Rapid Response: La Jetee

“La Jetee” is experimental filmmaking at its finest. In 1962, Chris Marker made a short film composed nearly entirely of still frame black and white photographs and told a breathtaking sci-fi mixed with a touching romance in a post-apocalyptic time travel story in the nuclear fallout after World War III.

The score’s cathedral filling elegaic choir immediately draws you into the story of a boy who vividly remembered a beautiful woman on the day the war began. It was the strength of this memory that convinced German scientists he would be appropriate for time travel experiments to go back in time and eventually forward in time to save the present. It wasn’t until the end of the film that I noticed a striking similarity between “La Jetee” and Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys,” but that was no coincidence. Gilliam remade this highly influential film that was the first to consider so strongly and seriously the ramifications of time travel in a time when nuclear war terrified everyone.

As I mentioned, the film is told entirely through still images. Marker did so for the reason that the cinematic experience itself manipulates time in a way he hopes to emulate with his movie. But watching it I began to question what is a film? Does a film come alive in its live action, a moving camera with active cinematography? Or does it take meaning different from that of a photograph because of the way it is edited?

Further, who is the driving force behind the success of a film like this? Is it the photographer who captured every individual frame? Is it the writer who conceived of the post apocalyptic concept before anyone else? Or is it the director who first had the vision to film it in this way?

Well, Marker was both writer and director on the short, and thank goodness for it. His film is visionary and influential, and at 28 minutes, certainly not a difficult film to sit through.

‘Tree of Life’ wins Palme D’Or: Cannes 2011 Recap

I’ve been following the events at this year’s Cannes film festival diligently for the last 12-ish days, and the news of how many great films, controversy and surprise has come out of France this year has been staggering.

But the biggest news of all was announced today when Terrence Malick’s highly anticipated family drama/sci-fi “The Tree of Life” was awarded the festival’s top prize, the Palme D’Or, by a jury led by Robert De Niro.

Malick, who previously won the Best Director award for “Days of Heaven,” is a notorious recluse and did not attend the festival, allowing his producers and star Brad Pitt to speak in his place. This marks the first time an American film has won the Palme since 2004 with Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the first time an English language film has won since 2006 with Ken Loach’s “The Wind that Shakes the Barley.”

As for other American winners, Kirsten Dunst won Best Actress for her film “Melancholia.” In the film, she plays a woman about to get married as another planet is set on a collision course with the Earth. This is a real surprise following the outrage over the comments of the film’s director, Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier. Von Trier made some distasteful jokes in which he declared himself a Nazi and claimed he sympathized with Hitler. He also made derogatory comments about Jewish and fellow Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier (“In A Better World”) and said, “Israel is a pain in the ass.” Following everything he said (and Dunst’s real performance was not losing it during the press conference as she sat next to him), Cannes declared Von Trier a “persona non grata” and banned him from the festival.  Continue reading “‘Tree of Life’ wins Palme D’Or: Cannes 2011 Recap”

Rapid Response: La Strada

Federico Fellini was put on the map as one of the world’s finest auteurs with his wide array of masterpieces from the ’50s, and “La Strada” is considered one of his finest.

It tells the story of a poor girl, Gelsomina, who learns her sister has died on the road with a traveling sideshow performer. Zampano, the performer with the lungs of steel, pays Gelsomina’s poor family 10,000 lire for her to come away with him, and she goes off into the world as a naive and simple girl ready to learn her life lessons. She loves being on the road and being an artist, but she dislikes Zampano, who’s cruel, insensitive and beats her.

The film is about how she learns to find her freedom and how everyone has a purpose, but she begins the film as no more than a loyal dog or a sheep, as Fellini so unsubtly refers to early on. A lesser film would make Zampano strictly one dimensional and would also be incapable of handling the amount of melodrama that in Fellini’s hands is perfectly convincing, natural and touching.

It also works because of Gelsomina’s (Giulietta Masina) wide range of expressions and emotions conveyed so simply by her. As a clown in Zampano’s show, she somehow reminded me of a female Chaplin. She’s often without words, has a warm and inviting smile and a pout that’s to die for. She’s a unique character who you can’t help but love and feel the deepest of empathy for.

