Category: Film Page 66 of 101

Cinema 101: Introductory Remarks

On February 21, 2011

Starting a new post series is always a shaky venture for me; if it weren’t mathematically impossible, I’d say I probably abandon more series than I start. Yet here I go again. I’ve been wanting to do something like an introduction to cinema for non-film experts for a while now. In other words, if I were teaching an Intro to Film course to college freshmen and sophomores, these would be some of the things I’d talk about. People who know a lot about film may find some of the things I talk about too basic, which is why I decided to do this series here rather than Row Three – my audience here is more varied.

The only thing keeping it different from an intro college course is that I’m not planning on doing things in order. That is, I may write about the invention of film in one post, then about the French New Wave in the next, then discuss what a producer does in the third. It’s likely a bunch of the entries will be either historical or theoretical (i.e., explaining the auteur theory or genre theory in film criticism), simply because that’s what I find the most interesting, but I will also try to include some practical stuff about production as well, since I know people tend to have questions about that side of film. But I am not a filmmaker and don’t have extensive technical knowledge, so even those will probably tend to take a historical tack. Some posts may be on an era or national cinema, others may be just about a single film. There’s going to be a lot of leeway in what’s covered and how it’s covered in this series, which I’m hoping will help keep it both interesting to me to write and to you to read.

And in fact, I would like for you to tell me what you have questions about – what areas of filmmaking, film history, film criticism, etc. you’d like to know more about. What film movements have you heard of but aren’t as familiar with as you’d like to be? What aspects of filmmaking would you be interested to learn about? I expect and intend to be doing a bunch of research for this series, and actually, that’s part of the impetus for it – to give myself a solid reason and drive to get back into reading about and learning about film in a dedicated manner myself. But I can do that in a more efficient and directed way if I have some ideas that I know people might be interested in. Otherwise, I’ll probably just talk about the New Wave and film noir a whole lot. :)

So please, go ahead and comment with some things you’d like to see in this space in the future.

When Posters Attack: The Rite

By Jandy

On January 21, 2011

In Film

I have absolutely no interest in seeing The Rite, an exorcism-demon possession horror film dumped in the rear-end of January, but I just needed to subject you all to the poster. Because, I swear, this thing scares the crap out of me at least three times a week as I’m driving around LA and Anthony Hopkins’ eyes emerge from the darkness. The worst is the bus stop just as you crown the hill going from Hollywood to the Valley on Laurel Canyon. It’s a pretty steep rise on both sides, and you just come over the hill and BAM. Anthony Hopkins staring at you creeptastically from the bus stop. The first time I thought it was actual creeptastic person lying in wait there.

Can’t wait until this movie is out of theatres.

My 2010 in Film: Three by Robert Altman

By Jandy

On January 2, 2011

In Film

[My list of favorite films released in 2010 will be going up on Row Three in mid-January, so I want to do something a bit different here. This series will include any films I saw for the first time this year and loved, regardless of release date. It may also include films from this year.]

Director Robert Altman was easily my favorite “discovery” of the New Hollywood marathon I did throughout this year. Discovered isn’t quite the right word; of course, I knew about Robert Altman and had seen a few of his films, but this year I saw several more that I ended up loving completely.

Nashville

I went into Nashville expecting to just put up with it, a begrudging viewing based solely on the film’s reputation and not any real interest in it on my part. I’m not into country music or politics, and I figured it’d just be a sprawling, overlong, not particularly interesting look at those things. Well, it is set in Nashville among a bunch of country musicians during the build-up to a political rally, but it is anything but uninteresting.

Altman is pretty well-known for his ensemble films, and this one proves why as much or more than any other (though he has plenty of other great examples). Loosely built around a coincidentally timed country music festival and a political rally for the fictional Replacement Party, the film is made up of a bunch of interweaving characters, each of whom has a well-developed and interesting arc. Often films like this suffer from not having time to develop any of the characters, or develops one or two at the expense of the others, making the film unbalanced, but Nashville contains at least ten or twelve characters that all feel real, that all seem to have back stories and arcs, and none of whom steals the spotlight from the others.

There’s the star vocalist recovering from a nervous breakdown, and maybe not quite ready to return to the stage, the waitress who wants to be a singer but doesn’t have the chops, the established trio whose interpersonal strife threatens the group, the gospel singer who feels more and more disconnected from her husband, the determined wannabe who overcomes all odds to get to the rally stage, the overeager reporter who’s equal parts naive enthusiasm and unwitting insensitivity, and several others – stereotypes in a way, perhaps, but they do not feel that way when you’re watching the movie. Everything just feels right and even though it is long, it’s perfectly paced and when the end credits rolled, I was actually sad the experience was over.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

This film snuck up on me while I was watching it. It takes a little while to get going, it’s a little low-key and quiet about getting there (reportedly there were sound problems on set that Altman never bothered to fix), and it’s tough at first to identify with anyone. But by the end, it got under my skin something fierce.

It’s truly a revisionist western in the sense that the main character McCabe (Warren Beatty) isn’t a classic western white-hat hero, but he’s not even really a morally complicated hero or anti-hero; he’s almost an a-hero. This is a world in which heroism basically doesn’t exist. The major conflict is purely commercial, and the major shootout isn’t fought in the open streets with the town watching, but sneaking around deserted buildings and through barns while the town is totally unaware.

It’s also not a typical love story, though McCabe and Mrs. Miller (the local brothel owner, played by Julie Christie) are one of those couples that are so clearly meant to be together and yet utterly not as well – they need each other, but for many reasons it wouldn’t work for them to be more to each other than they are. Their interactions with each other somehow carry the weight of tragedy. It’s a sad movie in many ways, but a great one that I can easily see myself revisiting over and over for years to come.

