Friday, August 03, 2012
Edward Copeland's Top 100 of 2012 (80-61)
People like to mock Frank Capra as simple-minded at times and this film especially, but it remains a rousing indictment of corruption in Washington that echoes to this very day. It's too bad that a filibuster doesn't still mean that a senator has to do what Jefferson Smith did and hold the floor for as long as he can instead of the procedural gimmick it's turned into today that prevents legislation from moving out of the Senate. Still, whenever I catch Mr. Smith, no matter how long it has been on, I have to watch until the end. It's the curse of being both a movie buff and a political junkie. In a way, with recent events, it seems to have a bit of timeliness beneath the treacle and idealistic love of how this country should work.
When people think Ingmar Bergman, they think heavy, but here flows one of his lightest and most enjoyable concoctions. In an introduction made for the Criterion edition of the film, Bergman remarks how Smiles changed everything for him. At the time, he was broke and living off the actress Bibi Andersson when his studio entered the film at Cannes and it won a prize (best poetic humor) and became an international success. Bergman says it was a turning point for both him and his studio, earning him free rein to go on and make even more of the greatest films of all time. The film contains obvious echoes of The Rules of the Game, though Smiles more than stands on its own with its tale of love and adultery, male vanity and female cunning, aging and youth. It's not only a delight as a film but inspired the great Stephen Sondheim to write one of his earliest great scores as composer and lyricist in A Little Night Music. Isn't it rich?
The Weinstein P.R. machine spun so much press off this film's twist that I think it takes away from how great a movie had developed before that plot turn even happens. I was fortunate enough to see it early, before the hype went into overdrive, so I thought another story turn was the "twist" and relaxed and the real twist took me by complete, wonderful surprise. I hope someday new viewers will be able to see the film without knowing what lies ahead. Even if they don’t though, they will see a great study in human nature as well as great performances from Stephen Rea, Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson and Jaye Davidson.
While Spike Lee still has talent to spare, he has yet to come close to equaling the power of his third film and its study of one hot day in Bedford Stuy. His strongest work has flourished in his documentaries, especially his pair of post-Katrina films When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise and the feature Inside Man. Something tells me he’ll come back eventually. More than 20 years later, Do the Right Thing retains the power it unleashed in 1989 as that breed of film that has become rarer and rarer: the conversation starter.
The film marketed as Bergman's "last feature" truly is one of his best, painting a vast semiautobiographical canvas of two children from a large theatrical family who find their lives upended when their mother weds an authoritarian monster of a minister. Beyond the narrative, Sven Nykvist's photography, Anna Asp’s art direction, Susanne Lingheim’s sets and Marik Vos’ costumes present a sumptuous feast for the eyes. Its three-hour running time flies by and watching the 312-minute cut Bergman originally made for Swedish television proves even more rewarding.
Bogie got one of his best roles, John Huston made one of his greatest films (winning his only two Oscars for writing and directing) and his old man got a supporting actor Oscar in the deal as well. When you see Walter Huston do his mocking, triumphant little dance, you want to join in. Sierra Madre wasn’t John Huston’s only classic starring Humphrey Bogart released in 1948 either. The two also collaborated on Key Largo, While it’s good, it’s this film with its prospecting south of the border that’s the real keeper.
Here comes Howard Hawks again and Cary Grant (playing a nerd, believe it or not) as well. (I haven't added it up, but I suspect Grant appears in more movies on this list than any other actor). Katharine Hepburn's most inspired performance powers this screwiest of screwball comedies as her flighty socialite wreaks havoc on the world of Grant’s mild-mannered paleontologist. All of this and a leopard or two, too.
Salieri may consider himself the "patron saint of mediocrity," but little can be called mediocre about Forman's adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play. F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce were both brilliant and you can't really argue against its musical score. The unitiated might suspect slowgoing in a period costume drama such as this, but they haven't seen enough and certainly not Amadeus which overflows with humor and light as well as its darker elements.
There wouldn't be a Breakfast Club without a Virginia Woolf, but I don't hold that against Edward Albee or his great play turned into a superb movie by Mike Nichols. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were never better and while the truth games and verbal battles make you cringe, you can't avert your eyes from their power. Albee's play marks its 50th anniversary this year and it still packs a punch a half-century later.
To me, one of the crimes of both versions of the AFI list is that Psycho is the only representation of black-and-white Hitchcock, as if no one noticed him until he started working in color, but nothing is further from the truth and Notorious is one of the best examples of that. The kiss between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant remains one of the most sensual images ever put on celluloid and Claude Rains is superb as the conflicted heavy of the piece.
This film shouldn't work and it probably wouldn't if its stellar cast hadn't saved it. Kazan and Budd Schulberg's attempt to justify their actions during the McCarthy hearings doesn't quite work as an allegory, but the film itself works as a powerful story thanks to the indelible performances it contains. Brando earns the big kudos but the solid work of Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden and especially Lee J. Cobb shouldn't be forgotten.
As digital projection sounds the death knell for celluloid, I feel even more grateful that when I saw Lawrence of Arabia for the first time, I saw the restored, 70mm print in a theater released for its 25th anniversary. I never could watch the cropped, pan-and-scan versions on TV. It’s a shame that more classics fail to get re-released outside major markets, but with the digital future, it’s almost moot. As for the film itself, if it weren't for the weaker second half, this movie that almost defines epic would have landed higher on this list. Still, with its stunning cinematography, gorgeous score and great Peter O'Toole performance, it belongs on the list nonetheless.
