VIVRE
SA VIE (1962) and HELAS POUR MOI (1993)
As the tributes poured in following the
death of Jean-Luc Godard, most declaring him as the most influential filmmaker
of his generation, I rewatched a few of his films in hopes of seeing that
brilliance others write about.
While I haven’t seen his entire
filmography, I have seen 20 of his films and, aside from his audacious,
entertaining and, yes, influential debut, “Breathless” (1960), there’s an
argument to be made that he’s the least interesting director to emerge from the
French New Wave. Truffaut, Chabrol, Melville, Rohmer, Resnais all show a
stronger sense of storytelling and character development while also having
something intelligent to say. In most cases, their films are the opposite of
what Hollywood movies represent; in Godard’s case, I’d have a hard time
classifying his work as filmmaking.
The camera lingers over Karina while she
has pointless conversations with a variety of men and, at one point, the film turns
into a Q&A about the life of a hooker. Clearly that was provocative in 1962
but it’s rather dull stuff unless you're 12.
As the years went on, Godard’s movies became less
cinematic and more didactic, essentially excuses for long discussions of philosophical
issues. At one point in the mid-1960s, he all but gave up on commercial
filmmaking and focused on anti-war, anti-capitalism propaganda films.
“Helas Pour Moi” (Oh, Woe Is Me) is an odd
mixture of politics and fantasy—God takes over the body of Simon (Gérard
Depardieu) so he can sleep with his wife, Rachel. Scenes rarely connect to each
other and most of the talk is little more than platitudes.
I also rewatched “Goodbye to Language”
(2015), his last film to receive mainstream attention. While just over an hour,
it’s hard to sit through. He seems especially fascinated by Mao and Hitler and
shooting over saturated forest and streams. And while one could make a case
that nearly every film of the 1960s and ‘70s was sexist, Godard never grew up.
He seems especially obsessed with the female body, filling the screen with
nudity without a point.
To me, Godard’s art was artless; his
films a scattershot of images coupled with actors speaking to the audience and
not to each other. I’m all for the cinema as a form of personal expression, but
Godard’s movies remind me of the work of an earnest film school undergrad who
just read Marx.
I have always been arrogant about my
opinions—I’m right and everyone who disagrees is wrong—but in this case, I
think everyone else is right and I’m wrong. There’s got to be something there
if all these critics and filmmakers who I admire find Godard so important. Not
to mention the straight line between Godard and two of my favorite directors,
David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch. I’m just not seeing or hearing what they do.
More provocateur than filmmaker, Godard
led the way to push cinema away from the constraints of Hollywood, gave fiery
interviews and always had a pithy quote: “The cinema is truth 24
frames-per-second”; “He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those
who stand and watch.”
For me, all those films after “Breathless”
left me in the void without a compass.
NOPE
(2022)
What distinguishes a good sci-fi film
isn’t how sophisticated the special effects are, but that it never allows those
effects to overshadow the people. Despite the popularity of “Star Wars,” “Star
Trek” and “Aliens” from an early era, the last 20 years have been the golden
era of sci-fi, highlighted by “Interstellar,” “Gravity,” “Arrival,’ “Children
of Men,” a better version of “Star Trek” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” while the
Marvel Universe ruled the box office.
The new Jordan Peele (“Get Out,” “Us”)
movie doesn’t quite reach the level of those films, but it smartly puts two
interesting characters and how they deal with supernatural events at the center
of the story.
Daniel Kaluuya, who won a supporting
actor Oscar for “Judas and the Black Messiah” and scored a nomination for
Peele’s debut “Get Out,” plays a horse trainer who seems unprepared to run his
uncle’s business of renting out the animals to Hollywood after the old man dies
mysteriously.
Joining Kaluuya’s laconic OJ (for Otis Jr.
but there must be something symbolic about that name) in the business is his
more flamboyant, self-promoting sister Emerald (Keke Palmer, who’s been in
movies since she was 10), who dreams of some kind of fame.
