Review: Scarface (1932)
Like many of my generation, I first encountered
Scarface as a very violent Brian DePalma film that was released in the early 1980s (didn’t see it til the early 1990s, my parents weren’t
that permissive). The credits of that film obviously cite the Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht movie, and I further read about it (very scrambled memories being assembled for narrative momentum here) in something that filmmaker Francois Truffaut wrote, something that commended the Boris Karloff murder scene as represented by the falling of a bowling pin. I think Truffaut also said that Paul Muni, as the titular Tony Camonte, gave a startlingly apeish performance in the role. I almost saw this film in college but a mishap prevented that.
Seven or eight years later, I’ve finally caught up with Hawks’ blunt, brutal, lean, inventive, badass gangster picture, and its so nice to be able to say that a classic film is every bit as good as its considerable reputation, and actually (barring a few exceptions) ages better than the fifty years younger remake that it inspired. The DePalma film is exhilarating and live wire in places, but it is very much a part of the 1980s. With the exception of a laughable intro card that was probably insisted upon by the censors, the old Scarface ages exceptionally well, and is a remarkably perverse picture, certainly one of the best criminal gluttony movies ever made.
Paul Muni owns this. Yes, the acting, even from him, is a bit more presentational than we are used to, but that suits the part of a low rent gangster who flies too close to the sun to a tee, he’s supposed to seem a bit obvious, and brutish. I imagine that this role was very influential in how many great actors would approach the fall of the crime lord movie. Muni shows you the brute, the gaudy showoff, but he intimates the calculation behind that, and the animal hunger that’s behind even that. Camonte is a complete creature of impulse, and its that impulse that causes him to topple. The more morally murky, too little too late motivations behind Tony’s sacking in the later film is non-existent here.
In the finish of this film, Paul Muni has essentially become King Kong (Truffaut was right), and, though much more vicious and unforgiving than that ape, a similar pathos arises as Muni chokes on tear gas and writhes and collapses in a hail of bullets. This ending was probably originally meant to be played as unquestionably happy, but Muni has brought too much life, vigor and uncontainable need for it us to accept it so patly.
Hawks, one of the most respected directors of all time, seems to be roused by Muni and the subject matter. Hawks is a master craftsman, no doubt, but he’s not usually a showy guy, his patterns usually emerge in theme more than camera pyrotechnics. His work in Scarface is flamboyant, and playful, with enough death metaphor for ten movies, or half of The Departed. One of Muni’s other super famous performances, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, has been sitting around my house forever, unwatched. That will soon change.
Review: The Simpsons Movie (2007)
The arrival of a Simpsons movie, like the long awaited film incarnation of any pop cultural touchstone, demands a bit of clarification of the tastes of the person reviewing it. So let’s get that out of the way as quick and painlessly as possible. I think that roughly the first dacade of
The Simpsons is a defining masterwork of its medium; compulsively rewatchable (one of the most addictively rewatchable things ever created) and unshakably brilliant in timing, character, and comic dread.
The second (almost) decade is basically the opposite of all that, inspiring die hard Simpsonites to utter that most hollow of cop outs: “Well, its still better than anything else on.” No, its not. To risk sounding like Comic Book Guy, modern Simpsons is a sort of betrayal; unfunny, undisciplined, with characters that are replicants of their former selves. Yes, The Simpsons is still funnier than say, Family Guy, but that’s only because the latter is one of the most inexplicably popular pieces of shit to roll off the haystack in recent years.
I figured the debate over The Simpsons Movie would be one of whether or not its competent. To my very pleasant surprise, the debate is whether or not The Simpsons Movie is a legitimate comedy classic. Yes, Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, and the endless collection of writers have done it; after nineteen years, nine of which having been very underwhelming, they have returned the Simpsons to their prime, for 85 minutes of blissful, stoned out, mild anarchy.
The mild in the above is the only disappointment. The Simpsons Movie never becomes the razor sharp, pop culture blitzkreig that the show was at its height. But, but, but it IS just as funny, and for this I will forgive quite a bit. The Simpsons Movie is a broad, specific, free floating burlesque of American indifference to its own corruption, its self-absorption, and in that, we get the hero we deserve, the iconic Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta), who, I think, its now very safe to say is one of the most potent creations in all of film or TV comedy.
The Simpsons Movie should also be commended for its remarkable balancing act. There are hundreds of characters here to choose from, and five principle characters and the movie never feels strained or shortchanged or over stuffed. The Simpsons Movie feels effortless, with many blitzed little non-sequiturs that many movies wouldn’t make time for.
