Movie Diary 9/14/2011

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (Eli Craig, 2010). It can’t quite live up to that title, and the mix of tones, while intentional, is a little trickier to pull off than the filmmakers seem to think. Still, somebody had to do it. (full review 9/30)

Straw Dogs (Rod Lurie, 2011). For a while Lurie might be re-working the material to get at the red-state/blue-state divide, and it starts to be intriguing, but his ham-handed vulgarity in staging the melodrama cuts it off at the knees. (Minor annoyance dept.: this is the second film in two weeks to show characters watching “old movies” in the wrong aspect ratio on TV. That war is being lost). (full review 9/16)

At What a Feeling!, the week is devoted the Best Picture Oscar winners. Today’s entry: Oliver Stone’s Platoon, a turning point on many fronts.

Movie Diary 9/13/2011

Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011). Not a whole lot of actual baseball in the picture, which I suppose fits the theme. Good part for Pitt. Aaron Sorkin co-wrote it, and the psychological arc looks a lot like the one in The Social Network, which is to say, intelligent and tidy. (full review 9/23)

At What a Feeling!, a week of 1980s Best Picture Oscar champs. Today: 1983 winner Terms of Endearment, a movie whose success I did not see coming at all.

Movie Diary 9/12/2011

Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds, 1995). I realize this seems sort of absurd and trivial. But I have a job to do. And hey, the movie looks about the way it did in ’95: pretty all right because it’s not that bad.

Set Up (Mike Gunther, 2011). Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Ryan Phillippe, and Bruce Willis in an incompetent heist movie. Stylistically, it’s full of tiny-jerk zooms. This is also under the category of “I have a job to do.”

Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973). Pacino shambling along a real groove; not a great movie, though it has an interesting rhythm. Whatever Lumet’s limitations, he displays here two of his strongest talents: well-chosen NYC locations, and a gallery of fun, oddball, fresh supporting players (some of whom become known – hey, that’s Judd Hirsch – and F. Murray Abraham? – and some never to be heard of again).

At What a Feeling!, we launch a week of reviews of movies that won the Best Picture Oscar. First up: Milos Forman’s Amadeus.

Saving Private Ryan (The Cornfield #41)

From Film.com, first published in 1998.

A Mauldin dogface: Tom Hanks

Saving Private Ryan has “masterpiece” written all over it: it sprawls to nearly three hours in length, it is properly measured and somber, it takes on a mighty subject. This is Steven Spielberg in Schindler mode. Private Ryan cannot merely be another war movie, or indeed just another movie. Thus the film begins with a half-hour sequence, the landings at Normandy on D-Day, that aspires to be the ultimate word in the depiction of battle on film.

Probably it is. Let’s be clear about something: despite the fact that he occasionally makes dumb movies such as Hook and The Lost World, Steven Spielberg is a master, and the opening of Saving Private Ryan is masterly. In the landing craft approaching the beach, as G.I.s puke on their own boots out of seasickness and fear, Spielberg takes a breath before the chaos to introduce his central character, Captain Miller (Tom Hanks). The camera finds Miller’s uncontrollably shaking hand, which reaches for a canteen and a drink of water—not for the soldier’s thirst, we suspect, but simply to give his shaking hand something to do. Miller’s face is hidden from view by his helmet, but the canteen leads us to his stubbled visage, with Tom Hanks looking very much like a dogface from a Bill Mauldin WWII cartoon. Throughout the film, Spielberg will lock us into Miller’s perspective for a moment of quiet and clarity, a little oasis of calm that throws the violence into even more dramatic relief.

Sometimes being a good director is all about taking a moment. This is one of them, and then the battle is joined, a jiggly, ragged sequence of random brutality and explicit gore. The very texture of the movie itself has the heightened look of a nightmare: the images are washed-out but hyper-real, and motion is slightly jerky, as though every moment stops in time for a micro-second before passing on to the next moment—any one of which could be the moment of death. Limbs are blown off in mid-shot; guts splay out of uniforms and onto the sandy beach; soldiers in mid-sentence are startled by bullet holes blossoming on their foreheads. Blood sticks to the lens of the camera. The director Samuel Fuller, an ex-infantryman who made his own version of D-Day in The Big Red One, used to say that the only way to realistically depict war in a movie would be to have someone firing bullets at the audience from behind the screen. Saving Private Ryan comes as close as anyone ever will to approximating that.