She sees a chance when a UFO hovers above
their ranch in Agua Dulce, a desert area in northern LA County. OJ and Emerald
reluctantly recruit a twitchy tech head working at Fry’s (gone but not
forgotten) with the hope of capturing the alien ship on video. Later they are joined by a wild-eyed
cinematographer played by Michael Wincott in a part that seemed to be written
for Michael McConaughey.
But, not surprisingly, things turn ugly,
highlighted by a visit by the alien entity to a nearby cowboy town tourist trap
run by a former TV child star Jupe (Steven Yeun). The thrice-repeated backstory
about the show Jupe starred in as a child, involving a homicidal chimp, felt
like it was left over from another movie pitch (one David Lynch might direct).
Peele is clearly saying something about celebrity and Hollywood—everyone
is connected to the movie business somehow—but it wasn’t clear to me: maybe
that it will suck the life out of you if you hang around long enough. Or, more simply, that the desire for fame has
surpassed the quest for real success in this still evolving century.
Superbly directed by Peele and
photographed by Hoyte van Hoytema, “Nope” is long, deliberate and, of course,
supernaturally ridiculous, but the banter between OJ and Emerald keeps it real.
Like in “Get Out,” Kaluuya’s expressive stare is worth a thousand words.
EMILY
THE CRIMINAL (2022)
Aubrey Plaza, memorable as a celebrity
stalker in the 2017 indie “Ingrid Goes West,” delivers an equally feisty and slightly
unhinged performance in this story of a young woman whose desperate search for
financial stability turns criminal.
Because of an aggravated assault charge
(a love affair gone wrong), Emily, a talented illustrator who dropped out of
school, struggles to find a decent job and instead is stuck delivering food for
a restaurant. Then her co-worker connects her to Youcef (an excellent Theo
Rossi), who runs a credit-card scam. Liking the quick money, she starts working
her own side scams, which Theo gets a cut.
Beyond the life of criminal hustling, the
well directed and written debut by John Patton Ford takes aim at the barriers
of gaining entry to corporate America. When her best friend Liz (Megalyn
Echikunwoke), after much delay, arranges an interview for Emily with her boss
(Gina Gershon), Emily discovers that the position is unpaid. She vents her
anger for all the so-called “interns” of the world as Gershon’s character
explains that she should be thanking her for the opportunity.
Unfortunately, the film leaves the
impression that the unfair treatment Emily finds in the legit world excuses her
criminal behavior. It explains it, but hardly gives her a free pass.
THREE
TOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING (2022)
After about 1000 years I started to doze
off. I found virtually nothing of interest in these slow-moving, uninvolving
recollections of an immoral genie (called a Djinn here), who is unleased from
his bottle by a mild-mannered literature professor.
After figuring out what’s what, Alithea (Tilda
Swinton) insists that the Djinn (Idris Elba) tell the story of his life.
Starting with his love affair with the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum) through a
much more recent involvement with an inventive third wife (Burcu Golgedar) of a
repulsive 19th Century aristocrat, the Djinn’s life is depicted in
vivid detail as he explains it to Alithea. But because these are all presented
as stories told rather than lived, the tales are more like turning the pages of
a glossy, coffee-table book rather than watching a motion picture. The
cinematography by veteran John Seale (“Mad Max: Fury Road,” Oscar winner for
“The English Patient”) is a bit too gorgeous.
Until
we arrive at the end of the film, Swinton’s Alithea almost disappears amid the
outlandish history of Djinn.
Directed by “Mad Max” auteur George Miller,
adapting a novella by AS Byatt, the picture’s attempt to extoll the virtues of
storytelling don’t make for much a film.
THE
KING OF MARVIN GARDENS (1972)
Bob Rafelson, who died in July at the age
of 89, directed just 10 features, but his contributions to American culture
outweighed his rather slim filmography.
First of all, he helped create “The
Monkees,” turning an offbeat comedy series about four “hippie” musicians into a
television phenom. The anarchistic adventures and catchy pop music of Micky,
Davy, Peter and Mike topped the charts and were the center of Rafelson’s
chaotic directing debut, “Head” (1968).
Secondly, he provided the opportunity for
Jack Nicholson to fully emerge from the drive-in movie world (“Easy Rider” had
offered a glimpse) and become the standard-bearer of a new kind of movie
leading man; a rebel who was fighting himself and society to understand what it
was all about.
