Rapid Response: The Trouble With Harry

“The Trouble With Harry” has to be the damnedest film Alfred Hitchcock ever made. Although all of his films have witty elements in their carefully constructed and orchestrated screenplays, this is one of his few movies that is a straight comedy.

Of course it is not without Hitchcockian elements, but it is at times a maddening film with the plot of a screwball and the dry delivery of an Ealing comedy.

As the tagline goes, the trouble with Harry is that he’s dead. A little boy (Jerry Mathers, before he was in “Leave it to Beaver.” Did the Beaver ever trade a dead rabbit for a frog and two blueberry muffins?) stumbles across a dead body in the lovely and idyllic Vermont forest. It’s poor Harry Wolp, and Capt. Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) believes he shot him while hunting for rabbits. He’s about to move the body, but person after person walks by before the Captain can hide it, including the boy with his mother, Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine, in her debut film role). Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Trouble With Harry”

Rapid Response: The Birds

If Hitchcock knew that a group of crows is actually referred to as a murder, do you think that would be enough to attract him to making “The Birds?”

Viewed as his last important and “unflawed” film in his otherwise spotless canon, it is unarguably one of Hitchcock’s most gimmicky pictures, but at times it is also one of the most gruesome and bloody he ever made.

The first stand out segment for me was the gory glimpse of a man with his eye sockets picked out by birds that had attacked his bedroom. Hitch paces this scene brilliantly, starting with Lydia’s (Jessica Tandy) slow walk down an eerily centered corridor and then first giving us a glimpse of a bloody pair of legs on the floor, the pajama pants poked through with tiny beak-shaped holes. Three quick edits that bring us closer and closer to the body confirm our suspicions in the best way possible without allowing it to linger on the shocking image for a second too long.

It’s a good example of how technically perfect “The Birds” is, despite some special effects and puppetry that aren’t quite up to today’s standards. We see his precision in the absolutely gripping finale as the birds attack the Brenner household as well as when Melanie (Tippi Hedren) silently approaches their house to leave young Cathy her present of two lovebirds. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Birds”

Meek’s Cutoff

I’d be lying if I said this movie was a Western.

“Meek’s Cutoff” is an indie drama that explores the pain of boredom. It is set on the Oregon Trail in the 1860s typically associated with Westerns, but it’s not that.

And while it can still be gripping, pointed and poignant character drama, there’s a frustrating feeling about illustrating the pain of boredom that feels more like the pain of pain or the boredom of boredom.

The three couples wandering the Oregon Trail is director Kelly Reichardt’s way of showing how any group of people going for weeks without water, without anything to do and without a sense of certainty as to anything can begin to weigh heavily on everyone. It’s not so much about the characters or the setting but about the burden it evokes.

In that way, you will feel a weight on your shoulders watching “Meek’s Cutoff.” The film is deliberately slow, with the opening shots themselves beginning the trend of a film that is quiet, slow, drawn out, distant and quaint. When we hear dialogue, it is often not of consequence but more atmosphere filling the void. Continue reading “Meek’s Cutoff”

Let’s talk about Sexploitation: The Stewardesses

What’s the most number of people you’ve ever watched porn with? None? Five? 10? More?

How about 200?

Last night I saw a special screening of “The Stewardesses,” a 1969 sexploitation film shown in 3-D. The exploitation genre is an expansive one of many forms of horror, action and campy comedy, but in an article I wrote for the IDS Weekend here, I said that some of these sexploitation films “bordered on soft and hardcore pornography.”

There’s nothing “bordered” about “The Stewardesses,” a full-fledged softcore adult film with flashes of a plot (amongst more gratuitous flashes of other things) so that it could be slightly more accessible to a wider audience, despite the fact that it had a self-assigned X-rating in the then new MPAA rating system that restricted it to select grindhouse theaters.

The movie is a barrel of laughs and has enough moments of unadulterated sex that aren’t exactly thought provoking. But there’s a temptation to not want to analyze the movie, simply because it is so fun. But “The Stewardesses” is important in one of two ways. It is firstly a cinematic relic and time capsule, and it is secondly an example of how people react to pornography in group settings.

“The Stewardesses’s” place in history is a peculiar one. In 1969, it was the first 3-D adult film ever made.

And believe it or not, it was more profitable than “Avatar.” Made for merely $100,000, it grossed $25 million worldwide, and with a profit of 250 times more than its budget, it is still the most profitable 3-D film ever made.

Although, the film’s box office performance is not exactly a good indicator of the film’s quality. It’s quite bad actually, in a wonderfully campy and fun way.

In terms of film, it’s poorly photographed (even for a porno, with crucial body parts often poorly cut out), the 3-D is a laughable gimmick (typically with feet, pool cues, cups and not boobs poking out of the frame), the story is flimsy and inserted at the front and back ends of the numerous sex scenes in between, and the dialogue is corny, blunt and awkward in the best way possible.

