Category: Rapid Response

Rapid Response: Children of Paradise

I watched Marcel Carne’s “Children of Paradise” without any prior knowledge to what it was or the history behind it. The 1945 film is a sprawling epic romance from France set in 1860s Paris. The scale of the film is impressive but not distracting, the performances are spot on and the screenplay is possibly one of the best ever written. Although it does not have the cynical bite of the French New Wave films less than two decades later, it is poetic, witty, deep, complex in its painting of even the smallest characters and wholly alive in its portrayal.

I was simply immersed in the dialogue, specifically with how many intelligent and quotable lines about love, life and philosophy presented themselves so effortlessly. And some of the characters are just so well spoken, most notably the Shakespearean actor Frederick Lemaitre, that you wonder how a script so clever could not be a comedy. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Children of Paradise”

Rapid Response: La Jetee

“La Jetee” is experimental filmmaking at its finest. In 1962, Chris Marker made a short film composed nearly entirely of still frame black and white photographs and told a breathtaking sci-fi mixed with a touching romance in a post-apocalyptic time travel story in the nuclear fallout after World War III.

The score’s cathedral filling elegaic choir immediately draws you into the story of a boy who vividly remembered a beautiful woman on the day the war began. It was the strength of this memory that convinced German scientists he would be appropriate for time travel experiments to go back in time and eventually forward in time to save the present. It wasn’t until the end of the film that I noticed a striking similarity between “La Jetee” and Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys,” but that was no coincidence. Gilliam remade this highly influential film that was the first to consider so strongly and seriously the ramifications of time travel in a time when nuclear war terrified everyone.

As I mentioned, the film is told entirely through still images. Marker did so for the reason that the cinematic experience itself manipulates time in a way he hopes to emulate with his movie. But watching it I began to question what is a film? Does a film come alive in its live action, a moving camera with active cinematography? Or does it take meaning different from that of a photograph because of the way it is edited?

Further, who is the driving force behind the success of a film like this? Is it the photographer who captured every individual frame? Is it the writer who conceived of the post apocalyptic concept before anyone else? Or is it the director who first had the vision to film it in this way?

Well, Marker was both writer and director on the short, and thank goodness for it. His film is visionary and influential, and at 28 minutes, certainly not a difficult film to sit through.

Rapid Response: La Strada

Federico Fellini was put on the map as one of the world’s finest auteurs with his wide array of masterpieces from the ’50s, and “La Strada” is considered one of his finest.

It tells the story of a poor girl, Gelsomina, who learns her sister has died on the road with a traveling sideshow performer. Zampano, the performer with the lungs of steel, pays Gelsomina’s poor family 10,000 lire for her to come away with him, and she goes off into the world as a naive and simple girl ready to learn her life lessons. She loves being on the road and being an artist, but she dislikes Zampano, who’s cruel, insensitive and beats her.

The film is about how she learns to find her freedom and how everyone has a purpose, but she begins the film as no more than a loyal dog or a sheep, as Fellini so unsubtly refers to early on. A lesser film would make Zampano strictly one dimensional and would also be incapable of handling the amount of melodrama that in Fellini’s hands is perfectly convincing, natural and touching.

It also works because of Gelsomina’s (Giulietta Masina) wide range of expressions and emotions conveyed so simply by her. As a clown in Zampano’s show, she somehow reminded me of a female Chaplin. She’s often without words, has a warm and inviting smile and a pout that’s to die for. She’s a unique character who you can’t help but love and feel the deepest of empathy for.

“La Strada” is a moving and heartbreaking film once revered as one of the best ever made. It’s a must see.

Rapid Response: Amarcord

“Amarcord” is a smattering of Italian family life in a small town as recalled in autobiographical form by a director at the end of his career but never more at the top of it.

Federico Fellini’s lovely and hilarious art film, the title of which literally translates into “I Remember,” is an easily accessible and rollicking comedy filled with moments of beauty and empathy.

Some of the moments I enjoyed most were a montage of classroom scenes with a student using a tube of paper to transfer his piss to the front of the class while another is doing a problem at the board. Another was a family dinner moment with everyone lovingly at each others’ throats the way any Italian family would be (We’re not yelling; we’re Italian.). And yet another as a character presumably a young Fellini goes to confession but regrets to tell the priest about all the times he’s touched himself.

All of Fellini’s movies are filled with life and grandeur, even if not all of them are in striking color the way “Amarcord” is. And they’re also all autobiographical in some way, but this is deemed his last masterpiece and one of the best movies ever made because it is a film made by a director considered one of the best of all time around when he made the film who then turned around and made a personal film about all of his joys, fantasies and memories.

It’s a gorgeous film, and probably the best looking comedy ever made outside of maybe “Manhattan.” It’s got all of Fellini’s natural cinematic flourishes and Nino Rota’s enchanting score. “Amarcord” is a real treat, the kind of art film you can show just about anyone and they’ll love, even your Italian mother.

Rapid Response: Black Orpheus

I got a B in Classical Mythology. Could’ve gone better, could’ve gone worse, whatever. If I learned nothing else from the class, I did learn that mythology played a role in ancient Greek society like we cannot imagine, and that in today’s society, the stories and themes are more prevalent than we know.

And upon watching “Black Orpheus,” I was glad to have the background knowledge necessary to fully grasp the greatness of this film.

Marcel Camus’s movie takes place in Rio de Janiero during Carnivale and through this modern lens recreates the heroic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice without ever actually betraying the realism of the setting.

