Movies

… yet there’s method in’t

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On the Waterfront is another one of those films that are parodied so often (at least the “I coulda been a contender” scene) that you feel you’ve already seen it. At least I did – and boy, was I wrong.

I’d previously seen that other big Kazan flick starring Marlon Brando: A Streetcar Named Desire. The latter is definitely a great film, but I must admit that I sometimes find Tennessee Williams too much of a drama queen. I expected similar high-class melodrama from On the Waterfront but was startled by the movie’s stark realism, both in its writing and its acting. So often, films from the ’40s and ’50s, especially films featuring sexuality and violence, seem rather arch these days. Even when they’re supposed to be realistic, they feel somewhat stiff and stagey.

Not so with Waterfront. Even the child actors are convincing (which is rare enough). One thing that helps the film’s realistic feel is that so much of it is filmed on location. None of the fake sets and back projection that you get in most films of the time. In fact, the movie has an almost documentary feel to it.

All in all, there were only two things that didn’t quite work for me, pulling me out of the realistic atmosphere. The first of these was the ending; I couldn’t really buy the scene where the badly beaten Brando walks down the dock, his fractured ribs probably sticking in his lungs like so many splinters. That one wasn’t so bad, though; what struck me more was Brando’s ex-boxer makeup which made him look like a Neanderthal wearing heavy mascara.

Cromagnon out on the town

Art School Confidential

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I usually don’t mind characters that do unlikeable things. One of the reasons why I like Six Feet Under as much is because it doesn’t ingratiate itself to the audience. The protagonists’ flaws are part of what makes the series what it is.

Nevertheless, with all the things that happen in the last two seasons of the series, I must say that I came to find Claire’s character arc fairly grating at times. The art school self-centredness and pretentiousness is obviously shown in a critical light, but even with that distancing mechanism I feel so often that someone should shake Claire, or failing that, someone should slap her. Interestingly enough, though, she’s now become so irritating that I even feel a bit of sympathy for Russell, her git of an ex. And that’s saying something. And ironically, only as Claire becomes the art school bitch of the end of season 4 and beginning of season 5 do I find her art visually interesting. Hmm.

 It’s art, innit?

Yesterday, we watched Garden State, which I hadn’t seen before. Since the film was quite the indie darling at the time, and everyone and their grandmother raved about it, I won’t say too much. I liked it, and I think I’ll like it even more on a second viewing. What struck me was how similar the plot was to Elizabethtown (which came later), but whereas I only somewhat liked Elizabethtown when I saw it at the cinema but afterwards came to feel more and more that it was phoney as hell, Garden State manages to pull off the quirkiness much better – mainly because it’s not infatuated with it, as so many ‘quirky’ indie flicks are. At its heart it’s about real people with real feelings, whereas Cameron Crowe’s variation on the theme was about ‘characters’.

P.S.: I’d be scared by my father too if he looked just like Bilbo Baggins…

Scary Ian Holm

The cake is a lie… or is it?

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“The Enrichment Center is committed to the well-being of all participants. Cake and Grief Counseling will be available at the conclusion of the test. Thank you for helping us help you help us all.”

“Did you know you can donate one or all of your vital organs to the Aperture
Science Self Esteem Fund for Girls? It’s true!” 

Portal is probably this year’s most written about game, even more so than Halo 3. And for good reason. It’s the first game I’ve every played (and I’ve been doing this since 1982, roughly) that I would call perfect. This weirdly wonderful offshoot of the Half-Life franchise, feeling like the movie Cube, if it had been written by Charlie Kaufman, doesn’t take a single wrong step. The brilliant idea that forms the premise of the game gets the usual Valve polish, but it’s the script that turns this into something special.

 Which is also why I’d rather show than tell. So, here goes, courtesy of YouTube:

P.S.: Portal‘s AI GLaDOS, who gives good old SHODAN a run for her money, is brilliantly written. The funnier she gets, the more disturbing she gets. And the song at the end makes me want to cuddle and cuddle and cuddle this game.

Pretty as a picture

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Actually, that’s not really accurate. Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven isn’t pretty – it’s beautiful. The cinematography has a grandeur that is breathtaking at times. There are films that you’d want to frame and hang on the wall, and all of Malick’s works have that quality.

