Friday, June 12, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 48
[48th of 100]. Audacity is the word I'd use to consider this landmark 1962 short film from Chris Marker. First, there is the ambitious breadth of his tale, a time-hopping science fiction epic about a prisoner from sometime in a post-World War III future, devastated by nuclear war, who is forced to endure the time-traveling experiments of his captors: he is made to go to the pre-war past, to a time he remembers from childhood because of a distinct memory he has of a woman on an observation platform at Orly Airport, and of a man he sees getting killed; he is also made to go to the future to glean advise from a more technologically advanced people what they could do in his present to survive the ravaged world. Needless to say, there are twists and revelations and complications in this complex story -- all told in a running time of 28 minutes. How audacious! Second, the entire movie defies the one requirement you'd think is a definition of a motion picture: it does not move, or to be more precise, it consists entirely of still photos flashed one after the other, save for one short second when something actually moves. How audacious! It feels almost like a throwback to the beginnings of the movies, right up to the horses of Eadweard Muybridge. The story of the film is interesting enough for a consideration -- in fact, its time-traveling tale has influenced such films as Terry Gilliam's
12 Monkeys. But I am more interested in Marker's choice of telling this story, via unmoving images, which feels almost antithetical to the very idea of the movies. It's a self-conscious conceit, and while we know panels in succession can be used to tell a story [hello, comics], we have been programmed to accept movies by the nature of its very name, that it moves. So it shouldn't work -- and yet, to our surprise, after the initial disorientation, the film exerts some raw power to lure us into its dark adventure, the still images invariably flowing along with the somber voice-over narration. It is not for everyone, but this classic taught me what's possible in thinking out of the box, that you can defy your own definitions and expectations and still be whole. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film
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Thursday, June 11, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 47
[47th of 100]. The best horror movie to come out of Philippine cinema does not employ ghosts or creatures from the bowels of lower mythology. But it has a monster in its midst -- the gimlet-eyed father whose Machismo proves murderous -- and it is even scarier because it has all the trappings of reality many of us in the Philippines breathe. We know severe fathers like Dadong Carandang, blustering machos whose harsh words are the laws of the family, whose withering glance settles everything, whose patriarchal privilege means everything he does cannot be questioned. This kind of fatherhood is so common, and is such a given in our culture, that we have even elected it President. To see this film from Mike de Leon now is to recognize anew Philippine society at its most damaged. The film is a shock, but not a surprise. It allows us access to the last few months of the Carandang family, which includes a jittery mother [played by Charito Solis] and a hapless daughter named Mila [played by Charo Santos], both dominated with such precise ownership by the head of the family [played to frightening perfection by Vic Silayan], and ruled over so thoroughly no one even questions the incestuous regard the father may have for the daughter. [That movie date scene is a nightmare.] When she falls for another man [played by Jay Ilagan] -- which is presented by the film as Mila's chance to escape her father's house -- it incites a series of events that would eventually lead to the tragedy we know has to come. The horror is cumulative, but it is thick as the atmosphere of the story, from the claustrophobia of the Carandang bungalow with all its grilled windows and bolted gates, to the tension pervading every family meal. The fact that it is actually based on real events gives the film the added spectre of true crime, like the shivering revelations of Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood. I mention that classic of New Journalism because the film is actually an adaptation of a literary work springing from the same well: Nick Joaquin's crime reportage, "The House on Zapote Street." In this essay and in the figure of Mr. Carandang [although in the essay, his real name is Pablo Cabading], Nick Joaquin -- a much-loved and revered National Artist for Literature -- does his most supreme depiction of the biggest heel he returns to now and again in his works: the Pinoy macho, who can either transform [as in Don Paeng Moreta in "The Summer Solstice"] or remain a heel [as in Don Badoy Montiya in "May Day Eve"]. In Cabading/Carandang, the heel becomes a murderer, and he is more nightmarish because real. What a film this is. De Leon has always struck me as the singular Filipino filmmaker who knew best the medium of film as a storytelling device -- he really should be National Artist for Cinema despite what hounds his reputation -- and of his vision, I think he comes closest to being our very own Stanley Kubrick. This 1981 masterpiece reminds me so much of the tautness of Kubrick's
The Shining, and we see touches of influence such as the rolling opening credits, the haunted house, and the father reduced to preying on his family. They also display the same cold and breathless intelligence in their storytelling, the same meticulousness to their moviemaking, and the same embrace of disparate genres. (De Leon has done a musical [
Kakabakaba Ka Ba?], two social problem films [
Sister Stella L. and
Batch '81], two romantic dramas [
Kung Mangarap Ka't Magising and
Hindi Nahahati ang Langit], a supernatural horror film [
Itim], a metafictional historical film [
Bayaning 3rd World], and a noir crime drama [
Citizen Jake] that serves as his polemic versus current political realities.) To date, this masterpiece of Philippine cinema remains unrestored, and unavailable to most, which is an equal tragedy. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film, philippine cinema
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Wednesday, June 10, 2020
12:00 PM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 24.