When I made my 2007 list, I admitted being torn between including 8½ or Nights of Cabiria to represent Fellini and I ended up opting for 8½. In the intervening five years, I’ve watched both films again and my preference clearly leans to Cabiria. While Giulietta Masina's remarkable performance as the title character might break your heart at times, more often than not, she'll leave you smiling, even if it's a sad smile. While Masina initially wins you over when seeing the film the first few times, on later viewings I've found the movie itself richer. It's constructed almost as a perfect circle, a ring of hell if you will, from which Cabiria would like to escape. "Everyone has a secret agony," a character tells her at one point and as much as Cabiria might try to avoid it, she hopes to abandon her life. First, she sees fun in a brief sojourn with a celebrated movie star (Amedeo Narrazi) that in a way predicts Pretty Woman some 30 years down the road, though without the manufactured happy ending. Fellini grounds Nights of Cabiria in reality, a world where the poor are forced to live in caves and anyone can be a victim. In another incident, when Cabiria realizes that once again she's been gypped, it leads to an ending that manages to be touching, magical and inspiring, all at the same time, ending with one of film's greatest close-ups.
Kirk Douglas probably was miscast, but this early Kubrick doesn't get the kudos it deserves and it certainly bears up better over the years than some of his later works such as A Clockwork Orange. Paths of Glory centers on one particular battle between the French and the German, where the poor French troops are outmanned and outgunned, but that's no excuse for disobeying orders in the eyes of one general. Kubrick often tackled the futility of war and its inherent contradictions, but he really knocked it out of the park with this one.
Of the many collaborations between Zhang Yimou and Gong Li, this one remains my favorite, even though it's less heralded than many of his others. Gong and Ge You portray a married couple and we follow their lives in a kaleidoscopic tour of Chinese history, beginning with the civil war in the 1940s and passing through The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and a few years beyond. Epic while staying focused and personal in the telling, if you haven't seen To Live, you should. This might end up being Zhang’s masterpiece.
Another instance of the all-too-rare occurrence of a sequel that's better the film that spawned it. Whale's funny follow-up to his own Frankenstein contains most of the classic moments you probably associate with the story: the blind hermit, "She's alive!" and much more. It also adds some pure wackiness such as Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius, with madder plans than Colin Clive’s original Dr. Frankenstein himself. We also get to hear Boris Karloff speak his first words as the monster and Elsa Lanchester play a dual role: Mary Shelley in a funny prologue setting up the sequel and as the bride herself. It’s a hoot from start to finish — and even manages to toss in a scare or two amidst the laughs.
Just as McCabe & Mrs. Miller isn't exactly a Western, it's not strictly a character study either. First and foremost, it's a Robert Altman film, one of those times when the late director got a hold of financing, cameras, actors, a crew and the things he needed for what intrigued him at that moment and did his cinematic dance, part strictly thought out, much improvised and lots that came about by happy accident. That style didn't always work throughout his long career, but when it did, magic resulted. As Pauline Kael wrote in her July 3, 1971, review of the film in The New Yorker, "Though Altman's method is a step toward a new kind of movie naturalism, the technique may seem mannered to those who are put off by the violation of custom — as if he simply didn't want to be straightforward about his storytelling.…He can't be straightforward in the old way, because he's improvising meanings and connections, trying to find his movie in the course of making it…" It took me about three viewings to warm to McCabe. Now, it stands as one of my very favorite Altman films and I can see it climbing higher in the future the more I watch it.
Even with a distance of more than a decade, I find it difficult deciding where to place newer films amid the established classics, but Memento continues to excite me more than any other new movie I saw between 1998 and 2002. The film surpasses the accusations of detractors who see it as merely a gimmick. It also manages to be both funny and heartbreaking as it spins the tale of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a man suffering from short-term memory loss that prevents him from remembering anything after a single day. Not helpful when you’re trying to solve your wife’s murder. The film that put Nolan on the map remains my favorite of his works. Pearce gives a great performance as do Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Anne Moss. It feels as if in the wake of Nolan’s Batman films and Inception, Memento has slipped from many long-term memories. It shouldn’t be forgotten.
When I first saw de Sica's masterpiece, English speakers knew it as The Bicycle Thief. It's only been recently that we've learned the more correct English translation. I guess his film still has things to teach us today. De Sica mastered the art of making films that plucked on a viewer’s heart strings without being so sentimental that it bred resentment. Shoeshine plays like a rough draft for Bicycle Thieves and he later made the great Umberto D., but I have to opt for the simple heartbreaking beauty of Bicycle Thieves and that unforgettable final shot.
A meditation on life, the universe and everything and, for a film whose story begins with a chess game between a knight back from the Crusades and Death for the knight's life as the Black Plague spreads chaos around them, it has a bit more humor than you'd expect. The film also marked the first teaming of Bergman with Max von Sydow, who portrays the knight. It sets the stage for many of the themes Bergman would return again and again throughout his career dealing with God, faith and so much more.
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Labels: Albee, Altman, Capra, Christopher Nolan, De Sica, Fellini, Hawks, Hitchcock, Huston, Ingmar Bergman, Kazan, Kubrick, Lean, Lists, Nichols, Sondheim, Spike Lee, Whale, Zhang Yimou
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Thursday, January 12, 2012
The lawn care truck thief
By Edward Copeland
When the Screen Actors Guild announced its award nominations this year, a couple of head scratchers popped up in its film nominations — a known actor in an unfamiliar film and an unfamiliar actor in a movie that only sounded vaguely recognizable. I discussed the former when I wrote about Nick Nolte in the hokey and formulaic Warrior. The latter came with the nomination of Demián Bichir as best actor for A Better Life. Thankfully, A Better Life and Bichir turn out to be both a better film and better performance than Nolte and Warrior.
A Better Life seeks to be in its own way an American variation on Vittorio De Sica's Italian neo-realist classic Bicycle Thieves, formerly known as The Bicycle Thief much as Beijing once was Peking. The additional layer added to A Better Life comes from the plight of undocumented immigrants to the United States who sneak into the U.S. hoping to find what the title promises. Given the recent economic circumstances here, you'd think would-be illegal immigrants would think long and hard before making the treacherous border crossing to be greeted for use as fodder in rabid political attacks on top of the difficulties of trying to get by. (As I'm writing this, an MSNBC promo just asked, "Is the American Dream in danger of extinction?" I always follow George Carlin's line, "They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.")