“La Strada” is a moving and heartbreaking film once revered as one of the best ever made. It’s a must see.

Rapid Response: Amarcord

“Amarcord” is a smattering of Italian family life in a small town as recalled in autobiographical form by a director at the end of his career but never more at the top of it.

Federico Fellini’s lovely and hilarious art film, the title of which literally translates into “I Remember,” is an easily accessible and rollicking comedy filled with moments of beauty and empathy.

Some of the moments I enjoyed most were a montage of classroom scenes with a student using a tube of paper to transfer his piss to the front of the class while another is doing a problem at the board. Another was a family dinner moment with everyone lovingly at each others’ throats the way any Italian family would be (We’re not yelling; we’re Italian.). And yet another as a character presumably a young Fellini goes to confession but regrets to tell the priest about all the times he’s touched himself.

All of Fellini’s movies are filled with life and grandeur, even if not all of them are in striking color the way “Amarcord” is. And they’re also all autobiographical in some way, but this is deemed his last masterpiece and one of the best movies ever made because it is a film made by a director considered one of the best of all time around when he made the film who then turned around and made a personal film about all of his joys, fantasies and memories.

It’s a gorgeous film, and probably the best looking comedy ever made outside of maybe “Manhattan.” It’s got all of Fellini’s natural cinematic flourishes and Nino Rota’s enchanting score. “Amarcord” is a real treat, the kind of art film you can show just about anyone and they’ll love, even your Italian mother.

Rapid Response: Black Orpheus

I got a B in Classical Mythology. Could’ve gone better, could’ve gone worse, whatever. If I learned nothing else from the class, I did learn that mythology played a role in ancient Greek society like we cannot imagine, and that in today’s society, the stories and themes are more prevalent than we know.

And upon watching “Black Orpheus,” I was glad to have the background knowledge necessary to fully grasp the greatness of this film.

Marcel Camus’s movie takes place in Rio de Janiero during Carnivale and through this modern lens recreates the heroic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice without ever actually betraying the realism of the setting.

However, the film is loaded with symbolism to the story and most notably its themes, but I can see how a strict reading of the film without the proper context would be an empty one. This is for the reason that “Black Orpheus” is certainly not a performance film, and the many histrionics that compose this tragic love triangle can be a bit much. Further, while it is alive with color from the Rio landscape, the film only has a select few moments of truly cinematic beauty, and for a person confused with the plot, those flashes of greatness may be lost. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Black Orpheus”

Rapid Response: Beauty and the Beast (1946) (La Belle et la Bete)

I hope this headline attracts a lot of Disney fans. Much as a I love “Beauty and the Beast” from 1991, Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” a French film from 1946, is equally as magical, enchanting and lovely as the beloved cartoon.

Cocteau’s film isn’t precisely a kids movie, although based on a children’s fable and certainly easy enough and fantastical enough to be enjoyed by one. It tells the story of which we are now all very much familiar but makes the film wondrous in its employment of trick film shots, special effects, extravagant costumes and more.

The Beast himself (Jean Marais) is a silly but certainly busy looking costume of fur and hair, and within his cursed castle is one of the strangest yet most appealing movie sets in history. Lining the walls are protruding arms holding candelabras, statues that open their eyes and follow the intruders and dark voids leading to stairs that seem to make no spatial sense. Today, the special effects are decidedly cheesy, clearly being nothing more than people sticking their hands through to another side of a set wall, but it’s impossible to care because the film is handled with such poetic grace and beauty in its glowing lighting and shimmering black and white cinematography.

There’s an elegantly done scene where Belle (Josette Day) first enters the Beast’s castle and runs through the enchanted place in slow motion and then literally glides as she floats past heavenly white curtains blowing in through the windows. And nearly the whole film is told with this grace and haunting beauty.

Cocteau was a multi-talented director in his day, also being famous for poetry, surrealist paintings, novels and plays. Roger Ebert wrote in his Great Movies piece about this film that unlike his first film, “Blood of a Poet,” which was “an art film made by a poet,” “‘Beauty and the Beast’ was a poetic film made by an artist.” It’s the reason the film seems so touching today as it explores themes like love and grief, and even a few common to Ancient Greek Tragedy, such as loyalty to a God versus loyalty to family. Cocteau even dabbled in Greek Mythology with his Orphic trilogy.