Labels: poetry, queer
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10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 46
[46th of 100]. Most would know what to expect in a Quentin Tarantino movie. His signature as a director is more or less set in stone: the ballet of violence, the stylized dialogue, the cribbing from B-movies and East Asian cinema, the playfulness with time and chronology, the electric score of superb musical choices, the casting [and career resurrection] of forgotten film legends, the inevitable show of foot fetish, and lately, the wishful alternations of horrific history. Most would point to
Pulp Fiction as the seminal Tarantino flick embodying many of these quirks in storytelling, and they would probably be right. But for me, the one movie that comes closest to being his masterpiece is his revenge extravaganza starring, and co-created by, Uma Thurman. It has everything you could ask for in a Tarantino movie [except the historical revisionism] -- and all of these Tarantino-esque elements come to an acute focus with the central performance, an energetic, devil-may-care, heartfelt turn by Thurman who should have won an Oscar for this role. As the blood-spattered Bride, we feel her pain [and fears]. As the vengeful snake, we feel for her fury and singular mission to kill those who have done her wrong. But I also love how Tarantino switches so effortlessly between his pop cultural inspirations and references -- from Japanese anime to the American Western, from kung fu movies to grindhouse grit, from Bruce Lee to Sonny Chiba to Gordon Liu [casting the latter two in central roles even] -- and telling them in a terrific mishmash of genres and music and chronology that adds to the shifting of moods, solidifying the story of a woman left for dead in the massacre of her wedding party, and then check-listing all of those she needs to kill for her reprieve, culminating with the title character. It is so epic in its scope and conceit, it had to be told in two films [although I prefer watching the long four-hour cut subtitled "The Whole Bloody Affair"]. Story-wise, this is the most that Tarantino has achieved in terms of cinematic deliciousness -- and also one of the last of his films edited by the late Sally Menke, who knew how exactly to piece together the fabulous shards of Tarantino's vision -- and while the rest of his almost spotless filmmography is fine, fine work, they have absolutely nothing on this truly masterful movie. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film
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Tuesday, June 09, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 45
[45th of 100]. Sometimes I love a film for the place it evokes. When I dream of paradise, for example, I do not think of sun-kissed beaches dotted with palm trees, blue-green waters all around, the sky a clear azure. [You could chalk up that indifference to me growing up an island boy where this was not paradise, it was -- and is -- just my regular, ordinary neighborhood.] My idea of paradise has a name: Koriko, the setting for Studio Ghibli's perfectly realized tale of a girl witch coming of age, and coming into her powers, complete with flying broom and talking cat. She stumbles upon Koriko, an island city patterned after Stockholm and Visby in Sweden, and decides to stay in the city to practice whatever witchcraft skill she develops, mostly because, like us, she has fallen for Koriko's charms. And what's not to like about a place teeming with Romanesque architecture, and trees and parks, and streetcars? But the way Hayao Miyazaki has captured it makes you believe that a good story can be enormously strengthened if it has a strong sense of place. I think this is a major reason why I return to this film now and again, to behold how Miyazaki can create a colourful, beautiful, pulsating place with the medium of animation -- and I realize all of his films have this sheer quality of "place-sense" [the jungles of
Princess Mononoke, the fantastical spa of
Spirited Away, the castle in the sky in
Laputa, the farmhouse in
My Neighbour Totoro, the safflower fields in
Only Yesterday] that is very much a part of the appeal of Studio Ghibli's catalogue. Kiki's story also charms, of course, and it is always refreshing to behold a story where the conflict does not come with a seething antagonist [perhaps an evil witch out to usurp Kiki's place!] but is channeled through a narrative of finding your place, finding your strength, and staying true to who you are. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: cartoons, film
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Monday, June 08, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 44
