Rapid Response: The Thin Man

Myrna Loy’s Nora Charles has an adorable look when she scrunches her face like a badger in a knowing and casual embrace of her husband Nick’s drunken tom foolery. One time she does it while he’s poking fun at her over the phone, right after he’s sent her on a detour to Grant’s Tomb, and the two have such wonderful, good-hearted chemistry that you can bet he knows she’s doing it.

This is what most people liked best about “The Thin Man,” a delightful, smart and quick crime comedy that had a strong story and a clever concept but was almost completely overshadowed by Powell and Loy’s sparks. The pair of them communicate instantly that they are a married couple who knows each other very well and are capable of wittily snipping at one another without batting an eye. Instead they trade smirks and off-the-cuff remarks, and their swift wordplay and punch lines as dry as their martinis make them so easily likeable. They also have one of the cutest and most iconic movie dogs, the loveable Asta.

And whereas most crime comedies use their plots as filler for a comedy vehicle, “The Thin Man’s” story is never secondary to Powell and Loy’s good fun. It’s about a comfortably married couple so wealthy that the pair of them can lie around all day drinking and throwing parties for anyone who needs a quick pick-me-up. Nick is a retired detective from California dragged back into snooping based on his wife’s prodding that it’s probably a fun diversion. A family friend has gone missing and is suspected of murder, and everyone begs Nick to get involved, even though he confesses it’s getting in the way of his drinking. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Thin Man”

The Exterminating Angel (1962)

“The Exterminating Angel” must be the simplest allegory film ever made. A group of wealthy individuals attend a dinner party, retire to the drawing room and then cannot bring themselves to leave.

The message? All of us are sheep to the conventions of society. Stripped of those conventions, human dignity slowly deteriorates until we reveal ourselves as nothing but animals.

And yet the concept is so simple that we think there must be more to it. Luis Bunuel tried to teach us with his first film, “Un Chien Andalou,” that we read too deeply into narrative, and yet here we make the same mistake to look for a riddle where there is none. Surely there must be some other force withholding them, but then again these are the conventions of society, this time established by Hollywood, taking over.

Bunuel doesn’t wait long before hinting at surrealism. The large dinner party enters into the foyer of a luxurious mansion, and the host looks around for his butler, strangely not there. Fail to pay attention, and you’ll miss Bunuel virtually repeat the moment.

The group’s conversation is all mildly peculiar, either subtly perverse or mysterious. One couple is madly in love, another is dying of cancer and a third has just recovered and is now infatuated with the doctor.

These details matter to an extent, but typically in one-room movies such as this, some characters are heavily developed while others serve as supporting players. Bunuel’s film uses all of his people as blank slates, individual chess pieces in this elaborate and silly game (watch the movie and you’ll understand that reference).

At first their inability to leave starts as simple social criticisms. Petty judgments about removing a suit jacket are whispered throughout the drawing room, and although everyone is tired, no one wants to betray the hospitality of the host by being the first to leave.

They all remain over night, and the following morning Bunuel has his characters call attention to their predicament. Each has their own perspective as to why they stayed, whether they were too tired or just enjoyed the company too much. But there’s no real answer to explain what halts these people in their tracks, and still no one can bring themselves to do anything about it.

Bunuel’s characters are slaves to their own impulses to be polite and sick at the thought of doing otherwise. They have conviction to act but no follow-through or backbone.

They predictably blame their blue-collar servants, who mysteriously left the mansion before the party began. One goes so far as to suggest that lower income people simply experience less pain. The next reaction is to jump to bizarre conclusions, like no one has come to save them not because they are idiots and hypocrites but because something in the world has gone horribly wrong.

Bunuel drew similar comparisons to the elite class in “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” but in that film all the characters do is leave the party, never actually sitting down to eat.

And at the end of the day when characters have withheld food and medicine, hidden away in closets and plotted to murder the host, we realize these are cruel characters in a cruel film, no matter how nice and polite they try to come across.

They’re biting criticisms, and Bunuel uses careful tact and pacing as their actions get stranger and more perverse. He slowly drowns us in madness and never goes for a punch line. In this way, the level of absurdity becomes so great and yet we believe it all to be plausible.