The D-Day sequence actually has nothing to do with the story of Saving Private Ryan. Like a lot of the concentration camp sequences in Schindler’s List, it exists outside the narrative, because of Spielberg’s desire to create a document rather than a motion picture. The plot kicks in when Miller and what’s left of his small platoon receive orders to retrieve a private Ryan (Matt Damon) from somewhere on the forward line in France. Ryan’s three brothers have all died in combat in the last week, and General George Marshall (Harve Presnell) wants to pull the private back to the states, to spare Mrs. Ryan the heartbreak of having all four of her boys killed in action. Then Private Ryan becomes a platoon movie, straight from the tradition of Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, Anthony Mann’s Men in War, and Oliver Stone’s Platoon, to name a sterling trio of the countless examples of the form. The men conform to the usual melting-pot collection of types: loyal meat-and-potatoes sergeant (Tom Sizemore), loudmouth Brooklyn-Irish cynic (Edward Burns), combat virgin (Jeremy Davies, from Spanking the Monkey), wisecracking Jew (Adam Goldberg), capable medic (Giovanni Ribisi), big-hearted Italian (Vin Diesel), bible-quoting sharpshooter (Barry Pepper). Hanks gives a truthful, well-judged performance—when when he and the Sarge are considering the roster of men for the mission, Hanks flickers with irritation, not sentimental regret, when the Sarge reminds him that so-and-so is dead and can’t join the group. Hanks doesn’t fit the conception of the role, at least in the way the other guys describe the captain; they say he’s silent, gruff, a battle-hardened veteran who shuts the other men out of his world. That doesn’t sound like Tom Hanks, that sounds like Robert Mitchum. But Spielberg has always favored the ordinary-guy hero, and Hanks eventually makes the part his own.

As a platoon movie, Saving Private Ryan is utterly engrossing, with some sharply written conversation and brilliantly executed scenes of danger and violence. In that, it is no better or worse than the trio of films named above. Spielberg is also reaching for a grander scale, and here he has mixed results. As an attempt to make the war movie more realistic and less Hollywood-ized, Private Ryan is often shockingly effective. There are moments in this film where you think, What is about to happen can’t happen in a Hollywood movie, let alone a Steven Spielberg movie—and then, unbelievably, it happens. The cruelty of the slaughter on Omaha Beach feels like an atonement on Spielberg’s part—an atonement for making (as a director) and liking (as a spectator) the sanitized war movies of the past.

The story, and presumably its theme, hinge on the cosmic absurdity of sending (and likely sacrificing) eight men in order to save one man, a grunt who has no special talent or value. Robert Rodat’s original screenplay, which has apparently been worked over by Spielberg and other writers, still carries a bit of the absurd, but not much; there’s something not-quite-thought-out about this movie. The possibility that the mission may be a colossal public relations operation is downplayed considerably when General Marshall reads a Civil War letter of consolation from Abraham Lincoln, tears brimming in his eyes.

So is the mission absurd or not? To give Spielberg the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the film’s theme is confused because war itself has no theme—at ground level, there is no meaning, just a mission. At that ground level, Saving Private Ryan is the masterpiece it wants to be. When it aims higher, it is merely a magnificent piece of movie-making.

Higher Contagion Warrior (Weekly Links)

Jennifer Ehle, contagiously great

Links to review I wrote for the Herald, and etc.

Contagion. “A slick, cold feel that fits the clockwork mechanism.”

Warrior. “Blunt-object insistence on stacking the deck.”

Higher Ground. “A better filmmaker might have rounded off its rough edges, but might also have lost what is distinctive and thought-provoking about it.”

On KUOW’s “Weekday,” I talk with Marcie Sillman about Contagion and other end-of-the-world movies, with lots of listener calls. It’s archived here; the movie bit erupts at the 14-minute mark.

I also sit in on the Stack of Dimes podcast this week, a bit of summer recapping and fall previewing. Check it here.

Next Thursday night I’ll be in Richland, WA, to deliver “Alien Encounters: Sci-Fi Movies and the Cold War Culture of the 1950s,” at the Richland Public Library at 7 p.m. Details here.