There is even a bit of pathos for those of you who remember the slightly more serious Simpsons fondly (that portion of the show was my favorite.) The toll that Homer’s self-destructive idiocy takes on his family is acknowledged, and the scenes are authentic, disarming and, best of all, unexpected. The Simpsons Movie is the biggest surprise of the summer and, for once, that’s good. But, for the record, frogurt is still bad. Or good, I forget.
Review: Ratatouille (2007)
When one discusses a Pixar film, the question usually isn’t whether it’s any good or not, but how good it is within the standards of the company’s impressive output. We all have our preferences. I know many that love
Finding Nemo, and I don’t begrudge them that, but it’s not, despite Albert Brooks’ wonderful work, one of my favorites. Pixar at their absolute best is a three way tie between the
Toy Story movies and
The Incredibles, which some have rightly claimed to be the best superhero movie, period.
Brad Bird, the writer-director of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and now Ratatouille, is as good as everyone thinks he is. He’s sort of a Ray Harryhausen of American animation, imbuing the genre with a respect, and an attention to detail that is seldom seen anywhere else. Yes, The Iron Giant is essentially E.T., but it was a new E.T. when we really needed it (Spielberg, though still interesting, and at times quite impressive, had lost that particular sensibility years ago.)
Ratatouille is a children’s film that explores a need for something despite overwhelming societal disapproval, and eventually gets around to telling us that we can have whatever we like if we work hard enough for it. Daring, I know. Ratatouille doesn’t have the unexpected thematic originality of The Incredibles (the shockingly un-pandering point that we as a society are content with mediocrity and threatened by anything else) but it, like The Iron Giant, is wonderful despite a more time tested (some less kind would say cliched) plot. Ratatouille is so beautiful you may find yourself melting like the film’s sort of villian (Peter O’Toole) and give in to its pleasures, its reliance on skill over gimmick, on character over breakneck, numbing, screw the mood pace.
The Peter O’ Toole character is a food critic, and its here that Ratatouille distinguishes itself in terms of plot mechanics. Of course, the critic, Anton Ego (love that) is redeemed, and rediscovers his love for his medium, but the film sneaks in a sly anti-critic commentary at the end that I wish it hadn’t saved for the last ten minutes. This is where Ratatouille could’ve broken apart from the usual you can do it pabulum, and, as well written and structured as the film is, I couldn’t help but wish the end were actually the starting point.
Review: Sorcerer (1977)
Anyone who likes to indulge in a little film nerdery, either for pay or pro bono, probably has a master list of films that they haven’t seen that they should get on their ass and see immediately.
Wages of Fear is on that list, and on that list it remains. The American remake,
Sorcerer, by William Friedkin was also on that list, and here we are today. Apologies for the chronological flip flop.
I’ve read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and it would seem that, at the time, Sorcerer was one of those grand, Quixoteish follies that destroyed 1970s superstar William Friedkin. More recently the film has had a sort of cult following, I know I’ve read that filmmaker Roger Avery considers it one of the best remakes of all time. Sorcerer is pretty remarkable, its a hard, gritty, sweaty, dity picture and Friedkin’s robot like absence of anything resembling empathy really suits the subject matter here. Sorcerer, like most Friedkin, feels more like an exercise than a film (yes, I’m including The Exorcist in that group people), but its one hell of an exercise; a perverse, cynical exploration of do or be done, of fuck it all existential doom.
The plot, which I assume is very similar in Wages of Fear, centers around four men, of varying desperation, who find themselves transporting two cases of severely unstable dynamite in a couple of trucks that would look at home in Duel. Except they are liable to break down at any minute (Dennis Weaver caught no such luck in the Spielberg film.) and the men must take the trucks over South American terrain that’s laughable in its extremity. Two elongated sequences of the trucks crossing the same teetery totery bridge at differing times rank as Friedkin’s finest exercise in purely visceral suspense, note perfect in execution.
The men themselves are all fine, obviously not filled in much, but that is sort of the point, humans are taking the back seat to squirmy cruel chance here. If a cursory look around the net is to be trusted, Friedkin wasn’t satisfied with how Roy Scheider, as the lead and the only American, turned out in the film. I’m not sure why. Scheider brings to the part what he brought to many notable films of the 1970s: an understated everyman quality that you believe in regardless of whatever is transpiring around him. But Scheider is more than that even, he’s an everyman tough guy, and that is rarer still.