Happy couple doing couply things

What about the rest of the film, though? Does it just look good but is a waste of time otherwise? Apparently, Days of Heaven was criticised for its muted emotions. Indeed, we don’t get the extremes of passion that the love-triangle plot would suggest. No shouting and screaming, and even during the film’s scenes of violence there’s a certain distanced quality of defeat and resignation. Which I liked a lot, thuogh. So much emotion in films is melodrama, going to 11, but a) this isn’t necessarily true to life and b) I wouldn’t want this sort of emotional forte fortissimo in every film. Not every tragedy of jealousy should be Othello.

The protagonists in Days of Heaven seem so know from the first that real happiness is likely to be out of their reach, that the best they can hope for is a momentary reprieve from the dull despair, of poverty, of illness, of loneliness. Melodramatic passion is an indulgence none of them believe in. Their emotions, or at least their expression of their feelings,  have been dulled by various kinds of deprivation.

This dullness is encapsulated neatly in the narration by the teenage character Linda. She’s a kindred spirit to Sissy Spacek’s Holly in Badlands, although without that character’s naive romantic imagination. As with Holly, nothing would seem to be quite real to Linda. Bad things happen, people die, that’s the way it is. No use crying about it. Fair or unfair doesn’t come into it.

Day of the Locust

I’m not sure I get the film’s ending, though. Although the narration’s focus lies with the lovers, we get a curious continuation of Linda’s story that ends abruptly. I’m certain there are film buffs who could explain the purpose of this not-really-epilogue to me. I could come up with a number of interpretations, but I’m not sure any of them would ring true. Perhaps I should just watch the film again, though, and become caught up in the sheer depth and width of the images all over.

Newsflash: Death cheats at chess!

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From Lowell Bergman to Ingmar Bergman. (Classy, huh?) Yesterday we watched Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Call me odd, but I find his movies entertaining. They get a bad rap for being a film nerd’s wet dream (but actually somewhat boring), but I think that many of the parodies of his style are unfair.

At least in the two Bergman movies I’ve seen so far – Wild Strawberries in addition to The Seventh Seal – there’s always been a gentle sense of humour that puts the more lofty philosophical and metaphysical passages into perspective. For every scene with the knight Antonius Block contemplating life, death and the existence (or lack thereof) of God, there’s a scene with his more cynical, down-to-earth squire Jöns, puncturing the musings of his more pompous master. And beyond all this, there’s nothing boring, overly intellectual or pretentiously existential in the very real dread of the scenes with the flagellants or the distrurbed girl about to be burnt at the stake.

And there’s something refreshingly sly about both Block and Death cheating at the chess game they’re playing, even if they cheat for different reasons.

But, fair or not, without Bergman we wouldn’t have scenes like this (wait for a bit to get to the Seventh Seal bit):

P.S.: By the way, I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to give away that they both win in the end.

It’s a Mann’s world

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Yesterday we watched The Insider, Michael Mann’s 1999 film about whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, 60 Minutes and the evil machinations of big US tobbaco. I like Mann’s cool jazz style, the calm rhythm of his movies. Watching The Insider for the fourth or fifth time, though, I was struck at how much the director’s cinematic world is a male one.

Insiders inside a car (duh…)

Like in several of Mann’s movies, it’s not so much that there isn’t any sympathy for the women (in this case especially Wigand’s wife Liane, played by Diane Venora), but that the film’s focus always remains with the man, and as a result the women are seen in terms of whether they remain loyal to their men or not. It’s really weird – if I write it like that, it makes Mann sound like the worst misogynist ever. However, I don’t think that’s quite fair. Venora’s character in Heat (this time she’s together with the Pacino character) also decides to walk out on her man because his job is more important than his family. It’s not that he doesn’t love her, but he’s obsessed with what he does. Perhaps that’s why the films aren’t straightforward exercises in sexism – Mann’s men are obsessive-compulsive, they choose their duties like lonesome cowboys. There’s something glamorous and admirable to the male protagonists, but at the same time they’re stuck in adolescence and in the belief that they don’t need anyone else, except the other boys they play their lethal games with.

By comparison, the women live in the real world much more than the men. Things aren’t as clear cut for them. Venora’s Justine Hanna in Heat realises that she will always come second to her husband. Her Liane Wigand knows that Jeffrey (fantastically acted by Russell Crowe, by the way) will not give up his quixotic quest against big tobacco, not even for the sake of his family. She comes off worse, perhaps, than other women in Mann, because Jeffrey Wigand is so clearly doing the right thing. But there is understanding in the film for her plight.

In the hands of a lesser director and actress, Liane and Justine would simply be shrews who screw over their good-guy husbands. It’s difficult to completely shake the feeling that they are disloyal and selfish. But they have a strength and a dignity that makes us look and think twice.