At What a Feeling!, a 1984 consideration of The Natural, Barry Levinson’s myth-making baseball picture.

Movie Diary 9/8/2011

World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973). You live long enough, you might get a chance to satisfy your curiosity about those obscure movies buried in the credits of directors’ careers. I have glanced past this title a thousand times in reading through RWF’s filmography, assuming it was a TV job destined never to be seen again, but here it is, all 205 minutes of it. It’s a quasi-sci-fi tale that unfolds in what seems like exactly twice as much time as it should require to tell it, and yet Fassbinder keeps startling you with the crazy orange-and-brown costumes and draperies, to say nothing of the series of baroque-camp camera angles (each chosen with utter authority – here, vulgarity seems positively courageous) which invariably find two or three mirrors facing each other – not a mere affectation in a movie about multiple false worlds. The stock company is very much on hand, too. Interesting movie: sluggish, haunting, dreamy.

Creature (Fred M. Andrews, 2011). Despite the flirtation with torture porn, this is really a horror picture of ye olde skool, with deformed hillbillies and a half-man, half-alligator monster on the loose. Did we mention it takes the film ten seconds to offer its first instance of full-frontal nudity? Not awful, but undistinguished.

At What a Feeling!, more Eighties material: reviews of Robert Zemeckis’s Romancing the Stone, and Jonathan Lynn’s Clue.

Movie Diary 9/6/2011

An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981). The tone is truly strange, almost not like any other movie, and if it weren’t for a few bad jokes and David Naughton’s diet-soda presence at the center, it might be something great. Despite the stumbles, it’s hard to entirely laugh off, anyway. The transformation scene remains convincingly violent and upsetting. (For my first take on the movie, see here.)

I Don’t Know How She Does It (Douglas McGrath, 2011). Can a woman have it all? Is this movie twenty years too late? (full review 9/16)

The Sunset Limited (Tommy Lee Jones, 2011). HBO filmization of Cormac McCarthy’s play, a two-hander with Jones as the voice of rational atheism and Samuel L. Jackson leaning on the everlasting arms. If you enjoy talk, and well-judged actors, you will get a lot of each.

What a Feeling! keeps track of the 1980s as they happened: vintage reviews of Mannequin and a double take on Dead Heat and Takedown, for instance.

House of Bamboo (The Cornfield #40)

CinemaScope was de rigueur at Fox at this moment (1955), so here is Samuel Fuller going widescreen for a bright-lit color-filled noir shot in Japan. Like Hell and High Water just before it, it feels as though Fuller is not yet happy about ‘Scope, and unless you have a giant TV it looks very tableau-heavy, with small figures moving around in large spaces.

However, Fuller does juice things up, rolling the camera through the midst of a traditional dance (a movement broken up by the blundering of the hero) and, especially, finding dynamic angles on a rooftop climax, where the final showdown plays out on a large, rickety globe that spins as it hangs out over Tokyo. Another gangster story where the boss thinks the world is his.

That story: American Robert Stack (nothing but voice and trenchcoat, already auditioning for Eliot Ness) is the blunderer, come to Japan to find a dead buddy and initiating contact with the buddy’s widow (Shirley Yamaguchi). After trying to lean on a few pachinko-parlor managers, Stack gets leaned on by the real local Ichiban, Robert Ryan, who runs protection (and the occasional bank robbery) with his loyal harem of flunkies. Ryan is introduced when Stack is sent flying through a screen wall in the back of the frame and we discover the boss perched here, amused at the crudeness of this newcomer.

It doesn’t take long for Ryan to become fond of Stack, much to the jealous frustration of Cameron Mitchell, formerly Ryan’s pet. DeForest Kelley is also in there as a henchman, and Brad Dexter and Sessue Hayakawa are initially prominent although the movie seems to forget about them, not without reason. This is Robert Ryan’s show, and it’s one of those movies where the bad guy so outweighs the ostensible protagonist that they don’t really seem to be boxing in the same fight.