The film’s greatest paradox however is its ease and simplicity. The characters both inside and outside the room seem to echo what the audience may be thinking. “There must be something else going on! It shouldn’t be this easy for us to just leave!”

Consider the rescue squad just outside the mansion. A captain says he sent a team of soldiers to go inside but not one of them could make it. A crowd of curious onlookers storms the mansion demanding to know what’s happening, and even they halt just at the gate’s entrance line. All of these people are perplexed by the obvious simplicity of the situation, and that’s what halts them. Society has dictated there should be complications, and when someone like a child can actually break through the barrier with ease, no one seems to fully understand why.

“The Exterminating Angel” is hardly as surreal as “The Discreet Charm” or “Un Chien Andalou,” but there must be skeptics coming across Bunuel and being infuriated by his clever, almost manipulative scenarios. They feel there must be a puzzle piece he’s not telling us when we see a bear and three sheep wandering the mansion, but we know better.

My Night at the Drive-In

Photo by Steph Aronson – IDS Weekend

“First time? Seriously? What fake version of the Midwest did you grow up in anyway?” – A tweet from my friend and colleague Brad Sanders, @bradscottsand

Brad is referring to my first visit to a drive-in movie theater. It does seem like something I would’ve done with my family years ago and something every Midwesterner should do at some point in their lives. It’s probably also a must for a film critic trying to grasp an old sense of movie nostalgia.

But if I haven’t been, it’s because no one is going to say seeing a movie at a drive-in is ideal for any movie buff. The sound and picture quality is poor, the weather can be a nuisance, the number of distractions is larger and the choices are limited. Why see “The Hunger Games” on a bizarre double bill with “Mission Impossible: 4” when there are so many other options available?

And yet I must recommend it, because the drive-in movie theater gave me a sense of movie magic I simply don’t feel anymore at the multiplex. Continue reading “My Night at the Drive-In”

A Separation

The emotions in “A Separation” are universal. Asghar Farhadi’s film gets at the harsh reality of everyday life. It’s enthralling, urgent, complex, saddening and one of the best films of the year.

I’m still too young to know how painful a divorce can be. I’ve also never lived in Iran, nor have I been so devoutly religious that I let a fear of sin dictate my actions.

But the emotions in “A Separation” are universal. Asghar Farhadi’s film gets at the harsh reality of everyday life. It’s enthralling, urgent, complex, saddening and one of the best films of the year.

“A Separation’s” first hard truth is that a broken marriage never just affects two parties. Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) are a middle-class couple living in Iran with their 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). They’re comfortable and care for each other, but Simin knows they can be better off and wants to move. Nader won’t budge because his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) is suffering through Alzheimer’s. Because the two must each go their separate ways, Simin files for divorce in a gripping opening sequence done in one shot.

Both are right, both are caring individuals for their family, and both are stuck at an impasse. With Simin gone, Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to work as a nurse. Razieh has her young daughter Somayeh (Kimia Hosseini) and has another on the way, so she desperately needs what little money Nader can now offer as a single parent. Continue reading “A Separation”

Lars and the Real Girl

If your brother showed up to your house with a sex doll he believed to be his real life girlfriend, you could have one of two reactions: Either you could go along with his delusion and try and help, or you could lop the head off the damn thing and try and help that way.

“Lars and the Real Girl” is a sitcom-y but sweet story about a man with a social phobia stuck in a delusion. It’s approach for self-help is the former, and it becomes obvious how drastically different a film this could’ve been if it adhered to the latter. But by straining to avoid cynicism and discrimination at all costs, “Lars and the Real Girl” overcomes what would otherwise be cheap, sitcom laughs.

Ryan Gosling shows magnificent range as Lars, the awkward but undeniably endearing disabled person who brings home a plastic girlfriend. He has a crippling fear of social situations and experiences a burning pain at the touch. But at almost every moment Gosling is just naturally beaming.

As we see him sitting with this slutty doll, we laugh with him, not at him. Everyone in town cares so much for him that much of Craig Gillespie’s film is about his family and friends more than it is about Lars. Continue reading “Lars and the Real Girl”

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

“An upper-class sextet (Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Cassel) sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts repeatedly thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.”