I think Friedkin’s sensibility normally hurts his almost great pictures (French Connection, The Exorcist) but helps his just ok pictures (the underrated The Hunted). In the great movies you crave a little more, in the Bish movies you appreciate the straightforward lack of horseshit. Sorcerer may be Friedkin’s best movie, because it merges these effects. It’s a trick (like killing ants with a magnifying glass) but its an undeniably brilliant trick.
Review: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
I’m a bit over post-modernism in movies lately, I say commit to the cliche wholeheartedly or discard it, but
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is an appealing sleeper. For one, the film is actually funny, and for two, it doesn’t have the superiority that has become suffocating in certain films, particularly in the horror genre.
Vernon follows a film crew as they follow Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel), an amusingly well spoken and good looking guy in his upper twenties, who aspires to be the next great serial killer in the tradition of Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, who actually exist in the world of this film. The particulars aren’t lingered on, but it would seem, until the end at least, that there is nothing supernatural about these killing machines, they just have a flair for showbiz, and actually benefit society by acting as manifestations of our anxiety (you know, what every shrink says about horror movies.)
Vernon is an ambitious man, and we watch as he does cardio (useful for keeping up with the victims while seemingly never breaking into a run) and searches for just the right group to stalk to ensure that his legacy will continue. Leslie Vernon had me the moment the great character actor Scott Wilson popped in as a mentor, and it certainly kept me when Robert Englund appears as a Loomis (Halloween, not Psycho, though you can be forgiven for some confusion) like character intent on stopping Vernon. Vernon himself couldn’t be happier, because you see, he’s found his “Ahab.”
You’re either going to go for this sort of thing or you’re not. Leslie Vernon is charming and well executed, and Baesel exudes considerable charisma as the lead. The film is clever, and never really bores until it becomes an actual slasher movie (and its still much better than the norm.) There is definitely a bit of the “short film inflated to feature length” vibe, but the movie’s lack of pretension makes it damn near impossible to dislike. The director here is Scott Glosserman, and I imagine that we will see him again.
Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
A variety of temperaments have tackled the very popular (and quite good) Harry Potter books, but no one, not Cuaron, not Newell, certainly not Columbus, has been able to wrangle one of Rowling’s books into a smooth, streamlined piece of storytelling. The books, with more room, are able to effectively convey a year in Harry’s life at Hogwarts, but the movies, even at their best (
Azkaban, and now
Phoenix) are start and stop, like those wind up toy cars that used to be popular, you take the moments of fun as they come, before the little twisty spring runs out and has to be reset again.
Cuaron’s film, the third, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, at least felt like a real movie, and not a book on tape. That film had a bit of the playful eroticism that Cuaron is known for, and crack atomsphere. Azkaban, at its best, caught the glee and melancholy of the classic coming of age adventure film, the scenes between David Thewlis’s Lupin and Harry could draw honest comparisons to the Luke/Obi Wan scenes from the first Star Wars, you know the stuff that made that series good and that Lucas couldn’t discard from the new series fast enough, but I digress.
David Yates, the director of the current Potter, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, doesn’t have Cuaron’s technical command, or even his impish sense of play, but he has, after Newell’s middling fourth film, brought conviction back to the series. This is the best acted Potter movie, and the most thrillingly dense and alive, the sense of boring over-fidelity to the books discarded in favor of a paranoid conspiracy invasion fantasy that actually improves upon the book.
Michael Gambon finally feels like Dumbledore (Cuaron seemed to be satirizing him in the third film, and I’m still not even sure Newell remembers directing the fourth) and Gary Oldman, regrettably shortchanged in the fourth, has a wonderful return, and lends the series a pathos that recalls Azkaban’s instances of fleeting splendor. Alan Rickman’s Snape is also finally allowed to cut loose. Snape is Rowling’s greatest creation, her one character with a real sense of complexity, and its nice to report that one of the movies is finally catching up with that.
Much has been understandably written about this series’ cast, but even more impressive is the cast’s total commitment and the complete lack of superiority over the material on display. This series feels like a true world, even at their most uninspired, and its almost unheard for a studio to sustain that for five pictures. Though it must be said that the prophecy at the heart of this film, taken from Rowling’s book, certainly wins the “no shit” award as prophecies go.
Posted on July 20th, 2007 in 2007, Reviews, Sci-Fi, Drama | Comments Off
© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress | RSS