[44th of 100]. Let me put down some things that might prove an obstacle to your watching Chantal Akerman's 1975 masterpiece. It is 3 hours and 45 minutes long. It is about a homely, middle-aged Belgian housewife named Jeanne Dielman. And the story consists of three acts, composed mostly of long shots, where we follow our protagonist going about her daily household chores: cleaning the house, mending clothes, cooking meals, and, well, hooking up on the side with gentleman callers for some extra income. [There's also a murder.] Sounds like a fun time, right? Truth to tell, the movie is not fun -- but it is totally absorbing. There is something fascinating about watching another human being go about his or her task in long, unbroken takes and in various degrees of concentration. I'm not sure why but apparently it's a thing: it's called "slow cinema," and it has found an unlikely popular niche. There's a TV show in Norway, for example, where millions of people have tuned in to watch footage of trains passing through landscapes, or boats cruising shorelines for hours and hours. Nothing happens, and that is everything. [Or does nothing really happen in "nothing"?] But to go back to the quotidian chronicle of Jeanne Dielman's thorough housekeeping, the faithfulness of the camera's absorption into her work soon begins to create a message. We have been brainwashed by our patriarchal culture to believe that the domestic sphere of life do not make for great narratives -- hence our canons of literature [or cinema] are usually filled with stories of men doing manly things, like going off to war or engaging in assorted manly conflicts, taking note of domestic stories only as tokens [hello, Jane Austen!] or as something to completely ignore, because not important. But here is a film that relentlessly offers only the details of housekeeping, invariably telling you, "Take note of this. Take note of this. Take note of this." Remember what Amy said to Jo near the conclusion of Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women? Jo thinks that the new book she's writing will not create a stir: “Who will be interested in a story of domestic struggles and joys? It doesn’t have any real importance.” But her sister Amy wisely responds, “Maybe. We don’t see these things as important because people don’t write about them.” "No," Jo replies, "writing doesn't confer importance, it reflects it." And then Amy says, "I don't think so. Writing them will make them more important." And that brings me back to Akerman's film: her act of recording Dielman's domestic chores gives them a narrative importance in cinema. If we can go through 20 minutes of war carnage in Steven Spielberg's
Saving Private Ryan, we can go through three hours of a woman washing dishes. But Akerman is interested in doing more: she gives this domestic focus a double-edged sword. Because we actually soon see a woman trapped in a box, not allowed to be more than just a slave to the domestic life. And gradually the film becomes a chronicle of her breaking down little by little, and by the time we get to the end the story has become a tragedy. I love the complexities of this film. I didn't get to see or hear about this film until about 2015, when I was invited to a party by a friend, and her husband just happened to be screening this film while the party was on-going. [I know! Such a strange film to screen in a party -- but then again, I have marvelously strange friends.] I was hooked. Sometimes I screen the film, too, when I go about the task of cleaning my apartment, Jeanne Delmain's household chores reflecting my own. And it deepens with every viewing, teaching me about relevance, about interiority, about the significance of the mundane in our existence. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: feminism, film
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Sunday, June 07, 2020
11:33 PM |
F*cking Up Local Journalism
The latest episode of Patriot Act with Hassan Minhaj on Netflix—about the gradual death of local newspapers [reasons: Facebook and Google are sucking up all ad revenues, and private equity firms are bleeding them dry] and the quick spread of lies and fake news through social media [e.g., that horrid Plandemic documentary]—is so enlightening and depressing at the same time.Labels: issues, journalism, television
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10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 43
[43rd of 100]. When I think of the films of Wong Kar-Wai, I think of fortuity -- the mess of creating art leavened by a singular vision, or maybe just luck, resulting to a finish that somehow sparkles, the jagged edges somehow turned to poetry. You could feel the jaggedness in
Chunking Express or
Days of Being Wild or
Happy Together -- but they have a cumulative power that works, approaching gracefulness even, perhaps magic cobbled in post-production. [And sometimes it doesn't work, like in the labored spread in later films such as
2046, My Blueberry Nights, and