This is Netflix’s plot description of Luis Bunuel’s surrealist masterpiece “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” which I didn’t even read ahead of time. The film is deliciously bizarre and mind-blowingly obtuse without any real sense of a plot. I wondered if Netflix could fill in the holes for me in a cohesive way I could not, although at the end of the day the concept is so wonderfully simple that I would have had no trouble telling you precisely what Netflix had said.

Think about Bunuel’s film for a second: If you have watched it but didn’t really get it, was there any moment on screen where you really didn’t know what you were looking at? Every bizarre joke Bunuel plays on these upper class twits is plainly coherent, and his game with the audience is making us wonder if it has any meaning beyond the literal.

One of the film’s best moments comes when the group goes to dinner at an army colonel’s house only to find the food is fake and the table rests on a stage in front of an audience. One character is stunned motionless, and he wakes realizing this was only a dream. “I was on a stage, but I didn’t know the lines,” he says. Neither do we, even though we know exactly where we are.

The bourgeoisie are Bunuel’s targets throughout every surrealist set piece, each of them mindlessly wandering through their lives with an entitled sense of direction and with nowhere to go. Bunuel literally calls attention to this by showing us all six of them doing just that down an empty road in the country.

And yet Bunuel’s talents as a filmmaker come in blurring the line between reality and fiction. At a certain point when the nightmares haunting these characters are quite literally dreams within dreams (“Inception,” anyone?), we begin to question everything we’ve seen until that point. Every time you can begin to grasp a sense of a running plot or a character motivation, something comes out of left field to disrupt that train of thought.

Don Raphael Acosta (Fernando Rey) is the ambassador to a fake European country, and we learn he’s having an affair with one of his friends’ wives. The moment is interrupted by the husband himself, who is even then blindly unaware, and the story diverts to another theme of a sexy, hippie protestor aiming to assassinate the ambassador. When her voice is blared out by a pair of plane engines, we realize lower class people have no voice in the proletariat. But even that hardly fits when in just the next scene an entire platoon practicing war games invades the bourgeoisie dinner party with stories and pot smoking.

Bunuel relishes in stringing us along, and it is this ambition more so than adding punchlines to his screwball scenarios that he’s interested in. Each set piece is so wild and yet addressed so dryly, and we watch with almost perverse fascination more than gleeful irreverence.

“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” was Bunuel’s most successful film. In 1972 it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, earned a screenplay nomination and was also a box office hit, or at least as much as a foreign surrealist film can be a hit. And yet the film is not too far away from his infamous short film he made at the very start of his career with Salvador Dali, 1928’s “Un Chien Andalou.” That short film too is a string of insane set pieces that are not visually nonsensical but play with our minds in ways we cannot process. In both films’ collections of all of these horrific dreams, some are sadistic, some are serene and some are surreal, but all of them display a level of remarkable imagination that is still unmatched.

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Perhaps the movie furthest away from Martin Scorsese’s oeuvre is not “Hugo” but is the late 19th Century period romance “The Age of Innocence.”

The 1993 film is an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s famous novel, and yet Scorsese makes it his own by reaching out to a complex, passion filled protagonist struggling for identity in a vicious, rough world. “The Age of Innocence” may lack the violence or blood of some of his masterpieces (this one deserves to be up there with his best), but it’s a biting and bittersweet character drama in which people are trapped within a rigid society of rules and tradition beneath luxurious decorum.

First off, this is a drop dead gorgeous film. “The Age of Innocence” may be 20 years old and the setting may be over 100, but Michael Ballhaus’s cinematography and Dante Ferretti’s production design haven’t aged a day. Every frame is lusciously picturesque, but the world Scorsese depicts is bleak, flat and two-dimensional. We see Newland Archer’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) wedding photo to May Welland (Winona Ryder) as it is being taken, and at that moment we realize how much this character’s world has been turned upside down. Constantly this dichotomy between the film’s look and its tone makes for a gripping experience.

Newland’s engagement to May is one dictated by society to be a good match, but Newland is in love with a woman who has just returned to New York from Europe, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). She’s an outcast because of her crumbling marriage and her subtle defiance for other social norms. “Why should America be a copy of another country,” she asks as she and Newland bemoan New York’s stringent and too utterly polite traditionalism.

