Parallax View

John Wayne in John Ford’s ‘The Searchers’

There are several flippant ways to respond to Quentin Tarantino’s remarks about John Ford’s purported racism, from gruff dismissal to just tossing out Sergeant Rutledge and calling it a day. Kent Jones offers the thoughtful response, and it’s definitive. Also at Film Comment, subversion of a less haunted, more joyously playful sort, in Maitland McDonagh’s salute to “godfather of gay porn” Peter de Rome.

Carmel Magazine’s Rebecca L. Knight makes it sound as if there are very few afternoons more delightful than one spent in the company of Joan Fontaine, whether the legend is making sure you get a selection of roses from her garden or proudly showing off the golf trophy she received for a hole-in-one. (It’s on the shelf above her Oscar: “Oh yes, well there’s that.”) Beginning on page 82. Via Eileen Orr.

Dolby’s last attempt at introducing a new sound system, the failed 7.1, added two more sound channels to 5.1’s six. Their latest, Atmos, offers 64, including the ceiling. Jeff Smith explains the potential and offers an assessment in a guest post at David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s blog. In a separate post Thompson uses the failure of Jack the Giant Slayer to argue, contra Hollywood marketing, that there’s really no such thing as a “Fantasy fan.”

“I know you want me so bad it’s like acid in your mouth. But not this time.” Sophie Brown’s efforts to screen Point Break are stymied as she tries and fails to hunt down the film’s British copyright holder. One of the runners-up in Sight and Sound’s Female Film Reporter competition.

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Saleem (Bhabha) in transit between identities and nations

When Midnight’s Children was published in 1981, one might have assumed that its promising author would become best known as a writer of magical realism and an observer of the divide between India and Pakistan. That’s not the way it worked out for Salman Rushdie. His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was judged to be blasphemy against Islam by the world’s worst literary critic, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Rushdie has lived under threat of death ever since.

Midnight’s Children predates all that, yet its absurdities depict the maelstrom out of which such chaos comes. And when the new film adaptation was in production in Sri Lanka, it encountered lingering hassles related to Rushdie’s notoriety; at one point a forced shutdown was lifted after director Deepa Mehta made nice with the president of the island nation.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

“That’s why I’m spending so much time talking to you about the business and the money, because this is the force that is pushing cinema out of mainstream movies. I’ve been in meetings where I can feel it slipping away, where I can feel that the ideas I’m tossing out, they’re too scary or too weird, and I can feel the thing—I can tell; it’s not going to happen….” Proving again the futility of resistance when the internet rises as one to whine, Steven Soderbergh changed his mind and allowed the San Francisco Film Society permission to post his State of Cinema address. It is a pretty engrossing speech, with Soderbergh conscious of the potential to seem an old fogy even as he lays out the numbers to prove Hollywood has no idea what it’s doing. And what’s the director been up to in the week since? You know, posting a surreal, Robbe-Grillet-flavored spy story to Twitter, as one does.

Surf’s up

Some interesting reading in the new Bright Lights, including John Engle’s fine, poetically inclined survey of the surfing movie from Gidget’s safe but still open-hearted testing of countercultural waters to the genre’s current obsession with mythic coming-of-age stories steeped in Zen bliss (why yes, Milius’s Big Wednesday is considered a key transitional film); Roger Leatherwood’s look at what Ari Kahan’s exhaustive Phantom of the Paradise website has to tell us about archiving in these amateur-friendly internet days; and Angela Aleiss’s uncovering the fascinating history of James Young Deer, actor and technical advisor for D. W. Griffith, director for Pathè, who adopted one ethnic identity (falsely claiming membership in the Winnebago tribe) to obscure another less amenable to the times.

“This is not Italy!” For Sight and Sound, Pasquale Iannone rounds up a dozen crucial precursors to the post-war Neorealists, from Pudovkin and People on Sunday to the 1942 feature debut of Manoel de Oliviera. The BFI appends his excellent overview with a gallery of posters for the films.

Another combo KO from two of The Chiseler’s heavy hitters. First, Dan Callahan treasures the perseverance of Sylvia Sidney in so many masochistic parts: “She has the sort of face that looks like it knows the worst before it happens, and so when the worst does happen, it just confirms the anxiety in her eyes.” Then Imogen Smith nails the sincerity of Joan Blondell’s con artists, with particular focus on Nightmare Alley. (“What she brought to all these movies about rackets, about schemers and saps, was the ability to put over a con and let us enjoy her triumph, yet also to express, without sanctimony, the melancholy weight of too much knowledge.”)