I digress. Chris Weitz produced and directed A Better Life and boy has Weitz's career traveled all over the map since he first came to prominence in the late '90s as a producer, a writer and an actor. He and his brother Paul co-wrote the animated Antz; he executive produced and occasionally wrote the TV remake of Fantasy Island; he produced most of the American Pie series; he played Chuck to Mike White's Buck in Miguel Arteta's you'll-like-it-or-hate-it Chuck and Buck; he and his brother Paul were two of the many writers credited with Nutty Professor II: The Klumps: he wrote and directed the great About a Boy with his brother Paul (Peter Hedges also contributed to the screenplay); he wrote and directed The Golden Compass; he produced the great films Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and A Single Man; and he directed The Twilight Saga: New Moon.
Now, after this unusual mixture of lowbrow comedies, big-budget films and critical darlings, Weitz helms a low-budget (It's funny — according to Box Office Mojo, its budget was $10 million, and I consider this low budget. The original Star Wars had a $11 million budget.) human story such as A Better Life featuring no well-known actors and a story by Roger L. Simon (whose previous credits include an Oscar nomination with Paul Mazursky for adapted screenplay for Enemies, A Love Story) and a screenplay by Eric Eason (who wrote and directed a 2002 feature called Manito that won many film festival prizes and was nominated at the Independent Spirit Awards that year for best first feature and Eason was named "Someone to Watch").
Somehow, this small film cut through the cacophony that comes during awards season and landed Bichir lead actor nominations at both SAG and the Independent Spirit Awards. Bichir plays Carlos Galindo, who has been living illegally in Los Angeles for decades. In fact, since his relocation he had a son, Luis (José Julián), pretty much your typical American teen whose relationship with dad can be frosty.
Carlos raises Luis alone — it's never quite clear what happened to his mother — doing his best to give his son a life he never had. He worries about the influence of gangs at Luis' high school and lives in constant fear that immigration agents will bust Carlos and deport him back to Mexico, separating him from his American-born son. Carlos keeps his head down as much as possible, working for another immigrant, Blasco Martinez (Joaquin Cosio), who has built up his own lawn care business in the wealthier section of L.A.
One day, Blasco tells Carlos that he's finally made enough money so he can return to Mexico and buy a farm. He offers to sell Carlos his truck, equipment and client list. Carlos hesitates, worried as usual about what happens if he gets pulled over without a driver's license. Besides, he isn't sure he should spend the money.
Meanwhile, Luis faces the usual troubles of a 15-year-old boy dealing with raging hormones and high school bullies. He gets into a fight with some of the seedier elements on campus and the security guard (Trampas Thompson) insists he lift his shirt so he can photograph his tattoos because the school won't tolerate gangs. Luis insists that he neither has tattoos nor belongs to a gang and he's making assumptions just because he's Hispanic, but the guard makes him do it anyway. Luis complies and shows the guard his bare skin, which gets photographed anyway.
Carlos' sister Anita (Dolores Heredia), who also lives in L.A., hears about her brother's opportunity and loans him the cash to take over Blasco's business. Carlos feels confidant for a change and his usual friction-filled relationship with Luis improves. On his first day with the truck, Carlos scouts among the many immigrants looking for day laborer's work. Unfortunately, he makes the wrong pick, choosing a man named Santiago (Carlos Linares). When they get to a yard with a tall tree and Carlo shows Santiago how they scale it to do the work, Santiago takes the opportunity to steal the truck with all the equipment.
Most of the remainder of the movie involves Carlos and Luis attempting to locate Santiago and the truck that holds the key to their life right now. Carlos keeps his anger and anxiety mostly in check, but Luis doesn't hide his hotheadedness, ready to give anyone a beatdown. It's during this journey when we get a better understanding of the father.
Bichir gets some nice speeches, especially when he explains to his son what he meant to him when he first saw him. The actor, who has been working for a long time including playing Castro in Steven Soderbergh's Che and having the recurring role of Esteban Reyes on Showtime's Weeds. His performance isn't showy, but quiet and touching at times, which makes the fact it received any awards notice all the more surprising. As I always like to remind people during this season, though I can never recall who said it, the prizes usually go to those "who act the most, not the best."
Young Julián delivers a very good performance as well in his first English-language feature film.
Weitz properly modulates the pacing of A Better Life, never rushing to try to force it into a suspense tale. The screenplay doesn't really contain that many surprises though its closing image is a heart-rending one.
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Labels: 10s, Animation, Awards, Carlin, De Sica, Mazursky, Nolte, Soderbergh, Star Wars, Television
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Sunday, December 25, 2011
A human life is strictly as frail and fleeting as the morning dew
"There was not a lot of dialogue. The titles were just to keep you up. It's the visual stimulation that hits the audience. That's the reason for film. Otherwise, we might as well turn the light out and call it radio." — Robert Altman
By Edward Copeland
Akira Kurosawa was 40 years old when he made the film that truly made moviegoers outside his native Japan take notice. Rashomon began filming July 7, 1950, and, in amazing turnaround time, debuted in Japan on Aug. 25 of that same year. However, the rest of the world didn't get to see Rashomon until 1951, starting with the Venice Film Festival in September where it won both the Golden Lion and the Italian Film Critics Award for best film. It unspooled next in the U.S., where it premiered 60 years ago today.
The Altman quote that I began this piece with comes from an introduction he taped for the Criterion Collection DVD release of Rashomon in 2002. While Altman certainly had it right about the visual wonders that Kurosawa summons in Rashomon, with the invaluable help of cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, with whom Kurosawa was working with for the first time, ironically (given the movie's subject), I
believe the other much-missed filmmaker's memory may have been faulty when it came to the amount of dialogue. Granted, Rashomon isn't overly chatty, but the film says nearly as much verbally as visually, not that I fault Altman — those images beckon you to lose yourself in them, even if subtitles get missed as a consequence. After all, Kurosawa himself admitted in his autobiography Something Like an Autobiography that he tried in Rashomon to recapture the spirit of silent movies that film had lost when sound came along. Criterion printed an excerpt of his memoir in the booklet that accompanied the DVD. "Since the advent of the talkies in the 1930s, I felt, we had misplaced and forgotten what was so wonderful about the old silent movies. I was aware of the aesthetic loss as a constant irritation. I sensed a need to go back to the origins of the motion picture to find this peculiar beauty again; I had to go back into the past," Kurosawa wrote. "In particular, I believed that there was something to be learned from the spirit of the French avant-garde films of the 1920s. Yet in Japan at this time we had no film library. I had to forage for old films, and try to remember the structure of those I had seen as a boy, ruminating over the aesthetics that had made them special. Rashomon would be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas and wishes growing out of my silent-film research."
