The Frame

Blind Spots 2014: Days of Heaven

On May 27, 2014

Terrence Malick has a way of making the most ordinary things seem positively monumental, even Biblical. That tendency has hit an apex, perhaps, with The Tree of Life (and To the Wonder, probably, which I haven’t seen, but the priest character isn’t in there by accident), but even as far back as Badlands and Days of Heaven, it’s there. It’s there in the cinematography, the pacing, the voiceovers…everything that makes a Malick film a Malick film.

Days of Heaven follows a trio of migrant workers in 1916 America – a man, his young sister, and his lover,who pretends to be his sister as well, because he thinks it’ll require less explanation. If you’re Biblically minded, this pretense may already suggest a portion of the story of Abraham, when his entourage is traveling around and he pretends Sarah is his sister instead of his wife, for even less explicable reasons. In the Bible story, the king of the land takes a shine to Sarah and intends to marry her, but Abraham ponies up that she’s his wife, and the king is like “whoa, sorry dude” and everything’s cool. In Days of Heaven, the plantation owner takes a shine to the woman, Abby, and the man, Bill, comes up with a plan for her to marry the owner, who he overhears is terminally ill, so she (and by extension, Bill) can inherit the plantation.

Blind Spots 2014: Predator

By Jandy

On May 27, 2014

In Film

I picked this for the Blind Spot poll this year because it’s one of a number of “classic” ’80s action flicks that I haven’t seen (the whole era is a blind spot for me), and it was one that came up more often than the others in conversations of actually pretty good ones. I knew a little bit about the premise from my husband, but went in pretty blind aside from that.

In a way, this is two movies in one. The first movie follows a bunch of commandos led by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers going into the jungle to rescue some hostages or something. It’s not really that important, even though it takes up a good chunk of the movie and ends in a pretty wild gunfight. The fact that this section is pretty long and leisurely paced should probably bother me, but it didn’t – it doesn’t feel like rote backstory or character set-up, but like a decent premise for an action movie that just gets cut off half way through because a killer alien shows up and starts picking off our commandos for no apparent reason.

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Jour de fete

By Jandy

On May 20, 2014

In Commonplace

“Jour de fete amounts to a kind of stylistic manifesto as well. Most of Tati’s work derives from observation rather than pure invention, inflected by the aesthetic and poetic properties of music, painting, and dance (which is where the invention comes in); everyday details are the basic unit of this enterprise rather than incidents designed to advance a plot. This is why Tati’s films are generally better appreciated by ordinary viewers than by critics and specialists, who tend to be more rigid about what films should be, storywise and otherwise. (Twenty years ago, my film class students were far more responsive to Playtime than were critics like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, who declared themselves bored and alienated.). Tati’s observation is tempered and structured by aesthetic-poetic imagination and by the perception that all of us, as critic Dave Hickey suggests, are living continuously inside a complex work of art that we call the world and that perhaps only another work of art can teach us to appreciate what’s right in front of us.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Essential Cinema

2014 TCM Film Festival: The Stranger’s Return

By Jandy

On May 16, 2014

In TCM Film Festival

The tightest scheduling block I attempted was between How Green Was My Valley (see here) and this film, and I was extremely lucky to get in – I was, in fact, the LAST person into a very full theatre. I felt kind of bad (and still do, since I know several people who tried the same schedule and didn’t make it in), because this was initially a filler film on my schedule. It’s short and fit in between How Green and Hat Check Girl, the Pre-Code comedy and MOMA restoration that I expected would be my favorite discovery of the festival. For some reason I didn’t read the program carefully on this film, and I thought “the stranger” was an aging man coming home to be with his family and their struggles in accepting him. I have NO IDEA why I thought that based on this program.

In the end, though, I’m very glad I did make it in, because THIS, not Hat Check Girl (though that’s fine too, post forthcoming), turned out to my gleeful discovery of the fest. Unlike the description I gave above, the story actually concerns a quick-witted and cantankerous old gentleman played by Lionel Barrymore sporting a gruff-looking beard, whose dubious excuse for a family is basically waiting around for him to die so they can take over his lucrative farm. The “stranger” of the title is his orphaned granddaughter from the city (Miriam Hopkins), who has never been to the farm but is cut from the same cloth as Grandpa.

He Says, She Says: The Frighteners (1996)

By Jandy

On May 8, 2014

In He Says She Says

[In this series, my husband Jonathan and I each write our reactions to films we watch together. Many of these films are ones that one of us is specifically sharing with the other, but it may also just be films that we watch and want to write about.]

The Movie

Director: Peter Jackson
Screenplay: Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson
Cast: Michael J. Fox, Trini Alverado, Peter Dobson, John Astin, Jeffrey Combs, Dee Wallace, Jake Busey, Chi McBride
Info: 1996 New Zealand/USA, Universal
Chooser: Jonathan
Date and Method Watched: 30 March 2014, Netflix Instant

She Says…

When Jonathan mentioned that heâ€™d like to put this on his list for me to watch, I was kind of like, whatever. I didnâ€™t know anything about it except that it was Peter Jackson before he became Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson, and that it was a horror-type movie with a somewhat goofy edge. At least, I think I knew about the goofy edge – Jon usually doesnâ€™t pick straight-up horror movies for me to watch, so maybe I just inferred that.