In terms of pornography, it’s even dated on our standards. Male genitalia and even the image of penetration were strictly off limits and would not even become legal until a few years later. At one point, a stewardess is tripping on acid (“The whole house to myself. Well if my parents are on a trip, maybe I should take a trip too. I can do acid!”) and picks up a lamp with a bust in the shape of a head from what looks like a Greek statue. A woman in the audience said “uh oh” and seemed to telegraph her dirty thought that this character would be shoving the top of that phallic lamp where it didn’t belong.

Although strangely, that may have been less odd and shocking than what actually happened, in which this naked woman began making out with the lamp as bad special effects flashed colored silhouettes of a man having sex with her, suggesting her mind trip.

It’s these sort of outbursts and reactions that make exploitation films so much fun. Watching it in a group setting, a good number of chuckles were had at the expense of pilot Brad Masters (what a great porn name) or the lesbian Jo Peters, who made a hilariously bad attempt to convince one woman to strip down to imagine she was swimming.

Another audience might get particularly quiet or be shocked at the hardcore stuff we see today, but the tame rubbing and kissing that makes up these softcore films elicits a whole different reaction. It doesn’t help that many of the sex scenes are not filled with erotic grunting and moaning but rather gentle elevator music, Indian mantras or other eerie soundtracks.

Contemporary audiences perhaps have never seen something like this, least of all in a group setting as large as this one and given the pervasive amounts of porn on the Internet, which I need not go into any further.

But “The Stewardesses” was not one of its kind in the 60’s and it was not the last either. Other sex films about women in actual jobs followed this one, rather than more films in which women were merely punished and abused for lurid amusement. And many received equally large distribution and attracted huge crowds of people.

The fact of the matter is, that type of audience does not exist any longer. The audience I saw it with maybe did act like teenage boys, but they were all mature film students looking to watch an amusing relic of cinema. I can only imagine what a screening of this would be with an ordinary audience, but those groups have dissipated to bedrooms and basements, and that fun has gone away from the movies.

Short of recommending that I’d rather see porn than “Jack and Jill” in the multiplex, I don’t really know what to do with that information, but I can recommend that if you are given the opportunity to see “The Stewardesses” in a setting such as I did, do so.

Pictures of People: Thoughts on Biopics

How do biopics shape our memory of historical figures?

“Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”

Lou Gehrig spoke these words and was immortalized.

But Gary Cooper spoke them too. His wonderful monologue at the end of “The Pride of the Yankees” forever shaped and dramatized the image of Gehrig. In fact, the last thing Gehrig said at the end of his speech were not those infamous words but “I may have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.”

Had it been these words Gehrig wanted to be remembered, he might not consider himself quite as lucky.

The biopic is a peculiar genre in film with the power to influence historical perception more than reality itself. If a director’s goal is typically to entertain or make a statement through a work of art, then the biopic is not often viewed as a director intended but as a recreation of a true moment in time.

How will audiences going to see “J. Edgar” this weekend react? Perhaps several generations now have no memory of J. Edgar Hoover or what people thought of him as he was alive. Their imagination of the man will be limited to Leonardo DiCaprio and the story Clint Eastwood tells. Continue reading “Pictures of People: Thoughts on Biopics”

J. Edgar

J. Edgar Hoover worked tirelessly to maintain an image of power, fame and significance in the 48 years he served the FBI.

Since his death, his legacy has been tarnished, if not forgotten, with allegations he was not as pivotal to the FBI as he appeared, that he held confidential information over politicians and public figures as a form of blackmail and that he was a homosexual who occasionally wore women’s clothes.

Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar,” along with Leonardo DiCaprio in the eponymous role, dons an equally inflated presence and renders itself just as unmemorable. Continue reading “J. Edgar”

Incendies

Denis Villeneuve’s powerhouse Greek tragedy drama was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.

“Incendies” is an emotional powerhouse of a drama drawing from real world headlines, Hollywood epics and Greek tragedy. This French Canadian soul-wrencher is a deep, far reaching film of many characters and complexities. But for all its ability to shock and floor you with painful realizations, it is never anything but engaging and riveting to watch.

It begins with the twins. Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) Marwan have just been read their mother Nawal’s (Lubna Azabel) will. “Bury me naked, face down, away from the world with no stone. No epitaph for broken promises.” Her broken promise was not revealing her full past to either of her kids, one who loved but never fully understood her and the other who gave up on her odd behavior long ago.

In death, she gives them two envelopes, one to be delivered to the father they never met and the other to the brother they didn’t know existed. Jeanne travels to Nawal’s homeland in the Middle East to track both down, and as she does, the movie intercuts her journey with Nawal’s own journey and torturous history. Continue reading “Incendies”

Life, Above All

“Life Above All” concerns the AIDS crisis in South Africa.

There is still a severe level of ignorance regarding AIDS in South Africa. In a small town near Johannesburg, a young teenage girl deals with the pain of her family and friends contracting the disease. But in “Life, Above All,” the real disease is the ridiculous gossip and horribly melodramatic tragedy that follows this family around.

“Life, Above All” vividly captures poverty in this town considered middle class in South Africa. It is a bright, breathtaking looking film that begins as a wholesome tearjerker but slowly piles on hardship until we are drowning in it. Continue reading “Life, Above All”

Downfall Review

“Downfall” is about the last days in the life of Adolf Hitler. It’s a Foreign Language Oscar Nominee for 2004.