Know what tickles me about writing a tribute to this film? Rashomon liberates me to go into excruciating detail (if I desire) about scenes — for instance, I can describe the scene where The Woman (Machiko Kyô) turns on both her husband, the samurai (Masayuki Mori), and the infamous bandit Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune), accusing them both of being weak and egging them on to fight to the death over who gets to keep her — because that's merely one version of what happened that led to the samurai's death. No character in the movie nor any viewer in the audience can declare with 100% certainty which version, if any, depicts the truth. Rashomon makes the need for giving readers spoiler warnings moot, praise be not only to Kurosawa but to his co-writer Shinobu Hashimoto and especially Ryûnosuke Akutagawa, who wrote the two short stories, "In a Grove" and "Rashomon," which inspired Kurosawa to make the film in the first place. Once Kurosawa had all his elements in place — cast, crew, shooting locations, set being constructed — even his assistant directors came to the director and admitted that the screenplay "baffled" them and asked Kurosawa to explain its meaning. In his autobiography, Kurosawa wrote, “'Please read it again more carefully,' I told them. 'If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.' But they wouldn’t leave. 'We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.' For their persistence, I gave them this simple explanation:
"Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings–the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave — even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.
"After I finished, two of the three assistant directors nodded and said they would try reading the script again. They got up to leave, but the third, who was the chief, remained unconvinced. He left with an angry look on his face. (As it turned out, this chief assistant director and I never did get along. I still regret that in the end I had to ask for his resignation. But, aside from this, the work went well.)" It saddens me the number of books I'll never find time to read. I wish I'd read Kurosawa's autobiography at a younger age — I have
so many unfinished and unstarted books lying around the house as it is. I digress. Rashomon may have puzzled Kurosawa's assistant directors, but I grasped it from the first time I saw it as a teen. Then again, perhaps geographical differences explain the comprehension gap. Sure — they shared a common country of origin with Kurosawa, but the director had immersed himself so deeply into Western culture through movies and literature, he might as well have hailed from the U.S. as Altman and I did, despite the large differences in our three ages. In fact, in my sophomore year of high school, not long after seeing Rashomon for the first time, my English teacher gave us an assignment to write something about our own time period based on the form of Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, which we'd just studied in clsss. The teacher made no requirement that our piece be true or realistic so I titled mine Rashomon, American Style and fabricated an attack on a classmate and wrote five letters by different people, each giving different accounts of what took place, though my piece didn't dwell remotely in philosophical realms — it aimed solely at the satirical side of life. I'm proud to say I received an A on the assignment. With that little anecdote, I've finally remembered to give a broad outline of the plot of Rashomon, which I've neglected to do so far. As much as I do love Rashomon, it might not make the top five if I ranked my favorite Kurosawa films. I know it doesn't make the top four. For Altman, it and Throne of Blood were his two favorites. In that introduction, Altman said:
"Rashomon is the most interesting, for me, of Kurosawa's films.…The main thing here is that when one sees a film you see the characters on screen.…You see very specific things — you see a tree, you see a sword — so one takes that as truth, but in this film, you take it as truth and then you find out it's not necessarily true and you see these various versions of the episode that has taken place that these people are talking about. You're never told which is true and which isn't true which leads you to the proper conclusion that it's all true and none of it's true. It becomes a poem and it cracks this visual thing that we have in our minds that if we see it, it must be a fact. In reading, in radio — where you don't have these specific visuals — your mind is making them up. What my mind makes up and what your mind makes up…is never the same."
Since I've avoided, not on purpose mind you, giving even a cursory synopsis or Rashomon's plot, I suppose now offers as good a place as any other to pen a brief summary for anyone unfamiliar with the film (in the unlikely event that their eyes remain fixed on this Web page this deep into the post). The title refers, according to Kurosawa's autobiography, the main gate to the outer precincts of Japan's 11th century capital city. As the movie opens, a Commoner (Kichijirô Ueda) seeks refuge from a heavy downpour of rain beneath the gate where a Buddhist Priest (Minoru Chiaki) and a Woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) sit visibly shaken, repeating variations of how they just don't understand and never have encountered a story as strange as this one. This intrigues The Commoner, who pumps both men for information about their rambling. "War, earthquakes, winds, fire, famine, the plague — years where it's been nothing but disasters. And
bandits…every night. I've seen so many men getting killed like insects, but even I have never heard a story as horrible as this," The Priest tells him. "This time, I may finally lose my faith in the human soul." When The Priest says that, The Commoner starts to lose interest. He just wanted to get out of the rain, not listen to a sermon, he responds, then The Woodcutter shares his involvement in the story and we get our first flashback, filmed as a long tracking shot through mountainous woods behind from behind the Woodcutter before it circles around him and continues as he walks toward it — stopping when he discovers a woman's white hat and veil hanging off a bush. He continues on and finds another item on the path until he finally stumbles upon the corpse of The Man and runs back to report it to the police. The Commoner learns that The Priest and The Woodcutter had come to the gate after being at the courthouse where they listened to the testimony of the famous bandit Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune), who was apprehended by a Policeman (Daisuke Katô); The Woman (Machiko Kyô), who was discovered at a temple; and even The Man (Masayuki Mori), who may have