A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

An elegant elegy. As everyone who's commented on this film so far has mentioned (Robert Altman included), A Prarie Home Companion is about death. Altman has taken Garrison Keillor's famed radio program and used it to make a film about how, as Milton put it, all things move towards their end and we all, Altman included, must face the angel of death some day. A lot of filmmakers have wrestled with this, and the resulting films generally come out cold and depressing; this is not so with Altman's grand freewheeling celebration of personal and societal impermanence. It's in every way a trademark Altman film, what with the accomplished ensemble cast and the fluid roaming camera and the overlapping dialogue. But there's a certain tone (call it benign wisdom?) that sets this apart from, say, Short Cuts; it's hard to imagine the vicious cynic who left Warren Beatty to die alone in the snow making a film as gentle as this one, but these things happen sometimes. It's fizzy rather than funereal, and often laugh-out-loud funny (call me a sucker, but the "Bad Jokes" number had me giggling shamefacedly like a schoolboy), but it's also the specter of death (and, at times, Death) that keeps the film grounded. Even at its sunniest, the idea of the final curtain hangs in the back of the mind. The cast is uniformly excellent with the exception of Virginia Madsen, whose awkward character does her no favors -- even Lindsay Lohan is credible, which says something. (Whenever I see Lily Tomlin in an Altman film, I wonder why nobody else is able to use her like he does.) And the songs are great as well, catchy and homespun without being cloying. Never knew I had such a soft spot for well-tuned Americana, but there it is...

Grade: A-

The Canterbury Tales (1972)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's adaptation of Chaucer's notorious collection of stories is, first and foremost, an ugly film. Predominately shot in shades of yellow and bleached-out brown, this looks like the film stock has been dipped in cess. What's more, the story and editing lurch instead of flow -- scenes bang and slam into one another with little regard for coherent pacing, and the stories often end abruptly, jumping from one narrative to another without indication. What's more, a couple of stories appear to have lost something in the translation from page to screen. (I have no idea what the hell happened in the Wife of Bath's tale.) In most films, these would be detriments. Not here, though -- if anything, the rough look and craft feel like an organic part of Pasolini's celebration of all things earth(l)y. If the filmmaking is crude, it's merely an extension of the subject; Pasolini has reconfigured the source material as a meditation on the bodily impulses and functions that unite us as a species. Which is basically a high-flown way to say that there's more fucking, shitting, pissing, farting, bouncing boobies and flapping willies in this than in any other reputable film you could care to name. Rather than being appalled, though, Pasolini seems amused and even impressed by the excretions and secretions of humanity (he drives this home by appearing in the role of Chaucer, thereby turning himself into the storyteller). His is an ode to baseness and vulgarity, not a fugue. If there's anything worth condemnation in his world, it's avarice. Time ans again, greed and thievery are punished; the reigning theme plays off as if the obeying of our animal sides is what brings us low and give us commonality, the pursuit of monetary acquisition or power is an attempt to betray that commonality and set hierarchies, which is the only sin here worthy of redress. In other words, it's very much a power-to-the-peasants movie (Pasolini's red side is showing!), the kind of film where an extortionist's attempt to squeeze money from a poor old widow results in the loss of his soul and where two young boys revenge themselves on a miller who tries to fuck them financially by literally fucking his wife and daughter, and as such, its bawdy, lowbrow sense of humor is understandable. Of course, I suppose it helps if you have a taste for the lowbrow (otherwise, you're just wallowing); fortunately, I do, so I thought this was funny as fuck. Even if I didn't find it particularly funny, I'd still be tempted to recommend it just on the strength of the closing tale, a jaw-dropping fever dream in which a money-hungry friar meets the Devil and discovers what awaits him in Hell. (The cheeky Chaplin homage was pretty cool too.) Pasolini's film may not be perfect, but I wager he'd argue that it's the imperfections that make it worthwhile.

Grade: B

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Entertaining hooey. Gets a bit thick with the silly biopic cliches and the button-mashing "uplifting" moments near the end, and I can see how Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman's fast-n-loose handling of historical and psychiatric truth could tick some people off; none of that, though, kept me from enjoying the film as an interesting story. Russell Crowe continues to impress me with his range; Jennifer Connelly keeps getting better, too, but who approved that old age makeup on her at the end?