The Grandmaster.] Cineasts know why this is so: the director famously goes into production without a complete script, often with just a glimmer of an idea, following his gut instincts in composing a scene and framing the narrative, and trusts that his actors and collaborators would have enough faith in him to follow his lead into uncharted territory. And then he labors in the editing room, in the piecing together of all the elements in post-production, often taking forever to shape a film into something coherent. [The completed print of 2046 famously arrived very, very late at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, forcing the organizers to issue a rare apology.] You could say Wong Kar-Wai embodies filmmaking as something to be lived dangerously, and much of that spirit seeps into his films as fluid energy, and as poetry. This 2000 contemporary classic is the definitive Wong Kar-Wai, and its influence since then has been considerable. It has made recent important cinephile lists as one of the greatest films ever made, cementing its now iconic stature. I cannot disagree with its current critical assessment, since there is so much about the film that truly remains memorable. Consider its use of Shigeru Umebayashi's "Yumeji's Theme" in its soundtrack, or Maggie Cheung's array of beautiful and fashionable qipao, or the embracing nostalgia for 1960s Hong Kong captured by the camera of Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bin. They all serve so well the drama at its core. It is as if Wong Kar-Wai -- in following the story of a man and a woman, neighbours in a crowded Hong Kong tenement brought together by the apparent infidelity of their respective spouses to each other -- has managed to distill the raw and brilliant emotionality of slowly falling in love even amidst despair. Never has film been this delicious and bracing. I saw this in 2000, when I was just starting out on adult living immediately post-college, in that sliver of time I'd recognize now as my last days of innocence just right before the shattering shocks of September 11 and its aftermath. What it offered me was a view of adulthood as a quagmire of compromises and heartbreaks, but still pungent with poetry if you cared to look for it. Just hearing a measure of Umebayashi's score today takes me back to those heady days, nostalgic for it as the film itself is nostalgic for a lost time. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film
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Saturday, June 06, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 42
[42nd of 100]. The films of Argentina's Marco Berger can be rightfully described as the cinema of furtive looks and longing, with naked -- often frustrated -- desire told in the vocabulary of eyes, quiet moments, and the subtlest of action, so much so that sometimes you can mistake them for silent movies. I like it that way. Isn't that how we first behold love? We don't dare speak, our breaths caught in our throats, and our eyes surreptitiously scanning the objects of our yearning, always from the corners of our eyes, afraid of being found out and yet reckless in our want for attention? This is the province of Berger's preoccupations, and he has done this with increasing virtuosity, from the short films in
Tension Sexual Volume 1: Volatil to the friendship drama in
Plan B, from the sporty conceit of
Taekwondo to the classroom drama of
Ausente. Did I mention that he does all this in the key of gayness? It's all about virile young men yearning for each other, sometimes almost in a subconscious way, not knowing what it's like to take the first step -- which frustrates but also gives us a heightened level of, well, horniness. I make it sound like his films are porn; they're not. There's barely any sex, but there's a lot of eye-fucking, a lot of shirts being taken off, a lot of swimming and showering, a lot of crotch shots. The thing that makes his films extraordinary though is how he implicates us, the viewer, in the whole drama of desiring. He does that by making the camera a stand-in for us, and we become the invisible third person in the room; the camera's lens become our eyes, and we are placed in the position of being privy to all that is unsaid. It makes for labored breathing watching his films, I tell you. This 2013 film finds Berger at the top of his thematic conceits. In it, he tells a simple story about a young man named Martin who has returned to the village of his childhood, only to find out there's no one left for him there -- and is forced to sleep on the streets. In a nearby farm, he chances upon his old childhood friend Eduardo, who is minding the house of his aunt for the summer while attempting to do some writing. Martin asks to do odd jobs around the farm, and Eduardo assents -- and soon they're spending their days and nights together, for meals, for repairs, for swims, and soon each of them starts to feel something for the other, but they refuse to acknowledge it, skirting around their pent-ups desires like fish ignoring the water its swimming in. And the whole film goes like that. In my own work, I've written whole short story collections centering around desire, both sated and unfulfilled, but I've rarely found it depicted so well on screen. Desire in cinema always seem to be a sexual battlefield [from
Fatal Attraction to
Last Tango in Paris, from
Love to
Blue Valentine], or an intellectual exercise in ennui [from
Eyes Wide Shut to
Henry & June, from
The Unbearable Lightness of Being to
Body Heat], or a parable of modern connection [from
Short Bus to
Boogie Nights, from
Shame to
Blue is the Warmest Color], or an anthropology of assorted kinks [from
9½ Weeks to
Nymphomaniac, from
Secretary to
In the Realm of the Senses]. But never just mundane desire. And so I found it amazing that this could be told so succinctly and so fraught with understandable tension on film, the way Berger treats it. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film