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Proposed: One of the basic concerns for a storyteller is what to put in and what to leave out. That sounds really obvious. But it’s a huge deal, and deciding what should go in—as opposed to all the other stuff that might, but shouldn’t—makes the difference between a spellbinding experience and a nap. It matters even more in movies than in literature: Ten pages of dull writing in a 400-page novel can be forgiven, but 10 off-key minutes in a movie will break an audience’s faith.

Eden (Jamie Chung) soon after capture

I thought about this principle while watching Eden, a harrowing film by Seattle director Megan Griffiths. Handled in middling fashion, the subject would have some punch: Eden is based on the true story of Chong Kim, a victim of the U.S. sex-trafficking trade, so horror and suspense are already built into it.

Even with that backbone in place, there are ways to mess this up, but Eden rarely sets a foot wrong. Given the potentially lurid material, Griffiths gives the film a sort of committed austerity—which comes to seem more horrifying for its calm approach.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

Kate Hudson and Riz Ahmed

The 2010 film Four Lions is about a British cell of Islamic fundamentalists plotting to plant homemade explosive devices at—among other targets—the London marathon. It’s an uproarious comedy.

Too soon after the Boston bombings to recall this scathing movie? Maybe, but it shouldn’t be—Chris Morris’ prediction of stupid, self-styled jihadists looks even keener and more furious than it did three years ago.

In Four Lions, Oxford-educated actor and hip-hop artist Riz Ahmed played the leader of the hapless terrorists. That movie’s a better vehicle for the wunderkind artist Ahmed than this tepid new effort from director Mira Nair, which passes glumly over distantly related turf.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

Michel Bouquet as Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pretty pictures in a movie are sometimes dismissed as eye candy, the implication being that empty calories are no substitute for the sound nutrition of noble stories and thematic depth. That may be, although it would be difficult to deny the chocolate-box allure of Renoir, a lushly photographed gloss on a real-life moment in an artistic family.

The title identifies the family; the moment is 1915. As war rages on the other side of France, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), by now elderly and arthritic, paints at his sun-dappled estate on the Côte d’Azur. He employs a new model, Andrée (Christa Theret), a willful redhead who suits Renoir’s vision of glowing flesh and interior mystery.

Actually we have to take the mystery on faith, because Theret doesn’t suggest much beyond a handsome surface.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

Whisky galore: Jasmin Riggins, Gary Maitland, Brannigan, and William Ruane

Ken Loach, that old British leftie director, keeps up his commitment to the poor and disenfranchised with The Angels’ Share, his latest collaboration with equally socially conscious screenwriter Paul Laverty. It’s set in the familiar Loach environs of troubled youth, the unemployed, and the eternal underclass—here specifically the slums of Glasgow. But after the political dramas Route Irish and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Loach instead builds an underdog, offbeat comedy on the scruffy camaraderie of some two-time losers. He directs it with warmth and affection.

Robbie (Paul Brannigan) has his past carved into his face like a road map. He’s got a prison record, a history of violence, and a short temper. But now he’s also a young father desperate for a fresh start, even while admitting he’s “stuck in the same old shite”—at least until his community-service supervisor (John Henshaw) introduces him to the venerable Scottish tradition of distilling whisky. Then Robbie discovers he has a nose and a knack for fine spirits.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

Ricky Jay is arguably the greatest master of sleight-of-hand and legerdemain in America today, but he’s more than an old-school magician with contemporary wit. He’s an actor, sure, a familiar presence in the films of David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson, yet he’s also a historian of magic and showbiz oddities, a collector of stories and lore. He’s an author, raconteur, and showman who prefers to work as “a close-up magician,” as he’s called in Molly Bernstein’s admiring documentary. He is a wonder with cards, his tool of choice; and the nonchalance of his presentation makes his mastery all the more riveting.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

It’s back. The Seattle International Film Festival, the biggest, the longest, and the best attended film festival in America, opens on Thursday, May 16 with Joss Whendon’s Much Ado About Nothing. That was announced a few weeks and news that the director and much of his cast (drawn from various orbits of the Whedonverse) would appear with the film on opening night helped make this the fastest sell-out opening event SIFF has seen.