Grade: B-

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)

Documentary about the trial(s) of the West Memphis Three is disturbing for a variety of reasons, not all of which have to do with the lopsided miscarriage of justice being presented. A lot of the film's effect has to do with the dispassionate stance assumed by filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. They aim for observational rather than confrontational, which results in an unflinching documentation of the horrifying nature of the murders; more importantly, because of this non-obtrusive style, they get candid confessions and strange moments on screen that would elude many other documentary filmmakers. (The produce-shooting scene is a bizarre, uncomfortable scene of catharsis that becomes doubly disconcerting given what we later learn about Mark Byers, one of the shooters.) The most crucial aspect of this filmmaking approach, though, is the veneer of evenhandedness. Berlinger and Sinofsky give equal time to all concerned sides - both the victims and the accused get their space to speak and make themselves understood, and the filmmakers never explicitly says which side is justified. They leave it to you to observe, as they have, and understand the situation, then come to your own conclusions. Not that Berlinger and Sinofsky don't have their positions, but the point is that they don't lead you by the hand to the "correct" beliefs -- rather, they let the situation speak for itself. A compelling tapestry of anger and confusion, full of messy contradictions and infuriating lapses in judgment (Damian Echols vacillates between modest intelligence and ill-considered defiance; there's a sense that he helps to sabotage his own trial); in other words, true-life drama at its finest and most affecting.

Grade: A-

The Omen (2006)

I could explicate why this needless remake, maybe the only film in history whose entire existence is predicated on a release date, is totally fucking worthless. But that would waste your time and mine. Besides, there's this review, which is brilliant and funny in ways I can't touch. So instead, I'll register a quick complaint about the sheer tactlessness of using footage of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina to prop up a threadbare Antichrist narrative and instead post the lyrics to the Since By Man song "Quid Pro Quo Motherfucker" (off their fantastic and loud 2005 album Pictures from the Hotel Apocalypse), a narrative infinitely more entertaining than Damien's:

We want, we want your daughter
We've come for your firstborn son
(We want, we want your daughter
We've come for your firstborn son)
Asphyxiation sets in
When is the ascension day?
This highway leads straight to Heaven
Hell helps us light the way

This time, lies will set the scene
Smell the burns feeding fire brings
Collections of souls, hands with holes
Get down on your knees and make me believe
Make me believe, make me believe
Crosses cross the T's
Make me believe, make me believe
Crosses crossing me

Mother make me
Father leave me
(repeat 4X)

And as I sleep inside my head
This reason builds my bed
Fingernails and elastic skin
Keep me tucked the fuck in
God come down and lick my skin
Because I know you like the cold

Sacrifice is what I love
(Holy Ghost please don't forsake me now)
Satisfaction is what I love
(Holy Ghost please don't forsake me now)
What I see and what I feel is what I love
(Holy Ghost please don't forsake me now)
These holes in my hands leak out what I love
What I love

When it all comes down
Where is your God now?

This time, lies will set the scene
Smell the burns feeding fire brings
Collections of souls, hands with holes
Get down on your knees and make me believe
Make me believe, make me believe
Crosses cross the T's
Make me believe, make me believe
Crosses crossing me

(I wanna believe, I wanna believe)
And when it all comes down
(I wanna believe, I wanna believe)
Where is your God now?
(I wanna believe, I wanna believe)
And when it all comes down
(I wanna believe, I wanna believe)
Where is your God?

The Shop on Main Street (1965)

