Kon Ichikawa Dies.
Kon Ichikawa, director of The Burmese Harp, died yesterday of pneumonia at the age of 92. Ichikawa is recognized, along with Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, as one of the leading Post-World War II Japanese directors. I would love to voice more appreciation but I’m afraid that Ichikawa represents a chink in my movie going armor: I only know him by reputation, and have not seen any of his films.
For a better appreciation and a characteristically rewarding discussion, I implore you to check out Craig Kennedy’s Living in Cinema. The whole disguising a link in the middle of a passage of writing technique eludes me at the moment, but you can find Craig under my blog roll.
Roy Scheider Dies.
Apologies, this would have been up yesterday, if it wasn’t for the internet gremlins.
Roy Scheider, one of the definitive bad ass laureates of American cinema, passed away yesterday after a two year battle with cancer. Scheider was most obviously known for his Chief Brody in Jaws, but he was a reliable (usually supporting) player in several other notably great movies: The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, Marathon Man, Sorcerer, Klute, Naked Lunch, as well as the much better than they’re known to be All That Jazz, and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Scheider had something that many stars, or even great actors, would kill for: your intent, insatiable curiosity. You always, in any given movie, wanted more Roy Scheider. Marathon Man boasts Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, but it’s Scheider you wonder about. The French Connection has one of the definitive Gene Hackman performances, but you can’t help but wonder why the Scheider dosage hasn’t been upped just a little more. Some supporting, mysterious bad asses whither when promoted to the center ring: Scheider only further justified the intrigue. Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s initially maligned, but now rightly revered remake of Wages of Fear, is definitive Scheider: hard, mysterious, unsentimental, fascinating and charismatic. Scheider, like many of the 1970s icons, is a MAN first and foremost. You don’t watch him and wonder where he studied technique, you watch him and wonder when he’s gonna call the bullshit he knows everyone is feeding him.
Scheider, and this is the mark of a real star, is never caught trying to be cool, and like Bogart (to which a few blogs compared him), he projects a restless intelligence. Scheider’s cynicism isn’t brought on by ego, but by a deep reservoir of sadness and understanding. Scheider, again like all the truly great tough guys, isn’t terrified of sentiment or vulnerability though. Watch the scene between Chief Brody and son at the dinner table in Jaws, where the son mimics Brody’s hand movements. Try not rooting for this man to kill the shark after a scene like that.
Scheider was also a wonderful dickhead. Have you seen Francis Ford Coppola’s much better than you think The Rainmaker? The film is a refreshingly leisurely handling of the usual Grisham hugger-mugger, and Scheider shows up late inning as one of the faceless executives who’s trying to shirk responsibility. I don’t remember what he’s trying to shirk responsibility for, but I remember the act of shirking, if only because it signaled a brief, welcome return for a man who deserved to be treated better in the last few decades. Also check out The Rainmaker for a nice little Mickey Rourke performance, ten years before it was hip to re-hire Mickey Rourke.
I haven’t seen the film in a long time, but you should also watch All That Jazz, in which the legendary Bob Fosse recruited Scheider as method of self-examination, in another of his too few lead roles. Scheider and Fosse create what has to be one of the most macho theatre directors in movies: but they manage that without compromising the more outlandishly temperamental aspects of what we think of when we think “acclaimed theatre director.” The performance and the film are superb examples of mutual glorification and deconstruction, or glory deconstruction, which what is most supposed deconstruction is anyway (see also: Allen, Woody).
But Scheider would’ve told me to shut up by now, if only with a fleeting look.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
The story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) is one of those occasional, jarring proofs that The Man Upstairs or whatever cosmic force you subscribe to can have you absolutely whenever he wants. One day Jean-Dominique is a charismatic editor of Elle magazine with some of the most beautiful women in the world at his call; the next he’s a vegetable: every body part having betrayed him with the exception of his eyes, and he loses one of those early on in a moment of surprising, forceful discomfort. The doctors tell Bauby that he’s suffered some sort of rare stroke and that he’ll be fixed up soon, but that vague, ominous “soon” becomes more and more elusive, and it’s soon clear to Bauby that this new organic tomb is to be his lot in life. The mysterious stroke, in perhaps its most perverse move, has spared Bauby’s mind. His hungers and his intelligence remain aggressively, stubbornly alive, never again to be quenched.
This is the true story that inspired Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the memoir of the same name by Bauby. Yes. Bauby wrote the book in the above condition, aided by some very dedicated nurses and aides who read the alphabet aloud to Bauby until he signaled the correct letter with a blink of his remaining eye. The letters added up to words, and the words added up to sentences which eventually yielded the source material that drives the film. This was Bauby’s one way out, a guided tour for others of the private Hell in which he spent the remainder of his life. The book (according to the movie) was received with rave reviews.