Announced today is the closing night film: The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s new feature with Emma Watson as the ringleader of a gang of teenagers who target celebrities to rob via social networking tools, simply for the kick of rubbing up against the famous while taking them for all they are worth. It’s based on a true story and seems ready made as a tale for our celebrity-obsessed times.

In between these films is 24 days of screenings with over 200 feature films (that includes the four Secret Festival screenings), 67 documentaries, and 175 shorts. (SIFF is an Academy qualifying festival for live-action, animated, and starting this year documentary shorts.) 18 features make their respective world premieres.

Gala showings include two films with Seattle connections: Touchy Feely from Seattle’s own Lynn Shelton (which kicks off six days of screenings in Renton) and Decoding Annie Parker, which dramatizes the true story of cancer research breakthrough guided by UW geneticist Mary-Claire King (played in the film by Helen Hunt).

Touchy Feely

Other galas and special event screenings include The Way, Way Back from writers / directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, “Gay-La” event G.B.F., Fanie Fourie’s Lobola from South Africa (the centerpiece of the African Pictures section), Populaire from France, Papadopoulos and Sons from the U.K., Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies with Anna Kendrick and Olivia Wilder, and the documentaries Twenty Feet from Stardom, Inequality for All, and Somm.

Thanks to a grant from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, SIFF will present a special section of 15 films from Africa, including the North American premiere of Last Flight to Abuja from Nigeria: the first Nollywood film to play SIFF.

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In honor of the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival, Parallax View offers a festival flashback: the Movietone News report from the 20th SFIFF.

[Originally published in Movietone News 53, January 1977]

The 20th San Francisco International Film Festival was … lively.

A half-dozen outstanding films from Europe were perhaps the most newsworthy events (and my list does not include the two popular successes of the festival, Truffaut’s Small Change and Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala, whose screenings I was unable to attend). But it was also a memorable festival because of its stimulating variety. Last year’s program was singularly dull, and even its high points seemed to confirm a sense of despair and dead ends, artistically and otherwise. [See "Out of Season", MTN 46.] But this year San Francisco not only came up with good movies; it also managed to be festive in a way that livened one’s sense of the art and its possibilities.

Films by Alain Tanner, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Claude Miller, Eric Rohmer, and Marco Bellocchio all demonstrated that, contrary to well-founded rumors, the cinema is not dead yet. And there was more: Hollywood on Trial, a documentary, became the catalyst for some revealing “political” moments; Pierre Rissient’s One Night Stand drew an audience reaction which suggested that Nouveau Puritans are everywhere, still; a goodly number of short films reaffirmed the value of work being done in that less-publicized area of filmmaking; and recent Spanish cinema, thanks to some special screenings, began to look like a significant factor in current moviemaking.

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Some marvelous audio finds from Cinephilia and Beyond. First, courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Alfred Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman work out the bishop’s kidnapping from Family Plot, the screenwriter cautious to fit the scene in to the movie as a whole, the director with the cathedral already constructed in his mind’s eye delighting in the possibility of “so many angles on this—so many shots.” (A transcript is also available.)

But it’s the website of Tony Macklin that’s the real treasure trove. Macklin, former editor of Film Heritage magazine, has been posting the (crudely captured, fair warning) recordings of his interviews here; the most recently posted, up just this week, is a dandy 1973 chat with Andrew Sarris; previous subjects include Altman, Eastwood, Peckinpah, Poitier, Sylbert, Head…. Just look; there’ll be somebody you’re dying to hear talk.

Children of Paradise

Matthew Spektor’s stint as a director of literary acquisitions (i.e., the guy who read and recommended books), starting with Coppola and DeVito, taught him that Hollywood does actually know what they’re doing; and what they’re doing is tossing the middle class on the scrap heap.

“Post-modernism before the fact—trash-mashing the ghastly with the frivolous, history and horror trumped by consumer products, the grim and the soothing, the high and the low together, sleeping in one Procrustean bed.” At This Long Century Mark Rappaport has a typically allusive, thought-provoking essay on the stills from Children of Paradise that beguiled him as a youngster, and the magazine he found them in: a 1945 issue of Life juxtaposing grim stories of the surrender of Germany with slick, bouncy adverts.

“Who is Pierre Etaix?” The question posed repeatedly at the end of the director’s documentary feature Land of Milk and Honey is answered exquisitely by David Cairns. Also at Criterion, a collection of Etaix’s sketches that reminds how multivalent his genius is.