And, with “Five Easy Pieces” (1970) and
“The King of Marvin Gardens” (1972), Rafelson became a crucial architect of a
New Wave of American cinema, which undercut the studio system’s way of making
movies and introduced themes, characters, attitudes and language that rarely
made appearances in films during the previous four decades.
Though this iconoclast was never able to
reach the heights he touched with the two Nicholson movies, all his features
were interesting, the best of the rest being a sizzling remake of the film noir
classic “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1981), with Nicholson and Jessica
Lange; “Mountains of the Moon” (1990), his sweeping telling of the Burton-Speke
expedition to find the source of the Nile; and “Blood and Wine” (1996) in which
Nicholson and Michael Caine play jewel thieves. His last picture, the barely
released “No Good Deed” was another crime film, starring Samuel L. Jackson and
based on a Dashiell Hammett story.
While “Five Easy Pieces” is his
masterpiece, among the 50 greatest American films, his less well-known “Marvin
Gardens” is essential viewing, one of the best depictions of the love-hate
relationship between brothers.
The original title of the script by Jacob
Brackman, an Esquire movie reviewer, from Rafelson’s idea, was “The Philosopher
King”—the role Nicholson’s sullen, thoughtful David Staebler plays in this
morality tale opposite his fast-talking con-man brother Jason (Bruce Dern). It
shouldn’t be a surprise, considering that Jason has 70 percent of the dialogue
that the actors were original set to play the opposite roles.
Dern has rarely been better as he schemes to
find funding to build a casino on an uninhabited Hawaiian island, but even when
David is standing silently in the background it’s always Nicholson’s film.
(Though in her key scenes, Ellen Burstyn is just as riveting as Jason’s depressed,
aging companion.)
Set in the Monopoly world of a nearly
deserted, off-season Atlantic City—yes, life is just a game for some—this movie
sees America as a shell of its former self; a crumbling dream with the dreamers
drifting from one grift to another.
The film ends with David back on his show
“etc.” offering his version of his trip to the Jersey coast (a monologue
written by Nicholson) and then returns to his home that he shares with his
grandfather, alive and well.
If
Rafelson didn’t live up to early expectations, you certainly can see his
influence in the works of some of the best filmmakers of the 1970s: Coppola,
Ashby, Pakula, Ritchie. Not a bad legacy.
HONKY
TONK (1941)
All these years, I never made an effort to
watch this popular frontier romance, assuming that it recycled the same cliches
of the genre. And it does: Shady but good-looking man, fast with the women and
his six-shooter, becomes civic minded, helping create a real community out of a
Western outpost.
But the film, despite its meaningless,
generic title, offers something more. Though a mainstream commercial product,
starting Clark Gable, still the “King of Hollywood,” and the newly crowned
glamour girl, 20-year-old Lana Turner, and directed by MGM veteran Jack Conway
(who had been directing pictures since De Mille and Griffith relocated to
Hollywood), it dares to show what most pro-capitalism American movies ignore.
From the very start, America was built on corruption, from newly appointed
governors, local judges or struggling shopkeepers everyone was getting their
cut of the action. Bribery and illicitly gained profits, taken at the end of a
gun or under pressure from powerful officials, were what turned America, at
least west of the Mississippi, from a dusty frontier to thriving money-making
machine, be it Las Vegas or Dodge City.
Gable, just two years removed from his
signature role as Rhett Butler in “Gone with the Wind,” plays Candy Johnson,
who, when the movie starts, is literally about to be tarred and feathered,
along with his partner The Sniper (a low-key Chill Wills), for scamming the
locals.
That’s when Candy realizes that there are
other ways to con the public. In the ironically named Pleasantville, he finds
an old friend (Frank Morgan), who now is a county judge facing trouble for
taking public money to maintain his drinking. (I doubt if there is any film
made before 1950 that doesn’t feature a falling-down drunk, usually as a comic
aside.) And, just arriving from Boston, is the judge’s daughter, Elizabeth
(Turner), who quickly becomes the focus of Candy’s charming nature.