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Friday, June 05, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 41
[41st of 100]. What could be a better film for these lockdown times? Here is a story of a man trapped within the confines of a specific place and time, waking up each day to find himself re-living the same 24 hours in the same small town, things changing only in small variations but ultimately following the same relentless blueprint. That it's a comedy only belies the deeper [and often darker] thematic levels this 1993 film dares to reach for: the possibility of redemption and reinvention, the existential claustrophobia of immortality, the power of love, the sweetness of death, the boredom of forever, the ultimacy of jazz. You don't expect to think of any of these when you first get to watch this movie. And perhaps for most people, maybe these things completely escaped them since the story itself is so hilarious, the direction [by Harold Ramis] and screenplay [by Ramis and Danny Rubin] so inventive, and the central performance [by Bill Murray] grounded so well in the star's public persona [which is that of wry, comic curmudgeon], with the added touch of exquisite, frayed humanity. [Murray would later perfect this persona ten years later in Lost in Translation.] We completely accept Phil as an asshole of a weatherman with a high degree of self-regard than he actually deserves. We laugh as he side-eyes the titular groundhog who shares his name and who's actually better at forecasting the weather. But we also completely accept his growing befuddlement with the time loop when it finally happens in full force, his initial prickishness at things [we will totally do that, too], his segue to a death wish that convinces him he's a "god" [completely understandable], and soon -- because what else is there to do? -- his dogged pursuit of reinvention in the name of love. The delight in this film is watching it chart out an interesting character's growth while traversing the same narrative set-up, again and again and again, always finding ways to discover interesting openings in the blueprint of a repeating day. I think we love it because the movie somehow promises us that we have the ability do better, and have x number of chances to do better even if we have royally fucked up. Of course that's mostly a fairy tale in an unforgiving world that constantly moves forward. The film, too, is really a fairy tale of second chances -- and it is a fantastic wish fulfilment of that. Nonetheless, life itself is difficult to bend to our heartfelt schemes. But what if the world has paused, like now? In the quarantine, did you ever find the time o learn to play the piano like Phil did in his own existential lockdown? Did you learn ice sculpture? Did you recite French poetry? I doubt most of us did. So, good for Phil; he remains the embodiment of all our good intentions. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film
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Thursday, June 04, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 40
[40th of 100]. The first time I watched this anime, I was unprepared for its power and its towering impact. At the end of it, when we finally got the certainty of Seita's and Setsuko's fates, I was a mess, I think I actually muttered something like, "How dare an animated film make me cry this much!" It wasn't the first time an animated film moved me: there was the trauma of Bambi's mother's death in my childhood, and there was exhilarating joy when I stumbled upon
The Little Mermaid in high school. And it wasn't as if the week in 2001 when I saw this movie there were no other animated films that also moved me. It was the third day of Eiga Sai, the annual Japanese film festival which was marking a leg of a nationwide tour in Dumaguete with the year's theme being Japanese anime, and we had just screened
Akira on Monday and
Barefoot Gen on Tuesday. [This was the first time anime were being screened in a film festival in Dumaguete, and we were drawing SRO crowds at every screening. I was the local organizer.] When the lights came up on this Isao Takahata contemporary classic, there were no dry eyes in the house -- and the applause was electrifying. It was so well-received that we had to hastily arrange another screening of the film because of the instant demand. In the years hence, I'd recommend this film once in a while to anyone who'd opine to me that animated films -- "kinengkoy" in the local parlance -- were for kids only and shouldn't be taken seriously. To watch these people's faces slowly crumple into tearful grimaces under the weight of the movie's emotional force is a joy to behold. [I've encountered one or two who feel nothing -- and frankly speaking, these people scare me.] I fully understand the impact of the movie. It's a carefully constructed anti-war drama with two winsome children trying to make do with the increasing hardships of war realities in Japan, the narrative a slowly tightening screw that never hesitates to dip into horror and despair. And the Studio Ghibli touches are evocative. I still remember a scene from earlier in the movie when Seita, the older brother of the girl Setsuko, just received devastating news he has no way of breaking to his sister. He finds her in the playground, and somehow the girl intuits the unsaid, and the film decides to stay with their silence, the girl playing quietly on the sand, the boy sitting pensively on the ground in front of a forlorn jungle jim. The tiny details are awesome to behold: a small breeze blows, their tiny bodies twitch, the tears fall -- and everything is suspended in such painful tension we actually feel the ache of the scene. The film taught me to take animation seriously; sometimes the medium can best channel the depths of humanity not even reality captured on film can show. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: cartoons, film