been murdered, but tells his version of events through a Medium (Noriko Honma). No one's version of the events matches the others' completely and The Woodcutter believes everyone, even the dead man, lied. "Dead men tell no lies," The Priest insists. "It's human to lie. Most of the time we can't even be honest with ourselves," The Commoner replies, repeating nearly verbatim what Kurosawa told his confused assistant directors. Most character lists you'll find for Rashomon agree to call Chiaki and Shimura's characters The Priest and The Woodcutter, but you'll find many names Ueda's role such as The Commoner, The Peasant, The Beggar, etc. Within the movie itself, only Mifune's bandit receives a name, Tajômaru. Somehow though IMDb gives full names to The Man and The Woman who could be called The Husband and The Wife or The Samurai and The Wife, but never get proper names.While I didn't intend for this anniversary tribute to end up reading as if it were a paid advertisement for the Criterion DVD of Rashomon, the disc also contains excerpts from the documentary The World of Kazuo Miyagawa where the late director of photography explains how he pulled off the complicated dolly shot of the Woodcutter's trek through the woods as well as other tricks on Rashomon. The movie marked his first teaming with Kurosawa. The Woodcutter's walk was one of the very first shots scheduled, so Miyagawa set out to impress the director. He had the track built so the camera could do a 180-degree turn and then at the proper time had Takashi Shimura cross over the track to allow the camera to view the actor from the front. Some other Rashomon secrets that Miyagawa (and Kurosawa) share
in the excerpt involve what tricks they employed to get desired effects in the woods of the Nara, Japan, region where they filmed because the trees stood unusually tall. As a result, it interfered with Kurosawa's wish for shadows and light reflecting on the actors' faces at various times. Miyagawa used the same tool to help with both problems — mirrors. To deflect the distant rays of the suns on to the performers, Miyagawa stole the full-length mirror from the costume department and set it up so it would catch the sunlight and direct it exactly where Kurosawa sought to aim it. The director also sought to darken portions of the actors' faces with tree branches — which would have been fine if the cast all had been about 8 feet tall. Since they weren't, they jerry-rigged some mesh out of sight of the camera and attached branches to it. After that, they again made use of the mirror to reflect the shadows of the standalone branches where they wanted on the actors. One other detail the documentary excerpt includes came only from Kurosawa, who talked about the trouble of filming rain. He said that when you want to film rain, it always had to be a downpour otherwise, the rain never shows up on the film. Even then, in the case of Rashomon, he admits that they tinted the color of the rain to make certain it could be seen. Though Miyagawa and Kurosawa worked together well, they only teamed up two more times since the two men seldom worked at the same Japanese studio at the same time. Their next collaboration didn't occur until Yojimbo and, though he wasn't the d.p., Miyagawa did consult on the photography for Kagemusha. Since Miyagawa served as cinematographer on more than 80 features between 1938 and 1991, he did work with many of the biggest names in Japanese cinema at least once (often multiple times) including Kon Ichikawa, Takashi Imai, Hiroshi Inagaki, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Kenji Mizoguchi(including Sansho the Bailiff and Ugetsu), Yasujirô Ozu (on Floating Weeds) and Masahiro Shinoda, among many others.
Though the importance of the visual ingredients of Rashomon shouldn't be understated, I believe that ultimately the film's success depends on the two separate trio of performers. First, we have Shimura, Chiaki and Ueda as The Woodcutter, The Priest and The Commoner, essentially static characters that function as narrators of a sort as well as our surrogates, debating the philosophical ideas that the movie raises. The Priest struggles with his faith in light of what he has heard while The Woodcutter already has abandoned his on the basis of what he has heard and saw. The Commoner, who receives all the information about the events in the woods second hand, serves both as the audience surrogate and as
someone who long ago realized that the world doesn't function in black-and-white terms and that horrible things happen every day. When he first arrives, The Priest informs him that a man has been murdered. "So what? Only one? Why, up on top of this gate, there's always five or six bodies. No one worries about them," The Commoner responds. At a later point, The Priest seems unable to listen to any more. "I don't want to hear it. No more horror stories," The Priest pleads. The Commoner fails to react with the shock of the other two men. "They are common stories these days. I even heard that the demon living here in Rashomon fled in fear of the ferocity of man," The Commoner tells him. That part always reminds me whenever a news anchor reports on a workplace shooting somewhere and leads his or her report with someone being "shocked." How many of these over how many decades do these news readers have to talk about until they feel it's OK for them to drop the illusion of being shocked by them? I've also heard there's gambling at Rick's. All three actors serve their roles well but, as always, I'm amazed at the physical changes Takashi Shimura undergoes in his various Kurosawa roles. From a "modern" detective his own age in Stray Dog to The Woodcutter here, from the old dying civil servant in Ikiru to the main samurai in Seven Samurai — I'd be hard-pressed at any time to tell you how old he really was or what he looked like in everyday life. By cheating, I can find his age. He was 45 when he made Rashomon. He died in 1982 at 76.
The second trio's task provides a more difficult acting challenge for Mifune, Kyô and Mori. The three performers aren't simply portraying The Bandit Tajômaru, The Woman and The Man — the film requires them to play widely divergent versions of those characters while still staying within the roles' essential frameworks. All three do well but, as you'd expect, Mifune stands out, though Kyô gives him a run for his money as The Woman. When Tajômaru gives his version of events, he testifies about The Woman's reaction, saying, "Her face turns pale. She stares at me with frozen eyes, her expression intense like a child's." However, when The Woman gives her own testimony, The Woodcutter and The Priest who were at the courthouse say she was docile and nothing like Tajômaru described. The Man's tale given through The Medium paints yet another portrait.