Candy hoodwinks the good citizens into
thinking he’s better than the last bunch of crooks by building a church and a
school and pushes out a corrupt sheriff, but he keeps getting richer and richer.
And even after he marries Elizabeth, he keeps his old flame “Gold Dust” (the
quintessential saloon gal Claire Trevor) nearby.
The key scene takes place in the large
dining room at his palatial estate, where Candy serves as host for the state’s
governor and other legislators, all happy to look the other way in regards to
Johnson’s skimming of the public till as long as they get their cut. They all
laugh at the drunken judge who condemns Candy. There in miniature, is the
foundation of our country. (While another half of the country prospered on the
back of inhumane slave labor.)
While I’m not trying to make a case for
“Honky Tonk” as great film, but one can’t help but admire its undersold, but
clear message that systemic corruption was as much a part of the winning of the
West as saloons, poker games and main street shootouts.
A director of over 100 films starting in
1912, Conway’s best works include the sound version of “The Unholy Three”
(1930), Lon Chaney final film; “Viva Villa! (1934) with Wallace Beery, “A Tale
of Two Cities” (1935) and numerous other Gable movies.
MRS.
HARRIS GOES TO PARIS (2022)
This lightweight fairytale-like picture, a
well-acted version of the Lifetime movie template, serves as an entertaining
vehicle for one of Britain’s finest actresses, Lesley Manville.
Rarely in the spotlight, the 66-year-old
has been stealing scenes in mostly English movies since the mid-1980s. In 2020, she was extraordinary as Liam Neeson’s
wife, fighting breast cancer, in “Ordinary Love.”
Her Ada Harris is a World War II widow
working as a housekeeper and seamstress in late 1950s London. But once a
wealthy client shows her a dress purchased at the famous French fashion house
Christian Dior, Ada has stars in her eyes.
After her financial luck takes a turn (an
unexpected veteran’s widow pension, winnings from the dog track and a reward
for a good deed), she’s off to Paris to buy her Dior dress.
The film loses any sense of gritty, post-war
reality it had in England when Harris lands in the City of Lights. It grows
increasingly silly as she becomes enmeshed with the staff at
Dior--match-making, leading a strike by workers and butting heads with the
uptight store manager (the great French actress Isabelle Huppert). It’s almost
as if the Paris scenes are but Mrs. Harris’ daydream.
Yet the resourceful acting of Manville
keeps the film upright. She’s never less than a salt-of-the-earth, humble
working woman of the 1950s.
She’s been disappearing in roles since she
became a regular in Mike Leigh pictures, including “High Hopes” (1988),
“Secrets & Lies” (1996) and “Topsy Turvy” (1999). In 2002, Leigh gave her a
more substantial part in “All or Nothing”
as
Timothy Spall’s wife working through the ennui of a couple’s middle age. It was
one of the year’s best performances, but she topped herself in Leigh’s “Another
Year” (2010) as Mary, the needy alcoholic who clings to a much happier married
couple. The way she cuts to the emotional bone of this sad character’s
loneliness is as heartbreakingly real a performance as you are likely to see.
The script earned an Oscar nomination for Leigh, but Manville was ignored.
Finally, in P.T. Anderson’s “Phantom
Thread” (2017), as the devoted sister who cleans up after her irresponsible
brother’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) messes, she scored an Oscar nomination. The next
year, she took on the difficult role of Mary Tyrone in a stage production of
Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” which had a short
run in Los Angeles. Both she and Jeremy Irons were nothing less than
mesmerizing in the play, the most emotionally draining work of the American
theater.
This year, Manville plays Princess
Margaret in the latest season of “The Crown” along with the scheming Marquise
de Merteuil in a series version of “Dangerous Liaisons” on Starz.
VENGEANCE
(2022)
Any story that sends a hotshot New York
writer to rural West Texas in search of the problem with America risks being
damned as elitist as it solicits laughs from the stereotype of poor white Southerners.
But this movie’s insightful, if wordy,
script by star-director B.J. Novak and the sympathetic characters he creates
manage to spread the satire evenly.