The powerful difference is that none of this is really what it seems. “Everything is labeled,” Newland says, “But everybody is not.” “The Age of Innocence” has a devilishly engaging twist near the end in which we learn how the entire society has politely turned on him and Ellen and composed one marriage necessity that here plays out like a death sentence. This is a movie that calmly obliterates you. Continue reading “The Age of Innocence (1993)”

The Hunger Games

I’m not a 12-year-old girl, but I would imagine they would not want to see children their age being gruesomely murdered with spears any more than I would.

“The Hunger Games” then is a puzzling blockbuster. The book trilogy by Suzanne Collins and this impending movie franchise are being marketed as the equivalent to “Twilight” and “Harry Potter.”

But the film is a shockingly bleak and brutal story of survival and mortality in the face of massive pressure and little hope. It is a deftly powerful piece of filmmaking that more closely resembles “Children of Men” than light entertainment. Continue reading “The Hunger Games”

Movies vs. TV

I’m grappling with the idea that it’s cooler to be a TV fan than a movie buff.

Today’s most critically acclaimed TV shows are also the most buzzed about in circles that don’t revolve around Chuck Lorre sitcoms. “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men,” “Downton Abbey” and “Community” are just some in the mix of what’s both cool and smart.

But movie critics are all jumping to see “The Turin Horse.” It’s the final film by the aging Hungarian master Bela Tarr. It’s slow, depressing, in black and white, has little dialogue and is bound to be this year’s art house masterpiece. It’s not exactly a blockbuster.

I love movies for their artistry, abstractness and technical wizardry. What’s frustrating to me is that people groomed on TV neglect those points because TV, much as I watch it, possesses none of these.

My goal now is to address these gaps without condemning TV as a whole.

TV is not a visual medium

The image of Luke Skywalker stepping outside to watch Tattooine’s two setting suns burns vividly in my mind. The wedding from “The Godfather” is there too, along with E.T. riding a bike in front of the moon or Lawrence of Arabia standing victoriously on a raided train.

I have fond memories of many of television’s finest moments, but I can hardly visualize any of them.

TV lacks iconic visual moments. A Google image search will prove me right. Search any good movie last year, even one you haven’t seen, and familiar images will still be there.

You may get Walter White standing in his underpants with a gun if you search a TV show, but you’ll mostly get cast photos and promos.

Many of these shows are gorgeous in HD with rich set dressing and costumes, but the nature of television requires cinematic simplicity and familiarity.

If one episode of a show looks too radically different from the next, people get wary. So directors develop patterns when shooting on a set, including reused establishing shots and lots of close up, over the shoulder conversations.

Rarely then do we stand back and marvel at the beauty or craft of an individual shot. Often film has the luxury of larger budgets and a longer shooting schedule, but there are dozens of indies that do away with HD cameras and are still more visually stimulating.

In fact, TV is not a visual medium. Its closest relative following World War II was radio, which likewise evolved TV into an art form that valued story over style.

TV is all about story

Any film school will tell you the three most important things a filmmaker can focus on are story, story, story.

Students then crank out a concept driven show like “Lost” with a million different narrative threads and an intricate web of clues that’ll add up by the season’s end.

But what that neglects are either shows with elegant, artistic simplicity or shows that are truly surreal.

And when something like “The Tree of Life” comes along and is a visual and emotional feast rather than a narrative one, people flip out.

“What does it all mean,” they cry, as if analyzing a string of lottery numbers that’ll key in the secret behind an island and smoke monster.

There’s a reason it’s called an “unconventional narrative.” Often, there’s not a complex answer to unravel because it’s anything but conventional. It’s art, beauty and expressionism for its own sake, and anyone who has seen the films of Bunuel, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Tarr, Fellini, Malick and countless others would know that.

TV is never ending

If I ask to watch “Lawrence of Arabia,” you cringe at its length. But you won’t bat an eye at a TV marathon.

If I don’t get into a show it’s because I can watch a dozen movies in the time it takes to watch just one season on Netflix.

And if I get behind on a new, must-see TV show, the moment has already passed. There’s no catching up with so many other things to watch.