Except The Diving Bell and the Butterfly isn’t a tour through Hell. It begins that way. Schnabel, in one of the more stunning bits of tee-total directorial empathy I’ve ever seen, chains us to Bauby’s eye and, for the first thirty minutes or so, rarely cheats. We see what Bauby sees, and we don’t see what Bauby doesn’t see. We share his disorientation and misery: professionals flit in and out with various banal comforts, and fresh embarrassments. Women of staggering beauty pop up from both the deep well of Bauby’s memories and in the actual room, both equally unattainable. One of the beauties invents the method of communication in which Bauby will write his book, and he promptly tells her that he wants to die. She scolds him for his selfishness and storms out, only to re-emerge a little later to apologize.
Several moments later, Bauby has decided to abandon self-pity, and this is where the film shakes off its limited perspective, and becomes surprisingly erotic and romantic. The highest compliment I can pay Schnabel, and there are several compliments to be paid for his performance here, is that he’s made a film that isn’t overly beholden to taste. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly isn’t a dead from the waist down disease of the week picture. The film is tender, intimate and refreshingly horny. The film doesn’t condescend to Bauby or to us; it takes his position and SEIZES it. There’s a moment, late in the film, where Bauby’s ex-wife takes him and their children to the beach, and she reads to him. Bauby notices her fleshy, beautiful legs hiding under the book and the dress. It’s a scene worthy of the casual reading room longing of a Rohmer picture.
It’s also a testament to Schnabel’s film, and Ronald Harwood’s script, that the newfound tragedy doesn’t immediately discount the fact that Bauby was, in his previous life, a bit of a self-absorbed, disreputable hound that had a habit of forgetting his family. Bauby left his wife for another woman, but the wife comes to see him anyway, still very clearly in love with him. The up to this moment absent lover calls late in the film, and the wife has to act as the go between. Bauby tells his wife to tell the lover that he waits for her to come every day. He may be paralyzed and he may long for her, but I, in that position, may have waited until my nurse returned to make that particular proclamation. The film is rich with showy, you are there technique, but this is the truly great scene in the movie, pulling you in four or five different directions at once, and still managing to be deliriously romantic.
I sometimes, as an American, resent the convenient Americans Are Boobs philosophy that seems to govern World Cinema thinking. But I must give the various other filmmaking countries one thing: the cliche that most America filmmakers don’t know shit about sex in film. Most of the great American filmmakers seem resigned to ignore the act altogether: think of the Coen Brothers, or Anderson, or Scorsese, or Spielberg, or most Soderbergh (though Out of Sight is still one of the most erotic American films of the past ten years, against admittedly little competition, and Soderbergh borrowed his best sex scene from a Brit.) Consider what The Diving Bell and the Butterfly could’ve been in many Americans’ hands: a respectful, asexual Triumph of the Human spirit movie. Very few things are less triumphant in the movies than a Triumph of the Human spirit movie. The Diving Bell acknowledges Bauby’s remarkable strength of spirit without softening him. Schnabel, once a photographer himself, understands that most great people are intensely in their own headspace: in other words, to be great you have to probably be a bit of an asshole.
We have Valentine’s Day coming up, and I, as a fervently single male under thirty, strongly recommend that you lucky people take your mates to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. If you’re new in the relationship, you’ll look cultured and worldy, and if you’re old in the relationship, the film will re-affirm the fact that you should devour one another as much, as passionately, and as often as humanly possible. How can you get any more life-affirming than that?
★★★½
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)
If Werner Herzog speaks of “ecstatic truth”, then let it be said that Chuck Bowen speaks of “inner absurdity”. We all need some of it, or something in general to relieve us of thoughts of taking out the trash, getting our oil changed, or making sure that the Wheat Thins we’re about to eat aren’t stale. We need a bit of inner absurdity to mull over as we drink our first cup of coffee at work, or take our first meeting of the day, or to distract us from the fact that a date the previous night didn’t go too well, or that our marriage may not be what it used to be. We need something really God damn frivolous and stupid to pursue and consume us.
Those people who don’t have something, and there are more than a few, are to be pitied, regardless of financial success or sexual prowess. Or at least that’s what I tell myself, perhaps in an act of self-delusion. Let’s just say that, as someone who spends several hours a week watching movies, discussing them, and writing about a few of them at a time when I probably should be working, I had no trouble accepting that two men could spend hours, and travel thousands of miles, to ensure that they top one another for the highest known score on the iconic arcade machine Donkey Kong.