However, the film is loaded with symbolism to the story and most notably its themes, but I can see how a strict reading of the film without the proper context would be an empty one. This is for the reason that “Black Orpheus” is certainly not a performance film, and the many histrionics that compose this tragic love triangle can be a bit much. Further, while it is alive with color from the Rio landscape, the film only has a select few moments of truly cinematic beauty, and for a person confused with the plot, those flashes of greatness may be lost. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Black Orpheus”

Rapid Response: Beauty and the Beast (1946) (La Belle et la Bete)

I hope this headline attracts a lot of Disney fans. Much as a I love “Beauty and the Beast” from 1991, Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” a French film from 1946, is equally as magical, enchanting and lovely as the beloved cartoon.

Cocteau’s film isn’t precisely a kids movie, although based on a children’s fable and certainly easy enough and fantastical enough to be enjoyed by one. It tells the story of which we are now all very much familiar but makes the film wondrous in its employment of trick film shots, special effects, extravagant costumes and more.

The Beast himself (Jean Marais) is a silly but certainly busy looking costume of fur and hair, and within his cursed castle is one of the strangest yet most appealing movie sets in history. Lining the walls are protruding arms holding candelabras, statues that open their eyes and follow the intruders and dark voids leading to stairs that seem to make no spatial sense. Today, the special effects are decidedly cheesy, clearly being nothing more than people sticking their hands through to another side of a set wall, but it’s impossible to care because the film is handled with such poetic grace and beauty in its glowing lighting and shimmering black and white cinematography.

There’s an elegantly done scene where Belle (Josette Day) first enters the Beast’s castle and runs through the enchanted place in slow motion and then literally glides as she floats past heavenly white curtains blowing in through the windows. And nearly the whole film is told with this grace and haunting beauty.

Cocteau was a multi-talented director in his day, also being famous for poetry, surrealist paintings, novels and plays. Roger Ebert wrote in his Great Movies piece about this film that unlike his first film, “Blood of a Poet,” which was “an art film made by a poet,” “‘Beauty and the Beast’ was a poetic film made by an artist.” It’s the reason the film seems so touching today as it explores themes like love and grief, and even a few common to Ancient Greek Tragedy, such as loyalty to a God versus loyalty to family. Cocteau even dabbled in Greek Mythology with his Orphic trilogy.

The fantasy scenes are certainly more magical than the real world scenes, most of which involve Belle’s two sisters (who reminded me more of characters from “Cinderella” than “Beauty and the Beast”), who spend all their time being petty and generally awful. And the end is a cornball moment as well, but there are wondrous cinematic tricks and touches that still make this film a marvel.

Rapid Response: The Lady Eve

Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” is considered, “A frivolous masterpiece. Like “Bringing Up Baby,” “The Lady Eve” is a mixture of visual and verbal slapstick, and of high artifice and pratfalls. Barbara Stanwyck keeps sticking out a sensational leg and Henry Fonda keeps tripping over it,” as Pauline Kael wrote in her book in 1992.

It isn’t often I disagree with the experts, and “The Lady Eve” is on a number of best movies of all time lists, including the Village Voice poll and AFI’s 100 Laughs (#55) and AFI’s 100 Passions (#26), but I didn’t think the film had the speed of a number of other screwball comedies like “Bringing Up Baby” or “His Girl Friday,” nor did I find it to have the wit of Sturges’ own “Sullivan’s Travels,” a film so self aware of the film industry around it that it seems an early example of shattering the fourth wall. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Lady Eve”

Rapid Response: Inherit the Wind

There are few political topics of ethics and morality as relevant today as they were in 1925 as the debate over evolution and Creationism. Stanley Kramer’s “Inherit the Wind,” a film adaptation of a play based on the real life events of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, has aged remarkably well because of it.

The film is accurate in every detail except the names of the main players. It tells how a town arrested a teacher in 1925 for teaching evolution, revered a presidential candidate serving as the prosecutor as a prophet and demanded him hung for spreading his atheist teachings and disputing the holy word of God. The Baltimore Sun sent a reporter and a famous lawyer to defend the teacher, and a battle between the right to think and the belief that faith is more holy than thought raged on. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Inherit the Wind”

Rapid Response: L’Age d’Or

“L’Age d’Or” is a film so weird, depraved, bizarre and perverse that in 1934 it was withdrawn from circulation and not seen again for 65 years. When it was made, it had to be pitched as a madman’s dream to even get a screening, and that screening did not end well. Throughout its 63 minute run, audience members hurled purple paint at the screen and slashed paintings in the theater lobby by Salvador Dali, Joan Miro and other surrealists.

It was made by Luis Bunuel, the father of all surrealist cinema. He was making avant garde films before that was even a genre. His first film, arguably one of the most famous shorts of all time, “Un Chien Andalou,” was just a taste of a mischievous mind at work. In that film that he made with Salvador Dali, he showed a woman’s eye sliced open with a razor blade, a man with ants crawling out of his hand and more. People have analyzed that film for decades to no avail, because the film has no meaning. It’s only significance is that Bunuel imagined it and had the capacity to imagine more. Continue reading “Rapid Response: L’Age d’Or”

Rapid Response: Badlands

I have now seen all of Terrence Malick’s movies… that is until “The Tree of Life” comes out. But having seen his first film last, “Badlands,” it is interesting to see how Malick has grown as a director over time.

The film recreates the story of mass murderer Charles Starkweather and his young girlfriend Carill Ann Fugate, but in the movie they are Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek). These two young kids, he an out-of-work 25-year-old and she a 15-year-old student, are lonely people that simply find each other and discover themselves attached. Their love is hardly a strong connection, and although he looks like James Dean, appearances aren’t really involved either. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Badlands”