Fuller is always great with violent cultural contrasts, and there are succinct examples here: a corpse seen from ground level, its feet toward us, as Mount Fujiyama domes white and eternal in the background, for instance, a swell Fuller touch. If the widescreen format takes some of the customary Fuller oomph out of the experience, it adds to the sense of House of Bamboo as exotica. The U.S. fascination with Japanese things in the 1950s and early 60s, seemingly incongruous in the years following a terrible war, is served here, as the movie presents a Lazy Susan turntable from which we can select various items: kimono styles, tatami mats, and an egg “on a shingle” eaten with chopsticks.

The film also lives in Robert Ryan’s performance, continuing his run as one of the great neurotics in an age when people thought about neurosis. He wonders aloud why he saved a wounded Stack during a robbery – despite his policy to kill anybody injured during a job – without quite coming out and saying he has some sort of attraction for his underling. You’re not supposed to do that kind of wondering out loud when you’re the boss, but he can’t quite help himself. Ryan’s anguish never fits neatly into his movies, much to their benefit.

More thoughts on Fuller: https://roberthorton.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/sams-place/

A Good Old-Fashioned Debt (Weekly Links)

Rhys Ifans, Mr. Nice: Karachi’s Swinging Sixties

Links to reviews I wrote for the Herald, and etc.

The Debt. (dead link; review below)

By Robert Horton

“The Debt” is one of those “Ah-ha!” movies, an otherwise conventional tale that abruptly shifts focus after you get a crucial bit of withheld information.

The question about this kind of film is, does it have a life beyond the “Ah-ha!” moment? Or is this a one-trick pony?

“The Debt” is adapted from an Israeli espionage film, and divides its storytelling over two time periods. After opening in 1997, we spend most of the first hour in East Berlin, 1965, where a trio of Israel’s Mossad agents are searching for a Nazi war criminal. The quarry is a Mengele-like doctor who now works as a gynecologist. This leads to the movie’s creepiest, most suspenseful scenes, as a spy named Rachel (Jessica Chastain) submits to a gynecological exam as a way of observing the doctor.

The doctor is played, expertly, by Jesper Christensen, the Danish actor who played “Mr. White” in the last couple of James Bond pictures. When he blandly says “We need to help you with a little injection” and reaches for the hypodermic needle, it’s far more terrifying than a movie shoot-out. Rachel shares close undercover quarters with her fellow agents Stephen (Martin Csokas) and David (Sam Worthington, from “Avatar”), which leads to tortured personal feelings—especially after the plot to seize the doctor gets complicated.

Thirty years later, Rachel (now played by Helen Mirren) is unexpectedly called to service in connection with this incident. Stephen (Tom Wilkinson) and David (Ciarán Hinds) are still around, too.

Director John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”) tries his best to get around the problems that come with a bisected movie like this: just as we get involved in the story with one cast, we switch to a new group of people. Employing Helen Mirren (admirably frosty here) and rising star Jessica Chastain helps keep the thread live, because both actresses are intense. Chastain recently appeared in “Tree of Life” and “The Help” (she was truly launched in Dan Ireland’s “Jolene”), and she’s got pale, waifish looks that belie a fierce commitment to the material.

The movie has possibilities as both an espionage yarn and a comment about the importance of truth and myths in public discourse. Yet it falls short on both counts, partly because of its self-importance and partly because Madden lacks the snap of a born spy-movie guy.

“The Debt” wants to be more than a good Saturday matinee picture, it wants to be a thought-provoker. But you’ll enjoy it best at a Saturday matinee.

A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy. “The yuck factor is a little higher than the ha-ha factor.”

Mr. Nice. “Chronicling the weirdness of it all.”

And a fall-preview thingie.

On KUOW’s “Weekday,” I talk with Marcie Sillman about The Help and its reception; the conversation is archived here. The movie bit kicks in around the 14-minute mark.

At What a Feeling!, we reach back for a review of The Clan of the Cave Bear, the first of a series of films based on Jean M. Auel’s books. Okay, the first and last.

Movie Diary 9/1/2011

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011). Good to see a movie, any movie on any subject or in any style, that has a strong sense of what it’s doing. That is the case with this film. Not a huge surprise that Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan grok the director’s vibe, but maybe a slight (but delightful) surprise that Albert Brooks so thoroughly does. (full review 9/16)

At What a Feeling!, a couple more 1980s pictures: one from John Woo, The Killer, and one strictly from hunger, Masters of the Universe.