly, not nearly as epic or grandiose in scale as Malick’s film.

“Wild Strawberries” is a gorgeous film (beautifully shot in black and white by the recently deceased cinematographer Gunnar Fischer) with a tenderness and spirituality that is universal.

Rapid Response: L’Avventura

Roger Ebert wrote about “L’Avventura” in his great movies entry that when he first saw Michelangelo Antonioni’s film in 1960 when he was merely 18 that he didn’t understand it’s greatness, and how could he, he asks? I was excited to see the film after seeing how many best of all time lists the film was on, and although I enjoyed it, I have to say I felt much of the same way.

The film is about a pair of lovers entrenched in decadence but bored beyond anything but their own sexuality. To say I didn’t really get that until I read it and heard it compared to Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” speaks to my own youth and inexperience (I also haven’t seen the Fellini movie).

What I did notice was a film filled with lying, cheating and seduction all photographed in striking black and white and deliberately paced. The film’s simple dialogue reveals some remarkably dry, insouciant characters with nothing but the idea of a forbidden love on their minds.

Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) is engaged to Anna (Lea Massari), and just before they leave to go on a cruise with Anna’s friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), they make her wait as they have sex, with her peering into the window in the distance. Later, Anna acts strangely on the cruise ship, making up a story about a shark and then disappearing on an island.

Sandro and Claudia spend much of their time looking for her, but soon give up and start their own tortured love affair. Naturally, the film is not about Anna’s disappearance but how Claudia unknowingly begins to transform into Anna, filling the void for Sandro.

This is my cursory understanding of the film. I didn’t quite grasp just yet how it was perceived as so radical in 1960, earning boos from a suspicious audience at Cannes but going on to win the Special Jury Prize for its “new film language and beautiful visuals.” It certainly is shocking in its sex appeal for 1960, right on the cusp of the edge of the production code system in America. It also has lovely deep focus cinematography that is at times just chilling.

I’ll have to watch the film again, but some others to watch before then include his other masterpiece “Blow-Up” and the three other movies he made with the legendary Monica Vitti (too bad I missed all those screenings at the IU Cinema).

Rapid Response: Mr. Hulot’s Holiday

“Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” is a film Charlie Chaplin would’ve made in the ’30s. It’s essentially a silent film with minimal dialogue and sound only used in effects to underscore a gag. It’s charm and its set pieces are reminiscent of one of those silent era stragglers, and like Chaplin and the Tramp or Keaton and his stone-faced characters, its protagonist Mr. Hulot would become a more recognizable identity than the man and director who portrayed him in four films, Jacques Tati.

Tati only made five theatrical features in his career, and “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,” his second film, was the one that introduced his alter-ego to the world, never to go back. But Tati’s legacy still lives on long after his death, now in the form of an unfilmed screenplay since made into the animated film “The Illusionist” (by the director of “The Triplets of Belleville”).

This film is famous because of it’s elegant charms. It’s laughs are simplistic in nature but still carefully constructed. We meet Hulot as he drives a sputtering, twirpy and slow car to reach his vacation destination, and when he steps out, he’s a tall, lanky, awkward man. Every step he takes seems deliberate, his hat is pulled down ever so slightly, and his quirks, like saluting an address over a radio, are all enough to make a great silent, French clown.

The film doesn’t attempt to thrill us with stunts the way Keaton would or move us with romance the way Chaplin would. In fact, he’s more like the everyman Harold Lloyd, the third great silent film star of the era. My favorite bit of Hulot’s is when he builds a boat, first painting it on the shore as the tide takes the paint can out to sea and then sends it back on his opposite side just as he reaches for more paint. He then gets in the boat on the ocean and has it collapse on him, sandwiching him in the middle to the point that as he flaps to escape, it resembles a shark approaching the beach.

It’s not precisely a laugh out loud moment, and nothing in the film is. But everything odd that seems to happen so smoothly is purposeful as its underscored by a playful jazz score and xylophone.

“Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” is a cute movie without any complications or deeper meanings. I look forward to watching “Mon Oncle” or “Playtime” and revisiting Monsieur Hulot once more.

Rapid Response: My Left Foot

Daniel Day-Lewis goes way too overboard in Jim Sheridan’s melodramatic biopic about Christy Brown.

My friend has told me how bothered he was when he first read that Daniel Day-Lewis did extreme method acting for Jim Sheridan’s “My Left Foot,” going as far as making cast and crew actually carry him around as he struggled to live his entire life while shooting the movie as a cripple. His work led him to an Oscar in 1989, but his performance as Christy Brown, the genius with cerebral palsy, is constantly on and in actuality crippling to the movie.

Day-Lewis is never not performing in this movie. Even when off screen, we hear Christy’s moans and flailing from the other room over. It’s kind of like Colin Firth recently in “The King’s Speech.” You can see all the work he did right up there on the screen, although even that film had a little more subtlety and charm to it than “My Left Foot” does.

Sheridan’s film is a strict melodrama charting the difficulties Christy had to overcome to become the less-than-a-saint genius he is. We see none of the more peaceful moments of his life where he grew as a painter and a writer, and there are few moments of comedy or laughter that would make Christy’s situation feel less like it was being exploited. Continue reading “Rapid Response: My Left Foot”

Rapid Response: The Hustler

It occurred to me as I was watching “The Hustler” that you could never make a pool/billiards movie today. Not that you couldn’t make a sports movie with its similar structure, but 2011 in America is the wrong time and place for a movie about pool. How many people actually watch it, play it professionally, go to pool halls (is that even a thing anymore?) and least of all attempt to make a living by going around hustling other people through gambling?

That’s not to say “The Hustler” is dated, but the gravitas Robert Rossen’s film pays it seemed a bit much to me. Think of what are intended to be staggeringly dramatic shocks when Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson gets his thumbs broken or realizes that he won’t be playing the rich gentleman in straight pool but in billiards (who knew there was a difference?).

The film was nominated for nine Oscars, won two, put Paul Newman on the map as not just a movie star but a genuine A-lister (for that I am thankful as he is one of my favorite all-time actors) and inspired a quasi-sequel over 20 years later starring Newman, Tom Cruise and directed by Martin Scorsese. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Hustler”

Rapid Response: Crimes and Misdemeanors

Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is one of his finest, yet darkest comedies he’s made. It brings up themes of human morality and meaning in life by dabbling in adultery and other sin, in this case a murder/assassination, which are familiar traits that can be found in one of his other masterpieces, “Hannah and Her Sisters.”

Martin Landau plays a respected ophthalmologist who has been seeing another woman for two years behind his wife’s back. She can’t live without him and wants to reveal herself to his wife, and he can’t deal with her neuroses and threats, so he has his brother, a sketchy con artist, arrange to have her killed.

These scenes are played strictly seriously, and Landau is excellent (he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1989) as he reflects on the religious ideas he sacrificed and forgot, only to have them now gnaw on his conscience as he questions how God judges sinners and what that has to do with his life on Earth in the present. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Crimes and Misdemeanors”

Rapid Response: Dances With Wolves

There was probably a period of time when I could’ve gotten away with not seeing “Dances With Wolves,” the 1990 Best Picture winner, for a little while longer, but the film has gained some attention of late with a Blu-Ray release, comparisons to “Avatar” and Kevin Costner having his first good role in years in “The Company Men.”

Even at three hours in length, the film absorbed me wholly and was quite simple to watch. Its plot is simple and not as poetic or profound as say, Terrence Malick’s Pocahontas story “The New World,” but it’s a gorgeous looking Western with a strong story telling presence. Any comparisons between this and “Avatar” are exaggerated, for while that film is very much a fish-out-of-water parable about Native Americans, the Iraq War and the environment (no intention of overselling James Cameron’s epic), “Dances With Wolves” is very much a story of identity and internal discovery. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Dances With Wolves”