Imogen Smith revels in the melodramatic (and actorly) pleasures of Lewis Allen’s So Evil My Love, wherein “theft, forgery, blackmail, murder, sickness, alcoholism, adultery, and betrayals that have no name corrode this world from the inside, like a drug that numbs as it kills.”

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Physical perfection has been an ideal for as long as there has been civilization, celebrated in games and competitions, extolled in song and story, captured in paintings and, since the late 19th century, photographs and movies. That inspiration continues today. In Pain and Gain, Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson pump iron to sculpt themselves into the bodybuilder ideal, modeling themselves on such specimens as Arnold Schwarzenegger, WWE champions and Mr. Olympia winners. Where they get off track in their pursuit of the American dream is when they put their hard bodies into the service of an ill-advised plot involving extortion and kidnapping. All that muscle seems to have gone to their heads when it should have gone to straight to the abs and pecs.

Bartolomeo Pagano as Maciste in ‘Cabiria’

That ideal of rippling musculature and hard definition across the arms, legs and chests was not always the model of masculine perfection. The muscleman of earlier eras with bulkier and brawnier, more like a beefy circus strongman or barrel-chested wrestler, and the image evolved thanks to the examples set by fitness gurus like Jack LaLanne and bodybuilders like Steve Reeves. Here’s a look at the changing image of fitness and strength and physical perfection on the screen, from the strongman of the silent days to the beefcake heroes of Hollywood spectacles to the oiled-up warrior in the new Hollywood version of the ancient world soldiers and gladiators.

‘Cabiria’ (1914)

Giovanni Pastrone’s lavish historical epic stirs warriors, pirates, slaves, a volcano eruption, a demanding god and an orphan girl tossed to the fates into a tale of the ancient world before Christ. The story is pure stage melodrama, but the sets and pageantry is magnificent, unlike anything seen on the screen before, and it launched a worldwide passion for cinematic spectacles. It also launched the cinema’s first muscleman hero: Maciste. Played with jolly passion by the brawny Bartolomeo Pagano, who developed his impressive figure working as a longshoreman in Genoa, Maciste was a gentle giant of a strongman and a brawny teddy bear of a hero, and Pagano brought Maciste up to the present in a long-running series of lively adventure films that blurred the line between onscreen hero and offscreen persona.

When the muscleman movies made a comeback in Italy in the ’60s, they were called Hercules or Samson or Goliath in the U.S., but back in Italy, most of them were the beloved Maciste. None of the subsequent actors succeeded in recapturing the big kid charm of Pagano.

Continue reading at MSN Movies

Pierre Etaix (Criterion)

Circus acrobat, clown, cabaret star, artist, actor, and for a brief time director, Pierre Etaix (pronounced eh-TEX) is one of the great comedy treasures of France. It wasn’t meant to be a secret, but his relatively small body of work as a director—he made five features (four comedies and a documentary) and three comedy shorts between 1961 and 1971—was out of circulation for four decades due to legal issues. They were freed only in 2009, restored in 2010, and rereleased in France to great acclaim. Seeing them for the first time is a revelation.

His debut short Rupture (1961), a nearly wordless one-man show with Étaix as a jilted lover whose entire world quite literally comes apart around him while he tries to write a response to a break-up letter. He won an Oscar for his second short film, Happy Anniversary (1962), where he’s on the losing side of a war with modern urban life while his wife awaits his return home. The dialogue is spare to say the least—his films could play sans subtitles and be just as effective—and he uses music just as sparingly. The audio punchlines are all in the cartoonish sound effects pumped up to a surreal prominence.

Yoyo

His masterpiece is Yoyo (1965), an almost silent comedy that in fact begins with an evocation of the silent era and ends with a wry jab at sixties TV culture. Étaix directs, co-writes (with Jean-Claude Carrière, his collaborator on every film except his documentary), and stars in two roles: a ruined millionaire who joins the circus with a beautiful trick rider and his own grown son, who becomes a celebrated clown and returns home to restore the neglected mansion. It’s quite gentle and sweet, with a quiet yearning under his masterful comic performance and hilarious comic inventions, but Étaix is a gag man first and foremost and “Yo-Yo” is filled with brilliant and sublime gags and physical humor.

As both filmmaker and comic screen persona, the obvious comparisons are to Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton: the silent movie clown in a sound world. He worked with Tati as a gag writer and cartoonist, creating Tati’s trademark caricature used on many of his film posters, and he is a master at shaping a visual gag with the grace of a dancing master and the imagination of a cartoonist. His hangdog expression, poised between curiosity and measured focus, has the shadow of Keaton’s stone-faced resilience in the face of adversity.