Billy Mitchell is the first man and reigning champion of the game since 1984, when he effortlessly stomped the supposed master, Steve Sanders, who was revealed to be lying about his ability. Steve’s highest score is something in the 200,000s, Billy tops it to the tune of 850,000 points. The early photos of the event, featured in Life, show Billy to be the personification of the cliche of the typical gawky gamer: pale, underfed, thrilled at the fame that a normally laughed off addiction is affording him. The King of Kong’s opening scenes are succinct and thrilling, and prepare us for an American Splendor style examination of the impassioned geek. But the joy of The King of Kong is how it plays us every bit as confidently as Billy.
Fast forward to a few years ago, and to Billy as an altogether different kind of man. He’s the famed geek made good, the sorta sexy Geek: George Lucas reborn as the lead singer of Journey who sells used cars on the side. Billy’s confidence and style have grown over the years, nurtured by the Kong victory. He’s a successful businessman, running a lucrative Buffalo wings sauce company. He’s married to the sort of amply endowed young lady that I’m sure was just a whiff of fevered imagination in those all night soda and arcade sessions of his teens. But most importantly, he’s still the world record holder in Donkey Kong.
Enter Steve Wiebe, who’s set up in the film as Billy’s polar opposite. Steve was your garden variety acceptable American teen: sharp, decent looking, and capable in sports. We notice immediately though that Steve, like Billy, doesn’t neatly fit our country’s convenient peg of expectation. Billy’s ironic geek vengeance: socially sharper and more conniving than you’d expect. Steve, the one who’s supposed to be all Aw shucks charm and confidence, is sensitive and insecure; broken by one adult disappointment after another. Steve is unemployed when we meet him, and playing Mr. Mom to a house of several kids and a wife who seems to be in a state of perpetual irritation with him. Even Steve’s friends, who speak of him highly, seem to be hiding something: they speak of him almost as you’d speak of someone who’s sick or dying. They mean well, but they, like Steve himself, have written him off. Steve, in his hopelessness, looks up the Donkey Kong record and sets out to beat it.
I’ve described roughly the first twenty minutes of The King of Kong, and if you think I’m projecting pathos for the sake of punching up my own writing, you are mistaken. The film starts out as a lark, but becomes something surprisingly tender and moving. Even Mitchell, who is ultimately cast as the villain, is vulnerable and human, willing to stoop to low, pathetic means to guard his precious score like a bird’s egg. We learn that Mitchell essentially has the score keeper’s association in his pocket and can seemingly bend the standards and rules of the existing record at his will. The Ref means well but comes off as a clueless goat in awe of Billy, and a protege of Mitchell’s, a pasty little toad called Brian Kuh, withholds from Steve crucial evidence of Mitchell’s one-upsmanship, evidence that, I might add, wasn’t deemed acceptable when it could have helped Steve.
I did just write “pasty little toad”, a phrase notably lacking in something I try to imbue in all of my reviews: empathy. And I’ve been looking forward to typing the phrase since finishing the film last night. The King of Kong, which sounds absurd on paper and in theory, whips you into a surprising, anticipatory fever. Steve beats the record early on, and Billy screws him over. Steve beats the record again, and again it’s discounted. Finally, a showdown is scheduled, a showdown that will determine which score is to go into the Guinness Book of World Records.
Steve travels some three thousand miles to play, and we wait as the stubborn, insecure, unreachable Billy remains largely off-screen, with only Steve Sanders (whose since become Billy’s closest friend) to act as spokesperson and preserver of Billy’s image. We wait, and wait, and we laugh when director Seth Gordon plugs the 1980s howler “You’re the Best Around” from The Karate Kid. It’s a testament to Gordon that we aren’t laughing AT these guys, we’re laughing at the fact that this story has truly morphed into a real life Karate Kid, only one in which we’re actively rooting for the more Johnnyish of the competitors. The Geek, for once, is the holder of all the cards.
The showdown? Be prepared. The film has a No Country for Old Men ending, elusive and disappointing. But is it exactly? Regardless of who you’re rooting for, the geeks have undoubtedly inherited the Earth, if for only 80 glorious minutes.
★★★½
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Alfred Hitchcock is obviously an institution, part of the essentials, the canon, and, as such, subject to a certain reverse underrating. Yeah, yeah, Hitch is great, we learned that in Elementary school and have moved on to other filmmakers of greater ambition and less tangibility. I’m probably prone to the “yeah, yeah, yeahs” sometimes myself; uninspired, who gives a shit Hitch can be tedious and impersonal, but Hitchcock at his top-tier, full throttle best, is still one of the great pleasures of the cinema. The Lady Vanishes, recently released by Criterion in a nice double disc, is a reminder of this basic truth. No one that I’ve encountered can deliver the same smooth blend cocktail best of a prime Hitchcock comedic-thriller-mystery.