It would be figurative suicide to say Hitler was right, but “Downfall” is a film that at times actually makes us feel empathy for the worst tyrant history has ever known. Bruno Manz’s performance as the Fuhrer is one of the only in film history to view the man as more than one-dimensional, a caricature or worse.

A foreign language Oscar nominee from 2004, “Downfall” is dedicated to portraying a truthful account of the last days of Hitler’s life and the fall of the Third Reich in Berlin. It opens and closes with interviews of Traudl Junge, a secretary to Hitler who escaped Berlin as the Russians were breathing down the city’s neck. The story follows Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), Hitler and his many other associates who all surrounded him in the bunker just before his death.

“Downfall” is a gritty looking film, photographed almost entirely in dimly lit underground corridors or ravaged war zones. But it is a unique portrait of Hitler that still finds many angles, from a story and cinematic perspective, to view him.

His depiction here is not a man of massive stature, but you can sense his hidden power. We realize that Hitler is at times a visionary and idealist rather than just a villain. For him, remaining in Berlin is not a blind power grab but a firm belief that a world where Germany does not win is not a world worth living in. The scary truth that follows the film in its last half hour after Hitler’s suicide is that he has imbued all of Germany with this same ego.

That said, there’s an empathetic pain in watching a character who realizes his own defeat but can’t bring himself to admit it openly. At times he speaks so eloquently, preaching that “compassion is a primal sin” and to show it is a “betrayal of nature.” His mesmerizing presence reminds me of the young Benito Mussolini in the Italian film “Vincere.” Watching the pair, you can’t blame the thousands who followed them willingly.

The difference between “Downfall” and “Vincere” however is “Downfall’s” acknowledgment that Hitler was a man with an ego, but also insecurity. Behind his back, we see Hitler’s hand fidgeting in a nervous twitch, an elegantly simple way of delving us into his complexity. As his army nears defeat, it is not anger that escapes his lips but fear that, because for him failure is essentially betrayal, all his power is meaningless.

This is a scary, relatable thought for any human being, not just the evil dictator of a global superpower. That’s the beauty of this film, one that finds humanity amidst destruction and declining evil.

Much credit is due to Bruno Manz, who is absolutely marvelous as Adolf Hitler. Manz has brilliant control over his entire face and body and so wonderfully melts into the role. Here is a famous German actor who has worked for many years and with directors as diverse and talented as Wim Wenders in “Wings of Desire,” and yet his performance is so strong that he will forever be remembered as the man who portrayed Hitler.

“Downfall” has been widely seen for one hilarious, if slightly unfortunate reason. A series of literally hundreds, if not thousands, of internet parody videos have surfaced on YouTube of Hitler in a pivotal scene responding to things as diverse as Oasis breaking up, the announcement of Qwikster and even people making so many “Downfall” parody videos.

Watching the scene as it was meant to be, I expected to be chuckling throughout it. But the scene is remarkably powerful and immersive simply because of Ganz’s powerhouse performance. I think many people who have watched the film for the same reason will be equally surprised by its impact.

4 stars

Vincere Review

Cinematically, “Vincere” is as lively and as enigmatic as the young Benito Mussolini on whom the film is based.

Cinematically, “Vincere” is as lively and as enigmatic as the young Benito Mussolini on whom the film is based. Marco Bellocchio’s film engages and enchants on a level that matches the same mystification instilled on the characters.

You’d be mistaken for presuming “Vincere” is a standard biopic, least of all on Mussolini (Filippo Timi). Here we see him as a young, lively, handsome man with a powerful glower in his eyes. Ideas and images of his rise to power are constantly flowing through his head, and the performance embodies an actually terrifying portrayal of Il Duce different from any image we’ve seen of him before.

As interesting as a character study of Mussolini would be at this young age, his personality is ultimately standard, and the film is more concerned with his lover and alleged wife Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Dalser met Mussolini in Milan when he was a journalist advocating socialism. She sold all of her possessions to help fund his newspaper Il Popolo D’Italia, and she had a passionate love affair with him during which time he fathered a child.

The intrigue of the film is in her madness and her obsession over her love for the man. After Mussolini is wounded in World War I, Ida comes to his side only to learn that he’s married Rachele Guidi. He denies any connection he has towards her and has her kept under surveillance ever since she began parading around their son, Benito Albino Mussolini, as proof of his infidelity. She’s eventually placed in a mental institution as she continues to insist that Mussolini is her husband, and Benito Albino is removed to an orphanage.

The strength of the film is in discovering a new angle for the sane-person-goes-to-mental-institution-and-no-one-believes-me-because-they-all-think-I’m-insane story. Her marriage to Mussolini may well have been true, even though no record of it was ever found, and moreover, it was no fantasy that Mussolini made love to her and cared for her. But what made her insane was her attraction. The energy Mussolini had, not even the man, the ideas or the power, was what swept her off her feet. Continue reading “Vincere Review”