The more Czech New Wave I see, the more I like. (This is part of the New Wave, right?) What I've seen thus far shares a sensibility I appreciate -- the idea of desperate laughter in the face of horror, at least until the horror overwhelms. It's really such a sucker's approach, but it gets me everytime. (See also: my enthusiasm for Little Murders, Devils on the Doorstep, Underground, the novel Catch-22, etc.) This film, set during WWII, begins as a caustic comedy about an itinerant carpenter, with a wonderful and boisterous drunken dinner-party scene that sets up the film's main conflict. This scene is entertaining, but it's also important, as it sets up Tony Brtko's confusion about the times, his inability to understand how to proceed in such times and his perceptions of inferiority. (His wife's characterization of him as "a good-for-nothing loafer" contrasts mightily with his terming of his brother, a Nazi official, as "the local God." It's about power, but more to the point, it's about confidence.) Directors Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, in a touch that may or may not be intentional but which I liked anyway, slyly allude to the direction their story will eventually take when they have Tony (and the camera) drunkenly staring through a highball glass (so we're going through the looking glass, eh?). Once Tony takes over the Jewish store assigned to him by his brother (monetary self-interest as "serving the country"?), the film then shifts into light whimsy with a dash of absurdism borne of incomprehension (Ms. Lautmann, the old Jewish woman who owns the repossessed store, is hard of hearing). It's pleasant, but the gathering storm is always in the background (the dog tax, for example) and the film's ironies get progressively darker. This continues until the film's last segment, in which the background erupts into the foreground, panic and desperation replace the light tone and laughs fall by the wayside. It's all fun and games until they come for you, and while one can struggle against inhumanity, there are times when that struggle comes too late to avoid being swallowed by the darkness. (The futility of Tony's final standing-up against his venal wife plays this up nicely.) Acting stellar on all counts, direction careful and assured, climax guaranteed to reduce all viewers to rubble; all in all, this thing's damn good. What's next, Czechoslovakia? (Closely Watched Trains, I believe.)

Grade: A-

Hey, guess what people? Nobody won the contest. How so not fun. Transporter 2, Flightplan and The Eighteenth Angel were all popular guesses, and believe me guys, I wish I'd been drunk during them. But alas, the actual answer was....

[...wait for it...]


[...keep waiting...]


[...no, it's not Waiting......]


[...really, I promise it's not Waiting... -- I was only drunk the second time I saw that...]


[...please don't ask why I saw Waiting... twice...]


...The Lady Eve. That's right, I was tits-up drunk on a bottle of red wine and a rocks glass of Hennessey during Preston Sturges's astonishing masterpiece of screwball comedy. Now you know. Did it change your life? Probably not. Anyway, carry on folks. I'll let you know when I think of something else fun to do. Hee-hee.

(P.S.: Sorry this took so long to get to -- I've been on vacation. I promise not to slack off in the future. My fingers are crossed.)

Hitler, A Film from Germany (1978)

Immense rumination on Hitler and his legacy. By Hitler, I don't mean the man -- I mean the historical concept, the social phenomenon, the crushing guilt and overwhelming agony that is Hitler and all for which he stood. Lest that make it sound like a fiber-rich homework film, the technique must also be reckoned with. It's deliberately performed on stages like a filmed play or an opera (a la Von Trier's Dogville), and it leaps between setpieces like it has rabies. There's puppets and fourth-wall breaking and explosions and endless reams of fascinating words. Director Hans-Jurgen Syberberg is attempting nothing less than a mass exorcism for the sins of Germany during WWII, and as such he throws everything he can think of into the eight hours that comprise his film to make his point. What emerges is a dizzying, brilliant, troubling and exhausting film that gambles everything and reaches too far into places that most people wouldn't think to go. It's divided into four parts (as any film of this length should be). The most astonishing segment comes midway through the first segment, during a series of representations of Hitler in different guises; during this parade of charades, an actor shows up as Hitler while acting out Peter Lorre's climactic speech in M, and the conflicting impulses that come from recontextualizing the famed plea for clemency (from a child molester, no less, in a film made by a man who had to flee Nazi Germany after refusing to make films for Hitler) makes for ballsy, jaw-dropping cinema. The film's most important stretch, though, (and part of the reason the aforementioned scene hits so hard) comes in the second half of the second part, as an actor in the guise of Hitler's valet recites a long speech about Hitler's likes and dislikes, his tastes in underwear and socks, his morning rituals and so on. As the actor talks, it slowly dawns that what's being done here is a gradual humanization of Hitler. The purpose, though, is not necessarily to make us see that Hitler was just a man like us but that he wasn't a demonic aberration -- in short, the guilt of Germany can't be expunged by just blaming the man and moving on. Hitler, it turns out, was the people's fault first and foremost. This realization ties in with Syberberg's frequent potshots at democracy and "the will of the people," which resonates a bit ironically given America's current political situation. (And before someone jumps on me, I'm not comparing Bush to Hitler. Like I said, this is more about the political phenomenon and less the literal guy.) This irony, too, is built in -- the end of the third segment has a Hitler puppet tearing off on a disturbing rant about how his thuggish brand of shock-troop politics didn't die with him and may indeed have become the dominant political philosophy of the 20th century. With all that's amazing about this film, it's then a shame that Syberberg goes back to the well to try and dredge another two hours out of his material, resulting in a mostly awful and repetitive fourth part in which one guy pontificates endlessly to the camera as though he's telling us something revelatory when all we want to do is shout back, "Yeah we got it, shut up and go away." Despite the serious damage done by the horrid fourth part, though, this is really quite something. Obviously, it requires a large dollop of patience and endurance, as well as a high tolerance for the unusual and experimental. But it is an important film and it does deserve to be seen.