When The Woodcutter finally comes clean about witnessing the events instead of just finding The Man's body afterward as he said before, he draws a sketch of The Woman as completely manipulative and evil. Kyô excels at all these variations. There comes a moment in one version where she's lying on the ground sobbing and suddenly sits bolt upright and lambastes both men that will send a chill down your spine. Mifune's most consistent quality is The Bandit's maniacal laugh, but his face seems incapable of exhausting possible expressions. He can be menacing, romantic, insane, sad — you name it, he probably plumbs it as Tajômaru. They even go so far as to show the difference in fighting abilities in the different version. In Tajômaru's testimony, he claims that he and The Man had a spirited sword fight and that no man had fought him as well as this samurai so he felt he owed it to him that he die admirably. In the account told by The Woodcutter only to The Priest and The Commoner, The Woman forces the two men to fight and their swordplay is sloppy and not done very well. Altman says in his intro that when Tajômaru's interrogation takes place, we never see anyone asking him questions because the audience is doing the interrogation and he was on the money about that. It's not as clear in the testimony from The Woman and through The Medium, but Tajômaru looks right into the camera and speaks to us. In that respect, Kurosawa achieved his goal of going back to the past and recapturing the days of silent movies because in many ways, that's how what divides the film and its two trios. The three men at the gate reside in the talkie and while dialogue exists in the woods, much of what happens, each time that it happens, occurs on the actors' faces.
The pair of prizes Rashomon picked up in Venice were just the first two in a long string of honors and nominations the film received stretching from September 1951 through the spring of 1953. Before Rashomon officially opened on Christmas Day 1951, the always-and-forever mysterious National Board of Review, shortly after changing its name from The Illuminati, awarded Kurosawa best director and gave the movie best foreign film more than a week earlier. The Oscars didn't have a competitive foreign language film category until 1956
so at the ceremony for 1951 films (held in early 1952), Rashomon became the fifth foreign language film to receive an honorary Oscar from the Academy's Board of Governors "as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States in 1951." The previous four went to Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief in 1947 and 1949, respectively; Maurice Cloche's Monsieur Vincent (1948) and René Clément's The Walls of Malapaga (1950). (Three additional foreign language films receive honorary Oscars before the regular category was added: Clément's Forbidden Games in 1952, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell in 1954 and Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai, The Legend of Musashi aka Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto in 1955.) Apparently, Rashomon didn't make it to England until 1952, because it was for that year that it received a nomination for best film from any source from the British Academy Film Awards, handed out in spring 1953 (and not yet merged with the British TV Academy to form BAFTA). What doesn't make sense is that NBR and the Academy both recognized that Rashomon's U.S. release occurred in 1951. Somehow though when the 1952 Oscars rolled around, the Academy nominated production designer Takashi Matsuyama and set decorator H. Motsumoto for their black-and-white art direction. Forget for the moment the question of how they ruled Rashomon eligible again but consider that being eligible the Academy ONLY nominated it for art direction in 1952, that year The Greatest Show on Earth won best picture. Also for the year 1952, Kurosawa received a Directors Guild of America nomination, the only DGA nomination he ever received, though he lost to John Ford for The Quiet Man — one of the 17 other contenders in the category. Hell, we’re already spending too much time talking about this year’s awards, I’ll stop talking about awards six decades ago now.
Besides, the honors aren't what matters in the end, it's the influence and it would be impossible to list all the movies, TV shows, plays and novels that have been influenced by Rashomon, which, of course, had its own influences to draw on before Kurosawa filmed it. Movies made before Rashomon had told a story through multiple points of views (most notably Citizen Kane), but nothing had really had alternate versions of a single event until Rashomon. When I watched Rashomon again most recently, the most recent film that popped into my mind was (500) Days of Summer where Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character's interpretation of Zooey Deschanel's character and moments they shared changed depending how he felt toward her at that given moment. In 1964, Martin Ritt directed an actual American remake called The Outrage that set the story in the Old West and starred Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey and Claire Bloom in the roles equivalent to The Bandit, The Man and The Woman and Edward G. Robinson, Howard da Silva and William Shatner in the parts equal to The Commoner, The Woodcutter and The Priest. Two recent films with similar premises, updated for the modern age, were Courage Under Fire and Vantage Point. A little Rashomon peeks out at times in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown. Many TV shows, especially sitcoms, have enjoyed borrowing the premise over the years, including a classic All in the Family where Mike and Archie differ over what happened when a TV repairman and his African-American apprentice came over. Almost by formula, any police or detective show has that quality to some extent. However, The Simpsons delivered by far the funniest dialogue exchange referring to the movie. In the 10th season episode "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo," Marge says to Homer, "You liked Rashomon the last time we saw it" to which Homer replies, "That's not how I remember it."
What remains important about Rashomon is that 60 years later, we do still remember it and the film has injected itself far enough into the cultural bloodstream that we'll continue to reference it. Sadly, the same can't be said for so much of our past works of film, television, music and literature as we increasingly become a disposable culture where it's been decided the most things should have an expiration date, usually tied somehow to the date Entertainment Weekly began publishing. Thankfully, Rashomon seems to have slipped by the pre-1990 terminators. Long may it baffle.
"It certainly changed my perception about what is possible in film and what is desirable. You just have to be able to let the audience come to that conclusion and they say, 'Oh, that isn't what happened.' Everybody that you would talk to about it — you'd sit down and make a person see the film — and ask them questions, you would not get the same answers from anybody which is the art of art. That is what art is — it penetrates your intellect…and your experience and history has to react on this new information. You're reacting from your own persona on it, but that's what gives it the power." — Robert Altman
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Labels: 50s, Altman, Awards, Books, De Sica, Edward G., Foreign, Gordon-Levitt, John Ford, Kurosawa, Mifune, Movie Tributes, Newman, Nonfiction, Oscars, Ray Top 100, Shatner, Silents, Tarantino, The Simpsons
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Friday, March 07, 2008
Centennial Tributes: Anna Magnani
By Josh R
Of the nearly 50 films that Anna Magnani made during her storied career, only a handful are available for viewing by the general public. I can therefore lay claim to having seen only but a fraction of her life's work (would that I could rectify the situation by being granted unfettered access to the vaults of Cinecitta Roma or the archives at UCLA). As it is, Magnani fans can only be grateful that many of her most celebrated performances remain readily accessible, given what a remarkable and singular talent she was, and what an impressive career she had.