But where Tati refuses to let the confounding modern world phase his optimism, and Keaton overcomes adversity with inspiration and tenacity, Etaix simply endures, resigned to every setback and compromise in a modern social culture he can never quite fit into. In that, and in the way Etaix keeps rolling his visual punchlines into a new gag, he shares a sensibility (if not exactly a temperament) with Jerry Lewis, a director he admired so much he wrote a book about him. Like Lewis, the Etaix protagonist is a man at odds with the world around him. He is, however, much more discreet and elegant in the way he loses his tangles with social conundrums and physical obstacles.

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Sam Peckinpah’s much-messed-with 1965 film Major Dundee has just come out on Blu-ray from the boutique label Twilight Time. The two-disc set features both the 2005 reissue based on a preview version of the movie and the version released theatrically 48 years ago. Both are worth having, as the following Queen Anne & Magnolia News article from 2005 suggests. – RTJ

[Originally published in the Queen Anne News, April 11, 2005]

Sam Peckinpah was one of our great modern filmmakers, but for many his name summons up such a fearsome Hollywood legend, of blighted career, outrageous excess and epic self-destructiveness, that remembering the great films becomes secondary.

Richard Harris and Charlton Heston keep the flag aloft

The legend began to lock into place with his third feature film, the 1965 Major Dundee—though it’s worth noting that even his universally admired second film, the elegiac Ride the High Country (1962), was nearly thrown away by its parent studio, only to be hailed as “the best American film of the year” by Newsweek magazine. Ride the High Country was a small film—a program picture, really—featuring two over-the-hill cowboy stars (Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott). Major Dundee would be, by mid-’60s terms, an epic, with a $4.5-million budget, two recently Oscared or Oscar-nominated stars—Charlton Heston and Richard Harris—and an international cast with more color and flair than, perhaps, any one motion picture could accommodate. It was also to be a film of vast and complex thematic ambitions, a dual character study that sought to refract not only the historical tensions of the Civil War–era frontier but also the fractious America of a century later, astir with the civil-rights movement and the beginnings of what we would come to know as the Vietnam era.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 47, January 1976]

Despite its director’s solid critical and commercial reputation and a Cannes Festival showing, The Nickel Ride arrived in Seattle well over a year late, as a first-run second feature to a new film being ballyhooed via the moronic action-film come-on. (That the new film happens to be a fine one, meriting very different advertising and going largely unseen by its proper audience as a result of its unpleasant sell—Robert Aldrich’s Hustle—is momentarily beside the point.) It’s easy to see why the film has been neglected by its distributor and downplayed by reviewers: a “depressing” story, set mostly in a dim, unglamorous locale, unfolding apparently within a generic context where hard and/or shrill action melodrama is the normal order of business—crime and those who practice or live on the edge of it—but without delivering the customary goods at the customary rhythms of shock and bruised relief, shock and bruised relief….

And to be perfectly fair, we ought to point out that The Nickel Ride is more an honorable failure than, when ya get right down to it, a good movie. Like so many of his contemporaries, from prestigious directors like Penn to the younger program picturemakers with a view to being “taken seriously,” Mulligan has turned to the film noir as a framework for spiritual dissection of the world we seem to be living in and some of the ways we elect for going about it. His frames, his spaces, his people’s movements bespeak a selfconsciousness and seriousness as impeccable as, say, Antonioni’s. Indeed, a good deal of The Nickel Ride consists of Jason Miller’s dark, massive, weary head sloped to a telephone receiver at the extreme right or extreme left of a wide Panavision rectangle hung in some gray-brown second-story space. Miller plays Cooper—Coop, if you want to be iconographic about it, though Mulligan manages not to insist—the “key-man” who holds the means of access to clandestine warehouses more violent types rely on as places to dump their freshly ill-gotten gains until the heat’s off. Cooper is also the long-established Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a godfather to his neighborhood where fixing fights and staking petty heist artists appear to be the most extreme forms of criminal behavior. It’s a job, and as Cooper leans milky-blue–suited through the gashing early-morning sun and pauses to listen to a bar-owner pal gripe about the rat race before hauling a carton of milk up to his office, anyone who has ever grown accustomed to the rituals and rhythms of a neighborhood while babysitting a store or office there will feel the correspondences in his gut.

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