August 2022

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.

      By his fourth picture, “Vivre Sa Vie” (My Life to Live), Godard seems to have run out of ideas, offering up this disjointed—though coherent compared to later works—tale of a young French woman Nana (his paramour at the time Anna Karina) who, lacking money to hold on to her apartment, takes up prostitution.

     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 19^th 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.

 

    Rafelson opens the film, before the credits, as few would dare, with a full-screen closeup of Nicholson in a dark room telling a story about himself and his brother when they were kids. It continues for close to five minutes as he calmly remembers the death of his grandfather as the two boys look on. They became “accomplices forever.” When a red light starts flashing on the side of Nicholson’s face, it’s clear that he’s on the radio, finishing up his 3 a.m. show.

    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.  

     Gable is just about perfect for this role; a slight variation of Rhett Butler and a template for many of the performances he gave for the next 20 years of his short career. As an actor, he wasn’t on the level of contemporaries Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy, but he never lost his screen charisma that made him a star by 1931. And, unlike his more talented brethren, he was extraordinary consistent. I recently watched “Call of the Wild” (1935), “Lone Star” (1950), “Soldier of Fortune” (1955) and “It Started in Naples” (1960) and he’s equally fine in each. No matter the quality of the film, Gable seemed to always give his all.

    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 21^st 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.

 

 PHOTOS:

Jean-Luc Godard

Daniel Kaluuya in "Nope"  (Universal Pictures)

Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson in "The King of Marvin Gardens" (Columbia Pictures)

Clark Gable and Lana Turner in "Honky Tonk"  (MGM)