Novak plays Ben Manalowitz, who we first
meet at a party holding a facile, sexist discussion about women with his buddy
John (musician John Mayer). But he’s really there to convince a radio exec
Eloise (Issa Rae) that he should do a podcast on the issues that divide
America. Then, later that night, on cue, he’s bullied into attending the
funeral of a women he barely knew months earlier. Abby had led her family to
believe they had a real relationship.
For
the first 30 minutes, “Vengeance” plays like a dumb comedy, with Ben unable to
express himself and the dead woman’s family overwhelm him with Southern
hospitality and insults. Then brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook) insists that Ben stick
around and find out who murdered his sister—she apparently overdosed (law
enforcement could care less) after a weekly outdoor party.
Though Ben thinks Ty is nuts, he sees the
dead girl and her conspiracy-following family perfect fodder for his podcast and
gets the family to agree to be recorded.
His
investigation leads him to an assorted collection of locals, including smooth-talking
record producer Quentin (Ashton Kutcher), who recorded Abby before she
travelled to New York to seek fame, but not much clarity.
The film captures both the good and bad of
rural America (you don’t have to be from Texas to know these people) but tries
too hard to make Ben equally foolish. Sometimes it’s hard to believe he’s a
successful writer.
This first feature film from Novak, best
known as Ryan Howard from the TV show “The Office,” reveals a writer-director
interested in ideas—especially the nationwide obsession to be famous (a theme
the film shares with “Nope”)—and a willingness to let characters talk at length,
a rarity in 21st Century Hollywood films.
THE
MIRACLE MAN (1932)
It’s unusual when a Hollywood picture deals
with religious faith, but it was a much safer bet 90 years ago when a large
majority of the country were regular church-goers. But this 1932 remake of a
silent film goes a step further, presenting a faith healer as legitimate.
The movie begins with a quartet of
pickpockets and small-time hustlers—Doc (Chester Morris), Helen (Sylvia
Sidney), Harry (Ned Sparks) and The Frog (John Wray)—slipping away from New
York cops and regrouping in a small upstate town where Doc finds a philosophical
religious man called “The Patriarch.”
Doc quickly sets up the scam: Helen
arrives in town claiming to be the Patriarch’s long-lost niece, while the Frog,
who fakes being a paraplegic, crawling across streets and floors, shows up to be
“cured.” Once the word gets out, Doc and Helen plan to rake in donations from
all over the country. The plan looks like a sure thing as the Patriarch, played
by silent film director Hobart Bosworth, seems to be in a constant stupor.
But things take a strange turn when the
Patriarch actually does heal people, including a crippled local boy and a
society woman. Oddly, there’s no long line of people seeking cures—apparently
the filmmakers decided that would muck up the story, which, surprisingly, comes
from a stage play by legendary song-and-dance man George M. Cohan. Director Norman
Z. McLeod, best known for Marx Brothers and W.C. Field comedies, doesn’t bring
much to the film, lingering over closeups of star Morris, waiting, it seems,
for some sign of acting to kick in.
As usual, Sidney, one of the finest
actresses of early sound, is completely convincing as she struggles with her
role in the scam. In 1931 alone, she starring in Rouben Mamoulian’s “City
Streets,” Josef von Sternberg’s “An American Tragedy” (from Theodore Dreiser’s
novel) and King Vidor’s “Street Scenes.” Later in the 1930s, she headlined
Fritz Lang’s “Fury” and “You Only Live Once,” William Wyler’s “Dead End” and
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Sabotage.” Though few actors have ever worked with so many
great filmmakers in a single decade, she fell out of favor in the 1940s—when she
was still in her 30s—and then turned to TV in the 1950s.
In 1973, she scored a supporting actress
Oscar nomination playing Joanne Woodward’s mother in “Summer Wishes, Winter
Dreams” and continued to work steadily until 1996—her last film was as the
grandma in “Mars Attacks!”
The 1919 original “Miracle Man,” a lost
film, is most famous for Lon Chaney’s ability to distort his limbs as The Frog.
John Wray, who played the drill sergeant in “All Quiet on the Western Front,”
does a good job following the master of offbeat characters.