While there is a fair argument to be made for the fiery yet tender leading lady as the cinema’s first truly naturalistic actress, it is also worth noting than no other performer from her country — not even the great Mastroianni — occupies a more important place in the history of global cinema. Italy’s cinematic output before the advent of the neo-realist movement had been negligible; Magnani was the face of that movement, and the impact of her work was immediate and far-reaching. She was the first Italian actor to achieve global stardom, with crossover success working in foreign productions and in other languages. These facts, while impressive, do not fully account for what qualified her as a pioneer, firing off the first and most penetrating shots in an ongoing campaign that, even now, is still being waged. In breaking the rules, she nearly succeeded in changing them.
Put simply, Anna Magnani was not beautiful, thin or young. She was over 40 by the time she achieved her widest stardom, with a Rubenesque figure, coarse features and a throaty voice. There was some precedent for this: Marie Dressler, a portly character actress of the early sound era with the countenance of a St. Bernard, had risen to the rank of leading lady and marquee attraction not before she was 60. Dressler was a star, to be sure, but envisioning her in a revealing negligee playing out a slow-burning, erotically charged seduction scene with some bare-chested, brawny buck 10 years her junior — say Lancaster, Brando or Franciosa — gives you some sense of how radically different Magnani was from anyone who’d come before, or many who have come since. Not even Italy’s premier sex symbol, Sophia Loren, ever exuded as much earthy sensuality, or expressed carnal desire as freely or as frankly as Magnani did. In The Rose Tattoo, Wild Is the Wind and a handful of other films, Anna Magnani was not only cast as an object of male desire; she was so persuasive to that end that she made slim, fine-featured young things like Marisa Pavan and Dolores Hart look pallid, prissy and frigid in comparison. In film after film, she was an irresistible source of fascination for the opposite sex, and why wouldn’t she be? Pretty girls are often no more than just that; passionate women are harder to forget.
The daughter of an Italian father and an Egyptian mother, she was brought up in the slums of Rome — that she displayed such a keen understanding of the hard-edged survival instincts of working class women was the product of firsthand experience. She began her career as a singer, performing in nightclubs. By the late 1930s, she was almost as famous as Piaf was in France; their backgrounds and career trajectories were strikingly similar. She made many poor, time-marking films before being cast by Vittorio De Sica in Teresa Venerdi, the film that launched her acting career in earnest. Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, in which she was the aching soul of a war-ravaged Rome, paved the way for international stardom. For that film, she received the best actress award from the National Board of Review — the first time any major American prize had been bestowed upon a foreign language performance. She worked for Rossellini again as the peasant woman convinced she is carrying the child of Christ in L’Amore, which cast her opposite the young actor who had also written the film’s screenplay, Federico Fellini. In Bellissima, directed by Luchino Visconti, she was tough, testy and ultimately heartbreaking as the stage mother determined to get her tiny daughter into films. The scene in which she observes, unnoticed, as her daughter’s screen test is being mercilessly ridiculed by studio executives showed how effortlessly she could segue from forceful bravado to quiet humiliation and despair. While Magnani was almost always cast as hardy, hearty women, she invariably managed to locate the fragile, wounded soul beneath the armor; audiences were always provided glimpses of the nagging self-doubts, irrational fears and easily bruised feelings that can reduce even the toughest of cookies to a state of naked vulnerability.
The world took notice, and a somewhat reluctant Magnani found herself a sought-after commodity on the international scene. She was the tempestuous star of a commedia del arte troupe in The Golden Coach, giving a grandly operatic performance; the film’s director, Jean Renoir, declared her to be “the greatest actress (he’d) ever worked with”. A star struck Tennessee Williams wrote The Rose Tattoo, a raucous comedy-drama about an Italian widow coming to terms with her late husband’s infidelity, specifically for her. Magnani declined the invitation to appear in the stage version, fearing her English wasn’t up to the task; her decision to opt out effectively launched the career of the unknown actress chosen to replace her. While Maureen Stapleton earned much praise (and a Tony) for her Broadway triumph, by the time the film version was being cast, Magnani had decided to reclaim the property. As Serefina Della Rose, her volcanic fits of fury were juxtaposed with moments of aching tenderness and grief — not even the clowny showboating of Burt Lancaster could derail her intensity, and the raw emotionalism of the performance was astonishing. She won the Oscar for the film, but the American career never really took off; not many scripts were being written with middle-age women with heavy accents in mind. She was very good — actually, too good — for the pulpy Wild Is the Wind, which brought her a second best actress nomination. If George Cukor seemed at a loss for how to temper the hamminess of Anthony Quinn, he didn’t allow it to upset the balance of the film too badly, and Magnani’s scenes with Anthony Franciosa generated more erotic heat than her ones with Lancaster had. Sidney Lumet cast her opposite Brando in The Fugitive Kind, a reworking of Williams’ Orpheus Descending — the film, while a flop, actually was better overall The Rose Tattoo, and featured a performance by Magnani that was, in some ways, superior. Her failure to receive an Oscar nomination for that film is somewhat baffling in retrospect, considering how a lean a year 1959 was for leading ladies; but Magnani lacked the transformative abilities of Marion Cotillard, Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman, and Oscar voters tune out when actors don’t exhibit enough range. As great as she was in The Fugitive Kind, some critics carped that, since her arrival in Hollywood, she’d been giving the same performance over and over again.
The Hollywood phase of her career behind her, she returned to Italy, probably somewhat relieved to get away from the type of films that were inclined to view her as an exotic; Magnani was too salt-of-the-earth to be considered anything of the kind, least of all by herself. Mario Monicelli’s The Passionate Thief provided her with a rare foray into the realm of comedy, while Pier Paolo Passolini’s Mamma Roma, in which she played a streetwise prostitute trying to give her teenage son a better life, was deemed too controversial to be released in the United States until 1995 (it’s not hard to see why). She was outstanding in a film that didn’t shy away from revealing her capacity for ruthlessness, or wondering how quickly unabashed, unapologetic sexuality can pave the way to madness. Stanley Kramer’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria was a reunion with an unrepentantly florid Anthony Quinn, allegedly a comedy, and definitely a mistake.