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Wednesday, June 03, 2020
11:24 PM |
Christo, 1935-2020
I'm late to the news and I am shocked that one of my favorite artists has passed away, and I didn't even know. Christo [1935-2020] completely redefined sculptural art for me, and I guess for most people as well. In giving skirts to islands, in draping whole buildings and bridges, in dotting parks with safron arches, he employed the out-of-the-box and the epic, creating both spectacle and art that was notorious, because no one else was doing what he was doing. I thought that was brave. I became an instant fan. The artist Saul Steinberg said of Christo: “He not only invented himself, he invented his art and, even more amazing, he invented his public.” For sure.
Read
The New York Times obituary here.
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5:11 PM |
Happy World Bicycle Day!
The last time I rode a bike was ten years ago, in Casa San Miguel. I had just arrived from the U.S., and Rica Bolipata-Santos whisked me away for a fantastic weekend in Zambales.
Labels: biking, memories
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12:00 PM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 23.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
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Tuesday, June 02, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 39
[39th of 100]. The films of Robert Altman are remarkable for their narrative sprawl, for their huge casts, for their overlapping dialogue. For these same reasons, they do seem to always be an either-you-love-it-or-you-hate-it affair. I think I got lucky that I was attuned to his way of filmmaking with my first brush of Altman cinema, which was 1993's
Short Cuts. Oh, that movie was something else. I was first attracted to it because I was trying to be a writer, and
Short Cuts had a literary pedigree -- an adaptation of the short stories of Raymond Carver. It amazed me how this one film managed to do a seamless interconnecting narrative of disparate stories from Carver's oeuvre. The literary adaptation was the start; and then I noticed the techniques we now call "Altmanesque." It was my gateway to my discovery of
Nashville, M*A*S*H, The Company, A Prairie Home Companion, 3 Women, A Wedding, and
The Player, all of which I love. The Altmanesque don't always land -- consider
Dr. T & the Women or
Prêt-à-Porter -- but even then, they are fascinating misfires. But for me, the ultimate exercise of the Altmanesque has got to be this 2001 film, which comes late in his life. I've always felt this film was the start of Altman feeling his mortality and gunning through work that would be definitive of a master in complete control of his talent. When he died in 2006 -- after surviving and working through a decade with a transplanted heart -- he proved to be at the peak of his artistry, having directed in succession this film about the English aristocracy in a whodunit, a 2003 film about a ballet company, and a 2006 film about radio artists in the twilight of their world. I love all three, but this film is the most delicious of the lot. Part of its appeal is its exuberant casting of top tier British actors playing out an upstairs/downstairs drama that would directly lead to
Downtown Abbey on television. [
Downton's creator was this film's Oscar-winning screenwriter.] Another one is its use of the murder mystery as a McGuffin, since the film is more concerned with the subtleties of class more than the identification of the murderer. Still another one is how drenched in atmosphere it is, correct to the exquisite detail, immersing us thoroughly in a vanished gilded world. That an American director could pull off a very British movie is amazing enough. This film is a gift. I hope it can be your introduction to the joys of an Altman movie. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film
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Monday, June 01, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 38
[38th of 100]. Every generation gets their own
The Wizard of Oz, a cinematic adventure fantasy that is definitive of its childhood years. This was mine. I came of age in the 1990s but I grew up in the 1980s, in a pop culture landscape that now gets the nostalgia treatment via movie remakes and things like Stranger Things. This was the time of Betamax, when the movies finally arrived in the comforts of family homes, ready to be devoured in ways unseen before. I remember watching again and again films like
Clash of the Titans and
E.T. and
Bluebeard's Ghost and all of the