Truthfully, with the exception of a few films such as Vertigo and Rear Window, even good Hitch films feel relatively impersonal. Compare him with his most frequent cover artist Brian De Palma; De Palma’s films, even usually the frequently God awful ones, are intense and feverish, they feel NECESSARY, they have to exist for their creator to continue walking down the street and drinking coffee and breathing and fucking.
Hitch’s films feel like a particularly macabre tea party, a bunch of geezers wondering what it would be like if a finger appeared in their cucumber sandwich. I’m not being disrespectful, Hitch knows this, Hitch relishes this and Hitch has even inserted variations of that scenario into his films (look at the famous near strangulation in Strangers on a Train). Hitchcock’s great films are (usually) Art of a different key, they are Art not (again usually not always) in their personality or their reveal, they are Art because they are restrained, brilliant, couldn’t be better examples of the form, the thriller. Hitchcock elevates the thriller to the level of Kabuki.
The Lady Vanishes is one of the greatest examples of this idea, Hitchcock shifts tones in the film like a particularly smooth stick shift (he had indeed already been directing pictures for thirteen years at this point). The film opens in a railroad station/hotel somewhere in a purposefully vague European country, I didn’t catch the name at all, but the IMDB reveals it to be the fictional Bandrika, a land much beloved by the quaint looking, courtly, Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty). Miss Froy strikes up a conversation with two very British gentlemen, Caldicot (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford). Caldicot and Charters are bent out of shape because the train to England has been delayed and they are at risk of missing an important cricket match. Miss Froy is sad to be leaving her beloved Bandrika.
Meanwhile, (yes, it’s that kind of movie), Iris (Margaret Atwood), a privileged young lady about to be married, gets into a scuttle with the lodger above her, Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) over the noise he’s making trying to record some obscure national folk song. She bribes the manager to have him thrown out, he retaliates by bunking in her room and refusing to leave until she bribes the manager to have him un-thrown out. Meanwhile again, Miss Froy, who has the room next to Iris, listens to music by a lone musician just outside her window. That is until the musician is strangled and hidden without her knowledge. In a typical Hitch touch, she tosses a coin as a tip, only to have it land on a deserted street corner.
The film is 95 minutes long, and it takes the better part of thirty of those minutes to get these and other characters on the train that I thought dominated the picture. The pleasure of the first third is the openness, the possibility of it. Hitchcock is known for the rigid planning of every shot, but The Lady Vanishes feels alive and human; funny in an uncalculated way. The first thirty minutes could just as easily be the beginning of an It Happened One Night style romance, and the ingenuity and pleasure of the film is that it never totally ISN’T that.
Then we get on the train to Britain, and Hitchcock begins to pile on the little bits that have made him a legend. I love the hum of the kind of picture that does this right: introducing a collection of seemingly desperate details and anecdotes that will have a very clear importance sometime before the final reel. As the film slips further into the second act, we notice that a very clear chill has entered the air, and that the fantastic is about to intrude. A magician shows his son a disappearing trick: POOF! A woman loses her glasses. An adulterous couple discuss the need to stay hidden in their compartment. The creepiest though is Froy and Iris’s tea; the last time they see one another before one of them disappears. Iris tells Froy her name, but a whistle goes off just as Froy tries to tell her her name. Froy responds by writing “FROY” in the condensation on the window. The next morning a woman is gone, but no one on the train seems to remember her being there to begin with.
I won’t spoil whether the lady existed or didn’t, disappeared or didn’t, but Hitchcock manages to continually ratchet the tension and the comedy to the point that we totally believe that a train could be re-routed and train-napped at the drop of a coin, and that a remarkably laid back shoot-out would be unavoidable should that situation arise. The explanation is satisfyingly creepy, absurd, and just vague enough (like many Hitchcock Macguffins) that we don’t really think about it too much.
In case you’re in risk of taking Hitchcock’s low throb ease with tone for granted, watch the Jodie Foster picture Flightplan. That film is a re-working of the “someone disappearing in a confined area” story that drives The Lady Vanishes, and is actually better than I thought it would be…for the first half. Flightplan plays, cannily for a while, on the “is it real” principle, working in a bit of parenting guilt to further up the creeps. The film is effective for a while, but the resolution is silly and needlessly convoluted. I didn’t realize until a day or two later that The Lady Vanishes is just as silly, but the particular grace and wit of Hitchcock’s slight of hand makes all the difference.