While Magnani got a late start in the world of film, her death from pancreatic cancer at the age of 65 was sadly premature. The conventionally pretty girls born around the same time had ceased to be interesting by the time they reached middle age; but at the age of 40, Anna Magnani was only getting warmed up. In her 70s, or even in her 80s, she might well have retained her ability to generate heat.
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Labels: Brando, Cotillard, Cukor, De Sica, Fellini, Lancaster, Lumet, Magnani, Nicole Kidman, Renoir, Tennessee Williams
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Saturday, September 01, 2007
Jewel of denial
By Edward Copeland
Sometimes the simplest of stories can result in the greatest of films and that's certainly the case of Max Ophuls' Madame de… or The Earrings of Madame de…, whichever title you prefer.
The copy I finally got to see thanks to a film friend calls the film Madame De…, so that's the one I'm going with (besides, it's shorter). Many times, when you've heard great things about a film for so long, it almost raises the stakes too high once you finally see it. Thankfully, this is not the case with Madame de… which more than deserves its reputation.
Ophuls (along with Marcel Achard and Annette Wademant) adapted Louise de Vilmorin's novel with efficiency, grace and class, spinning its simple tale of a love triangle into something so much more. At one point in the film, the general (Charles Boyer) tells his wife Countess Louise (Danielle Darrieux) what Napoleon once said about love: The only way to win is to retreat. It is a lesson that none of the points of the movie's romantic entanglements seem to grasp.
Affairs of the heart aren't what first set things in motion in Madame de…, it's debt, namely that of the countess. Desperate for funds to pay off bills, Louise pawns the sometimes-titular earrings, a gift from the general on their wedding day. Unfortunately, the jeweler (Jean Debucourt) who buys the earrings is not a man of discretion and tells the general about what his wife did after she's faked losing them (or having them stolen) during a trip to the opera.
The dutiful husband buys them back, presumably to return to his wife, only instead he sends them off to Constantinople with his mistress. Unfortunately for the general, his mistress is as bad with finances as his wife and she too is forced to sell the jewelry, which returns to Austria yet again, this time in the possession of a diplomat, Baron Donati (played by the great director Vittorio De Sica). Soon, the baron not only wants to return the earrings to their original owner, but he finds himself falling for her as well.
Ophuls' direction moves Madame de… smoothly from start to finish, with exquisite sets and fine acting by the three leads. It's interesting to hear Boyer speak in his native French and Darrieux, still acting at the age of 90, perfectly portrays the arc of the countess from desperation to lovestruck to frantic to destroyed and back again.
De Sica is such a legend for his own films, it's easy to forget his extensive acting credits (including an Oscar nomination for 1957's A Farewell to Arms) and he's great here as well.
At another point in the film, the general tells his wife that "unhappiness is an invented thing." I don't know if that's really true, but Ophuls' Madame de… is one invented thing that certainly didn't inspire sadness in this film lover.
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Labels: 50s, De Sica, Foreign, Ophuls, Ray Top 100
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Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Cinema Interruptus
By Edward Copeland
I admit it — DVD has decidedly changed my movie-viewing habits. Granted, fatigue has a lot to do with it, but it's rare that I watch anything from beginning to end anymore. The surprising thing to me is how little it seems to affect my opinion on the movie in general — and if something is really good, it will hold my attention no matter how tired I am.
As I mentioned previously, it took me more than two weeks to get through Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, but I'm not sure my opinion would have been much different if I'd seen the whole thing in a more reasonable period of time.
However, this was certainly not the case with The Best of Youth, Marco Tullio Giordana's six-hour story of two brothers spanning the years 1963-2000 in Italy. Because of its length, it's divided on two discs, which unfortunately no rental services seem to want to send out at the same time. As a result, I finished part 1 back on April 7 and didn't get Part 2 until a few days ago, finishing it last night.
Miraculously, I did remember most of what had happened before, but something was definitely lost by the interruption and it's a shame, because I think this is probably a very good movie. The leads — Luigi Lo Cascio and Allesio Boni — are both good as are most of the supporting cast, especially Sonia Bergamasco as Giulia and the great Adriana Asti (so memorable in Vittorio De Sica's 1970s film A Brief Vacation) as the men's mother. I really can't craft a coherent review of the film, due to the way I had to watch it, but even under those less-than-perfect circumstances, I could tell there was much to admire.
Perhaps some day I'll try it again when I can watch it in a more compressed time period. Mail rental services should really take steps to prevent this sort of delay.
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I admit it — DVD has decidedly changed my movie-viewing habits. Granted, fatigue has a lot to do with it, but it's rare that I watch anything from beginning to end anymore. The surprising thing to me is how little it seems to affect my opinion on the movie in general — and if something is really good, it will hold my attention no matter how tired I am.
As I mentioned previously, it took me more than two weeks to get through Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, but I'm not sure my opinion would have been much different if I'd seen the whole thing in a more reasonable period of time.
However, this was certainly not the case with The Best of Youth, Marco Tullio Giordana's six-hour story of two brothers spanning the years 1963-2000 in Italy. Because of its length, it's divided on two discs, which unfortunately no rental services seem to want to send out at the same time. As a result, I finished part 1 back on April 7 and didn't get Part 2 until a few days ago, finishing it last night.
Miraculously, I did remember most of what had happened before, but something was definitely lost by the interruption and it's a shame, because I think this is probably a very good movie. The leads — Luigi Lo Cascio and Allesio Boni — are both good as are most of the supporting cast, especially Sonia Bergamasco as Giulia and the great Adriana Asti (so memorable in Vittorio De Sica's 1970s film A Brief Vacation) as the men's mother. I really can't craft a coherent review of the film, due to the way I had to watch it, but even under those less-than-perfect circumstances, I could tell there was much to admire.
Perhaps some day I'll try it again when I can watch it in a more compressed time period. Mail rental services should really take steps to prevent this sort of delay.
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