James Bond movies -- really the staples of my childhood's introduction to popular film. This 1985 caper occupied a central place in my imagination -- it was peopled with kids in the margins, just like me, stumbling into a search for a treasure to save their neighborhood from becoming a parking lot. And then there's so much more: gangsters and monsters and gadgets and hidden enclaves and pirates and maps and clues to an unfolding mystery. It's a circus of things that were delightful to a child dreaming of ways to escape the humdrum. Truth to tell, the whole enterprise was dreamed up by executive producer Steven Spielberg when he wondered to himself: "What adventures would a child dream up on a rainy day?" That question is the very heart of this film. It sustains childlike wonder, and it is to its credit that so many years later, it has not lost its magic even for the grownups we have become. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film
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Sunday, May 31, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 37
[37th of 100]. Tom Hanks' Joe Fox in
You've Got Mail makes an interesting point in one of his missives to Meg Ryan's Kathleen Kelly, which he revisits all throughout Nora Ephron's romantic comedy classic: that everything important he has learned in life he learned from this Francis Ford Coppola classic trilogy. And Joe Fox is right. What's not to learn from the greatest gangster epic ever made? Here are a few nuggets of wisdom to live by: "Never discuss the family business." "Always make them an offer they can't refuse." "Go to the mattresses." "Revenge is a dish best served cold." "A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemies overestimate your faults." "Never let anyone know what you're thinking." "A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man." "Leave the gun, take the cannoli." [Knowing these lines also make the likes of Joe Fox the manliest of cinevores.] A lot of these quotes, of course, are cold advise in surviving a rotten, dangerous world -- but you could make the point that the world is exactly like that. And so we watch, and we absorb. I watch this trilogy at least once a year to remind me of that, but of course also other things: that cinematic genius can [often] elevate pulp fiction; that a confluence of masters -- the direction and screenplay of Coppola [with novelist Mario Puzo], the cinematography of Gordon Willis, the music of Nino Rota, the editing by William Reynolds, Peter Zinner, Barry Malkin, Richard Marks, Lisa Fruchtman, and Walter Murch, the powerhouse cast of Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, John Cazale, Robert De Niro, Andy Garcia, Eli Wallach, Joe Mantegna, George Hamilton, Bridget Fonda, among others -- can indeed create film entertainment of the highest order; and that Coppola's generation of filmmakers was a massive wave that did away with the stodginess of the old studio system, bringing newfound vitality to filmmaking, but also with it the hubris that would create its own end. It's a time capsule, and a fount of wisdom. What's the film trilogy?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film
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Saturday, May 30, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 36
[36th of 100]. Everyone who has ever been a teenager, at least starting in the 1980s, has been through a John Hughes phase, or at least have a favorite John Hughes movie. It's an inevitability. For many, it's
The Breakfast Club, an unlikely teen movie where all high school stereotypes we know gather for a Saturday detention in the library, and then after the expected hostility erupts between them as tokens of their cliques, gradually begin to mesh, then to talk, and then to share their feelings -- earning Hughes the moniker "the philosopher of the teenage soul" from critic Roger Ebert. Many love the zaniness of
Weird Science, the invisibility parable of
Sixteen Candles, the class divide love story of
Pretty in Pink [or its reverse,
Some Kind of Wonderful]. I love most of all this 1986 movie about a popular, clever, devil-may-care kid with all the obvious privileges who transcends high school cliques, and makes it his business to get away with playing hooky on a beautiful Chicago day with his girlfriend and his neurotic best friend. It is a movie of exquisite, if bordering on fantastical, execution, made alluring by what it has in excess: mood sharpened by charm. You see it in our protagonist constantly breaking the fourth wall to apprise us of the details of his shenanigans. You see it in his ingenuity and drive just to have a good time, including commandeering a city parade for the musical joy of all. You see it in the film's embrace of grea Chicago sites -- from Willis Tower to Wrigley Field, from the Art Institute to Lake Shore Drive, embuing them with the sheen of "cool." [That impressionistic Art Institute sequence is one for the books.] You see it in the cruel but hilarious comeuppance of our bumbling antagonist, Vice Principal Rooney, or the knowing "This is all unfair!" frustrations of Ginny, our protagonist's sister -- both of whom provide the perfect, and complementary, contrast to our hero's titular day-off. We