But TV thrives on its endless narratives. In fact, TV is the only art form that can actually change between episodes and seasons as people watch and debate.

This is so true that TV now encourages live discussions on Twitter through strategic hashtags, whereas doing so in a theater is plain rude.

If I was an old fashioned troll I could say that a work of art should stand alone with one artist behind it, and a TV series with a million contributors on social media is intrinsically not that.

TV is not film

Everything I’ve argued could also be a reason for why TV is so special.

The strength of TV is that it’s not film’s bastard child. In the last decade alone it has learned to tell stories in a way no other medium can and dispelled most rumors that TV is nothing but a trashy wasteland.

And there are even exceptions to my rules. “Louie” is a show that represents what television could be if it chose to follow that path. It’s a program that uses a serialized format to its advantage to create essentially short films. “Louie” is not only well made and often surreal, but individual episodes can stand alone as art. Not to mention, Louis C.K. is TV’s closest example to an auteur.

What we’re left with is a war between two completely different art forms and two sets of preferences. It’s black and white, but we’ve been comparing two shades of gray.

That’s why I’m scared when movie theaters are losing business to a digital age, episodic film franchises dominate the market and Netflix moves closer and closer to just being HBO.

Film is becoming the cultural dinosaur, and TV is thriving in a way that threatens to make interesting movies extinct.

Throne of Blood (1957)

You could do a thesis studying Lady Washizu’s eyes in Akira Kurosawa’s underrated masterpiece “Throne of Blood.” Isuzu Yamada is brilliant as the feudal Japan equivalent of Lady Macbeth, at once appearing sinister and manipulative just in the way she controls her body’s stillness and gaze into nothingness. And when you realize she’s capable of overcoming the powerhouse acting of even Toshiro Mifune, you realize how eerily wonderful this entire film is.

“Throne of Blood” is possibly the best Shakespearean adaptation ever made, rivaled only by Kurosawa’s own “Ran,” which adapted “King Lear” rather than “Macbeth.” It’s a loose retelling that takes liberties with the story and especially the language, but Kurosawa’s interest lies not in making a poetic character drama but a tight, haunting genre picture that finds poetry in its cinematography.

Lady Washizu never dances around the kill or be killed paradox running through “Macbeth,” and her character rapidly develops as someone capable of eating away at every inhibition we carry. What Mifune’s character Washizu is left with is his own hubris and apprehensions, all compiling to build toward his tragic (and awesome) death.

Despite Shakespeare’s powerful tragedy, the story is almost a side factor to Kurosawa’s enchanting mash-up of Japanese Noh Theater and Western movie imagery.

Interior shots are particularly theatrical, and the camera beacons and teases the audience and the characters by starkly isolating them to the point of vulnerability. The framing is impeccable in the dinner scene in which Washizu awaits his guest of honor and rival Miki (Akira Kubo), and there’s no question from Kurosawa’s off-kilter camera how crazed and engrossing the lengthy, uncomfortable moment is.

As for the exteriors, Mifune is a commanding presence unlike any actor Japanese or American, and yet Kurosawa is capable of dwarfing him with thunderous surroundings, eerily luminous lighting amidst forestry and the Godlike effervescence of the film’s evil spirit. Kurosawa captures fog in his shots like few directors, and in smaller scope scenes he controls it even further to skillfully mask the studio space as we venture into the evil spirit’s ghastly hollow.

But above all else, “Throne of Blood” is famous for its unbelievable finale. An over-confident Washizu barks at his men to enter into a losing battle, and his archers betray him in a hellfire of arrows. The scene is done with real arrows and without special effects, and it has the power of engulfing us in madness as we watch. It’s also followed by one of the best movie deaths ever as a defeated Washizu staggers aimlessly with an arrow jutting from his throat.

How “Throne of Blood” could be little seen or underrated amongst Kurosawa’s oeuvre is beyond me. He made it in 1957 shortly after his triple play of “Rashomon,” “Ikiru” and “Seven Samurai” and didn’t exactly break new ground in storytelling or action direction the way he did in those films. But as a cinematic masterstroke first and Shakespearean adaptation second, it deserves a place amongst Kurosawa’s finest.