The Long Goodbye

I’m pretty sure I saw at least some of this movie in an undergrad film course I took, and didn’t care too much for the part I saw. Clearly there was something wrong with me then, because when I watched/rewatched it this year, I loved every bit of it. It’s a take on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe character that somehow manages to be irreverent, unique, and poke fun at the hard-boiled detective genre while also being loving and true to it.

The homages to classic detective films from the 1940s are peppered throughout, but with a sense of ironic world-weariness that is perfectly ’70s. Elliott Gould’s Marlow is a lackadaisical fellow whose catchphrase is “it’s okay with me,” a statement of bemused apathy that nonetheless is belied by his casual yet dogged pursuit of the truth about a friend of his accused of murder.

The film contains recognizable references to specific classic noir films, but also the detached style of European cinema of the 1960s, making it a quintessential New Hollywood film and perfectly poised to hit all of my buttons, and so it did. This time around at least, it was perfection.

My 2010 in Film: Playtime

By Jandy

On December 26, 2010

In Film

French writer/director/comedian Jacques Tati is often compared with Charlie Chaplin – despite his major films coming in the 1950s and 1960s, thirty years after the end of the silent era, Tati’s style of comedy is nearly silent, depending on sight gags and the empathetic persona of his character M. Hulot much as Chaplin depended on the Little Tramp. That comparison is well-founded, and since I love Chaplin, I assumed I would immediately love Tati. But my reaction to the first two Tati films I saw (M. Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle, which are also his best-known) was mixed at best – I just didn’t really feel involved in them or care what happened. That all changed when I saw Playtime this year, and I’m really looking forward to rewatching his other films now.

Playtime combines several threads of interweaving story, the most prominent of which is a group of American tourists in Paris. M. Hulot runs into them at various points – at the airport business offices, where he is unsuccessfully trying to get a problem fixed, at a sort of electronics trade show, and finally at a newly opened night club. Each of these locations (and a few others) are mined for every bit of comic action, but Tati has plenty of time for some incisive social commentary as well, especially on the rise of consumerism and artificiality.

The entire film was shot on a giant replica of Paris that Tati built just outside of the real city – the expense of this endeavor mixed with the disappointing reception of the film devastated him financially, but it’s not hard to see why he did it. Throughout the film, the tourists joy at finding “the real Paris,” but they never actually do – they find replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc du Triomphe (the real ones show up only in reflections in open doors, reflections most of the tourists don’t even notice), and they find street cart vendors who let them take staged pictures, but the real thing, the real gritty, grimy, living thing they wouldn’t know what to do with if they found it.

Except for one woman who we kind of single out to identify with and who becomes the major connection to Hulot throughout the film. Meanwhile, Hulot gets pulled into sight gag after sight gag that are all the more hilarious because Tati lets them go on forever – long after most directors would’ve cut and gone on to something else. But Tati knows exactly how to pace this, and he lets every joke play out completely and wonderfully. He also uses space better than almost anyone else I’ve seen, shooting on 70mm, but not in widescreen, which gives a tremendous depth of field for shooting long-angle shots that let you seek out every corner with delight for something else he’s hidden there for you. I swear, you could watch this film several times, every time focusing on a different part of the frame, and see things you’d missed every time.

Despite Tati’s tendency to use people almost as props rather than as developed characters and let the camera look on noncommitally as they bumble their way through the set, he achieves a great sympathy for his characters in Playtime, and a great depth of theme in his subtle commentary on the state of the modern world. Going back to the Chaplin connection, this is his Modern Times. Many might point to Mon Oncle for that comparison, which makes sense with Mon Oncle‘s setting in a mechanized house, but for my money, Playtime is his masterpiece, and mirrors Chaplin’s masterpiece in the themes of modernity and displacement within modernity yet with the promise of human connection despite the odds.

My 2010 in Film: In the Mood for Love

By Jandy

On December 24, 2010

In Film

People have been telling me to see In the Mood for Love for ages, and I wanted to see it (especially after seeing Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express, which made the top of my favorites list last year), but didn’t get around to it until a few months ago. Once in a while I see a film and I get a very profound sense of attachment – something deeper than just enjoyment or even love – and I felt that stronger with In the Mood for Love than I’ve felt it in a long time. I can’t even say that I got everything out of the film, but I immediately knew that I will have a life-long relationship with this film. I will rewatch it often, allowing it to reveal new insights and truths to me over the years as I come to it at different points in my life. I will grow old with this film.

It’s difficult to explain exactly what about the film gives me that feeling, but it’s undeniable. The story – almost more of a premise or a situation, though that word gives the wrong impression – follows two couples who move into adjacent apartments at about the same time. The husband of one couple and the wife of the other both travel often for work, leaving their spouses home alone for days sometimes. Over time, those left behind begin spending time together. But what sounds like the beginnings of a sordid, adulterous love affair instead becomes an intensely moving but wholly chaste expression of a love that’s far deeper than physicality.

The film is so subtle and languidly paced, and plays so much on mood rather than action that you may not even be sure at first what is going on, but the film sweeps you along with it anyway. The use of color and oblique camera angles is incredible – noticeable but never overpowering or self-aggrandizing, always playing into the overall mood of the film. It’s distant in the way it depicts the relationship, never pushing in on the characters or invoking any sentimentality or unearned emotion, but never cold or calculating. Instead, the very distance becomes part of the heartbreak.