really should be seething at our protagonist's abundant selfishness and utter disregard for almost everything -- he lies and manipulates, too -- but he is played with such charm by Matthew Broderick that we somehow forgive him for his trespasses, and understand the urge to ditch school. [But he does get away with things a little too much, no?] I have probably seen this movie a thousand times, and it has never failed to entertain -- and to think I stumbled on it quite by accident in high school, renting out the Betamax purely from the promise of Broderick's smirky mug on the cassette jacket. It was my introduction to the teenage world of John Hughes. I don't question why Hughes's films seem to transcend generations of teenage lives, from Generation Xers to Millennials, with young people today still making a claim of "being seen" in a John Hughes film, and not just depicted as aspirational Hollywood fodder played by actors who are clearly no longer teenagers. Hughes "saw" them. He respected how they saw the world from the narrow viewpoint of that magnificent but also horrible time of being adolescents, ravaged by hormones, a nebulous sense of self, and the constant demands for conformity. He gave them the words with which they can try to express themselves, and to find the answers to the question, "Who the hell am I?" What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
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Friday, May 29, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 35
[35th of 100]. This movie is the gateway drug to the surreal world of the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. I prefer this 1967 classic to his more celebrated 1972 film
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie because in the latter film, the usual targets of his withering critique -- the upper class and the clergy -- may still bear the brunt of his harsh allegories but there is a sense of doing so in a deflected form of affection. In this movie, there is no such accommodation: it is harsh, and it is damning, and it is funny. Perhaps it is best to say now that the film is, of course, a comedy. A black comedy if you want to call it that. I mention
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie because the two films are often seen as bookends of the same conceit. In
Bourgeoisie, wealthy people sit down to have dinner together, again and again, yet are always interrupted by some circumstances, and the food never comes. In this film, we get the opposite: a wealthy Spanish couple in the time of Franco hosts a dinner party -- but when the meal is over, everyone finds it mysteriously impossible to leave the room, even if there is no physical barrier to their departure. They settle in for the night, realizing only the severity of their predicament by morning. As the days go by, they hang on to the civility expected of their class, only to find it a frayed thing -- they become hungry, and dirty, and hysterical, eventually turning on one another in a kind of
Lord of the Flies for the moneyed class. It is a delicious social satire that also delights with its unexplained surreal elements: What to make of the chained bear in the kitchen, or the sheep? Or the chicken claws in a handbag? Or the crawling disembodied hand? Why do the servants except for the majordomo hasten to leave the house even before the dinner guests start arriving? What to make of the fact that things seem to happen twice? Early in the evening of the dinner, the guests enter the house twice. During dinner, the host gives the same toast twice, to different reactions from the guests. Everything seems to beg for an interpretation, and I think that's one of the appeals of this movie: it's an intriguing puzzle you simply wish to solve. It was that inclination that first made me embrace the movie when I first saw it in college -- and I soon came to realize it's just one in the long run of delightful pranks Buñuel peppered his works with. Sure they are allegories, and sure you can read them however you want. My singular pleasure now is just to take them in and laugh at the demented sense of humour of this extraordinary filmmaker. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film
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Thursday, May 28, 2020
4:33 PM |
Larry Kramer, 1935-2020
I've been holding off giving my usual personal tributes to people I've admired when they pass on simply because there has been too much of these passings on of late. But I couldn't ignore Larry Kramer. When I began studying gay literature with some seriousness in the 2000s, his name was the one name that kept popping up, and quickly I learned who he was: author of the play
The Normal Heart and the novel
Faggots, angry man of American gay literature, and the activist who led the chorus of angry voices damning the American establishment for turning a blind eye to the ravages wrought by the early waves of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. He is probably the most important figure in gay literature and LGBTQ activism, and for all that he has done, he should be remembered.
Read
The New York Times obituary here.
Labels: obituary, people, queer, writers
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