(Note: Grading this is really rather unfair -- any movie that can hold my notoriously wandering attention rapt for six hours running deserves nothing less than an A, and this is, if nothing else, a grand artistic achievement. But the fourth section lost me almost completely. The breakdown goes like this: Parts 1 & 3 get an A, Part 2 gets a B+ and Part 4 gets a C-.)

Grade: B

The Set-Up (1949)

Plotwise, this film about an aging boxer being set up to throw a match without his knowledge only tangentially resembles the average film noir. When it comes to tone and theme, though, this is noir down to the marrow of its bones. It's filled with hard-luck chumps, weary fatalism and the glimmer of dreams not yet crushed. Robert Ryan and his fellow pugilists are beaten down by life, both literally and figuratively. The dressing room in which Ryan is sitting during the film's first half is filled with fighters both old and new, and the contrast is effective; the young ones are on their way up without seeing that at the end of the road they'll become one of the old glass-jawed guys still scrapping to scrape up supper. All of the fighters, no matter the age, are wonderfully portrayed by a memorable galley of mugs as nice, clumsily philosophical guys with wants and hopes which are oft-thwarted (i.e. the boxer who keeps citing the legendary champ who was knocked down 21 times before making his title run). This is then contrasted with the spectators, a mass of sweat and smoke who act as groupthink suckers, screaming for blood and cheering when they get it. The canny structure has Ryan fighting last, so we get a sense of what happens to these guys in the ring from the fighters who return before him (winners or losers, they're all beaten and bleeding); the doubly cruel edge is that Ryan doesn't know about the forces massing against him -- the lack of faith held by the people supposedly in his corner who've sold him out for money which he won't see. Then there's the fight, and the film earns its noir stripes there most of all. The bout in this film is one of the best seen in cinema (like, Raging Bull good) because the desperation of Ryan contrasts with the confidence of his opponent, which then disappears when Ryan refuses to go down like he should. He's old, but he's nobody's palooka. That's it in a nutshell: A man stands in defiance and battles his enemies, not knowing all the while that life has it in for him but good. Still, there's a flash of worn-out hope at the end. You can't get more noir than that.

Grade: A-

Guardian of the Frontier (2002)

Sisters are doin' it for themselves, Slovak style: This, the first feature film from Slovenia directed by a woman, has a big ol' Feminist Slugger to swing around. So you know what that means -- the women are independent, the men are perverts and there's more phallic symbols than you can shake a stick at. Director Maja Weiss isn't subtle about her intent, either, as she fills the screen with fishing poles and large oblong shadows and knives and there's a song proclaiming "This is a man's world" on the soundtrack. What's interesting about this film isn't its ideological or political slant (the villain is, among other things, a fundamentalist conservative politician) but its mythic examination of the relative permeability of borders. The intrepid threesome which the film follows are on a canoing excursion (the word "frontier" has both figurative and literal interpretations), and the river upon which they float is divided in the middle by the border between Slovenia and Croatia. The division is there in the political life and mind of both countries even as it isn't there in reality, and people attempting to cross from Croatia to Slovenia are punished by the title character; it then follows that many of the film's metaphorical borders are similarly both broachable and unassailable. There's the division of real and unreal that Weiss rides out for a while, giving the film the quality of a Grimm Brothers tale. This is especially prevalent in the superior first half; as the nubile trio floats deeper into the woods, one gets the sensation of drawing ever closer to monstrous things. This culminates in a strange interlude where the three girls cross into Croatia and meet with an old man who values all things earthy and artistic. At this point, the film switches gears and pushes another border to the forefront -- the border between normal and perverse sexuality and what indeed constitutes normality. (Yes, lesbianism is involved.) There's a sarcastic dimension to the notions of normal and abnormal as Weiss sees them, and she demonstrates this by having the title character pontificate about "the border between right and wrong," thus ironically framing a biological and emotional issue as a moral one. It's in this second half, though, that the film stumbles over itself; once the more lyrical aspects dissipate in favor of feminist nightmares incarnated as second-rate horror-movie menace, the paucity of the film's narrative becomes difficult to ignore, as does the unevenness of the performances. (The latter point is especially true of the actress playing Simona, who flattens everything out to a slight whine.) In other words: The journey's got nice scenery (and I mean that in every way -- voyeurs like myself will be pleased), but the destination leaves much to be desired. The last scenes at least maintain a striking air of ambiguity, and the last scene has stuck with me even though it's mostly indulgent, meaningless narcissism. (I say "mostly" because the epilogue does tie into the idea of relative permeability; the "dedicated to myself" title card before the credits, though, is just plum silly.)