But it doesn’t change that, at its heart, Michael Mann’s world is a man’s world indeed.

Tom and Jamie,/Sitting in a Car…

Sniffle…

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Since I feel like I’ve come down with something, I’m going to take it easy today. No long speeches, no pretentious analyses of videogame narratives.

Just a trailer for one of the films I’ve been looking forward to most.

Oh, and it’s got that coward Jack McCall and Francis Wolcott in it. Playing the same character.

It happened at the movies… (3)

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(… although technically that should be (4), since my entry on The Departed was also part of this tightly plotted, carefully laid out series. Ah well.)

I wish I could remember the title of this movie…

Christopher Nolan made an impression on me with his second film, Memento, which I thought clever, affecting and fascinating. Insomnia, his follow-up, didn’t do much for me, well crafted and acted tough as it was. It didn’t have the conviction of the Norwegian original, sitting uncomfortably between Hollywood thriller and harsh morality play.

The Prestige is probably Nolan’s best film since Memento. His reboot of the Batman franchise was good and intelligent, but its plot was predictable. The Prestige, a film about 2+ rival magicians at the turn of the century is at least as cleverly conceived and told as his amnesia thriller. Judging from the plot of the original novel (as given on Wikipedia), the film adaptation has been changed quite a bit, so it’s all the more surprising and impressive to find such an intricately structured, yet elegantly executed plot in the movie.

What struck me most was Nolan’s witty use of repeated motifs that, in a second viewing, might look like obvious hints at the twists in the movie. Every element is carefully laid out, and the film plays fair, yet when the viewer thinks he’s figured it out and smugly leans back, chances are he’ll realise half an hour later that he’s underestimated Nolan’s Chinese box.

And apart from The Prestige‘s cleverness (which has a slightly arch quality to it, just as some of the voiceovers), there’s something admirably goofy about casting David Bowie as an aging Nicholas Tesla, perhaps the truest magician of the piece yet the least mysterious, least self-dramatising character in the film.

Is there life after Mars?

Weee are alien magicians!

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Videogame critics keep saying that there’s precious little humour in video games (or at least humour that isn’t unfunny at best and cringeworthy at worst). Now, it may be true that the humour in most games is made up of stale wisecracks and one-liners that make you groan… but then, most movie comedies aren’t really very funny, are they? There’s little good comedy in games as in films, but there are of course gems in both media. The games I’m thinking of, for instance, are many of the old LucasArts adventures (Grim Fandango, Sam & Max Hit the Road, the Monkey Island titles minus Escape from…), No One Lives Forever, Psychonauts – and Anachronox.

I never finished Anachronox when I originally played it; the pre-patch version was so buggy that it started to crash frequently halfway through the story. Now, thanks to some new tech and inofficial patches, I’m finally able to play it again, and in spite of the engine showing its age, I’m riveted. The game’s the strange offspring of Japanese RPGs, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Raymond Chandler crime novels. It’s got some of the best writing and voice acting ever in computer games. Even though I don’t particularly enjoy the gameplay itself, I still can’t stop playing, no matter that I’ve got newer games waiting for me both on my computer and on PS2.

It’s a shame the game didn’t sell very well at all, since it was meant to be followed by a sequel. As it is, Anachronox ends on a cliffhanger, and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get the follow-up. Which is roughly like ending Lord of the Rings on The Fellowship of the Ring, with Frodo and Sam going off to Mordor – THE END. NO, WE WON’T TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENS. It’s a crying shame that good writing sells less well in videogames than big boobs, big guns and uninspired franchises.

P.S.: Anachronoxis a good illustration of my theory that humour is usually funnier when the characters aren’t just Punchline Delivery Agents(tm), but are actually fleshed out. There are moments of surprising poignancy in the game, which make the comedy shine more brilliantly.

P.P.S.: Here are some more trailers of genuinely funny games – because it’s these kind of games the medium needs if it wants to be more than just adolescent (male) power fantasies. I also hear that the new game Portal, scripted by Eric Wolpaw of Psychonauts fame, is very funny, and very good.

Psychonauts: 

Grim Fandango:

Portal:

I’ll throw you the whip…

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Today’s entry is very short (for a change). Since I went on at great length yesterday about appreciating great craftsmanship, here’s an example of brilliant genre cinema that isn’t deep or existential – but it may just be the best film in its genre.

I still get the same kick out of watching Raiders of the Lost Ark as I did when I first saw it, even though Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was my first Indy movie. Arguably, it’s one of the most fun films ever.

And who couldn’t love a film that has this scene in it?