The fantasy scenes are certainly more magical than the real world scenes, most of which involve Belle’s two sisters (who reminded me more of characters from “Cinderella” than “Beauty and the Beast”), who spend all their time being petty and generally awful. And the end is a cornball moment as well, but there are wondrous cinematic tricks and touches that still make this film a marvel.

The Beaver

Some stories are flawed on a fundamental level. No matter how well told or performed they are, there are certain things it becomes tough to get past. “The Beaver,” a lovingly directed film by Jodie Foster, falls into this trap. It’s not bad or uninteresting, just problematic.

Walter Black (Mel Gibson) is a hopelessly depressed man. He has no ambition and spends much of his day sleeping. As the CEO of a failing toy company and the distant father of his lonely little boy Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) and his self-hating teenager Porter (Anton Yelchin), he has no one to look to but his wife Meredith (Foster). But she has given up on him after years of trying to help him come out of his slump and kicks him out of the house.

He drunkenly tries to kill himself, only to be startled by an ugly old hand puppet of a beaver. Walter talks through it with a Scottish accent and assumes this new persona. He convinces his wife it is a therapy procedure and finds his confidence at home and at work through it. Continue reading “The Beaver”

Winter’s Bone

Characters are the lifeblood of any movie, and so many mainstream films forget that crucial fact. “Winter’s Bone” was 2010’s top winner at the Sundance film festival, partially because it tells a real world, bitter, brutal and cold blooded narrative in the heart of America, but more likely because of the remarkably strong female performance at its core.

Debra Granik directs the young Jennifer Lawrence as Ree Dolly, a 17-year-old from the Ozarks responsible for her young brother and sister and her medicated and helpless mother. Her father Jessup has jumped bail and is missing after being caught cooking meth, and he has posted their house as his collateral. It quickly becomes Ree’s job to find her dad in the 10 days before his court date if they wish to not be thrown off their land.

Ree’s quest does not take her far, as everywhere a person could possibly disappear to can be found within this small mountain town. The people that refuse to help her or can’t are all neighbors, friends or close and distant relatives.

Whether or not this world Granik has created for Ree to inhabit is believable or not is beside the point. Granik is making a statement about the often over sentimentalized view of these rural communities. When everyone is this close and so much family in breeding has seemingly taken place, tensions run high. Continue reading “Winter’s Bone”

Rapid Response: The Lady Eve

Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve” is considered, “A frivolous masterpiece. Like “Bringing Up Baby,” “The Lady Eve” is a mixture of visual and verbal slapstick, and of high artifice and pratfalls. Barbara Stanwyck keeps sticking out a sensational leg and Henry Fonda keeps tripping over it,” as Pauline Kael wrote in her book in 1992.

It isn’t often I disagree with the experts, and “The Lady Eve” is on a number of best movies of all time lists, including the Village Voice poll and AFI’s 100 Laughs (#55) and AFI’s 100 Passions (#26), but I didn’t think the film had the speed of a number of other screwball comedies like “Bringing Up Baby” or “His Girl Friday,” nor did I find it to have the wit of Sturges’ own “Sullivan’s Travels,” a film so self aware of the film industry around it that it seems an early example of shattering the fourth wall. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Lady Eve”

Bridesmaids

Kristen Wiig is the funniest woman in the movies today, and one of the best character actors too. Such has long been the position of a number of critics, and her breakout comedy “Bridesmaids,” which she co-wrote, definitively proves it.

Wiig is a real trooper. She simply knows how to be funny and make anyone laugh, not just women. Her film, and yes, this is her film even though Judd Apatow produced it, knows how to be goofy, silly, smart, stupid, raunchy, vulgar and even heartfelt. It finds the perfect middle ground between bad chick flick and offensive bromance.

What “Bridesmaids” is not is “Sex and the City” at a wedding. Wiig’s Annie is a kind-hearted woman with a protective instinct and a competitive edge, especially when it comes to her childhood best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph). She differs from the bitchy and gossiping foursome on HBO’s hit show with a disdain for men, other women and children. She just shows an inherently believable female instinct to preserve her friendship in an awkward, yet civil manner. Continue reading “Bridesmaids”