Grade: B-

Maniac (1980)

This movie would be offensive if it had any ambition. As it is, the accusations of misogyny, while understandable, are misguided. Yes, the film objectifies women, but that's only because it objectifies everyone. (Note that Tom Savini's most show-stopping makeup effects are saved for the film's two male deaths.) William Lustig's poisonous valentine to pre-Disney 42nd Street grime is the passive gaze writ large -- there are no characters, only bodies. This applies even to Frank Zito, the film's title character. As much time as we spend with him, and as much sweat as Joe Spinell expends in his performance (which is nothing if not committed), we never get a sense of Zito having an inner life. He's a standard-issue psycho with mother issues, and Lustig locks us out of his head so that we're only watching. This approach leavens a lot of the potential unpleasantness, but is this really the approach that best fits the material? A film like this is supposed to be unpleasant, and though this movie is a lot of things (humorless, hackneyed, dull), it's never as unpleasant or disturbing as it should be. The bottom line is that misogyny is an ideology, and ideologies require a convicted belief system. Lustig and Spinell, on the evidence we have here, don't believe in anything, not even their own film. Because of this, Maniac is a curious and dispassionate film that reveals itself to be unworthy of any, let alone serious, consideration. To hate this requires expending more energy on thought than the filmmakers did.

Grade: C-

Krapp's Last Tape (2000)

Atom Egoyan does Samuel Beckett, and the results are impressive. It's a small, modest film about John Hurt as a man listening to tapes he'd made earlier in life, and there's a striking sense of stillness about it (Egoyan uses maybe ten cuts in the entire forty-minute film), so that every word and every movement becomes of exaggerated import. This is a technique often used to create a sense of weight, which it does here; unexpectedly, though, it also accentuates Beckett's sneaky wit. In particular, the opening five minutes contains one of the best sight gags I've ever seen, which wasn't something I was expecting from a project with this kind of pedigree. (Shows how much I know about Beckett.) John Hurt is the whole show here; he's clearly enjoying the wordplay (he turns the word "spool" into a mantra), and he's also skilled enough to get both the pathos and the absurd wit across, often in the same scene. Krapp's tapes are a physical manifestation of the memory process, with Krapp speeding past the parts he wants to forget and replaying the parts over which he obsesses, and this oddly funny and poignant film is about the perils of memory (which may explain why Egoyan chose to do it). Beckett, in essence, is saying that the overexamined life is just as unfulfilled as the unexamined one.

Grade: B

The Intruder (1962)

William Shatner (of all people) tries to foment anti-segregation sentiment in the South in this Roger Corman hot-button flick. Shatner's infamously intense and mannered style of acting makes for a hell of a demagogue, though at times it can be a bit much. The film kind of goes that way as well -- like its lead, it's not subtle ever. The sort of in-your-face crudity of Corman's approach, though, does give it a forthrightness and an effectiveness that a more tasteful attempt at the material might yield. Characterizing it as such also glosses over the occasional small touches that Corman throws in when he doesn't think anyone's paying attention; for instance, when a character gets accused of a rape at a pivotal juncture in the narrative, Corman shows him resigned and almost expectant of the accusation rather than shocked or defiant. Also worth mentioning is the script's use of language -- aside from the use of the N-word (which, if anything, is more shocking today than in '62, if only because the casualness with which it appears), the use of "boy" as a designation of inferiority yields an interesting twist at film's end. It's not perfect, but it's a sight better than Crash.

Grade: B-