★★★★
Being There (1979)
Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers) watches TV and waits for the maid Louise to bring him his breakfast. Louise enters and tells him that the man of the house has died. Chance pauses, and comments on the weather. Louise, aghast, asks Chance if that is all he has to say. A moment later she embraces him, and, tenderly, says something to the effect of “Of course, it is.”
Chance, having no legal claim on the residence, is tossed out by a couple of lawyers and forced to find a new way in life. He is hit by a car, luckily the car of very wealthy, powerful man, Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas). Benjamin’s wife, Eve (Shirley MacLaine) gives Chance a ride to their house to get fixed up and offers him a drink on the way. Eve asks Chance for his name as he chokes on his first sip of liquor, suddenly “Chance the Gardener” has become Chauncey Gardener, and it would seem that Chauncey Gardener is a wizard of financial practices, just the kind of wizard the President of the United States needs…even though Chance the Gardener would appear to be illiterate.
This scenario could be from a Frank Capra movie of the 1940s, or a John Landis movie of the 1980s. Instead Being There is, to everyone’s benefit, a Hal Ashby movie of the 1970s. The film is obviously a satire, of our self-absorption, of our insecure need to buy whatever’s being sold just so long as the salesman looks right, and of our rush to believe generic, comforting, meaningless promises. In short, Being There is the perfect film to revisit during the primaries, a time when our country speaks vanilla vagueries as a second language.
The most notable aspect of Being There is, as usual with Ashby, the tone. I’m not quite sure how to quantify what Ashby brings to any given film, but there is an elusive, tender electricity to his films that has been under-acknowledged. Let’s try to pin it down. This film works as bitter, sad satire, but is also very moving and strange without compromising the satire. Ashby, unlike many satirists in film, doesn’t sacrifice humanity for the sake of a theme, satire or not, humanity IS the theme, as it almost always is with an Ashby picture.
Many of Being There’s best scenes would probably be cut by another director. Watch the scene when Eve tries to seduce Chance. The naughty wife trying to screw the hapless hero is a staple of the Misunderstood Stupid Guy genre, but Ashby’s version is goofier and more vulnerable: heightened and real at the same time. Chance has no idea what Eve is offering him, and tells her that he likes to watch. He’s referring to watching television, but she takes him to mean something else entirely, leading to image of memorable loneliness and disconnect: Eve masturbates on the floor while Chance obliviously imitates an elaborate position on the program he’s watching.
Or watch how Ashby and screenwriter Jerzy Kosinski handle the Benjamin Rand character. Most films would play off of the character’s greed over and over again, but Rand, who is dying, is allowed a moment of grace and understanding. Rand’s doctor, who’s always been suspicious, figures out that Chauncey is merely a Chance, and approaches Rand on his death bed. Yes, Rand has elevated Chance because he tells the old man what he’s always wanted to hear (nothing) but we see in this scene that a certain longing also motivates him. Douglas, who is terrific, gets a line here that’s almost too much for this kind of film; he tells the doctor that knowing Chance has made him feel better about dying. What can the doctor possibly say to a confession like that?
None of these scenes soften the impact of Ashby and Kozinski’s rage though, which culminates in a devastating final image that ups the stakes considerably. Are all lives spent following meaningless, random, idiotic catch phrases? Are even the swiftest thinkers slaves to chic? Are even the super sacred things accident or happenstance? Is the film’s final line: “Life is a state of mind” meant as consolation or damnation? And what of Peter Sellers’ uncompromising work as Chance? I would be tempted to call the character poignant, the performance heartbreaking, but maybe that’s what I want to see just as a financial whatevermayhaveyou is what Rand needed to see. The idea of a total cipher is too unbearable and alien to imagine, and when we don’t understand something, well, then we decide to make it something we DO understand, like, oh I don’t know, how we may or may not use religion to rationalize something beyond our ability to rationalize.
Being There isn’t perfect. At 130 minutes, it’s thirty minutes too long, and Ashby’s pace is too deliberate, funereal. The film should be faster and more anarchic, like some of the earlier Ashby pictures, but the passion, the curiosity, the anger of Being There will stick with you. Just as the image of Chance watching his television as refuge from the surrounding confusion will stick with you.
★★★½
Hiccup.
My Wolfman bit disappeared into the realms of internet afterlife as I was trying to update it to include the recently announced decision that Joe Johnston, of October Sky and Jurassic Park III, has been hired to take over after Mark Romanek decided to vacate. At the risk of unoriginality, I think Johnston’s better than Ratner, and I have no major problem with anything he’s done, but the decision strikes me as boring. I’m still interested in Del Toro’s Talbot and Baker’s Wolfie, but that’s about it.
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